waka waka waka

It’s late in the day, and it’s been a long, full day: up early this morning to drive our son back to college, then an evening memorial service here in Wellfleet for a truly remarkable woman — Ellen Rafel, our next-door neighbor here on Hiram Hill, who lost her fight with cancer this spring. So for tonight I want to direct readers to an ongoing discussion at The Maverick Philosopher on what is perhaps the most intractable social and political dilemma of them all: abortion.

(more…)

I watched a little of the opening ceremonies of the Olympics the other day. It was an elaborate spectacle, and quite beautiful: an enormous troupe of drummers, identically clad, playing and dancing in perfect unison. There may well have been thousands of them; there were at least many hundreds.

(more…)

We’ve been giving morality, and the universality of moral intuitions, a good going over lately (particularly in this discussion, which now has over 100 comments). Readers with an interest in this topic might like to have a look at Harvard University’s Moral Sense Test. Feel free to share your thoughts here.

Note: Don’t read the comments below before you take the test!!

Don’t like having your freedoms infringed? Worried about the economy? Forget the Patriot Act and the credit crisis; here comes the EPA.

In today’s Times, John Tierney calls our attention to the possibility that the government may soon be imposing “Title IX” requirements on university science departments, because there aren’t “enough” women going into fields like physics and engineering.

This is dangerous territory, of course; we all remember the shameful pillorying of Harvard president Lawrence Summers for merely suggesting that there might be innate reasons for the asymmetrical distribution of men and women in science. His perfectly reasonable remarks were taken as an outrageous and impermissible thought-crime, and he was hounded from his post.

Now the dispute turns on whether there might be fewer women physicists and engineers simply because women are inherently less attracted to these disciplines, or whether it is a symptom of a lingering and pernicious discrimination that must be remedied by intrusive government action.

Learn more here.

Feeling tired? Listless? Maybe all you need is some concentrated water. Just add water.

(more…)

Democracy has obvious drawbacks, not least of which being that at its worst it is nothing more than mob rule. As William Alger said, “a crowd always thinks with its sympathy, never with its reason.” So the leader of a democracy, depending upon his aims and his talents, can seek to lead by addressing his people as individuals amenable to reasoned argument and capable of rational deliberation — or he can appeal to their sentiment, their prejudices, their greed, their pride, and their social allegiances in all their coarsest forms.

(more…)

From my friend Wayne Krantz comes a link to a story that will appear in tomorrow’s New York Times: apparently some of Barack Obama’s younger and more enthusiastic supporters, having noticed that his middle name — Hussein — has been a heavy cross to bear, have decided to make it their own middle name as well.

This comes as Mr. Obama continues to be vexed by rumors that he is a closeted Muslim. He appears, quite reasonably, to regard these allegations as slanderous calumny (which they almost certainly are), and has done all he can to distance himself from that troublesome religion — including going so far as to have a pair of bescarfed Muslimahs removed from the stage during a recent campaign appearance. For him actually to be a Muslim, of course, would be political suicide: it would be hard to imagine anything more viscerally repugnant to the average US voter, short of being a rational secularist with no religion at all. (That said, there is in fact one Muslim member of Congress: Representative Keith Ellison, a Farrakhan supporter who represents the anomalously tolerant district of Minneapolis — but the politically astute Mr. Obama has so far had the good sense to fend him off with a boathook whenever he approaches.)

One girl’s father was appalled, his heart blackened by fear that his daughter might actually be converting to Islam. But he needn’t have worried: it’s all in good fun, of course. Whee!!

Read the story here.

This just in, from the Washington Post:

The Supreme Court ruled Thursday that Americans have a right to own guns for self-defense and hunting, the justices’ first major pronouncement on gun rights in U.S. history.

The court’s 5-4 ruling struck down the District of Columbia’s 32-year-old ban on handguns as incompatible with gun rights under the Second Amendment. The decision went further than even the Bush administration wanted, but probably leaves most firearms laws intact.

…Writing for the majority, Justice Antonin Scalia said that an individual right to bear arms is supported by “the historical narrative” both before and after the Second Amendment was adopted.

The Constitution does not permit “the absolute prohibition of handguns held and used for self-defense in the home,” Scalia said.

Well done.

In response to yesterday’s item about punitive sterilization, a reader e-mails:

I think maybe the main problems are that it is an extreme punishment, taking away an obviously fundamental “right,” and the irreversibility issue in a world of inaccurate justice. In that regard, it is outside the penal philosophy of “rehabilitation,” … which should be part of any criminal justice system.

I suppose the eugenics problem comes from identifying “bad” genes. … I don’t know that I have any problem with temporary sterilization. I don’t want to take the time to think through the tension between people whose crimes are so bad they’re going to be locked up forever (in which case they wouldn’t seem to need sterilization) and people somehow deserving of being sterilized forever. Probably it requires too fine a moral judgment of the convicted: that they are capable of posing no threat to society, but some combination of their genes and child-raising skills would still result in such danger.

Good comments. Perhaps the topic isn’t as beyond-the-pale as I had thought it was.

(more…)

Some topics seem to be entirely off limits for discussion these days. Often, they are ideas that not all that long ago were not only not taboo, but were embraced at the highest levels of progressive academia and government, right here in the USA. To the philosophically minded, though, there are no off-limits topics — and to the anthropologically curious, taboos can be importantly revealing phenomena. So here’s something I wonder about.

(more…)

There’s a piece in today’s Times Magazine that is so breathtakingly misbegotten that I am reduced nearly to speechlessness. I had thought of giving it a thorough, line-by-line fisking, but as blogger Steve Sailer also realized upon reading it, it simply stands on it own, a fantastic self-caricature. It is, essentially, an argument that European culture is morally culpable for the crime of reluctance to abet its own destruction. One brief quote stood out above all, and will give you an idea of the tone of the essay:

[A] hallmark of liberal, secular societies is supposed to be respect for different cultures, including traditional, religious cultures — even intolerant ones.

Ah yes, of course: to be good secular liberals we must “respect”, and welcome into our midst, even cultures that implacably advocate the subjugation or destruction of our own. It’s our “hallmark”, after all.

Complete your education here.

In today’s New York Times is yet another mention of a notion that seems to be attracting a lot of attention lately: Ray Kurzweil’s idea of an impending technological “Singularity”.

The concept is simple enough: if we look at the history of the world, we see a consistently accelerating rate of progress — first biological, and then technological — which, if extrapolated into the future, predicts that something extraordinary is about to happen.

(more…)

Good work by Horace Jeffery Hodges at his website, The Gypsy Scholar. See here, and here.

A couple of days ago I linked to Steven Pinker’s discussion of the recent report by the President’s Council on Bioethics, and mentioned that one of the contributors, surprisingly given the overall makeup of the Council, was the irreligious and materialist philosopher Daniel Dennett. In his essay, he is in fine, feisty form.

(more…)

Can anybody explain to me why there is such a flap about Hillary Clinton’s mention of the RFK assassination? It makes no sense to me whatsoever, even taking into consideration that taking offense is the new national pastime. I’m no fan of Mrs. Clinton, but this seems ridiculous.

It’s been a hectic weekend, and there’s been no time for writing. Fortunately, our West Coast correspondent Jess Kaplan has sent along two items of interest.

(more…)

It’s already well-known that affluence and education are positively correlated with any number of desirable outcomes: longevity, general health and happiness, that sort of thing. Now we find that it not is only disadvantageous to be poor and ignorant, it hurts. Story here.

George Orwell, in his 1946 essay Politics and the English Language, wrote: “The word Fascism has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies ’something not desirable’. ” Little has changed since then.

(more…)

While looking over the latest from our friend The Stiletto (who, by the way, has just been chosen as a Webby Awards Official Honoree for her “tart” political commentary), I ran across a story about Arizona’s efforts to deal with its enormous influx of illegal aliens. I was struck by one passage in particular:

[E]nough immigrants have left that the government of Sonora, the Mexican state bordering Arizona, has complained about how many people have arrived on its doorstep.

Read the story here.

As long as I am to be pilloried as a racist and reactionary xenophobe anyway, I might as well carry on. Here’s the latest cave-in, this time from Britain.

No matter what your reaction — snarling in defiance, as are the conservative voices of the West, groveling in awe, as are the liberal governments of Europe, or exulting, with growing confidence, as in the mosques and madrassas — radical Islam is rising. Those who see it, rightly, as a potentially lethal threat to all that Western civilization stands for, argue for a variety of responses: restriction of immigration, economic boycotts, intolerance of non-assimilation, expulsion of seditious agitators, ethnic profiling, intellectual debate, military intervention, and the republishing of cartoons. One hears somewhat less, however, about another sort of response, one that might be the most effective of all: the education and empowerment of Muslim women.

(more…)

I’m sorry to have been off the air yesterday; I spent a long day with the promising young band Bulletproof Soul at Avatar Studios, mixing some of the material we recorded a few weeks ago. I am also working at the office all day today, so can’t write at length now either — but it appears that our recent post about the distinction between democracy and government-by-consent has sparked a discussion that it would be interesting to continue.

(more…)

We’ll all sleep a little better knowing that monsters like these are off the streets. Story here.

As long as we’re on the subject of spineless capitulation to religious extremism, here’s a relevant post over at Gates Of Vienna.

On the opinion page of today’s New York Times was an insightful essay, by business editor Eduardo Porter. In it Mr. Porter makes the case that to the extent that societies are fragmented along ethnic, racial, linguistic and religious lines, they are less inclined to support public spending for social programs. While this may be good news for conservatives opposed to Utopian social-engineering schemes and confiscatory redistribution of wealth, it is also, insofar as it reflects a reluctance to pull together as Americans when necessary for the common cause, bad news for a nation of immigrants.

(more…)

We thank Kevin Kim once again, this time for calling our attention to a gratifying piece by David Mamet about a road-to-Damascus event regarding the standard liberal worldview.

(more…)

An item in today’s Washington Post informs us that our only hope to avoid total annihilation is to reduce our carbon emissions to zero. Now.

(more…)

With hat tips to both the Big Hominid (from whom this entire link-based post is essentially plagiarized) and the Gypsy Scholar, allow me to introduce you to Pat Condell, a British comedian, atheist, and polemicist. If you love a good rant, you won’t be disappointed.

(more…)

Our online friend Jeffery Hodges, writing once again from his home base in Seoul, South Korea, has added an interesting essay of his own to the discussion of multiculturalism that we’ve had here recently. He cites some intriguing research into the way different sorts of cultures deal with the problem of freeloaders in cooperative systems. Have a look here.

Well, I certainly stirred up some controversy with that recent post about the Dutch and their apparent willingness to ban a forthcoming film in order not to anger any Muslims. A great many topics came up, and I think some readers may now look at me as some sort of Eastward-facing version of Lester Maddox. I want to clarify a few things.

(more…)

The struggle of civilizations, or perhaps more aptly the struggle of modern civilization against medieval barbarism, has taken a depressing turn in the Netherlands. Unlike their neighbors the Danes, who have staunchly defended their liberties despite storms of outrage from thin-skinned Muslims mortally offended by a few cartoons, the Dutch are planning a somewhat different response to Islamic fury over a forthcoming film: supine, craven appeasement.

(more…)

With a hat tip to our pal The Stiletto, we offer an article by the independently minded journalist John Stossel (who is currently a guest speaker, by the way, at this conference on the excesses of global warmism). In this essay Stossel makes the case that restrictive gun laws unfairly deprive us of the ability to defend oursleves, and make us vulnerable to violence such as the Virginia Tech and NIU massacres.

(more…)

If you’re wondering what you’re missing at TED 2008, have a look at this on-the-spot blog. If this isn’t the place to be for these few days, I don’t know what is.

Today was the beginning of the annual TED conference, which has become just about the toughest ticket in the world to get hold of. Held in Monterey, California, it’s a gathering of 1,000 of the “edgiest” members of the tech, entertainment, and design communities, and frankly, it sounds like a blast. Each speaker is given 18 minutes to present something amazing, and at its best, it’s a glimpse of the future.

You can learn more about the conference, and see some videos of past presentations, at the TED website, here. You can also find lots of TED-talk videos on YouTube.

There’s been quite a ruction lately about comments made by Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, that called for Britain to adopt Islamic Sharia law as part of its legal system. This sort of supine acquiescence is the road to cultural suicide, it seems to me, and he has been roundly castigated by all, as he ought.

(more…)

Thanks to Kevin Kim for bringing to our attention the World’s Stupidest Comment Thread. It includes such gems as:

When politicians say they are for Change but never explain what the change is we better all be careful. I think Adolf Hitler was elected in Germany on a platform of “Change”.

and

A lot of people have pointed out that Mr. Obama is a practicing muslim, but the thing that a lot of folks have yet to recognize is: sources have told me that Barack Obama is actually a Nazi. I have yet to confirm this, but his comments about terror, Mitt Romney and others seem to lean that direction. Am I saying that he wants to burn the entire Jewish race? I haven’t seen any comment from him on that topic, one way or the other. But his stance of pro muslim, pro terror and anti israel politics seems to indicate as such.

Here it is.

*Update: if you’re just reading this for the first time, you’re too late. The whole comment thread has been taken down, I’m sad to say. -MP

About forty years ago I read a science-fiction book called Wasp. I remember it only dimly, but as I recall it was a corking good read, and the central metaphor of the book has stayed with me: that a small insect, buzzing around the inside of an automobile, can so distract the driver as to cause an accident. A tiny animal weighing less than a gram can cause the destruction of an enormously massive machine and the deaths of its vastly more powerful occupants.

(more…)

Dennis Mangan calls our attention to another depressing instance of Draconian speech-policing, this time at Brandeis University.

(more…)

In his recent New York Times Magazine article on the evolutionary and biological underpinnings of morality, Steven Pinker acknowledges the nihilistic shadows nearby, and, like other popularizers of Darwinian naturalism, reassures us that we needn’t worry. I think he’s right — we needn’t — but not for the reasons he suggests.

(more…)

As promised, Steven Pinker has written what I think will be seen as a a fairly important article for the New York Times Magazine about human morality. Having banged on the topic of morality a great deal myself lately, I encourage all of you to read it. I found little to disagree with, though his attempt to ameliorate the discomfort of moral nihilism by arguing that moral systems such as ours are sort of an evolutionary “forced move” — which I also think is about the most one can do in that department — will be unsatisfying to some. (Then again, the Copernican system was unsatisfying to some, too.)

(more…)

Perhaps some of our Korean correspondents might like to weigh on in this odd practice.

I’ve just run across a website that might have interesting possibilities. It’s called BigThink, and its aim is to be a sort of online multimedia venue for the exchange of Ideas. I’ve only just started poking around in it, so I haven’t anything much to say about it so far — and being so new that it doesn’t even have a Wikipedia entry yet, it might take a little while to gather steam. It’s the kind of thing that could go either way: I’ve learned how easy it is for these promising ventures to flop. But it could turn into something worthwhile.

Anyway, have a look here.

We read here that the Supreme Court is considering the legality of the most widely used method of lethal injection, on the grounds that it may cause undue suffering to the party being executed, thereby running afoul of the Constitutional proscription regarding “cruel and unusual” punishment.

(more…)

Following a link from Bill Vallicella, I’ve just read a review of the movie Pete Seeger: The Power of Song, in which the reviewer, the historian Ronald Radosh — who knew Seeger personally, and admires him as an artist and a man of peace, generally — nonetheless calls attention to the unrepentance of those of the American Left, including a great many beloved folk musicians, who strove on behalf of the Communist Party for much of the 20th century.

(more…)

Readers will probably be familiar with Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the Somali-born Muslim apostate and political writer. You may have heard of her in connection with the film Submission, about the opression of women under Islam — for which she wrote the screenplay, and for which its director Theo van Gogh was murdered in an Amsterdam street by a Muslim zealot.

(more…)

Having set such a breezy tone with my previous post, I’m sorry to have to get back to more serious matters. But I’ve just been presented with further evidence, in case any was lacking, that Western civilization is indeed circling the drain: apparently the first season of Sesame Street, from way back in 1969, has just been released on DVD — and such delicate creatures, such timorous little milquetoasts, have we become in a mere 38 years that the recordings have been marked as unsuitable for children.

No wonder the barbarians are at the gate. Learn more here.

Thanks to our friend Dennis Mangan, the curmudgeonly proprietor of Mangan’s Miscellany, for commenting at his website on our recent post The Teflon God. Dennis — with whom, by the way, we generally agree about most things — raises the objection, often made, that some of the worst brutality in recent history was committed by atheistic regimes. This is undeniably true, but I think that it misses the main point, which is that these horrors ought more reasonably to be charged against totalitarian, Utopian, social-engineering schemes — which often take the form of secular “religions” themselves, as I mentioned in this post — than to atheism per se, which, in contrast to most religions, asserts no normative ideology of its own. Indeed, I would lay much of the responsibility for the mass brutality of the Russian, Chinese, and Khmer Rouge regimes upon the pernicious nature of Communism itself, which can only enforce equality of wealth by institutionalizing an enormous inequality of power, with predictably corrupting effect.

The mistake here, then, I think, is to confuse “Godless and wicked” with “Godless, therefore wicked”.

From our old friend Peter Kranzler comes a link and a question. The link is to this news item, which tells us that the infamous Westboro Baptist Church of Topeka, Kansas, has been ordered to pay $10.9 million to relatives of a U.S. Marine killed in Iraq, after church members jeered at people attending his funeral.

(more…)

I haven’t time just now to write at length, but want to draw your attention to an excellent article, by one Sarah Baxter, from London’s Sunday Times. It examines the convergence between the Far Left and radical Islam, which arises from a confluence of several interests, loathing of America and resentment toward Israel being foremost among them.

(more…)