Not to worry. The State Department professionals have a firm grip on protocol, and this should smooth over any minor little hiccups.
As they say over at Ace, oh, sweet meteor of death, smite me now. I'm begging you. Also, I would like to buy you a Coke.
You think I'm making this part up?
Transphobia
This requires no comment, other than to wonder if the deliquescence of thought processes can proceed any further, or if we have reached the molecular stage.
Preach It, Father
I feel pretty justified today. It sounds like the Pope and I are on the same page.
He said:
The important part for me is this endorsement from the Holy Father of a reasonable amount of violence in response to intentional provocation as a natural, normal part of human morality. We talked about this in the comments to this post.
The very idea is upsetting to some at Hot Air, who have bought into the line that all violence is wicked and children should be taught never to hit.
This is a very old position, by the way: here's St. Thomas Aquinas on the subject. Should anyone ignore the Pope's introductory remarks and take to killing people, the Church also endorses the right of self-defense.
He said:
“One cannot offend, make war, kill in the name of one’s own religion — that is, in the name of God,” Francis said. “To kill in the name of God is an aberration.”Now bear in mind that the Pope's "cannot" here is not a legal cannot, but a moral one aimed at Catholics who take his authority seriously. You have the legal freedom, but a good Christian -- the Pope is telling his flock -- wouldn't do these things. In another context, that would be a noncontroversial thing coming from a Pope, a bishop, a priest, or a nun.
But then the pope began to outline what he sees as important limits on free expression. Francis began by joking that if someone were to swear against his mother, “a punch awaits him.”
Continuing more seriously, the pope said: “One cannot provoke, one cannot insult other people’s faith, one cannot make fun of faith.”
“There is a limit,” he said. “Every religion has its dignity.”
The important part for me is this endorsement from the Holy Father of a reasonable amount of violence in response to intentional provocation as a natural, normal part of human morality. We talked about this in the comments to this post.
I am not sure I condemn violence against people who are doing their best to provoke it. I condemn murder, of course, but I often think we go too far in condemning all violence. If the father of a soldier forced to endure a Westboro protest at his son's funeral were to punch one of them in the nose, I'd think we should do nothing whatsoever to punish him for the action. If Westboro seeks to press charges against him, as they always do, I would think the proper response would be, "What did you expect to happen?"We agreed, after discussion, that just when such violence is justified is a judgment call that is going to need to be subject to reasonable standards and social/legal controls. But that's true of the more serious violence we justify too: the 'stand your ground' laws justify lethal violence, subject to a whole series of legal controls and reviews by members of the community -- the police, prosecutors, juries, etc. Even where we want to craft a positive law creating a specific authorization to use force, all those modes of review are necessary to ensure it isn't misused or unreasonably applied.
This attack violates a number of my principles -- against murder, against using firearms against unarmed and weak persons, against ganging up on people, and so forth. There's plenty to condemn.
But I think maybe there is a point at which we should say, "Of course you have the right to say it, and nobody will stop you, but don't come crying to us if you get bopped in the nose for it." If we drew the line there, maybe there'd be more nose-bopping and fewer gratuitously offensive cartoons, and we'd reach a place where we were both less violent (no mass murder, and probably pretty quickly no need to nose-bop) and less indecent (fewer ugly public statements meant to insult).
The very idea is upsetting to some at Hot Air, who have bought into the line that all violence is wicked and children should be taught never to hit.
“In freedom of expression, there are limits, like in regard to my mom,” Francis continued. “If he says a swear word against my mother, he’s going to get a punch in the nose. That’s normal.”You're missing the Pope's point, I think. First, he specifically sets aside lethal force in these cases. His chosen example is very close to mine, actually: a punch in the nose. But he isn't advocating punching people in the nose so much as he's advocating not being an ass. If everyone follows his advice, nobody will get punched in the nose. It's only when people don't follow the advice that we get to nose-bopping. But the nose-bopping is itself a natural feedback mechanism, especially if society endorses its reasonable application. It's just by endorsing standing up to people like Westboro that you get fewer of them. It's by protecting them from natural feedback that you get more.
No, it’s not “normal.” The individual moved to violence over an insult has lost control, and that’s unacceptable. It is unequivocally wrong to hit someone in the face regardless of the circumstances that led to that outburst, which is a lesson that parents around the world teach their children every day. Good luck now, mom and dad. When even the Pope says it’s “normal” to go on a violent rampage because your feelings were hurt, those opposed to this uncivilized behavior have lost the ability to appeal to moral authority.
This is a very old position, by the way: here's St. Thomas Aquinas on the subject. Should anyone ignore the Pope's introductory remarks and take to killing people, the Church also endorses the right of self-defense.
Migration, Multiculturalism and Ghettoization
From Maggie's Farm, an article by George Friedman, author of Flashpoints: The Emerging Crisis in Europe:
The current crisis has its origins in the collapse of European hegemony over North Africa after World War II and the Europeans' need for cheap labor. As a result of the way in which they ended their imperial relations, they were bound to allow the migration of Muslims into Europe, and the permeable borders of the European Union enabled them to settle where they chose. The Muslims, for their part, did not come to join in a cultural transformation. They came for work, and money, and for the simplest reasons. The Europeans' appetite for cheap labor and the Muslims' appetite for work combined to generate a massive movement of populations.
The matter was complicated by the fact that Europe was no longer simply Christian. Christianity had lost its hegemonic control over European culture over the previous centuries and had been joined, if not replaced, by a new doctrine of secularism. Secularism drew a radical distinction between public and private life, in which religion, in any traditional sense, was relegated to the private sphere with no hold over public life. There are many charms in secularism, in particular the freedom to believe what you will in private. But secularism also poses a public problem. There are those whose beliefs are so different from others' beliefs that finding common ground in the public space is impossible. And then there are those for whom the very distinction between private and public is either meaningless or unacceptable. The complex contrivances of secularism have their charm, but not everyone is charmed.
Europe solved the problem with the weakening of Christianity that made the ancient battles between Christian factions meaningless. But they had invited in people who not only did not share the core doctrines of secularism, they rejected them. What Christianity had come to see as progress away from sectarian conflict, Muslims (and some Christians) may see as simply decadence, a weakening of faith and the loss of conviction.
. . .
. . . Newly arrived immigrants are always poor. That's why they immigrate. And until they learn the language and customs of their new homes, they are always ghettoized and alien. It is the next generation that flows into the dominant culture. But the dirty secret of multiculturalism was that its consequence was to perpetuate Muslim isolation. And it was not the intention of Muslims to become Europeans, even if they could. They came to make money, not become French. The shallowness of the European postwar values system thereby becomes the horror show that occurred in Paris last week.Friedman has no solution to suggest. I take him to be implying that we've got a fight coming, whether we like it or not. He won't claim a moral justification for the fight, but he also declines to be slaughtered.
An Alternative View on Blasphemy
So, Tex had a good post on the subject with which I think few of us will be much inclined to disagree. Here's an alternative idea of the importance of restricting free speech when it comes into conflict with "hate speech," of which blasphemy might often be considered a subset.
My opposition to the view is easy enough to explain, so since she asks why Americans oppose her, I'll give it briefly. It starts with her idea that you have a right to honor. I suspect she really means that you have a right to receive honors. You do not. Honor is sacrifice. It is by showing honor, at significant personal cost, that you become deserving of receiving honors. It's not a right.
Neither is respect. Respect must be earned.
Neither is dignity. Dignity can be thrown away, and if you throw it away, you have no right to insist on being given more.
Non-discrimination is a trickier case, but I think that if you strip it down to a generalized claim that no one should discriminate against anyone, it's unworkable and foolish. There are some specific things -- especially race -- that we should not allow to be causes of discrimination. There are lots of other things (for example, a history of felonious behavior) that are perfectly valid causes for discrimination.
So, we can begin our disagreement by simply noting that I dispute that anyone has rights to any of the things you list as rights. Even if we agree that freedom of speech has to deal with conflicting rights, I dispute that any of these are examples of rights. Freedom of speech sometimes conflicts with real rights, in which case we have to work out compromises. We don't have to compromise with rights that don't, and many of which can't, exist.
Also, perhaps you should re-read Orwell.
Relying on the authority of these organizations to redefine the terms of the discussion is what your opponents are referring to when they say you sound like Orwell. You do.
There are other problems with the article, such as likening freedom to hold opinions you find bigoted to 'a right to murder,' which shows a hugely tendentious understanding of the harm principle. But we'll leave those for now.
Anyone with any kind of basic, entry-level knowledge of human rights will tell you that the human right to freedom of speech always has to be balanced against other human rights, such as the human rights to dignity, respect, honor, and non-discrimination. A human rights-based approach to freedom of speech (such as the one found here) emphasizes that speech has to be restricted when it comes into conflict with other human rights. Human rights activists – including the United Nations and human rights groups all over the world – not only believe that hate speech should be outlawed, but that so should cultural appropriation and other forms of speech which violate basic human rights (in the case of cultural appropriation, the right of cultures to retain ownership of their culture and to ensure that their culture is not misused).This is reported to be the "whole world's view," with America as a kind of weird outlier. Of course, 'the whole world' doesn't end up including very much of the world -- not Russia, not China, not Africa, not the Islamic world, and not large parts even of India. I suspect that, if you move away from the question of formalities (e.g., UN treaties or unenforced legislation) and to the realm of lived experience, the number of people who believe this is actually very small.
My opposition to the view is easy enough to explain, so since she asks why Americans oppose her, I'll give it briefly. It starts with her idea that you have a right to honor. I suspect she really means that you have a right to receive honors. You do not. Honor is sacrifice. It is by showing honor, at significant personal cost, that you become deserving of receiving honors. It's not a right.
Neither is respect. Respect must be earned.
Neither is dignity. Dignity can be thrown away, and if you throw it away, you have no right to insist on being given more.
Non-discrimination is a trickier case, but I think that if you strip it down to a generalized claim that no one should discriminate against anyone, it's unworkable and foolish. There are some specific things -- especially race -- that we should not allow to be causes of discrimination. There are lots of other things (for example, a history of felonious behavior) that are perfectly valid causes for discrimination.
So, we can begin our disagreement by simply noting that I dispute that anyone has rights to any of the things you list as rights. Even if we agree that freedom of speech has to deal with conflicting rights, I dispute that any of these are examples of rights. Freedom of speech sometimes conflicts with real rights, in which case we have to work out compromises. We don't have to compromise with rights that don't, and many of which can't, exist.
Also, perhaps you should re-read Orwell.
All human rights groups understand that all governments have an obligation to punish hate speech, and that outlawing hate speech does not interfere with freedom of speech in any way (if anything, it is necessary to outlaw hate speech in order to protect freedom of speech). Amnesty International, for example, has emphasized many, MANY times throughout its long history that hate speech MUST always be outlawed. Here, you can find an explanation from Amnesty International about what freedom of speech REALLY is. Freedom of speech is NOT the right to say whatever you want about whatever you want whenever you want. Freedom of speech – like all freedoms – comes with responsibility. Words have consequences, and your freedom ends when it starts to intefere with the freedoms of others – such as their freedom to live without hatred and oppression....What was going on in Orwell was that words were getting redefined by authority. The Ministry of Truth told lies, but the lies they told were declared to be true by authority, so they were "true" in the new sense of the term. You say that freedom of speech can't conflict with a ban on hate speech, because freedom of speech has been defined by your organizations to exclude hate speech. The reason this strikes your opponents as similar to Orwell is that you are conducting your argument by redefining the terms to mean what you'd like them to mean. Freedom of speech does mean, to many people, freedom to say what you want. You would like to use authority to redefine the terms to exclude what you want excluded, and to use authority to ban your opponents from organizing politically as "far-right parties that pose a threat to freedom and democracy." Do you see what you did there? You endorsed a plan to have government redefine "democracy" as something that would be threatened by allowing people who disagree to organize politically and have their message voted on by the people. That is, "democracy" would be redefined to mean the opposite of what the word means now.
Many have compared my proposals to Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell. These people do not seem to understand that human rights policies exist to prevent something like what’s described in Orwell’s dystopian world from happening, as they prevent people from advocating totalitarianism and other human rights violations.... Right now, hundreds of human rights groups are leading the charge to enact strong domestic hate speech legislation in Japan, while human rights groups in Europe are working to ban far-right parties that pose a threat to freedom and democracy.
Relying on the authority of these organizations to redefine the terms of the discussion is what your opponents are referring to when they say you sound like Orwell. You do.
There are other problems with the article, such as likening freedom to hold opinions you find bigoted to 'a right to murder,' which shows a hugely tendentious understanding of the harm principle. But we'll leave those for now.
Blasphemy
Heather Wilhelm argues that Christians should get comfortable with blasphemy. Allahpundit reports with some alarm that a majority of Americans don't think they have the "right" to blaspheme. It's a ticklish subject, even when no one is threatening to shoot up the place. Where it most often goes off the rails is in the muddiness surrounding the word "right."
I'm sure I have, and should have, the legal right to blaspheme. No matter who thinks I'm blaspheming, I don't want him to have recourse to the government to come and shut me up by force, nor do I want him to get a free pass for killing me to stop my intolerable threat to his peace of mind. I should think we'd had enough centuries of bloodshed to settle that question of policy by now. Nevertheless, I don't think I have the moral right to be intentionally offensive about someone's religion for no better purpose than to put a stick in his eye. If I hold an opinion of some aspects of his religion that strike him as less than flattering or orthodox, I expect him either to get over it, or at least confine himself to nonviolent retaliation--preferably in the form of reasoned discourse, though he's free to snub me socially and professional as well. Good manners and charity should lead me to express my disagreement as tactfully and unhatefully as I know how. But if the problem is that no doubt or contradiction can be brooked, I can't help the guy. He may not be capable of living in a free society.
So I decline to participate in campaigns to keep pigs and sausage out of children's books, while upholding the right of anyone who doesn't like them to decline reading them, even to the point of taking their kids out of school if it comes to that. Although I wouldn't dream of drawing a race-baiting caricature of a Semite, whether Arab or Jew, or of a black man, I also wouldn't lift a finger to prevent someone else from doing so, beyond refusing to support his effort with either my own patronage or tax revenues. Nor will I accept "religious rage" as a defense to murder any more than I've ever been impressed with defenses like "homosexual panic." Maintaining a free society means expecting grownups to control their emotional impulses, not parade them.
I'm sure I have, and should have, the legal right to blaspheme. No matter who thinks I'm blaspheming, I don't want him to have recourse to the government to come and shut me up by force, nor do I want him to get a free pass for killing me to stop my intolerable threat to his peace of mind. I should think we'd had enough centuries of bloodshed to settle that question of policy by now. Nevertheless, I don't think I have the moral right to be intentionally offensive about someone's religion for no better purpose than to put a stick in his eye. If I hold an opinion of some aspects of his religion that strike him as less than flattering or orthodox, I expect him either to get over it, or at least confine himself to nonviolent retaliation--preferably in the form of reasoned discourse, though he's free to snub me socially and professional as well. Good manners and charity should lead me to express my disagreement as tactfully and unhatefully as I know how. But if the problem is that no doubt or contradiction can be brooked, I can't help the guy. He may not be capable of living in a free society.
So I decline to participate in campaigns to keep pigs and sausage out of children's books, while upholding the right of anyone who doesn't like them to decline reading them, even to the point of taking their kids out of school if it comes to that. Although I wouldn't dream of drawing a race-baiting caricature of a Semite, whether Arab or Jew, or of a black man, I also wouldn't lift a finger to prevent someone else from doing so, beyond refusing to support his effort with either my own patronage or tax revenues. Nor will I accept "religious rage" as a defense to murder any more than I've ever been impressed with defenses like "homosexual panic." Maintaining a free society means expecting grownups to control their emotional impulses, not parade them.
British Satire
SUPPORT for far-right politics in Britain is at a 20-year low if you do not include things like beliefs and ideas, researchers have found.Good to know.
UPDATE: Heh. Here's what they're responding to, which is not satire.
East Jerusalem
One of the people I met in Jerusalem was Yishai Fleisher, a paratrooper (and rabbi) who appears in this video. Actually, I also went out to his home, which appears here: he invited me to lunch because his wife is from Texas and she really looked forward to a chance to talk with someone from back home.
He sent this video with a note that says, "While Vice let me have my say, they colored the atmosphere of the video with frightening music and, of course, frightening footage to match. Vice, and their ilk, are happy to highlight the conflict, the violence, the discord, and the seemingly never ending hate, but they are unwilling to show the decent lives that both Arabs and Jews have in Jerusalem, far superior to the other regional capitals of Baghdad, Cairo, and Damascus. They cut my description of a hopeful future because they are not interested. Vice were searching for facts to match their thesis and not the other way around."
For what it's worth, I walked through all this area by myself, and nobody gave me a minute's trouble. One Arab shopkeeper went out of his way to tell me that Americans were very welcome in his neighborhood. I'd have to say, based on my couple of weeks exploring Jerusalem, that Yishai is probably right that a lot of the tension in the video was added for dramatic effect. That's not to say there isn't any tension. I just think he's right that it's a whole lot nicer than Baghdad.
He sent this video with a note that says, "While Vice let me have my say, they colored the atmosphere of the video with frightening music and, of course, frightening footage to match. Vice, and their ilk, are happy to highlight the conflict, the violence, the discord, and the seemingly never ending hate, but they are unwilling to show the decent lives that both Arabs and Jews have in Jerusalem, far superior to the other regional capitals of Baghdad, Cairo, and Damascus. They cut my description of a hopeful future because they are not interested. Vice were searching for facts to match their thesis and not the other way around."
For what it's worth, I walked through all this area by myself, and nobody gave me a minute's trouble. One Arab shopkeeper went out of his way to tell me that Americans were very welcome in his neighborhood. I'd have to say, based on my couple of weeks exploring Jerusalem, that Yishai is probably right that a lot of the tension in the video was added for dramatic effect. That's not to say there isn't any tension. I just think he's right that it's a whole lot nicer than Baghdad.
A Fuller View of Charlie Hebdo
Daily KOS would like you to understand Charlie Hebdo in a more complete fashion, so they've published cartoons that they think will make you approve of them much more. And you will, if you like Daily KOS.
It turns out, unsurprisingly really, that they're a completely conventional leftist outfit: we already knew that the anti-Islam cartoons were just a symptom of the kind of severe hatred for organized religion that is common on the French Left (and has been since the Revolution). Now we see them endorsing all the other ordinary opinions of leftist thought: they are against patriotism, against the military, against oil, against the police, against the right-wing, and sure that all expressions of nationalism are merely about murder or theft.
Instead of a revolutionary magazine, its expressed opinions are so ideologically commonplace as to be boring. The only difference is that Islam is more important in France; here we only get this kind of bitter hatred aimed at Christianity.
It turns out, unsurprisingly really, that they're a completely conventional leftist outfit: we already knew that the anti-Islam cartoons were just a symptom of the kind of severe hatred for organized religion that is common on the French Left (and has been since the Revolution). Now we see them endorsing all the other ordinary opinions of leftist thought: they are against patriotism, against the military, against oil, against the police, against the right-wing, and sure that all expressions of nationalism are merely about murder or theft.
Instead of a revolutionary magazine, its expressed opinions are so ideologically commonplace as to be boring. The only difference is that Islam is more important in France; here we only get this kind of bitter hatred aimed at Christianity.
Look out
What were we saying about scratching that veneer? When angry, grieving people start spontaneously singing patriotic songs, you're seeing bonding of a sort that may turn out very dangerous for the people who have angered and grieved them.
So, Why Wasn't There Top-Level Representation?
So, whether you agree that it's a good answer or a bad answer, you all know that there's an answer to this question: for two hundred years this year, the standards set by the Congress of Vienna make the Ambassador the personal representative of the chief executive and entitled to represent him and meet with his equals in his place. Therefore, there was top level representation in accordance with the accepted standards of international law in the modern era. "And so absolutely no slight should be read into this. The Ambassador is exactly the right person to attend in the absence of the head of state."
Why can't this woman give that answer?
Does she not know? I'm willing to excuse John Kerry for his ignorance, which is only to be expected. But if there's one person in the world who should be expected to know how to explain this, it's the spokeswoman for the US Department of State.
I'm done defending the administration here. Some foreign service officers in Paris got it right, and they apparently deserve a massive debt of their countrymen's gratitude, because they are the only ones in the entire government who seem to have known what the United States was supposed to do if the President decided not to come.
Why can't this woman give that answer?
Does she not know? I'm willing to excuse John Kerry for his ignorance, which is only to be expected. But if there's one person in the world who should be expected to know how to explain this, it's the spokeswoman for the US Department of State.
I'm done defending the administration here. Some foreign service officers in Paris got it right, and they apparently deserve a massive debt of their countrymen's gratitude, because they are the only ones in the entire government who seem to have known what the United States was supposed to do if the President decided not to come.
Two from Douglas
Tex was just saying she wanted to hear more from him on all subjects, and today he has sent me a couple of items for your consideration.
The first is an article on the differences between cops and soldiers, focusing especially on why it's OK for cops to engage in political processes like the mockery of the mayor. He invokes the Weberian point, which we have discussed here many times, that the state has 'a monopoly on violence.' I stand by my eternal rejection of that position, unless it is formulated in the specific way I just offered Tex in the comments to a recent post:
The second thing Douglas sent was the following poster he made for us:
I like it.
The first is an article on the differences between cops and soldiers, focusing especially on why it's OK for cops to engage in political processes like the mockery of the mayor. He invokes the Weberian point, which we have discussed here many times, that the state has 'a monopoly on violence.' I stand by my eternal rejection of that position, unless it is formulated in the specific way I just offered Tex in the comments to a recent post:
[I]t's not problematic if we say that citizens acting qua citizens can exercise that power. For example, citizens defending themselves from terrorist attacks! Or citizens acting in defense of the common peace and lawful order by using violence to stop crimes in progress, for that matter. And, of course, the militias of the several states, which can be called into Federal service.That to the side, I see the point he's making. The police are civilians, and citizens, and should be free to behave in political ways within limits. My concern is that the NYPD may be more powerful than the mayor, so that they couldn't really be fired if they refuse to do their duty (just as they are plainly beyond his capacity to force to do their duty). On the other hand, the quasi-strike has actually improved things in New York without any increase in crime, at least so far. The mayor's office has found a way to retaliate, by denying leave requests until revenue collection returns to normal.
Since the People are also sovereign, then, what we end up saying is just that the citizenry is sovereign over the monopoly on warfare. The state may be tasked to lead the effort, but that delegation can be withdrawn and the People resume their sovereignty should the state become tyrannical or nonfunctional[.]
“Everyone here is under orders — no time off,” said one officer at the 105th Precinct in Queens. “And the majority of [new] summonses written aren’t protecting the public in any way. But now they’re realizing how much revenue the city is losing and they’re enforcing their will upon us.”So it's proceeding less like a coup, and more like a labor dispute. That's not out of order.
In once case, no police officer on duty was allowed to return to the precinct or even take a break until two summonses were logged, according to one source....
The station house has memos posted that notifies officers that no new vacation days would be approved beyond those which have already been approved. There would also be no sick days without a doctor’s note.
The second thing Douglas sent was the following poster he made for us:
I like it.
She may get woolly
Young girls they do get woollyBut law schools are on the job with therapy dogs. Also with programs to avoiding triggering stress by forcing students to confront issues of law enforcement that might involve unpleasant behavior.
Because they're under stress . . . yes . . . .
Actually, I like the dog idea, in this and just about every other situation.
Let's Play A Game
In the post about Twain and Austen, Tex wrote:
If you would find a list of major authors helpful, here's a good one (though it has a strange date for the beginning of the Renaissance -- usually the English Renaissance is said to begin in the 16th century, but for some reason they locate it sometime after Chaucer's death in 1400 and before Malory in the mid-1400s).
If Twain were a character in an Austen novel, she'd like him grudgingly but put him through the wringer for being such a juvenile, then marry him off to a lesser heroine after he'd been shaped up a bit. If Austen were a character in one of Twain's novels, he'd never "get" her, so he'd completely fail to provide a believable characterization.This sounds like a fun game to me. Take any two well-known authors, and describe how they would write each other if they attempted to include the other as a character in one of their stories.
If you would find a list of major authors helpful, here's a good one (though it has a strange date for the beginning of the Renaissance -- usually the English Renaissance is said to begin in the 16th century, but for some reason they locate it sometime after Chaucer's death in 1400 and before Malory in the mid-1400s).
Why We Don't Drink Pig's Milk
A thorough response from an intern at the Illinois Pork Producers Association.
How About Some Incitement to Terrorism?
Our commitment to free speech seems to embrace it, as long as it is phrased just the right way.
You allow the Americans, who are the biggest butchers in the world, to stop at Shannon Airport to refuel and go on to kill people in Muslim countries. If you believe the Americans are terrorists, the Irish government is colluding with them and aiding and abetting terrorism,” he said....Now, he didn't actually say, "Go blow up some Irishmen." He just said that Ireland is "a legitimate target."
“You know it’s not just now that it’s become a legitimate target - I believe for a long time that in the eyes of al-Qaeda and others, [Ireland] is a place which is being used to aid and abet the war. The Irish claim that it is neutral is not something which has been bought by Muslims around the world,” he said.
Daesh
The French and the Aussies have hit upon a way to annoy ISIS: refer to them instead as "Daesh."
So what does “Daesh” mean? According to France24, it is a loose acronym of the Arabic for “Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant” (al-Dawla al-Islamiya al-Iraq al-Sham). However, the term is also one of defiance and disrespect.So now you know.
It is also considered insulting, and the IS (Islamic State) itself doesn’t like the name Daesh one bit.
Beyond the acronym, “Daesh” sounds lie the Arabic “Daes”, meaning “one who crushes something underfoot” as well as “Dahes”, which means “one who sows discord”.
Dahes is also a reference to the Dahes wal Ghabra period of chaos and warfare between Arab tribes which is famous in the Arab world as one of the precursors of the Muslim age.
“Daesh” therefore has considerably negative undertones. There can be little political ambiguity behind the French government’s decision to deploy Daesh as a linguistic weapon.
Meanwhile, in Nigeria...
While the world's leadership focused on the attacks in Paris, Boko Haram killed two thousand people in a massacre designed to enforce their vision of Islam.
As Islamic terrorists continue to spread, more nations are in danger of simply collapsing as their citizens lose faith in their ability to keep them safe. We’re in serious danger of having an increasing pile of failed states which will serve as a breeding ground for more of the same. Unfortunately, as bad as Boko Haram is, attacks like this are never going to capture the media’s attention the way an attack in France (or America) will.
So what can we do about Boko Haram realistically? I have absolutely no idea. Launching a major military offensive against them (given how much else we have on our plate) seems unlikely in the extreme, even if the will existed in the White House to do so. And I doubt we have any allies left who have the resources and the interest to do it in our stead.
Stimulating D.C.
From a Michael Barone piece on U.S. population-movement patterns since 2010:
The rest of the article is interesting, too, on the subject of which states get or lose international or domestic net immigration, and why.
The 2013-14 numbers just released, for example, show interesting contrasts with those of 2010-11, when the economy was flagging and stimulus money disbursed. Back then the Washington metropolitan area — Virginia, Maryland, D.C. — was growing well above the national average. Now, with the sequester cuts, growth in the region is below average.Is that what Keynesian stimulus amounts to? Congress authorizes a bunch of spending, but little of it makes it more than a few miles from D.C.?
The rest of the article is interesting, too, on the subject of which states get or lose international or domestic net immigration, and why.
It Does Work
Al-Qaeda in Yemen didn’t attack Charlie Hebdo because we are all Charlie Hebdo.What we do in the contemporary West is we protect groups like the Westboro Baptist Church, who malign everything we really believe, so they can make the funerals of our soldiers more painful for the parents of our beloved dead. We protect them, but fuck them. Their heads are the ones that belong on spikes; we are just too nice to post them.
The opposite. It sent in the brothers Cherif and Said Kouachi because Charlie Hebdo was almost alone.
Yes, that’s right, almost alone, despite the hundreds of thousands marching with their “Je Suis Charlie” placards.... Even the Jyllands-Posten, the Danish paper that originally publish the cartoons that provided Muslims with a pretext for mayhem and murder, even that paper has declined to republish anything that might be “offensive” to Muslims because, they said, “violence works.”
Well, "we" are.
Anyway, this business about being 'almost alone' is more complicated than it looks. Mostly I think outfits like Charlie deserve protection as a kind of limit case. They aren't the core of what we're about, as a decent people. They're about our tolerance for liberty, even when it descends into garbage. We believe in liberty, so we tolerate -- we defend, we protect -- the garbage.
That doesn't mean it isn't still garbage. And maybe we haven't found the right point of balance yet: Maybe there's still a better solution for groups like Westboro, wherein they can be made to accept responsibility for the garbage they bring into the public space.
Another Pleasant Quiz
Which Ancient or Medieval Warrior Are You?
No one will be surprised by my results.
No one will be surprised by my results.
William Wallace
A valiant freedom fighter, you are the Scotsman William Wallace! You strongly believe in the individual freedoms of every man and woman, regardless of background - and are willing to fight 'til the end for it. Close-minded individuals are perhaps your biggest pet-peeve. "This great warrior was a fiercely loyal Scottish landowner who willingly defied the bullying of the English nobles on behalf of his countrymen. He later led a wildly outnumbered and unprofessional army against well-trained advancing English forces in the Battle of Stirling Bridge, turning contemporary rules of engagement on their heads and earning a Scottish knighthood in the process."
No Future
I promptly asked, “What’s the situation?” Our shared patrimony obviated any need for further elaboration; as a European Jew addressing an American one, he knew exactly at what I was aiming. “There is no future for Jews in France,” he said.
As you know, I recently returned from Jerusalem. While I was there, I had many opportunities to talk with thoughtful Israelis on the subject of their country and its mission -- no subject seemed more dear to them. Some of them were not only thoughtful but professional historians and philosophers, who discussed Zionism from a position of personal conviction. Some were immigrants, Jews born elsewhere but who had taken advantage of Israel's open offer to all Jews everywhere to 'come home' -- the term in Hebrew means 'to go up.'
Right now the figures are tiny. 7,000 Jews out of a population of a half a million might not even interfere much with natural replacement. But I heard Natan Sharansky -- a genuine hero of anti-Communism, a man who stood firm in the prisons of the KGB on charges of being an American agent -- say that immigration from the First World was, for the first time in Israel's history, the leading source of immigration.
The people I spoke to clearly believe, and I see why they think they are right, that Israel is the only home for the world's Jewish population. They clearly believe, and I think they really are right, that having the option to resort to Israel is key to the safety of Jews everywhere.
Now, I'm not a Jew, but as long as I live I can say that Jews will be safe within the realm of my right arm. I suspect many Americans would say the same, and so perhaps this place may long be a place where they can linger, if they wish.
In another way, I'm sorry we do not have what they have: a Númenor to their Undying Lands, our ancient home now sunk in the sea, a place to which we as they might withdraw if our values came under a similar assault.
There is no such place for us. We have only the sword.
Conrad Black on the Defense of the Christian West
His introduction is an amusing transgression of the social restraints on married couples seeming too interested in each other, but he goes on to a high note.
As I was sitting down to write about the atrocity in France, my wife Barbara hove into view, always a delicious sight, and announced that she was writing elsewhere on the same subject and that I could not do it. So I will not, other than to say that France.. has been comparatively indulgent of Muslims... but this incident... will motivate France to lead the Western counter-attack against militant Islam that should have been launched by our united civilization many years ago.... [W]hen French possession and enjoyment of their country is threatened, the national faith in liberty, equality and fraternity will give way to more systematic repression of violent Islamists than would be acceptable in an Anglo-Saxon democracy.The related subject is more interesting.
...[I]n France there will be none of the faddish and abusive meddling of human rights commissions such as persecuted Mark Steyn and Ezra Levant in this country. Since the barbarians comingled with the Romanized Gauls 1,500 years ago, no one has displaced the French from their complete cultural occupation of la douce France. Those who have tried, including the Moors, the Plantagenet kings of England, and the German Empire and Third Reich, were a great deal more formidable and comparatively numerous than the venomous rag-tag of contemporary Islamist terrorists. Vive la France, which now awaits the continuator of Charles Martel, Joan of Arc, and Charles de Gaulle; a relatively easy victory awaits him or her.
Since I have been cyber-gagged from pursuing this subject further, I will retreat to a related one.
An Article in the NYT I'm Glad To See
It's been the case since the beginning of the nation that the North has told itself a story of racism in which it was the hero and the South was the bad guy. We hear about slavery, but not about how the slave ships that fueled the Middle Passage sailed so often out of Boston and New York. We hear about how the cotton economy was built on slave labor, but not about how the North's industry was built from the proceeds of the Triangular Trade. The Civil War is the reflex point, in which whatever marginal guilt the North admits for having 'compromised' with the South on slavery is washed clean in blood. Subsequent history is virtuous Northerners periodically forcing vicious Southerners to amend their Jim Crow ways, until at last LBJ came down to help MLK and victory was achieved.
So it's not merely a timely but an evergreen question that the Times is asking today: "When Will The North Face Its Racism?"
So it's not merely a timely but an evergreen question that the Times is asking today: "When Will The North Face Its Racism?"
In matters of racial injustice, the South has been the center of attention since before the time of the Civil War. But the North, with its shorter history of a mass black population, has only more recently dealt with the paradox of an enlightened ideal coexisting with racial disparity. The protests have become a referendum on the black condition since the Great Migration. “The protests are beginning to wake people up to the idea that the problems are not only there but have been obvious all along,” the historian Taylor Branch told me. “It feels like the South in the 1950s.”Yet the parallels drawn aren't to the South in the 1950s, but to the South at the height of lynching. The parallel between lynchings and police killings of blacks is overblown, as we've discussed before, because even if the rate at which such killing occur is about the same, the population growth means that the rate per black citizen is a fraction of what it was. Still, "it feels like" doesn't require much substantiation: the feeling may not be purely rational, but feelings are often not. Grappling with the problem means both that many in the North may have to acknowledge a greater degree of structural racism than they want to admit to or recognize; it may also mean that some in the black community may have to admit to a kind of objective improvement in the facts, even if there are times when they still feel strongly the sense of oppression.
Shooting the unarmed
A Phoenix anti-cop activist shows surprising flexibility of thought after completing a shoot/don't-shoot training course. It obviously made him rethink what should happen when an unarmed man walks right up into an officer's face.
Photo anti-op
Cut Eric Holder some slack. He was in Paris as the sole representative of the U.S. government in the current crisis, but he had to meet with some senior people. In the meantime a bunch of senior people were marching arm in arm:
Left to right: Greek Prime Minister Antonis Samaras, Spanish Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy, British Prime Minister David Cameron, Danish Prime Minister Helle Thorning-Schmidt, European Union foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini, Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo, European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Malian President Ibrahim Boubacar Keita, French President Francois Hollande, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, European Union President Donald Tusk, Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas, Jordan’s Queen Rania, Jordan’s King Abdullah II, Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi, Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu, Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko and other guests.Holder wasn't meeting any of them.
Is this sorry enough?
It's not clear to me from this report that the newspaper used the "s" word, but I'd say this was pretty thoroughly abject: no weaseling.
Magna Carta
A free online course by the University of London will explore the history of Magna Carta, and how the ideas expressed in it -- little things like "no taxation without representation" and trial by jury -- have influenced the world.
I think it sounds like fun. If you want to do it too, you can sign up here.
I think it sounds like fun. If you want to do it too, you can sign up here.
More unclear motives
A German tabloid that reprinted the Mohammed cartoons has been firebombed. Police say it's too soon to ascribe motives to the attack.
A couple of comments from David Foster's place, ChicagoBoyz:
A couple of comments from David Foster's place, ChicagoBoyz:
There is an interesting piece today in the Wall Street Journal about historian Tom Holland and the writing of his "In the Shadow of the Sword, the Rise of Islam," which is about the origins of Islam and Muhammed, which do not agree with the Quran or the Hadiths. He was OK until the BBC made a documentary about the book then he started getting lots of death threats. He said he never thought that a historian would be at such risk since all he wanted to do was tell a true story.
I’m ordering all three of his books about the Middle East. Apparently Muslims do not read much but do watch TV. Maybe they read cartoons, as well.and
#JESUISCHARLIE is one thing.
I think that we are more in need of #JESUISCHARLIEMARTEL.
His motives remain obscure
Don't call him an Islamist. It might stir up anti-Islamist sentiment. Who can really say why he acted as he did? Well, other than himself, of course.
A brief stint as Oskar Schindler
A nice vignette from the troubles in France: a black guy amusingly described as "African-American" by a CNN news anchor used quick thinking to shove about 30 Jewish customers of a kosher store into a basement freezer to protect them from the Islamist hostage-takers. They all survived; the hostage-taker is now at room temperature.
The British Press Has A Banner Week
The British press has never seemed as out of touch as it is today. All our broadsheet papers are packed with pleas to the people of France, and other European populations, not to turn into Muslim-killing nutjobs in response to the Charlie Hebdo massacre. The Guardian frets over “Islamophobes seizing this atrocity to advance their hatred.” The Financial Times is in a spin about “Islamophobic extremists” using the massacre to “[challenge] the tolerance on which Europe has built its peace.” One British hack says we should all “fear the coming Islamophobic backlash.” And what actually happened in France as these dead-tree pieces about a possible Islamophobic backlash made their appearance? Jews were assaulted. And killed.It's been a great week at the Guardian particularly. Regarding the new Clint Eastwood movie about former Navy SEAL Chris Kyle, they published an article titled, "The real American Sniper was a hate-filled killer. Why are simplistic patriots treating him as a hero?"
Don't get your hopes up -- she didn't actually try to understand the answer to the question of why people think of him as a hero.
Snapshots from Hubble
The newest pictures from the Hubble orbiting telescope of our nearest large galactic neighbor, Andromeda, are sharp enough to show 100 million individual stars. This link has images that are sharp enough to admire, but not big enough to take a long time to download. A link within the link will take you to a 200MB image.
Andromeda, a spiral galaxy, is only 12.5 times as far away as it is wide (2.5MM to 200,000 light-years), so it shows up relatively well in our sky. It's on a collision course with the Milky way--ETA is about 3.75 billion years--which makes it one of the few elements of the universe that isn't rushing away from us. Andromeda is just barely visible to the naked eye in good conditions. Human beings have been recording their observations of it since the 10th century, but only in the 19th century did its spectral lines suggest that it was not a gaseous nebula but had some kind of stellar nature. Believing it to be a relatively close object, astronomer first guessed that it was some kind of nova. In 1925 Edwin Hubble demonstrated that it was a separate galaxy similar to our own.
Even the old-fashioned pictures are pretty spectacular.
Men are from Dune, women are from Pemberley
Grim's link took me to other articles by Examiner writer Michelle Kerns, including her "Men are from Dune, women are from Pemberley" lists of 75 Books Every Man or Every Woman Must Read. I'm afraid I haven't read very many of them, but I've read 16 from the men's list and only 11 from the women's.
Both lists pick a single book by a famous writer and let it go at that. I don't read that way; I'm more likely to read all of the works of an author that suits me and never quite get through even the first book of an author that doesn't. What's more, almost none of the books I've read from either of these lists is on my "desert island" list of the few books I'd want to have on hand to read repeatedly for the rest of my life, in a pinch. "Lolita" isn't on either list, for instance. But "War and Peace" is on one and "Middlemarch" on the other, so there's that. And yet no C.S. Lewis! I don't know what I'd do with myself if I couldn't read and re-read his works. Not to mention Robert Heinlein, John Varley, Frederick Pohl, Larry Niven/Jerry Pournelle, and a handful of other science-fiction writers I depend on year after year--science fiction and fantasy being my true lifelong literary enthusiasms.
But as for Twain, Dickens, Joyce, Rushdie, Hemingway, Henry James, Maya Angelou, J. K. Rowling, and other high- and low-brow favorites, I just can't read them at all.
Both lists pick a single book by a famous writer and let it go at that. I don't read that way; I'm more likely to read all of the works of an author that suits me and never quite get through even the first book of an author that doesn't. What's more, almost none of the books I've read from either of these lists is on my "desert island" list of the few books I'd want to have on hand to read repeatedly for the rest of my life, in a pinch. "Lolita" isn't on either list, for instance. But "War and Peace" is on one and "Middlemarch" on the other, so there's that. And yet no C.S. Lewis! I don't know what I'd do with myself if I couldn't read and re-read his works. Not to mention Robert Heinlein, John Varley, Frederick Pohl, Larry Niven/Jerry Pournelle, and a handful of other science-fiction writers I depend on year after year--science fiction and fantasy being my true lifelong literary enthusiasms.
But as for Twain, Dickens, Joyce, Rushdie, Hemingway, Henry James, Maya Angelou, J. K. Rowling, and other high- and low-brow favorites, I just can't read them at all.
Is that why the buildings are ugly?
It's an enduring question: is it just me, or are most of the buildings ugly? In The New Urbanism, William Lind argues that some high-style architecture is deliberately ugly, on the theory that the essence of a capitalist system is alienation, and therefore all true art must alienate in order to be authentic. He attributes this idea to Theodor Adorno. I don't know about that, but here is a summary of what's supposed to be Adorno's thinking:
The Lind article has defensible ideas about the use of conservative ideas in urban architecture, including the superior market appeal of mixed-use developments and therefore the absence of a need for government regulation to improve neighborhoods; the market will do that for us if we prevent the zoners from requiring undue separation between residential and commercial functions. I'm not sure he's really nailed the ugly-architecture problem, though. Why is our new fire station an eyesore, for instance? No high-concept architect set out to mirror the incurable alienation of the local population. No architect had much input at all, except in the sense that someone with minimal training did a bit of work making sure the hallways all led to rooms and some of the exterior walls had windows in them. Otherwise it's a metal shell with a shallow roof in random colors, and a bunch of rooms jammed inside. It was cheap, it was fairly easy to build, and it made no concessions to aesthetic experience.
The ancient Welsh-style cottage pictured below was cheap and fairly easy to build, but it's not ugly. What are we missing? Why should economy of construction be ugly?
It actually looks quite a lot like my cistern, which I love, and would love even more if the cylinder were shorter and the witch's hat bigger:
Lind has other ideas about making cities livable, his main thrust being that conservatives should be able to find common ground with the largely liberal urbanist crowd. One of his most valuable insights is that beautiful public spaces rely on money and security:
The unavoidable conclusion is that if I didn't want the fire station to be ugly by my standards, I should have found a way to fund its construction myself. After all, I don't find my house ugly! Of course, I didn't expect it to express the simultaneous necessity and illusoriness of art, or to serve as the antithesis of society. I just wanted it to function properly and delight me.
Adorno's claims about art in general stem from his reconstruction of the modern art movement. So a summary of his philosophy of art sometimes needs to signal this by putting “modern” in parentheses. The book begins and ends with reflections on the social character of (modern) art. Two themes stand out in these reflections. One is an updated Hegelian question whether art can survive in a late capitalist world. The other is an updated Marxian question whether art can contribute to the transformation of this world. When addressing both questions, Adorno retains from Kant the notion that art proper (“fine art” or “beautiful art”—schöne Kunst—in Kant's vocabulary) is characterized by formal autonomy. But Adorno combines this Kantian emphasis on form with Hegel's emphasis on intellectual import (geistiger Gehalt) and Marx's emphasis on art's embeddedness in society as a whole. The result is a complex account of the simultaneous necessity and illusoriness of the artwork's autonomy. The artwork's necessary and illusory autonomy, in turn, is the key to (modern) art's social character, namely, to be “the social antithesis of society”.It does sound as though the idea were to make us unhappy for the sake of raising our consciousness. When someone starts talking about simultaneous necessity and illusoriness, I suspect him of being in a serious sulk.
The Lind article has defensible ideas about the use of conservative ideas in urban architecture, including the superior market appeal of mixed-use developments and therefore the absence of a need for government regulation to improve neighborhoods; the market will do that for us if we prevent the zoners from requiring undue separation between residential and commercial functions. I'm not sure he's really nailed the ugly-architecture problem, though. Why is our new fire station an eyesore, for instance? No high-concept architect set out to mirror the incurable alienation of the local population. No architect had much input at all, except in the sense that someone with minimal training did a bit of work making sure the hallways all led to rooms and some of the exterior walls had windows in them. Otherwise it's a metal shell with a shallow roof in random colors, and a bunch of rooms jammed inside. It was cheap, it was fairly easy to build, and it made no concessions to aesthetic experience.
The ancient Welsh-style cottage pictured below was cheap and fairly easy to build, but it's not ugly. What are we missing? Why should economy of construction be ugly?
Lind has other ideas about making cities livable, his main thrust being that conservatives should be able to find common ground with the largely liberal urbanist crowd. One of his most valuable insights is that beautiful public spaces rely on money and security:
We offer the understanding that traditional middle-class values work. Without them, no city, neighborhood, or town, however well designed, is likely to function. We point out the reality that order, safety of persons and property, is the first essential. [Celebrated urbanist Andres] Duany said to me at a recent CNU [Congress for the New Urbanism] meeting, “I’m beginning to understand that we design beautiful public spaces to which no one dares come.” Indeed. Conservatives understand that for New Urbanism to succeed, it must create an arena where businessmen can make money. Urban areas that are not market-friendly will remain poor.We could blame that problem on capitalism--guys like Adorno certainly made a career of it--but it's possible that the real problem is designers who aren't interested in making forms nearby which people want to sleep, work, shop, recreate, or reflect. Capitalism gets a bad rap for reducing "value" to "money," but I suspect what's really irritating about it is that ordinary people get to vote on whether they find something valuable. Their betters don't always get to prescribe it for them, or force them to feed and house artists and other intellectuals who want to be the antithesis of society. If they don't like it, they just won't buy it.
The unavoidable conclusion is that if I didn't want the fire station to be ugly by my standards, I should have found a way to fund its construction myself. After all, I don't find my house ugly! Of course, I didn't expect it to express the simultaneous necessity and illusoriness of art, or to serve as the antithesis of society. I just wanted it to function properly and delight me.
Mark Twain on Jane Austen
I've occasionally mentioned Mark Twain's brutal, and completely accurate, review of Cooper's 'Leatherstocking' tales. I also knew that Jane Austen was not universally loved by American authors -- Emerson didn't care for her ("Suicide is more respectable," he wrote of her work), but who cares what Emerson thinks? Still, I hadn't realized until this morning that Twain had written occasionally about his dislike for her work.
"Jane Austen? Why I go so far as to say that any library is a good library that does not contain a volume by Jane Austen. Even if it contains no other book."There are a host of great author-on-author put downs here. If any of you are Austen fans horrified to find that Twain held her in such low regard, there's an essay here that examines his comments in greater detail from a pro-Austen perspective.
"I haven't any right to criticise books, and I don't do it except when I hate them. I often want to criticise Jane Austen, but her books madden me so that I can't conceal my frenzy from the reader; and therefore I have to stop every time I begin. Every time I read 'Pride and Prejudice' I want to dig her up and beat her over the skull with her own shin-bone."
"All the great critics praise her art generously. To start with, they say she draws her characters with sharp distinction and a sure touch. I believe that this is true, as long as the characters she is drawing are odious."
Chanticleer
For when I see the beauty of your face,The FBI and Justice Department prosecutors recommend felony charges for General Petraeus.
The scarlet red you have about your eyes,
It makes my dread all wither and it dies,
As certainly as In principio,
Mulier est hominis confusio--
Madam, the meaning of this Latin is
'A woman is man's joy and all his bliss.'
Why Not Free? Well, "Free."
ThinkProgress proposes that the President's free lunch 'free two years of community college' plan is taking the wrong way 'round. We could just as readily make college free for the whole four years, at all public colleges, without spending more than we're already spending:
Thus, our options as a country are:
1) Allow our fellow citizens to fall out of the productive/employable classes, which means that they will not be providing tax revenues (and, most probably, will be consuming expensive public welfare programs -- but even if we were to manage to restrain those, they still will not be adding to the common fund),
2) Spend some of our public stores to help make sure people can retrain in productive ways.
The best way to do this would be to establish some right/left limits on what kinds of programs we consider productive enough to merit public funding, probably based on some rolling estimate of which industries are coming-to-be or passing-away due to current changes in technology. We would need to make sure money didn't go to waste, but was directed at programs designed to help people retrain for current careers. This is something that we're just going to have to expect people to do more and more as time goes along, and the poorest most often, so we probably need to think about a solution that doesn't require them to have either money or credit if we want them to succeed. We should want them to succeed, if only for selfish reasons of keeping them off welfare rolls and helping with the taxpaying duties for a larger percentage of their lives.
Public colleges are a good start, but we should really expand especially to vocational schools. A travel agent put out of work by Expedia may not have the chops for a degree in engineering, but might benefit from getting a CDL so she could move to Texas and drive trucks to and from the oil fields. That's something we could do pretty cheaply and relatively quickly, compared to 99 weeks of unemployment benefits, and it would get her back on her feet and into the taxpaying class as quickly as possible. We'd save money, even if it is not in any sense "free," and it would be good for the moral health of our citizenry as a whole if more of them were able to work and fewer were on welfare of any kind.
If President Obama truly wants to transform the cost of higher education, however, he could make college free for all students without having to lay out more money to pay for it. That’s because the federal government could take the $69 billion it currently spends to subsidize the cost of college through grants, tax breaks, and work-study funds and instead cover tuition at all public colleges, which came to $62.6 billion in 2012, the most recent data. (The government spends another $197.4 billion on student loans.) That would give all students who want to get a college degree a free option to do so. It could also put pressure on private universities to compete with the free option by reducing their costs, which have risen 13 percent over the last five years.I have a sense that we're going to have to extend the "free" (meaning publicly subsidized) education we pay for in this country. We already provide publicly-funded education through high school. The expansion will need to come because the continual transformation of the economy by technology means that (a) whole industries are dying -- see travel agencies, secretarial pools -- and (b) the only thing like an answer to that problem is to retrain people for whatever new sectors of work are emerging from the constant technological change. But the people being forced out of dying industries are low on the list of those likely to be able to afford the cost of advanced education.
Thus, our options as a country are:
1) Allow our fellow citizens to fall out of the productive/employable classes, which means that they will not be providing tax revenues (and, most probably, will be consuming expensive public welfare programs -- but even if we were to manage to restrain those, they still will not be adding to the common fund),
2) Spend some of our public stores to help make sure people can retrain in productive ways.
The best way to do this would be to establish some right/left limits on what kinds of programs we consider productive enough to merit public funding, probably based on some rolling estimate of which industries are coming-to-be or passing-away due to current changes in technology. We would need to make sure money didn't go to waste, but was directed at programs designed to help people retrain for current careers. This is something that we're just going to have to expect people to do more and more as time goes along, and the poorest most often, so we probably need to think about a solution that doesn't require them to have either money or credit if we want them to succeed. We should want them to succeed, if only for selfish reasons of keeping them off welfare rolls and helping with the taxpaying duties for a larger percentage of their lives.
Public colleges are a good start, but we should really expand especially to vocational schools. A travel agent put out of work by Expedia may not have the chops for a degree in engineering, but might benefit from getting a CDL so she could move to Texas and drive trucks to and from the oil fields. That's something we could do pretty cheaply and relatively quickly, compared to 99 weeks of unemployment benefits, and it would get her back on her feet and into the taxpaying class as quickly as possible. We'd save money, even if it is not in any sense "free," and it would be good for the moral health of our citizenry as a whole if more of them were able to work and fewer were on welfare of any kind.
Risk and blame
Examples in another context of the confusion between ignoring risk and excusing wrongdoing: there's a new book out, drawing attention once again to the government policies that contributed to the 2008 housing crisis. The book is drawing the predictable criticism that it's a mistake to attribute the housing crisis to government regulatory initiatives, when it's so obvious that many bankers were greedy and incompetent. That's a confusing criticism, considering that we're not likely to start inhabiting a world in which bankers are drawn exclusively from the ranks of the saintly and skilled. We have systems for restraining the more unpleasant results of bankers who go wild. They start with making it highly likely that the bankers will lose money if they keep it up, and go on to criminal penalties if, in addition to responding to a natural impulse to make money, they drift into outright fraud. But none of that explains very well what went so dramatically wrong with our housing market in 2008.
What does explain it quite handily is a look at the impact of a government-sponsored entity that sends out a strong signal, "We'll buy the craziest mortgages you can sign up. Lend money to people with bad credit. Not only will you get credit of various sorts from people (on both sides of the political aisle) who want to see homeownership expand in our society, but you won't even pay a financial price for writing loans you ought to know perfectly well are going to default in above-average numbers. We'll subsidize your losses." What exactly did we expect to happen, especially considering that banks make money on processing fees and therefore are highly motivated, all other factors being equal, to maximize loan volume? The force that normally puts a brake on this motivation is fear of failure. We took fear of failure almost completely away.
Does that mean no banks behaved badly? Obviously not. But, as voters, we're not in control of bankers' consciences. We are in control of the laws we pass. We don't have to pass laws that fuel the very behavior we claim to be outraged by. I don't know why we can't learn the lesson that you get more of whatever you subsidize.
As usual, I think the basic underlying mistake here is to imagine we can escape the price tag of a charitable impulse. Both Democrats and Republicans had a natural, even laudable, goal to improve the lives of Americans by extending the benefits of home ownership to greater numbers of people. We went wrong by fantasizing about a world in which such a thing would not have a cost, a real cost that real people would have to pay. We're like people who want to feed the homeless, and place an order for restaurants to deliver hot meals to 10,000 people, then settle back in our armchairs feeling compassionate. But when the bill comes in the mail, we throw up our hands and refuse to pay it. "I thought it wouldn't cost anything! I thought someone else was going to pay it! If you don't keep delivering the hot meals without waiting for my check, you're just mean! You must be in favor of hunger! Restaurant owners are greedy!"
What does explain it quite handily is a look at the impact of a government-sponsored entity that sends out a strong signal, "We'll buy the craziest mortgages you can sign up. Lend money to people with bad credit. Not only will you get credit of various sorts from people (on both sides of the political aisle) who want to see homeownership expand in our society, but you won't even pay a financial price for writing loans you ought to know perfectly well are going to default in above-average numbers. We'll subsidize your losses." What exactly did we expect to happen, especially considering that banks make money on processing fees and therefore are highly motivated, all other factors being equal, to maximize loan volume? The force that normally puts a brake on this motivation is fear of failure. We took fear of failure almost completely away.
Does that mean no banks behaved badly? Obviously not. But, as voters, we're not in control of bankers' consciences. We are in control of the laws we pass. We don't have to pass laws that fuel the very behavior we claim to be outraged by. I don't know why we can't learn the lesson that you get more of whatever you subsidize.
As usual, I think the basic underlying mistake here is to imagine we can escape the price tag of a charitable impulse. Both Democrats and Republicans had a natural, even laudable, goal to improve the lives of Americans by extending the benefits of home ownership to greater numbers of people. We went wrong by fantasizing about a world in which such a thing would not have a cost, a real cost that real people would have to pay. We're like people who want to feed the homeless, and place an order for restaurants to deliver hot meals to 10,000 people, then settle back in our armchairs feeling compassionate. But when the bill comes in the mail, we throw up our hands and refuse to pay it. "I thought it wouldn't cost anything! I thought someone else was going to pay it! If you don't keep delivering the hot meals without waiting for my check, you're just mean! You must be in favor of hunger! Restaurant owners are greedy!"
I Think It's The Other Way Around
InstaPundit:
LIVE BLOG — PARIS UNDER SIEGE: Charlie Hebdo Attackers Cornered, Hostage Situation in Kosher Store in East Paris.
The right way to apologize
The humiliated Maryland city council member noted by Grim earlier this week has thought it over and decided he was completely wrong in his eccentric view that newspapers needed his permission to use his name. Not that some people might have thought he was wrong and been inexplicably offended, but just that he thoughtlessly blew it, plain and simple. His apology is completely appropriate, a refreshing example of the genre:
"Of course, as I am an elected official, the Frederick News-Post has the right to use my name in any article related to the running of the county — that comes with the job," he said. "So yes, my statement to the Frederick News-Post regarding the use of my name was wrong and inappropriate. I'm not afraid to admit when I'm wrong."I liked Volokh's take:
Uh, Council Member: In our country, newspapers are actually allowed to write about elected officials (and others) without their permission. It’s an avantgarde experiment, to be sure, but we’ve had some success with it.
Speaking of Questionable Judgment in Public Office...
A gift from Lindsey Graham to incoming Senator Joni Ernst.
A Fair Point
Also in September 2012, as the Federalist’s Mollie Hemingway recalls, the president of the United States addressed the United Nations General Assembly. He declared (in a speech that, as she puts it, “includes some good commentary and more indefensible commentary”): “The future must not belong to those who slander the prophet of Islam.”Ouch.
"People Know The Consequences"
And if they don't, they should by now.
This in a culture that produces regular, ongoing mockery and testing of its own core belief system. We invented Heavy Metal music, which was little more than an exercise in blasphemy. We make movies and television shows that mock the religion shared by the vast majority of Americans both living today and historically. So this sensitivity isn't part of a general commitment to anti-blasphemy, it's part of a general commitment to be sensitive to the feelings of Muslims.
Apparently this is not enough, however. And you know the consequences for not submitting.
Muslims do not believe in the concept of freedom of expression, as their speech and actions are determined by divine revelation and not based on people's desires.Normally I would argue that we don't need a law, since the mores are so strong: although the quantity of mockery is not none, in America it's really very close to none without the bother and expense of legal actions.
Although Muslims may not agree about the idea of freedom of expression, even non-Muslims who espouse it say it comes with responsibilities. In an increasingly unstable and insecure world, the potential consequences of insulting the Messenger Muhammad are known to Muslims and non-Muslims alike....
Within liberal democracies, freedom of expression has curtailments, such as laws against incitement and hatred.
The truth is that Western governments are content to sacrifice liberties and freedoms when being complicit to torture and rendition — or when restricting the freedom of movement of Muslims, under the guise of protecting national security.
So why in this case did the French government allow the magazine Charlie Hebdo to continue to provoke Muslims, thereby placing the sanctity of its citizens at risk?
It is time that the sanctity of a Prophet revered by up to one-quarter of the world's population was protected.
This in a culture that produces regular, ongoing mockery and testing of its own core belief system. We invented Heavy Metal music, which was little more than an exercise in blasphemy. We make movies and television shows that mock the religion shared by the vast majority of Americans both living today and historically. So this sensitivity isn't part of a general commitment to anti-blasphemy, it's part of a general commitment to be sensitive to the feelings of Muslims.
Apparently this is not enough, however. And you know the consequences for not submitting.
Inside the Minds of the Shooters' Supporters
The Counter Extremism Project collects supporters' statements from today's Paris attack.
One Came Calling
I don't really find the form of humor especially enlightening, but that's the point of free expression. We protect the bad ideas, too.
Of course, "protect" in this case would have better been done by having a couple of rifles in the office and some guys who knew how to use them. If I were running a satirical magazine -- or a think tank -- I'd look into making sure that there was a weapons locker and some training days on the corporate calendar.
Climb To Glory, Commando
WTF Army Moments reported this, but I checked it myself and it's for real.
Well, we rode on Black roads in Iraq. There it meant probable IEDs. What's a little snow?
'A Sufficient Number of Psychologists'
I don't have a problem with this idea, as long as we can agree that the sufficient number of psychologists in a riot is always zero.
Not being allowed to "verbally degrade or make derogatory comments" sounds silly to me, though. I assume most departments have standards governing that anyway, so perhaps there's no harm in it, but still.
But 'social workers, counselors, and psychologists'? We'd be well off without them.
The Missouri Democrat who told MSNBC the riots of Ferguson and the tremors of racial outrage that spread nationwide from the Missouri community were “our race war” unleashed a Twitter tirade Jan. 3 that foreshadowed a stormy legislative session ahead for her white colleagues in the Missouri Legislature....Most of these sound like sensible ideas. "Use of deadly force" laws in Georgia hold the police to the same standard as anyone else -- only to stop an immediate threat of death or grievous bodily harm -- which is a pretty reasonable standard. A special prosecutor standard may well be warranted in cases of unarmed persons being killed by police, at least for a while given the serious degradation in public trust in the system's ability to hold the police to account. The use of third party validators is not a bad idea in such an environment either: the US military used embedded media to great effect in tamping down the worst of the irresponsible accusations of excessive force. (In fairness, the embeds sometimes caught some actual excessive force on camera -- but that can be valuable too, especially in a policing environment where the goal really is to train so that excessive force will not be used.) Visible identification aids public accountability too, especially in an age of easy access to cameras and video recording equipment.
Her legislation also includes what Chappelle-Nadal described as citizen protections and officer professional standards:
• The bill scales back the current “use of deadly force” laws in Missouri, allowing officers to use deadly force only in instances where a suspect poses a clear danger to the officer or the public.
• If a police officer shoots an unarmed citizen, or a police officer kills an unarmed citizen by any other means, a special prosecutor will automatically be appointed.
• When law enforcement is deployed to a protest situation or a scene of civil unrest, all officers will be required to wear accurate and visible identification with their full names clearly displayed.
• Law enforcement officers shall not be allowed to “hog-tie” citizens or verbally degrade or make derogatory comments toward any peaceful protestors.
• If the governor declares a state of emergency due to civil unrest, the governor shall immediately reassign and mobilize a sufficient number of state social workers, counselors, and psychologists to the area.
• The deployment of tear gas shall not be allowed unless the governor has declared a state of emergency and a neutral third-party agency (such as Amnesty International) is on the scene to certify that the tear gas will be deployed in a humanitarian manner.
• If the governor declares a state of emergency due to civil unrest, the governor shall concurrently contract with a neutral third-party agency (such as Amnesty International) to immediately report any abuses of human, civil, and constitutional rights to the Missouri and United States attorney generals.
• All law enforcement agencies in Missouri must be accredited by July 1, 2016.
Not being allowed to "verbally degrade or make derogatory comments" sounds silly to me, though. I assume most departments have standards governing that anyway, so perhaps there's no harm in it, but still.
But 'social workers, counselors, and psychologists'? We'd be well off without them.
Symmetry
Another snowflake, next to the last one. Funny, I was trying to do something similar.
Update: on top, a third variation on a theme, more what I was aiming at. I'm on the last round of this iteration; the completed part is on the bottom left. You can see how big it is by the fact that it's sitting within the earpieces of the glasses I have to use when I'm working with thread this fine.
Update: on top, a third variation on a theme, more what I was aiming at. I'm on the last round of this iteration; the completed part is on the bottom left. You can see how big it is by the fact that it's sitting within the earpieces of the glasses I have to use when I'm working with thread this fine.
The Black Church Loses... in Atlanta
It's one thing when this happens in California, but to lose one in Atlanta has to hurt.
The mayor says the real reason he's firing the Fire Chief is that he questions his judgment, and had told him not to speak to the matter in public while a national controversy raged about his good name. The Chief says that isn't what happened, and that part is one of those 'he/she said' controversies.
But the mayor gives the game away when he says that "he believes Cochran opened up the city to the potential for litigation over future discrimination claims," and that "such writings were inconsistent with the city's employment policies[.]" What that means is that he believes that it is against the law for a government official in Atlanta to publish a book making these kinds of claims, both in the sense that it would constitute a tort and that it is a violation of the laws governing employment policy.
If true, that would mean that the religious views of the Chief's church are illegal for a public official in Atlanta to profess. That sounds suspiciously like a religious test for public office -- a kind of negative test, so to speak.
Fire Chief Kelvin Cochran — the subject of recent controversy over remarks made in a self-published religious book — has been terminated from the Atlanta Fire Rescue Department, Mayor Kasim Reed announced today.Of course you can have private religious views. In private. They're certainly not to be published in a book, even a religious book for religious audiences -- not if you want to hold a job.
Cochran returned to work today following a month-long suspension for comments in his 2013 book “Who Told You That You Are Naked?” Many criticized the book as promoting discriminatory and anti-gay views, while Cochran’s suspension — and now termination — has since become the focus of a fight over “religious liberty.”...
Among what city leaders said were troubling remarks in the fire chief’s book was a description of homosexuality as a “perversion” akin to bestiality and pederasty. Reed said in November that such writings were inconsistent with the city’s employment policies and opened an investigation into potential discrimination within the fire department. The findings of that investigation have not yet been released.
The mayor says the real reason he's firing the Fire Chief is that he questions his judgment, and had told him not to speak to the matter in public while a national controversy raged about his good name. The Chief says that isn't what happened, and that part is one of those 'he/she said' controversies.
But the mayor gives the game away when he says that "he believes Cochran opened up the city to the potential for litigation over future discrimination claims," and that "such writings were inconsistent with the city's employment policies[.]" What that means is that he believes that it is against the law for a government official in Atlanta to publish a book making these kinds of claims, both in the sense that it would constitute a tort and that it is a violation of the laws governing employment policy.
If true, that would mean that the religious views of the Chief's church are illegal for a public official in Atlanta to profess. That sounds suspiciously like a religious test for public office -- a kind of negative test, so to speak.
Red Phone
You can secure calls from your cell phone by encrypting them, which you might consider since the FBI apparently thinks they have free reign to listen to you talk without a warrant.
Writing in Ars Technica, David Kravets is unimpressed with the FBI’s regard for Americans’ expectation of privacy.Of course, there's always a chance that the tech firms offering the encryption have partnerships with the government. That's certainly been the pattern in the past.
The bureau’s position on Americans’ privacy isn’t surprising. The Obama Administration has repeatedly maintained that the public has no privacy in public places. It began making that argument as early as 2010...
Al Sisi's Speech
The man seems to be showing some spine.
Now President Sisi is in a position similar to ours in Iraq after the defeat of Al Qaeda and Iran. He has defeated the Muslim Brotherhood, and he is pressing his advantage, liquidating the leaders the Brothers had elevated over the course of eighty-odd years, and in the last week he delivered the blockbuster speech and became the first president in Egyptian history to attend Coptic Christmas celebrations in Cairo.
It’s a very big deal.
Kings of England
If you're interested in this playful quiz matching you with one of the kings of England, have a go. I got "Henry V."
Artistic License
Trolls are variously depicted in the literature. Some of them are very small, and some of them are very tall...
They are generally all ugly, however.
They are generally all ugly, however.
Wassailing
Apparently a revival of the old tradition is happening in parts of Britain.
Although the etymology caught my eye:
Yet of course the story might be wrong -- much else is in Geoffrey's history. On the other hand, Geoffrey got the phrase from somewhere. He wasn't living in the Old Danelaw, but in Wales. He claimed his sources were originally from the Welsh language, and probably some of them were. So perhaps this part of his history is right, and the OED is wrong: perhaps the phrase is original Old English, and not a Danish addition to the language.
The fire is lit, then they sing and dance in the frosty night, offering good wishes to a fruit tree and slurping from a bowl of carefully brewed spiced alcohol. This is wassailing, a pagan ceremony to bring on the spring. Once an ancient Twelfth Night ritual on the wane, wassailing is increasingly being appropriated by modern food-and-drink folk.Why not? It's fun, and it's Twelfth Night -- approximately, since traditions differ slightly on just which night is the twelfth.
Although the etymology caught my eye:
Sounds like a quaint Nordic custom, doesn't it?I would have told you it was Old English rather than Danish, although it's hard to argue with the OED. My reasons for doing so are that it is a term that was put into the mouth of the Anglo-Saxons by none other than Geoffrey of Monmouth.
Well, actually, you might be on to something. The term "wassail" comes from the Old Norse "ves heill", meaning "be healthy", and was probably introduced by Danish-speaking inhabitants of England, according to the Oxford English Dictionary.
In the meantime, the messengers returned from Germany, with eighteen ships full of the best soldiers they could get. They also brought along with them Rowen, the daughter of Hengist, one of the most accomplished beauties of that age. After their arrival, Hengist invited the king to his house, to view his new buildings, and the new soldiers that were come over. The king readily accepted of his invitation, but privately, and having highly commended the magnificence of the structure, enlisted the men into his service. Here he was entertained at a royal banquet; and when that was over, the young lady came out of her chamber bearing a golden cup full of wine, with which she approached the king, and making a low courtesy, said to him, "Lauerd king wacht heil!" The king, at the sight of the lady's face, was on a sudden both surprised and inflamed with her beauty; and calling to his interpreter, asked him what she said, and what answer he should make her. "She called you, 'Lord king,'" said the interpreter, "and offered to drink your health. Your answer to her must be, 'Drinc heil!'" Vortigern accordingly answered, "Drinc heil!" and bade her drink; after which he took the cup from her hand, kissed her, and drank himself. From that time to this, it has been the custom in Britain, that he who drinks to any one says, "Wacht heil!" and he that pledges him, answers "Drinc heil!"Sir Walter Scott follows this usage in Ivanhoe, where he uses knowledge of the proper response to the call to establish Richard the Lionheart's familiarity with the Saxon traditions of the country over which he, as a Norman, rules. Scott's suggestion that Richard might have known the story is well-founded. Geoffrey was Welsh, but his history was written in large part to benefit Norman claims to the English throne. He wrote it around 1136; it was translated into Norman verse in 1155, two years before Richard was born. It's highly likely that Richard would have known the story.
Yet of course the story might be wrong -- much else is in Geoffrey's history. On the other hand, Geoffrey got the phrase from somewhere. He wasn't living in the Old Danelaw, but in Wales. He claimed his sources were originally from the Welsh language, and probably some of them were. So perhaps this part of his history is right, and the OED is wrong: perhaps the phrase is original Old English, and not a Danish addition to the language.
I'm Not Sure I Got My Point Across About Mazzy Star
If you don't know them, you should listen to a bit of their work.
They once wrote a piece that got my attention, given my love for highways and speed and the death that attends them.
This one was their famous piece:
But really in the end, I liked everything they did.
They once wrote a piece that got my attention, given my love for highways and speed and the death that attends them.
This one was their famous piece:
But really in the end, I liked everything they did.
Free Expression
My guess is that banning hoodies won't work in the United States, though I gather something similar was passed in the UK. Oddly enough, UK opponents referred to this law (which also banned owning bicycles for gang members) as an "American-style" system. But of course that's nonsense: no American jurisdiction could make sense of a law banning bicycles for some citizens and not others, and probably couldn't digest any ban on bicycles at all.
If you get to the point that you're banning bicycles, any American would say, you've lost the ball.
If you get to the point that you're banning bicycles, any American would say, you've lost the ball.
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