Obama Calls On Young Americans to Serve (Him)

By Myrhaf from Myrhaf,cross-posted by MetaBlog

In Barack Obama's Wesleyan Commencement Address he urges students to dedicate their lives to service to others rather than the pursuit of money. Obama equates altruism and collectivism with Americanism:

You can take your diploma, walk off this stage, and chase only after the big house and the nice suits and all the other things that our money culture says you should by. You can choose to narrow your concerns and live your life in a way that tries to keep your story separate from America’s.

Obama doesn't seem to understand that individualism and the rational self-interest of our "money culture" are expressed in America's founding document, the Declaration of Independence, which declares that all men have the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

It’s because you have an obligation to yourself. Because our individual salvation depends on collective salvation.

He has it backward. America's prosperity and liberty depend on individual prosperity and individual liberty. Why does the poorest American today have luxuries that kings did not have 100 years ago? Because Americans have been free to pursue their greed in a free market. Because rapacious capitalists have made billions of dollars in profits that Obama considers obscene and thinks should be taken from them. Battalions of social workers wiping babies' butts in ghettoes will not create an ounce of wealth that can be invested in our future and make us more prosperous. New cures for diseases, new drugs, life extension, higher quality of life -- all of these things and many more depend on capital savings invested by individual capitalists. All the state can do -- if it tries to do more than protect and defend individual rights -- is interfere with that process. When the state interferes with the economy it only destroys; it destroys wealth and it destroys our future.

But then, Obama probably does not equate prosperity with our "collective salvation." Maybe he thinks we would be better off spiritually if we were all wallowing in mud in an orgy of mutual self-sacrifice.

You don’t have to be a community organizer or do something crazy like run for President.

Doesn't that just make you want to throw up? Yes, Obama is merely doing his community service by attempting to gain power over America and enslave us all to his vision of collectivism and altruism. You so crazy, Obama!

I ask you to seek these opportunities when you leave here, because the future of this country – your future – depends on it. At a time when our security and moral standing depend on winning hearts and minds in the forgotten corners of this world, we need more of you to serve abroad. As President, I intend to grow the Foreign Service, double the Peace Corps over the next few years, and engage the young people of other nations in similar programs, so that we work side by side to take on the common challenges that confront all humanity.

Our moral standing does not depend on America sacrificing more for the socialist hell-holes of the world in make work programs like the Peace Corps that serve only to allow altruist young Americans to strut around in moral exhibitionism. Those forgotten corners of the world that think America is in low moral standing do not understand American liberty and capitalism -- and neither does Barack Obama, who might spend the next four years working to destroy it from the Oval Office.

At a time when our ice caps are melting and our oceans are rising, we need you to help lead a green revolution. We still have time to avoid the catastrophic consequences of climate change if we get serious about investing in renewable sources of energy, and if we get a generation of volunteers to work on renewable energy projects, and teach folks about conservation, and help clean up polluted areas; if we send talented engineers and scientists abroad to help developing countries promote clean energy.

The man is ready to enchain our economy for a fantasy.

At a time when a child in Boston must compete with children in Beijing and Bangalore, we need an army of you to become teachers and principals in schools that this nation cannot afford to give up on. I will pay our educators what they deserve, and give them more support, but I will also ask more of them to be mentors to other teachers, and serve in high-need schools and high-need subject areas like math and science.

He plans to turn American education into another welfare state scheme of redistributing wealth.

On the big issues that our nation faces, difficult choices await. We’ll have to face some hard truths, and some sacrifice will be required – not only from you individually, but from the nation as a whole.

Ever notice how power-lusters are always willing to make the rest of us sacrifice? We're all just insignificant parts of Obama's excellent community service adventure; we exist only so he can dictate how we will all suffer and then preen about his altruist morality.

You know, Ted Kennedy often tells a story about the fifth anniversary celebration of the Peace Corps. He was there, and he asked one of the young Americans why he had chosen to volunteer. And the man replied, “Because it was the first time someone asked me to do something for my country.”

I don’t know how many of you have been asked that question, but after today, you have no excuses. I am asking you, and if I should have the honor of serving this nation as President, I will be asking again in the coming years.

How do you "ask" something with a gun in your hand? That's like the Godfather saying, "I'm asking you to do me a favor." You can do what he asks or you can end up at the bottom of the East River. The whole apparatus and propaganda of the welfare state serve only to obfuscate the common denominator between the Godfather and Barack Obama.

If Obama becomes President, we will be electing a mediocrity who is too goddamned stupid to understand that you cannot make America better by violating individual rights. All Obama can do with his altruist-statist-collectivist premises is make America less free, less prosperous, less happy and less successful. Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness will all suffer at the dictates of a two-bit, sanctimonious, dull-witted social worker. Obama will leave America mired in cynicism, bitterness and despair because statism does not work. And he will do it all while orating insufferable banalities about service to the collective.

If McCain is elected, we will be electing the same ignoramus.

Climate Change

By Paul Hsieh from NoodleFood,cross-posted by MetaBlog

Climate change on the planet Jupiter is causing it to develop another Red Spot:

In what's beginning to look like a case of planetary measles, a third red spot has appeared alongside its cousins — the Great Red Spot and Red Spot Jr. — in the turbulent Jovian atmosphere.

This third red spot, which is a fraction of the size of the two other features, lies to the west of the Great Red Spot in the same latitude band of clouds.

...The Hubble and Keck images may support the idea that Jupiter is in the midst of global climate change, as first proposed in 2004 by Phil Marcus, a professor of mechanical engineering at the University of California, Berkeley. The planet's temperatures may be changing by 15 to 20 degrees Fahrenheit. The giant planet is getting warmer near the equator and cooler near the South Pole. He predicted that large changes would start in the southern hemisphere around 2006, causing the jet streams to become unstable and spawn new vortices.

I'm sure this must be mankind's fault somehow...

Farming with Mules

By Diana Hsieh from NoodleFood,cross-posted by MetaBlog

This news story -- High gas prices drive farmer to switch to mules -- is straight out of Atlas Shrugged:

MCMINNVILLE, Tenn. - High gas prices have driven a Warren County farmer and his sons to hitch a tractor rake to a pair of mules to gather hay from their fields. T.R. Raymond bought Dolly and Molly at the Dixon mule sale last year. Son Danny Raymond trained them and also modified the tractor rake so the mules could pull it.

T.R. Raymond says the mules are slower than a petroleum-powered tractor, but there are benefits.

"This fuel's so high, you can't afford it," he said. "We can feed these mules cheaper than we can buy fuel. That's the truth."

And Danny Raymond says he just likes using the mules around the farm. "We've been using them quite a bit," he said.

Brother Robert Raymond added, "It's the way of the future."

What could better concretize the damaging economic effects of government regulations strangling energy production than this return to mule power? If such exists, I can't think of it!

For a brief sketch of just some of those government regulations restricting the supply of oil, see Alex Epstein's recently-published op-ed on Investigate Big Congress, Not Big Oil.

(Hat tip: Robbservations.)

Check Your Premises

By Diana Hsieh from NoodleFood,cross-posted by MetaBlog

In a lengthy post entitled Dissecting Epistemology, Monica challenges the objectivity of many of our supposedly scientific beliefs about the world. She writes,

Apart from the obvious idea that much of science is ideologically driven, many scientists - irrespective of any underlying, driving ideology - have deliberately cooked data and managed to get it published in scientific journals for no other reason than the fact that they are second-handed and they want to be right. And of course, scientific history is also rife with examples of new ideas taking time to become established in the mainstream due to a lack of objectivity in the scientific community. Just take that "quacky" idea that bacteria might cause ulcers!! We scientists "know" that bacteria can't inhabit stomach acid!? Right?? Most commonly of all, in my opinion, is not intellectual dishonesty but the fact that shoddy science is done all the time and people just fail to fully and objectively evaluate that research. Sometimes, those claims then end up becoming part of the "objective scientific consensus" that persists for 50 years.

To say, "I've not studied the issue, so I just don't know," is often the most objective, the most self-aware, and the most honest reply possible to an inquiry. Sometimes, it's also the hardest reply.

In my judgment, even though I'm an ardent advocate of evolutionary theory, Ayn Rand exhibited exactly that kind of objectivity in her statement on evolution in her essay "The Missing Link" in Philosophy: Who Needs It. She wrote, "I am not a student of the theory of evolution and, therefore, I am neither its supporter nor its opponent." I've seen that statement harshly criticized in some corners of the internet, as if Ayn Rand were obliged to swallow the standard scientific account of man's origins -- without any study of the facts of the matter. That's completely wrong: it's a demand to accept a theory on faith, just because it's endorsed by a sufficiently large number of supposed authorities. Ayn Rand refused to be that kind of epistemic second-hander. Instead, she formed her own judgments based on her actual knowledge. As a result of that method, she effectively challenged two millennia of altruism in ethics. That's the kind of insight that scrupulous objectivity -- not to mention a large helping genius -- makes possible.

Investigate Big Congress, Not Big Oil

By Alex Epstein from The Ayn Rand Institute Stories,cross-posted by MetaBlog

Investigate Big Congress, Not Big Oil

By Alex Epstein

With gasoline prices exceeding $4 a gallon in some states, politicians are responding as usual: Blame Big Oil First. Several prominent senators have once again summoned industry leaders to Capitol Hill, subjecting them to yet another barrage of rhetorical questions, interruptions, accusations, and sermons. The lawmakers' goal, claims Sen. Patrick Leahy, is to identify "causes of the rising price of oil on which Congress can act." But the foregone conclusion is that "price gouging," "collusion," and "market manipulation" by Big Oil, or speculation by financiers, is responsible.

The simple fact that such Congressional investigations are designed to obscure is that the prices of oil and gasoline are determined by supply and demand--which neither private oil companies nor speculators have any power to dictate in their favor. If they had such market mastery, then why didn't they use it in the 1990s, when gasoline was selling at a barely profitable $1 a gallon? To be sure, speculators can bid up prices--but they only do so when they believe that oil will become even more expensive in the future, and only make money when they are right.

The question Congress should really be asking, then, is: What nonmarket factors are distorting supply and demand? If they sought an honest answer, they would discover that much of the blame lies with Congress itself.

No one disputes that environmentalist laws passed by Congress have cut off some of our most promising and plentiful sources of oil. In the name of safeguarding a tiny portion of caribou habitat in the Alaskan wilderness, drilling is prohibited in the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge--a potential source of 1 million barrels a day, 5 percent of America's daily oil consumption. Also off-limits is 85 percent of America's coastline, which Shell estimates contains some 100 billion recoverable barrels--13 times America's annual oil consumption--and the vast majority of oil shale in Colorado, which Shell estimates at 1.5 trillion barrels.

Congress should publicize these facts, prepare an inventory of how many oil-rich areas they have blocked off, and bring in economists to estimate how much all of this raises gas prices.

And how about the effects of Congress's open hostility toward the future of oil? Our politicians damn oil as an "addiction" to be eliminated, and seek to cut--by up to 90 percent--the use of oil and other vital fossil fuels that make our standard of living possible. Congress should ask oil executives how this possible forced cut in demand affects their industry. It should ask whether they feel safe to make the billion dollar investments and decades-long plans that oil production requires when Barack Obama, a leading presidential candidate, can uncontroversially proclaim that "the country that faced down the tyranny of fascism and communism is now called to challenge the tyranny of oil." Is it a coincidence that the much-maligned speculators think oil will become even scarcer in the future, and are acting accordingly?

In addition to investigating its own impact on gasoline prices, Congress should investigate how its economic policy partner, the Federal Reserve, has raised our gas prices by lowering the value of the dollars we buy gasoline with. The Fed, along with the Treasury Department, has for years had an inflationary policy that has caused the value of the dollar to plummet relative to other currencies. Were it not for this devaluation of the dollar, oil prices would likely be 40 percent lower--as they are for those on the Euro. Why not call a free-market economist to the stand and ask how much more expensive Alan Greenspan, Ben Bernanke, and Henry Paulson have made our gasoline?

Americans deserve to know the story--in all its gory detail--of what their government has done and is doing to cause high prices at the pump, and to make gasoline--indeed, all energy--more scarce and more expensive in the future. A congressional investigation of Congress would be a great public service.

 

Wrapping Up the OAC, Year 2

By noreply@blogger.com (Dan Edge) from The Edge of Reason,cross-posted by MetaBlog

When I first looked at the syllabus for the Sophomore year at the Objectivist Academic Center, I thought "No sweat!" The source material for SARPO (Seminar on Ayn Rand's Philosophy of Objectivism) includes OPAR, ITOE, Philosophy: Who Needs It, The Virtue of Selfishness, and a few others -- all books I've read at least twice, and in some cases many times. I already have a BA in Philosophy, and I've been studying Objectivism for twelve years. This Undergraduate course would be a cinch. "I won't even have to study," I thought.

Wrong!

SARPO was among the most challenging courses I've ever taken. Our instructor Onkar Ghate set the pace in the first class. He stressed that Ayn Rand did not arrive at her philosophy deductively. Objectivism was the result of massive inductions by a brilliant mind over the course of decades. He warned against taking a rationalistic approach and said that, in SARPO, we would be trying to emulate her approach in grasping Objectivism. This meant many examples, many questions, and many extensive discussions. Ghate would keep questioning us on each key point until we had fully grounded it to reality. Partial or halfway understanding was not sufficient.

Sometimes I would question why Ghate spent so much time on a certain point. I would opine, "I see what you're saying, Dr. Ghate, I just don't think it's that important. Why focus on X instead of Y?" On a few points, I openly disagreed with his approach, whether it was his use of certain terms (like "metaphysical" certainty, a concept I reject), the application of virtue (I argued that parenting is a productive activity), or whether it was possible to make the professor laugh out loud during class (I thought yes, but he proved a difficult target). He would patiently dissect his own reasoning for stressing particular principles and formulations. I wasn't always satisfied, and follow-up questions were always welcome. Sometimes I still didn't agree with him after a few rounds of back and forth. Ghate would continue the discussion until time constraints forced us to move on, but one was struck by the degree of respect with which he treated every question or objection. There are truly no stupid questions in Ghate's class. (Contrary to the myth propagated by some, no one is ever berated or chastised in class.)

SARPO challenged me to fully integrate each key principle of Objectivism. Thanks to this class, I have a much more thorough understand of the philosophy as an integrated system. I feel like my understanding has been taken to a whole new level. My own studies in Objectivism have taken me far, but there is simply no substitute for guided learning from someone who knows more about the subject matter. I'm a proud man, but I must admit that Ghate knows a little bit more about Objectivism than I do (at least for now -- give me a few more years).

It goes without saying that I highly recommend the OAC to anyone, at any level of study. But especially students. The writing classes from the first year alone will take you to another level of intellectual achievement. And if you survive till the end of year 2, you will have a fully grounded platform of knowledge from which to spring into any specialized field of study you choose. The instructors are professional and knowledgeable, the assistants are friendly and helpful, and your classmates will likely be the cream of the crop. From what I hear, the admissions requirements are getting more and more stringent each year, so you best get in now while the gettin's good. The application form can be found here. I would be happy to answer any questions about my experience from prospective students. Ask in the comments section of this post or email me at i.am.dan.edge(at)gmail.com

I will be taking a hiatus from the OAC next year to work on The Undercurrent student newspaper. But I will miss my classmates, I will miss Dr. Ghate, and I will miss being immersed in knowledge every Wednesday from 7 pm - 10 pm. Fortunately, I have developed friendships with several of my classmates who live in the New York area, so they can keep me current on the OAC front. But for now: so long, OAC! We'll see you again in the fall of 2009. I know you will miss me, but be strong. When next we meet, the Benevolent Universe will shine through sparks and flying dragons!

--Dan Edge

Iraq

By softwareNerd from Software Nerd,cross-posted by MetaBlog

I did some catching up on Iraq news. The situation has improved significantly in the last year or so.

Sunni areas: After the U.S. invasion, Kurdish areas were peaceful, but many Sunnis allied with the Al Queda, while the Shia allied with Iran. In the last two years (remember the battle for Fallujah), the Sunni areas have been brought around to where they are peaceful enough for life to begin again. (Michael Totten files informative reports from the Sunni areas of Iraq.)

The primary characteristic of the so-called "surge" seems to be the strategy of taking back the streets -- taking control of neighbourhoods, rather than simply establishing bases on the outskirts of cities and making patrols. The Sunnis are being paid by the U.S., to keep the peace; but, the peace does appear to be genuinely popular.

One also sees the Al Queda leadership addressing the Iraqi Sunni community in threatening tones, and complaining that other Muslims are not doing enough to help the islamist insurgency in Iraq. Mosul is the last major city with significant problems; but, the Iraqi government is trying to take control there too.

The Shia insurgency -- with cleric Sadr as the most public face -- had declared a ceasefire, probably hoping to wait the U.S. out. Nevertheless, with the Sunnis relatively quiet, the Iraqi government has moved against Sadr. They started with a fight in Basra, in the south (Iraq's only port). The Iraqis said they would do it without U.S. help, and some news-reports spoke of how they needed to call in U.S. support after all. I don't think that's a big deal, since they did do much on their own, and since the political willingness to take on the Shia militants is a bigger step than the actual fight.

Having shown force in Basra, the Iraqi government turned to Sadr city in Baghdad. This time, the U.S. support was closer, but the Iraqi units were out front. Again, some news-reports said that many Iraqi soldiers deserted rather than fight, and some units shrunk back when faced with particularly dangerous situations. The bigger point is that -- overall -- the Iraqi army won this battle. (More reports on Basra here and here.)

Cleric Sadr warned that he would lift the cease-fire and spoke of "open war". His fighters were being killed, and he was threatening to fight back -- how lame is that? Soon, he issued a clarification, saying that his "open war" would not be with the Iraqi government, but with the U.S. Now, he's declared a truce. This seems like a potential turning point.

In an odd development, Sadr's Iranian supporters distanced themselves from him. According to one article linked above, Sadr's militia were gaining over the Badr militia that is closer to Iran. So, Iran still remains a huge threat, but it is good to see the Shia-militia on Shia-militia rivalry, and -- more importantly -- to see the government has that moral authority to act against them. [A good summary of the initiative against Shia militia from the WSJ, here.]

Problems remain: There are rumours that the Al Queda and the Shia are trying to cooperate against their common enemy. The bigger threat is Iran's ability to support an insurgency, particularly if the U.S. pulls out.

Iraq still has a long, long way to go. Still, the Sunni areas reached a turning point about a year ago, and need to consolidate. The Shia area are in the middle of a potential turning point. If the Iraqi government can build on these successes, in a few years, Iran will be the only remaining major threat.

What next? The Iraqi government is finally holding together and taking baby steps in the right direction. However, it does not seem to be strong enough to take on various militia without help from the U.S. Even if McCain wins and keeps the U.S. there for another 4 years, there are real problems. Given the history of the region, there's a strong likelihood that any coalition will slowly break, along Shia, Sunni, Kurd lines.

I have an Iraqi neighbor with family in Iraq, who is there now as an Army interpreter. He tells me that things have settled down, and he feels that -- given time -- it can be stable. I think his optimism reflects what the "silent majority" would like, not what their politicians will deliver. I don't think the big risk is ascendant Islam. The more likely risk appears to be a sectarian split, and a division of the country into three major areas. the way the Balkans have split.

That's my "capsule" on Iraq.

John Lewis on Islamic Totalitarianism

By Diana Hsieh from NoodleFood,cross-posted by MetaBlog

John Lewis has an excellent post on the rise of fundamentalist Islam in Turkey on Principles in Practice, highlighting the actual commands of the Koran that "an agency of the Turkish government [the "Presidency of Religious Affairs and the Religious Charitable Foundation"] will use as its basic guide for the next century." It's not good, as you might imagine.

Also, for my Israeli readers, Dr. Lewis will be speaking at Tel Aviv University on June 2nd. He writes:

I will be speaking at Tel Aviv University, Israel. on June 2, 2008, 18:00-20:00, Room 133 Gilman Building. The talk is sponsored by the Moshe Dayan Center. Thanks to Boaz Arad for arranging the invitation, and to the Ayn Rand Institute for logistical support.


Mr. Arad has translated my article 'No Substitute for Victory': The Defeat of Islamic Totalitarianism into Hebrew, for the journal Nativ [20.3, May-June, 2007]. [The Hebrew translation is here.] He has also translated my article 'Gifts from Heaven': The Meaning of the American Defeat of Japan, 1945 for the website Anochi. [The Hebrew translation is here.] Mr. Arad also translated an article by Yaron Brook and Alex Epstein entitled 'Just War Theory' vs. American Self-Defense, also from The Objective Standard.

Abstract of the talk: "The Inner Jihad and Islamic Totalitarianism."

This talk confronts and repudiates claims that jihad is not war, but rather a benign "inner struggle." These claims are ahistorical, and run contrary to the energetic statements of those waging war for Islam today. The purpose of such claims is to obfuscate the goal of imposing Islamic law by force. The outward manifestation of such obfuscation is the censorship and propaganda that exists in the Middle East today. This lecture will consider the relationship between this intellectual corruption and the rise of totalitarian Islam, a foe that must be confronted intellectually and defeated militarily.

I'd love to hear that talk!

Finally, I should note that Dr. Lewis' article "'No Substitute for Victory': The Defeat of Islamic Totalitarianism" has also been translated into Italian by Dr. Paolo Valerio Mantelli.

Why the New Atheists Can't Even Beat D'Souza: Science vs. Miracles

By Greg Perkins from NoodleFood,cross-posted by MetaBlog

(Previous in the series: The Best and Worst in Human History.)

Taking on "New Atheists" such as Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, Dinesh D'Souza explains that he wants to strip away a kind of pose: atheists, he says, present themselves as men of data and evidence, merely following where it leads, when in reality they are faith-filled dogmatists who only assume that there are no gods and that miracles are not possible. In his debate with Hitchens, he drove this home by asking his opponent to name just one scientific law which he knows has no exceptions. Hitchens admitted he couldn't and had to stand there sheepishly while D'Souza crowed that he was leaving room for miracles even while denying them without investigation—that the atheist stance for science and against miracles is only based on faith in certain "metaphysical assumptions." In his view, the real difference between scientists and theologians is that religious people have enough integrity to admit their beliefs are rooted in faith.

D'Souza's effectiveness in exposing confusion and sowing skepticism illustrates how the New Atheists and most scientists lack an objective philosophical foundation. With a little training in the actual relationship between philosophy and science, they could explain how science is not perched atop blind faith in "metaphysical assumptions," and they could articulate exactly why miracles should not be dismissed as merely improbable, or even as inherently unverifiable, but as outright incoherent. In fact, they would know the issue is as stark as this: if miracles are possible, then science isn't.

To see why, let's begin by looking at what a miracle has to be. We are not talking about just any improbable happening, and not even something which violates our current understanding of the world as expressed in scientific laws, like D'Souza tries to argue. The entire point of miracles is to provide evidence of divine intervention, and surprises which may only reveal a current lack of understanding can't accomplish that: by that measure, even the tricks of magicians would count as miracles. Indeed, much of what we enjoy in our modern world would have been considered miraculous in previous times, from vaccines and medications, to cars, and the Internet and on and on. Yet none of these prove or even suggest a possibility that there is a God. No, a meaningful miracle is not merely something which would violate the laws of nature as we currently understand them, but something which would be a violation of any such law we could ever discover. That is, it would have to be a violation of lawfulness itself. That's a tall order.

Causality and Identity

When we talk about how things act and what they do and why, we are talking about causality. As Aristotle observed some 2500 years ago, things act according to their natures (their identities). They act the way they do because of what they are—balls roll when pushed, and piles of dirt don’t. Eggs break when dropped because that is an expression of their identity as things with a brittle shell and goo inside, crashing against a hard floor. Action is an expression of identity, and to understand why and how things act the way they do, we seek to understand what those things are. We seek to understand their identities. So if an egg broke into song instead of a messy puddle, it wouldn't be a normal egg—it would have to be something else. Because identities include capacities for action, we know and classify things by what they do, too.

The crucial thing to keep in mind about action being an expression of identity is that everything has identity merely in virtue of existing, not because of any dictate. Think of this as a law of existence, something true of Being itself. As Ayn Rand observed some 50 years ago: to be, is to be something—to be something particular, to be this and not that, to be capable of these actions and reactions and transformations, and not those. Or from the opposite perspective: to not be anything particular, is to simply not be. And this is not any article of faith or merely a "metaphysical assumption." This is a philosophical axiom reaching below any will to the bedrock of existence itself, a self-evident truth that lies at the base of all truths and all thinking, a fact so absolute and inescapable that it is actually reaffirmed by any attempt to deny it.

It is this ironclad law of existence that tells us there are scientific laws to pursue in the first place. It is how we can have absolute confidence that we are in a position to plumb the depths of the world, that we can seek to understand the identities of the things which are acting and interacting in nature, and that it is worth working to understand it all in terms of ever broader and deeper principles. The fruitfulness of this pursuit can't be denied: just look around and marvel at how our striving for a rational, scientific understanding of the world has improved our lives in countless ways.

And it is this very same law of existence that also guarantees there can be no miracles for us to pursue. If we were to somehow experience an "egg miracle," it isn’t that we would have found something we thought was a regular egg that surprised us and needs more study. No, the very idea of miracles requires violating causality. It requires that a normal egg break into song. Or picking something from the Christian tradition: it requires a normal loaf of bread to break into 1000 servings. In short, a genuine miracle requires a thing to act against its own identity—to have a contradictory identity—to literally not be what it is, which is incoherent. Everything is what it is, and contradictions can only exist inside peoples' confused thinking.

Either-Or

That is why it is one or the other, science or miracles. Accepting the possibility of miracles means rejecting the very basis of science; accepting the basis of science means rejecting any possibility of miracles. Indeed, to the degree that scientists entertain the possibility of miracles, they tragically undercut their own psychological motive and ability to pursue such knowledge: there is no point in looking for the laws of nature when existence isn't actually lawful and there is no real understanding to be found. Even if scientists think they can be "practical" and approach the world as being "almost always lawful," they are still fatally compromised because every surprise they meet could be a clue that an idea is in need of refinement or correction—or it could be an inexplicable miracle from the arbitrary will of God. The harder and more important the puzzle, the harder it will be to resist that nihilistic pull to simply throw up their hands and give up being a scientist to blindly assert that it must be an arbitrary intervention.

All of those potential advances lost to scientists giving up on science are a tragedy—and any effort spent repelling that call to give up is a waste. At the dawn of science, Francis Bacon said that "nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed." Knowledge is power precisely because existence is in fact lawful, and every advance we've achieved up through the wonders of modern civilization is a brilliant testament to this simple truth.


(Upcoming in the series: The Gap in Religious Thought and Morality and Life.)

Abortion Debates in Great Britain

By Paul Hsieh from NoodleFood,cross-posted by MetaBlog

Americans are used to abortion as being a hot button issue in politics. Hence, I found this article from The Economist to be an interesting contrast object of how the issues could play out politically in a system without quite such a strong religious undercurrent. In the case, the issue was a proposed law to change the cutoff point for a legal abortion from 24 weeks gestation to 22 weeks. Here are a few excerpts:

BRITONS, thankfully, have been spared America's abortion wars. Political candidates' positions on the matter are of little interest to the electorate. More Conservatives are "pro-life" and more Labour MPs "pro-choice", but allegiances are rarely, if ever, based on this single issue. This is partly because Britain is less religious than America, but also because abortion laws are made in Parliament, where shades of grey can be debated, not in the courts, where black or white usually prevails.

...By precedent, votes on abortion are "free": MPs may vote according to their consciences rather than a party directive. They still divided along party lines. Most Labour MPs—including the prime minister, Gordon Brown—voted against all the amendments, although three Catholic cabinet ministers supported a cut to 12 weeks. Most of the shadow cabinet voted for some reduction, and the Conservative leader, David Cameron, backed lowering the limit to either 22 or 20 weeks.

...The day before that, MPs had voted on two other amendments. The first would have prohibited experiments involving "chimera" embryos created by placing human DNA inside empty eggs from other mammals. The second sought to rule out creating "saviour siblings": screening embryos created by IVF in order to select a match for an existing sick child whose life could be saved by cord blood or bone marrow from a suitable brother or sister.

All three issues went the government's way, even though Mr Brown had to allow his party a free vote after a campaign by Catholic bishops made it clear that he risked losing three ministers if he did not.

Clearly, religion still has some influence in the debates, although not as strong as in the US. The interesting question will be whether this influence increases or decreases over the next several years.

Turning Off the Lights of the World

By Paula Hall from NoodleFood,cross-posted by MetaBlog

Ayn Rand's masterpiece Atlas Shrugged ends when the lights go out in the world:

The plane was above the peaks of the skyscrapers when suddenly, with the abruptness of a shudder, as if the ground had parted to engulf it, the city disappeared from the face of the earth. It took them a moment to realize that the panic had reached the power stations---and that the lights of New York had gone out. . . .

She remembered the story Francisco had told her: "He had quit the Twentieth Century. He was living in a garret in a slum neighborhood. He stepped to the window and pointed at the skyscrapers of the city. He said that we had to extinguish the lights of the world, and when we would see the lights of New York go out, we would know that our job was done."

In the novel, the lights go out as a result of willful evasion -- the refusal of the world's leaders to acknowledge that it is the power of the mind to reform nature in its own image that keeps the world alight. Evil enough, as far as it goes.

Now it's worse. Now there are people actively looking for the world's light switch and positively salivating at the prospect of flipping it off.

Many commentators, not just at NoodleFood, have identified the man-hating irrationality in the leadership of the environmental movement. (For example, see NoodleFood here; see The Ayn Rand Institute here and here.) But I speak of a new horror: the advent of lawsuits charging specific companies with responsibility for global warming and demanding compensation for damages. This phenomenon unites an unholy trinity of destructive factions: the acolytes of the environmental movement; fear-ridden and pandering lawmakers; and those prepared to cash in on the regulatory scheme resulting from the self-reinforcing lunacy of the first two -- the plaintiff's bar.

Kivalina is an Inupiat Eskimo village in Alaska. As of the 2000 U.S. Census, over one-quarter of Kivalina's residents lived below the poverty line. In 2006 the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers described Kivalina as follows:

Kivalina is home to 402 residents, who live in very overcrowded conditions in just over 70 homes. The community is predominately Alaska Native, and residents depend on subsistence activities for a majority of their caloric intake. The community does not have a piped water or sewer system, except for running/piped water in its school and washeteria. Residents rely on self-haul water and on honey buckets for human waste.

The village is experiencing catastrophic coastal erosion; ice which used to prevent shore damage from fall and winter storms has been melting. Unsurprising, given its location, shown above (New Orleans, anyone?). To continue its existence, the village must relocate. The U.S. Army Corps of engineers estimates it will cost anywhere between $150 - $250 million.

Kivalina is suing energy companies for $400 million.

Two non-profits, the Native American Rights Fund (NARF) and The Center on Race, Poverty & the Environment have filed suit on behalf of Kivalina against 24 energy companies. The nonprofits have teamed up with -- wait for it -- attorneys who successfully sued big tobacco companies. If the suit is succesful, the attorneys' fees will be about 30% to 40% of the recovery. Meaning that what's left for the plaintiffs will be pretty much the amount the U.S. Army thinks it will cost to relocate the village. Pretty neat how that works out, eh?

The Atlantic Monthly writes:

[T]he suit also accuses eight of the firms (American Electric Power, BP America, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, Duke Energy, ExxonMobil, Peabody Energy, and Southern Company) of conspiring to cover up the threat of man-made climate change, in much the same way the tobacco industry tried to conceal the risks of smoking—by using a series of think tanks and other organizations to falsely sow public doubt in an emerging scientific consensus.

In other words, attorneys plan to throw the tobacco playbook at rich energy companies. The message the case wishes to convey is that energy companies knowingly caused global warming and must pay for the damage they've wrought by selling the fossil fuels that provide the world with energy.

There is no scientific consensus on the extent or causation of global warming (putting it charitably). But that is not the biggest problem with the lawsuit. The real problem is that to the extent the lawsuit is successful, it brings mankind closer to the squalid standard of living of the population of Kivalina.

The ability to use fossil fuels for our own benefit is the predominant reason humans enjoy the standard of living that we do. And it's not like this is a big secret: witness developing nations' persistent objections to global emissions policies on the grounds that their priority is economic development.

So here we have the spectacle of million-dollar attorneys . . .

. . . driving their fossil-fueled cars to work

. . . where they'll work well into the night in offices brightly lit using energy provided by the companies they're suing

. . . after which they'll go home to luxurious houses made comfortable through the use of energy to warm and cool their environment

. . . and enjoy a quality of life that would not exist but for the energy companies their lawsuits could put out of business.

There is a terrific irony here. The residents of Kivalina have a subsistence economy. The difference between a subsistence economy and the standard of living most Americans take for granted is based on the use and technology of energy. It takes energy to create factories that manufacture plumbing pipes and pre-packaged food, and it would take energy to transport these conveniences of modern life all the way up to Alaska by air, sea and land. But after lawsuits like this one have destroyed energy companies by wringing billions of dollars out of them on the grounds they've covered up evidence that does not exist, we may all end up living like the residents of Kivalina.

Creationist Science Teachers

By Paul Hsieh from NoodleFood,cross-posted by MetaBlog

According to New Scientist, 16% of US science teachers are creationists. The following data is from a 2007 random survey of nearly 2000 US high school science teachers:

When Berkman's team asked about the teachers' personal beliefs, about the same number, 16% of the total, said they believed human beings had been created by God within the last 10,000 years.

And what do science teachers actually teach in the classroom?

Despite a court-ordered ban on the teaching of creationism in US schools, about one in eight high-school biology teachers still teach it as valid science, a survey reveals. And, although almost all teachers also taught evolution, those with less training in science – and especially evolutionary biology – tend to devote less class time to Darwinian principles.

...[A] quarter of the teachers also reported spending at least some time teaching about creationism or intelligent design. Of these, 48% – about 12.5% of the total survey – said they taught it as a "valid, scientific alternative to Darwinian explanations for the origin of species".

I find it deeply disturbing that an American child's only formal exposure to one of the fundamental principle of modern biological science may come from a government school teacher who is willing to let his own personal religious beliefs bias his portrayal of the facts.

As some have correctly noted, "intelligent design" is just religion in disguise. This is yet another reason that parents should oppose mandatory government schooling for their children.

Waging the War of Non-Ideas

By noreply@blogger.com (Edward Cline) from The Rule of Reason,cross-posted by MetaBlog

"It wasn't real, was it?" - "We seem to have heard it." - "We couldn't help it." - "We don't have to believe it, do we? Do we?" - "Tell them to go on as if nothing had happened."1.

Ayn Rand was always there first. She articulated the fundamentals of metaphysics and epistemology that govern the continuance of human existence. The statements above are spoken by some villains after they have heard John Galt's speech in Atlas Shrugged. They reveal the dead-end of the kind of consciousness that refuses to acknowledge the existence of anything and everything, including speeches, of a consciousness that wishes A to be non-A at the same time, to be militantly certain of nothing in order to reshape reality to the need of the moment.

That same species of consciousness has also been charged with the security of the U.S. against Islamic jihad. It was formulating policy long before 9/11, decades before that, as jihadists of various gangs hijacked and blew up planes, murdered Americans and other Westerners, and extorted concessions from us throughout the years from the 1960's. But one of its benchmarks is President Bush's so-called "war against terrorism."

What is a policy? According to the Oxford Concise Dictionary, it is "prudent conduct, sagacity; course or general plan of action (to be) adopted by government, party, person, etc."

What we have had for the last twenty years could be called an anti-policy, because there seems to be no general plan of action that has ever been adopted by any Western government, particularly the U.S. government, except one of abject, pragmatic appeasement and pseudo-conciliation.

An Accuracy in Media report of May 21, "Unresolved U.S. Strategy on Jihad and the War of Ideas," perfectly demonstrates the anti-ideological nature of our foreign policy.

"Last fall, Sen. Joe Lieberman questioned the FBI, the DHS, the Director of National Intelligence, and the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC) about their organizations' role in the 'war on ideas' against Jihadists. The answer was a giant shrugging of shoulders.

"...FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III revealed during the hearing that the FBI has no counterideology response other than its 'outreach' to Muslim-American communities so they 'understand the FBI and 'address the radicalization issue.' Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff also said nothing is being done domestically to battle Islamist extremist ideas....Retired Vice Adm. Mike McConnell, director of national intelligence, said the intelligence community does not conduct any battle of ideas against terrorists...unless there is a foreign connection."

If a "war of ideas" is a legitimate way to combat a mortal enemy, why should a "foreign connection" make a difference? It is the "foreign connection" - Islam - that is the root of the "war." It gets worse.

"...[W]hen the NCTC Acting Director Michael Leiter had a confirmation hearing with the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, and Mr. Leiter brought up the issue of a 'war of ideas,' a reasonable person might have expected some discussion as to organizational responsibilities and goals. Mr. Leiter stated 'we must have an equally robust effort in what many term the "War of Ideas."' But Mr. Leiter offered no organizational ownership or goals other than seeking to respond to al Queda's use of mass media and Internet technologies, 'we must engage them on this front with equal vehemence - and we can do so in a way that makes quite clear how bankrupt their extremist ideology is.'"

"What some term the 'War of Ideas'?" To Mr. Leiter's mind, this "strategy" is as subjective and arbitrary as a choice between card games, say, between canasta and bridge. It is completely optional, more like a public relations campaign to put something over on a recalcitrant opponent. But, which ideas does he propose to engage the enemy on with "equal vehemence"? None were discussed at the hearing, nor have any ever been discussed anywhere in Foggy Bottom, except to "win the hearts and minds" of Muslims everywhere by expending blood and treasure on good intentions.

Well, that campaign had a partial success. The Iraqis certainly bought the idea of "democracy," and voted themselves a mongrel government based largely on Sharia law, complemented by a smidgen of secular statist legislation.

Further, Leiter is the pot calling the kettle black when he claims that Islam's "extremist ideology" is bankrupt. One can imagine that he regards the philosophy of life, liberty, property and the pursuit of happiness as an "extremist ideology" that was "hijacked" by the Founders. (Historically, that was more or less the position taken by the Crown and American Loyalists in the Revolutionary period.)

The Senate Select Committee did not think it relevant to question Leiter on the wisdom of the NCTC's recommendation that the government refrain from using "insensitive," "provocative," or "counterproductive" language when referring to jihadists, "nor did it have any questions on the NCTC Extremist Messaging Branch recommendations on not defining the enemy..." (See "State Department Goodthink," April 29). Nor did it think it pertinent to delve into the agency's function.

"At Mr. Leiter's confirmation hearing, there was little reported discussion of what 'strategic operational planning' NCTC provides, or what NCTC's role in the 'war of ideas' is."

Leiter, of course, was confirmed by a panel of politicians whose non-extremist ideology is compatible with his own. Committee chairman John Jay Rockefeller (D-West Virginia), told Leiter, "You're kind of an ideal of what a public servant should be." Leiter is also a lawyer, more concerned with "civil liberties" than with defeating and eradicating the enemy.

The AIM article, commenting on the purged lexicon of terms which Leiter is now editor of and which his agency promulgated, and which Bush endorses, wrote, "we continue to have an enemy whom we won't define and whose ideology we won't understand."

Our anti-policy claims that the enemy and his messages aren't real, although the policymakers seem to have heard something, they couldn't help it, but they don't need to believe it, and neither should Americans, who should just go on as if nothing had ever happened.

So, apparently every federal agency charged with the responsibility of defending this country is party to a game of blind man's bluff. In the meantime, our jihadist enemies, soft and hard, are fully focused on what they want to accomplish: the conquest and subjugation of the West. (And that is aside from what any of the three presidential candidates propose in the way of their statist solutions to all the government-caused problems within the country.)

1. Atlas Shrugged, pp. 978-979, Signet Centennial edition, paperback.

Iran: Land of the 20,000 Eyeballs, or “My Barbarians Are Better than Your Barbarians!”

By Scott Powell from Powell History Recommends,cross-posted by MetaBlog

Is BPA Really Safe?

By Gus Van Horn from Gus Van Horn,cross-posted by MetaBlog

As one who remembers the Alar scare of the late 1980s, I am hardly surprised that for all the government- and media-fanned panic about it, Bisphenol-A (BPA) is actually safe. Nancy McDermott of Sp!ked reports:

The Canadian ban and the subsequent panic has an almost Orwellian feel for anyone who actually follows scientific discussions of BPA. To appreciate fully the gulf between the public perception of risk and the reality, it is worth knowing something about the discussion of BPA among scientists. Scientists have been studying the chemical intensively for the better part of a decade since it was first suggested it might pose a risk to human health by Frederick vom Saal of the University of Missouri at Columbia. More than 4,000 studies and several major risk assessments later, scientists in the US, Japan and the European Union have exonerated it.

That sounds like old hat. McDermott also makes some interesting observations about why scientific evidence is getting short shrift in this latest panic:

It is of course very tempting to put these distortions down to journalists' predisposition for sensation, or perhaps to an environmentalist bias among some parents - but the story's grip on the public imagination suggests that there's more going on here. It is not that the facts are unavailable or that parents and journalists are incapable of grasping them. It’s more that it never occurs to them to be critical. They are blinkered by a mistrust of the fruits of modernity and by deep pessimism about the future. [bold added]

McDermott is on to something here, but she's not being hard enough on journalists -- or others on the continuum of intellectual occupations. Consider the following from some past commentary about environmentalist "safety" scares by Alex Epstein of the Ayn Rand Institute:

Environmentalists got the pesticide DDT and the apple preservative Alar off the market with claims that each causes cancer--based on studies using mice fed the equivalent of over 100,000 times normal human consumption. To "prove" that fossil fuels cause cataclysmic climate change--first, global cooling in the 1970s, now, global warming--environmentalists cite the predictions of wildly inaccurate computer models that, according to climatologist Dr. Patrick Michaels, perform "worse than a table of random numbers when applied to U.S. temperatures."

The environmentalists' proclamations of danger and doom are not honest errors based on an overzealous concern for human safety and well-being--they are a dishonest scare-tactic to make their anti-industrial policies appealing to those who do not share the environmentalist belief that nature should be preserved at human expense. [bold added]

The "blinders" of which Ms. McDermott speaks are both the unfortunate long-term result of several generations of "progressive" education mixed with propaganda and the shorter-term effect of the overwhelming overexposure such environmentalist scares get in a news media dominated by altruist-collectivists -- who know, by the way, that the best way to stir panic is to imply that infants and children may be in danger.

In the long-term, we see the epistemology of the general public becoming less rational, and in the short-term we see that this is opening the public up to the active evil of environmentalists.

-- CAV

Barack Obama or What You Will

By Myrhaf from Myrhaf,cross-posted by MetaBlog

Charles Krauthammer has an entertaining piece on "Obama's Growing Gaffe."

Before the Democratic debate of July 23, Barack Obama had never expounded upon the wisdom of meeting, without precondition, with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Bashar al-Assad, Hugo Chavez, Kim Jong Il or the Castro brothers. But in that debate, he was asked about doing exactly that. Unprepared, he said sure -- then got fancy, declaring the Bush administration's refusal to do so not just "ridiculous" but "a disgrace."

After that, there was no going back. So he doubled down. What started as a gaffe became policy. By now, it has become doctrine. Yet it remains today what it was on the day he blurted it out: an absurdity.

It is an absurdity, but it should be remembered that Obama's statement is not a true gaffe, such as Al Gore's saying a leopard cannot change its stripes. (For you young people still serving out your sentence in public schools, leopards have spots, not stripes.) Obama's pro-appeasement statements accurately reflect his far leftist ideas. In the liberal cocoon he inhabited before running for President, nothing Obama has said is controversial.

More recently,

In a speech to Israeli lawmakers this morning, President Bush suggested that statements from Democrats –including Barack Obama – about reaching out to America’s enemies were akin to appeasement of Hitler ahead of World War II. This drew a quick reaction from the Obama camp.

Bush said: “The fight against terror and extremism is the defining challenge of our time. .. Some seem to believe we should negotiate with terrorists and radicals, as if some ingenious argument will persuade them they have been wrong all along. We have heard this foolish delusion before. As Nazi tanks crossed into Poland in 1939, an American senator declared: ‘Lord, if only I could have talked to Hitler, all of this might have been avoided.’ We have an obligation to call this what it is – the false comfort of appeasement, which has been repeatedly discredited by history.”

Obama's immediate reaction, "He's talking about me!" reminds me of this passage from Shakespeare's 12th Night, or What You Will:

MALVOLIO: 'Besides, you waste the treasure of your time with a foolish knight,'--

SIR ANDREW: That's me, I warrant you.

MALVOLIO: 'One Sir Andrew,'--

SIR ANDREW: I knew 'twas I; for many do call me fool.

Sir Andrew is a comic character, so addled-brained that he is almost retarded. Obama is an American politician.

Since the McGovern rout Democrats have approached the Presidency by hiding their far leftist ideas, especially on foreign policy. They ride tanks and wear flag pins, hoping to fool voters into thinking they're as strong on defense as voters mistakenly think Republicans are.

Obama is something new. He "missed the memo," as the current phrase goes.

His sincerity has helped him among his base and young people. He exudes idealism and morality. No more of that cynical, Clintonian triangulation for Obama! His speeches induce swooning among Democrats. They haven't tasted this wine since the days of Camelot with JFK.

But more discerning and intelligent people find Obama surprisingly naive. Over and over, in blogs and comment sections of those who support free markets and individual rights, people have written something like "He really means it!"

For all of this, we should not be lulled into thinking Obama is without Machiavellian duplicity in the pursuit of power. Take this disturbing news:

His mild-mannered style has thrown off even some angry black radicals, who want him to speak out more forcefully about the legacy of U.S. racism and economic inequality.

One is Princeton professor Cornel West, a militant black and self-described socialist. Reportedly, West was reluctant to join the refined Obama's presidential campaign until Obama took him aside and explained to him that he had to walk a rhetorical tightrope to reassure whites. West is now solidly on board his campaign as an adviser.

(HT: Kriegsgefahrzustand)

If this is true, then as far left as Obama has been in his statements, he could go even farther were he not walking "a rhetorical tightrope to reassure whites."

All his life Obama has been deeply cloistered in the liberal cocoon. His father was a communist, so hardline that he sneered at communists who compromised Marxist principles to make them practical in this world. His preacher and mentor is a radical who believes in "black liberation theology." His wife is an ardent collectivist and typical anti-American leftist.

A life in the cocoon has left Obama out of touch with reality. The 20th century is one big laboratory experiment demonstrating the failure of socialism; Obama does not seem to have noticed.

The Fall of Conservatism

By Myrhaf from Myrhaf,cross-posted by MetaBlog

George Packer has written a long essay in the New Yorker called, "The Fall of Conservatism." Dan Flynn has written a post on Packer's essay. AmSpecBlog has some interesting posts on the essay here, here, here, here and here.

To sum up the essay up briefly, Packer concludes correctly that conservatism has failed, then talks to big government conservatives like David Brooks and David Frum, who suggest that the solution is for conservatives to embrace big government.

Although it is predictable that Packer, a liberal, thinks the right should become more liberal, the essay is interesting for being packed with information about the last 40 years of politics.

One thing I must object to is the idea that Nixon won over Democrat voters because he...

...adopted an undercover strategy for building a Republican majority, working to create the impression that there were two Americas: the quiet, ordinary, patriotic, religious, law-abiding Many, and the noisy, élitist, amoral, disorderly, condescending Few.

I have read elsewhere the notion that the Republicans appealed to racism and other dark passions to steal voters from the Democrats.

Nixon certainly worked hard to get Democrat votes, but even if the Republicans had not noticed that there were Democrats out there for them to steal, the Democrat Party would have lost those voters anyway. The Republicans did not so much win those voters as the Democrats lost them when they became a party of New Leftists. No way culturally conservative, pro-American voters would stay in a party that moved away from them. The real "dark side" that pieces such as Packer's never mention is the darkness of collectivism and statism adopted by the Democrat Party.

I must also object to the ever-appalling David Brooks, who calls small government conservatives "un-American." As Philip Klein responds,

But conservatives believe in limiting the size and scope of government not because of some random whim, but because it is a necessary way of preserving liberty. Unlike anarchists, we believe that government is necessary to protect individual rights -- through a police force that catches criminals, a court system that prosecutes them and settles disputes among individuals, and a military that protects us from foreign threats. Far from being "fundamentally un-American," these are precisely the principles on which the nation was founded. The Declaration of Independence reads that "governments are instituted among men" to "secure" our unalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit --not attainment -- of happiness. The U.S. Constitution also envisioned a federal government of limited scope.

The welfare state that Brooks supports came from Bismarck's Germany. Bizarre, isn't it, that he sees this foreign import as the essence of Americanism?

Of course, neither Packer nor his conservative critics get close to the fundamental reason for the failure of conservatism: the political movement has been undercut from the beginning by the ethics of altruism. Capitalism cannot be defended by an ethics of sacrifice, only by an ethics of rational self-interest. Conservatism was doomed when Buckley made religion an integral aspect of the movement.

One of the key moments of the last 40 years, the government shutdown of 1995, is a perfect example of how conservative politics are undermined by altruist ethics. The Democrats stood firm with moral righteousness -- because they knew the morality of altruism that they shared with the Republicans was on their side. Once the TV networks started showing sob stories of government workers not getting their paychecks, the Republicans collapsed like a cheap lawn chair.

After '95 came the defeat of Bob Dole in 1996. In 1997 Brooks wrote his first piece on "National Greatness Conservatism." The fight was over. The idea of limited government had lost.

Where does the fall of conservatism leave America?

It leaves us waiting for next crisis. How we respond will determine our course into the 21st century. As Mises has written, crises caused by government intervention in the economy tend to lead to further intervention and eventually dictatorship. Hayek called it the road to serfdom. I don't want things to get worse, but I expect they will.

To Hell with Economics

By Diana Hsieh from NoodleFood,cross-posted by MetaBlog

Oh, why bother with knowing the economics of supply and demand, when a person could just pray for lower gas prices?

Rocky Twyman has a radical solution for surging gasoline prices: prayer.

Twyman -- a community organizer, church choir director and public relations consultant from the Washington, D.C., suburbs -- staged a pray-in at a San Francisco Chevron station on Friday, asking God for cheaper gas. He did the same thing in the nation's Capitol on Wednesday, with volunteers from a soup kitchen joining in. Today he will lead members of an Oakland church in prayer.

Yes, it's come to that.

"God is the only one we can turn to at this point," said Twyman, 59. "Our leaders don't seem to be able to do anything about it. The prices keep soaring and soaring."

Gas prices have been driven relentlessly higher this year by the bull market for crude oil, gasoline's main ingredient. A gallon of regular now costs $3.89, on average, in California, while the national average has hit $3.58.

To solve the problem, Twyman isn't begging the Lord for any specific act of intervention. He is not asking God to make OPEC pump more oil. Nor is he praying for all the speculative investors to be purged from the New York Mercantile Exchange, where crude oil is traded. Instead, he says anyone who wants to follow his example should keep it simple. "God, deliver us from these high gas prices," Twyman said. "That's all they have to say."

Ah yes, giving recommendations to God would be the sin of pride, I suppose.

However, as an omniscient being, God must be already perfectly aware of the high price of gas. As an omnipotent being, he must be capable of lowering gas prices. Since he's all-benevolent, he wouldn't allow gas prices to remain as they are if that was an evil. Ergo, high gas prices must be all for the best.

So... Thanks, God!

(Nick Provenzo also blogged about this news.)

Swallow My PostModernist Propaganda Whole -- Or Else!

By Diana Hsieh from NoodleFood,cross-posted by MetaBlog

This story of a Dartmoth English professor threatening to sue her students for challenging her postmodernist views is beyond mind-bloggling. I can't help but quote the whole article, as the insanity just never ends:

Often it seems as though American higher education exists only to provide gag material for the outside world. The latest spectacle is an Ivy League professor threatening to sue her students because, she claims, their "anti-intellectualism" violated her civil rights.

Priya Venkatesan taught English at Dartmouth College. She maintains that some of her students were so unreceptive of "French narrative theory" that it amounted to a hostile working environment. She is also readying lawsuits against her superiors, who she says papered over the harassment, as well as a confessional expos&e, which she promises will "name names."

The trauma was so intense that in March Ms. Venkatesan quit Dartmouth and decamped for Northwestern. She declined to comment for this piece, pointing instead to the multiple interviews she conducted with the campus press.

Ms. Venkatesan lectured in freshman composition, intended to introduce undergraduates to the rigors of expository argument. "My students were very bully-ish, very aggressive, and very disrespectful," she told Tyler Brace of the Dartmouth Review. "They'd argue with your ideas." This caused "subversiveness," a principle English professors usually favor.

Ms. Venkatesan's scholarly specialty is "science studies," which, as she wrote in a journal article last year, "teaches that scientific knowledge has suspect access to truth." She continues: "Scientific facts do not correspond to a natural reality but conform to a social construct."The agenda of Ms. Venkatesan's seminar, then, was to "problematize" technology and the life sciences. Students told me that most of the "problems" owed to her impenetrable lectures and various eruptions when students indicated skepticism of literary theory. She counters that such skepticism was "intolerant of ideas" and "questioned my knowledge in very inappropriate ways." Ms. Venkatesan, who is of South Asian descent, also alleges that critics were motivated by racism, though it is unclear why.

After a winter of discontent, the snapping point came while Ms. Venkatesan was lecturing on "ecofeminism," which holds, in part, that scientific advancements benefit the patriarchy but leave women out. One student took issue, and reasonably so – actually, empirically so. But "these weren't thoughtful statements," Ms. Venkatesan protests. "They were irrational." The class thought otherwise. Following what she calls the student's "diatribe," several of his classmates applauded.

Ms. Venkatesan informed her pupils that their behavior was "fascist demagoguery." Then, after consulting a physician about "intellectual distress," she cancelled classes for a week. Thus the pending litigation.

Such conduct is hardly representative of the professoriate at Dartmouth, my alma mater. Faculty members tend to be professional. They also tend to be sane.

That said, even at -- or especially at -- putatively superior schools, students are spoiled for choice when it comes to professors who share ideologies like Ms. Venkatesan's. The main result is to make coursework pathetically easy. Like filling in a Mad Libs, just patch something together about "interrogating heteronormativity," or whatever, and wait for the returns to start rolling in.

I once wrote a term paper for a lit-crit course where I "deconstructed" the MTV program "Pimp My Ride." A typical passage: "Each episode is a text of inescapable complexity . . . Our received notions of what constitutes a ride are constantly subverted and undermined." It received an A.

Where the standards are always minimum, most kids simply float along with the academic drafts, avoid as much work as possible and accept the inflated grade. Why not? It's effortless, and there are better ways to spend time than thinking deeply about ecofeminism.

The remarkable thing about the Venkatesan affair, to me, is that her students cared enough to argue. Normally they would express their boredom with the material by answering emails on their laptops or falling asleep. But here they staged a rebellion, a French Counter-Revolution against Professor Defarge. Maybe, despite the professor's best efforts, there's life in American colleges yet.

That's absolutely abominable behavior for a professor. It's good that students question what they're taught in college, rather than simply swallowing it, regurgitating it for the exams and papers, and then forgetting about it. Students have every right to be skeptical of some pet theory of a professor -- and to express objections to it in class. The professor should make the best arguments he can, then move on, accepting that students will make up their own minds about the material. Certainly, despite my strong views on various subjects, that's always what I strive to do in my own teaching.

In contrast, Priya Venkatesan thinks that she's entitled to agreement from her students. As an interview with her makes clear, she's so completely immersed in postmodernism that she cannot even grasp the meaning of any criticism thereof. Sadly, from what I know of English Departments, she was likely encouraged in that attitude -- and shielded from any non-postmodernist views or anti-postmodernist criticism -- in graduate school.

Thankfully, this kind of intellectual authoritarianism is pretty rare in philosophy departments today. Philosophers are generally willing to entertain a wide variety of views, so long as they're defended with arguments. In fact, at least some of the philosophy professors at Boulder are pretty thoroughly appalled by the dogmatic teaching of postmodernist crap in some other humanities departments.

(Notably, Christiana Hoff Sommers said as much about philosophy departments in a lecture on the problem of lefist bias at universities given at CU Boulder a few years ago. In fact, if memory serves, I asked her about philosophy departments, and she made some positive remarks on their willingness to consider a wide variety of views due to their focus on arguments.)

Of course, philosophy departments have their own slew of problems, some quite serious. Yet they also have many virtues, particularly relative to other humanities departments. So... two cheers for philosophy departments!

To Be a Millstone

By Diana Hsieh from NoodleFood,cross-posted by MetaBlog

Rebecca Walker describes the damage of growing up as the daughter of famous feminist Alice Walker:

My mother's feminist principles coloured every aspect of my life. As a little girl, I wasn't even allowed to play with dolls or stuffed toys in case they brought out a maternal instinct. It was drummed into me that being a mother, raising children and running a home were a form of slavery. Having a career, travelling the world and being independent were what really mattered according to her.

I love my mother very much, but I haven't seen her or spoken to her since I became pregnant. She has never seen my son -- her only grandchild. My crime? Daring to question her ideology.

By that, she means that she voluntarily became a mother. Happily, Ms. Walker seems to have made a very good life for herself, despite her unenviable upbringing.

Coffee Capitalism

By Paul Hsieh from NoodleFood,cross-posted by MetaBlog

As everyone knows, the market for coffee products in the Seattle area is fiercely competitive. The quest for customers have led one entrepreneur to develop the "sexy espresso stand":

Espresso drive-through stands with bikini- and lingerie-sporting baristas are popping up from Monroe to Edmonds.

In the past year, at least six of these java joints employing provocatively dressed young women have opened in the county.

A few owners of these roadside stands say business is so brisk, they're hiring more employees and have plans to open new locations.

...Sometimes wearing little more than pasties and bikini bottoms, the scantily clad baristas at Wheeler's stands have scores of well-tipping customers.

This adds new meaning to the term "fair trade coffee"... (Via Neatorama.)

Quick Roundup 329

By Gus Van Horn from Gus Van Horn,cross-posted by MetaBlog

Meditation on a Japanese Parrot

Q. What did he know, and when did he know it?

A. A sequence of sounds, and all along.

A Japanese family has been reunited with its pet, thanks to having taught it a sequence of noises that they knew other human beings would interpret as a name and an address.

"I'm Mr. Yosuke Nakamura," the bird told the veterinarian, according to Uemura. The parrot also provided his full home address, down to the street number, and even entertained the hospital staff by singing songs.

"We checked the address, and what do you know, a Nakamura family really lived there. So we told them we've found Yosuke," Uemura said. [bold added]

This episode reminds me of a discussion of the epistemological status of the arbitrary, in which Leonard Peikoff likens arbitrary pronouncements to the squawkings of a bird:

The arbitrary ... has no relation to evidence, facts, or context. It is the human equivalent of [noises produced by] a parrot . . . sounds without any tie to reality, without content or significance.

Note that the police didn't just take the parrot at his "word".

This parrot didn't know its address as an address any more than a mailing label does. For all we know, it had finally escaped its tormentors only to be foiled by its instinct for mimicry.

Remember this the next time you hear someone citing this as an example of animal intelligence. (And you will.) Some birds do display remarkably sophisticated behavior, but this isn't even an example of that.

Sue the Bastards!

This reads like a story straight out of Politically Correct Bedtime Stories.

The House of Representatives overwhelmingly approved legislation on Tuesday allowing the Justice Department to sue OPEC members for limiting oil supplies and working together to set crude prices, but the White House threatened to veto the measure.

The bill would subject OPEC oil producers, including Saudi Arabia, Iran and Venezuela, to the same antitrust laws that U.S. companies must follow.

The measure passed in a 324-84 vote, a big enough margin to override a presidential veto.

Let me count the things that are wrong with this bill!

First, it passes the (highly inflated) buck on the real source of rising prices. (It's not just oil, and for oil, it's not just that we're printing money.) Second, short of the United States taking military action well in excess of what it should have done decades ago when foreign tyrants started stealing the property of American citizens, this bill will have only symbolic import. Third, and what will this bill symbolize? American spinelessness. Fourth, ....

That's enough for now. Only obscenities could adequately describe this defiant shaking of the fist from behind the robes of the judiciary, which Congress seems to be confusing with a mother's skirt.

I wish this were merely pathetic.

Sue Noel Keenlyside!

Perhaps while Congress is feeling litigious, Heidi "Lysenko" Cullen can persuade it to sue for the removal of European climatologist Noel Keenlyside's scientific credentials. After all, he is flirting with a sin on a par with Holocaust denial:

Climate scientist Noel Keenlyside, leading a team from Germany's Leibniz Institute of Marine Science and the Max Planck Institute of Meteorology, for the first time entered verifiable data on ocean circulation cycles into one of the U. N.'s climate supercomputers, and the machine spit out a projection that there will be no more warming for the foreseeable future.

And Tom Knutson....

Global warming isn't to blame for the recent jump in hurricanes in the Atlantic, concludes a study by a prominent federal scientist whose position has shifted on the subject.

Not only that, warmer temperatures will actually reduce the number of hurricanes in the Atlantic and those making landfall, research meteorologist Tom Knutson reported in a study released Sunday. [bold added]

So "the science" isn't settled that we will have global warming or, that if we do, it will be all bad.

And the fact remains that whatever the scientific conclusion might be, it still doesn't justify the leftist agenda being pushed on account of "climate change".

-- CAV

Updates

Today: Corrected name of Noel Keenlyside. Where on earth did I get "Neely"?

Minnesota Madrassa Update

By Gus Van Horn from Gus Van Horn,cross-posted by MetaBlog

I know, it's a Madrassa like Islam is "peaceful"....

The following video clip should provide an interesting follow-up to my April post about allegations by a substitute school teacher that Minnesota is financing the teaching of Islam with public funds.


Several things are worth noting about this video and the circumstances that led to my finding it.

As Ayn Rand once said (at second occurrence of search term "faith and force" -- why don't they have hypertext anchors for individual quotes?):

[F]aith and force are corollaries, and ... mysticism will always lead to the rule of brutality. The cause of it is contained in the very nature of mysticism. Reason is the only objective means of communication and of understanding among men; when men deal with one another by means of reason, reality is their objective standard and frame of reference. But when men claim to possess supernatural means of knowledge, no persuasion, communication or understanding are possible. Why do we kill wild animals in the jungle? Because no other way of dealing with them is open to us. And that is the state to which mysticism reduces mankind -- a state where, in case of disagreement, men have no recourse except to physical violence. [bold added]

Thanks for the demonstration, there, Mo!

But what's really striking is how I found this -- from a blog hosted at the online version of the late theocrat William F. Buckley's National Review. Thank God the people who want Christian prayer in the public schools again are on the lookout for separation of (the wrong) church from state! And thank God the infidels -- I once heard a Catholic priest say, "That was our word!" -- set themselves up so well as foils to Christian "tolerance"!

For its objective merits in showing faith in action, this video also, conveniently for Christian theocrats, allows them to smear non-Christians in general, by sloppy comparison.

The sloppiness lies in ignoring the essential similarity between Islam and Christianity -- reliance on faith as a means to knowledge -- while focusing on superficial differences -- like how thoroughly integrated into one's life an individual's rejection of reason actually is.

As Greg Perkins so astutely pointed out yesterday when noting how one prominent Christian apologist likes to lay the blame for Communist atrocities on atheism:

[S]uch a comparison is fundamentally confused. Recall that atheism is not itself an ideology and therefore doesn't lead people to do anything in particular -- good or bad. So again we need to approach the issue in terms that will actually shed some light. The illuminating question to consider is: What does reason offer humanity over faith?

...

[L]ong-standing Christianity only accommodated the relatively recent changes that unleashed minds brought while its overwhelming authority eroded. We were delivered from the Christian Dark Ages despite Christianity, not because of it.

Does the author of the Phi Beta Cons post at NRO himself want Christian prayer back in public schools? I must admit that I don't know. But he is working for a publication animated by the malevolent spirit of William F. Buckley. At best, the author is making a theocrat's legacy look better than it should.

-- CAV

The "Inner Jihad" and Islamic Totalitarianism

By John Lewis from The Ayn Rand Institute Stories,cross-posted by MetaBlog

PRESS ADVISORY
AYN RAND INSTITUTE
May 21, 2008

The "Inner Jihad" and Islamic Totalitarianism

Who: Dr. John Lewis, Senior Research Scholar in History and Classics, Social Philosophy and Policy Center, Bowling Green State University. 

What: A talk explaining the real meaning of jihad: a war for the expansion of Islamic rule. A Q & A will follow.

Where: Moshe Dayan Center for Middle Eastern and African Studies, Tel Aviv University, Israel

When: June 2, 2008, from 6 to 8 PM

Admission is FREE. The lecture will be open to the public and the media. 

Description: This talk confronts claims that the real meaning of jihad is a benign "inner struggle," and not war for the expansion of Islamic rule. Such claims are contrary to history; even mystical orthodox philosophers such as Al-Ghazali confirmed the meaning of jihad as war. Claims that jihad is an "inner struggle" are best seen either as the apologetics of those who do not want to face the fact that jihad means war, or who wish to cover up this fact in order to achieve the ends of Islamic rule. What the claimants call an "inner jihad" is a process of internal intellectual evasion, in which facts and conclusions contrary to support for Islam are suppressed. The outward political manifestations of such deception are censorship and propaganda, which are used to further Islamic rule. Islamic totalitarianism remains an active, and dangerous, force in the world, which must be confronted intellectually and defeated militarily.

Bio: Dr. John Lewis is a research scholar in history and classics at the Social Philosophy and Policy Center, Bowling Green State University, and a visiting scholar for the year 20072008. He has been an associate professor of history at Ashland University. He holds a PhD in classics from the University of Cambridge, a BA in history from the University of Rhode Island. He has taught at the University of London, and was a visiting scholar at Rice University. 

Dr. Lewis has published in classical journals such as Polis and Dikē.

He is consulting editor of The Objective Standard, and writes for Capitalism Magazine. He is the author of Solon the Thinker: Political Thought in Archaic Athens and Early Greek Lawgivers. His book on military history, Nothing Less Than Victory: Military Offense and the Lessons of History, is in production with Princeton University Press.

For more information on this talk, please e-mail media@aynrand.org

###  ### ###

Dr. John Lewis is available for interviews now and after his talk.
Contact: Larry Benson          
E-mail: larryb@aynrand.org          
Phone: 949-222-6550, ext. 213

 

 

Heroism: A Memorial Day Comment

By noreply@blogger.com (Edward Cline) from The Rule of Reason,cross-posted by MetaBlog

In his tribute to Ferdinand Magellan, William Manchester, in A World Lit Only by Fire, wrote, in the concluding chapter, “One Man Alone”:

“He was not the wisest man of his time. Erasmus was. Neither was he the most gifted. That, surely, was Leonardo. But Magellan became what, as a child, he had yearned to be – the era’s greatest hero. The reason is intricate, but important to understand. Heroism is often confused with physical courage. In fact the two are very different. There was nothing heroic about Magellan’s death. He went into that last darkness a seasoned campaigner, accompanied by his own men, and he was completely fearless because as he drew his last breath he believed – indeed knew – that paradise was imminent. Similarly, the soldier who throws himself on a live grenade, surrendering his life to save his comrades, may be awarded the medal of honor. Nevertheless his deed, being impulsive, is actually unheroic. Such acts, no more reflective than the swift withdrawal of a blistered hand from a red-hot stove, are involuntary. Heroism is the exact opposite – always deliberate, never mindless.

“Neither, if it is valor of the first water, may it be part of a group endeavor. All movements, including armies, provide their participants with such tremendous support that pursuit of common goals, despite great risk, is little more than ardent conformity. Indeed, the truly brave member is the man who repudiates the communal objective, challenging the rest of the group outright. Since no such discordant note was ever heard around the Round Table, young Magellan, in his enchantment with the tales of Arthur, Lancelot du Lac, and Gawain, was being gulled. It follows that generals, presidents – all leaders backed by blind masses – are seldom valiant, though interesting exceptions occasionally emerge. Politicians, who defy their constituents over matters of principle, knowing they will be driven from office, qualify as heroic. So, to cite a rare military instance, did General MacArthur when, protesting endless casualty lists with no prospect of an armistice, he sacrificed his career and courted disgrace.

“The hero acts alone, without encouragement, relying solely on conviction and his own inner resources. Shame does not discourage him; neither does obloquy. Indifferent to approval, reputation, wealth, or love, he cherishes only his personal sense of honor, which he permits no one else to judge. La Rochefoucauld, not always a cynic, wrote of him that he does ‘without witnesses what we would be capable of doing before everyone.’ Guided by an inner gyroscope, he pursues his vision single-mindedly, undiscouraged by rejections, defeat, or even the prospect of imminent death. Few men can even comprehend such fortitude. Virtually all crave some external incentive: the appreciation of peers, the possibility of exculpation, the promise of retroactive affection, the hope of rewards, applause, decorations – of emotional reparations in some form. Because these longings are completely normal, only a man with towering strength of character can suppress them.”

While I think this is an eloquent statement on heroism, I have several reservations with it. Coupled with what is his key sentence: Heroism is the exact opposite – always deliberate, never mindless – physical courage may be a necessary partner, without which, one’s intention would be futile. I do not think, however, that Manchester is derogating the role of physical courage, but simply noting a distinction between it and heroism as a character attribute he so aptly describes in the third paragraph.

Another statement, that the soldier who throws himself on a live grenade to save his comrades performs an unheroic act, also omits the motivation behind such an action: The admiring altruist would call it an act of self-sacrifice; for some, it may well be that. But if his comrades represent a value to him, then faced with a single choice requiring a split-second decision, he has instead acted to preserve that value.

This hardly would be an emotionally driven impulse. That is heroism, and it is preeminently a selfish motivation. I once corrected a young fan to whom I recommended the movie Gunga Din. After he had watched it, in his letter to me he remarked that he thought Din was a brave man who sacrificed his life to save his friends. No, I answered him; knowing the risk, Din exposed himself to enemy fire to signal a warning in order to preserve a value. Such an action is not the hallmark of selflessness, but of just the opposite. A man cannot place his physical existence in peril who did not first have a self; a selfless man who did would be little more than a robot, which is what altruists and collectivists and tyrants of all stripes today wish men to be.

Manchester's key sentence contradicts Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Transcendentalist notion that heroism “feels and never reasons and therefore is always right.” That is the hallmark of jihadists, of suicide bombers, and similar killers for a “cause.” It also contradicts the idea of heroism expressed by Arthur Ashe, noted tennis player and later a “social activist”: “True heroism is remarkably sober, very undramatic. It is not the urge to surpass all others at whatever cost, but the urge to serve others at whatever cost.”

The last statement of Manchester’s which I take issue with is his conception of “normalcy” in respect to “external incentives” to heroism: the appreciation of peers, the possibility of exculpation, the promise of retroactive affection, the hope of rewards, applause, decorations – of emotional reparations in some form. These motivations have been the stuff of great and not-so-great literature, and can be cited in real life, as well. Because these longings are completely normal, only a man with towering strength of character can suppress them.

Most of these “normal” incentives are other-oriented, with the possible exception of “emotional reparations,” which is a completely selfish means and end, and “exculpation,” which implies a pursuit of justice and acquittal. But a man of “towering strength of character” would not root his “longings” on the approval of others. He would be utterly devoid of any consciousness of the value others might place on his actions, and so would not crave other-oriented rewards; those longings would not be present in him to be “suppressed.”

Compare Manchester’s description of a hero to Aristotle’s:

“The beauty of the soul shines out when a man bears with composure one heavy mischance after another, not because he does not feel them, but because he is a man of high and heroic temper.”

That is a finer, more precise description of heroism. It describes Ayn Rand’s fictional Howard Roark, John Galt, and Francisco d’Anconia. It describes Cyrano de Bergerac and many lesser heroes, lesser because the obstacles their creators put in the path of their heroes were not as daunting and insurmountable as Cyrano’s. It describes the real life heroes who have advanced virtually every realm of human knowledge and happiness in science, medicine, technology, industry and, too infrequently, and much to our detriment, in philosophy and politics. It also describes those few men faced with the terrible task of war.

Their heroism was always deliberate, and never mindless.

Why the New Atheists Can't Even Beat D'Souza: The Best and Worst in Human History

By Greg Perkins from NoodleFood,cross-posted by MetaBlog

In the firefight between Christian apologist Dinesh D'Souza and "New Atheists" such as Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, and Sam Harris, the New Atheists are suffering serious damage. The tragedy is that D'Souza wouldn't stand a snowball's chance if they had a strong philosophical grounding.

For example, several of the New Atheists point to the Inquisition and Crusades and Witch Trials of early Christianity, the deadly Jihad waged in the name of Islam today, and so on—and D'Souza agrees this is a terrible toll that religion is responsible for. But he goes on to argue that when you actually look at the numbers, this responsibility is minuscule in comparison to the slaughter of over 100 million by the atheistic regimes of the 20th century. So he contends it is obvious that "Atheism, not religion, is responsible for the mass murders of history."

This point has devastated the New Atheists. They try to defuse it by arguing for some causal association between religion and those bloody regimes: if not explicitly by talking about the Catholicism in Hitler and Nazi Germany, then implicitly by gesturing to a "religious mindset" or some other vague influence of religion. But discussion of the Catholic connection to Hitler and Nazi Germany quickly turns into a back-and-forth of citations from competing historical experts. And while the dust is swirling over whether religion might be connected to that one part of 20th Century totalitarianism, D'Souza points to the explicitly godless Communist regimes. The New Atheists have been reduced to weakly objecting that the Crusades and Inquisition were done "in the name of" Christianity, while Communism and Nazism weren't done in the name of atheism—but given all the references that can be made to those regimes' explicit work to eradicate God, this approach is not convincing. The New Atheists are struggling because they aren't able to frame the issue properly.

What Atheism Isn't

First, consider that atheism is not itself an ideology; there is no such thing as an "atheist mindset" or an "atheist movement." Atheism per se hasn't inspired and doesn't lead to anything in particular because it is an effect—not a cause—and there are countless reasons for a person to not believe in God, ranging from vicious to innocent to noble. The newborn baby lacks a belief in God, as does the Postmodern Nihilist, the Communist, and the Objectivist—but each for entirely different reasons having dramatically different implications. So lumping all of these together under the "atheist" label as if that were a meaningful connection is profoundly confused. Yet this is exactly what the New Atheists do and encourage: they talk about how there are so many atheists out there, and advocate their banding together into an atheist community to seek fellowship, foster cultural change, build a political voice, and so on.[1] But what would a committed Communist and an Objectivist have in common—regarding what they do believe, why they believe it, how that leads them to live personally, the sort of social system they would strive for in government? Nothing. They are polar opposites in principle and practice, across the philosophical board.

The New Atheists can't rebuff D'Souza because he is actually following their own lead to associate them with brutal totalitarian regimes. And worse, that confusion makes it difficult to see the fundamental cause of the misery and bloodshed found across all of those failures of humanity—from the early Christian Crusades and Inquisition, through the 20th Century totalitarian regimes, up to the Islamic theocracies in the Middle East today. The important contrast is not atheism vs. religion, but rather rationality vs. irrationality.

The Wages of Irrationality

All of that bloodshed is a result of people rejecting reason as the way to do business in reality—which means rejecting our only means of peaceful and productive coexistence. Operating in the realm of reason, people are oriented to the facts, their means of dealing with one another is persuasion, and reality is the court of final appeal when there is disagreement. Take scientists, for example: necessarily focused on reason and reality, they resolve their scientific disputes with logic and by reference to facts. We don't find them fragmenting into sects and breaking out into violence over their disagreements. Indeed, just the opposite happens: the body of scientific knowledge converges over time as disagreements are sorted out and facts are acknowledged. Their successes and this convergence don't come from the use of guns and clubs, but from a commitment to reason and reality, facts and logic.

While it is easy to see brutes in totalitarian regimes reaching for a gun rather than peacefully persuading free minds, the connection to force may not be so obvious in the case of people of faith. Yet just as reason and freedom go together, so do their antagonists, faith and force. As Ayn Rand observed, "every period of history dominated by mysticism, was a period of statism, of dictatorship, of tyranny"—and she underscored this shared rejection of reason in identifying the two as species of the same basic animal: the brutes as "mystics of muscle," and the faithful as "mystics of spirit." To see how religious faith plays into the use of force, consider theologians in contrast to the scientists discussed above. Here we find ever-expanding divergence and fragmentation in their body of thought—just notice how religions and the denominations within them have multiplied through history. And we don't see believers resolving disagreements over their articles of faith by persuasion and reference to the facts of reality—whether it is Muslims vs. Christians, Catholics vs. Protestants, Baptists vs. Mormons, or one part of a congregation breaking away from another. This is because articles of faith aren't based on a grasp of the facts of reality, and so they can't be explained or defended by references to the facts of reality. Since people of faith can't resolve such differences using facts and rational persuasion, they are left with only one alternative: force.

Having it Both Ways

Besides trying to tar his opponents with the worst atrocities in history, D'Souza regularly tries to give Christianity credit for mankind's positive strides. For instance, he argues in an op-ed that "Christianity has illuminated the greatest achievements of the culture" such as the rise of science, human rights, equality for women and minorities, ending slavery, and so forth. That "when you examine history you find that all of these values came into the world because of Christianity." He contrasts Christianity and atheism, saying that these advances arrived in Christendom and by the hands of Christians—not atheists. And he uses this to score extra points in debate by asking his opponents what atheism has to offer humanity, other than the chance to undermine all that progress.

Once again, such a comparison is fundamentally confused. Recall that atheism is not itself an ideology and therefore doesn't lead people to do anything in particular—good or bad. So again we need to approach the issue in terms that will actually shed some light. The illuminating question to consider is: What does reason offer humanity over faith?

Here we see a striking contrast. Every discovery, every invention, every new idea that guided every step we have taken up from the poor, nasty, brutish, and short lives of those who came before has been made possible by one thing: thinking. Revelation never delivered a vaccine or explained the rainbow. Faith never designed a building or fed a baby. Submission to authority never discovered a better social organization or put a man on the moon. The power of this-worldly reason did.

Even the broadest strokes of history make this clear: Mankind stagnated for a thousand years through the Dark Ages while the Christian faith reigned supreme. Then what changed? Mankind started to believe that this world matters and that we are worthy and capable of living in it. The suffocating grip of faith and otherworldliness began to loosen as more people turned to reason and reality, and the West clawed its way from darkness into the Renaissance and Enlightenment. It took this-worldly thinking to discover the methods of science—not scripture and revelation, which had been present for millennia. It took free minds aimed at the task of living on earth to ignite the Industrial Revolution and the Information Revolution, and to deliver every bounty in the explosion of progress that followed—not prayer and intercession, which have been with us for all time.

Correlation isn't causation. Obviously, long-standing Christianity only accommodated the relatively recent changes that unleashed minds brought while its overwhelming authority eroded. We were delivered from the Christian Dark Ages despite Christianity, not because of it. Countless lives were made shorter and more miserable by its cruel stranglehold—and how much higher would we be flying now without its dead weight?

The New Atheists haven't been able to slam-dunk D'Souza because they lack the objective philosophical perspective necessary to penetrate to the core of these issues. In this case, their struggles reveal a failure to genuinely appreciate how religion is not itself the fundamental problem—irrationality is. Religion constitutes just one form of unreason, and the only thing that makes it particularly noteworthy and dangerous is that it has at its heart an explicit, committed, philosophical attack on reason: extolling faith as a virtue.


(Upcoming in the series: Science vs. Miracles, The Gap in Religious Thought, and Morality and Life.)

Notes:

1. Sam Harris stands out as an exception to advocating atheists banding together under the atheist banner, though his rejection of the label appears to be more of a pragmatic move to avoid troublesome connotations than a principled avoidance of the basic mistake it represents.

Nationalizing the Oil Industry?

By Diana Hsieh from NoodleFood,cross-posted by MetaBlog

Just when you thought American politics couldn't get any worse, Maxine Waters threatens to nationalize the oil industry, if consumer prices aren't to her liking:



Of course, Maxine Waters wouldn't ever support the genuine cure for high energy prices, namely the elimination of government controls on drilling for and refining oil, as well as on other forms of energy like coal and nuclear power. As any semi-conscious student in a microeconomics class knows, such controls constrict supply and drive up prices. But nevermind that mumbo-jumbo. Maxine Waters has a different kind of plan: oil company executives must find some way to magically violate the basic laws of economics -- or else!

(Via Kelly McNulty on FRODO)

The Fruits of Altruism

By Myrhaf from Myrhaf,cross-posted by MetaBlog

Although it is old news now, I have a question inspired by that special congressional election in Mississippi that was the third special election in a row won by a Democrat.

Does not the unpopularity of Republicans show what a disaster George Bush's policies (supposedly thought up by Karl Rove) have been? Bush let Kennedy write the education bill; he passed the prescription drug bill, the biggest welfare state handout since Johnson's Great Society; he expanded government regulations, such as outlawing the incandescent light bulb; he increased steel tariffs; he sent spending through the roof. The theory behind all this is the very old mixed economy program of spending money to buy votes from various pressure groups. You might call it the Republican version of Clinton's "triangulation," or defeating the enemy by joining it.

What has this orgy of big government bought Bush and the Republicans? Bush is now hated by both the left and the right. Bush could have spared us the massive explosion in spending and regulations -- and who knows, he might have ended up more popular than he is today. I think even many Republicans will agree that Bush's presidency must count as a failure and a tremendous waste of treasure. His is not the template for future Republican presidents.

When a party spends money to buy votes, the least it should get is more votes. If they're too incompetent to get even that, then they deserve to lose. (So much for the myth of Karl Rove's genius.)

So why did Bush pursue a program so damaging to the Republican Party? Because it is a program of altruism. Bush, a committed Christian, thought all that government spending was the right thing to do. Bush was not primarily motivated by partisan advantage, but by morality. When people pursue their morality, they will follow it even it ends up destroying them.

This brings us to the lingering war, a huge factor in Bush's unpopularity. It took us four years to defeat the Germans and Japanese in WWII. Seven years after 9/11 we are still mired in the Middle East, as taxpayer money and military lives go to bring a state of semi-freedom to Muslims who have never known freedom. We are establishing a program of permanent American sacrifice in the Middle East because we no longer have the confidence and boldness to wage a serious war to destroy our enemies.

Politicians tend to take the easy way out instead of showing leadership and taking risks. It might be hard to understand at first, but Bush's war policy is the pragmatic, easy way out. Waging serious war in America's self-interest would incur the wrath of the world, the intellectuals, the media and the State Department. It would take a President with a spine of titanium to stand up to all that altruist opprobrium. More precisely, it would take a President with a philosophic understanding that America has the right to defend itself and to demolish its enemies. Poor little George Bush, who holds Jesus as his favorite political philosopher, is hopelessly incapable of such an understanding. Instead of waging serious war, he has package-dealed war with setting America up as the nanny state of the Middle East. Bush could not conceive of America reducing a nation to rubble without also spending trillions to clear the rubble and rebuild the buildings.

By the standards of altruism Bush is a moral, noble, great president. Unfortunately for America, the morality of sacrifice can lead only to failure and death in this world.

Breaking News

By Myrhaf from Myrhaf,cross-posted by MetaBlog

Simon Cowell announced today that Big Brown, winner of this year's Kentucky Derby and Preakness Stakes, will be allowed to compete in tonight's "American Idol" final.

The decision to allow the horse to sing in the final competition is controversial, as Big Brown did not have to endure the entire process like the other two finalists, David Archuleta and David Cook.

"I decided to let Big Brown compete because he has a chance to make history," Simon explained. "Big Brown could win the Triple Crown and be the American Idol, which has never been done before. Plus, it's nice to have a final contestant not named David."

Big Brown is scheduled to sing a blues number, "Don't Take Me to the Glue Factory, Mama," and a reggae song, "I Shot Eight Belles (But I Didn't Shoot the Deputy)." The horse is reported to have a lively baritone that is fast out of the gate and closes well.

Waging the War of Words

By noreply@blogger.com (Edward Cline) from The Rule of Reason,cross-posted by MetaBlog

To the photo album of the two Bush administrations can be added a recent picture that accompanied an Associated Press article of May 16, "Saudi Arabia rebuffs Bush on oil production," about the President's one-day visit to the medieval kingdom. George W. Bush is seated next to King Abdullah. In a dark business suit, his hands folded on his lap, sitting on what looks like a throne, Bush stares grinning at the camera in that special imbecilic way of his that political cartoonists have exploited ever since the 2000 election.

On the other side of the low table separating them, Abdullah's face is nearly inscrutable. Except for the Arab dress, he could be taken for a modern day Mafia chieftain. The spade beard and moustache, the dark glasses, and the smug blandness of the monarch's expression speak volumes about his relationship with the American president. In this instance, he seems to be tolerantly humoring a high-ranking fool for whom he must put on a show of welcome with much fanfare. It would not be an exaggeration to say that humoring a fool has been the leitmotif of their relationship since its inception.

But Bush is a perfect portrait of dhimmitude. Dhimmitude, of course, means a state of subjugation under Islam. Dhimmis are also kaffirs, or non-Muslims or non-believers. And later on that day, Abdullah reminded the kaffir of his subjugation by rebuffing his plea that the Saudis increase oil production to help relieve Americans of soaring gas prices.

"The White House said Friday that Saudi Arabia's leaders are making clear they see no reason to increase oil production until customers demand it.

"The Saudi oil minister, Ali al-Naimi, said there was no need to increase production now. 'Supply and demand are in balance today,' he told a news conference. 'How much does Saudi Arabia need to do to satisfy people who are questioning our oil practices and polices?'

"He said the kingdom decided on May 10 to raise production by 300,000 barrels, at the request of customers and that increase was sufficient."

Bush saw Abdullah in mid-January, made the same plea, and was also given the cold shoulder.

One thing should be clarified here, lest someone think that the Saudi oil minister, Bush and his economic advisors know what they are talking about.

"Bush's visit to Saudi Arabia [fresh from Israel, no less, and one may speculate if the Saudis secretly objected to the whiff of "ape" or "pig" Bush may have brought with him], which has the world's largest supply of oil, comes two days after Congress voted to temporarily halt daily shipments of 70,000 barrels of oil to the nation's emergency reserve. Bush has refused to stop pouring oil into the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, saying the stockpile was meant for emergencies and that halting the shipments would have little or no impact on gasoline or crude oil prices."

Actually, the world's largest supplies of oil are in the Gulf of Mexico and in Alaska, but they remain untapped because of environmental laws. Saudi Arabia has the world's largest oil production capacity, thanks also to environmental laws coupled with an irrational foreign policy of appeasement and accommodation with the Saudis and OPEC that dates back to the 1940's. This is aside from the issue of environmental law and other regulations that limit our ability to refine crude oil.

The Associated Press article spells out how the U.S. cut cards with the devil:

"The Saudi-American relationship began in the 1940s with a simple bargain: Saudi Arabia offered oil in return for U.S. protection. The United States became the kingdom's biggest trading partner and the Saudis became the biggest buyers of U.S. weapons."

Thus the West, and in particular, the U.S. and its oil companies, ceded to medievalist tribalists a monopoly on oil production. Subsequent environmental law and industry regulation ensured that monopoly. The devil is collecting his due and sticking it to all Americans. Earlier in the article, a security analyst observed:

"U.S. influence over OPEC and Gulf oil production is diminished. It's not clear what the incentive is to Saudi Arabia. We can't deliver on (Mideast) peace. We can't deliver on arms transfers. We can't deliver on the Iraq that Saudi Arabia wants. We are raising problems in terms of Iran. And the reality is the market isn't being driven by us; it's being driven by China, by India, by rising Asian demand."

No, the market is being driven by the U.S.'s irrational policies, in conjunction with the statist policies of Russia, Venezuela, China, India and other countries. If anyone claims that the global market is driven by free enterprise, he is living on the planet Xanadu. Bush's grasp of economics is as eclectically premised as his grasp of Islam, which, to him, is a "religion of peace."

In my April 29 commentary, "State Department Goodthink," I remarked on the State Department's recent summary of "offensive" terminology concerning terrorism and jihadists.

"...[H]ere is another damning legacy being bequeathed to us by President Bush. He has claimed from the beginning that Islamic terrorism is perpetrated by people who have 'hijacked' a 'great religion.' But he himself has now hijacked and sabotaged language."

On May 7, Jamie Glazov of FrontPageMagazine interviewed Bill Warner, director of the Center for the Study of Political Islam. In "Kafir Dreams," Warner explicated the precise meanings of terms that have been carelessly bandied about since 9/11, such as "moderate Muslim," "kaffir," and "jihad." And, much to my surprise, Warner came to the same conclusion I have been emphasizing for years: that Islam cannot be "reformed" without turning it into something that is not Islam. This is a conclusion which not even Steve Emerson, Daniel Pipes, or Robert Spencer have endorsed. All three have stated or implied that Islam can be "reformed." Warner is especially stirred by the sloppy use of the term "moderate."

"Very few people know much about either the doctrine or history of political Islam," says Warner, who distinguishes between religious Islam, as it is practiced by rank-and-file Muslims, and political Islam, which encompasses all facets of living, including law and ethics, and including kaffirs and dhimmis.

"So they think of Islam as only a religion and believe since Islam has so many members, it must be one of the great religions. And all religions are good, so Islam must be good....Since Islam has been defined as good, there must be an explanation [for today's terrorism and for Islam's history of conquest and slavery]. Those Muslims who kill must be 'extremist' Muslims. That leaves Islam as good with a few rotten apples."

Glazov asked Warner if there was any hope or point in trying to "reform" Islam.

After an odd comment that there are "almost no points of comparison between Islam and Christianity," Warner answered,

"The religion of Islam needs no reform. Who cares about how Muslims worship? All kaffirs must be concerned with Islamic politics or how Islam defines them. The Koran, the Sira and the Hadith determine the treatment of kaffirs."

Neither Glazov nor Warner touched on the subject, but integral to Islam is not only how it is practiced in the mosque and at home, but what it requires of its adherents, such as honor-killings, female mutilation, the severing of hands for petty theft, dress codes, in some Islamic sects, self flagellation, and, in general, the whole "legal" universe of Shari law. For just a smidgen of the barbarity Islam imposes on its votaries, see this Voice of America article.

"To reform the Koran, all of the hateful, cruel, and bigoted references to kaffirs would have to be removed. If the kaffir material is removed, then only 39% of the Koran remains. The greatest part of the Koran, 61%, is devoted to negativity about kaffirs.....The Sira (the life of Mohammed) has about 75% of its material devoted to jihad. The Hadith [the teachings of Mohammad] has 20% of its material devoted to jihad. There is not one positive reference to kaffirs.

"If you delete 61% of the Koran, 75% of the Sira and 20% of the Hadith, you will have reformed Islam. You will also have destroyed it. There is a very good reason that Islam has never been reformed. It is impossible."

To "reform" anything - whether it is a living room, a diet, a character, or a religion - means that the thing is no longer what it was. As for the "reformation" of a religion, one need only recall the history of the Catholic Church in the Renaissance. It was one of the most murderous, blood-soaked, chaotic periods of European history, in which uncounted tens of thousands died in religious wars, pogroms, church-conducted trials by Catholics and Protestants, the Inquisition, and just by barbarity in the guise of religious cleansing.

Books were burned in several cities and the homes and shops of Catholics and Protestants were destroyed in the best spirit of the Nazi Kristallnacht. Thousands of living bodies were tied to stakes after horrendous torture and burned to death. Secular humanists were hunted down and murdered. And all that was just an overture to the Thirty Years' War, which ended in 1648. This was the Reformation sparked by Martin Luther in 1517.

So, any attempt to "reform" doctrinal Islam would ignite similar phenomena, and it would be exacerbated by the existence of the two principal and absolutist Islamic sects: the Shiite and the Sunni. One could argue that this conflict is occurring now.

During the interview, Glazov asked Warner why he objected to such terms as "moderate Muslim," "extremist Muslim,' "good Muslim," and "radical Muslim."

As Warner explains it, a moderate Muslim is one who simply obeys the Koran and the Sunna. He is chiefly a religious Muslim, but he harbors an indoctrinated antagonism for all kaffirs, which of course, can swell into a seething hatred, and ultimately action. Osama bin Laden, says Warner, is a Medinan or "moderate" Muslim. So were all nineteen hijackers on 9/11. All jihadists are "moderates." Fundamentally, to Islam, the adjectives "moderate," "extremist," "good" and "radical" are interchangeable and mean the same thing. The only people who see any distinctions between them are kaffirs, who invented the terms, and those distinctions are wholly imaginary and the product of wishful thinking.

"The word kaffir is the worst word in the human language. It is far worse than the n-word, because the n-word is a personal opinion, whereas, kaffir is Allah's decree. Nearly two-thirds of the Koran is devoted to the kaffir. Islam is fixated on the kaffir and the moderate Muslim thinks that you are a kaffir. How moderate is that?"

For a single, exemplary instance of how Sharia law in its political/religious mode is imposed on kaffirs, see this Associated Press report from February 20, 2007.

Elsewhere, Warner clarifies the distinction between the kaffir meaning of "moderate Muslim" and the true, unalterable Islamic meaning of it.

"In any case, the term moderate Muslim has two totally different meanings. The kaffir meaning is warm, fuzzy, and incorrect. The Islamic meaning is cruel, precise and correct."

I do not know if George Orwell ever had anything to say about Islam (his contemporary, Winston Churchill, certainly had nothing good to say about "Moslems"), but Warner deftly describes Islamic doublethink:
.

"What is a radical Muslim? A radical Muslim is capable of harming kaffirs. A radical Muslim is a Medinan (or moderate) Muslim, but a Medinan Muslim follows Mohammad's actions. So killing kaffirs is not radical. Harming kaffirs follows Mohammad's example and is pure Islam, not a radical interpretation." (Italics mine.)

"The false names used by kaffirs [such as our policymakers and in the news media] are an attempt to humanize Islam or suggest that violence is a bizarre interpretation of Islamic doctrine. But Mohammad was involved in a violent episode on the average of every six weeks for his last nine years. Again, Mohammad defines moderation, and the violence is integral to Islam."

Elsewhere, Warner says,

"Dualism is the key to understanding Islam. On the surface many parts of the Koran contradict each other. The usual explanation is that the older, nicer verses [purportedly composed in Mecca] are abrogated by the later verses [purportedly composed in Medina]. But in reality all of the Koran is true since it comes from the only god, Allah. Allah is perfection, and therefore, the contradictory statements in the Koran are all true. That violates Aristotelian kaffir logic, but it defines the Islamic dualistic logic. In Islam, two contradictory things can both be true at the same time....Contradictions are integral to Islamic logic."

"Logic," wrote Ayn Rand in 1974, "is the art or skill of non-contradictory identification."1. Doubtless, Islamic scholars would dismiss that statement as an irrelevant kaffir-ism and possibly even an insult to Islam and Muslims for accusing them of illogic, and call for another round of riots, car burnings and killings.

Warner labels the three basic views of Islam and its doctrine as believer, kaffir, and dhimmi. "The believer-centric view is the standard Islamic viewpoint. For the believer, the Koran is the perfect word of the only god of the universe and Mohammad is the perfect pattern for all human life and all times."

"Kaffir-centric is the view of the victim...the kaffir-centric school is skeptical and analytic.

"The dhimmi-centric viewpoint is the academic school and is neither fish nor fowl. It is marked by political correctness and never refers to the deaths of the 270 million kaffirs [over 1,400 years of Islamic history], never talks about the suffering of the dhimmis. The dhimmi-centric school is actually believer-centric 'lite.' It rarely applies skepticism. The dhimmi-centric school is the predominate school in the universities, military, law enforcement, government and the media.

"One of the marks of the dhimmi-centric school is to ignore Islamic political theory."

Which school is President Bush a member of? Condoleezza Rice? The current presidential candidates? Most Republican and Democratic politicians? Even our highest-ranking military officers?

The dhimmi-centric school. To them, to perceive nefarious designs on the West by Islam is thoughtcrime.

Warner makes another interesting observation, this one on what he calls "kaffirized" Muslims, that is, Muslims who live in Western, secularized societies but who attach some value to some Western institutions in some unacknowledged, pro-life way (and not in the way that Saudi libel tourists, for example, place some value on British or American legal systems, which is their form of cultural jihad). Clarifying the term "kaffirized Muslim," Warner says:

"What are its advantages? It is better than any of the alternatives such as a 'good Muslim,' or a 'moderate Muslim' or my 'Muslim friend.' All of these names are an attempt to bring some good out of Islam. But, there is no good in Islam for kaffirs, only for Muslims....The goodness of your Muslim friend comes from the kaffir civilization, not Islam. Your friend is a kaffirized Muslim, but he is not a good or a moderate Muslim...."

Warner claims that it is important to discriminate between Muslims and "kaffirized Muslims," for the latter should be judged as individuals and not as members of an entrapping "box." Orthodox Muslims do not regard "kaffirized Muslims" as true or actual Muslims. Kaffirized Muslims, he argues, in practicing the "ethical dualism" mentioned above, are nominal participants in what he calls "the shared reciprocity of altruism," that is, they observe the Golden Rule to "treat others as you want to be treated." ("Do unto others what you would have others done unto you.")

The flaw in Warner's position here lies in his notion of the "reciprocity of altruism," which he states "is the very basis of civilization" and which he rightly says Islam neither practices nor condones. Treating others as one would want to be treated is not fundamentally an "altruist" ethic. True altruism, like "moderate" Islam, is actually a mortal enemy of reason and civilization. Both have as a basis a belief in the supernatural, from which are decreed their separate moralities. They are tautologically identical but with different ends.

Witness Bush's costly altruist policy of bringing "democracy" to Iraq and the value he places on self-sacrifice (of both individual American soldiers or of our whole nation) to accomplish that end, or the regular use of American military power to act as an agent of humanitarian aid to countries struck by catastrophic natural disasters (when it should be unleashed to destroy our enemies, which is its sole legitimate function).

And, witness the jihadist policy of bringing Islam to the West, and the value it places on "self-sacrificing" martyrs who devote themselves to slaying kaffirs, and the especially Saudi-financed campaign to brainwash Americans into believing that Islam is just another "good religion" that means them no harm.

However, Glazov's interview of Bill Warner sheds much needed light on the fallacies and folly of politically correct goodthink about Islam as practiced by our policymakers, the news media, and academia. It is a refreshing antidote to the puerile dhimmitude of George W. Bush.

1. Ayn Rand, "Philosophical Detection," (1974), in Philosophy: Who Needs It, 1982. New York: Signet, p. 15.

PHR Middle East Watch - Bogus Elections Signal End for Mubarak?

By Scott Powell from Powell History Recommends,cross-posted by MetaBlog

Einstein on God

By Diana Hsieh from NoodleFood,cross-posted by MetaBlog

I've not studied the views of Albert Einstein much, but I was surprised by this revelation of his views on God (via Dan Rohr):

Albert Einstein described belief in God as "childish superstition" and said Jews were not the chosen people, in a letter to be sold in London this week, an auctioneer said Tuesday. The father of relativity, whose previously known views on religion have been more ambivalent and fuelled much discussion, made the comments in response to a philosopher in 1954.

As a Jew himself, Einstein said he had a great affinity with Jewish people but said they "have no different quality for me than all other people". "The word God is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weaknesses, the Bible a collection of honourable, but still primitive legends which are nevertheless pretty childish. No interpretation no matter how subtle can (for me) change this," he wrote in the letter written on January 3, 1954 to the philosopher Eric Gutkind, cited by The Guardian newspaper.

The German-language letter is being sold Thursday by Bloomsbury Auctions in Mayfair after being in a private collection for more than 50 years, said the auction house's managing director Rupert Powell. In it, the renowned scientist, who declined an invitation to become Israel's second president, rejected the idea that the Jews are God's chosen people. "For me the Jewish religion like all others is an incarnation of the most childish superstitions," he said. "And the Jewish people to whom I gladly belong and with whose mentality I have a deep affinity have no different quality for me than all other people." And he added: "As far as my experience goes, they are no better than other human groups, although they are protected from the worst cancers by a lack of power. Otherwise I cannot see anything 'chosen' about them."

Previously the great scientist's comments on religion -- such as "Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind" -- have been the subject of much debate, used notably to back up arguments in favour of faith. Powell said the letter being sold this week gave a clear reflection of Einstein's real thoughts on the subject. "He's fairly unequivocal as to what he's saying. There's no beating about the bush," he told AFP.

That's definitely a refreshing blast of anti-religious air. Yet it doesn't go far enough. The Hebrew Bible not a collection of "collection of honourable, but still primitive legends." It is a collection of bloody, barbaric, and primitive legends. As a body of primitive literature, the Hebrew Bible is fascinating and often compelling -- but it's wholly unsuitable for moral instruction. The moral lesson of The Binding of Isaac, for example, is the absolute obligation of blind obedience to God's commands, even when those commands require morally abhorrent sacrifices of priceless treasures. Abraham must sacrifice his only beloved son Isaac to God simply because God demands it -- and he's rewarded by God because he's willing to do so without so much as a peep of protest. Such stories ought to be studied and enjoyed as historical curiosities, not as a foundation for modern life and morals.

With Friends Like These . . .

By Paula from NoodleFood,cross-posted by MetaBlog

I frequent a blog called The Panda's Thumb, which keeps track of the dastardly intelligent design movement. Reading some recent entries on that blog led me to look up what some recognized cultural standard-bearers of atheism, such as Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins, are actually saying.

So, if you're at all interested, read "The Atheism FAQ with Richard Dawkins" -- and weep. His answers to challenges to atheism are often clever, but they focus on non-essentials. And sometimes, they are downright pernicious. The most egregious, in my opinion (poor grammar and typos in original):

Q. Religious people claim they derive their morality from religion. Where from an atheist derive his morality?

A. . . . We derive our morality from the environment we live in, Talk shows, Novels, Newspaper editorials and of course by the guidance of parents. . . . An atheist derives his morality from the same source as a religious people do.

Q. In your book, you've said that God 'almost certainly' does not exist. Why are you leaving open the possibility?

A. Any scientific people will leave open that possibility, that they cannot disprove whatever unlikely the event might be. I would be the first person to accept God once evidence comes in favour of it.

Dawkins' answer to the first question unmasks him as a "mystic of muscle." His answer to the second unmasks him as a thoroughgoing skeptic. Which I guess is saying the same thing. I don't suppose it occurred to Dawkins to answer to the first question: "The choice to live in reality"; or to the second: "The law of identity and the validity of induction."

Now I remember why I couldn't get through more than the beginning of Dawkins' The God Delusion -- it's because anyone who argues against religion from the premises of social mysticism and skepticism is himself deluded.

The First High-Def Election?

By Gus Van Horn from Gus Van Horn,cross-posted by MetaBlog

There is an interesting article posted over at Slate that touches on John McCain's role in forcing television manufacturers to plunge into digital technology before the market warranted and how this might lead to his own political undoing.

For all I know, McCain is in fine physical condition. If he appears older than his chronological age, that probably has something to do with the torture he endured as a prisoner of war in Vietnam; nine years ago the Arizona Republic reported that he continued to experience "orthopedic limitations" related to his imprisonment, including pain in his shoulders and right knee. But TV is unfair, as Richard Nixon learned when his perspiration and five o'clock shadow helped give John F. Kennedy the edge in the first-ever televised presidential debates. Had HDTV been available eight years later, I'm not sure Nixon could have won the Republican nomination, let alone the presidency.

...

The prevailing cliche about 2008 is that it's the first YouTube election. But it may turn out to be, more saliently, the first high-definition election. If that's the case, then McCain -- more precisely, McCain's political ambition -- may play the unfortunate role of Dr. Frankenstein, whose lifeless body at the end of Mary Shelley's novel is wept over by the demon he created. ... But doesn't Obama look fabulous? [links dropped]

Only Hillary Clinton prevailing over Obama might keep us from the cold comfort of seeing, perhaps, McCain being killed by the monster he helped create. The man who so despises freedom of speech as to hinder it during elections would lose in part on appearances (not that his ideas have any merit or substantive difference from Obama's). The man who could not leave the world's most innovative and productive economy alone would succumb due to the very results of his meddling. The man who so likes giving out orders would be foiled by an army of too-obedient machines.

This would be mere poetic justice -- the only kind available in this year's elections. This result cannot head off tyranny, for these candidates are fundamentally the same despite appearances. But in terms of America's long-term future, perhaps technology and McCain's inopportune power lust might be the kind of break we can take advantage of.

It will only be by using every break we get to make the case for individual rights -- and yet not depending on dumb luck -- that we who value freedom can stop the advance of tyranny.

-- CAV

Yaron Brook: Why Unregulated Capitalism Is Moral

By David from Truth, Justice, and the American Way,cross-posted by MetaBlog

Watch more great videos at the Ayn Rand Institute channel on YouTube

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Hatred of the Good

By Paula from NoodleFood,cross-posted by MetaBlog

**DISCLAIMER**DISCLAIMER**DISCLAIMER**DISCLAIMER**

I'm going to talk a little politics now, but nothing I say should be taken as an endorsement, nor should approval of one isolated aspect or policy of a candidate be taken as agreement with or approval of anything else about him or her.

I've become a bit of political junkie this election year because of the historic demographics of the Democratic party candidates. It has been informative, usually painfully so.

I took a hit watching television this morning as Pat Buchannan and Katrina Vandenheuvel discussed the problem of the "elitist" label that Barack Obama has been fighting. The accusation of "elitism" has been political Kryptonite, so this is serious stuff.

Buchanan said Obama reeked of Harvard Law Review, or something to that effect (Obama is a past President of the Harvard Law Review). Vandenheuvel pointed out that President Bush went to Yale and Harvard Business School. Buchanan laughed, shook his head, and replied derisively, "But Bush was helped through Yale and Harvard!"

The clear implication being that the fact that President Bush didn't earn admission into an Ivy League school, while Obama had earned it, meant that his alma mater couldn't be used to tag Bush as an "elite" the same way it could be hurled as an accusation at Obama.

So down is officially up -- to demonstrate that someone has earned a value is to indict him for it.

Not that I haven't been aware all along that the "elitism" issue is perverted, in that it turns what should be an achievement into a slur. This morning's exchange was just so close to an explicit denunciation of the good for being the good that it blew my hair back.

Lovers Slaughtered in India

By Diana Hsieh from NoodleFood,cross-posted by MetaBlog

As a point of contrast to yesterday's post, Three Cheers for Marrying Whoever You Damn Well Please!, consider the concrete meaning of forcibly preventing marriages for the sake of the supposed good of society: Indian village proud after double honor killing.

Five armed men burst into the small room and courtyard at dawn, just as 21-year-old, 22-week pregnant, Sunita was drying her face on a towel. They punched and kicked her stomach as she called out for her sleeping boyfriend "Jassa," 22-year-old Jasbir Singh, witnesses said. When he woke, both were dragged into waiting cars, driven away and strangled. Their bodies, half-stripped, were laid out on the dirt outside Sunita's father's house for all to see, a sign that the family's "honor" had been restored by her cold-blooded murder.

A week later, the village of Balla, just a couple of hours drive from India's capital New Delhi, stands united behind the act, proud, defiant almost to a man. Among the Jat caste of the conservative northern state of Haryana, it is taboo for a man and woman of the same village to marry. Although the couple were not related, they were seen in this deeply traditional society as brother and sister. "From society's point of view, this is a very good thing," said 62-year-old farmer Balwan Arya, sitting smoking a hookah in the shade of a tree in a square with other elders from the village council or panchayat. "We have removed the blot."

...

This story reminds of me of Ayn Rand's notable comment on the essence of civilization: "Civilization is the progress toward a society of privacy. The savage's whole existence is public, ruled by the laws of his tribe. Civilization is the process of setting man free from men."

Conservatism Now

By Myrhaf from Myrhaf,cross-posted by MetaBlog

Since the Republican Party and the conservatives gave up being a political faction that stands for limited government, what issues excite voters on the right? Abortion, immigration and gay marriage.

The Republicans have become a party of religion and bigotry. What genius thought up that?

I know I'm courting controversy by dismissing opposition to immigration and gay marriage as bigotry. Intelligent people have sophisticated arguments against both. But underneath the legalistic arguments lie ugly passions and irrationality.

Gay marriage has become an issue in California. (Since it is in the news, I will focus on this issue and set aside abortion and immigration.)

The California Supreme Court ruled yesterday that gays have a constitutional right to marry, striking down state laws that forbade it, in a decision that is likely to reenergize the election-year debate over same-sex marriages and gay rights.

Conservatives see this as the court "legislating" from the bench. If a majority of voters pass a law violating the individual rights of a minority, conservatives think the judicial branch should allow the unjust law to stand. Democracy over all!

Religious people oppose gay marriage because of anti-homosexual passages in a book written in ancient times called the Bible. Their opposition rests on superstition. (Religion is superstition widely held and therefore respectable.)

I can see nothing wrong with two people of the same sex marrying. How does their mutually consenting contract violate anyone else's right?

On what basis do we deny homosexuals the right of marriage? Because 2,500 years ago some semi-barbaric tribe wrote down its hatred of homosexuals in a group of writings that Christians and Jews today worship as the word of God? By that reasoning, we might as well start burning witches again.

I say gays have a right to be as miserable as the rest of us. Let them marry.

I realize that I am redefining the traditional concept of marriage. But note that capitalism has from the start been a revolutionary force redefining the traditional values of feudalism. Capitalism cares naught for tradition; it cast aside the values of God and king to give individual rights to man. In this respect, medievalist conservatives such as Richard Weaver and Hillaire Belloc are right in seeing capitalism as the enemy.

Some traditional values needed to go, such as primogeniture, serfdom and women as chattel. If we redefine marriage to include same sex unions, rights will only be expanded and strengthened. The marriages of heterosexuals will not be threatened in the least.

Abortion, immigration and gay marriage -- on all three issues, conservatives come down against individual rights. Liberals deny rights in the name of collectivism; conservatives deny rights in the name of mysticism. No wonder the right is on the losing side: who, aside from the deeply religious, wants to fight for a political agenda based on superstition?

Conservatism is as wrong, as foolish and as dangerous as liberalism. Let us cast aside these old standards and forge a new movement dedicated to individual rights in both the economic and the spiritual realms -- a movement of radical capitalism.

UPDATE: Revision.

Brooks on "Neural Buddhism"

By Gus Van Horn from Gus Van Horn,cross-posted by MetaBlog

New York Times columnist David Brooks comments on a trend that hardly surprises me, given today's near-universal intellectual sloppiness and confusion: The embrace of mysticism by scientists. Indeed, although he fails to integrate the progression correctly (or particularly well), he does outline it in the way it unfolded.

Let's follow his outline, but in the vein of understanding how this progression follows from some of the philosophical errors common among today's intellectuals.

In the following, Brooks' comments are in plain text, and mine are in bold.

• To these self-confident researchers, the idea that the spirit might exist apart from the body is just ridiculous. So far, so good.

• Instead, everything arises from atoms. Genes shape temperament. Brain chemicals shape behavior. Assemblies of neurons create consciousness. Free will is an illusion. Human beings are "hard-wire" [sic] to do this or that. Religion is an accident. Most scientists are determinists and, to my knowledge, regard the idea of free will as inherently mystical. Determinism flies in the face of the evidence that man has volition, but to my knowledge, only Objectivists have entertained the idea of volition as being a form of causation inherent to intelligent beings, and arising from their material nature. On top of that, few understand that it is philosophy that sets the terms of the debate about epistemology, the nature of the mind, and indeed, what constitutes science. So they study the mind philosophically half-cocked and end up attempting to make pronouncements of a philosophic nature based on their evidence, when what they desperately need is a correct understanding of the nature of the mind in order to interpret this evidence properly.

• In this materialist view, people perceive God's existence because their brains have evolved to confabulate belief systems. That does follow from materialism, if you mistake the widespread existence of religious belief for evidence that it confers an evolutionary advantage.

• If they suffer from temporal lobe epilepsy, they will show signs of hyperreligiosity, an overexcitement of the brain tissue that leads sufferers to believe they are conversing with God. Religion is a tangled knot of horrible philosophical premises and legitimate aspirations -- and the emotions that go with them. Imagine the insights we could have if scientists better understood what religion and emotions were when they were studying them! Instead, we have determinists ignorant about both looking at this. Brooks' hero, Tom Wolfe saw where this would go.

• The two sides have argued about whether it is reasonable to conceive of a soul that survives the death of the body and about whether understanding the brain explains away or merely adds to our appreciation of the entity that created it. The scientists are wasting their time here. Like I said, science does not set the terms of philosophical debates. It can eliminate some of the "gaps" in "god of the gaps" types of arguments, but this just proves my point.

• And yet my guess is that the atheism debate is going to be a sideshow. The cognitive revolution is not going to end up undermining faith in God, it’s going to end up challenging faith in the Bible. This follows from the nature of faith and the beginning of that slippery slope was the original concession: to "debate" the faithful at all.

• Over the past several years, the momentum has shifted away from hard-core materialism. The brain seems less like a cold machine. It does not operate like a computer. Instead, meaning, belief and consciousness seem to emerge mysteriously from idiosyncratic networks of neural firings. Those squishy things called emotions play a gigantic role in all forms of thinking. Love is vital to brain development. The false reason-emotion dichotomy pays off in spades for the religionists as scientists, disarmed in the face of (1) evidence that emotions might (gasp!) have a survival role for human beings, (2) their own ignorance of the nature of emotions, and (3) their own implicit acceptance of the reason-emotion dichotomy, find "evidence" of the supernatural.

• Researchers now spend a lot of time trying to understand universal moral intuitions. Genes are not merely selfish, it appears. Instead, people seem to have deep instincts for fairness, empathy and attachment. If altruism is everywhere, and a material being cannot have free will, widespread philosophical errors and their consequences must be instinctual!

• Scientists have more respect for elevated spiritual states. Andrew Newberg of the University of Pennsylvania has shown that transcendent experiences can actually be identified and measured in the brain (people experience a decrease in activity in the parietal lobe, which orients us in space). The mind seems to have the ability to transcend itself and merge with a larger presence that feels more real. What did I say a while ago about having a grasp of the nature of emotions and of religion before attempting to study what goes on in the brain during religious-types of experiences?

• This new wave of research will not seep into the public realm in the form of militant atheism. Instead it will lead to what you might call neural Buddhism. See Sam Harris.

• If you survey the literature (and I’d recommend books by Newberg, Daniel J. Siegel, Michael S. Gazzaniga, Jonathan Haidt, Antonio Damasio and Marc D. Hauser if you want to get up to speed), you can see that certain beliefs will spread into the wider discussion. Yeah. The beliefs that already saturate our culture like a sponge left to soak in a sewer.
  

• The real challenge is going to come from people who feel the existence of the sacred, but who think that particular religions are just cultural artifacts built on top of universal human traits. It's going to come from scientists whose beliefs overlap a bit with Buddhism.

• In unexpected ways, science and mysticism are joining hands and reinforcing each other. Unexpected -- only to the philosophical victims of Immanuel Kant....
  

Many of these scientists see philosophy as impotent, and themselves as coming to the rescue of humanity by offering hard facts and evidence on the "big questions". And yet it is their own ignorance of philosophy that is causing them to bolster the very enemies of reason who might ultimately undo the scientific revolution.

This scientist disagrees.

-- CAV

McCain's Instability

By Gus Van Horn from Gus Van Horn,cross-posted by MetaBlog

And no, I'm not talking about John McCain's infamous short fuse.

I'm talking about the danger a McCain Presidency can pose to our system of federal government above and beyond McCain's own bad policies, his opposition to freedom of speech, and the possibility that he will aid America's descent into theocracy by placing Mike Huckabee on his ticket.

The Software Nerd, some time ago, wrote a very interesting post about how a large coalescence of political power near the "middle" can result in an end to the "gridlock" our Founding Fathers engineered into the federal government, but which so many foolish "moderate" voters bemoan:

I have a hypothesis though: even though the center-of-gravity remains unchanged in the middle, the more people there are crowding around the middle, the faster and more likely such policies will get enacted at all. As long as enough people from both sides are far from the middle, they will delay and fight changes, and government is slowed down a bit.

I was reminded this morning of one important check against the irrational passions of the electorate that I haven't heard discussed much so far: The Supreme Court. (I just love how the short primary season has gutted what little deliberation was left from the process of vetting presidential candidates....) By the time our next President -- and we are all but guaranteed a horrible one this time around -- takes the helm, he will probably have the opportunity to appoint more than one new Supreme Court justice since five of the nine will be more than 70 years old. John Paul Stevens is 88 now.

And if we are to believe Jeff Jacoby, McCain thinks "Supreme" means "really big" and "Court" means "legislative rubber stamp":

The senator emphasized the importance of judicial modesty and deference to the elected branches of government, lamenting that "federal judges today issue rulings and opinions on policy questions that should be decided democratically." He criticized Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton for not being concerned "when fundamental questions of social policy are preemptively decided by judges instead of by the people and their elected representatives." [bold added]

Great. McCain already buys into the bipartisan Bad Idea of the Day, massive economic regulation inspired by global warming hysteria. He's too leftist (and eager to curry favor with a leftist media) for us to hope that he will reign in a Democratic Congress. He's too much of a Pragmatist to offer any real opposition to the Religious Right, if he isn't really one of them already.

And now, we might get to see him monkey around with the composition of the Supreme Court. The next four years looks uglier by the minute. (For the record, I do not regard the comments at this link as either reason to vote for McCain or a sufficient argument against voting for a Libertarian. Neither voting for McCain nor voting Libertarian is an acceptable option.)

-- CAV

Three Cheers for Marrying Whoever You Damn Well Please!

By Diana Hsieh from NoodleFood,cross-posted by MetaBlog

First, via GVH, I found this interesting NY Times article on the history behind the Loving v. Virginia case that ultimately legalized interracial marriage. That case was decided just 41 years ago. I'm very grateful -- in a very personal way -- that race is no longer a factor in marriage in America. It's not a legal obstacle whatsoever, and not even much of a social obstacle. That's absolutely wonderful.

Second, the California Supreme Court has ruled that laws restricting marriage to heterosexuals violate the state's constitution. While I might not agree with the reasoning of the court, I do wholeheartedly support gay marriage. The essence of marriage is the total integration of two lives: sexually, legally, socially, financially, geographically, sexually, morally, etc. The fact that most marriages involve two people with contrasting genitalia is not of any grand significance. My marriage, for example, has far more in common with the relationship of a committed, rational lesbian couple than to the now-dissolved insane marriage between Brittney Spears and Kevin Federline.

Significantly, to recognize gay marriage as fundamentally similar to heterosexual marriage -- i.e. as a primary, enduring relationship fundamentally integrating two lives -- is not a lapse into subjectivism. That's because such integration is only possible with certain kinds and numbers of people.

1. Marriage to beasts is impossible, as the marriage relationship requires the capacity for rationality, not to mention a basic equality in rights. The relationship involved in pet or livestock ownership is wholly different even from that of a fleeting and unserious romantic relationship.
   
   
2. Marriage to children is excluded for the same basic reason: children are not yet able to fully exercise even the basic rationality required to live independently. That capacity for independence is required for the integration of lives involved in marriage. In other words, a child has no financial, social, moral, or legal life of his own to integrate with another person. Of course, I need not even mention the abhorrent evil of foisting a sexual relationship on a child.
   
   
3. Polygamous marriage is excluded because whatever relationships would result from multiple unions would be fundamentally different than that of a two-person marriage. Most polygamous marriages, I suspect, would not be a genuine integration at all, but rather a juxtaposed set of individual marriages, each half-starved due to competing demands on time, resources, and attention. Even if the various husbands and wives do live a single, integrated life together, the resulting relationships would be hugely different than an ordinary marriage. Decisions might be made by majority vote. (Sorry Sally, but you were outvoted: we're moving to North Dakota.) Social norms would be completely different. (Do I have to invite all Joe's wives to dinner, or just the mother of our daughter's classmate?) The laws governing divorce, child custody, medical power of attorney, inheritance, testifying against a spouse, and so on would have to be totally re-worked. (If I don't have a medical power of attorney, which husband directs the course of my medical care while I'm in a coma? If I die, how will my property be divided? Also, should each person be able to marry multiple people?) Notably, sex is basically a two-person activity, so that would have to be juxtaposed, rather than integrated. Basically, polygamous relationships -- even if somehow recognized by law (and I don't oppose that) -- would be fundamentally different from marriages between two persons, whether of the same or opposite sex, along multiple dimensions.

Marriage is an extremely important institution in a civilized culture. It's the full-blown, across-the-board public commitment to share one's life with another person. It's a fundamental value in life that my gay friends deserve just as much as my straight ones.

So... as the title of the post says: "Three Cheers for Marrying Whoever You Damn Well Please!"

(Note: I have no idea whether my co-bloggers agree with me on this issue. They can speak for themselves...)

McCain: Carbon Dictator

By Paul from NoodleFood,cross-posted by MetaBlog

Republican Presidential Candidate John McCain recently made a number of alarming statements about his approach to the "global warming" issue. In particular, on May 12, 2008 he stated that, "he would pursue mandatory U.S. curbs on greenhouse gas emissions if he wins the White House in November". This is not the first time that he has expressed such views. During the Republican candidates' debate of May 2007, he defended his policy along lines similar to Pascal's Wager:

Now, suppose that [California Governor Schwarzenneger] and I are wrong, and there's no such thing as climate change. And we adopt these green technologies, of which America and the innovative skills we have and the entrepreneurship and the free market, which is embodied by Senator Lieberman's and my cap-and-trade proposal, is enacted, and there's no such thing as climate change. Then all we've done is give our kids a cleaner world.

But suppose we do nothing. Suppose we do nothing and we don't eliminate this $400 billion dependence we have on foreign oil. Some of that money goes to terrorist organizations and also contributes to greenhouse gas emissions. Then what kind of a world have we given our children?

Of course, McCain's argument omits the hundreds of billions of dollars of economic harm caused by implementing draconian policies that limit industry and commerce, as well as the countless harms done to individuals by prohibiting then from engaging in productive free enterprise.

McCain's statements put him squarely in the camp of the "global warming authoritarians" as described by Keith Lockitch of the Ayn Rand Institute. Although he poses as a defender of "entrepreneurship and the free market", he clearly has no objection to an environmentalist agenda that is fundamentally inimical to human life. Those who support McCain over one of the Democrats on the grounds that he is somehow "better" than either Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama may need to look more closely at what McCain really stands for.

Four Great American Paintings (Part 1)

By noreply@blogger.com (Nicholas Provenzo) from The Rule of Reason,cross-posted by MetaBlog

The American painter Norman Rockwell ranks among my favorite artists. Often derided as being mawkish and never taken seriously by the art establishment, Rockwell is nevertheless one of the few artists to dedicate his talent to capturing the American spirit in action. This first installment discusses one of four paintings that I consider to be among Rockwell's greatest achievements.

The Scoutmaster (1956)




This panting depicts the central figure of a man standing sentinel over the glowing embers of a nighttime fire as boys peacefully slumber in their tents. The starry blue of the night sky and dry rocky soil suggest a remote and secluded location. The man, muscular and taught, stands uniformed but he is not militaristic, a policeman or a hunter; he carries no weapon upon his person or badge of office. No threats are presented, yet the man stands watch nonetheless, his modestly ringed hand resting upon his hip, his stick racking the coals as a gentle wisp of smoke flutters in the nighttime air. The man's face is directed off-canvas, we know not at what, yet his expression reveals no tension; his gaze seems more inward than outward. By the different color hair of the boys, we see that they are not his, yet he watches over them as if they were his own. A small tripod stands over the fire, lashed together with line whose bitter ends hang out; these are knots seemingly tied by the hands of a novice. An aluminum pot hangs off the tripod, a coffee pot rests nearby and rocks and small stumps ring the faint fire; hunger or want is of no concern in this scene. Instead, Rockwell presents an image of quite calm; of a man standing silently as the entrusted leader of future men.

I admire this painting for its technical mastery; the contrapposto pose of the man feels effortless, the natural drapery of the man's uniform and gentle billowing of his neckerchief reveals an artist who fully understands how body, cloth, and atmosphere interact with one another. I also admire this panting for its thematic presentation; even if we know nothing about the mission and history of the Boy Scouts, we can immediately see that Rockwell is depicting a man dedicated to the boys in his care and that this man is the product of specific values and achievements.

For example, set this scene in the middle ages, and one easily imagines a different scene where the man is a knight and the boys are his youthful attendants, yet here the man is depicted as serving the youth. Rockwell presents an expedition whose purpose is not to forage for food or wage war, but to instruct boys in the arts of self-reliance and personal independence--and that is why I see this painting reflecting a quintessential American theme. America is a land of plenty. The thing to be conquered, the challenge we would prepare our youth to face is not privation or other men; it is the mastery of their own nature as free and independent beings.

In my view, Rockwell captures the essence of those dedicated to such instruction and he captures it in a way that will resonate as long as images of this work continue to exist.

Next installment: a veteran's homecoming.

MELTING POT

By Martin Lindeskog from EGO,cross-posted by MetaBlog

I am glad to see that the melting pot is still bubbling, although the latest raid against a kosher meat plant is an example of anti-immigration hysteria. Here is an quote from Robert Tracinski's newsletter, TIA Daily.

And this anti-immigrant push is based on nothing more than hysteria. The only legitimate concern about immigration is a fear that the new immigrants will not assimilate into American society—not merely that they won't adopt our language, or dress like us, or eat our food (American cuisine is largely a combination of various immigrant cuisines, anyway), but that they won't adopt our ideals.

I don't think we have much to worry about on that score. I know too many immigrants who are more American in spirit than the average native-born American, and I have confidence that our culture is still so strong, so appealing, and so rewarding to those who adopt it that it will continue to propagate itself. (TIA Daily, 05/13/08.)

Related: My post, IMMIGRATION POLICY.

Another Day at the Circus at the End of the World

By Myrhaf from Myrhaf,cross-posted by MetaBlog

John McCain's worst enemy is John McCain. Both Obama and Clinton are so inadequate and weak that they don't pose much of a threat to McCain.

Obama, if he ends up the Democrat nominee as most people think probable, will be the least distinguished nominee of a major party in my lifetime, and perhaps in American history. He is the emptiest of suits, a mediocrity who ascended through Chicago politics by networking, going to a church shepherded by a raving leftist anti-American and socializing at the salon of aging radical terrorists. He is an effete liberal who views America as a foreign country and longs to transform it into France. An Obama presidency would look much like Jimmy Carter's, with a naive, appeasing President being bitch-slapped into reality by a mean world that wants to destroy America.

Clinton has high "negatives," the touch of death in a profession that lives on votes. Not only that, she has a way of energizing her enemies, who see her as the Wicked Witch of the West, Mussolini and their mother-in-law rolled into one woman.

All John McCain has to do is smile, kiss babies and stand tough on America's defense and he can waltz into the White House against either of these losers. Unfortunately, he seems determined to prove he is as bad as any Democrat.

McCain wants to take on the highly speculative, dubious problem of "global warming."

McCain's major solution is to implement a cap-and-trade program on carbon-fuel emissions, like a similar program in the Clean Air Act that was used to reduce sulfur dioxide emissions that triggered acid rain.

Industries would be given emission targets, and those coming in under their limit could sell their surplus polluting capacity to companies unable to meet their target.

Now, for any reader who might think there is something to all this global warming talk, consider this from Walter Williams:

Over 95 percent of the greenhouse effect is the result of water vapor in Earth's atmosphere. Without the greenhouse effect, Earth's average temperature would be zero degrees Fahrenheit. Most climate change is a result of the orbital eccentricities of Earth and variations in the sun's output. On top of that, natural wetlands produce more greenhouse gas contributions annually than all human sources combined.

Why is it that environmentalists never put global warming in the context that Dr. Williams provides? Could it be that they're trying to scare us with bad science? Could it be that their real goal is state control of the economy and the destruction of capitalism?

John McCain doesn't give a damn about capitalism and freedom. He loves state power; he holds sacrifice to the collective as the moral ideal. He thrills to the idea of mandating vast regulations on industry in the name of "saving the planet." As a man who has confessed his ignorance of economics, it doesn't matter what the actual, practical effects of his regulations will be; all that matters is his feel good fantasy and massive sacrifice. To altruists the gesture of sacrifice is an end in itself unconnected to any practical benefits. Nay, practical benefits would make sacrifice more of a selfish long-term trade, and where is the morality in that?

But McCain being McCain, he has to take the dishonesty of his proposal a little further by calling his massive regulations a "free market" solution. (In reality his "cap and trade" policies will amount to K Street lobbyists buying off politicians to get favors for their clients.) He does not understand that a market dictated and controlled by the state is not free. Laissez-faire capitalism is the separation of state and economy. The word for McCain's vision of private industry dictated by the state is fascism.

On the heels of this environmentalist nonsense, as if McCain were on a mission to rub the nose of small government Republicans in shit, the word comes out that he is considering Huckabee as his Vice President running mate. Could he make a worse choice than a religious nanny-stater? (Maybe he wants Huckabee at his side because the Arkansan is the only prominent Republican who makes McCain look smart about economics.)

FAQ on Free Market Health Care

By Paul from NoodleFood,cross-posted by MetaBlog

I've received multiple e-mails in response to my recent letter to the editor in the May 11, 2008 New York Times advocating a free market in health insurance. I appreciate the fact that the correspondents all took the time to read my letter, see my affiliation with Freedom and Individual Rights in Medicine (FIRM), search for the FIRM website, find my e-mail address, and then write me with their comments and questions.

The various correspondents posed a number of good questions about the nature of a free market in health insurance, as well as some more fundamental issues on individual rights and the proper role of government in health care. I've had several stimulating rounds of e-mail discussion with folks from around the country. And even though we didn't always agree on some important issues, all of the e-mails I received were polite and articulate, and I appreciated the many thoughtful remarks from all of the writers.

One correspondent recommended that I post my responses online so that other interested parties would have a place to read a more fully developed and explicit explanation of the ideas related to a free market in health insurance. I thought that was an excellent suggestion. Hence, I've paraphrased and collated an essentialized set of questions (and my subsequent responses) in the form of this brief FAQ.

(This FAQ has also been posted on the FIRM blog here.)

===========

Q1) In a free market for health insurance, should insurers be able to exclude someone based on a pre-existing condition?

Q2) Why should whether I live or die depend on whether an insurance company finds it too costly to pay for my care? Should my fate be determined by whether a corporation finds it profitable?

Q3) How would a free market guarantee that all Americans will have necessary health coverage?

Q4) What if someone has a bad disease through no fault of his own, can't afford the treatment, and no insurance company will cover him? Who will pay for his care?

Q5) Isn't the purpose of a government to promote the common welfare of all citizens?

Q6) Your position is very harsh and Darwinian. If you were dying of cancer and could not afford treatment, would you really say to yourself, "Oh well, this is my random bad luck, no one has an obligation to treat me and so I must die"?

Q7) Isn't it my social obligation to subsidize the health care of those who can't afford it?

Q8) I agree that health care is not a "right", but isn't it moral for the US government to raise taxes to improve the overall welfare of the nation? Universal health care (ideally administered through a free-market mechanism to the greatest extent possible) would be a good use of that power.

= = = = = = = = = =

Q1) In a free market for health insurance, should insurers be able to exclude someone based on a pre-existing condition?

A1) Yes. In a free market, insurers (like any other businesses or individuals) are entitled to set whatever terms they wish for the products they wish to sell. Similarly, customers can choose to accept those terms, decline them, or negotiate with them for some other mutually agreed-upon alternative.

It's also important to note that our current system is far from a free -- at best it's semi-free. Insurance companies are under numerous government constraints about what sorts of services they must/must not offer, who they can/cannot exclude, what sorts of prices they can charge, when they must accept customers, etc. For instance, some states require that a healthy 22-year old man must pay the same premium as a 60-year old man with multiple chronic health problems. Some states require that insurance companies that offer small group policies must accept every group that applies and must accept every member of the group regardless of lifestyle choice or health condition. Constraints such as these make it difficult for customers to purchase insurance in the first place. These constraints are the cause of our current problems and it is those contraints that I wish to see repealed. (For more details, please refer to "Moral Health Care Vs. 'Universal Health Care'" by Lin Zinser and myself.)

Q2) Why should whether I live or die depend on whether an insurance company finds it too costly to pay for my care? Should my fate be determined by whether a corporation finds it profitable?

A2) One should reverse that question. Should an insurance company be obliged to run at a loss? For example, there are many people who wish to force insurers to cover expensive treatments that are of minimal (if any) proven efficacy, such as bone marrow transplant in patients with late-stage breast cancer. If or when such laws are passed, insurance companies don't survive for long or else they pull out of local markets where such laws are in force, thus depriving all the other residents of that locality the possibility of purchasing insurance from that company. If an insurance company cannot be profitable, then they can't provide coverage for anyone.

More fundamentally, should an insurance company be obliged to pay for your care purely because you need it, regardless of the cost to them? The fact that you have a need does not create an automatic obligation on others to fulfil that need.

Q3) How would a free market guarantee that all Americans will have necessary health coverage?

A3) There's a premise in your question that I must disagree with - namely that it's the government's responsibility to guarantee health coverage for all Americans. It is not, any more than it's the proper role of the government to guarantee that every American has a job or a car. Health care is a need, but that's not the same thing as a right.

A right is a freedom of action that an individual possesses, such as the right to free speech. Rights impose no positive obligations on other people, merely the negative obligation to leave you alone. Rights are not automatic claims on the goods and services produced by others -- that is just state-sanctioned theft.

To further concretize the difference between a need and a right, consider an innocent child with a rare disease who will die unless he gets a bone marrow transplant from a matching donor. The only potential donor with the proper tissue match is someone who doesn't want to donate, for whatever reason (maybe he's scared of needles, maybe he's a Jehovah's Witness, maybe he's just an ornery old cuss). We'll also stipulate that the potential donor understands exactly what is at stake for the child, and that he correctly understands that donating bone marrow is a very safe procedure that would involve a few minutes of tolerable physical pain and a couple of hours of his time, but otherwise wouldn't impair his life afterwards. The fact that the child will die without that bone marrow does not mean that the child's family (or anyone else) has the right to strap that potential donor down and forcibly take a marrow sample from him against his will. The child's need does not constitute a right to that other man's bone marrow.

Q4) What if someone has a bad disease through no fault of his own, can't afford the treatment, and no insurance company will cover him? Who will pay for his care?

A4) The short answer is, "Anyone who wishes to do so."

If someone incurs an unfortunate random hardship (even though it is no fault of his own), it does not create an automatic obligation for anyone else to pay for it. Depending on the exact circumstances, I might be willing to voluntarily donate my own time/money to help him out. For example, in my capacity as a physician, I have personally waived my own professional fee more times than I can count out of voluntary charity for patients whom I've thought were worthy recipients. The same is true for nearly every other physician I know. And in general, Americans have been extraordinarily benevolent about voluntarily donating their time and money for innocent victims of natural disasters, disease, and man-made harms (such as 9-11 or the Oklahoma City bombings).

So if someone developed a bad disease that would cost him $100k, and either didn't get insurance or couldn't get insurance, then he essentially has to rely on the voluntary charity of others. His need (genuine as it may be), does not create a right to someone else's property or time.

This isn't limited to health care. The same would be true if an unfortunate homeowner didn't or couldn't purchase flood insurance, then his house was completely destroyed by a freak 100-year flood. His hardship does not constitute any sort of automatic claim on others' assets. Again, I (and many others) might be willing to be offer voluntary charity to help him out. But if no one is voluntarily willing to help him out, then he loses his house.

Furthermore, the very fact that such examples tug at the sympathies of normal decent Americans also means that those Americans will be forthcoming with voluntary charity. And I fully support giving to charities that are consistent with my values and priorities.

Q5) Isn't the purpose of a government to promote the common welfare of all citizens?

A5) No, the purpose of government is to protect individual rights - specifically to protect individuals from the predations of others who would use force to deprive men of their rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. This includes protecting honest men from external enemies who would wage war on us as well as internal criminals who would use force to steal, murder, commit rape, etc. Hence the purpose of a government is to create and enforce conditions where men and women can freely and voluntarily exchange ideas, goods, and services to the mutual benefit according to their best rational judgment, without fear that someone else will try to forcibly rob them of those benefits. Man's essential nature requires that he uses his reasoning mind to create the values necessary for sustaining his life. Hence, protecting his right to the free use of his mind (and the right to voluntarily trade with others for the products of their thought and effort free from compulsion) is the basic function of a government.

When a government ceases to be the protector of individual rights and instead becomes one of the chief violators, then it undermines the very reason for its existence. It's akin to a government claiming that "we need to protect the freedoms of Americans from enemies abroad", and then imposing a military draft on young Americans to fight in a war (and violating those draftees' freedom and rights in the process).

Q6) Your position is very harsh and Darwinian. If you were dying of cancer and could not afford treatment, would you really say to yourself, "Oh well, this is my random bad luck, no one has an obligation to treat me and so I must die"?

A6) Yes. My life is my own responsibility. Others may choose to voluntarily help me if am in need, but they should not be legally required to do so (i.e., they should not be forced by the government to help me against their will or punished by the government for failing to help me.)

If I needed $100,000 for a life-saving cancer treatment but couldn't afford it, I would of course do everything legal and moral to try to live. I might borrow money from friends and family, I might ask for charitable contributions, I might sign up for clinical trials of experimental drugs, etc. But I wouldn't hack into my neighbor's bank account and steal that money from his kids' college fund. Or steal $100 each from a thousand of my neighbors. Or ask the government to take it from my neighbors by force.

Similarly, if my next-door neighbor was the only possible matching bone marrow donor to cure my rare disease but he didn't want to donate a sample to save my life, I wouldn't strap him down and take it from him by force. If I had a brain tumor that required a delicate operation in order for me to live, and the only neurosurgeon with the necessary skill was unwilling to do the procedure, I wouldn't force him to perform the surgery at gunpoint (or have the government force him).

That's not being Darwinian -- that's just being moral. Of course, I would prefer to live rather than die of a terrible disease. But I wouldn't want to live if it costs me my integrity and my self-respect.

Q7) Isn't it my social obligation to subsidize the health care of those who can't afford it?

A7) No, you have no positive binding obligation to help others although of course you have the voluntary choice. Nor is this limited to health care -- it's an application of a more general principle. If I saw a child drowning in the ocean, in all likelihood I would try to save him if I thought I had a reasonable chance of success. And nearly everyone I know would feel similarly. But if a different passerby chose not to make the attempt for whatever reason, then that's his choice to make and one which I have to respect. He has the right to decide whether he wishes to try or not. Conversely, the drowning child cannot demand that a random passerby must help him as a matter of right -- only out of voluntary charity. If it turned out that a passerby was a strong swimmer but refused to help because he was a total jerk, then I might hold him up to public moral censure -- maybe he'd lose his friends, his job, and the respect of his peers. But the government should not send him to jail for failing to take a positive action that could have saved the child's life (assuming that he wasn't the cause of the child's drowning in the first place).

Just as a passerby should not (and currently does not) have a legally binding positive obligation to help a drowning child even if he is capable of doing so at no cost to himself, he should not be obligated by law to pay for my cancer treatment. There's a crucially important difference between him having the negative obligations not to steal from me or not to deprive me of freedom of speech (i.e., to respect my rights), and any purported positive obligations to pay for my health care or save me from an accident. Again, my right to free speech implies only a negative obligation on his part not to violate it -- it does not require a positive action on his part. On the other hand, any alleged entitlement rights such as a "right" to health care is essentially a demand by me for some forced positive action from others.

Q8) I agree that health care is not a "right", but isn't it moral for the US government to raise taxes to improve the overall welfare of the nation? Universal health care (ideally administered through a free-market mechanism to the greatest extent possible) would be a good use of that power.

A8) If we agree that there is no "right" to health care, then by what right does a government force one citizen to pay for the care of another citizen? That's what any system of "universal care" essentially amounts to. What you consider a moral use of government power is something I consider deeply immoral. And the experience of other nations shows that any attempted system of universal care ends up destroying the free market that makes quality health care possible.

At a practical level, if I needed major medical care and couldn't afford it, I'd much rather rely on a pure free market plus voluntary charity from my fellow Americans, than a British-style system of government "universal care".

Although critics of the free market regularly claim that it would lead to "people dying in the streets", this would not actually happen unless Americans were far more impoverished and callous than they are today. The free market is our best protection from that scenario. And if Americans ever became that impoverished and callous, then no system of government-run universal care would be sustainable or even possible.

On the other hand, the nationalized health systems routinely deny care to people who have theoretical "universal coverage". Those patients *do* end up dying because of the allegedly "compassionate" government system.

No Bailouts for Borrowers or Lenders (U.S.News & World Report, Orange County Register)

By David Holcberg from The Ayn Rand Institute Stories,cross-posted by MetaBlog

No Bailouts for Borrowers or Lenders
By David Holcberg (U.S.News & World Report, May 7, 2008; Orange County Register, August 27, 2007)

Government should not intervene in the housing market with bailouts.

Any government bailout of either homeowners or lenders would have to be financed with money taxed from other people--and that would be utterly unjust.

Lenders knew--or should have known--the risks of making loans to individuals who had shaky finances and deserved little, if any, credit. And borrowers knew--or should have known--the risks of taking loans that they might not be able to repay.

In either case, lenders and borrowers are responsible for their decisions and should bear the consequences of their mistakes (or misfortunes) on their own.

Why should responsible, hard-working individuals who pay their mortgages and rents on time, or who already paid for their homes, be forced to pay also for the mortgage of others who defaulted on their obligations?

 

The Grave Robbers

By noreply@blogger.com (Edward Cline) from The Rule of Reason,cross-posted by MetaBlog

"The game will continue, and the bandwagon-riders will destroy James Bond, as they have destroyed Mike Hammer, as they have destroyed Eliot Ness, then look for another victim to 'parody'..." 1

Next fall the twenty-second "official" James Bond movie, "Quantum of Solace," will be released, first in Britain, then around the world, starring Daniel Craig as Bond in his second appearance in the role. This number does not include two "unofficial" Bond movies, "Casino Royale" (1967), which was a spoof of the novel, and "Never Say Never Again" (1983), which starred Sean Connery.

And on May 28, the 100th anniversary of Ian Fleming's birth, the twenty-second bogus James Bond novel, Devil May Care, will be published, written by British novelist Sebastian Faulks.

Fleming wrote only twelve full-length Bond novels, aside from a collection of short stories, For Your Eyes Only, from which the title of the new Bond movie was taken. In addition, he wrote what are actually two very short novelettes, Octopussy and his posthumously-published The Living Daylights; the latter two have been published under one cover, Octopussy, and include another short story, "The Property of a Lady."

So the output of bogus Bond novels exceeds what Fleming himself wrote. I call the non-Fleming Bond novels "bogus" because, in fact, in terms of quality, plot, character, and intent, they have as little to do with James Bond as Fleming conceived him, which is as a hero, as a Disney movie has to do with Victor Hugo's Notre Dame de Paris or with any other classic. Beginning with the movie version of From Russia with Love, the destruction by second-handers of Bond as a hero has continued without let-up since Fleming's death in 1964.

Fleming died about a year after Dr. No, the first Bond movie, was released. The shot script is more or less faithful to the novel, although some pointless gratuities were taken with the original story. For example, in the novel, the villain is buried in a mountain of guano; in the movie, he is broiled alive in a vat of radioactive water. One can only speculate whether or not Fleming would have approved or sanctioned the subsequent gutting of his novels for the big screen.

After all the novels had been filmed (each of them used a Fleming title but little or nothing of the story), Hollywood began inventing Bond stories. Sean Connery, the original and most credible Bond, even appeared in one, "Never Say Never Again." Then Hollywood, ever the congenital literary and esthetic shoplifter, shot one short story from the collection, "From a View to a Kill," and now has turned to another, "Quantum of Solace." Neither has anything to do with the Fleming stories, which, if they were actually and competently produced, would make interesting hour-long television specials.

In addition, there is even a series of "young" James Bond novels. The hacks have left no stone unturned in their quest to cash in on the Bond-Fleming name.

It has been a long, tedious, macabre parade of bandwagons. Their riders, as Rand put it in "Bootleg Romanticism," are "a group of previously undistinguished persons" getting "their chance at distinction and at piles of money." Like price, when it comes to exploiting Fleming's creation and reaping unearned distinction and piles of money, esthetics, story integrity and honesty are no object.

Research for this commentary uncovered a bewildering number of websites and "fanzines" devoted to James Bond, which either pant or drool over the prospect of new Bond novels or movies. Like CommanderBond.net, they are all markedly oblivious to any wider issues concerning Fleming's creation. Several non-Fleming "graphic" (or illustrated) Bond novels have also been published and list not only their authors' and illustrators' names, but Fleming's, as well. That is likely at the insistence of Ian Fleming Publications Ltd., which controls and owns the rights to the Bond character for the trustees and heirs of the Fleming estate, in addition to all the novels and movies, Fleming and non-Fleming. There are many forms of prostitution. Apparently, one of them is leasing out literary rights to a fictional character to any chance, indiscriminate hack, and calling it a "franchise."

But, why the fascination? One can almost excuse the fans' almost ghoulish obsession with Bond and their hankering for more of him. What other recent fictional hero in popular literature has represented manly efficacy, glamour, and excitement all rolled into one? But that unfastidious obsession simply encourages the literary parasites to exploit the character, and the novelists who undertake to "recreate" James Bond in the manner of Fleming, in the looting, nihilistic spirit of our age, will not allow him to remain efficacious, glamorous and exciting. Like the architect Gus Webb in Rand's The Fountainhead, who is assigned to "redo" one of Howard Roark's creations, they want to express their "individuality," too. But their "individuality" and "creativity," providing they even exist, are not worth contemplating.

When the second bogus Bond novel, License Renewed, by John Gardner (the first, Colonel Sun, by Kingsley Amis, appeared in 1968), was published, I wrote a Wall Street Journal review of it (June 4 1981), "A New James Bond Novel by Fleming's Successor," and said that Bond

"...is so appealing a hero, so amply endowed with those values and virtues we ought to want to see in any character, real or imaginary, that he has become the special target of those whose 'creativity' is limited to smears, parodies and innumerable pasticcios. James Bond was killed long ago - by movie producers, directors, ham actors, scriptwriters, stuntmen, gadget masters, tongues in many cheeks and, last but not least, by the artistic 'license' to kill."

Ironically, The Wall Street Journal twenty-seven years later ran this story on May 8, "Doubleday, Penguin Try to Revive Bond Series with New Author." It recounts the trials and tribulations of the bogus Bond novels and the overall diminished interest in Bond as a hero. There have been five "new authors" of Fleming's character, not including Samantha Weinberg, who published three "diaries" by M's secretary, Miss Moneypenney, and not including the "graphic" novels. Faulks is the fifth to try his hand.

Why has interest in Bond fallen? One thing the marketers of the bogus Bond novels have not thought of is how Bond, in the hands of his hacks, has undergone changes for the worse, usually to update him to bring him in line with politically correct "virtues" and the panacea of the moment. In both the novels and the movies, he gave up smoking, drove more environmentally acceptable cars, felt anxiety about killing his enemies, and grew glib, facetious, and unserious. (In the movies, he was merely a two-dimensional puppet in the hands of special effects crews in the action scenes.) In short, he became a boorish, fatuous stereotype that became more and more unbelievable. In Daniel Craig's movie version of the character, Bond is just a well-dressed brute.

The May 8 WSJ article reports that the publisher has taken a stab at trying to rectify the problem of Bond's unpopularity.

"Partners, a unit of WPP Group PLC that specializes in corporate branding, took two months to come up with a cover [for Devil May Care] that satisfied Penguin....One challenge: portraying sex and violence without being too graphic for teenagers, a target audience. 'We're trying to appeal to older Bond readers and bring along a new audience,' Mr. Renwick says."

A Daily Telegraph (London) article of May 11, "It's hell being a superhero," comes closer to an explanation. Many recent "superhero" movies are based on comic books. In remarking about the "Golden Age" of comics, the article says,

"This was the period between 1938, when Superman was invented, and the post-War late-Forties, when the public had an understandably voracious appetite for the exploits of strong, decent, super-endowed men and women triumphing over evil.

"But then came a backlash, in which superheroes fell out of favor, accused of everything from fostering juvenile delinquency to promoting deviant sex....The adoption in response by the comics industry of a stringent new Comics Code resulted in story lines so blandly inoffensive that no one wanted to read them.

"What the disillusioned Seventies crowd wanted were more socially conscious types like the Green Arrow...and antiheroes like the savage Wolverine and dark and tormented The Punisher....Today, audiences are far too sophisticated to take at face value the plain, honest, good-versus-evil simplicity of the Golden Age superheroes."

The DT article elaborates on that "sophisticated" taste. Commenting on a 1986 graphic novel, Watchmen, that helped to pioneer the "humanized" superhero, the article goes on to say

"This portrayed superheroes not as magnificent, selfless, crime-fighting role models, but as warped, sexually confused sociopaths whose powers had brought them little but misery and psychological damage."

One might think: Isn't this the reverse of cultural "trickle down"? Shouldn't comic books simplify and pictorialize standard, full-length literature, which came first and has existed for decades, even centuries? One would be right. The comics merely emulated the literature of the times, chiefly Naturalism, but souped up their stories with superheroes burdened with personal problems.

"Today's audiences," reports the DT article, "like their superheroes to be flawed: the more messed up the better."

"Hence the popularity of the increasingly dark Batman movies, based not on the original caped crusader but on the much edgier, more angst-ridden and morally compromised figure in Frank Miller's 1980s Dark Knight graphic novels."

The assumption in the WSJ and DT articles that contemporary readers have grown as corrupted and malevolent as the culture is properly the subject of separate commentary. But the CommanderBond.net site, in its coverage of "Quantum of Solace," features an interview with Daniel Craig, and what he says is in sync with the effort to "humanize" Bond.

"The way we finished up in 'Casino Royale' [Craig's first Bond film] was with a man who'd lost something that was taken away from him. The woman that he loved killed herself because he thought she was guilty because she was double-crossing him. And he never had the chance to go: 'Why?' said Daniel Craig during a roundtable interview. 'That's where we start the story and he's looking for that quantum of solace. He's looking for that little bit, but he can't be open about it because it's a sign of weakness.'"

The actor who plays the chief villain in "Quantum of Solace" dwelt on the "intricate mix of reality and fantasy that make up the film."

"If it was realistic the evil would win because that's what would happen today. That's why I think it's called Quantum of Solace. It's quite ironic. It's as if Bond was saying, 'Please, can I stop running? Maybe if the evil wins I can have some peace and go home and just sleep.'"

Obviously, this actor has never read the original story; I doubt if a single member of the cast has read any of the original novels or stories. Rand, in "Bootleg Romanticism," discusses the epistemological disintegration of intellectuals who approve of the reverse-bowdlerization of good literature. This actor had no epistemology that could disintegrate.

It is doubtful that Sebastian Faulks will do a better job in Devil May Care than his predecessors in writing an "official" bogus Bond novel and revive the corpse they helped to bury. Known better in Britain than in the U.S., he is the successful author of eight other novels. I have not read any of them and, based on his acceptance of the task of producing a bogus Bond novel, I do not plan to read any of them. Whether or not they are any good, however, is irrelevant. What I wrote for the Wall Street Journal in 1981 applies as well in 1881 as in 2008:

"'License Renewed' points up the futility of faithful imitation. No matter how well a writer - or any artist, for that matter - manages to capture the style or content of an original idea or work of art, something will always be missing: originality."

Writers should not be so hungry for distinction, fame and fortune that they would treat resorting to robbing the graves of their betters as a "realistic," pragmatic option, and to hell with originality and the chance to create something of which they could say: This is mine. (Consequently, the authors of bogus Bond novels are paragons of selflessness, as are the authors of bogus Sherlock Holmes and Philip Marlowe novels.) And readers should not be so hungry for any kind of "hero" that they reward them. Their lack of discrimination in what they seek and accept earns them what they deserve: literary cadavers.

1. Ayn Rand, "Bootleg Romanticism" (1965), in The Romantic Manifesto (1971, revised 1975) (New York: Signet), p. 140

Quick Roundup 325

By Gus Van Horn from Gus Van Horn,cross-posted by MetaBlog

Well! Looking forward to a (relatively) light weekend, I was feeling frivolous going into this post. I figured on a joke I got in the mail yesterday, maybe a meme, and something interesting.

But then, before I could really get going on the meme hunt, I realized that I was seeing too much good stuff to go with the original plan.

I'll get the joke out of my system first....

I didn't know what I was getting into!

This comes from my father-in-law:

The first man married a woman from Georgia and told her that she was going to do dishes and house cleaning. It took a couple days, but on the third day he came home to a clean house and dishes washed and put away.

The second man married a woman from South Carolina. He gave his wife orders that she was to do all the cleaning, dishes and the cooking. The first day he didn't see any results but the next day he saw it was better. By the third day he saw his house was clean, the dishes were done and there was a huge dinner on the table.

The third man married a girl from Louisiana. He told her that her duties were to keep the house cleaned, dishes washed, lawn mowed, laundry washed and hot meals on the table for every meal. He said the first day he didn't see anything, the second day he didn't see anything, but by the third day some of the swelling had gone down and he could see a little out of his left eye, enough to fix himself a bite to eat and load the dishwasher.

I am in fact much more "domestic" than my wife.

But that's a coincidence.

It is!

Take Care of Yourself, First

Flibbert makes an excellent point about taking care of oneself in one's relationships when commenting on a scene from House:

Many, if not most, people would have said, "Do what you want" and mean "Do what I want," but she didn't. She told him precisely and plainly without hint of manipulation that she wanted him to do what he wanted.

Yes. "He" is oncologist James Wilson, but you don't need to be a House fan to get Flibbert's point.

And there's lots of other good stuff up where that came from, so stop by and start scrolling.

Quote of the Day

Paul Hsieh brings up a quote from Richard Ralston of Americans for Free Choice in Medicine that perfectly sums up the correct approach to cultural/political activism:

Don't worry about changing the politicians. The politicians will wear their fingers to the bone sticking them in the air to test which way the wind is blowing. Instead, work on changing the wind. If you change the wind, the politicians will follow.

And stop by there, if you haven't already, to see what "changing the wind" looks like.

Obama's Ideas

Myrhaf offers an interesting insight on how Obamamania might cost the Democrats yet another presidential election:

The attacks [on Obama] are just name calling? This is the kind of self-serving delusion that keeps the left from realistically assessing the American electorate. Voters are smarter than the Democrats think they are; they understand that there are ideas behind the names and the labels.

And on top of his terrible ideas, there is either a remarkable lack of sophistication or an incredible degree of cynicism going on in his head:

CNN showed a clip of Barack Obama this morning in which he said that the Gas Tax holiday is a sham because -- and I'm paraphrasing -- "every time we've tried to do that, the oil companies just raise the price to where it was with the tax." [minor edit]

Hmmm. Before I read the whole post, I would have leaned towards the former, but now it's at least equally the latter.

Iron Man

Jennifer Snow has a good, short review of Iron Man that I am glad I saw.

Objectivist Carnival

This week's Objectivist Roundup has been posted by Rational Jenn.

Caption Contest

This is too good! (And I get to end my roundup on a frivolous note, after all!)

-- CAV

PS: A couple of the Boston bloggers have posted reviews of last night's Ford Hall Forum lecture by Yaron Brook.

Updates

Today: Added a PS.

Why She Lingers

By Gus Van Horn from Gus Van Horn,cross-posted by MetaBlog

Dick Morris pens a very interesting column about why Hillary Clinton doggedly remains in the race for the Democratic nomination despite -- and I feel like I'm being generous here -- the near-inevitability of her defeat at the hands of Barack Obama.

Morris ticks off a variety of reasons the Clintons are staying in: They see themselves as above "the rules", Hillary feels a nearly-metaphysical sense of entitlement to the nomination, and they (she and Bill) have learned over time that persistence can pay off. Morris then goes on to slam Hillary for "an uncharacteristic absence of a reality base" in her thinking, but on this, I see him as half-redundant and half-missing a broader point.

In so far as Morris is being redundant, the fact that he slams the Clintons for waiting for yet another lucky break is a little silly. Their whole political career shows that patience can pay off. Like he just said....

And in so far as Morris is missing a broader point, he is dead wrong to say that Clinton has no "reality base" in her thinking. Part of this, again, we could put as "fortune favors the persistent" and part lies in the Clintons' uncanny political acumen. They understand on a gut level that America has been intellectually gutted by generations of pragmatism and altruism.

When they left the White House in utter disgrace over their ethical lapses and greed [sic], they were under attack from even the friendliest of liberal media. But years of keeping their heads low, working hard at getting along with people in the Senate, turning to charitable works (with a little help from George W. Bush) and helping the party regulars erased the sordid images. Memories of pardons sold for campaign and library contributions, their scoundrel lobbyist brothers, and the hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of 'gifts' that were solicited from people who wanted favors from the White House disappeared. Once again, time healed all. [bold added]

This aspect of the Clintons' thought process seems irrelevant to the current situation, but I see it as highly relevant. Without pragmatism to make Americans dismiss principles enough to regard the Clintons' criminal behavior as not that important after a time, and without the insurance of their altruistic "good deeds", Hillary wouldn't even be around at this point.

And yet, the American sense of life is strong enough -- as they learned on their own hides -- that in the immediate aftermath of something sufficiently contemptible, there will be loud cries of indignation and calls for heads to roll.

In the short span of a political campaign, should something sufficiently bad come to light about Barack Obama, he will have no time for the public to forget, and Hillary will be waiting in the wings, and made to look relatively more worthy than she deserves. (And without firm moral principles to guide one's judgement, appearances are effectively everything. She will have effectively been "cleansed" in the eyes of many by Obama.)

And the Clintons, having the requisite moral turpitude to make it as politicians in today's culture have a firm basis in reality to hope that Obama has another yet-to-be revealed skeleton in his closet. He is, after all, one of them under his skin.

-- CAV

Life And Taxes (Forbes.com)

By Yaron Brook from The Ayn Rand Institute Stories,cross-posted by MetaBlog

Life And Taxes
By Yaron Brook (Forbes.com, April 17, 2008)

Your taxes are overdue, if you're just reading this now. But the fact is that every day is April 15 for Jane and John Smith, America's most tax-savvy couple.

continue reading >>

Fish vs. Men in the Supreme Court

By Thomas Bowden from The Ayn Rand Institute Stories,cross-posted by MetaBlog

Ayn Rand Institute Press Release

Fish vs. Men in the Supreme Court
May 12, 2008

Irvine, CA--Forty percent of America's energy comes from 550 electric power plants whose massive turbines and reactor cores are cooled with billions of gallons of water from nearby rivers, lakes, bays, and oceans.

The Clean Water Act requires these plants to use "the best technology available" to safeguard fish and other aquatic organisms swept up in the water flow. The Supreme Court recently agreed to decide, in the case of Entergy v. EPA, whether the Environmental Protection Agency can lawfully allow power companies to avoid hugely expensive "closed-cycle" cooling systems in favor of cheaper "once-through" systems that save fewer fish.

"This case requires the Supreme Court to pretend that the welfare of wildlife can be incorporated into a legal system designed to protect the rights of man," said Thomas Bowden, an analyst at the Ayn Rand Institute. "The 'best technology'--for whom? Fish or men? There is no rational way for a court to 'balance' a fish's interest in living against man's interest in producing electricity.

"The Founding Fathers gave us a constitutional structure of checks and balances, including judicial review by the Supreme Court. But for such review to be rational, the court must apply an objective standard in each case. The highest such standard--the individual human being's right to life, liberty, property, and the pursuit of happiness--is implicit in the Founders' recognition that 'to secure these Rights, Governments are instituted among Men.'

"By the standard of individual rights, any law purporting to protect wildlife from men would be struck down immediately, as a violation of man's right to sustain his life by exploiting nature. But America's lawmakers have sunk to a level unthinkable to the Founders. Through such statutes as the Clean Water Act, the Endangered Species Act, and a variety of other environmental protection laws, Congress has conferred upon wildlife a legal status equal to men.

"This creates an impossible dilemma for judges. If fish and men are equal before the law, whose welfare should prevail when their interests conflict? There can be no rational answer.

"With standards out the window, it's impossible to predict which irrational or subjective factors will end up controlling the outcome--the judges' sentiments, their personal political views, or random outside pressures. All we can know for sure is that the result will be neither rational nor consistent with America's founding ideals."

###  ### ###

Mr. Bowden is an analyst at the Ayn Rand Institute, focusing on legal issues. A former lawyer and law school instructor, who practiced for twenty years in Baltimore, Maryland, his op-eds have appeared in the Wall Street Journal, Philadelphia Inquirer, Miami Herald, Los Angeles Daily News, and many other newspapers. Mr. Bowden has given dozens of radio interviews and has appeared on Fox News Channel's Hannity & Colmes.

Thomas Bowden is available for interviews.

Contact: Larry Benson
E-mail: media@aynrand.org
Phone: (949) 222-6550 ext. 213

For more information on Objectivism's unique point of view, go to ARI's Web site. Founded in 1985, the Ayn Rand Institute promotes the philosophy of Ayn Rand, author of "Atlas Shrugged" and "The Fountainhead."

Pat Corvini 2007 Course on Math Now Available

By Paul from NoodleFood,cross-posted by MetaBlog

In my 4/26/2008 blog post, "Are Mathematical Truths Discovered or Invented?", I referred to Dr. Pat Corvini's superb course at the 2007 OCON as an excellent example of applying the Objectivist epistemology to the concept of number. At the time, the course was not yet available for sale.

As an update - the course is now available for purchase from the Ayn Rand Bookstore. Here's a slightly modified description of the course, per Dr. Corvini:

Two, Three, Four and All That

Number, though ubiquitous, is widely misunderstood. Drawing on Objectivist epistemology, this course sheds new light on the subject by sketching a reduction of the key ideas behind the modern number system and by showing their connection to cognition in general. Recognizing the objectivity of number provides a new framework for resolving historical and modern debates, and yields a heightened appreciation for the science of mathematics as a whole.

This course uses a detailed examination of the ideas behind counting, negative numbers, and area-measurement as concretes on which to illustrate wider conclusions about the nature of number. While not strictly a prerequisite, this material provides context for Dr. Corvini's course on modern ideas of number and infinity ("The Sequel," to be delivered at Objectivist Summer Conference 2008), and is highly recommended for those planning to attend.

According to the Ayn Rand Bookstore, the course is a 6-CD set, selling for $61.95. Total run time is 4 hrs., 29 min., including Q & A.

Objectivism Seminar's OPAR Sessions Begin Sunday

By Greg from NoodleFood,cross-posted by MetaBlog

The Objectivism Seminar will begin going through Leonard Peikoff's book, Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand this coming Sunday. If you are new to Ayn Rand's ideas, I encourage you to join us!

From the original announcement:

Whether you are new to Rand or a veteran student of Objectivism, our sessions will be valuable to you: we'll go through the entire system, with the experienced folks refining their understanding and ability to articulate and apply the ideas, while the newer folks grapple with the ideas and ask all the right questions. So please don't be shy about jumping in -- the reading and meeting load is light, and you'll be working with a great group of people!

We'll begin the weekly sessions for OPAR on Sunday May 18, 7:30pm Mountain time, reviewing and discussing two or three sections per meeting. I'll almost always be moderating to keep us on track. And as we go, each section will have two volunteers at the helm of the discussion (maybe you!): one reviewing the material, and one playing Devil's Advocate to stimulate productive engagement. Everyone else can join in as desired to flesh out our picture of important elements and connections, explanations and applications, and to bring questions and concerns for us all to grapple with.

For more information, please visit the www.ObjectivismSeminar.com site!

Jamal ad-Din Al-Afghani, Is That Your Final Answer?

By Scott Powell from Powell History Recommends,cross-posted by MetaBlog

The Morality of Capitalism

By Eric Daniels from The Ayn Rand Institute Stories,cross-posted by MetaBlog

PRESS ADVISORY
AYN RAND INSTITUTE
May 8, 2008

The Morality of Capitalism

Who: Eric Daniels, research assistant professor at the Clemson Institute for the Study of Capitalism and speaker for the Ayn Rand Institute

What: A talk explaining why capitalism is the only moral social system. A Q&A will follow.

Where: Hilton Costa Mesa, 3050 Bristol Street, Costa Mesa, CA  92626

When: Thursday, May 22, 2008, at 7:30 PM

Admission is FREE.

Description: Despite capitalism's enormous success in producing material abundance and political freedom, it faces a crisis--one that may lead to its demise. Capitalism is perishing because its supposed defenders lack a real defense.

In this lecture, Eric Daniels explores the most common arguments in favor of capitalism. He finds that they all break down in the face of the popular argument that capitalism is immoral and destructive--because it is selfish. Dr. Daniels explains that only Ayn Rand's crucial insight--that capitalism is the only moral social system because it is based on "the virtue of selfishness"--can truly defend capitalism. He illustrates the need for a moral, and not just an economic, defense of capitalism.

Bio: Eric Daniels is a research assistant professor at the Clemson Institute for the Study of Capitalism. He has lectured internationally on American ethics, on American business and legal history, and on the American Enlightenment. Dr. Daniels's publications include a chapter in The Abolition of Antitrust and five entries in the Oxford Companion to United States History.

For more information on this talk, please e-mail events@aynrand.org.

###  ### ###

Eric Daniels is available for interviews now and after his talk.
Contact: Larry Benson
E-mail: media@aynrand.org
Phone: (949) 222-6550, ext. 213

For more information on Objectivism's unique point of view, go to ARI's Web site at www.aynrand.org. Founded in 1985, the Ayn Rand Institute promotes the philosophy of Ayn Rand, author of Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead.

Looking for Allies

By Elan Journo from The Ayn Rand Institute Stories,cross-posted by MetaBlog

Looking for Allies

By Elan Journo (Commentary magazine, May 2008)

Joshua Muravchik and Charles P. Szrom would have us court "moderate" Islamists. But is their notion of moderate coherent? Consider the two sub-groups offered as our most promising "assets" within the larger category of moderate Muslims--secular liberals and moderate Islamists.

The secular liberals, we are told, stand for a "belief in the separation of mosque and state analogous to the practice in most of the West." This presumably means some form of society in which government upholds individual rights to liberty. The moderate Islamists, by contrast, are Muslims who "hope and pray for the eventual recognition by all mankind of the truth of Muhammad's message" but who wish (so they say) to achieve this by non-violent means.

What, however, can the latter ideal mean politically, if not a society shaped by the tenets of Islam and a government informed by Islamic law? Whatever the authors' two groups of "moderates" have in common, they seek entirely different political ends, and are fundamentally dissimilar. To include the second group among the moderates is to blur a crucial distinction between advocates of a basically free society and those sharing the jihadist aim of wielding power in the name of Islam.

Lebanese Governmnet Surrendering to Hezbollah

By noreply@blogger.com (Dan Edge) from The Edge of Reason,cross-posted by MetaBlog

According to CNN, the Lebanese government has effectively surrendered to Hezbollah militants. I do not exaggerate. Over the past few days, Hezbollah has initiated a military coup, moving to take over airports and pro-government television stations. The Lebanese army is not fighting back, their leaders say, because so many soldiers are pro-Hezbollah, and ordering them to attack would throw the army into disarray. Instead, political and military leaders have negotiated the surrender of western Beirut. Pro-government gunmen are being persuaded to lay down arms without a fight.

With Hezbollah in control of Lebanon, and with the backing of Iran and it's puppet, Syria, we can be sure that Lebanon will again become the primary staging point for attacks on Israel. If any positive slant can be taken on recent events, it is that Israel now clearly has the right to wage a full scale war against Lebanon and Syria. I seriously doubt that will happen, but as soon as attacks against Israeli civilians begin to mount, they will demand military action. Of course, militants will continue to use the Lebanese civilian population as cover, and Israel will be condemned the first time it destroys a Hezbollah rocket position that happens to be on top of a hospital.

If you want my opinion of what Israel needs to do to defend itself, read my article Israel Must Respond to Militant Islam With Overwhelming Force. This article was a response to Israel's military actions against Hezbollah following the kidnapping of IDF soldiers in 2006, but the same principle still applies: that a nation has the moral right to do anything it must to defend its citizens against an enemy aggressor. If only Israel (or better yet, America) heeded this advice, we would live in a much safer world.

--Dan Edge

Afghanistan: Highway of Conquest

By Scott Powell from Powell History Recommends,cross-posted by MetaBlog

Changing the Wind: The Opposition's Perspective

By Paul from NoodleFood,cross-posted by MetaBlog

At FIRM (Freedom and Individual Rights in Medicine), we may or may not necessarily win the battle over any specific piece of legislation. But as Lin Zinser has pointed out, that's a secondary goal. Our main goal is the promote the idea of free market health care and to make it part of the mainstream discussion, so that policy makers and the general public regard it as a serious alternative to the status quo.

Or to borrow a point from Richard Ralston of AFCM (Americans for Free Choice in Medicine), "Don't worry about changing the politicians. The politicians will wear their fingers to the bone sticking them in the air to test which way the wind is blowing. Instead, work on changing the wind. If you change the wind, the politicians will follow."

One indication that we are having the desired effect comes from our ideological opposition. A few months ago, Michele Swenson, an advocate of Canadian-style "single payer" health care for Colorado posted the following on the weblog for ProgressNow.org, which is one of the "progressive" leftist advocacy organizations in Colorado. She was complaining about the horrible media bias towards free market health care, and the appalling lack of coverage for her beloved single-payer "solution". Here's an excerpt:

Open Letter to Denver Media: The information blackout by the Denver Post and Rocky Mountain News regarding Single Payer health care reform - their bias toward 'free-market' solutions

Throughout the process of the Colorado Blue Ribbon Commission for Health Care Reform, the two large Denver newspapers have consistently failed to present factual information about the Colorado Health Services Single Payer Proposal -- the one that was most favorably evaluated by the Lewin Group.

Since March of 2007 both the Denver Post and the Rocky Mountain News have each printed a number of commentaries by 'free-market' health care advocates Brian T. Schwartz and Paul Hsieh, as well as commentaries by Sen. Andy McElhany and ex-Senator Mark Hillman. Only Rep. Claire Levy was granted a commentary in the Post that dissented from the predominant 'free market' view.

At least five commentaries since the Spring of 2007 have been submitted by myself and others about the advantages of the Single Payer proposal, as well as the broken system of third-party multi-payer commercial health insurances. The information has been ignored by the Post and the News. Only out-state papers like the Pueblo Chieftain and some northern Colorado papers, including the Fort Collins Coloradoan and the Northern Colorado Business Report, have consistently printed different perspectives of health care reform, including the Single Payer perspective...

Our opposition definitely knows that we are out there. And they are clearly feeling a bit on the defensive.

So we must be doing something right if the statists are demoralized over what they believe to be a media bias towards the "predominant 'free market' view"!

Of course we still have a long ways to go. And there will be inevitable ups and downs throughout the process. But I believe that we can take heart from our opponents' statements and recognize that we are changing the direction of the wind.

My Health Care LTE in New York Times

By Paul from NoodleFood,cross-posted by MetaBlog

The May 11, 2008 New York Times printed my LTE in response to their earlier article from May 4, 2008, "Even the Insured Feel the Strain of Health Costs". My letter is the fourth one down on this page, and they included a mention of FIRM:

To the Editor:

The skyrocketing costs of health insurance are the result of onerous government regulations, such as mandatory benefits.

Many states require insurance plans to include benefits like chiropractor care or in vitro fertilization. Such mandatory benefits raise insurance costs by about 20 percent to 50 percent, according to the Council for Affordable Health Insurance.

More fundamentally, mandated benefits violate an individual’s right to contract freely with insurers and providers according to his rational judgment for his best interest. Instead, a bureaucrat decides how the individual must spend his own money.

Eliminating these mandates would make health insurance available to millions of Americans who desperately want it but cannot now afford it.

The proper solution to the health insurance crisis is not more government, but a free market.

Paul Hsieh
Sedalia, Colo., May 4, 2008

The writer, a doctor, is co-founder, Freedom and Individual Rights in Medicine.

It's the Ideas, Stupid

By Myrhaf from Myrhaf,cross-posted by MetaBlog

I am struck by how blind the left is to Obama's weakness as a candidate. They have their usual rationalizations for every criticism from the right.

Obama's father was a communist? McCarthyism!

Obama is not electable? Electability is a code word used by racists!

Obama has terrorist friends? Ayers is a distinguished academic. So what if he had a radical youth -- who didn't?

Obama's preacher is an anti-American conspiracy theorist? White America cannot understand black rage!

It seems that Obama himself does not understand the criticism against him.

Obama denounced what he called the Republican campaign plan: "Yes, we know what's coming. ... We've already seen it, the same names and labels they always pin on everyone who doesn't agree with all their ideas."

The attacks are just name calling? This is the kind of self-serving delusion that keeps the left from realistically assessing the American electorate. Voters are smarter than the Democrats think they are; they understand that there are ideas behind the names and the labels.

If Obama is surrounded by far-left anti-Americans, is it not logical to wonder if maybe Obama agrees with them? Is he trying to BS his way to the presidency without revealing what he really thinks?

His wife raises even more suspicions in the minds of voters who are of the far left. She has some sense of humor:

"Asked how she feels about Bill Clinton's use of the phrase "fairytale" to describe her husband's characterization of his position on the Iraq war, (Michelle Obama) first responded: "No."

But, after a few seconds of contemplation, and gesturing with her fingernails, she told the reporter: "I want to rip his eyes out!"

Noticing an aide giving her a nervous look, she added: "Kidding! See, this is what gets me into trouble."

This unpleasantness comes on top of her anti-American statements and her altruist-statist-collectivist vision of widespread sacrifice:

...Barack Obama will require you to work. He is going to demand that you shed your cynicism. That you put down your division. That you come out of your isolation. That you move out of your comfort zones. That you push yourselves to be better. And that you engage. Barack will never allow you to go back to your lives as usual; uninvolved, uninformed.

There are profound ideas involved here, and questioning them is not name-calling or McCarthyism. People are justified in wondering just how Barack Obama intends to make them work.

It looks to me like we are in for a dreary autumn season of the left demonizing anyone who criticizes Obama as they strive to shift the focus from his ideas -- anything but an honest examination of what he really believes -- to the evil character of those who would oppose him. The left is projecting its own postmodern contempt of reason onto its enemies. This is the road to defeat for Obama, as I must not believe the American people are yet so dumbed down and corrupted that they cannot see beyond names and labels to the abstract ideas that words denote.

Concealed Carry in National Parks

By Diana Hsieh from NoodleFood,cross-posted by MetaBlog

Paul recently posted the following alert to my OActivists list:

Currently, the federal government does not allow people to carry concealed weapons in National Parks. The Dept of the Interior is considering changing that rule so that if you have a valid permit to carry in your state, then you can also carry in a National Park located within that state.

(Currently, one can do so in a National Forest but not a National Park.)

The Fed Gov is currently requesting public comments in support or opposition of this measure.

The proposed rule change can be found here: General Regulations for Areas Administered by the National Park Service and the Fish and Wildlife Service.

You can leave a comment in support of those rule changes.

Here's the comment I submitted:

As a concealed carry permit holder in Colorado, I strongly support this change in rules to allow the carrying of firearms in national parks as state law allows.

The ban on firearms in national parks disarms honest, law abiding citizens, thereby preventing them from protecting themselves if attacked. Meanwhile, the criminals know that park visitors are easy pickings, precisely because they are disarmed.

The standard claim that allowing concealed carry will result in more violence and crime is plainly false -- as empirical data from the 36 states with shall-issue concealed carry laws proves. Morally, the government ought to allow people to protect themselves from criminals in emergency situations when the police are not on hand.

Please do implement this change in rules.

After I wrote that, I saw that others noted that the rule should allow a concealed carry permit holder from any state to carry in any national park. That's right, and I wish I had thought of that!

The Post-American World

By Paul from NoodleFood,cross-posted by MetaBlog

Recently, there have been a couple of high-profile articles featuring excerpts from the forthcoming book by Fareed Zakaria, international editor for Newsweek, entitled The Post-American World.

One article can be found here at the Newsweek site: "The Rise of the Rest".

The second article from Foreign Affairs is mirrored here: "The Future of American Power".

The New York Times has just reviewed the book here: "A Challenge for the U.S.: Sun Rising on the East".

These articles have already gotten a lot of attention on the blogosphere, and I anticipate the book will also be widely discussed. The basic premise is that the current era of American dominance in the world will soon come to an end, yielding to other powers such as China and India, much as the British dominance in the 19th century ended in the early 20th century (fortunately yielding to the United States.)

Zakaria does recognize important differences between the two situations, and he makes a number of correct observations with respect to specific issues and challenges facing the US. For instance, in the Newsweek article, he correctly points out that the US benefits greatly from energy of hard-working immigrants seeking to better their lives. In the Foreign Affairs article, he correctly notes that onerous government regulations threaten to harm the vitality of our capital markets, to the detriment Americans in a global economy.

However, he also makes some serious errors. For instance, in the first article, he argues that the key in the international arena is to work on stabilizing the "global system" and ensuring that "China, India, Russia, Brazil all feel that they have a stake in the existing global order", to lessen the dangers of "war, depression, panics, and breakdowns". In the second article, he blames our "dysfunctional" political system, and argues that politicians of both major political parties must "compromise" in order to address major issues such as "health care, Social Security, tax reform".

Overall, he doesn't quite manage to tie all his points into a single unifying theme. Hence, I think this is an excellent opportunity for interested Objectivists to set forth their own arguments on the source of American greatness, what happened to erode it, and how we can recover it.

For example, here is the LTE I sent to Newsweek in response to their article:

American decline is far from inevitable. America rose to greatness because it was founded on the principle of individual rights for all men (albeit imperfectly implemented). The resultant boom in American prosperity and power was the result of a capitalist system that allowed men and women to freely use their reason to better their lives. China and India are prospering because they are starting to allow partial capitalism into their economies as well.

If America wants to remain a vibrant, prosperous country, we need to abandon our current path towards European-style welfare statism and return to laissez-faire capitalism. The government should confine itself to protecting the individual's right to life, liberty and pursuit of happiness, and barring the initiation of force between men. If we reaffirm that basic principle, America can continue to remain a shining example of freedom and prosperity for the rest of the world.

Paul Hsieh, MD
Sedalia, CO

Obviously, much more could be written on this subject. And Objectivists have a number of important and unique ideas to contribute to this discussion.

Philosophy for Salespeople?

By softwareNerd from Software Nerd,cross-posted by MetaBlog

In "The Art of Fiction" (Ch 10), Ayn Rand speaks of dramatizing a scene versus narrating it. While narrative is indispensable, important parts must be dramatized. This makes them concrete to the reader. If supported only by narrative, they remain "floating".

Worse still, narrative can sometimes contradict the concretes. Rand says: "Whenever you make estimates in narrative... ...be sure that the action and dialogue support your estimate. If you say that a man's conversation is sophisticated—show it. Otherwise, do not make the estimate."


A good salesman understands this. Even a rookie salesman won't say something as abstract as "this car is good"; but, even saying "this car is fast", or "this car is silent", or "it's economical" is a little "floating". One has to help the customer concretize what that means. Concretes: "even today, a full tank of gas will only cost you $25", "this uses half the fuel of your current car, in a year that'll save you $1,500 on gas", etc.


A silicon valley venture-capitalist got so tired of sales-pitches that were long on narrative that he laid down what he described as the "no adjectives" rule. Here is a little of what this investor said:

I hate adjectives. I don't want to hear that one of the company founders is a "fantastic sales exec." I want to hear that she was Presidents Club the last twelve years running.

I don't want to hear that the product is "revolutionary and paradigm-shifting." I want to hear about the specific features of the product that are differentiated and how.

I don't want to hear that the company has "massive market traction." I want to see a graph of progressive quarterly sales and a giant sales pipeline.

How's that for everyday philosophy.

Pray-in gas station asks God to lower prices

By Nicholas Provenzo from The Rule of Reason,cross-posted by MetaBlog

Add this to the horror file:

Rocky Twyman has a radical solution for surging gasoline prices: prayer.

Twyman - a community organizer, church choir director and public relations consultant from the Washington, D.C., suburbs - staged a pray-in at a San Francisco Chevron station on Friday, asking God for cheaper gas. He did the same thing in the nation's Capitol on Wednesday, with volunteers from a soup kitchen joining in. Today he will lead members of an Oakland church in prayer.

Yes, it's come to that.

"God is the only one we can turn to at this point," said Twyman, 59. "Our leaders don't seem to be able to do anything about it. The prices keep soaring and soaring." [David R. Baker, San Francisco Chronicle]

And if that story astounds you, just wait until you read this (hat tip: Noodlefood):

Jim Porter, chief technical analyst for one of the UK's largest banks . . . uses heliocentric magi astrology to predict the direction of the international financial markets. Millions of pounds worth of commodities, shares and currencies are traded on his command. His decisions may affect the value of your pension, your home, and perhaps decide whether or not you have a job tomorrow.

When I spoke to him late last year, he told me that the position of the planets indicated a 3.2 percent fall in the American markets. The following week they duly fell 3.5 percent.

"My attitude is that if you can test it, and it works, then it's just another tool that you can use to predict the direction of the markets," he says.

"I have tested it and astrology works. Used with other techniques it can give you confidence, and the more confidence you have, the bigger the risks you can take." [Danny Penman - www.newsmonster.co.uk]

Wow. If I had my money in a UK bank, I'd be searching high and low to make sure it wasn't in this guy's bank.

Nudging -- with a Gun

By Gus Van Horn from Gus Van Horn,cross-posted by MetaBlog

Via Arts and Letters Daily is an article about a pair of academics enjoying their day in the sun as proponents of the latest rage in political philosophy (and trauma care), libertarian paternalism. I've commented on this idea before.

What this article caused me to think about was how difficult endemic confusions about the nature of capitalism and the purpose of government make it even to intelligently discuss many valid discoveries and ideas unearthed by academics.

For example, the following is a really clever way to increase the safety of certain stretches of road:

"You see that?" Richard H. Thaler asks as we ride down picturesque Lake Shore Drive in Chicago. Thaler knows the route well. He travels it every day on his commute home from the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business, where he is a professor of behavioral science and economics. At the moment, he is excitedly jabbing his finger toward an approaching curve in the road, telling me that it is the scene of numerous accidents caused by drivers who fail to sufficiently reduce their speed. Then he directs my attention to a grid of lines that appear on the road ahead of us: Evenly spaced at first, as we near the apex of the curve, the lines begin to bunch closer together, which makes us feel like we are speeding up.

As Thaler taps the brakes and gently steers into the bend, he explains how the tightly spaced lines trigger an instinct [sic] that causes drivers to slow down. With evident glee, he notes that Chicago is effectively exploiting -- to society's [sic] benefit -- one of the many ways in which human perception is flawed. Or, as Thaler puts it, drivers are being "nudged" toward safety. [bold added]

For the sake of argument, I merely note before going on with this that man does not possess instincts and that the notion of "benefit" cannot apply to "society", except as a collection of individual men.

The interesting thing here is that this creative use of road markings really is a good idea, and it would likely see legitimate use in a fully free society -- by private firms interested in lowering their liability for automobile accidents on the roads they own or operate and, perhaps, improving their reputation for building and maintaining safe roads.

Unfortunately, everyone is so used to the government owning the roads, and so used to it often footing medical bills that few so much as bat an eye when they hear of the government looking for ways to psychologically manipulate people into doing its bidding. Indeed, in this limited context, it is hard to argue productively against the government taking advantage of such knowledge about human perception.

But more unfortunately, the fact remains that the fundamental nature of the government is that it is the social institution that possesses the sole monopoly on the use of force. This is proper, when the government is delimited to its only legitimate role, protecting individual rights. Sadly, the government has progressively moved away from its proper function over the last few decades.

It is bad enough that the government owns and operates basically all the roads. It is worse that we also have longstanding precedents of it dictating how we are to dispose of our own property and live our own lives, because these precedents are being subordinated to how various busybodies who would substitute their judgement for our own would have us live our lives.

The article puts this attitude too perfectly not to quote it:

[Libertarian paternalism] is a corrective to the longstanding assumption of policy makers that the average person is capable of thinking like Albert Einstein, storing as much memory as IBM's Big Blue, and exercising the willpower of Mahatma Gandhi. That is simply not how people are, they say. In reality human beings are lazy, busy, impulsive, inert, and irrational creatures highly susceptible to predictable biases and errors. That's why they can be nudged in socially desirable directions. [bold added]

This is even more insulting than an argument Ayn Rand rightfully slammed some "pro-capitalists" for making in "defense" of capitalism: that we aren't good enough for a dictatorship!

This leads us to the third -- and the worst -- argument, used by some "conservatives": the attempt to defend capitalism on the ground of man's depravity.

This argument runs as follows: since men are weak, fallible, non-omniscient and innately depraved, no man may be entrusted with the responsibility of being a dictator and of ruling everybody else; therefore, a free society is the proper way of life for imperfect creatures. Please grasp fully the implications of this argument: since men are depraved, they are not good enough for a dictatorship; freedom is all that they deserve; if they were perfect, they would be worthy of a totalitarian state. ("Conservatism: An Obituary", in Capitalism:The Unknown Ideal, pp. 198-199)

Whatever the libertarian paternalists think -- if they do -- of man's moral stature, they clearly regard man as too stupid for freedom.

And so if individuals can't be left up to charting their own courses, what might a "socially desirable" direction look like? No surprise here:

What does a peculiar pattern on the road have to do with fixing the nation's health-care woes, protecting the environment, ... and increasing donations to charity?

Ideally, nothing. Except that the premise that the government should run everything is taken as an unquestioned axiom by so many today. In other words, these velvet-gloved pragmatists are helping the Left achieve what they have been trying to do for decades, but have failed to accomplish every time they have been open about it: Have the government run every aspect of our lives. This is made to look good by such things as the road-striping cited above, which distracts many from the fact -- if they have an inkling of it -- that the government running everything is, ultimately, detrimental to the survival of man as the rational animal.

It will come as no surprise that our featured libertarian paternalists are advising the far-left Obama campaign.

Regardless of how unobtrusive-seeming libertarian paternalists manage to make government interference in our lives, the fact remains that the government has no business eliminating our choices (as it does under medical experiments being conducted without patient consent in America), dictating our choices (as it does under certain "opt-out" organ donation schemes in Europe) or "nudging" us towards any kind of behavior at all.

The purpose of the government is to protect us from having our choices removed by other people, not to violate our rights by doing just that, through stealth or otherwise.

-- CAV

The Right to Sell and Use "Medical" Marijuana (Ottawa Citizen)

By David Holcberg from The Ayn Rand Institute Stories,cross-posted by MetaBlog

The Right to Sell and Use "Medical" Marijuana
By David Holcberg (Ottawa Citizen, April 25, 2008)

Just as the government has no right to dictate what foods we ingest or what books we read, it should have no right to dictate what drugs anyone takes, even if the user is acting irrationally, so long as he does not violate the rights of others.

And in the case of people with terminal diseases, where the use is eminently rational, forcefully preventing them from using drugs that might alleviate their pain and improve their well-being is unconscionably immoral.

Upgrade Your Understanding of Objectivism!

By Greg from NoodleFood,cross-posted by MetaBlog

Ready to engage your brain and get serious about understanding Rand's philosophical system? The Objectivism Seminar is about to go through Leonard Peikoff's presentation of the entire philosophy in Objectivism: the Philosophy of Ayn Rand (OPAR)!

Whether you are new to Rand or a veteran student of Objectivism, our sessions will be valuable to you: we'll go through the entire system, with the experienced folks refining their understanding and ability to articulate and apply the ideas, while the newer folks grapple with the ideas and ask all the right questions. So please don't be shy about jumping in -- the reading and meeting load is light, and you'll be working with a great group of people!

We'll begin the weekly sessions for OPAR on Sunday May 18, 7:30pm Mountain time, reviewing and discussing about two sections per meeting. I'll almost always be moderating to keep us on track. And as we go, each section will have two volunteers at the helm of the discussion (maybe you!): one reviewing the material, and one playing Devil's Advocate to stimulate productive engagement. Everyone else can join in as desired to flesh out our picture of important elements and connections, explanations and applications, and to bring questions and concerns for us all to grapple with.

For more information you can read the original Invitation to The Objectivism Seminar, and you can visit the www.ObjectivismSeminar.com site to get geared up for the journey!

India's Sandalistas

By Gus Van Horn from Gus Van Horn,cross-posted by MetaBlog

During the ride in to my conference one morning this week, I heard an interesting report on NPR about a phenomenon in India that sounded eerily familiar: American-born Indians returning to their ancestral homeland to work for left-wing causes, most notably environmentalism.

"Trash is just trash," says Vinay Prakash, a young businessman who is helping create one of India's first waste-recycling companies, EcoWise Waste Management. "Primarily, we don't have any, any sense of category of waste. It's just waste with us."

But young Indians who grew up in Britain, Australia and America are now arriving here, hanging out with Indian friends, and important conversations about climate change and the [environment] are starting. [bold added]

Completely unmentioned in the short summary page at the NPR website, however, was something from the audio report (available at the above link) that sounded like music to my ears -- a native Indian woman who wouldn't have any of the doomsday global warming hysteria spouted by the "ABCDs", as the American do-gooders are known over there.

If you don't have time for the whole audio, start at about the 4 minute mark for that. There's also a guy who confuses his interviewer by expressing a love of a new mall that sprang up in his area. "This is exactly what [my friends] aspire for," he says. But then, shortly after that, the subject returns to what leftists really find stimulating: garbage.

The phenomenon of Americans -- raised with all the material benefits of capitalism, but without an appreciation for its virtues or its intellectual foundation and with the belief that it is harmful -- going out into the developing world to undermine its progress by implementing bad ideas is hardly new. The same thing happened in Nicaragua back in the eighties:

"I am just back from Central America," proclaimed James Matlack last April on the steps of the Capitol as he tried to get arrested for protesting Contra aid. "I feel we have to keep faith with those who struggle." He is not alone: each year some 15,000 to 20,000 Sandalistas (a name that pays tribute to their footwear) fly south to Managua and then flock to Washington, D.C., claiming spiritual solidarity with the Nicaraguan people.

The biggest differences between the Sandalistas and the ABCDs appear to be that the Sandalistas were, as a group, far less productive than the ABCD's, and that the privileges the Sandalistas enjoyed came much more from the government of the country they were descending upon than those of the ABCDs.

Nevertheless, each group is working to spread and implement ideas from the left that would, in undiluted form, hamstring and ultimately destroy any country that implemented them consistently, including the United States.

-- CAV

"Give Us This Day Our Daily Gasoline"

By Andy from The Charlotte Capitalist,cross-posted by MetaBlog

I normally don't watch the news, but while working out last Sunday morning I saw a FoxNews segment discussing the value of praying to God to make gasoline prices drop. I couldn't find a transcript...

State Department Goodthink

By Edward Cline from The Rule of Reason,cross-posted by MetaBlog

The Associated Press on April 24, under the headline, "'Jihadist' booted from government lexicon," announced that,

"The Bush administration has launched a new front in the war on terrorism, this time targeting language.

"Federal agencies, including the State Department, the Department of Homeland Security and the National Counter Terrorism Center, are telling their people not to describe Islamic extremists as 'jihadists' or 'mujahedeen,' according to documents obtained by [or "leaked" to] The Associated Press. Lingo like 'Islamofascism' is out, too."

So, here is another damning legacy being bequeathed to us by President Bush. He has claimed from the beginning that Islamic terrorism is perpetrated by people who have "hijacked" a "great religion." But he himself has now hijacked and sabotaged language.

The "new front" is in reality a craven retreat from the old one, which is a costly, futile hit-or-miss campaign to capture or kill individuals responsible for terrorism, and not a campaign against states that sponsor terrorism. In this new development, the State Department, certainly with the sanction of the Bush Administration, will allow the Islamists or Islamofascists to advance and take more ground in their campaign to subjugate the West, and in particular, America.

The AP article claims that one document, "originally prepared in March by the Extremist Messaging Branch of the National Counter Terrorism Center [called "Words that Work and Words that Don't: A Guide for Counterterrorism Communication"], was approved for diplomatic use this week by the State Department, which plans to distribute a version to all U.S. embassies, officials said."

What is the rationale for adopting a policy of surrender by expunging "offensive" terms from the nuance-sensitive pragmatist's Newspeak lexicon? According to Matthew Lee, author of the AP article,

"Such words may actually boost support for radicals among Arab and Muslim audiences by giving them a veneer of religious credibility or by causing offense to moderates.

"For example, while Americans may understand 'jihad' to mean 'holy war,' it is in fact a broader concept of the struggle to do good, says the guidance prepared for diplomats and other officials tasked with explaining the war on terror to the public. Similarly, 'mujahedeen,' which means those engaged in jihad, must be seen in its broader context.'"

A Homeland Security report, called "Terminology to Define the Terrorists: Recommendations from American Muslims," claims that

"U.S. officials may be 'unintentionally portraying terrorists, who lack moral and religious legitimacy, as brave fighters, legitimate soldiers or spokesmen for ordinary Muslims.'"

Let us parse some of these statements in the memo and examine the terms they employ. I cannot determine from Matthew Lee's report whether or not he is sympathetic to the report, so any criticisms here are meant for the report's language and not his account of it.

"Such words may actually boost support for radicals among Arab and Muslim audiences by giving them a veneer of religious credibility or by causing offense to moderates."

Islam is radical. It means submission, specifically, to Allah's will. It is a 24/7, 365-days-a-year creed, with no allowance for slackers or sabbaticals from it. Every Muslim is either a passive, rank-and-file adherent, or an active one engaged in applying Islam's tenets in one of two ways: in Arab societies or in insinuating Sharia in Western or non-Muslim societies - or by bomb. The radical activists already have a veneer of moral and religious credibility, which is based on the religion itself. They possess such credibility in the eyes and minds of all Muslims.

There are no moderates in Islam. One accepts the creed in toto, or one abandons or rejects it; there is no halfway agreement or technical dissension within Islam. Its clerics and scholars do not allow it, nor does the Koran condone it. Anyone who attempts to "reform" Islam risks being chopped by its most consistent practitioners.

Conclusion: One federal agency and one cabinet-level bureaucracy propose to "protect" the U.S. by blanking out reality and not identifying our enemies.

"It's not what you say," the AP article quotes from the memorandum, "but what they hear." In other words, reality is what is in other people's minds, not in what you might inadvertently be referring to out there in reality. A "jihadist" is merely someone who is "struggling" to "do good" and to "be good" in Allah's eyes, and not an "extremist" who really isn't practicing his beliefs, but who is "hijacking" a religion and giving it bad name.

The memo urges officials not to "take the bait" by actually saying, "A is A" when Osama bin Laden or al-Qada "affiliates" speak. Never mind that half the world's 1.4 billion Muslims cheered when the Twin Towers were destroyed on 9/11 and bin Laden took credit for it, while the other half silently approved.

"We should offer only minimal, if any, response to their messages. When we respond loudly, we raise their prestige in the Muslim world."

Which means that instead of expressing moral condemnation of terrorists and their murderous acts, we should whimper quietly in a corner, perhaps in the company of a grief counselor. The enhanced "prestige" of the jihadists and Islamofascists is guaranteed if that is to be our "response" to terrorist acts.

The Associated Press goes on to note that Homeland Security's Orwellian Newspeak report treats definitions and meanings as irrelevant.

"Regarding 'jihad,' even if it is accurate to reference the term, it may not be strategic because it glamorizes terrorism, imbues terrorists with religious authority they do not have and damages relations with Muslims around the world."

Which means that accuracy is optional but basically undesirable and potentially embarrassing. Feelings might be hurt. The most astounding imputation is that using the terms "jihad" and "jihadist" (or any other possibly "offensive" defining term) glamorizes terrorism. The author (or authors, the report is very likely the product of a committee) of that document is someone who believes that "glamorizing" Bonnie and Clyde or Al Capone or Adolf Hitler or Yasir Arafat is wrong, not because these killers were evil and undeserving of any suggestion of good, but because it is impractical. After all, we want other bank robbers, gang leaders, dictators and terrorists to like us, or at least not hate us, and calling these killers killers would damage our relations with all the fools who admire them and who would emulate them if they could. What has morality to do with it?

Steven Emerson, commenting on the Homeland Security report on his Investigative Project on Terrorism site on April 25, noted that

"Apparently the report does not say which American Muslims offered the recommendations. But it is virtually identical to a long campaign by the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) and other Islamist groups....So the U.S. government is taking its cues from a group that emanated from a secret Muslim Brotherhood operation in America, one with a stated goal of being 'a kind of grand jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within and "sabotaging" its miserable house by their hands and the hands of the believers so that it is eliminated and God's religion is made victorious over all other religions.'"

"'Don't compromise our credibility,'" quotes the AP article from the Counter Terrorism Center memo, "by using words and phrases that may ascribe benign motives to terrorists."

Given the gelatin principles and marshmallow ethics that govern the fantasy world of the White House, State Department and our foreign policy, what credibility is left to compromise? And who on earth ever ascribed benign motives to al-Qada, Hezbollah, Hamas, the Taliban, or Ahmadinejad's Iran? These are not branches of Rotary International.

The Counter Terrorism Center memo, reports the AP, contains these pointers:

"Never use the terms 'jihadist' or 'mujahedeen' in conversation to describe the terrorists...Calling our enemies 'jihadis' and their movement a global 'jihad' unintentionally legitimizes their actions....Use the terms 'violent extremist' or 'terrorist.' Both are widely understood terms that define our enemies appropriately and simultaneously deny them any level of legitimacy." [Note that the term 'violent extremist" implicitly concedes that Islamic terrorists are acting in the name of Islam, in its most "extreme" interpretation. Apparently the term is widely understood by everyone but the State Department and Homeland Security.]

So, our concern is not with defeating our enemies, but with denying them any "legitimacy" in the eyes of their passive co-religionists, not with destroying those who would destroy us, but with mentally segregating them from Islam. No such thing as a global jihad exists; it's just a lot of bad guys with guns and bombs who claim they are obeying the will of Allah, but we don't need to believe that. Not to worry.

One consequence of adopting this evasive anti-language policy is that it will enable our policymakers to dodge the issue of state-sponsored terrorism. It will permit them to negotiate with Islamic regimes that call for our destruction, not eradicate them. What it will not do is change reality.

One unsung hero who summed up the cause and consequence of that policy is Major Steven Coughlin, U.S. Army Reserve, Military Intelligence, author of a paper, "To Our Great Detriment: Ignoring What Extremists Say About Jihad," submitted in July 2007 to the National Defense Intelligence College. In it, he establishes the crucial links:

"Accepting assurances from moderate Muslims that Islam had nothing to do with the events of 11 September 2001, President Bush made policy statements holding Islam harmless for the actions done by 'extremists.'...As it turns out, the jihadis are able to find a doctrinal basis for their notions of jihad in Islamic law....This legal definition of jihad remains consistent through the 1,400 year span that incorporates the contributions of the authorities relied on in the thesis....Because of our inability to understand the enemy stems from a decision not to know him, this thesis recommends the return to a threat analysis process as the methodology to analyze the enemy's stated doctrine...." [Italics mine, to underscore the epistemological corruption of our policymakers]

One thing that will be learned if that doctrine is ever analyzed is that Islam is a pernicious, evil ideology that cannot be "reformed" without rendering it something other than Islam. Another thing that will be learned is that it must be defeated root and branch, militarily with retaliatory force, and philosophically, through reason.

DC Area Event: Andrew Bernstein on Selfishness in Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead

By Nicholas Provenzo from The Rule of Reason,cross-posted by MetaBlog

What: Andrew Bernstein on Selfishness in Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead

When: Thursday, May 1st, 8pm
Where: University of Maryland, College Park, ASY (Art-Sociology) room 2309

In her novel The Fountainhead, novelist/philosopher Ayn Rand fully dramatizes the moral theory of rational egoism - the theory which holds that it is each person's responsibility to choose his goals and values by use of his independent reasoning mind; and that it is his right to pursue these goals in quest of his own selfish, personal happiness. Dr. Andrew Bernstein explores how the plot and conflict of The Fountainhead convey this theme, including a detailed, in-depth analysis of the five major characters in the story.

The talk is sponsored by the Terrapin Objectivists and admission is free to the general public.

Campus Map: http://transportation.umd.edu/visitor/campusmap.html

History At Our House Update 04/29/08

By Scott Powell from Powell History Recommends,cross-posted by MetaBlog