One Size Fits All?

January 4, 2012 – 1:18 am

In the discussion thread of our recent post about Yusuf al-Qaradawi and the Muslim Brotherhood, the issue soon became: what should the attitude of the West have been toward the democratic uprisings in Egypt and elsewhere? On the one hand, as Americans it seems we ought to support democracy wherever we can; on the other, democracy will produce different results when practiced by different peoples. My own concern, which has so far been borne out by events, was that these revolts would lead directly to Islamist regimes in the region: hardly a gratifying outcome in terms of Western interests.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

By Malcolm | Posted in Society and Culture, Religion, Jihad | Comments (25)

Please Remain Calm

January 3, 2012 – 10:15 pm

This in the mailbag from our old friend David Pauley: Freeman Dyson on catastrophes, real and imaginary.

By Malcolm | Posted in Global Warming | Comments (0)

Enunciatory Modalities

January 2, 2012 – 11:05 pm

With a hat-tip to Bill Valicella, here are some prize-winning examples of spectacularly bad writing.

By Malcolm | Posted in Language | Comments (4)

Well, I’ll Be

January 2, 2012 – 5:21 pm

Nearly a year ago, as the uprising in Egypt was gaining traction, I wrote:

The Muslim Brotherhood (or “Ikhwan’) differs from militant Islamist factions like al-Qaeda not in its goals, which are more or less the same, but only in its strategy: it has no moral or philosophical aversion to violent jihad, but considers it unnecessarily provocative, and therefore counterproductive. As such, it can make an ostentatious public display of distancing itself from terrorism, and so it is embraced by gullible Westerners ”” for whom the only imaginable threat from Islam is terrorist violence ”” as a “moderate’ Muslim organization to be supported and embraced. This suits the Ikwhan, whose avowed strategy is to sabotage secular democratic societies from within, just fine.

The Obama administration, however, which has made “outreach’ to the Muslim world a priority (even going so far as to make NASA’s “foremost’ mission helping Muslims “feel good about their historic contribution to science and math and engineering’) clearly feels the the Muslim Brotherhood is an outfit it can do business with. We should not be surprised to see ”” in fact we should be astonished not to see ”” the Ikwhan seizing the opportunity now taking shape in Cairo, for which it has worked and waited so long. We should also not be surprised to learn that they will do so with the overt or covert support of the United States: so broad is the Brotherhood’s influence in Egypt that it is almost unimaginable that they will not take the reins, and you can be sure that Foggy Bottom and the Oval Office have already made the appropriate calculations.

For my trouble, I was berated in the comment thread for having made, under the bewitchment of “confirmation bias”, an assertion that was “unsupported by fact” and unable to “withstand even the slightest amount of scrutiny”.

A lively eleven months have passed since then, and we have yet to see any flowering of secular Jeffersonian democracy in the region, despite the lavish and effervescent optimism with which the initial disturbances were greeted by most observers here in the West. As was suggested at the time by those of us who have rather less faith in the universal appeal of Western ways, and a more sober understanding of the history of the area and its people, the likeliest outcome of these populist upheavals would be a transition to Islamic governance, with a concomitant erosion of Western interests in the region, and deepening existential peril for Israel.

Now, as Andrew McCarthy notes here, The Hindu reports that the Obama administration has turned to none other than Yusuf al-Qaradawi — the Muslim Brotherhood’s principal ideological theorist and dawa-jihad strategist — to negotiate the terms of our accommodation with the Taliban.

More confirmation bias, no doubt (after all, it’s just the Hindu, not the New York Times). We’ll just have to see.

By Malcolm | Posted in Foreign Affairs, Jihad | Comments (25)

Again?

January 1, 2012 – 4:30 pm

Last January we noted in these pages a mysterious event at Beebe, Arkansas: thousands of red-winged blackbirds had fallen out of the sky on New Year’s Eve. An excerpt:

It seems that thousands of red-winged blackbirds (and as far as I can tell, only red-winged blackbirds) fell dead from the sky on New Year’s Eve in the area around the town of Beebe: victims, apparently, of some “massive trauma’. The cause is as yet unspecified; those who abhor such explanatory vacua, and must fill them, have suggested that “a loud noise’ might have been to blame.

A loud noise? It’s a dandy explanation, of course, and ought to settle the question ”” but as I head for the door I find myself turning back again, troubled, Columbo-style, by a nagging little detail. You see, the thing is that I have been around a lot of very loud noises in my day, and have even caused quite a few myself ”” and it strikes me that on no occasion did any of them, not even the very loudest, cause thousands of birds, of a single species, to drop lifeless from the firmament. So I wonder.

This seemed awfully strange then, but it seems even stranger now — because exactly the same thing has happened again, and on New Year’s Eve again, too.

I have not even the slightest inkling as to what might be going here, but it is very odd.

By Malcolm | Posted in General | Comments (4)

Happy New Year!

December 31, 2011 – 2:26 pm

With grim 2011 winding down, I thought about making a New Year’s resolution to take a more positive outlook toward the future, to express more optimism in these pages, and generally to stop being so pessimistic about everything.

I figured it probably wouldn’t work out, though, so I gave up on the idea.

But just because the world (or at least Western civilization, which as far as I’m concerned amounts to pretty much the same thing) really is going down the drain doesn’t mean we can’t set aside our well-justified gloom for a moment, and raise a glass with family and friends. So here’s to you, readers! And for all I know, things really will turn around in 2012, and we’ll look back on this moment in history as the time when the West, at the very brink of disaster, awoke in sudden terror to the folly of the course it had charted, and with desperate resolve managed to steer clear of the fatal catastrophe.

Ha! Just kidding. Anyway, bottoms up, folks — and thanks as always for reading and commenting.

By Malcolm | Posted in General | Comments (3)

Search Me!

December 30, 2011 – 2:42 pm

There’s something for everyone here at waka waka waka, and we’ve made it a late-December tradition to take a look back at some of the thousands of keyphrases that brought visitors our way from Google and other search engines over the past year. Here’s our 2011 selection; it’s a curious crop as always.

Read More »

By Malcolm | Posted in General | Comments (3)

This And That

December 27, 2011 – 8:20 pm

We’re on something of a holiday schedule this week — so for tonight, just a grab-bag of little diversions:

— An item that, if it were a post of its own, would surely have been titled “Bird Brains”, or perhaps “Counting Crows”.

— A little hibernal music from the late Jackie Gleason.

— For you city dwellers yearning for a rustic getaway, some Cabin Porn.

— Some very detailed doodles.

— Music hath charms, etc.

We’ll be back to normal operations sometime early next year. Until then, we’ll be focusing on our habitual last-days-of-December routine, which consists mostly of deserted seascapes, cheery blazes, old books, introspective rumination, and potent seasonal beverages.

By Malcolm | Posted in General | Comments (2)

Merry Christmas!

December 25, 2011 – 1:26 pm

Whatever Christmas means to you — be it everything or nothing — I hope you all have a warm and happy one, in the company of people you love.

By Malcolm | Posted in General | Comments (5)

Christmas Eve, World At War

December 24, 2011 – 4:23 pm

Here’s a time capsule from December 24th, 1941, seventy years ago today: Christmas Eve remarks from the White House lawn by Franklin D. Roosevelt and the visiting Winston Churchill. The US had just entered the war; Britain had until a fortnight earlier stood alone against the Nazis, and since September had endured the horrors of the Blitz.

This was a far different era of Western civilization. It’s hard to imagine that it was within living memory of many who are still with us.

By Malcolm | Posted in General | Comments (0)

Circling The Drain

December 23, 2011 – 7:02 pm

Diana West comments here on the dismal verdict in the Elisabeth Sabaditsch-Wolff trial in Vienna.

Her crime, if you haven’t followed the case, was to comment disapprovingly on Mohammed’s deflowering of his nine-year-old wife Aisha.

Well, tolerance is paramount in a decent society, I guess.

Meanwhile, Christmas masses have been canceled in Iraq due to fears of anti-Christian violence.

By Malcolm | Posted in Foreign Affairs, Jihad | Comments (6)

Auto-Goal

December 23, 2011 – 11:40 am

Well, there you have it: a bumbling, humiliating performance by the House GOP on the ridiculous two-month payroll-tax moratorium (which, among its other shortcomings, is so idiotically brief that it presents costly problems to payroll processors). Nice work, guys.

Charles Krauthammer offers a scathing summary here.

By Malcolm | Posted in Politics | Comments (9)

Tower Of Babel

December 23, 2011 – 10:46 am

Here’s a page that shows a live stream of Wikipedia edits. You can filter the stream by language version and edit size. It’s curiously fascinating, for a minute or two at least.

By Malcolm | Posted in Curiosities | Comments (0)

Shadow Portrait

December 22, 2011 – 11:59 pm

Here’s a clever idea.

By Malcolm | Posted in Curiosities | Comments (0)

Lil’ Kim

December 22, 2011 – 2:28 pm

For you strategic-security wonks, John McCreary has published a substantial post on events in North Korea today at NightWatch — complete with a parting jab at the Times. I’ll reproduce it here.

North Korea: North Korea is demanding that foreigners either remain in their homes or leave the country. Pyongyang authorities ordered some foreigners to leave, according to Chinese nationals who frequently visit North Korea.

A Chinese student in Pyongyang said North Korean professors ordered their Chinese and Russian students to avoid leaving their residences. According to a Chinese man who flew out of Pyongyang on 20 December, foreigners were not allowed to leave their accommodations after the announcement of Kim Jong Il’s death on the 19th.

North Korea also is deporting some foreigners from Pyongyang, Sinuiju and the Rajin-Sonbong special economic zone, Chosun reported on 21 December. Missionaries and US businessmen engaged in charity work in Rajin-Sonbong and Sinuiju have been forced to leave. North Korea is preventing foreigners from entering the country and will not issue any new visas until after 29 December.

Comment: Control of foreigners, including expulsion, is one of the national civil readiness measures prescribed in a semi-war state of alert, which is a preparatory stage of war preparations for an attack as well as for defense against an attack. Such measures are out of sync with a global and increasingly integrated economic system, but for North Korea they are normal during conditions of stress, such as leadership change.

Kim Jong un’s first military order, according to Korean news services, was to order all military units to return to garrison. His military mentors, most likely Vice Marshal Ri, the chief of the General Staff, had him sign this order on 18 December. This also is prescribed in a semi-war state of alert for rear and mobile military units. For forward forces just north of the Demilitarized Zone, they are supposed to report to wartime defenses and commence tunnel living.

Comment: The context for this order is that the annual Winter Training Cycle for the Korean People’s Army began on 1 December. Winter is the period of the most intense and extensive training for the entire Army.

In December, which is the first month of the cycle, soldiers are in classrooms or at shooting ranges and other basic field training sites for the early phases of the cycle. The cycle culminates in large unit – corps- and multiple corps- echelon — field exercises in early spring.

Confining units to garrison means the early phases of the training cycle have been interrupted and the entire cycle must be truncated by at least a month. Army readiness peaks in April, after the cycle ends and remedial training is completed for units that failed to meet standards. The Army cannot now meet that schedule without sacrificing readiness.

The North Korean Marshals and Generals will appreciate that the coming year will be a period of extraordinary military vulnerability until the summer training cycle is completed. They may be expected to be prickly and prone to violence over perceived provocations by the Allies.

The order to confine troops to barracks during a time of internal stress always means the leadership does not trust its lower echelons of leadership. It does not want troops to have access to live ammunition and will not risk normal training because of the danger of a military revolt.

Special comment: The succession of Kim Chong il in 1994 was not peaceful or smooth, despite western punditry and North Korean propaganda. There were multiple assassination attempts against Kim Chong il during his first year as leader, although he was his father’s understudy for more than a dozen years. An entire North Korean Army Corps revolted against him in early 1995 and requested American and South Korean assistance, which it did not receive. Its leaders fled to China. The corps was disbanded.

Despite the North Korean propaganda and the shallow Western news coverage, the succession of Kim Jong un is likely to be much more unstable than was Kim Chong il’s, once the mourning period ends in January 2012.

All the video reports and written news items on the home pages of the Korean Central News Agency stress that the Army and the people support Kim Jong un. Every video of Kim Chong-il during his life shows Kim Jong un in the background. But all the images are quite recent and they are few. Kim Chong-il did not take his designated heir everywhere with him, as his father did with him.

Moreover, the videos and other reports do not mention that the communist party or the government support Kim Jong un. The Army always is listed or mentioned first. The North Korean people will understand that for now they are under army rule.

Finally, North Korea is an oriental despotism as described by Professor Karl August Wittfogel in his seminal book “Oriental Despotism.” It is not inscrutable or unpredictable or mysterious. It is Asian.

That means that an extended royal family governs and risks being destroyed if the government changes. It will exhibit no interest in reform that jeopardizes its status and life style.

That family pampers and depends on the loyalty of the armed forces leaders. That means that every army corps commander has a villa, Mercedes Benz personal vehicles, Rolex watches, flat screen HD TVs and all the luxuries that North Korean can afford. Kim Chong il never neglected his senior commanders and they are now in charge of national security.

All of that means that peace with South Korea is highly unlikely because the generals and vice marshals will lose their life style and the Army will lose its reason for existence.

Internal economic reform will be measured by whether it helps the Kim extended family. The young Kim is a victim of the decisions of his grandfather and father.

Anecdote: South Korea’s director of the National Intelligence Service told the press today that US satellite photos show that all of the leadership trains used by Kim Chong-il were in their normal parking areas in Pyongyang rail yards on 17 December, the day Kim died.

This means that Kim could not have died on a train during a field tour, as the Pyongyang government announced on the 19th, and as the official media broadcast. He died with no heroics.

On the 18th, however, the North Koreans did move a leadership train from Pyongyang, apparently and belatedly recognizing their gaff.

The South Korean intelligence chief reported that Kim most likely died in bed, or at least in Pyongyang. The story about dying on the train was part of the mythology the North Koreans love to indulge, but which no North Koreans believe.

Final comment: The New York Times published an absurd article about a massive intelligence failure because the US did not know that Kim was dying in his villa in Pyongyang, and learned of his death from official North Korean press statements … as it did when Kim Il-sung died in 1994.

The intelligence failure thesis reveals an ingénue’s complete misunderstanding of US intelligence. No one knows or can know when a national leader is dying suddenly, including the Chinese, even in a Web 2.0 world. There is no App for dying national leaders.

By Malcolm | Posted in Foreign Affairs | Comments (6)

Dueling Donks?

December 22, 2011 – 12:19 pm

I’ve been getting robocalls over the past few days for a “Draft Hillary” campaign. Mounting a primary opposition to the President would be a smart move for the Democrats, I think, given how deeply Mr. Obama has disappointed so many of his supporters. I have a feeling Hillary would be a lot harder to beat in November then the incumbent would, though a primary battle in which the Obama attack machine trained its fire on a fellow Democrat might be more than the party has the stomach for. It would certainly be fun for those of us in the loyal opposition to watch those two flay each other for a few months, I have to say.

This could get interesting.

By Malcolm | Posted in Politics | Comments (3)

Shades Of Night Descending

December 22, 2011 – 12:41 am

Here is a long and deeply depressing essay about California’s dying Central Valley, by one of its lifelong residents, Victor Davis Hanson.

How did we let this happen to ourselves?

By Malcolm | Posted in Society and Culture | Comments (6)

Yeah!

December 21, 2011 – 11:59 pm

Time for some NRBQ, I think. Here’s Wild Weekend. And here’s Get Rhythm.

Man, what a band.

By Malcolm | Posted in Music and Recording | Comments (0)

We’ll Make It Up In Volume!

December 21, 2011 – 2:07 pm

Via Drudge: According to an investigation by one James Hohman, of the Mackinac Center for Public Policy, the Chevy Volt bakes in up to a quarter of a million dollars of government subsidies per vehicle.

Meanwhile, sales of the Volt for 2011 had reached just over 6,100 by the end of November, which looks to fall short of Chevrolet’s hoped-for 10,000 units for 2011. Buoyed, however, by the fact that anyone’s buying them at all (and, no doubt, by the continuing prospect of a place at the public trough for the GM snout), the company is gearing up its plant for a production run of 60,000 Volts in 2012. Order now! They’re sure to fly off the lot.

By Malcolm | Posted in Politics | Comments (2)

Worlds Without Number

December 20, 2011 – 10:44 pm

Here’s the latest from the Kepler planetary probe: Earth-sized exoplanets. Not in the temperate, ‘habitable’ zone, but we’ve found some of those too. All this after only a couple of years of looking, with a technology that is still in its infancy.

Can anyone really imagine anymore that the galaxy isn’t teeming with Earth-like, watery worlds? Can we really imagine that we are alone?

By Malcolm | Posted in Science | Comments (4)

The Haunting of Don Carlo

December 19, 2011 – 4:33 pm

An article in the current New Yorker begins:

On the night of October 16, 1590, a palace apartment near Piazza San Domenico Maggiore, in Naples, was the scene of a double murder so extravagantly vicious that people are still sifting through the evidence, more than four centuries later. The most reliable account of the crime comes from a delegation of Neapolitan officials, who inspected the apartment the following day. On the floor of the bedroom, they found the body of Don Fabrizio Carafa, the Duke of Andria, whom a contemporary described as a “model of beauty,’ one of the handsomest young men of his time. The officials’ report stated that the Duke was wearing only “a woman’s nightdress with fringes at the bottom, with ruffs of black silk.’ The corpse was “covered with blood and pierced with many wounds,’ Lying on the bed was the body of Donna Maria d’Avalos, the famously alluring wife of Don Carlo Gesualdo, the Prince of Venosa. Her throat had been cut and her nightshirt was drenched in blood.

Interviews with eyewitnesses left no doubt about who was responsible for the murders. Gesualdo had been seen entering the apartment with three men, shouting, “Kill that scoundrel, along with this harlot!’ The report ended with the observation that Gesualdo had left town. A prince being a prince, there matters rested.

Don Carlo Gesualdo was more than just a vengeful prince, however: he was also a composer, as one contemporary observer noted, “of infinite art”. He wrote choral music — madrigals — of a sort that had never been heard before, and the like of which was not heard again until the twentieth century. His compositions, which I had never listened to before last night, seem to occupy two worlds at once: a familiar and beckoning realm of sublime and uplifting harmony, and a strange, alien dimension of unnameable dissonances and constantly shifting keys. Listening to his music is a kaleidoscopic, almost hallucinatory experience; no sooner has the spirit come to rest in a pool of limpid sunlight than the scene shifts, through brief passages of swirling and often terrifying darkness, to the next open glade. The music is never still, and to surrender to it is to be borne away to a dreamlike place of lonely, haunted beauty.

Wikipedia’s article on Gesualdo notes:

The evidence that Gesualdo was tortured by guilt for the remainder of his life is considerable, and he may have given expression to it in his music.

Surely he did. Go to YouTube, search for ‘Gesualdo’, and listen.

By Malcolm | Posted in Music and Recording | Comments (2)

This Just In

December 18, 2011 – 10:30 pm

Kim Jong Il has died. This is going to be interesting.

By Malcolm | Posted in Foreign Affairs | Comments (6)

Murder On The Nile

December 18, 2011 – 12:40 pm

Horrifying images and video from Egypt, here.

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

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

Just Saying

December 17, 2011 – 10:31 pm

You know who I feel sorry for? Flightless birds. Jesus, what a crappy deal.

By Malcolm | Posted in General | Comments (3)

Hitchens Pro And Con

December 17, 2011 – 8:16 pm

There’s been a huge outpouring of opinion about Christopher Hitchens from both Right and Left, most of it encomiastic, but mixed in with some harsh reviews as well. That isn’t surprising; obviously a polemicist like Hitchens — especially one who crossed the aisle as publicly as he — is going to have his fair share of enemies and critics.

The hard traditionalists, like Lawrence Auster, didn’t like him at all. For Auster it was Hitchens’s militant atheism that put him far beyond the pale. It’s a fair cop, too, I think: I’m an atheist myself, but have come to believe that secularism is, as far as cultural survival is concerned, a maladaptive trait, and to recognize that religion plays, whether I like it or not, a vital role in a nation’s cohesion, vigor, and cultural continuity. Atheists should be more careful about this, if you ask me: they risk, without realizing it, kicking down the tent-pole. But in the end, it’s a matter of priorities: for Mr. Hitchens, the almost certain falsehood of most religious doctrine, and the stupidity and violence with which he so often saw it propagated and defended, was simply more than he could suffer in silence, no matter the cost.

Jonah Goldberg, who knew Hitchens, made this point in his latest ‘G-File’ newsletter:

I once wrote somewhere around NRO that I thought that maybe — just maybe — Hitchens could be considered a “man of the Right.” He was no conservative. You can’t really be a conservative in the Anglo-American tradition and hate religion. You can be a non-believer, I think. But you have to at least have respect for the role of religion and maybe a little reverence for the role of transcendence in people’s lives. Hitch had nothing but contempt. It was one of the last truly asinine Marxist things about him.

…The more I thought about it, the more it seemed to me that Hitch — who believed in the importance of Western Civilization (he said he’d rather defend Western Civilization than denounce John Ashcroft), gloried in the splendor of the Canon, admired other cultures but rejected utterly the asininity of multicultural leveling — was certainly not a man of the contemporary Left, or maybe not of the Left at all.

I no longer think Hitch was really a man of the Right, chiefly because you can’t be a man of the Right and reflexively, perhaps even childishly, reject the label.

Here’s John Derbyshire:

Christopher Hitchens has died, much too young. I can’t say I was a fan, am not in fact sure I ever read to the end of anything he wrote.

Hitch was a court jester for the liberal elites. He took care never to violate their most sacred taboos. Like Stephen Jay Gould, who also died too young, also of cancer, Hitch carried the banner of soft Marxism forward into the post-Soviet era.

I’m sorry if I sound lukewarm. I’m an opinion journalist, like Hitch, and I am fully aware, as he was, that it is a low kind of trade ”” “the vituperative arts,” as Auberon Waugh said. Hitch was superbly good at it, far better than I could ever hope to be, and miraculously productive to the end. Is that a bit better?

I’ll add this: He was often fun to watch, quick at thinking on his feet, and something like a genius at not suffering fools gladly.

There now; it didn’t come out so bad. I even think the subject might have applauded it. Goodnight, Hitch.

I don’t think that even those who were unapologetic admirers, like me, could possibly have agreed with the man about everything, or perhaps even most things. For me, as I said before, what made me a Hitchens fan were those qualities with which he seemed unfairly, impossibly gifted: his coruscating intelligence, his dazzling skill in debate, his virtuosic wordcraft, and above all, his luminous vitality and style.

In a post yesterday on atheism and death, Bill Vallicella offered this:

‘Brilliant’ is a word I don’t toss around lightly, but Hitch is one to whom it unarguably applies. Public intellectuals of his caliber are rare and it will be sad to see him go. Agree or disagree with him, it is discourse at his level that justifies the high regard we place on free speech.

Yes indeed: it’s sad to see him go.

By Malcolm | Posted in General | Comments (0)

Lumos!

December 17, 2011 – 5:56 pm

The Senate has passed their stopgap spending bill, which included a rider that annuls, temporarily at least, what would effectively have been a ban on incandescent bulbs beginning this year. The intrusive legislation had made an awful lot of people hopping mad — but looking on the bright side (especially now that it has been deferred), it became such a cause célÁ¨bre for the Right, and such a poster-child for the excesses of the liberal nanny state, that it seems to have awakened a lot of people to the urgency of the conservative cause.

Getting people fired up about this wasn’t too hard, when all you had to do was quote the Energy Secretary’s remarks on the State’s rationale for the ban:

“We are taking away a choice that continues to let people waste their own money,” he said.

This sums up the paternalism of the big-government Left so precisely that it could probably be used with high accuracy to identify political orientation. Does the quoted remark seem to you a perfectly sensible policy statement from an unelected Federal executive? Or does it get you thinking dark thoughts about the the consent of the governed, and the Second Amendment? Form two lines, please.

Anyway, it’s a small victory, but we’ll take it. It’s too bad that Mr. Obama’s chum, General Electric CEO Jeff Immelt, has already closed our last domestic incandescent-bulb plant, in anticipation of a flow of consumers given no choice but to buy the more-expensive and less-popular compact-fluorescent bulbs — but chalk up one for liberty, and for the free market, nevertheless. If people actually want to buy CFLs, of course, they’re still perfectly welcome to do so.

I haven’t read the bill itself yet, but my understanding is that it also forces the White House to make a call on the Keystone pipeline project within 60 days, rather than deferring it until after the 2012 election, as the president had hoped to do. All good.

By Malcolm | Posted in Politics | Comments (5)

Christopher Hitchens, 1949-2011

December 17, 2011 – 12:25 am

The death of Christopher Hitchens has hit me hard today; he was something of a hero of mine. Mr. Hitchens was everything I admire in a writer: a master of language, with incomparable style and wit, and a restless and erudite scholar — but unlike so many in possession of similar (but almost invariably lesser) gifts he was also a man of real passion, fully engaged in the life of the world all around him, and always willing to be persuaded by the truth, even when it necessitated a painful public apostasy. He lived.

If all that weren’t enough, he possessed another gift I envied: that rich, beautifully accented, sonorous baritone Voice. How it ensorcelled and enchanted! Could he have woven that Hitchens spell with the pipes of, say, Gilbert Gottfried?

Ah, me. Well, now he’s gone, and we’ll just have to carry on. His obituary in our newspaper of record is here, though of course everyone who had even the slightest acquaintance with the man now seems to have gone to press with a detailed memoir of their happy time together, even if it consisted of nothing more than a pizza delivery, or a one-off dry-cleaning transaction.

I, on the other hand, shared something truly meaningful with Hitch, I’ll have you know. We had the same birthday.

By Malcolm | Posted in General | Comments (0)

Sad News Tonight

December 16, 2011 – 1:14 am

Christopher Hitchens has died.

Read this remembrance, by Christopher Buckley.

By Malcolm | Posted in General | Comments (4)

Into The Mire

December 15, 2011 – 7:25 pm

In an excellent little essay at NRO, Michael Knox Beran reminds us that human suffering is, to borrow a word from the natural sciences, conserved: it can be transformed but not eliminated — and that the modern liberal obsession with its eradication at any cost is futile, and in the end destructive.

We read:

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

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

Very well said. Read the rest here.

By Malcolm | Posted in Society and Culture | Comments (23)

Dawa Digest

December 15, 2011 – 7:05 pm

Here are a couple of recent items on the dawa-jihad front:

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

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

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

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

Don’t Let the Door Hit Ya Where That Bulldog Shoulda Bit Ya

December 14, 2011 – 8:42 pm

The British New York Times columnist Roger Cohen has registered, in this recent item, his condescending disapproval of David Cameron’s rejection of the EU’s fiscal-union proposal. It is regrettable, opines Mr. Cohen, that the “pinstriped effluence” of the ancient British nation should wax so mawkishly sentimental over its silly old sovereignty, which is at this point nothing more than an embarrassing reminder of its obsolete, and morally embarrassing, imperial pretensions. Here’s a little sample of Mr. Cohen’s tone:

Since Cameron’s “No,’ there’s been much chatter about the return of Britain’s “bulldog spirit.’ Self-delusion is a lingering attribute of former imperial nations adjusting to a lesser reality.

Let’s unpack that a little:

Yes, you were once a great nation and people, but no longer, and good riddance. You are now a sagging, broken, deracinated little country, just as we planned — with nothing left to sustain you but empty traditions and fading memories, and no hope for the future but to submit to the will of your new masters.

Kneel!

In response (and with a hat tip to David Duff), here’s Ed West of the Daily Telegraph:

Of course the EU has brought wonderful benefits. In the old days one had to go through the palaver of changing currencies before going on holiday; now, thanks to the EU, that is no longer a problem, as no one can afford holidays. And, of course, after 45 years of European peace, a peace maintained by the US military (protection which, alas, has created a sort of infantile anti-Americanism among Europeans, the same sense of resentment a grown-up child living with their parents feels), the EU has done an amazing job of bringing Europeans together. The German chancellor is rarely off the front page of the Greek press, and Irishmen love the fact that their budget must first be discussed in Berlin before anyone in Dublin has a say.

But of course the EU is not about economics, and never has been ”“ it’s a moral idea with the millennial goal of destroying nationalism, which is why for four decades British Eurosceptics have been cast as moral deviants or caricatures (incidentally the latest YouGov polls show less support for the EU among women than men). That is why Guardian readers ”“ and I imagine it is quite similar with New York Times readers ”“ are always surprised to find normal, affable people who hold conservative views.

That last bit — about educated liberals who have been so deeply marinated in the warm crock-pot of smug multi-culti PC groupthink for so long that they’re genuinely surprised, upon finally making the acquaintance of an actual conservative, to find that he lacks horns and a tail — I can vouch for personally. Where I live, it happens all the time.

You can read the rest of Mr. West’s piece here.

By Malcolm | Posted in Foreign Affairs | Comments (0)

Fry, Baby, Fry

December 13, 2011 – 4:31 pm

A few months ago I started noticing a particular female announcer’s voice on radio and television commercials. She had a pleasant enough voice, but I thought it exhibited a peculiar weakness — in her falling inflections she would routinely drop below the bottom of her tonal register, and her sonorous voice would break momentarily into a pitchless croaking.

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

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

Learn more here.

By Malcolm | Posted in Society and Culture | Comments (4)

All Quiet On the Eastern Front

December 12, 2011 – 9:08 pm

Not having much to say tonight, I thought I’d just put up a few pictures I snapped around Wellfleet yesterday and today. I apologize for the mediocre quality: I’d left my camera behind in New York this time around, and so they were taken with my phone.

Yesterday I decided to explore the path leading away into the woods from the parking lot at Great Pond. These woods are crisscrossed with old trails and fire-roads, and I knew that one could make one’s way through the forest to a picturesque little kettle-hole called Dyer Pond, though I’d never done it myself.

Here’s a shot of the fire-road right by Dyer Pond:

And here’s the pond itself:

On the way back I stopped by Great Pond to have a look. There was hardly any breeze, and the water was clear and still.

In the summer, Great Pond is a very popular swimming-hole (I do a daily mile there myself), and the water never has a chance to settle. But on these clear calm days in the off-season, it becomes as limpid as glass, and the sandy bottom, undisturbed by all those vacationing feet, takes on lovely rippled patterns. I took a tall shot of the trees and sky reflecting in the smooth surface:

Then I lowered the frame so as just to show the sandy bottom, fading into the reflected sky:

How like a fingerprint those ripples are. As above, so below.

Late in the afternoon today I took a walk down to Great Island, which forms the western barrier of Wellfleet Harbor. At the northwest corner of the “island” (it isn’t really an island at all, but is more of a “tombolo”, connected to the nearby land by a narrow isthmus) there’s a steep hill accessible by a narrow sandy path (I’ve marked it here). I’d never been up there before, and it looked like a fine vantage, so up I went. Here’s the view from the top, looking north. The harbor’s on the right, and the 25-mile breadth of Cape Cod Bay is on the left:

Here’s the same view, from a few yards back along the ridgetop:

By this point the sun was setting over the Bay, with a little sun-dog in the icy clouds over to the right:

After the sun had set, I climbed down and walked out on the beach, looking west toward the mainland over the Bay. The tide was receding, and I was able to walk a long way out:

That’s all for today, I’m afraid. I’m sure there’s plenty going on in the busy wider world, but out here sometimes it’s kind of hard to care.

By Malcolm | Posted in Cape Cod | Comments (3)

Eine Kleine Nachtmusik

December 11, 2011 – 6:50 pm

We have coyotes out here in the Wellfleet woods, though we hear them oftener than see them. They like to socialize on moonlit nights, and last night they had a pretty good jamboree going not far from our little hilltop. The sound of it isn’t exactly musical, to my ear at least, but you can tell they’re putting their hearts into it, and maybe even having a little fun.

The coyotes around here, when you do happen to catch sight of one, have a wretched, scraggly, slinking look about them, and they skulk off directly once they realize they’ve been seen. But you don’t have to take my word for it — here’s Mark Twain, in one of my favorite passages from Roughing It:

The cayote is a living, breathing allegory of Want. He is always hungry. He is always poor, out of luck and friendless. The meanest creatures despise him, and even the fleas would desert him for a velocipede. He is so spiritless and cowardly that even while his exposed teeth are pretending a threat, the rest of his face is apologizing for it. And he is so homely! — so scrawny, and ribby, and coarse-haired, and pitiful. When he sees you he lifts his lip and lets a flash of his teeth out, and then turns a little out of the course he was pursuing, depresses his head a bit, and strikes a long, soft-footed trot through the sage-brush, glancing over his shoulder at you, from time to time, till he is about out of easy pistol range, and then he stops and takes a deliberate survey of you; he will trot fifty yards and stop again — another fifty and stop again; and finally the gray of his gliding body blends with the gray of the sage-brush, and he disappears. All this is when you make no demonstration against him; but if you do, he develops a livelier interest in his journey, and instantly electrifies his heels and puts such a deal of real estate between himself and your weapon, that by the time you have raised the hammer you see that you need a Minié rifle, and by the time you have got him in line you need a rifled cannon, and by the time you have “drawn a bead” on him you see well enough that nothing but an unusually long-winded streak of lightning could reach him where he is now. But if you start a swift-footed dog after him, you will enjoy it ever so much — especially if it is a dog that has a good opinion of himself, and has been brought up to think he knows something about speed.

The cayote will go swinging gently off on that deceitful trot of his, and every little while he will smile a fraudful smile over his shoulder that will fill that dog entirely full of encouragement and worldly ambition, and make him lay his head still lower to the ground, and stretch his neck further to the front, and pant more fiercely, and stick his tail out straighter behind, and move his furious legs with a yet wilder frenzy, and leave a broader and broader, and higher and denser cloud of desert sand smoking behind, and marking his long wake across the level plain! And all this time the dog is only a short twenty feet behind the cayote, and to save the soul of him he cannot understand why it is that he cannot get perceptibly closer; and he begins to get aggravated, and it makes him madder and madder to see how gently the cayote glides along and never pants or sweats or ceases to smile; and he grows still more and more incensed to see how shamefully he has been taken in by an entire stranger, and what an ignoble swindle that long, calm, soft-footed trot is; and next he notices that he is getting fagged, and that the cayote actually has to slacken speed a little to keep from running away from him — and then that town-dog is mad in earnest, and he begins to strain and weep and swear, and paw the sand higher than ever, and reach for the cayote with concentrated and desperate energy. This “spurt” finds him six feet behind the gliding enemy, and two miles from his friends. And then, in the instant that a wild new hope is lighting up his face, the cayote turns and smiles blandly upon him once more, and with a something about it which seems to say: “Well, I shall have to tear myself away from you, bub — business is business, and it will not do for me to be fooling along this way all day” — and forthwith there is a rushing sound, and the sudden splitting of a long crack through the atmosphere, and behold that dog is solitary and alone in the midst of a vast solitude!

It makes his head swim. He stops, and looks all around; climbs the nearest sand-mound, and gazes into the distance; shakes his head reflectively, and then, without a word, he turns and jogs along back to his train, and takes up a humble position under the hindmost wagon, and feels unspeakably mean, and looks ashamed, and hangs his tail at half-mast for a week.

By Malcolm | Posted in Cape Cod | Comments (1)

The Road To Energy Independence

December 10, 2011 – 5:25 pm

Okay, forget Solyndra. If the Obama administration really is serious about “investing” in “innovation”, they should have a look here.

By Malcolm | Posted in Technology | Comments (2)

Bloody Well Right

December 9, 2011 – 11:44 pm

David Cameron is getting plenty of heat from the EU for standing up for his people, for once.

Well, good for him, I say, for refusing to surrender England’s ancient sovereignty to a lot of unelected Eurocrats as their doomed continent falls under the all-too familiar shadow of coalescing German dominance.

To quote Winston Churchill:

“You have enemies? Good. That means you’ve stood up for something, sometime in your life.”

By Malcolm | Posted in Foreign Affairs | Comments (4)

PSA

December 8, 2011 – 11:40 pm

Let’s be careful out there, folks.

By Malcolm | Posted in General | Comments (1)

Wishful Thinking

December 8, 2011 – 10:23 pm

In a recent STRATFOR article, George Friedman uses the example of the “Arab Spring” uprising in Egypt as a case study in what he calls “an inherent contradiction in Western ideology and, ultimately, of an attempt to create a coherent foreign policy.”

At the root of this ideological confusion, says Friedman, is a tension between two central tenets of Western political philosophy:

Western countries, following the principles of the French Revolution, have two core beliefs. The first is the concept of national self-determination, the idea that all nations (and what the term “nation’ means is complex in itself) have the right to determine for themselves the type of government they wish. The second is the idea of human rights, which are defined in several documents but are all built around the basic values of individual rights, particularly the right not only to participate in politics but also to be free in your private life from government intrusion.

The first principle leads to the idea of the democratic foundations of the state. The second leads to the idea that the state must be limited in its power in certain ways and the individual must be free to pursue his own life in his own way within a framework of law limited by the principles of liberal democracy. The core assumption within this is that a democratic polity will yield a liberal constitution. This assumes that the majority of the citizens, left to their own devices, will favor the Enlightenment’s definition of human rights. This assumption is simple, but its application is tremendously complex. In the end, the premise of the Western project is that national self-determination, expressed through free elections, will create and sustain constitutional democracies.

I’m a recovered neoconservative, and as such I used to share this opinion myself. Many still do:

It is interesting to note that human rights activists and neoconservatives, who on the surface are ideologically opposed, actually share this core belief. Both believe that democracy and human rights flow from the same source and that creating democratic regimes will create human rights. The neoconservatives believe outside military intervention might be an efficient agent for this. Human rights groups oppose this, preferring to organize and underwrite democratic movements and use measures such as sanctions and courts to compel oppressive regimes to cede power. But they share common ground on this point as well. Both groups believe that outside intervention is needed to facilitate the emergence of an oppressed public naturally inclined toward democracy and human rights.

The problem with all of this is a curious modern blindness to vital historical and cultural realities, brought on by Western vanity about the universal appeal of its values:

The idea that the destruction of repressive regimes opens the door for democratic elections that will not result in another repressive regime, at least by Western standards, assumes that all societies find Western values admirable and want to emulate them. This is sometimes the case, but the general assertion is a form of narcissism in the West that assumes that all reasonable people, freed from oppression, would wish to emulate us.

Our choices, then, are not so simple as we would like to think they are:

Assume there is a choice between a repressive, undemocratic regime that is in the interests of a Western country and a regime that is democratic but repressive by Western standards and hostile to those interests. Which is preferable, and what steps should be taken?

These are blindingly complex questions that some observers ”” the realists as opposed to the idealists ”” say not only are unanswerable but also undermine the ability to pursue national interests without in any way improving the moral character of the world. In other words, you are choosing between two types of repression from a Western point of view and there is no preference. Therefore, a country like the United States should ignore the moral question altogether and focus on a simpler question, and one that’s answerable: the national interest.

The question then is: if the simplistic moral calculus applied earlier this year by giddy “Arab Spring” cheerleaders who saw little more in Tahrir Square than Westernizing hipsters with iPhones was based on a narcissistic delusion, then what is our real national interest in the region? If the creation of secular pro-Western Jeffersonian democracies in the Muslim lands of the Middle East and Maghreb is just a pipe dream — and it is — then we should evaluate our aims more coolly and clearly. I can think of a few (your mileage may vary):

1) Tamping down Islamism where we can, or at least ensuring that Islamist regimes understand that we will entertain no more costly fantasies about “nation-building” in response to the next hostile act on the part of their jihadis against us; that the next time around there will instead be a good deal of nation-demolition on offer, and very little indeed in the way of building.

2) Maintaining the economically vital flow of oil and shipping through Mideast waters.

3) Standing in solidarity with Israel: our only genuine ally, the only West-friendly democracy, and indeed the only non-barbarous nation in the region.

You can read all of Mr. Friedman’s excellent essay here.

By Malcolm | Posted in Foreign Affairs | Comments (1)

Destroying Civilization, By Degrees

December 7, 2011 – 11:53 pm

Here.

By Malcolm | Posted in Rubbish | Comments (14)

It Was Behind The Sofa

December 7, 2011 – 9:26 pm

There’s a buzz going round that the boffins at LHC may have found the Higgs boson.

By Malcolm | Posted in Science | Comments (7)

Changing Times

December 7, 2011 – 5:55 pm

President Obama gave a rousing speech for his base yesterday in Osawatomie, Kansas: a collectivist stem-winder in which he invoked the rough-riding spirit of Teddy Roosevelt to call for more leveling, more government regulation of everything, and more central planning — in general, more “tutto nello Stato, niente al di fuori dello Stato, nulla contro lo Stato.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

By Malcolm | Posted in Society and Culture, Politics | Comments (1)

Speak, Pencil

December 7, 2011 – 12:05 pm

Have you ever read this?

By Malcolm | Posted in Society and Culture | Comments (1)

Hitchens On The Mattress Grave

December 7, 2011 – 11:05 am

Christopher Hitchens has suffered the torments of the damned in the past eighteen months, and in this harrowing essay at Vanity Fair, he reflects skeptically on Nietzsche’s oft-repeated claim that “Was mich nicht umbringt macht mich stÁ¤rker“. What has not yet killed him, as he makes very clear indeed, has made him no stronger at all.

By Malcolm | Posted in General | Comments (0)

Does Size Matter?

December 6, 2011 – 11:30 am

Following on our recent post about race and intelligence: one question that often comes up is where brain size fits in. Brain size does seem to vary among human populations in the same way that the distribution of intelligence does — with East Asians, for example, having bigger brains on average than whites — so it is both tempting and reasonable to conclude that the correspondence indicates a causal relationship.

This often draws the objection, however, that females have distinctly smaller brains than males, but do not show lower average intelligence within their population groups than males. So if this difference doesn’t account for differences in intelligence within groups, why should mean brain volume be responsible for IQ differences between groups?

The answer is coming into view. It appears, as many have suspected, that the difference in brain size between males and females is due to the presence of extra machinery in the male brain for processing spatial-relationship data — a feature that is independent of general intelligence.

Charles Murray comments here.

By Malcolm | Posted in Mind and Brain, Science | Comments (3)

Potential

December 5, 2011 – 11:23 pm

Mulla Nasrudin was carrying home some liver which he had just bought. In the other hand he had a recipe for liver pie which a friend had given him.

Suddenly a buzzard swooped down and carried off the liver.

“You fool!” shouted Nasrudin, “the meat is all very well — but I still have the recipe!”

From “The Exploits of the Incomparable Mulla Nasrudin”, by Idries Shah

By Malcolm | Posted in Inner Work | Comments (6)

How High’s The Water, Mama?

December 4, 2011 – 9:47 pm

Not really rising at all, according to sea-level expert Nils-Axel Mörner, who actually goes and measures it, all over the globe. David Duff has brought to our attention to a new article by Dr. Mörner in the Spectator, in which we read (my emphasis):

It has now become traditional for climate change summits to open with a new, dazzling prediction of impending catastrophe. The UN Climate Conference under way in the South African coastal town of Durban is no exception. This year’s focus is on a familiar and certainly arresting argument: that sea levels are rising at a catastrophic and unprecedented rate mainly due to man-made global warming.

No one makes this point with quite so much panache as Mohamed Nasheed, president of the Maldives. In the run-up to the summit, he declared that he leads ”˜an island nation that may slip beneath the waves if all this talk on climate does not lead to action soon’.

… I may be able to help. As someone with some expertise in the field, I can assure the low-lying countries that this is a false alarm. The sea is not rising precipitously. I have studied many of the low-lying regions in my 45-year career recording and interpreting sea level data. I have conducted six field trips to the Maldives; I have been to Bangladesh, whose environment minister was claiming that flooding due to climate change threatened to create in her country 20 million ”˜ecological refugees’. I have carefully examined the data of ”˜drowning’ Tuvalu. And I can report that, while such regions do have problems, they need not fear rising sea levels.

Dr. Mörner quotes the International Panel on Climate Change’s Fourth Assessment Report, from 2007:

”˜Even under the most conservative scenario, sea level will be about 40cm higher than today by the end of 21st century and this is projected to increase the annual number of people flooded in coastal populations from 13 million to 94 million. Almost 60 per cent of this increase will occur in South Asia.’

Sounds dire. But wait:

This is nonsense. The world’s true experts on sea level are to be found at the INQUA (International Union for Quaternary Reseach) commission on Sea Level Changes and Coastal Evolution (of which I am a former president), not at the IPCC. Our research is what the climate lobby might call an ”˜inconvenient truth’: it shows that sea levels have been oscillating close to the present level for the last three centuries. This is not due to melting glaciers: sea levels are affected by a great many factors, such as the speed at which the earth rotates. They rose in the order of 10 to 11cm between 1850 and 1940, stopped rising or maybe even fell a little until 1970, and have remained roughly flat ever since.

… At Tuvalu in the Pacific, I found no evidence of flooding ”” despite claims in Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth that it was one of those ”˜low-lying Pacific nations’ whose residents have had to ”˜evacuate their homes because of rising seas’. In fact the tide gauge of the past 25 years clearly shows there has been no rise.

But the best-known ”˜victim’ of rising sea levels is, without doubt, the Maldives. This myth has been boosted by the opportunism of Mohamed Nasheed, who stars in a new documentary called The Island President. The film’s tagline is ”˜To save his country, he has to save our planet’. It is a depressing example of how Hollywood-style melodrama has corrupted climate science. Nasheed has been rehearsing his lines since being elected in 2009. ”˜We are drowning, our nation will disappear, we have to relocate the people,’ he repeatedly claims.

But if sea levels in the Maldives really aren’t rising, why would the island nation’s leader go around raising false alarms? The question one must ask, as always, is: Cui bono?

If this is what President Nasheed believes, it seems strange that he has authorised the building of many large waterside hotels and 11 new airports. Or could it perhaps be that he wants to take a cut of the $30 billion fund agreed at an accord in Copenhagen for the poorest nations hit by ”˜global warming’?

But what about all that satellite data we keep hearing about?

The IPCC’s Fourth Assessment claimed that ”˜there is strong evidence’ of sea level rising over the last few decades. It goes as far as to claim: “Satellite observations available since the early 1990s provide more accurate sea level data with nearly global coverage. This decade-long satellite altimetry data set shows that since 1993, sea level has been rising at a rate of around 3mm yr”“1, significantly higher than the average during the previous half century. Coastal tide gauge measurements confirm this observation, and indicate that similar rates have occurred in some earlier decades.’

Almost every word of this is untrue. Satellite altimetry is a wonderful and vital new technique that offers the reconstruction of sea level changes all over the ocean surface. But it has been hijacked and distorted by the IPCC for political ends.

“Hijacked and distorted”? That’s strong stuff. What have you got?

In 2003 the satellite altimetry record was mysteriously tilted upwards to imply a sudden sea level rise rate of 2.3mm per year. When I criticised this dishonest adjustment at a global warming conference in Moscow, a British member of the IPCC delegation admitted in public the reason for this new calibration: ”˜We had to do so, otherwise there would be no trend.’

This is a scandal that should be called Sealevelgate. As with the Hockey Stick, there is little real-world data to support the upward tilt. It seems that the 2.3mm rise rate has been based on just one tide gauge in Hong Kong (whose record is contradicted by four other nearby tide gauges). Why does it show such a rise? Because like many of the 159 tide gauge stations used by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, it is sited on an unstable harbour construction or landing pier prone to uplift or subsidence. When you exclude these unreliable stations, the 68 remaining ones give a present rate of sea level rise in the order of 1mm a year.

Read the whole thing here.

Can we have our light bulbs back?

By Malcolm | Posted in Global Warming | Comments (3)

Dead Civilization Walking

December 3, 2011 – 5:08 pm

Pure insanity in deep-blue Boston:

First-grader accused of sexual harassment

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

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

Mark Steyn comments:

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

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

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

Sometimes societies become too stupid to survive.

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

By Malcolm | Posted in Society and Culture | Comments (1)

Fa-La-La

December 3, 2011 – 2:30 pm

The merry Christmas season is upon us once again, so in a joyous Yuletide spirit, let’s put aside all this partisan bickering and enjoy a little light-hearted holiday cheer.

Why, I’ve got just the thing.

By Malcolm | Posted in General | Comments (0)

Third Rail

December 3, 2011 – 1:40 pm

The wall of ideological taboo around frank discussion of race and intelligence is beginning to crack. So far we’re used to hearing about it mostly from beyond-the-pale HBD bloggers, or rare damn-the-torpedoes authors like Charles Murray — but truth, when buried, has a way of patiently seeking daylight. (Or, as Churchill put it, “you must look at the facts, because they look at you.”) In this case, the facts appear to be that a) general intelligence is reliably measurable in ways that are independent of cultural bias, b) that it is highly heritable, c) that it is strongly predictive of life outcomes, and d) that its distribution varies in persistent ways in different human populations.

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

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

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

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

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

By Malcolm | Posted in Society and Culture, Science | Comments (11)

How Insensitive

December 2, 2011 – 2:24 pm

Hot on the heels of Climategate II, Walter Russell Meade brings to our attention a peer-reviewed paper from the latest Science that calls into question “settled” wisdom about the sensitivity of global temperature to increases in atmospheric CO2. Here.

Traffic’s up around here lately, and this might be a good moment to reiterate our position on Global Warmism for new readers. We break the issue into four questions:

1) Is the Earth currently getting warmer?

It may well be; we have no idea. The Earth has certainly has got warmer and colder many, many times in the past — most of them long before humans could possibly have had anything to do with it. No reason it mightn’t be doing so now.

2) If the Earth actually is warming, is it due to human activity?

Given that the Earth’s climate has fluctuated continuously throughout the eons, then any current warming trend isn’t necessarily due to human activity. But if the Earth is indeed in a warming spell, it’s certainly possible that human activity may be partly or even largely responsible this time around.

3) If the Earth is warming, and that warming is in large part due to human activity, can it be ameliorated or halted by curtailing that activity?

We don’t know. Perhaps it can. On the other hand, if any ongoing warming is simply the latest of the natural fluctuations that Earth’s climate has always been subject to, perhaps not.

4) If the Earth is warming, and that warming is in large part due to human activity, and can in fact be ameliorated or halted by curtailing that activity, is it worth it to do so?

We’re stacking up a pretty big pile of “ifs” by this point. To answer this question we need to weigh, as best we can, the adverse social, political, and economic costs of taking action, against the negative (and positive!) consequences of doing nothing. (We also need to factor in the chance that whatever we try to do, at terrible cost, may not even be effective.) There are all sorts of hidden agendas and ulterior motives in play here, and most of the remedies on offer are burdensome indeed, mainly in terms of economic cost and bureaucratic infringement on national sovereignty and individual liberty.

Our position, then, is best described as conservative: distrustful of grand, disruptive schemes, mindful of the fragility of prosperous, happy societies, and keeping a cynic’s wary eye on the various Utopians, collectivists, grant-recipients, professional uplifters, and “green-energy” grifters who see all this as little more than a juicy opportunity for self-advancement, and a “crisis” not to be wasted.

We set the bar, then, rather high: to justify the drastic responses that many currently seek, we will need to be convinced beyond any doubt 1) that the Earth is indeed in a warming phase, 2) that we are the cause, 3) that drastic measures can actually make a meaningful difference, and 4) that the consequences of not taking drastic action are clearly worse than the costs of doing so.

By Malcolm | Posted in Global Warming | Comments (3)