— Learn a card trick from Penn and Teller.
— A survey of meteorologists on “climate change”.
— Unintended consequences of Britain’s welfare state.
— Why Intelligent Design retains its broad appeal.
— The Museum of Imaginary Musical Instruments.
— Watch the change in popularity of given names over time.
— Waivers? No way. (From 2012.)
— For you chessplayers: an endgame gem.
— A nifty tool for taxonomists.
— Awwww….
Boy, what a week. Not being a man of independent means, I still must toil for my daily crust, and this week that included a 24-hour-long workday spanning Tuesday and Wednesday (a software crisis in the Antipodes, now resolved).
I used to do a lot of those as a youthful studio rat, but for a man of my advancing years, they take a heavy toll on what M. Poirot used to call the “little grey cells”.
Back with something more substantial when the fog lifts. For tonight, though, all I have for you is this remarkable lass.
Blessed is he who hath a soul,
Blessed is he who hath none,
Woe and sorrow to him who hath it in conception.
– Gurdjieff
Well, it appears from yesterday’s referendum that the people of Crimea would rather be Russian. Vladimir Putin is glad to welcome them back to the Motherland.
The Obama administration, which didn’t want to see the referendum happen at all, imposed some punitive measures on a few Russian big-shots, but nobody over there seems to mind much.
Here’s one reaction, from a Russian television personality:
“Russia is the only country in the world realistically capable of turning the United States into radioactive ash,” anchor Dmitry Kiselyov said on his weekly news show on state-controlled Rossiya 1 television.
No need to bother, tovarich. Just leave that to the Democrats.
[rimshot]
Meanwhile, local self-determination is busting out all over. Can’t imagine why.
In other news, it was a big day for astrophysicist Alan Guth, whose brilliant 1979 insight — that in the earliest moments after the Big Bang, the universe expanded, very briefly, at a staggeringly enormous rate — has received dramatic confirmation in recent observations. Learn more here.
Mitch Leigh has died. He’s the one who wrote the music for the 60’s Broadway hit Man of La Mancha, which featured a song I know you know: The Impossible Dream. (For the fullest possible effect, here’s Robert Goulet singing it at a Jerry Lewis telethon!) You can read his New York Times obituary here.
One thing about that obituary: Mitch Leigh started out as a composer of music for advertising. He was very good at it, and anyone my age who grew up in America will remember a lot of his melodies (this one, for instance). In my own eclectic recording career, I worked with many of the best jingle-writers in the biz, and I came to realize that there was generally more creative spark at any of the major New York jingle houses than in the whole Top 40.
So it got my Irish up to see this in Mitch Leigh’s obit:
He never apologized for working in advertising…
“Apologized”? Excuse me?
Oh wait, it’s the New York Times. Right. Never mind.
I knew Mr. Leigh slightly; he had a nice office, with a very serviceable little recording studio, on 57th Street in Manhattan, and sometime back in the mid-90’s I spent a month or so doing synth programming and mixing for a personal project of his, called Changing Times: a Jazz Symphony. (I still have a copy somewhere; I should give it another listen.) Mr. Leigh treated me very well, and paid me handsomely. He was an artist and a gentleman. May his heart lie peaceful and calm.
Finally, that Malaysian airliner’s still missing. Theories abound. Here’s mine: some people wanted a jet, and now they have one. I wonder what they’re going to do with it.
Our e-pal hbd*chick has just put up a fascinating post on the Hajnal Line.
The what?
The Hajnal Line marks a boundary between areas of Europe characterized by different marriage practices. Among hbd*chick’s primary areas of interest is the effect these differences have had on both culture and genome in historical time.
Hie thee thither and learn more.
Over at VDare, John Derbyshire reviews A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race, and Human History, a forthcoming book by chief New York Times science writer Nicholas Wade.
The book is important — a watershed, really. For the first time (that I’m aware of, at least), a major writer with impeccable Cathedral credentials brings squarely into mainstream discourse the full-blown scientific reality of human biodiversity (though apparently not without a cautious, and understandable, dispersion of what Mr. Derbyshire refers to as “squid ink”). Others have paved the way: E.O. Wilson’s 1975 book Sociobiology established a beachhead (at a personal and professional cost to Wilson that must have evoked the landings at Normandy), and Steven Pinker’s 2003 The Blank Slate secured some strategically important territory, but Wade’s book appears to be a push for the capital. It will be out on May 6th.
Read Derb’s review here.
A while back I agreed to comment on a New York Times editorial advocating a rise in the minimum wage. (The editorial, entitled The Clear Benefits of a Higher Wage, is here.)
The brief editorial’s main point is that a minimum-wage increase cannot be reliably expected to cause enough of an increase in unemployment to offset its benefits. In this earlier post, I took a look at the effect of historical minimum-wage rates on unemployment, and in my (admittedly cursory) survey of the data, was indeed unable to see any persuasive correlation. That said, however, this surely must depend on how high the minimum wage is set; if it were to be raised to $100 an hour, obviously a great many employers would go out of business, and a great many jobs would be lost. It may well be the case, though, that a minimum-wage rise of the amount currently proposed — to $10.10 an hour from $7.50 — might strike a tolerable balance in terms of jobs lost vs. more money for those not fired. As the minimum wage rises, however, and technology gets better and cheaper, the threshold at which automation becomes more attractive than human employees will naturally become lower — especially given the ever-increasing incidental cost and bureaucratic burden of hiring human workers. It will be more and more likely that this is what a ten-dollar-an-hour fast-food employee looks like.
A common criticism of minimum-wage increases as a means to assist poor families is that many of the people who earn minimum wage are not adults supporting such families, but teenagers or other members of families that are well above the poverty line (or both). The Times asserts that 90% of minimum-wage workers are over 20 years old, but according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, this is simply false: the BLS puts the number under 20 at 30.9%, and the number under 25 at 55%. Meanwhile, according to the Congressional Budget Office, only 19% of minimum-wage earners have family incomes below the poverty level. The Times, understandably, doesn’t even comment on this.
We should note also that a great many of the nation’s poor are chronically unemployed; a policy that seeks to ameliorate poverty by raising the minimum wage obviously won’t help these people at all. Indeed, if anything it will hinder them, because it will make entry-level work that much harder to get.
Another consideration is that most minimum-wage jobs are entry-level, temporary positions. Most people earning the minimum wage — the estimates I’ve found are generally around two-thirds — are earning more a year later. But while individuals with minimum-wage jobs tend to move fairly quickly off the bottom rung, minimum-wage increases impose a permanent increase to employers in the cost of staffing these positions.
This brings us to the conservative’s principal objection to minimum-wage policy as a means of addressing poverty: it takes a public problem — the existence of the poor — and uses the compulsory power of law to foist it off onto an arbitrarily selected subset of the private sector. It’s a way for politicians to offer magnanimous sound-bites — “Give America a raise!” — while doing little except bossing private citizens around, interfering with the natural equilibria of labor markets, and placing yet another burden on employers, a burden that, as with all government regulation, falls hardest on small businesses.
Conservatives find this sort of thinking, always in evidence on the Left, particularly offensive. Winston Churchill once summed it up this way:
Some people regard private enterprise as a predatory tiger to be shot. Others look on it as a cow they can milk. Not enough people see it as a healthy horse, pulling a sturdy wagon.
It isn’t, after all, as if the public sector doesn’t have other effective solutions available; as the Washington Post argues here, addressing the problem through the Earned Income Tax Credit is both more effective at getting the results we want, and has the moral advantage of solving a public problem with public money. (At the very least, it would be a blessing to the half-million people who, by the CBO’s estimate, would be out of work as a result of the proposed minimum-wage rise.)
A further disadvantage of minimum-wage increases is that businesses will do what they can to pass along cost increases to their customers, which can cause a general price inflation. Worse, because so many minimum-wage jobs are in local service-industry businesses, particularly groceries and fast-food restaurants, such price increases are naturally borne in large part by members of the same low-income community that the wage increases are intended to help.
Although it is something of a digression, I also think it would be remiss to discuss the minimum wage without touching on its dark origins in the Progressive ideology that prevailed in the first part of the 20th century. The original aim of minimum-wage laws was not to lift the lowest stratum of the underclass out of poverty; it was to starve them out of existence. The idea was simple enough: one might hire a man of the lowest order for the most menial job at a pittance, and so enable him to scratch out a meager existence, but one that was livable by his rock-bottom standards; in doing so, you enabled the propagation of the least fit, to the detriment of society as a whole. E.A. Ross, a prominent Progressive intellectual and eugenicist (the two were generally synonymous), wrote that “the Coolie cannot outdo the American, but he can underlive him.’ The idea of the minimum wage, as understood by the forward-looking intellectuals of the era, was simple enough: nobody, given the choice of hiring a superior or an inferior man for the same wage, would choose the latter, and so the least fit would gradually fade away. (Much the same logic was behind the Progressive crusade for freely available contraception among the lower classes; it was conceived, for want of a better word, as a way to lower the birthrate among the ‘unfit’.) A 1986 working paper by the CBO also acknowledges this effect, saying that the minimum wage will tend to cause employers to hire more experienced adults if they can no longer get teenagers at a discount, thereby depressing employment prospects for young people.
Finally, I have to say that the whole debate about a minimum-wage increase, and about how best to improve the prospects of low-skilled workers in America, seems a bit surreal when we seem resolutely committed to importing millions of bottom-rung immigrants every year. It seems almost childishly obvious that the very first thing we ought to do to improve the prospects for low-wage Americans is to turn off the spigot of cheap imported labor. Such is the power, however, of the unholy alliance between Republican business interests seeking the cheapest possible workforce, and Democrats seeking new voters and new clients for public services, that the prospects for American workers seeking to rise into the middle class are very bad indeed — and are going to stay that way, regardless of what happens to the minimum wage.
WSJ columnist James Taranto has a regular feature in his Best of the Web newlsetter, in which he posts news items where obvious cause-and-effect relationships are presented as baffling paradoxes. A typical such item might be a headline that says “Despite Historically Low Crime Rate, Incarcerations Are At All-Time High”.
He had a good one today, from an article by Heather Knight in the San Francisco Chronicle:
San Francisco spends $165 million a year on services for homeless people, but all that money hasn’t made a dent in the homeless population in at least nine years.
Baffling, no?
I’m working late tonight, as I often do on Tuesdays. To ease my toil, I generally listen to classical music on Pandora; one of today’s highlights was the pyrotechnic allegro ma non troppo from the Introduction and Rondo Capriccioso for Violin and Orchestra in A Minor, by Camille Saint-SaÁ«ns, as played by the incomparable, and instantly recognizable, Jascha Heifetz.
I couldn’t remember how long ago Heifetz had died, so I took a moment just now to look him up on Wikipedia. (It was 1987.)
The article contained two little anecdotes that I enjoyed so much I thought I’d post them here. The first took place at Heifetz’s Carnegie Hall debut, when he was only sixteen:
On October 27, 1917, Heifetz played for the first time in the United States, at Carnegie Hall in New York, and became an immediate sensation. Fellow violinist Mischa Elman in the audience asked “Do you think it’s hot in here?”, whereupon the pianist Leopold Godowsky, in the next seat, imperturbably replied, “Not for pianists.”
The second: somewhat later, Heifetz told Groucho Marx that he had been earning his living as a musician since the age of seven. Groucho’s repsonse: “And I suppose before that you were just a bum.”
OK — back to my oar, or I’ll get a taste of the lash.
PS — one more thing, from the One Eyed Man: jokes for intellectuals.
It was a sad day today: the lovely Nina and I drove to Philadelphia to attend a memorial service for the twenty-eight-year-old son of some dear friends. The young man, who died suddenly and unexpectedly, had made a very deep and very positive impression on a great many people’s lives, and hundreds were in attendance.
Things like this are a shocking reminder of the evanescence and uncertainty of life, and the permanence of what lies beyond life. You would think that by my age I’d need no reminders of this, but the fact of our brevity, and of our insignificance in the immensity of time, is not an easy thing to bear — and so we do whatever we can to distract ourselves, to deny, to turn away, to forget, to hurry back to the waking sleep that we call ordinary consciousness.
From Marcus Aurelius:
Live not as though there were a thousand years ahead of you. Fate is at your elbow; make yourself good while life and power are still yours.
At the very end of Gurdjieff’s Beelzebub’s Tales to his Grandson, Beelzebub is asked by his beloved grandson Hassein what would be necessary for the awakening and salvation of humanity, if indeed such a thing is possible at all. Beelzebub replied:
That every one of these unfortunates, during the process of existence, should constantly sense and be cognizant of the inevitability of his own death, as well as the death of everyone upon whom his eyes or attention rest.
Aurelius again:
Come back now to your true senses; recall your true self; awake from slumber, and recognize that they were only dreams that troubled you; and as you looked on them, so look now upon what meets your waking eyes.
Goodbye, Daniel.
And he will make the face of heaven so fine
That all the world will be in love with night
And pay no worship to the garish sun.
While all eyes are on Ukraine, it would be easy to lose sight of an earlier U.S. foreign-policy triumph: Libya. Has it really been a year and a half since we stopped having to worry about how to spell ‘Khadaffy’? How time flies.
Anyway, in case you were wondering, it’s going straight to hell — which won’t surprise anyone, except perhaps the people who made it all possible.
For some reason, we haven’t heard much about Libya from Foggy Bottom, lately. I guess our work there is done.
OK, one more on the events in Ukraine, this time from DiploMad. (h/t to Bill Keezer.)
Key excerpt:
“Putin is a patriot; Obama is not.”
Here’s another good article about Putin’s play in the Ukraine (or just “Ukraine”; I can’t keep track).
From the Times:
WASHINGTON ”” The Obama administration, struggling with continued political fallout over its troubled health care law, said Wednesday that it would allow consumers to renew health insurance policies that do not comply with the law for two more years.
The action is a reflection of the difficulties the president has faced as he tries to build support for the Affordable Care Act, and the backlash over his promise ”” which he later acknowledged was overstated — that individuals who liked their insurance plans could keep them, no matter what.
Under pressure from Democratic candidates, who are struggling to defend the president’s signature domestic policy, Mr. Obama announced in November a one-year reprieve on the cancellation of the noncompliant policies.
But today’s action goes much further, essentially stalling for two more years one of the central tenets of the much-debated law: that health insurance plans had to meet a basic minimum standard for care. The administration’s decision appears to buttress Republican criticism that the law was not ready for implementation last year.
The action also helps Democrats in tight midterm election races because it avoids the cancellation of insurance policies that would otherwise have occurred at the height of the political campaign season this fall.
We’ve come a very long way, now, from the idea that Congress passes laws, and that those laws are, well, the law.
There is still, perhaps, some awareness in Mr. Obama’s mind that this sort of thing is deeply, fundamentally wrong, and wholly at odds with the nation’s founding principles; we can guess this because he still, for now at least, feels the need to offer a little spin, a little cover. His motivation here, we are told with a straight face, is not political, but is rather to “ease the transition” to the better world that lies just ahead — in, oh, 2016 or so. (The kindly Mr. Obama wouldn’t want us to be overwhelmed by all of Obamacare’s wonderfulness all at once; after all, given what we’ve been through with all those failed policies for the past couple of centuries, it might be too much for our weakened constitution.)
We were also reminded, reassuringly, that this latest diktat was pronounced only after “close consultation” with several members of Congress. (I haven’t yet found the part of the Constitution that says the Executive can rewrite duly enacted law provided he has “consulted” his political allies in Congress, but I figure it must be in there someplace. Otherwise, people would be rioting in the streets by this point, right?)
So yes, there is still a tinge of caution there, a sense that, as he’s so fond of saying, there will be “consequences” if he goes too far with this. I don’t for a moment imagine that it rises to anything resembling shame — not this man — but still, perhaps, there is a wariness about limits. If nobody sets any, that won’t be a problem much longer.
Anyway, soon he’ll really be able to get his groove on. This November will be the last time that Mr. Obama will have to worry at all about a national election. After that, he’ll have more flexibility.
XKCD is always clever, and often brilliant. I like this one in particular.
I’ve been hearing a lot lately about Vladimir Putin’s being behind the curve, history-wise. The reader who sent me that Ceylan Ozbudak article yesterday, for example, said in his email to me that “territorial gain is an atavistic idea”, as well as saying that “I really question how strong supposed ethnic/historical affiliations are at this point in history, at least in a place like Ukraine as opposed to tribal Africa”. (This is a liberal friend of exceptionally high intelligence, but with whom, as you might imagine, I have various disagreements when it comes to politics.)
Why, our own Secretary of State delivered himself of the opinion on Sunday that “You just don’t in the 21st century behave in 19th century fashion”, and today our President uttered the words I’d been waiting for, the words that for every decent liberal are in any debate the ace of trumps, the unreturnable serve, and the capture of the Snitch: he told Mr. Putin that he was “on the wrong side of history”. (Tremble!)
The problem is, I rather doubt that Mr. Putin gives a rat’s ass about Mr. Obama’s concept of history, or about what lies on which side of it. He is, I think, aware instead that history is just what happens, and that what happens is more often the result of what powerful people do than what others may say. Was Alaric the Goth on the “wrong side of history”? Was Tamerlane, or Suleyman the Magnificent? I doubt you’d even have been able to make them understand the question.
History is not teleological. Utopians think it is. Vladimir Putin is no Utopian.
Here’s a depressing commentary on, among other things, the quality of the modern American male (my emphasis):
Woman Going Into Labor Robbed in Anne Arundel County
— A woman reported to be in labor and her boyfriend were robbed in Annapolis as they headed to a hospital, police said.
The couple was confronted by three men with guns as they left an apartment on Copeland Street about 4:30 a.m. Sunday, police said. When the woman’s boyfriend fled, police spokeswoman Cpl. Amy Miguez said, the suspects tried to get the woman to let them into an apartment, but she didn’t have a key.
Maybe “reported to be in labor” meant that she was an AFSCME executive or something, but it’s a pretty sad story nevertheless.
I haven’t said much here about the situation in Ukraine; it would be like shooting fish in a barrel to use this latest ruction as an opportunity to highlight the incompetence of this administration’s foreign-policy team, and anyway, others have beaten me to it. (I will, however, recall that during the 2012 presidential campaign, Mitt Romney pointed out that Russia was still our primary geopolitical foe — to which Mr. Obama, with the blithe self-assurance of the pathological narcissist, jeered in response that “the 1980s are now calling to ask for their foreign policy back.”)
The most obvious parallel is with the Sudetenland, 1938, as many writers have pointed out.
Among all the things I’ve read about the Ukrainian affair in the past couple of weeks, there were two that I remember as being of particular interest: this blog post from Ara Maxima, and this entry from John McCreary’s NightWatch. Both are worth your time.
Just today a reader and old friend sent me this item, from the Turkish political analyst Ceylan Ozbudak. (At the risk of sounding unprofessional, let me say right up front that Ms. Ozbudak, besides being, no doubt, a keen political observer, is also one muy hot tamale. (Normally, of course, as a gentleman of the “old school”, I’d be the last person to discuss a prominent female intellectual in this way — but given the effort and expense she has obviously put into this, I’m sure she won’t mind my bringing it to your attention. She is manifestly not the sort to hide her light — or lights — under a bushel.)
In the linked article, Ms. Ozbudak had this to say:
In an article in last week’s Russian Pravda, it was noted that if Ukraine was divided, then the status of the Crimean Peninsula ”“ returned to Ukraine in 1954 by Nikita Kruschev, would be open to discussion, and that would include Turkey having a say in the future of Crimea.
The reference to this claim is the “Küçük Kaynarca” (Karlowitz I) signed 230 years ago. As per this agreement, signed by the Russian Tsarina Catherine II on April 19, 1783, the Crimean Peninsula was taken away from the dominion of the Ottomans and handed over to Russia. However, one of the most important provisions of this treaty was the debarment of independence for the Peninsula and outlawing its submission to a third party: Should any such attempt be made, then Crimea would automatically have to be returned to the sovereignty of Turkey.
While the pneumatic Ms. Ozbudak herself clearly scores an eleven out of a possible ten, I can’t give her article full marks for accuracy. The Treaty of Küçük Kaynarca was signed in 1774, not 1783, and what Catherine did in 1783 was simply to annex the Crimean Khanate, not as per the treaty, but in violation of it. (It is also not the Treaty of Karlowitz, which was a different pact, also humiliating to the Ottomans, that was signed in 1699.)
As it happens I had just been reading about Küçük Kaynarca in an excellent book called Worlds At War, by Anthony Pagden. In it he wrote:
The treaty of Küçük Kaynarca had also stipulated that the sultan recognize the “independence” of the khans of the Crimea. It soon became clear, however, that this had been intended only as a preliminary to full annexation. This duly followed in 1783. For the Turks, as Volney commented later, the Russian occupation had … inflicted on the Ottomans “the misery of the humbling of an ancient grandeur.”
So Ms. Ozbudak is drawing, I fear, more on her Turkish pride than on historical facts or contemporary realities when she imagines that the Russians will feel bound by this obsolete pact (that was itself violated by the Russians, with regard to the very territory now in question, less than a decade after its signing hundreds of years ago) to let the Turks have much to say about Crimea.
I have a feeling that what she’ll get instead will be something more like this.
One other thing about Ms. Ozbudak — I couldn’t help but notice, at the bottom of the page, the following:
Ceylan Ozbudak is a Turkish political analyst, television presenter, and executive director of Building Bridges, an Istanbul-based NGO. As a representative of Harun Yahya organization, she frequently cites quotations from the author in her writings.
Harun Yahya is a pen-name of one Adnan Oktar, who caught my attention a few years ago when he published the Atlas of Creation, a huge, glossy compendium of creationist hooey. He’s an interesting fellow: a “Sunni zealot”, and a fervent anti-Zionist, Koranic literalist, and author of a book called The Holocaust Deception. He’s also a handsome devil, as you can see here, and given that Ms. Ozbudak “frequently cites quotations” of Mr. Oktar’s, I wonder if they don’t get along very well generally.
Given the popularity in recent years of books like Steven Pinker’s The Blank Slate, and the ready availability of reference material on the internet — and given also the accumulated wisdom of the ages, the testimony of our own eyes, and simple common sense — it always comes as a bit of a shock to me to see how many people are still in the stupefying grip of what’s called the Standard Social Science Model, which Wikipedia describes as the paradigm that “the mind is a general-purpose cognitive device shaped almost entirely by culture”. You’d think that by now this would have taken its place alongside phlogiston and the luminiferous aether, but it’s as stubborn as kudzu.
As a public service, then (and being too lazy to write anything tonight), I’ll take this opportunity to plug one of the best bloggers on the subject of human biodiversity, who goes by the name ‘Jayman‘. For an opening salvo, here’s a post of his entitled All Human Behavioral Traits are Heritable.
For much more, browse the selections at HBD Bibliography.
Lastly, no survey of the topic would be complete without reading the incomparable hbd*chick.
There’s been a lot of argument lately about whether to raise the minimum wage, and I haven’t had much to say about it in these pages. But a comment in a recent thread got me digging into the topic more deeply than I had before, and so it’s time for a post about it, I think.
The subject came up almost by accident: our liberal commenter Peter K., a.k.a. The One Eyed Man, having made the audacious assertion that conservative thought was ‘mostly hokum’, offered to to take any conservative column or article of my choosing and expose its ‘fatuities’. I quickly chose one, more or less at random: a recent piece by Thomas Sowell on the minimum wage. I invite you to read it before proceeding.
In a Takimag article called Useless Mouths, John Derbyshire looks at the road ahead, as technology displaces more and more workers.
I recall that this sort of gloomy forecast was common when I was a boy, but I think this time round it’s more on the mark. (Barring a Butlerian Jihad, that is.) Things have come a long way in the past half-century.
We’ll probably be offline for a few days.
Meanwhile, here’s something interesting to read.
Update: this is a good one too: with a hat tip to Bill K., a fine rant from VDH.
Our previous post touched once again on how liberal orthodoxy habituates its adherents to deny reality and suppress the expression of truth. One such truth is the near-total hegemony of liberal orthodoxy itself in the social sciences, and of course our leading liberal commenter has wasted no time in denying it. (As I said in the post, this is a perfectly natural meta-effect of the same underlying cause, and should surprise no one.) “For every Bowdoin“, he says, there is a “Liberty University”. (This is, of course, simply false, but as noted just above, that’s rather the point here.)
Having denied any preponderance of liberalism in academia, however, he then switched gears to defend it, on the basis that critical thinking is important in universities, and conservative thought is “sheer hokum”. (See how easy this is, once you get the hang of it?)
For today’s selection, then, we have a longish excerpt from an Edge.org piece by social psychologist Jonathan Haidt (who is hardly a Bible-thumping redneck) in which he examines precisely this question. (I’ve bolded a few passages.)
If a group circles around sacred values, they’ll evolve into a tribal moral community. They’ll embrace science whenever it supports their sacred values, but they’ll ditch it or distort it as soon as it threatens a sacred value. You can see this on the right with global warming denialism. They’re protecting their sacralized free markets. But when sacred values are threatened, the moral force field turns on, and beliefs fall into line. We become intuitive theologians.
Is Social Psychology a Tribal Moral Community?
Has social psychology become a Tribal Moral Community since the 1960s? Are we a community that is bound together by liberal values and then blind to any ideas or findings that threaten our sacred values? I believe the answer is yes, and I’ll make 3 points to support that claim.
1) We have taboos and danger zones.
First, we have taboos and danger zones. We social psychologists are normally so good at challenging each other’s causal theories. If someone describes a phenomenon and then proposes a causal explanation, the rest of us will automatically generate 5 alternative causal explanations, along with 5 control conditions needed to rule out those alternatives. Except when any of these issues are in play. These issues turn on the force field, constrain our thinking, and deprive us of our ability to think of the full range of alternative hypotheses. It’s too dangerous for me to work through examples. I’ll just refer you to Larry Summers’ famous musings about why men are overrepresented in math and science departments at the nation’s top universities.
As on one of his 3 hypotheses, he noted that there is a sex difference in the standard deviation of IQ scores between men and women. He didn’t say that men are smarter. He didn’t say that men have higher IQs. He just noted the well known fact that the variance of male scores is larger, which means that there are more men at the very bottom, and at the very top. Might that contribute to the underrepresentation of women at the very top levels of science? If you’re standing outside the force field it’s a good hypothesis, certainly worth exploring. But if you’re inside the force field, it is not a permissible hypothesis. It is sacrilege. It blames the victims, rather than the powerful. The ensuing outrage led ultimately to his resignation as president of Harvard. We psychologists should have been outraged by the outrage. We should have defended his right to think freely.
2) A statistically impossible lack of diversity
My second point is that we have a statistically impossible lack of diversity in social psychology. This graph shows Gallup data since 1992. Self-identified conservatives have long made up about 40% of the American public. Self identified liberals have made up about 20%. So the ratio in America is about two to one, conservative to liberal. What’s the ratio in social psychology?
To begin calculating our ratio, I first turned to Google. I simply Googled the phrase “liberal social psychologist.” I got 2740 hits. Then I changed liberal to conservative, and got 3 hits. So it looks like a ratio of roughly 1000 to one, liberal to conservative. But it’s actually much higher than that because this first one is some guy on a dating site asserting that his father was the only conservative social psychologist; this second one is a typographical error; and this third one is a conservative blogger who is angry about liberal bias in social psychology, who writes ”¦ “we can further conclude that the possible existence of a conservative social psychologist is statistically insignificant.’ So Google failed to uncover a single instance of a conservative social psychologist who is currently active.
I next conducted a small survey by emailing 30 social psychologists I know, spanning all levels from very senior professors down to grad student. I simply asked:”¦ “Can you reply to this message with the names of any social psychologists that you believe are politically conservative?’ There were 4 names mentioned one time each, but each of them was hedged with doubt, such as “I don’t really know, but she did work with Phil Tetlock.’ So I won’t print these 4 names. Peter Suedfeld got 2 votes, and he definitely worked with Tetlock. Rick McCauley got 3 votes. The next most common candidate was “I can’t think of any conservatives.” And finally, it turns out there is a fair amount of agreement as to who the conservative is in social psychology, and its Phil Tetlock. So there you have it, we do have a conservative. That conservative blogger was wrong. Right?
Well, not quite. I wrote to Phil to ask him whether it was true, as widely believed, that he is a conservative. Phil wrote back to me, in characteristically Tetlockian fashion, and said: “I hold a rather complex (value-pluralistic) bundle of preferences and labeling me liberal or conservative or libertarian or even moderate is just not very informative.”
But I pressed on in my search for the wild conservative social psychologist, and I found him, hiding in a bamboo grove outside of Philadelphia. Watch closely: there he is. Rick McCauley, at Bryn Mawr College. Rick is the only social psychologist I know of who publicly acknowledges that he is politically conservative.
I am extremely fortunate that I got to know Rick when I was a grad student at Penn, because Rick was a friend of one of my advisors, Paul Rozin. When I first met Rick I was wary of him. I had heard that he was a conservative. I had heard that he supported the Viet Nam war. It was only after I forged a personal relationship with him that I got over my distrust. I had never before met an actual conservative professor, and it took me a while to realize how valuable it was to hear from someone with a different perspective. Rick is now one of America’s foremost experts on the psychology of terrorism. I am convinced that many of his insights have only been possible because he stands outside of the liberal force field.
But McCauley can’t be the only conservative in social psychology. If we did a poll of the whole field, we’d surely find at least, what, five percent? Well, this room is just about the best sample of social psychologists we’re ever going to find, so let’s see. If there’s around a thousand people here, we should have about 50 conservatives. That would be 5%. So please tell me, by show of hands: How would you describe your political orientation? If you had to choose from one of these 4 labels, which would you pick? How many of you would describe yourself as liberal, or left of center. [At this point, a sea of hands went up. I estimated that it was between 80 and 90% of the audience, and I estimated the audience size to be about 1000 people.] How many of you would describe yourself as centrist or moderate? [approximately 20 hands went up]. How many of you would describe yourselves as libertarians? [Twelve hands went up] And when I asked how many would describe themselves as conservative, or right of center? [Exactly three hands went up.]
As you can see, we have nowhere near 50 conservatives in this room, we are nowhere near 5%. The actual number seems to be about 0.3%. In this room, the ratio of liberals to conservatives appears to be about 800 to 3, or 266 to 1. So the speaker in the earlier talk was correct when he said, from this stage: “I’m a good liberal democrat, just like every other social psychologist I know.’
Of course there are many reasons why conservatives would be underrepresented in social psychology, and most of them have nothing to do with discrimination or hostile climate. Research on personality consistently shows that liberals are higher on openness to experience. They’re more interested in novel ideas, and in trying to use science to improve society. So of course our field is and always will be mostly liberal. I don’t think we should ever strive for exact proportional representation.
But a ratio of two or three hundred to one, in a nation where the underlying ratio is one to two? When we find any job in the nation in which women or minorities are underrepresented by a factor of three or four, we make the strong presumption that this constitutes evidence of discrimination. And if we can’t find evidence of overt discrimination, we presume that there must be a hostile climate that discourages underrepresented groups from entering.
I submit to you that the underrepresentation of conservatives in social psychology, by a factor of several hundred, is evidence that we are a tribal moral community that actively discourages conservatives from entering.
3) Closeted Conservatives
And this brings me to my third point, closeted conservatives. I recently came across this narrative, written by a young gay woman in 1985:
Until about a year ago, I was very quiet about my sexual orientation… I often didn’t understand the sexual jokes made by my colleagues”¦ the people making the jokes thought that we all felt the same way, and I certainly wasn’t going to reveal that I disagreed. That would have been much too awkward.
JB was really the first person I talked to about my sexual identity. He made me feel more comfortable and seemed to want to hear other perspectives”¦. Since then, taking PT’s class opened up a dialog and others have shared more as well. Before I thought that I was completely alone and was afraid to say much because of it. Now I feel both somewhat obligated to speak up (don’t want others to feel as alone as I did) and also know that I have more support than I originally realized.
Compare that text to this political coming out narrative, which was sent to me last week, as I was searching for conservative social psychologists. One of my friends said, in response to my email survey, that he knew of two grad students who might be conservative. I wrote to each of them and asked them about their experiences in social psychology. Both of them said they are not conservative, but neither are they liberal, and because they are not liberal, they feel pressure to keep quiet. One of them wrote this to me. As you can see, it’s nearly identical to the coming out narrative.
In fact, it differs by just five words, because that’s all I had to change to convert this text”¦ into this text, which I told you, falsely, was a coming out narrative from 1985. This is the text of the email that was sent to me last week, by a graduate student who is here in the room with us right now. She and other non-liberal students would like to come out of the closet, just as gay students wanted to 25 years ago. I think we have an obligation to help them.
Of course it’s a moral issue, and the moral argument about political discrimination is being developed by Richard Redding, at Chapman University Law School. But I’m going to set that aside. I’m not even going to make the moral argument. Rather, what I really want to emphasize today is that it is a scientific issue. We are hurting ourselves when we deprive ourselves of critics, of people who are as committed to science as we are, but who ask different questions, and make different background assumptions.
Here’s the email I got from the other non-liberal student:
I consider myself very middle of the road politically: A social liberal but fiscal conservative. Nonetheless, I avoid the topic of politics around work”¦ Given what I’ve read of the literature, I am certain any research I conducted in political psychology would provide contrary findings and, thereby, go unpublished. Although I think I could make a substantial contribution to the knowledge base, and would be excited to do so, I will not.
This too is from a student who is in the room with us right now.
This how we like to see ourselves. We social psychologists are supertolerant free thinkers. We celebrate diversity and non-conformity. We boldly follow our science wherever it takes us, and no matter whom it offends. We care only about truth!
But in reality, we are a tribal moral community. In support of that claim, I made three arguments. I said that, because we have sacred values other than truth, we have taboos that constrain our thinking; we have almost no moral/political diversity; and we have created a hostile climate for graduate students who don’t share those sacred values. If these statements are true, then I think we must begin some serious discussions about how to turn off the magnet.
Last year I wrote this about liberal orthodoxy’s unavoidable antagonism to truth:
A sine qua non for the modern liberal ideologue is a flair for living comfortably in a state of cognitive dissonance. This is made necessary by the internal contradictions of his worldview, and by its frequent, and calamitous, collisions with the social, political, economic, cultural, mathematical, and biological realities of the actual world.
That this reality-denying orthodoxy dominates, to the point of suffocation, our educational institutions has from time to time been a contentious issue in our comment-threads (which is in itself a meta-effect of the same cause, I suppose).
Well, then, here’s another exhibit for you, from the very heart of the Cathedral itself: the Harvard Crimson. It “puts the cards on the table”, clearly and without apology: when truth and ideology collide, truth must die.
We read:
If our university community opposes racism, sexism, and heterosexism, why should we put up with research that counters our goals simply in the name of “academic freedom’?
Instead, I would like to propose a more rigorous standard: one of “academic justice.’ When an academic community observes research promoting or justifying oppression, it should ensure that this research does not continue.
It’s easy to understand the real threat that such research poses: not the justification of oppression, but the revelation that human groups actually do differ in nontrivial ways, that the stubborn differences in life outcomes among various human groups may in large part be due to these innate differences, and that therefore the systematic, malevolent “oppression” that they plan to devote their lives to eradicating, and that they have dedicated entire academic departments to vilifying white male Europeans for, might not exist at all. For the acolytes of this priesthood, then, such research poses not just a social threat, but an existential one.
The article is very clear and direct (and to those of you familiar with the history of the last century, will seem ominously familiar). We should thank the author, Sandra Korn, and the editors of the Crimson for publishing it. That they are comfortable enough to publish it, however — that, dear Readers, should disturb your slumber.
I’m working late, so all I have for you tonight is this little quiz. Give it a go.
Julius Evola, from the opening pages of Men Among The Ruins:
Recently, various forces have attempted to set up a defense and a resistance in the sociopolitical domain against the extreme forms in which the disorder of our age manifests itself. It is necessary to realize that this is a useless effort, even for the sake of merely demonstrative purposes, unless the disease is dealt with at its very roots. These roots, as far as the historical dimension is concerned, are to be found in the subversion introduced in Europe by the revolutions of 1789 and 1848. The disease must be recognized in all of its forms and degrees; thus, the main task is to establish if there are still men willing to reject all the ideologies, political movements, and parties that, directly or indirectly, derive from those revolutionary ideas (i.e., everything ranging from liberalism and democracy to Marxism and communism)…
Strictly speaking, the watchword could then be counterrevolution; however, the revolutionary origins are by now remote and almost forgotten. The subversion has long since taken root, so much so as to appear obvious and natural in the majority of existing institutions. Thus, for all practical purposes, the formula of “counterrevolution” would make sense only if people were able to see clearly the last stages that the world subversion is trying to cover up through revolutionary communism. Otherwise, another watchword is to be preferred, namely reaction. To adopt it and call oneself “reactionary’ is a true test of courage. For quite some time, left-wing movements have made the term “reaction” synonymous with all kinds of iniquity and shame; they never miss an opportunity to thereby stigmatize all those who are not helpful to their cause and who do not go with the flow, or do not follow what, according to them, is the “course of History.” While it is very natural for the Left to employ this tactic, I find unnatural the sense of anguish that the term often induces in people, due to their lack of political, intellectual, and even physical courage; this lack of courage plagues even the representatives of the so-called Right or “national conservatives,” who, as soon as they are labeled “reactionaries,” protest, exculpate themselves, and try to show that they do not deserve that label.
What is the Right expected to do? While activists of the Left are “acting’ and carrying forward the process of world subversion, is a conservative supposed to refrain from reacting and rather to look on, cheer them on, and even help them along the way? Historically speaking, it is deplorable that a “reaction’ has been absent, inadequate, or only half-hearted, lacking people, means, and adequate doctrines, right at the time when the disease was still at an embryonic stage and thus susceptible to be eliminated by immediate cauterization of its infectious hotbeds; had that been the case, the European nations would have been spared untold calamities…
Naturally, the term “reaction” intrinsically possesses a slightly negative connotation: those who react do not have the initiative of action; one reacts, in a polemical or defensive way, when confronted by something that has already been affirmed or done. Thus, it is necessary to specify that reaction does not consist in parrying the moves of the opponent without having anything positive to oppose him with. This misperception could be eliminated by associating the formula of “reaction” with that of “conservative revolution,” a formula in which a dynamic element is evident. In this context “revolution” no longer signifies a violent overthrow of a legitimate established order, but rather an action aimed at eliminating a newly emerged disorder and at reestablishing a state of normalcy. Joseph De Maistre remarked that what is needed, more than a “counterrevolution” in a polemical and strict sense, is the “opposite to a revolution,” namely a positive action inspired by the origins. It is curious how words evolve: after all, revolution, according to its original Latin meaning (re-volvere), referred to a motion that led again to the starting point, to the origins.
In conversation with my friends on the Left I often hear the phrase “the wrong side of history”; implicit in the use of this expression is the idea that it is the flow of history itself that ratifies changes in the condition of human society, rather than any higher and more permanent principle. The stark contrast between this view and that of the reactionary was borne home to me in two exchanges over the past weekend.
In the first, I replied to a remark made on Twitter about gay marriage. Someone had tweeted:
In 20 years, conservatives will be pointing out the positive effect marriage has on the gay community.
I replied:
And liberals will point out that opposition to gay marriage 20 yrs ago was just as strong as opposition to interspecies marriage is now.
In my mind this was a reductio ad absurdum, intended to show the lack of a limiting principle, and the folly of ascribing intrinsic wisdom to the entropic evolution of history.
A day later, the subject came up again, this time in private conversation with a dear, but very liberal, friend. I pointed out that, now that the ancient and universal understanding of marriage had been overthrown, marriage could defensibly become a relationship between a man and his goat.
She responded by reminding me that I was too mired in present-day attitudes, and that in a few decades it may well turn out to be considered perfectly acceptable for a man to marry his goat. What had been for me a reductio ad absurdum, then, was for her a perfectly plausible progression; in other words, it was her view that whatever such norms might become in the future, they are ratified, and justified, simply by virtue of their having evolved into whatever they will have become. This is the implicit meaning of “the wrong side of history”.
It seems to to me that “reaction” stands in relation to this worldview in the same way that position is related to momentum in quantum-mechanics: it is a complementary property of the human psyche. If we analyze the eigenfunction of a quantum particle so as to determine its position, we introduce uncertainty as to its momentum; by focusing on location, we lose sight of its motion. Likewise, we can understand the condition of a society either in terms of its location relative to an absolute frame of reference — i.e., to a set of immutable principles, or our concept of the sacred — or simply in terms of its momentum.
From Australia’s News.com.au:
New forms of discrimination, known as “neoracism”, are taking hold in scientific research, spreading the belief that races exist and are different in terms of biology, behaviour and culture, according to anthropologists who spoke at the annual American Association for the Advancement of Science conference in Chicago.
This would be bad enough all by itself — but what makes the spread of this belief particularly worrisome is the fact that races exist, and are different in terms of biology, behaviour and culture.
Read the rest here.
Yep, they’ve been piling up again. (Just like the snow is supposed to do, again, here in the Outer Cape tonight.)
— The GDP of American states and foreign nations.
— Theodore Dalrymple on the suppression of dissent.
— See above.
— The most beautiful rendition of the National Anthem you will ever hear.
— Magnus Carlsen crushes Bill Gates.
— The arrogance and ignorance of hoplophobic liberals.
— A spectacular new lode of Burgess Shale fauna.
— The “science is settled”, so the observations must be wrong.
— Another nail in the blank-slate coffin.
— Crazy ants.
— Jim Donald on natural law. Excellent.
In which blogger Mark Shea is shamelessly pwned by a spectacularly imaginative troll. Here.
Some heartening news on the Second Amendment front:
First, the good people of Connecticut are defying that state’s new registration laws with some old-fashioned civil disobedience. This is what you get when you pass bad laws: people will not respect them, and will not obey them.
Second, the Ninth Circuit (!) has tossed out, as unjustifiably restrictive, the “good cause” provision in California’s handgun-carry law. This is a major victory for the citizens of the Golden State, and will no doubt set an important precedent. New York, for example, has similar restrictions; I hope this ruling will provide ammunition for related litigation there and elsewhere.
Third, this “bears” watching: the Supreme Court will be announcing shortly whether it will take on yet another basic Second Amendment issue.
Got two items in the mail today from Barack Obama’s Ministry of Truth, shortly after learning that He had decided, on a whim, to change an explicitly articulated (and politically damaging) proviso of the healthcare law until after the upcoming elections.
Make sure you read the letter from ‘Cathi’, which I’ve pasted in below the ‘Selfie With The President’ email.
Does any of this bother you? The personality cult? The pathological, unceasing narcissism? The utter contempt for the law, and for us?
Well, get over it. As He reminded Himself earlier today, on camera: “That’s the good thing about being president: I can do whatever I want.”
“This could be you”? A tattooed Eloi female, in thrall to a malevolent megalomaniac? I think not.
Anyway, next there’s this:
Malcolm —
If you think you’re never going to win a chance to go backstage to meet President Obama, I need to tell you something:
That’s what I thought, too.
When I got the phone call to tell me my name had been selected, I was floored. It wasn’t long before my husband and I were getting on a free flight to D.C. to meet the President face to face.
I’m here to tell you — if you’re still on the fence, you should go for it right now.
Anyone who adds their name to help with the final push on health care enrollment is automatically eligible to win. Chances are, you were probably planning to help out anyway. This is a pretty amazing bonus.
When you get home, all your friends will want to know: What is it like to meet President Obama?
Here’s the truth — it felt like meeting an old friend.
The President is so warm and genuine — he wanted to know all about me and my husband. Talking with him completely reaffirmed my commitment to keep fighting for what is important. And the photo of the three of us is one of my favorite things to show off.
If I could go again, I’d do it in a heartbeat — heck, I’m going to throw my name in too, just in case.
Add your name to help spread the word on health care enrollment, and you’ll be automatically entered to meet President Obama himself:
http://my.barackobama.com/This-is-Your-Chance
Thanks — I’ll be pulling for you!
Cathi
If any of you happen to be baseball fans, my son Nick has just launched a new website: Pitcher GIFS. Go have a look.
.
Here’s your antidote for those Monday blues: two stories to warm your heart.
First you’ll be glad to see that New York State residents can own an AR-15 after all, and at the same time show just how foolish these hysterical “assault-rifle” bans — which prohibit, on the basis of superficial appearance, weapons that are almost never used in gun violence — really are.
And then there’s this.
The CBS program 60 Minutes reported tonight, to everyone’s astonishment and dismay, on a recent, and heretofore completely unsuspected, scientific discovery.
The context was specific — differences in the effect of the sleeping pill Ambien on men and women — but it appears, shockingly, that the scope of the problem might be far more general, with truly horrifying implications.
I won’t sugar-coat it for you, readers; we are all grown-ups here, and I’m just going to give it to you straight: these profoundly disturbing new findings suggest that men and women might actually be quite different.
In a clip from this evening’s show, reporter Lesley Stahl interviews UC Irvine neuroscientist Larry Cahill. Ms. Stahl explains that Dr. Cahill “used to share his field’s assumption that males and females, outside the reproductive system, were fundamentally the same.”
One can almost feel the ground shifting beneath their feet as the interview continues. Asked by Ms. Stahl if this problem of sex-based differences might be bigger than just Ambien, Dr. Cahill confirmed her darkest fears:
“Once you see this difference — and that difference — and that difference — and that difference — and that difference — and that difference — and you see this thing’s everywhere, you go ‘wait a minute!’ So the assumption we’re making, that it really doesn’t matter — sex — is not a valid assumption!”
Later, in a panel discussion, Ms. Stahl was asked: “what surprised you most of all the things that you found out?”
She replied: “I guess the big thing is how pervasive the differences between men and women are.”
Yes, it’s surprising, all right — unless, of course, you have any acquaintance whatsoever with literature, history, folklore, human nature, human societies, actual men and women, the real world, the theory of evolution, or simple common sense.
As bad as this is, folks, it gets even worse. Our pal Mangan has more.
A while back, the comment-thread of a post about the government shutdown turned into a discussion about the obesity of the American poor. A commenter remarked:
The reason why many poor people are obese, of course, is that the cheapest foods tend to be high in carbs and low in nutrients, which often leads to obesity, diabetes, and cardiovascular problems.
I replied:
Interesting. The cheapest food everywhere, throughout history, has always been starchy and nutrient-poor.
If you go to, say, poor Asian neighborhoods, where people of no greater income live (especially considering that government food subsidies are readily available), you don’t see much obesity. You see women in the markets, selecting inexpensive but nourishing ingredients to take home to cook.
Perhaps the difference is mostly that: taking eating seriously enough to make the effort to seek out nourishing food, and to cook it at home, rather than as just another passing appetite to satisfy with the least effort possible, and the no reflection upon the long-term consequences of one’s dietary choices.
The exchange continued:
This probably has a lot to do with what is locally available. If you live in Flushing, you can get great food which is fresh and cheap. If you live in Harlem, your choices are mostly overpriced supermarkets, overpriced Korean markets, and fast food joints.
I pointed out:
People only sell what others will buy.
This subject of “food deserts” — inner-city areas where fresh and nutritious food is hard to find — has been in the air again lately. In yesterday’s Best of the Web opinion digest, the Wall Street Journal’s James Taranto had this to say:
Poverty used to mean going hungry. These days — at least in the developed West, and especially in America — it means getting hungry, consuming loads of inexpensive carbohydrates, and becoming fat and unhealthy. It’s progress of a sort, but those concerned with social uplift aren’t wrong to see a problem here. But their assumptions about its cause and solution have been tested and found wanting.
As National Journal’s Clara Ritger describes it:
With the obesity epidemic in full swing and millions of American [sic] living in neighborhoods where fruits and vegetables are hard to come by, the Obama administration thought it saw a solution: fund stores that will stock fresh, affordable produce in these deprived areas.
But now, three years and $500 million into the federal Healthy Food Financing Initiative, there’s a problem: A study suggests it’s not working.
The idea behind what we wish the administration had the wit to call the Affordable Pear Act is that “food deserts” exist because of a market failure–because produce is in short supply. The experiment suggests the problem is more one of demand.
Ritger reports on a study in the February issue of Health Affairs. Researchers from Penn State and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine “studied two comparable neighborhoods in Philadelphia”:
When a grocery store was opened in one Philadelphia food desert, 26.7 percent of residents made it their main grocery store and 51.4 percent indicated using it for any food shopping, the report found. But among the population that used the new supermarket, the researchers saw no significant improvement in BMI, fruit and vegetable intake, or perceptions of food accessibility, although there was a significant improvement in perception of accessibility to fruits and vegetables. . . .
The researchers compared the Philadelphia neighborhood that would soon receive a new supermarket to a similar community three miles away, hoping to avoid any crossover effect from the opening of the new store. They polled the two communities before and after the store opened to see the effect of the change.The results “mirror findings in the U.K., where researchers created a similar comparison of two neighborhoods in Scotland and observed no net effect on fruit and vegetable intake,” Ritger adds.
All of which suggests that the Affordable Pear Act rests on a backward assumption about cause and effect. It’s not that most “food desert” denizens eat unhealthy food because grocers refuse to supply them with fruits and vegetables. Instead, grocers don’t supply them with fruits and vegetables because the demand is insufficient.
Theodore Dalrymple wrote a piercing essay, back in 2002, about the malnourishment of the underclass. He wrote:
It has become a truth universally acknowledged that food deserts actually exist and must be the fault of the supermarket chains (and, by extension, the System). Indeed, the government, ever on the lookout for new areas of life to control with its dictatorial benevolence, has proposed a new law to eradicate what is now known as “food poverty’ by irrigating these deserts with subsidies to food suppliers. As yet the additional provisions of the bill are not at all firm, except for the establishment of a Food Poverty Authority in every district, manned by bureaucrats, who will measure food poverty and count the miles people have to go to get fresh vegetables. One man’s poverty is another man’s employment opportunity: as long ago as the sixteenth century, a German bishop remarked that the poor are a gold mine.
Nothing has changed, at least not for the better. Read Dalrymple’s article here. (Though depressing, it’s well worth your time — and it contains the cleverest paraphrase of Hobbes ever written.)
Some good reads from the Web today:
Matt Ridley on inequality.
Kevin Williamson on feminism.
From the Statistics Lab at Cambridge University, a look at some climate-alarmist buncombe.
The Second Amendment notwithstanding, it appears that some pretty serious infringement is under consideration in Massachusetts, right-to-bear-arms-wise. Boston.com reports (my emphasis):
More than a year after the school shootings in Newtown, Conn., a panel of academic experts today released a long-awaited report recommending that Massachusetts tighten its gun laws, which are already considered among the toughest in the country.
The panel made 44 recommendations, including that Massachusetts join a national mental health database for screening potential gun owners, that it beef up firearms training requirements, and that it eliminate Class B gun licenses, which are seldom used.
It recommended that the Massachusetts Chiefs of Police Association help define a series of factors that could be used to prohibit “unsuitable persons’ from acquiring firearms. The panel said the current process allows local law enforcement officials too much discretion to determine whether a person is suitable to be granted a license to carry.
It also said Massachusetts should require anyone wanting to purchase a hunting rifle or a shotgun to pass those standards of suitability. That could allow local police chiefs to deny gun purchases to people who have been arrested, but not convicted, of a crime.
Charles C. W. Cooke tweeted:
In other words, MA wants to deny a constitutional right to anyone who the state has accused of doing something wrong.
In other words:
1) You annoy the State.
2) The State arrests you, on charges that it knows it cannot prove.
3) You can now be legally and permanently disarmed.
Even in these dark days, it startles me that a “panel of academic experts” (i.e. statist Eloi hoplophobes) could issue, without fear of inciting widespread rebellion, such a breathtakingly audacious insult to the liberty of the people of Massachusetts, and to the Constitution that supposedly guarantees their most basic rights. (I should know better by now; things are moving very fast these days.)
Keep your powder dry, people.
I used to spill a lot of ink here about the question of free will. In the most recent of a series of thirteen related posts on the topic, I mentioned a disagreement on this topic between two writers whose names are often linked: the philosopher Daniel Dennett and the neuroscientist Sam Harris. Both are, probably, best known to the public as members, along with Richard Dawkins and the late Christopher Hitchens, of the prominent quartet of atheist authors often lumped together as the “Four Horsemen”.
Before all this atheism, though, Daniel Dennett had already made a name for himself for his controversial work on the philosophy of mind, and for several books and papers on free will. When it comes to free will, Dennett is what’s known as a “compatibilist”: he believes that our traditional concept of volitional freedom, when examined closely, is incoherent, but that even an ordinary materialistic understanding of our nature — in which our minds, and our choices, are entirely supervenient upon the workings of our biological brains — can give us, nevertheless, all the free will that’s “worth wanting”. I have found his two books, Elbow Room and Freedom Evolves, to be persuasive, and I would say that I am a “compatibilist” myself. (If you are interested in this ancient question, you should read them both.)
Sam Harris, on the other hand, is what you might call a “hard determinist”. He agrees with Professor Dennett both that our ordinary idea of free will is incoherent, and that our minds and choices are simply the output of our material brains — but unlike Dennett, he argues that free will is simply an illusion, and that this has important moral consequences. He has written a book of his own about this.
Daniel Dennett has now written a serious critique of Sam Harris’s book, which Dr. Harris has posted at his own website. You can read it here. If this topic interests you at all, it’s well worth your time.
Over the years readers have mentioned to me that too much of the discussion here takes place in the comment-threads, which are often far longer than the posts themselves. The days go by, the posts roll away down the screen, and exchanges that happen days after the original post are, effectively, hidden. I’ve been trying to remind myself to make substantial responses to comments in new posts, but I often forget.
In a recent item I mentioned that most conservatives regard liberals as decent, well-intentioned people. Responding to our consistently leftmost commenter, I wrote:
I think that both conservatives and well-intentioned liberals such as yourself want the same thing, which is to create and sustain a prosperous and well-functioning American society that maximizes opportunity and happiness, in harmony with our nature. What we disagree about is how best to achieve it (and I think this is due in large part to disagreements about the realities of human nature).
This prompted another commenter to inquire:
What I don’t understand is: why do conservatives insist on seeing liberals as good people with bad ideas?
I replied:
I feel that way only because I know so many of them. Looking at history with aloof, post-Enlightenment skepticism, modern liberals have come to believe that the source of humanity’s endless conflict and suffering is the self-confidence of traditional societies ”” above all, the discriminations that such cultures, in order to survive and flourish, necessarily make between friend and foe, higher and lower, self and other, good and evil, beauty and ugliness, wisdom and folly, sacred and profane, and right and wrong.
The key to harmony and happiness, then, is to reject and abandon all such confident discrimination in favor of radical doubt, which leads in turn to radical relativism. The equally radical — and poisonous — consequence of this is that if nothing and nobody can rightly be judged to be better or worse, or right or wrong, then the world’s obvious inequalities must mean that somehow, somebody cheated.
For example, look at the phenomenal success of Western, Judeo-Christian civilization, which effectively conquered and transformed the entire world, while creating sublime works of art, immeasurable wealth, and lifting billions out of poverty.
There are two possibilities. One is that for such a stupendous conquest to have happened, there must simply have been something inherently superior about such a civilization — and, because cultures do not fall from the sky, something special also about the people who created it.
But if you must rule that out, because it is offensive even to imagine such a thing, then what’s left? Only that somehow it was a dirty trick, a great injustice ”” and that in the name of justice the villains must be brought down, their perfidy exposed, their altars shattered, their ill-gotten wealth confiscated, and their ambitions confounded.
This necessary insight — that the essence and primum movens of modern liberalism is the pursuit of a radical equality that ultimately eliminates all basis for conflict, and that this pursuit makes necessary a corrosive and ultimately suicidal relativism — is obviously not my own. I had my first serious encounter with it in Allan Bloom’s 1987 book The Closing of the American Mind. Reading that book was what started me on my own road to Damascus.
Bloom wrote this about the students entering his university (my emphasis):
They are unified only in their relativism and in their allegiance to equality. And the two are related in a moral intention. The relativity of truth is not a theoretical insight but a moral postulate, the condition of a free society, or so they see it. They have all been equipped with this framework early on, and it is the modern replacement for the inalienable natural rights that used to be the traditional American grounds for a free society…
The danger they have been taught to fear from absolutism is not error but intolerance. Relativism is necessary to openness; and this is the virtue, the only virtue, which all primary education for more than fifty years has dedicated itself to inculcating. Openness — and the relativism that makes it the only plausible stance in the face of various claims to truth and various ways of life and kinds of human beings — is the great insight of our times. The true believer is the real danger. The study of history and of culture teaches that all the world was mad in the past; men always thought they were right, and that led to wars, persecutions, slavery, xenophobia, racism, and chauvinism. The point is not to correct the mistakes and really be right; rather it is not to think you are right at all.
President Obama recently called the quest for equality “the defining challenge of our time”, and said “it drives everything I do in this office”. It is the Holy Grail.
In my response to our commenter, I ended with a polemical flourish:
And so liberals, with the best of intentions, have made themselves the enemies of everything good, everything true, everything superior, and everything sacred: in short, everything that once made our civilization great.
This is, perhaps, a trifle excessive, though not by much. I certainly do not mean to say that in modern liberalism’s relentless jihad against all forms of inequality, nothing good has been accomplished. Although the capacity to make essential discriminations is necessary for the survival of any living organism — from a paramecium to a civilization — not all discrimination is good or just, and the liberal juggernaut of the late 20th century achieved some genuine moral victories, particularly in its struggle to ensure that all Americans, regardless of race, stood as equals before the law. The problem is that the radically egalitarian anti-discrimination at the heart of modern liberalism knows no limiting principle: it is a “universal acid” that gnaws relentlessly at any vessel that tries to contain it. Having leached away the pernicious discriminations in our society’s laws, it began next to attack the civil, social, and educational framework of society itself — and now dissolves the very foundations upon which our nation, and our civilization, were erected. In particular, it is antagonistic to both truth and liberty: to truth, because it must deny the permanent, natural inequalities of the world, and to liberty, because, as Will Durant reminds us:
[F]reedom and equality are sworn and everlasting enemies, and when one prevails the other dies. Leave men free, and their natural inequalities will multiply almost geometrically, as in England and America in the nineteenth century under laissez-faire. To check the growth of inequality, liberty must be sacrificed, as in Russia after 1917. Even when repressed, inequality grows; only the man who is below the average in economic ability desires equality; those who are conscious of superior ability desire freedom; and in the end superior ability has its way.
I’ve been working long hours this week, and haven’t had the time — nor sufficient sleep — to write anything worth reading. Meanwhile, the links have been piling up, as they tend to do. So it’s time once again to flush, as we programmers say, the cache:
— Another reason that I hope humans never lose their fondness for creating beautiful, useless things.
— From Ben Franklin, a handy compendium.
— Goats.
— Going, going…
— We’ve been neglecting this topic. More later.
— U.S. cities over time, in a lovely chart.
— Nice UI. (It was recommended for use with the GSS, as I recall.)
— Safe house. See also here.
Here’s a pleasingly dyspeptic assessment of the State of the Union pageant, from Kevin D. Williamson.
It’s the dead of winter here in the Outer Cape, and it’s been unusually cold and snowy. That doesn’t stop me from getting outside, though. Here are a few cell-phone shots from some recent walks around Wellfleet:
First, our little wooded lane, after Tuesday’s snowstorm:
Next, a few shots of Duck Harbor from about ten days ago. (The beach faces due west, across Cape Cod Bay.) These were taken at the end of a rainy day:
Just as the sun was about to set, the clouds broke. Here’s some of that famous Cape light:
It’s been so cold that the harbor was choked with ice earlier today:
From Powers Landing, a couple of days ago: snow, sand, ice, sea, and sky.
And from just before sunset today, a view of The Gut, from the Herring River dike:
I feel sorry, sometimes, for the throngs of people who come here every summer, but never get to see how beautiful it is in the winter. Can’t really say I miss ’em, though.
Here’s something that seems to be in the air today.
Yesterday I added a comment to our Benghazi thread from a few days back. As usually happens as threads lengthen, the conversation had wandered off-topic toward the more general sort of ideological scuffling that is a constant attractor in any discussion of current events these days.
I was responding to a typical example of what self-styled “progressives” think conservatives are all about, to wit:
The Republican Party does “really stand for something.’ It stands for a lot of things: tax cuts for high income households, subsidies for farmers, science denial, the criminalization of abortion, hostility to immigrants, indifference towards the environment, bans on gay marriage, favored treatment towards their favored industries, and so forth. You could look at the concatenation of Ayn Rand / Rand Paul / Paul Ryan and see a miserly and contemptuous worldview which would make Ebenezar [sic] Scrooge blush.
After I had responded to some of the other points the commenter had made, I ended with:
I will say this though, in a spirit of generosity: leaving aside professional political operatives of both parties, whose only aim is to seize and retain power, I think that both conservatives and well-intentioned liberals such as yourself want the same thing, which is to create and sustain a prosperous and well-functioning American society that maximizes opportunity and happiness, in harmony with our nature. What we disagree about is how best to achieve it (and I think this is due in large part to disagreements about the realities of human nature). It’s wrong of you to impugn our motives so, and I wish you’d stop doing it.
I had also added, but then deleted shortly after posting, an extra passage in which I pointed out an asymmetry between the ways conservatives and liberals view each other — namely that while conservatives generally think that liberals are misguided, and live in deep denial of obvious truths about human nature and the way the world actually works (as opposed to the way they think it ought to work), liberals view conservatives not just as misguided, but as morally evil. From there, it is easy to demonize and dehumanize them.
It may well be that our differences are truly intractable (indeed, I think they are), and that what we need is some sort of divorce, or disaggregation — but at the very least it would be nice to accomplish this without bloodshed, and if history teaches us anything at all, it teaches us that framing your political opponents not only as different, but evil, has a worrisome track-record.
Shortly after I posted this abridged comment, our reader Henry sent along a link to a column by Thomas Sowell, published just today on this very subject.
We read:
From the 18th century to today, many leading thinkers on the left have regarded those who disagree with them as being not merely factually wrong but morally repugnant. And again, this pattern is far less often found among those on the opposite side of the ideological spectrum.
The visceral hostility toward Sarah Palin by present day liberals, and the gutter level to which some descend in expressing it, is just one sign of a mindset on the left that goes back more than two centuries.
T.R. Malthus was the target of such hostility in the 18th and early 19th centuries. When replying to his critics, Malthus said, “I cannot doubt the talents of such men as Godwin and Condorcet. I am unwilling to doubt their candor.”
But William Godwin’s vision of Malthus was very different. He called Malthus “malignant,” questioned “the humanity of the man,” and said “I profess myself at a loss to conceive of what earth the man was made.”
This asymmetry in responses to people with different opinions has been too persistent, for too many years, to be just a matter of individual personality differences.
Although Charles Murray has been a major critic of the welfare state and of the assumptions behind it, he recalled that before writing his landmark book, “Losing Ground,” he had been “working for years with people who ran social programs at street level, and knew the overwhelming majority of them to be good people trying hard to help.”
Can you think of anyone on the left who has described Charles Murray as “a good person trying hard to help”? He has been repeatedly denounced as virtually the devil incarnate — far more often than anyone has tried seriously to refute his facts.
Such treatment is not reserved solely for Murray. Liberal writer Andrew Hacker spoke more sweepingly when he said, “conservatives don’t really care whether black Americans are happy or unhappy.”
Even in the midst of an election campaign against the British Labour Party, when Winston Churchill said that there would be dire consequences if his opponents won, he said that this was because “they do not see where their theories are leading them.”
But, in an earlier campaign, Churchill’s opponent said that he looked upon Churchill “as such a personal force for evil that I would take up the fight against him with a whole heart.”
In today’s Best of the Web James Taranto also picked up the same theme. Mr. Taranto commented on New York governor Andrew Cuomo’s harsh remarks about traditional conservatives (he said on TV the other day that they had “no place in the state of New York”) — an opinion that was quickly and enthusiastically seconded by Gotham’s radically left-wing Mayor, Bill de Blasio. Mr. Taranto wrote (my emphasis):
[T]here’s something a bit puzzling about the sheer viciousness of the governor’s and the mayor’s rhetoric. Liberals, after all, pride themselves on their toleration and open-mindedness, but often they sound like Michael Caine’s character in “Austin Powers in Goldmember” who said: “There’s only two things I hate in this world. People who are intolerant of other people’s cultures and the Dutch.” Cuomo and de Blasio, unlike Caine, don’t understand they’re the butt of the joke.
One explanation for this phenomenon comes from social psychologist Jonathan Haidt, author of “The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion.” Todd Zywicki, coincidentally on the same day Cuomo made his remark, summed up the relevant finding in a Volokh Conspiracy post:
Haidt reports on the following experiment: after determining whether someone is liberal or conservative, he then has each person answer the standard battery of questions as if he were the opposite ideology. So, he would ask a liberal to answer the questions as if he were a “typical conservative” and vice-versa. What he finds is quite striking: “The results were clear and consistent. Moderates and conservatives were most accurate in their predictions, whether they were pretending to be liberals or conservatives. Liberals were the least accurate, especially those who describe themselves as ‘very liberal.’ The biggest errors in the whole study came when liberals answered the Care and Fairness questions while pretending to be conservatives.” In other words, moderates and conservatives can understand the liberal worldview and liberals are unable to relate to the conservative worldview, especially when it comes to questions of care and fairness.
In short, Haidt’s research suggests that many liberals really do believe that conservatives are heartless bastards–or as a friend of mine once remarked, “Conservatives think that liberals are good people with bad ideas, whereas liberals think conservatives are bad people”–and very liberal people think that especially strongly. Haidt suggests that there is some truth to this.
Haidt has a theory that moral reasoning is driven by, as Zywicki writes, “five key vectors or values of psychological morality: (1) care/harm, (2) fairness, (3) loyalty, (4) authority, and (5) sanctity.” Haidt posits that “conservative values are more overlapping than liberals–conservatives have a ‘thicker’ moral worldview that includes all five values, whereas liberals have a ‘thinner’ view that rests on only two variables,” in Zywicki’s summary.
I don’t know much about Haidt’s research, but I do know, from extensive personal experience, the vicious antipathy — it hardly seems excessive to call it hatred — that “progressives” so often feel toward conservatives. Again and again, when I have been with them in social settings, and the conversation turns to politics, I have heard truly intemperate expressions of moral condemnation and venomous loathing expressed about conservatives, with the general agreement of those assembled — and when I have chosen not to sit in silence, but to engage their ideas from a conservative viewpoint, I have seen, again and again, their faces darken with resentment as their eyes narrow with a look of barely contained fury. It is altogether familiar and predictable. It is clear that to them I am not just someone with a different opinion about what makes for happy, harmonious societies: I am a heretic, a malefactor, a threat, a devil. It is distinctly unpleasant to be on the receiving end of such malignance, and for some folks it must even be frightening. I can easily see why some people are afraid to speak up.
Thomas Sowell concludes:
Examples of this asymmetry between those on opposite sides of the ideological divide could be multiplied almost without limit. It is not solely a matter of individual personality differences.
The vision of the left is not just a vision of the world. For many, it is also a vision of themselves — a very flattering vision of people trying to save the planet, rescue the exploited, create “social justice” and otherwise be on the side of the angels. This is an exalting vision that few are ready to give up, or to risk on a roll of the dice, which is what submitting it to the test of factual evidence amounts to. Maybe that is why there are so many fact-free arguments on the left, whether on gun control, minimum wages, or innumerable other issues — and why they react so viscerally to those who challenge their vision.
I’m sure that’s true. But the intensity of this reaction seems to go beyond mere defensiveness about one’s self-image. It seems downright… religious.
A common response from those who wish to inoculate the Obama administration, and in particular Hillary Clinton, from charges of negligence and malfeasance in the Benghazi murders, is to suggest that Ambassador Chris Stevens was in large part responsible for the absence of security at the diplomatic compound. In our own comment thread, for example, we saw:
What looks obvious in hindsight appears much less so in real time: we know that Ambassador Stevens twice declined offers of military assistance shortly before the attacks. If the Ambassador on the ground considers the consulate to be safe, one could forgive people in Washington for minimizing the risk.
Right, there’s Hillary off the hook. Anyway, what difference, at this point, does it make?
Well, not so fast, says Gregory Hicks. He should know; he was there.
It’s good to see someone sticking up for Mr. Stevens, even now. Too bad nobody did when it mattered.
The venerable liberal journalist Nat Hentoff joins the chorus calling for Barack Obama’s impeachment.
Worth a try, say I. The only plausible objection I can think of is Joe Biden, but at this point that’s a trade I’d be glad to make.
Boy, do these things pile up quickly.
— Ice balls.
— I can almost hear him say “I told you so.”
— Maybe we can get the Dems to primary this guy in 2016.
— Common sense from Jim Cramer.
— Even more personality tests.
— Race trumps sex, gals. (There’s plenty of room over here on the right.)
— 102 years old and counting: inside the 1911.
— Coming soon: the 28th Amendment. Not.
— Bundle up, folks, and throw some more carbon on the fire.
— More on this one later.
— The UK: as good as dead.
A lot has been made of The New York Times’s recent article, by David Kirkpatrick, about the sacking of the U.S. diplomatic mission in Benghazi on September 11th of 2012, in which four men, including our ambassador, were killed. The Obama administration’s partisans have given the article a triumphal reception, and have announced repeatedly that it ‘debunks’ the Right’s criticism of the administration’s handling of the affair. I was happy to let this one pass by in silence — there has been ample commentary from all sides, and most people’s minds are already made up when it comes to this shameful affair — but having had some requests from readers and commenters, I thought I should put together a post. I’m sorry that it’s a little “after the fact”.
What, then, does the article say? I’ve read it several times now, and as far as I can see, it makes only two claims that might be understood as ‘debunking’ anything. These claims are:
1) That the attack was not an al-Qaeda operation, and
2) That the attack was in fact a reaction to a provocative video, as the Obama administration claimed in the days and weeks after the attack.
The first point was made clearly and explicitly by Mr. Kirkpatrick:
Months of investigation by The New York Times, centered on extensive interviews with Libyans in Benghazi who had direct knowledge of the attack there and its context, turned up no evidence that Al Qaeda or other international terrorist groups had any role in the assault.
This assertion was taken up immediately and effectively by a great many sources. The Washington Post, for example, gave us the following:
Militiamen under the command of Abu Sufian bin Qumu, the leader of Ansar al-Sharia in the Libyan city of Darnah, participated in the attack that killed U.S. Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens and three other Americans, U.S. officials said…
Qumu, 54, a Libyan from Darnah, is well known to U.S. intelligence officials. A former tank driver in the Libyan army, he served 10 years in prison in the country before fleeing to Egypt and then to Afghanistan.
According to U.S. military files disclosed by the anti-secrecy group WikiLeaks, Qumu trained in 1993 at one of Osama bin Laden’s terrorist camps in Afghanistan and later worked for a bin Laden company in Sudan, where the al-Qaeda leader lived for three years.
Qumu fought alongside the Taliban against the United States in Afghanistan; he then fled to Pakistan and was later arrested in Peshawar. He was turned over to the United States and held at Guantanamo Bay.
He has a “long-term association with Islamic extremist jihad and members of al-Qaida and other extremist groups,’ according to the military files. “Detainee’s alias is found on a list of probable al-Qaida personnel receiving monthly stipends.’
Qumu also had links to Zayn al-Abidin Muhammed Hussein, known by his alias Abu Zubaida, a key al-Qaeda facilitator who is being held indefinitely at Guantanamo.
Even the New York Times itself had previously acknowledged Mr Qumu’s a-Qaeda connections.
After all this came out, the Times tried to backpedal. In particular it denied that Qumu was involved. The Weekly Standard stops this cold. (Why were Ansar al-Sharia Derna’s men in town that day?)
The Times also reported, on October 29th of 2012, that one Muhammad Jamal was involved in the attack. Mr. Jamal, who trained with al-Qaeda, is a long-standing acolyte of Ayman al-Zawahiri, al-Qaeda’s global leader. Here are some of Mr. Jamal’s letters to Zawahiri. Both the State DepartmentFoggy Bottom and the UN have certified Jamal’s link to al-Qaeda.
Regarding Mr. Jamal, the Weekly Standard reports:
Jamal was arrested in November 2012 by Egyptian authorities and identified as a leader of the so-called Nasr City cell, which has multiple ties to al Qaeda.
Jamal is not the only key suspect omitted by Kirkpatrick. Another suspect is Faraj al-Shibli, a Libyan who, according to U.S. intelligence officials contacted by THE WEEKLY STANDARD, served as Osama bin Laden’s bodyguard during the 1990s. According to these same officials, al-Shibli is suspected of bringing materials from the Benghazi compound to senior al Qaeda leadership in Pakistan. Al-Shibli was detained in Pakistan and then Libya. Al Shibli did not immediately admit his involvement in the Benghazi attacks and was subsequently released. But U.S. officials continue to believe he played a role.
Far from being ‘on the run’, as the Obama administration would have us believe, al-Qaeda is doing very well, and its web of influence appears to be expanding throughout the Mideast and the Maghreb. In August, Reuters reported on connections between the Benghazi attackers and the jihadis who made a deadly January 2013 assault on a gas plant in Algeria, in which 39 foreigners were killed. Reuters added:
At the center of the web is Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), which has expanded far from its Algerian birthplace and now has links to other jihadi groups in Maghreb countries, including Tunisia and Libya. Their shared ideology combines with other, often financial, interests.
Just a week or so ago, CNN reported that al-Qaeda now controls more territory than ever in the Middle East.
Besides its claim that there was no al-Qaeda involvement in the attack at Benghazi, the Times‘s article tried to shore up the Obama administration’s early insistence that the massive assault was simply a spontaneous demonstration about a blasphemous movie, Innocence of Muslms. To support this assertion, the article featured a photo taken on September 11th at the U.S. embassy in Cairo, which showed angry protestors (waving al-Qaeda flags, by the way), and bore the following caption:
Egyptian protesters tearing down the United States flag at the American Embassy in Cairo on Sept.11, 2012, during a demonstration against “Innocence of Muslims,’ a video offensive to Islam.
As multiple sources have reported, though, the Cairo demonstration wasn’t about a movie, but was about the continued imprisonment of the “blind sheik” Omar Rahman, who remains incarcerated for his role in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. Aaron Klein reminds us that CNN covered the story that day:
On the day of the Sept. 11, 2012, protests in Cairo, CNN’s Nic Robertson interviewed the son of Rahman, who described the protest as being about freeing his father. No Muhammad film was mentioned.
In the wake of the Obama administration’s media blitz about the movie, Fox News commissioned Agincourt Solutions (now Babel Street), a global social-media analysis firm, to look for signs of a groundswell of resentment about the film. They found none:
As the State Department began Tuesday to circulate a highly anticipated report into what happened in the Sept. 11 Libya consulate attack, a separate analysis found that the first reference to the anti-Islam film that was initially blamed for sparking the attack was not detected on social media until a day later.
The independent review of more than 4,000 postings was conducted by a leading social media monitoring firm.
“From the data we have, it’s hard for us to reach the conclusion that the consulate attack was motivated by the movie. Nothing in the immediate picture ”“ surrounding the attack in Libya — suggests that,’ Jeff Chapman, chief executive with Agincourt Solutions told Fox News.
This attack employed arson, small arms, vehicle-mounted machine guns, rocket-propelled grenades, and mortars. (Much of this weaponry, by the way, was under the control of our former ally Muammar Qaddafi — until we threw him to the dogs. Our military intervention, made entirely without Congressional approval, allowed his arsenals to fall into the hands of jihadist militias.) There is also evidence that the attackers knew the layout of the compound in advance, including the location of the “safe room” in which Ambassador Stevens was asphyxiated. There is simply no compelling reason for any thinking person to doubt that it was a premeditated assault. The Times invests a lot of ink in parsing the distinction between the al-Qaeda core, its major affiliates, and the many sympathetic warlords and militias who carry out jihadist warfare throughout the bloody Muslim world, but at bottom, to quote the woman for whose sake the article was obviously written: “what difference does it make?” Our people were put in harm’s way, with grotesquely insufficient security, in a failed state that had become a viper’s nest of violent and heavily armed jihadists. How could something awful not have happened?
Leaving aside its claims about al-Qaeda and the video, there is much in the Times’s article that is damning indeed, and indicates serious incompetence, and astonishing unwisdom, at the State Department. Again and again Mr. Kirkpatrick exposes the naive optimism that led to this catastrophe. In the first section of the article, Mr. Kirkpatrick refers to State Department’s “months of American misunderstandings and misperceptions about Libya and especially Benghazi”:
The United States waded deeply into post-Qaddafi Libya, hoping to build a beachhead against extremists, especially Al Qaeda. It believed it could draw a bright line between friends and enemies in Libya. But it ultimately lost its ambassador in an attack that involved both avowed opponents of the West and fighters belonging to militias that the Americans had taken for allies.
Bloody fools.
A fuller accounting of the attacks suggests lessons for the United States that go well beyond Libya. It shows the risks of expecting American aid in a time of desperation to buy durable loyalty, and the difficulty of discerning friends from allies of convenience in a culture shaped by decades of anti-Western sentiment. Both are challenges now hanging over the American involvement in Syria’s civil conflict.
There simply are not words to express the historical, cultural, and strategic naiveté on display here. How could anyone not a child or an idiot be surprised by any of what happened? Yet this administration, and this reporter, having at last been “shown the risks” by the actual slaughter of our people, stand in dawning awareness only now.
As depressing as all of this is, far, far worse is the prospect that the architect of this folly — the heartless, ambitious woman who set the stage for this calamity, and who has declined, as both she and her husband always have throughout their disgraceful career in public life, to accept any responsibility for the wreckage she has left in her wake — may in a few short years ascend to the Presidency.
Note: so polarizing is this topic, and so unlikely to produce fruitful discussion, that it is with some reluctance that I leave the comment-box open. But comment away, if you like. I doubt I’ll join in.
According to the New York Times, the “prolonged” execution of one Dennis McGuire — who had been condemned for the brutal murder of a young pregnant woman — has raised, once again, questions about the humaneness of various methods of execution. In Mr. McGuire’s case, the technique was lethal injection:
As the lethal drugs flowed into his veins in the Ohio death chamber, Dennis B. McGuire at first “went unconscious’ and his body was still, his daughter, Amber McGuire, said Friday.
But a few minutes later, she said, she was horrified to see her father struggling, his stomach heaving, a fist clenching.
“He started making all these horrible, horrible noises, and at that point, that’s when I covered my eyes and my ears,’ said Ms. McGuire, who watched the execution on Thursday at the Southern Ohio Correctional Facility, near Lucasville. “He was suffering.’
Mr. McGuire’s execution, conducted with a new and untested combination of drugs, took about 25 minutes from the time the drugs were started to the time death was declared. The process, several witnesses said, was accompanied by movement and gasping, snorting and choking sounds.
It has not been established whether Mr. McGuire was conscious of pain or whether the drugs that were used were responsible for his prolonged death. But at a time when the drugs once routinely used in executions are in short supply and states are scrambling to find new formulas, the execution is stirring intense debate about the obligations of the state toward those it kills.
Let’s leave aside the not-uninteresting question of the “obligations of the state toward those it kills” (some might argue, after all, that flaying and exposure would be a more suitable response, and a more effective deterrent, for the kind of crime Mr. McGuire committed). We will assume, arguendo, that what we want is a means of execution that is sudden, 100% reliable, and can safely be assumed to cause no lingering discomfort.
Is this really so difficult to produce? How about, say, three simultaneous shotgun blasts to the back of the head, at point-blank range? That ought to satisfy our criteria. What about dropping a ten-ton flat steel slab from a height of about fifteen feet? Why not a Semtex neck-pillow? (I could go on, but you get the point: this is easy.)
What am I missing here? Why all this fussing? Given what we are trying to accomplish here this should be, if you will forgive me, a no-brainer.
Here’s the only answer I can think of: we’re squeamish. All the methods I’ve suggested are messy, and create a lot of splatter. I think that we prefer silly, complicated arrangements — gas chambers, electrocution, and lethal injection — because they make killing the condemned more painless for us.
