Prev | List | Random | Next
Join
Powered by RingSurf!



Anti-PC League

Powered by Blogger


Day By Day© by Chris Muir.


Friday, March 17, 2006

We want YOU for RWOTG!

I've put this off, because self-referential blogs make for tiresome reading, but people do ask and it has sort of come up, so here goes:

Dan is no longer administering RWOTG (the blog you're reading). He's still a contributor, but as you may know, Dan is in the army, and these are very busy days for the US armed forces. This left him without the time to update as often as he'd like, and so he offered the administration of the blog to the contributing members. I ended up being the new admin. To sum up the upcoming changes I have planned for the blog: Not much. The changeover, in most things, is just a formality, my watching the store while Dan is busy helping defend our country.

We are currently looking for new contributors, one of whom (Kallistos) joined recently. The way I do these things is by asking would-be contributors to sign up for Conservative Midwestern Pagans and introduce themselves. I do ask that those joining have a reasonably well-developed page of their own, and yes, blogs count. Why? For one thing, because it gives me a chance to check out your writing. For another, because in Pagandom especially, one can find more than a few liberal trolls who try to pass themselves off as conservatives, in order to slip into and undermine conservative communities. I know that sounds paranoid, but people have tried. What I want to see is solid evidence that you basically really are a Conservative, a Libertarian, or some combination of these, and have been for some time, and I want to get some sense of who you are, as a person. I want to know who it is that I'm sending an invitation to, before I send it. I would also ask you to look over the blog, and make sure that this is a site you'd like to help us build.

I look forward to hearing from you.


Thursday, March 16, 2006

Book 'em, Danno!

Watch it, buddy!


A story from home, more or less - DuPage County, Illinois, where I grew up. Yes, it's another story from the mean streets of Suburbia.


Written by Ted Gregory, a staff reporter in the Chicago Tribune, Wednesday, March 15 issue on the bottom of the front page (really) - "Man Shoots Goose. Will the Judge cook his?"




A nice cassoulet would go over well, right now, but guess they meant that more figuratively ...



"Like a lot of homeowners, Larry Tomko has grown weary of geese. He's tired of scraping poop from his driveway with a shovel."



Hey, buddy, let's not mince words. We call that "doo-doo" around here.



"He's fed up with boorish geese gobbling millet he leaves for the chickadees. He feels overrun when dozens of the feathery transients loll in the pond a few steps from his yard."



And probably less than completely excited when a bunch of them decide to fertilize his car. Picture a 50 pound pigeon with a nasty disposition. Now picture a bunch of those travelling in huge numbers, much higher than anything you'd see almost anywhere in Chicago, because unlike those oh-so-clever, habitually liberal and self-righteously environmentally sensitive city folk, we ignorant bumpkins did not see the wisdom of turning our own home into a poisoned, barren, broken glass-strewn concrete-choked wasteland, meaning that we actually have an ecosystem we have to deal with. What could we possibly have been thinking about? Good thing that a whole bunch of those sensitive liberal city folk decided to show their environmental sensitivity by moving out to live with us, at least until the rising property taxes they voted in resulted in a whole bunch of us being uprooted, forcing some of us ignorant bumpkins to move into the aforementioned poisoned, barren, concrete-choked wasteland, and witness how magnificently glass strewn it was. Have you ever seen the sparkle of the first rays of the rising sun off of the facets of the ten year old debris of a Michelob bottle down by the Lake? It's a sight you'll never forget.

I can certainly see why a writer located downtown would pick up a snarky tone as he talked about how the remaining native hicks who hadn't been displaced, yet, were treating the environment. Why, do you realise that some of us were letting the weeds continue to run wild, so much so that they had grown into these patches called "prairies" and "savannahs", some of them miles across? I can still remember the dark days of my youth when, my home suffering from the insensitive ravages of Conservative Republican rule as it was, run by the kind of men who just don't understand that nothing can possibly be good until it's been changed around a lot, I found that I could bicycle for miles down some roads, and where the land had not been overrun by the savannahs and prairies, it was under a thick blanket of glossy greenness, stretching as far as the eye could see in some directions. I think that such places used to be called "forests".

The good news is that after so many of our good, liberal democratic voting friends from Chicago proper and from the cities of the coasts arrived, bounced us rednecks out and started tearing down some of those hideous Victorian and Georgian structures we had laying around (replacing them with the finest in contemporary plywood), they saw the environmental crisis we had left brewing and took action. In place of the woods and prairies and savannahs and other blights upon our landscape, the newcomers have transformed much of DuPage into one of the world's largest reserves for the rare and endangered Kentucky blueglass, which I understand at one point covered no more than a few million acres. There's still a lot of work to be done, what with the prairies still choking out as much as three square miles of Illinois - the prairie state - but courtesy of tax policies that force many people to sell whether they want to or not and federal road subsidies that encourage the sprawl, we need not doubt that this nasty little problem will dusted off, soon enough. But I digress.



"When his frustration brims, Tomko has run out his front door waving him arms and shouting at the geese. Sometimes he launches bottle rockets at them. About ten years ago, he started firing pellets from an old air rifle at the geese. They would squawk and flee.

Then on Feb.26, he killed one, accidentally, sort of, with the pellet gun. Geese are federally protected, and neighbor Jack Casino saw it. Casino is a former hunter who said he has seen too many innocent animals suffer at the hands of man.

Now Tomko has a date with the criminal justice system."




As well he should, bad, bad man that he is, and what a tribute to the well-focused set of priorities our criminal justice system is developing. How well focused? Remember that earlier post about the Children's bootcamps? Well, you'd have some of the convicted felons running the camp accidentally kick some of the campers in the head or stomach because they were thoughtlessly throwing up or selfishly suffering renal failure after a forced march through the Southwestern deserts, during which the camp counselors had inadvertantly re-enacted the Bataan death march, only with children and under harsher conditions. Don't you hate it when that happens? I mean, you turn around, and all of a sudden you've raped a few of the 14 year old girls whose care you were entrusted with and some selfish brat who you unintentionally forced to strip naked in front of the other kids has started bleeding out of some of his orificies, and just won't stop no matter how lovingly you beat him.

How do these things happen?

Well, as hard as some of you may find this to believe, some of us backward conservative hicks wanted those guys brought up on manslaughter charges or worse, on some goofy legal theory that brutalizing children is at least as bad as brutalizing adults. You'll be relieved to know that we didn't get our way. The counselors, in those cases, were hardly ever charged with anything more serious than "reckless endangerment" (the same charge levelled against a single mother who leaves her children home alone when she goes to work), when they were charged at all, and nothing more than suspended sentences were given out to those running the death camps camps for troubled teens. We have to keep those prison cells empty for the real criminals, the truly dangerous people who our justice system has seen the need to focus its energies on the pursuit of: the accidental killers of unowned livestock. Godspeed, men! Let's see how the story continues.



"Casino, 45, is a self-employed tree specialist who calls himself an environmentalist. He and his family have lived in the neighborhood, bordered by a federally protected wetland, for about four years. Their home sits on two acres where horses and wild turkeys roam."



And the deer and the antelope play. Note that horses are not indigenous to Northern Illinois. They are an intruder species, one notorious for damaging grasslands, and Jack has reportedly brought in a whole bunch of them, according to this story, once again showing his commitment to serving the environment by helping to transform it beyond recognition. Good work, Jack! But let's read and learn more about this hero's tale.




"Casino said he started hunting at age 12 but grew increasingly unsettled by it and stopped in his mid-20s. About five years ago, he watched as a Canada goose was struck deliberately and killed on Warrenville Road.

'I swore if I ever saw that again,' Casino said, 'I'd do something about that.'"



Shouldn't he be out on a dark foggy night, maybe standing on top of a skyscraper, as he says something like that, while the voiceover man says "make room for a different kind of hero"? Isn't it really the tragedy at the beginning that makes the hero - Batman losing his parents, Superman losing his homeworld, and Casinoman losing about 40 lbs. of perfectly good protein? I picture him on the ground, cradling the goose's head in his hands, pleading with it to honk just one more time, crying out "as God is my witness, I shall never purchase sauerkraut again", as the goose breathes its last. I'm sorry, I need a moment here, I promised myself that I wasn't going to cry ...

I'm better, now. Really I am. But alas, Goosey Loosey can not say the same, for such is the destiny of a hero - the tragedy that defines him must always repeat itself.




"At about 2 pm Feb.26, while driving by, Casino said he saw Tomko level a pellet rifle and a goose on the frozen pond and fire.

'It was probably about five minutes of flopping and staggering', Casino said. 'I saw it die. It was pretty gross.'

Tomko said that he also was astonished and saddened. he said he had hit 'literally hundreds' of geese with pellets from the spring-loaded rifle and never injured one.

Tomko said that he became frightened by the irate Casino, who shouted that he was calling the police."




which is such a strange way for a 61 year old man to react, when a 45 year old man completely loses it and starts screaming at him, right? The authorities wasted no time in responding to this crisis.




"When two DuPage County sheriff's officers arrived a few minutes later, Tomko confessed. the officers told him to stay in town.

The next afternoon, one of them phoned Tomko and offered to let him surrender at the sheriff's office March 3, which he did. He also surrendered the pellet rifle. ...

Tomko was charged with unlawful taking of a migratory waterfowl, a misdemeanor violation of the Illinois Conservation Code. He was booked, posted a $250 bond and given a March 30 court date in Wheaton ...

Tomko said that he joked with his pastor that God had exacted retribution for missing church the day of the killing, a Sunday. The night before he surrendered, friends took him to a "last supper" and presented him with a bottle of Grey Goose vodka.

But Tomko conceded that he is a little nervous. If convicted, he could spend a year in jail and be fined $500 to $5000.

'I've never gone through this before', he said.

Casino says that he hopes that a prosecutor 'nails [Tomko's] butt' ..."




The state of the prisons being what it is, if one sends this rather nonthreatening looking, partially retired man even into a county correctional facility, somebody probably really will "nail his butt", as Mr.Casino says, ever so elegantly. As you read about this incident and the reactions of those involved, keep in mind that this man getting forcibly sodomized is likely to be a part of the package that will be his punishment, in response to his having had a freak accident with what amounts to being a souped-up BB gun, while trying to scare off an animal pest. Even if he does get put in with boy scouts, which seems unlikely given the reality that there are now gangs in the increasingly urbanized (and certainly no longer rural) DuPage County, we still have this terrified old man being thrown into prison for a year.

Does the punishment seem to fit the so-called crime? Jack Casino seems to think so. Starting exactly where we left off in the Tribune article, at the end of that last quote




"... although even Casino acknowledges that geese are a problem in the neighborhood. 'So what? The law is there to protect them', he said."




Either that, or to radically empower tinplated dictators with messiah complexes; sometimes one has difficulty remembering which. Such an exaggerated response to such a minor aggravation does little for the already strained community life of the region, as the report notes:




"Casino and Tomko barely know each other, but their feud has placed neighbor Chris Strong in an awkward spot. The goose was on strong's pond.

He is friendly with both men, but considers the geese a nuisance, especially when they chase his kids, or when his wife refuses to leave the house in the geese's presence.

'I'm not in a state of mourning, right now,' Strong said of the goose's end. 'I respect everybody's ideas, but I sure would like to see more hunting. That would be a great start.'"




And don't forget the garlic and white beans.

Guys, a goose isn't your neighbor, it isn't even a pet. It is livestock and the only right it has, as somebody once put it, is the right to be served with the proper garnish. The only immorality to be found in any of this, aside from the likelihood that the Winfielders would leave the sausage out of that Cassoulet when the goose was finally served, is to be found in the way Mr.Tomko has been treated, and I'm not going to joke about that. I salute the man's strength, for his being able to joke about what has happened, himself, and only wish that more of the people around him could be equally cool.


Tuesday, March 14, 2006

Children's Bootcamps: A well-paved road to Hell

Excerpts from Aaron Bacon's journalAn observation you can confirm for yourself and a question to ponder: If one takes a look at a traditional Jewish family, or a traditional Chinese or Thai one (I'm thinking of a particular branch of our extended family), one sees very little (if any) corporal punishment going on. One rarely hears a son calling his father "sir". Yet these cultures produce many of the most dutiful children ever found, and many of these children remain respectful of their parents throughout their lives. Why?

Because respect is not fear. Fear implies distrust, and one can't respect somebody that one doesn't trust. By declining to call his father "sir", the Jewish son does not refuse him the respect he would show his boss, he elevates him by showing that to him, the word "father" conveys far greater esteem than the word "sir" ever could; no substitute for that simple and loving word could ever ring as praise on his father's ears. Of course, this relationship is far likelier to be found in a culture in which the son would have learned from an early age that no points were to be made among his friends by any show of disrespect for his elders, meaning that while the relationship between parent and child may have had its strained moments, it would have never proceeded on a truly adversarial basis.

Once the seeds of distrust are sown and well watered, uprooting the noxious growth that results will be difficult, maybe even futile. It is not without reason that many of us view "modernity" as being a giant step backwards.




I came across this page and skimmed it, and probably would have been very skeptical about it, but for one accident of my personal history: a past girlfriend was a survivor of one of the places mentioned (North Star) and spoke out about the place before it ever hit the news. The page: Children's Gulags.

I'll try to keep the length of this post under control, because I'd rather you spent your time listening to what the people who are reporting such abuses have to say - and please feel free to link to reports of other such incidents in the comments section.

What we are seeing in these stories is the dark side of "do your own thing", and some of us have been saying this for years. Ever since the 1960s, an attitude has become entrenched in many parts of society that those of us who speak of the need for morality are a bunch of killjoy fuddie-duddies who can't get with the times and see the liberation that comes when people decide that meaning well and feeling warm fuzzy feelings are together an acceptable substitute for honoring the rules of civilized society. The thing is, once there are no longer any rules in the picture and the norms of behavior are thus left free to drift like an untethered boat, one can find oneself amazed at what supposedly loving people will be able to rationalize and keep on rationalizing, until it is too late to save the innocent from an undeserved fate.

Killing your child through an abundant display of "tough love" is not conservatism. Responsible and loving parenting is what would constitute a conservative response to the beautiful (if sometimes stressful) reality of this little person who is sitting on one's lap, looking up at one and expecting so much that one wonders if one will know how to give, and who will need so much from one for so many years to come. We speak of the need to expect things of our children, and in reasonable measure, that is part of love: a child raised without demands put upon him grows without developing self-control, and that leads to an empty life and the inability to live well with others. But how strange that very often, little has seemed to have been expected of the parents, who've (at times) been invited to run their own families as if they were their own private fiefdoms, subject to no civilized restrictions.

It's the flipside of a social trend that drives me buggy - this business of children calling their parents and other elder relatives by the first names. Undue informality, even when coming from a child who is fully grown. In this case, more of the same, in a different form: instead of asking the child to greet the adult as if he were another child, the adult is expected to act as if he were another child and do what feels good, now. We are to protect our younger relatives, in the long term out of that sense of love of family that grows and deepens with time and familiarity, but in the short term, when our better natures fail us, out of that most unfashionable thing - a sense of duty. Would you rather be out partying at Metro, instead of sitting at home with the little ones RIGHT NOW? One suspects that every parent, or every babysitting uncle or aunt has had something roughly akin to that thought, or maybe even the impulse to act on it, but the discipline that was instilled in us growing up draws us back to our duty before we come close to doing wrong, or at least doing as much wrong as we might were we less socialized. It slows us down, calms us, thus helping the fleeting madness of an impulse to give way to something deepier, worthier, more heartfelt and in the long run, a lot more fulfilling.

But lacking that self-control and being as young children when we should be as adults? Those kids stand between a stressed guardian and a quick and easy good time, and if one is so free of the thought that there are rules one should have to honor and duties one should be ready to embrace whether or not they "feel right for you", then there is nothing that is going to force one to slow down, do the hard work of self-examination, and unravel the resentment that can so easily build, just below the surface, when sacrifices need to be made. Shame and guilt aren't hip or cool, but without them, God help us. Passive aggression runs out of control, as we fool ourselves with a skill that would have done Johnny Cochrane proud.

What goes for us goes for previous generations, some of which, regrettably, were known to sustain fads for very permissive parenting, bringing us to today. In the horror stories on that site - and you can find a multitude that are just as bad elsewhere - one hears parents crying about the horror after the fact, but when muscle bound thugs show up at one's house, put one's teen in a headlock, and drag him off into the desert to be physically brutalized - and that's how the program was pitched to one - what does one expect is going to happen? Genuinely loving, responsible parents aren't so eager to find shortcuts to dealing with their children, that they're going to drag those children through a detour that potentially dangerous.




I remember greatly amusing somebody from a more "assimilated", "mainstream" nuclear family oriented cultural background by observing out loud that at the current rate of diffusion, I expected our little clan to reach the Gulf Coast some time in the next few hundred years; I was guessing sometime around the year 2500. Extended family cultures, like our quasi-mediterranean (and now partially Southeast Asian) grouping, do not move quickly. Think of what must be done to preserve such a structure, and you'll see why. As much as I like New Orleans - and that's a lot more than I like Chicago - unless I wish to trash some serious family obligations, I have to bring my family with. That doesn't just mean my brothers (and certainly my dad, now that mom is gone) and my nieces and nephews, but my cousins as well, and there is the difficulty. They, of course, will have to bring their cousins with, who in turn will have to bring their cousins ... and so on and so on, until Northeastern Illinois' population has seriously dipped. Realistically speaking, it's more than I can pull off. It's more than anybody can pull off.

Tradition is very big and I am very small. Family is one of those things that I can connect to that is far bigger than myself, greater than anything that I could ever create.

It blew her mind that I wouldn't just toss away all of that old fashioned stuff and just do my own thing on the spot, especially during the long grey chill of a Chicago winter and the less than cordial reception often given to people from both mom and dad's ethnic and cultural backgrounds around here. "Why not just do your own thing". I could speak to those asking such questions by speaking of a rich level of interdependent existence that comes from connecting to a network in which one's membership is not negotiable, something bound by blood, a living reality that redefines everything and everybody it touches - and I would be as the one who tries to explain the color red to somebody who was born blind. In the absence of common referents, my words would be reduced to meaningless patterns of sound for the one I was speaking to.

But in moments like the ones leading up to the incidents in that article, maybe we can find something that the assimilated among us can connect to a little, if they're open to understanding why, when they ask those keeping to a more traditional life to "just relocate", they keep hearing the word "no". Where a more traditional way of life is seen, one still sees some dysfunction, one just doesn't see quite as much of it, and certainly a lot less of the kind of dysfunction that the parents were responding to, in however inappropriate a way. Why?

One word covers a lot; "babysitting". Having the brothers and sisters and first and second and third cousins around (and well known) means that the parents can get out a lot more than can their supposedly more modern and "liberated" counterparts in mainstream society, and that saves a lot of sanity, when practical. Family members take turns babysitting each other's children while the cousins bond. But also, the experience of life becomes so rich that drugs and alcohol have little allure and the bad apples at school can't even begin to compete. Ponder the experience of the nephew who, when he had a few questions about Science, in short order found his wishes travelling along the family tree until they found their way to a few scientists PhDed in the right areas. I understand that in some cultures it is considered unusual for the life of the mind to begin for a child before the age of ten; at less than half that age, I got to learn about Relativity and start working on my future major (Mathematics). Those more artistically inclined could find guidance from yet another extended family member who could actually achieve the "trompe l'oeil" effect usually associated with the art of past centuries ...

Do you begin to gain a sense of how huge this is? What is possessed within one becomes part of what is lived by all. Yes, it is a huge cultural advantage for those pursuing careers, and certainly a boon that helps those of us from such backgrounds weather economic storms better than we otherwise would, but it offers the child something else as well. Suppose, given that early boost in life, young Samuel comes across somebody who wants to give him a doobie. He's already been told far more about the psychological and physiological consequences by an array of family members than any kid would probably ever want to know, but aside from the fear, he's a lot less likely to be tempted. Why? Think about it. If you found yourself gazing upon a beautiful vista that you had long heard about and travelled to see, would you be in a hurry to blur your own vision? The pleasures we share with him require mental focus to be enjoyed; the only thing the pusher can offer him is an instant loss. Where is the temptation going to be?

That's the part of the answer some of us have for the question "well, what's a parent supposed to do when a kid goes that wrong"; don't wait for things to get that bad. Keep the child's life a full one from the beginning, and such problems are a lot less likely to arise in the first place. The bad news for some is that Hillary Clinton, for once, was right when she said this: "It takes a village to raise a child". No village lives on uncompromising self-indulgence; all must yield a little if all are not to lose greatly. With that statement, I suppose that I'll probably open the floodgates to a fair amount of indignant commentary, because this fits in poorly with almost every version of Political Correctness known, but so be it. So long as one tells the truth, all else can be left to sort itself out.


Thursday, March 02, 2006

One option re: Iraq that might get considered and doesn't

As the new Iraq moves closer and closer to civil war, as the factions in question (Kurdish, Sunni and Shiite) fight over who will have how much power in the new republic, I find myself asking one question that some people don't seem to want to accept really ought to be on the table:

Why are we (the US and the West in general) so set on seeing to it that these people all live within the same national boundaries?

Think about it. One of the usual rationales for binding smaller entities (like the Greek city-states in antiquity or the somewhat more historically recent German principalities) into larger entities that the people may not be so happy with (modern nation-states) is that the small fry will be easy prey for the empire builders, unless they give up a little of their identities and some of their self-determination, and band together for mutual defense. But take a look at the parties in question, and take a look at what is becoming of the Iraqi landscape. Do these factions seem likely to come to the defense of one another?

For that matter, do they really seem like "small fry"? Quickly skimming some comments by the UCLA International Institute, one comes across a condescending reference to the Kurds as being a "rump state". There are, in fact, 20 million Kurds, which would make a unified Kurdistan about half the size of Spain, or twice the size of Portugal. If that's a rump, it's an impressively big one, substantially larger in population than the original United States, which nevertheless was large enough to sustain political stability. (See remarks in Federalist papers regarding the dangers of majority faction formation in very small political entities).

One does not even have the far-fetched rationale the colonial authorities had, as they released Egypt from their grip, of resurrecting a long lost ancient land. Mesopotamia was a region, not a kingdom or nation, that would frequently be divided between two or more civilizations (eg. the Akkadians and Sumerians, the latter a diverse collection of city-states) and united only under empires which would spread far enough to hardly be specifically Mesopotamian (eg. the Assyrian Empire). One would have something akin to 19th century Romanticism at its most absurd - a reckless return to a past that never was, that would blindly ignore all that had changed in the thousands of years of real history that had happened since the time of one's imagined bygone realm. None of which, by the way, has produced anything resembling a rationale for thinking of the Iraqis as being any more each other's countrymen than the countrymen of some of each other's neighbors. A Kurd in Mosul is closer to an Arab in Baghdad more than he is to a Kurd in Southeastern Turkey? Why would that be?

Why, then, fight so hard to revive and keep united an ancient land which never really existed, at least not as some would carelessly imagine it? Let the three regions go their separate ways, each a respectably sized nation unto itself, and the issue of domination by the hated other ceases to be an issue, at least in the new parliament, or parliaments as the case may be. Because, apparently, the British government decreed it to be so a few decades back, without feeling any great concern about what the newly made Iraqis might think about their newly created identity imposed from on high by their departing colonial masters, and the fashion is to take the status quo as being an unquestionable given. Which, considering the remarkable look of the current maps of Eastern Europe and Central Asia, takes a remarkably willful blindness and more than a little inertia on the part of some to maintain. (Small reminder: Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia, once deemed to be permanent Soviet acquisitions, to be inevitably Russified, are now members of NATO - the world does change, and it changes greatly).

I went looking for available references today, after getting back from tutoring a client, and am still looking, but this is what I remember (and please check the history to see if I've remembered this correctly) - I remember a reference being made to the Kurds being incorporated into the newly created Iraq over the objections of the Kurds on the basis that if they were granted the independence that they desired, that one of the two remaining factions in Iraq would easily dominate the other. Well, I'm sorry, but to offer that as a rationale for giving away somebody else's country is just simply arrogant. One does not have the right to give away another's future as a gift; the Kurds had the right to make their own destiny regardless of whether or not their choices would suit somebody else's geopolitical aims. Such a stance is, in civilized terms, unbelievable. Imagine the descendants of a triumphant Mongol Empire finally agreeing to leave a long colonized Europe, and telling the English that they would be forced to remain part of the new country of Noreuropa which the Mongols had just assembled, including most of what was once France and Germany, because in their absence the ethnic Germans would easily dominate the ethnic French.

The proper response to such an argument is "what of it and who do you think you are". I could certainly understand why an appointee of the British Empire would behave in such a highhanded and presumptuous manner, but given the history and rationale of the foundation of the US, why does our government feel compelled to rubber stamp the results of the aforementioned highhanded act of nation building, governing imposted on terms agreeable to Britain without the consent of the governed? Wasn't there some small disagreement between our countries about that kind of thing back around 1776? But apparently the Kurds et al. are not supposed to expect the same say in their creation of their own future, that America demanded for itself - and got? This position would irritate almost anybody on the receiving end, and it is decidedly un-American, so one might well ask, where is it coming from?

Go to Europe or North America and you will find, for all of the many imperfections of these two regions, countries whose boundaries were set through the struggles and choices of those living within them. The results have not been perfect, especially in such cases in which an unwilling weaker subject has been annexed by a stronger power, but in time more and more of those are finding their way to freedom (eg. Ireland in the 1920s and many of the newly independent Eastern European countries), and along the way we have countries that basically work. Go to much of the Third World, to Africa and the Middle East in particular, and one will find nation-states whose boundaries were set by fiat by outsiders, without consulting the natives, and lo and behold - one finds countries that basically don't work. There should be a lesson in that for some of us, but it's a lesson that some of us are reluctant to learn because it calls for a little humility - know when to back off and leave tradition be, because we're never as clever as we think we are.


Comments on M.Jacques post

In a recent post, I rebutted a few absurdities penned by somebody named Martin Jacques. How cruel of me to pick on the mentally challenged like that, and why am I wasting the reader's time by focusing on the rantings of some nobody on the Net like that, some might ask? Let's take a look at the bottom of the article linked to in that previous post:



Martin Jacques is a senior visiting research fellow at the Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore


While Jacques may deserve to be nobody, in terms of status he very much is somebody and this means that he does get heard. As I keep saying, read and be amazed. Many conservatives have complained about the politicization and resultant intellectual downgrading of much of academic life, only to be told to stop exaggerating and overdramatizing the situation.

Look at that article I linked to, which reads so much like the diary entry of a freshman who needs to spend a little less time at the peace rallies and a little more time in the library, and think about the position of the man posting it, and what he was hired to do. What you've been hearing from some of those annoyed (and sometimes greatly distressed) conservatives is not exaggeration or overdramatization, it is a recognition of the sad truth that an academic tradition that has taken centuries to create is being coopted by those who engage in politics as a fashion statement, and is thus being prostituted along the way.

One need not look all of the way to Singapore to find this being done, either. One of these days, I'll get around to ranting about the use of Bayesian methodology in social statistics by those with blatantly activist agendas, much of which is just absolute fraud and can be rigorously be shown to be such. ("Choose whichever a priori distribution best meets your personal needs"). Yet there the practitioners are in a variety of departments, holding tenured chairs and deciding who the next faculty hires will be. There is a serious need for some serious housekeeping in Academia, but with the cranks having as entrenched a position as they do, at present, I wonder where reform would even begin.