ArmedLiberal

2002-10-25T17:12:00.000-07:00

WE'RE NOT HERE ANY MORE Go to www.armedliberal.com

2002-10-16T16:12:00.000-07:00

PLAYING WITH BLOGGER Bear with me...I'm having problems with archives and publishing. I've submitted a request, and am puttering around with it myself. I need to get the new site together...

2002-10-16T14:20:00.000-07:00

BRITTLE GOVERNMENTS One of the difficulties of dealing with matters in much of the Middle East and Third World in general is the ‘brittleness’ of the governments there. This is raised in the questions raised by Chris Bertram a few days ago, in his commentary on the Thomas Pogge article (pdf file) on the legitimacy of authoritarian governments in resource-dependent countries. Bertram and Pogge start by pointing out that political power in a place like Nigeria is the path to wealth – by Western standards – for the individuals in power. They take this further, to suggest that the West is immiserating the populations of these countries by accepting the legitimacy of, and trading with, the kleptocrats. And it is certainly the case that many of our problems in the Arab world are the result of our desire to have compliant trading partners – as we have in Saudi Arabia – whose interests may not intersect well with their population. The anger of the population, logically directed at their rulers, then is redirected by the rulers and cultural institutions that they explicitly support first at Israel and the United States, and then secondarily at modernity in general. Having mounted this tiger, there is no safe way for these governments to dismount. I don’t know how to respond to Bertram on the issue of ‘legitimate ownership’ and who should get to determine it; the sad reality is that for most of human history, the definition of property was ‘what I could keep others from taking’. They aren’t wrong about presenting the problem, but we’re short of the kind of enlightenment – as well as the kind of Enlightenment – that would enable justice to be done. There are a whole slug of problems to be addressed here; I’ll start with the straightforward one. We somehow continue to expect that cultures which have been in place for hundreds or thousands of years will suddenly, on contact with us, dissolve and allow their members to simply join ours. Now the reality is that Western, market-based culture is corrosive of traditional cultures. But it itself has a cultural base; I’ll make the Weberian argument that can be seen in ‘The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism’, and suggests that capitalism, and the self-restraint necessary for a culture to succeed in capitalism, is different than the unselfrestrained accumulativeness in more ‘backward’ societies. Weber said:

The universal reign of absolute unscrupulousness in the pursuit of selfish interests by the making of money has been a specific characteristic of precisely those countries whose bourgeois-capitalistic development, measured according to Occidental standards, has re-mained backward.

Now I’ll skip over the (very big) issue of whether or not we should attempt to make other countries and other cultures look like us. But I will suggest that we keep operating with the expectation that they will, and that maybe, just maybe, that is going to be much harder than we think.

2002-10-16T12:51:00.000-07:00

...JUST AS I THINK I'M GETTING OUT... Rob Lyman pulls me back into the gun issue with a damn interesting philosophical piece.

Partly, this disagreement arises because the parties are talking about different things. I have no doubt that reducing gun ownership among drug dealers whould reduce urban violence. I just don't see how bugging hunters and target shooters will accomplish that. The anti-gunners, on the other hand, don't make a very clear distinction between me and an urban gang-banger. We both have handguns; we are both "potential" murderers.

Wait a minute...wasn't I supposed to blogroll him?? ...on the way.

2002-10-16T09:57:00.000-07:00

TWO THINGS THAT WOULD MAKE ME REALLY DAMN HAPPY RIGHT NOW 1. A meaningful tax on oil. As long as we are abjectly dependent on oil from the Middle East (or anywhere abroad), we will always face the accusation that we are acting to protect Ford Excursions and GM Hummers rather than any other national or international interest we may claim. Some people say it will destroy our economy. No it won’t. Instead of shipping dollars abroad on something we use once(to be recycled as bank deposits, or invested in William Simon’s business ventures), we’ll spend them on products and services that we create within our economy. It should be phased in, over a period of several years. It could be passed now, and not take effect for two years, and we would be able to begin the process of planning for higher energy costs. I know this has been a political non-starter for twenty years, but since we're about to go to war, maybe we could sack up and at least start discussing the issue? There’s more detail, but I’ll lay it out in the next day or so, along with a detailed talk about 3rd party gun registries and how they actually might work. 2. Bill Simon’s withdrawal from the California Governor’s race. He’s going to get spanked (I even have a bet on this), and right now the best thing he could do would be to withdraw, let Riordan or someone else embarrass Davis in the election and destroy Davis’ plans to run for President. A last-minute campaign à la New Jersey might actually rescue this from becoming one of the worst electoral campaigns of the year. Oh – world peace and domestic tranquility would be nice, too…

2002-10-16T08:43:00.000-07:00

SMALLPOX Ross, over at the Bloviator has a bunch of information on what the CDC is doing around the smallpox issue. I love it when government actually kinda works...it sounds like smart people are looking at this in a constructive way.

2002-10-15T15:40:00.000-07:00

DO IT!! DO IT NOW!! Ann Salisbury reminds us all to get off our butts and register to vote Right God Damn Now. She is, as she almost always is, absolutely right. As disgusted as I am by the Governor's race between "SkyBox/ATM" Davis and "Daddy's Money/Simple" Simon, I'll be flogged if I'm going to miss my chance to cast a vote in this. Even if it is to write in Obi-Wan Kenobi, or just simply vote Green.

2002-10-14T10:46:00.000-07:00

I SEE SMART PEOPLE, TOO... In polar opposition to the stupidity below, Barry over at Ampersand had the class to email me and ask me to clarify what he thought was my position on divestment and anti-semitism, an area where we have disagreed in the past. He stated that he wanted to have an argument around my real position, rather than a strawman, and went out of his way to privately contact me and try and confirm what he understood my position to be. We may disagree on issues, but for this he’s the Blogger Of The Day as far as I’m concerned. My reply to him is below:

OK, here's a first cut: >As I understand it, the argument you're making connecting divestment >campaigns to anti-Semitism can be summed up this way: > >1. Anti-Semitism is bigotry against Jews. OK >2. "Divestment from Israel" campaigns single out Israel, among all the >nations (many of which are worse than Israel), for activist opposition. Unlike other 'divestment' candidates (South Africa the best example), the threat to Israel is external and real; South Africa faced no meaningful threat to it's existence as a nation, nor did the white or colored South Africans face a real, organized threat to their lives. Divestment supporters don't take this into account when criticising Israel's actions, nor to they have a realistic response. Mandela wanted to see non-whites get their equitable share of political and economic power; the core positions of the Palestinian political powers remain a vague commitment to a two-state solution in English, and 'from the river to the sea' in Arabic. None of this is dealt with or remarked on in the pro-'peace' or pro-divestment comments I've read. >3. There is no reason to single out Israel, except that Israel is a Jewish >state. I don't believe that's why the divestment campaign has focussed on Israel; I think it is for a variety of reasons: 1) I think that the philosophical bent is linked to the anti-colonial, anti-modern philosophical strains I've discussed at length in the blog, and Israel represents both colonialism - both in its foundation after WW2, and in it's effectrive treatment of the Occupied Territories - and modernity, in its embrace of technology, markets, and pluralism. I wonder what the discussion would have been like if Israel's identity was as self-consciously socialist as it was in the 50's. 2) I think that it is the natural inclination to root for the underdog, and (as when I was in school) the visual rhetoric of powerful war machines bearing down on a peasant population tends to drive arguments. >4. Therefore, the reason pro-divestment activists have singled out Israel >is >that Israel is a Jewish state. Don't think that. >5. Therefore, pro-divestment activists are anti-Semites. I do think they are anti-Semitic in a variety of ways; they accept the hateful rhetoric promulgated by many of the Palestinian organizations (how would the broad student community react to a poster suggesting that the secret ingredient in Afican-American 'soul food' was white babies? No one in this half-century would have even _thought_ of saying or doing such a thing), and I think the pro-PA student movement discredits itself by excusing that kind of behavior; and more, importantly I do connect the existence of Israel as a predominantly Jewish state (this has its own problems that I'll probably write about soon) with the 'state' of the Jewish people thoughout the world (note: I'm not Jewish; but I did grow up in a predominantly Jewish community). And what I do not see on the part of the divestment activists or any of the pro-Palestinian 'peace' community is any thoughful response to the real threat to the existance of Israel and the people who live there. The best I can see is the possibly sincere hope that if they lay their arms down, the Palestinians will do the same; something sadly not borne out in recent history. I think Israel has done some illegal, immoral, and stupid things, partly from a knee-jerk reactiveness, partly out of fear. I do think that the palestinians have been screwed over, by the israelis on one side, and by the other Arab states and their own insane leadership on the other. As I've said many times in the blog, I think that the average Palestinian isn't a monster, but someone who wants food, shelter, work, the love of their family and a better future for their children - none of which are in wide supply today. Does this help stake out a position that's clear?? And thanks for asking me to explain...in careful discussion, we have a chance to find a common ground in this mess. A.L.

2002-10-14T10:17:00.000-07:00

I SEE STUPID PEOPLE... So open the mailbox this morning, and have a pair of emails from Ralph Albertson. I haven’t got any really stupid or abusive email so far. I’m genuinely impressed at the level of comments and email I’ve received to date, so I’m going to quote these screeds in full and comment:

Your pro-gun arguments are specious to the point of being farcical. Perhaps you are merely unaware of the large number of children that are injured, maimed, or slain by "accidents" involving guns in their homes or perhaps you actually love your guns more than your children. In any even, if you will list your home address, I will be more than happy to report to the your nearest child protection agency for child endangerment. Now there is another NRA nutcase sniper shooting people at random. That is another excellent example of your argument in action. In Stockton, one of your people uses a similar weapon to shoot up a schoolyard and murder children. Rather than act to protect the lives of children as the English did in a similar case by banning weapons, NRA people like you fought regulation, which proves again that you love your guns more than your children. The blood of thousands of innocent American who are murdered by guns in this country every year is on your hands. You must be proud to be gun scum. http://www.childhealthmonitor.org/DirectorySearch.php?topic=84 http://www.neahin.org/programs/schoolsafety/gunsafety/statistics.htm

and

Professor InstaCracker Seeks To Deflect Attention Away From NRA Professor InstaCracker, gunloon and NRA water-carrier, is beating the drums complaining nobody is looking into the Maryland (Montgomery County) Shootings as a potential Al Qaeda terrorism attack. Professor InstaCracker vaguely cites Al Qaeda training manuals as 'evidence' this could be a terrorist attack. While terrorism as a motive for these crimes cannot be discounted, it should be noted the Al Qaeda manuals advised would-be terrorists to take advantage of lax US gun laws (the very same laws Professor InstaCracker would do away with) to obtain firepower. However, this shooting spree doesn't really fit the mold of a terrorist attack; one would think a terrorist would select crowds and would attack in a more dispersed area in order to maximize terror. I suspect InstaCracker knows this as well but is engaging in a bit of misdirection to deflect attention from the far greater possibility these senseless murders are the result of yet another of the NRA's apocryphal "law-abiding citizens" exercising the NRA's interpretation of the Second Amendment. Another NRA killer on the loose.

Ralph, you’re a moron. You’re not a moron for opposing guns; that’s a legitimate position to take, albeit one that I think is wrong (albeit is a long word that means ‘although’). You’re a moron for believing that overheated rhetoric and namecalling will do anything except vent whatever personal frustrations you may have with your life, and make you look foolish in public, which in the long run will add to the personal frustrations you have with your life. It’s a sad negative feedback loop. You want to challenge my beliefs or Glenn Reynolds’ beliefs, step up and challenge them. That’s what this is about. But you’ll have to actually do some thinking and work to do so. I’d suggest that you start with the CDC databases, where you’ll learn that swimming pools are far more dangerous to American children than guns are, something sadly borne out in my personal experience (I have two friends who have lost children in swimming pool drownings). So your concern isn’t with the safety of children, but with banning guns, and you're shilling behind dead children to make your argument. OK, that's sleazy, but you need to make a case. And unless you’re prepared to actually attempt to construct an argument, do it someplace else. You see, this is arguments…abuse and stupidity are down the hall.

2002-10-14T10:03:00.000-07:00

BACK AGAIN Back from a great weekend in Monterey and a stupendous motorcycle ride back down most of the two-lane roads in Central California. Blogging will resume shortly. I obviously (and sadly) forgot to tell people not to kill anyone or blow anything up while I was gone…

2002-10-13T21:22:00.000-07:00

IF YOU LIVE IN L.A. FYI: DIAGNOSIS CRITICAL: An Urgent Call for a Healthy Los Angeles A Town Hall Meeting on health care issues in your community Sunday October 20th, 2002 2:30 - 5:30pm Agape International Spiritual Center 5700 Buckingham Pkwy Culver City, CA 90230 with featured guest speakers: Warren Olney - Panel Moderator from Radio Station KCRW Assemblyman Gil Cedillo - California State Assembly Dr. Thomas Garthwaite - Director and Chief Medical Officer for the LA County Department of Health Services and Local Community Leaders Eleven public health clinics and all school clinics closing. Trauma centers threatened. Reductions in hospital beds and funding for private clinics anticipated. 5000 jobs lost. 2.5 million residents without health care covereage. There are solutions for a healthy LA. Find out what we can do! PARTNERS Community Health Councils Interfaith Communities United for Justice and Peace Office of the Americas www.NonviolenceWorks.com ADDITIONAL SPONSORS Councilman Mark Ridley Thomas Agape International Spiritual Center SEIU Local 434B The Gas Company T.H.E. Clinic --thanks to Bob Morris!

2002-10-11T23:03:00.000-07:00

ON BREAK In Monterey being a corporate spouse...back Monday.

2002-10-10T11:05:00.000-07:00

HEALTH, AGAIN In recent news, Los Angeles County is hustling to keep from rolling down the shutters on a large portion of the public healthcare infrastructure. Meanwhile, voters in Oregon are looking at a statewide ‘one-payer’ plan (which appears to be getting mixed reviews, at best). So here’s another thought-question for the folks out there: How would we know when the public health system here had collapsed? What would that collapse look like, and how would we react? The problem seems pretty simple; Hospitals are morally and legally mandated to care for patients with little regard for their ability to pay. Some of those costs are covered by state and local government, some by the owners of hospitals (who are simultaneously declaring record profits on one hand, and going out of business on the other), and some by insured patients, who face cost pressures as hospitals try and stay solvent. So the cost of taxes and insurance goes up, meaning fewer people can pay until < sarcasm> there is only one insured, tax-paying patient, and he (Bill Gates) is covering the costs for all the rest of us.< /sarcasm> Clearly, we’re in an untenable position, and headed into deeper water on a leaking boat. So, back to my original question: How do we know when the system has finally broken? What will it take to get the necessary political will to deal with the problem?

2002-10-10T10:04:00.000-07:00

JUST WHAT I'VE BEEN WONDERING Frequent commenter Mostafa works in the securities industry and has now started his own blog (hopefully we will keep at least some of his frequent and smart comments, even if he persists in disagreeing with me once in a while). He's starting a series on the markets which promises to be interesting. Permalinks aren't working (is happening to me as well, so it's a Blogger problem), so just go to meaux's stream of consciouness...

2002-10-09T12:28:00.000-07:00

DAMN!! Here's someone who has some concrete suggestions to make:nathan_lott. He manages to both applaud the move of the African-Amercian polity to the mainstream (driven, I imagine by the black soccer moms I now see here in the formerly lily-white South Bay), and make some concrete and excellent suggestions (schools and housing) on what 'reparations' for Jim Crow might look like. I'm wary of 'reparations' for slavery (or even for Jim Crow) as a justification for doing the right thing. I think the books on slavery were balanced by the blood of white boys spilled to free slaves during the Civil War...a simplistic construction, but nontheless true. But that doesn't mean nothing needs to be done. I like to think of it as nation-building...for our own nation. Check nathan out and see what you think.

2002-10-09T10:41:00.000-07:00

BLOGGER TENNIS In a valiant effort to keep from becoming the perpetual ‘Gun Channel’ of the Blogoverse, I went to Barry’s reply to my post on calling Jews ‘Nazis’. My points included:

The issue is that insult derives from context and intention. To call me a ‘Nazi’ because I’m obsessed with and rigid about safety, or a women a ‘Nazi’ because she is obsessed with or rigid about feminism, or an ecologist a ‘Nazi’ because they are obsessed with or rigid about ecology is a different thing than to call someone by the name of the enemy who specifically targeted them out and attempted to exterminate them.

and:

The issue in criticizing Israel’s sometimes misguided policies is to distinguish one key fact: do you support Israel’s right to exist? As a Western and predominantly Jewish state? Because while I have been and will continue to be critical of many of their loonier policies, their right to exist trumps a whole range of other issues for me, and their opponents refusal to meaningfully agree to their right to exist and to take concrete steps to back up that agreement devalue their claims almost to zero.

In reply, Barry takes me to task for being dismissive of ‘feminazi’ as an insult, giving it roots in Rush Limbaugh’s overheated prose and pointing out in addition it is more hurtful in that most feminists are Jewish. I’ve never listened to Rush (really!), and the term may have a more overtly political history than I’ve granted it; I’ll take that under advisement. But then he jumps the shark, as we say here in L.A. He explains that I missed his main point:Unfortunately, none of the folks who responded to me explained how someone saying "I favor divestment from Israel to pressure the Israeli government to remove settlements" is anti-Semitism. Instead, people responded to me about the word "feminazi."I thought my second point address this, but he goes on. I’d like to collapse his argument, but it’s tough to do, so I’ll just quote extensively:

It's not Cathy Young's opinion; it's not Larry Summers' opinion; and I presume it's not the opinion of anyone who agreed with Summers' speech. Why? Because Summers's speech presented a radical new idea of anti-Semitism: anti-Semitism in effect, even when there isn't anti-Semitic intent. In this new version of anti-Semitism, an anti-Semitic action is one that hurts Jews, whether or not prejudice against Jews - "intent" - is involved. (Say, if an earthquake levels a Jewish neighborhood in Brooklyn, is that anti-Semitism?). But here's my problem with Israel's paritsans - they want to have it both ways. When it comes to criticizing liberals, they use the broadest definition of anti-Semitism imaginable, so that even a purely political action against the government of Israel, conducted by folks who have never shown any sign of anti-Jewish prejudice, is anti-Semitism.

Here he makes the leap from Point A: I’m dismissive of a (potentially insulting) term that he argues is anti-Semitic (‘feminazi’); to Point B: I’m opposed to divestment and while divestment may harm the State of Israel, it has nothing to do with Jews – and therefore I’m a hypocrite, because I embrace a ‘tight’ standard in one case, and a ‘loose’ standard in another. First, let me plant a flag on the hypocrisy issue. Lacking other values, it seems that the only meaningful criticism available to Bad Philosophers is internal inconsistency. The reality is that human thought and behavior is complex and ambiguous. Consistency is valued, but it isn’t the only value, nor, in my mind, the highest. I’m sure we’ll be talking about this later. Next, in my original post, I concluded with the demand that Israel’s critics take a clear position on the survival of Israel, and it’s survival ‘as a Western and predominantly Jewish state’. My issue with Barry’s defense of the divestment petition and other criticisms of Israel’s actions – or one criticism, because as Meryl points out there are a host of others – is that they fail to either a) take a stand that says ‘Israel is an illegitimate country and needs to be dismantled,’ or b) ‘Israel has a right to exist in the face of outside attacks and here is a plan whereby it can do so.’ Because last time I looked, ‘Palestine from the river to the sea’ was still the rallying cry. When ‘peace’ activists propose a plan in which they act as human shields in Israeli restaurants and schools, instead of for terrorist leaders, I’ll take the quotes off their label. Meanwhile, I’m unconvinced, and I’m afraid Barry and I will have to agree to disagree for a while. I’ll think about the feminazi thing though (although it’s never been a term I’ve used, it has been one I’ve tolerated use of in my presence…I’ll think about that). There’s more, and some of it even includes criticism of Israeli politics that have helped create the situation, and an interesting questions raised by correspondent Evan Weisberg:

Third -- although this is less a point than a question -- what does it mean for Israel to have a "right" to remain a "Western" state? What does it mean for it to have a "right" to remain a "predominantly Jewish" state? Does Australia have a right to remain Western? Does Armenia have a right to remain predominantly Christian?

This will serve as fodder for some interesting talk later, I’ll bet.

2002-10-08T17:58:00.000-07:00

ARMEDLIBERAL.COM CLASSICS Based on emails and discussions below (and because I'm too damn busy to get any writing done right now), I thought I'd repost something I wrote some time ago. Looking at it, I don't see anything I'd significantly change. REPOST - WHY BE AN ARMED LIBERAL? I’ve actually gotten a fair number of emails asking me this; they presuppose that the only valid position for a liberal is to be disarmed, and the only valid position for a gun owner is to be a conservative. I’m neither. I own guns, and have spent a fair amount of time, energy and money becoming at least moderately competent with them. And let me state bluntly that while the politic thing for shooters to say in public is "I just shoot [trap and skeet] [a few targets] [to hunt birds].", that I do all those things, and in addition have trained hard to become competent in defending myself by, if necessary, shooting people. I’m also a liberal, who believes that the government has the obligation, not just the right, to work to make our society, nation and world a better place. Which better place ought to be one in which fewer people are physically threatened seriously enough to need to resort to shooting people. The intersection of those two beliefs – which on their face seem to be incompatible, but which I believe are not – defines a lot of what I believe about politics and the nature of good government. Let’s talk a little bit about the armed side of it. Why be armed in today’s society? Well, I’ll suggest four reasons: 1) It’s fun. Shooting is a pleasurable sport, things go “bang!!” loudly; well-hit clay pigeons gratifyingly disintegrate into a cloud of dust. 2) It is moral. I came to the conclusion a long time ago that people who eat meat and have never killed anything are morally suspect. Some creature gave its life for the chicken Andouille sausages in the pasta sauce I made tonight. Pork chops and salmon don’t start out wrapped in plastic on the grocery shelf. I have hunted deer, wild pigs, and birds, and I can say with certainty (and I imagine anyone else who hunts can say) that it fundamentally changed the way I look both at my food and at animals in the world. I respect the death that made my dinner possible in a way I never would have had an animal not died at my own hand. When I have a gun in my possession, I am suddenly both more aware of my environment, and more careful and responsible for my actions in it. People who I know who carry guns daily talk about how well-behaved they are how polite they suddenly become. Heinlein wrote that “an armed society is a polite society”, and while in truth I cannot make a causal connection, when you look at societies where the codes of manners were complex and strong, from medieval Europe or Japan to Edwardian England, there was a wide distribution of weapons. I know several people who are either highly skilled martial artists or highly skilled firearms trainers, and in both groups there is an interesting correlation between competence (hence dangerousness) and a kind of calm civility – the opposite of the “armed brute” image that some would attempt to use to portray a dangerous man or woman. 3) It is useful. The sad reality is that we live in an imperfect world, one in which some people prey on others. They may do it because it is a kind of crude redistribution (you have a BMW, he would like one); because they are desperate, or because they are deranged. They may have been damaged in some way by their genetic makeup or their upbringing. Or they may just be evil. Bluntly, at the moment I am under threat, I don’t care why they do it. My response is not very different from my response to my friends who said that “America had it coming” on 9/11. “Maybe. So what?” People who attack me or mine need to be stopped. If the only way I have to effectively stop them is to kill them, so be it. Once I am out of danger, I am happy to consider what it will take to improve education and job opportunities in the central cities, or to talk thoughtfully about helping the Palestinians figure out how to become a nation and a state. There are bad people out there, folks. Some of them are tormented by what they do, some don’t care, some may revel in it. Someday, you may be confronted by one. What will you do? 4) It is the politically correct thing to do. I say this with all appropriate irony, but I am also a believer that an armed citizenry does two important things to the American polity: a) it fundamentally changes the nature of the relationship between the individual and the State. I am pretty dubious about the apocalyptic fantasies of those who believe that a cadre of deer hunters could stand up against the armed forces of the U.S. or some invading army. In reality, I think that the arms possessed by the citizens of the U.S. are primarily symbolic in value, much like the daggers carried by Sikhs. But, having lived in Europe, I think that the symbolic value carries a political and social weight; b) it makes it clear that we as citizens have some measure of responsibility for ourselves. The tension I talk about above is one between self-reliance and mutual reliance. In England today, a subject (I am careful not to say citizen) faces increasing limitations on the right of self-defense; the State is moving toward an absolute monopoly on the use of force. It should not be hard to imagine that the character of both the relationship of the individual to the state and of the individual’s relationship to society is vastly different under those circumstances. By being armed, I am taking responsibility – literally, the responsibility of life and death – on myself. When the state cannot entrust individuals to act with some significant responsibility, except as an adjunct of the state, we will have truly lost something that is a key part of what makes our politics work (note that I think that the same thing is happening in the EU today, with the same effect). There’s more, which can be put simply that people will sometimes do stupid or evil things with their freedom. But without their freedom, they will seldom do great things. So by protecting society against one, you also deprive it of the other. Sometime soon: how to be a liberal in a society that values freedom, and why freedom is critical to building an effective and durable liberal society.

2002-10-08T10:00:00.000-07:00

WHY YOUR 401(k) IS IN THE TOILET Forbes.com: Massachusetts Finds CSFB 'Smoking Gun'. I've been talking with some friends about the runup in wealth during the boom years, and I keep asking the question: was there any real wealth created, or was it all just staged market perception? (Yes, I know that one can lead to the other, but there must be some way to allocate between the two. Max?? Brad??)

2002-10-07T23:21:00.000-07:00

MY SECRET PLAN Everyone has a Secret Plan. Admit it, if you were suddenly found to be the secret heir to an unknown branch of royalty, and your words was suddenly about to become law, you’ve got some kind of plan for what you’d do. Ban cars. Ban advertising. Ban fat people. Ban diet food. Make everyone buy a lhasa apso. In my case, other than the obvious school for wayward supermodels that I’d be forced to open on the island of Catalina, it has involved gun regulation (driver regulation, too, and disarmament, and taxes, but we’ll have to wait on those…). We have two problems to solve simultaneously. On one hand, it is useful to carefully screen people who were buying guns to make sure they weren’t criminals, insane, etc. etc., and better still, had some reasonable amount of training. It would even be nice to be able to ballistically test all the guns out there so when a crime was committed, we’d know what gun did it and where it was likely to be, and to require that my guns be tested before I can buy ammo for them or carry them legally. On the other hand, there are a large group of people in this society who hate guns, and devoutly wish to make them go away…at least except for the ones they get to carry (see CA state Senator ‘Beretta’ Perata) or their bodyguards carry (see Rosie). And these people are close to the levers of power, and it isn’t hard to imagine that one day they’d get those levers, and use them to do whatever they could to take guns away from everyone who wasn’t them. Solving the first problem isn’t too hard (assuming people comply) technically. But you wind up with this big list somewhere of who owns guns and what guns they own. And that feeds the potential that people like me see for the second problem, in which Rosie and Sen. ‘Beretta’ Perata team up to use that Big List to target all the known gun owners out there and forcibly take away their guns. Which I think, for a variety of reasons, would be a Bad Thing. So one day I was thinking about this, and then I had to go to traffic school. This is a California institution in which a traffic offender, such as I was once, get their record cleared and insurance premium protected in return for sitting through an eight hour class in traffic laws and traffic safety. It turned out that there was a class just down the street from where we live. Sadly, it wasn’t staffed by supermodels. But it was a private agency licensed by the State to certify that I had been trained. Which gave me the germ of an idea, which as germs do, grew. Why does the government have to keep the Big List? Why can’t I get my certification from a private list-holder, who agrees that under specific conditions, they will release my data to the courts or police, or to a firearms dealer checking on me? Some of them could be open and easy about my data. Some of them could be run by rugged survivalists who keep their data centers under mountains in Idaho with EMP bombs next to the RAID arrays. All of them would have to be subject to audit, and post an immense bond to assure performance. I’m sure the NRA and other gun-rights organizations would be the first to become registrars, and I’d be happy to have them register me. They would store ballistic data about my guns, and training data about me, and check me against the government’s ‘do not sell guns’ list periodically. When a crime was committed, the police could submit the ballistics to a query engine that would query all the registrars, and the one holding the registration would return the data. When the police got the appropriate warrant, they could check an individual and see what guns they owned. I can envision a time when an attempt is made to change the laws and pry the data out of the registrars, and I’m sure that the registrar that I entrust with my data would be happy to wipe the database before turning it over. It’s not a perfect solution, or a fully-baked one (unlike the supermodel idea), but it keeps coming back to me as a framework that might allow both sides in this issue to get what they want. As usual, I look forward to people's responses to see if I'm out of my mind again...

2002-10-07T13:51:00.000-07:00

Comments and Responses Here are some comments from the San Ysidro post below, with my comments interspersed.

My views on gun control aren't as strong as they used to be, but I just gotta point out: at the airport, we're dealing with armed f/t security prepared for the worst. (In several European airports, police patrol El Al baggage claim holding automatic weapons.) Unless we're going to have armed guards right at the entrance to McDonalds (which they have in Israel now), a suicidal shooter is going to get off more rounds there than at the airport. Maybe not 21, OK. But some. I get kinda worried by people who think a gun permit conveys Spidey-Sense, too. They're gonna be shooting up mailmen and paperboys. Maybe even themselves. Andrew Lazarus

Andrew: Two main responses; First that unless we are willing to live in a world where there is a policeman on every corner, with the concomitant impact on civil liberties, I’ll suggest that we’ll never get a high enough density of police/guards to effectively stop these events, as opposed to cleaning up afterwards, which is what typically happens now. Next, that I don’t know anyone who thinks possession of a gun conveys ‘spidey-sense’, and while I’m willing to let the implied insult roll, the simple facts…that shootings in states where CCW’s are ‘must issued’ haven’t skyrocketed…might give you some ground to reconsider.

I didn't follow your reference to Australia. Care to clarify? -- tim Dunlop

Gun crime in OZ has declined, but not at any greater rate than it did before the buyback (see Guns And Crime: Gun Control in Australia I haven’t seen any data contradicting the data and conclusions there, including the INSA study in 2000.

Steve L., I think you missed my point. I think that the significant difference between the McDonalds shooting and the LAX shooting is that at El Al check-in counters worldwide, there are armed, alert security personnel whose full-time job is protection. I think it's a dangerous fantasy to believe that armed fellow passengers in line could have done a better job of stopping this suicide attack. In fact, I put that right up there with dreaming that you're Spiderman. A surprise attack where the terrorist just wants carnage and doesn't intend to survive and there isn't already someone on guard is going to be "successful", maybe not as successful as the 21 victims in the McDonalds but a lot more than the two victims at LAX. If we really have a lot of gun-toting honest citizens who think their superhuman reflexes are going to head off unexpected, unprovoked terrorist attacks by other gun-toting malevolent citizens, I think I'll stay in the basement until the crossfire dies down. -- Andrew Lazarus

Yeah, I’ll agree. I don’t think San Ysidro would have been prevented by the presence of an armed civilian. But it might have been mitigated. And how many of the 19 people who dies in San Ysidro would have had to survive before you’d consider that a positive result?

Hartin's post is an example of exactly the kind of thing I object to. He believes, and would have us believe, that England and Australia are terribly dangerous places. That's false. I know that there are some statistics floating around, but I know people who have lived in both places. He believes, and would have us believe, that armed self-defense has always been the primary source of personal safety. That's false too -- the rule of law works a lot better. St. Onge says that someone carrying a gun is unlikely to use it in any given year. Sure, but a statistically small number of uses can be pretty awful. If "concealed carry" is by permit, it is a form of gun control. And if carriers are screened, I don't have a big problems with that. Most second amendment guys don't want any regulation or registration at all, though. Note that both St. Onge and Hartin are totally passive about the "causes of violence". We're just a violent country, nothing can be done about it, gun ownership isn't the cause, and since we're a violent place we should all arm ourselves. Somehow the fact gets lost that, even after arming ourselves, we're still less safe than people in a lot of other countries. If I have a gun, I can protect myself against fists, clubs, and knives. Against guns, only maybe. The initial advantage is lost, especially because an evildoer with a gun has the initiative. Nobody took up what I said about the third-world places where every man is armed and armed self-defense really is the only safety you have. Those are NOT safe places. -- Zizka

Ziska: Your assumptions about England and Oz are off-base. I know people who live in Moscow right now, and they haven’t been mugged, so is Moscow safe today? The plural of anecdote isn’t fact; you have to dig into the real numbers somewhat, and the reality is that major cities in Europe are as dangerous or more so than major cities in the U.S. right now. And at what point in history – before the foundation of modern police forces by Robert Peel in London in the 1820’s – was armed self-defense not the ‘primary source of personal safety’? You flatly misread history there. It’s no more true that 2nd Amendment absolutists want ‘no regulation’ than that gun control advocates want ‘no guns’. The reality is that both political organizations are increasingly radicalized. Sadly, because I know that the large majority of gun owners would accept some reasonable regulation (I know I’m handwaving a bit here), as long as it was tied to some irreducible right rather than being this year’s slice of the salami. No, the issue isn’t that we’re a ‘violent country’ so we should do nothing; it’s just that we are a violent country and this piffle about gun control gets in the way of finding and fixing the problems that make us so. Your facts about armed self-defense aren’t true either; the average gunfight takes place at close range, a number of shots are fired, few if any hit, and it takes ten to fifteen seconds.

Hartin: I find your analysis simplistic. There are societies that are highly armed that are relatively safe against personal crime, and ones that are terribly dangerous. There are societies that are lightly armed that are safe and I suppose there are ones that are dangerous, although, frankly, I'm having a hard time thinking of one. I've spent about 2 months in the UK over the last 5 years, and believe me I wasn't walking around scared. What bothers me the most about your argument, however, is that it appears to me to be based on symbolic or ritualistic thinking. In other words, the UK and Australia are going to have high crime because they've gotten on the wrong side of the Gun God and the right to self-defense. Sometimes you look like you're writing a statistical argument (one which I suspect is false: Australia is a safe country), sometimes you seem to believe that a philosophical/historical argument compels the desired statistical results. I don't think so. I've decided that some gun control groups have indeed missed the target: the target is gun crime (and I suppose gun accidents), not gun ownership. But your metaphysical arguments don't sway me. -- Andrew Lazarus

Well, we’re in agreement – the target is gun crime. But then why does everyone focus on the one variable that is a) relatively uncontrollable – there are more than enough guns in the world today to provide for criminals for the next millennium; and b) shown not to have major impacts on the gun crime we are concerned with?

This thread all got started from the comparison of the 21 dead in the San Ysidro massacre with the 2 dead at LAX, with the clear implication that more people carrying guns around McDonalds would have cut down on the death toll. And I've been saying that is only very partially true. Even people carrying guns (but who are not armed security guards looking for troublemakers) won't get the drop on a suicidal lunatic who comes in gun[s] blazing. First they'll have to put down their Big Macs. You don't seem to accept this. Hence I am very worried that your faith in the defensive capabilities of firearms is exaggerated. -- Andrew Lazarus

No, Andrew, I know for a fact what the defensive capabilities of firearms are; I’ve done force-on-force training and studied the literature on the subject extensively. It would be useful to find people who wanted to debate this issue who had done the samething. It might get us past rhetoric, and on to problem-solving, because (unlike many in the gun world – who won’t admit this I believe because they feel it’s like giving your arm to a shark) I believe we do have a horrible problem with gun crime in this country, and I’m ready, willing, and able to sit down with people who really want to solve it. This has been a relatively civil thread on a heated and controversial topic; I want to thank everyone – even you, Andrew! – and look forward to more. Maybe we can find a path through this together. We certainly won’t do it alone.

2002-10-07T11:28:00.000-07:00

RISK Great comment from Stephen M. St. Onge:

Thinking about the never ending gun control arguments, I had a possibly original idea: Carrying/not carrying a gun is controversial because of the message it sends, not because of the effects of the guns themselves. Guns are tools for doing harm to people, but outside of video fantasies, someone carrying a firearm is highly unlikely to use it during any given day -- or year. What makes the gun so controversial is that the gun carrier is sending a message: 'I think we live in a violent world, where we might be attacked at any time, and if it happens, I'm going to deal out some violence too.' The principled non-carrier is also sending a message: 'I think we may live in a society where violence could occur at any moment, but I refuse to be part of the culture of violence. By refusing in advance to prepare for violence, I will help stamp it out.' In short, one says "I'm dangerous, watch out for me,", the other "Give peace a chance." What's really at stake is a question of how people ought to live. No wonder the issue is so highly charged!

I wildly disagree with him, but believe that he has neatly encapsulated the gap between the sides. I’ll characterize it differently. One side is dealing with the world as they wish it were, and the other with the world as they are afraid it is. Look, I like to eat, and spend a decent amount of time in East and South-Central L.A. making my taste buds happy. Many of my Westside and beach-community friends are horrified at this idea. They are convinced that if they drive to The Pit or King Taco #1, they'll be robbed or worse. The reality is that I’m at greater risk from the fat in the ribs and the lard in the beans than I am from being attacked while I'm there eating. Having said that, I exercise and eat the ~~good~~ bad stuff in moderation, so that I can manage the risk. Possessing some skills and tools to defend yourself is also a part of managing one’s risk. I’d like to live in a world where I could eat burnt ends two meals a day without effect. I don’t… Lots of other sensible and less-sensible comments; as time permits today, I’ll promote them and respond. Oh, and I had a great trip, thanks for asking.

2002-10-04T08:41:00.000-07:00

MO’ GUNS Dean Peters, of blogs4god comments:

Thanks for the link. And thanks for your discussion on a topic I've been agonizing over. For some time now, the thought of my wife and daughter at home without a reasonable means of defense was on the back of my mind from time to time. Now it is an obsession. I think to myself, "what if the murder[s] need a house to hole up?" I mean he/they had to drive by MY HOUSE 2 to 3 TIMES to get to or away from a couple of the slaughters. Yeah, I know, raging paranoia, but 40 years in a safe neighborhood instantly turned into shooting gallery makes me think ... what if I saw the muzzle of a gun out of the back of a step-van ... what could I do, throw my keys at his eyes across the parking lot? Yeah, I know, we don't want vigilantes. Trust me, I'm not one of them. Its like a friend said to me when discussing whether or not to arm the pilots. "It's a shame that the most well armed individual is someone who's smuggled onto a plane a pair of nail clippers ..." My friend also lives here in the middle of the danger zone. Thanks for the link. And the discussion. I'm putting in for my 7 days this afternoon. -- Dean Peters

Dean, not to focus unduly on you, but this is my chance to give a small (inflexible and hence Nazi-like) safety rant about gun ownership. Simply put, simply owning a gun will not make you safe, but it will bring on a while new world of responsibilities. On the first point, Col. Cooper (not Professor Cooper) said: "Owning a handgun doesn't make you armed any more than owning a guitar makes you a musician." On the second point, you need to think carefully how you will deal with this new responsibility in the context of the responsibilities you apparently already have…your wife and children. I cannot stress enough the importance of training…training for you in how to use the gun, and training for you, your wife, and children on how to be safe in the presence of guns. I devote two weeks a year to firearms training, and probably spend another week a year with my sons and SO reviewing firearms safety issues. I’ll suggest visiting the firearms links on the left, just to get a sense of the and two excellent books by Mas Ayoob as starting points: In the Gravest Extreme The Role of the Firearm in Personal Protection and The Truth About Self Protection, Mas is excellent at talking about the ‘context’ of the use of firearms by citizens. Find a local instructor, or email me at the address at the upper left and I can help you find on in your area. A gun is not a talisman that automatically banishes evil. It is a tool that can help good people defeat it, though. I'm on the road. See everyone Monday. Try not to kill anyone or blow anything up while I'm gone.

2002-10-03T22:17:00.000-07:00

ALL KINDS OF NEWS Well, it’s definitely a king-hell weird day. First, and foremost, the shootings in Maryland, well covered by a number of new sources and bloggers today. Check out Dean at ‘Blogs4God’, for local details. There’s a lot of discussion on whether this is terrorism, a spree killing, or something else, and obviously there isn’t enough information to have an opinion. For now, I’ll call it a ‘mucking’ and suggest again that everyone go read ‘Stand on Zanzibar’. It looks like the bad guy used a rifle from the back of a panel van, possibly with another sick SOB driving. He most likely parked where the back of the van could cover a place where there were a number of ~~pedestrians~~ targets and waited. I have a hard time imaging how you defend against this with a traditional LEO response; you can pull all the box vans in the area and hope to get lucky, or more likely, someone will get a glimpse of a plate or distinguishing feature, or someone will overhear a plan or remember seeing something odd, a gun store will be able to track the ammunition, and he’ll be tracked and, hopefully, captured. I hope the arresting officers are careful… And here I’ll jump in with a pro-gun point, and compare two events, one indirectly mentioned by Susannah Cornett. In 1984, in San Ysidro, CA (near San Diego), a nut whose name I won’t publicize walked into a McDonald’s with three guns, and killed 21 people. In 2002, at Los Angeles International Airport, another nut whose name I won’t publicize walked into a terminal concourse with two guns and killed two people. The difference?? At LAX, an armed, trained ticket supervisor (with the help of some others who declined the shooter's offer to be victims) engaged, shot and killed the shooter as soon as he opened fire. In the event of a ‘low-level’ (and believe me, to the families involved, this isn’t ‘minor’, or ‘low-level’ or anything except apocalyptic…) terrorism, or random acts like this, the police are here to investigate, cleanup the mess, investigate, and when they find the Bad Person, overwhelm and hopefully arrest. This is a good thing. It’s just not too useful to the 3rd through 19th people who die, if you know what I mean. Look, this is an old and tired set of arguments. Lots of folks don’t like guns, are horrified that anyone would own one, and firmly believe that incrementally ratcheting down the number of people who own guns is the best way to avoid these kind of tragedies. In an ideal world, they’re right. In this world, they’re wrong, as Australia and the U.K. suggest:

The one crime [in the U.K.] that has shown a stubborn unwillingness to fall is assault, especially street robberies. Police have been recording a 20 per cent rise in muggings, yet the BCS suggests there has hardly been a rise at all.

I’m not going to weigh in with moral arguments right now. It’s been a bad day, and I need to take the weekend and get out of town. But let’s look at this instrumentally. We have two ‘success’ stories in dealing with terrorism this go-round. Flight 93 and LAX. I’m not suggesting that we arm passengers with handguns (although I do think we’re crazy not to have immediately allowed pilots to have them). I am suggesting that the only form of defense that is likely to work while there the bodies are still breathing is to involve every one of us as an thoughtful, active observer of our environment, and someone who is willing to act appropriately when it is called for. In some cases, that will involve larger numbers of people with guns. They can be officers, standing on streetcorners, costing us tax dollars, and nosing deeper and deeper into our lives, or they can be citizens. Our pilot. The ticket agent. Our neighbors. Some of then will screw up. Some of them will do bad things. But the reality is that they screw up and do bad things right now. And as far as I can tell from other folks’ experience, it doesn’t get better as you try and take the guns away. And it doesn’t get worse as you let people have them, either. Think about it. Think about San Ysidro, and think about LAX. Think about how hard it will be to have a policeman catch the Maryland shooter at just the right time in just the right place. For those of you repelled by firearms ownership outside the agents of the state think about this: Even if you don’t agree with John Lott that crime has gone down in must-issue states (where average citizens who pass background and training requirements can get permits to carry guns), I have seen no evidence that remotely and reasonably suggests that it has gone up. So if it doesn’t effect crime, and it could effect terrorism or ‘mucking’, what’s the issue? Think about the 19 lives difference, and wonder whether they could have been saved before you answer.

2002-10-03T21:58:00.000-07:00

SHORT TAKES In other news, Dwight Meredith has one of the most sensible decision trees on Iraq that I've seen to date. Why the hell aren't any of the national figures taking with that kind of thoughtful determination?? DWIGHT FOR SPEAKER!! And in an issue I'll have to address Monday, Ross at The Bloviator takes on Reynolds on the issue of "is violence a public health issue". I have some thoughts...

2002-10-02T22:53:00.000-07:00

A NEW LOW... If you go to the url for the New Times: http://www.newtimesla.com/, you'll wind up at the site for the L.A. Weekly. It appears that the parent corporations of each have pulled a swap; The Voice/Weekly group gets L.A., and the New Times group gets Cleveland. Unbelievably sleazy. The redirect is a new low, though, even for a left-liberal paper that fights unions among its own staff and also can't stand competiton. Matt Welch, Ken Layne, and their L.A. Examiner have a lot more. More tomorrow.

2002-10-02T18:01:00.000-07:00

OH, REALLLLY… Here’s the key text from today’s N.J. Supreme Court decision regarding replacing Torricelli on the November ballot(emphasis mine):

And the Court having concluded that the central question before it is whether the dual interests of full voter choice and the orderly administration of an election can be effectuated if the relief requested by plaintiffs were to be granted; And the Court being of the view that
[it] is in the public interest and the general intent of the election laws to preserve the two-party system and to submit to the electorate a ballot bearing the names of candidates of both major political parties as well as of all other qualifying parties and groups. Kilmurray v. Gilfert, 10 N.J. 435, 441 (1952);
And the Court remaining of the view that the election statutes should be liberally construed
to allow the greatest scope for public participation in the electoral process, to allow candidates to get on the ballot, to allow parties to put their candidates on the ballot, and most importantly, to allow the voters a choice on Election Day. Catania v. Haberle, 123 N.J. 438, 448;

Yeah, right. It infuriates me to see the Democrats crowing and the republicans throwing fits, as though the sanctity of the electoral process meant anything to any one of their SkyBox-sitting asses. If the law of the land is that we should have a choice on Election Day, why do the courts tolerate the outrageous gerrymandering that creates essentially one-party seats? It’s important to have two parties on the ballot, you see, but it doesn’t really matter whether there’s an election or not. Here are two great articles on the subject. First, from this Sunday’s L.A. Times (actually, a good damn issue…): In California, Politicians Choose--and Voters Lose. Here’s a quote:

What if the World Series had been played during spring training, the commissioner of baseball having picked the competing teams? Baseball fans would be outraged. Yet something similar has happened to California elections. In the vast majority of legislative and congressional districts, we have no general election contests this fall because the races were decided in the spring primaries. The political stadium is dark. How many competitive races for the House of Representatives are there in the Southland? None. How many competitive races for the state Senate? None. How many for the Assembly? Two--at most. … That's what a politician likes--the fewer voters, the better, and especially if they are the most partisan ones. Candidates beat their breasts about what hard-core partisans they are, and the tiny number of people who go to the polls respond by electing the most hard-core partisans in both parties. The result is a largely dysfunctional Legislature. Members chosen in a closed primary, with a minimum of voters participating, come to Sacramento intent on representing the narrow partisan positions that got them there. Is it any wonder they cannot negotiate a state budget? Passing the budget--it was two months late this year--is the most important and most difficult thing a legislator does because it requires compromise and negotiation. The current system encourages exactly the opposite. One Republican who might have broken the budget impasse this summer privately told friends, "Look, I can't afford to cross my primary voters; they demand that I hang tough." The sentiment was the same on the Democratic side. A look at the shadow Legislature elected in March shows future members will be even more ideologically rigid. Californians might remember this when they cast their meaningless votes in November for their preordained members of the Legislature--if they bother to vote at all.

And from UPI (via Eugene Volokh), this interview with Dan Polsby:

The 2002 elections for Congressional Representatives will be the first conducted under the new districts drawn following the 2002 Census. Although important issues are at stake in November, most of the districts' borders have been gerrymandered so skillfully that the typical race's outcome is predetermined. Time Magazine estimates that 394 House seats are "safe," 29 are "almost safe," and eleven are "toss-ups." That's eleven toss-ups out of 435 separate elections. In contrast, 8 of 34 Senate seats are said to be toss-ups. The Senate is more than ten times more competitive than the House, in large part because Senate races are fought over entire states, which can't be gerrymandered. With districts, however, by carefully redrawing boundaries, parties can ensure that that most of their incumbents enjoy a comfortable majority. This is the opposite of what the Framers of the Constitution intended for the House of Representatives. They wanted the House to represent the views of the public by allowing voters to make wholesale changes in their Representatives every two years. The Senate, in contrast, with its staggered six-year terms, was supposed to provide a brake on popular passions.

Explain why we have elections now?? Both parties are guilty as hell in this. My own Congressional district…once one of the few competitive districts in Los Angeles…was ‘readjusted’ with the conservative areas of Palos Verdes given to the next district south to make it a safe Republican seat, and the more liberal areas of Santa Monica added to make it a safe Democratic seat. Why not just let the party staff and donors pick the Congressmembers directly? Why do they even bother filling my mailbox with inane crap? Can you tell I’m more than a little put out by this?? You should be too.

2002-10-02T15:53:00.000-07:00

ANDREW!! The normally eminently sensible Andrew Edwards steps in it with this comment:

(NOTE: I still favour war on Iraq, for what it's worth. But I'd be willing to put that off for a couple years to see GWB handed his ass on a plate in the next two elections)

C'mon Andrew, you don't mean that, do you?? If you really believe war in Iraq is in the national interest, screw electoral politics. I'm tired as hell of both sides playing this as a wedge they can use come this November or November 04. I'd like it, just once, if one of them...one public-voiced Senator, one Congressmember...took a position that wasn't nakedly and obviously clasping for partisan advantage. Have they no shame? I'd imagine not...

2002-10-02T10:14:00.000-07:00

LIGHTNESS Looking over at Blogcritics, I found this review of Coyote vs. Acme, one of the funniest things ever written, if you think Chuck Jones sits at the Right Hand of God, as I do. That reminded me of a lesser-known but equally brilliant piece by Frazer (who is up there in the People I’d Like To Have Dinner With list), his Lamentations of the Father

On Screaming
Do not scream; for it is as if you scream all the time. If you are given a plate on which two foods you do not wish to touch each other are touching each other, your voice rises up even to the ceiling, while you point to the offense with the finger of your right hand; but I say to you, scream not, only remonstrate gently with the server, that the server may correct the fault. Likewise if you receive a portion of fish from which every piece of herbal seasoning has not been scraped off, and the herbal seasoning is loathsome to you, and steeped in vileness, again I say, refrain from screaming. Though the vileness overwhelm you, and cause you a faint unto death, make not that sound from within your throat, neither cover your face, nor press your fingers to your nose. For even now I have made the fish as it should be; behold, I eat of it myself, yet do not die.

This guy obviously has kids.

2002-10-02T09:45:00.000-07:00

ANTI-SEMITISM AND THE TWO ‘N-WORDS’ My Central Valley bud Devra points out Ampersand’s comments about conflating anti-semitism with criticism of Israel. She tags a few good points…although I think Goodwin’s Law applies, and that the term “Nazi” is most usually used as a meaningful-conversation-stopper; I think there has to be a distinction between some uses of the term…for example, some of my motorcycling and climbing friends have called me ‘the Safety Nazi’ with mixed levels of warmth, which I don’t find terribly insulting because I am inflexible about safety, and the use of the terms feminazi or econazi, which I’ve heard used to apply to folks who are equally inflexible about feminism or ecology. Both have an element of the dismissive about them, and could, in some light be seen as insulting. But to call Jews ‘Nazis’ is a different level of the game, in no small part because it is a targeted and intentional insult aimed at the heart of their cultural and racial history. It isn’t an indirect or general insult, it is a intentional slap in the face no less than the other “N” word. And because I usually use anecdote to make my points, here’s a personal one. As a teenager, my brother went through a phase of his life when he was simply convinced he was black. He dated black girls, hung out with the black kids at school, spoke in that soft middle-class West Los Angeles version of a black drawl with traces of black urban grammar. I never quite figured out where it came from; both of us has been in part raised by strong black men who were close friends to our checked-out parents, but I’d simply acknowledged my status as a mutt and always been comfortable with it. Maybe it connected with him in some deeper way, I really don’t know. Later in life, he would fall into his ‘wigro’ role among black friends or co-workers. Until one day, he got fired because in the heat of an argument at work, he’d called a black co-worker by the ‘n-word’. He called me in tears and rage. He’d used the same word, collegially, a dozen times, he told me. He couldn’t understand why, now, his colleague had called management and management had summarily fired him. I told him that I understood, and that if he’d worked for me, I’d probably have fired him, too. The issue is that insult derives from context and intention. To call me a ‘Nazi’ because I’m obsessed with and rigid about safety, or a women a ‘Nazi’ because she is obsessed with or rigid about feminism, or an ecologist a ‘Nazi’ because they are obsessed with or rigid about ecology is a different thing than to call someone by the name of the enemy who specifically targeted them out and attempted to exterminate them. And to wave that off is simply as morally indefensible as what my brother did. At least he learned his lesson. I’ll add a ‘geopolitical’ point as well. The issue in criticizing Israel’s sometimes misguided policies is to distinguish one key fact: do you support Israel’s right to exist? As a Western and predominantly Jewish state? Because while I have been and will continue to be critical of many of their loonier policies, their right to exist trumps a whole range of other issues for me, and their opponents refusal to meaningfully agree to their right to exist and to take concrete steps to back up that agreement devalue their claims almost to zero.

2002-10-01T22:43:00.000-07:00

THIS MUST MEAN SOMETHING Had lunch today with a youthful colleague from the Netherlands, and we had occasion to discuss our various vehicular indiscretions, and the response of the local constables. I was ticketed last year on my motorcycle by a local policeman with a laser speed detector; I saw him at a distance, but I assumed he was using radar. Motorcycles have a small cross-section, so we have to be relatively close to the radar gun to register. Sadly, that isn't the case with a laser. I slowed down with what I thought was plenty of distance, and was shocked, really just shocked to be pulled over. I was cooperative, the officer was polite, and instead of writing my ticket for the actual speed he’d measured, reduced my speed, raised the noted speed limit, and so meaningfully reduced the severity of the ticket (and fine). My Dutch friend and I discussed the pros and cons of fighting tickets (I almost never fight them; I have been lucky enough never to have received a ticket I didn’t deserve, and I view it as a kind of tax on speeding). But I have a number of friends who do and have successfully fought tickets in court. My friend was somewhat shocked. In the Netherlands, tickets are given by teams of police officers, who collect the fines on the spot. There is no appealing to a court. There is no discretion on the part of the officer. If you are pulled over, you are guilty, you pay your fine, and you go on. Unless they impound your car on the spot, which they do for various moving violations. Somehow, this difference typifies the American attitude toward government. Personal, messy, possibly forgiving (or possibly the opposite, if you are less practiced at dealing with police officers than I may be). My rights equal those of the officer in front of the court (in theory, anyway). In the Netherlands, the officer is the state. Now there are arguably advantages to that system. Minorities get tickets at the behest of an objective radar gun, not a possibly prejudiced officer. The powerful have a harder time getting off by simply being who they are. But something is lost, as well. Some call it the difference between being a citizen and a subject; I’m not completely sure how to express it. But it’s an important difference. The imperfections of our system aren’t something to necessarily be rationalized out of existence. In some ways, the imperfections are the system. I need to think about that some more.

2002-10-01T19:12:00.000-07:00

MO-MO PO-MO Erin O'Connor, over at CantWatch has a great, annotated transcript of a Hardball dialog between my man, Stanley Fish, and Thor Halvorsson of FIRE (Foundation for Individual Rights in Education). A live Fisking...

2002-10-01T14:35:00.000-07:00

MORE ON DOUBT The New Republic Online has a great article on angst in the art world. Check out After Disenchantment. A sample:

Disenchantment has itself become a fashionable attitude. The people who cannot get from Experience A to Experience B have based an entire aesthetic on their inability to weave things together. Turn the pages of Vitamin P: New Perspectives in Painting, an ultra-hip anthology that has just been published by Phaidon, and you encounter a mood that tends to be hands-off, formulaic, and terminally ironic in the work of more than one hundred artists, some of whom are unfamiliar, some of whom are very familiar, such as Luc Tuymans, who specializes in wan, nearly monochromatic vignettes, and Elizabeth Peyton, who paints the youth of today with the manipulative sensitivity of a high school student on the make. The cream-colored cover of Vitamin P is decorated with tablet-shaped details from paintings. The message is that painting is good for you. Vitamin P is meant to be an optimistic book, but the artists and the critics involved carry such a baggage of stylish pessimism and are so determinedly post-everything that their plea for the re-enchantment of painting seems little more than another attitude.

Note how this fits into my discussion of doubt as a philosophical base.

2002-10-01T14:13:00.000-07:00

MEAT IS...MEAT, WHICH YOU GET BY KILLING THINGS Rob Lyman has a great post on PETA, meat, and hunting (I've always subscribed to the People for Eating Tasty Animals version, myself). I made a shorter comment:

2) It is moral. I came to the conclusion a long time ago that people who eat meat and have never killed anything are morally suspect. Some creature gave its life for the chicken Andouille sausages in the pasta sauce I made tonight. Pork chops and salmon don’t start out wrapped in plastic on the grocery shelf. I have hunted deer, wild pigs, and birds, and I can say with certainty (and I imagine anyone else who hunts can say) that it fundamentally changed the way I look both at my food and at animals in the world. I respect the death that made my dinner possible in a way I never would have had an animal not died at my own hand.

but his is more thorough and pointed. Check it out. He also catches the amusing point in the 'Uppity Negro' comments:

And why in heaven's name would you issue death threats against a guy called Armed Liberal?

Is he on my blogroll yet??

2002-10-01T10:37:00.000-07:00

UNCLEAR NUCLEAR THOUGHTS Ken Hirsch paints a ‘rational’ response to nuclear terrorism, in response to a scenario by Eugene Volokh, which is different from and as scary as mine. When I wrote the scenario below, I had two thoughts in mind: First, that the small ‘chattering classes’ of the left and right keep forgetting hysteresis, the tendency for systems set in motion to overshoot, and the impact when the large, silent center finally takes a position; and second, the complexity of the real world, which resists being reduced to simple if>then formulations. First, let me say about the scenario, that I think that it, or something like it, will remain a reasonable possibility (not a 1:5 chance, but not a 1:10,000 either) for the foreseeable future. The reality is that we live in a world in which a large number of people dislike us, don’t respect us, and see their interests directly challenged by our efforts to defend ours. I’m not, as Avedon Carol suggests, painting this as a nightmarish ‘if we don’t invade Iraq’ scenario. On one hand, if we allow folks who hate us to get stronger, it becomes more likely. On the other, as we bring the hostility out into the open, it becomes more likely. The Iraq issue is a separate one that I’ll try and address later (as soon as I figure out where I stand). Without getting too deeply into what it itself an immense and complex topic, I believe that our interests are, in line with American character, an odd mixture of blind, shortsighted self-interest, noble humanitarianism, and naiveté. We want simultaneously to preserve our cheap oil and cheap Nikes, and to see that everyone else gets some, too. Right now, we are, along with Europe, an island of prosperity and relative safety in an increasingly impoverished (we’ll talk about that in a minute) and unsafe world. This represents a massive supply of ‘potential energy’ in the social and political sphere, and this reservoir of energy will drive international and domestic politics for quite some time into the future. About impoverishment – I am aware of the various studies showing that the objective level of world poverty may be declining. But impovrishment – the ‘feeling’ of being poor – increases, as both the traditional social structures that support people break down, and as they are immersed in the mediaverse that shows them an idealized vision of the prosperous life in the West. So let’s stipulate that the issues Neal Stephenson raises may be valid, even if his outcomes are outlandish.

When it gets down to it--talking trade balances here--once we've brain-drained all our technology to other countries, once things have evened out, they're making cars in Bolivia and microwave ovens in Tadzhikistan and selling them here, once our edge in natural resources has been made irrelevant by giant Hong Kong ships and dirigibles that can ship North Dakota all the way to New Zealand for a nickel, once the Invisible Hand has taken all those historical inequities and smeared them out into a broad global layer of what a Pakistani brickmaker would call prosperity--y'know what? There's only four things we do better than anybody else: music/movies/microcode (software)/high-speed pizza delivery.

And until that smearing happens, there are a bunch of people out there who will be seriously pissed off at us. And as the march of technology assures that the handheld iPAQ that I use every day has more processing power than (pick your obsolete mainframe), absent a massive and probably unworkable effort, the technology of warfighting and of mass destruction similarly moves downscale and becomes more and more widely accessible to those pissed-off people. So one of these days, one of the containers off San Pedro may very well contain someone’s message of destruction and hate. We’ll survive it. I don’t believe that anyone except possibly the Chinese will be able to threaten the U.S. with massive destruction, and they are as a state, likely to be reasonable and deterrable as were the Soviets. But how will we react? That’s the $64 million question. Right now we have two polar positions, occupied by relatively small and vocal groups of people. The larger majority are either confused or inattentive, with some general feelings – they’d rather not be seeing dead people on TV, and they’re kind of pissed off about 9/11. I’ve spent the last six months talking to almost everyone I meet about this stuff…store clerks, cab drivers, hair cutters, kid’s teachers, coworkers, and my decidedly unscientific poll is what has led me this conclusion. It is my belief that both poles are relatively well-intentioned; they just have very different view of what the world looks like and as a result how best to deal with it. But I don’t think either side has clearly thought their positions through, nor do I think that they have thought through the real consequences of their positions. For the hawks, the reality is that we are talking about a return to colonialism. There’s a problem: In the old colonial days, colonies paid for themselves through often-brutal extractive practices. I’m not sure how the economics work today, but I’d bet that they are still uneconomical. Ideally, this would be an enlightened colonialism…and to be blunt, given a choice between Idi Amin and a colonial administrator, I’ll bet the average Ugandan would take the administrator every damn day. But it will stretch us financially and morally. For the doves, the reality is that we are talking about Fortress America, about an autarky. Unless we are willing to hold the world’s biggest potlatch and simply give our wealth away…and maybe even then, given my belief that the roots of the struggle against the West are in the struggle against modernism…we will still face implacable enemies abroad. We will need to withdraw militarily and economically from the rest of the world; maybe not totally, but substantially. Our economy is big enough to do it; our standard of living will fall, but it’s in a slow decline anyway, and attaining a stable sustainable level of economic activity brings other possible benefits. I detest both ideas. Intellectually, I rebel against a colonial future; and I know in my heart that we will never be able to build walls high enough to keep the rest of the world out. In my mind, the primary discussion we should be having as a nation is how we will address this issue in the long run. And as a part of that discussion, we need to openly discuss and firmly establish how we will respond to the kind of scenario I paint, or Eugene Volokh paints. Because if we wait until it happens, we will be driven by the way that the silent middle jumps, and my belief is that that jump will be extreme (in either direction) and virtually impossible to control. Fear and rage are never good mental states to make life-and-death decisions in.

2002-09-30T11:38:00.000-07:00

PLEASANT SURPRISES I’ve harshed Hesiod and Sullywatch over language and tone, and while I’ve been impressed at the work Charles at LGF does in bringing Middle Eastern news to light, I’ve got issues with his comments section; the omnipresent tone of Arab-bashing and chest-beating, at a time when we need to proceed with determination, care, and seriousness is part of what led to my ‘thought experiment’ below (and which I’ll follow up on as time allows today). Then this charming set of comments over at Aaron's 'Uppity Negro' blog was pointed out to me:

[sorry, crabby] I feel a collecting-spree coming on, & I'm afraid Armed Liberal's blinky, doe-eyes are looking mighty fine. Can I have'em, Aaron? Can I? Posted by: Neogrammarian on September 16, 2002 05:21 PM As long as I can have the ears. Those necklaces of them look quite fetching. Posted by: Aaron on September 16, 2002 05:41 PM

So, trying to figure out how to comment on them, I can only think of one response…molon labe, kids, molon labe. [a few folks wanted to know what 'molon labe' meant...I added a link]

2002-09-29T18:08:00.000-07:00

AFTER A BRIEF BREAK... We're back, after a snap 3-day camping and kayaking trip to Catalina with the Littlest Guy and two other couples with similar-aged kind. You wouldn't _believe_ how much [stuff] you have to take when you're wrangling kids...beautiful, beautiful weekend. I'll get caught up and comment on the comments and events later, along with an explanation of the intent of the 'thought experiment' below.

2002-09-26T21:53:00.000-07:00

DOUBTFUL So Kevin Reybauld led me to Jeanne d’Arc, who also was interviewed here. Her post, was about

My problems with the engineering students had to do with their arrogance and shallowness. Those were universal traits in the students I got from the engineering department (and I'll throw business majors into that category, too), and I think when I read Armey's remarks, he reminded me so much of my old students that I had to lash out. I had quite a few pre-med students as well, and a lot of them shared that arrogance (the extreme shallowness was less of a problem with potential doctors), but there were exceptions.

And

My other problem with engineer wannabes was their shallow thinking. To put it in the bluntest terms, not one of them had ever read a challenging novel, essay, poem or play. They had reached their late teens without ever having thought a serious thought, without ever having challenged their own immediate perceptions in any way. Their understanding of human behavior was straight out of sitcoms and the cheapest, most exploitational movies. Black and white. Them and us. Good and evil. Unless they have aged better than I expect, I don't think any of them would be capable today of understanding that there was anything odd about the notion of a "war" on "evil."

started me thinking, and, as happens sometimes, a light went on in my head. I went back to Dawn’s post on parenting, which said

When I look back at those first months of Lily's life all I can remember are just snapshots of moments. I was so exhausted and overwhelmed. I feared sundown for the first month because I knew I would be tired and in need of sleep, but Lily would be wide-awake. We spent many nights in the rocking chair, her looking up at me out of the corner of her eye, nestled at my breast, me reading every child care manual I had - over and over. Lily grew, as all children do and soon she will be three. We don't see eye to eye on most things and she tests my boundaries every chance she gets. She is frenetic, stubborn, ornery, devilish, smart, sweet, manipulative, interesting and thoughtful. Sometimes I think she hates me, sometimes I think I am the only person she loves. Sometimes I want to tape her mouth closed, sometimes I want to cry because she is so insightful and bright.

which led to Devra’s reply where she said:

But I wonder if they weigh the mistakes they've made against the positives & find they're somehow lacking. I can't imagine that a loving parent would say they 'regret' having children, but I wonder if there isn't a small voice inside asking "Are you sure you made the right decision?" If you're a parent, are you allowed to wonder if you're the last person in the world who should be trying to raise children? If you're a parent, are you allowed to doubt yourself? How do you get past that terror? How do you get through each day without thinking you're fucking it all up? And what do you do when you do fuck it all up?

Now, I admire the hell out of both Dawn and Devra (except for the whole Dawn stalking me thing, but she’s accepted the restraining order with a certain grace that bespeaks experience…), but there’s a thread here I want to try and follow, and to bring out for your consideration. It’s about self-doubt, and self-criticism, and a perception that maybe traps us an endless loop of self-criticism and self-doubt. Look. Doubt, and a willingness to change are critical to any kind of progress. Some measure of introspection and self-questioning are a part of any adult. But when they become the dominant strain in one's philosophy or spirituality, I think there are consequences, both personal and political, that are serious and negative. Jeanne’s post centers on the difference between someone she considers ‘literate’ and ‘deep’ (Dick Armey’s words, not hers, but they fit here), and someone who deliberately isn’t. Now, I’ve got a foot in each world. Many of my friends here in L.A. are poets, writers, and artists, many are engineers and businessman (the artists have better parties). Maybe that’s part of what makes me so weird. But one thing that I do see is that the relentlessly self-critical attitude (and yes, I do mean to tie this in both to ‘critical theory’ and to Maoist ‘self-criticism’) is one that brings with it a certain set of bags, and a certain philosophical worldview...and hence, I’ll argue, a certain politics. That politics is based on an inherent doubt and distrust…of authority, of the future, of our fellow citizens…and it results in an increasing bureaucratization of risk, the paralysis of over-analysis and a worship of a perpetual, inclusive process over result. But inside…where it counts…we are left insecure, unconfident, anxious. And part of what I see in today’s society – and part what I am sure drives people toward religious fundamentalism – is the corrosive self-doubt that has become the reflexive position of a modern thinker. This doubt cuts to the core issues deepest in our lives. Dawn doubts if she can be a good enough mother. Devra doubts if she should be a mother at all. And in reaction to that pervasive doubt, some people choose a mad kind of certainty. I’ll turn to John Gardner’s On Moral Fiction for a response.

The language of critics, and of artists of the kind who pay attention to critics, has become exceedingly odd: not talk about feelings or intellectual affirmations – not talk about moving and surprising twists of plot or wonderful characters and ideas – but sentences full of large words like hermaneutic, heuristic, structuralism, formalism, or opaque language, and full of fine distinctions – for instance those between modernist and post-modernist -- that would make even an intelligent cow suspicious. Though more difficult than ever to read, criticism has become trivial. … In a world where nearly everything that passes for art is tinny and commercial and often, hollow and academic, I argue – by reason and by banging the table – for an old-fashioned view of what art is and does and what the fundamental business of critics ought therefore to be. Not that I want the joy taken out of the arts; but even frothy entertainment is not harmed by a touch of moral responsibility, at least by an evasion of the too fashionable simplifications. My basic message throughout this book is as old as the hills, drawn from Homer, Plato, Aristotle, Dante, and the rest, and standard in Western civilization down through the eighteenth century; one would think that all critics and artists should be thoroughly familiar with it, and perhaps many are. But my experience is that in university lecture halls, or in kitchen at midnight, after parties, the traditional view of art strikes most people as strange news. The traditional view is that true art is moral: it seeks to improve life, not debase it. It seeks to hold off, at least for a while, the twilight of the gods and us. I do not deny that art, like criticism, may legitimately celebrate the trifling. It may joke, or mock, or while away the time. But trivial art has no meaning or value except in the shadow of more serious art, the kind of art that beats back the monsters and, if you will, makes the world safe for triviality. That art which tends toward destruction, the art of nihilists, cynics, and merdistes, is not properly art at all. Art is essentially serious and beneficial, a game played against chaos and death, against entropy. It is a tragic game, for those who have the wit to take it seriously, because our side must lose; a comic game – or so a troll might say – because only a clown with sawdust brains would take out side and eagerly join in.

And some of those people with sawdust brains walk up the stairs of burning buildings into tragedy, because they choose life over death, and hope over doubt. They aren't all engineers, some of them are poets.

2002-09-26T17:07:00.000-07:00

I'M SPEECHLESS Barbra Streisand faxes Dick 'Gebhart' (Adobe Acrobat required). Look, she's as entitled to her opinions as anyone else...in this era, more so since she can raise $10 million in a night easily if she wanted to...it's the majestic tone of the memo that just makes me giggle. Her political assistant writes:

As you know, Barbra Streisand is busy in rehearsals for the performance she's giving on Sunday for the DCCC, so she asked me convey to you her feeling that it is time for the Democrats to get off the defensive and go on the offensive.

If you want to know where the Democrats hear their master's (or mistresses') voice... SkyBox all the way.

2002-09-25T18:17:00.000-07:00

BITER, BIT The L.A. Weekly is the more successful of the two alternative weeklies in Los Angeles (the other is the Jill Stewart-blessed New Times); it tears vigorously at the ankles of the local establishment with a variety of generically progressive reportage, blended with feet and feet of ads for sexual vigor, plastic surgery, clothes, furniture, dates and escorts - which make it a cash cow for its owner, Village Voice publications. Occasionally, they will pull off a great article, like this leftist critique of the anti-war movement. But like much of the Los Angeles progressive (as opposed to Progressive) community, the paper has satisfied its yearning for political stance by supporting Mumia, opposing the LAPD, talking Eastside while selling Westside, and vigorously supporting union organization. Until it came home to roost. In today’s Times, the Empire gets a chance to strike back.

Last May, members of the paper's advertising staff--concerned about escalating sales targets, post-Sept. 11 layoffs and other job security issues--petitioned to join their colleagues' local. Given the Weekly's unwavering editorial stance as a reportorial champion and unapologetic political ally of organized labor, employees were stunned when the paper's recently appointed publisher, Beth Sestanovich, and her aides deployed every means at their disposal to try to defeat the organizing campaign. As a consequence, this Friday's representational election is deemed too close to call. … [publisher] Sestanovich said, "We believe that when you look at the highly individual and entrepreneurial work of advertising salespeople, union representation just isn't in the interest of those employees. We coexist with our existing union without friction, and I know that it has surprised many of its members that we would contest extension of their union. But I feel strongly that every employee has a right to make a free and informed choice about this."

Now, I’ve talked about SkyBox liberalism before. And I can’t think of a better example of it than a paper which aggressively supports unions…for everyone else.

2002-09-25T14:08:00.000-07:00

”MA, MA, WHERE’S MY PA?” (campaign dig on Grover Cleveland, alleging that he had an illegitimate son) Hardball campaigning isn’t a new feature in American politics (or in politics in general…), and my comments below on the tone of debate in the Blogosphere isn’t meant to compare it with the tone of electoral politics (although I also think that the tone there is depressing); it’s meant to talk about the tone of the politics of governance, which in my mind ought to be totally different than electoral politics (I know, I know, the campaign never ends, and in today’s politics every utterance is aimed directly at the heart of the next election…to me, that expresses the problem rather neatly). Blogs…the prominent blogs…are meant to shape discourse, to launch memes, and to try and steer opinion ever so slightly. When I criticized Sullywatch and Hesiod, it wasn’t because my thin skin was unable to take the sharp words they launched; I’ve read worse, hell, I’ve said worse; they’ve never criticized me, and to be honest, I’m indifferent as to whether they do. It is because I’m a liberal too, and this kind of cheap rhetoric is great at whipping up your existing base, and not so terrific at building it. They’re tearing down what I want to see built. And as a part of my thoughts on combat, I’m getting to the point of ‘honorableness’ in combat, which goes to the fact that combat may end, and that you may have to negotiate with your opponent. And if you have shown trustworthiness, humanity, and honor in the small ways that you can during battle, then there is a door open to greater displays of trustworthiness, humanity, and honorable dealings during peacetime. The Israelis know this, the Palestinians don’t. And, sadly, neither do the rabid bloggers of the left and right. My criticism applies equally well to both sides; it just happens, as a partisan, that I feel responsible for only one. And that matters, because you have to remember the reply to the slur in the title. It was “Gone to the White House, ha, ha, ha.” [Update: Eugene Volokh weighs in on name-calling in lieu of argument.]

2002-09-25T12:10:00.000-07:00

Embattled Dreams: California in War and Peace 1940 - 1950 (from Blogcritics) I have been a huge fan of Kevin Starr’s boosterish histories of California since I read the first book, Americans and the California Dream. His work is the perfect anodyne to Mike Davis’ self-flagellating critique of California and modernity, City of Quartz. Compare Starr:

So too in the popular entertainment of 1940, so much of it originating in California, did the desire for amusement, fantasy, humor, and escape resist the dawning recognition that the United States would soon be entering the conflict.

To Davis:

Such relations of ‘pure capitalism’, of course, are seen as invariable destructive of the identity of ‘true’ intellectuals, still self-defined as artisans or rentiers of their own unique mental productions. Snared in the nets of Hollywood, or entrapped by the Strangelovian logic of the missile industry, ‘seduced’ talents are ‘wasted’, ‘prostituted’, ‘trivialized’, or ‘destroyed’. To move to Lotusland is to sever connection with national reality, to lose historical and experiential footing, to surrender critical distance, to submerge oneself in spectacle and fraud.

Embattled Dreams is the sixth book in Starr’s series, and in some ways the key one, because the roots of modern California were planted in World War II. There were older Californias, and we still can see their traces, but the California in which I live, and the California which serves as a bellwether for modernity, was laid out and built during and immediately after the war. In it he details the cultural and human impact of the war, and then touches on the rise of Republican Progressivism which has defined much of the postwar era. He talks at length about Earl Warren, the Republican prosecutor turned Progressive Governor turned liberal Supreme Court Justice. He also, I believe, tries to answer Davis and the critical challengers of the left by emphasizing the pernicious racism of the era, manifested by the anti-Japanese agitation that culminated in the relocation camps, and by the challenges of wartime integration. Where the book fails, I believe is in integrating both of those histories…of the hopeful, optimistic Folks (as he calls the Midwestern immigrants) with the hope and optimism that led the Japanese, Hispanic, and African-American immigrants to also settle in California – and what happened when their dreams and the fears of the Folks clashed. He concludes the book with the opening chapter of California red-baiting (which will figure prominently in his next book, I assume), and

The ensuing decade would witness Earl Warren emerge as one of the most influential – and liberal – Chief Justices in American history. Calm, majestic, Warren seemed destined for the marble corridors of the Supreme Court. Now, as Chief Justice, the other side of Warren’s nature – the liberal side of the California duality – was free to emerge. Historians would later describe Warren as reversing his philosophies and values after being appointed to the Court and turning liberal, even going soft, did not know the full complexity of Warren’s California Progressive sensibility with its admixture of conservative and liberal values.

I wish that the book had dug deeper into California Progressivism; I think it hold the key to understanding how we can reclaim the territory abandoned by the culture warriors of the right and left. Starr needs no defense against Davis; California itself is his defense.

2002-09-24T21:17:00.000-07:00

MAINSTREAMING Read this Boston Globe Online op-ed, and understand that the principles of 4th Generation defense are beginning to percolate upward to mass consciousness.

When the plane that hit the Pentagon and the plane that crashed in Pennsylvania are looked at side by side, they reveal two different conceptions of national defense: one model is authoritarian, centralized, top down; the other is distributed and egalitarian and accords with what the Framers of the Constitution expected of the citizenry.

More later. (link via Instapundit)

2002-09-24T12:27:00.000-07:00

TARGETS The concept of a ‘non-combatant’ is one that really did not arise until feudal times in Europe and Japan (I don’t know enough about Chinese, African, or MesoAmerican history to comment on their history). Before that, wars had most likely looked Homeric, as community fought community and alliance fought alliance. The able-bodied men of one community fought the able-bodied men of another, with their lives, the freedom of their women and children (this was in times when they spoke of ‘their’ women) and all the assets of the community at stake. (I haven’t unboxed the Homer and Hesiod yet, so can’t provide a quote; but I’m sure there are a number of them about the ‘sad-eyed women being led away from the burning city’, etc. etc.) The increasing depth of the economies (partly driven by consolidation due to conquest) began to generate larger and larger surpluses…both of labor, so that a class of landowners and retainers began to grow up whose daily labor was not needed…and of technology and wealth so that more elaborate fortifications, larger food surpluses to feed armies for longer periods of time, and most of all, more sophisticated weapons and armor were available. Using these weapons and defeating the more-sophisticated defenses required more and more training, which consumed the time of the landowners and their retainers, and began to define them as a military class, distinct from the agrarian and mercantile classes. Eventually, laws were passed (both in Europe and Japan) prohibiting non-members of these classes from owning weapons, or being trained in their use. (Of course there were substantial exceptions; in England, young men were required to train in the use of the longbow…) The styles of warfighting changed as well; from the melee to the set battle and the siege, and as the practice of fighting began to become formalized, so too grew up riles designed both to define ‘honorable’ military practice, which meant both defining how to behave toward other combatants, and toward this new class of people who were to be left alone…in part because devastating a large economy meant that the wealth necessary to support armies would be destroyed. This professionalization progressed in both cases through the Industrial Age. It was the American Civil War which showed the impact of industrialization on warfighting. The North may have been outgeneraled, but it outmanufactured and outtransported the South. And as industrialization and the economy that supported it became the key to Northern success, their efforts to weaken the Southern economy…first through blockades, then as Sherman headed to Atlanta, through devastation of the local economies…were a key part of their military effort. Note that Sherman evacuated Atlanta before he burned it, and his orders were not to slaughter the farmers whose corn he burned and whose livestock he slaughtered. His goal was economic devastation and collapse, not massacre. And, to a large extent, it worked. It was strategic warfare…war fought against the strategic (economic) assets of the enemy, rather than the tactical (military) assets. Note that this wasn’t the first time this had been done; just one of the more successful. The industrialization of warfare meant both that it was integrated backwards into the economy in some unprecedented ways (i.e. the factories that made the weapons and the railroads that shipped them were a part of the ‘weapons system’), and that warfighting itself was changed, as the industrial skill of Krupp and the Germans made the difference in the second Franco-Prussian war, and the invention of accurate, transportable, rapid-firing artillery, the rapid-firing infantry rifle and then the self-loading machine gun changed the way in which war itself was fought. World War I was the last purely ‘tactical’ (as I’m defining it…meaning a war defined by maneuver and tactics addressing the opposing forces) major war. After this war, the English led the way in refocusing their efforts on strategic warfare, as they refocused production on large bombers. Trenchard led the effort to arm the UK with a fleet of heavy bombers, with the deliberate intent of attacking an enemy’s economy, thereby collapsing the industrial supply train that supported their army. When World War II began, the UK attacked German cities with night bombing; the techniques of precision daylight bombing would have to await the Norden bombsight. But until the German defenses were degraded, the level of losses remained unacceptable high, so the allies continued high-altitude bombing aimed at generally weakening the German economy…by destroying it’s infrastructure, killing its participants, and straining its resources (forcing them to deal with the damage done through bombing). In effect, we had returned to the tribal warfare of Homer; the women and children of the combatants on the front lines were now directly hostage to the fortunes of the war. And with Hiroshima, and the ensuing decades in which we concentrated on ‘strategic warfare’…meaning the demolition of enemy civilian infrastructure and the associated civilians, it sure looks like we have returned to the notion of tribal, ‘total’ warfare. So, in effect, it looks like we have effectively blurred the distinction between combatants and non-combatants in today’s warfare. Ironically, as that distinction has been blurred by the emphasis on strategic warfare at the top and on terrorism and intergroup violence (former Yugoslavia, Rwanda) at the bottom, we have worked diligently to bureaucratize and formalize the conduct of war, creating ever more complex rules of engagement, and using modern communications to have military attorneys review orders in real time. So if we have passed the traditional values which separate legitimate targets (opposing military) from illegitimate targets (opposing civilians), how do we judge the appropriateness of attacks in which civilians are killed? And to take it further, as warfare becomes increasingly economic, how do we judge the appropriateness of attacks in which civilians are indirectly killed, through famine, disease, or other indirect effect? These questions cut to the heart of not only the Israel/ Palestinian conflict, but to the conduct of the United States in the near future as we try and deal with the aftermath of 9/11. It is obvious to me that there both is and must be some appropriate basis for judgement. It is equally obvious that different interest groups - supporters of Israel or Palestine, of immediate invasion and normalization of relationships - most likely are applying different grounds for judgement. Next, some suggestions on sorting this mess out.

2002-09-24T09:51:00.000-07:00

LOOK, HERE William Burton does it again, with a personal, accurate, and serious explanation of why our drug laws are stupid. I think it was William Burroghs who pointed out that being a rich junkie wasn't such a big problem. And as far as Mr. Burton is concerned - just go there every day before you come here. I can't think of anything more reasonable to do. Someday he may write something I disagree with, or that isn't damn smart. And it may snow here in L.A., too.

2002-09-23T18:49:00.000-07:00

CLASS WILL OUT Jeff Cooper, already one of my favorite bloggers, shows insane amounts of class in this post rethinking his position on the Central Park 'wilding' convictions. It's not just because he 'kinda sorta' ends up agreeing with me, or with Tom McGuire, who has carried a lot of water on this. The way he handles is is a freaking model, and I hope to respond to challenges half as well.

2002-09-23T17:48:00.000-07:00

IRAQ I’m working semi-diligently on the ‘combatants’ post, but haven’t got it to come out right yet (i.e. I’m not impressed by the arguments I’m making, and yet haven’t revealed interesting enough gaps in them); so was browsing around and just read the Patio Pundit’s take on why we should invade Iraq. Rather than get into a point-by-point discussion (I don’t disagree, I don’t completely agree, I’m kind of tilting slowly over the fence toward ‘do it’), I thought I’d present a thought experiment. Take a live cat, and put it in a sealed box…no, wrong experiment. Try this one instead.

One nice afternoon, I’m sitting here in my home office near the Palos Verdes peninsula when I notice a brilliant flash of light and some of my windows break. The power goes out, the telephones, cell phones, and computers don’t work. My backup AM/SW/SSB radio in the garage doesn’t work, and I step onto my driveway and look toward San Pedro and see a dark mushroom cloud. We’ll skip over the fact that all the electronics in the area are kaput because of EMP, and hypothesize a working TV or radio, which informs me that it appears that a small…5KT…nuke has just exploded on a container ship in San Pedro harbor, along with another one in Red Hook, just across from Manhattan, and another one at the container yard in Seattle. We’ll skip over the hundred thousand or so who have just died or will die at each site in the coming week, from burns and radiation poisoning, or from one of the diseases or a lack of medical attention caused by the collapse of the public health system. My family and I are not in immediate danger, because I’m maybe 10 miles from the blast center, and shielded by the mass of Palos Verdes hill, and the prevailing winds are onshore, meaning they blow the radioactive dust inland and away from me, but the next few days are pretty chaotic. They’ve declared martial law, and imposed strict limits of transportation, because about half the refinery capacity for Southern California is destroyed or offline; the dark clouds from the burning tank farms and the smell of burning oil still fill the air. But I’m upwind, so it isn’t too bad. The shortage of distillates like gasoline and jet fuel will last a while, because even though the offline refineries only represent maybe 5 – 10% of the national refining capacity, the emergency uses have taken priority. The economy is at a halt, both because of the martial law and because three of the five national shipping centers have been devastated and contaminated beyond immediate use, meaning that Los Angeles/Long Beach Harbor and Seattle harbor on the West Coast are out of commission, as is the Port of New York on the East. They aren’t letting container ships into San Francisco Bay yet, and probably won’t for a few weeks. NEST is setting up a scanning system on helicopters and positioned on the Golden Gate Bridge, but emergency and military supplies will get precedence, so many of the ships simply turn around and head back to Japan and Hong Kong. Meanwhile, politics have gotten a little complicated. There is a lot of saber-rattling going on, and everyone in national office is pretty much ready to sign any declarations of war the president asks for; he gets broad emergency powers, and habeas corpus is suspended, along with a number of other rights as large parts of the country are placed under military control. Internationally, everyone is lining up to send aid, and the Arab countries are falling over themselves to send monetary aid and to deny any role in this. The ships themselves were from Europe, Singapore and Hong Kong, and the origins of each container on the ships is being investigated, along with the detritus of the bombs themselves. Saddam Hussein swears on his mother’s life that he had nothing to do with it. The President needs the resources of the military at home, to manage the martial-law driven economy, and the new demands for autarkic security, so we begin to withdraw troops from Europe, Korea, and the Middle East, trying to degrade the readiness of each area as little as we can. There is some evidence that one of the weapons was a Russian tactical nuke, in a batch that was thought to have been in Georgia, and that Chechen militants were suspected of having access to it; they suddenly have a national treasury that is $100,000,000 richer, and it looks like some of the funds came from ~~madrassas~~ hawalas (thanks, William), the Middle Eastern ‘cash’ banking community. One of the weapons appears to have been homemade, and we can’t figure out where the other one came from. The pressure is on the president to do something. The U.N. issues statements deploring the ‘tragedy’ and supporting direct action against the perpetrators, as soon and sufficient evidence is found to identify who they were. We find that some of the funds which might have paid for one of the weapons might have been paid by a Jordanian oil trader who is thought to sometimes act as a front for the Iraqi government. We’ve turned a blind eye to him in the past, because the funds that went back were partially used for humanitarian purposes, and because he gave some of our intelligence assets entrée to the Iraqi underground. Hussein goes on CNN and Al-Jazeera, and states that a conspiracy among his senior officers was responsible for ‘this humanitarian tragedy’ and publicly executes them and their families on live television. He offers to open the country to inspections by a joint French/Swiss/German inspection team, and to pay $1,000,000,000 in reparations to the U.S. once the oil embargo is lifted. The UK offers troops to assist with ‘humanitarian aid’ in the U.S. There are fistfights in the Capitol, as the question of how to respond to this splits the House and Senate.

Got the picture?? So here are some questions for all parties. For the hawks: How strong is the temptation to nuke somebody…anybody…who might have had anything to do with this, regardless of whether it gets the people who really planned it? For the doves: How long after this happens does the first column come out in the New York Times that suggests that nuking Iraq won’t bring back our dead or rebuild our economy, and that we should pull in, buckle down, and take care of our own? See, I see two likely outcomes from an event like this, (which I personally don’t believe would be all that hard to pull off). One is that we go berserk, and turn the Middle East into a plain of glass. The other is that we surrender our role as leader of the world, the economic and security benefits that come with that, and attempt to retreat into a Fortress America. As you can imagine, I see problems with both. What do you see as the outcome of a scenario like that? And how does it influence your thoughts on what to do today? [10/2/02: followup discussion is here]

2002-09-23T08:47:00.000-07:00

SMALLPOX PLANS The Bloviator has a teriffic post on the Administration's smallpox plans, and on issues in managing bioterror generally. Take a look and comment.

2002-09-22T16:31:00.000-07:00

HISTORY LESSON Ranting Screeds takes me to task for laying the roots of hostile political discourse at the feet of Newt Gingrich. They go far deeper, says he, and liberals were among the founders. I'll have to hit the books and think about this...

2002-09-21T13:53:00.000-07:00

PARENTING REDUX Just a quick one between under-6 soccer and an afternoon of work. Devra M, over at Blue Streak (whose link I've fixed on the blogroll, BTW) has a followup on Dawn’s parenting post I’ve commented on below (enough dependent clauses and links yet?). Devra’s post is a great, nakedly honest, self-revelatory comment on her fears about being a good enough parent. I think the fact that she has those fears and can articulate them certainly means that she almost certainly is someone who can be a good enough parent. I largely raised myself; my parents, while competent adults in the outside world were certainly not competent parents, and my brother and I carry the burden of that. I resolved long ago that I would be the parent my parents couldn’t be, and that’s the rock I’m always pushing up the hill. She says:

But I wonder if they weigh the mistakes they've made against the positives & find they're somehow lacking. I can't imagine that a loving parent would say they 'regret' having children, but I wonder if there isn't a small voice inside asking "Are you sure you made the right decision?" If you're a parent, are you allowed to wonder if you're the last person in the world who should be trying to raise children? If you're a parent, are you allowed to doubt yourself? How do you get past that terror? How do you get through each day without thinking you're fucking it all up?

Let me answer for a moment by telling a story. When my oldest was an infant, we had a dinner party and had some friends over. It was early, he was still up, and then as happens, he needed changing. I ran upstairs with him and changed him (with poop, sub 30-second changes were always my goal – I was the Woods Brothers of diaper changers), then not wanting to miss the conversation, hurried back down. I was barefoot, as I often am in the house, and slipped on the carpet at the top of the stairs. Today, seventeen years later, I still remember what it felt like to realize that I wasn’t going to be able to recover; to feel my body stretching out over the stairwell, and to know that I had my son in my arms. I thought I had killed him. I thought my life was over, that I had through carelessness failed as a father and that I was worthless as a man who should take care of his children. And while I was thinking that, some other part of me…some part more active and less articulate…dropped my shoulder and pulled him into my chest so that when I fell, I hit and rolled around him. I wound up lying on my back on the landing, my feet in the air, with two cracked ribs…and my son was laughing and waving his arms, suggesting, I’ve always felt, that that was a lot of fun and we should do it again. Every parent I know has a story like that. Not all these stories end well. But what I know about the good parents…the ones who try, the ones who, when the moment comes, drop a shoulder and roll into whatever is being handed them…is that regardless of the outcome, they are better people for having tried it. This doesn’t mean I think everyone should have kids. I desperately wanted them. But I do think that fear is a bad reason to choose not to, because what I’ve learned from being a parent is that a child brings out the part of you that has the will to walk through whatever fears you have and come out the other side.

2002-09-20T16:29:00.000-07:00

RIFFAGE As a man who enjoys a well-turned phrase almost as much as a well-turned ankle, I often find myself reading one, and giving my usual reaction: "Bastard! I should have written that!!"
Recent email from reader Marshall has had me muttering under my breath. I said:

"I think that the root of my kind of liberalism is that belief that we can build human systems that strive toward improvement, believing that perfection is unattainable and still worth struggling for."

He replies:

"The root of conservatism is that belief that human systems are not built but grow naturally, believing that perfection is unattainable and therefore not worth struggling for." "The root of socialism is that belief that we can strive toward building the system, believing that perfection is attainable and is worth legislating toward." "The root of totalitarianism is that belief that we can build human systems that are perfect, believing that perfection has been attained and is worth killing to maintain." "The root of libertarianism is that belief that we can discard inconvenient human systems, believing that that is perfection and is worth blogging for."

Bastard.

2002-09-20T11:58:00.000-07:00

WTF?? - WWF-STYLE BLOGGING So I’ve been wrestling with my own stuff this week…moody, frustrated at the outer world’s ambiguity and my own lassitude…trying to get back to a mindset where I can see some clarity in my life and in the world of ideas outside. And everything seems kind of…off. Voices I’m reading are less thoughtful and interesting, and I’m wondering if it’s just my mood and what I’ll have to do to shake it off (land one of these consulting projects, for starters!). And then I read something, and the world becomes clear. I’m randomly clicking links as I tend to do when I’m not really paying attention (and which in my darker moments is what I imagine my 200 readers do to find me…), and read this:

None of these things were true of Sullivan when he edited The New Republic a decade ago. You could disagree with him but often his pieces showed a relaxed respect for his adversaries and the joys of an inquisitive, independent mind at work. If that Sullivan could have seen what he’d let himself get reduced to ... maybe he’d just have let the HIV take its course. -- from SullyWatch

And my eyes snapped wide open. I put it into context with some quotes from Hesiod about Den Beste’s series:

It's time for an intervention. Take a day or two away from your blog. Then go back and read your manifesto again. This time substitute the words "Jew" and "Jews" for the words "Arab" and "Muslim." If it doesn't send a chill up and down your spine, check yourself into a mental hospital, or seek professional counseling. And I'm not being sarcastic about this. You accuse the Arabs of living in the 14th century. Arguably, your "solution" comes right out of the 20th. Roughly from the years between 1932 and 1945 to be precise. It's not to late to wake up and re-think things. -- from Hesiod’s email toDen Beste

It’s the overall dismissive and contemptuous tone that I’m seeing in Hesiod’s (and some other) liberal sites. I don’t know if they’re hoping to get tryouts on cable talk shows, or if their rhetoric has just been infected by it. It’s the evolved state of the Newt Gingrich “no-more Mr. Nice Guy” politics, and what we’ve done as liberals is to adopt the worst features of that politics: harsh and divisive rhetoric, which we think makes us clever; an unwillingness to engage political opponents on any meaningful dialog, because playing attack-dog until you or your opponent backs down seems like a better way of reaching compromise than simply sitting down and compromising (not to mention an attachment to seats in SkyBoxes and the largesse that well-heeled donors can provide). I think this kind of politics sucks, and not just because I’m too polite to call people names or wish for their slow death by AIDS. I talked about it before:

And we’re at a point in our political history that’s been made by single-issue warriors…for and against development, for and against abortion, for and against parks for dogs...and damn those on the other side of the issue. I had the unique opportunity to have dinner once with then-State Senator John Schmitz. He was a genuine John Birch society member, elected from Orange County, who lost his office when it was discovered that his mistress had sexually abused their sons. (His daughter is also Mary Kay Le Tourneau, so I’ll take as a given that the family had…issues…). He was still in the Senate, and made a comment that I’ve always remembered: When Moscone ran the Senate, he and I used to fight hammer and tongs all day, then go out and have drinks over dinner and laugh about it. We differed on where we wanted the boat to go, but we recognized that we were in the same boat. These new guys would gladly sink the boat rather then compromise. And that’s why I think the [Pledge] decision was stupid, and why the forces behind it…the Church of My Wounded Feelings…and their soldiers, the Warrior Cult of the Single Issue…are incredibly destructive. And right now, we don’t have the time for it.

Look, whether you are in agreement with Den Beste’s arguments or not; whether you agree with Sullivan or not, the fact is that there are important issues that can no longer be treated as theoretical about how we deal with the rest of the world; hard discussions need to take place. And when I see the folks I would logically side with talking like adolescents with a bad need to Be Bad, it doesn’t fill me with warm fuzzies that I'm gonna see one. And in case Hesiod and whoever does Sullywatch don’t care if I have warm fuzzies, I’ll remind them that preaching to the choir is pretty satisfying, but it doesn’t make the church grow, if you know what I mean…

2002-09-19T15:30:00.000-07:00

I'LL BE READINGTHIS BLOG TODAY Latif's Cavern, apparently written by a Pakistani living in the UK, with a lot of Arab and Islamic history and some interesting prescriptions for the future. I don't yet know enough to have an opinion...

2002-09-19T11:05:00.000-07:00

PUBLIC HEALTH The Bloviator looks at the process of distributing Federal funds, and gives a great off-the-cuff definition of 'public health'. I was at a dinner with friends last night, and the impending closure of the Harbor-UCLA trauma center was much discussed; my friend's wife had her life saved there last year after she was struck by a car, and it is the Class I trauma center me and mine would go to if we needed it. This issue is cutting ever closer to home...

2002-09-19T10:51:00.000-07:00

GUN CONTROL OR CRIME CONTROL? My new target-of-jealousy-because-he-blogs-so-well William Burton takes Andrew Edward's and my discussions on gun control and spins them up to 78rpm. Go check them out; this will be a fun discussion!

2002-09-19T10:38:00.000-07:00

TERRORISM VS. WARFARE Part 1 – World War II Aerial Bombing Frequent commenter Ziska has been drilling me on the issue of ‘terrorism” as opposed to “legitimate warfare”. He has drawn several parallels to wars of national liberation, and our discussion has moved from Algeria to Eire, and from India to Sri Lanka. Others have joined him in criticizing the distinction I make, which seems very clear to me….but obviously not to them. So I thought I’d take a stab at a broad discussion of “legitimate” vs. “illegitimate” uses for force, and what I perceive to be the tragic, if moral, consequences of legitimate warfare versus the equally tragic and immoral consequences of terrorism. First, and foremost, let me dwell on the tragedies involved. Innocent people die, are maimed and wounded, have their lives shattered irrecoverably. Whether they are killed by a stray Allied bomb in WWII, a cannon shell in a besieged city in one of the sieges of the 30 Years War, a Palestinian bomb in Tel Aviv, or an Israeli tank shell in Gaza. Some starve because the crops have been ruined or irrigation systems destroyed or livestock killed; some die from treatable diseases because hospitals have no power or are inaccessible. Each of these tragic stories represents an individual noncombatant who did not deserve to die. But the reality of human existence is that innocents die. The earliest human stories…for example, the ballads of of Homer…talk of the tragedies that befall humans at the capricious whim of the gods. Our civilized society has little appetite for this, and we have erected structures that ostensibly protect the innocent, in international law and custom. Not everyone follows those laws and customs, however. So let’s talk cases. During World War II, German and Allied forces bombed each other’s cities; the stated reason for Allied bombing was:

The deployment of the air forces opposing Germany was heavily influenced by the fact that victory was planned to come through invasion and land occupation. In the early years of the war, to be sure, the RAF had the independent mission of striking at German industrial centers in an effort to weaken the German economy and the morale of the German people. source: THE UNITED STATES STRATEGIC BOMBING SURVEY (authors J.K. Galbraith, among others)

The German justification was somewhat different:

I believe this plan [raiding RAF airfields] would have been very successful, but as a result of the Fuhrer's speech about retribution, in which he asked that London be attacked immediately, I had to follow the other course. I wanted to attack the airfields first, thus creating a prerequisite for attacking London . . . I spoke with the Fuhrer about my plans in order to try to have him agree I should attack the first ring of RAF airfields around London, but he insisted he wanted to have London itself attacked for political reasons, and also for retribution. I considered the attacks on London useless, and I told the Fuhrer again and again that inasmuch as I knew the English people as well as I did my own people, I could never force them to their knees by attacking London. We might be able to subdue the Dutch people by such measures but not the British. — Reichmarschall Hermann Goering, International Military Tribunal Nuremberg, 1946.

Notice two points of difference: the Allied strategy was set to a) weaken the fighting effectiveness of the German Army by collapsing the industrial economy that supported it, and secondarily weakening the morale of the German people. The German strategy was out-and-out retribution…a lashing out at the British people, and secondarily, if at all, attacking their means to wage war. The Hague convention of 1923 states:

Bombardment from the air is legitimate only when directed at a military objective, the destruction or injury of which would constitute a distinct military disadvantage to the belligerent.

In general, we understand and support attacks which logically support weakening the ability of belligerent soldiers to fight. The allied raids on the ball-bearing factories in Schweinfurt may have destroyed whole neighborhoods, but they can be justified as attacking a target of military importance (precision machines need bearing); similarly the Allied attacks on steel, oil and nitrate production necessary to produce weapons gasoline and explosives, as well as the roads, waterways, and railroads necessary to transport them – and the food needed to support an urban industrial economy. The Allies did not limit themselves to ‘militarily useful’ attacks, however. Dresden and Cologne certainly were not. But the other stated purpose was to attack the morale of the enemy, and realistically, satisfy the emotional need to damage the opposing state. How well did they work?

The Survey has made extensive studies of the reaction of the German people to the air attack and especially to city raids. These studies were carefully designed to cover a complete cross section of the German people in western and southern Germany and to reflect with a minimum of bias their attitude and behavior during the raids. These studies show that the morale of the German people deteriorated under aerial attack. The night raids were feared far more than daylight raids. The people lost faith in the prospect of victory, in their leaders and in the promises and propaganda to which they were subjected. Most of all, they wanted the war to end. They resorted increasingly to "black radio'' listening, to circulation of rumor and fact in opposition to the Regime; and there was some increase in active political dissidence -- in 1944 one German in every thousand was arrested for a political offense. If they had been at liberty to vote themselves out of the war, they would have done so well before the final surrender. In a determined police state, however, there is a wide difference between dissatisfaction and expressed opposition. Although examination of official records and those of individual plants shows that absenteeism increased and productivity diminished somewhat in the late stages of the war, by and large workers continued to work. However dissatisfied they were with the war, the German people lacked either the will or the means to make their dissatisfaction evident. -- Strategic Bombing Survey

So it appears that the goal of demoralizing the enemy seems to have had some effect. The interesting thing is that the bombings in England seemed to have the opposite effect, of infuriating the population and strengthening their will to fight. I might suggest that part of the difference lay in the magnitude of the attacks, meaning that while the attacks on Britain were damaging, they did not represent a force overwhelming enough to call victory into question (there were certainly other issues…of national character, political leadership, the perceived legitimacy of the government, etc.), while the devastating attacks by the RAF and then the Americans certainly would have had to make the average German question the viability of the war enterprise. Finally, you cannot talk about aerial bombardment without talking about Hiroshima and Nagasaki. There are three broad questions: 1) were the attacks on nonstrategic targets legitimate at all? 2) should we have demonstrated the bomb first? and 3) to what extent was racism toward the Japanese people an element in making us more willing to bomb them? Serious books have been written on these subjects, and will be for the foreseeable future. I’ve read a few of them. My father was also a cryptographer in Army Intelligence in WW II, stationed in India and Burma, and then Japan after the war, and he and I had some extensive talks about it. Here’s my (personal, inconclusive) take on these three questions: 1) were these attacks legitimate? Yes, to the extent that the attacks on Cologne, Dresden and Tokyo were also legitimate. Part of the enterprise in national war is to both destroy the fighting ability of the enemy, which can be done both by destroying the men and equipment in their armed forces, and in a modern industrial society, by destroying the economy that supports them. In addition, the effects on morale – both of the enemy and of the attacker – must be considered. Fights are won, in no small part, on emotion. My personal judgment, is that in the context of a global war like WW II, strikes against enemy population centers were not unjustifiable. By hastening the collapse of the enemy as an effective fighting force, they may have saved combatent lives on both sides lives in offset to those non-combatant lives the bombing cost. I’ll address the ‘combatant’ vs. non-combatant’ issue later. 2) should we have demonstrated the bomb first? There has been a lot written and discussed about this; about the effect of an announced demonstration over Tokyo Bay or an unoccupied islet. It strikes me as a nice idea, but we are far removed from two things: a) the uncertainty that was widely present at the time about whether the bomb would actually work, or would simply produce a conventional explosion and shards of U238; and b) the genuine emotional hatred in effect at the time, which feeds into: 3) was racism the key to using the Bomb in Japan? Yes, but. But we would have used the Bomb in Germany if it had been ready in time. But it was racism that cut both ways. The level of cultural misunderstanding between the Japanese and Western politicians and military is probably matched by the level of misunderstanding between the militant Native American tribes and the European immigrants. The Japanese military was to the American view, insanely – no, suicidally – brave, and equally insanely cruel. The Western military was – to the Japanese view – cowardly and weak. From talking to my father and to other men of his age who fought the Japanese (and my father’s battles were quite cushy and non-life-threatening), the real differences in the warfighting styles, amplified by the propaganda machines, led to real and deep feelings of fear and hate. Had this picture of the Japanese not been pervasive – and again, I’ll state that it had its roots in real cultural differences, amplified and ‘played up’ by propaganda – I wonder what we would have done. The Germans were, on the other hand, perceived as ‘fellow Westerners’, and even the knowledge of the extermination camps did not drive them out of that place. But according to contemporary documents, the fear that the Germans were close to a bomb, and the certainty that they would use it if they had it, I believe would certainly have led to the use of the A-bomb in Europe if VE day had been sufficiently far away. So, in summary, I’m trying to justify the collateral death and destruction on civilian, nonmilitary targets in WW II as a part of a larger war plan, and in the context of those intentions, legitimate. Remember that criminality (and hence morality) depends in large part on intentions. The dead are just as dead. But when we judge the living, we have to judge them in large part by what they meant to do. Next, nuclear war and Homeric war.

2002-09-18T10:55:00.000-07:00

KIDS So I’m tied up in arguments over the police, the definition of terrorism, the progress of peace in Palestine, and I can’t articulate my ideas and my head just hurts. I usually take this as a good sign, one that means that the purpose of this blog – forcing me to think through and clearly articulate my thoughts and opinions – is being met. (thanks by the way to everyone who is tossing rocks into the soup) But right now I can’t write about them worth a damn. Then, scanning the blogs, I read Dawn’s prayer to become a better parent, and there’s something I can start to talk about. I love being a dad, even when one of my kids gives me shit online. Somehow especially then… I think I’m a pretty good Dad, although time will tell. I know that I work harder at it than I ever have at anything in my entire life, and that it gives me more pleasure than anything I’ve ever done in my life. It’s also true that it’s different – and I think harder – for moms. It may be coincidence, but both of my marriages started to splinter about the time the first child were born, and while I certainly have to carry my share of the weight for that, I can also say that I saw the women I’d married…smart, tough, professional, independent women…crack under the burden. Not only the burden of physically bearing children and tending them when they are small and helpless…I was up nights, too, and we were lucky enough to have household help…but the burden of conflicting expectations and conflicting images of who they ought to be and what they ought to hold important. But those are issues for them, and their blogs, if they ever choose to have one. For me, becoming a parent has been so incredibly liberating, because it has taken me out of myself. The best story I can tell is about a ski trip we took with the boys and two childless good friends ... they had the ‘first chair up, last chair up’ attitude we’d always had when we skied together. But now we had the boys…ages six and four…and the reality was that we were going to move on what I called ‘kid time’…we were going to get it done, but on the boys' pace. By the end of the trip, we were so frustrated with our friends, and they with us, that violence felt like a real possibility. And I felt like I had to make a choice, and I did...I chose to move on 'kid time'. And learning about ‘kid time’, and the ability to still get them where I want them to go while accepting that the path we take may not exactly be the one I planned on, is the best lesson I could have received. This means that I’ve always dealt with my sons as ‘people’ even when I recognized that when young, they didn’t have the capacity to be truly independent. I called this ‘peas or carrots’; they always had choices at dinnertime…I just determined what the choices were…peas or carrots? And they were always willing to stand up and tell me what they wanted…while I determined if they got it or not. I have close friends who have raised their children along the other paths…where the children were browbeaten and given no say; and where the children basically ran the house. In both cases, both the parents and kids seem to be coming out broken. It’s damn hard. You get called away just as you’re getting ready to go to the important meeting, or there is a knock at the bedroom door at the worst possible breathing-hard moment. Their shoes come untied – again – as you are late getting them to school. And for me, somehow, the burden always lifts just as it becomes unbearable. I find another bit of patience when I thought I was done. I turn and apologize after saying something that I wish I hadn’t said, and the anger lifts. And the road ahead becomes that much less steep when I do. And that ability...the ability to reach a little further,to be a little better...is the gift my sons have given to me. We’re not done yet…one is away at school, one in high school, and one in first grade…but I’m proud as hell of them, and hopeful for all of our futures. Hang tough, Dawn. It’s all worth it.

2002-09-18T06:07:00.000-07:00

FIND THEM AND HANG THEM This sure looks like Israeli terrorism. There are evil fools on both sides, it appears (actually, this has been true for years). (via Jeff Cooper).

2002-09-17T21:02:00.000-07:00

SOME GOOD STUFF IS HAPPENING I’ve talked endlessly about the need for a ‘moderate’ Palestinian politics to step forward in order to have any chance of meaningful peace, and my belief that there was a substantial number of people living on the West Bank and in Gaza that weren’t sold on the "Palestine from the river to the sea or Death" meme. There have been some encouraging signs here and here. These are not conclusive, nor answers, but they are steps in what smells like a right direction. Commenter Mostapha Sabet pointed this out:

Something that bothered me is how a lot of people sort of blew off the Fatah announcement. Saying things like, "Oh, well the Pals don't consider settlers civilians" or "They only said they would stop attacks on civilians not all targets" without recognizing that this may be one small step in the right direction, but it's a huge step in the quest for peace. Now there is a somewhat major group (and growing in relative strength as IDF wipes up Hamas) that might actually prove to be a voice of reason. Let's hope it sticks.

I think this is critically important, and goes to my apology to Ziska, because it is incredibly hard to fight against and opponent and still maintain their humanity, but it is necessary because someday the fight will be over. Aram Rubyan pointed out in a comment that I was wrong to apologize, inferring that humanizing the Palestinians was the wrong way to go. I disagree. I think that Israel is right to use force to defend itself, and as long as the Palestinian leadership persists in propagating their evil “River To The Sea” fantasy, that defense will be fierce. And the people on the sharp end of the spear will doubtless have feelings and attitudes about their opponents which are not humane and charitable and warm. Which is why it is important for the rest of us to do so. Because of our distance we can both fiercely defend Israel, as I have done – as far as words can go – and humanize and sympathize with the individual Palestinians who are trapped by bad leaders, evil allies, and damaged culture. Someday, this fight will be over. All fights are.

2002-09-17T20:42:00.000-07:00

APOLOGIA I’ve been working on a post on the whole ‘wilding’ thing, and it just keeps on coming out badly. Maybe it’s just that I am friends with too many cops, and see the damage done to them – and to their ability to be what we want them to be – by the overt hostility coded in these articles. I want to write something thoughtful and evenhanded and my emotions keep getting in the way. Here’s the objective point: First, there is error in any system, and our system of justice is no different. Some of the error is caused by bias, some by laziness, some by unavoidable chance, all of it is tragic. Every system of justice has the same problems, and has had them for as long as there have been systems of justice…or human systems of any kind. What is unique about ours is the very faith in its perfectability…in the attainability of a justice beyond that given through personal relationships, connections, clout, or bribery. On one hand this faith is misplaced…the reality is that we are nowhere close to there. But on the other…on the other…the goal speaks to virtually everyone in our society. The shining, Platonic, unattainable ideal of perfect justice is one that we do believe in, and fight for, and the genius of our system is that it lets us do it, and harnesses our desire for it, and does so in the name of progress toward the unattainable perfection. It speaks to us, and we act on it. I think that’s great, and that’s what I spoke to when I gave my opinion on this case. I think that sets our system of justice apart from any other that I have read about. I think that the root of my kind of liberalism is that belief that we can build human systems that strive toward improvement, believing that perfection is unattainable and still worth struggling for. And what I don’t see in these rounds of endless criticism is a real belief in making the systems better; what I see is a wholesale rejection of the systems…the brutal cops, corrupt prosecutors, the enforcers of the intolerable status quo…that protect the middle-class critics, who seldom acknowledge the benefit of the protection they receive. See, I believe that there are Really Bad People out there…and that there are many of us who given the right circumstance can be really Bad. The police and the folks in the criminal justice system deal with it every day, at its very bad worst. We need them. It’s a crappy job done for little money and less respect. It has its own satisfactions, and the good cops I know live for them…for the times they can save someone, the times they can “hook up” a bad guy, the times they can bring some justice and order to an unjust and chaotic world. I know the “choose” the job, but as a consumer of their services, I’ll tell you that we all have a vested interest in seeing them do as good a job as possible. Some, very few of them are corrupt in meaningful ways (not talking about free donuts); some are racist, some cruel. But fewer today than ten years ago, and fewer still than fifty years ago. Some of my employees do a bad job, too. Sometimes my sons do bad things. But I find that a blanket condemnation is seldom a good way to get good performance out of them; and if you want to deepen the “us v. them” chasm, the kind of criticism I’ve seen levied at the NYC folks seems like a pretty good shovel. So I’m sorry that I haven’t been able to set out the logical social critique of the case and the arguments; I’ll work on it and try to do better.

2002-09-17T16:50:00.000-07:00

GO VISIT TED BARLOW He's losing faith in the whole blogging thing, so go visit him and leave some intelligent comments.

2002-09-17T09:52:00.000-07:00

YOU TRY TO RAISE YOUR KIDS RIGHT... I still can't believe my dad can even log onto the internet, let alone have a friggin site......

2002-09-16T20:54:00.000-07:00

WHO IS THIS GUY? William Burton hits another brilliant post out of the park. he expresses, in one post, the process that took me months to understand and realize; that while I didn't like the Israeli policies, they never, ever, in any way, justified the current spate of suicide bombings. Zika reminds me that the people on both sides are human, and they are. But some of them haven't been acting that way. He also reminds me of the campaign of the Tamil Tigers, who also used suicide bombers...including those who assassinated an Indian P.M. I'll do some more research, but I'll bet that the prime targets of the Tamils weren't pizza parlors, but military bases and military and political figures. Different game, Ziska...guerilla war, not terrorism. The good news is that the Palestinian 'moderate middle' I looked for appears to be appearing. I'm sure it's hard to give Sharon credit for anything, but it looks like something is working.

2002-09-16T18:17:00.000-07:00

WHEN I'M WRONG, I'M WRONG Ziska points out, in a comment below:

Actually, the point I was trying to make, and failed completely to make, was that you shifted gears between the Israeli individual and the Palestininan "they". You could have commemorated a Palestinian victim without even softening your opposition to what "they" are doing, simply by commemorating (for example) commemorating the 18-year-old woman who was recently killed by thei'm Palestinian Authority because her uncle (who was also lilled) had implicated her in Israeli intelligence work. Or you could have commemorated apolitical Palestinians who die because of the curfew. So what we got from you was a humane comment about real people with real lives (Israeli) followed immediately by the same old objectifying talk about "they" (the Palestinians).

I was wrong, and will remember that.

2002-09-15T22:01:00.000-07:00

MORE WILDING NEWS Here's a new-to-me blog with some sensible commentary on the Central Park case: Just One Minute; take a look. I'm working on a more philosophical piece, but having stayed up Really Late last night (the concert ended close to midnight and was an hour and a half away) and danced a little too hard, I'm taking some Motrin and going to bed. I wonder if the twenty-year olds have to do that...(not really)... (Link from Instapundit.)

2002-09-15T15:06:00.000-07:00

SOME THINGS SPEAK FOR THEMSELVES The family of a terror victim in Israel has asked bloggers aroundthe world to link to her memorial page. I'm honored to comply. Go to Remembering Shiri Negari, and be reminded that while we wave our hands and have high-level discussions about policy, real people with real lives bleed and die. It will give you perspective. I do not doubt that there is real tragedy on the Palestinian side as well; when they stop trying to get my attention by killing Shiri's, I'll be happy to talk about it. Link thanks to Ted Barlow.

2002-09-14T10:56:00.000-07:00

TOO MUCH FUN Well, two of my favorite bloggers are having a dustup over fun, of all things. Instapundit and Ted Barlow are bickering over Alex Beam’s column in the Boston Globe, in which he discusses the idea that:

Is it true, to paraphrase the famous Clairol marketing campaign: Do conservatives really have more fun? The answer is yes, incontrovertibly so. Who would you rather be? Me, plodding through errands on my bicycle, sporting my pathetic ''One Less Car'' T-shirt, or one of the many SUV drivers who blast exhaust in my face as they roar off to fill up on cheap gas?

Instapundit gets all ironic about it:

This is funny, but it's a serious problem for the Left. Like Sweden, it's cruised for a long time on a reputation for free-wheeling hedonism that no longer holds. The hair-shirt left is alienating to a lot of people -- I mean, which would you rather have, wild sex and high living or Andrea Dworkin and a spare lifestyle relieved only by an affected moral superiority?

and then Ted gets genuinely upset:

Glenn has fairly complained about liberals who look at the Right as if it's always and everywhere Birmingham in 1963. Then he turns around and talks about the left as if it's always and everywhere Berkeley in 1985.

Geez, guys, lighten up. First, and foremost, am I the only one who caught a whiff of self-depreciating irony in Beam’s column? The last half of the paragraph above drives the skewer right home:

Who would you rather be? Goo-goo good guy Warren Tolman, painstakingly explaining his position on the School Building Assistance Program? Or Mitt Romney, who has his own, no-frills education plan: Send them to (private, tony) Belmont Hill! It worked for his kids - why won't it work for everybody?

and does it in what I’d consider to be a pretty damn fair (hence pro-liberal way). I read Beam’s column as a mild satire, playing on the stereotype of the humorless, crunchy liberal while actually hammering home a few pretty good pro-liberal points - good government and building schools is a liberal program, sending your kids to tony private schools isn’t. Beam then goes on to throw a few well-placed elbows at the stereotype…including Taki as an example of the ‘fun-loving’ right. The danger of daily punditry is that quick reads miss obvious things, and we’re all reading too damn quickly. I think that Beam’s column was a bit of pointed fluff, that Glenn picked up on it to beat one of his favorite dead horses, and that Ted rose to the bait like a trout. Look, here’s the deal. There are a bunch of people in the world…on the left and right…who are pissy and unhappy by nature. They tend to become bad bureaucrats and bad pastors. Somehow, about the time George McGovern got nominated, they captured the levers of liberal power over here (I don’t know European political history well enough to know when it happened over there, but it did), and the ‘don’t play with scissors’ crowd became the vanguard of leftist thought. Me, I’m a leftist; how are -- government-sponsored health care, support for unions, a higher minimum wage, stronger environmental laws, a biiig gas tax, support for same-sex marriage, progressive taxation, strong public schools, support for a woman’s right to choose – as credentials? I do think we need to temper those with the understanding that Stalinist command-and-control aren’t always the best way to get there, and that the new information technologies and the social and management structures enabled by those technologies ought to change the tactics we use to get from here to there. And most of all, I think that we need to design these in a way that encourages responsibility and individual accountability. But enough serious stuff; I’ve led a life with just too damn much fun; my sexual history would make Dawn blush; vodka, hell - I’ve pretty much exhausted the possibilities in the pharmacopoeia; I’ve seen U2 at the Roxy, Nureyev at the SF Opera House, the Beatles at the Bowl; dated centerfolds from Playboy and Penthouse; been married to two great women; held my sons when they were born, and spent their first night with them sleeping on my chest; driven away from my oldest son as he moved into his own home (but still took him to the drugstore to buy him condoms); sailed in through the Golden Gate at dawn; seen 145 on the speedometer of a motorcycle; spent the night with a dying friend; and seen the dawn just sitting and talking with the amazing friends I have made; and maybejusy maybe am lucky enough to have finally found the right woman for the rest of my life. I’m off today to take my 15 year old to the ‘Inland Invasion’ punk show. I’ll be the 49-year old guy with glasses in the mosh pit. So here’s the deal folks. I do think that the visible Left needs to connect with its joy, and its aggressiveness. We need leftwing Vodkapundits, and leftwing Rush Limbaughs…well, maybe not…and leftwing Instapundits, too. And we need the same things on the Right, and in the Radical Center and from the Libertarians, and the Vegitarian Unitarian Veterinarians, for that matter. I said something once on this blog a while ago:

Forgive me if this sounds sappy, but there are voices out there folks, a great chorus of different voices, and when you listen to the song we’re all singing…well, to me, the song sounds sort of like America.

2002-09-13T11:41:00.000-07:00

WORKS FOR ME... William Burton lays out our foreign policy pretty damn clearly. A sample:

So, remember. We don't want to kill anyone and we'll try hard not to, but if we have to defend ourselves we will. Don't think that any bad stuff that may happen is intentional. It's not. We're just as likely to fuck up as anyone else, we just do it with bigger ordinance. And if there's any way to interpret what we say in a way that doesn't make you angry or sad, that's the way we meant it. Honest. We'd also like to apologize for not learning your languages. We bought the tapes and have been meaning to get around to it, but the game was on and a friend came over with some beer. Next thing we knew it was 3am and we were on our way to Padre. You know how it is.

2002-09-12T21:39:00.000-07:00

SOMETIMES, I BELIEVE THAT THE BEST CURE FOR BAD PHILOSOPHY IS ART “Two Cities”, by Mark Doty

I had grown sick of human works, which seemed to me a sum and expression of failure: spoilers, brutalizers of animals and one another, self-absorbed until we couldn't see that we ruined, finally, ourselves - what could we make? An epidemic ran unhalted, The ill circumscribed as worthless and unclean; the promises of change seem hollow, the poor and marginal hopelessly marginal, endlessly poor. I saw no progress, and the steeping ink of this perception colored everything, until I felt surrounded by weakness and limit, and my own energies failed, or were failing, though I tried not to think so. I awoke in Manhattan, just after dawn, in the tunnels approaching Grand Central: a few haunted lamps, unreadable signs. And with a thousand others, Each of us fixed on the fixed point of our destination, whatever connection awaited us, I spilled up the ramp and under the vault and lugged my bag out onto 42nd Street, looking for the Carey Bus. The dawn was angling into the city, A smoky, thumb-smudged gold. It struck first a face, not human, terracotta, on an office building's intricate portico, seeming to fire the material from within, so that the skin was kindled, glowing. And then I looked up: the ramparts of Park Avenue were radiant, barbaric; they were continuous with every city's dream of itself, the made world's angled assault on heaven. The city was one splendidly lit idea - its promises intact and held in a disturbed, golden suspension. Weeks later, there was a second city; not really a city at all: nights, in the coastal town where I live, voices, engines cough over the water from the end of the pier where trawlers cluster and fog-rimmed lamps shimmer the undulant harbor, so that wharf’s end becomes a distant city, foreign, storied: extended downward in the flung glitter of reflection (as if it floated, on pylons of light, above a gilded, Oriental double, domes and towers blurred by rising smokes) and radiating upwards, also, above itself, in the mist’s ethereal wash: a Venice, a city dreaming itself into being? Had I walked out there, as I have, some nights, I wouldn’t have reached it; That city’s coherent only from this distance, a fable, a Venice not merely because it is built on water, but because it is built, even though it is the capital of inwardness, built and erased and drawn again as surely as Manhattan is: liquid avenues, archives of all we’ve imagined, our haunted, interior architecture "Venice," Nietzsche said, "is a city of a hundred solitudes." New York is a city of ten million, And my American Venice - phantom boulevards rippling and doubled in the dark - a city of two hundred and fifty million solitaires, the restless dreamers' dreamed magnificence: our longing's troubled mirror, vaporous capitol.

A slightly different version is in the book Atlantis: Poems. I feel in my gut that posting this entire work is probably a violation of Doty’s property rights; I hope that some people will buy his book and get him paid a bit for it. After doing it twice tonight, I won’t do it again. But to me, this poem perfectly symbolizes the antidote to the anomie and despair below. You don’t need brutality and death to transcend despair; the human mind and soul can find it in the brilliant smudge of sun on a building’s wall, and in the appreciation for the “banal” works of humankind, for ‘the made world’s angled assault on heaven’.

2002-09-12T18:59:00.000-07:00

IT'S BEEN A DAY Full of news some good, some bad, some awe-ful. The fool with 'Daddy's Money' is back in the race for Governor against 'SkyBox' Davis. There's a ship which may be radioactive off of New Jersey. Bush gave a damn good speech, and the hopes in my letter below seem to be being supported. Close to home, some terrible news about Warren Zevon, who I don't know, but who is a friend to Brian Linse, who I do. I've been glancing at my poetry books, trying to readjust my attitude, when this came to mind:

He said it doesn't look good he said it looks bad in fact real bad he said I counted thirty-two of them on one lung before I quit counting them I said I'm glad I wouldn't want to know about any more being there than that he said are you a religious man do you kneel down in forest groves and let yourself ask for help when you come to a waterfall mist blowing against your face and arms do you stop and ask for understanding at those moments I said not yet but I intend to start today he said I'm real sorry he said I wish I had some other kind of news to give you I said Amen and he said something else I didn't catch and not knowing what else to do and not wanting him to have to repeat it and me to have to fully digest it I just looked at him for a minute and he looked back it was then I jumped up and shook hands with this man who'd just given me something no one else on earth had ever given me I may have even thanked him habit being so strong

-- "What The Doctor Said", By Ray Carver.

2002-09-12T08:41:00.000-07:00

WHAT BAD PHILOSOPHY LOOKS LIKE From the controversial Salon piece, ”Forbidden thoughts about 9-11: Readers respond”:

When the towers started collapsing and all chaos broke loose, I felt actual excitement. Here was an event that broke banality. Finally, here was something meaningful. I had grown so tired of the meaningless fluff our continent had become so enamored with. Here was an issue of raw emotions. I was glad that this was happening to snap people back into reality, to snap them back to mortality. My last sinful thought was that of genocide -- lets just send nuclear missiles to all of the Middle East and let it be done once and for all.
- Name withheld I played the part, of course; I expressed the mandatory shock, outrage and sadness while watching events unfold with co-workers. I was, in outward appearence, the very picture of solemnity and sympathy. Inside, though, I was excited. I got the same weird sense of roller-coaster joy I do when a hurricane comes up the coast or a blizzard shuts down the city. In the chaos of the initial reports, I found myself disappointed to find out that some of the early reports of additional targets being hit were erroneous. As the second tower collapsed, I found myself with a terrible sense of satisfaction. It was almost like, somewhere deep in the parts of my soul that don't see the sun, I was rooting for the event to be even bigger -- for it to cut so deeply through the banality of daily life, that things would never be the same. I suspect I am not alone. Whether it's shark attacks, wars, school shootings or child abductions, something in human nature gives people a sick thrill in such horrific voyeurism. That's what drives the infotainment industry we like to call the nightly news. In the Civil War, spectators went out to watch the battle. Until fairly recently, watching public executions was regular entertainment for the masses. Few have the guts to admit it publicly, but we're all monsters.
-- Michael Middleton For nearly every single day since Sept. 11, 2001, I've been saying, "When's the other shoe going to drop?" The dirty secret that I've never revealed to anyone is that there's a part of me that actually wants it to drop. Rationally, not really -- I've got family and friends who would be in serious danger if something happened in our major cities. But the little devil on my shoulder keeps saying, "Come on already, let's get this fucking apocalypse OVER WITH." I mean, there are times when I'd almost feel relieved if something happened -- it would be better than this awful waiting accompanied by an overwhelming sense of looming doom.
-- Female writer, living in Texas

...emphasis added

So what do you think the odds are that this yearning to “break through the banality” has anything to do with the Romantic urge for the ultimate self-affirming, all-consuming moment? That orgasmic instant of annihilation when the will to power overcomes the humble stones of the world around us? And if you lived in squalor, felt oppressed, were told every day that the hated oppressor was the reason for your misery, would this underlying repugnance of the world as it is be a fertile medium of the kind of memes that make strapping on a Semtex belt seem like the absolutely right thing to do? I’m suddenly finding myself becoming a fan of banality.

2002-09-11T20:33:00.000-07:00

September 11, 2002 The Hon. Dianne Feinstein Senator from California 331 Hart Senate Office Building Washington D. C. 20510 The Hon. Barbara Boxer Senator from California 112 Hart Senate Office Building Washington, D.C. 20510 The Hon. Jane Harman Congresswoman, 36th District 229 Cannon House Office Building Washington, D.C. 20515 Dear Senator Feinstein, Senator Boxer, Congresswoman Harman: Senator Feinstein, I met you when you were on the Board of Supervisors in San Francisco and I worked on affordable housing projects in Chinatown with CCHC. Senator Boxer, I similarly met you when you were a Supervisor in Marin. Congresswoman Harman, we met in Venice at one of the first coffees hosted for your first campaign. I have followed all your careers with interest, and while we may not agree on all issues, I am thrilled to be represented by three capable and forceful women such as yourselves. But I am writing all of you today – on September 11th – in response to the anniversary and to what I see we have done and left undone in the intervening year. Overall, I believe that we are doing a terrible job. We are vacillating between belligerence without real menace and accommodation without action. You – the visible leadership in Washington – appear to those of us at home to be more concerned with political advantage and advancing pre-existing agendas than in securing the safety of our children. No one appears to be taking this with the level of seriousness or commitment that will be necessary to see our way through this. I expect more. The money used to kill our people came from the dollars we spent to fill our gas tanks. No one will take us seriously, nor should we be taken seriously, until we do something to reduce our dependence on imported energy and our use of energy overall. A gas tax to encourage reduced consumption has been avoided for decades, as our railroads become rights-of-way for fiber optics and our dependence on trucking and taste for SUV’s increases our thirst for oil. We will have to better exploit our own reserves, and the environmentalist in me is willing to trade away some measure of greater exploration and exploitation for meaningful overall reductions in consumption at the retail end. We must continue to aggressively support Israel, both because the Israelis represent a model for democracy and development in the Middle East, and because Palestinian and Al-Quieda terrorists are brothers in ideology and in the means they are willing to use against the hated West. But there has to be some light at the end of the tunnel for the average Palestinian, and we should, independent of UNRWA, begin to find our own ways to encourage trade and education in the Palestinian territories, and begin to cultivate, support and protect the moderate people who live there and who are the real hope for peace. As to Iraq, Senator Feinstein’s speech on September 5 was fine, to a point. I believe that it is important to build and keep alliances where possible, and certainly believe that an effective inspection regime (which we have never had – I will direct you to Charles Duelfer’s article in the September Arms Control Today – online at http://www.armscontrol.org/act/2002_09/duelfer_sept02.asp) should be tried before overwhelming military action. But the reality is that we have allowed a toxic hatred of America to become the platform autocratic, ineffective regimes use to keep themselves in power. And as long as we do that, there will be an endless crop of angry young men and women who can be armed with the weapons purchased with our money recycled, as it were, from gasoline into violence. Iraq is a key and vulnerable link in the team of nations that is forming to oppose our interests in the world…and to do so by brutally oppressing the hopes and dreams of the average citizens who live there. Nothing short of absolute and unfettered access…not the kind of playacting that Scott Ritter saw (before his dramatic and unexplained conversion)…should keep us from enforcing the terms of the ceasefire agreed to by the Iraqi government at the conclusion of the war that they started. And opponents of an immediate invasion should be absolutely clear and resolute that absent such real and useful inspections, the terms of the ceasefire will be enforced by whatever means the Iraqi government makes necessary. We must implement effective domestic security measures. I am friends with a number of members of the police and military forces, and their opinion, which I echo, is that we have a Potemkin Village of a security system…designed to look good on television or in front of your hearings, but of doubtful effectiveness. We are imposing massive, top-down bureaucratic structures in the hopes of solving critical problems…just as those kinds of structures are being proved relatively ineffective in the corporate world. In this month’s Atlantic magazine is an excellent article by Bruce Schneier on security. A few quotes:

The moral, Schneier came to believe, is that security measures are characterized less by their success than by their manner of failure. All security systems eventually miscarry in one way or another. But when this happens to the good ones, they stretch and sag before breaking, each component failure leaving the whole as unaffected as possible.

and

Few of the new airport-security proposals address this problem. Instead, Schneier told me in Los Angeles, they address problems that don't exist. "The idea that to stop bombings cars have to park three hundred feet away from the terminal, but meanwhile they can drop off passengers right up front like they always have ..." He laughed. "The only ideas I've heard that make any sense are reinforcing the cockpit door and getting the passengers to fight back." Both measures test well against Kerckhoffs's principle: knowing ahead of time that law-abiding passengers may forcefully resist a hijacking en masse, for example, doesn't help hijackers to fend off their assault. Both are small-scale, compartmentalized measures that make the system more ductile, because no matter how hijackers get aboard, beefed-up doors and resistant passengers will make it harder for them to fly into a nuclear plant. And neither measure has any adverse effect on civil liberties.

What is needed is not a super-secret security apparatus locked away in bunkers while the rest of us walk through our lives in ignorance. What is needed is a system which empowers and informs the average citizen; the baggage clerk, the ticket agent, the average police officer on the street. Our expensive security apparatus didn’t do anything effective last year, the informed and active citizens on Flight 93 did. Help us all become informed and effective; trust us as we trust you. I have two teenage sons and one in first grade; it is for their sake that we must sacrifice, must be smarter, and most of all, must be determined to bring these issues to a conclusion in our lifetime, not theirs. This is a rare time to be in our government. You are each blessed and cursed by being in office now. My thoughts are with you, and my eyes and the eyes of my neighbors are on you.

2002-09-10T14:21:00.000-07:00

9/11 From frontline: faith and doubt at ground zero | PBS. Maybe this blog is my way of reaching out and holding hands with all of you. Nothing I write today or tomorrow can touch the magnitude of my feelings on this, so I'm going to step aside and ask that everyone reading this just reach out and hold someone's hand. Tomorrow night I'll write my Congressman and Senators, and put the letters up here.

2002-09-09T14:27:00.000-07:00

THEY’RE GONNA COME KNOCKING IN THE MIDDLE OF THE NIGHT…AND TAKE AWAY MY ACLU CARD FOR THIS Scanning the blogs at lunch, I came across Jeff Cooper’s link to Jeanne d’Arc’s post about the Manhattan ‘wilding’ arrests, and the news that a recent confession and DNA testing are set to exonerate the youths convicted back in 1989. Jeff’s reaction is cautionary:

The large quantity of cases reversed by DNA evidence over the past several years ought to give us pause as the government seeks broad new investigative and prosecutorial powers as part of the war on terror. Much as I admire prosecutors (full disclosure: my wife was a deputy prosecutor in Indianapolis for five years), there is a tendency—not invariable, but nevertheless real—on the part of police and prosecutors to sink their teeth into particular suspects and hold on regardless of contrary evidence. Why should we be confident that prosecutorial abuses would be less of a problem in secret or military courts with secret evidence than they are in the public trials that produced verdicts that we now know were erroneous?

While Jeanne’s is more…I’m looking for a word…self-satisfied:

A lot of people say that September 11 changed everything, which is nonsense, of course, but it changed a lot of things, among them Americans' willingness to set aside the Constitution and launch wars that no one can explain. Some stories change the way we view the world, and the story of the Central Park jogger was one of those. It emboldened people who were already filled with hate, and made those of us who weren't a little more defensive. I, for one, grew more embarrassed by people like Al Sharpton, who seemed to cry racism at every turn. (It should be noted now -- for whatever it's worth -- that one of the few people to stand up for the Central Park "rapists" was Al Sharpton). I became less likely to wonder if racism lay behind an arrest. I assumed the boys were guilty. And I became more likely to assume that if a nagging suspicion that something was wrong tugged at me, I was simply guilty of having an embarrassing "bleeding heart." The revised story wasn't widely covered. It won't have an emotional impact on as many people as the original story had. It probably won't change anything big. But it will make me trust my bleeding heart again. And nobody's going to make me feel embarrassed or defensive about it.

My reaction is actually surprisingly different. I’m thrilled. And excited. And proud. I feel bad for the youths wrongly convicted (although my bad feelings are somewhat offset by the admitted fact that they had been wilding…randomly assaulting innocent people in the park…). I’m bothered by the fact that poor kids of color get worse legal representation than rich white guys like Skakel. But none of this changes the fact that I’m proud because we live in a society where we are willing to face up to and admit our mistakes. To correct them where possible. No politically connected prosecutor was able to bury the confession or prevent the DNA testing that ultimately appears to have exonerated them. I’m thrilled that we have been able to take the fruits of our technology and apply them, fairly and objectively to support the interests of people who would normally be beneath consideration. I’m excited because I believe that these tools…the technology and the open legal system…that are the product of this society will be used in the future to prevent bad things from happening…like convicting the wrong people of horrible crimes. I’m interested in why our three reactions are so disparate, and it cuts to one of my significant core issues, the alienation of many of us from our society and the overt disgust with all the instruments of government. In other words, the collapse of legitimacy. I’m interested in why it is, when we correct the injustices of the past, and devise tools to ensure that it will be difficult to make the same mistakes again, we are dwelling on the “Oh, no, we were so bad” rather than the “we’re getting better”. See, I think that real liberalism…the kind that builds schools and water systems and improves people's lives…comes from a belief in progress. We aren’t perfect. No one is or ever will be…to quote William Goldman, “Life is pain, Highness! Anyone who says differently is selling something.” But we can either keep trying to get there or sit on the floor dwelling on our shortcomings. Which one would you rather do, and why?

2002-09-08T10:38:00.000-07:00

REAL LIFE CONTINUES TO INTERFERE WITH BLOGGING Sorry, but real life continues to interfere with time in front of the computer; yesterday Tenacious G (my SO) managed her re-entry motorcycle ride into the Santa Monica mountains, where we met and breakfasted with friends. She hasn’t ridden in the mountain roads since her two accidents last year, and to be blunt, I haven’t exactly encouraged her. She did great, a good time was had by all, and I will slowly learn to give up trying to ride her motorcycle and mine at the same time. It’s not easy to live in anxiety about someone you care for, but in order to care for them you have to respect their choices…even the ones that make you anxious. This somehow plays into today’s Steve Lopez column in the LA Times (signin ‘laexaminer’/’laexaminer’), in which he tells the story of a young man who ultimately succeeded in committing suicide, despite the efforts of his mother to protect him. He ultimately shot himself with his handgun – which had been taken away by the LAPD when he had been picked up and taken in for evaluation, and then given back by the LAPD when he was not admitted. We have a terrible mental health system here in California, where care for ill people takes a back seat to ‘respect’ for their rights, and a desire not to spend any money on them. The results can be seen daily on Main and Los Angeles streets downtown, where the homeless congregate. And can be seen in this small tragedy. And above all the policy issues, we want to make things better and to keep our children safe. So again, in today’s Times, an article about a high school here in Southern California which is being used as a testbed for surveillance technology, in part because

” Schools are among the first to embrace new technology, often because companies view campuses as perfect testing grounds before rolling products out to corporate America. For instance, one of the companies behind West Hills' system, PacketVideo Corp., predicts that demand for products like SkyWitness will grow, as people are tracked at factories, office parks, stadiums--even places such as the Third Street Promenade shopping district in Santa Monica. Companies like the fact that students enjoy fewer constitutional protections than adults and have lower expectations of privacy than their parents.”

The desire to keep our kids safe places them in Bentham’s Panopticon, the perfect prison where visibility would ensure behavior. This is ass-backwards; I’ll try and get into why it doesn’t work later, but for now, simply want to say that, hard as it is to say and do, we cannot provide total safety to those we love. I don’t know enough facts about the case Lopez talks about, but I do know the feeling I get when someone I love straddles her motorcycle and rides away. And despite those feelings, I know that I simply have to put my head down, ride my own motorcycle, and let her ride her own. Anyway, a great dinner with friends last night, too much Big House Red, lunch and a movie today with my brother (who still owes me for this), and another dinner with friends tonight. It’s a rough life, isn't it? But I'm working on a review of Embattled Dreams and some other stuff...so please come back tomorrow!

2002-09-06T18:40:00.000-07:00

HOW TO LOSE THE BATTLE AGAINST BAD PHILOSOPHY In Erin O'Connor's academic blog, she details the incoming orientation for Brown frosh-of-color.

That pomp is also a politics: the TWTP web site offers a remarkable explanation for why well-heeled, privileged Brown students should choose to call themselves "third world" students. It's a remarkable explanation, which I quote here in full: Students first began using the term "Third World" over "minority" because of the negative connotations of inferiority and powerlessness with which the word "minority" is often associated. Although the term "Third World" may have negative socioeconomic connotations outside of Brown, Third World students here continue to use the term in the context originating form the Civil Rights Movement. Frantz Fanon, author of The Wretched of the Earth (1961), urged readers to band together against oppression and colonialism, by pioneering a "Third Way" meaning an alternative to the ways of the first world (U.S. & Europe) and also the second world (USSR & Eastern Europe). When students adopt the term "Third World", they use it in the sense of a cultural model of empowerment and liberation. Brown students of color continue to use the term "Third World" in a similar fashion: to describe a consciousness which recognizes the commonalities and links shared by their diverse communities. This consciousness at Brown also reflects a right, a willingness, and a necessity for people of color to define themselves instead of being defined by others. The concept of "Third World" has special meaning for minority students at Brown. It is not to be confused with the economic definition of the term used commonly in our society today, but understood as a term that celebrates the cultures of Arab, Asian, Black, Latino, Multiracial and Native Americans. TWTP thus understands itself as a local materialization of Frantz Fanon's vision of resistance to oppression and colonialism--a vision that was explicitly violent in nature: "Violence," Fanon argued, "is a cleansing force. It frees the native from his inferiority complex and from his despair and inaction; it makes him fearless and restores his self-respect." The TWTP website glosses over the fact that Fanon's "Third Way" was the way of revolution, that his notion of liberation involved completely destroying the present world order. But in affiliating itself with Fanon's vision and vocabulary, TWTP nonetheless expresses a distinctly militant perspective on what exactly constitutes racial empowerment. The Wretched of the Earth, hailed by TWTP as the origin of Brown's ideal "cultural model of empowerment and liberation," was hailed by its publisher as "the handbook for the black revolution." A Marxist account of Fanon's experiences in Algeria during its struggle for independence, the book outlines the role of class conflict in the creation of a new nation's national consciousness, arguing that postcolonial African nations will implode if they merely replace white leaders with black ones while conserving an essentially bourgeois capitalist social structure.

I don't see the priviledged underpriviledged of Brown lubing up their AK-51's and packing Semtex into suicide belts. But I do see hpw a national leadership weaned on Fanon (and the leadership of this generation was) could be paralyzed into inaction by the guilt this ideology lays on them, and more, be inwardly sympathetic to the 'liberating purity' of the Palestinian and Al Queida 'militants'.

2002-09-06T18:18:00.000-07:00

WHY DIDN'T I THINK OF THIS? E-Gray : Government favors at auction prices - Gray Davis. Via The Indepundit.

2002-09-06T17:12:00.000-07:00

I'M NOT ALONE!! Check out the latest Field Poll (requires Acrobat Reader); After shooting himself in the head at least three times by my count, Simon only trails Davis by 6 points...down, Ann!! Down! Please don't hurt me!! I just finished Embattled Dreams, the latest by Kevin Starr, and believe me, I'm inclined to vote for Earl Warren over these morons, and he's been dead for a long, long time...

2002-09-06T14:35:00.000-07:00

GROWNUPS, REDUX I read Part 3 of Wright’s article with glee…while he and I differ slightly (and I think he’s done a much better job of laying out his arguments than I have done)…we fundamentally agree that the enemy we are facing is a contagious mindset…a meme…to which I’ll add that this meme is rooted in a philosophical tradition here in the West...which must be addressed. I’ll follow up with an amplification of his points, but want to first address Eugene Volokh’s response to him. Here are some key points made by Volokh:

But I think Wright is missing an absolutely fundamental point: Trying to get people to love us -- especially the sorts of people who might become suicide bombers, or even cheerleaders for suicide bombers -- may actually make them love us less. The problem with appeasement isn't some abstraction about honor or sticking to one's guns. Appeasement is often in a very basic way counterproductive. … So the brutes end up having a competitive advantage over the nice guys (or, to be precise, more of one than they had before). Either the nice guys will turn brutish, or the nice guys will be overrun by the brutes, and it is the brutes, not the nice guys, who will reproduce their brutal culture of terrorist threat. Evolution will help the fittest survive -- except in the policy structure that Wright recommends, the fittest (the ones whose interests we'll treat with the most concern) are the ones who are the most likely spawning grounds of terrorists. What then, should be done, given the risk that small groups could kill millions of Americans? I don't know the answer to that. But I am pretty sure that while technology may have magnified the power of small groups (for good and for ill), it hasn't repealed basic laws of human nature: Behavior that is rewarded, as I mentioned, gets repeated. The violent appeased come to demand more and more of the appeasers, and come to have more and more contempt for the appeasers. And to the extent that willingness to murder becomes an effective weapon in deterring us, the result will be more groups that choose to use that weapon against us.

I have a couple of responses. First, that he would be right if in fact Wright’s point was to lavish the potential terrorists with love, instead of threats of violence. But my take on Wright’s point is more subtle. He says:

The Philippines escapade resulted from taking the phrase "war on terrorism" literally and thinking of the enemy as a finite group of warriors, rather than a contagious mind-set that may spawn new warriors faster than you kill the old ones. We mounted a "show of force"—something that may work when you're trying to intimidate a potentially aggressive nation but that may backfire when the enemy is, in part, Muslim resentment of American power and arrogance. This suggests Policy Prescription No. 4: In a war on terrorism, applying force inconspicuously makes sense more often than in regular wars.

He also suggests:

Policy Prescription No. 2: The substance of policies should be subjected to a new kind of appraisal, one that explicitly accounts for the discontent and hatred the policies arouse.

and

Policy Prescription No. 3: The ultimate target is memes; killing or arresting people is useful only to the extent that it leads to a net reduction in terrorism memes.

And here he is right on the key point. While you could (and Volkh does) interpret Policy #2 as “appease them”, and some of the actual points made by Wright lead you there, the substance of what he says is simple: our deeds and policies have both physical and ‘psychological’ reactions. We need to think through the ‘psychological’ ones carefully, and make sure that the reaction in that sphere doesn’t outweigh the physical effect. Number 3 is useful because it lets us decide to target the origins of the problem, rather than the symptoms. Now here, as in first aid, we must be aware that the symptoms can kill us, and that they need to be managed. But the simple fact is that the costs of terrorism are so low, relative to the costs of defending effectively against it, that we will be bankrupted (forgetting the moral and political consequences of a tight terrorism defense) if we allow it to continue. We must both find ways to defend ourselves, and simultaneously find ways to carry the attack to the sources of the problem…which may require a war where the weapons are ideas. Number 4 is critical. It is about the difference between ‘bluster’ and ‘threat’. Because we can effectively turn the whole of the Middle East to a glass plain, we expect our to be respected and our desires to be obeyed, or at least considered. But because of the (literally, if you’re a Believer) apocalyptic nature of our response, it’s also clear that there’s a pretty high threshold for triggering it. On the other hand…does anyone else remember the story in the 80’s about the Russian response to a kidnapping of one of their embassy staff in Beirut? This was when Western diplomats and journalists were being kidnapped and held hostage fairly frequently. The story was, and I remember reading this in the paper at the time, that the Russians had sent over a spetsnaz team, who kidnapped members of the clan who did the kidnapping, and sent several of their body parts in lieu of cash to the kidnappers…who promptly released the hostage, and never took another. We parked aircraft carriers off the beach and sent a bunch of negotiators. Which was the effective response?? And, in the context of who we are and want to be, how do we duplicate the effect of the effective response? I’m not exactly sure, but it involves small, quiet, probably lethal actions in lieu of the large and loud actions we tend to take.

2002-09-06T12:51:00.000-07:00

HONEST, I STARTED WRITING ABOUT THIS YESTERDAY… ‘Threat assessment’ is something I mentioned in the post below; it is a simple concept. Martial arts skills can be crudely divided into two parts: what to do and when to do it. The ‘what to do’ part is more easily taught, and is what is studied in dojos and on traditional shooting ranges. The ‘when to do it’ part is more complex, both because it deals with real-life situations in which there are many uncontrolled variables, and because it introduces the element of uncertainty and risk. Uncertainty is important because in real life, threats seldom walk up to your door, knock, and introduce themselves as threats (actually, two of my favorite cinema bits…the ATM mugger in “LA Story”, who introduces himself as “Hi, my name is Bob and I’ll be your robber tonight.”; and the brilliant Wile E Coyote v. Bugs Bunny cartoon...have threats that introduce themselves). So you have to make a decision, and the problem is that on one hand the decision probably shouldn’t be to shoot anyone who seems vaguely menacing, nor should it be to wait until that vaguely menacing guy is within Tueller range or worse, has you in “the hole” (a close enough distance where being armed or skilled isn’t enough to overcome the element of surprise, and where a skilled opponent could effectively control you). These concepts are important, because they add the variable of ‘potential threat’ that must be assessed. A guy with a knife is not necessarily a significant threat to someone with a gun, until the opponent is within about 21 feet…the Tueller range at which someone can close and strike before a typical person could unholster and shoot. A skilled jujitsu practitioner will most likely control, disable, and kill an armed opponent if the fight starts with the two within arm’s reach. The best class I have ever seen (although I did not take it) in dealing with this issue is the IMPACT/Model Mugging series. They teach their students to actively interact with potential threats, which allows you to make the determination of risk at a range you select. When I walk up, the IMPACT student is taught to say “Excuse me, but you’re coming too close to me,” and then escalate from there depending on the response. If this were directed at me (affable, but sometimes irritable), I’d back up, and probably shake my head at the oversensitivity and lack of trust in the modern world. The Bad Guy won’t, and that difference in behavior lets you know what you are dealing with. My role model Clint Smith puts it pretty well: "You better learn to communicate real well, because when you’re out there on the street, you’ll have to talk to a lot more people than you’ll have to shoot, or at least that’s the way I think it’s supposed to work." This is relevant to our situation in the ME, because we are, as they would say in the South, all full up with ‘what to do’ and pretty well dry on ‘when to do it’. Neither the leadership of the country nor the citizenry has really come to any resolution on what constitutes a threat, and how we agree we can appropriately react. I genuinely believe there are people who wonder why we haven’t turned the Middle East into glass in response to 9/11, as I believe there are folks whose response to two nukes and smallpox in U.S. cities would be “but killing all those innocent people won’t bring back the dead”. Somewhere between those two factions, we’d better come to a conclusion on the level and source of the threat and our response and do so fairly quickly.

2002-09-05T22:53:00.000-07:00

(clears throat) MEME MEME (that's an opera joke, son...) OK, it's getting interesting, and I have to finish reading a 300 page document in time for a 0900 interview in BFE tomorrow morning. So comments will be delayed until tomorrow afternoon. But meanwhile, read Part 3 of Wright's article, then read Eugene Vokolh's reply, and think about them...

2002-09-04T18:14:00.000-07:00

THE RESIDENTS Over at Blogcritics, they’ve got an interview with Homer Flynn, graphic artist for The Residents. If you’ve been listening to Jon Bon Jovi for your whole musical life, you may not know them; they are a troupe of two men and two women, along with associates, who record and perform some of the most amazing pieces around. I saw their performance of the King & Eye here in LA, and it probably ranks with one of the most amazing concerts or dance performances I’ve ever seen. In it, they deconstruct American music, culminating in…wait for it…Elvis. Go check these guys out. As far as I’m concerned, The Residents and Survival Research Labs alone justify the entire artistic pretentiousness output of the San Francisco Bay area…

2002-09-04T17:33:00.000-07:00

Chris Bertram emails: From the preface to Hobbes's De Cive: "For though the wicked were fewer than the righteous, yet because we cannot distinguish them, there is a necessity of suspecting, heeding, anticipating, subjugating, self defending, ever incident to the most honest and fairest conditioned." Relevant to your latest post, I thought. The more things change...

2002-09-04T14:12:00.000-07:00

ON IRAQ Chris Bertram, as well as Eric Tam highlight the American Prospect article by William Galston on just war theories and Iraq. The key quote:

Saddam Hussein may well endanger the survival of his neighbors, but he poses no such risk to the United States. And he knows full well that complicity in a 9-11-style terrorist attack on the United States would justify, and swiftly evoke, a regime-ending response. During the Gulf War, we invoked this threat to deter him from using weapons of mass destruction against our troops, and there is no reason to believe that this strategy would be less effective today. Dictators have much more to lose than do stateless terrorists; that's why deterrence directed against them has a good chance of working. In its segue from al-Qaeda to Saddam Hussein, and from defense to preemption, the Bush administration has shifted its focus from stateless foes to state-based adversaries, and from terrorism in the precise sense to the possession of weapons of mass destruction. Each constitutes a threat. But they are not the same threat and do not warrant the same response. It serves no useful purpose to pretend that they are seamlessly connected, let alone one and the same.

While well-intentioned, I believe that this construction has a fatal flaw. Before I get into it, let me explain that I am not today waving flags to encourage an invasion of Iraq. I am a fence-sitter, probably tipped slightly in favor of invasion but anxious about the prospect that will face us afterward. But as to this argument, I have a serious problem. First, that any WMD attack on the US (or any of our forces protected proxies) will certainly not be readily traceable to Saddam, or anyone else with the absolute level of proof that I believe would be required before some people would grudgingly support the idea of war. Remember that there are many who do not today believe that Al Quieda was behind 9/11, and it is unlikely that we will get access to video of Saddam handing Joe Terrorist the keys to a truck loaded with smallpox ampoules, or of Saddam pushing a big red button labeled “Blow Up Tel Aviv”. As I have discussed below, the probable response looks more like:

“Wow!! Bummer about Tel Aviv!! Who would be crazy enough to smuggle a nuke in there? Wasn’t us, promise!! No, really!!” While the tame game theory model suggests that he and others can be managed successfully through boundary and consequence-setting, the only thing that might work would be something Godfather-like: If anything bad happens to me; if I catch a cold and go to the hospital; if I get hit by a car while rollerblading drunk; you will die. You are now the guarantor of my wellbeing.

and I have a hard time imaging some of the more profoundly antiwar folks being willing to accept anything like this. Let’s talk about this for a minute. I will not pretend to be an expert on warfare, conventional or otherwise, but I have studied and practiced a number of ‘real world’ martial arts for a number of years. And the consistent most significant problem that is shared by all of them is ‘threat identification’; i.e. how do you know who is a threat and who isn’t? It's easy to know on the mat or at the shooting range, but much muddier out in the streets and alleys of the real world. ...actually, I just realized that this is a longer and more significant point than I originally thought, and will polish it and try and post later today. Sorry about that!

2002-09-04T13:32:00.000-07:00

THE GROWNUPS ARE TALKING Over at Slate, an interesting series by Robert Wright has begun, on Terrorism. So far two parts are up, and in them, he makes these assertions (with which I agree completely): Proposition No. 1: Al-Qaida and radical Islam are not the problem. Proposition No. 2: For the foreseeable future, smaller and smaller groups of intensely motivated people will have the ability to kill larger and larger numbers of people. Go read it, it’s gonna be interesting. I was referred there by Matt Yglesias, who comments regarding assertion#2:

I think this is basically wrong because at the same time as technology reduces the number of people you need to carry out a destructive attack it also makes it easier and easier for big rich states like the United States to locate their would-be attackers. Admittedly, all our satellites and communications gear may still have let bin Laden get away (though it does seem like he's dead) but even so they let us find and target rather precisely any number of Al Qaeda facilities that would have taken forever to find without 21st century IT.

I’ll respectfully disagree with Matt, simply because of the disparity between the potential number of attackers to monitor and the resources (and level of intrusiveness) necessary to monitor them. Plus, if I’m correct (and Wright makes a parallel argument when he says:

This high-tech mobilization of radical constituencies needn't be centrally orchestrated. Since 9/11, American pundits have griped about the propaganda issuing from TV channels run by Arab governments. But take a look at the free market at work: The new, unregulated satellite TV channels—notably Al Jazeera, founded in 1996—haven't exactly been a sedative for irate Muslims. The uncomfortable fact is that a free press often fuels antagonisms because people choose channels that bolster their biases. (Which is the most popular American cable news channel? The most ideological one—Fox.) Increasingly, "tribes"—interest groups of any kind, including radical ones—will be, in effect, self-organizing.)

the overall level of ‘spontaneous’, or ‘self-generated’ terror will increase.

2002-09-03T16:18:00.000-07:00

FEELING LIKE A REFUGEE Dan Hartung, over at lake effect: a weblog, has a good post on the number of European refugees who were resettled in WW's I and II. Take a look, and decide for yourself how to fit the current issues into history...and whether it is 'racism' that we are dealing with. (link thanks to War Liberal)

2002-09-03T11:45:00.000-07:00

THE FUTURE OF THE E.U., THOUGHTFULLY DISCUSSED Porphyrogenitus fails to live up to his blog title ("Ranting Screeds") once again, in putting together a thoughful and informed discussion of the structure of the E.U. and some likely consequences. Shameful business, as my son says. We are becoming rant-deprived...

2002-09-02T20:30:00.000-07:00

REVIEW Posted a serious review over at Blogcritics; it's of Mark Doty's new book of poetry, Source. Check it out check it out...

2002-09-02T20:24:00.000-07:00

Commenter Ziska writes:

The guerrilla war/ terrorism distinction escapes me. The difference, as far as I know, is that you can have terrorism without guerrilla warfare (mostly because you can't manage guerrila war) but that you seldom have guerrilla warfare without terrorism.

Well, you've got part of it. Terrorist tactics are a subset of guerilla tactics, but applied without the military discipline or tactical and strategic intent. Typically guerilla tactics will focus on the actual forces of the opponents...in this case, it would be Israeli military outposts, reservists staging areas, etc....while what we are seeing is attacks against photogenic targets of opportunity. In my mind, there's a significant difference in the moral standing of the two, as noted in my post earlier.

I'm not at all convinced that non-violence would work in Israel/Palestine, or that it worked in India, or that it worked anywhere. There was also a violent resistance in India, and England had many practical reasons to exit.

You're kidding, right? As long as the Indian Revolt was violent, supressing it maintained huge support in England, despite the fact that colonies were simply no longer economically viable. If tyou read the contemporary accounts, it was Gandhi's campaign which unlocked the English opposition, and allowed them to move to the center of the political stage.

One form of "moral parity" that I would argue is that if a tactic being used by some present insurgent group was also used by some successful insurgent group in the past, one that has been admitted to the family of nations such as Ireland, Israel, and Algeria, then we must find some additional reason for denouncing the present-day group. Not just because of the tactic.

Again, I'll suggest that you review your history. My late father-in-law fought with the French in Algeria (as well as Indochina), and he and I had a number of discussions about both, and about the tactics used by and against the French in both cases. Terror was used by the FLN against the Pied-Noir leadership, and to enforce discipline and secrecy within the FLN (and doubtless to purge the occasional political rival within the FLN) but primarily it was a straight-ahead guerilla war against the French military itself. Ireland waged war primarily against the British colonial apparatus (including the tax-collectors) and the much-hated landlord class.

2002-09-02T15:36:00.000-07:00

HMMM, SOUND INTERESTING...WHAT DO FOLKS THINK??

Received: from hellrimore2983.com ([195.166.233.167]) by mail.mysitehosting.net (Merak 4.4.2) with SMTP id XXXXXXXX for ; Mon, 02 Sep 2002 22:07:53 +0200 From: "SHEIKH SHEHU MUSTAPHA" Reply-To: shehumusa@email.com Date: Mon, 2 Sep 2002 21:08:41 -0700 Subject: MUSTAPHA X-Mailer: Microsoft Outlook Express 5.00.2919.1990 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable My dear friend, I got your email address through the internet,so do not be surprised. First of all let me sacrifice my life in this transaction ,by letting out this piece of information i am about to give to you.As a betrayal of this trust puts my life at stake.I have choosen this transaction to be strictly business,so that you would not think otherwise,as you would be rewarded for your assistance. I am sheikh shehu musa mustapha,a business tycoon from iraq,presently in prison in iraq for the past four years,for my alledged assistance to the american government against my motherland iraq(treason),which i happen to know nothing about.My detractors have finally put me to shame,but i leave them to their own fate. In july 11 1999,i was accused of assisting the american government as a spy against iraq, i am sure that the outside world has no knowledge this happening,since i did not in any way transact with the american government or any other government,if not i am sure my case would have been making news in the world ,as acase of violation of my fundamental human rights,which i have been deprived of since i have not stood trial since my incarcertation. My companies assets have been seized, my numerous accounts frozen and as such my family have been living in abject in poverty as i, their breadwinner have been rendered useless in prison.As luck would have it against me,my wives are uneducated and my children too young to pull up a fight. My dear friend,i do not want you to inform your western government yet,of my predicament,because i stand to loose my life and lives of my family,if that happens now.I am willing to loose my life but i want my family to live and tell the story of my life,since i do not even know my fate now.So please listen carefully and adhere to my instructions if you are willing to assist me. In the year 2000,some of my trusted aides on my orders,successfully smuggled some of my money out of iraq,without the government knowledge.This money amounting to $61,340,000 was successfully smuggled and lodged with a security firm in holland.But my so called trusted aides as if they believe i am never going to make it out alive,eloped with $20,000,000 of this money,i leave them to their fate.However the documents backing the remaining money in the security firm in Holland was sent to me through my trusted friend Al Farouq,who knows nothing of the contents of the documents,but has kept it in safe hands.I cannot bear to see my family suffer in pain and lacks,so i am willing to sacrifice my life for them to live. My friend ,all iwant you to do for me is to help me retrieve the money from this security company and secure it.All the documents would be sent to you once i am sure you are willing to assist me.Then i want you to send some amount from this money to my family through my friend Al Farouq,who would in turn help me smuggle them(my family) out of iraq to your civilized world,from where they can now after their safety has been guaranteed,tell the whole world about what is going on in iraq. Whatever befalls me after then i am ready to take. I am placing my life in your hands,so even if you are not willing to assist me,please do not let this story out,because it would mean you are killing me and my beloved family. Iwould appreciate it if you send me your telephone#,since i am entitled to make just one call to my family once in every two weeks.But icannot provide you with any phone number,as the best and only way to contact me is through the internet,which we are provided with as a form of recreation in prison ,though under tight scrutiny,but not to worry the guards here have been friendly to me,besides they do not understand english. If you can assist me in this transaction,i am offering to give you 20% of the money in the security firm,once retrieved,for your efforts,so apart from your good conscience,iam offering a reward.If i hear from you,i would there after furnish you with the neccesaryinformation.God bless you Yours trully Musa Mustapha.

Damn, I've had this address less than two months...

2002-09-02T10:28:00.000-07:00

IT'S LABOR DAY! Why are you looking at your computer?? Go play with your kids...we're off to the beach, the art museum, and maybe the bookstore...

2002-09-01T13:24:00.000-07:00

MOVIE REVIEW IN THE FORM OF A VOICEMAIL MESSAGE TO MY BROTHER “You loser. You incredible loser. You don’t have a single cell of taste in your whole body. Not a cell, not a mitochondria, not even a virus. You should get out of the movie business tonight and go work at a 99 cent store where they sell cheap-ass rejects, because the movie you recommended to me tonight was the worst castoff reject-laden piece of shit I’ve seen since “Supertroopers”, and my FIFTEEN YEAR OLD SON even apologized for making me see that. This move had the stupidest script I’ve seen in years, most of the acting was phoned in, except for the lead, who appears to have gone to the Al Pacino School For Cheap Overemoting for this film. The writer/director didn’t miss a cheap or obvious opportunity in the script, and the producer…the same guy, coincidentally, who forgot to spend more than the 99 cents – like the stuff you should be selling instead of working on movies – on special effects WHICH WERE CRUCIAL TO THE FILM. Not only do you owe me the $18 I spent on tickets, but I want the $400 I would have billed for the time, as well. What a god-damn unbelievable loser you are for recommending this film, and so are all the stupid loser people who are making it the biggest film in the country right now… What are you doing for dinner Tuesday? Want to come over?” As you may guess, we saw ‘Signs’ last night. I did manage to crack up a few people in the lobby as I was calling my brother and leaving this message as we walked out. And the group of teenagers who walked out in front of us has the classic comment ”Jeez, we should have seen XXX”. No s**t, kids, you should have.

2002-08-29T20:34:00.000-07:00

IS THE WAR ON TERROR THE WAR ON BAD PHILOSOPHY? OK, a belated final wrapup and then we’ll (in geological time) work into some constructive suggestions. I’m proposing a theory that has three parts, each of which has some basis which we should be able to discuss or test. First, that there is a form of political violence which I will label “terrorism”, which is by its nature different from guerilla warfare and mass murder, which are its neighbors on the continuum of violence. The defining features of terrorism are: 1) attacks on opposing civilians and military with the sole intent of demoralizing them, and the wider media audience who views the attacks and their consequences, and with little or no thought to traditional military effectiveness (i.e. degrading the capability of the enemy to fight you); 2) an ideological base in the self-perceived powerlessness of the attacking side; 3) reliance on the restraint and civility of the opposing force to allow terrorist operatives to stay concealed in a civilian population relatively free from reprisal. *** Next that while terrorism has roots in traditional political conflicts, its nature as a different method of conflict has implications for the sponsoring political entity, as well as those targeted. There is something about terrorism as a tactic that both attracts and entraps the participants. In other words, there is something about terrorism which redefines the participants and makes it hard for them to move out of committing terrorist acts and into constructive military and political activity. Much like the legendary pirates who committed cannibalism because, having eaten human flesh, they could not return to civil life, it seems that the participants in terrorism do not have a great track record at abandoning terror and moving to more traditional military and political activities. This traps the terrorists and their sponsors, and makes it more difficult for them to step across the line to which I will call “civic” politics. Not that it isn’t impossible, as recent developments in Ulster and Sri Lanka suggest. *** Finally, that the roots of terrorism, or rather the roots of the political decision to assume terrorism as a tactic, have to do as much with the desire to have an impact on people’s awareness as on their behavior. When I accuse the Palestinians of adopting tactics aimed at dramatic TV coverage as much as at damaging the Israelis, I’m pointing out that in terrorism the desire to psychologically defeat the opponent may outweigh the desire to defeat them in practical terms. Now what is unique about terrorism is that it stands alone as a kind of “media war” in which the rhetoric and media images matter more than the actual balance of power “on the ground”. Terrorists almost never attack targets that would have substantive impact; they attack airport waiting areas, and not the radar or air-traffic control facilities that would shut down the airport. Even when they do attempt attacks against infrastructure (the Pi Glilot refinery), one wonders if it was for the effect on fuel supplies of the size of the explosion that mattered. *** And here’s where it gets interesting. Commenter Ziska writes:

I think that Osama's methods are rational. He wanted to provoke the United States, destabilize the Middle east and especially Saudi Arabia, and rouse his sympathizers. (I don't think that his attack on the WTC was symbolic in a futile sense. The symbolism was appealing to the people he was trying to rouse; and in fact the WTC is very substantially meaningful, since it was a communication and control center and what he was fighting against was an international order dominated by the US from places like the WTC, rather than a flesh and blood nation.)

First, she acknowledges the symbolic, as opposed to practical import of the action…although as a ‘symbolic’ attack on the U.S., I’d suggest that the White House, U.S. Capitol, or even the Statue of Liberty would have been of greater impact…then she suggests that it is a ‘communication and control center’; no, it’s an office building. MAE-WEST, which is in an office building here in Los Angeles, is a communications and control center, and it’s destruction would have had a far greater impact on our ability to actually function than an attack on the WTC. What the WTC was is a symbol of Western economic power and (and to skirt the Freudian) potency. Again, I keep coming back to the ineffectiveness of the attacks, both on 9/11 and overall in Israel (this is not to demean the real tragedy that both represent) to suggest that the attackers are not using the same calculus as us to measure success and failure, and that their motivations are not what they appear to us to be...or possibly what they themselves articulate. I obviously have not yet gotten the Baudrillard book noted by Junius below, but I’ll repeat the publisher’s quote, because it is so damn telling:

Continuing an analysis developed over many years, Baudrillard sees the power of the terrorists as lying in the symbolism of this slaughter. Not merely the reality of death, but a sacrificial death that challenges the whole system. Where the past revolutionary sought to conduct a struggle of real forces in the context of ideology and politics, the new terrorist mounts a powerful symbolic challenge, which, when combined with high-tech resources, constitutes an unprecedented assault on an over-sophisticated, vulnerable West.

and add to it a quote from V.S. Naipul (thanks to Roublen Vessau):

I don't think it was because of American foreign policy. There is a passage in one of the Conrad short stories of the East Indies where the savage finds himself with his hands bare in the world, and he lets out a howl of anger. I think that, in its essence, is what is happening. The world is getting more and more out of reach of simple people who have only religion. And the more they depend on religion, which of course solves nothing, the more the world gets out of reach.

This suggests to me that it is not any one issue that triggers terrorism (although Ziska is right that it has centered on ‘national liberation’, but typically in concert with more traditional military and guerilla tactics), but infinitely many. And that the problem with this is that whatever we concede, there will be another group, another faction…if not the PLO, than Hamas, if not Hamas, than Fatah, if not Fatah, than Al-Aqusa Martyr’s Brigade, ad infinitum…who will find issues, because I am arguing that the real issue is modernity. There are internal and external critiques of Western modernity. The internal critiques have philosophical roots going clearly back to the 19th century, and which I will argue, have been picked up by many making the external critiques, until there is a roughly common philosophical and political ‘umbrella’ under which both operate. And one of the concerns I will raise is that given that there are folks internal to the West who share these views, what is the barrier to more widespread terrorism? We are seeing it now, in a loose way…in the armored-car robberies of the Aryan groups, mirroring the deadly armored-car robberies intended to finance the Weather Underground in the 70’s; in the acts of animal liberationists, anti-abortionists, of Earth First! and Columbine. The cost of defending ourselves, in the long run, will bankrupt us physically, psychically, and morally. So we have to defeat this. And by virtue of its nature, terrorist violence can (and must) be held at bay, but within the limits of modern Western tolerance, cannot be defeated by violence alone. We have to find a way to stop growing the people who do it. And so yes, I’ll suggest that we have a War On Bad Philosophy, and that the places to look are the churches, mosques, temples, and lecture halls … at the people who need to create and then spread some philosophical antibodies. In the next few days, I’ll make some concrete short-term and longer term suggestions.

2002-08-29T15:09:00.000-07:00

OOPS!! Forgot to add arch-liberal Andrew Edwards as well as fellow Raven, the Fusilier Pundit (had to keep the blogroll karmically balanced, ya know).

2002-08-29T11:21:00.000-07:00

HMMM... I NEED TO READ THIS... (from Junius): Jean Baudrillard's new book: The Spirit of Terrorism. A quote:"In dealing all the cards to itself, the system forced the Other to change the rules of the game. And the new rules are ferocious, because the game is ferocious." And from the publisher's blurb: Continuing an analysis developed over many years, Baudrillard sees the power of the terrorists as lying in the symbolism of this slaughter. Not merely the reality of death, but a sacrificial death that challenges the whole system. Where the past revolutionary sought to conduct a struggle of real forces in the context of ideology and politics, the new terrorist mounts a powerful symbolic challenge, which, when combined with high-tech resources, constitutes an unprecedented assault on an over-sophisticated, vulnerable West. I just ordered it...

2002-08-28T17:55:00.000-07:00

BIGGER BLOGROLL So I've added a few folks to the blogroll: *Corsair the Rational Pirate
Geek Press
The Hamster
*IndePundit
*Me-Zine
Patio Pundit
Ranting Screeds
Stefan Sharkansky
Mike Silverman
South Knox Bubba
Testify!
Wahoo Pundit
...much good stuff, go read them and stop being so productive...

2002-08-28T14:22:00.000-07:00

OBVIOUSLY, I WANT TO WIND UP WORKING AS A SCREENER Otherwise I wouldn't be surfing and have found this, the perfect design for the California quarter (given that Davis wins...)

2002-08-28T13:51:00.000-07:00

JOHN GRAY HAS A SOULMATE! The pomo idiot below has an English buddy...and Lileks rips him a new one. This reminds me... When I was a mere sprout, given to organizing demonstrations aginst the Invasion of Cambodia and suchlike, I was invited to join fellow upper-middle-class radical sprouts in 'organizing' poor black kids at a youth center in Will Rodgers Park in South-Central L.A. I spent some time down there, realized that I was a pathetic loser at hoops and futball, but managed to talk to a fair number of the kids and their folks as I helped them with homework. And quickly realized that the only ones pushing for the big R were the middle-class white kids from UCLA. The folks we were talking to ... the poor folks ... wanted a job at the GM plant in Van Nuys, a house with a fence in a safe neighborhood, and good enough schools that their kids could go to college and become arrogant clowns like we were. Just a thought.

2002-08-28T13:13:00.000-07:00

I LIKE THE SOUND OF THIS Ranting Screeds lays even more groundwork for the 'War on Bad Philosophy' and he & I are now calling it. I'm trying to get a proposal out the door (don't forget that I'm looking for work, and will have to drastically cut back on blogging if I have to get a job as an airport screener...), but promise that I will get the last terrorism piece up today, and will follow up with some amplification on Ranting's suggestions.

2002-08-27T20:58:00.000-07:00

ANOTHER POMO THEORIST MAKES MY ARGUMENTS FOR ME Aparently John Gray, Professor of European Thought at the LSE, has written a book explaining the errors of human exceptionalism (the assumption that we are somehow above nature), and suggests in the book that 'Homo rapines is only one of very many species, and not obviously worth preserving. Later or sooner, it will become extinct. When it is gone the Earth will recover.' Some of us are trying to prevent that... (from spiked-culture,via Instapundit.)

2002-08-27T18:37:00.000-07:00

I'M A LIBERAL AND I AGREE TANSTAAFL suggests a quick test for critics of the West:

Take a few minutes today to ask yourself a few questions about where you live, and how you live. Here are a few samples to start you off: Do I like where I live? Is there another place substantially different where I would prefer to live? Do I have reasonably good access to the peaceful means of changing the laws and practices of my society? How secular is my society? How does it treat gender differences? Sexuality? Race? How free am I? Can I criticise the Government? The Police? Are my thoughts suppressed by government policy? Do I have access to alternative sources of information? Can I disseminate my thoughts? Are the processes of my Government transparent? Am I in danger of random arrest? Torture? Summary execution? Secret imprisonment? What we’re looking for here is a kind of Aggregate Society Satisfaction Rating. There is no perfect society for all. It’s possible Mrs Kublai Khan and all the younger Kahns complained that Xanadu was too far out in the sticks. But realistic debate cannot proceed without an examination of the values that the Western Society stands for in large part, and a comparison to the alternatives of offer. Take a look at where you live, and how you live. If you wouldn’t live anywhere else, make that you starting point for any and all thought about your country, and keep it in mind before you open your mouth.

As a liberal, I'm constantly frustrated because this is where there is hope for the poor, the marginal, women, minorities. I've lived in Europe, and I'll tell you there are few things I've encountered more racist and sexist than a Parisian dinner table in the 16th arrondissement, and relative to most of the world, France is good. (link via Meryl)