But as divisive as Mr. Obama’s presidency has been, it would be wrong (at least in part) to blame the man: the issue is systemic. We read:

What do those numbers tell us? Put simply: that the country is hardening along more and more strict partisan lines.

While it’s easy to look at the numbers cited above and conclude that Obama has failed at his mission of bringing the country together, a deeper dig into the numbers in the Gallup poll suggests that the idea of erasing the partisan gap is simply impossible, as political polarization is rising rapidly.

Out of the ten most partisan years in terms of presidential job approval in Gallup data, seven — yes, seven — have come since 2004. Bush had a run between 2004 and 2007 in which the partisan disparity of his job approval was at 70 points or higher.

There is a broadening ideological schism in American sentiment on major issues of fundamental importance: the ever-increasing scale of federal spending and scope of intrusive federal regulation; nation-building abroad; the indifference of the Federal government to most illegal immigration, and outright antipathy to states who try to act when Washington abdicates; institutionalized racial and ethnic preferences that consistently disfavor white, Anglo-European people and culture; refugee-resettlement scams; foreign aid to nations that hate us; radical multiculturalism and non-discrimination; and so on.

The rift between these two constituencies is only getting wider and deeper and angrier, and that trend isn’t going to change. So as I’ve been saying for some time now: the practical issue is not that liberals and conservatives disagree about these things — it’s that they can’t get away from each other. This seems to me little different from the religious and ethnic tensions that have torn countries apart, often violently, throughout history. Such things rarely turn out well, and I don’t expect this will, either.

One can only hope. Find out here.

The app has apparently irked various interest groups, who I suppose think that gathering crime-rate statistics and making them available them to the public gives high-crime areas a bad name, or something.

In the article, we read:

Sarah E. Chinn, author of ‘Technology and the Logic of American Racism,’ told AOL the app is ‘pretty appalling.’

‘Of course, an application like this defines crime pretty narrowly, since all crimes happen in all kinds of neighborhoods.’

‘I can’t imagine that there aren’t perpetrators of domestic violence, petty and insignificant drug possession, fraud, theft, and rape in every area.’

That’s just fantastic, and highly original, too. Just to be clear, because this is such a piercing insight that you might not get it right away: if you were to imagine that a neighborhood with, say, fifty street assaults a week is somehow a more dangerous place for a stroll than a neighborhood with five such crimes per decade, you’re thinking too narrowly. Instead, the right way to understand crime rates, in light of Ms. Chinn’s intellectual breakthrough, is to assign them only two possible values: 0 or 1. And since “all crimes happen in all kinds of neighborhoods” *, we can narrow the range even further: everyplace just gets a 1! Done.

(Somebody should tell Microsoft this, by the way — because as a professional software engineer, I can tell you it will make coding this app one hell of a lot easier. Fewer bugs, too, I’ll wager.)

So there you have it — a breathtaking unification, a Great Leap Forward in what was until now a dauntingly complex field of study: all crime happens equally, everywhere. Move over, James Clerk Maxwell!

Read the rest here.

* I’ll confess that I’m having trouble remembering the last time there was, for example, a gang-related drive-by shooting in Wellfleet, MA (pop. 2750), but just to be sociable I’ll defer to Ms. Chinn as to whether “all crimes happen in all kinds of neighborhoods”. She is, after all, a published author.

Israel Upholds Citizenship Bar for Palestinian Spouses

Israel’s Supreme Court has upheld a law banning Palestinians who marry Israelis from gaining Israeli citizenship.

Civil rights groups had petitioned the court to overturn the law, saying it was unconstitutional.

“Human rights do not prescribe national suicide,” Judge Asher Grunis wrote in the judgement.

How about that! “National suicide”. Amazing that somebody can get away with calling a spade a spade like that in this day and age. As Dennis remarked (my emphasis):

Judge Grunis appears to be sound on what exactly constitutes a nation, that is, it consists of a people, not anyone who can manage to get to a physical location.

Very unfashionable notion these days, that.

What say you, readers? Should Israel be allowed to define itself as home to “a people”?

If you say ‘no’, then why not? If you say ‘yes’, then you probably know what I’m going to ask next.

The ‘crux of the biscuit’ is this question: Do Western normative principles appeal to universal longings, and are therefore universally applicable across all peoples and cultures? Both liberal muticulturalists and neoconservative nation-builders seem to agree that they are.

Our commenter ‘The One-Eyed Man’ summed up with this:

…I do think that the principles in the Declaration of Independence are universal, applying to Muslims equally to Christians and everyone else.

This is a commonly held view, but with particular regard to Islam, it’s a fundamental error, of critical importance. I’ll try to explain.

As much as it may be fashionable (especially among unbelievers like me) to downplay the significance of religion in America’s founding, the Declaration of Independence explicitly expresses a Judeo-Christian understanding of the nature of God, and of God’s relationship with human beings. It clearly declares this understanding in its most famous passage:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights…

The central argument of the Declaration of Independence is that the Crown, having repeatedly infringed on the rights of its American colonists, has voided its claim to sovereignty over them. So: what does it mean for men to possess inalienable rights granted to them by God, and how is this belief distinctly Judeo-Christian?

First, this assertion reflects the belief that a loving God grants these rights as part of His covenant with mankind — a covenant made first with the Jews, and then extended to the rest of humanity by Jesus Christ. Central to both is the idea of a loving God who, loving all men as individuals, directly grants each of them the assurance of His protection. The Declaration explicitly places this direct, individual assurance from God above any earthly institution’s power to abrogate.

But the idea of a loving Creator with whom mere humans may enter into this sort of personal covenant is directly at odds with the Islamic concept of God. The Islamic God Allah is perfect, transcendent, and aloof; the idea of Allah deigning to “love” a mere human is absurd, and indeed the thought is offensive to God’s majesty. The great Islamic theologian and philosopher Abu Hāmed Mohammad ibn Mohammad al-Ghazzālī, who died in 1111 but remains probably the most influential Islamic theorist of all time, argued against this by pointing out that love implies a need, an incompleteness, on the part of the lover that can only be fulfilled by the beloved. But God is perfect, continued Ghazzali, and complete unto Himself — so the idea that He might have a longing that can only be fulfilled by reciprocal love with mortal men is an abomination, as is the notion that He would enter into an equal partnership with anyone or anything at all.

This brings us to a second point: the very idea of an irrevocable covenant, as implicit in the concept of inalienable rights, necessarily implies a limitation of God’s sovereignty: for God to make an unbreakable promise necessarily limits God’s freedom of action. But the divine Will and infinite potency of God obviously can permit no such limitation — again, the very idea is an offense and an abomination.

Furthermore, the Declaration of Independence is a product of the philosophy of the Enlightenment, which in turn has at its foundation the idea of a lawful natural world. This concept also reflects the Judeo-Christian assumption of a loving God: one who, having endowed Man with the gift of reason, provided a world that operated without caprice, and that was subject to reliable regularities that human reason could comprehend. But again, this idea of a lawful Cosmos necessarily limits the freedom and sovereignty of God. Indeed al-Ghazali went so far as to say that because God’s power is infinite, His moment-by-moment attention to the world’s every minutest detail is what maintains the world’s seeming regularities, and the appearance of lawful connections between observed causes and effects is merely an illusion. If drinking water seems to alleviate thirst, it is only because God, on each occasion, has chosen to follow our drinking of water with the relief of thirst. But to imply that God’s choice in the workings of His creation is constrained by natural laws is again to suggest that God’s sovereignty is limited, and is again an abomination.

Finally, there is the Islamic concept of tawhid, or the unity of God. This idea was developed extensively by Taqi al-Din Ibn Taymiyya, a medieval Salafist whose teachings still exert great influence. In his widely read paper A Genealogy of Radical Islam, Quintan Wiktorowicz explained (emphasis mine):

One of Ibn Taymiyya’s most important contributions to Salafi thought is his elaboration of the concept of tawhid — the unity of God. He divided the unity of God into two categories: the unity of lordship and the unity of worship. The former refers to belief in God as the sole sovereign and creator of the universe. All Muslims readily accept this. The second is affirmation of God as the only object of worship and obedience. Ibn Taymiyya reasoned that this latter component of divine unity necessitates following God’s laws. The use of human-made laws is tantamount to obeying or worshipping other than God and thus apostasy. [20th-century Muslim theologian Mawlana Abul A’la] Mawdudi adopted this position and drew a sharp bifurcation between the “party of God” and the “party of Satan,” which included Muslims who adhered to human-made law.

This idea, which is very much a part of mainstream Islamic thought throughout the world, raises an impassable barrier between Islam and the Judeo-Christian tradition of a distinction between divine and worldly law — the root of America’s founding principle of a separation of Church and state.

There is much more I could say about all of this, but it’s late, and this post is already long enough. I hope, however, that I have shown that it is a mistake, and betrays a dangerously superficial acquaintance with core Islamic doctrine, to imagine that bedrock American principles — in particular those Enlightenment principles expressed by Jefferson in our Declaration of Independence — apply as aptly to serious Muslims as they do to those of us raised in the Western religious and cultural tradition.

How did we let this happen to ourselves?

One of the consistent lessons of history, from Aristagoras to Gorbachev, is that authoritarian systems place themselves at great risk when they attempt to liberalize. The Supreme Council of the Armed Forces is learning this lesson today; they have unleashed forces that they have no idea how to control.

We read:

The dream of a painless world is the great illusion of liberalism. Classical liberalism, it is true, never promised to make men happier; it promised only to make them richer. Adam Smith argued that we deceive ourselves when we suppose that those material luxuries that we associate with happiness are “worth all the toil and anxiety which we are so apt to bestow” on their attainment.

Material wealth is good, Smith says, not because it makes us permanently happier, but because it enables us to dispense, in some measure, with physical and corporeal miseries (hunger, squalor, disease, and the like). In their place we have psychological and spiritual debilities. The primitive man famishes; the civilized man despairs — he experiences the accidioso, the dejection and spiritual sloth, described by Dante, or the noia and “inward death” of Leopardi, or the ennui of Baudelaire. The civilized man is not happier than the savage, but his misery is more polished and elegant, and as a general rule comely things are to be preferred to uncomely ones.

Very well said. Read the rest here.

First: you may have heard about the kerfuffle that arose recently when the home-improvement chain Lowe’s decided to yank its sponsorship of the “anti-Islamophobic” television series All-American-Muslim. (Dozens of other sponsors soon joined them; all are now predictably being tarred as “racists” by the ummah‘s useful idiots on the Left, although opposition to the spread of Islam in the West has nothing whatsoever to do with race, and everything to do with a perfectly sensible wariness toward a totalitarian, intolerant, and virulent ideology.) Robert Spencer comments here.

Also: what with the recent persecutions of Geert Wilders, Elisabeth Sabaditch-Wolff, and Lars Hedegaard, the witch-hunt for “instigators” following the Anders Breivik rampage (which has made the Norwegian writer Fjordman’s life a living hell), the imprisonment of (the admittedly loutish) Emma West, and the stifling effect of Europe’s incremental dhimmitude on free speech in general, it should be no surprise that the OIC, the global organizing body for dawa jihad, is feeling its oats these days — and has its eye on that last bastion of free expression, the United States.

With that in mind, Clare Lopez at American Thinker has had her eye on a meeting, now presumably concluded, between OIC and our Secretary of State. Read her substantial article here.

Having had a great deal of experience in recording audio for advertising, I was amazed that these defective (to my ear, anyway) voice-over performances had made it onto the air. But once I had noticed this woman, there she was, week after week, reading copy for several different products. (I wish I could remember what they were, so I could dig up a clip for you.) I also started noticing other female announcers who had the same problem.

Well it turns out this is a new fashion trend for the female voice. It has a name, too: it’s called “vocal fry“.

Learn more here.

The base liked it. The New York Times, for example, has been spoiling for Mr. Obama to put up a real fight against the evil Right for some time now, and seemed pleased to imagine that their man seems finally to be getting his Irish up:

In demanding “a new nationalism,” Roosevelt supported strong government oversight of business, a “graduated income tax on big fortunes,” an inheritance tax and the primacy of labor over capital. For that, he was called a socialist and worse, as Mr. Obama observed, having endured the same.

Mr. Obama was late to Roosevelt’s level of passion and action on behalf of the middle class and the poor, having missed several opportunities to make the tax burden more fair and demand real action on the housing crisis from the big banks that he excoriated so effectively in his speech.

But he has fought energetically for a realistic plan to put Americans back to work and has been stymied at every step by Republicans. That seems to have burned away his old urge to conciliate and compromise, and he is now fully engaged against the philosophy of his opponents.

As Jonah Goldberg pointed out today, however, the Times didn’t always feel this way about Mr. Roosevelt’s view of things. In a September 30th, 1913 editorial, which was entitled “ROOSEVELT’S SUPER-SOCIALISM”, the Grey Lady’s editorial board wrote (.pdf here, if you can’t get past the paywall):

Theodore Roosevelt has now thought out and matured his doctrine of Socialism. It is not the Marxian socialism. Much that Karl Marx taught is rejected by present-day Socialists. Mr. Roosevelt achieves the redistribution of wealth in a simpler and easier way. He leaves the land, the mines, the factories, the railroads, the banks — all the instruments of production and exchange — in the hands of their individual owners, but of the profits of their operation he takes whatever share the people at any given time may chose to appropriate to the common use. The people are going to say, We care not who owns and milks the cow, as long as we get our fill of the milk and cream.

… Mr. Roosevelt’s reconstruction of society would leave it inert by destroying individual initiative, hope, and ambition, which are the foundations of progress. It is a sterile system, yet being sterile, why has constructed it? Because he knew that with his great skill he could make this Utopian dream attractive to that very considerable part of society which is the material with which agitators work: the discontented, the unsuccessful, the envious.

Well, some things do change, I guess. Others don’t.

First-grader accused of sexual harassment

A Boston elementary school is investigating a 7-year-old first-grader for sexual harassment after he struck another boy his age in the groin.

But the mother of the accused said her son was fending off the other child, who had choked him in an altercation on a school bus on Nov. 22.

Mark Steyn comments:

The mother said she spoke with the principal, Leslie Gant, who supposedly told her:

“It doesn’t matter who hit who first… He said he hit him in the testicles. That’s assault. That’s sexual assault.”

There may be “another side” to this story, but it’s hard to foresee any version of events in which a First Grader can plausibly be guilty of “sexual assault”. Nevertheless, if found guilty, Mark Curran when he turns 18 will be placed on a “sex offender registry”, and his life will be ruined. If officials of the Boston public schools system genuinely believe that when a seven-year old kicks another seven-year old in the crotch that that is an act of “sexual harassment”, then they are too stupid to be entrusted with the care of the city’s children. If, on the other hand, they retain enough residual humanity to understand that a seven-year-old groin-kick is not a sexual assault but have concluded that regulatory compliance obliges them to investigate it as such, then they are colluding in an act of great evil.

Sometimes societies become too stupid to survive.

Yes, they do. Too stupid — or too effeminized, too weak, too decadent, too pampered…

Even though it is repeatedly stressed by everyone that the research behind all of this concerns itself only with statistical aggregates, and has absolutely nothing to say about the intelligence of any individual person, the subject is obviously Kryptonite for public figures, and discussion of it has been ruinous for more than a few. (Just ask James Watson, for example.) The widely read blogger Andrew Sullivan has now rather bravely taken up the topic in a series of posts; the latest of them is here. (HT: Dennis Mangan.)

Given what a lethally electrified topic this is, it’s fair to ask: even if this is all true, why bring it up? In a conversation I had a while back with a friend in Wellfleet who was a professor of sociology at Harvard, she actually went so far as to insist, when pressed, that this sort of research simply should not be conducted, as nothing good can come of it anyway. Here’s Mr. Sullivan’s response to that (my emphasis):

Two points: research is not about helping people; it’s about finding out stuff. And I have long opposed the political chilling of free inquiry into any area of legitimate curiosity or research. I’m not going to stop now. Secondly, I agree that there would be very little, if any, use for this data in our society, apart from the existence of affirmative action. But when public policy holds that all racial difference in, say, college degrees, are due to racism, a truth claim has already been made. So the p.c. egalitarians have made this a public and social issue by a statement of fact they subsequently do not want to see debated or challenged using the data. That’s an illiberal position, in my view.

I remain gob-smacked by the resilience of IQ differences between broad racial groups, controlling for much other data. Maybe if we understood what was going on – which particular and subtle combination of genetics, culture and generation makes this the result – we could help increase equality of opportunity. Maybe racial categories themselves have become so fluid and opaque the whole area is now moot. Maybe we should accept that differences in outcomes among racial groups have some element of irreducibility to them. Maybe the answer is to abolish racial affirmative action and replace it by class-based forms. Maybe the answer is to abolish affirmative action altogether (my preferred outcome). But all these questions depend on a thriving research culture which has been chilled by politics. That’s what saddens me.

Leaving aside Mr. Sullivan’s more general sentiment about stifling free inquiry, his highlighted point is exactly right: the reason we ought to be able to engage in this particular research, and to discuss its results without opprobrium, is that others have already used truth claims about the distribution of intelligence as the basis of a great deal of public policy, while at the same time declaring it off-limits for debate. But if we can come to accept, for example, that the prevalence of Ashkenazi Jews and East Asians in elite intellectual occupations, and the low representation of other groups in those areas, merely reflect actual differences in the distribution of innate intelligence rather than malevolent racism, perhaps we can finally stop making futile and polarizing gestures at terrible expense, stop falsely demonizing statistically more-successful groups as vile oppressors, and eventually learn to treat people as we should have been doing all along: as individuals.

Let’s go back to square one. The purpose of American immigration laws and policies is not to be either humane or inhumane to illegal immigrants. The purpose of immigration laws and policies is to serve the national interest of this country.

There is no inherent right to come live in the United States, in disregard of whether the American people want you here. Nor does the passage of time confer any such right retroactively.

…When you import people, you import cultures, including cultures that have been far less successful in providing decent lives and decent livelihoods. The American people have a right to decide for themselves whether they want unlimited imports of cultures from other countries.

At one time, immigrants came to America to become Americans. Today, the apostles of multiculturalism and grievance-mongering have done their best to keep foreigners foreign and, if possible, feeling aggrieved. Our own schools and colleges teach grievances.

Read the rest here.

Exhibit A is a landmark study of intellectually precocious youths directed by the Vanderbilt University researchers David Lubinski and Camilla Benbow. They and their colleagues tracked the educational and occupational accomplishments of more than 2,000 people who as part of a youth talent search scored in the top 1 percent on the SAT by the age of 13. (Scores on the SAT correlate so highly with I.Q. that the psychologist Howard Gardner described it as a “thinly disguised” intelligence test.) The remarkable finding of their study is that, compared with the participants who were “only” in the 99.1 percentile for intellectual ability at age 12, those who were in the 99.9 percentile — the profoundly gifted — were between three and five times more likely to go on to earn a doctorate, secure a patent, publish an article in a scientific journal or publish a literary work. A high level of intellectual ability gives you an enormous real-world advantage.

… It would be nice if intellectual ability and the capacities that underlie it were important for success only up to a point. In fact, it would be nice if they weren’t important at all, because research shows that those factors are highly stable across an individual’s life span. But wishing doesn’t make it so.

No, it doesn’t. Neither does pretending it isn’t so, or insisting it isn’t so, or making public policy based on the assumption that it isn’t so.

Here’s a related statistical fact, of no less significance: the qualities under examination here have been repeatedly demonstrated to be highly heritable (another commonsense datum that would once have been obvious to all, but nowadays only to professional psychometricians, black-hearted curmudgeons, and breeders of livestock).

Taken together, what are we to make of these results? Gee, I really can’t say. And you’d better not, either.

Money quote:

The creativity and resourcefulness of the definitions, the broadness and rigor of the rules and codes, have always betrayed their more Orwellian purpose…

Also:

Codes of sexual harassment imagine an entirely symmetrical universe, where people are never outrageous, rude, awkward, excessive or confused, where sexual interest is always absent or reciprocated, in other words a universe that does not entirely resemble our own.

Read the rest here.

They demand Social Justice, by any means necessary.

Meanwhile, a fellow by the name of Shawn Carter — a young black man who, abandoned by his father, was raised in a housing project in one of the worst inner-city districts in the country, dropped out of high school to pursue an interest in rap music, and who is now better known as the music- and fashion-industry mogul ‘Jay-Z’, husband of the R&B siren Beyoncé — will be selling “Occupy Wall Street”-themed t-shirts.

Mr Carter will be keeping the proceeds. He is worth an estimated $450 million.

The “moral of the story”? As Satchmo famously said: “Man, if you have to ask, you’ll never know.”