Teleologic Blog: Philosophy Archives

September 07, 2009

Burning Man 2009 - What it was like (Part 1)

Burning Man - I attended the event from 8/31/09 to 9/6/09.

The following is my experience at Burning Man.

Imagine if you would, the biggest campground on the surface of the Earth. The average campground in the U.S. has space for 50 to 250 camp sites. Burning Man has some 50,000 people attending, resulting in about 10,000 camps. So its big. So big you can't see it all without spending days traveling about the site on bike. The camps as modest as one man in the back of his pick-up truck to camps of 30 Indian wigwams holding more than 100 people along with associated geodesic domes, trucks, power-generators, and very odd vehicles.

Unlike the normal campground, located in a scenic spot, near running water or a lake, Burning Man is located in one of the harshest places you can visit in the United States. The terrain is dead flat and utterly dry. The ground is completely covered in a fine dry white clay which instantly turns to sticky gray mud with a small application of water.

Let me repeat again: there is no water. None. There is no vegetation. There is essentially nothing living in the Burning Man camp zone. This is so strange that it is very hard to wrap your head around it. Every place that humans have ever settled has water, without exception. A place without water is only a place humans traveled across, never a place that they stopped at, unless bitter necessity forced such a stop. To voluntarily live in a place without water is profoundly unsettling. It feels unnatural, as indeed it is. At times, in the middle of the day, as the sun beat down on the cloth tarp spread over my mattress I felt desperate to escape - to leave Burning Man as fast as I could and find a lake to throw myself in. But I stayed. Just like nearly everyone stays.

At the outer edges of the Burning Man camp, the tents are usually quite normal and - except for the crowding - you would not think twice about what you saw. People sitting on camp chairs, in the shade they created with their own plastic cloths stretched over tent poles. Eating, talking, snoozing in the heat of the day. Occasionally you would see a bigger tent, or one built on the location in the shape of a geodesic half-dome made out of metal tubes and covered with a parachute, flapping in the wind.

Go further in, towards the center, and you see more unusual structures. Some tents in the middle zone are huge, the size of circus tents, sheltering 10 or 20 smaller tents underneath. Some camps are very odd indeed, decorated with a design motif, accessorized by the addition of statues, flags, or random bits of junk. Some camps offer things to passers-by such as: a chance to jump on their trampoline, a phone call to the outside world, a quick shower of water from their huge drum, a pancake, a melted cheese sandwich, a hug, a complement, a home-made drink, and so forth.

All of this is free as one of the few rules of Burning Man is that nothing can be sold or bought (there are two exceptions, you can buy ice and coffee at the center of the campground). If you offer something, you can not ask for money in return.

The inner ring of the camp is where the most unusual things are to be found. This is where you find groups (collectives? tribes? guilds? associations?) of people who have joined together to create places/things/art just because they feel like it. There is really nothing like these organizations outside Burning Man. The short description might be "a group of people that want to impress the other people at Burning Man with their created space".

One group collects costumes (discarded cloths as well as items they buy) and then encourages people to come and pick a costume and wear it. Another group built a giant video screen and invited people to come to a central booth to play Tetris against other random people. Another group gave away free watermelon pieces, still another group gave out free ice-cream. (I suppose if you really wanted to spend all your time mooching you could bring no food at all to Burning Man and still survive, though your diet would hardly be balanced).

By far the most common inner core structures are bars such as The Golden Cafe) or the Ashram Galactica. The groups that run these bars spend thousands of dollars to set up and run super-tents where people can come in, sit down and be served alcoholic drinks and food. They build structures that are decorated around a theme and they are typically open 24 hours a day for the duration of the event. Some 125 people set up and run the Ashram Galactica, an operation that requires major logistical and planning effort. Why anyone would do this is - at this time - unfathomable to me. I must suppose that it starts small, and just snowballs year after year.

The other major type of camp are the music camps, such as Opulent Temple, Root Society, and The Hookahdome. These camps a the biggest structures/places in the whole of Burning Man and they are filled with huge speakers, powered by fleets of generators, and blasting out very odd music from nightfall till dawn. Opulent Temple had lasers, two huge projection screens, and even a flame thrower all to add to the musical effect. Going to the Opulent Temple at night was better than going to the best dance clubs in San Francisco and, again, there was no charge. As for me, musically I don't particularly enjoy the music they played but I was truly impressed by the shows. How these huge music camps collect enough money to operate at Burning Man is beyond my understanding.

Driving around streets of the Burning Man camp are tanker trucks filled with water that spray the streets, temporarily turning the dusty roads to mud paths that are best not stepped on. Also there are sewage tankers that pump out the human waste from the many Port-A-Potties that are located around the grounds.

By far the most interesting vehicles are the Art Cars, the bizarrely decorated cars (and more rarely, bikes) that show off the creativity of the builders. Some of the art cars I saw were giant snails, an "eel" at least 75 feet long, a huge double-decker bus covered on one side with loudspeakers with a DJ on the top, and a huge glowing heart shape above him. There were so many art cars that I could not count them all, I lost track at 150. Cat cars, fish cars, sailboat cars, a car shaped like a sandworm from Dune, a dragon that could breath fire and more, and more again.

Nearly all the art cars are designed to be viewed at night and so they are decorated with lights. Formerly this was done with neon lights but now EL-wire is the new thing and few cars did not make use of the amazing properties of this new light source.

...(more later)...

Posted by rakhier at 03:16 PM | Comments (0)

June 04, 2008

A "defense" of sorts, of the power of the state

This post from The Fly Bottle was a very enjoyable (if not completely coherent) argument about support for the power of the state.

Here is the initial attack on the state:

My irritating yet astounding new book Against the State argues that

(1) The political state or government rests on force and coercion.
(2) Force and coercion are always wrong if they can’t be morally justified. (That is, the use of force is wrong if it lacks a moral justification.)
(3) The arguments for the moral legitimacy of state - for example those of Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Hume, Hegel, Rawls, and Habermas - are unsound.
(4) Hence, state power has not been shown to be morally defensible.
Until you show me otherwise, I conclude that government power is in every case illegitimate.

Not only are the existing arguments for the legitimacy of state power unsound; they are pitiful. They are embarrassments to the Western intellectual tradition.

So I issue a challenge: Give a decent argument for the moral legitimacy of state power, or reconstruct one of the traditional arguments in the face of the refutations in Against the State.

If you can’t, I insist that you are rationally obliged to accept anarchism.

Henceforward, if you continue to support or observe the authority of government, you are an irrational cultist.

We’re all anarchists now, baby, until further notice.

Here is the response from Wilkinson:

I may agree with Sartwell about legitimacy, depending on what he means by it. But I detect a missing premise or two. For example, that in the absence of a decent argument for the legitimacy of state power, you are rationally obliged to accept anarchism. Aren’t you rationally obliged to accept the social system that does best relative to the values you care about? So what if human flourishing, not legitimacy, is your greatest concern. You can still accept that all states are illegitimate. But suppose the path to the best feasible anarchy leaves people worse off in terms of flourishing than in the best illegitimate states. It seems, in that case, you would be rationally obliged to support states that do better for people than anarchy, despite their illegitimacy. In which case, it would be irrational cultlike behavior to endorse anarchy just because it is not illegitimate.

Now, some people would say that doing better for people than the relevant non-state alternatives is all it means to say government is legitimate or coercion is justified in the relevant sense, but I don’t think so. It seems perfectly coherent to me to say both that an instance or pattern of coercion is morally unjustified and that it leaves its victims better off than they would be in the nearest anarchist possible worlds. In that case, you just have to choose between flourishing and legitimacy.

I think moral and political philosophers have a bad tendency to make all normative vocabulary line up. So you can retrofit all moral language so that “justified” just means “best for flourishing.” But I think that we in fact have multiple conventional moral vocabularies that are orthogonal to one another, which relate messily, and sometime incoherently. In the absence of a revisionist account of moral terms that gets them all to march in a single direction, you just have to accept that sometimes its best (according to one conventional moral conception) to do the wrong thing (according to another conventional moral conception) and there is nothing internal to reason or morality, as such, to tell you which conception generally carries overriding force.

Anyway… The point is: Showing that the state is not legitimate does not deliver anarchy because “If the state is not legitimate, then it is not morally defensible” is a false premise. The existence of a moral justification, in terms of flourishing, say, doesn’t entail final moral justification, since there is no fact of the matter about the final authoritative moral vocabulary. And the language of “legitimacy” may have its own internal logic that is at some level indifferent to flourishing. So showing that the state is not legitimate need not entail that it is morally indefensible.

I have some thoughts on this but I'm leaving this here for the future.

Posted by rakhier at 09:07 AM | Comments (0)

January 22, 2007

Philosophy Teacher on Love...

This was a brilliant essay by Eric Schwitzgebel (The link is here).

The common view that love is a feeling is, I think, quite misguided. Feelings come and go, while love is steady. Feelings are “passions” in the classic sense of ‘passion’ which shares a root with ‘passive’. They strike us largely unbidden. Love, in contrast, is something actively built. The passions suffered by teenagers and writers of romantic lyrics, felt so painfully, and often so temporarily, are not love – though in some cases they may be a prelude to it.

Rather than a feeling, love is a way of structuring one’s values, goals, and reactions. One characteristic of it is a deep commitment to the good of the other for his or her own sake. (This characterization of love owes quite a bit to Harry Frankfurt.) We all care about the good of other people we meet and know, for their own sake and not just for utilitarian ends, to some extent. Only if the regard is deep, though, only if we so highly value the other’s well-being that we are willing to thoroughly restructure and revise our own goals to accommodate it, and only if this restructuring is so well-rooted that it instantly and automatically informs our reactions to the person and to news that could affect him or her, do we possess real love.

Conjugal love involves all this, certainly. But it is also more than this. In conjugal love, one commits oneself to seeing one’s life always with the other in view. One commits to pursuing one’s major projects, even when alone, always in a kind of implicit conjunction with the other. One’s life becomes a co-authored work.

The love one feels for a young child may in some ways be purer and more unconditional than conjugal love. One expects nothing back from a young child. One needn’t share ideals to enjoy parental love. The child will grow away into his or her own separate life, independent of the parents’ preferences.

Conjugal love, because it involves the collaborative construction of a joint life, can’t be unconditional in that way. If the partners don’t share values and a vision, they can’t steer a mutual course. If one partner develops a separate vision or does not openly and in good faith work with the other toward their joint goals, conjugal love is impossible and is, at best, replaced with some more general type of loving concern.

Nonetheless, to dwell on the conditionality of conjugal love, and to develop a set of contingency plans should it fail, is already to depart from the project of jointly fabricating a life and to begin to develop a set of individual goals and values opposing those of the partner. Conjugal love requires an implacable, automatic commitment to responding to all major life events through the mutual lens of marriage. One cannot embody such a commitment if one harbors persistent thoughts about the contingency of the relationship and serious back-up plans.

There may be an appearance of paradox in the idea that conjugal love requires a lifelong commitment without contingency plans, yet at the same time is conditional in a way parental love is not. But there is no paradox. If one believes that something is permanent, one can make lifelong promises and commitments contingent upon it, because one believes the contingency will never come to pass. This then, is the significance of the marriage ceremony: It is the expression of a mutual unshakeable commitment to build a joint life together, where each partner’s commitment is possible, despite the contingency of conjugal love, because each partner trusts the other’s commitment to be unshakeable.

A deep faith and trust must therefore underlie true conjugal love. That trust is the most sacred and inviolable thing in a marriage, because it is the very foundation of its possibility. Deception and faithlessness destroy conjugal love because, and exactly to the extent that, they undermine the grounds of that trust. For the same reason, honest and open interchange about long-standing goals and attitudes stands at the heart of marriage.

Passion alone can’t ground conjugal trust. Neither can shared entertainments and the pleasure of each other’s company. Both partners must have matured enough that their core values are stable. They must be unselfish enough to lay everything on the table for compromise, apart from those permanent, shared core values. And they must be shorn of the tendency to form secret, individual goals. Only to the degree they approach these ideals are they worthy of the trust that makes conjugal love possible.

Makes sense to me.

Posted by rakhier at 03:32 PM | Comments (0)

November 01, 2006

The Secular Humanists have no courage...

I've come to the same conclusion stated here by Mellanie Phillips. Secular humanism leads to cowardice in the face of terrorism; leads to submission in the face of facism; leads to surrender to thugs who could in fact be defeated.

Another must-read piece at the Brussels Journal by Paul Belien says that the Dutch have effectively thrown in the towel before the unstoppable Islamisation of their country and progressively all of Europe:

As Tom Bethell wrote in this month’s American Spectator: ‘Just at the most basic level of demography the secular-humanist option is not working.’ But there is more to it than the fact that non-religious people tend not to have as many children as religious people, because many of them prefer to ‘enjoy’ freedom rather than renounce it for the sake of children. Secularists, it seems to me, are also less keen on fighting. Since they do not believe in an afterlife, this life is the only thing they have to lose. Hence they will rather accept submission than fight. Like the German feminist Broder referred to, they prefer to be raped than to resist. ‘If faith collapses, civilization goes with it,’ says Bethell. That is the real cause of the closing of civilization in Europe. Islamization is simply the consequence. The very word Islam means ‘submission’ and the secularists have submitted already. Many Europeans have already become Muslims, though they do not realize it or do not want to admit it.

The crucial insight here is that only a strong indigenous faith has the capacity to resist Islamisation. That is why the collapse of Christianity in Britain and Europe and its steady replacement by secularisation is so catastrophic for the defence of the west. The useful idiots who believe that only a secular society can hold off the forces of irrational belief at the heart of the Islamic jihad have got this diametrically the wrong way round. Secularisation produces cultural enfeeblement, because the pursuit of personal happiness trumps absolutely everything else. The here and now is all that matters. Dying for a cause, however noble, becomes an absolute no-no. It’s better to be dhimmi than dead – the view that has now effectively prevailed in Britain and Europe.

The Islamists, whose shrewdness and perspicacity are consistently overlooked by racist European liberals who believe that Arabs and Muslims are too backward to have anything intelligent to say, are absolutely correct in their analysis of Europe as culturally decadent and too weakened by hedonism to fight for their way of life. The same danger looms, incidentally, for Israel, which despite all its vicissitudes, is fast turning into a spoiled, materialistic, consumer society in danger of eroding its Jewish values through precisely the same march of secularism (as Britain’s Chief Rabbi, Sir Jonathan Sacks, recently suggested). This is the single biggest difference between Britain and Europe, on the one hand, and America. Although the US is the high temple of consumerism, it is still a country with a very strong sense of its Christian faith. That fact is key to its robust sense of national identity, confidence and pride; and because it has such a strong sense of itself as a nation, it is prepared to fight to defend itself – the one bit of the analysis that the Islamists got wrong (although there are now deeply disturbing signs that the west’s cultural enfeeblement is beginning to erode American resolve too, at least around the edges).

That is why the cultural cringe of the Church of England before the advance of both secularism and Islamism is such unmitigated disaster, and why the Pope’s recent intervention was so significant. That is why those who sneer at President Bush’s strong Christian faith are cultural lemmings. And that is why I, a British Jew, argue that it is vital that Britain and Europe re-Christianise if they are to have any chance of defending western values.

I may have to re-convert to Christianity, not because I believe, but because its the only organization that is really willing to stand up for something transcendent. Secular humanists won't lift a finger to save other people or, when it comes to it, their own freedom. They are gutless cowards. Sad but apparently true.

Examples abound: no comment from Hollywood or Secular Humanists when Theo van Gogh is murdered on the streets of his home city but cries of "Free Tibet" ring out. Ha! As if anyone is actually going to go up against China (one of the worlds most powerful nations) and DO anything about Tibet. No, its just an easy way to feel good about yourself without the least possible danger because, lets be serious, who is really going to fight China? China will rule Tibet for exactly as long it feels like ruling Tibet. Period.

Cries of "Free Mumia" from all sorts of Secular Humanists but when Iran hangs a 16 year old girl because she had sex with older men, there is no outrage. Who goes around today protesting the Government of Iran for its criminal behavior?

Posted by rakhier at 10:26 AM | Comments (0)

October 30, 2006

Lee Harris on Reason and Belief...

This is a brilliant essay from Lee Harris. I've got no time but here is the link. Here are two highlights:

If the individual is free to choose between violence and reason, it will become impossible to create a community in which all the members restrict themselves to using reason alone to obtain their objectives. If it is left up to the individual to use violence or reason, then those whose subjective choice is for violence will inevitably destroy the community of those whose subjective choice is for reason. Worse still, those whose subjective choice is for violence do not need to constitute more than a small percentage of the community in order to destroy the very possibility of a community of reasonable men: Brute force and terror quickly extinguish rational dialogue and debate.

Modern reason, to be sure, cannot prove scientifically that a community of reasonable men is ethically superior to a community governed by violent men. But a critique of modern reason from within must recognize that a community of reasonable men is a necessary precondition of the very existence of modern reason. He who wills to preserve and maintain the achievements of modern reason must also will to live in a community made up of reasonable men who abstain from the use of violence to enforce their own values and ideas. Such a community is the a priori ethical foundation of modern reason. Thus, modern reason, despite its claim that it can give no scientific advice about ethics and religion, must recognize that its own existence and survival demand both an ethical postulate and a religious postulate. The ethical postulate is: Do whatever is possible to create a community of reasonable men who abstain from violence, and who prefer to use reason. The religious postulate is: If you are given a choice between religions, always prefer the religion that is most conducive to creating a community of reasonable men, even if you don't believe in it yourself.

And this section:

The answer, according to Schopenhauer, was that modern scientific reason derived its model of the universe from the Christian concept of God as a rational Creator who has intelligently designed every last detail of the universe ex nihilo. It was this Christian idea of God that permitted Europeans to believe that the universe was a rational cosmos. Because Europeans had been brought up to imagine the universe as the creation of a rational intelligence, they naturally came to expect to find evidence of this intelligence wherever they looked--and, strangely enough, they did...

Human beings will have their gods--and modern reason cannot alter this. Indeed, modern reason has produced its own ersatz god--a blind and capricious universe into which accidental man has found himself inexplicably thrown. It is a universe in which all human freedom is an illusion, because everything we do or think was determined from the moment of the Big Bang. It is a universe in which there is no mind at all, but only matter. Yet without mind, how can there be reason? Without free will, how can there be reasonable choices? Without reasonable choices, how can there be reasonable men? Without reasonable men, how can there be communities in which human dignity is defended from the indignity of violence and brute force?

Remarkable reasoning. I see he has a new book soon. I look forward to it.

Posted by rakhier at 12:07 AM | Comments (0)

October 17, 2006

Reason and Islam - A Problem

This essay by Spengler (published in the Asia Times) is a very well reasoned analysis of the problem which reason has for serious Islamic scholars. This is the link but, on the off chance the link goes dead, here is the text of the essay.

Some of the issues raised in the Muslim response are bit abstract, but the practical implications are quite stark. Theology, as Benedict stated on September 12, is "inquiry into the rationality of faith". Its most important function is to reject purported revelation that cannot possibly be true, such that faith may acknowledge revelation that might be true. Christianity and Judaism have endured two centuries of withering criticism from scientific study of their sacred texts. To perform the same function in the case of the Koran puts a scholar's life at risk. I do not know whether the scholars who question the Koran's authenticity are correct - I am not a specialist in such matters - but I am quite sure that their conclusions are reasoned. If reason might demonstrate the founding premises of a religion to be false, it is nonsense to argue, as the clerics do, that reason itself can be subsumed into a system of religious belief.

Reason and faith need each other, the pope argued in Regensburg. At the same time, modern science requires philosophical, and even theological premises which it cannot itself provide. Kurt Goedel, the 20th century's greatest mathematician, proved that no mathematical system can prove its own axioms, which must be accepted as if it were a matter of faith. As Benedict said: "Modern scientific reason quite simply has to accept the rational structure of matter and the correspondence between our spirit and the prevailing rational structures of nature as a given, on which its methodology has to be based. Yet the question why this has to be so is a real question, and one which has to be remanded by the natural sciences to other modes and planes of thought - to philosophy and theology."

But the pope added, "For Muslim teaching, God is absolutely transcendent. His will is not bound up with any of our categories, even that of rationality ... God is not bound even by his own word, and that nothing would oblige him to reveal the truth to us. Were it God's will, we would even have to practice idolatry." Conversion by force through jihad is the consequence of irrationality.

Here is the response of the 38 Muslim clerics in the open letter:

[T]he dichotomy between "reason" on one hand and "faith" on the other does not exist in precisely the same form in Islamic thought. Rather, Muslims have come to terms with the power and limits of human intelligence in their own way [emphasis added], acknowledging a hierarchy of knowledge of which reason is a crucial part ... [I]n their most mature and mainstream forms the intellectual explorations of Muslims through the ages have maintained a consonance between the truths of the Koranic revelation and the demands of human intelligence, without sacrificing one for the other. God says, We shall show them Our signs in the horizons and in themselves until it is clear to them that it is the truth (Fussilat 41:53). Reason itself is one of the many signs within us, which God invites us to contemplate, and to contemplate with, as a way of knowing the truth.

Reason, the Muslim clerics aver, is one more of the "signs in the horizon" that God sets before us to reveal His presence, like sunsets and rainbows. Now, I suppose that sunsets, rainbows, cellular mitosis and one's capacity to bisect an angle all might serve as inspiration. Reason in the West, though, is something quite different. Reason first of all is the capacity to doubt, to subject belief to the sort of merciless questioning that made Socrates so unpopular in Athens. Benedict drew a parallel between Socratic reasoning and Hebrew revelation to which I objected (Not what it was, but what it does, October 3, 2006). Socratic reasoning is ironic and destructive in Kierkegaard's reading, not affirmative of faith. [2] But that is a secondary matter here.

Reason, in the Muslim clerics' view, is a sign from God, an object that God has created and planted in our brains to show us God's presence. For example, if I say that as a reasoning fellow I don't believe in Allah, the answer must be, "Aha! You are using your reason to doubt the existence of Allah, and the fact that you have reason demonstrates the existence of Allah, because if you have reason, someone must have given it to you, and that only could be Allah."

To state that the dichotomy between faith and reason simply doesn't exist in Islam is another way of saying that Islam does not admit reason. The modern concept of reason, Benedict observed in his September 12 address, begins with Rene Descartes in the 17th century, who shifts the subject to the individual man away from God.

Descartes' most famous dictum, "I think, therefore I am," changes the subject from the Scholastic question, that is, the existence of God. Rather than ask, "How do I know whether God exists?", Descartes asks, "How do I know that I exist?" To which the simple answer is: if I don't exist, then who's asking the question? Following our 38 Muslim clerics, the Muslim reply must be: "Aha - you believe that you have thoughts, but those thoughts must come from somewhere, and where could those thoughts come from, except for Allah? It is not 'I think, therefore I am', but rather, 'I think, therefore Allah is'."

If God simply has planted reason in our brain the better to demonstrate to us His presence, then we have no thoughts that God does not send us. God as it were has placed a radio transmitter in our brain and is sending us signals.

The trouble is that not only Allah can plant a radio transmitter in our brain, but also Satan. Suppose I employ reason to conduct the most elementary sort of consistency check on the Koran. I will have trouble reconciling Sura 47:4 ("When you meet the unbelievers, strike off their heads," etc) with 50:45 ("We well know what the infidels say, but you are not to compel them"), and hundreds of other verses on other subjects. Reason shows only a contradiction; reconciliation of such statements requires recourse to a tradition of "abrogation" of supposedly early verses by later verses for which no empirical demonstration exists.

Men of reason have argued for centuries that Judeo-Christian revelation must be a hoax, on the strength of such observations as:

The repetition of numerous stories in the Bible (for example, the two Creation stories in Genesis 1:27 and Genesis 2:7) suggests multiple authorship and the redaction of conflicting stories;
Unmistakable differences in style within books attributed to a single author (for example, the two or three Isaiahs);
Evident corruption of certain texts; [3]
Glaring differences among the four Christian Gospels (eg, two different lineages for the Virgin Mary), not to mention the existence of variant Gospels; [4]
Suspicious similarities between the Christian Eucharist and the pagan cult of Dionysus

And so forth. Christians and Jews have had to come to terms with these and countless other quite reasonable objections, with the understanding that reason is a different function than faith.

Muslims have yet to come to terms with similar objections, including such scholarly arguments as the following:

There are numerous variant versions of the Koran, making it quite unlikely that the Archangel Gabriel dictated the entire document to the Prophet Mohammed;
Approximately a fifth of the Koranic text is "just incomprehensible" according to Professor Gerd R Puin of the University of Saarbruecken;
Much of what is incomprehensible in Arabic makes good sense if one reads the text instead in Syriac, the liturgical language of pre-existing Christian communities in the Middle East, according to "Christoph Luxenburg";
The archeological evidence (assembled by Yehuda Nevo) from the Koranic period strongly contradicts the notion that a finished text of any sort existed within a century of Mohammed's death.

The scholarly arguments that the Koran had nothing to do with the Archangel Gabriel, but rather consists of a much later hodge-podge of poorly edited and contradictory material, much of it cribbed from easily-identified Jewish and Christian sources, are vast, and easily available. [5] They are matters for specialists, and I do not need to adopt a stance toward them. It is quite clear, though, that if the Koran is a 9th-century redaction rather than a 7th-century revelation, of course, Islam has a serious problem.

If the Pentateuch of the Old Testament was revealed to a handful of individuals, not just to Moses as tradition has it, Christians and Jews can absorb the damage. Not so Muslims if the Koran was revealed to (or redacted by) someone else than Mohammed. That is why some prominent text critics of the Koran publish under pseudonyms ("Christoph Luxenburg", "Ibn Warraq"), or not at all.

In the Western tradition, Descartes' man - rather than God-centered metaphysics - led first to a revolt against faith. But science, as Benedict argued on September 12, had to learn its own limitations. Creation ex nihilo, once derided as the most unreasonable of Biblical doctrines, does not seem so unreasonable now that the physicists concede that all the laws of nature cease to have meaning prior to the origin of the universe in the Big Bang. Mathematics, thanks to Kurt Goedel, now must admit its axioms depend on faith rather than proof. Modern reason began as the antagonist of faith, but in its best manifestation has been housebroken into its proper role as the Accusing Angel in the heavenly court.

The core of the issue is human freedom. Reason is a gift from God, to be sure, but it is a parent's gift of love to a child: the capacity to doubt and even to rebel, in the hope that grace will overcome man's obstinacy. The 38 clerics, by contrast, consider reason no more than another feature of nature to be contemplated on the horizon. That is what Benedict means when he characterizes Allah as "absolutely transcendental". As Franz Rosenzweig explained, mainstream Muslim theology

... presumes that Allah creates every isolated thing at every moment. Providence thus is shattered into infinitely many individual acts of creation, with no connection to each other, each of which has the importance of the entire creation. That has been the doctrine of the ruling orthodox philosophy in Islam. Every individual thing is created from scratch at every moment. Islam cannot be salvaged from this frightful providence of Allah ... despite its vehement, haughty insistence upon the idea of the God's unity, Islam slips back into a kind of monistic paganism, if you will permit the expression. God competes with God at every moment, as if it were the colorfully contending heavenful of gods of polytheism. [6]

Doubt, that is, reason, will not find a place in Islam, if the 38 clerics are a fair representation of Muslim thinking.

Notes
[1] Click here for the press release. Scroll down to find a link to the full text of the letter.
[2] Socrates the destroyer, May 25, 2004.
[3] See the entry on the "Book of Job" in the Encyclopedia Judaica, for example.
[4] See for example Elaine Pagels, The Gnostic Gospels (Random House, New York, 2004).
[5] See Ibn Warraq, What the Koran Really Says (Prometheus Books: Amherst NY, 2002). Warraq, an apostate from Islam, republishes the most important scholarly arguments for the inauthenticity of the Koran.
[6] Oil on the flames of civilizational war, December 2, 2003.

Update: the Author (in this essay) quotes Franz Rosenzweig (a German-Jewish philosopher from the early 1900s) who attacks Islam on a number of intellectual fronts:

Love requires the Judeo-Christian God to create the world. By contrast, "the God of Mohammed is a creator who well might not have bothered to create. He displays his power like an Oriental potentate who rules by violence, not by acting according to necessity, not by authorizing the enactment of the law, but rather in his freedom to act arbitrarily. By contrast, it is most characteristic of rabbinic theology that it formulates our concept of the divine power to create in the question as to whether God created the world out of love or out of righteousness."

Allah's creation for Rosenzweig is a mere act of "magic". Muslim theology "presumes that Allah creates every isolated thing at every moment. Providence thus is shattered into infinitely many individual acts of creation, with no connection to each other, each of which has the importance of the entire creation. That has been the doctrine of the ruling orthodox philosophy in Islam. Every individual thing is created from scratch at every moment. Islam cannot be salvaged from this frightful providence of Allah ... despite its vehement, haughty insistence upon the idea of the God's unity, Islam slips back into a kind of monistic paganism, if you will permit the expression. God competes with God at every moment, as if it were the colorfully contending heavenful of gods of polytheism."

By paganism Rosenzweig refers to a specific mindset as well as a political system which crushes individual identity into the whole. In the pagan state, he wrote in the Star, "The individual does not stand in relation to the state in the way that a part stands in relation to the whole. On the contrary, the state is all, and its electricity pulses through the veins of every individual."

Personally I'm not sure why Rosenzweig is the ultimate authority on this topic. Could be the author of the essay is simply showing off that he has read an obscure German philosopher.

Posted by rakhier at 10:18 AM | Comments (0)

October 05, 2006

The Reasons for Marriage

This essay from 2004 by Maggie Gallagher (see here for the PDF) is a brilliant statement of why society recognizes marriage as a union of a man and a woman. I've put together some sections from her paper (roughly starting around page 45) into a brief summary.

Most of what are now routinely described as marriage benefits are more accurately described as legal incidents of marriage. Generally speaking, the law treats you differently if you are married, because the law presumes that marriage makes you and your spouse three things: (a) next of kin, (b) financial partners, and (c) exclusive sexual partners.

Why does marriage exist as a legal institution?

The reason marriage was singled out for special legal attention is that it is the only human relationship that can both (a) produce the next generation of babies and (b) connect those babies to both their mother and father.

Marriage exists in virtually every known human society. Since the begining of recorded history, in all the flourishing varieties of human cultures documented by anthropologists, marriage has been a universal human institution. As a virtually universal human idea, marriage is about regulating the reproduction of children, families, and society.

What is it about human nature that leads culturally separate and distinct societies to independently come up with the same basic idea?

Here is what I think the answer is: Marriage as a universal social institution is grounded in certain universal features of human nature. When men and women have sex, they make babies. Reproduction may be optional for individuals but it is not for societies. Societies that fail to have "enough" babies fail to survive. And babies most likely grow to functioning adulthood when they have the care and attention of both their mother and father.

Marriage arises again and again in some form out of the basic human need for a social institution to manage these basic human sexual realities. Societies that fail to manage these realities fail to survive long enough to be recorded by anthropologists among the human alternatives.

Sex makes babies. Society needs babies. Babies deserve mothers and fathers. Together these three ideas explain the public purposes of marriage, its shape and form.

By making marriage a permanent sexual union based on the fidelity of both spouses, the state seeks to increase the likelihood that children will be raised in "intact" families, cared for by their mother and father. State preferences for marriage over other kinds of unions transmit a clear message to the next generation: the man and woman who make the baby are supposed to stick around, take care of each other and their baby too.

Research clearly demonstrats that family structure matters for children, and the family structure that helps children the most is a family headed by two biological parents in a low conflict marriage.

To summarize the arguement so far: Marriage law is important not because it distributes administrative benefits that help people live their private lives... The reason the state is justified in "imposing" such norms on people's intimate lives is that sex makes babies, societies need babies, and children deserve their own mothers and fathers. Managing the sexually based phenomenon known as "procreativity" is not optional, but essential if a civilization is the perpetuate itself over the long term.

Ms. Gallagher then goes on to list some very compelling reasons as to why allowing gays to marry would be bad for the idea of marriage.

She lists several problems:

the meaning of marriage, which has a long and deep meaning in history, culture, and literature, will have to change. In fact it will have to change so much that we might well want to come up with a new word to mean "a union between a man and a woman who are raising their own children together". In other words: if you redefine marriage we will have to create, in short order, a brand new word which means exactly what the old word used to mean.
Long standing legal rules relating to marriage would be thrown into confusion. For example, the concept of adultery would no longer make much sense. For another, the concept of the "presumption of paternity", the legal presumption that the husband is the father of the wife's children. This concept is rooted in biological and social reality, reality which is thrown out the window when gay men and women can marry other men and women. If they have children, who is the father or mother? What legal rights have been assumed by the partner in the marriage?
It is dangerous of societies to attack such a fundemental element of their society. The risk of unintended consequences are huge. Potentially they could destroy the civilization itself.

If marriage is redefined then a sure consequence of this redefinition is that the original meaning of marriage will become stigmatized and those who argue in favor of the old meaning of marriage will be attacked publically by the courts and by law. "People who believe that children need both mothers and fathers will be treated like bigots in the public square".

Her conclusion is:

Court-created same-sex marriage will transform our shared, public meaning of the word "marriage". It will disconnect marriage from any futher relationship with its great historic task of making the next generation, and connecting those children to both their mothers and fathers. A new unisex language of parenting in the public square will demote the idea that "children need mothers and fathers" to a form of rudeness or bigotry. Organizations that try to transmit in any strong way to the next generation the idea that marriage is about creating and connecting children to their mothers and fathers will be increasing treated the way bigots who oppose interratial marriages are treated in the public square.

I'm convinced. Redefine marriage = stupid idea. Gays have the right to marry: another man (or woman) of the opposite sex. What they are asking for is the brand new right to redefine marriage to include two people of the same sex. As an idea, this needs to be fought.

Posted by rakhier at 10:09 AM | Comments (0)

September 28, 2006

Is Islam Compatible with Democracy?

I have talked about this problem before. A year ago I gave a qualified yes. Now I am not so sure. This comment from a post by Donald Sensing captures the problem very neatly

Here is the root of the problem: Islam does not respect other religions. Or to put it in base terms: Islam is incompatible with religious freedom.

I’ll repeat what the whole problem with Islam and how it relates to the West, other cultures, other religions, etc:

Islam does not tolerate religious freedom.

And therefore we can easily gauge when we know we will have won this war: When Islam tolerates religious freedom (including apostasy from Islam). The “war on terror” is really a war for religious freedom. I wish we fought it in those terms. I wish our policies were based around that simple fact. But they are not. And we are floundering because of it.

So we have been fighting this war from the wrong angles. Unfortunately, most of the western world will not fight for religious freedom (the secular left); in fact they are finding common cause with the Islamists on this main account alone. So we have a internal rift in the West based largely on this fact. And the Islamists know it and have exploited the “useful idiots” of the secular left to maximum effect.

One thing can be said to be at the root of all “modern” democracies: They tolerate religious freedom not just in law, but in principle and practice of its populations. That is why the Islamic world is having a hard time with democracy; they cannot get the most basic tenet of modern democracies: true freedom of religion. Their people (Muslims) don’t believe in it, aren’t taught it, and abhor the thought of it. That is why even Turkey struggles with it.

So I rather argue that our goal in this war must be one that has one simple premise: We must find a way to force Islam to accept religious freedom (including apostasy). We have the obligation. If Islam cannot reform this basic tenet by itself (and the odds are highly against that) then we must do everything we can to make them.

I think that’s what makes this war against Islamists so very much different than our other wars against ideologies. We have failed to outline what the real problem is. We are afraid of pointing out the real problem:

And the root problem is that Islam does not tolerate religious freedom (including apostasy).

This is a huge problem and the author is correct, it is quite real in Islam. Another way of putting the issue was expressed by this post

I suggest, based on the examples of so-called majority muslim “democracies” that democracy and islam can coexist in a state of varying degrees of tension, but they are inherently incompatible. It is impossible for islam, even if most of its more violent features are sublimated, to be fully compatible with any social or political scheme that fundamentally relies upon freedom of individual thought and action and political/legal equality of all such free actors. If a muslim cannot decide to renounce islam and/or sharia and voice that decision, even submit it for discussion and vote by the community–and we know that’s flatly verboten even under relatively progressive islam–then islam and democracy are fundamentally at odds. I find it hard to comprehend why this rather obvious circumstance would even require discussion.

It is hard to square the idea of democracy with the problem of a rejection of Islam by a former adherent. They have got to drop this concept of aposty = death. They must. No ifs, ands or buts. Period.

Posted by rakhier at 05:57 PM | Comments (0)

September 20, 2006

Ms. Applebaum is very angry and I agree with her...

I'm not sure I've read a more angry Op-Ed piece in a major American newspaper. At least as I read it, this is pretty close to fury. But see for yourself:

But Western reactions to Muslim "days of anger" have followed a familiar pattern, too. Last winter, some Western newspapers defended their Danish colleagues, even going so far as to reprint the cartoons -- but others, including the Vatican, attacked the Danes for giving offense. Some leading Catholics have now defended the pope -- but others, no doubt including some Danes, have complained that his statement should have been better vetted, or never given at all. This isn't surprising: By definition, the West is not monolithic. Left-leaning journalists don't identify with right-leaning colleagues (or right-leaning Catholic colleagues), and vice versa. Not all Christians, let alone all Catholics -- even all German Catholics -- identify with the pope either, and certainly they don't want to defend his every scholarly quotation.

Unfortunately, these subtle distinctions are lost on the fanatics who torch embassies and churches. And they may also be preventing all of us from finding a useful response to the waves of anti-Western anger and violence that periodically engulf parts of the Muslim world. Clearly, a handful of apologies and some random public debate -- should the pope have said X, should the Danish prime minister have done Y -- are ineffective and irrelevant: None of the radical clerics accepts Western apologies, and none of their radical followers reads the Western press. Instead, Western politicians, writers, thinkers and speakers should stop apologizing -- and start uniting.

By this, I don't mean that we all need to rush to defend or to analyze this particular sermon; I leave that to experts on Byzantine theology. But we can all unite in our support for freedom of speech -- surely the pope is allowed to quote from medieval texts -- and of the press. And we can also unite, loudly, in our condemnation of violent, unprovoked attacks on churches, embassies and elderly nuns. By "we" I mean here the White House, the Vatican, the German Greens, the French Foreign Ministry, NATO, Greenpeace, Le Monde and Fox News -- Western institutions of the left, the right and everything in between. True, these principles sound pretty elementary -- "we're pro-free speech and anti-gratuitous violence" -- but in the days since the pope's sermon, I don't feel that I've heard them defended in anything like a unanimous chorus. A lot more time has been spent analyzing what the pontiff meant to say, or should have said, or might have said if he had been given better advice.

All of which is simply beside the point, since nothing the pope has ever said comes even close to matching the vitriol, extremism and hatred that pour out of the mouths of radical imams and fanatical clerics every day, all across Europe and the Muslim world, almost none of which ever provokes any Western response at all. And maybe it's time that it should: When Saudi Arabia publishes textbooks commanding good Wahhabi Muslims to "hate" Christians, Jews and non-Wahhabi Muslims, for example, why shouldn't the Vatican, the Southern Baptists, Britain's chief rabbi and the Council on American-Islamic Relations all condemn them -- simultaneously?

Maybe it's a pipe dream: The day when the White House and Greenpeace can issue a joint statement is surely distant indeed. But if stray comments by Western leaders -- not to mention Western films, books, cartoons, traditions and values -- are going to inspire regular violence, I don't feel that it's asking too much for the West to quit saying sorry and unite, occasionally, in its own defense. The fanatics attacking the pope already limit the right to free speech among their own followers. I don't see why we should allow them to limit our right to free speech, too.

It is long past time that we stop appologizing for our right to say what we want to say about the Islamic world and its people and their beliefs.

The idea that we can't comment about their religion of hate, about their history of murder and oppression. The idea that the leader of the Catholic Church can't actually critique a religion which is dedicated to the destruction of his own religion. It just boggels the mind. Who do they think they are? They act like they already rule the world and that everyone now has to submit to their laws or pay the penalty (death, its always death for them).

Posted by rakhier at 10:22 AM | Comments (0)

The Geneva Convention Doesn't Apply to When its Not Followed by the Other Side

This post is yet another arguement for why the Geneva Conventions do not apply to terrorists or to any prisoners of a country which is not abiding by the conventions. The conventions are a pure example of "tit for tat". They only apply if both sides follow them. As soon as one side breaks them in its treatment of POWs, the other side can break them also. Period.

Granted, the Geneva Convention could be of use in the unlikely event that we were to get into a war with Belgium, Italy, Spain or some other Western European nation. However, isn't the argument we're hearing from Europeans and American liberals that we should treat the terrorists we've captured by the rules of the Geneva Convention (as a matter of fact, better than the rules require) despite the fact that they haven't signed onto the treaty? Since that's the case, why wouldn't the same rules apply to any signatories of the treaty that we fought with? Even if, theoretically, we were doing something as evil as kicking their captured soldiers into industrial paper shredders for fun, shouldn't they give our soldiers every benefit the Geneva Convention requires?

What's that, you say? If we don't do it for their soldiers, why should we expect them to treat our troops with respect? Great! Now why doesn't that apply to our troops and Al-Qaeda? If Al-Qaeda is torturing and murdering our troops, why should we treat their captured prisoners as well as, say, American soldiers that are thrown into the brig? Why should we treat some terrorist from Saudi Arabia who wants to kill American citizens like he's a uniformed soldier who follows the rules of war or worse yet, like he has the same constitutional rights as an American citizen?

We shouldn't!

If the Geneva Convention were actually being properly applied, it wouldn't apply to terrorists. If people, including irresponsible Supreme Court Justices, want to pretend that it actually does apply to terrorists, then the Geneva Convention has outlived its usefulness and should be abandoned.

Found at Right Wing News.com.

The example by President Lincoln is instructive. When he learned that the Confederacy announced they would execute any former slave found in a Union Army uniform, he announced that for every member of the Union Army that was a POW and then killed, he would order the execution of a like number of Confederate soldiers. Period. No "oh we are better than they"; no "Oh those poor black soldiers, too bad we have to abide by the rules of war in dealing with their soldiers". Nope, Lincoln said if they kill one of ours, then we will kill one of theirs.

Faced with this threat, the Confederacy did not "officially" execute any black soldiers in the Union army.

This is how we should deal with the people we capture. Pure "tit for tat" behavior. You saw off the head of one of our POWs, we hang one of the POWs we have captured. Very simple, easy to understand logic. You torture our POWs, we torture yours. This applies across the board. None of this "we will treat them better than they treat us". Such a policy is stupid and counter productive. What incentive do our enemies have for treating our POWs better? At the moment, none at all. This needs to change.

Posted by rakhier at 10:12 AM | Comments (0)

August 19, 2006

On morality in war...

Hard to argue with this logic. Very disturbing. From BlackFive

The gentle soul -- how I respect her! -- will begin by pointing out how many innocents have died in the recent wars, and especially the children, who are the most obviously innocent. She will point out figures for Iraq, for Afghanistan, for Lebanon, and ask: "How can you justify this? These poor children, who might have been good men, good women, lain in the cold earth?"

We have all had the conversation that far, have we not? We are accustomed to reply: "But the enemy is the one that targets children. We try our best to avoid hurting children. That makes us better. Furthermore, the enemy hides himself among children. As a result, in spite of our best efforts, sometimes children die on the other side also. But again, it is not our fault -- it is his fault. He endangers them."

She replies: "But how can you justify their deaths? Regardless of how hard you try, will you not kill them? Some of them? Should we not choose peace instead?"

Let us consider that.

What if we asked her, "Let us speculate that our enemy -- say in Iran -- seeks to kill our children. If we attack them to stop it, we may or may not kill any of their children -- and we will do everything in our power to avoid it. If we do not, they certainly will kill ours. Should we attack them or not?"

She will answer: "That is a false example. Nothing is certain, and it is said that hard cases make bad law."

"Fair enough," we reply, "but where will you find the parent who will sacrifice her children for the possibility of keeping another parent's child alive?"

"It would be impossible," she will agree, but add, "However, nothing is that certain."

"Then let us make it conditional," I continue. "Let us say that there is the possibility we shall kill a child -- but we shall do our best not to do so -- and only the possibility that they will kill our child, but it is their aim. Now, should we try to stop them -- though risking their child? Or should we refuse, and take the increased risk that they will succeed in their murder, since no one dares disrupt them?"

"It is always wrong to take the risk of killing a child, whether we do it or they do," she will say.

"Why so?" I ask.

"Because it endangers the innocent," she replies.

"If that is the reason," I answer, "then you are wrong. It is best that we bomb without fear."

Her eyes grow wide. "You are mad," she says.

"Not so," I answer. "Consider: when the enemy seeks to kill our child to motivate us to surrender to his will, is it not because he believes that the danger to the children will move our hearts?"

"It is," she must agree.

"And when he hides among children," I add, "why? Children do little to deflect artillery. Must it not be because he knows that we -- we ourselves -- fear for the children, even his children?"

She nods, silently.

"Then it is proven," I say. "It is our love of these innocents that endangers them. If we did not care if children died, they would be in little danger."

"That cannot be," she replies in anger.

"But it is so," I contest. "If we did not care if our children died, they would not be targets. There would be no reason to target them, because we would not be moved by their deaths.

"If we did not care if their children died," I add, "there would be no reason to clutter military emplacements with their presence. If it were not that we are horrified by the deaths of children, the enemy's children would be clear of all places of battle -- because they are, except for the fact that we love them, a hindrance."

She bites her lip.

"Of course, we cannot cut out our hearts," I tell her. "Nor should we -- as we wish to remain men, and good men, rather than monsters. Yet it is our love that is the chief danger to the innocent now -- to our own innocents, and theirs also."

"What do you suggest?" she demands of me. "If you will not hate children, if you assert that it is right to love them -- but you say we cannot love them, without wrongfully endangering them -- what can we do? Where is the right?"

"It must be," I tell her sadly, "Here: That we pursue war without thought of the children. That we do not turn aside from the death of the innocent, but push on to the conclusion, through all fearful fire. If we do that, the children will lose their value as hostages, and as targets: if we love them, we must harden our hearts against their loss. Ours and theirs."

"How can that be right?" she wonders.

"It cannot be," I must say. "Love should always rise, above war and fear and death. Love should always be first, and not last, in our hearts. It should never be that love brings wrong, and disdain brings right.

"And yet," I say, "It is. I have shown you that it is. That means we have moved into a time beyond human wisdom. We can no longer know the right. It is beyond us.

"We can only do," I must warn her, and you. "We can only do, and pray, that when we are done we may be forgiven."

This is from a comment to the essay

Our fathers met this same kind of challenge in WWII, if not so blatantly, chose and won. The firebombings of Dresden and Tokyo, the nuclear obliterations of Hiroshima and Nagasaki demonstrate this quite clearly. They knew the cost to their souls, and yet paid, for the sake of those to come - us. Now we face the same choice - to give in to evil and so doom our own offspring, or kill when we must, accepting the taint and imperilling our souls for the sake of our children. Even as I would go hungry so that my children be fed, I will kill other children to keep mine free from such savagery.

I keep thinking the terrorists are insane if they think they can actually win this war, and force the rest of the world to submit to Islam. It isn't going to happen. They can force us to kill millions but they can not force us to submit to their religion. We were willing to kill in vast numbers to defeat the Soviet Union. Not much has changed. Not enough to save the Islamo-Fascists.

-- Rakhiir

Posted by rakhier at 11:42 AM | Comments (0)

Solzhenitsyn, 30 years ago, pointed out some problems in the West

This essay from Wretchard is well worth the read. Here is a part

The matchless power of inherited Cold War weapons was more than overcome by withering of the very mental attitudes which made them effective. Mark Steyn argued that as a result the West's power shrank in direct proportion to the effectiveness of weaponry because the laws of political correctness always diminished the will to use them faster than their increase in destructiveness. "We live in an age of inversely proportional deterrence: The more militarily powerful a civilized nation is, the less its enemies have to fear the full force of that power ever being unleashed. They know America and other Western powers fight under the most stringent self-imposed etiquette. Overwhelming force is one thing; overwhelming force behaving underwhelmingly as a matter of policy is quite another. ... The U.S. military is the best-equipped and best-trained in the world. But it's not enough, it never has been, and it never will be."

The near panic which gripped Teheran and Damascus in the early days of Operation Iraqi Freedom was not the result of the fear that America had found new weapons -- the lethality of those weapons were already known -- but that it had found unexpected the will to use them. Today even better weapons are there yet the American force in Iraq is regarded as having become totally impotent, not because it has become militarily weaker; through fixed airbases, experience, new weapons it has become immeasurably stronger than it was in 2003. But it's impotence is due entirely to the perception that it's will has drained away -- that it cannot use its power. That leaves American power weaker than had it never been used...

Indeed. One has to wonder why the Islamo-fascists aren't more afraid to do the things they do. One plausible answer is that they think we lack the conviction to kill to keep our society the way it is. I think they are wrong, as World War II proved (to my mind). Hitler thought that France and Great Britian lacked the conviction to stop him and he was right, up until September, 1939.

Posted by rakhier at 11:30 AM | Comments (0)

July 28, 2006

Krauthammer explains why Israel does not have moral problems...

Charles Krauthammer explains in this column why criticism of Israel's so-called disproportionate response is wrong.

What other country, when attacked in an unprovoked aggression across a recognized international frontier, is then put on a countdown clock by the world, given a limited time window in which to fight back, regardless of whether it has restored its own security?

What other country sustains 1,500 indiscriminate rocket attacks into its cities -- every one designed to kill, maim and terrorize civilians -- and is then vilified by the world when it tries to destroy the enemy's infrastructure and strongholds with precision-guided munitions that sometimes have the unintended but unavoidable consequence of collateral civilian death and suffering?To hear the world pass judgment on the Israel-Hezbollah war as it unfolds is to live in an Orwellian moral universe. With a few significant exceptions (the leadership of the United States, Britain, Australia, Canada and a very few others), the world -- governments, the media, U.N. bureaucrats -- has completely lost its moral bearings.

The word that obviates all thinking and magically inverts victim into aggressor is "disproportionate," as in the universally decried "disproportionate Israeli response."

When the United States was attacked at Pearl Harbor, it did not respond with a parallel "proportionate" attack on a Japanese naval base. It launched a four-year campaign that killed millions of Japanese, reduced Tokyo, Hiroshima and Nagasaki to cinders, and turned the Japanese home islands into rubble and ruin.

Disproportionate? No. When one is wantonly attacked by an aggressor, one has every right -- legal and moral -- to carry the fight until the aggressor is disarmed and so disabled that it cannot threaten one's security again. That's what it took with Japan.

Britain was never invaded by Germany in World War II. Did it respond to the Blitz and V-1 and V-2 rockets with "proportionate" aerial bombardment of Germany? Of course not. Churchill orchestrated the greatest air campaign and land invasion in history, which flattened and utterly destroyed Germany, killing untold innocent German women and children in the process.

The perversity of today's international outcry lies in the fact that there is indeed a disproportion in this war, a radical moral asymmetry between Hezbollah and Israel: Hezbollah is deliberately trying to create civilian casualties on both sides while Israel is deliberately trying to minimize civilian casualties, also on both sides.

In perhaps the most blatant terror campaign from the air since the London Blitz, Hezbollah is raining rockets on Israeli cities and villages. These rockets are packed with ball bearings that can penetrate automobiles and shred human flesh. They are meant to kill and maim. And they do.

But it is a dual campaign. Israeli innocents must die in order for Israel to be terrorized. But Lebanese innocents must also die in order for Israel to be demonized, which is why Hezbollah hides its fighters, its rockets, its launchers, its entire infrastructure among civilians. Creating human shields is a war crime. It is also a Hezbollah specialty.

On Wednesday CNN cameras showed destruction in Tyre. What does Israel have against Tyre and its inhabitants? Nothing. But the long-range Hezbollah rockets that have been raining terror on Haifa are based in Tyre. What is Israel to do? Leave untouched the launch sites that are deliberately placed in built-up areas?

Had Israel wanted to destroy Lebanese civilian infrastructure, it would have turned out the lights in Beirut in the first hour of the war, destroying the billion-dollar power grid and setting back Lebanon 20 years. It did not do that. Instead it attacked dual-use infrastructure -- bridges, roads, airport runways -- and blockaded Lebanon's ports to prevent the reinforcement and resupply of Hezbollah. Ten thousand Katyusha rockets are enough. Israel was not going to allow Hezbollah 10,000 more.

Israel's response to Hezbollah has been to use the most precise weaponry and targeting it can. It has no interest, no desire to kill Lebanese civilians. Does anyone imagine that it could not have leveled south Lebanon, to say nothing of Beirut? Instead, in the bitter fight against Hezbollah in southern Lebanon, it has repeatedly dropped leaflets, issued warnings, sent messages by radio and even phone text to Lebanese villagers to evacuate so that they would not be harmed.

Israel knows that these leaflets and warnings give the Hezbollah fighters time to escape and regroup. The advance notification as to where the next attack is coming has allowed Hezbollah to set up elaborate ambushes. The result? Unexpectedly high Israeli infantry casualties. Moral scrupulousness paid in blood. Israeli soldiers die so that Lebanese civilians will not, and who does the international community condemn for disregarding civilian life?

And this essay from Claudia Rosett (no fan of the U.N.) explains what the U.N. has been doing in southern Lebenon for the last six years. Absolutely nothing...

You bet. But not from Israel. It’s coming from the U.N. Hezbollah deliberately provoked this war on July 12 by kidnapping Israeli soldiers inside Israel’s borders, and has been launching rockets into Israel from a massive arsenal that under U.N. writ Hezbollah is not even supposed to possess. That was not the deal under which Israel, in keeping with U.N. wishes, withdrew entirely from southern Lebanon in 2000. The U.N. promise was that Hezbollah would be defanged and that U.N. peacekeepers would help the Lebanese government reestablish control over Hezbollah-infested terrain inside Lebanon.

Over the past six years, Israel honored its commitment to peace. The U.N. — disproportionately — required in practice no such compliance on the Lebanese side of the border. The “peacekeepers” of the U.N. Interim Force in Lebanon, called UNIFIL, sat passively looking on, costing about $100 million a year and doing nothing to stop Hezbollah from trucking in weapons, digging tunnels, and running the armed protection rackets with which it has kept a grip on swathes of Lebanon, including the southern border with Israel, parts of the Bekaa, and southern Beirut. Before the current fighting, UNIFIL had most recently distinguished itself for a run-of-the-U.N.-mill financial swindle involving a contingent of Ukrainian peacekeeping troops. On that subject, whatever laws might have been violated, the U.N. has — as usual with U.N. scams — refused to release details. Now, UNIFIL peacekeepers have been reduced to casualties of the crossfire, while Secretary-General Kofi Annan urges that we take what the U.N. has done wrong already, and do more of it.

With its false promises, and disproportionate deals for “peace,” the U.N. left Israel exposed to the attack that has now come, and a war that Israel did not seek. Like America when attacked by al Qaeda, Israel has been fighting back. In response, U.N. officials have come close to trampling each other in their stampede to the media microphones — not to admit the U.N.’s own failure to stop Hezbollah, not to apologize for administering a phony peace that incubated this miserable war, but to denounce Israel.

These latest exercises in disproportion begin, of course, with U.N. officials ritually condemning all parties. With that sleight of hand, they conjure the baseline U.N. fallacy known as moral equivalence. In that U.N. scheme of the universe, a democratic society that is attacked while honoring U.N. agreements is treated as no different from its death-cult rule-violating terrorist attackers. But — and here we get to the U.N.’s real dark arts — having set up that bizarre equation, U.N. officials then proceed with their “proportionate” calculus, lavishing their further innuendos, sly criticisms, or, in some cases, outright denunciations on Israel. These comments — biased or even inane though some of them are — echo especially loud in the so-called international community because they come from officials flashing a U.N. badge.

So, Israel, attacked by a non-state terrorist organization is supposed to engage in a proportionet response? I think not. Israel should destroy the so-called Party of God and those people/countries that get in the way should learn from the fate of the Taliban in Afghanistan. Giving aid and shelter to terrorist organizations is a dangerous business. Lebanon is reaping the consequences of its failure to control or disarm Hezbollah.

Yes Lebanon was weak, chaotic, and disorganized. And yes, Hezbollah was popular in the country amoung the Shiite population. Which means that Lebanon and its population has to share some of the problems now coming their way. When you live in a country, you are responsible, to some degree, for what that country does, or does not do. In the specific case of Lebanon, what the government did not do was disarm Hezbollah and prevent it from controlling large chunks of territory and building up its supply of rockets and missiles (which it is now using to engage in terror attacks on Israeli cities).

I'm quite confidant that the United States would not have gone to war with Hezbollah if they abducted three of our soldiers from the streets of Baghdad. However, if some sort of similar organization were allowed to form and take over an equivolent amount of territory in northern Mexico on the U.S. border and if it then built up its supply of rockets like Hezbollah did, we might well do the same thing as Israel did. It is a threat, it is clearly uncontroled by the state which nominally owns its territory, and it has very aggressive long term plans. It needs to be destroyed for the security of the state.

Posted by rakhier at 03:20 PM | Comments (0)

June 15, 2006

Political Correctness = Hidden Socialism

A very long essay by Fjordman, published on the Gates of Vienna web site. It starts with the brilliant observation by Theodore Dalrymple

Political correctness is communist propaganda writ small. In my study of communist societies, I came to the conclusion that the purpose of communist propaganda was not to persuade or convince, nor to inform, but to humiliate; and therefore, the less it corresponded to reality the better. When people are forced to remain silent when they are being told the most obvious lies, or even worse when they are forced to repeat the lies themselves, they lose once and for all their sense of probity. To assent to obvious lies is to co-operate with evil, and in some small way to become evil oneself. One’s standing to resist anything is thus eroded, and even destroyed. A society of emasculated liars is easy to control. I think if you examine political correctness, it has the same effect and is intended to.

Fjordman's point is: Multiculturalism and Political Correctness are in ascendecy in the West and they are opposed to core values of the Western world such as:

Individual Responsibility
Rationality and Logic
Freedom of Speech

Cultural Marxism — aka Political Correctness — and Islam share the same totalitarian outlook and instinctively agree in their opposition to free discussion, and in the idea that freedom of speech must be curtailed when it is “offensive” to certain groups.

Posted by rakhier at 02:59 PM | Comments (0)

April 30, 2006

David Gelernter argues against Rights and in favor of Duty

David Gelernter makes a very impassioned arguement against the modern idea of "rights" as a world view vs. "duties". Its a very interesting arguement. His key point is that "rights" are obligations put on other people to defend or enforce. Duties are things we put on ourselves.

As he says a bit later: "The problem with the [rights] is that it blacks out whenever we reach the hard questions. Who will police the rights of Iraq, and guarantee the rights of Iraqis? The usual answer is the U.N. or some other multinational concoction. In other words: nobody."

A very interesting essay indeed. I'm not sure I'm convinced but in any case, I've put the whole text in the extended section of this post.

No More Vietnams
This time, let's finish the job.
by David Gelernter
05/08/2006, Volume 011, Issue 32 http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/012/151alsid.asp?pg=1

NOT LONG AGO RICHARD COHEN of the Washington Post wrote a column about Iraq headlined "As in Vietnam, dereliction of duty all over again." The Vietnam analogy has been part of the Iraq war story since the fighting started (in fact, since before it started). The Bush administration often deals with its critics by ignoring them. This time it can't. Too much rides on the president looking these critics in the eye and telling them: Damned right this is Vietnam all over again. Only this time we will not get scared and walk out in the middle. This time we will stand fast, and repair a piece of the American psyche that has been damaged and hurting ever since we ran from Vietnam in disgrace way back in April 1975.

Of course any citizen is welcome to criticize the conduct of any war--tactfully, without giving aid and comfort to the enemy. Maybe we are doing things all wrong in Iraq. But those who launch the Vietnam analogy at the administration are lobbing heavy artillery for a different reason. They are predicting (with obnoxious schadenfreude) that Iraq will turn out like Vietnam in the end: We will proclaim ourselves beaten, give up, and go home. The sooner we understand this, the sooner we will do the intelligent and humane thing and surrender.

These critics ought to be told firmly that Iraq is indeed another Vietnam. Once again we are in the middle of cleaning out one of the world's ugliest abscesses, which turns out (again) to be infected and putrefying. In Iraq as in Vietnam, the government gave the American people an unrealistic estimate of how hard the war would be. Both times it was an honest but costly mistake, which could probably have been avoided.

In Iraq as in Vietnam, it's impossible to say whether our intervention was justified by self-interest. (Churchill: "It is not given to the cleverest and most calculating of mortals to know with certainty what is their interest. Yet it is given to quite a lot of simple folk to know every day what is their duty.") In Iraq as in Vietnam, we have promised to rescue a suffering people from its tormentors. (Our duty was not to plant democracy in Iraq; our duty was to put an end to unbearable suffering. But planting democracy seemed like the only way to accomplish this goal, unless we were bucking for a new colony.) In Iraq as in Vietnam, the fighting is ugly and bloody. But in Iraq, unlike Vietnam, we will stay until we are finished.

Not many nations get a second chance to show the world and themselves that they are serious after all, that their friends can trust them and their enemies ought to fear them. There is no way we can atone for the blood and death we inflicted (indirectly) on South Vietnam by abandoning it to Communist tyranny. That failure can never be put right. But we can make clear that "No More Vietnams" is a Republican slogan. It means that we will never again go back on our word and betray our friends, our soldiers, and ourselves.

Most wars bog down in hard fighting at some point or other. When that happens, America must be able to trust itself not to run away. George Washington and his men did not run away after General Howe took Philadelphia for the British in September 1777, and Washington's counterattack on Germantown failed in October, and the brand new American army had to settle into miserable, freezing winter quarters at Valley Forge. Every American schoolchild used to know what Valley Forge meant: Stand firm and fight, no matter how terrible things are. The Union army did not run away in the fall of 1862, although Lee and Jackson had won a huge Confederate victory at Second Bull Run, and Lee had crossed the Potomac into Maryland and was threatening Washington, Baltimore, and (again) Philadelphia, and was expected to capture all of Maryland and a crucial railroad bridge in Pennsylvania--which would just about cut the Union in two. But Lincoln and the Union did not give up.The Confederates didn't run away either. Their cause was wrong, but they stood up heroically and fought till they were crushed to bits.

Nor did the American army run away 80 years later in the spring of 1942, although the Pacific fleet had been smashed at Pearl Harbor, Manila had been evacuated, Bataan had surrendered after a desperate, starving defense--and then Corregidor had surrendered too. But MacArthur promised that Americans would return to liberate the Philippines, and that's just what happened.

The United States has no tradition of running away. The left had better get this straight: Vietnam was an aberration. There will be no more Vietnams.

THOSE WHO THINK that "no more Vietnams" means that cowardice is the better part of wisdom don't know their Vietnam history either. There are many important lies in circulation about Vietnam, like counterfeit $50 bills that keep resurfacing. Those who held these views during the war itself weren't liars; in most cases they were telling the truth as they understood it. But decades later, it requires an act of will to keep one's ignorance pristine.

Lie #1: We were wrong to fight the Vietnamese Communists in the first place; they only wanted what was best for their country. In Why We Were in Vietnam, Norman Podhoretz summarizes Vietnam after the Communist victory. He quotes the liberal New York Times columnist Tom Wicker, outspoken critic of the war, on its aftermath. "What Vietnam has given us instead of a bloodbath [is] a vast tide of human misery in southeast Asia." He quotes Truong Nhu Tang, minister of justice in the Provisional Revolutionary Government that ruled South Vietnam after the Americans were ordered by Congress to run away: "Never has any previous regime [previous to the Communists] brought such masses of people to such desperation. Not the military dictators, not the colonialists, not even the ancient Chinese overlords." Prominent South Vietnamese were thrown into prison and tortured with revoltingly inventive cruelty. Virtually the whole South Vietnamese army and government were herded into concentration camps. Tang fled Vietnam in 1979, one of untold thousands who put to sea in crowded, rickety boats. Anything to get free of Communist Vietnam, the workers' and peasants' paradise, Fonda-land by the Sea. In Vietnam, as everywhere else on earth, communism was another word for death.

Lie #2: The Vietnam war was unwinnable. We had no business sending our men to a war they were bound to lose. The Communist Vietcong launched their first major coordinated offensive in January 1968--the "Tet offensive." "Tet was a military disaster for Hanoi," writes the historian Derek Leebaert. "Intended to destroy South Vietnamese officialdom and spark a popular uprising, Tet ironically had more of an effect in turning South Vietnam's people against the North." But America had been fighting ineffectively. In May 1968, Creighton Abrams replaced William Westmoreland as supreme American commander in Vietnam and U.S. strategy snapped to, immediately. With Abrams in charge, the war "was being won on the ground," writes the historian Lewis Sorley, "even as it was being lost at the peace table and in the U.S. Congress." The British counterinsurgency expert Sir Robert Thompson commented on America's "Christmas bombing" campaign of 1972, which devastated the North: "You had won the war. It was over." American anti-warriors insisted on losing it anyway.

Lie #3: As the American people learned the facts, they turned against the war and forced America's withdrawal from Vietnam. Actually, Americans continued to support the war nearly until the end. The 1972 presidential election was a referendum on the war; "Come home, America!" said the antiwar Democrat George McGovern--and he lost to Richard Nixon in a landslide. Of all U.S. population segments, 18-to-24-year-old men--who were subject to the draft, who did the fighting--were consistently the war's strongest supporters. "It was not the American people which lost its stomach," writes historian Paul Johnson, "it was the American leadership."

Lie #4: The real heroes of Vietnam were the protesters and draft-resisters who forced America to give up a disastrously wrong policy. If this was heroism, it was dirt cheap heroism. While college students paraded and protested and whooped it up, America's working classes bore the brunt of the fighting, bleeding, and dying. Around 80 percent of the 2.5 million enlisted men who fought in Vietnam came from poor or working class families. They lacked the law-breaking and draft-evading skills that their better-educated countrymen could draw on. And they lacked the heart to say no when their country called. Reread Norman Mailer's gorgeously written yet (like the smell of marijuana) faintly disgusting Armies of the Night, about a massive antiwar march on the Pentagon. You will learn or relearn all about the passionate ingenuity of left-wing lawyers fighting for clients they admired--who were innately superior to the law but scared of the consequences when they broke it.

All these lies are present symbolically in the Vietnam wall near the Lincoln Memorial in Washington. Many other memorials, in Europe especially, have commemorated fallen soldiers by listing every name. The soaring (yet knotted-up, anguished) Thiepval Memorial Arch at the Somme, by Sir Edwin Lutyens (1924), is the most extraordinary and celebrated instance of the list-every-name school of memorial design. Our own wall is different, for one, insofar as it stands in a scraped-out hole in the ground; a symbolic open grave. Some day we will tear down that wall and fill up the open grave, and rebuild the wall above ground and re-engrave every name, and add two more words at the end. Two words the designer did not see fit to include. Thank you. On that day we will finally have gotten over Vietnam.

IN THE ARGUMENT OVER IRAQ we can see reflected (like ominous headlights in a rearview mirror) one of the central disputes of modern times--between a traditional "morality of duties" and a modern "morality of rights." Philosophers like to argue that these two worldviews are complementary. In fact they are contradictory. Each of these two worldviews yields an all-inclusive blueprint for society, with no room for further contributions.

Granted, it's convenient to speak of one's "duty" to help the poor and one's "right" of self-defense. No contradiction there. But think it over and you will see that, by laying out everyone's duties explicitly, you lay out everyone's rights implicitly; and vice versa. You have a right to self-defense--or, to put it differently, a duty to use no violence except (among other cases) in self-defense. Both formulas reach the same destination by different routes. By means of the "morality of duty," you shape society the way a sculptor carves stone; by the "morality of rights," you shape it the way a sculptor models clay. Two different, contradictory techniques.

The morality of duties originated in Judeo-Christianity, the morality of rights in Roman jurisprudence. The Hebrew tradition knows about rights--but only in the context of covenants, where two parties each acquire rights and responsibilities simultaneously. America's Founders and Framers spoke of rights, but might well have had this Judeo-Christian idea in mind.

But the modern preference for rights over duties has nothing to do with religion or covenants. And your choice between these two worldviews is important. Morality deals, after all, with how to conduct yourself--whereas a right ordinarily confers an advantageous position, to put it formally; having a right means that your will is favored over someone else's. It's therefore conceivable that the morality of duties is the one and only kind of morality; that a morality of rights is a contradiction in terms. It's conceivable that a "morality of rights" actually rejects morality in favor of some other way to organize society--I'll call it "rights-liberalism." Rights-liberalism might be better than traditional Judeo-Christian morality, or worse, or neither, but in any case I believe it is not morality. In fact, proponents of rights-liberalism seem to believe (though they rarely say so point blank) that it is the next step beyond morality.

Even if you don't care about religion, you might still choose the morality of duty, with its focus on an individual's obligations, over rights-liberalism--which focuses not on your duty but on what is coming to you. Many Republicans and conservatives do prefer to discuss duties; many Democrats and liberals would rather talk about rights.

Now when you assign someone a duty, he is responsible for carrying it out; when you assign him a right, someone else is responsible for guaranteeing it. Rights-liberalism is a worldview that centers on "make way for me"--and some find it unattractive for just this reason. "Ask not what your country can do for you," said JFK, "ask what you can do for your country." In other words: Don't ask for rights, dammit; ask for duties. Nowadays Kennedy's most famous line is dismissed as a routine call for good citizenship. But there is more to it than that. The statement was taken up with amazing enthusiasm. Every schoolchild knew it. The enthusiasm was partly because the line is catchy; it might also have reflected a deep-lying sympathy over the rising call for civil rights. But it's also true that America in 1961 was just on the point of seeing traditional morality swamped by rights-liberalism. People felt what was happening. No doubt some felt, too, that Kennedy was sticking up for an older, better worldview that was on its way out.

We find this same deep disagreement over Iraq. Should we talk about America's duty to protect itself, and do its best to protect other, weaker peoples? Or should we talk about Saddam Hussein's right to develop weapons so long as they aren't "weapons of mass destruction," and the Iraqi people's right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness?

The problem with the second formulation is that it blacks out whenever we reach the hard questions. Who will police the rights of Iraq, and guarantee the rights of Iraqis? The usual answer is the U.N. or some other multinational concoction. In other words: nobody. Sometimes we do leave things largely to the U.N. The Security Council has just voted to freeze the assets of four prominent Sudanese: the first punitive measures ever against instigators of violence in the Darfur region--which so far has killed hundreds of thousands.

When conservatives repossess the motto "No more Vietnams," it will be a perfect occasion to address one of the most important questions of our time. Is American policy based on rights or on duties? Is America in Iraq because of our duties or their rights? If "their rights" is the answer, liberals are correct: We have stuck our necks out unnecessarily; we could just as easily have let someone else worry about it, the way France and Germany did. If the answer is "our duties," we had no choice. We had an obligation to take charge of our own safety in a world that is lousy with terrorists, and we had to face up to our obligations as the world's strongest nation. And obviously we have duties in nations besides Iraq also. America doesn't have the power to help everybody--which is no excuse for helping nobody.

American character is on the line. For the sake of this nation--of its good name, its big heart, the sacrifices of its many brave defenders, the genius of its creators--of its greatness, in short--conservatives had better not lose this fight.

The administration was wrong to let Americans get the idea that Iraq would be easy. But it was right to fight. And because Iraq is exactly Vietnam all over again, our eventual victory won't only be good for Iraq, the Middle East, and peace on earth. It will repair American self-respect. And it will turn the Friends of Cowardice, the U.S. Mothers for Despair, and all their allied groups back into the peripheral players they always used to be in this country--until Vietnam.

David Gelernter is a contributing editor to The Weekly Standard and a national fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.

Posted by rakhier at 12:55 AM | Comments (0)

March 15, 2006

The Road to Serfdom

Friedrich Hayek wrote a short little booklet called The Road to Serfdom that was illustrated and shows very clearly why Totalitarian governments are able to take control. Its well done if very simplistic.

Posted by rakhier at 09:20 PM | Comments (0)

March 03, 2006

A Government that does not defend its people has lost its reason to exist...

Amit Ghate, writes a long and impassioned essay called All for One.

In this essay he argues that western governments main reason for existance is to protect the lives of its citizens, because the lives of its people are important.

He further argues that westerns goverments have failed to do this in response to the Islamist threat, starting with Khomeini supporters taking over the American Embassy in Tehran in 1979, continuing with the fatwa ordering the death of Salman Rushdie in 1989, and going on and on. Till today, people that want to speak freely and openly about Islam, are threatened with death and are not protected.

The historical pattern is clear and consistent. For twenty five plus years, Islamists have isolated and targeted Western citizens around the world with impunity, and have succeeded in fostering fear in most citizens...

To stand together means to assert our rights with our government as our agent. To those who threaten us with force, asserting our rights means responding with force, in fact, with overwhelming force. We must say to Iran (which on February 14 just reconfirmed the Rushdie fatwa) “oust and turn over the regime which sees fit to condemn a single citizen of ours to death, or face all out war.” And if they refuse, give them the war they started, but be sure to win it decisively, not protecting their mosques and infrastructure, but instead doing everything necessary to ensure they have no capacity to ever threaten us again. To Pakistan and India, which host clerics bold enough to put bounties on the heads of our citizens, demand that they turn over the men and their supporters, and if they refuse, go in and take them by force.

For if we fail to reverse our pattern, men will continue to learn that their rights are a sham, that the government’s promise to protect the individual is a hoax, and that only by refraining from thinking and speaking out might they be momentarily safe. Men will then go on to realize that they must seek out true protectors, in the form of some gang; ethnic, religious or otherwise; who may afford them a measure of security, albeit at the cost of complete obedience. Eventually the gangs will fight it out in an effort to wrest absolute power and to subjugate the others.

I agree with his analysis. Our basic freedom is being threatened by governments and organizations from other countries and our own government is standing to the side and doing little or nothing to protect us. We have the right to say what we want to say, regardless if other people in this country don't like it and especially regardless if people in other countries don't like it. If our government will not protect this right, then it has ceased to have real meaning. A right that is not defended does not exist.

People need to learn all they can about Islam. People need to understand just how morally bankrupt this relgion really is. Their death threats against cartoonists is just the tip of the iceberg. Islam needs to be reformed.

Posted by rakhier at 10:35 AM | Comments (0)

February 23, 2006

More on Freedom of Speech

Bill Bennett and Alan Dershowitz together write in the Washington Post that the newspapers in the Western world have failed to do their duty. By not publishing the Danish cartoons "To put it simply, radical Islamists have won a war of intimidation. They have cowed the major news media from showing these cartoons. The mainstream press has capitulated to the Islamists—their threats more than their sensibilities."

Read the whole thing with comments here by Protein Wisdom.

Eric Raymond writes in a recent essay that the west is plauged by evil ideas which were created largely by Soviet intelligence operatives from 1930 to 1980. His essay is called Gramscian damage

While the espionage apparatus of the Soviet Union didn’t outlast it, their memetic weapons did. These memes are now coming near to crippling our culture’s response to Islamic terrorism.

Lastly the Armchair Philosopher points out that the ideas which the Soviets came up with are, in fact, partly correct. See his very interesting essay here.

Posted by rakhier at 08:56 PM | Comments (0)

February 12, 2006

Hirsi Ali on the Cartoon War...

Hirsi Ali, a member of the Dutch legislature (a Somali woman who is now a former Moslem) writes a clear and serious defence of the publication of the cartoon. She calls it "The Right to Offend". Naturally, I agree with what she says. It was published at this web site. See the extended section for her essay.

The Right to Offend by Ayaan Hirsi Ali

I am here to defend the right to offend.

It is my conviction that the vulnerable enterprise called democracy cannot exist without free expression, particularly in the media. Journalists must not forgo the obligation of free speech, which people in other hemispheres are denied.

I am of the opinion that it was correct to publish the cartoons of Muhammad in Jyllands Posten and it was right to re-publish them in other papers across Europe.

Let me reprise the history of this affair. The author of a children’s book on the prophet Muhammad could find no illustrators for his book. He claimed that illustrators were censoring themselves for fear of violence by Muslims who claimed no-one, anywhere, should be allowed to depict the prophet. Jyllands Posten decided to investigate this. They -- rightly – felt that such self-censorship has far-reaching consequences for democracy.

It was their duty as journalists to solicit and publish drawings of the prophet Muhammad.

Shame on those papers and TV channels who lacked the courage to show their readers the caricatures in The Cartoon Affair. These intellectuals live off free speech but they accept censorship. They hide their mediocrity of mind behind noble-sounding terms such as ‘responsibility’ and ‘sensitivity’.

Shame on those politicians who stated that publishing and re-publishing the drawings was ‘unnecessary’, ‘insensitive’, ‘disrespectful’ and ‘wrong’. I am of the opinion that Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen of Denmark acted correctly when he refused to meet with representatives of tyrannical regimes who demanded from him that he limit the powers of the press. Today we should stand by him morally and materially. He is an example to all other European leaders. I wish my prime minister had Rasmussen’s guts.

Shame on those European companies in the Middle East that advertised “we are not Danish” or “we don’t sell Danish products”. This is cowardice. Nestle chocolates will never taste the same after this, will they? The EU member states should compensate Danish companies for the damage they have suffered from boycotts.

Liberty does not come cheap. A few million Euros is worth paying for the defence of free speech. If our governments neglect to help our Scandinavian friends then I hope citizens will organise a donation campaign for Danish companies.

We have been flooded with opinions on how tasteless and tactless the cartoons are -- views emphasising that the cartoons only led to violence and discord. What good has come of the cartoons, so many wonder loudly?

Well, publication of the cartoons confirmed that there is widespread fear among authors, filmmakers, cartoonists and journalists who wish to describe, analyse or criticise intolerant aspects of Islam all over Europe.

It has also revealed the presence of a considerable minority in Europe who do not understand or will not accept the workings of liberal democracy. These people – many of whom hold European citizenship – have campaigned for censorship, for boycotts, for violence, and for new laws to ban ‘Islamophobia’.

The cartoons revealed to the public eye that there are countries willing to violate diplomatic rules for political expediency. Evil governments like Saudi Arabia stage “grassroots” movements to boycott Danish milk and yoghurt, while they would mercilessly crash a grassroots movement fighting for the right to vote.

Today I am here to defend the right to offend within the bounds of the law. You may wonder: why Berlin? And why me?

Berlin is rich in the history of ideological challenges to the open society. This is the city where a wall kept people within the boundaries of the Communist state. It was the city which focalized the battle for the hearts and minds of citizens. Defenders of the open society educated people in the shortcomings of Communism. The work of Marx was discussed in universities, in op-ed pages and in schools. Dissidents who escaped from the East could write, make films, cartoons and use their creativity to persuade those in the West that Communism was far from paradise on earth.

Despite the self-censorship of many in the West, who idealised and defended Communism, and the brutal censorship of the East, that battle was won.

Today, the open society is challenged by Islamism, ascribed to a man named Muhammad Abdullah who lived in the seventh century, and who is regarded as a prophet. Many Muslims are peaceful people; not all are fanatics. As far as I am concerned they have every right to be faithful to their convictions. But within Islam exists a hard-line Islamist movement that rejects democratic freedoms and wants to destroy them. These Islamists seek to convince other Muslims that their way of life is the best. But when opponents of Islamism try to expose the fallacies in the teachings of Muhammad then they are accused of being offensive, blasphemous, socially irresponsible – even Islamophobic or racist.

The issue is not about race, colour or heritage. It is a conflict of ideas, which transcend borders and races.

Why me? I am a dissident, like those from the Eastern side of this city who defected to the West. I too defected to the West. I was born in Somalia, and grew up in Saudi Arabic and Kenya. I used to be faithful to the guidelines laid down by the prophet Muhammad. Like the thousands demonstrating against the Danish drawings, I used to hold the view that Muhammad was perfect -- the only source of, and indeed, the criterion between good and bad. In 1989 when Khomeini called for Salman Rushdie to be killed for insulting Muhammad, I thought he was right. Now I don’t.

I think that the prophet was wrong to have placed himself and his ideas above critical thought.

I think that the prophet Muhammad was wrong to have subordinated women to men.

I think that the prophet Muhammad was wrong to have decreed that gays be murdered.

I think that the prophet Muhammad was wrong to have said that apostates must be killed.

He was wrong in saying that adulterers should be flogged and stoned, and the hands of thieves should be cut off.

He was wrong in saying that those who die in the cause of Allah will be rewarded with paradise.

He was wrong in claiming that a proper society could be built only on his ideas.

The prophet did and said good things. He encouraged charity to others. But I wish to defend the position that he was also disrespectful and insensitive to those who disagreed with him.

I think it is right to make critical drawings and films of Muhammad. It is necessary to write books on him in order to educate ordinary citizens on Muhammad.

I do not seek to offend religious sentiment, but I will not submit to tyranny. Demanding that people who do not accept Muhammad’s teachings should refrain from drawing him is not a request for respect but a demand for submission.

I am not the only dissident in Islam. There are more like me here in the West. If they have no bodyguards they work under false identities to protect themselves from harm. But there are also others who refuse to conform: in Teheran, in Doha and Riyadh, in Amman and Cairo, in Khartoum and in Mogadishu, in Lahore and in Kabul.

The dissidents of Islamism, like the dissidents of communism, don’t have nuclear bombs or any other weapons. We have no money from oil like the Saudis. We will not burn embassies and flags. We refuse to get carried away in a frenzy of collective violence. In number we are too small and too scattered to become a collective of anything. In electoral terms here in the west we are practically useless.

All we have are our thoughts; and all we ask is a fair chance to express them. Our opponents will use force to silence us. They will use manipulation; they will claim they are mortally offended. They will claim we are mentally unstable and should not be taken seriously. The defenders of Communism, too, used these methods.

Berlin is a city of optimism. Communism failed. The wall was broken down. Things may seem difficult and confusing today. But I am optimistic that the virtual wall, between lovers of liberty and those who succumb to the seduction and safety of totalitarian ideas will also, one day, come down.

Berlin, 9.02.06

Ayaan Hirsi Ali

Posted by rakhier at 10:05 AM | Comments (0)

January 03, 2006

Things I No Longer Believe in...

I went through a mental list of things I no longer believe in the other night:

I used to think Green Peace was doing good things - Sorry. Green Peace is a crazy organization which wastes its time and money protesting things that either are wrong (such as opposition to nuclear power) or are close to pointless (the best way to get rid of old oil platforms).
I used to think the American Communist party was independent from the Soviet Union. No, it turns out it really was under the control of the Soviet Union. All their statements to the contrary were lies.
I used to think Mao's government was at least decent. Now I think the Chinese government under Chairman Mao was far from being benign or even average. Like every other Communist government it was a failure economically and evil in its behavior towards its own citizens.
I used to think all politicians were evil. Now I realize many politicians in the US are good. Politicians have the impossible job of resolving disputes which are at core, unresolvable. Good politicians try hard to come up with solutions that make as many people as possible happy. The fact that they fail is not a reflection on them so much as it reflects the fact that no good solutions are possible.
I used to think the people, on average were stupid and not trustworthy and that educated elites should make important decisions. Now I think that the people, on average, are smarter and make better decisions than a small group of highly educated individuals. In other words: I longer trust elites, but I trust democracies. Linux, Firefox, and the Wikipedia are living proof that large groups of people can do better work than smaller groups of experts who are paid to do a good job. Not always, but often. Bottom line: democracies work, dictatorships don't.

Posted by rakhier at 11:14 AM | Comments (0)

December 09, 2005

Neo-NeoCon on Morality of Torture...

Good post here by Neo-NeoCon. I especially liked this analysis:

However, in writing it out that way, I think a basic contradiction becomes glaringly obvious: Geary is himself making such a "good and evil" sort of moral judgment, and that is that the greatest good is to esteem all people on earth equally, and accord them all equal and complete human rights. It's impossible, however, if one follows his logic, to escape the notion that groups with more of a dedication to preserving human rights would be more "good" and less "evil" than those who torture freely. I think this is an illustration of the fact that it's simply impossible to talk about moral decisions without making some sort of moral judgments.

I think this point is correct. You have to stand somewhere. There is no way to talk about the right thing to do, the correct thing to do, without making implicit moral judgements, value statements. It can't be avoided. People who try to avoid them end up saying nothing.

In the real world in which we live--rather than the lofty world of the London School of Economics in which Gearty seems to live, and where I'm sure no one ever does anything unethical--moral choices are usually between the lesser of two evils (or, as I've written before, the least crazy of several competing crazinesses). Failure to make such choices between relative goods/evils would make us into moral monsters of another sort, trapped in a rigid rules-bound way of thinking that would lead almost inevitably to tragic consequences.

Yes. We often have to face choices where all the decisions we make are bad and will hurt people. We still have to choose. Even not choosing is a choice that will hurt or kill. The old high-school stand-by of "I only want to leave other people alone" doesn't work when your choices are death for some vs. death for others.

Posted by rakhier at 05:09 PM | Comments (0)

December 01, 2005

Greg Benford and Mike Rose...

Greg Benford (one of the three killer-B's) has a new blog along with Michael Rose. Here is an exerpt from their essay on the future

Aristotle is [the] progenitor of the opposition to collectivism... [but] the clearest, and historically most important, expression of this tradition came out of the Scottish Enlightenment: David Hume, Adam Smith, Adam Ferguson, among others. This tradition emphasizes indirect effects, the futility of government attempts to control markets and international trade, the value of enterprise, and the limits to the benign effects of concerted action.

This tradition had its most visible success with James Madison's Constitution for the new American republic, the vastly successful state that replaced the loose confederation of colonies who started the American rebellion against the English Crown. Madison was perhaps the greatest practical student of the Scottish Enlightenment, and certainly the person who most effectively set about implementing its precepts...

We wish to recruit new adherents. Our agenda is simply the view that solutions to political and cultural difficulties can be found in the deliberate cultivation of the empirical, individualistic, skeptical Western tradition.

Put another way: We wish to drive a stake through the heart of the dominant cultural traditions of piety, correctness, ideology, and faith. Then we would like to dance on their graves.

Hear hear!

Posted by rakhier at 09:44 AM | Comments (0)

November 29, 2005

Interesting Moview Review Site...

The web site/blog Libertas is a movie review/comment site from a conservative perspective. Since this is a perspective I now find myself sharing I appreciated their comments on some films.

Highlights of the site are the extensive comments about the recent Star Wars films:

Episode One - Phantom Menace
Episode Two - Clone Wars
Episode Three - Revenge of the Sith

My comments: I agree with much of what he says about Episode One. It IS a spectacular duel at the end between Darth Maul and the two Jedi. I've watched that duel at least 10 times and its still a master piece.

I like many parts of Episode 2, the chase through Coruscant, Obi Wan's visit to the Cloner world, and the entire last 45 minutes. However, as a film, its a sad excuse for a coherent work of art.

I thought Episode 3 (though I've only seen it once) was an disaster from start to finish, mitigated only by a two scenes: the by-play between Obi Wan and Anakin inside the giant space ship and the scenes where Anakin and Padme are seperated and Anakin is thinking about betraying the Jedi order. I'm seriously tempted to NOT buy the last film on DVD, we shall see...

BTW: On an unrelated note - I enjoyed watching "Troy". I thought Brad Pitt captured some of the raw cold-blooded killer which made Achiles the archetype of a warrior. There were lots of things wrong with the film but the opening sequence and the attack on the shore of Troy really worked for me.

Posted by rakhier at 10:07 AM | Comments (0)

November 28, 2005

The Problem with Feminism - no children for top end women

This essay by James Pinkerton for TCS is a good read on the state of relations between the sexes circa 2005. Pinkerton makes the arguement that in a real sense, Hugh Heffner's vision of the world has won, for the moment.

First, the Playboy Mogul publicly exults in his singleness, bragging about all his many conquests, even as he nears 80 -- while for her part, Dowd publicly laments her aloneness. OK, but that's changeable, one might say. Hefner is almost dead, while there's plenty of time for Dowd to get married.

But the second difference between Hugh and Maureen can't be changed. And that is this: Hefner, by his two ex-wives, has four children -- two of them he fathered when he was in his 60s -- while Dowd, who will turn 54 in January, has none. She can get married, she can even adopt -- but absent some miraculous medicine, she can't have children of her own.

Thus we come to the fundamental asymmetry of the sexes: Thanks in no small part to Hefner's philosophizing, men can fool around and then have kids pretty much whenever they want -- as such late-December fathers as Norman Lear and the late Tony Randall have demonstrated.

And yet while men changed the laws, and the customs, to suit their specific needs such as virility enhancement, women have made no similarly powerful change in areas that affect them specifically, such as fertility enhancement. That is, if women had gotten together and decided that it was as important to extend the age of female fertility as it was for men to have access to Viagra, one can only assume that medical science would have made that change -- science is like that. But women, who outnumber men, both in terms of population and at the ballot box, never organized themselves to demand such a fertility breakthrough...

[I]n the end, the Hefs, dominant as they might be, aren't that smart. They created an architecture that guaranteed pleasure for themselves, but they wrought no guarantee for the long-term survival of their nouveaux value system -- because women, such as Dowd, who have been Hefnerized, are unlikely to have many children. Many of the brightest and most educated women have, in effect, gone on strike, baby-making-wise. And yet until such time as a Playboy-ized economy can run entirely on clones and robots, the future of America will still depend on men and women coming together for procreation. Which is to say, both men and women are necessary.

The inability of the smartest, most successful women to reproduce is clearly a long term problem for any society which allows this to happen. This is happening in the United States (and I think Western Europe and Japan) right now and the trend shows no sign of reversing itself. I don't have any good solutions to this either...

One thing is certain: over the long run (say 200 to 300 years from now) the societies/cultures which manage to get the best women to have children will be dominate vis a vis everyone else.

Posted by rakhier at 04:12 PM | Comments (0)

October 20, 2005

An Arguement Against Same Sex Marriage...

There is a truely facinating set of posts over at the Volokh Conspiracy by Maggie Gallagher. Ms. Gallagher makes a complex arguement so let me try and distill it (somewhat)

The big picture

That, is the family crisis we face is not a crisis of intimacy, or sexual satisfaction, or emotionally satisfying relations, which our family system. taken altogether, may be better at than any in human history (I'm not sure how one would measure): it is about whether under modern conditions in modern societies, the man and woman who make the baby are going to stick around, love each other, and the baby too.

The conditions that create the creative class, and the conditions that create people, may be diverging.

This crisis is playing out in somewhat different ways in different regions (Italy has extremely low birth rates and much family cohesion, while Sweden has moderately low fertility and high rates of illegitimacy, for example. U.S. has relatively high birth rates, but extremely high rates of solo mothering and divorce).

But in every case technologically innovative, wealthy, western, democratic, market societies are no longer routinely doing what the family did really quite well for most of human history: reliably producing the next generation and reliably connecting most of those children to their father.

Conservatives like to blame welfare alone, or the Sixties and bad moral values. I think this seriously misunderestimates the nature and depth of our marriage and family crisis, which is institutional and structural in nature.

For most of human history children were assets. We depended on family members to produce most of the goods we consumed, and to provide most social insurance: someone to nurse us when we are sick, feed us when we cannot work, shelter and care for us in old age. Under these condition the necessity of procreation and family loyalty were obvious, urgent personal moral and social imperatives. People are always better at duties when it is apparent that you do well, by doing good.

Nowadays, government and the market have taken over large parts of these social functions. The main reason for this is: government and the market do them much, much better. (If you doubt this, imagine have to perform your current job functions while depending only on close kin for colleagues, bosses and employees.). The genius of the market is the way that it allows biological strangers to combine their productive energies.

We can quibble about specific government programs, but basically welfare, unemployment insurance and social security, Medicare and Medicaid aren’t going away in a democracy because people like them. People prefer to depend on either the government, or a pension fund, to becoming dependents on their children in old age.

So why don’t we just let marriage go, stop worrying about what people do or don’t do in the bedroom? Because there is this one critical, literally irreplaceable social function that marriage does, and only marriage does: making babies and connecting fathers to the babies they make.

Now in the middle of this broad, deep crisis, which I truly think does threaten American civilization in the medium term, if its not confronted, what’s the one legal change powerful social, legal and cognitive elites support?

Why, making marriage a union of any two persons, clearly unrelated to procreation and paternity!

Ok. This is, I think, an essentially correct picture of the situation.

Second point: Research clearly demonstrates that family structure matters for children, and the family structure that helps the most is a family headed by two biological parents in a low-conflict marriage.

Third point:

extending marriage

4th Point: Marriage is not innate.

I don’t think marriage

Yes, there are things in human nature that help sustain it (e.g. a pair bonding preference; sexual jealousy) but others that undermine it (e.g. men’s subjection for much of their life to powerful, indiscriminate and rather impersonal lusts).

But fundamentally marriage is sustained by culture, not biology. Why then is it universal? Because it is the answer to an urgent problem that is biological and innate: sex makes babies. Nature alone won’t connect fathers to children. Children need a society in which both men and women are committed to their care.

When anthropologists in the thirties went out into the vanishing world of human diversity, the reason they found marriage everywhere is that societies that do not hang onto the marriage idea do not survive very long.

But marriage in a particular society is not inevitable; death by sexual disorganization is always an option. Happens quite a bit actually. cf. Roman empire.

So in one sense I’m not worried about marriage. In spite of the progressive mythology that the drive to gay marriage is the irresistible wave of the future, I’m quite confident that 200 years from now, we’re not going to be living in a world where gay marriage is the norm.

I’m just not sure of the place of Western civilization in that future world.

So, here arguement is: marriage can break down and when it does, it pulls the society down with it. Clearly we have a problem in the Western world today with marriage and fertility. Is the solution to weaken the idea of marriage?

Posted by rakhier at 09:51 AM | Comments (0)

October 03, 2005

Dalrymple talks about his ideas...

Dr. Theodore Dalrymple is one of the greatest living philosophers, a man who has lived in the real world, unlike so many academics who only know a tiny slice of the world as seen from Harvard...

I've been reading his essays in City Journal for some years now and he has collected many of them into a book: Our Culture, What's Left of It

In this feature, he talks with Mr. Glazov of Frontpage Magazine.

Dalrymple: I have noticed the disappearance of the word 'unhappy' from common usage, and its replacement by the word 'depressed.' While unhappiness is a state of mind that is clearly the result of the circumstances of one's life, whether self-inflicted or inflicted by circumstances beyond one's control, or a mixture of both, depression is an illness that is the doctor's responsibility to cure. This is so, however one happens to be leading one's life. And the doctor, enjoined to pass no judgement that could be interpreted as moral on his patients, has no option but to play along with this deception. The result is the gross over-prescription of medication, without any reduction in unhappiness.

Q: Your observation about humans’ thrill for danger and how this interrelates with humans’ pattern of self destruction and the voluntary choosing of misery is very profound. Could you share your thoughts with us about this?

Dalrymple: It is clear to me that people often want incompatible things. They want danger and excitement on the one hand, and safety and security on the other, and often simultaneously. Contradictory desires mean that life can never be wholly satisfying or without frustration.

I think it was Dostoyevsky who said that, even if the government were 100 per cent benevolent and arranged everything for our own good, as judged by rational criteria, we should still want to exercise our freedom by going against its dispensations.

One reason for the epidemic of self-destructiveness that has struck British, if not the whole of Western, society, is the avoidance of boredom. For people who have no transcendent purpose to their lives and cannot invent one through contributing to a cultural tradition (for example), in other words who have no religious belief and no intellectual interests to stimulate them, self-destruction and the creation of crises in their life is one way of warding off meaninglessness. I have noticed, for example, that women who frequent bad men - that is to say men who are obviously unreliable, drunken, drug-addicted, criminal, or violent, or all of them together, have often had experience of decent men who treat them well, with respect, and so forth: they are the ones with whom their relationships lasted the shortest time, because they were bored by decency. Without religion or culture (and here I mean high, or high-ish, culture) evil is very attractive. It is not boring.

Q: You make the shrewd observation of how political correctness engenders evil because of “the violence that it does to people’s souls by forcing them to say or imply what they do not believe, but must not question.” Can you talk about this a bit?

Dalrymple: Political correctness is communist propaganda writ small. In my study of communist societies, I came to the conclusion that the purpose of communist propaganda was not to persuade or convince, nor to inform, but to humiliate; and therefore, the less it corresponded to reality the better. When people are forced to remain silent when they are being told the most obvious lies, or even worse when they are forced to repeat the lies themselves, they lose once and for all their sense of probity. To assent to obvious lies is to co-operate with evil, and in some small way to become evil oneself. One's standing to resist anything is thus eroded, and even destroyed. A society of emasculated liars is easy to control. I think if you examine political correctness, it has the same effect and is intended to.

Read it all.

Posted by rakhier at 01:47 PM | Comments (0)

September 13, 2005

Neo-NeoCon writes about 9/11

I have an essay in my mind which talks about my thoughts when 9/11 happened. In the meantime, her essay is wonderful. Read it all.

Posted by rakhier at 11:16 AM | Comments (0)

September 08, 2005

Why Some New Orlean's Residents Acted Badly...

First, its an established fact that the Governor of Louisiana prevented the Red Cross from making humanitarian deliveries to the Superdome. See the Red Cross's web page on this issue here.

Second, its a reasonably well founded statement that the vast majority of the people who stayed in New Orleans, despite requests and orders to leave town, were the poorest people of New Orleans. This essay suggests their bad behavior during and following the hurricane only makes sense with this knowledge.

Why are people responding to natural destruction by causing further destruction? Why are they attacking the people who are trying to help them?...

What Hurricane Katrina exposed was the psychological consequences of the welfare state. What we consider "normal" behavior in an emergency is behavior that is normal for people who have values and take the responsibility to pursue and protect them. People with values respond to a disaster by fighting against it and doing whatever it takes to overcome the difficulties they face. They don't sit around and complain that the government hasn't taken care of them. And they don't use the chaos of a disaster as an opportunity to prey on their fellow men.

But what about criminals and welfare parasites? Do they worry about saving their houses and property? They don't, because they don't own anything. Do they worry about what is going to happen to their businesses or how they are going to make a living? They never worried about those things before. Do they worry about crime and looting? But living off of stolen wealth is a way of life for them.

People living in piles of their own trash, while petulantly complaining that other people aren't doing enough to take care of them and then shooting at those who come to rescue them�this is not just a description of the chaos at the Superdome. It is a perfect summary of the 40-year history of the welfare state and its public housing projects.

The truth is, in all societies you find an underclass. Look at the Cockneys in the east end of London. Look at the Dalits of India. Look at the Gypsies of Europe. Look at the Burakumin of Japan. I could go on. Clearly, New Orleans had such a society, and they reacted to the disaster differently from what an average American would expect. Where normal Americans see a breakdown in law and order as a problem that needs to be fixed, the underclass sees it as an opportunity. While one can see this is a big problem, there are no easy solutions to this problem. It is an old problem. It is wide spread. And there are good reasons why it still exists even in America.

Does the existance of this group in the (now flooded) low areas of New Orleans explain why the levees were built only to withstand a class 3 hurricane? Was this an unstated part of the cost-benefit analysis from the 1960s?

Posted by rakhier at 12:22 PM | Comments (0)

August 31, 2005

When there is no solution - Wicked Problems

Many problems found in running countries (political problems) fall into the category of wicked problems. This is the Wikipedia definition.

Armed Liberal wrote about such problems here and here.

There is no definitive formulation of a wicked problem - unlike the question "how do we prevent this street from flooding during the fall rains". So a wicked problem like what we see in Iraq today defies any attempt to even describe the problem clearly.
Wicked problems have no stopping rule - unlike the problem of "does your house have an electrical hook-up?" when would you say we have completed our work in Iraq?
Solutions to wicked problems are not true-or-false, but good-or-bad - example: I want to defend the United States from terrorist attack. Binary solution? Hardly.
There is no immediate and no ultimate test of a solution to a wicked problem - in other words, in the short term you cann't know if you have succeeded.
Every solution to a wicked problem is a "one-shot operation"; because there is no opportunity to learn by trial-and-error, every attempt counts significantly. All attempted solutions change the problem you are trying to fix. You don't get to say "well that didn't work, lets try this again with a different solution".
Wicked problems do not have an enumerable (or an exhaustively describable) set of potential solutions, nor is there a well-described set of permissible operations that may be incorporated into the plan. Again, since the problem can't be clearly described, there is no clear set of solutions.
Every wicked problem is essentially unique. This condition is self-evident as every real world problem is unique in some sense. For wicked problems we mean unique in that a huge number of variables are different from any possible historical example. For example, if we were to take over Iran, the problems and the solutions would not be the same as Iraq. Iran is not Iraq.
Every wicked problem can be considered to be a symptom of another problem - this is due in large part to the fact that you can't clearly define the problem you are trying to solve in the first place. Since you can't define the problem, logical analysis does not stop you from redefining the problem as a symptom of some other problem.
The existence of a discrepancy in representing a wicked problem can be explained in numerous ways. The choice of explanation determines the nature of the problem's resolution. - Since you can't clearly define the problem, the way any one person defines the problem will determin their proposed solution.
The planner or designer (solving the problem) has no inherent right to solve the problem, and no permission to make mistakes - in other words: the person who is trying to solve the problem does not have a clear mandate (legal authority) to solve the problem.

Most problems in life which are worth political debate are wicked problems. For example, no one talks about how to provide clean water for a city because we know how to do it. The problem is clean, simple, well understood, and well defined.

For anyone to assert that they "know the answer" to problems like we see in Iraq today, is to deny the reality of wicked problems. There are no simple, clear solutions to wicked problems. The best we can do is try something that makes sense, learn from mistakes, and have determination. A half-way decent solution (with some error correction) followed consistently for 10 years is better than a good solution which is only figured out after 8 years of switching around from bad solution to bad solution.

Posted by rakhier at 10:22 AM | Comments (0)

August 22, 2005

The anti-war left thinks soldiers are children...

Mark Steyn has a must-read essay on "Mother Sheehan". Its worth the read...

Really? Well, what about those other parents who've buried children killed in Iraq? There are, sadly, hundreds of them: They honor their loved ones' service to the nation, and so they don't make the news. There's one Cindy Sheehan, and she's on TV 'round the clock. Because, if you're as heavily invested as Dowd in the notion that those "killed in Iraq" are "children," then Sheehan's status as grieving matriarch is a bonanza.

They're not children in Iraq; they're grown-ups who made their own decision to join the military. That seems to be difficult for the left to grasp. Ever since America's all-adult, all-volunteer army went into Iraq, the anti-war crowd have made a sustained effort to characterize them as "children." If a 13-year-old wants to have an abortion, that's her decision and her parents shouldn't get a look-in. If a 21-year-old wants to drop to the broadloom in Bill Clinton's Oval Office, she's a grown woman and free to do what she wants. But, if a 22- or 25- or 37-year-old is serving his country overseas, he's a wee "child" who isn't really old enough to know what he's doing.

I get many e-mails from soldiers in Iraq, and they sound a lot more grown-up than most Ivy League professors and certainly than Maureen Dowd, who writes like she's auditioning for a minor supporting role in ''Sex And The City.''

The infantilization of the military promoted by the left is deeply insulting to America's warriors but it suits the anti-war crowd's purposes. It enables them to drone ceaselessly that "of course" they "support our troops," because they want to stop these poor confused moppets from being exploited by the Bush war machine.

I resisted writing about "Mother Sheehan" (as one leftie has proposed designating her), as it seemed obvious that she was at best a little unhinged by grief and at worst mentally ill. It's one thing to mourn a son's death and even to question the cause for which he died, but quite another to roar that he was "murdered by the Bush crime family."

Also: "You tell me the truth. You tell me that my son died for oil. You tell me that my son died to make your friends rich. You tell me my son died to spread the cancer of Pax Americana . . . You get America out of Iraq, you get Israel out of Palestine."

And how about this? "America has been killing people on this continent since it was started. This country is not worth dying for." That was part of her warm-up act for a speech by Lynne Stewart, the "activist" lawyer convicted of conspiracy for aiding the terrorists convicted of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.

You can see why Lynne's grateful to Sheehan. But why is Elizabeth Edwards sending out imploring letters headlined "Support Cindy Sheehan's Right To Be Heard"? The politics of this isn't difficult: The more Cindy Sheehan is heard the more obvious it is she's thrown her lot in with kooks most Americans would give a wide berth to.

Don't take my word for it, ask her family. Casey Sheehan's grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins put out the following statement:

"The Sheehan Family lost our beloved Casey in the Iraq War and we have been silently, respectfully grieving. We do not agree with the political motivations and publicity tactics of Cindy Sheehan. She now appears to be promoting her own personal agenda and notoriety at the expense of her son's good name and reputation. The rest of the Sheehan Family supports the troops, our country, and our President, silently, with prayer and respect."

Ah, well, they're not immediate family, so they lack Cindy's "moral authority." But how about Casey's father, Pat Sheehan? Last Friday, in Solano County Court, Casey's father Pat Sheehan filed for divorce. As the New York Times explained Cindy's "separation," "Although she and her estranged husband are both Democrats, she said she is more liberal than he is, and now, more radicalized."

Toppling Saddam and the Taliban (Mrs. Sheehan opposes U.S. intervention in Afghanistan, too), destroying al-Qaida's training camps and helping 50 million Muslims on the first steps to free societies aren't worth the death of a single soldier. But Cindy Sheehan's hatred of Bush is worth the death of her marriage. Watching her and her advanced case of Bush Derangement Syndrome on TV, I feel the way I felt about that mentally impaired Aussie concert pianist they got to play at the Oscars a few years.

Yet in the wreckage of Pat and Cindy Sheehan's marriage there is surely a lesson for the Democratic Party. As Cindy says, they're both Democrats, but she's "more liberal" and "more radicalized." There are a lot of less liberal and less radicalized Dems out there: They're soft-left-ish on health care and the environment and education and so forth; many have doubts about the war, but they love their country, they have family in the military, and they don't believe in dishonoring American soldiers to make a political point. The problem for the Democratic Party is that the Cindys are now the loudest voice: Michael Moore, Howard Dean, Moveon.org, and Air America, the flailing liberal radio network distracting attention from its own financial scandals by flying down its afternoon host Randi Rhodes to do her show live from Camp Casey. The last time I heard Miss Rhodes she was urging soldiers called up for Iraq to refuse to go -- i.e., to desert.

On unwatched Sunday talk shows, you can still stumble across the occasional sane, responsible Dem. But, in the absence of any serious intellectual attempt to confront their long-term decline, all the energy on the left is with the fringe. The Democratic Party is a coalition of Pat Sheehans and Cindy Sheehans, and the noisier the Cindys get the more estranged the Pats are likely to feel.

Sorry about that, but, if Mrs. Sheehan can insist her son's corpse be the determining factor in American policy on Iraq, I don't see why her marriage can't be a metaphor for the state of the Democratic Party.

Casey Sheehan was a 21-year old man when he enlisted in 2000. He re-enlisted for a second tour, and he died after volunteering for a rescue mission in Sadr City. Mrs. Sheehan says she wishes she'd driven him to Canada, though that's not what he would have wished, and it was his decision.

His mother has now left Crawford, officially because her mother has had a stroke, but promising to return. I doubt she will. Perhaps deep down she understands she's a woman whose grief curdled into a narcissistic rage, and most Americans will not follow where she's gone -- to the wilder shores of anti-Bush, anti-war, anti-Iraq, anti-Afghanistan, anti-Israel, anti-American paranoia. Casey Sheehan's service was not the act of a child. A shame you can't say the same about his mom's new friends.

I'm going to say this once: no one in America has more moral authority than anyone else. We are all equal in this country. I can talk about any issue and help enact any legislation. It does not matter what my skin color is or my sex or my race. Nor does it matter what my history is or my education. To assert otherwise is anti-democratic and spits in the face of what America is now, a nation of free people under the rule of law. Cindy Sheehan is one person, she has no greater moral authority than I have.

The Democratic party is failing to win national elections because there is no consensus within the party on some key issues: how to defend American from Islamic terrorists and how to keep the American economy strong. Until they do, the Republican party will continue to win presidential elections.

Posted by rakhier at 12:56 PM | Comments (0)

July 22, 2005

Norman Geras attacks the apologists for Islamic Terrorism

An interesting essay found in the Guardian - by Norman Geras

Within hours of the bombs going off two weeks ago, the voices that one could have predicted began to make themselves heard with their root-causes explanations for the murder and maiming of a random group of tube and bus passengers in London. It was due to Blair, Iraq, illegal war and the rest of it. The first voices, so far as I know, were those of the SWP and George Galloway, but it wasn't very long - indeed no time at all, taking into account production schedules - before the stuff was spreading like an infestation across the pages of this newspaper, where it has remained.

No words of dismay, let alone grief, could be allowed to pass some people's lips without the accompaniment of a "We told you so" and an exercise in blaming someone other than the perpetrators. No sense of what such a tragedy might call for or rule out on the first day. Exactly as if you were to hear from a distraught friend that her husband had just been murdered while walking in a "bad" neighbourhood, and to respond by saying you were sorry about this but it was foolish of him to have been walking there by himself. We had the same after 9/11; still, one nurtures the illusion that people learn. Evidently some don't.

It needs to be seen and said clearly: there are, among us, apologists for what the killers do. They make more difficult the fight to defeat them. The plea will be - it always is - that these are not apologists, they are merely honest Joes and Joanies endeavouring to understand the world in which we live. What could be wrong with that? What indeed? Nothing is wrong with genuine efforts at understanding; on these we all depend. But the genuine article is one thing, and root-causes advocacy seeking to dissipate responsibility for atrocity, mass murder, crime against humanity, especially in the immediate aftermath of their occurrence, is something else.

Note the selectivity in the way root-causes arguments function. Purporting to be about causal explanation rather than excuse-making, they are invariably deployed on behalf of movements or actions for which their proponent wants to engage our indulgence, and in order to direct blame towards some party towards whom he or she is unsympathetic.

A hypothetical example illustrates the point. Suppose that, on account of the present situation in Zimbabwe, the government decides to halt all scheduled deportations of Zimbabweans. Some BNP thugs are made angry by this and express their anger by beating up a passer-by who happens to be an African immigrant. Can you imagine a single person of left or liberal outlook who would blame this act of violence on the government's decision or urge us to consider sympathetically the root causes of the act? It wouldn't happen, because the anger of the thugs doesn't begin to justify what they have done. The root-causers always plead a desire merely to expand our understanding, but they're very selective in what they want to "understand".

If causes and explanation are indeed a serious enterprise and not merely a convenient partisan game, then it needs to be recognised that causality is one thing and moral responsibility another, though the two are related. The fact that something someone else does contributes causally to a crime or atrocity doesn't show that they, as well as the direct agents, are morally responsible for that crime or atrocity, if what they have contributed causally is not itself wrong and doesn't serve to justify it. Furthermore, even when what someone else has contributed causally to the occurrence of the criminal or atrocious act is wrong, this won't necessarily show they bear any of the blame for it.

The "We told you so" crowd all just somehow know that the Iraq war was an effective cause of the deaths in London. How do they know this, these clever people? For what they need to know is not just that Iraq was one of a number of influencing causes, but that it was the specific, and a necessary, motivating cause for the London bombings. If it was only an influencing motivational cause among others, and if, more particularly, another such motivational cause was supplied by the military intervention in Afghanistan, then it's not the case that the London bombings wouldn't have happened but for the Iraq war.

Ever on the lookout for damning causes, the root-causers never go for the most obvious of these. This is the cause, indeed, which shows, by its absence, why most critics of the Iraq war or of anything else don't murder people when they are angry. It is the fanatical, fundamentalist belief system which teaches hatred and justifies these acts of murder. That cause somehow gets a free pass from the hunters-out of causes.

There are apologists among us, and they have to be fought intellectually and politically. They do not help to strengthen the democratic culture and institutions whose benefits we all share. Because we believe in and value these, we have to contend with what such people say. But contend with is precisely it. We have to challenge their excuses without let-up.

· Norman Geras is professor emeritus in government at the University of Manchester; a longer version of this article can be found at www.normblog.typepad.com

Posted by rakhier at 03:59 PM | Comments (0)

June 13, 2005

Shermer's Principles of Provisional Morality

Michael Shermer's Three Principles of Provisional Morality and Evolutionary Ethic (found in the Edge - World Question Center)

Here is a great law from Steve Quartz

Quartz's Law of The Primacy of Feeling

In everyday life, one's anticipated emotions regarding a decision is a better guide than rational deliberation. Brain science is increasingly appreciating the centrality of emotions as guides to life, and emotions are typically more in line with one's wishes than rational deliberation, which can be easily disconnected from one's desires and goals. The upshot: deliberation is cheap, emotions are honest.

McWhorter's Law of Social History

In a context of widespread literacy, easy communications, and a large class of people with ample leisure time, the social movement that begins by addressing a concrete grievance will, after the grievance has been largely addressed, pass into the hands of persons inclined for individual reasons towards the dramatic and self-righteous, who will manipulate the movement's iconography and passion into a staged indignation difficult for outsiders to square with reality, and with little actively progressive or beneficent intention.

My rule:

95% of all literature consists of real people and real events with the names changed. Most fiction is the life experiences of the author, retold.

Posted by rakhier at 10:45 AM | Comments (0)

June 02, 2005

Lee Harris Tries to Defend Tradition

Lee Harris has a very long essay in which he tries to defend tradition. It is a complex essay and has many features. I enjoyed reading it but it took me a solid hour and I still don't fully understand what he is saying in parts.

Here is a section from near the end, to give you a flavor of what he is saying. I really wish I could summarize his arguements, but I can't.

In the current debate on gay marriage, its advocates are cast in the role of long-oppressed suppliants demanding their just due. Indeed, the whole question is put in terms of their legal and moral rights, against which the opponents of gay marriage have nothing to offer but “residual personal prejudice,” to recall again the memorable words of the chief justice of the Canadian Supreme Court.

But it is a mistake to conflate the automatic with the irrational, since, as we have seen, an automatic and mindless response is precisely the mechanism by which the visceral code speaks to us. It triggers a rush of emotions because it is designed to do precisely this. Like certain automatic reflexes, such as jerking your hand off a burning stovetop, the sheer immediacy of our visceral response, far from being proof of its irrationality, demonstrates the critical importance, in times of peril and crisis, of not thinking before we act. If a man had to think before jumping out of the way of an onrushing car, or to meditate on his options before removing his hand from that hot stovetop, then reason, rather than being our help, would become our enemy. Some decisions are better left to reflexes — be these of our neurological system or of our visceral system.

This is why for most people, including many gay men and women, the immediate response to the idea of gay marriage came at the gut level — it somehow felt funny and wrong, and it felt this way long before they were able to spare a moment’s reflection on the question of whether they were for it or against it. There is a reason for that: They were overwhelmed at having been asked the question at all. How do you explain what you have against what had never crossed your mind as something anyone on Earth would ever think of doing? This invitation to reason calmly about the hitherto unthinkable is the source of the uneasy visceral response. To ask someone to reason calmly about something that he regards as simply beyond the pale is to ask him to concede precisely what he must not concede — the mere admissibility of the question.

Imagine a stranger coming up to you and asking if he can drive your eight-year-old daughter around town in his new car. Presumably, no matter how nicely the stranger asked this question, you would say no. But suppose he started to ask why you won’t let him take your little girl for a ride. What if he said, “Listen, tell you what. I’ll give her my cell phone and you can call her anytime you want”? What kind of obligation are you under to give a reason to a complete stranger for why he shouldn’t be allowed to drive off with your daughter?

None. A question that is out of order does not require or deserve an answer. The moment you begin to answer the question as if it were in order, it is too late to point out your original objection to the question in the first place, which really was: Over my dead body.

Marriage was something that, until only quite recently, seemed to be securely in the hands of married people. It was what married people had engaged in, and certainly not a special privilege that had been extended to them to the exclusion of other human beings. Who, after all, could not get married? You didn’t have to be straight; you could be gay. So what? Marriage was the most liberal institution known to man. It opened its arms to the ugly and the homely as well as to the beautiful and the stunning. Was it defined as between a man and a woman? Well, yes, but only in the sense that a cheese omelet is defined as an egg and some cheese — without the least intention of insulting either orange juice or toast by their omission from this definition. Orange juice and toast are fine things in themselves — you just can’t make an omelet out of them.

Those who are married now, and those thinking about getting married or teaching their children that they should grow up and get married, may all be perfect idiots, mindlessly parroting a message wired into them before they were old enough to know better. But they are passing on, through the uniquely reliable visceral code, the great postulate of transgenerational duty: not to beseech people to make the world a better place, but to make children whose children will leave it a better world and not merely a world with better abstract ideals.

Posted by rakhier at 10:57 AM | Comments (0)

May 12, 2005

VanDerLuen on God...

Gerard Vanderluen has a long and extraordinary post about how he survived his encounter with rage and self-hatred. It is a wonderful story, very moving. This little piece is from the end

Okay, I thought, lets get on with it. So I told my hand to reach out and turn the key.

And for the second time that day, I couldn't move my hand. I mean, I really could not move my hand. I told it to move with my mind in no uncertain terms over and over to no effect. It just stayed in my lap in that limp and unresponsive state your limbs get to if you sleep on them and cut off the circulation. When I thought about reaching across with my left hand to do the duty of my right hand, that entire arm stopped working. That made me angry enough to talk to my hand out loud, "Just get with it. Quit screwing around and turn the damn key!"

Which is when I wept, very loudly and for a very long time, but not for the last time. It was okay to weep though because, as I thought at the time, I was the only one there.

It is remarkable the writing one can find on the web these days.

Posted by rakhier at 10:17 AM | Comments (0)

April 14, 2005

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:

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.

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:

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)

March 03, 2005

Lee Harris Explains the Nonsense of Palestinian terror

Lee Harris (the writer of the brilliant book Civilization and It Enemies) has a very long essay up in which he explains why Palestinian terrorism is nonsense and must be ended.

Harris pulls no punches in this essay. Terrorism, as he explains, can be and has been used to create nations. In other words, he posits that terrorism can not be condemned in and of itself. Instead Mr. Harris relies on emperical analysis: is what the terrorists are trying to do possible? If the answer is no, then the terrorism becomes nonsense.

Clearly the Palestinian terrorists are trying to do something which is impossible: the destruction of the state of Israel.

His arguement is much more complex and you should read his essay to understand his point. I must say I'm impressed by the arguement but troubled as well. I'd certainly rather come from a position that terrorism can be condemned without first having to assess whether what the terrorists are trying to do is possible.

Posted by rakhier at 10:51 AM | Comments (0)