tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-169862592024-02-28T02:13:31.673-05:00Right-Wing of the GodsA Bastion of the Religious Right - Just not the Religion You ExpectAntistoicushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02164862563095145370noreply@blogger.comBlogger19125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-16986259.post-1169212458270757062007-01-19T07:19:00.000-05:002007-01-19T08:14:18.370-05:00Cutting out for KeepsImagine this: you go to a company's headquarters to give a talk on Business ethics. While you're on the podium, glancing out the window, you see the manager in charge of accounts receivable out in the parking lot, trying to get your hubcaps loose. You feel somebody brushing against your hip; somebody in human resources is trying to pick your pocket. As you interrupt your speech and try to get a hold of the CEO and see if he can restrain his people a little bit, you notice that he's just cracked open your briefcase and is rifling through your credit cards, while scolding you out loud for being so judgmental as to mind. Tell me - what is the likelihood of your deciding to continue that speech on ethics, and if you did decide to continue it, who could your intended audience possibly be at that point?<br /><br />The story in <a href="http://christohellenic.blogspot.com/2007/01/goodbye.html" target="_blank"><font color="#006600">the parting post</font></a> on <a href="http://christohellenic.blogspot.com/" target="_blank"><font color="#990000">my personal blog</font></a> gets a little involved, but the absurdity of the hypothetical situation I posed is the absurdity of the situation I faced, and it has been far too many times in my dealings with the Pagan community. I guess you could say this one was that one time too many; a mature philosophical discussion of ethics is at the core of what I was attempting, and Pagandom, with a tiny handful of exceptions lost and buffeted around in the boisterous crowd, just doesn't offer an audience appropriate for the material. If you were one of the people who wanted to know when there were going to be further updates to the Almond Jar, as I announced on one of the pages on that site, there won't be any.<br /><br />I guess you could say that I'm discouraged but not disheartened, as I do have other places to me. More time spent doing Mathematics and Engineering, playing with my nieces and nephews, working on my recipes, spending time with my friends ... doesn't sound like much of a loss. Life will be growing more rich for me, not less, to say nothing of more prosperous, as the drain on my time that being "Antistoicus" involved was hardly boosting my income, any more than it was improving my mood, as I was one of those strange people who never tried to turn religion into a business. Were I sacrificing on behalf of a community that gave the gods good reason to feel glad for their worship, I might not mind the loss because it would be the price of something serving the greater good, but after a few years of bashing one's head into the wall, as a friend of mine is fond of saying, one should be prepared to conclude that the wall isn't what is likely to give way. Further sacrifice would be for nothing.Antistoicushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02164862563095145370noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-16986259.post-1149545910449426732006-06-05T17:08:00.003-05:002011-01-20T05:35:16.528-05:00Cutting out for a while[post slightly updated, Monday, January 8, 2007, and Wednesday, December 30, 2009]<br /><br />In case you were looking for them, yes, I've deleted my posts (which began on Thursday, July 20, 2006) to this blog about the Appius Claudius Priscus / Joseph Keller affair at Nova Roma, relocating them to <a href="http://antistoicus.150m.com/appius_claudius_priscus.html" target="_blank">this new page</a> on my diskpace at Friendlyfirm. If you haven't seen them, they were a discussion of how we approach the issue of freedom of speech in a real world in which all is not hugs and love, in application to the case of somebody whose racial views didn't please everybody, and an illustration of how the standards of justice we can expect out of our Politically Correct friends aren't changing for the better. This evolved into long enough of a personal segue, that I didn't feel comfortable with the idea of leaving it on Right Wing of the Gods, but for those who want to read it, <a href="http://antistoicus.150m.com/appius_claudius_priscus.html" target="_blank">here it is</a>.<br /><br />I don't know what the plans of the other contributors are, but we haven't heard from them for a while, so I'm guessing that we won't be hearing from them in the near future.<br /><br />I'm going to take a break from the Internet for a while, to enjoy the warm weather the way the gods intended - outdoors. When I get back, I probably won't be posting much. I commented on this on "Jotting it Down" - the amount of traffic one gets doesn't seem to justify the effort. Not complaining, certainly not whining, it's just supply and demand. There's a huge supply of blogs and relatively little potential readership. When seven hits per day makes your blog one of the big boys, you come to realize just how little potential readership there is.<br /><br />Useful information; more of us will redirect our efforts elsewhere. See you later.<br /><br /><br /><br />Note added, January 12, 2007: I got a little clarity a few days ago, when I was transferring the Appius files to my diskspace at Googlepages. A rate of seven visitors per day was definitely not making my day, but it was also raising questions because it seemed so statistically anomalous. Why <i>exactly</i> seven visitors, for so long? OK, maybe because we only had the same seven people visiting us over and over came the discouraging thought, but ... the same seven people who never miss a post? The same seven people who never have a kid's birthday they're too busy planning, who never have their computer go down, who never just plain don't feel like it? In real life, traffic is never that steady. Where was the fluctuation? Even a moving average should fluctuate a little, especially when it's that low. This moving average wasn't doing that. Why?<br /><br />I found a partial answer as I cleared the files. Once I've deleted a post, it's gone, so I was being very careful as I did this, placing each post and its copy up on screen, comparing original and copy paragraph by paragraph before deleting and republishing the blog, in effect revisiting the thing a few times. Near the end of the process, I found that RWOTG stop loading on my screen. It literally could not handle the traffic I was giving it, just going through that series of posts. Guess how many posts I was into the series before I found myself unable to load the next?<br /><br />That would certainly explain the lack of random fluctuation; if and when traffic started to pick up, those who would have lifted the daily average to eight visitors (or dare I dream, to nine or even ten) would have been in for a frustrating experience, one which wouldn't have left them wanting to return. Nobody enjoys having a page hanging on his screen, refusing to load. Attached as this blog was (and still is, at the time of this writing) to a site that, shall we say, sees a few more than seven visitors per day according to site stats, and what we have is the likelihood of more visitors being pumped into this location, than the rather weak system was designed to handle. The average didn't fluctuate because the cap wasn't fluctuating.<br /><br />To anybody who had that experience, if by some remarkable chance you are seeing this, I regret the annoyance and I suspect the others do as well. I honestly didn't know that this was happening, probably because I like to get up very early during the summer and would have been one of the first people clicking on this site. At this point, as far as I'm concerned, the fat lady has sung for both RWOTG and my own personal blog. I'll be happy to leave both in place as they are free and Blogger seems to allow this, but writing a page on which traffic is effectively capped at such a low level seems pointless. Producing a blog post may not take as much work as putting together a webpage, but it still represents a real effort, one not justified by the tiny audience circumstances allow us to have. Whether our own efforts could have attracted a larger crowd in as competitive a field as blogging, I don't know, but wouldn't it have been interesting, to find out?<br /><br />No grand exits for me, as I only blogged for a few months and this moment is really not redefining my life, but this is a shame, I suppose. As before, I can only speak for myself, having not consulted with Dan and the others on this, but as for me, I'm fairly sure that this is my last Blogger post.Antistoicushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02164862563095145370noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-16986259.post-1147219557908638932006-05-09T17:57:00.001-05:002009-04-20T03:05:54.249-05:00Striking a blow for Goosey Loosey!<a href="http://www.latimes.com/features/food/la-fo-foiegras3may03,1,6249122.story?coll=la-headlines-food&ctrack=1&cset=true" target="_blank"><img style="FLOAT: left; MARGIN: 0px 10px 10px 0px; WIDTH: 200px; CURSOR: hand" alt="Alderman Joe Moore, image links to story about this silliness in the LA Times" src="http://i44.tinypic.com/2wel7kg.jpg" border="0" /></a><br />This is truly a good year to be a goose in Chicago. About a month and a half ago, I wrote about <a href="http://rightwingofthegods.blogspot.com/2006/03/book-em-danno.html" target="_blank"><span style="color:#006600;">an elderly man who was facing a possible prison sentence for accidentally killing a canadian goose</span></a>. It's been over a month, now, so I suppose that it is time for the animal right's activists to have their dementia validated again, and so it has been.<br /><br />The Chicago City council has passed a law banning the sale of foie gras, fattened goose liver. The rationale is as bizarre as the legislation - the fattening of geese is supposedly "cruel". Guess what "force feeding" consists of? One takes the goose's head, tilts it back, and pours as much grain down the throat of a notoriously gluttonous animal as it will take. Supposedly this is "cruel" because it's bad for the health of the goose.<br /><br />Excuse me? The goose is due to be killed in about a month when force feeding commences. Life expectancy is, by then, a rather moot point. But our crusaders will not be denied in their holy quest to take control of the lives of others. As one of our local chefs told a reporter<br /><br /><br /><blockquote><span style="color:#990000;"><i>"Today, Tramonto laughs off the exchange. 'Charlie and I got a chuckle out of it. Hey, both of us made Newsweek.'<br /><br />But he finds nothing funny in the current situation. "Unfortunately, the public is the loser," he says. "If [animal rights groups are] going to dictate what we're going to eat, what's next? That's the problem that I have. I wish I could say that the people have spoken, but I don't really think the people had anything to do with this."</span></blockquote></i><br /><br /><br /><br />The spin one sees from the outside media is what one would expect. Many leftists talking about how wonderful it is that our city council has gone where no obtrusive American legislator has gone before. One gets the usual snide remark from lone individuals on the coasts about ignorant Midwestern hickishness running amok into legislation, as if farmers tended to be in favor of this kind of thing. But let me give you the little detail the newspapers won't pick up on, because pointing out this kind of thing is politically incorrect, and because knowing this would involve knowing the community one was reporting on, instead of just pulling the story off the wire, e-mailing a few people, and tossing in a few editorial glosses.<br /><br />Chicago, like Louisiana, is home to a large ethnic French population. Chicago, unlike Lousiana, has a lengthy history of treating its French-Americans like dirt, to be trampled underfoot and defecated on, when nobody is looking. The largest contingent in that community is the Alsatian one. Guess which is one of the delicacies most closely associated with Alsace, very much a part of that province's traditions, traditions that our not very good friends from the North Shore have been trying to high pressure some of us into giving up for generations?<br /><br />Foie gras, a key ingedient used (usually sparingly) in a number of Alsatian dishes served on very special occasions. It's as if Boston passed a law against the sale of cardone, and then tried to pretend that this was not aimed at the large Southern Italian community in the North End. It is nativism masquerading as humanitarianism, and the second most amazing thing about the whole situation is that this is being marketed as "progressive" legislation. The most remarkable thing is that many people will probably accept that, considering the flimsiness of the pretext under which the traditions of others are being sabotaged.<br /><br />Ignorantly simpleminded? Hardly, "Sneaky" is more like it. Openly passing a law banning the consumption of Alsatian food, at the very least, would raise a few eyebrows. Trying to accomplish the exact same thing indirectly, in bits and pieces, won't raise as many, and that's the idea. The real kicker is what Joseph Moore, the author of this legislation, has the actual nerve to put near the top of <a href="http://www.ward49.com/" target="_blank"><span style="color:#006600;">his ward's homepage</span></a>:<br /><br /><br /><blockquote><span style="color:#990000;"><i>"Celebrating Diversity in the 49th Ward"</i></span></blockquote><br /><br /><br />I guess diversity doesn't include you or your traditions if you happen to be French, in Mr.Moore's vision of Chicago. But then, for those of Southern European descent, that's how things usually work around here. By the way, according to <a href="http://www.democrats.org/a/2005/12/chicago_alderma.php" target="_blank"><span style="color:#006600;">this page on the official Democratic party homepage</span></a>,<br /><br /><br /><blockquote><span style="color:#990000;"><i>"Joe Moore, Alderman from the 49th Ward in Chicago, is chairman of the National Democratic Municipal Officials Conference and serves on the Executive Committee of the Democratic National Committee."</i></span></blockquote><br /><br /><br />You remember the Democrats, right? Our courageous fighters for tolerance and individual liberty? Still want to know why I vote Republican? If so, stick around. The goose stepping tendencies of the Chicago Democratic party are an inexhaustable subject, one that does not fit in with the public image that party likes to cultivate, and you'll be hearing more about them here. A lot more, and it gets a lot worse.Antistoicushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02164862563095145370noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-16986259.post-1146717014624767372006-05-03T21:35:00.000-05:002006-05-03T23:48:13.226-05:00Iran: Not sure that I'm buying this<a href="http://www.lanl.gov/orgs/pa/newsbulletin/2002/05/15/text02.shtml" target="_blank"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1506/1865/320/Omega_Reactor2.jpg" border="0" alt="Omega West Reactor, Los Alamost National Laboratory, decommissioned a few years ago" / ></a><br />I'd like to start by noting that I was and am very much in favor of Pres.Bush's decision to remove Hussein from power. Yes, he had every right to do so, yes, even had he done so unilaterally. Hussein was a strongman who ruled brutally without any consent from the governed by benefit of the power granted to him through the sale of high tech Western weaponry, with which he and those relatively few close to him successfully crushed a long series of attempted coups, drowning them in blood. Handguns and knives vs. attack helicopters, machine guns, tanks, poison gas, etc. - how, realistically speaking, can that scenario be expected to play out? For the West to claim neutrality, having done so much to tip the balance of power in favor of Hussein in his dealings with his own people, would be absurd.<br /><br />What is even more absurd is the argument that in some nebulous sense, the US victimized Iraq by invading it. Who in Iraq, specifically, was left with a legitimate grievance? Where there are no victims, there is no victimization, and while there certainly were some casualties of war, there were unusually few of them considering the scope of the operation, and nothing like the body count Hussein was running up. What we are left with, then, is the sobbing of a bully who discovered that a bigger kid was willing to step in and stop him from terrorising the smaller kids (the bully being Hussein's faction), and those softheaded in just the right, trendy way that allows them to sustain the illusion that bullies have the right to proceed unimpeded, as they attack their intended victims. Didn't we outgrow this kind of thinking back in kindergarten? Apparently not.<br /><br />Then there was the "scandal" of not finding any weapons of mass destruction, aside from the ones that were actually witnessed in use to fill some of those mass graves, I suppose. "But where is your evidence that Hussein was going to make and use MORE poison gas, hmmmmm ...." Yeah. Right. As for the failure to locate any nuclear warheads, let us consider what was being looked for. The plutonium core of a thermonuclear device is about the size of a grapefruit. The rest of the bomb in mostly a mass of Lithium Hydride. The desert in Iraq covers an area about the size of California, one very large haystack in which to drop a few potentially very destructive needles. Take your plutonium core, and find an underwater reservoir of water, or any other hydrogen rich liquid like say ... petroleum. The figure I hear quoted is that five meters of water (about 17 feet worth) will provide the same shielding against radiation as that offered by the earth's atmosphere at the elevation at the top of the Sandia Crest, outside of Albuquerque. Even allowing for the fact that the liquid in and underground reservoir is mixed with substrate material, then, we have the reality that as you drop your core fairly deeply into a reservoir that may go down a few hundred feet, that very little gamma radiation and virtually no neutron radiation will even reach the drier parts of the soil overhead, much less the surface.<br /><br />The fact, then, that no warheads were found is not informative, because one wouldn't expect to find any. They're just too easy to hide, as common sense should have told many of those offering such sagely smug commentary. Entire cities have been lost in the desert and not been found for centuries, and even small villages do tend to be somewhat larger than grapefruit. This reality is bound to dawn on people, who may find themselves uninclined to listen to the peaceniks when they realize how weak the arguments they had been offered by that crowd often were, and this can be regrettable. The problem is that the peaceniks are not always wrong. I'm wondering if we're approaching one of those moments when they aren't, and if so, whether or not they'll be listened to, after their previous ranting.<br /><br />Iran is not Iraq. While it is certainly not a society that I or most Americans would care to live in, the revolution that introduced its current form of repression did seem to be a popular one, so we begin without the likelihood of winning the hearts and minds of the Iranian people, should our army invade that nation of over 68 million people. We'd be sending our army into a likely bloodbath were we to go that route, and I would hope that we would respect the sacrifices made by our armed forces enough to not ask them to walk into one of those, lightly. But if Iran remains defiant, do we have another choice? Possibly yes, and here's one we might consider: walking away and leaving this one alone.<br /><br />I have the strangest feeling of deja vu, right now, remembering these bizarre shouting matches (as if they weren't all bizarre) I used to have with extreme liberals, who'd be appalled by my support for the commercial use of nuclear power. "Oh yeah, what about Hiroshima", displaying a mystifying inability to distinguish between the use of a nuclear reactor and a nuclear warhead. But this time, we have some conservatives not getting the distinction and that is truly strange. Eight percent enrichment of uranium is not 90 per cent, no matter how one may try to dance around the subject, and do we really want to be in the position of telling the Iranians that peaceful technological progress is forbidden to them? How would we react to such a proclamation, especially in an era in which discussion of what to do when the oil becomes scarce has already become so very topical?<br /><br />If there were some real reason to suspect that Iran intended to build a hydrogen bomb, we MIGHT have some cause for concern. (Note that the military nuclear club already has one Islamic member - Pakistan. How many warheads has it used so far?) But if there is evidence for this, I have yet to hear about it. What I am seeing is some heavy handed pressure being used in an attempt to keep Iran from doing something that it has every right to do, so far seems to pose no credible threat to anybody, and in the long run, might just make Iran LESS dangerous.<br /><br />Yes, you read that right. Less dangerous. Why? Think about it. What is the argument for thinking that if Muslims get the H bomb, that they will necessarily use it? Aside from the ons who already have it, and haven't used it, I mean? The Islamic belief that if one dies in the service of God, that the wonders of Paradise will await one. Well, excuse me, but exactly how is that different from what Christianity teaches, on the same subject?<br /><br />While we're thinking about it, I'd also like to remind some of one of the images from the end of the first Gulf War - that of Iraqi soldiers coming out of their bunkers, terrified for their lives (as well they might be), kneeling before the victorious American forces and kissing their hands in a gesture of humility, submission and anything else that might keep them from being shot, blown up or incinerated. They certainly didn't seem that indifferent to their own survival, Muslims though they were. One might think that people would have noticed that, but for some reason, many of our citizens don't seem to want to do so, preferring a demonic enemy we can't understand or an angelic adversary who would treat us with all gentle grace were we to but smile glady upon its numbers, to the messy flesh and bloody reality of dealing with another mixed bunch of flawed human beings, with whom one must measure one's severity and compassion with prudence and at least moderately difficult deliberation. Angels (as seen by liberal commentators) and devils (as seen by neocon ones) are so much more comfortable to deal with, because one can deal in simpleminded absolutes, and without doubt.<br /><br />But sometimes we need to get back to reality.<br /><br />Let us ponder this. Why would any Christian hesitate to be a martyr, with such wonderful rewards waiting for him in Heaven? Yes, he would be leaving his family behind, but surely they could find opportunities to join him and ... appalling image, isn't it - a chain suicide by proxy. But why do we hesitate? Why are we horrified? Because we know that faith isn't knowledge. We may believe that an afterlife is waiting for us, but there is that nagging doubt, and one's very existence is a lot to put at risk. If your life is basically good, that can be a lousy deal. But if your life seems so inescapably wretched that the theoretical rewards granted by God to the martyr are the only hope one sees for a bearable existence, then the logic of one's situation changes greatly. Look at the past pattern of performance by the civilizations in question - in the Middle Ages, when life was far harder for the Europeans than for the Muslims, religious fanaticism was more common in the West than the Middle East and now, over the centuries, the roles have reversed.<br /><br />This is one reason why I am reluctant to go along with Bush's position. While building nuclear warheads wouldn't contribute positively to the very prosperity that may help make throwing one's life away less appealing to the young people of Iran, building nuclear reactors just might, especially after the oil starts to get scarce. Reactors offer power, not just for lighting and heating homes, but for keeping factories and farms going as well, and while our country seems determined to forget this, it is those basic sectors of the economy (manufacturing and agriculture) upon which much of the wealth that the financial sector channels depends. Cripple those, and pushing for the acceptance of free market reforms is going to be a quixotic gesture, because market mechanisms won't have any resources to help allocate.<br /><br />Iran has a right to a future, and there is no future in technological stagnation. Nor is there much of a one in remaining dependent on outsiders in order to function at all, which is what is wrong with the self-serving Russian suggestion that the Iranians have their uranium processed in Russia, no doubt for a modest fee per unit mass of uranium enriched. What some of us need to remember is that when one fight to close off another's path to a brighter future, one corners him into fighting back, and if one leaves him with little to lose, one leaves him with little to fear. We can do better than that, and often have. Now would be a good time to do so, while the West can still claim the moral high ground.Antistoicushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02164862563095145370noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-16986259.post-1146002250006144512006-04-25T14:25:00.000-05:002006-04-25T17:08:26.763-05:00A Holocaust Debt Long Overdue for Repayment<a href="http://shamash.org/" target="_blank"><img style="FLOAT: left; MARGIN: 0px 10px 10px 0px; CURSOR: hand" alt="Mass grave at Belsen" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1506/1865/400/Belsen01.jpg" border="0" /></a>The truly vile picture you see to the left comes to us courtesy of Shamash.org, "the Jewish network". If you find this image crude, just think about how crude the reality it portrays would have to be in Jewish eyes, anywhere. Yet experience tells me that if I were to put a mailform on this site and thus make responding easy, I'd probably hear from somebody who, having seldom thought about the incident, would be outraged at the portrayal. Actual horror, some can forgive and forget. It's being reminded of that horror that provokes their anger. One could not image a more genuinely selfish point of view, and yet the Emily Post standards of "etiquette" called for by "proper, high class people" in this country tend to be perversely supportive of that which common decency would condemn. Perhaps this is why some of us, at times, seem to embrace an almost self-conscious earthiness: we are too used to seeing a brittle facade of elegance laid over a core of savagery that would bring shame to the heart of a New Guinea headhunter, and we find ourselves with a deep craving for directness. With that thought in mind, I'm going to be a little blunt about a story that just bounced across the Yahoo homepage.<br /><br />In Ynet news (an Israeli news site), we find the story "<a href="http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3243522,00.html" target="_blank"><span style="color:#006600;">Survivors still waiting for compensation</span></a>". I could not help but be annoyed by the opening passage:<br /><br /><br /><br /><blockquote><span style="color:#990000;"><i><b>"Thousands of Holocaust victims who have yet to receive compensation from Germany are living in Israel. The sums are not large and will not make them wealthy, but they will help Holocaust survivors end their lives with honor.<br /><br />Some of them live beneath the poverty line, and they hope that their legal suit against the Prosecutions Committee – an international organization connecting the Holocaust survivors and the German government – can help them out of their sad situation.<br /><br />In 2002, 1,915 Holocaust survivors sued for the compensation, under the name of the non-profit organization "The Children of the War". The survivors sued for a sum of NIS 19 million (about USD 4). The prosecutors claim the Prosecutions Committee decided on criteria for who is eligible for the compensation which do not appear in the decision of the German government.<br /><br />The criteria which appear for men is that they must show 80 percent disability or 50 percent lack of physical fitness, which came as a direct result from Nazi persecution. ...</b></i></span></blockquote><br /><br /><br />Now, excuse me, but let's draw a few distinctions that some are bound to use a little impassioned rhetoric to try to gloss over. This is not a group of people doing as some PUSH members would do here in Chicago, and say "your ancestors oppressed my ancestors 500 years ago, so you owe it to me to buy me a summer home". "Yeah, yeah, Antistoicus", somebody usually pipes up, "but this was over 60 years ago, so shouldn't we let bygones be bygones". "Oh, really?", I'll respond to the (usually Anglo-Saxon) person asking the question, "let's say that I was a lot older, and that I had taken an woodman's axe to a few schoolchildren in Kenilworth during the 1920s - would you be prepared to let bygones be bygones". (For those living outside the Chicago area, Kenilworth is a very rich, very Anglo-Saxon kind of place). Disgusted expressions and a shocked hush usually follow, pierced by my raised voice as I ask where they get off being offended by my question, given what they just had the nerve to ask. Take a good look at that photo. To be clear on this, I've never committed any such crime as the one I hypothetically described, but if I were that kind of person, I could clear out an entire school district, raping every little victim before and after their demise, and I still would not be able to compete with the people who made the above picture possible for just sheer, graphic, gratuitous and horrific evil.<br /><br />Do I have to put it that crudely? Yes, I do, because if I should be so cooperatively gentle as to leave alone the sensibilities of those I'm bothering at this point, I'm going to be letting them sidestep a question that "polite" people have been allowed to sidestep for far too long. Why does my hypothetical example of an atrocity committed on a lesser scale among Anglo-Saxons produce more horror than the reality of atrocities committed with unimaginably greater cruelty to far more people, for absolutely no reason whatsoever? Before the survivors of the Deutsche Yehudim prudently fled, in many cases to America where their descendents are often noteworthy for their patriotism as Americans, the Jewish population of Germany wasn't just a pack of innocent bystanders, by and large, they were a loyal, productive and patriotic segment of the German population, contributing to their society in a measure out of all proportion to their actual numbers. What was done to them, then, becomes not only an exercise in savagery but one in an almost incomprehensible cowardice, the frustrations of the post WWI era taken out on a nearly defenseless minority population that had worked long and hard to be a good friend to the people among whom it had dwelled for generations.<br /><br />Why does this not produce more outrage than it does? Yes, one can show a few graphic pictures, and after some griping about how unnecessary such graphic imagery is, one will hear <i>maybe</i> a few reluctant expressions of horror from some of our upper crust friends, but one wonders if one has hit them in the heart or the stomach. The uncomfortable reality is that as much as some of these "nice" people will try to deny it, they don't see their Jewish neighbors as being quite as fully human as those they more closely identify with, and no, that is not a universal human trait. Worrying about your own people (whoever they may be) first may be a universal trait, but "do not do unto others that which you would find hateful if done unto you" is an observation that spans most of the globe, and most of the microcosm of that globe that is American society at its less "polite", lower, working and middle class grassroots level.<br /><br /><br /><br />"It's been over 60 years, so can't we just let bygones be bygones". In a case in which we are talking about the compensation, not of the distant descendents of the victims but of the victims themselves, this only makes matters worse. One of the issues that has arisen has been the compensation of Jews who had their property confiscated by the German government under Hitler <i>and never had it returned</i>. Imagine being robbed when you are twenty, having to wait until you are eighty before compensation is even considered, and then being asked to forgive the *ahem* loan you were coerced into making to your own personal oppressors on the basis that their heirs had dragged their feet on repayment for so long. If this were done to "nonhyphenated Americans" (ie. members of the Anglo-Saxon psuedo-majority), the expected response to such a suggestion would be one of pure, out of control rage, even under circumstances far less provocative, yet Central European Jews are expected to be "good sports" about the exact same thing, by "high class" people who then wonder out loud why they are hearing talk about hypocrisy.<br /><br />"It's been over for 60 years ..." Can you picture walking past a pile like the one seen in that photo, looking down unsure as to which of those withered corpses was a parent or sibling, and being pyschologically whole in a hundred years, much less 60? But, of course, as we can see by looking at those insane conditions set for compensation, psychological wholeness is not the only issue. Imagine it! If one is "merely" 75 percent disabled, a glorious 25 percent removed from being confined to a feeding tube for the rest of one's life - and don't ask me how such a thing could be quantified - too bad for you. You'd be basically helpless in a job market in which even the partially disabled have mostly faced long term unemployment for years, your disability the product not merely of negligence but of open, malevolent, willful harm done by the authorities, but you get nothing and you get flipped the bird in the name of sovereign immunity and German government policy.<br /><br />What boggles my mind is that the German government was allowed to set the terms for compensation, in an episode that should almost redefine the word "actionable". Just imagine the possibilities for wrongful death suits, alone. But, we get back to that bad old concept of sovereign immunity, strangely supported by many conservatives, under which a government can only be sued with its own consent. Real conservatives, as far as I'm concerned, believe in holding people responsible for their own choices. The rationale I've heard for sovereign immunity holds that the people should be viewed as being an innocent party, too, who would be wronged by the need to raise their taxes in order to pay out for any judgement against their government (thus transferring the penalty to them), but in a democratic society, who is to blame for the fact that the current idiots are in charge, but the people themselves? To reject sovereign immunity, then, is to do no more than extend the established and sensible principle that an employer is civilly liable for the misdeeds of his employees, the employees of the population as a whole being its government.<br /><br />Some will try to respond to this by saying that Nazi Germany was no democracy, which it certainly wasn't, but Weimar Germany was, and as much as some apologists would like to forget this, Hitler et al. did come to power through democratic means, at a time when they were anything but vague about what it is that they believed. How surprised did the German people really have the right to be? Then there are those who will point out that after all of this time, we would be penalizing an electorate most of which had not even been born at the time the outrages occured. Were we to talk about demonizing contemporary Germans based on what had occured in their country during the 1930s and 1940s, that would certainly be unjust for exactly that reason, but we're not. We're talking about repayment of a debt, something of a more civil than criminal nature in spirit, and there is no precedent for the notion that debts are dissolved upon the death of the debtor. They, in fact, are inherited along with the estate that ran them up, so unless the current German people wish to vacate Germany, it is difficult to see how one can justify such a refusal to honor their legitimate debts, even hereditary ones.<br /><br />Unjust? Unfair? Are we not setting the grandchildren's teeth on edge because their grandparents have eaten bitter lemons? Hardly. Look at the basis for objection. One could call for the end of Social Security on the same basis, or even the confiscation of the bank accounts of retirees who are, after all, effectively obtaining the living their money buys in exchange for work performed before those from whom they obtain those goods and services they buy today were even born, very often - do you feel cheated by this fact, or do you accept this as being simply a matter of the elderly getting their due? The same principle applies. What should have been done at the end of WWII is clear - even granting the residual and righteous anger that the highhanded imposition of the Versailles treaty produced in Germany, the Germans should have been forced to accept their debts, at gunpoint if necessary, which if you think about it is pretty much how individuals are forced to accept their debts. (Try unilaterally reneging on a debt and ignoring a court judgement, and see what happens).<br /><br />Today, that would be a little more difficult to do directly, as Germany isn't lying prostrate as it was in 1945, and we are dealing with the heirs of the guilty rather than the guilty themselves which would make waging war in collection of the debt an option almost nobody would care to entertain, myself included, but it is not too late to apply a little pressure. Germany, like any net food importer, is highly dependent on foreign trade, and as musch as some of their citizens may like to make defiant remarks about "Jewish ears perking up to the sound of German cash registers", the Germans can ill afford to disregard the sensibilities of a world community among which they must trade merely to obtain the necessities of life. To exploit this fact in order to extract from them more than is just would be wrong, but there is no injustice in forcing others to grant justice, especially when justice is so long overdue. The only question is whether the world community will care enough about justice to be bothered.<br /><br />The question almost answers itself, doesn't it?Antistoicushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02164862563095145370noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-16986259.post-1144362096931207312006-04-06T16:24:00.000-05:002006-04-06T17:21:39.766-05:00A few reservations about the Hussein trialTo talk about justice in connection with the trial of Saddam Hussein may seem comical. It is as if Hitler had survived World War Two, and found himself facing the Nuremberg tribunal, the difference being that Hitler was a far more sympathetic figure. One can not imagine a figure more clearly, damnably guilty, more perfectly the embodiment of pure evil than this absurd little man sitting in a Baghdad courtroom. Yet I find myself with misgivings over what I am seeing, and even more misgivings about the fact that nobody else seems to be having any misgivings at all.<br /><br />Looking just in the moment, we find ourselves with nothing to worry about. The facts are not in serious dispute, only the spin is. But let's look ahead a little, this time, and think about the system that is about to be validated by what is likely to be felt as a moment of long awaited relief - the conviction and likely execution of Hussein. There is no jury in the new Iraqi judicial system, I'm told. All is decided by the decree of a single man - the judge - in this case, somebody who, having served prison time under the Hussein regime, is unlikely to prove impartial. There probably is little damage to be done to the level of justice that Hussein can personally expect from the system, because there is so little justice that the man can still be said to be owed, but one can not necessarily say the same of the next defendent to come along in a system that seems designed to be abused.<br /><br />Embedding the jury trial requirement into the US Constitution early in the process of amending it was not just an arbitrary cultural choice. Having the right to be tried by "a jury of one's peers", no matter how horrendous the charges against one, means that the government can't simply trump up a charge, grab one off the street, hold a show trial and then kill one; or drop one into a dungeon somewhere. It is a necessary check on the ability of a capricious government to abuse its discretion as it tries to disguise tyranny as law enforcement. One would think that if any nation on earth would have an appreciation of the dangers of not hemming in the abuse of governmental power, right now, it would be Iraq.<br /><br />Hussein might not deserve any better than he is about to get, but the Iraqi people do. Righteous anger should never become a pretext for pushing through an unrighteous law.Antistoicushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02164862563095145370noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-16986259.post-1144069447309012132006-04-03T04:20:00.000-05:002006-04-03T08:25:12.336-05:00Watching the Culture Wars on Immigration<a href="http://img217.imageshack.us/img217/2005/notext8ja.gif"><img style="FLOAT: left; MARGIN: 0px 10px 10px 0px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand" alt="" src="http://img217.imageshack.us/img217/2005/notext8ja.gif" border="0" /></a><br /><br />Yes, more grassroots garbage. I know it might not seem as important as what is going on in Congress, but this is where politics begins. One can't leave this out of the picture, even if one finds oneself sighing and going "people, must we", which some of us are bound to do. While forgetting this became fashionable during the 1990s, America is not entirely compromised of highly assimilated Anglo-Saxons and angry inner city minority activists. As extreme positions are taken on both sides of an issue and sniping starts to go back and forth, somewhere barely noticed (by some) in the background one will find us, the silenced majority, wishing BOTH sides would sit down and be quiet. A few comments about some of the commentary I've heard about immigration and multiculturalism, in some cases by people I will name:<br /><br /><br />1. To the many angry Latino activists I saw on the news, talking about how they were being oppressed by proposed penalties for illegal entry into this country, and by the very idea of immigration being restricted at all:<br /><br /><br />You may feel that you or that relative or neighbor back home, who you'd like to bring over, would be a wonderful addition to this country. You may well be right and I may well agree with you, but the fact of the matter is that you and yours are trying to move into somebody else's home, in many cases, without even asking first. Those whose country this is, have every right in the world to say "no" to you for <i>almost</i> any noncoercive reason they please, be it wise or stupid. That's what ownership means - one has the right to make one's own choices, even bad ones - and the citizenry owns its country. Please do not insult anybody's intelligence by pretending to believe otherwise. Note that Mexico, whose government has long screamed a blue streak about US limitations on Mexican immigration, has not been shy about limiting immigration into Mexico from Central America, from countries whose emigres often have had a far stronger claim to refugee status than the vast majority of would-be Mexican immigrants. This leaves Mexico in the position of telling the US "do as we say and not as we do".<br /><br />Should you really be surprised when such demands are greeted hostilly? This isn't a time to make demands. You are belligerently greeting the population of a nation from which you desire consideration. To what end do you do this? To browbeat people into giving you what you want? How would you respond if you were greeted in that matter? It would be a matter of honor, would it not, to respond to such a rudely made petition with defiance? Do not be surprised if that which would anger you, angers somebody else as well.<br /><br />Let us speak plainly. The country you are trying to bully into submission could turn Spanish into a dead language in less time than it takes to make a decent cup of atole, quick frying everything right up to the Portuguese border. I certainly wouldn't like to see that happen, and I'm glad to say that neither would many people in the US, but even in the absence of a genocidal impulse, it still leaves us with the reality that there is no muscle behind your bluster, and the American people can well afford to disregard your anger, if it seems unreasonable to them. When you demand that Mexican immigrants get a free pass into this country that hasn't been given to any immigrant group before them, demanding a special privilege for your own people granted to none other, that is unreasonable and that is going to generate deep resentment in people absolutely capable of telling you "no".<br /><br />When you approach somebody, desiring something from him that he has both the power and the right to deny you, don't make demands, make polite requests, and make the effort to be the kind of person whose requests others would like to answer with a "yes". When you pridefully declare your right to disregard the laws of the country you're entering, as did one demonstrator who angrily insisted that being an illegal didn't make him a criminal, you're not being that kind of person by anybody's standards. If you break the law, you're a lawbreaker. It's a tautology. Let's move on.<br /><br /><br /><br />2. Lou Dobbs of CNN's Money Report got much less heat than he deserved, lately, for remarks that would have been considered backward well before Political Correctness made its appearance on the American scene, resurrecting the ghost of nativism. Nativism, if you're fortunate enough to have never encountered it, is an entitlement mentality based system of non-thought that holds that a particular brand of Anglo-Saxon culture (that fancies itself as being the mainstream culture of the US) is entitled to a privileged status within the US, having a special claim to calling itself THE American culture in a way in which any of the many other American cultures do not, and sometimes that Anglo-Saxons are themselves more legitimately American than other Americans. I like to think of it as being the old British imperialism's whiny bast**d stepchild, complete with that desire to ram one's own way of life down everybody else's throad, by whatever means expedient.<br /><br />Mr.Dobbs has apparently opposed most immigration into the US from Mexico, and fine, that's his privilege. But he's also complained about Mexican Americans waving Mexican flags at Cinco de Mayo and even to the holding of St.Patrick's Day, beloved of what may well be the least likely American ethnic subculture to ever harbor separatist ambitions. That is not his privilege, because that is not any of his business.<br /><br />Yes, you're reading that right and I mean it exactly the way it sounds - the man is not entitled to his opinion. By this, I do not mean that I think that there should be any kind of government sanction against him for voicing that opinion. I do believe in the first amendment. But the first amendment was never supposed to provide those who made outrageous remarks with bulletproof protection from the negative social consequences that might result. The right to voice one's opinion does not always give one to do so without encountering scorn and social censure, especially when one is so presumptuous as to tell other members of a supposedly free society what they should have for dinner or do on their free time.<br /><br />Mr.Dobbs, like many like him who come out of the woodwork at moments like this, would return America to a past that never was, to honor a vision that would have profoundly disgusted the founding fathers. America, above all else, was created to be a place of refuge where those who found that they could not live life on their own peaceful terms in the old country (wherever that might be), could find their own little pocket to live in and make their own, living in freedom and in peace, and you know what? Not only did this work, but it worked gloriously, producing a highly non-homogenized America that bears little resemblence to the place some of our Corporatist friends would like to transform our country into. What Mr.Dobbs is calling for today, following in the undesirable footsteps of Teddy Roosevelt as he dares to portray this as an expression of patriotism, is the very un-American unitary version of nationalism that made so much of early modern Europe into the Hell it became for so many - "one land, one people, one culture", and if that sounds like something Hitler might have said, this is not without reason.<br /><br />A country that is created as a place of refuge is going to tend to catch all of the many varied subcultures that the intolerance of so many other lands will drive out, and that's what built the real America, not this plastic, synthesized culture of TV sitcoms, plywood ranch house subdvisions and mediated, conformist groupthink that many assume one is celebrating, when one flies the American flag on one's site or over one's home. America has been so much more than that, and that is its strength, a strength that some have a great deal of difficulty accepting. One might ask how one can demand that others give up so much of what has made America distinctively American (as opposed to European) and call this "patriotism", or express intolerance for that very traditional diversity of cultures that America has enjoyed from its beginning, and pretend to be doing so for the sake of brotherhood. Brothers let brothers be themselves, and draw joy from their own individual presences. But aside from all of this, one should be amazed that so many believe that what this intolerant brand of nationalism offers is anything but a route to decline and decay.<br /><br />Let us examine the history of monism. Consider France. Before the Revolution, it was noted as a country remarkable for its regional variation in every aspect of culture, language included - there are a number of languages native to France, other than the Parisian French widely recognized. (Occitan, Breton, Basque, Alsatian and Corsican come readily to mind). After the Revolution, in a spirit of Modernism that would meet approval in some of the trendy circles one meets pro-assimilationists in, the governing of France was radically centralized (France has no federalism) and regional identities were suppressed. According to a monist's view of how the world should work, this should have strengthened France by weakening the divisive presence of regional diversity and identity. In actual point of fact, France was the leading land power in pre-revolutionary Europe, and post-revolution, has gone on to become known as the country that couldn't defend itself against Italy. (Literally - WWII, Mussolini's armies were able to occupy the Southeastern corner of France). Germany, on the other hand, while it did embrace some of the more regrettable spinoffs of 19th century notions of nationalism, never pursued Paris' program of homogenizing the provinces, and hardly seems to have been hobbled by this.<br /><br />Homogenity, then, is a cure looking for a disease, a prescription for building a stronger society that, having failed every time it was tried anywhere, still wins the support of a pseudo-intellectually trendy crowd that will never let itself be slowed down by the facts, as long as it has rhetoric. Its apologists speak of cultural diversity as being an impediment to progress, in some vague handwavey way, amazing those of us who actually have studied the subjects that make what is commonly known as "progress" possible. Speaking as one of those people, I can tell you that of all of those I've known who've done well in postgraduate study in the pure or applied sciences, not one has ever come from what would be called a "mainstream" cultural background. The one who came closest was an unreconstructed confederate from Tennessee - not the same thing at all.<br /><br />If one destroys the cultural backgrounds that have given rise to about 100% of America's scientists and engineers, guess what happens to technical progress? We may argue about why American pluralism has been such a fountain of strength for our country, except when it is blindingly obvious (eg. WWII, with refugee scientists from Europe contributing outstandingly to the Manhattan Project), but short of doing the equivalent of closing one's eyes and covering one's ears and yelling "no, no, no", one can't escape the fact that it has been a blessing. Richer and more varied cultures simply tend to produce more creative people, and creativity is what powers research. If you'll pardon an apt cliche, the Europeans, in their folly, killed the goose that had, culturally speaking, been laying the golden eggs. In doing so, they ended their own Golden Age.<br /><br />Mr.Dobbs would have us follow in their footsteps, out of a fear, perhaps, that comes from projecting his own intolerance onto others, but having been the odd ethnic kid out more than a few times, I can certainly tell you from personal experience that the unassimilated ethnics were the last ones one ever needed to fear. It was the self-consciously homogenized "ugly American" crowd that posed almost all difficulty. In this, one can see a sign of where American and European civilization went their own seperate ways. When a European sees strange and exotic customs in the province next door, he fears the civil war that may someday come, with people shooting their neighbors over a difference in dress, or dialect or family structure. When the average American hears about the same thing, his fear is that he'll run out of gas during the road trip, when he'll get to have fun checking out that exotic strangeness. Diversity only becomes a source of weakness for those who've become so timid, that they've forgotten how to enjoy it.<br /><br />Of course, looking at Dobbs, one struggles to picture him enjoying anything, so for one such as him, we bypass the argument from pleasure and get to points greatly reminiscent of those posed to the pro-immigration extremists mentioned above. "You're making demands about the disposition of something that doesn't belong to you - somebody else's money and leisure time - and you don't have the firepower to back up these ludicrous demands, so get over it". America is 93% non-Anglo-Saxon, and the culture Mr.Dobbs et al. want to bully everybody else into adopting isn't even close to being universal among Anglo-Americans. Go visit Georgia, Arizona and Massachussetts in short order, and compare and contrast. If maybe - what, 2 or 3% of the population wishes to force its ways on the other 97 or 98% of the population, how is that supposed to work?<br /><br />It's high time that the rest of us called their bluff, and backed people like this guy way the H*** off. Nothing is more American than the willingness to stand up for oneself, when one is being pushed around.<br /><br /><br /><br />3. On the far end of something, one finds <a href="http://theobfuscationreport.blogspot.com/2006/03/immigration-issue-has-many-opinions.html" target="_blank"><span style="color:#006600;">a remarkable piece of anti-Americanism by Tony Hendra</span></a> on a blog called "The Obfuscation Report", which I offer to the reader in much the same spirit that I might hand somebody a tape of "Plan 9 from Outer Space". It's so bad, it's good. Sort of.<br /><br />I discussed this one in greater detail in my April 1 post to <a href="http://groups.yahoo.com/group/pgnchil" target="_blank"><span style="color:#006600;">Conservative Midwestern Pagans</span></a>. To summarize briefly: Mr.Hendra supports open borders with Mexico on the basis that the American people have no right to live in their own homes, and have offended him by not cooperating with his desire to see their society become as dystopian as he'd like it to be. He's even angry at some of them for restoring some of the old Victorian homes, feeling that in some vague sense, they are promoting an ancient corporate evil by doing so.<br /><br />I am laughing at Hendra, not with him. He's laughable only because he is powerless. The level of hatred he puts on display is quite remarkable, and it is sobering to think of what he would do, if he could, judging by his own words. What I find quite disturbing, as I look at the seemingly left wing blog on which I found that rant, is that the editor reposting the man's words can not (or will not) bring himself to describe this outpouring of venom as being anything other than just another opinion.<br /><br />There is, sometimes, a social duty to pass judgement, because not everything should be negotiable. For those who feel that it is the left that cares about the common man, I offer that post as an excellent example of why I don't buy that. The difference between anger and hatred is that anger would like to find resolution and hatred is only inflamed by the attempt. Look at the tone of that article, and try to imagine making peace with that man. Would it even be possible?<br /><br />For those of us on the Right, anger is a reality that we have to deal with, and the source of strength nature gives us to fight when we must. We come to terms with it, but we don't find pleasure in it. When one reads an article in which the author is enraged by the very concept of somebody enjoying a pleasure as simple and inoffensive as that offered by the beauty of a traditional old home, flying into a dyspeptic rage over the mere presence of a porch on somebody's home, he is clearly not trying to resolve anything at all. He's enjoying hatred for its own sake, and he's getting validated by his fellow liberals as he does so.<br /><br />That's the difference between us and them.Antistoicushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02164862563095145370noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-16986259.post-1142618757369868882006-03-17T12:21:00.000-05:002006-03-17T13:06:02.973-05:00We 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:<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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 <a href="http://groups.yahoo.com/group/pgnchil" target="_blank">Conservative Midwestern Pagans</a> 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.<br /><br />I look forward to hearing from you.Antistoicushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02164862563095145370noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-16986259.post-1142556466718498482006-03-16T15:58:00.001-05:002009-04-20T03:23:49.862-05:00Book 'em, Danno!<a href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1506/1865/1600/goose.jpg"><img style="FLOAT: left; MARGIN: 0px 10px 10px 0px; CURSOR: hand" alt="Watch it, buddy!" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1506/1865/200/goose.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><br />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.<br /><br /><br /><blockquote><span style="color:#990000;"><i>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?" </i></span></blockquote><br /><br /><br /><br />A nice cassoulet would go over well, right now, but guess they meant that more figuratively ...<br /><br /><br /><br /><blockquote><span style="color:#990000;"><i>"Like a lot of homeowners, Larry Tomko has grown weary of geese. He's tired of scraping poop from his driveway with a shovel."</i></span></blockquote><br /><br /><br />Hey, buddy, let's not mince words. We call that "doo-doo" around here.<br /><br /><br /><br /><blockquote><span style="color:#990000;"><i>"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."</i></span></blockquote><br /><br /><br />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.<br /><br />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".<br /><br />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 - <i>the prairie state</i> - 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.<br /><br /><br /><br /><blockquote><span style="color:#990000;"><i>"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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />Now Tomko has a date with the criminal justice system."</i></span></blockquote><br /><br /><br /><br />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 <a href="http://rightwingofthegods.blogspot.com/2006/03/childrens-bootcamps-well-paved-road-to.html" target="_blank"><span style="color:#006600;">earlier post about the Children's bootcamps</span></a>? 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.<br /><br />How do these things happen?<br /><br />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 <s>death camps</s> 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.<br /><br /><br /><br /><blockquote><span style="color:#990000;"><i>"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."</i></span></blockquote><br /><br /><br />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.<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><blockquote><span style="color:#990000;"><i>"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.<br /><br />'I swore if I ever saw that again,' Casino said, 'I'd do something about that.'"</i></span></blockquote><br /><br /><br />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 ...<br /><br />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.<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><blockquote><span style="color:#990000;"><i>"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.<br /><br />'It was probably about five minutes of flopping and staggering', Casino said. 'I saw it die. It was pretty gross.'<br /><br />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.<br /><br />Tomko said that he became frightened by the irate Casino, who shouted that he was calling the police."</i></span></blockquote><br /><br /><br /><br />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.<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><blockquote><span style="color:#990000;"><i>"When two DuPage County sheriff's officers arrived a few minutes later, Tomko confessed. the officers told him to stay in town.<br /><br />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. ...<br /><br />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 ...<br /><br />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.<br /><br />But Tomko conceded that he is a little nervous. If convicted, he could spend a year in jail and be fined $500 to $5000.<br /><br />'I've never gone through this before', he said.<br /><br />Casino says that he hopes that a prosecutor 'nails [Tomko's] butt' ..."</i></span></blockquote><br /><br /><br /><br />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.<br /><br />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<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><blockquote><span style="color:#990000;"><i>"... although even Casino acknowledges that geese are a problem in the neighborhood. 'So what? The law is there to protect them', he said."</i></span></blockquote><br /><br /><br /><br />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:<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><blockquote><span style="color:#990000;"><i>"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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />'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.'"</i></span></blockquote><br /><br /><br /><br />And don't forget the garlic and white beans. <img src="http://i39.tinypic.com/2z7ohug.gif" /><br /><br />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.Antistoicushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02164862563095145370noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-16986259.post-1142335506724573072006-03-14T03:11:00.001-05:002009-04-20T03:28:47.551-05:00Children's Bootcamps: A well-paved road to Hell<a href="http://outside.away.com/magazine/1095/10f_jour.html" target="_blank"><img style="FLOAT: left; MARGIN: 0px 10px 10px 0px; WIDTH: 200px; CURSOR: hand" alt="Excerpts from Aaron Bacon's journal" src="http://i42.tinypic.com/n34r2q.jpg" border="0" /></a>An 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?<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br /><br /><br /><br />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: <a href="http://www.orange-papers.org/orange-gulags.html" target="_blank"><span style="color:#660000;">Children's Gulags</span></a>.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />Killing your child through an abundant display of "tough love" is not conservatism. Responsible <i>and loving</i> 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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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 - <i>and that's how the program was pitched to one</i> - 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.<br /><br /><br /><br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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?<br /><br />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 ...<br /><br />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?<br /><br />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.Antistoicushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02164862563095145370noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-16986259.post-1141354765128132052006-03-02T20:24:00.000-05:002006-03-02T21:59:25.203-05:00One option re: Iraq that might get considered and doesn'tAs 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:<br /><br />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?<br /><br />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?<br /><br />For that matter, do they really seem like "small fry"? Quickly skimming <a href="http://www.isop.ucla.edu/darfur/article.asp?parentid=24920" target="_blank"><span style="color:#cc0000;">some comments by the UCLA International Institute</span></a>, 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).<br /><br />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?<br /><br />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).<br /><br />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 <i>over the objections of the Kurds</i> 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.<br /><br />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 <i>without the consent of the governed</i>? 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?<br /><br />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.Antistoicushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02164862563095145370noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-16986259.post-1141348676164147992006-03-02T19:47:00.000-05:002007-02-01T14:29:36.286-05:00Comments on M.Jacques postIn <a href="http://rightwingofthegods.blogspot.com/2006/02/martin-jacques-and-temple-of-gold.html" target="_blank"><span style="color:#006600;">a recent post</span></a>, 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:<br /><br /><br /><br /><blockquote><i><span style="color:#cc0000;">Martin Jacques is a senior visiting research fellow at the Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore</i></blockquote></span><br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><span style="color:#006600;"></span>Antistoicushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02164862563095145370noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-16986259.post-1141163905703541802006-02-28T14:49:00.001-05:002009-04-20T03:44:41.819-05:00Martin Jacques and the Temple of Gold<a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/02/22/AR2006022200454.html" target="_blank"><img style="FLOAT: left; MARGIN: 0px 10px 10px 0px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand" alt="" src="http://i42.tinypic.com/ip6w52.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br />Image Source: Yahoo/AP, thanks to Michelle Malkin for finding and posting this on her site.<br /><br />This image should be a sobering one for any Muslim who views it. Even were not a single person to have been caught in the blast that left us with these before and after shots, Islam would still have lost one of its holy places and Mankind have lost a piece of its cultural heritage, something that had stood for well over a thousand years, a little bit of wonder forever gone from the world. And so it has, with loss of life as well? This was not done by a West intent on breaking the spirit of Islam, but by other Muslims, and now retaliatory bombings are taking place across Iraq by (who else) Muslims. At the moment, the greatest enemy the Islamic world would seem to have is itself.<br /><br />No, I'm not laughing at that thought. I am somewhat saddened by the observation that nobody in Iraq seems to be having it. Where I do find some mild amusement is in the excellent rebuttal it offers to <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,,1711874,00.html" target="_blank" title="article in Guardian Unlimited"><span style="color:#990000;">some of the fear mongering being encouraged by one Martin Jacques</span></a>, who I understand used to run something called "Marxism Today", in response to <a href="http://rightwingofthegods.blogspot.com/2006/02/danish-boycott-cartoonist-isnt-kidding.html" target="_blank"><font color="#006600">the cartoon riots</font></a>. Quoth Jacques:<br /><br /><br /><blockquote><span style="color:#990000;"><i>A continent that inflicted colonial brutality all over the globe for 200 years has little claim to the superiority of its values</i></span></blockquote><br /><br />As opposed to the love and kisses some of the Arabian caliphates were blowing across the straits of Gibraltar during the Middle Ages, or the kind caring compassion the Chinese have bestowed upon the Tibetans, or the gentle touch of the Aztec priesthood as they'd slice the heart out of a prisoner's chest (done with love, I'm sure) and let's not forget the gentleness the Hutus and Tutsis have long shown to each other in Rwanda or ... ad infinitim. Our Earth is not a gentle world, and non-Westerners in general have often obliterated each other's cities with gleeful abandon, in some cases millenia before the Europeans played much of a role on the World's stage. I wonder if somebody ever heard of the Assyrians, perhaps had gotten word of that whole mass impalement of the conquered business? If not, then I would urge them to read and be amazed. Without defending such moments as the destruction of the indigenous population of Tasmania, one is left with the sad reality that as dark as some times have been in the West, the Europeans do not come even vaguely close to being the most brutal civilization in history.<br /><br />But let's continue, and note just how Orwellian some of the writing will get:<br /><br /><br /><br /><blockquote><span style="color:#990000;"><i>Europe has never had to worry too much about context or effect because for around 200 years it dominated and colonised most of the world. Such was Europe's omnipotence that it never needed to take into account the sensibilities, beliefs and attitudes of those that it colonised, however sacred and sensitive they might have been. On the contrary, European countries imposed their rulers, religion, beliefs, language, racial hierarchy and customs on those to whom they were entirely alien. There is a profound hypocrisy - and deep historical ignorance - when Europeans complain about the problems posed by the ethnic and religious minorities in their midst, for that is exactly what European colonial rule meant for peoples around the world. With one crucial difference, of course: </i></span></blockquote><br /><br /><br />To be sure. The Western misdeeds Jacques speaks of are the misdeeds of some of the upper class ancestors of some of the Europeans, carried out at a time when few if any of us were even born yet; indeed, in many cases, one's greatgrandparents hadn't even met at the time. The attempt by the rioters to deny freedom through the use of intimidation is happening right now. There is certainly no comparison at all, and more than a little shamelessness in a double standard that shines a spotlight on Western mistreatment of non-Westerners, while casually overlooking the brutality often inflicted by non-Western powers, many times on Europeans - the Ottomans in Greece and the Mongols in Russia come to mind.<br /><br /><br /><br /><blockquote><span style="color:#990000;"><i>But it is no longer possible for Europe to ignore the sensibilities of peoples with very different values, cultures and religions. First, western Europe now has sizeable minorities whose origins are very different from the host population and who are connected with their former homelands in diverse ways. If European societies want to live in some kind of domestic peace and harmony - rather than in a state of Balkanisation and repression - then they must find ways of integrating these minorities on rather more equal terms than, for the most part, they have so far achieved. That must mean, among other things, respect for their values.</i></span></blockquote><br /><br /><br />In case the reader doesn't see what's coming next, Jacques is speaking about the values of the rioters. Yes, he's going to seriously argue that the Europeans are oppressing the Muslim world by refusing to let themselves be bullied into submission. But that they could bully others in such a manner more often, these days, but let's read on.<br /><br /><br /><br /><blockquote><span style="color:#990000;"><i>Second, it is patently clear that, globally speaking, Europe matters far less than it used to - and in the future will count for less and less.</i></span></blockquote><br /><br /><br />In other words, "give in or else", sidestepping the entire issue of whether or not the demands made by the rioters have any legitimacy by using fear as an argument - "give in, because your defeat and the defeat of your values and notions of freedom are inevitable, no matter what your arguments may be". Hmmm, where have we heard that before? Could the answer perhaps be found in the standard Marxist argument for Socialism (or Communism, if you prefer), which sweeps aside questioning of the Marxist vision of the future of World Society by claiming that the Socialist revolution is an inevitable outcome of historical forces? Causes may crumble, but old habits die hard, I suppose, especially when there's always a new brand of totalitarianism to be an apologist for.<br /><br /><br /><br /><blockquote><span style="color:#990000;"><i>Europe has little experience of this, and what experience it has is mainly confined to less than half a century. Old attitudes of superiority and disdain - dressed up in terms of free speech, progress or whatever - are still very powerful. Nor - as many liberals like to think - are they necessarily in decline. On the contrary, racial bigotry is on the rise, even in countries that have previously been regarded as tolerant. The Danish government depends for its rule on a racist, far-right party that gained 13% of the seats in the last election.</i></span></blockquote><br /><br /><br /><br />So, let's see - we supposedly have Europe being destroyed by non-Western immigrant rioters in the street if it doesn't become meekly submissive enough to instantly yield on any matter which any one group of nonwesterners wants to throw a tantrum about, but having assumed that, we should then go on to agree that only a racist could be opposed to immigration into Europe? Should we conclude, then, that a desire to not be burned out of one's own home and eventually murdered if one doesn't surrender one's civil liberties is a form of racism? Intriguing - and such are the implications of the man's own stated assumptions. One might say something about the racism and outright paranoia of assuming that nonwesterners are acting in monolithic collusion to bring down the freedoms of Europeans, but then one would be oppressing Jacques by saying something he doesn't want to hear, and we dare not do that.<br /><br /><br /><br /><blockquote><span style="color:#990000;"><i>The decision of Jyllands-Posten to publish the cartoons - and papers in France, Germany, Italy and elsewhere to reprint them - lay not so much in the tradition of free speech but in European contempt for other cultures and religions: it was a deliberate, calculated insult to the beliefs of others, in this case Muslims.<br /><br />This kind of mentality - combining Eurocentrism, old colonial attitudes of supremacism, racism, provincialism and sheer ignorance - will serve our continent ill in the future. Europe must learn to live in and with the world, not to dominate it, nor to assume it is superior or more virtuous.</i></span></blockquote><br /><br /><br />There you have it - Jacques equating the concept of Europeans not letting themselves be dominated by a Middle Eastern street rabble's fanaticism - apparently a fanaticism that some among the Islamic clergy have been futily trying to defuse among a misbehaving segment of the laity - with an alleged European attempt to dominate the Islamic World. As I wrote in Pagan Conservatives, this strikes me as being a very Marxist failing, a failure to see where the self begins and the other leaves off. Peter having the imagined right to steal from Paul, because Paul's not letting Peter forcibly take something from him has been equated with Paul forcibly taking it from Peter, this fallacious equation being rationalised by failing to recognize that some things are Peter's and some are Paul's. As with property rights, so with freedom of expression - as Jacques illustrates so well, the old naive defense of Marxism that holds that it is "just an economic theory" does not hold up under inspection of the behavior of Marxists, in practice. Jacques goes on to write:<br /><br /><br /><br /><blockquote><span style="color:#990000;"><i>This attitude of disdain, of assumed superiority, will be increasingly difficult to sustain. We are moving into a world in which the west will no longer be able to call the tune as it once did. China and India will become major global players alongside the US, the EU and Japan. For the first time in modern history the west will no longer be overwhelmingly dominant. By the end of this century Europe is likely to pale into insignificance alongside China and India. In such a world, Europe will be forced to observe and respect the sensibilities of others. ...<br /><br /><br /><br />For 200 years the dominant powers have also been the colonial powers: the European countries, the US and Japan. They have never been required to pay their dues for what they did to those whom they possessed and treated with contempt. Europeans have treated this chapter in their history by choosing to forget.</i></span></blockquote><br /><br /><br /><br />In other words, "they're entitled to oppress us because our ancestors oppressed their ancestors hundreds of years ago, and if you're Jewish or Polish or Greek or Welsh or a member of some other group of Westerners who were themselves being oppressed in centuries past - ssshhh! Stop being so divisively provincial". And don't bother asking just how much Colonialism the US has actually been guilty of. Some people call that being progressive. I'll call it being masochistic. Jacques continues the self-flagellation, writing<br /><br /><br /><br /><blockquote><span style="color:#990000;"><i>So has Japan, except that in its case its neighbours have not only refused to forget but are also increasingly powerful. As a consequence, Japan's present and future is constantly stalked by its history. This future could also lie in wait for Europe. We might think the opium wars are "simply history"; the Chinese (rightly) do not. We might think the Bengal famine belongs in the last century, but Indians do not.<br /><br />Europe is moving into a very different world. How will it react? If something like the attitude of the Danes prevails - a combination of defensiveness, fear, provincialism and arrogance - then one must fear for Europe's ability to learn to live in this new world.</i></span></blockquote><br /><br /><br />bringing us to what lies at the root of the left wing's ethic of appeasement - a paranoid and ironic fear that all the rest of the world will unite and go after us if we are not properly submissive. Ironic because such timidity only encourages aggression, thus increasing the likelihood of a destructive coalition of hostile powers, because to put this in quasi-Skinnerian terms, one is reinforcing the both the aggressive stance and the expectation that it will be rewarded with compliance, and thus the misplaced sense of aggrievement when some hear the word "no". As they must, sooner or later, because otherwise demands will simply escalate without limit until the one appeasing has nothing left to yield - and even after that.<br /><br />This time, however, one need only ponder that very sad image this post opened on, that of the destruction of the historic golden domed mosque of Samarra. All of the world will unite together in this jihad against the publishers of a cartoon? A call for real repression based on the assertion of an unreal scenario. How unreal? Take a good long look at that shattered dome. All of the rest of the world is a monolithic front? Hardly. When one can't even count on the followers of another denomination of one's own religion among one's own countrymen to not blow up a place of worship, one clearly isn't even seeing monolithic support in one's own backyard, much less globally. To expect the latter would to to sink into the realm of fantasy.<br /><br />But then fantacising about monolithic rebellions is what Socialists love to do best, isn't it? Jacques may be enjoying the opportunity to indulge in a nostalgic return to a past, back before his revolution of choice ended up on history's scrap heap, but should any of the rest of us begin to respond to his fear-mongering with actual fear, I hope that they will take the time to consider the source.<br /><br />And then maybe wash their worries down with a bottle of Tuborg. <img src="http://img235.imageshack.us/img235/7973/smiley4vo.gif" />Antistoicushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02164862563095145370noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-16986259.post-1138889872065595502006-02-02T08:55:00.000-05:002007-02-01T14:20:44.660-05:00Danish boycott ... the cartoonist isn't kidding!<a target="_blank" href="http://www.astoft.co.uk/denmark/"><img style="FLOAT: left; MARGIN: 0px 10px 10px 0px; CURSOR: hand" alt="Statue of Little Mermaid, Copenhagen harbor. Full image located at http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1506/1865/1600/Copenhagen-Mermaid_statue.jpg; thumbnail links to page of photographs of Danish architecture" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1506/1865/200/Copenhagen-Mermaid_statue.jpg" border="0"/></a>See: <a href="http://www.daybydaycartoon.com/2006/02/02" target="_blank">Day by day strip for the day of this post</a>, alluded to in the title.<br /><br />Yes, this has apparently really happened, or at least there has been large amounts of consistent buzz to that effect: <a href="http://www.forward.com/articles/cartoons-of-prophet-spark-boycott-by-arabs/" target="_blank">LETTER FROM COPENHAGEN</a>. My morning coffee (iced, please), a newspaper and some serious head clearing await, but for now let's take a look at some selected excerpts from the article in question.<br /><br /><blockquote><i><br /><br />Denmark has become, much to its tolerant citizens' bewilderment, the target of an international Muslim boycott, in protest of what international Muslim groups call Denmark's "aggressive campaign waged against Islam and its prophet."<br /><br />"Boycott" actually understates the case. In the past week alone, crowds of angry Muslims in several Arab countries burned the Danish flag, a mob attacked European Union offices in Gaza and at least two Danes were beaten in the Middle East. Saudi Arabia withdrew its ambassador from Denmark; Libya closed its embassy, and Iraq, Iran, Jordan and Sudan lodged official protests. A meeting of Arab interior ministers in Tunis demanded that Denmark punish the "authors" of the offense. Danish products were taken off the shelves in Saudi Arabia, Algeria, Kuwait, Bahrain and other countries, forcing one Danish dairy firm to lay off 800 workers. The European Union trade commissioner, Peter Mandelson, struck back with a threat to haul the Saudis before the World Trade Organization. Muslim states replied by submitting a complaint to the United Nations. At midweek the dispute was growing into a full-scale global confrontation between Islam and the West.<br /><br />The cause of the fury? A dozen cartoons that were published in a Danish newspaper last September, depicting the Prophet Muhammad in satiric guises. One showed him with a fuse attached to his turban; another showed him telling dead suicide bombers that he had run out of virgins to reward them. ...<br /><br /><br /><br />But the furor has not died down. The 55-nation Organization of the Islamic Conference declared this week that Denmark's refusal to censor its newspapers was, oddly, "an affront to free expression." ...<br /><br /><br /><br />Danes themselves seem shocked. They are, after all, citizens of a country that has opened its doors to tens of thousands of Muslim immigrants in recent decades. They have been generous in their support, monetary and political, for the Palestinian cause. Danish public debate, strongly pro-Israel a generation ago, has followed the general European shift toward the Palestinians. Just days before the Palestinian election, Denmark's Channel 2 Television rebroadcast a 2002 documentary on the "Jenin massacre," reviving the now-discredited slur that Israel perpetrated a mass killing in the West Bank city. The film was a tendentious mélange of anti-Israel propaganda that somehow never mentioned the U.N. investigation showing the "massacre" to be a fabrication.<br /><br />Then again, the same Channel 2 broadcast a program this week on the 1969 American moon landing. This gave equal time to crackpots who say that the whole thing was faked. ...<br /><br /><br />Denmark, like France, Great Britain and the Netherlands, is finally being forced to face the question of just what it means to be an immigrant. Does it mean accepting the culture of one's adopted homeland, keeping one's own roots as long as they don't violate the law? Or does it mean, "Thanks for a piece of your territory, and now I will teach you — or force you — to live by my norms"? And what's a free society to do about it?<br /><br /></i></blockquote><br /><br /><br />Learning to remember to trust one's friends before one trusts one's enemies is always a good start. Sigh. The United States has been a friend and ally to Denmark for how long? Was there even a time when the US was hostile toward Denmark? Remember all of those US troops that used to be over there, protecting Western Europe from becoming a Soviet acquision during the late 20th century? Do they remember WWII at all? And, on the other hand, we have the fun loving people who've been setting off explosions in a variety of public places in Europe for the last few decades, killing and maiming innocent bystanders aplenty.<br /><br />Are all Muslims like that? No. Are a whole lot of them like that? One need only look at the body count to get an answer to such a question. When one knows that trouble has often arrived from one particular direction, common sense should incline one to keep a slightly warier eye on those approaching from that particular direction.<br /><br />Yes, I know, "love those who hate you", Jesus said that, and somebody sooner of later is bound to notice the "Christo-" part of the word "Christohellenic", up near the top of my (Antistoicus') own personal blog, and are going to love having the chance to pounce on an imagined inconsistency. But love has to be tempered with prudence and a realistic picture of what one can expect from those loved <i>at the moment</i>. Love in this sense is an openness to the possibility of progress in a relationship, a willingness to gently nudge that relationship in a more positive direction, and when we say that we love our neighbor, we shouldn't confuse that with the concept of liking him. When we speak of "liking him", this refers to what we expect from him, what we think he wants for us; when we speak of loving him, this refers to what we expect of ourselves, what we want for him.<br /><br />There is some logic in a call to love one's enemies; without such love, conflicts can only hope to escalate. There is, however, no sense in unconditionally liking one's enemies. "Love" is encouraging the drunk next door to get to an AA meeting, because doing so will help him begin a better life for himself. "Liking him" would mean letting him into your place after he's tied on a few and doesn't have a good explanation for why it is that he's carrying that broken bottle, or something else equally foolhardy. Not the same thing at all.<br /><br />In this case, one might argue, not only aren't the two synonomous, they aren't even compatible. The attitudes expressed through this most recent outburst of fundamentalist hysteria - one in a long series - are not attitudes compatible with any sort of even remotely liberal democracy. They aren't even compatible with peaceful co-existence with one's neighbors, and let us be realistic. If the Islamic world approaches all of the rest of humanity in this hyperaggressive manner, it will eventually learn that it should not have done that. Europeans may dither to a potentially fatal extent when it comes to their own self-defense (eg. pre-WWII, Neville Chamberlin), but the Chinese, for example, are most unlikely to be equally timid, and if truly pushed could easily turn Islamic civilization into a scorched, smoking memory. What's love? Love, in this case, is doing one's part to help urge some of those societies off the ultimately self-destructive path they're on, and if one should help out one's own society in the process, there's nothing wrong with that.<br /><br />There's nothing wrong or hateful about setting limits, about sending the message people eventually get when, having abused the hospitality of many, they find more doors closed to them than they'd like, doors they discover that they can't reopen with a show of bluster and bravado, and they have no escape from the dreadful prospect of having to wonder why that is, and the even more dreadful need to act on the understanding that follows. It's like showing that drunken, violent neighbor the door - you need to do it for yourself, yes, but the drunken, violent neighbor needs you to do it, too, because nothing else will force him to do what he needs to do, but doesn't know to want to do yet - engage in some long, intense self-examination.<br /><br />As with individuals, so with cultures. I might ask, given the long centuries of Jewish service to the societies of Europe and the long-established pro-Western stance of Israel, where this easy comfort with bashing Jerusalem comes from, but I think that one can guess. The desire for instant gratification as one seeks comfort and ease. One appeases one's enemies by stepping on one's friends because one is more worried about how one's enemies will respond than one's friends, right up until the day one has so alienated one's former friends that they've become enemies in their own right, as well, and why not? If one sets perverse incentives in place, should one be amazed when the rewards one reaps for oneself are equally perverse?<br /><br />Respect should be shown when and to the extent that it is earned, not demanded. In this case, many of our muslim neighbors (across the sea, if you're in Europe; across a whole ocean for us in North America) have not been earning respect at this point; a demand that we live by their laws is nothing more than de facto imperialism. What defines where a nationa's boundaries lie, but the extent to which its laws are applied? No apologies should be offered, nor even attempts at diplomacy; the demands made have been arrogant and outrageous, so this is the time for open defiance. I'm pleasantly surprised to see that some of it has been on display in Europe of late. Let's hope that there will be more to come.<br /><br /><! -- link formerly went to http://www.forward.com/articles/7296 -->Antistoicushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02164862563095145370noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-16986259.post-1138460347769481912006-01-28T09:51:00.000-05:002007-02-01T13:50:28.050-05:00Another open reply to Pawnman's PostThe article I'm responding to is "<a href="http://rightwingofthegods.blogspot.com/2006/01/how-does-religion-affect-politics.html" target="_blank">How does religion affect politics</a>". Shaun has already posted <a href="http://rightwingofthegods.blogspot.com/2006/01/open-response-to-pawnmans-post.html" target="_blank">a reply</a> and I've just placed <a href="http://christohellenic.blogspot.com/2006/01/karma-and-conservative-politics-for.html" target="_blank">one of my own</a>, written from a different theological perspective (a Christohellenic one) on my own personal blog.Antistoicushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02164862563095145370noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-16986259.post-1138447865559045162006-01-28T04:28:00.000-05:002007-02-01T13:40:56.826-05:00Paging Mr.Dilbert ...<a href="http://www.imageshack.us/" target="_blank"><img style="FLOAT: left; MARGIN: 0px 10px 10px 0px; WIDTH: 200px; CURSOR: hand" alt="Image links to ImageSkack, where it is hosted, a free image hosting service with which I've had good experiences ." src="http://img4.imageshack.us/img4/8063/headandshoulders4mt.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br />Sometimes, as a Conservative, one encounters an expectation that one will stubbornly assume that people always get their just deserts and that all has to be for the best, in this best of all possible worlds, and that we're nasty punitive types who love nothing better than cracking down on people who've gotten out of line, instead of having a big huggy lovefest and letting bygones be bygones, like those caring lovable liberals. No doubt, some of them might point to <a href="http://www.chron.com/content/chronicle/business/97/03/31/jobcopy.html" target="_blank">this story</a> as an example of how insane and horrible life can become, when big business runs amock with its harsh conservative attitudes:<br /><br /><br /><blockquote><i><span style="color:#990000;">Stephen Chiu remembers the time a prospective employer asked what kind of shampoo he used.<br /><br />"Head and Shoulders," replied the electrical engineering senior at the University of Texas at Austin.<br /><br />Chiu didn't get invited for a second interview.<br /><br />The interviewer worked for a manufacturing firm that made shampoo among its other products, and the question was designed to see how much job candidates knew about the company. Chiu admits he didn't even know the company produced shampoo.</span></i></blockquote><br /><br /><br />I can already picture some future Bill Clinton clone reading this story on the campaign trail as an example of how Kafkaesque life has become in George Bush's America (insert rehearsed hisses), and there's no denying that this kid was treated badly by the interviewer. Even if it would have been reasonable to expect him to know what every subsidiary of the company did - and given how many leads one has to pursue in search of that first job, it's not - was the guy supposed to have known from birth which brand of shampoo he would be expected to have purchased on the day of some interview far off in his future? Was he supposed to lie to the interviewer if he'd been buying another brand - in the process doing something which would offer a firm legal basis for later termination (lying during an interview)? The interviewer's stance is absurd to the point of just, sheer lunacy, and that's one was not really an isolated case either. A lot of good people get shut out for reasons this dumb or dumber, and some of them suffer real, serious and unjust damage to their personal lives because of it. I wouldn't dream of denying that, and neither would most conservatives.<br /><br />But before we break out our copies of the Marx-Engels Reader and begin the good fight against elitism, judgemental standards, etc. let's notice one thing that usually gets glossed over during these post-horror story rantfests that some like to engage in. It's a rare day when the CEO conducts an interview. The people who do these crazy, horrible things to people looking for a start in life, or for a chance to get back on their feet aren't this nebulous entity called "big business", these are specific individuals in specific low rent corporate positions, who've been radically empowered. You remember "empowerment", right? That was something that corporations were supposed to do for their employees, so that the employees would have their self-esteem boosted, even if that meant letting the employees act like complete nitwits. Why, how very sweet of the companies to agree to this, how non-judgmental, how very, very ...<br /><br />Liberal. "Who cares about the results, as long as we feel good about ourselves" is not, was not and never has been a conservative idea. Look at that interviewer and ask yourself "is he putting in a professional performance". Is he doing what is in his employer's best interests, what his boss would want him to do, or is he just letting his own ego run unchecked and enjoying a power trip? Then as you ponder the image of this guy throwing a roadblock in the way of that kid's life, and maybe think about how unforgivingly harsh those evil monolithic corporations are, remember this - somebody had to hire that nutcase of an interviewer. Did the standards he had to meet seem that harsh or judgmental? And as one of my brothers who works in labor law would tell you, firing the nitwit over so subjective and minor an issue as his glaring incompetence is not always so easy for the nitwit's boss, especially if said employee is an inheritence from the boss' predecessor and has been with the firm for years. Nonjudgmental hugginess sometimes carries the weight of law, and those who try to get rid of employees belonging to protected classes, even employees who richly deserve it, can find themselves on the losing end of costly litigation.<br /><br />After all, our compassion must be unconditional, must it not? At least, as it applies for those it is fashionable to care about. <img src="http://img7.imageshack.us/img7/3994/rolleyes6cv.gif" /><br /><br />And if that loony employee should be standing in the way of somebody who really does deserve a break? Then badly misplaced compassion is going to burn somebody who deserves better - a lot of those somebodies, to be exact, because looniness is not a fleeting condition, which gets us to a possibility that I would invite some to consider, as they talk about the cold, uncaring harshness of a red state dominated America that has cut off opportunity for so many, and left many of those who remain having to jump through an unreasonable number of hoops. Maybe the unreasonable harshness of the job market that Mr.Chiu is encountering is a direct consequence of the inadequate harshness of the job market of a few decades back, junior employees of that era who should never been hired for positions of responsibility going on, as they were allowed to pursue opportunities they should never have been able to enjoy, to become the nightmare managers tormenting the next few generations of employees trying to make their way.<br /><br />It's nice to want to be nice, but maybe, in the long run, there's such a thing as a maximum sustainable level of kindness and that societies that try to push beyond it for those living in one era, can only do so at the expense of those in the eras that follow - and maybe a truly decent person tries to think about all who his choices will impact on, not just the ones who are sitting right in front of him right now, and are making him uncomfortable with those forlorn looks as they see him reach for a pink slip or can't understand why he won't just give them the A they need to get into B-school. Seeing somebody's life get stomped down on hard isn't fun, but you know what? Somebody has to do it, sooner or later, and if one acts in such a way as to insure that the person who does get stepped on probably won't be the one who will have deserved it, is that easy escape from an uncomfortable situation a kind choice on one's part, or a selfish one?<br /><br />Responsibility is not supposed to be fun, but somewhere along the way a lot of people who should have known better got the idea that they were supposed to feel happy and comfortable 24 hours per day, 7 days per week, and every time somebody saw that expectation getting indulged, it got reinforced a little more, producing a cumulative, lasting impact on the culture. When hard choices needed to be made by those who might have made them more reasonably some years back, they didn't get made, and somebody else ended up paying for it. A good many somebodies, in fact, in so many places at so many times throughout the current era. A vote for liberalism is a vote to start that whole destructive cycle all over again; the easy comfort we steal for ourselves today has to be paid for tomorrow.Antistoicushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02164862563095145370noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-16986259.post-1137553076618514352006-01-17T21:39:00.000-05:002007-02-01T13:34:00.786-05:00"Did I say Chocolate? I meant more of a parfait."Up date to <a href="http://rightwingofthegods.blogspot.com/2006/01/nagin-wants-chocolate-new-orleans.html" target="_blank">Nagin wants a chocolate New Orleans</a>; Nagins has since <a href="http://www.cnn.com/2006/US/01/17/nagin.city/" target="_blank">apologized for his remarks</a>. Whether the fact that he seemed to do far better among white voters than <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/10/13/AR2005101301729.html" target="_blank">black ones</a> played any role in his decision to offer that apology is a matter for speculation.<br /><br />I would have to agree with Shaun; what we are seeing is a double standard at work. Picture Mayor Daley saying something like "G-d wants to see a white Chicago", and imagine what the response would be. How is this any different?<br /><br /><! -- former url linked to: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060117/ap_on_re_us/new_orleans_mayor -->Antistoicushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02164862563095145370noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-16986259.post-1136623170373056572006-01-07T00:43:00.001-05:002009-04-20T04:06:48.348-05:00But don't you want to spend money on this?<a href="http://www.chihuly.com/glass.html" target="_blank"><img style="FLOAT: left; MARGIN: 0px 10px 10px 0px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand" alt="Glass flower by Dale Chilhuly. Image links to artist's homepage, showing some of his other work in the same medium." src="http://img213.imageshack.us/img213/7199/chihulymain15pn.jpg" border="0" /></a><br />Let me tell you a story. OK, a few stories, really.<br /><br />I live in Chicago, which in most years is a bleak and gray winter wonderland from November well into what should be Spring. This tends to leave the locals very much in favor of whatever will help them escape those winters. One of those escapes is a pair of domed gardens - they're a little big to be called greenhouses - called the Lincoln Park and Garfield Park conservatories, where one can go in to the 80 degree heat, look at the greenery growing around one, and if it weren't for the 45 mph wind whistling past, one could almost forget that it was winter. This is open to the public, free of charge, courtesy of the tax supported park district. Isn't that wonderful? Surely only a big old meanie could be opposed to tax dollars being spent that way, right, bringing a little cheer into a person's day? <img src="http://img386.imageshack.us/img386/4782/youbet3hb.gif" /><br /><br />Most of the time, those of us who question that kind of thing hold our tongues, because not being thought of as being the reincarnation of Ebenezer Scrooge does make it much easier to get through one's day. But let's think about that one for a second. It's a nice thing to have, but why do so many people get so upset when somebody suggests that the government ought not be in the business of providing this small urban pleasure? Dig through a lot of indignant rhetoric, and what you'll come to is a very casual equating of the notion of the government doing something with the thing being done at all; ie. suggesting that maybe the city government maybe shouldn't be spending tax dollars on such things is assumed equivalent to saying that it shouldn't be done at all.<br /><br />Where does such an assumption come from? Gardens were with us for millenia before the government saw the need to subsidize such things; private citizens and groups created such things on their own, and sometimes people would share what they had created with their neighbors. Back before "bleed 'em dry so the government can spend like there's no tomorrow", there even used to be this thing called "philanthropy" where rich people and the foundations they would establish would share some of that wealth with the rest of us. Enough to build a really big greenhouse, you ask? Friend, enough to build entire universities and museums, things that dwarf that friendly little oasis, and yes, sometimes things of beauty. No, a little showpiece like this would be no problem. Yet it is not done so very often, any more. Why?<br /><br />Because there is no such thing as a free lunch; the wealth and manpower that the government takes control of and puts to its own uses is no longer available for private efforts. Taxation doesn't create wealth, it commandeers wealth, leaving all of us, the rich included, with less control over our own assets which are in no way enriched by the transaction, and what's worse is that as that commandeered wealth is used to do for the people that which they could do for themselves, the people get out of the habit of thinking that they can do such things for themselves or even that they should. Compared to many things that we might want to see done, creating even an elaborate garden is a small thing, indeed. What does it say about the state of private initiative in a community if even creating something like that garden gets to be beyond what the people think themselves capable of?<br /><br /><br /><center><a target="_blank" href="http://www.chicagoparkdistrict.com/index.cfm/fuseaction/parks.detail/object_id/45AA3ED2-7C6F-4461-83B2-29CB991637E6.cfm"><img alt="Image courtesy of the Idaho department of transportation; links to homepage for Lincoln Park Conservatory" src="http://img223.imageshack.us/img223/7011/chrysanthemumcarinatumsmall1nk.jpg" border=0/></a></center><br /><br />Where is the harm? Yes, I'm going to get to a bigger topic than sheltered winter blossoms in a moment, but right now I'm busy leading you down the garden path. <img src="http://img497.imageshack.us/img497/9926/smiley3vq.gif" /> A typical example of the problem that arises at this level can be found when one takes a look at the annual chrysanthemum show. Easily their best show, the high point of that institutions display season, or at least it was until a few years ago. What went wrong? One of the park district administrators got the bright idea that if the mum show was started a little earlier, that he'd be able to squeeze an extra show in. The problem? Mums won't blossom in warm weather, and with the man's schedule change, they were now being planted one week after the official end of Summer, and being uprooted at the end of November to make way for the next show. Anybody who grew up in the Midwest should know better - in most years, Summer is followed by Indian Summer, and most of October can be very warm, indeed. For the next few years, some relatively expensive buds were yanked up by the roots; most of the mums didn't have time to open.<br /><br />If that admin were to go up to some private individual, having done something that incredibly boneheaded, and ask for a donation, he would most likely be out of luck, not just because he needlessly disappointed his visitors, but because his policy lead to him foolishly squandering the money already given to him, doing something that countless others had told him not to do - pride, pride über alles, even over common sense. When it's your own personal cash, the fact that somebody is asking you to let him flush it down a toilet is something that you may take very personally. But with taxation and tax subsidized public services, the person controlling the purse strings is not spending his own money, and given the difficulty in getting a government employee fired or his budget cut for even the grossest exercise in incompetence, in practice the person disbursing the funds doesn't have to answer to anybody, and he feels little personal loss if the money is spent foolishly, because this is not money that would have contributed to his own personal lifestyle. The results were predictable - as badly as the policy change worked out, the admin wouldn't budge and now the same silly thing gets done every year.<br /><br />We can laugh about this one item because it's only a flower show and the money squandered is, by itself, not enough to sink the city. It certainly contributes, though, to an overbloated city budget - it and a thousand other things as silly - and it should give us something to think about. Even the most developmentally challenged farmer would know better than to plant a late autumn crop just after the close of summer; if our illustrious city government can't handle a decision that simple, just imagine how it will handle something more complicated and important - the education of our children. Non sequitir? Not really. As I've said before, if a student flunks Arithmetic, do you try him out on Calculus?<br /><br /><a href="http://www.blogger.com/profile/13287105" target="_blank">Dan S.</a> recently wrote about <a href="http://rightwingofthegods.blogspot.com/2006/01/nea-priorities.html" target="_blank">the priorities of the NEA</a>. The subject struck a chord with me; like a lot of people out looking for more regular work, I've done the substitute teaching thing, for the glorious $50/day (before taxes) alloted us courtesy of the generous folks in the Chicago Public School System, and our beloved union. This has allowed me the opportunity <s>to learn how to find cover really quickly</s> to see yet another branch of our local government spend the funds that citizens are forced to give to it at gunpoint, more or less. How were they doing? Let me give you an example of one of those magical work days.<br /><br />I wouldn't even get to work until late morning, even though I got up at 5 am. Sub center would often take its own sweet time about calling back, and as I would come in at 11 am, I would find myself confronted by a principal who'd want to know where I had been. "I didn't get my assignment until 10:30; considering the fact that I'm on the CTA and had to transfer twice, I think that's pretty good time". Miraculous, actually; my lungs feel like they're going to start bleeding from the running I did to make those miraculous transfers. The principal is stunned for the half-second it takes her to remember how often this has happened in the past. "We called the absence in yesterday", she says. Half the day is now gone, and students have taken advantage of the lack of supervision to start sneaking off of campus. Oh, and even though my academic background is primarily in Mathematics (supposedly a subject the CPS is straining to find teachers in), and I speak not a word of Spanish, I've been assigned two Spanish classes, one gym class, and the rest of the day will be humanities in a variety of forms.<br /><br />Something that you learn relatively early on is that giving a lecture in one of those classrooms is a lost cause. The students view that as an attempt to establish dominance over them, but you have to teach them somehow, don't you? Not that you do, most of the time, the job usually seeming more like crowd control than like teaching, not really much of a surprise as all that the kids are usually given to occupy an hour of their energetic young lives is a word puzzle that should take them about five minutes to finish - babysitting masquerading as teaching, with the vacuous curriculum dictated from on high, very often - but today I'm feeling ambitious, and it looks like I might even get away with it! The way around the impasse that I've found most effective is to print up lecture notes and exercises, expanding on the assigned material, pass the notes around the class as a massive assignment, and then attend each of the students individually as questions arise. They're too overwhelmed to feel the urge to act up, and the fact that they're calling me over lets them pretend that they're running the show. They keep their pride and don't get their backsides kicked in on the way home. Probably. And I get to teach.<br /><br />At least, so goes the theory, but today I'm being told that while the principal doesn't mind my expanding on the assigned material, running copies off on the ditto machine is an extravagance that Pershing Road (the headquarters for CPS) can't afford. Amazing. If you've ever been to that building, you know that the word to describe it is <i>cavernous</i>. Six stories or so high, covering a very large city block, entirely populated by administrative personnel. Chicago's a big town, but we're not Tokyo; this is excessive. What's even more excessive is what I get to hear after I come back home, exhausted from yet another unfunded day of fruitlessly trying to keep the students from damaging the facilities too much. I flip on the news, and discover that the many, many employees down on Pershing Road were treated to a steak and lobster dinner at one of those administrative meetings, tonight, full portions of both, apparently. I thank the gods for a cultural background that has provided me with a wealth of recipes for beans, and chow down on my lentils. Not exactly lobster, but at least my lights aren't being turned off. All the same, it would have been nice if maybe a little of that luxury could have been foregone from time to time so that we could, oh, say hire a few extra security guards, something that probably would have come in handy when Benny (a 7'6" student) was busy slamming my puny 6'5" frame into the wall. I turn off the TV, and turn on talk radio (oh, what a mistake), where I get to hear a few people griping about the terrible teachers who let the schools become zoos. "And you know that we're not allowed to give out detentions, right? And that the school can't expel students for disciplinary violations?", I ask after getting on the air. "What are we supposed to do without the system backing us up? Tell a few of the Disciples that we won't like them any more if they won't stop slamming us into the wall?"<br /><br />As my eldest brother has observed, "these are the wonder years". But I digress.<br /><br />Oddly enough, very few people, having had the memorable experience of having subbed, ever want to go back to one of those schools. No teaching is encouraged, unless you believe that working a crossword puzzle or a jumble is educational, the environment is chaotic to the point of thwarting any attempt to get anything done, one sees no support from parents or administration, and one gets the final crowning indignity of being scapegoated for the inevitable results of stupidly bad decisions that one doesn't even get to give input on. <i>And the admins can't be fired.</i> At least, not without a near-epic struggle, waged by people with a lot more clout than most of us, and most of them have their kids in private schools, so they have little personal reason to get involved.<br /><br />What would work better? Here's a possibility to kick around. Let the parent choose the school, and whatever funds would have been allocated for that child's education goes to that school, wherever those fund may have come from (parental contributions, or maybe some sort of financial aid for those children whose parents need help). Just as with those gardens I spoke of earlier, but with so much more at stake, I think that we need to recognize that in the absence of accountability, a kind of entropy takes down performance; those attempting to uphold standards get in trouble for rocking the boat, far more than those who slightly lead the herd as it drifts toward slack. But if schools have to compete for students? Think of yourself as the parent, with these limited funds to be allocated for something you have a personal stake in - and then think of being told at one of those competing schools that all your kids are going to get there is an opportunity to work a few puzzles while ducking garbage being tossed out of the lunchroom. How impressed would you be, and how long would it take you to take your business elsewhere?<br /><br />Liberals by the score can be heard speaking out about the evils of nonresponsive monopolies, when the monopolies are privately held. Why do they imagine that the same principle will hold any less if the monopoly in question has guaranteed government support?<br /><br />Who knows? In time we might even get back to the idea of private charity helping out the poor, lessening the need for public aid offices to do so, which given the poor return on the dollar offered by such agencies, might be taken to be prudent management of resources, at the very least. But say this in public and what do you hear? "How can you be against children getting an education?" Which is why I took that detour through the Park District - maybe, before some knew where I was going with this, I got them to think about a few principles they take for granted, because it's harder to get overwrought about chrysanthemums than it is about children. But how sad it is if caring comes to mean <i>not</i> thinking clearly about what needs to be done and why.<br /><br /><a href="http://imageshack.us" target="_blank"><img src="http://imageshack.us/img/imageshack.png" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><span style="font-size:60%;">(This post has been subjected to open trackbacks at: <a href="http://stoptheaclu.com/archives/2006/01/06/weekend-open-trackbacks-3/">Stop the ACLU</a>; <a href="http://www.mudvillegazette.com/archives/004019.html">Mudville Gazette</a>; <a href="http://www.rightwingnews.com/archives/week_2006_01_01.PHP#005012">Right Wing News</a>; <a href="http://basilsblog.net/archives/2006/01/picnic-01-07-2006/">Basil's Blog</a>; <a accesskey="1" href="http://stuckon-stupid.com/blog/2006/01/overdue_opening_linkfest_1.html#more">Stuck On Stupid</a>; <a href="http://www.outsidethebeltway.com/archives/13209">Outside the Beltway</a>; <a href="http://thirdworldcounty.blogspot.com/2006/01/warp-speed-0pen-post.html">Third World Country</a> ; <a href="http://www.tmhbaconbits.net/2006/01/06/bbop-36">TMH's Bacon Bits</a>; <a href="http://pointfiveblog.com/index.php/2006/01/635">Point Five</a>; <a href="http://rightwingnation.com/index.php/2006/01/07/633/">Right Wing Nation</a>; <a href="http://www.conservativecat.com/mt/archives/2005/12/continue_the_co.html">The Conservative Cat</a> -Dan S.)</span>Antistoicushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02164862563095145370noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-16986259.post-1130541893395320712005-10-28T18:21:00.000-05:002005-10-28T18:27:33.320-05:00Wilma WoesReally, there is only one word for how people in South Florida have reacted to Wilma... RIDICULOUS.<br /><br />No where in the US are people reminded over and over about how to use a generator. Yet people keep dropping like flies because they didn't know they can't use them <em>indoors</em>. You wouldn't drive your car up into your house and run it in the living room, would you? Hello folks! Gas engine = carbon monoxide.<br /><br />No where in the US are people reminded over and over again about how to treat a 4 way stop. Yet people keep smashing into each other because they just don't seem to give a damn. 4 way stop means STOP. Not 4 way look or 4 way sneak through.<br /><br />And today the news conference I just heard takes the cake. NO SCHOOL UNTIL TUES. Tuesday? What the hell? Are they just making excuses for not sending our kids back? I waited in line for propane with a principal from a Naples Elementary school. She said that she was going up to assess the damage there and that the kids would be back in school in a couple of days. If anything she was going to allow it to be used for a daycare, and that the kids could survive on peanut butter sandwiches; that it wouldn't kill them. This was so that parents could return to work. Wouldn't that be nice.... For the last couple of days, I've had to take my children to work with me. There is nothing worse than trying to do work and take care of your kids at the same time.<br /><br />I just heard that the priority for FPL (Florida Power and Light) was to return power to gas stations. Excuse me?? People getting gas in their cars is more important than our children attending school? Yes the gas lines are a pain. I know first hand. I waited in line for an hour and half yesterday, only to be told that I couldn't get gas because the gas station could not take anything larger than a $50 bill. (I had a $100). However, my woe at the gas station is NOT more important then the education of my children.<br /><br />There is a national law stating that American children have to attend school for 180 days in the school year. Yesterday, I heard that they may come up with some kind of plan allowing South Florida's children to not have to attend that many days, due to the hurricane. I believe, pre-hurricane, the day of dismissal for the summer was May 26. With these added days for Wilma, the day of dismissal would only be June 6th or 7th. Our kids can't handle that? Oh no, it might mess up someone's holiday plans.<br /><br />It just seems a shame to me that South Florida's priorities are all out of whack.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.com