College students who wish to impress their post-modern professors with their ability to master the art of speaking PoMo might try this site where links at the bottom of the article will take you to a PG (Postmodernism Generator) to help you construct (and maybe deconstruct) essays like the one at the page. The essays are total nonsense, of course, but that seems to be the point.
Thanks for the tip to Uncommon Descent.
The satirical ScrappleFace has some "comments" from Nancy Pelosi on the anniversary of Katrina and a few remarks by President Bush in response to Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's insistence that Iran's nuclear program is purely for peaceful purposes:
One Year Later, Some Katrina Victims Still Slow to Respond
One year after hurricane Katrina, despite an outpouring of billions of dollars from government, church and private charity, and countless teams of volunteers who have come to their aid, many residents of New Orleans have still failed to restore their homes and neighborhoods, or even to clean up the storm-tossed debris, according to House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-CA.
"Katrina was a tragedy in itself," Rep. Pelosi said at a news conference in a neighborhood where moldy furniture still lay in front yards, "but it exposed a tragedy of greater proportions. Some people in this region have lost the spirit of our forefathers - the work ethic, the persistence, the determination to overcome adversity."
The California lawmaker said that when she becomes the next Speaker of the House she plans to use her new prominence to tell Americans to "stop expecting the federal government to protect you from natural disasters, and to bail you out afterward."
When reporters asked what might be learned in the aftermath of Katrina, Rep. Pelosi said there were at least three lessons.
"One: don't buy a house between a lake and the sea that's built below sea level," she said. "Lesson two: if there's a hurricane coming, get out of town. And lesson three: if your home gets wrecked, clean up the mess and start rebuilding - like many people on the Gulf Coast have already done - or at least rip it down, cart off the debris and start over on higher ground."
Rep. Pelosi reserved her harshest comments for people who have "made a lifestyle out of blaming President Bush for everything."
"Were you expecting President Bush to show up at your door and whisk you to safety in his armored SUV?" she asked rhetorically. "After the storm, did you think he was going to skydive out of Air Force One and start shoveling the junk out of your living room? Wake up and smell the personal responsibility. What have you been doing for the last 360 days? Get off your keister, organize your neighbors and get this mess straightened up."
Asked if she was concerned that her remarks might be perceived as "less than compassionate," the lawmaker said, "Compassion does not mean fostering a culture of dependency that leaves people vulnerable and helpless when the inevitable trials come."
"Sometimes the greater part of compassion," she added, "is challenging people to use their God-given abilities in a way that preserves their human dignity and strengthens them for the next crisis."
Bush: B-2 Flights Over Tehran for 'Peaceful Purposes'
Just hours after Iran opened a new plant capable of making plutonium "for peaceful purposes", U.S. President George Bush assured his Iranian counterpart that any B-2 bombers that appear over Tehran in the near future would also serve peaceful purposes.
President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad cut the ribbon on the new heavy-water nuclear plant Saturday as part of a month-long Iranian tribute to the effectiveness of the United Nations.
Mr. Bush hailed Iran's "transparent diplomacy" and said, "I called President Ahmadinejad today to congratulate him, and I told him that if he happens to notice one of them Stealth bombers going over his town at about 600 miles per hour, he can be assured that the pilot has only the best intentions in his heart for world peace."
"There's nothing like the B-2 when it comes to giving peace a chance," Mr. Bush added.
There's more at the link.
Christianity Today has an interesting interview with New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristoff in which Kristoff, no friend of orthodox Christianity, shares his thoughts on how the evangelical wing of Christianity has evolved over the last couple of decades. Surprisingly, perhaps, he's very sympathetic, probably because he sees evangelicals as allies in some of the causes to which he is committed.
At one point, however, he makes this rather patronizing statement, which is as gratuitous as it is misleading:
Christianity has certainly been growing since the early 1980s. But in the past there's been a certain stigma attached to it among some intellectual quarters, because often the Christians have been peasants. It struck me that in the last few years there have been more intellectuals in the cities converting to Christianity.
If Kristoff thinks that the phenomenon of urban intellectuals converting to Christianity is something that's just been happening over the last few years he simply hasn't been paying attention. Christians, unwittingly following the advice of the Italian communist Antonio Gramsci (d. 1937), have been making their long march through the institutions of our culture at least since the sixties. Perhaps what Kristof means is that having begun this process decades ago Christian intellectuals have only recently begun to arrive at the pinnacles of their professions and begun to be noticed by observers such as himself.
Even so, there's much left to do and it seems that there's little time in which to do it. As the culture unravels in its lemming-like pursuit of hedonistic gratification, consumerism and materialism can enough people with a clear vision of what a culture should be move into positions of influence soon enough to forestall what George Will has called our "slide into the sewer"? One hopes ... and prays. If not, given our current trajectory, what will our children's and grandchildren's world be like?
We need to keep marching, and maybe even pick up the pace a little.
Amir Taheri writes that Hezbollah has been severely shaken by the recent unpleasantness with Israel and that the ramifications of this will play out for years into the future:
Why did Nasrallah decide to change his unqualified claim of victory into an indirect admission of defeat? Two reasons.
The first consists of facts on the ground: Hezbollah lost some 500 of its fighters, almost a quarter of its elite fighting force. Their families are now hounding Nasrallah to provide an explanation for "miscalculations" that led to their death.
What angers the families of the "martyrs" is that Hezbollah fighters had not been told that the sheik was starting a war to please his masters in Tehran, and that they should prepare for it.
The fighters found out there was a war only after the Israelis started raining fire on southern Lebanon. In fact, no one - apart from the sheik's Iranian contacts and a handful of Hezbollah security officials linked to Tehran and Damascus - knew that Nasrallah was provoking a war. Even the two Hezbollah ministers in the Lebanese government weren't consulted, nor the 12 Hezbollah members of the Lebanese National Assembly.
The "new Saladin" has also lost most of his medium-range missiles without inflicting any serious damage on Israel. Almost all of Hezbollah's missile launching pads (often placed in mosques, schools and residential buildings) south of the Litani River have been dismantled.
Worse still, the Israelis captured an unknown number of Hezbollah fighters and political officers, including several local leaders in the Bekaa Valley, Khyam and Tyre.
The second reason why Nasrallah has had to backtrack on his victory claims is the failure of his propaganda machine to hoodwink the Lebanese. He is coming under growing criticism from every part of the political spectrum, including the Hezbollah itself.
Last week he hurriedly cancelled a series of victory marches planned for Beirut's Shiite suburbs after leading Shiite figures attacked the move as "unmerited and indecent." Instead, every village and every town is holding typical Shiite mourning ceremonies, known as tarhym (seeking mercy), for the dead.
As the scale of the destruction in the Shiite south becomes more clear, the pro-Hezbollah euphoria (much of it created by Western media and beamed back to Lebanon through satellite TV) is evaporating. Reality is beginning to reassert its rights.
And that could be good news for Lebanon as a nation. It is unlikely that Hezbollah will ever regain the position it has lost. The Lebanese from all sides of the political spectrum are united in their determination not to allow any armed group to continue acting as a state within the state.
Read the rest of Taheri's analysis at the link.
Mike Gene at Telic Thoughts tells us that:
One of the best scientific animations ever can be found here.
It illustrates the process of leukocyte extravasation, but focuses largely on a protein's-eye view of the various events that take place inside the cell. You'll see both the assembly and disassembly of actins and microtubules, the shuttling of the cargo vesicles by the motor protein kinesin, the export of RNA through the nuclear pore complexes, the assembly of ribosomes on the RNA along with translation, the shuttling of ribosomes to the surface of the endoplasmic reticulum, the transport of vesicles to the golgi complex, and the exocytosis and activation of new receptors. Many details are missing and this is only a three minute excerpt from an eight minute animation.
The video is pretty neat although there's no explanation of what you're seeing. Even so, it's a remarkable piece of animation, especially if you appreciate biological beauty and are impressed by the amazing complexity of living cells. It just astonishes me to think that blind, purposeless processes and forces could produce such a marvel of engineering, but it must be so, after all, because people like Richard Dawkins assure me that it is.
For a little background on the clip go here.
The bottom line for much that is going on in the Middle East today may be found at the link below. You may want to read this excerpt serveral times so it really sinks in...
Read the entire article here.
Sojourners magazine ran a column recently by David Cortright which lays out a case for adopting a non-violent strategy against terrorism. As much as I'd like to be assured that there is a non-violent approach that would work against Islamic terrorism, I just don't think he makes a very good case. In fact, I think his argument is exceptionally naive.
He writes:
In the months after 9/11, Jim Wallis challenged peace advocates to address the threat of terrorism. "If nonviolence is to have any credibility," he wrote, "it must answer the questions violence purports to answer, but in a better way." Gandhian principles of nonviolence provide a solid foundation for crafting an effective strategy against terrorism.
Nonviolence is fundamentally a means of achieving justice and combating oppression. Gandhi demonstrated its effectiveness in resisting racial injustice in South Africa and winning independence for India. People-power movements have since spread throughout the world, helping to bring down communism in Eastern Europe and advancing democracy in Serbia, Ukraine, and beyond. The same principles - fighting injustice while avoiding harm - can be applied in the struggle against violent extremism.
At the outset he has caused me some doubt. In every case he cites where pacifist approaches were successful they were employed by oppressed and relatively powerless citizens against their own government. We find ourselves in a very much different situation vis a vis the Islamists. We are not yet governed by the Islamists nor do we have any non-violent tools at our disposal such as passive non-compliance, etc. which would be relevant to our circumstance. Moreover, in the cases Cortright mentions the goals of the oppressors were political whereas the goals of the Islamists are primarily religious. It was not in the interest of the oppressors in Cortright's examples to kill off their citizens, but it is very much in the Islamists interests, as they see it, to kill off all the infidels.
Bush administration officials and many political leaders in Washington view terrorism primarily through the prism of war. Kill enough militants, they believe, and the threat will go away.
I share Cortright's skepticism that we'll ever be able to "kill enough militants" to make the threat disappear entirely. But just because killing terrorists is not a sufficient condition to ending terrorism it doesn't follow that it's not a necessary condition. It may be that without killing at least some terrorists no diplomatic solution will work.
The opposite approach is more effective and less costly in lives. Some limited use of force to apprehend militants and destroy training camps is legitimate, but unilateral war is not.
What does he mean by "unilateral war"? In what sense is the war on terrorism unilateral? He doesn't say, but surely he doesn't mean that we're fighting against an enemy who is not himself fighting us. He must mean that we're alone in fighting the enemy, but if this is his meaning then not only is the statement false but it's absurd. There are many nations which have joined us in this struggle in one way or another and depending on where the conflict is being fought other nations will join us as well. We can't permit ourselves to think that just because the French aren't willing to help that therefore we're all alone. Moreover, even if we were fighting the battle by ourselves his statement is patently absurd. If one is fighting for one's life one doesn't give up the fight just because no one else will help.
In the three years since the invasion of Iraq, the number of major terrorist incidents in the world has increased sharply. War itself is a form of terrorism.
Here Mr. Cortright is succumbing to the temptation to indulge in rhetorical excess. Terrorism, ab defino, is the deliberate use of violence against innocent civilians in order to effect a change in their government's conduct. The United States is not, as a matter of policy, engaging in deliberate violence against the citizens of Iraq or any other country. War is only a form of terrorism if terrorism is defined as an activity in which people are deliberately killed. This definition, however, would have the unhappy consequence of making regular police work terrorism.
Using military force to counter terrorism is like pouring gasoline on a fire. It ignites hatred and vengeance and creates a cycle of violence that can spin out of control. A better strategy is to take away the fuel that sustains the fire. Only nonviolent methods can do that, by attempting to resolve the underlying political and social factors that give rise to armed violence.
It could be as easily argued, though, that the refusal to fight back against terrorism only emboldens those who would not otherwise join with the terrorists to do so and thereby increases the number of terrorists with which one must contend. Cortright's reasoning is the same that every bully hopes his victim will adopt: No matter what the bully does, no matter how savagely he beats his prey, the victim should not strike back in self-defense because that will only make the bully angrier.
The most urgent priority for countering terrorism, experts agree, is multilateral law enforcement to apprehend perpetrators and prevent future attacks. Cooperative law enforcement and intelligence sharing among governments have proven effective in reducing the operational capacity of terrorist networks. Governments are also cooperating to block financing for terrorist networks and deny safe haven, travel, and arms for terrorist militants. These efforts are fully compatible with the principles of nonviolence.
No doubt these methods must be employed, but if Mr. Cortright seriously believes that police work alone will stop Osama bin Laden and other terrorists then he's deluding himself. Consider Iraq. The police in Iraq would be overwhelmed by the insurgents were they not backed by military force. What police force on earth would be able to remove the Taliban from Afghanistan or disarm Hezbollah or apprehend Osama bin Laden or Abu al Zarqawi?
Terrorism is fundamentally a political phenomenon, concluded the U.N. Working Group on Terrorism in 2002. To overcome the scourge, "it is necessary to understand its political nature as well as its basic criminality and psychology." This means addressing legitimate political grievances that terrorist groups exploit - such as the Israel-Palestine dispute, repressive policies by Arab governments, and the continuing U.S. military occupation in Iraq.
These deeply-held grievances generate widespread political frustration and bitterness in many Arab and Muslim countries, including among people who condemn terrorism and al Qaeda's brutal methods. As these conditions fester and worsen, support rises for the groups that resist them. Finding solutions to these dilemmas can help to undercut support for jihadism. The strategy against terrorism requires undermining the social base of extremism by driving a wedge between militants and their potential sympathizers. The goal should be to separate militants from their support base by resolving the political injustices that terrorists exploit.
Reading this causes me to wonder if Mr. Cortright really understands the nature of the threat we're facing today. By far the predominant form of contemporary terrorism is perpetrated by Muslims, and it is not motivated primarily by politics, it's motivated by religion. The radical Islamists wish to spread their religion throughout the globe and to purge the world of all non-Muslim influences. To the extent that they have a political grievance it is that Israel exists and must be eradicated. Everything else Mr. Cortright mentions is, in their minds, trivial by comparison. The solution to these "dilemmas" is not hard to discern, of course. We can all simply convert to Islam and abandon Israel. That is the only non-violent solution that will appease the Islamo-fascists which plague the world today.
A nonviolent approach should not be confused with appeasement or a defeatist justification of terrorist crimes.
William James once observed that "a difference, in order to be a difference, has to make a difference". I see no practical difference between appeasement and what Mr. Cortright is advocating in his article. By refusing to fight them where they are we would be giving them exactly what they want. The situation would be similar to that of a football game where one team plays by the rules but only plays defense whereas the other team plays by whatever rules it wishes and plays only offense. The prospects of the defense being successful aren't encouraging.
The point is not to excuse criminal acts but to learn why they occur and use this knowledge to prevent future attacks.
But we know why they occur. The terrorists resent our very existence. They loathe it and believe they're doing God's will by killing us. The sooner Mr. Cortright himself realizes this the sooner he'll realize how hopeless are his suggestions for how to address the threat.
A nonviolent strategy seeks to reduce the appeal of militants' extremist methods by addressing legitimate grievances and providing channels of political engagement for those who sympathize with the declared political aims. A two-step response is essential: determined law enforcement pressure against terrorist criminals, and active engagement with affected communities to resolve underlying injustices.
And if that doesn't work, what then? Mr. Cortright proposes we throw the terrorists all in jail. How are we going to do that without moving militarily into the countries which harbor them? I don't think warrants for the arrest of terrorists in Saddam's Iraq, or Mohammad Omar's Afghanistan, or Kim Jong Il's North Korea or Ahmadinejad's Iran would put very many killers behind bars. What police force on earth is capable of acting beyond the borders of its own nation? And what's the difference anyway between a police force acting beyond its nation's borders and a military force?
Ethicist Michael Walzer wrote, counterterrorism "must be aimed systematically at the terrorists themselves, never at the people for whom the terrorists claim to be acting." Military attacks against potential sympathizers are counterproductive and tend to drive third parties toward militancy. Lawful police action is by its nature more discriminating and is more effective politically because it minimizes predictable backlash effects.
Lawful police action? What's lawful when we're talking about the dysfunctional states mentioned above? Would Mr. Cortright have urged that the British send their police to arrest Adolf Hitler in 1940?
Mr. Cortright might recall what happened the last time we did what he recommends. After 9/11 we demanded that the Taliban turn over Osama bin Laden. They refused to do so. So, what does he suggest we should have done next? Should we simply have given up the attempt to capture him?
I'm certain Mr. Cortright means well and that he sincerely believes the things he writes, but his argument fairly drips with naivete. I wish it weren't so because I agree with him that violence can often be counterproductive. Unfortunately, in the present conflict it's the only realistic alternative, for both the West and for Israel, to total abject surrender to the Islamist jihad being waged against us. We're in a war for the survival of our nation and our culture. Our enemy is implacable, and a war like that can't be won solely with police officers and arrest warrants.
Karen Armstrong of the Guardian writes a column in which she makes a plea for better understanding of the different religious worldviews that are floating about in the global marketplace of ideas. After subjecting us to a dose of postmodern hocus-pocus which she employs, as best as I can tell, to make the point that truth is often a complicated thing, she closes with this:
We must, therefore, make a concerted attempt to listen critically to all the stories out there in order to gain a more panoptic vision. This includes our own cultural narrative. Our modernity has liberated many of us, but it has disenfranchised others. Counter-narratives that question the myth of western freedom must also be heard, because they represent a crucial element in the conflicted, tragic whole.
I have a couple of questions: Why is it that we're always the ones who have to try to understand other people's "stories"? Shouldn't Ms Armstrong's plea for understanding be directed at the Islamists who are undertaking to purge the globe of Western civilization? Shouldn't they be expected to show greater appreciation for our "myth"?
Second, when the "other" starts flying hijacked airplanes into our skyscrapers isn't the time for acquiring "a more panoptic vision" and appreciating their "context" pretty much at an end? Or are we supposed to keep "affirming" their "narrative" right up to the moment when they've sliced our head from our shoulders?
Take any critic of the administration's Middle East policy, and, after he has gone through the entire list of what the Bushies have done wrong over the past five years, ask them, well, what should the president have done before, and what should he do now? Invariably, the answer will be that he should rely more upon diplomacy and negotiations. The administration should have sat down and talked to Saddam, to Ahmedinejad, to Hezbollah, to the Palestinians, to the North Koreans. They should sit down now and talk with the Europeans and get them to put more economic pressure on the bad guys in the Middle East. The Bush administration, we will be told, is absolutely inept when it comes to the art of diplomacy. And how does the critic know this? Because our diplomatic efforts have obviously not worked.
When talks fail to bring about the desired result, as they inevitably will when dealing with Islamo-fascists, the critics' assumption is that it's our fault. It's also our fault that the French and Germans didn't go along with the invasion of Iraq because we couldn't persuade them that that would be better than raking in billions in oil for food money. It's also our fault if Ahmadinejad, convinced that he's riding the crest of history's wave, insists on provoking Armageddon. It must be our fault because all these people are reasonable and want peace. Only Bush wants war.
If the matter weren't so serious the response would be amusing. It assumes that the administration hasn't been talking, and it assumes that the other side is comprised of reasonable people who are willing to accept compromise. It assumes that the other side will make concessions, even if there's no threat of force hovering over their heads, if only we can convince them that we mean well. That none of this has come to pass can only mean, in their minds, that we've failed to persuade them of our good intentions and that our team must be negligent or incompetent negotiators.
Should we ask the critic what we should do if, for whatever reason, talks fail to convince the peace-loving Iranians and North Koreans to abandon their nuclear programs, or fail to persuade Hezbollah and Hamas to live in peace with Israel, the response will be more irrelevant, rambling, recapituations of Bush's failings as a negotiator. In other words, the critic really has no answer to this question.
Some of them might hint that what Bush needs to do, in Iraq at least, is send in more troops, but although this might indeed be an appropriate measure, few critics, especially on the left, really want him to follow through with it. They'll use inadequate troop strength as a club with which to beat him up politically until he decides to follow their advice, and then they'll accuse him of pouring more resources into a failed cause, or of diverting attention from the real war on terror, and why haven't we caught Osama yet, etc.
The conversation follows this or a similar path because critics know they can't say what they're really thinking which is that they actually want the president to do nothing at all. They want the United States to give up its power, both military and economic, and become Sweden or Switzerland. They know that saying this would be political suicide for their party, and so they stick to their criticisms and mumble through their vague and unhelpful recommendations if they must.
This is why the left cannot be entrusted with the reins of power. They have no solutions to the most pressing issue of the day and don't really want to have to wrestle with it. The seeming indefiniteness of the war on terror is a great tool to use to diminish Republicans in the eyes of the voters, but the critics on the left have no idea what they would do differently, aside from surrender, appeasement, and trying to convince the Osama bin Ladens of the world that we really mean them no harm, that we want to give peace a chance, and why can't we just all get along.
Chris Muir, in his Day by Day political cartoon strip, illustrates the point:
Like many Europeans in 1938, not a few of the president's most vocal critics are living in a fantasy world, a world as they'd like it to be, but, unfortunately, not the world as it is.
I haven't written much on the Valerie Plame business because I thought it was very much ado about nothing much at all. The Bushaphobes have been frothing at the mouth for three years now hoping and praying (well...maybe not praying) that somebody, preferably the detestable Karl Rove, would take a hard fall for what always seemed to me to be a very trivial peccadillo.
Now, after a fortune in tax dollars has been squandered on a feckless investigation into a non-crime, it's all over and the Bush-despisers are crestfallen and stultified yet again. The major malefactor appears to be Ms Plame's husband, Joseph Wilson, who seems to be an almost pathological prevaricator, and the source of the infamous leak about her identity is a State Department official, Richard Armitage, who vigorously opposed the Iraq war and is thus one of the left's angels of light.
Since no administrative heads will be rolling - except the relatively minor noggin of Scooter Libby, who I predict President Bush will now pardon - and since the villains are all Bushaphobes in good standing, the breathless media hyperventilations have suddenly flatlined, and the story is sinking as quietly as a stone in the ocean.
The Washington Post offers perhaps the best eulogy:
[I]t now appears that the person most responsible for the end of Ms. Plame's CIA career is Mr. Wilson. Mr. Wilson chose to go public with an explosive charge, claiming -- falsely, as it turned out -- that he had debunked reports of Iraqi uranium-shopping in Niger and that his report had circulated to senior administration officials. He ought to have expected that both those officials and journalists such as Mr. Novak would ask why a retired ambassador would have been sent on such a mission and that the answer would point to his wife. He diverted responsibility from himself and his false charges by claiming that President Bush's closest aides had engaged in an illegal conspiracy. It's unfortunate that so many people took him seriously.
Indeed. Well, now MSNBC's Keith Olberman can go back to bashing Bill O'Reilly, and meanwhile we'll await Hardball's Chris Matthews' apology to Karl Rove for having so gleefully anticipated his indictment.
The Israelis don't need many more reasons not to trust the U.N. to do the job they're supposed to do in Lebanon, but if they did need a reason maybe this would be it:
During the recent month-long war between Hezbollah and Israel, U.N. "peacekeeping" forces made a startling contribution: They openly published daily real-time intelligence, of obvious usefulness to Hezbollah, on the location, equipment, and force structure of Israeli troops in Lebanon.
UNIFIL--the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon, a nearly 2,000-man blue-helmet contingent that has been present on the Lebanon-Israel border since 1978--is officially neutral. Yet, throughout the recent war, it posted on its website for all to see precise information about the movements of Israeli Defense Forces soldiers and the nature of their weaponry and materiel, even specifying the placement of IDF safety structures within hours of their construction. New information was sometimes only 30 minutes old when it was posted, and never more than 24 hours old.
Meanwhile, UNIFIL posted not a single item of specific intelligence regarding Hezbollah forces. Statements on the order of Hezbollah "fired rockets in large numbers from various locations" and Hezbollah's rockets "were fired in significantly larger numbers from various locations" are as precise as its coverage of the other side ever got.
So much for Kofi's Kids as disinterested peace-keepers.
The American Thinker informs us of an article in the Washington Times that suggests that Israel is moving closer to war with Iran:
In what must be an officially approved leak, the London Telegraph reports that Israel has appointed a top general to oversee a war against Iran, prompting speculation that it is preparing for possible military action against Tehran's nuclear program. ... Maj. Gen. Elyezer Shkedy, Israel's air force chief, will be overall commander for the "Iran front," military sources told the London Sunday Telegraph.
This must be a signal to the Iranians - and to the rest of the world, especially Europe and America: If you don't stop the Khomeiniacs, we will. The Telegraph is often used by British intelligence, and it is friendlier to Israel than other European media. It is read in the United States.
Go to the link for the rest of the story. Israel apparently believes it has one year to decide either to accept a nuclear Iran or to do what it can to prevent it.
The "entertainment" left has plumbed new depths in their forthcoming televison docudrama based on the hypothetical assassination of President Bush. I can't imagine a similar series being produced during the tenure of President Clinton. If one were to be aired the outrage from the Democrats would have been incandescent, and rightly so. The more used to the idea of killing a specific human being we become, the more likely someone will take it into his/her head to attempt it.
There was a time when people thought that murdering a president was a topic that decent folk simply would not dream of talking about out of a respect for the value of human life and prevailing standards of taste, and also so as not to incite the crazies. But that time is past. The present-day secular left, never known to be constrained by taste or consideration for the well-being of political figures they despise, or, for that matter, the Biblical mandate to love one's neighbor, seems instead to be positively obsessed with the idea of killing George Bush.
Michelle Malkin offers the documentation here. It's pretty revolting, actually, but the idea behind the new docudrama will doubtless be boffo with the gentle folk at the Daily Kos and Democratic Underground.
A friend directed me to this article at the very liberal Huffington Post. I hasten to point out that the writer, Russell Shaw, is not endorsing a terror attack on the United States and is at pains to express his own revulsion at such a thought. Nevertheless, his speculations and reasoning seem to draw him, against his will, in the direction of hoping for one and they demand some critical examination. Mr. Shaw writes:
What if another terror attack just before this fall's elections could save many thousand-times the lives lost? I start from the premise that there is already a substantial portion of the electorate that tends to vote GOP because they feel that Bush has "kept us safe," and that the Republicans do a better job combating terrorism.
If an attack occurred just before the elections, I have to think that at least a few of the voters who persist in this "Bush has kept us safe" thinking would realize the fallacy they have been under. If 5% of the "he's kept us safe" revise their thinking enough to vote Democrat, well, then, the Dems could recapture the House and the Senate and be in a position to:
Block the next Supreme Court appointment, one which would surely result in the overturning of Roe and the death of hundreds if not thousands of women from abortion-prohibiting states at the hands of back-alley abortionists;
Mr. Shaw is an example of a man so blinded by ideology that he can't see the fallacies in his own argument even though they're as obvious as the noon-day sun.
How does he know, for instance, that a terrorist attack would not have the opposite effect of driving more people toward the GOP? He doesn't. And what makes him put scare quotes around "he's kept us safe" as if he thinks this is an absurd notion? What makes him think that the current administration hasn't kept us safe from terrorist attacks? Have there been any such attacks in the U.S. since 9/11? And where does he get the idea that overturning Roe would result in the deaths of thousands of women? What statistics is he relying on for this conjecture? Further, could it not be just as plausibly argued that overturning Roe would save the lives of millions of babies?
Nevertheless, Mr. Shaw, having demonstrated that he's not interested in something so inconvenient as competing facts, is just starting to gather his rhetorical momentum:
[This would place the Democrats] in a position to elevate the party's chances for a regime change in 2008. A regime change that would:
Save hundreds of thousands of American lives by enacting universal health care;
How does he know that granting universal health care would result in "hundreds of thousands of lives" saved? Where does he get that figure? How does he know that the decline in medical effectiveness that has accompanied state-run systems elsewhere around the world wouldn't also occur here with the result that we experience long-term increase in the number of people who die earlier than they otherwise would have?
Save untold numbers of lives by pushing for cleaner air standards that would greatly reduce heart and lung diseases;
It could be argued that the expenses incurred by forcing compliance with tougher emissions standards would result in companies laying off thousands of employees and thus thrusting these workers into a poverty which would shorten their lives and that of their children. Mr. Shaw offers no reason for thinking this would be unlikely.
More enthusiastically address the need for mass transit, the greater availability of which would surely cut highway deaths;
Democrats were in control of the White House throughout the nineties and never made mass transit a priority. Democrats also control the governorships and or legislatures of many states. Do these states have a better and more effective system of mass transit than states controlled by Republicans? It's not clear that Democrats would be any more effective at implementing mass transit systems than would Republicans.
Enact meaningful gun control legislation that would reduce crime and cut fatalities by thousands a year;
Gun control legislation actually has the opposite effect wherever it is tried (see John Lott's More Guns, Less Crime). The only way to eliminate gun crime is to deny criminals access to guns and the only way to do that is to eliminate guns from the face of the planet. That, of course, will never happen. Moreover, neither of the last two Democratic candidates for president supported gun control, why does Mr. Shaw think the next one will?
Fund stem cell research that could result in cures saving millions of lives;
Mr. Shaw has no evidence to support the claim that stem cell research could save "millions" of lives. Moreover, there's no law prohibiting private funding of stem cell research now, nor is there a prohibition against federal funding of adult stem cell research. This statement is pure flummery reminiscent of John Edwards' assertion in the last election campaign that if John Kerry is elected president Christopher Reeve would get out of his wheel chair and walk.
Boost the minimum wage, helping to cut down on poverty which helps spawn violent crime and the deaths that spring from those acts;
Be less inclined to launch foolish wars, absence of which would save thousands of soldiers' lives- and quite likely moderate the likelihood of further terror acts.
The most foolish war in our history, Vietnam, was launched by two Democratic presidents, John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson. Shaw's implication that the war in Iraq has increased terrorism is simply not supported by the evidence. We went to war in 2001 in Afghanistan and since then there has been no terrorist attack on our soil. That doesn't mean there won't be in the future, but it certainly lends greater support to the belief that what moderates terror attacks is fighting terrorists in their house rather than ours.
I am not proud of myself for even considering the notion that another terror attack that costs even one American life could ever be considered anything else but evil and hurtful. And I know that when I weigh the possibility that such an attack- that might, say, kill 100- would prevent hundreds of thousands of Americans from dying who otherwise would- I am exhibiting a calculating cold heart diametrically opposed to everything I stand for as a human being. A human being, who, just so you know, is opposed to most wars and to capital punishment.
Of course it's possible that a terrorist attack would drive voters to the Democrats, as Mr. Shaw predicts, and it's possible that a Democratic administration would do the things Shaw assumes they would, but then anything is possible. No serious thinker would base an ethical question of this magnitude on mere possibility. It's possible, after all, that if someone burned down Mr. Shaw's house the whole nation would experience rapturous paroxysms of profound joy, but the bare possibility is certainly no justification for the arson.
But in light of the very real potential of the next two American elections to solidify our growing American persona as a warlike, polluter-friendly nation with repressive domestic tendencies and inadequate health care for so many tens of millions, let me ask you this. Even if only from the standpoint of a purely intellectual exercise in alternative future history:
If you knew us getting hit again would launch a chain of transformative, cascading events that would enable a better nation where millions who would have died will live longer, would such a calculus have any moral validity?
This question is to "intellectual exercise" what raising a donut to one's mouth is to physical exercise. Nor does his argument rise to the level of a "calculus". It's based entirely upon ungrounded speculation and suppositions. It boils down to this: If the deaths of a hundred innocent citizens could conceivably, maybe, if everything went right and counter to all of our experience, bring about the longer lives of tens of thousands, even millions, of others, it would be moral to allow, or hope for, the hundred to be murdered.
Perhaps the most succinct refutation of this bizarre piece of moral analysis is this: Keeping in mind that the benefits are only possible, and not even close to being demonstrably probable, Mr. Shaw might be asked whether he would be willing to volunteer one of his own children to be one of the terrorists' victims. If, as I would be willing to wager, he would not be at all agreeable to such a sacrifice, even though there may be a slim chance that it might secure a very great good for others, then what makes him think that his suggestion of sacrificing other peoples' children has any "moral validity" at all?
Well, we're pretty confident you won't find this tune by Pearl Jam on too many Darwinians' ipods:
Go here for the video and here for the lyrics (which are pretty much unintelligible on the video).
This is not the sort of direction, I wouldn't think, that Darwinians want people to think materialistic evolution takes us in.
Thanks for the tip to Uncommon Descent.
UPI informs of this development at the Vatican which seems to indicate that Rome is soon going to clarify its stance on the ID/Darwinism controversy:
Pope Benedict XVI may reportedly embrace the theory of intelligent design, possibly heralding a fundamental shift in the Vatican's view of evolution.
Philosophers, scientists and other intellectuals are to meet with the pope this week at his summer palace near Rome to discuss the issue, The Guardian reported Monday.
Advocates of the theory argue the universe and living things are so complex they must be a product of intelligent design rather than natural selection. Critics say the theory is a disguise for creationism.
Vatican officials last week announced evolution and creation would be the topics for this year's meeting of the pope's Schulerkreis -- a group consisting mainly of his former doctoral students that has been gathering annually since the late 1970s, The Guardian said.
Pope Benedict raised the issue during the inaugural sermon of his pontificate, saying, "We are not the accidental product, without meaning, of evolution."
HT: Uncommon Descent.
A friend linked me to this column by Tony Norman in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. According to what Norman has been able to discover the presidential reading regimen is quite impressive. In fact, it seems almost unbelievably impressive:
The list of 60 books Mr. Bush is alleged to have read this year reveals an intellect of Promethean scale and ambition. He's read 10 books more than his chief adviser, Karl Rove, who presumably continues to run the country with Mr. Cheney while Mr. Bush wanders the aisles of Barnes & Noble.
A partial list of the books Mr. Bush is alleged to have devoured between mountain biking and weight lifting two hours a day includes Edvard Radzinsky's "Alexander II: The Last Great Tsar," John Barry's "The Great Influenza: The Epic Story of the Deadliest Plague in History," Geraldine Brooks' "Nine Parts of Desire: The Hidden World of Islamic Women" and "Mao: The Unknown Story" by Jung Chang and Jon Halliday.
Mr. Bush also put away three books about Lincoln this year -- "Manhunt: The 12-Day Chase for Lincoln's Killer" by James Swanson, "Lincoln: A Life of Purpose and Power" by Richard Carwardine and "Lincoln's Greatest Speech: The Second Inaugural" by Ronald White Jr.
Mr. Bush's summer reading list is formidable, clocking in at 25 books. The list includes the three Lincoln books previously mentioned, "After Fidel: The Inside Story of Castro's Regime and Cuba's Next Leader" by Brian Latell, "Revolutionary Characters: What Made the Founders Different" by Gordon Wood, "Mayflower: A Story of Courage, Community and War" by Nathaniel Philbrick, "Polio: An American Story" by David Oshinsky and "Clemente: The Passion and Grace of Baseball's Last Hero" by David Maraniss.
And while contemporary writers exert a powerful pull on Mr. Bush's imagination, he also managed to reread Shakespeare's two greatest tragedies, "Hamlet" and "Macbeth" just to keep his literary allusions sharp and pungent.
Frankly, if this list is true (and I have no reason to doubt the veracity of the White House press office), Mr. Bush has fallen off the wagon of American anti-intellectualism that has served him so well and is now flagrantly engaged in the greatest presidential reading spree in the republic's history.
Well, I'm afraid I'm skeptical, but be that as it may, I wish that somewhere in the midst of his prodigious consumption of the printed word the president would find time to read Pat Buchanan's State of Emergency: The Third World Invasion and Conquest of America. If he did he would learn the following:
The list goes on. Buchanan's book weighs every aspect of the immigration controversy - the argument that we need the workers, that they will assimilate, and so on - and finds them all wanting. Given the urgency of the topic State of Emergency may well be the most important book of our time, and President Bush would do well to read it. If for no other reason he should read it to discover why many of his supporters are growing increasingly disillusioned with his lack of leadership on this issue and his egregious failure to perform his sworn constitutional duty to uphold the laws of this nation.
Sunday I posted some comments on an essay by Heather Mac Donald which has triggered a debate among conservatives on the importance of Christianity to a conservative worldview. I'd like in this post to consider the argument she makes in her follow-up piece. Ms Mac Donald notes in this second column that the fundamental question, the "threshold question", is whether Christianity is true. She believes it is not, and the reason she gives is that she believes that the existence of a loving and just God is simply incompatible with the evil that afflicts our world:
The most important characteristics of the Christian God, as I understand them, are his love of man and his justice. If one were to posit a god who is capricious, ironic, absent-minded, depraved, or completely unknowable, I'd be on board. Any one of those characteristics would comport with a deity superintending the world as I see it. But not the idea, as a Bush administration publicist put it to me, that every one of us is "precious in God's eyes."
In the course of laying out her argument, which she does quite persuasively, she writes many things to which Christians would do well to give careful consideration, but she does not, in my opinion, successfully defend her claim that the presence of evil refutes belief in the Christian God.
In fact, Ms Mac Donald is really attempting two arguments in her paper. One argument is against the inconsistent manner in which many Christians conceive of God's action in the world, an argument with which I concur. The other is an argument that seeks to show that the manifest evil of the world is incompatible with the existence of a God who is loving and just.
The nut of this second argument is found here, I think, where she writes:
Let me take a banal example. As I write this, the Los Angeles Times has a small item on a thoroughly unremarkable traffic accident. A 27-year-old man in Los Angeles misread a traffic signal, and drove his car into an oncoming Blue Line Metro Train. He and his sister were killed; his 7-year-old son and his grandmother were seriously injured.
Now imagine that a human father had behaved towards the occupants of the car as our Divine Father did. That is: a) He knew that his children would be mowed down by a train; b) he had the capacity to avert the disaster through any number of, for him, quite simple means; and c) he chose to do nothing. No one would call this father's deliberate and possibly criminal passivity "love." Instead, we would deem such a father a monster and banish him from our midst. Yet when God behaves in just this way, we remain firm in our conviction that he loved the occupants of that car, and that each was "precious" in his eyes.
Ms Mac Donald is implying that there is a contradiction contained in the conflation of the beliefs that God is able to prevent evil and wants to prevent evil with the manifest fact that evil exists. Actually, this was a popular argument among atheists ever since Epicurus sketched it out over 2000 years ago up until the 1960s when just about everyone finally realized that, in point of fact, there actually is no contradiction. God might well be omnipotent and omnibenevolent and still have a reason, nonetheless, for permitting evil. Such reasons might include a commitment to honor our autonomy and to grant us the freedom necessary to make us more than robots. Or it could be that preventing some evils would unleash even greater evils. There may be other reasons as well which lie beyond our ken, but the point is that as long as it's possible that God have such reasons the argument that His existence is logically incompatible with evil just doesn't work.
Let's suppose, hypothetically, that the God Ms Mac Donald accuses of being able to prevent the train crash, unbeknownst to us cries out in profound anguish as this terrible tragedy unfolds. It breaks His heart to see it happen, to know from all eternity that it is going to happen, and yet, although He could intervene to suspend the laws of nature and prevent it from happening, He is constrained by considerations, perhaps self-imposed, of which we are unaware to let the event unfold. Suppose, too, that the grief God experiences in allowing this terrible tragedy far exceeds that of any experienced by even the family of the victims. Suppose, finally, that God quickly folds those victims into His bosom and embraces them in love and joy forever. Just suppose that something like this happens. If so, would Ms Mac Donald now say that the God of Christianity is a "monster"? Yet isn't this a thoroughly Christian view of the God of the Bible?
It could be, however, that Ms Mac Donald is trying to say something a little less strong than that there is a contradiction between evil and the existence of the Christian God. Perhaps she's making the case that the existence of evil makes the existence of a loving and just God not logically impossible but rather highly improbable. God's existence, she might be taken to mean, is unlikely given the facts she lays out in her essay.
Now the facts that she sets forth certainly must be allowed to count as prima facie evidence against the existence of God, and if these were all the facts there are then we might agree that it seems indeed that God, if He exists, at least appears to be either uncaring and unjust, or capricious, or inscrutable. But there is more to consider here than just the argument based upon the world's horrors before we conclude that the existence of God is unlikely.
Consider the following example. Someone tells you that they know a Chinese man who is over seven feet tall. You, having seen lots of Chinese men, none of whom is much over six feet, are very dubious. But suppose you then learn that this person is a professional basketball player, a center in the NBA. These additional facts might soften your doubt and make you reconsider. The fact that he's Chinese may count against him being seven feet tall, but the other facts would count in favor of it.
Likewise, the existence of so much apparently gratuitous suffering, grief, pain, and terror count, on the face of things, against the existence of the Christian God, but then we should throw into the pot the classical arguments for God's existence - the cosmological and ontological arguments, and Kant's moral argument, for instance - as well as the religious experience of millions of believers, the fine-tuning of the universe which gives every appearance of having been designed, the existential argument that concludes that the existence of God is the best explanation for man's yearning for meaning, as well as for a ground for morality, dignity, human rights, justice, and for his desire to survive his own physical death, etc. We should also stir into the mix the irreducible complexity of some biological structures and systems and the ubiquity of information throughout the biosphere, both of which point prima facie to an intelligent author of life. We should add, too, the implausibility of a naturalistic origin of life and the phenomenom of consciousness. All of these must be counted in support of the proposition that God exists.
We might then reason that if God does indeed exist the testimony of the Scriptures and the internal witness of the Holy Spirit might also count as evidence that this God is both loving and just.
All of these lines of evidence may have explanations other than God, of course, but the point is that the evil we find ourselves surrounded by might also have an explanation other than the one Ms Mac Donald assumes.
She is right that Christians often respond to instances of evil much too glibly and with an unseemly assurance that they understand God's doings, but the shortcomings of some theists is hardly an argument against the existence of God.
One final note. At one point in her essay she writes this:
Religious institutions and beliefs are, however, human creations. They grow out of man's instinct for system and order, as well as out of the desire for life beyond death and a divine intervener in human affairs. Our striving for justice is one of the great human attributes. Far from imitating a divine model, man's every effort to dispense justice is a battle against the randomness that rules the natural world.
A believer might ask Ms Mac Donald from whence she derives her notion of justice. If she's correct that there is no transcendent source of moral truth then her concept of justice is perforce a matter of her own subjective preferences. Justice for one person may be, as Plato has Thrasymachus say, merely the interest of the stronger (or the ruler). For another person justice may be treating other people with dignity and kindness. If there is no God there's no way to decide that one definition is better or any more right than the other. The correct definition is simply whichever one Ms Mac Donald likes the best. In other words, if there's no transcendent standard for justice, Ms Mac Donald's last two sentences above are nonsensical.
The Washington Post has a must-read account by Laura Blumenfeld of an Israeli air-strike against Hamas leadership in 2003. It is especially important that those who suspect Israel of wanton killing of Palestinians read this article all the way to the end.
I wonder if the Palestinians put themselves through the same agonizing moral struggle before they launch their suicide bombers and rocket attacks against the Israelis. It's hard to imagine.
There's much of interest in this report in the British Daily Mail on a recent poll taken in that country. Here are some of the findings:
Most Britons now believe the Muslim faith is a threat to Western democracy, a new survey has revealed. A YouGov poll shows that increasing numbers think "a large proportion" of British Muslims feel no loyalty to the UK and are ready to condone or even carry out terrorist atrocities, while far more people feel threatened by Islam itself than was the case five years ago.
The starkest finding was that 53 per cent of people now agreed that Islam itself - not just fundamentalist groups - posed a threat to Western liberal democracy, while only 34 per cent disagreed. A year ago the proportions were evenly balanced, and in 2001 only 32 per cent of people felt threatened by the Muslim faith while 63 per cent believed there was no threat.
The proportion of respondents who agreed that "a large proportion of British Muslims feel no sense of loyalty to this country and are prepared to condone or even carry out acts of terrorism" has almost doubled since last year from 10 to 18 per cent. At the same time the proportion stating that "practically all British Muslims" are law-abiding and deplore terrorism has dropped from 23 to 16 per cent.
More people now want MI5 and the Police to focus their counter-terrorist efforts on Muslims - up from 60 to 65 per cent in a year - while fewer are concerned about the impact on race relations -down from 30 to 23 per cent.
My first reaction to this story is surprise that the percentages were as modest as they are. I wonder how many respondents would have answered otherwise but didn't wish to seem to the pollster as being "illiberal".
The poll results came as Communities Secretary Ruth Kelly admitted that the doctrine of multi-culturalism - the cornerstone of left wing immigration and race policies for the past 20 years - may have been wrong, and contributed to isolation and alienation between communities.
Launching the Government's new Commission on Integration and Cohesion - first promised by ministers last year following the July 7 bombings - she admitted that encouraging immigrants to retain their own culture rather than to integrate with wider society may have "encouraged separateness."
This just goes to show that even a government bureaucrat can have the scales fall from her eyes if the evidence smacking her in the head hits her hard enough. It has long been an argument in this country that multiculturalism is counter-productively divisive. When we emphasize the things that make us different rather than those things that make us alike we should not be surprised that our communities remain balkanized and suspicious of one another. We should not be surprised, when we tell immigrants that they need not worry about assimilating into the larger culture and adopting the political values of the larger society, that they don't.
Immigration would be a good thing for both the immigrant and his new nation if the immigrant wished to become a full citizen in his new country, but Muslim immigrants too often don't. Their dream - I had an imam tell me this once in so many words - is to replace the constitutions of the countries in which they live with Islamic law. They'll use democratic processes to do this, but once they are successful in achieving political dominance the principles of democracy will be discarded and all law will be based on the Quran. Now there's an unsettling thought.