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April 28, 2005
The Filibuster - I'm against it in its current form...
This entry in Powerline Blog says in 1995 when President Clinton (Democrat) had some key legislation held up by a Republican minority in the Senate, the New York Times proclaimed
- The U.S. Senate likes to call itself the world's greatest deliberative body. The greatest obstructive body is more like it. In the last season of Congress, the Republican minority invoked an endless string of filibusters to frustrate the will of the majority. This relentless abuse of a time-honored Senate tradition so disgusted Senator Tom Harkin, a Democrat from Iowa, that he is now willing to forgo easy retribution and drastically limit the filibuster. Hooray for him.
Yes. The New York Times was, a mere decade ago, strongly in favor of changing the Senate rules so that filibusters could be blocked after 8 days, with a simple majority.
But now, when the shoe is on the other foot, the idea of changing the Senate rules is unthinkable. What has changed in 10 years? Surely if it was a good idea in 1995, it is still a good idea in 2005?
Bottom line: The current rules in the Senate make it trivially easy to filibuster a bill. A modern filibuster now requires a 60 vote majority to end. The net result is: the Senate now operates as though 60 votes are required to pass legislation, instead of a simple majority. This is not historically the way the Senate used to operate and I see no reason why this change should have occured.
The current rules on filibuster in the Senate should be changed.
Posted by rakhier at 11:10 AM | Comments (0)
Three Experts Comment on Islamic Extremism
Three experts Irshad Manji, Steven Emerson, and Gilles Kepel respond to some important questions about Islam and the west. Ms. Manji is quite interesting to listen to ---
- How widespread is Muslim extremism in European Muslim communities and mosques?
Manji: It mostly depends on how you define extremism. If you mean "literalism," then it is more than widespread - it is mainstream. If you mean the overt preaching of violence, then it percolates on the margins. The key here is to recognize that because literalism is mainstream in Islam today, the thin minority of Muslims who have any intention of engaging in terror are nonetheless protected by the vast majority of moderate Muslims who don′t know how to debate and dissent with that proclivity.
Let me explain why. We Muslims, even in the West, are routinely raised to believe that because the Koran comes after the Torah and the Bible (historically and chronologically), it is the final and therefore perfect manifesto of God′s will. The Koran, we are taught, does not lend itself to the inconsistencies and ambiguities and outright contradictions and, God forbid, human editing like those earlier scriptures. Mainstream Muslims believe, as an article of faith, that the Koran is not like any other scripture. It is the summit of the holy books. This is a supremacy complex, which even moderate Muslims share. And this supremacy complex is dangerous because when abuse happens under the banner of Islam, most Muslims do not yet know how to debate, dissent, revise or reform. That′s because we have not yet been introduced to the possibility, let alone the virtue, of asking questions about our holy book. The same cannot be said today for “moderate” Christians and Jews.
Clearly, this is a problem. Hat Tip to Winds of Change.net
Posted by rakhier at 10:55 AM | Comments (0)
How to Blog Anonymously
Here is a good essay on how you can blog and avoid getting into trouble or getting fired.
How to Blog Safely (About Work or Anything Else)
I may need to do this sometime. The cult of polical correctness has even reached into some areas of public education. Sigh.
Posted by rakhier at 10:46 AM | Comments (0)
April 25, 2005
The Coming Anarchy in Nepal
This is a good post on what the author, Curzon, calls The Coming Anarchy in Nepal.
I personally find it hard to support in any way a king like the current king of Nepal. A man who is unfit to lead the country and seems to have no feel for government. Many people would make better leaders, such as the Nepalese themselves.
It is true that Communist revolutionaries have a bad track record but it is not as bleak as the author suggests. Counter examples to Cambodia and Afghanistan are Nicaragua, and Cuba. I think Castro is one of the worst leaders in the world today and I think the Sandinistas were very average political leaders but you can not honestly say that when they took over millions died in Cuba or Nicaragua.
Frankly, the insergents in Nepal have valid points. 90% of the land in Nepal is owned by a small class of hereditary land owners. They have owned the land for hundreds of years and have done little to promote the well being of the people who work on the land. The average Nepalese is dirt poor and has no hope for improvement in their life time.
The current government in Nepal is a king who rules, not because he has any skill in ruling but because his brother was killed by his own son. This is no way to run a country in the modern world. The current king seems to think it is still the year 1750 C.E.
Ideally the Nepalese would throw out the useless King Gyanendra and create a new democratic republic. The new government could then address the really serious needs of land reform and poverty in Nepal. I certainly don't want to see another Pol Pot or Stalin or Mao in control of Nepal but I also don't want to see King Gyanendra rule as a despot keeping the Nepalese in poverty while his sons cruise around Kathmandu in expensive autos for the next 20 years.
Bottom line: Monarchy is a terrible form of government. Most modern governments are much better than Monarchies. Change can be good.
Posted by rakhier at 04:28 PM | Comments (0)
April 14, 2005
On the former Pope - Karol Wojtyla
I have an opinion on the late Pope. On balance I think he was a net negative for the World as a whole, though a very small negative. Not as bad as Pope Pius 12, not as good as Pope John 23. He had many positive attributes - energy, spirit, dedication, conviction that he knew the right direction for the Catholic Church. But, in my judgement, he was wrong about the right direction for the Catholic Church, wrong about the Church's moral stand on a large number of critical moral issues, and wrong about the Church's relation to true evil in the world.
People like to give the Pope credit for the fall of Communism in Eastern Europe, or for the rise of the Solidarity Movement. I don't think either claim is a good one. Communism in the U.S.S.R. didn't work. Everyone in the system knew it. But it did produce some true believers, like Gorbachev, who thought that if Communism was done morally, it would be a good system. He was wrong about that but he didn't try to "fix" his mistake by killing millions of people (as Lenin and Stalin had done before him). The Pope had nothing to do with Gorbachev or his moral decisions - Gorbachev and his fellow reformers were atheists.
As to Solidarity, yes the Poles were (and are) Catholic. Yes the Pope was Polish, but I fail to find any linkage between the origin of the dockworker's strike in Gdansk and the Pope. The shipyard strike in August of 1980 seems to have had no connection to the Pope but does fit a long pattern in the life of Lech Walesa - a man who wanted to work in a good shipyard where workers weren't abused and forced to work under idiots.
I would like to point out - for those people who want to claim the Pope is a great hero - that a true test of the Pope's moral character can be found in his relation to one of the greatest moral struggles in Polish history: World War II. Poland was attacked in 1939. Mr. Wojtyla, then 19, was in a university. He stayed in the University until it was closed by Nazis. He responded to the Nazi occupation by hidding in an underground seminary run by the very powerful Archbishop of Krakow. So far as we know, his activities during this time of war and horrendous evil was to study to be a priest. There are many things Mr. Wojtyla could have choosen to do. Many dangerous things which might have saved lives or helped defeat the Nazis. But instead, his life during this time is a blank. Empty. This is not the behavior of a great hero (like say Mordechaj Anielewicz or Tadeusz Bór-Komorowski). One can say that his behavior as a priest and later bishop in Communist Poland was heroic. Perhaps so.
Finally, on a lesser note, I think the Pope should have stepped down from the Papacy in 2000. His health was clearly failing and the church basically stood still for the last 5 years, waiting for him to die. Important things happened in the last 5 years while the Catholic Church has essentially been in a state of suspended animation.
Interesting article critical of the Pope here by John Derbyshire.
Article about Mr. Wojtyla here (Wikipedia)
Posted by rakhier at 11:21 AM | Comments (0)
On the Frivolity of Evil...
You won't read a more devestating article about the moral chaos in the Welfare state than this article The Frivolity of Evil in City Journal by Theodore Dalrymple. Mr. Dalrymple has spent 14 years working as a doctor in a city in England, treating poor and prisoners. This is a must-read essay on the question of morality and evil in Europe today.
Some exerpts:
- Yesterday, for example, a 21-year-old woman consulted me, claiming to be depressed. She had swallowed an overdose of her antidepressants and then called an ambulance.
There is something to be said here about the word "depression," which has almost entirely eliminated the word and even the concept of unhappiness from modern life. Of the thousands of patients I have seen, only two or three have ever claimed to be unhappy: all the rest have said that they were depressed. This semantic shift is deeply significant, for it implies that dissatisfaction with life is itself pathological, a medical condition, which it is the responsibility of the doctor to alleviate by medical means. Everyone has a right to health; depression is unhealthy; therefore everyone has a right to be happy (the opposite of being depressed). This idea in turn implies that one's state of mind, or one's mood, is or should be independent of the way that one lives one's life, a belief that must deprive human existence of all meaning, radically disconnecting reward from conduct. (Emphasis mine)
A ridiculous pas de deux between doctor and patient ensues: the patient pretends to be ill, and the doctor pretends to cure him. In the process, the patient is willfully blinded to the conduct that inevitably causes his misery in the first place. I have therefore come to see that one of the most important tasks of the doctor today is the disavowal of his own power and responsibility. The patient's notion that he is ill stands in the way of his understanding of the situation, without which moral change cannot take place. The doctor who pretends to treat is an obstacle to this change, blinding rather than enlightening
This section talks about the depressed young woman. She has given birth to 3 children from 3 men, none of whom are actual fathers.
- My patient was not just a victim of her mother, however: she had knowingly borne children of men of whom no good could be expected. She knew perfectly well the consequences and the meaning of what she was doing, as her reaction to something that I said to her—and say to hundreds of women patients in a similar situation—proved: next time you are thinking of going out with a man, bring him to me for my inspection, and I'll tell you if you can go out with him.
This never fails to make the most wretched, the most "depressed" of women smile broadly or laugh heartily. They know exactly what I mean, and I need not spell it out further. They know that I mean that most of the men they have chosen have their evil written all over them, sometimes quite literally in the form of tattoos, saying "FUCK OFF" or "MAD DOG." And they understand that if I can spot the evil instantly, because they know what I would look for, so can they—and therefore they are in large part responsible for their own downfall at the hands of evil men.
Moreover, they are aware that I believe that it is both foolish and wicked to have children by men without having considered even for a second or a fraction of a second whether the men have any qualities that might make them good fathers. Mistakes are possible, of course: a man may turn out not to be as expected. But not even to consider the question is to act as irresponsibly as it is possible for a human being to act. It is knowingly to increase the sum of evil in the world, and sooner or later the summation of small evils leads to the triumph of evil itself.
My patient did not start out with the intention of abetting, much less of committing, evil. And yet her refusal to take seriously and act upon the signs that she saw and the knowledge that she had was not the consequence of blindness and ignorance. It was utterly willful. She knew from her own experience, and that of many people around her, that her choices, based on the pleasure or the desire of the moment, would lead to the misery and suffering not only of herself, but—especially—of her own children.
This truly is not so much the banality as the frivolity of evil: the elevation of passing pleasure for oneself over the long-term misery of others to whom one owes a duty. What better phrase than the frivolity of evil describes the conduct of a mother who turns her own 14-year-old child out of doors because her latest boyfriend does not want him or her in the house? And what better phrase describes the attitude of those intellectuals who see in this conduct nothing but an extension of human freedom and choice, another thread in life's rich tapestry?
Here he explains where this comes from:
- A necessary, though not sufficient, condition is the welfare state, which makes it possible, and sometimes advantageous, to behave like this. Just as the IMF is the bank of last resort, encouraging commercial banks to make unwise loans to countries that they know the IMF will bail out, so the state is the parent of last resort—or, more often than not, of first resort. The state, guided by the apparently generous and humane philosophy that no child, whatever its origins, should suffer deprivation, gives assistance to any child, or rather the mother of any child, once it has come into being. In matters of public housing, it is actually advantageous for a mother to put herself at a disadvantage, to be a single mother, without support from the fathers of the children and dependent on the state for income. She is then a priority; she won't pay local taxes, rent, or utility bills.
As for the men, the state absolves them of all responsibility for their children. The state is now father to the child. The biological father is therefore free to use whatever income he has as pocket money, for entertainment and little treats. He is thereby reduced to the status of a child, though a spoiled child with the physical capabilities of a man: petulant, demanding, querulous, self-centered, and violent if he doesn't get his own way. The violence escalates and becomes a habit. A spoiled brat becomes an evil tyrant.
But if the welfare state is a necessary condition for the spread of evil, it is not sufficient. After all, the British welfare state is neither the most extensive nor the most generous in the world, and yet our rates of social pathology—public drunkenness, drug-taking, teenage pregnancy, venereal disease, hooliganism, criminality—are the highest in the world. Something more was necessary to produce this result.
Here we enter the realm of culture and ideas. For it is necessary not only to believe that it is economically feasible to behave in the irresponsible and egotistical fashion that I have described, but also to believe that it is morally permissible to do so. And this idea has been peddled by the intellectual elite in Britain for many years, more assiduously than anywhere else, to the extent that it is now taken for granted. There has been a long march not only through the institutions but through the minds of the young. When young people want to praise themselves, they describe themselves as "nonjudgmental." For them, the highest form of morality is amorality.
There has been an unholy alliance between those on the Left, who believe that man is endowed with rights but no duties, and libertarians on the Right, who believe that consumer choice is the answer to all social questions, an idea eagerly adopted by the Left in precisely those areas where it does not apply. Thus people have a right to bring forth children any way they like, and the children, of course, have the right not to be deprived of anything, at least anything material. How men and women associate and have children is merely a matter of consumer choice, of no more moral consequence than the choice between dark and milk chocolate, and the state must not discriminate among different forms of association and child rearing, even if such non-discrimination has the same effect as British and French neutrality during the Spanish Civil War.
The consequences to the children and to society do not enter into the matter: for in any case it is the function of the state to ameliorate by redistributive taxation the material effects of individual irresponsibility, and to ameliorate the emotional, educational, and spiritual effects by an army of social workers, psychologists, educators, counselors, and the like, who have themselves come to form a powerful vested interest of dependence on the government.
Clearly, the social-economic experiment with socialism and the welfare state is causing large problems in England (and one suspects, in Western Europe in general). The fundemental principal in functioning social systems is people must take responsibility for their own lives and actions. When you (the state) step in and solve people's problems, the people will respond by becoming more dependent on the state. Humans are quite willing to act like children, irresponsible, headless of consequences. The state has got to get out of the way and make people responsible for what they have done. Yes this will produce suffering. The test is: more or less suffering than the welfare state today? The evidence suggests: less state support results in less overall suffering.
Posted by rakhier at 10:36 AM | Comments (0)
April 11, 2005
History News Network.
This is a group blog which tracks news stories and essays which have some connection to the general idea of history.
Occasionally interesting...
Posted by rakhier at 12:29 PM | Comments (0)