Who Knew?

November 30, 2012 – 12:48 pm

Another thunderbolt from the frontiers of science: men like sports more than women.

This will require an intervention, I think.

By Malcolm | Posted in Society and Culture, Sport | Comments (2)

Just Another Day In Paradise

November 30, 2012 – 11:08 am

For those of you with any lingering interest in the pestilential viper’s-nest we like to call the “Mideast” — that blasted, slippery-edged sinkhole of human misery that manages always to be going straight to Hell without ever actually getting there and leaving the rest of us in peace — I reprint below two items from John McCreary’s latest NightWatch:

Syria: On 29 November, the administration of Damascus’ airport cancelled all incoming and outgoing flights because rebel groups had cut the road from the airport to Damascus, for the first time.

Syrian rebels also used shoulder-fired anti-aircraft missile systems (MANPADs) that were captured from Syrian forces to shoot down a government helicopter and a fixed wing combat aircraft in a 24-hour period.

Comment: The Syrian uprising crossed an important strategic threshold with the first demonstrated capability to shoot down government aircraft. This is a major escalation of the threat to the Damascus government.

One news report stated an opposition group had captured 40 MANPADS in recent overruns of government air force bases. That number is enough to neutralize the government’s air advantage, provided they are distributed adequately to trained shooters. A key question is who is providing the training. That is almost certainly US special forces.

The gradual loss of air superiority means the regime cannot survive, though its demise is not yet imminent.

Several other recent tactical successes by opposition fighting groups also almost certainly are the result of US and possibly other Western training, guidance and possibly leadership. Within four months of American announcements that US Special Operations Forces were providing training to opposition groups in camps in Jordan, the opposition groups suddenly have become tactically more effective. The targets of some of their attacks are more harmful to the Damascus regime and some groups have greater ability to coordinate their attacks.

These are the effects of superior outside military involvement. These same opposition groups fumbled around for 18 months with no significant impact on the stability of the regime. The US is involved in the fight, probably with special forces inside advising selected rebel groups.

The regime is falling back, trying to find a line it can hold. That presumably is the corridor from Damascus to Latakia, the Alawite homeland.

As noted above, policy choices have consequences. Should the Alawite government fall, Syrian Christians, Jews, Zoroastrians and other minorities will be killed and shrines destroyed. That is why the Syrian Kurds are opposing the Syrian opposition fighters and jihadists.

State of Palestine: The United Nations General Assembly on Thursday voted to upgrade the status of the Palestinian Authority. Henceforth, the UN will treat the Authority as a non-member observer state, instead of as an entity. The vote was 138 delegates in favor of the measure, nine against and 41 abstentions.

Comment: US State Department and the US Permanent Representative to the UN have been humiliated in one of the worst defeats of US diplomacy in the modern era. The US diplomats failed to persuade US allies to vote with the US. It is a setback for Israel’s negotiating position.

Some news pundits have called it a symbolic victory. Actually that is quite wide of the mark. The Palestinian State will now be an equal – in the UN – negotiating partner with Israel, rather than an inferior.

The positions of the negotiators are forever changed. As a state, Palestine is entitled to a much wider range of international support than as an entity. It is freed from dependence on the largesse of Arab states, the US, the West and non-governmental organizations. It has the authority to negotiate on its own, without Israel permission.

It also may be recognized as a belligerent by other states, entitling it to provision of arms. It also means that Israel’s sea blockade of Gaza may be judged an act of war, rather than an act to contain a renegade entity. Airspace controls also may be affected. As for ground borders, Egypt can negotiate with the Palestinian state about how to control the border in Sinai, rather than with Israel.

Palestine also can negotiate directly with Iran and Sudan to ensure the supply of arms through Egypt. No UN member needs, ex officio, to work with or through Israel, henceforth, in dealing with or helping the Palestinians.

This is a diplomatic and strategic calamity for the US Department of State and its UN mission and for Israel. Its full consequences will become clearer over time, but US national security interests have taken a major hit.

By Malcolm | Posted in Foreign Affairs | Comments (15)

The Dark Enlightenment

November 29, 2012 – 7:08 pm

The title of this post is a term that is taking root in a certain corner of the intellectual blogosphere. Dennis Mangan has written about it just today; I first saw it in a post by John Derbyshire about a month ago. That post led me to a four-part series by Nick Land, in which Mr. Land discusses the singular oeuvre of blogger Mencius Moldbug.

If you want to get an idea of what all this is about, read Nick Land’s extended essay: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, and Part 4. There are many links to follow from there, to Moldbug’s place and elsewhere; for example this item from the well-known biology blog Gene Expression.

This is all rather a large and exotic reading assignment, and caveat lector: for some of you, it may turn out to be a “red pill” you can’t unswallow. Others may find their throats constricting at the first taste of it, and won’t be able to get it down at all.

Update: there’s more. Read the rest of Nick Land’s extended essay here: parts 4a, 4b, 4c, 4d, 4e, 4f(inal).

By Malcolm | Posted in Society and Culture | Comments (7)

The Beatings Will Continue Until Morale Improves

November 29, 2012 – 5:34 pm

Here’s an item that’s making the rounds today: it’s the abstract of a paper published in the Psychology of Women Quarterly. The topic is something called “benevolent sexism”, which refers to all those “chivalrous” things gentlemen do for ladies: holding the door for them, seating them at table, offering them your arm during a stroll, serving them first, etc.

Shockingly, it turns out that these gestures actually make everyone happier.

Here’s the abstract (my emphasis):

Previous research suggests that benevolent sexism is an ideology that perpetuates gender inequality. But despite its negative consequences, benevolent sexism is a prevalent ideology that some even find attractive. To better understand why women and men alike might be motivated to adopt benevolent sexism, the current study tested system justification theory’s prediction that benevolent sexism might have a positive linkage to life satisfaction through increased diffuse system justification, or the sense that the status quo is fair. A structural equation model revealed that benevolent sexism was positively associated with diffuse system justification within a sample of 274 college women and 111 college men. Additionally, benevolent sexism was indirectly associated with life satisfaction for both women and men through diffuse system justification. In contrast, hostile sexism was not related to diffuse system justification or life satisfaction. The results imply that although benevolent sexism perpetuates inequality at the structural level, it might offer some benefits at the personal level.

All good so far, right? Well, here’s the authors’ conclusion:

Thus, our findings reinforce the dangerous nature of benevolent sexism and emphasize the need for interventions to reduce its prevalence.

Love that “thus”. In other words:

“Here’s an ancient, natural feature of human social life that, as our own study has just shown, makes people happy. It conflicts, however, with our wholly artificial conception, for which there is absolutely no basis whatsoever in any successful culture ancient or modern, of what the “correct” relation between the sexes ought to be.

If, therefore, as appears to be the case, establishing the “correct” relation between the sexes actually decreases human happiness, then society (under the benevolent guidance of the Psychology of Women Quarterly and its contributors) shall perform whatever “interventions” are necessary for the re-education of the people, and the reprogramming of human nature.”

We see here once again, as we see everywhere, the psychotic, suicidal effect of the unitary principle that all of modern liberalism is reducible to: that the suppression and eradication of any and all discriminations, whether by Man or by Nature, is the highest possible good.

This, friends, is a world gone absolutely barking mad.

By Malcolm | Posted in Society and Culture | Comments (9)

No Fishes?

November 29, 2012 – 1:24 pm

This is either some top-notch street magic, or some clever video jiggery-pokery. Worth a look, in any event.

By Malcolm | Posted in Shameless Filler | Comments (1)

Padawan Wars

November 28, 2012 – 7:22 pm

Here.

It’s all fun and games, until someone loses a leg.

By Malcolm | Posted in Tomfoolery | Comments (0)

Approaching The Bench

November 28, 2012 – 7:01 pm

Here’s Stanford’s Peter Robinson, interviewing Antonin Scalia for the Federalist Society (in five parts: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5). Well worth your time, I think, and you might be surprised by some of what Justice Scalia has to say.

By Malcolm | Posted in Society and Culture, Reason and Philosophy, Language | Comments (0)

Pain, No Gain

November 28, 2012 – 4:55 pm

I used to run. I never liked it much, but I did it anyway. I was never fleet of foot, and I never ran very far — two or three miles, usually, with the longest effort ever being only about six miles or so.

I did it mainly because I found running to be good training for the will. I disliked it so much that the mental effort it took for me to get out there and do it cultivated a useful kind of inner discipline. But as the years went by the various injuries I’ve accumulated — a teenage hatchet-wound to my left ankle, a torn left ACL with serious meniscus damage, and a shredded right Achilles tendon — made running more and more unpleasant, and so a few years ago I stopped altogether.

I’m happy to see that this turns out to have been exactly the right move.

By Malcolm | Posted in Sport | Comments (2)

Forward!

November 28, 2012 – 11:24 am

From an article entitled When Work Is Punished: The Tragedy Of America’s Welfare State:

We realize that this is a painful topic in a country in which the issue of welfare benefits, and cutting (or not) the spending side of the fiscal cliff, have become the two most sensitive social topics. Alas, none of that changes the matrix of incentives for most Americans who find themselves in a comparable situation: either being on the left side of minimum US wage, and relying on benefits, or move to the right side at far greater personal investment of work, and energy, and… have the same disposable income at the end of the day.

As I wrote just after the election:

America has now crossed the event horizon, and the singularity lies ahead. Before we reach it ”” and although “there is a lot of ruin in a nation’, the acceleration will now be brisk ”” the tidal forces it will exert will soon begin to tear the nation to pieces.

Meanwhile, in England, there’s this — as described by Thomas Sowell, here.

The social engineers and professional uplifters responsible for this dog’s breakfast of a civilization in decline would have done well to reflect on two important concepts in evolutionary theory: “fitness landscapes” and “local maxima”.

By Malcolm | Posted in Politics | Comments (2)

Dumb Ways To Die

November 28, 2012 – 10:54 am

Here’s a light-heartedly macabre Australian train-safety video.

By Malcolm | Posted in General | Comments (0)

Your Lips Say “Moo”, But Your Eyes Say Yes

November 27, 2012 – 4:32 pm

Here’s something: Germany is planning to ban sex with animals.

This is not, mind you, because humans having sex with animals is something that a goodthinkful liberal society might wish to prohibit on any moral grounds. That would be discriminatory — and now that the universal acid of secular nihilism has dissolved away any foundation for moral judgment in polite society, the only sin that remains, the worst thing a person can be guilty of, is judgment itself.

No, the ban is being considered for the sake of the animals, presumably on the assumption that they are unable to give informed consent. Clearly, a failure to extend the prohibition against non-consensual sex to the animal kingdom introduces an impermissible discrimination between humans and animals, so it has to go.

I wonder if cucumbers are next.

By Malcolm | Posted in Society and Culture | Comments (3)

To Your Health

November 26, 2012 – 5:03 pm

A great sage once hoisted a glass and made the following toast:

“Here’s to Alcohol: the cause of, and solution to, all of life’s problems.”

With thanks to the indefatigable JK, here are some further details.

By Malcolm | Posted in General | Comments (2)

A Fire Shall Be Woken

November 25, 2012 – 11:57 pm

Like a great many people my age, I was bowled over in my adolescence by the books of J.R.R. Tolkien. I was smitten, transformed. Not only was I transported by the great story itself, but as the immigrant son of British expats, I was also awakened for the first time to the great depth of my heritage: my connection to an ancient culture and people, to their folkways and song and poetry and myth, and to the lives they lived, and the stories they told, in the fertile valleys and craggy hills of my ancestral homeland.

The depth and beauty of Tolkien’s language — both his plain English prose and the several tongues he created for the books — aroused in me what would become a lifelong fascination with words and their history. Perhaps above all, the books gave this unchurched boy an unforgettable and richly embroidered parable, my first lesson in the persistence of evil in the world, and gave me also an inexpressibly poignant (adolescents do “inexpressibly poignant” better than anybody) awareness of the transience, and inevitable passing, of even the greatest works of men.

I realize I’m not the only one to have been affected in this way, at the dawn of adult understanding, by Tolkien’s books. Another, as it turns out, is Bruce Charlton, who writes about it all here — although he speaks also of one effect that I was immune to.

By Malcolm | Posted in Books | Comments (3)

You Asked For It, You Got It

November 25, 2012 – 5:38 pm

With a hat tip to Kevin Kim, here’s one physician’s comments on Obamacare (which of course we have now lost any hope of repealing).

By Malcolm | Posted in General | Comments (3)

Dignity

November 24, 2012 – 11:06 pm

Forgive me, readers, for the paucity of output here lately. A concatenation of upheavals and disruptions in my personal life, combined with a deepening gloom as regards our position on the great arc of history, have together knocked some of the stuffing out of me, and I find myself slow to recover.

Much on my mind has been the brevity of our lives, and how little we can truly lay claim to as our own. All we really possess, in the last analysis, is that which cannot be taken away — and let me remind you, friends, that in this life anything that can be taken away most likely will be, before the last curtain falls.

Dignity? Fuhgeddaboutit, as they say in these parts. (It’s a stupid concept anyway, says Steven Pinker.)

That’s all I have right now, I’m afraid. I’m going to spend the rest of the evening with Aurelius and something strong to drink.

By Malcolm | Posted in General | Comments (4)

Happy Thanksgiving

November 22, 2012 – 1:17 pm

To you all. Yes, we’ve just taken an awful beating, and must now come to terms with the grim fact that the great Republic born with such promise in 1789 is now a tottering corpse, beyond hope of resurrection, and that its future now holds only decomposition and decay.

But if you have family and friends to hold close, if you have a roof over your head and clothes on your back and food to eat, if you still have a healthy body and sense enough to perceive all the beauty in the world, then you have a very great deal indeed to be thankful for.

At the very least, as Al Swearengen reminds us, we aren’t dead. And that’s plenty.

My thanks to you, readers, for joining me here all these years. Let’s raise a glass and be genuinely thankful for all our many blessings.

By Malcolm | Posted in General | Comments (4)

Back In NYC

November 21, 2012 – 1:53 am

My father’s situation having stabilized, I’ve just got back home. Thanks to you all for your kind comments and emails.

Old age is a terrible thing. Each crisis leaves you a little lower, a little weaker, a little frailer than the last. It’s hard to see aging as anything but a terrible, progressive, wasting disease, universally fatal.

Given that the body is a machine, aging is merely a technical problem, a matter of engineering. I have no doubt that it will be solved. Then we will have some new problems to solve.

Will the solution be expensive, perhaps extravagantly so? That will soon lead to a world divided between an immortal plutocracy, with all the time in the world to learn and master everything they ever wanted to know, and the rest of us.

Will it be cheap enough to be universally accessible? What will become of the world when all the old folks stop dying and getting out of the way?

I know this: it’s hard to think of a graver affront to human dignity than what old age does to a person.

By Malcolm | Posted in General | Comments (7)

Service Notice

November 18, 2012 – 7:22 pm

Things will likely be quiet here for a few days — my elderly father’s health has taken a sudden turn for the worse, and I’ve flown out to California to help look after him.

By Malcolm | Posted in General | Comments (7)

I Was Like

November 16, 2012 – 5:59 pm

With a hat tip to Laura Wood, here’s Clark Whelton on the recent descent of English into content-free moosh. An excerpt:

This deliberate descent into verbal bedlam first came to my attention when I was interviewing intern candidates for Mayor Edward I. Koch’s speechwriting office in New York City. Until the mid-’80s I had no trouble finding talented students from colleges such as Columbia, NYU, Pace University, and the senior colleges of New York’s City University system. Suddenly, however, it became difficult to recruit articulate candidates with writing ability. Even English majors had withered vocabularies and a hazy grasp of grammar. Many didn’t know a noun from verb and – strangest of all – they struggled mightily to avoid direct speech. In its place they employed self-quoting, playbacks of past conversations, “uptalking” (ending declarative sentences with an interrogative rise), and run-on sentences. They seemed to be defending themselves against their own words. I called this evasive dialect Vagueness.

At first I wondered if Vagueness had escaped from the zoo of post-hippy slang. For example, the overuse of “like” as a speech particle goes back to the early 1960s and beyond. But slang usually has an edge. Vagueness was amorphous. Operating as a kind of oral anti-matter, Vagueness camouflaged meaning with childish idioms, vocal intonation, facial expressions and ambiguity. To be understood, Vagueness had to be decoded. It wasn’t as though these students were capable of speaking standard American English but, for some perverse reason, had decided not to. Extended interviews revealed that most of them had no idea how to carry on a lucid conversation.

Like Ms. Wood, I disagree with the author’s suggestion (at the end of his essay) that the decline of clarity and coherence in written and spoken English has run its course. Why would it have? It exists in deadly embrace with a decline in critical thinking generally. Clear thinking can only be expressed in clear language, and the tendency toward vagueness in language exacerbates, and is in turn exacerbated by, a deepening avoidance of, and incapacity for, precision in analytical thought.

In Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, the contradictions and antinomies inherent in Ingsoc’s totalitarian ideology required that its subjects be conditioned to practice doublethink: the ability to hold in one’s mind whatever beliefs are necessary, espousing any or none of them as required, without regard to coherence. Because public utterance is a matter of public record, this means that language must in turn reflect the shape-shifting, foundationless irrationality of doublethink, and so it became Newspeak.

Now some of you will argue that the decline noted here might be due to our insistence on lowering academic standards so as to grant more general access to “higher” education, and no doubt this is true. But what critical analysis led to that? Anyway, one thing leads to another — and as noted below, we have already “progressed” to the point where considerable mastery of doublethink is necessary in order just to get through the day without incident.

By Malcolm | Posted in Language | Comments (6)

Fail

November 15, 2012 – 11:33 pm

The central inconsistency of multiculturalism: the belief that a culture that believes all cultures are of equal value is a superior culture.

By Malcolm | Posted in Apophthegmata | Comments (3)

As Good As A Mile

November 13, 2012 – 10:34 pm

Courtesy of David Duff: 23 brushes with death.

By Malcolm | Posted in General | Comments (0)

What-ever

November 13, 2012 – 10:24 pm

My, what a lot of advice folks on the Left are giving the GOP all of a sudden! They seem truly concerned. It’s all very touching.

Meanwhile, I’m encouraged by how eager so many on the Right seem to be to shape-shift into something more marketable to the tiny voting bloc they imagine they might peel away from the Democrats next time round, if they can just find the right set of beliefs to renounce. Amnesty for illegals? Repeal the Second Amendment? Post-partum abortion on demand? Maceration of the rich? Retire the Army? Polygamy? A condom in every pot? Whatever it takes.

As some wag once said:

“Madam, these are my principles. If you don’t like them, I have others.”

By Malcolm | Posted in Politics | Comments (5)

Whipped

November 12, 2012 – 11:55 pm

Sorry – it’s quiet here at the moment, because the lovely Nina and I are moving house this week. I’m no longer as young as I was, and this sort of thing is exhausting.

Please browse our archives, take our ‘View a Random Post’ link for a spin, or go read some of what Bill Vallicella’s been throwing down.

Or, if you want to pursue the gloomy theme we’ve been featuring post-election, go find yourself a copy of Brian W. Aldiss’s short story The Failed Men (I first saw it under the title Ahead).

For those of you who’ve already read it, I’ll just say: we’ve got the struback in the hizzy.

By Malcolm | Posted in General | Comments (0)

Goodnight Nurse!

November 11, 2012 – 11:08 pm

I haven’t written much about martial arts lately, but tonight I do have a brief and instructive item.

As I sat catching a bite at a local saloon last night, I saw what has to be one of the most stupendous UFC knockouts ever. It was administered to 38-year-old Rich Franklin by the 40-year-old fighter and MA-film star Cung Le, in the first round.

When you throw a left roundhouse kick, the lower body swivels clockwise. To maintain balance and conserve angular momentum, the upper body rotates in the opposite direction, and a fighter will typically drop the left hand momentarily to accentuate the effect. This creates a brief opening in the left upper gate. If you’ve seen your opponent do this a few times in a row (and UFC fighters love to pound on their opponents’ thighs with these bruising and wearying kicks), you can lie in wait with an overhand right.

To see how it’s done, have a look here.

By Malcolm | Posted in Martial Arts | Comments (1)

Modernity As Maladaptation

November 11, 2012 – 1:40 am

In 2009 I wondered if secularism was an evolutionary dead end, a self-terminating defect. It is a fascinating question.

The expansion of modern secularizing culture — in particular its characteristic features of irreligion, prolongation of education and the expansion of the educational franchise to women, widely available contraception and abortion and the elimination of any stigma regarding their application, and transition to knowledge-based economies in which women can compete as equals against men — always acts so as to sharply reduce fertility rates wherever it takes hold. This makes the young and productive an ever-shrinking segment of society, while the old geezers who contribute little or nothing and must be supported become proportionally more and more numerous. This puts unsustainable fiscal pressure on a dwindling economic base. Catastrophe looms.

I see three possibilities:

1) Total social and population collapse.

2) A return to higher birthrates either through radical changes to the secular culture (by economic incentives, perhaps, or, conceivably, worse), or through a rejection of modern secular culture in favor of more “traditional” family and social norms, including religion. In either case, contraception and abortion would have to be broadly suppressed, or rejected outright.

3) Direct government production of babies ex utero.

I consider 3) the most likely, though that’s just a hunch. (Huxley had it right, I think.) Perhaps all three will happen in different parts of the world. In any event, I expect some rather unpleasant “bottlenecking” to happen in coming decades. (Keep your powder dry.)

Here is an outstanding survey of the issues, by Stanley Kurtz. Read. Discuss.

By Malcolm | Posted in Society and Culture | Comments (29)

Some Things Are In Our Control And Others Not

November 10, 2012 – 11:25 am

In times like these, when hopes are dashed and all seems lost, when the red tide of battle has sown the fields with the corpses of your brethren, when a dark night has fallen that dawn may never break, it’s time to consult the Stoics.

One of the greatest of them was Epictetus (55-135), a slave of Rome who, after enduring unspeakable cruelty throughout his early life, achieved his freedom and became a teacher of philosophy. His lectures were transcribed by his young student Arrian, and the choicest of them come down to us in a slim volume known as the Enchiridion.

Read it here.

Read also this, if you want a tale of Stoicism in the face of unimaginable oppression: a speech by the late Admiral James Stockdale, who was tortured for seven years in Hanoi, and who, carrying the teachings of Epictetus in his heart, made them more than mere philosophy.

By Malcolm | Posted in Reason and Philosophy | Comments (2)

Sad News

November 8, 2012 – 6:39 pm

In my previous post I mentioned that as this blog turned more toward the political, I had noticed that there were some interesting commenters that didn’t come around any more. Longtime readers will certainly recall one, in particular, who posted here frequently: an exceptionally intelligent, thoughtful, and articulate man by the name of Bob Koepp. He often disagreed with me, but it was always on solid intellectual principles, and he always kept me honest. He loved a good scrap as much as I do, and I greatly enjoyed having him around.

About a year ago he rather suddenly stopped commenting, and I had often wondered why.

Until today.

Peace be upon you, my friend, and flights of angels sing thee to thy rest.

By Malcolm | Posted in General | Comments (5)

Cue Chumbawumba

November 8, 2012 – 1:50 pm

Last night I sat up late, ruminating on Tuesday’s result, and weighing defiance against despair.

I thought about how the tone and content of this blog (which are of course just a mirror of the tone and content of its author) had been taken over, more and more as years went by, by the need to understand and resist the deadly disease afflicting America and the West.

In its early days this website was a very different place, which must mean that I too was in some important sense a very different person. The content was broadly varied (see, for example, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here). I wrote about philosophy, the nature of mind, music, chess, martial arts, inner work, evolution, the absurdity of the passing scene, and much more.

There was a lightness of spirit here that is now largely gone, displaced by a grim concern for the great calamity of our time: the slow and deliberate suicide of our nation and of its rootstock, the high civilization of the West. I had many interesting commenters, back then, who don’t come around any more. I miss them. (Browse our early archives, and you’ll see what I mean.)

If it is to be despair or defiance, give me defiance. Despair is death, and we must choose life. We must do what we can, and we must continue to speak the truth, no matter the cost. (Indeed, this watershed election makes clear that we now have nothing to lose by frank and unapologetic consistency with our axioms: we ran a man who was more willing to compromise and dilute conservatism than any conservative ought to be, and we lost nevertheless.) We must also find a way to survive among the ruins, and to preserve what we can of our fallen society, and the timeless principles that once made it great. That requires that we continue to analyze, understand, and explain the political, ideological, and demographic forces that drive the accelerating changes all around us, and that those of us who are committed to building some sort of ark in which our civilization can ride out the Flood must brace ourselves to this duty. We’ve been beaten, yes, roundly and soundly. But we aren’t dead!

So: if we will not despair, then it is vital for the battered spirit to remember that there is still light and beauty in the world, and boundless opportunity for wonder and fascination, for love and laughter. There is much more to life than this grim struggle, and it’s time to pay attention once again to good things long neglected around here.

By Malcolm | Posted in General | Comments (21)

Down. Out?

November 7, 2012 – 12:44 pm

Peter Kirsanow posted this at the Corner today:

Now that president Obama has been given more “flexibility,’ conservatives need to pause, recharge, assess, recalibrate.

Then fight.

Conservatives can’t be in denial. The country may very well be at a tipping point. Yes, millions fewer voted for Obama than in 2008, but it’s astonishing and disconcerting that tens of millions voted for him with their eyes wide open. They voted for him after four years of 8 percent unemployment, exploding deficits, foreign-policy fecklessness, unsustainable debt, and assaults on liberty.

The electorate may well have shifted politically, and perhaps culturally. That will happen when we cede our institutions to the minions of ’progress,’ when our media is biased and political elites cowardly. But human nature has not changed and neither have the principles conservatives ”” Americans ”” hold dear.

Obama and the Left will be emboldened. They will continue their effort to “fundamentally transform’ America. Indeed, now that Obamacare will go into effect in full, the transformation will take several giant, worrisome steps forward.

That’s why we must fight. Harder, smarter, relentlessly. While we must shrewdly assess what went wrong politically, we don’t have time for finger-pointing and recriminations. Those inclined can do so later.There are too many perils at our doorstep.

There is no time, either, for the traditional post-election honeymoon. This president has already enjoyed one for the last four years. We have principles and values to defend and we must defend them vigorously. For on the immediate horizon are galactic problems: Defense cuts, a nuclear Iran, an entitlement catastrophe, tax increases, energy restrictions, Supreme Court appointments, a bellicose China, suffocating regulations, amnesty for illegals, chronic high unemployment, just to name a few.

Obama won last night, but we rejoin the fray today. Fight every attempt to spend us further into oblivion. Fight every attempt to further redistribute wealth. Fight every attempt to entrench a new entitlement. Fight every attempt to weaken our military. Fight every attempt to bury Benghazi. Fight every attempt to curb our religious freedom. Fight every attempt to revise history. Fight the enervating imposition of political correctness.

Fight for American exceptionalism. Fight for what’s best about America.

I am reminded of Churchill’s epigraph:

In War: Resolution. In Defeat: Defiance. In Victory: Magnanimity.

The great man also said:

Never give in, never give in, never, never, never, never — in nothing, great or small, large or petty — never give in except to convictions of honour and good sense. Never yield to force; never yield to the apparently overwhelming might of the enemy.

Well, resolution didn’t carry the day, and so magnanimity is off the table. That leaves defiance.

When you’ve done your best to stand up to a bully, but have been beaten to the ground, dazed and bloody, defiance begins with the simple act of picking yourself up to your hands and knees, shaking your head, refocusing your eyes, then narrowing them as you remember what you are fighting for and why. The alternative is submission, and the death of the spirit.

This is a hard one, though. Some on the Right are already pointing the finger at Mr. Romney and his campaign — blaming his vagueness and inconsistency, and his team’s inability to counter the Obama “ground game” — but that isn’t why we lost.

In a time of deep and persistent economic misery, and with fewer people employed today than were working four years ago, we put up a decent, likable man, a seasoned executive whom a majority of Americans thought would do a better job of restoring the economy than the incumbent — and were beaten nevertheless.

After four years of bitter division and intractable malaise, after Fast and Furious, the stimulus, the bloody partisan imposition of Obamacare, after Solyndra and Benghazi, after four years of trampling the separation of powers and the role of the nation’s elected representatives in order to govern at the whim of the Executive and his unelected “czars”, we stood up a modest, moderate, cooperative candidate who stood for the idea that the United States can still be a constitutional republic — and were beaten nevertheless.

After four years of withering assault upon the mediating layers of civil society and local government that stand between a radically atomized citizenry and the federal Leviathan, and that have, until this final epoch in the arc of American history, been the most important and most sustaining aspect of the nation’s ordinary life, we put up a sensible man who understood that a happy and healthy society emerges from the bottom up, rather than being imposed willy-nilly by a distant, central authority — and were beaten nevertheless.

At a time when a runaway culture of dependence and entitlement has degraded and infantilized an ever-expanding proportion of our citizenry, and has brought what what was once a virile and vigorous nation of free and self-reliant individuals to the point of almost certain spiritual and fiscal ruin, we put up candidates who understand that this is the path to national extinction — and were beaten nevertheless.

No, the problem isn’t that the GOP allied itself too closely with “extremists”, or that Mitt Romney was too much of a flip-flopper, or that he didn’t go after Mr. Obama vigorously enough in the later debates. The problem is that, as the founders understood so well — and tried their best to prevent by lacing up the government in the Constitution — democracy naturally descends into tyranny, and the rule of the mob. America has now crossed the event horizon, and the singularity lies ahead. Before we reach it — and although “there is a lot of ruin in a nation”, the acceleration will now be brisk — the tidal forces it will exert will soon begin to tear the nation to pieces.

The problem here was not Mr. Romney, or even Mr. Obama. The problem is that the American people themselves are no longer what they were. Mr. Obama spoke of “fundamentally transforming” America, but to imagine that he has done so is to confuse cause and effect. Had the fundamental character of this nation not already been transformed, he never would have succeeded.

So: America gets the government it wants, and that it deserves. We have chosen “equality” over liberty; free lunch over freedom; reassurance over responsibility. It will not last: it is utterly unsupportable. It will quickly be the death of America’s greatness, and will lead soon thereafter to the death and decomposition of America itself. But this is what we, the people, have chosen.

Defiance? I suppose. But it’s hard to believe that lifting ourselves from the mud and staggering to our feet again will, from this moment forward, ever change a thing.

Sorry to be so glum, readers. I’m sure I’ll perk up a bit as time goes by. Right now I’m still on all fours in the dirt, spitting out teeth.

By Malcolm | Posted in Society and Culture, Politics | Comments (10)

Sunset

November 7, 2012 – 12:10 am

We lost. I don’t know quite what to say about that just yet. I thought that just maybe this nation could pull the nose up before it was too late, but I guess it wasn’t to be. Brace for impact.

Nothing to be ashamed of, though. We had a couple of pretty good centuries there. It was a pretty impressive run.

That’s about all I have to say, for now at least.

No, I’ll add this: if the current numbers stand, our commenter The One-Eyed Man called the electoral vote with perfect precision. I can’t let that pass by in silence.

I’ll also say: most impressive, Mr. President.

Update, the morning after: ECV 303 Obama, 206 Romney.

By Malcolm | Posted in Curiosities | Comments (8)

This Is It

November 6, 2012 – 11:56 am

Shortly after taking office in 2009, the newly minted President Barack Obama, speaking of his plan to re-energize America’s economy, told Matt Lauer:

“If I don’t have this done in three years, then there’s going to be a one-term proposition.’

OK, folks! Today’s the day. Let’s get out there and assert the proposition.

By Malcolm | Posted in Politics | Comments (0)

Chomsky, Prediction, and Polls

November 5, 2012 – 3:23 pm

An interesting item from Dan Foster. Here.

By Malcolm | Posted in Politics, Science | Comments (2)

“Cool”

November 4, 2012 – 11:21 pm

This over the transom from the Obama campaign tonight:

Malcolm —

This is cool:

You can see exactly how many people named Malcolm have already voted.

Take a look at that. Then share it with your friends so they can see how many people with their names have voted, too — and look up their polling place.

Bottom line: We need every Malcolm — and everyone else, too — to make it out to the polls to support President Obama.

So help get the word out — and the vote:

http://my.barackobama.com/Your-Name

Thanks,

Yohannes

One more day.

By Malcolm | Posted in General | Comments (0)

Rushdie On Free Speech

November 4, 2012 – 10:24 pm

Here’s a post by our pal Jeffery Hodges in which he excerpts some remarks by Salman Rushdie on the subject of free speech. There is also a comment, by someone called “Crude”, that triggered a knee-jerk reaction on my part — but which, as I began to respond, I realized deserved more careful consideration. I’m still thinking about it. Here it is:

Rushdie only supports freedom of speech insofar as he thinks that freedom advances his social and political aims. If you ask him, what if a real freedom of speech would undermine liberal values, make the world more religious and conservative, he wouldn’t be able to process it. To him, you can tell if you have those freedoms properly by whether the very thing he wants to see happen, happens more often.

Even you are similar. You say, “Better to have the bad ideas out in the sunlight where they can be attacked”. But what happens if Freedom of Speech doesn’t make the bad ideas wither and die? What if the “bad ideas” – I wonder what they are – thrive in a Free Speech environment, and the “good ideas” die? Will it be time to call the project a failed experiment?

Anyone can support a supposedly precious freedom when they think it will lead to a world they personally prefer.

The question the comment aroused in me is: are there memes that are so virulent, so dangerous, that they outcompete more virtuous and desirable memes in the arena of free expression?

This has of course been the motivation, throughout history, for the suppression of heresies. But is it still something we should be worried about? Think carefully before you answer.

What does it take for a “bad idea” to defeat a “good idea” in the open market? Highly successful memes, for example the world’s more durable and infectious religions, have been tuned by a long-term selective process to be tremendously contagious, and impressively resistant to attack.

Is free-speech absolutism more dangerous than it seems?

By Malcolm | Posted in Society and Culture | Comments (7)

Comfy? Not If We Can Help It

November 3, 2012 – 12:48 am

I’ve been almost completely disconnected from the Internet for the past couple of days (I traveled back yesterday to storm-ravaged New York City, where I’m staying with friends, as our house here is still uninhabitable due to a construction project). So for tonight, just an item from the mailbag.

The latest edition of Jonah Goldberg’s weekly newsletter, the “G-File” features a fine rant, in the same vein as his latest book, The Tyranny Of Cliches (which, by the way, I’ve just read and enjoyed). In this item he takes on the pious and too-familiar exhortation to “comfort the afflicted, and afflict the comfortable”.

You may not love Mr. Goldberg’s style; he’s one of a breed of political commentators I think of as “playful polemicists” (along with, for example, writers like Mark Steyn). No matter how grave the topic or how deeply he seeks to wound the enemy, there is always in his mind the wish for the little joke, the lighthearted aside, the frolicsome fillip. For many, he’s just too flippant, and I’m afraid that it’s often a regrettable distraction, because he’s an astute thinker, with much of value to say.

Here’s a long excerpt (I’ll keep it below the fold):

Read More »

By Malcolm | Posted in Society and Culture, Politics | Comments (5)

Rough Night

October 31, 2012 – 11:12 pm

Here’s a grim item: a time-lapse film of Sandy ravaging New York, shot from a camera above the East river.

By Malcolm | Posted in General | Comments (0)

My Fifteen Minutes

October 31, 2012 – 11:26 am

Got picked up on Michelle Malkin’s popular Twitter-aggregator site today. Not quite ready to quit the day job just yet, though.

By Malcolm | Posted in General | Comments (5)

Out Of The Mouths Of Babes

October 31, 2012 – 10:47 am

Here’s a video that’s making the rounds, from Steven Crowder (the fellow who gave us that Lena Dunham parody a few days ago).

In this one Mr. Crowder “redistributes” Hallowe’en candy to reduce inequality. Needless to say, the kids he’s taking the candy from don’t like it.

It’s a funny video, sort of, and yes, we get the point — but let’s keep in mind that these are children, and perhaps are not exactly who we should be consulting to fine-tune our tax policy.

Instead, given how things have been going lately, I’d say start ’em off on foreign policy first, and see how that goes.

By Malcolm | Posted in Politics | Comments (30)

Welcome Back!

October 30, 2012 – 1:20 pm

Mangan’s is back up, after a long hiatus. Pop over for this item on the effects of high diversity.

By Malcolm | Posted in General | Comments (7)

Worlds In Collision

October 29, 2012 – 9:27 pm

From NOAA, here’s the Water Vapor Loop for the eastern US.

By Malcolm | Posted in General | Comments (13)

Uh-Oh

October 29, 2012 – 8:39 pm

Here’s the big Con Ed plant at 14th Street. Blowing up.

Here’s Long Island City and the East River. Jesus.

Three feet of water on the floor of the NYSE (maybe; there are conflicting reports).

This is getting biblical, folks.

Worst of all, now: NYU medical center reported to be without power and no backup power.

By Malcolm | Posted in General | Comments (2)

It’s That Bad

October 29, 2012 – 7:08 pm

Tweeted just now by @tonywoodlief:

Hurricane Sandy forces closure of UN, causing intolerable delays in the global spread of moral equivalence.

Meanwhile, in New Jersey there are sharks in the streets.

Update: that last one’s a fake.

Here’s Atlantic City.

And Brooklyn Bridge Park.

Stuyvesant Town. Holy crap.

Dennis Miller (@DennisDMZ) tweets:

I’m in NY. Bloomberg just warned people if storm does drive them to cannibalism they should not use salt on their fellow citizens. #sandy

First Avenue.

(High tide still a little while off, BTW.)

14th Street.

And now, power failing in Manhattan. I can’t believe it’s still on here in Wellfleet…

Battery Tunnel now filling with water.

Manhattan now cut off – no way in or out.

OK, you get the idea. Watch the news.

By Malcolm | Posted in General | Comments (0)

Comic Relief

October 29, 2012 – 4:36 pm

Rickles at Reagan’s second inaugural. Here.

By Malcolm | Posted in Tomfoolery | Comments (0)

I Feel Better Now

October 29, 2012 – 12:57 pm

Cheers!

By Malcolm | Posted in General | Comments (2)

Waiting

October 29, 2012 – 1:03 am

It’s 2 a.m., and getting mighty windy here in Wellfleet as Sandy moves north. Everybody knows the power’s going out sooner or later.

I know that the worst of this storm is going to be felt south and west of here, but my, that wind sure is howling, and at times like this it’s awfully hard to forget that the Outer Cape is only a little wisp of sand flung far out into a cold and angry sea.

By Malcolm | Posted in Cape Cod | Comments (10)

Feel-Good Story Of The Day

October 28, 2012 – 3:40 pm

This warms my heart in so many ways.

By Malcolm | Posted in General | Comments (1)

The Council Of One

October 28, 2012 – 2:49 pm

With a hat tip to Bill Keezer, here’s a look at the Obama administration’s increasingly routine use of kill lists and drone strikes to prosecute foreign policy.

I excerpt two notable quotes from this post. The first is by its author:

Benghazi illustrates the problem of the President having the authority for everything and the responsibility for nothing.

The second is from the great war historian B.H. Lidell Hart:

In peace we concentrate so much on tactics that we are apt to forget that it is merely the handmaiden of strategy.

As disturbing as this new tactic is, frankly I think we will need to get used to it. Even under historical, traditional conditions of war, where antagonistic nations pit uniformed armies against each other on the battlefield, and navies upon the sea, the transparency and diffusion of power inherent to representative democracy has always been a hindrance to the cohesion of strategic and tactical will, as well as to stealth and surprise. But in this not-so-brave new world, where the enemy arrayed against us is a shape-shifting army of shadows, and in which we good people of the compassionate West bind our military’s hands with rules of engagement better suited to a suburban paintball club than to mortal combat against implacable, pitiless foes, this sort of thing is about all we’ve got. I expect it will continue, no matter who wins the election.

By Malcolm | Posted in Society and Culture, Politics, Foreign Affairs, Jihad, Military | Comments (0)

Circle Of Life

October 28, 2012 – 12:08 pm

Kevin Kim gives us a memorable visual recap of the recent execution by mortar round of a tippling Nork military bigwig.

By Malcolm | Posted in Foreign Affairs | Comments (3)

The Panopticon Is Here

October 27, 2012 – 10:39 pm

With a hat tip to the indefatigable JK, here’s the latest on micro-drones.

When I was at Singularity University this past April, a recurring theme was that the coming ubiquity of tiny, cheap and efficient sensors will soon have a seismic effect on the technological, and therefore the human, landscape.

We like to think that we are much freer, in the modern liberal West, than our forebears were under the monarchies, autocracies, and dictatorships of the past. But the truth is that even under the most capricious and unenlightened despots, the lives of ordinary subjects long ago were rarely if ever affected directly by the sovereign, who lived in some far-off keep and was entirely unable to monitor or control the day-to-day activities of his people. But the advent of modern communication and transportation in the twentieth century, followed by electronic-record-keeping of financial transactions and other interactions, has made possible a far greater degree of interference by the government in the minutiae of everyday life — and the development in the twenty-first century of small, ubiquitous sensors, connected in real time to intelligent and adaptive monitoring systems, will carry this trend to its logical endpoint: enabling the continuous monitoring of everything any of us does, anywhere, anytime.

By Malcolm | Posted in Society and Culture, Technology | Comments (0)

Auxetic Material

October 27, 2012 – 10:38 pm

Never heard of it? Neither had I. It has a negative Poisson ratio.

Here. See also here and here.

By Malcolm | Posted in Technology | Comments (1)