Adeimantus

The Smart Thing and the Right Thing Are the Same Thing

2006-04-04T23:45:00.000-05:00

It will be sad indeed if, in angry pursuit of immigration policies that would be both vengeful and Quixotic, certain Republicans succeed in driving Latino voters into the laps of ANSWER Coalition, La Raza, and other such leftist ilk.

In coming weeks, Republicans in Congress must choose either a comprehensive immigration reform package including a guest-worker program or a narrowly focused border-security bill. The former would improve homeland security, help our economy and build greater Republican majorities. The latter, conversely, would ignore fundamental problems, hurt our economy and risk the party's majority status.

It is perhaps too much to expect that every one my fellow Republicans would resist less noble impulses toward our brown-skinned "guests." Yet is it too much to hope that some of the angry Republicans might cool down enough to perceive the glaring political reality?

Reality: George W. Bush led the GOP to substantial gains among Hispanic voters in both 2000 and 2004. Without those gains, he could not have won either election. But the current immigration debate puts those gains back into play. If the Latino vote starts to go the way of the black vote, the GOP will never again in our lifetimes be a majority party.

Immigration Policy Helpful Hint Number 1: Getting pissed off at reality doesn't help.

Immigration Policy Helpful Hint Number 2: Supporting pseudo-conservative politicians who pander to your pissed-offness is even worse, unless you take masochistic pleasure in the thought of liberals running the country for the next 50 years.

On immigration, as in most things, the right thing and the smart thing are the same thing. But many Republicans seem to want to persist in trying the same old stupid wrong things, the same stupid wrong things that have never worked and never will work.

But now someone in the GOP has a new stupid wrong idea: Build a big ol' brick wall 700 miles long.

Build that wall, . . . and we Republicans will spend the next fifty years bashing our heads against it.

The Privileged Few

2006-04-03T01:49:00.000-05:00

From: Bathus
To: David Frum
Sent: Monday, April 3, 2006
Subject: Immigration and Protectionism

Dear Mr. Frum,

You write:

When we debate free trade, it is the free-traders who speak for the public interest and the protectionists who champion narrow selfish constituencies: because protectionism imposes costs on almost everybody in society while concentrating its benefits on a privileged few.

But when we debate immigration, it is the restrictionists who speak for the public interest. The best economic research on the subject strongly indicates that high levels of unskilled immigration impose costs on most people - and concentrate their benefits on a privileged few. (New York mayor Michael Bloomberg spoke for that lucky group in a wonderful Marie Antoinette moment yesterday on WABC radio. Speaking to radio host John Gambling, Bloomberg said, "You and I are beneficiaries of these jobs. You and I both play golf; who takes care of the greens and the fairways in your golf course?" Lower wages for thee equals lower green fees for me!)

If we apply the logic you use to zing Bloomberg about his green fees, then we should also prohibit importation of golf balls because cheap access to those pock-marked pseudo-ovums benefits only the idle "privileged few" who golf (and who are generally from the upper layers of the economic strata).

If you want to know who are the "privileged few" benefiting from immigrant Latino labor (both legal and illegal), go to your local nursing home, assisted living facility, or hospital, and see who's working in the kitchen, wheeling the meal cart, emptying the trash, doing the laundry, and cleaning the commodes.

People rightly scream about the public cost of illegals who show up at hospital emergency rooms for routine health care, but they don't seem to notice all the immigrants who work (for low wages) emptying grandpa's bedpan and wiping granny's fanny in those very same hospitals. The low wages (and hard work!) of unskilled immigrant workers in the health care industry make it possible for granny to live out her days in a rather nicer old folks' home than many of us could otherwise afford to provide. As is so often the case, when it comes to the economics of illegal immigration, immigration opponents focus exclusively on the small bits of the picture that support their view, as to which your riff on Bloomberg is a typical example.

The "privileged few," as you call them, are anyone whose aging parent's health care is assisted by immigrant labor, anyone who works for a company with offices cleaned by immigrant labor, anyone who drives on a highway laid down by immigrant labor, and anyone who lives in a house sheetrocked and roofed by immigrant labor. Simply put, we are all the "privileged few," but most especially privileged are the thousands of recent new home buyers, and the economy whose growth has been driven and sustained by the recent housing boom that would not have been nearly so robust were it not for the lower construction costs made possible by the low cost of unskilled and semi-skilled labor of immigrant Latinos.

The truth is, because immigrant labor contributes to the provision not just of greener greens, but so many of the basic and essential goods and services we all consume, the benefits and the burdens of immigrant labor are spread pretty evenly throughout our economy, especially when one considers that states like mine (Texas) that bear greater burdens also enjoy greater benefits. (We can argue later whether the benefits outweigh the burdens. I think they do, although that is a largely academic argument, given the economic forces that impel the migration. As I've written elsewhere, we might as well make it illegal for hurricanes to enter the Gulf of Mexico.)

One last thing: In exchange for your Bloomberg zinger, let me zing you one in return. The immigration debate sure gets interesting when otherwise sensible conservatives like you start sounding Gorish anti-rich, populist themes about the "privileged few." Next you'll be warning us of "powerful forces."

Nonetheless, I remain . . .

Your loyal advocate,
Bathus

Jackson Now, Wilson Maybe Later

2006-03-25T01:10:00.000-06:00

Although I don't quite agree with his conclusions, I would rate Rich Lowry's recent NRO piece, The "To Hell with Them" Hawks (subscription required, but an edited version is available here), as the most insightful thing I've read on the current positions and movements of conservative attitudes about the Global War on Terror. (Or should I now say the Global War on Islamism?)

For all the reasons Lowry recounts, more and more conservatives now wish to abandon Bush's attempt to blend Jacksonian and Wilsonian foreign policies (policies manifested respectively in the theories of preemption and nation-building). As Lowry explains, THWT Hawks

are comfortable using force abroad but have little patience for a deep entanglement with the Muslim world, which they consider unredeemable or at least not worth the strenuous effort of trying to redeem. To put their departure from Mr. Bush in terms associated with foreign-policy analyst Walter Russell Mead, they want to detach Mr. Bush's Jacksonianism (the hardheaded, somewhat bloody-minded nationalism) from his Wilsonianism (the crusading democratic idealism).

But among conservatives I speak with, what it's come down to is not really a question of striking the right balance of idealism and hardheadedness.

What it's come down to is a threshold question of trust. Can we trust Muslim peoples not to turn our humanitarian inclinations against us?

Conservatives, and the American people collectively, are beginning to conclude that Muslim peoples cannot be trusted, that our every attempt to assist and accommodate them they will eventually interpret as either overweening malevolence or contemptible weakness, claiming revenge for the former or advantage from the latter. That, in a nutshell, is why the Dubai Port Deal could never go through. The American people don't trust Dubai or any Muslim nation. It's as simple as that.

Confirming that distrust, Afghanistan's official prosecution of Abdul Rahman for the crime of converting from Islam to Christianity is only the latest (to my mind the most dispiriting) incident draining the last dribbles of hope from the Wilsonian ambition. As I wrote in my last post, America will not long spend its treasure and spill the blood of its youth to build nations that would kill Christians for becoming Christian. But that is exactly what seems to have been happening so far: As repayment for the young lives lost and the treasure spent to lift Afghanistan out of a brutal religious tyranny, the Afghan government threatens to kill a Christian for nothing other than becoming Christian.

How can we ever trust such people?

So whether THWT Hawks are right or wrong, their numbers are growing. Those numbers easily will be supplemented by what Lowry might call THWT Doves, i.e., the majority of loyal Democrats who will hardly object (and under a Democrat president, will positively chirp) if frequent and substantial use of American force to check noxious regimes almost exclusively involves only bombing and cruise missiles.

Lowry seems to worry most that Bush Wilsonianism might not survive among conservatives to the end this administration. But even if the nation-building project does survive through Bush's term, unless things turn around fast--unless the American people suddenly begin to have a reason to believe Muslims can soon be trusted to govern themselves sanely--it is hard to imagine a new president of either party carrying on the Wilsonian theme.

What has long been easy to imagine is a tough-talking President Hillary Clinton implementing a wildly popular, coldly bloody-minded, and aggressively preemptive Jacksonian policy--a policy that would consume a heretofore inconceivable number of smart bombs and cruise missiles. But once the bombs and missiles have done their work, our first Madame President will dispatch no troops quixotically to rearrange the burning rubble. So beyond Lowry's concern, it's not so much a question of Bush's Jacksonianism being "detached" from his Wilsonianism. It's the reality of American popular opinion rejecting Wilsonianism in any post-Bush leader. At which point aggressive Jacksonianism emerges as the only viable alternative.

Lowry asserts THWT Hawks are as "naïve and unrealistic as Bush at his dreamiest." Yet, as to "the contention that Islam is a religion of peace," Lowry advises that "even if this seems a polite fiction, it is an important one."

But as that consoling fiction begins to appear more dangerous than polite, I find myself turning to a Jacksonian frame of mind. One recalls Machiavelli's advice that one must be able to change one's nature to fit the circumstances. One begins to think that what's needed at the moment--and for a good while to come--is a stronger application of Jackson, after which we could try another round of Wilsonian tutoring. It seems that before the Muslim peoples will desire to reform themselves, they must first experience the crisis of an experienced realization that Islamism does not bring Muslims victory, or even much in the way of a satisfying revenge, but brings Muslims only unbearable suffering.

If that is true, then our noblest efforts to ease the transition of Muslim peoples to democracy and liberalism will be counter-productive until an actual and much prolonged experience of the horrible destruction Islamism invites upon Muslims convinces Muslims peoples to purge themselves of stubbornly ingrained theofascist tendencies. Apparently Afghanistan's Taliban adventure, perhaps because it was self-inflicted, was not an adequate lesson.

Jackson now. Wilson maybe later.

If Afghanistan Executes Abdul Rahman

2006-03-23T22:00:00.000-06:00

One hopes some wise soul has mentioned to George Bush that if Afghanistan executes Abdul Rahman for the crime of converting from Islam to Christianity, it's all over.

If Afghanistan executes Rahman, you can start bringing the boys home.

If Afghanistan executes Rahman, "We the People of the United States," who are just about damn well fed up with Muslims already, will in November begin to instruct our leaders that we wish to wash our hands of Afghanistan and Iraq and the whole effing lot of them, and ultimately that we would prefer to deal with the followers of the religion of peace somewhat differently: at longer range with heavy bombers and cruise missiles and at shorter range by imprisoning and/or deporting any Arab or Muslim--citizen or not--whose devotion to America permits the slightest doubt.

It's not that one would want things to go that way, but if Afghanistan executes Rahman, that's how things will end up.

This is one of those moments that matters.

A few choice quotes from the story linked above. From cleric Abdul Raoulf who, so the AP tells us, is "considered a moderate":

Rejecting Islam is insulting God. We will not allow God to be humiliated. This man must die. Cut off his head! We will call on the people to pull him into pieces so there's nothing left.

And from Mirhossain Nasri, whom the AP story identifies as "the top cleric at Hossainia Mosque, one of the largest Shiite places of worship in Kabul":

If [Rahman] is allowed to [seek asylum] in the West, then others will claim to be Christian so they can too. We must set an example. He must be hanged. We are a small country and we welcome the help the outside world is giving us. But please don't interfere in this issue. We are Muslims and these are our beliefs. This is much more important to us than all the aid the world has given us.

On that we can agree. To us here in America too there's hardly anything that could prove more important than Afghanistan killing a Christian for converting from Islam.

If Afghanistan executes Abdul Rahman for the crime of converting from Islam to Christianity, America's collective sentiment will settle into something like this:

Okay, you 7th century Islamic zealots, we see we made a very big mistake. You've convinced us you can't learn how to govern yourselves in a sane way any time soon. There's nothing we can do to help you right now. So we're getting out. It's all yours to make as big a mess of as you want.

Bag your women and treat them like cattle. Raise your children in slavish ignorance. Degenerate your society back to Mohammad's Year Zero. Behead all your heretics and install bin Laden as your final messiah. That's your business, and we'll leave you to it.

Sell us your oil or drink it for tea. We don't give a damn, because we can manage without it if we have to (and if we can't somehow manage without it, we'll just take what we need).

But at the first threatening whisper we hear from your direction, what happened to Dresden in late winter and early spring of 1945 will seem like a pillow fight.

It's not just Abdul Rahman's innocent life at stake here, though that is enough.

America cannot spend its treasure and spill the blood of its youth for regimes that kill Christians for becoming Christian. I hope you understand that, George Bush. Because if you don't understand that, it's all over.

Unamerican! Or Maybe Not?

2006-02-11T01:03:00.000-06:00

In this era of official eavesdropping, I thought you might especially enjoy eavesdropping on a conversation about eavesdropping.

The conversation transpired among me and my dearest online pals in our private (or so we thought) Yahoo Group (which we have unpretentiously named "thesmartcafe"). As is usual, our online chatter in this thread ranged through more than one subject, but if you think about it, you'll see that the whole thing really does form a single piece about what it means for something or someone to be "American" or "Unamerican."

Our repartee was incited by smartcafe member Bill's post, bringing to our attention the following story:

Yahoo accused in jailing of 2nd China Internet user
Feb 9, 2:05 AM (ET)
By Lindsay Beck

BEIJING (Reuters) - Yahoo Inc. provided evidence to Chinese authorities that led to the imprisonment of an Internet writer, lawyers and activists said on Thursday, the second such case involving the U.S. Internet giant.

The latest storm over Western Internet companies in China comes just weeks after Web search giant Google Inc. came under fire for saying it would block politically sensitive terms on its new China site, bowing to conditions set by Beijing.

Writer and veteran activist Liu Xiaobo said Yahoo had co-operated with Chinese police in a case that led to the 2003 arrest of Li Zhi, who was charged with subverting state power and sentenced to eight years in prison after trying to join the dissident China Democracy Party.

Yahoo gave public security agents details of Li's registration as a Yahoo user, Liu said in an article posted on U.S.-based Chinese-language news portal Boxun, citing a defense statement from Li's lawyers.

A spokeswoman for Yahoo said the company was looking into the matter.

Bill's take on the story is short and to the point:

Unamerican!

Dan is reliably witty and topical:

I guess they will come up with a cartoon filter next.....

But did Bill happen to notice that Yahoo is the provider that hosts our internet group? In my response, as in my wont, no matter how I start out, I wind up aiming for something philosophical:

Should we consider moving this group to another provider? But who? Google is in bed with the Chicoms, and so is Microsoft. As is everyone else, so far as I can tell.

Proof that the almighty greenback trumps just about everything--which is usually a good thing in the long run, because capitalism is the most efficient way to generate wealth, so the desire for wealth eventually transforms tyrannies into commercial republics, or so the theory goes. We even have a handy euphemism for making money from doing business with murdering tyrants, which those of us on the right side of the political fence made good use of to describe economic dealings with South Africa back in the apartheid days: "constructive engagement." Clinton later rehabilitated the euphemism to justify dealing with China.

It's so hard to be pure in this modern world.

Southerndeb chimes in:

You know, I was thinking the same thing. It sure pisses me off.

Does anyone know of another [provider] that offers these services?

I've been working late every night, so on the way home I've listened to the financial show on NPR at six. They did a week-long series on the new Chinese economy. You know what was the most surprising thing I learned? There is no religion. None. So when people get more money than they need, become rich and richer, they have absolutely NO feeling of responsibility for those less fortunate, do not donate to charity, or even THINK about anything except themselves. The host of the show interviewed one very rich woman and she seemed absolutely stunned that he would ask her to take care of the poor.

In reply to Southerndeb's query about moving our group to a more ethical provider, tongue-in-cheek Tom suggests:

Al Jazeera.

Hey, at least they'd be honest about it.

That's a good one, Tom. Glad to see the chemo hasn't affected your wit. But I'm wondering, Southerndeb, what are you doing listening to NPR?!?! And what kind of conservative would ever suggest that the rich have any responsibilities for the poor? If you weren't the founder and moderator of this group, I'd have you exiled to the DailyKos! Seriously though, Southerndeb's insinuation that charitable feeling originates from religious instruction is priceless wisdom, wisdom that even the most religious liberal simply can't allow himself to contemplate, much less comprehend. That's exactly the sort of well-grounded, almost innate, wisdom that makes Southerndeb such a fine conservative--and sets her apart from bleeding heart liberals and selfish pseudo-conservative libertarians.

Then Jim weighs in with a geo-historical political economic analysis. He worries that Lenin was right, that we Western capitalists would sell the commies the rope to hang us with:

It doesn't matter, Deb. They own us. All of corporate America panders to them and their best lobbyists in this country are members of Congress. They've already defeated us in an economic war. Sun Tzu would be proud. So would Lenin. Historians will call Deng Xiaoping the most consequential statesman of the last quarter of the 20th Century. They'll be right.

Deb, infected by Jim's noble pessimism, quickly agrees:

You're right, of course. I was talking to a friend the other night discussing the kind of world in which our grandchildren will grow up. It dawned on me that it will be Chinese against the Muslims world-wide, and here at home it will be an Hispanic majority. USA as a world power will eventually be history.

Jim responds and elaborates with more detail:

The Chinese are using the Muslims against us.

It was lots of help from Beijing that made it possible for Pakistan to go nuclear. Within the borders of China there's a huge Muslim nation in the northwest, Xinjiang Province. The people are called Uighurs (wee-gurs), Sunni Muslims related to the Turks, the people who opened and ran the old Silk Road for centuries. The Chinese have been oppressing and ethnic cleansing the hell out of them for decades. Some of them have gone radical and have thrown in with Bin Laden. Our government decided shortly after 9/11/01 that meant all Uighur nationalists must be terrorists so we declared China our ally in the "War On Terror."

It was a battle of wits, and our side was unarmed.

Dan adds his piece:

That is why the poorer, rural areas of China are rioting. The hinterlands are a powder keg, but in a country with government controlled media, that story goes largely untold....

But I, the eternal optimist, am recalling that the last news we heard about Lenin, his perpetual lease in the Kremlin had been revoked. Yeah, we sold the Ruskies the rope, the wheat, and lots of technology, too. (Better to sell them our technology than to have them steal it for free!) But in the end, no matter how much rope we sold them, the Soviets ended up hanging only themselves.

Well, all that talk about the Chinese and the Muslims is highly interesting, but as soon as anyone alludes (with even the barest hint of derision) to my south-of-the-border blood cousins, that's a fight I'm going to jump right in the middle of. The way I see it, in a pinch our good hard-working Pope-loving Hispanic (soon-to-be) majority will be able to kick the asses of any number of godless Chinese oligarchs and suicide-bombing Muslims. So I post one of my pompous semi-philosophical diatribes:

Nah, we'll outlast them all [the Muslims and the Chinese], because we'll corrupt the hell out of them all.

Rot their guts with American soft drinks and addle their brains with our TV reruns. American popular culture is an almost deadly toxin to everyone who's not an American. That's exactly why the Muslims hate us: because they know their culture can't resist the seductions of ours, but lack the social constitution that would permit their cultures to absorb the worst products of American popular culture without being poisoned in the process. The only way they can survive our cultural imperialism is to become almost identical to us. The convulsions in the Muslim world are the last spasms of a dying culture.

The Chinese society, as presently constructed, cannot survive without massive change. There's no way to efficiently tyrannize a billion and a half people. Notwithstanding Yahoo's collaboration in official oppression, the expansion of technology on the whole makes tyranny harder, not easier, to sustain. If you want to find people who understand freedom, go to China. (Which reminds me of a quip attributed to the last pope: "The last communist will be an American nun in Boston.")

As for the emergence of an Hispanic majority, that doesn't bother me in the least, so long as they preserve the "good ol' American" values.

American is not a skin color or an ethnicity or a cuisine.

American is an idea.

All it takes to be a "real American" is to sign on to that idea.

So I don't care whether the inheritors and preservers of that idea are brown or yellow or white or black or red. I would go so far as to say that you'll find a greater percentage of "real Americans" (people who dedicate their lives to the American idea) among Hispanic immigrants than among 10th generation white skinned folks. The white ones think they deserve something just because their great-great-grandpa was lucky enough to be born here.

They think God created America as a birthright for white people. So all they do is piss and moan about how the tan ones are over-running "their" country.

Meanwhile, the tan ones understand the American dream, and they believe in it all the way. They understand that they have to work hard for what they get, and they do work hard for what they get. The white folks piss and moan about medicare and the size of their social security checks. Most white folks have forgotten what hard work really is. They only think they work hard. But they haven't the faintest idea what a hard life is. They have forgotten what it means not to have their cell phones, their cable TV, their dishwashers.

Nothing lasts forever, but America, the idea that is America, has got a long run to go. Whether that idea will be carried on by white, brown or tan, doesn't matter. But if I had to bet, I'd bet on the tan ones.

Now I have to confess that what I wrote above was in large part calculated to dig a rhetorical elbow into the metaphorical ribs of my dear online pal, Bill, a resident of Arizona who, to put it mildly, views immigration from Mexico and places further south rather differently than I do.

Sure enough, I do get a slight rise out of Bill. But he responds with grace, dignity, good humor, and a recitation of 10 generations of his family tree (which, until he corrupted it, looked about as WASPish as you can get):

1) Obadiah S____y b. about 1615, England d. August 25, 1657, Stanford CT. Arrived in America in 1630's. Is in records of being in Stamford 1635.

2)Obadiah S____y b. 1647 Stamford, CT d. Fairfield, CT July 25, 1680.

3) Obadiah S____y b. 1670 Stamford Ct d. Stamford CT September 04, 1745.

4) John S____y b. August 25, 1693 Stamford, CT d. Stamford, CT March 19, 1756.

5) Major Gideon S____y b. September 27, 1729, Stamford, CT d. December 18, 1804 in Croton river, Westchester County, New York .

6) Isaac S____y b. November 20, 1768 South Salem, New York d. October 26, 1850 Westchester County, New York. (Bought the farm and land where I was born 1938, my father in 1879, my grand-father in 1852, and my great grand-father in 1799.)

7) George S____y b March 15, 1799 d. May 01, 1870 Greenville, New York (now Scarsdale , NY).

8) Henry S____y March 20, 1852 d. June 10, 1920, Scarsdale.

9) William H. S____y b. May 30, 1879 d. November 1952, Scarsdale.

10) William H. S____y, Jr.. ME!!!! b. October 28, 1938 d. still living (and I just checked).

11) John Isaac S____y b. November 27, 1995 (still living) North Shore Hospital, Roslyn , New York

Except for my two oldest boys that are half Asian, you can call us all "Whitey".....(VBG)

Bill's post calls forth a flurry of posts about family trees.

Vic's:

I'm jealous. There was an earthquake in Crete--the church collapsed and the bible burned. The town in Cyprus was bulldozed and is on the Turkish frontier.

So I have no idea which goatherd or pirate was my ancestor.

Dan's:

My family tree isn't pretty either, but at least the limbs do fork.

Tom's:

America is generational stories, that's all. Whether the generations are white, black, yellow, brown, or tan, America is and always has been a bunch of strangers in a strange land trying to get along. Its collapse will come about when those strangers no longer want to get along, and that's where it's headed. Whites, blacks, yellows, browns and tans are as adept at exploiting and killing each other as they are "opposing" races.

My paternal grandparents came over - separately - in typical fashion. Nothing but the clothes on their backs and settled in South Philadelphia. Now, despite our surname, my dad's was more a matrilineal heritage. His family tree traces its origins back to the old country through his mother's side. My paternal grandfather came over here alone and was a laborer. Seems my paternal grandmother's oldest brother, Dominic had the balls to come over here and start a business that enabled him to bring over the rest of the siblings, three sisters, one of whom became my paternal grandmother. He was capo de capo of that family. All his sisters' children at one time or another worked in the soda business he had built up from nothing to having quite a reputation from Delaware to PA through NJ and lower NY. Because he was so successful, a small soda water bottler based in the south came up to him and asked if he would like to be the sole distributor of its product in the northeast. Uncle was simultaneously a savvy entrepreneur and stereotypically bullheaded immigrant that couldn't see a difference between a business 'partnership' and 'working for somebody'.

So he turned down a deal with Pepsi. Did it again with 7-Up.

Like a good Italian brother, Dominic saw to it that his sisters all married nice Italian men he approved of - meaning ornery old cusses like himself. He got two out of three. My paternal grandmother married Emedio M_________, a nice guy whom Uncle "Doom" couldn't stand. When they were both in their 40s, Uncle once told Emidio (who's American nickname, for some reason, was Jim), "Jim, I'ma gonna piss onna you grave." Grandpop said, "You probably will." Uncle took a stroke in an outhouse that year and died a few hours later. They went to my grandfather and told him, "Jim, Dom died." My grandfather sat there for a minute, then said, "Let me know when they're buryin' him. I'll drink a lot a wine beforehand."

Grandpop died on a Saturday afternoon in November, 1963, one week before JFK's assassination, at the age of 94. Took his afternoon nap and never woke up. We all ought to go that way.

And finally, mine:

Bill, yours is an impressive family tree, with a history stretching back almost 400 years in this land you white folks thought was a New World.

Here's mine, not as impressive as yours, but with a bit longer history on this particular continent:

1. Great-great-great grandfather (to 300th power): aboriginal person of unknown name with skull shape similar to that of modern ape. . . believed to have immigrated from Asia across Bering Strait through Alaska approx 8000 B. C.

2. Approximately 300 generations of other savage progenitors of whom the historical record is equally vague (including several from "the woodpile").

3. Grandfather: John Ander Jacobs, b. 1906, in swamps of SE North Carolina. (First in family line to adopt use of personal table utensils, specifically, knife and spoon. Ten years later introduces use of fork, which is still widely employed at table in the Jacobs family even up to present time.)

4. Father: Herman Jacobs, b. 1930, in swamps of SE North Carolina. (Too poor to afford a middle name. Survives Great Depression eating field peas, the only crop his father ever learned how to grow with any success. Unfortunately, Great Depression in NC marked by a glut of field peas, so there was no market for the family's produce. Joins US Navy 1947. Marries 1952 Ellen Walker, b. 1929, dirt poor orphan hillbilly from Kentucky. Continues family tradition of using table utensils at most meals; however, reverts to eating field peas with knife.)

5. Herman Edward Jacobs [aka Bathus], b. 1956, Portsmouth Naval Hospital. (Still too poor to afford a middle name. Mother gives him one anyway in hopes of future prospects. Usually eats field peas with fork. Uses knife only to round up strays.) Married Sandra Ann K____ (Cajun with moss growing between toes) b. 1955, New Orleans.

6. Children: daughter J____ M____, b. 197_. B.A. Yale, English Lit, 199_, Skull & Bones inductee; M.A. Columbia, Public Administration, 199_. Presently a major muckabout in State Public Health Department. (Thinks she's hot shit, but we know better. Married very nice white boy, Daniel M___ S____. No issue yet (but we remain hopeful). (Always eats field peas with fork.)

One presumes Yahoo has already neatly indexed, catalogued, and archived the above text, so that it will be available (for a small fee) to the government of Iran, the United States, The Peoples Republic of China, Turkey, Mexico, or any other regime implicated therein, should such government wish to investigate the activities of members of the infamous Yahoo Group known as thesmartcafe.

We Will Not Yield to Islamist Pressure!

2006-01-30T17:22:00.000-06:00

A few weeks ago, an independent Danish newspaper, Jyllands-Posten, published some rather mild cartoons that were critical of Islam and its founder, Mohammed. Since then, whackos from throughout the Muslim world have been threatening all sorts of dire consequences, including, one must assume, a boycott of Danish hams.

The Danish Prime Minister has basically told the objecting Muslims to go to paradise (unlike his Norwegian neighbors, who somehow felt compelled to apologize for the Danes' anti-Muslim "atrocities").

It turns out mocking Mohammed is something of a Danish national pasttime, that is if the reaction of my friend Wiggin (who lives in Denmark) gives us anything to go by. He has graciously given me permission to reproduce his brilliant homage to the Prophet (pbuh)(peanut butter upon him) above. On the off chance that there are any Islamists reading--I guess you just won't be enjoying any more delicious Danish ham.

Hopefully the "we must address the reasons why they hate us" crowd is paying attention. They hate us because theirs is an ideology of hate. If it's not our foreign policy, it'll be the cartoons in our newspapers. If they drive us out of Baghdad, they'll want Seville.

UPDATE:

Jyllands-Posten has published a non-apology apology. It's addressed to "Honourable Citizens of the Muslim World" (though one wonders if honorable Muslims are the ones making a hullabaloo) and essentially says "We're sorry you're offended." Not bad, I suppose, though I think "We're sorry you feel compelled by your religion to act as though you live in the 13th century," or "We're sorry you let your imams think for you" might have been even better. Don't look for a big Saudi rush on Danish ham.

UPDATE 2:

Bucking the national tradition of appeasement, the French newspaper France Soir has reprinted the Danish cartoons (the originals, not Wiggin's masterpiece above). In recognition of this dramatic and unexpected feat of non-cowardice, I think tonight I'll enjoy a bottle of French wine--my first in over two years.

UPDATE 3:

I knew it was too good to be true. The French compulsion to surrender is just too strong. The owner of France Soir has fired its editor for his un-Gallic display of courage and issued an appropriately grovelling apology. It's too late for me to un-drink that bottle of French wine, but as it leaves my body I dedicate it to the owner of France-Soir. Get used to it, mon ami, there's a long line of radical Muslims preparing even now to piss on you, too.

UPDATE 4 (on 02/02/2006 by Bathus):

PBS Watch has been doing a fine job blogging the Cartoon Wars. For the latest developments, insightful commentary, relevant links, and reproductions of the cartoons themselves, see the following PBS Watch posts (listed here in reverse chrono order):

Who Won the Election?

Once In A While

Maturity

More Help For Tarek

We Have Always Been At War With Oceania

Trumping The Blogburst

Europe Grows A Backbone

Rodney King

The Final Solution

Helping Tarek

Advancing the Discussion

Farenheit 451 Alert (The Danish cartoons are reproduced here.)

Study Reveals Joe Biden Is Judiciary Committee's Biggest Gasbag

2006-01-10T23:00:00.000-06:00

[01/11/2006 NOTE by Bathus: There's an update of this item here at the end of this post.]

Let's have some fun with statistics, shall we?

In the senate judiciary committee hearings this morning, Ted Kennedy clumsily attempted to make use of a Cass Sunstein "study" to support a charge that "Judge Alito rules against individuals 84 percent of the time." Writing for National Review Online two days ago, Byron York pointed out in advance that, with all its caveats, qualifications, and disclaimers, Sunstein's report is useful "to prove virtually nothing." Well, it does prove that if a bloated liberal senator gives Cass Sunstein enough money, in a very short time that scholar of unimpeachable credentials will produce a study of sufficient rigor to convince the bloated senator that what the bloated senator wants to be believe is actually true.

Kennedy didn't mention Sunstein's ample disclaimers because the ample senator doesn't care whether Sunstein's ginned up stats reveal everything, something, or nothing about what kind of justice Alito would be. Kennedy's not alone in that regard. If any of the senators on the judiciary committee actually cared about using these hearings to learn something about Alito, they would spend more time listening to what the nominee might have to say, and less time self-indulgently bloviating.

Kennedy's use of Sunstein's dubious statistics inspired me to do a little number-crunching myself, to answer the pressing question: Which senator, when measured by an objective standard, can be identified as the biggest gasbag on the judiciary committee?

My methodology is completely objective:

Using this transcript of the morning session of today's hearings, for each senator's thirty minute question period I took the number of words spoken by the senator and divided it by the number of words spoken by the nominee and the senator together. Actually, because some senators use bigger words and some use smaller words, I decided that, instead of using words as the unit of measure, it would be better to use individual letters (without counting spaces between words), so that the phrase "Alito sucked eggs" and the phrase "Alito dissembled" count exactly the same: 15 characters. (Before calculating percentages, I excluded words spent on administrative matters and other similar interruptions. However, the senators'--often extensive--introductory remarks were counted.) So the numbers in the second and third columns of the chart below reflect the number of letters (not words) appearing in the transcript of questions and answers asked by and answered to each senator. The resulting percentages, shown in the last column (labelled "Senator %,") indicate what portion of each senator's dialogue with Alito was comprised of the senator's "questions."

The great thing about careful statistical analysis is that it reveals truths that just can't be discerned by casual observation and common sense alone.

For example, I bet you never would have guessed that the biggest gasbag during the first session of questioning was Joe Biden, who monopolized almost 80% of his dialogue with Alito. Roughly speaking, the nominee got in edgewise one word for every four that meandered out of Biden's yap.

Coming in a distant second in verbosity this morning was the ever-generous Ted Kennedy, who gave more than twice as much as he received. But it's not really fair to expect the bloated one to be up to snuff so early in the day.

As a group, during the morning session the senators used up three-fifths (60.32%) of the total dialogue and left the nominee to make do with two-fifths. I guess that's only fair since there are so many of them and only one of him.

Kyl was the only senator who failed to out-talk the nominee. But as the last questioner of the morning session, Kyl was interrupted when the committee adjourned for lunch ten minutes into his allotted thirty minutes. With a light lunch and a heavy nap, perhaps Kyl can catch back up with pack when the hearings resume in the afternoon.

Joe Biden also claimed the morning's prize for the longest soliloquy, wherein he wasted more than a third of his entire dialogue with Alito on this single "question":

BIDEN: Well, it was a pretty outrageous group. I mean, I believe you that you were unaware of it. But here I was, University of Delaware graduate, a sitting United States senator, I was aware of it because I was up there on the campus. I mean, it was a big deal. It was a big deal, at least in our area of the Delaware Valley, if Princeton, Penn, the schools around there had this kind -- because the big thing was going on at Brown at the time as well.

And by the way, for the record, I know you know when you stated in your application that you are a member -- you said in '85, "I am a member" -- they had restored ROTC. ROTC was back on the campus.

But again, this is just by way of why some of us are puzzled. Because if I was aware of it, and I didn't even like Princeton...

I mean, I really didn't like Princeton. I was an Irish Catholic kid who thought it had not changed like you concluded it had.

I admit, one of my real dilemmas is I have two kids who went to Ivy League schools. I'm not sure my Grandfather Finnegan will ever forgive me for allowing that to happen.

But all kidding aside, I wasn't a big Princeton fan. And so maybe that is why I focused on it and no one else did. But I remember it at the time.

The other thing is, Judge, the other thing you should be aware of -- and do not take this personally, what's going on here -- every nominee that comes before us is viewed by all the senators -- left, right, center, Democrat, Republican -- at least on two levels, at least in my experience here.

The first one is individual qualifications and what their constitutional methodology, their views are, their philosophy.

But the other is -- and it always occurs -- whose spot they're taking and what impact that would have on the court.

Everybody wrote with Roberts after the fact that a lot of people voted for Roberts that were doubtful. I was doubtful, I voted no. But he was replacing Rehnquist. So Roberts for Rehnquist, you know, what's the worst that can happen, quote/unquote, or the best that can happen?

No, I'm not being facetious. What's the best or worst?

If you're conservative, the best that can happen is he's as good as Rehnquist. From the standpoint of a -- someone who's a liberal, the worst that can happen, he's as good as Rehnquist.

So, I mean -- but you're replacing -- I mean, we can't lose this and so people understand this. You are replacing someone who has been the fulcrum on an otherwise evenly divided court. And a woman who's -- most scholars who write about her, and in a retrospective about her, say this is a woman who viewed things from -- the phrase you've used -- a real-world perspective. This was a former legislator, this was a former practitioner, this was someone who came to the bench and applied -- to her critics, she applied too much common sense. Critics would say that she was too sensitive to the impact on individuals, you know, that -- what would happen to an individual.

So her focus on the impact on individuals was sometimes criticized and praised.

It's just important you understand, at least for my questioning, that this goes beyond you. It goes to whether or not your taking her seat will alter the constitutional framework of this country by shifting the balance 5-4, 4-5, one way or another.

And that's the context in which, at least, I want to ask you my questions after trying to get some clarification, or getting some clarification from you on concern Princeton. Because, again, a lot of this just is puzzling; not not able to be answered, just puzzling.

Judge, you and I both know -- and clearly one of the hallmarks, at least in my view, of Justice O'Connor's position was, she fully understood the real world of discrimination. I mean, she felt it.

Graduated number two in her class from Stanford, couldn't get a job, was offered a job by law firms -- granted, she was older than you are, but couldn't get a job because she was a woman; they'd offer her a job as a secretary.

And so she understood what I think everybody here from both ends of the spectrum understand: that discrimination has become very sophisticated. It's become very, very sophisticated, very much more subtle than it was when I got here 34 years ago or 50 years ago.

And employees don't say any more, you know, "We don't like blacks in this company," or, "We don't want women here."

They say things like, "Well, they wouldn't fit in," or, "You know, they tend to be too emotional" or "a little high-strung."

I mean, there's all different ways in which now it's become so much more subtle. And that's why we all, Democrat and Republican, wrote Title VII. We wrote these laws to try to get at what we observed in the real world.

What we observed in the real world is it's real subtle. And yet it's harder to make a case of discrimination even though there's no doubt that it still exists.

And so I'd like to talk to you about a couple of anti- discrimination cases. One is the Bray case. In that case, a black woman said she was denied a promotion for a job that she was clearly qualified for. There was no doubt she was qualified. And she said, "I was denied that job because I'm a black woman."

And it was, as I said, indisputable she was qualified. It was indisputable that the corporation failed to follow their usual internal hiring procedures. And the corporation gave conflicting explanations as to why they reached the decision to hire another woman who they asserted was more qualified than Ms. Bray.

Now the district court judge said, you know, Ms. Bray hadn't even made a prima facie case here, or she made -- but she hadn't made a sufficient showing to get to a jury; I'm finding for the corporation here.

And Ms. Bray's attorney appealed and it went up to the 3rd Circuit. And you and your colleagues disagreed. Two of your colleagues said, you know, Ms. Bray should have a jury trial here. And you said "No, I don't think she should," and you set out a standard, as best I can understand it. I want to talk to you about it.

And your colleagues said that if they applied your standard in Title VII cases, discrimination cases, that it would effectively -- their words -- eviscerate Title VII because, they went on to say, it ignores the realities of racial animus.

They went on to say that racial animus runs so deep in some people that they're incapable of acknowledging that a black woman is qualified for a job.

But, Judge, you dismissed that assertion. You said that the conflicting statements that the employer made were just loose language, and you expressed your concern about allowing disgruntled employees to impose cost of a trial on employers. And so your colleagues thought you set the bar, I think it's fair to say, pretty high in order to make the case that it should go to a jury.

Can you tell me what the difference is between a business judgment as to who's most qualified -- you said, "This comes down to subjective business judgment" -- and discrimination? You said, "Subjective business judgment should prevail unless the qualifications of the candidate are extremely disproportionate."

What's the difference between that in today's world and discrimination? I know you want to eliminate discrimination. Explain to me how that test is distinguishable from just plain old discrimination.

So the big revelation from this morning's hearing is that, based on objective statistical analysis and confirmed by anecdotal evidence, Joe Biden is the biggest gasbag on the judiciary committee.

Even though he is an indeflatible gasbag, from what I've heard Joe Biden is actually a pretty decent guy on a personal level, which is more than one can say--on any level--about certain other members of the committee: If I can figure out an objective way to measure who's the biggest asshole on the judiciary committee, my next post will feature Ted Kennedy.

UPDATE 01/11/2006: The table above displayed data only for the first seven senators who questioned Alito during yesterday's morning session. By this afternoon the judiciary committee had completed its first full round of questioning, so I've run the numbers to show results for all eighteen senators:

With one full round of questions completed, Joe Biden retained his top spot in the gasbag stakes, but saw his lead threatened by Republican John Cornyn who now trails him by less than one percent. By the end of the first round, Ted Kennedy had slipped all the way to fifth place, when Senators Schumer and DeWine both recorded truly inspired displays of fatuous bloviation. Undeterred, the bloated senator from Massachusetts remains within what for him is easy stinking distance of the lead, and has promised an especially gaseous outing in the second round of questions, which was set to begin right after lunch today. Thrown off stride when his first round questions were interrupted by an adjourment after only ten minutes, Senator Kyl had been the only inquisitor to fail to out-talk the nominee in yesterday's morning session. But after the adjournment Kyl came back strong in his final twenty minutes to offer a respectably gas-filled performance that propelled him back toward the middle of the pack. Bringing up the rear were Senators Feinstein and Kohl. Those two senators, who permitted the nominee to out-gas them badly, have fallen so far behind that some have suggested they should drop out of the competition altogether.

(Thanks to James Taranto at Best of the Web for linking this post.)

Ostracon

2006-01-08T13:48:00.000-06:00

Sad but true, "throw 'em to the wolves" is sometimes for the best.

The Dems set their sights on bringing down Tom Delay a long time ago, and now they've succeeded.

I had expected all along that they would succeed, and to be perfectly frank I've looked forward to their success because Delay (aka "The Exterminator," aka "The Hammer") has never presented the most appealing image of the Republican Party. He's not the devil the Dems want to make him out to be, but there is something about his persona that lends itself to a caricature drawn with the most hideous stereotypes one can associate with Republicans and conservatives. I doubt Delay will be convicted (but then again I thought Martha Stewart would be acquitted), but that's irrelevant to what's in the best interests of conservatives, the GOP, and the public generally.

What's happening to Delay is akin to the ancient Athenian democracy's practice of ostracism, a practice in which the actual guilt or innocence of the political leader is completely irrelevant. The person's status comes to depend entirely upon whether he is admired or reviled (or feared). Ostracism is a formalization of a fundamental instinct of all democratic peoples: The need, now and then, to bring low some person of high status.To be ostracized by the Athenians meant being exiled from the land for a period of ten years. But one was not imprisoned, and one's property was not confiscated. In our democracy, ostracism can be both harsher and more frivolous than it was among the Athenians: Our practice is harsher because our modern ostracisms sometimes entail criminal prosecutions, with loss of freedom and/or property. Martha Stewart's criminal trial was a modern ostracism. She was convicted because she was reviled and envied. Our process is also sometimes more frivolous than it was among the Athenians, because they reserved ostracism for great political leaders. The Athenian people would have thought they had demeaned themselves if they ostracized a mere celebrity like Martha Stewart.

To have been ostracized by the Athenian democracy was a mark of greatness and power. To be ostracized by the American democracy it is enough merely to be popularly disliked or envied.

Distasteful (and morally abhorrent) as all this is, aside from the nice question of whether what is happening to Delay is fair or just to him personally, the reality is that in a democracy a leader cannot serve the public good if he is too widely reviled or envied. In that question of the public good, the justice of the individual case cannot stand against the public necessity.

The Dems and Ronnie Earle are doing the GOP a favor by giving them the excuse to do, and claiming the ignoble credit for doing, what many Republicans have wanted to do-- what must be done for the good of all, all except Tom Delay.

Further Thoughts on the Little White Lie about a Little Read Book

2006-01-04T01:59:00.000-06:00

[01/05/2006 NOTE by Bathus: There's an important update of this item at the end of this post.]

On further reflection I have realized that my last post on this subject was too hard on the UMass Dartmouth student and too easy on the newspaper that published his lie.

I still believe that the student's name should be disclosed for the public good and for the good of journalism, and that the student himself will be better off in the long run if he steps forward to take personal responsibility for his lie.

So if and when I discover his name, I still intend to publish it in this space.

However, after looking more closely at the way the New Bedford Standard-Times handled this story, especially how that newspaper's editors and its reporter have slyly sought to deflect the major responsibility for their journalistic sin from themselves onto the student, I have come to the conclusion that the Standard-Times, not the student, is the real villain of this piece.

My thinking about all this is set forth in full in the following email I dashed off to the Standard-Times editor, Robert Unger. (I've edited the text of my email a bit to spruce up sloppy grammar and to clarify especially awkward phrasing.)

From: Bathus
To: Robert Unger
Date: Wednsday, January 04, 2006 12:40 AM
Subject: Further Thoughts on the Little Red Hoax

I am an attorney and blogger who operates under the nom de blog "Bathus" at Adeimantus Blog, where I have recently written on the subject of the now infamous UMass Dartmouth Little Red Book hoax.

In its apologia for publishing this false story, the New Bedford Standard-Times has put forward three rationales for withholding the hoaxer's identity:
[W]e didn't name the student, at the request of the university. We also worried about the student's mental state and about the careers of professors Williams and Pontbriand.
(In his follow-up story, your reporter Aaron Nicodemus had similarly stated, "At the request of the two professors and the university, The Standard-Times has agreed to withhold his name.")

Your paper's stated rationales for refusing to disclose the identity of the UMass Dartmouth hoaxer are not plausible. Let's look at them one by one:

I. "We didn't name the student at the request of the university."

This rationale standing by itself is worthless. No responsible newspaper would ever withhold newsworthy facts from the public merely because some entity, even a beloved local institution of higher education, so requested. If the information is newsworthy (and in the course of reading this email it should become clear to you why the student's identity is indeed newsworthy), then the newspaper should publish it notwithstanding the university's understandable desire to protect its students--unless the university offered some very weighty reasons not to publish. Such reasons have not been forthcoming.

II. "We also worried about the student's mental state."

This rationale, while somewhat compelling emotionally, is not otherwise persuasive. Editors and reporters are not qualified to make a psychologist's judgment that publishing the student's name would do him significant emotional harm beyond that which he has already suffered. One wonders whether--except for the inapplicable rationales for withholding the names of minors and victims of sex offenses--the Standard-Times has ever before worried whether publishing the name of a person at the very center of a story would affect that person's mental state. In a similar context, would the Standard-Times hesitate to publish the name of a 22 year-old factory worker whose false statements were at the center of a nationally significant story reported in its pages? Notwithstanding the sympathies one might feel toward students as a class, does a student deserve milder treatment than a factory worker?

One must evaluate the credibility of the Standard-Times' purported concern for the student's frail emotional state in light of an editorial column titled "Sizing up [the] week of news" in which the Standard-Times published the following post hoc analysis:
Student should be ashamed

Thumbs down for the UMass student who lied to professors and The Standard-Times about being visited by federal agents after he ordered a copy of Mao Tse Tung's Little Red Book through the inter-library loan system. This bogus story went around the nation and gave the public a false impression of our government at a time when our government is under intense pressure to defend the homeland from terrorism and does not need the public to turn against it. (emphasis added)
The above statement elicits the following observations:

Firstly, with the above statement, the Standard-Times appears to be attempting unfairly to place the bulk of the blame on this student in order to deflect responsibility away from itself, when (as I explain more fully below) it was the Standard-Times' extremely shoddy reporting that transformed what otherwise would have remained a thoroughly unremarkable "private lie" between a student and his professors into a source of massive public embarrassment for all the involved parties.

Secondly, the Standard-Times' assertion that the student deserves shame is not consistent with its statement that the Standard-Times is worried about the student's mental health. If the Standard-Times were truly concerned about the student's purportedly fragile mental health, it would not have published the above statement asserting that the student deserves to have shame heaped upon him. (On the other hand, you can call me old-fashioned, but I personally believe that this student would emerge from this episode with greater integrity, both emotional integrity and ethical integrity, if he were required publicly to take personal responsibility for his role in this fiasco.) The Standard-Times inflicts more public shame on the student (whose identity is already known among a large segment of the UMass Dartmouth community) while at the same time using the student's supposed mental frailty as an excuse for withholding his name.

Thirdly, the Standard-Times' statement correctly points out that this story "gave a false impression of our government at a time when our government is under intense pressure to defend the homeland from terrorism and does not need the public to turn against it." Because that is true, the Standard-Times editor has a journalistic duty to the public, to his own paper, and to his profession to reveal the name of the hoaxer so as to discourage others from using the media to disseminate information they know to be false. This duty to protect the integrity of your profession, and to serve the public's right to the full truth on a story that has corrupted the public debate in a matter of national interest, outweighs any speculative concerns the Standard-Times might have about private harm that might redound to the person who originated the lie.

III. We also worried about . . . the careers of professors Williams and Pontbriand.

All of the considerations that apply to discredit your concern for protecting the mental health of the student apply equally to your concern for protecting the careers of the professors. Since when did tenured university professors become a specially protected class under the First Amendment?

More particularly, I am unable to see how disclosing the name of this student could do further harm to the careers of these two professors--unless that disclosure might lead to discovery of additional facts indicating the professors had reason to know, before the story was first published, that this student and his story did not merit the defense that they attempted to provide. In either case, the story remains unfinished, and the Standard-Times has a journalistic duty to complete the story that it started.

The implicit suggestion that disclosure of the student's name would cause harm to the professors' careers leaves one with precisely the impression that the professors do have something to hide. If you really do care about the professors' careers, assuming their careers deserve journalistic protection, you would serve them better by publishing the student's name. But your duty is not to protect reputations and careers. Your duty is to get all the facts out so your readers, including those who happen to be in a position to make judgments about the two professors' careers, can determine for themselves what judgments are fitting.

In that regard, one notes Professor Williams' positively glowing statement--that this student, whom he claimed to "know well" was "the real thing . . . mature, honest, reliable, hard-working and genuinely interested in getting to the truth"--an evaluation that simply does not match up with the picture of this student that emerges from the Standard-Times later reporting, wherein the student comes across as self-centered:
When I came back, like wow, there's this circus coming on. I saw my cell phone, and I see like, wow, I have something like 75 messages and like something like 87 missed calls. Wow, I was popular.
and not quite the budding scholar the professor described, if the above sample of his thinking and the following sample of his writing are fairly illustrative:
The fact is that my being panicked about this hole (sic) event led me to unfortunately prop up my story (i.e., fabricate it), for that I have to apologize to you and to my professors. I have spoken to my family about the whole issue and the fact is that they were understandibly (sic) angry. My name has been dishonored within my family and so I will spend the rest of the winter trying to restore even a little bit of it back, at least.
One finds it difficult to believe that Professor Williams could be so utterly deceived about the character of a student he claimed to know so well. Thus, one is left to wonder whether the incongruity between the character of the student Professor Williams described and the character of the student who made the above statements should be otherwise, or at least further, explained. Several persons, including myself, have speculated whether the unidentified student might have originated as a creation of professor's imagination. Many others have speculated that the student's story was seeded by the government to embarrass Bush's critics, and that the two professors were in on it the whole time. The plausibility of such speculations confirms that the story remains incomplete and cannot be wrapped up until this student's identity is known.

Having gone through the reasons that the Standard-Times' rationales for withholding this student's name are implausible, let me offer my opinion as to the real reason, for your reticence, a reason which I hinted at above and which can be summed up in single word:

Guilt

(Pardon me here if I indulge in the same sort of psychological analysis for which I have faulted the Standard-Times. We lawyers grant ourselves wide latitude.)

The Standard-Times, or should I say its editors and reporter, feel downright guilty, as well they should, that their sloppy journalism had the effect of tempting and aiding an otherwise fairly decent young man to persist in what was an otherwise mildly blameworthy private lie until that private lie was transformed into what now seems to threaten to become a public humiliation.

Let me explain how I reached that judgment about your motives for withholding this student's name, motives of which you yourselves might not yet be fully conscious. Based on the Standard-Times' own reporting and editorializing, it seems clear that events unfolded thusly:

In the course of a conversation Nicodemus initiated to obtain a comment from Professor Williams, the professor let drop, "almost as an aside," that he'd heard tell from a fellow professor that a student had been interrogated by government agents for attempting to get his hands on a copy of the Little Red Book. Had Professor Williams known that Nicodemus would want to make a full-blown story out of that yarn, he probably would never have mentioned that seemingly harmless little anecdote in the first place,even if he did believe at the time it was true. But Nicodemus seized on the juicy tidbit, and--based on a second piece of second-hand hearsay "corroboration" (which was just as worthless as the first piece of second-hand hearsay "corroboration")--put the story into print without first making direct contact with the student himself.

Let me here point out with special emphasis the important fact that, although the student had lied privately to his professor, he did not lie to the Standard-Times reporter until after the Standard-Times had already put the story into print. The Standard-Times got the story wrong without ever talking to the student. Therefore, it is quite false, unethical, and grossly unfair to the student (about whom the Standard-Times now claims to worry so much), for the Standard-Times to have left its readers with the impression that the paper got the story wrong because the student purposefully misled the Standard-Times reporter. That is exactly the impression you tried to create when you wrote, "We must be as sure as we can that a source is telling us the truth," which leaves the impression that you got the story wrong only because the student lied to you. Yes, the student misled his professors. But the Standard-Times misled itself. And then the Standard-Times slyly tried to nudge the bulk of the blame for its own mistake onto the student. For that journalistic sin, you deserve every bit of the guilt you now feel.

That failure to speak with the student before printing the story was the fatal error. And that failure to speak with the student remains the source of the Standard-Times' abiding feelings of guilt. That sense of guilt prevents the Standard-Times editors from perceiving their journalistic duty.

If, oh if, the reporter Nicodemus had just made contact with the student, and if, oh if, Nicodemus had then pressed him as he should have, it is entirely probable either that the student would have backed off his fish story or that Nicodemus would have smelled something fishy that would have warned him off the story.

But once the story was in print, once the student's favorite professors had publicly placed their own reputations on the line in defense of the student's tale, the stakes became just to high for the student to pull back. By unilaterally upping the ante (with some help from the gullible professors), the Standard-Times made the game too rich for the student to fold. That's the kind of thing that can happen when newspapers gamble with the truth. Lots of people lose.

So the Standard-Times feels especially guilty toward the student for taking what should have remained an entirely private matter (a student's private lie to his professors) and transforming it into a major public humiliation for the student. The Standard-Times then magnified its guilt by suggesting that the student had misled its reporter into filing a false story, when the Standard-Times, by its own admission, never spoke to the student before printing the false story.

So guilt, that good old fashioned emotion, is the real reason the Standard-Times won't finish reporting this story. And it seems that, by apparently promising the professors and the university not disclose the student's name, the Standard-Times has made things worse by painting itself into a journalistic corner. One journalistic sin just keeps leading to another, until it seems the Standard-Times only option is to clam up entirely.

Let me suggest a way out for the Standard-Times to escape from its dark and silent corner.

First, come clean. All the way clean. Admit explicitly that you screwed up completely. Not a little. Completely. Off the charts. Off the scale screw up. Don't offer explanations that sound like excuses. Don't give us these half-apologies about how Nicodemus "corroborated" the story with a second source. (Pontbriand's "corroboration" was confirmation of what the student said; it was not confirmation of the truth of what the student said. Don't you see the difference? If Pontbriand had said that a student had said the moon is made of green cheese, would you claim to have a second reliable corroboration that the moon is made of green cheese?)

Second, apologize publicly and profusely to the student, whom you have unfairly cast as the main villain. Explain explicitly that although the student's private lie was certainly blameworthy, it was worthy only of private blame, to be negotiated between him and his professors. Explain that, although the student was clearly wrong to lie to his professor, that private act did not the merit the public humiliation that the Standard-Times' sloppy reporting lead to. Explain that once the Standard-Times published the story without giving the student a chance to confirm or to retract his private lie, and without proper corroboration, the damage was already done. Explain that by the time your reporter got around to speaking with the student, the die had already been cast by the Standard-Times, and nothing the student could have said once the story was already in print could undo much of the damage the Standard-Times had done. Explain that it is certainly understandable that after the Standard-Times rashly raised the stakes by making this private lie public, it would have been extremely difficult for any young student to come clean right away when his apparently harmless private peccadillo suddenly threatened to compromise the public reputations of his favorite professors. Explain and admit to your readers over and over that, although it was a private wrong for the student to lie to his professors, it was a much worse public wrong for the Standard-Times to rely on a second-hand story that made that private lie into public humiliation. Retract and apologize profusely for your editorial heaping blame on the student, when the vast bulk of the blame belongs to the Standard-Times for blowing this private lie completely out of proportion. Remind yourselves and your readers over and over again that although the student had lied privately to his professors, he didn't lie to the Standard-Times until after the Standard-Times had already published this false story. Remind your readers that the Standard-Times never published a single word that was based on a lie the student told directly to the Standard-Times, and that it was therefore terribly wrong for the Standard-Times for try to blame lies, to which it was not a party, for its own sloppy reporting.

Third, publish the student's name. But before you do so, explain to him that, although his private lie deserves private blame, the Standard-Times will acknowledge that its own sloppy reporting--by exploding a private lie into a public matter--placed him into what for almost any young person would be an untenable position. Explain to him that you must now publish his name because one journalistic sin cannot serve as the justification for a second journalistic sin. And give the student another chance to make a fuller public statement, in a separate piece to be published prominently on your editorial page, concurrent with the publication of his name. (And this time, have your editors clean up his grammar, spelling, and diction so he won't look like an idiot.) If you approach this student honestly, if you explain to him that you will now deal with him fairly, I believe that he will agree to have his name disclosed.

There's an honorable and honest path open to you if you have the guts to take it.

Or alternatively you can dig yourselves deeper into your dark and silent corner and hope to weather the storm. But (God bless the internet!) some blogger (maybe me) will soon come up with this student's name and will disclose it. Several of us are working on it already, and it is just a matter of time. No, my site traffic is not on the scale of Instapundit or Kos, but I suspect that if I come up with this student's name before you disclose it, Instapundit and Kos and dozens of other bloggers large and small (and perhaps a few MSM outlets) will link to my post. When that day arrives, you can rest assured that I will be fairer to this student than you have been thus far. Indeed, on further contemplation, I have come to realize that my recent blog post was far too hard on the student and much too soft on the Standard-Times editors and reporter, who to my mind were and remain the real culprits here. So now I can assure you that if the Standard-Times doesn't come clean, if and when I get this student's name, I will use that occasion to give the Standard-Times the public blistering it will by then most richly deserve.

Respectfully,

Bathus

If you have information that might lead to the identity of theUMass Dartmouth Little Red Book hoaxer, email me at bathus@houston.rr.com.

01/05/2006 UPDATE

Standard-Times editor Robert Unger replied to the above email. I wrote him back, and he replied a second time:

From: Robert Unger
To: Bathus
Date: Wed, 4 Jan 2006
Subject: Re: Further Thoughts on the Little Red Hoax

Dear Mr. Jacobs,

Whether or not you decide to publish the name of the student is your business. We made our decision based on what we believed to be right and fair. You disagree, as is your right. You also are free to criticize us in any way you choose.

With best regards,

Bob Unger
Editor, The Standard-Times
¤ ¤ ¤ ¤ ¤ ¤
From: Bathus
To: Robert Unger
Date: Wed, 4 Jan 2006
Subject: Re: Further Thoughts on the Little Red Hoax

Dear Mr. Unger,

Thank you for reminding me that I am free to criticize the Standard-Times in any way I choose. We agree about that much.

But with respect to those matters where agreement is less easy to come by, I had hoped that your reply might substantively address at least a few of the points raised in my email.

I believe the Standard-Times has an obligation, not to me, but to its readers, to provide a fuller explanation of its decision to withhold this student's name. Can't you expand further on the reasonings that led you to believe it was "right and fair" to withhold the student's name? One assumes there was a thought process involving a weighing of interests, a consideration of consequences, etc. Or was it just a gut feeling that prompted you to make a promise to the university and the two professors without really thinking things through? If you aren't going to publish the student's name, you should at least explain the reasoning that brought you to that decision. The account you've given so far is simply not persuasive or even plausible, for all the reasons I've pointed out [in my last email].

I am still hoping for a fuller reply.

Respectfully,

Bathus
¤ ¤ ¤ ¤ ¤ ¤
From: Robert Unger
To: Bathus
Date: Wednesday, January 04, 2006
Subject: Re: Further Thoughts on the Little Red Hoax

Hello, Mr. Jacobs,

I didn't mean to blow you off in any way, and I hope you'll forgive me if that's how it sounded. It's just that I have heard from a lot of non-readers (mostly bloggers, talk radio hosts and people with strong pro- and anti-Bush perspectives all wanting to talk about this case) and I do have a fulltime job here that keeps me plenty busy. My two reasons for not ID'ing the student truly was as I said.

The two professors we quoted [Pontbriand and Williams] both were facing possible disciplinary action because they divulged to our reporter private information about a particular student. In that it was our reporter [Aaron Nicodemus] seeking comment from them on the Times story about the eavesdropping on U.S. citizens, which we do from time to time in seeking reaction to significant national or international events, we believed that they would pay an unfairly heavy price for talking to us.

In addition, it was our belief (along with our other sources) that the student who told this tale -- which as I said we should not have reported without evaluating his story directly ourselves -- was emotionally unstable and we feared for him. We believed that revealing his name, therefore, was likely to do more harm than good. At no point did we promise anyone -- either the student or the university -- that we would not name him; we made that determination ourselves after long discussion. I believe it was the right thing to do. I hope that answers your questions, and I respectfully acknowledge that you disagree with that decision.

With best regards,
Bob Unger

I do appreciate Unger's willingness to respond to a highly critical email from an obscure blogger. His second email--by abandoning the dismissive tone of his first email--represents at least a stylistic improvement. However, inasmuch as neither of Unger's replies succeeds in meeting the points I had raised in my long and detailed email, there's nothing to be gained by my rehashing arguments to which he has failed to respond. Without doing much to address my points, Unger's reply does create new questions and new contradictions:

1. To support the rationale that the Standard-Times withheld the student's name to protect the professors' careers, Unger writes:

The two professors we quoted both were facing possible disciplinary action because they divulged to our reporter private information about a particular student. In that it was our reporter seeking comment from them on the Times story . . . , we believed that they would pay an unfairly heavy price for talking to us.[emphasis added]

So far as I know, there had not been--until now--any public allegation that the professors had improperly divulged private information about the as-yet anonymous student. While I have no idea under what circumstances a professor's disclosure of such information would violate UMass Dartmouth policies, and while I have no knowledge about precisely what private information the professors disclosed, it seems to me that, with his startling admission that the professors had "divulged to our reporter private information about a particular student," Unger has provided evidence that now substantially increases the risk that the professors could be subjected to discipline by their university.

So much for the Standard-Times' concern about protecting the professors' careers!

And there's a larger point here. For reasons that I discussed in my long email above, the Standard-Times' concern about the professors' careers is misplaced. Instead of sending me an email disclosing potentially damaging facts about acts these professors might have committed in furtherance of the hoax, the fact that these professors, possibly wrongfully, disclosed private information about their student should have been published several days ago in the pages of the Standard-Times. That fact, along with the identity of the student hoaxer, is necessary for the public to evaluate exactly how and why it came to be that, at a crucial moment in a vitally important public debate, the Standard-Times published a false story that corrupted the debate.

2. If indeed the professors are candidates for university discipline, either for divulging a student's private information to a reporter or for some other act, it is not clear to me that by withholding the name of the student, the Standard-Times thereby reduces the professors' risk of being disciplined. If the UMass Dartmouth disciplinary system is administered fairly, the professors liability for academic discipline will depend solely upon the acts the professors themselves committed, not upon acts committed by a third party. If the professors violated university policy by divulging a student's private information to a reporter, the act deserving discipline was complete the moment the information was passed to the reporter. Whether or not the reporter then further disseminates the information is irrelevant to the question of the wrongfulness of the professors' disclosure. If the professors were wrong to disclose a student's private information to a reporter, that act does not become less wrong because the reporter chose not to publish the information.

3. In my original email to Runger I had speculated that perhaps the Standard-Times had bound itself to silence by rashly promising either the student, the professors, or the university not to disclose the hoaxer's name. In his second email to me Unger contends that, "At no point did we promise anyone--either the student or the university-- that we would not name him; we made that determination ourselves after long discussion." However, in his follow-up article reporting that the student's tale was a hoax, Standard-Times reporter Nicodemus wrote, "At the request of the two professors and the university, The Standard-Times has agreed to withhold his name." Does The Standard-Times' agreement, made at the request of the university and the professors, constitute a promise? Other lawyers can split hairs over that one, but from a common sense perspective--and probably from the perspective of an expert in journalism ethics--it sure looks an awful lot like a promise to me. If so, it was a promise rashly given, a promise prompted, as I have already suggested, not by an evaluation of journalistic duty, but by a sense of guilt.

And so one journalistic sin leads to another and another and another.

It's time for the Standard-Times to come clean.

Help Me Identify This Sniveling Lying Coward

2005-12-30T01:59:00.000-06:00

[01/04/2006 Note by Bathus: After I had already written and posted the following item, and after thinking things over for a couple of more days, I came to the conclusion that I was a little too tough on the anonymous UMass Dartmouth student, and way too easy on the the New Bedford Standard-Times. In a more recent post, I explain why the kid deserves less blame and the newspaper deserves more blame.]

Can You Identify This Man?

1. He's a senior at UMass Dartmouth, majoring in history.

2. He's 21 or 22 years old.

3. His family resides in New Bedford, Massachusetts.

4. He has a twin brother who is a student at UMass Amherst.

5. He has an uncle who lives in Puerto Rico.

6. In Autumn 2005 at UMass Dartmouth, he was enrolled in Prof. Robert Pontbriand's course on fascism and communism.

The young man who fits the above profile is a liar and coward, and he deserves to be identified by name.

¤ ¤ ¤ ¤ ¤ ¤

So what's this all about?

Surely by now you've heard the bewitching tale, originally reported by Aaron Nicodemus of the New Bedford Standard-Times, about the poor UMass Dartmouth student who claimed he had been interrogated by Department of Homeland Security agents. The student's tale, which Nicodemus swallowed hook, line, and sinker, included the inflammatory claim that those government agents warned him he had been placed on a "watch list" because he had submitted an Inter-Library Loan request to check out Mao's Little Red Book.

One can evaluate the direction of Nicodemus' bias in this comment he wrote when his reportage quickly came under withering scrutiny:

[M]y story, published in The Standard-Times on Saturday, Dec. 17, is real and is factual to the extent I reported. I am trying to convince the student to come forward, and for the university library loan system to come clean about its involvement, and of course, for the Department of Homeland Security to admit it visited the student.

So you might wonder exactly how far into Nicodemus' original story one can read before encountering reporting that is not real and factual? The answer is, one line, the very first line in which Nicodemus really and factually reported falsely that, "A senior at UMass Dartmouth was visited by federal agents two months ago, after he requested a copy of Mao Tse-Tung's tome on Communism called The Little Red Book." Manfully ignoring the many paths to enlightenment that honest bloggers were pointing out to him, Nicodemus still saw nothing dubious about the student's tale. His journalistic duty, as he understood it, was not to scrutinize more carefully an uncorroborated second-hand anonymous source. No, Nicodemus' highest journalistic duty, as he saw it, was "to convince . . . the Department of Homeland Security to admit it visited the student," a factoid Nicodemus accepted as an established truth, in the glaring light of which his job was merely to obtain a full confession from the relevant authorities.

Once the bogus story had hit the internet, every variety of radical leftist America-hater (from Ivins to Kos to Carville, with Ted Kennedy being the most notable example) immediately threw gas on the fire and set about fanning the flames. This was, they gleefully announced, precisely the sort of abuse we would all regularly suffer if Bush got his way with the Patriot Act, which was at that moment a subject of heated debate. (Just google "patriot act" umass mao to get a sense of how the often the left repeated this flimsy story to gin up opposition to the Partriot Act. This was not a harmless hoax.)

But at the same time, bloggers (mostly on the right, but including a few on the left) began drowning the radical leftists' fantasy in well targeted jets of ice cold water. Within a week the reporter who "broke" the strange story admitted the kid's claim was entirely false.

As noted above, one of the more obvious of the many problems with the story was that Nicodemus first put the tale into print based entirely on information received second hand from a single uncorroborated anonymous source with whom the reporter had not yet had any direct contact:

Although The Standard-Times knows the name of the student, he is not coming forward because he fears repercussions should his name become public. He has not spoken to The Standard-Times.

Okay, even if Nicodemus didn't bother speaking directly with his single anonymous source, there was a tiny shred of corroboration: the opinions of two of the student's professors who--though they themselves had no personal knowledge of any of the actual events comprising the substance of the student's tale--were nonetheless eager to stake their own reputations on the student's truthfulness. (For that misjudgment, they might yet be called upon to pay a more concrete penalty beyond the damage done to their reputations.)[UDATE: The Standard-Times has now issued a statement conceding that the newspaper never should have published the story without first making direct contact with the uncorroborated second-hand source: "We -- reporter and editors -- failed here because we put our faith in what two college professors told us. We should have held off publishing the story until we had a chance to judge the student's credibility for ourselves."]

¤ ¤ ¤ ¤ ¤ ¤

In a post titled The Homeland Security agent ate my paper!, blogger Academic Elephant at Elephants in Academia explores the comic possibility that the student-hoaxer was motivated by that familiar necessity of coming up with a story juicy enough to convince a prof to give you more time to finish that paper you've been putting off starting all semester:

[I]t was a surefire way to get out of writing Professor Pontbriand's odious paper, which, I assume was due in a few days, or might have already been overdue, because the Homeland Security agents took the book with them. The student knew his audience from the content of the class, and was confident that his professors would lap up this story and let him out of his responsibilities--and almost certainly give him an A as a badge of honor. If this is the case I must applaud the student's deviant verve, because "The Homeland Security Department took my book" is an excuse I have not yet heard--and I've heard a lot. Give him an E for effort but an F for the course, put him on academic probation and be done with it.

¤ ¤ ¤ ¤ ¤ ¤

I have a different hypothesis about how this lie was born, grew, and evolved.

But first a legal disclaimer:

My speculation, I admit, is exactly that--speculation and nothing more. (But hey, what's sauce for the goose!). My speculation is not grounded in fact and should not be understood as fact. My speculation does not even rise to level of an opinion. It's less than an opinion. My speculation is meant to be a sort intellectual exercise, an almost worthless mental gymnastic with which we must maintain ourselves until either the good professor Williams, UMass Dartmouth, the MSM, some industrious blogger, or perhaps even the cowardly lying student himself favors us with the actual confirmable facts about how this lie originated, including the identity of the person who first dreamed it up.

So, with that disclaimer out of the way, I offer my idle speculation, which is:

The anonymous student originated purely as a figment of the imagination of the good professor Brian Glyn Williams.

And here's how I speculate that things might have snowballed out of control for the good professor Williams:

A reporter from the local press phones an undeservedly obscure, courageously ambitious, mildly charismatic academician, one Associate Professor Brian Glyn Williams at UMass Dartmouth, to obtain an utterly predictable comment to fill out a piece of fluff the reporter is putting together on the evile evils of the evile Bush junta spying on wholesome God-fearing ordinary citizenry. Intoxicated by the prospect of a little press attention, the prof embellishes his comment with some harmless BS anecdote. The prof claims he heard tell of a student who recently had been investigated by DHS agents for trying to get a copy of Mao's Little Read Book. (Pun intended!) Much to the prof's surprise, the lefty reporter gobbles up that mini-bolus of harmless BS and promptly poops out a story glorifying the poor student's plight.

The story immediately burns up the internet.

All this attention comes as quite a shock to the prof, who had no idea that his harmless little mini-bolus of an anecdote would generate such a shit storm. At first he's basking in his cheaply-won celebrity, as he smugly taps out emails like this one to his well-wishers in the academic left:

I am delighted to hear that librarians are aware of this outrage. I was wondering if you could possibly give me a link to the site that displayed the story. All is well here in Boston, the story has caused a surge of interest in academic freedoms and I have been inundated with emails from people urging me to teach my class [the class the poor victimized professor had been quoted as saying he was now afraid to teach].

But then things start to get way out of hand. Reporters start calling the good prof from all over the country, and now they want some kind of corroboration. Yikes! To save his reputation, the good prof has to come up with a real live flesh and blood student to present to the press.

Not to worry. That might have been a serious problem if the prof and the university and the entire MSN hadn't made protecting the sacred anonymity of this hoaxer their highest value. But with a promise of anonymity (and maybe some extra credit points), the prof can easily find a student willing to play out the role conjured in prof's imagination. So the cooperative student spends a few minutes rehearsing his story with the good professor, and then spends a few more minutes on the phone chatting with intrepid reporters, and then a few more minutes in the dean's office elaborating his tale. Of course, eventually the story had to fall apart, but in the process the good prof manages to anoint himself a self-sacrificing hero for single-handedly conducting the investigation that unearths "the real truth": "My investigation eventually took me to his house, where I began to investigate family matters. I eventually found out the whole thing had been invented, and I'm happy to report that it's safe to borrow books." Great work, professor. We all share deeply in your relief.

After the tale was fully debunked, the prof laments sadly, "I feel as if I was lied to."

Uh, excuse me prof, whadaya mean you "feel as if" you were lied to? If this student really exists, there can be no "feeling" about it. You were lied to, plain and simple. But if the student was a figment of your imagination, then I suppose conjuring up a "feeling" is about the best you could be expected to do. In the good prof's inability to state flatly that he was lied to, I detect the sort of mental slippage that arises from the subconscious pang experienced by all but the most accomplished fabricators.

And in another email to a colleague that was posted to an ALA list serve shortly after the story broke-- when the story was coming under fire, but before it was fully debunked--the good prof Williams wrote:

I know this student well. He is the real thing, he is mature, honest, reliable, hard-working and genuinely interested in getting to the truth on issues, i.e. he is everything we train our students to be. The fact that Dr. Bob Pontbriand who is by the way a passionate educator who seeks to instill just this sort of above-and-beyond-the-call-of-duty research in his students also vouches for him lends two voices to his defense. I sincerely hope that your questions are meant to be the sort of critical inquiry we expect from our students and not some reflexive attempt to de-legitimize our reporting of what it is frankly a rather disturbing act of surveillance . . .

Let's look more closely at the above email that the good professor Williams wrote to defend his student's claim against his fellow academicians' skeptical inquiries.

This student, so the good prof Williams claimed at the time, was "the real thing . . . mature, honest, reliable, hard-working . . . everything we train our students to be." That over-the-top praise instantly sets off the BS detector. Without intending disrespect toward undergrads (whom I sincerely consider the most delightful, but hardly the most honest, creatures God ever invented) and based on my experience loitering around college campuses for the better part of the last twenty-five years, I would estimate that the prof's assessment of the hoaxer's character can be applied accurately to approximately zero out of every forty zillion undergrads. And the prof's perfect student was certainly no exception. When all was said and done, the putatively perfect student summed up his experience with these lucid lines:

When I came back, like wow, there's this circus coming on. I saw my cell phone, and I see like, wow, I have something like 75 messages and like something like 87 missed calls. Wow, I was popular.

Like wow, like something like wow. Thus spake Professor Williams' ideal student?

So pardon me for my confusion, Professor Williams, but how can you expect anyone to believe that you yourself honestly believed that Mr. Like Wow Anonymous could be the same student you had previously claimed was "everything we train our students to be"? Something just doesn't add up. Not even a college professor could so thoroughly misjudge the character, not to mention the scholarly inclinations, of a student he claimed to know well. When Mr. Honest Mature Reliable of your fantasy turned out to be Mr. Like Wow I'm Popular Anonymous, it left me with a suspicion that the perfect student you had described (whom no decent prof could disbelieve) really was too good to be true--too perfect to be anything more than a character playing a part in a good professor's fantasy university, where perfect students of undeservedly obscure professors are hounded by black-suited government agents.

And that was all fine until the fantasy got mixed up with reality.

Interestingly, just as Professor Williams over-hyped the character of his fantasy student, he also seems to have vastly oversold the endorsement he claimed his colleague, Robert Pontriband, had offered on that student's behalf. Williams claimed that Pontbriand "also vouches" for the student. But Pontriband himself now contends that he "merely confirmed that the student in his seminar on totalitarianism had asserted that he had been visited by federal agents." (Whether the student made that claim to Pontbriand before or after Williams had already reported it to Nicodemus remains unclear.)

Note also the way the good prof's email slyly assaulted the integrity of an academic colleague who had the balls to question the story: "I sincerely hope" wrote the good professor Williams, "that your questions are . . . not some reflexive attempt to de-legitimize our reporting of what it is frankly a rather disturbing act of surveillance." That aggressive-defensive posture, of the sort one often hears from liars who try to shame their critics into silence, coming from a man who is supposedly dedicated to the relentless pursuit of truth, strongly suggests to me that the good prof himself might have something to hide. Again I repeat, this is all idle speculation, which I wish the professor would lay to rest by telling us the name of the student who got him sucked into this lie.

In any case, and this is my main point, this student, if he exists, needs to be outed forthwith.

If this student were anything more than a lying crybaby of a coward without a scrap of integrity (he reportedly "broke down and cried" when he could no longer sustain his lie), he would have come forward voluntarily to admit and openly apologize for what he has done.

His hoax corrupted the public debate on extension of the Patriot Act at the critical moment when the rational resolution of that debate was a matter of the utmost national concern.

There are lessons to be learned here. And for the lessons to work the way they should, a name and a face needs to be put to this lie. This story is not wrapped up until this liar is outed for all the world to see.

The MSM won't do it, and you know why, just as you know how they'd light up a student who invented a story championing some right-wing dogma. Imagine how bright the floodlights bathing the liar's front lawn had his fantasy story been one that supported a conservative viewpoint! Can the reporters at the Boston Globe, the Standard Times, and other MSM outlets honestly contend that they have an ethical journalistic duty to protect the identity of a source who tried to use them to promulgate what he knew was a bald-faced lie? To the contrary if anonymous sources knew they'd be exposed if they used the media to publish what they knew were blatant falsehoods, those sources would be rather more reliable than they currently are.

So if you'd like to help me help track down this sniveling cowardly liar, so he can bear the shame he deserves and serve as an example to others of his kind, reread the profile at the top of this post. There can't be many students who fit that profile. If, on the other hand, it turns out that there is no UMass Dartmouth student who fits that bill, then one is left to conclude that some good prof made up the entire story from the start. If this student actually does exist (and contrary to what I've speculated above, I do believe the student does exist), and if you know who he might be, send me an email telling me what you know. (I promise you anonymity--unless you lie to me.)

Science and the Meaning of Things

2005-12-04T23:51:00.000-06:00

Material existence carries the meaning of things the way the meaning of a book is carried by the words written on its pages. It's not as if words don't matter in themselves, but one would not mistake the arbitrary shapes of ink pressed on paper for the meaning. Neither should one mistake the words, isolated from each other, for the full meaning. All the words of a book affect each other's meaning. They have to be understood together, as a whole. And the meaning of a book exists in some sense apart from the words which carry that meaning, just as the meaning of things exists in some sense apart from material existence.

The modern scientist's concern with what makes up material existence, his quest to master and to remake it, is akin to a concern with the compounds and processes that go into producing the ink and paper of a book. The modern scientist, with our encouragement, begins his quest to remake the book without bothering to read more than a few words, much less trying to understand the whole story. He never grasps that the ink, the paper, and the isolated words are not the meaning. He believes what is almost the opposite, that one finds the truth about the book of meaning by ripping pages from binding to see what they are made of and how they are held together, and then tearing pages into sentences, and then dissecting sentences into words, and then cutting words into letters, and finally boiling the letters down to ink and pulp. Then he tries to reconstruct some of those pieces in a way that seems more useful or convenient for the purpose of the moment. He does not fail to concoct a more permanent ink and a sturdier paper. Emboldened by that success, he will set about repairing or replacing the imperfections he sees in isolated words and sentences that he believes to be most important, which are the words and sentences he imagines he understands.

When something cannot be explained by his method, the modern scientist tries nonetheless to assign a meaning that accords with his method: "Love," says a scientist, "is at bottom nothing more than a series of electro-chemical reactions." (Most of us still refuse to believe what the scientist says about love. Yet even though we disbelieve him about love--the most important thing in our lives--we stand ready to believe whatever he says about almost everything else.) Whatever cannot be assigned a such a meaning, the scientist dismisses as having no real meaning. Thus, a mediocre scientist will proclaim, "the only truth is scientific truth." A better scientist, knowing the very idea of "scientific truth" to be a contradiction of the basic principle of science, instead proclaims, "There is no truth. There is no meaning. There is no love. There is only the expanse of space, particles of matter, bits of energy, and perhaps some sorts of in-between stuff we've not quite discovered yet, but which amount to much the same thing."

If the modern scientist continues in his own way and with our encouragement, he will eventually manufacture something that looks like the real book, the one with real meaning, which he will have ripped apart to produce what he believes will be a more perfect version, or at least a version that promises to be more amenable to our usual preferences. But the story he writes will be a chaos--a loveless, friendless, soulless chaos--within which no one would wish to live.

Something to Be Ashamed of

2005-11-16T00:25:00.000-06:00

To: The Editorial Board of the Houston Chronicle
From: Bathus
Date: November 15, 2005
Re: Texas Constitutional Amendment Banning Gay Marriage

The Chronicle's editorial board would have us believe that the recently-approved state constitutional amendment banning gay marriage was unnecessary, "mean-spirited," and an "embarrassment":

However satisfying this amendment is to its many supporters, its passage is no victory for Texas. Its presence on the ballot was as unnecessary as it was mean-spirited. Texas law already defines marriage as between a man and a woman, and Texas does not recognize same-sex unions recognized in other states.

* * * *

Not only was there no legal or practical need to elevate current state prohibitions to constitutional writ, but doing so came across as a direct attack on gays and on their struggle for a measure of legal equality. Besides being an embarrassment, the amendment sends the wrong signal to businesses that thrive on intellectual capital and creativity.

Inner city black voters in Harris County, many of whom have long experience with the denial of civil rights, favored the marriage amendment by an even higher majority than the general Harris County voting population. Black discomfort with homosexual marriage is rooted less in conscious discrimination than in religious belief, but support for the amendment brought blacks into incongruous accord with members of the Ku Klux Klan, whose members rallied in Austin in support of Proposition 2.

As to the necessity of the amendment, even though an existing Texas statute already prohibited gay marriage, that state statute could have been superseded by a pronouncement of the state supreme court, exactly as happened last year in Massachusetts. If Massachusetts voters had enacted a similar amendment to that state's constitution, the Massachusetts Supreme Court would not have been able to impose gay marriage by judicial fiat. Therefore, to remove the question of gay marriage permanently from the hands of the Texas judiciary, a state constitutional amendment was indeed necessary.

As to the implication that the three-quarters of Texas voters who approved the amendment are mean-spirited and an embarrassment, does the Chronicle's editorial board believe that gratuitous insults will shame its readers into adopting a more enlightened view?

Does the editorial board believe that black readers will not notice the presumptuous condescension with which the Chronicle's editorial writer (who must have worked hours to find what he thought were just the right words) implies that black voters' disapproval of gay marriage must be (ever-so-gently) excused as a product of "religious belief" rather than "conscious discrimination"? With its insinuation that religious belief is, among blacks, a peculiar cause of unconscious discrimination, the Chronicle's editorial manages to impugn blacks both for possessing inordinately unsophisticated religious beliefs and for lacking ordinary intellectual acuity.

Aghast that such an overwhelming majority of blacks voters has escaped from the white liberal plantation, the editorial finally tries to "Uncle Tom" them back into submission with a rhetorically unimaginative observation that the Ku Klux Klan had also demonstrated in favor of the amendment. The only way the Chronicle's editorial writer could have made that last observation more patently disgusting would be to append to it the equally irrelevant remark that the majority of KKK'ers also enjoys fried chicken and watermelon.

The Chronicle editorial board's insulting and condescending attitude toward Texas voters, particularly black Texas voters, on this and a host of other issues is one of the reasons the paper's daily paid circulation declined last year at a rate twice the national average.

Now there's a real embarrassment.

Since It Looks Like We'll Have to Have a Cold War with Iran and North Korea, Let's at Least Give Ourselves a Chance to Win It

2005-11-11T21:05:00.000-06:00

A sadly predictable course of events continues to unfold unabated in the West's attempts to restrain the nuclear ambitions of Iran and North Korea.

In case of the former, the regime's ongoing use of al Qaeda terrorists as active instruments of an aggressive Islamofascist foreign policy is well-documented. When Iran constructs a nuclear device, whether that occurs in two or three years, or ten years (or easily much sooner if Iran is able to smuggle in the fissile material it as yet appears unable to produce on its own), the threat of a hostile regime placing a nuclear weapon in the hands of a fanatical terrorist will have acquired an immediacy against which U.S. policy on nuclear deterrence should be designed to respond well in advance.

Therefore, it must now become the settled policy of the United States that:

In the event of nuclear attack against this nation, its vital interests, or its vital allies,

if each of the progenitors, executors, accomplices, accessories, and abettors of the attack cannot immediately be reasonably ascertained,

the United States shall retaliate without delay, in kind, and with disproportionate and overwhelming force,

against the territories and regimes of North Korea, Iran, and every other hostile government that has possessed, does possess, or has evidenced a volition to possess, nuclear weapons.

If articulated now, such a policy--in addition to fulfilling the absolute necessity to address in advance the apparent eventuality that a state-sponsor of terrorism will soon enough possess nuclear weapons--might also give that regime reason to pause to reconsider the utility of its present course.

Come and Get Me, I Dare Ya

2005-11-02T21:07:00.000-06:00

When it comes to restricting free expression of political views on the internet, the United States House of Representatives and the tyrants of communist China now officially see eye to eye.

In the Peoples Republic of China:

authorities have introduced scores of regulations, closed Internet cafes, blocked e-mails, search engines, foreign news and politically-sensitive websites, and have recently introduced a filtering system for web searches on a list of prohibited key words and terms.

Those violating the laws and regulations which aim to restrict free expression of opinion and circulation of information through the Internet may face imprisonment and according to recent regulations some could even be sentenced to death.

For the US version of similarly obscene restrictions on your fundamental right of free political expression, you can thank the so-called reforms of McCain-Feingold, which limited what kind of opinions can be expressed about federal election candidates, and who can express them, within 30 days of a primary and 60 days of a general election.

And as of today you can thank the United States House of Representatives for eliminating any doubt about the power of the Federal Election Commission under McCain-Feingold to shut down your blog, fine you, and seek to have to jailed.

But you think McCain-Feingold restrictions on free speech can't possibly apply to your modest little blog?

Think again.

Before McCain-Feingold was passed, the ACLU (which for once is on the right side of an issue) warned that:

individual citizens who want to join together to engage in [issue] advocacy would be subjected to new and burdensome registration and reporting requirements under McCain-Feingold. And for citizen groups whose message is particularly controversial, such disclosure requirements are tantamount to placing a gag around their mouths and silencing them.

In other words, you and your pals on your little team blog that focuses on saving the wetlands or preserving Second Amendment rights are now exposed to FEC regulation, hefty FEC fines, and jail time if you and your fellow bloggers have the balls to join together online to express opinions about a particular federal candidate's position on your pet issue within 30 days of a primary or 60 days of general election. Even if you are so cowardly as to submit to McCain-Feingold's pre-election blackout on free speech, Hercules scissors won't be powerful enough to cut through the red of tape of reporting forms you'll be legally required to file if you are so bold as to use a paypal button to raise a little cash to support your blogging. And heaven help you if take it one more step and use your blog the way God intended to join with like-minded bloggers to support or oppose a particular issue or candidate: You will have then engaged in "coordinated activity," which is conduct subject to severe restrictions under McCain-Feingold, according to U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly who apparently is thoroughly unimpressed by your First Amendment rights to free association and free speech.

That's right. Just as the ACLU warned, McCain-Feingold gave the FEC the power to regulate what you say about politicians and political issues on your blog, what you link to (especially around election time), and ultimately the power to shut down your blog altogether and have you tossed in jail if you resist.

Today the United States House of Representatives, by failing to exempt internet communications from the reach of McCain-Feingold, effectively confirmed that the FEC does indeed possess all that power and now has a green light to wield it against bloggers, big and small:

House Defeats Bill on Political Blogs
Thursday November 3, 2005 1:31 AM
By JIM ABRAMS
Associated Press Writer

WASHINGTON (AP) - Online political expression should not be exempt from campaign finance law, the House decided Wednesday as lawmakers warned that the Internet has opened up a new loophole for uncontrolled spending on elections.

The House voted 225-182 for a bill that would have excluded blogs, e-mails and other Internet communications from regulation by the Federal Election Commission. That was 47 votes short of the two-thirds majority needed under a procedure that limited debate time and allowed no amendments.

The vote in effect clears the way for the FEC to move ahead with court-mandated rule-making to govern political speech and campaign spending on the Internet.

Opposition [to the bill to exempt the internet from campaign finance restrictions] was led by Rep. Marty Meehan, D-Mass., who with Rep. Christopher Shays, R-Conn., championed the 2002 campaign finance law that banned unlimited "soft money" contributions that corporations, unions and individuals were making to political parties.

"This is a major unraveling of the law," Meehan said. At a time when Washington is again being tainted by scandal, including the CIA leak case, "[exempting the internet from campaign finance restrictions] opens up new avenues for corruption to enter the political process."

The bill's sponsor, Rep. Jeb Hensarling, R-Texas, said the federal government should encourage, rather than fetter, a phenomenon that was bringing more Americans into the political process.

"The newest battlefield in the fight to protect the First Amendment is the Internet,'' he said. "The Internet is the new town square, and campaign finance regulations are not appropriate there."

Without his legislation, Hensarling said, "I fear that bloggers one day could be fined for improperly linking to a campaign Web site, or merely forwarding a candidate's press release to an e-mail list."

Bloggers from liberal and conservative perspectives made similar predictions at a hearing on the subject in September. "Rather than deal with the red tape of regulation and the risk of legal problems, they will fall silent on all issues of politics," said Michael J. Krempasky, director of the Web site RedState.org.

House Speaker Dennis Hastert, R-Ill., writing Wednesday on a blog he recently started, said the bill "is about all the folks out in the blogosphere. It's going to protect what you say. It keeps the hand of the federal government out of Internet speech."

But Meehan said no one wants to regulate bloggers. He said he and Shays have an alternative that would protect the free speech rights of bloggers while closing the cyberspace loophole where a lawmaker could vote for a prescription drug bill and then ask pharmaceutical interests to write six-figure checks for campaign ads for them to run on the Internet.

FEC commissioner Scott E. Thomas said at the September hearing that some $14 million was spent on Internet ads in the 2004 campaign.

A federal court last year, amid the escalation of political activity on the Internet, instructed the FEC to draw up regulations that would extend federal campaign finance and spending limits to the Web.

Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid of Nevada has introduced a companion bill to the Hensarling measure, but the Senate has yet to take it up.

In accord with a long American tradition, and in accord with a somewhat more recent but no less impressive blogging tradition, I have just one thing to say to the United States House of Representatives, to the FEC, and most especially to George W. Bush for signing McCain-Feingold into law, after he admitted it was unconstitutional and promised to veto it:
SCREW
THE
LOT
OF
YOU!

Some other lawyers can worry themselves with sophistical niceties of the constitutional limits on FEC's regulatory powers over political speech. For me, the rule I follow in expressing my views about political matters on this blog is simple, just like the First Amendment:

Congress shall make no law . . . . abridging the freedom of speech . . . or the right of the people peaceably to assemble.

And that applies to speech on the internet and to "peaceably assembling" with my fellow bloggers on the internet.

So here's my rule and my pledge: On this blog, when it comes to political matters, I say whatever I want, whenever I want, however I want, about whoever I want, to whoever I want. I will do all my free speaking and free assembling peaceably, so long as the government leaves me alone. But I will never, ever, so long as I draw breath, register this blog with the FEC or any other government entity. I will never, ever, so long as I draw breath, submit this blog to any legislation or government regulation that purports to place any limit whatsoever on my right peaceably to express my political views. It's that simple.

And if you folks at the FEC don't like it, you can come and get me.

Just try. I dare ya.

There's a Reason Why I'm Not Talking About It

2005-10-18T23:04:00.000-05:00

With regard to my silence about . . .

(1) Harriet Miers

(2) recent developments in Iraq,

take your pick:

A. Somebody else has already said whatever needs to be said better, or at least sooner, than I ever could.

B. You'll have to figure it out on your own, because I'm just too dern busy with non-blog life to help you out on this one--besides which, things ought to be clear enough to anyone who's paying the slightest attention.

C. I'm ambivalent about it.

D. I'm holding my fire until I see the whites of their eyes.

E. Things are going well enough without me adding my two cents.

F. I'm waiting for additional evidence, which will be forthcoming shortly and should dispel any lingering confusion.

G. I've run out of mixed metaphors and worn out clichés, and I just can't write without them.

H. I haven't thought about it enough to offer a decent opinion.

I. It's too depressing to talk about it.

J. It's too depressing even to think about it.

Missing Rita

2005-09-21T22:43:00.000-05:00

I live in Houston.

At this very moment, as Hurricane Rita takes aim at my home city, I'm high and dry, well out of harm's way. In fact, I'm almost ashamed to admit where I am: Aspen, Colorado.

To celebrate my wife's fiftieth birthday, we've been vacationing here for the last week. In the mountain sky, close and clear, it's easy for me to count my lucky stars.

We were originally scheduled to return to Houston tomorrow morning. We thought about staying here in Aspen for a few more days, but the money is running out, and--though it would be insane to go back to Houston when half the city is evacuating--I still want to be a little closer to home. So instead of going home to Houston, tomorrow we'll be flying into Dallas where my dad will pick us up and take us to his place out in the country near Hillsboro. We'll stay there until Rita has done her damage, and then on Sunday or Monday we'll drive down to Houston to see what's left of our house.

UPDATE 09/25/05: Much to be thankful for! Houston was largely spared Rita's wrath. And because we were already out of town on vacation when Rita began her approach to the Gulf Coast, we were doubly lucky to avoid the chaos of the Houston evacuation, which turned out to be worse than the storm itself. Friday night we flew from Aspen to Dallas, and we've spent the last few days relaxing at my dad's place in the country.

Our next door neighbor, who did not evacuate, reports that our house came through unscathed, but the electricity has been out in our area since 5:00 a.m. Saturday. So, rather than hurrying home to a house without A/C (unbearable in Houston's 100 degree heat and 99 percent humidity!), we'll sit tight right here until the returning traffic eases up and the electricity is restored. I'm guessing we'll make it back home Monday or Tuesday.

UPDATE 09/26/05: We're home!

Traffic on the main routes from Dallas to Houston was still a little clogged, so we took the back roads. Took a little longer than usual, but we're home, the electricity is back on (the food in the freezer stayed frozen!), and all's well.

A Gift That Will Keep on Giving: The Small Business Disaster Relief Fund

2005-09-12T15:30:00.000-05:00

A little over a week ago, when the putrid wind of post-Katrina political opportunism had yet to gather hurricane strength, I counseled Adeimantus readers that we all should try to resist the only-too-human proclivity to dissipate our frustration by descending into mutual recriminations at the height of a crisis, that we should all try to find ways to contribute positively to dealing with the challenges at hand, rather than wasting time and energy undermining our leaderships' efforts to do so.

With appropriate modesty, I am happy to report that my advice achieved its intended result--if not on a national scale, at least among faithful Adeimantus readers. Among those who read my recent post on this topic (a readership whose number easily surpasses low double digits), the level of carping dropped substantially as they turned their thoughts and efforts toward doing something positive to help people affected by the disaster.

One especially noteworthy example of a person who has eschewed public carping in favor of doing positive good work is my longtime online friend, Dan Juneau, president of the Louisiana Association of Business and Industry (LABI). As a native son of the bayou and as a politically astute proponent of Louisiana business interests, Dan has a particularly good insight into the conditions, both recent and long-standing, that contributed to the successes and failures in the preparation for and the response to Hurricane Katrina. If he were inclined to do so, Dan could have used this disaster as a golden opportunity to make political life miserable for quite a number of prominent local, state, and national leaders on either side of the ideological divide. But instead of descending into political opportunism, Dan chose to highlight and to address a need the importance of which cannot be over-emphasized. Under Dan's capable leadership, LABI, in conjunction with the Baton Rouge Area Foundation, quickly established the Small Business Disaster Relief Fund to assist qualified small business owners in getting their operations back up and running.

We all know that meeting the immediate basic human needs of individuals displaced by this disaster has been the matter of most pressing concern. Yet, over the long haul, re-animating the economy that will make it possible for those individuals to lead productive lives independent of government assistance is perhaps even more important. In that process, the re-establishment of small businesses is the vital precondition to the long-term recovery of New Orleans and the region.

This revitalization of small business must be accomplished as rapidly as possible because small businesses provide the majority of jobs, and, as Dan Juneau wisely points out, if there are no jobs to return to, people simply will not return:

The rapid recovery of small businesses is the biggest factor in the preservation of the workforce on the Gulf Coast. If there are no jobs, there is no future-and workers will go where they can work.

It is incumbent upon those handling the public and private relief and reconstruction efforts (which follow closely behind the rescue effort) to do everything in their power to assist small businesses in their efforts to reopen and re-employ their workers.

To assist in that regard, the Louisiana Association of Business and Industry-with the assistance of the Baton Rouge Area Foundation-has created a Small Business Disaster Relief Fund. The fund will provide start-up grants to Gulf Coast businesses severely impacted by Hurricane Katrina. Contributions to the fund-dollar for dollar-will be used to help get as many small businesses back into business as possible. The grants will serve as "gap funding" for things not covered by insurance. Beginning September 15, the grant application form and details can be accessed via the LABI Web site. Any business in one of the federally designated disaster parishes or counties with fewer than 100 employees on August 29, 2005 that suffered significant damage or disruption due to the hurricane is eligible to apply. Volunteers recruited from the CPA Society, the local Bar Association, and the Independent Insurance Agents will screen the applications in an anonymous system to ensure fairness.

Many of you have already dug deep into your wallets, your closets, and your cupboards to help meet the immediate essential needs of Hurricane Katrina's victims. But now I'm asking you to please dig a little deeper and to click here to give a gift that will keep on giving, a contribution to the Small Business Disaster Relief Fund.

Maps of New Orleans Flooding

2005-09-02T19:36:00.000-05:00

The map below shows areas that were under water in Jefferson and Orleans parishes in New Orleans as of 8/31/2005. The image below has been stiched together from maps that are available here on a FEMA website.

On FEMA's site you can find separate and more detailed maps (pdf files) showing all areas of New Orleans that were under water in Orleans, Jefferson, St. Bernard, Plaquemines, and St. Charles parishes.

UPDATE 09/07/2005: C&C Technologies, Inc. has put together a clickable map (integrated with Google maps) that gives an estimate of floodwater crest depth at any point in New Orleans. Here's a sample screen cap:

Instructions for using the map are on this page, with a link at the bottom of that page that'll take you to the clickable map.

¤ ¤ ¤ ¤ ¤ ¤

[Note: Because small businesses collectively provide the majority of jobs, the re-opening of small businesses will be absolutely crucial to the long-term recovery of regions affected by Hurricane Katrina. If you'd like to help small businesses put their people back to work as quickly as possible, please consider contributing to the Small Business Disaster Relief Fund. Further information is available here.]

I Demand to Know Why This Disaster Isn't Being Run More Smoothly

2005-09-01T20:52:00.000-05:00

Katrina has brought a disaster of an intensity never before experienced in this country.

Certainly in terms of physical and economic damage, perhaps in terms of loss of life and perhaps even in terms of the psychic blow to the body politic, 9/11 was by comparison a gentle autumn rain.

A great part of the man-made portion of this disaster (and in every disaster there is a man-made portion) stems from the fact that so many people did not heed the mandatory evacuation order. Although I am sure there are exceptions, I am not buying the excuse that most lacked the wherewithal to leave. Most of those who stayed behind did so, not because they had no choice, but because they made an astoundingly bad choice--one that put their own lives, and the lives of their rescuers, at grave risk. But their bad decisions are water over the dam now. One hopes that all this will count as one of the lessons learned so that if there is, heaven forbid, a "next time," the authorities will enforce and implement their evacuation orders more vigorously. But enough of that--there'll be plenty of time for recriminations later.

At this stage I don't think it's fair, or helpful, to waste time laying blame on the authorities and political leaders who have the unenviable responsibility for trying to bring order out of chaos. In the few group crises I've experienced in my life, I've observed that the most useless people--the ones you just want to throttle and toss overboard--are the ones who are constantly bitching about how incompetent the leadership is. The only thing these whiners accomplish is to make everyone angry at everyone else and to make others feel more helpless, lost, and miserable than they are already. The best use to make of such people (assuming one is not permitted to give them a massive injection of thorazine) is to sit them down well off to the side where they can't get in the way, give them a box of pencils and a fat spiral notebook, and tell them that they have been specially selected for the very important assignment of making a list of everything that is totally screwed up.

Their list might actually come in handy later.

But right now there isn't time to have an election to choose new leadership. We are stuck with the fallible humans we have collectively put in charge. So instead of bitching about the people in leadership positions, it would be better if we all try to refrain from carping, find a way to be useful, or at least provide moral support to the ones who are trying their best to make things better, give calm and constructive advice if in a position to do so, and pull together instead of apart.

If you can't do that right now, then kindly please do shut the hell up.

Yes, we've noticed things are screwed up. We had heard that disasters usually don't run smoothly, but thank you so much for reminding us. Yes, all sorts of things that should have been done, both before and after this disaster struck, were left undone or done in a way that now looks ridiculous. Yes, even now all sorts of things that could be done differently aren't being done exactly the right way at exactly the right speed. Yes, it's pandemonium. We'd really appreciate it if you would try not to add to it. If you've got an idea that might work better, let's talk it over quickly and quietly, without getting bogged down on who's to blame for this or that.

Whatever you do, don't you dare start agitating about race and class. If you do that, then as far as I'm concerned you're worse than the street looters. In a time of crisis, you brazenly loot the stores of the public trust to haul off a garbage bag full of ephemeral political trinkets. I hope you drown under the weight of it in hell's molten brimstone.

The right steps to take in a crisis always seem obvious to people who have no responsibility for getting something done in that crisis. Decisions are easy when nothing depends upon them. So if pointing out the leaderships' failures is the only contribution you have to offer at the moment, then come sit over here in this quiet corner where there's a big box of pencils with your name on it.

¤ ¤ ¤ ¤ ¤ ¤

The New Iraqi Constitution: The Impetus to an Islamic Reformation?

2005-08-22T14:12:00.000-05:00

If breaking reports are correct (here, here, and here), the draft of the new Iraqi constitution will be unveiled today. In the Western press, that event will unleash unending spin, much of which for all intents and purposes had already been prepared in advance and will now be slightly modified so as to appear to respond to the actual contents of the document itself.

Among the more pervasive lines of spin will be the allegation that the draft constitution does not sufficiently protect the values we in the West hold most dear (or claim to hold most dear), particularly religious freedom, which the critics will disingenuously define more specifically as "separation of church and state." Interestingly, critics who have spent the last four years complaining what a mistake it is to attempt to "impose" (to use terms they prefer) "Western-style democracy" and "Western values" on Muslim countries will now complain that the new Iraqi constitution is a failure because it does not create a "Western-style democracy" enshrining every Western value.

Much will be made of the fact that the new Iraqi constitution cites Islam as "the main source" or "a main source" of law. As of this moment the final draft has not been released, so it is not clear which, if either, of those formulations will be present in the final document. Not sharing the critics' (soon to be abandoned) concern about "imposing" Western values on Muslim countries, I would have much preferred that neither formulation exist in the Iraqi constitution. But there is a world of difference between a statement that Islam is "a main source" and "the main source" of law. In either case, I also recognize that the Iraqi constitution is ultimately for the Iraqis themselves to write, to accept or to reject, and presumably to amend or to replace, if they discover that relying on Islamic religious law does not enhance their well-being.

One should also note that any statement citing Islam as a source of law most certainly will be counter-balanced and moderated by other constitutional provisions that guarantee such things as due process, freedom of worship, and freedom of speech and of the press. (Perhaps this is a good place to remind ourselves that our founding documents, indeed our human rights, rely implicitly on the religious concept of a "creator" who endows us with "certain unalienable rights.")

Once the critics have exhausted themselves decrying what they assume will be the pernicious influence of Islam on Iraqi law, perhaps they should allow themselves a moment of optimism to discern the opposite possibility, that the influence will operate in the opposite direction in the opposite way, that the inclusion of the principle that Islam is "a source," but not the only source, of Iraqi law will have the effect of purging from Islamic theory the worst and most extreme interpretations of Islamic religious law, that the "mixture" of Islamic legal theory with humanistic politics and secular law will ultimately have the effect of advancing the status of more moderate strains of Islamic theory.

According to early reports the new constitution will provide that:

[N]o laws would be adopted that contradict the principles of Islam. In addition, no law shall be adopted that contradicts human rights and democratic principles.

The drafters of the Iraqi constitutions appear to believe that these two sources of fundamental principles, Islamic legal theory and secular political theory based on human rights and the consent of the governed, can be reconciled. The presence of these two potentially conflicting bodies of fundamental principles will necessitate debate in the public square and argument among and between Iraq's political and religious elites as to what is required by Islamic religious principles and what is required by secular humanistic principles. It almost goes without saying that extreme interpretations of Islam cannot exist side by side with genuine human rights and a truly democratic form of government. Therefore, reconciliation of these two sources of fundamental principles (and it would be a mistake to presume these two cannot be reconciled) will necessitate the establishment in Iraq of a moderate interpretation of the requirements of Islamic religious law. By placing Islamic principles and secular humanistic principles side by side in their founding document, the drafters of the Iraqi constitution, whether or not they intended to do so, will have inspired a debate (not a theoretical debate, but a debate with immediate real world consequences) the results of which hold the promise of a "reformation" of Islam that is the necessary precondition to peace in the Muslim world.

So one could take the pessimistic view and assume that a constitution that seeks to mix Islamic legal theory and human rights necessarily renders human rights a nullity. One could as easily assume that the same mixture will render Islamic legal theory a nullity. But perhaps the most likely prospect is that the mixture will lead to a modification and a moderation of both Islamic theory and secular humanistic political theory. As a citizen of the West, who--though immensely proud of the heritage we have built for ourselves--often gazes sadly upon the crudity and debasement that has lately come to dominate so much of our own culture, I cannot yet judge that the Iraqi version of the never-ending democratic experiment will turn out so badly as the pessimists will hasten now to predict.

UPDATE 8/22/2005 at 7:30 P.M.: According to a U.S. State Deparment press release, the draft text of the constitution has been submitted to the Iraqi National Assembly, which apparently has been given three days to make amendments before voting on the final text. New York Times writer Dexter Filkins calls the submission with the three day period for amendments a "legal sleight of hand" designed to allow the drafters to claim that they met today's deadline even though the document remains subject to revision. Sleight of hand or not, by exposing the draft to further discussion and revision in the National Assembly, the drafters will have broadened the legitimacy of the document that finally emerges. Of course, the whole process remains fragile and could descend into anarchy at any moment, but I remain optimistic and am encouraged that the descriptions of guaranteed rights are rather more specific than the rather vague references to Islam as a "main source for legislation." As of now, the proposed text provides, inter alia, statements of guaranteed rights that counter-balance and moderate the statement that Islam is a "main source for legislation":

Article 2

The political system is republican, parliamentary, democratic and federal.

1. Islam is a main source for legislation.

- a. No law may contradict Islamic standards.

- b. No law may contradict democratic standards.

- c. No law may contradict the essential rights and freedoms mentioned in this constitution.

2. This constitution guarantees the Islamic identity of the Iraqi people and guarantees all religious rights; all persons are free within their ideology and the practice of their ideological practices.

* * * *

Article 36

The State guarantees:

1. Freedom of expression by all means.

2. Freedom of the press, printing, advertising and publishing.

Article 37

Freedom to establish political groups and organizations.

* * * *

Article 39

Iraqis are free to abide in their personal lives according to their religion, sects, beliefs or choice. This should be organized by law.

UPDATE 8/23/2005:

From the debate NRO has going in The Corner:

Ramesh Ponnuru agrees that the mutual influences of secular rights and an Islamic tradition upon each other is not necessarily a one way street, that the statement of rights in

[the Iraqi] constitution can influence a culture for the better.

Michael Ledeen has similar thoughts about reasons for optimism:

First, there is hardly a country in the region without some language acknowledging Sharia as either "the" or "a major" basis for national legislation. But Iran, for example, says that Allah is the sole source of authority, while the Iraqi constitution says that the people are the only legitimate source of authority. This in itself is a revolutionary event.

And even Andy McCarthy, who said he was getting "off the bus" if the Iraqi constitution established "supremacy of Islam" in legislation, appears to be willing to hang on for the ride at least a little longer:

[M]uch of my trepidation may be based on the version of the draft constitution reported in the mainstream media, which your last post indicates is way overblown in its description of how firmly Islam is installed as the law of Iraq. There is a world of difference between "a" and "the," and a bill of rights that actually guarantees equality and civil rights would assuage many concerns.

Shall We March Out the Grieving Mothers?

2005-08-16T17:55:00.000-05:00

In a society in which politicians are admired for the capacity to "feel your pain," or to appear to do so when they bite their own lips, a society in which otherwise ordinary folks come to blows to win a camera's attention so they can emote about their family members' private failings on national daytime television, a society in which the successes of our most prominent interviewers--the Winfreys and the Walters--are measured by the facility with which they can extract tears from interviewees as if on cue, in such a society--one in which emotion has never before been so widely and thinly dispersed, nor so close to the surface of the national psyche--the powerful contrast of a mother's deep and genuine grief rises to the status of a sanctified thing.

It is always said that there is no grief greater than that of a mother who has lost her child. Every decent person knows instinctively that such grief, in and of itself, should never be questioned. Yet one may still ask, "What can that grief demand? What is owed to such grief?"

When the mother has lost her son to war in the service of this nation, she is owed, and should never have to demand, for herself a sincere regard for her loss and every other consolation her fellow citizens can reasonably bestow, and for her son the unstinting honors of a grateful nation.

Even beyond that, if she wishes to speak about her son's death and the cause for which he gave his life, whether or not she supports or opposes that cause, she does deserve to be heard. Yes, she does deserve to be heard because it is quite possible that the immeasurable loss she has suffered has inspired her to think about that cause more deeply and more carefully than those whose lives have not been similarly affected. At the same time, one must keep in mind that it is also possible that the loss she has suffered might instead have caused her to think less rationally, more angrily, more vengefully.

So when Cindy Sheehan speaks, decency obliges us all to give her a respectful hearing. But though we are obliged to hear her, we are not obliged to heed her.

Unfortunately, her wrathful voice brings no new insight. Her opinions are nothing more and nothing less than re-amplified repetitions of the hyperbolic irrationalities that have been heard from her manipulators on the extreme left since before the war in Iraq began. Thus, we are obliged to give Cindy Sheehan a fair hearing, but we are not obliged to heed her when she says:

The Halliburtons, Bechtels, KBRs, and the oil oligarchs of the world, who are laughing all the way to the bank, think of Iraq with greedy glee each day.

When will the rest of America finally come out of its coma? When, God forbid, the jack-booted thugs come pounding on their door some midnight?

[T]ens of thousands of the other victims . . . have been killed for nothing but outright lies and bald-faced betrayals.

Your grandchildren and children who will be entering Kindergarten this fall will be fighting George’s endless war if he gets his way and is allowed to continue spreading the cancer of imperialism in the Middle-East.

I know it was "worth it" to Dick Cheney who was the CEO of Halliburton, (of no-bid contract fame) which has raped billions of dollars from our government, from the people of Iraq, and from our soldiers who are not getting what they need to survive in a combat zone.

Our "president" thinks stolen elections confer a mandate.

Our media was, and still is, a willing shill for the Administration and has never told the American public the truth.

Casey was sent to die in a war that was based on the imagination of some Neo-Cons who love to fill our lives with fear.

This war was sold to the American people by a slimy leadership with a maniacal zeal and phony sincerity that would have impressed snake oil salesmen a century ago.

We are not obliged to heed her when she says:

Is there yet an American who can not clearly see that Dick Cheney . . . whether it be 1975 or 2005. . . will say whatever he thinks is required to ultimately cause wealth and power to move to himself and to his friends?

Is there anyone in America who cannot yet see that Donald Runsfeld is a liar . . . that he, as with Hitler and Stalin . . . will say anything so long as he thinks it will help shape the world to his own liking?

Our country has been overtaken by murderous thugs . . . gangsters who lust after fortunes and power; never caring that their addictions are at the expense of our loved ones, and the blood of innocent people near and far.

We are not obliged to heed her when she says:

You get that maniac [Bush] out here to talk with me in person.

[J]ust what was the noble cause Casey died for?' Was it freedom and democracy? Bull---t! He died for oil. He died to make your friends richer. He died to expand American imperialism in the Middle East. We're not freer here, thanks to your PATRIOT Act. Iraq is not free. You get America out of Iraq and Israel out of Palestine and you'll stop the terrorism.

We need not heed her when she says:

If anyone reading this has children, would you think it was worth it?? Instead of some Congress leaders showing ink-stained fingers at the SOTU address they should have held up blood soaked hands. . . . [M]y first born was murdered. Am I angry? Yes, he was killed for lies and for a PNAC Neo-Con agenda to benefit Israel. My son joined the Army to protect America, not Israel. [Note: Sheehan has recently denied writing these particular statements, but the evidence indicates that she did write them.]

Nor are we obliged to heed her when she says:

We are not waging a war on terror in this country. We’re waging a war of terror. The biggest terrorist in the world is George W. Bush. How many more people are we going to let him kill before we stop him?

I know that George Bush and his band of neo-cons and their neo-con agenda killed my son.

America has been killing people, like my sister over here says, since we first stepped on this continent, we have been responsible for death and destruction. I passed on that bullshit to my son and my son enlisted. I’m going all over the country telling moms: This country is not worth dying for. . . . We might not even have been attacked by Osama bin Laden[.] [I]f 9/11 was their Pearl Harbor to get their neo-con agenda through and, if I would have known that before my son was killed, I would have taken him to Canada. I would never have let him go and try and defend this morally repugnant system we have.

They’re a bunch of fucking hypocrites!

Such statements by Cindy Sheehan reveal an undeniable depth of feeling, a blind and inconsolable anger, an insane grief--and nothing else.

Yet in our time, "feelings" are being elevated to be the ultimate measure of the validity of one's opinions, such that if one's feelings are known or asserted to be "deeply held," those feelings thereby satisfy every deficiency of reasoned argument. Thus, we are told that "the moral authority of parents who bury children killed in Iraq is absolute."

So now shall we round up all the grieving mothers, divide them into contingents of those who support and those who oppose the war, arm them with placards and megaphones, march them onto opposite sides of a field in Crawford, let them have it out, and televise the whole thing in weekly installments, with a grand finale during May sweeps? But how shall we judge the result? By the volume of their wailings. By the number of tears shed on either side? By the number of votes cast via a 1-800 number?

Such an appalling scene is the grotesque end toward which the growing spectacle of Cindy Sheehan, nurtured by the media, would point us. There is nothing that could be learned from it as to whether or how to conduct the war, and the same can be said of the sad spectacle that Cindy Sheehan has made of herself, with her claim that her son was "murdered by the Bush crime family" or her claim that her son "was killed for lies and for a PNAC Neo-Con agenda to benefit Israel."

As Cindy Sheehan continues with such irrational statements, just as decency obliged us to listen to her in respectful silence, the very same decency now obliges us to turn away and listen no more, lest we encourage her in displays that even the deference accorded to insufferable grief cannot prevent from becoming hideous self-humiliations.

¤ ¤ ¤ ¤ ¤ ¤
Yet though it is now clear that there is no lesson to be learned from Cindy Sheehan about how or whether to fight the war, there is a lesson, more personal but no less universal, to be learned from the way she has chosen to channel her grief and the way some other grieving mothers have dealt differently with the same terrible blow.

Consistent with the liberal theology of victimology, in which only victims can be heroes, Cindy Sheehan always refers to her son, Casey, as a "hero." And in truth, Casey is a hero--not a passive "victim-hero," as Cindy Sheehan would have him remebered, but a genuine active hero who died in service of his country. Yet if she does have her way now, Cindy Sheehan will transform her son from an active hero into a helpless pawn. Before he went to war, when Cindy Sheehan "begged him not to go," her son told her:

Mom, I have to go. It's my duty. My buddies are going.

But now, according to Cindy Sheehan, her son's life, his legacy, is not one exemplifying the nobility of individual free choice, loyalty to comrades, and devotion to duty. That legacy, which is Casey Sheehan's by every honorable right, is by her now to be obliterated and supplanted by a legacy of infantile victimhood, in which he is held forth as an example of a man who, once he ventured beyond the perimeter of his mother's skirt, lacked the good sense to avoid being duped and misled:

Sheehan . . . never wanted Casey to join the military. She said he did after being misled by his recruiter.

Ultimately Cindy Sheehan would make even that ignoble legacy of ignorant victimhood depend not upon her son's own actions, but upon her actions. You see, Casey's legacy now depends upon Cindy Sheehan, who explains:

If anything I do can shorten the war by one minute or save one life, or bring discredit to the evil bastards in the administration, my life will have been worthwhile, and Casey's sacrifice meaningful.

In other words, according to Cindy Sheehan, the meaningingfulness of her son's life and death should not be determined by the decisions he voluntarily chose while he lived, but should be determined, after his death and contrary to his own free decisions, by the actions of Cindy Sheehan. Casey Sheehan's legacy is not to be found in his own noble choice to serve his country and risk death in war. No, his legacy is to be determined by whether or not Cindy Sheehan succeeds in her own cause. According to Cindy Sheehan, her son's life will be "meaningful" only if she succeeds.

Cindy Sheehan has taken from her son, and abrogated to herself, the power to determine the meaning of his life.

But Cindy Sheehan is not the only grieving mother.

Penelope Gavriel also grieves. And she too deserves to be heard.

Her son, Dimitrios Gavriel was killed fighting in Iraq on November 19, 2004. Four days later, Bob Oakes interviewed her on the radio show Here and Now:

Penelope Gavriel: He was a very idealistic person. He believed in integrity, leading by example, honesty. He was always mentoring people to do the right thing ever since he was in highschool. He was one of the youngest captains on his wrestling team. Then after his college years when he joined the working people ranks, he realized that the world is a lot different than what he imagined it to be . . . . And then it was Sept 11. During that tragic incident he lost two of his closest friends, and that emboldened his belief that that is really what he has to do, that he needs to enlist, go serve his country, give back to his country a little bit of what he can. And also he felt like many young men and women who joined after September 11, that this was a calling for them.

. . . .

Q: What made you decide you had to let him go?

A: It wasn't a matter of a decision on our behalf. The only role we played at that moment was, just bless him, and let him go. . . . He told one of his friends I could not go on living my life until I go through this. He enlisted last year, October 23rd. He did boot camp for three months, and then went to Camp Lejeune where he was based. After drills in urban warfare, they rated them for Iraq, and they left. They were deployed June 23rd of 2004.

Q: What do you know about his duty in Iraq? Did he seem concerned?

A: Not at all. Because he knew we were very concerned about his safety from conversations and questions we were asking him, every time we communicated with him . . . [he said], "Everything is great, I'm in good shape, I'm eating well, I'm healthy, the weather is getting nice now. It's not as hot. . . . Don't worry about me. I'm in great shape. I'm looking forward to finish the job we have to do here and come back home."

Q: He was a gung ho guy.

A: Absolutely.

Q: A real Marine. He was interviewed by the NY Times just a few months back, and he was quoted as saying, "We're locked, cocked, and ready to rock."

A: And ready to rock.

Q: And "that's about how we feel."

A: And that's who he was. He wasn't though the polemical war monger as he might sound from these words. He was a lot softer than that. The Marines though are a tough corps, and you cannot act softly. You need to talk boldly and act boldly. Inside he was a very loving, soft giant, and he had very many ways that he demonstrated that among his friends and his family.

Q: He told a friend of his, a former room mate at Brown University, that he was concerned about his legacy. And I know it might be a little early to think about this, but what do you think his legacy is?

A: . . . . I think he's going to have the best legacy he ever dreamed of. At what price though? He wanted to be remembered as somebody who never backed off out of a difficult moment, fearless, and always striving the hardest. He wanted to be challenged, always.

Q: Mrs. Gavriel, I'm sure there are folks who are listening to us talk who wonder how you have the strength do this at this time, and so eloquently I might add. I know that part of the reason you want to talk to us and to other reporters is that you want Demi to be remembered as a role model for other children.

A: Exactly. With these interviews and meetings we have with media, we like to convey to the youth primarily of this country that bravery is not an advantage [you are born with]. It's something that everybody can do. You can always be brave, love your country, be a good person, and achieve high in life, if you want to.

Q: Penelope Gavriel, I'm sure that I speak for most everyone who's listening when I say thank you so very much for speaking with us and we're very sorry for you loss.

A: I thank you, too. We are grieving for his loss, but he was another good man of the many who were lost in this cause.

Like Cindy Sheehan, Penelope Gavriel tried to discourage her son, Dimitrios, from joining the service to fight in Iraq. But she understood that it was his life and his decision. "Just bless him and let him go."

To comprehend the full meaning of Ms. Gavriel's words, I urge you to click this audio link to listen to the sound of her voice, which reveals a love and respect for her son that printed words cannot convey. In her grief, Penelope Gavriel does not seek to transform her son's legacy into that of a dupe and victim. She does not seek to transform the meaning of his life and death to suit her own political aims. For all we know, Ms. Gavriel herself might oppose the war. But her respect for her son as a man, as his own man, inspires her to proclaim simply and honestly the honorable legacy Dimitrios Gavriel sought, and won, for himself.

A Little Oppo Research

2005-07-20T11:36:00.000-05:00

In a recent Weekly Standard article, Dean Barnett examined the pernicious influence liberal blogs have wrought upon the Democrat Party:

While conservative blogs remain for the most part virtual op-ed columns (with the notable exception of Charles Johnson's Little Green Footballs), the Daily Kos has become a virtual family which allows readers to write their own blogs-within-the-blog (called diaries) and to engage in limitless amounts of commenting. . . .

. . . .

[T]he Democratic party seems to be under the impression that [liberal] bloggers are an enormous, important constituency--and that it must go to whatever lengths necessary to win the hearts and minds of this virtual community.

This seems like a major miscalculation, because the politics of the left-wing blogs are far out of the American mainstream. Where most of the 120 million Americans who voted in the last election bear a benign indifference to political matters, the left half of the blogosphere seethes with hatred for George W. Bush and his supporters. What's more, the blogs take numerous positions that would strike all but the most passionate Democratic partisans as patently preposterous. . . .

Also, the level of discourse on the Daily Kos and other prominent liberal blogs is not something that would be attractive to the majority of the American public. The writings are often obscene and usually relentlessly hostile and negative. Crude personal attacks, whether aimed at right-wing bloggers or politicians, are the order of the day.

A few minutes scanning any of the more popular liberal blogs will confirm Barnett's thesis. Take for example this comment thread, excerpted from the most popular left-wing blog, Daily Kos, on Bush's nomination of John Roberts to the Supreme Court:

Did You Catch His Wife. When Roberts thanked his family, he mentioned his son, Jack...Roberts' wife's face fell. It was like a poker tell. I think we should research Jack.
by mayan on Tue Jul 19th, 2005 at 13:13:01 PDT

interesting observation, wonder if anything will come of it...
by storme on Tue Jul 19th, 2005 at 13:19:01 PDT

He's probably gay. Of course, this is how ridiculous rumors get started, but extreme conservatives seem to have a lot of homosexual children...
by Geotpf on Tue Jul 19th, 2005 at 13:19:08 PDT

Worse - he's a lesbian
by moltar on Tue Jul 19th, 2005 at 13:41:10 PDT

A Trangendered One at that. And an alcoholic and drug addict...That's how Karl starts the smearing process, isn't it???
by Volvo Liberal on Tue Jul 19th, 2005 at 13:50:14 PDT

Robert's son, Jack, is four years old.

Like Rabbits

2005-07-15T13:49:00.000-05:00

From: Bathus
To: Victor Davis Hanson
Sent: Friday, July 15, 2005 1:30 PM
Subject: Why Do We Hate Us

Dear Mr. Hanson,

Thanks for another excellent analysis, which I would refine to this extent:

All three phenomena--moral equivalence, utopian pacifism, and multiculturalism--which you identify as the cause of the left's "false narrative" can be traced to a single origin: relativism. That origin seems to me to be obvious as to the first and the last of the three, and less directly, but no less completely to account for utopian pacifism as well. (I've explored this topic in my usual clunky and round-about way in a recent blog post titled The Final Paradox.)

The question (I ask rhetorically) is, What is it that seems to make contemporary Western culture so especially susceptible to the seductions of relativism?

I think the source of that susceptibility can be located in the predominate passion of a democratic people, the passion Tocqueville catalogued so well: the love of equality. Relativism appears to allow one to hold all things equal, which is the first instinct of the democratic soul.

Add to that instinct the Western intellectual heritage of self-examination and self-doubt (e.g., Socrates and Descartes), a heritage grotesquely corrupted by relativism; and then add to that relativism's false promise to free us from the weight of moral judgment, thereby allowing all of us to do (with a clear conscience and mutual "tolerance") whatever our desires suggest, and relativism's seduction is, for us good democrats, almost irresistible.

The left's "false narrative" you recount is merely a particular manifestation of the intellectual confusion and moral self-loathing that relativism finally engenders.

So then the question becomes: What: can we do about it? What sort of thing can help democracy resist this dangerous inclination toward relativism?

Formerly, the main answer was religious instruction, but that doesn't seem to be working out so well these days. Perhaps our saving grace might be the painful yet fortuitous reception of external forces, which by creating a clear and immediate threat to our very survival would cause us, as a matter of self-preservation, to abandon the self-indulgent luxury of self-doubt. However, that "solution" works only so long as the external threat has a certain intensity and immediacy. In other words, if the Islamists are smart, they will treat us somewhat like the proverbial frog in the pot of boiling water: more 7/7s but no more 9/11s. (Don't you think bin Laden would admit in hind-sight that 9/11 was a too spectacular to serve his ends?)

One is rescued more often by one's enemies' vices than by one's own virtues. In that regard, I would add another animal analogy: If we aren't going to fight this war aggressively (an uncertain matter after the expiration of GWB's term of office), perhaps our best hope is that the "chase instinct" of our adversaries will divert them from the more patient and cerebral tactic of boiling the Western frog slowly, i.e., that the jihadists' vicious passions will tempt them to close in for the kill prematurely, or at least to kill too many too soon. Indeed, one could say that the jihadists' animal instinct to kill what they see as weak and contemptuous (i.e., us!) is almost the only explanation for their resort to terrorism because, without setting off a single bomb, the jihadists could more easily defeat us demographically and culturally, as they are now defeating the French and the Germans. How strange it would be if it turned out that the better course of action for us, rather than sitting idle like frogs in the pot, might be to run like rabbits--enticing our enemies to chase and to corner us while we still retain some latent capacity to resist. (Salamis!)

That's all very interesting, to me at least, but perhaps the best solution to our confounded moral, military, demographic problem is a lot more straightforward over the long haul: Marry and have babies!

Thanks again for all your fine writing.

Bathus

Manufactured in West Yorkshire, U.K., under Exclusive License Granted by the Government of Her Majesty the Queen

2005-07-12T22:14:00.000-05:00

It appears that the London bombers differ from the 9/11 terrorists in one crucial respect.

If the breaking press reports turn out to be true, the London terrorists, just like the 9/11 hijackers, were young Muslim men of middle-eastern heritage. [Correction: One was a Jamaica-born convert to Islam.]

But unlike the 9/11 hijackers, all of whom had been recently exported to the United States specifically to carry out their attacks, the young Muslim men who killed themselves and their fellow passengers in London were British citizens or long-time residents, reared, educated, and indoctrinated within burgeoning Muslim communities of West Yorkshire, just a quick train ride from London.

Blair's government will certainly do all it can to overlook the disturbing fact that the London transit bombers were "home grown" terrorists. To the extent that Blair does acknowledge that fact, the emphasis will be on alleged "root causes," such as "poverty" and "social alienation."

In what will surely be a Herculean demonstration of studied ignorance, Blair will seek and no doubt receive the moral assistance of men such as Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams. At the very moment when bodies living and dead still smoldered unfound in dark and burned out tunnels beneath London's streets, the Archbishop was enjoying morning tea with his "Muslim colleagues and friends in West Yorkshire," whence he emerged to mumble placatory pieties about how "faith communities will have to continue to stand and work together for the well being of our nation." Yes, Blair will seek to ally himself in studied ignorance with men like Rowan, even though the most reverend doctor had previously implied that Blair's "regime" was a "threat to its citizens and others" and had "jeopardise[d] its claim to obedience."

Were these Muslim youths from West Yorkshire listening closely when Rowan preached that Blair's government was such a threat to them that they owed it no obedience?

For additional support, Blair can also count on a man whose visage cannot fail to inspire confidence, West Yorkshire Chief Constable Colin Cramphorn, the chief local law enforcement official in the area the London bombers called home. Perhaps to avoid distracting the citizenry's attention toward the danger of terrorist clubs expanding their ranks among Muslims within his jurisdiction, Cramphorn had counseled those terrorists' future victims that they must never use "the misleading terms 'Islamic' or 'Muslim' to describe supporters of violence against the west" because those appellations "risked alienating a significant community which had no sympathy with violence." (Historical note on the West Yorkshire Muslim community's sympathies: A quarter century ago, when Khomeini issued his fatwa condemning Salman Rushdie for writing The Satanic Verses, Muslims in Bradford, West Yorkshire, famously rioted to display their support--for the fatwa--and burned a few copies of Rushdie's book for good measure.) To drive home Cramphorn's point, late last year West Yorkshire police, working with Blair's Home Office and the Crown Prosecution Service, arrested British National Party Leader Nick Griffin along with several other BNP members on suspicion of inciting racial hatred.

My purpose here is neither to advocate nor to defend Griffin's politics or his positions. My point instead concerns the juxtaposition of his story and that of Omar Bakri Mohammed:

It appears that Griffin, who was running for Parliament from a West Yorkshire district, had gone on record stating that Islam is an "evil and vicious religion." According to this report, "in a statement following the arrests, West Yorkshire police proudly announced that it had deployed a team of officers on the case 'five days a week, ten hours a day'" for at least six months, presumably to further establish the case against Griffin and his fellow party members. When Nick Griffin announced that Islam was an evil religion, the West Yorkshire police, under the leadership of their aforementioned Chief Constable Colin Cramphorn, diverted against him substantial resources that might have been used to monitor terrorist rumblings in a region within their jurisdiction that had "become known for the growth of radical Islam."

In the days immediately following the 9/11 attacks, and even before the war in Afghanistan was launched, a Muslim cleric, Omar Bakri Mohammed, went to West Yorkshire to lead protests against the United States' actions against the Taliban. Bakri,"suspected of having links with Abu Qatada, the alleged Al-Qaeda leader in Europe," is the founder of the radical Muslim group, al-Muhajiroun ("the immigrants"), which is "known to recruit among young British Muslims." But the West Yorkshire police declared that they were "powerless to stop" Bakri from leading protests in Bradford "despite a Government ban on political rallies." One month later Muslim youths from Luton were the very first Brits to die in Afghanistan, where they were fighting on the Taliban side. All signs indicate that they were recruited through Bakri's organization. More recently, two of Bakri's "students" matriculated from his tutelage to take up "advanced studies" as suicide bombers for Hamas in Israel. A yet more chilling "coincidence": right after the Madrid bombings, Bakri warned in a published interview that it was "'inevitable' that London would be hit by a large attack 'because they are being prepared by various groups'" that were on "the verge of launching a big operation." Bakri is said to have recently "disbanded" al-Muhajiroun, but, at last report, the man himself still walks free in Britain.

A prediction: I have no idea whether the London bombers (whose names have just now been released) were in any way connected with Bakri. But it seems likely that these young men received an indoctrination and were recruited domestically. After bloggers and the MSM have a little time to scrutinize the bombers' backgrounds and "connect the dots" between them and their handlers, or even if it turns out that these four young men were acting entirely on their own initiative, the Blair government's embarrassment will increase a hundred-fold as the British public begins to learn the extent to which the resources of Her Majesty's Government have been deployed in ways that failed to prevent, enabled, and even encouraged an "education in terror" for specifically these four young Muslim men from West Yorkshire.

UPDATE (07/14/05) This is no surprise:

LEEDS -- The transformation of four young British men into terrorists appears to have taken place at a government-funded storefront youth centre in Leeds that, according to youth workers, was a hub of radical Islamist activity.

The centre was sealed off and searched by police yesterday after three of its workers said in an interview on the street outside that at least two of the suicide bombers had been "very regular" visitors at all hours to the Hamara Youth Access Point, and a third had been seen there occasionally.

"It had become so radical and so hateful that I asked if I could stop working there," said one of the workers, who along with two others described the storefront drop-in centre as a hub of radical Muslim politics and a hotbed of Islamic organizing, routinely hosting mysterious figures to speak about extremist politics.

. . . .

"It's fair to say that there was some kind of recruiting going on here," one of the workers said. "Some of the youth workers were really involved with it, and it got to the point where they were acting really hostile to anyone who wasn't their kind of Muslim."

As the interview was taking place on the street, police cordoned off the building, expelled people from neighbouring buildings and began a detailed search of the youth centre.

The centre receives funding from the British government and the European Union, as well as charitable funds, and as such is officially secular and non-political. But in practice, it was neither. On its walls were posters from the Respect Party, an extremist pro-Islamic party founded by MP George Galloway, that showed Israeli soldiers pointing rifles at Palestinian children. When some workers complained about these, they were harassed by other staffers.

The Final Paradox

2005-07-08T06:32:00.000-05:00

"The only thing we have to fear is fear itself." Though Roosevelt spoke not of violent conflict but of economic collapse, his famous paradox has become the line most often quoted both by those on the political right and by those on the political left to justify their prescriptions in the West's present confrontation with Islamist terrorism.

Those on the pacific left quote Roosevelt to legitimize their accusation that right-wing warmongers and profiteers have incited and exploited irrational fear to coerce a sheep-like public to accept an overly-militarist and misdirected response, to the detriment of implementation of a more peaceful solution and preservation of individual rights. Those on the right quote the same words, calling into question the courage of the anti-war left, with the charge that their fear of retaliation makes them grovel toward an irrational and ultimately self-defeating appeasement.

There is, potentially, a grain of truth in the charges both the right and the left bring against the other: a reaction to fearful circumstances could be excessive in either direction. And so, it seems that Roosevelt's rhetorical flourish, while heightening our consciousness of the dangers at either extreme, gives us no guidance as to how closely our present course adheres to the virtuous mean.

Notwithstanding its grains of tautological truth, in our day Roosevelt's stirring paradox not only fails to reveal the truth about our present condition, but actually veils and nurtures a deeper and more dangerous paradox. These days Roosevelt's words hardly inspire confidence and are rarely used with an intention to inspire confidence. Instead, the intent and the effect nowadays of almost every use of Roosevelt's words is to inspire us to wonder, "Are we fearing the right kind of fear?"

But the real danger for us is neither a paralyzing fear nor an irrational rage. Those who oppose a forceful response to terrorism are anything but paralyzed. To the contrary, they are among the most active, with their movies, their protests, and their endless litigations. They do not seek to appease our enemies. What most of them seek, let us speak the obvious truth, is to incite and inflame our enemies' anger toward us, and, more than that, to incite a self-hatred among our own people. As much as those activists would have us believe otherwise, the real danger for us is not that we could be misled by our own purportedly irrational rage. A nation that tortures itself on the minuscule details of an accusation, ridiculous even if true, that its warriors have "mishandled" a few Korans, cannot colorably be accused of excessive rage. The real danger for us is not "fear itself," but self-criticism transformed into self-doubt, transformed into self-loathing, and finally into self-negation.

If he were speaking in the latter half of the twentieth century, and especially if he were speaking to the post-9/11 Western world, Roosevelt would have more aptly said, "We have nothing to fear but self-doubt."

Yes, fear can be paralyzing to some, but in the event rarely is so. The instinctive human response to the fear of grave and immediate danger is not to stand still but "to fight or to flee." If there is nowhere to flee, to fight becomes the only possible response. Thus, in the months immediately after 9/11, while we remained as it were in the grip of fear, when it seemed there was no place of safety from attackers who crashed civilian jets into our tallest buildings in our largest city, to flee was not an option. As a people, we seemed resolved to fight. Self-doubts were, if not extinguished altogether, submerged in the moment of existential fear.

It is only as fear abates that self-doubt can begin to re-emerge.

The terrorists understand this. They understand that, for all but a very few extremely weak-willed or horribly corrupted souls, the immediate instinctive reaction to their brutal attacks will be rage. Indeed, if the terrorists still fear anything about us, it is our rational rage, that healthy life-affirming emotion for which we yet retain a latent capacity. They understand that, so long as we retain that capacity, after each attack they must expect to absorb or avoid the blows of our rage for some time. But they are confident that as our immediate fear abates, our rage will dissipate also. For the French and the Germans, that rage can be measured in days. For the Spanish, it can be measured in hours. For the Americans, the clock is still ticking. For the British people, with the bombings in London yesterday the clock was reset, and no one knows this time how long it will run. But the terrorists are confident that eventually we will lose even the instinctive capacity for rage, and the clock will stop altogether.

Thus, they employ fear merely as a catalyst, administered judiciously with varying intensity in cycles of various lengths. Within each cycle, as our fear is absorbed and metabolized in the collective psyche, the fear refines and crystallizes the prevailing sentiments. In the presence of a dissipating fear, pre-existing sentiments of self-doubt transform and harden into self-loathing and a will to self-negation. Pre-existing sentiments of self-respect and self-confidence transform and stiffen into the calm resolution of a will to prevail against enemies who are so obviously our moral inferiors.

The doubt I speak of is not a Rooseveltian concern about whether we fear too much or fear too little or fear the wrong things, but rather the more fundamental doubt about whether we--we the United States and we the West--deserve morally to prevail in our confrontation with Islamic fundamentalism.

We in the West must balance ourselves forever in a precariously paradoxical position, one that requires an equilibrium that it would be unimaginable to sustain for long had not the culture of the West been performing that magical act with generally increasing success for the last several hundred years. For self-questioning is itself a vital principle of Western values. With an honest irony that eludes contemporary self-doubters, Socrates could brag that his superior wisdom consisted in his knowledge that he knew nothing. In self-doubt, Descartes managed to confirm the palpable truth of his own existence. His "I doubt, therefore I am," expresses perfectly the paradox of Western culture. To us in the West, self-examination has rightly been understood as, if not virtue itself, a pre-condition of virtue. Yet in our present struggle against Islamofascism, more so even than in our struggle against communism, this impulse to self-criticism, this pre-condition of Western virtue, has been corrupted in a way that could finally be our moral and mortal undoing. We are losing our balance.

For this loss of balance, we can blame the ascendancy of the moral and cultural relativists, who assert that all purported "truths" espoused anywhere at any time are in reality merely the preferences of a particular culture in a particular place in time. In other words, all "truths" are "culturally relative" and "historically relative." The "truths" an Islamist terrorist holds dear are as valid from his point of view as the "truths" we hold dear are valid from our point of view. One man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter. There is no genuine basis to distinguish between them. The relativisists teach that the "truths" we hold to be "self-evident" are not truths at all, but are merely the preferences of some long-dead white guys (who really didn't believe those so-called truths themselves, but were only mouthing those fancy words to distract the masses from their power grab).

Furthermore, even aside from the non-existence of moral truth, the relativists explain that, because we are all blinded by the value system in which we were acculturated, we have no capacity to judge the goodness or evil of any culture of which we are not a part. Inasmuch as we have no grounds to judge the goodness or evil of the acts and practices of other cultures, we have no moral standing to judge ourselves superior to them, and we certainly have no moral standing to go to war against them, even when they attack us, because we simply cannot make a valid judgment about whether their attacks were just or unjust. Sure we didn't like it when they killed thousands of our innocent civilians, but they didn't like it when we started selling Coca Cola in Saudi Arabia. Who's to judge which was the worse offense? Besides, you can't properly discuss these things using words like "justice" and "innocent" because such terms are laden with impermissible value judgments.

Yet, even though we cannot, according to the relativists, justify our wrath on moral grounds, can we not--aside from any moral question--appeal to a basic instinct of self-preservation of which the impulse to rage in the presence of danger is the most obvious natural manifestation? But then arises the question, "Do we even deserve to survive?" In making that judgment we are not permitted to compare the goodness of our culture with that of one that seeks to exterminate us. No, the relativists remind us that all we can rightly assess is our own culture, the extent to which we adhere to the moral principles we purport to uphold. We cannot make moral use of the comparative fact that our enemies slaughter children for their parents' religion, while we, albeit imperfectly, uphold a principle of freedom of religion for all faiths.

Abstracted from any trans-historical or trans-cultural context (i.e., abstracted from the practical and imperfect world as it is, as it was, and as it is likely to be), self-examination becomes an unbalanced process, a spirit-draining one-sided game we play against ourselves and are guaranteed to lose, a game in which we measure ourselves against an absolute scale of our own highly developed standards of civilized behavior, while granting our implacable enemies complete immunity from all moral judgment. We inevitably discover that we fall short of the principles we espouse. To the relativists, the fact that our enemies slaughter children for their parents' religion is irrelevant, while the "mishandling" of a few Korans is highly revelatory. Indeed, insofar as adherence to their principles is concerned, our enemies are superior to us in that they adhere more consistently to their principle that children of infidels can be slaughtered to advance the jihad, while we do not perfectly uphold our principle of respect for all religions. The relativists believe that there is no truth worth dying for, yet believe at the same time that our enemies' apparently endless willingness to sacrifice themselves and numberless innocents somehow lends credence to their bloody cause. Unlike the philosophy of a Socrates or a Descartes, for whom self-doubt was the impetus for deeper moral inquiry, in the contemporary thought dominated by relativists, self-doubt is a moral dead end--not exactly an absolute dead end, but a dead end with a trap door opening into an empty abyss of self-negation.

Relativism, is of course, utter nonsense, manifestly self-contradictory in its fundamental claim: "There is no truth!" a contradiction rendered only slightly more obvious when fully restated as, "The truth is there is no truth!" It is all too easy to understand why generations of academicians would have become enraptured, and still are enraptured, by such foolishness. What is slightly more difficult to understand is why the nonsense assertion that "the truth is there is no truth" could have gained currency in popular (small d) democratic political thought.

To some extent the emergence of popular relativism is attributable to the elite relativists' having in the last century secured a virtual monopoly in the social institutions--the arts, academia, the press, and to a lesser extent religion--that have historically served as anchors of moderation and counter-weights to extremes in popular political opinion. But a more complete explanation of the ascendancy of relativism in popular political thought can be traced to the innate and powerful inclination of democratic peoples to want to hold all things equal.

In democracies, with our love of equality, we are overly fond of believing that no one's opinion is superior to any other's. In the face of conflicting truth claims, we seem forced to choose one as superior to the other, and we are uncomfortable making such a choice because it would seem to violate the democratic principle that every man (and his opinion) is the equal of any other man (and his opinion). Relativism saves us from the distressing choice. It allows us to say with a straight face that both opinions are equally true for the persons who hold them. Everything becomes a matter of personal preference, and it all seems so affable and tolerant. As the relativists mouth their pernicious pseudo-philosophy, they can congratulate themselves for their intellectual subtlety. One of the subsidiary paradoxes of relativism is that each of its proponents considers himself an intellectual superior. But the relativist is intellectually the laziest and most self-deceiving of human types, for he believes he vanquishes every opponent with just one triumphant rejoinder: "That's just your opinion, and who are you to judge!" Whenever someone deploys that non-sequitur, you can be sure that he is a relativist, even if he would not recognize himself as one. And if you ever make use of that line yourself, you should consider the possibility that insidious relativism has taken hold of your own soul as well.

Just as relativism relieves its adherents from the discomfort of expressing moral judgments about others, which every democratic spirit by nature wishes mightily to avoid, it also seems to relieve them from the awful weight of moral judgments about themselves. The great seduction, and the great deception, of relativism is that it promises to free its adherents from self-doubt, because it allows them to assert confidently without examination or argument that whatever moral values they settle upon are as good as any others. What once appeared to be dubious moral values are now all merely "alternative lifestyle choices." Any argument against them can be easily dismissed: "That's just your opinion, and who are you to judge!" When one's lifestyle choices are challenged, one need not defend them with rational arguments about the better and the worse. There is no better and worse. In the relativist world, even "opinion" becomes too strong a word because an "opinion" implies underlying reasons, but for the relativist there can be no valid reasons. Eventually all that remain are "preferences." It's enough to say, "This is my choice based on my preferences, and it is as good as any other." To suggest that some choices are better than others is to commit the only relativist sin--the sin of intolerance.

So how does one exist as a relativist? Well, the truth is one can't actually operate in the world as a practicing relativist. The relativists, being human, make moral judgments. They tell us that it is "wrong to be judgmental," but the command not to be judgmental entails, of course, a moral judgment. We humans are, by nature, judging creatures. Our psychic life requires moral judgment as much as our physical life requires air to breathe. And so the moral self-doubt reappears when relativism, which seemed so comfortably attached to democratic values of freedom of thought and tolerance, pronounces as it must that those very democratic values are in fact no better than any others. This marks the beginning of relativist self-doubt among democratic peoples. For one cannot live without self-doubt under a theory that judges that the devotion one feels to Western values has no rational moral basis and is merely a "preference," no more worthy to persist on this earth than the Islamofascist preferences of its attackers.

Yet instead of abandoning their contradictions, which would require giving up a pleasant amorality, (actually an immorality that promises to permit the unquestioned satisfaction of all desires), the relativists--like all zealots--become more vehement in their fallacy, which they champion under the noble-sounding cause of tolerance. But at the core of their souls, the democratic relativists have those doubts, and those doubts are the fertile ground for the growth of self-loathing. As I have written previously in this space:

The shapers of opinion on the left embrace the contemporary moral laxity, which allows them openly and freely to pursue and enjoy the personal and financial fruits of debauchery while ridiculing their critics as "judgmental moralistic bigots." Yet at some deep level they feel ashamed of themselves and this shame manifests itself in self-loathing. Those on the left, lacking steadfastness of moral principles of their own, find something attractive in the steadfastness of the moral clarity the Islamofascists claim for themselves. Thus, twenty-five years ago the political and intellectual leaders of the Western left made their pilgrimages to Paris to sit cross-legged at the feet of Ayatollah Khomeni. In domestic economic matters, this phenomenon of leftist self-loathing has long been correctly identified as "limousine liberalism." They sense that, morally speaking, we are all going to hell in handcarts. But the ride is too pleasant to resist, so they assuage their guilt by fretting over whether the upholstery of some handcarts is too plush compared to some others.

Now consider all this in light of yesterday's terrorist attack in London. When terrorists attack a Western people, they know well that among its countrymen and allies will be many whom relativism has predisposed not only to equivocate the brutality, but to form a fifth column.

Yes, while fear prevails, we can expect to hear the usual statements of national and international solidarity against terrorism. While fear prevails, most of the relativists will remain confusedly silent, for among them are many of those thoroughly corrupted souls in whom fear engenders not rage, but a confused paralysis. While the fear prevails, some relativists, even those who had in the not too distant past openly embraced terrorist sympathizers, might now go so far as to vent what remains of their honest instinctual rage in an almost unequivocal condemnation of the attacks. But as the fear abates, the voices of the self-loathing critics will gain strength and multiply. As the fear subsides further, the relativists, even the ones who were initially (mildly) outraged, will be unable to bring themselves to condemn their attackers because that would require what is for them an impermissible trans-cultural value judgment.

And thus, as the fear abates, the relativists' critique can only turn inward. (How quickly this can happen!) But though the relativists make moral judgments as much as (even more than) anyone else, the intellectual flaccidly of their theory has left them bereft of the capacity for sensible and rigorous judgment, the kind of sense and rigor that is a pre-requisite to the most difficult, dangerous, and necessary critique: the moral examination of one's own self. And so the relativists will not aim their criticism directly against themselves, for the lazy habits of their theory ("That's just your opinion!") have cost them the moral strength that a such a precise self-criticism would require.

Instead, they will excuse themselves and deflect the ire of their self-loathing toward their own people, their own culture, their own values, their own leaders, their own soldiers, their own countries, which are no longer really their own, because--as the relativists themselves would assert--an attachment to their own people and culture and values depends entirely upon historical accident. As their fear subsides, the vehemence of the relativists' critique will exactly equal the vehemence of their self-loathing. They will try to teach others the bitter lessons of their angry self-doubt, the lesson that we are no better than our enemies, the lesson that we fail to uphold our own values, the lesson that it's all about blood for oil, the lesson that we have no right to impose our values on other peoples, the lesson that we have unjustly incited our attackers, and the ultimate lesson that we do not deserve to prevail in our death-struggle against the Islamists.

After the fear subsides, the terrorists will wait to give the relativists time to spread their teachings as far as possible. Then they will strike us again, and the cycle will begin anew. At the end of it all, if the terrorists have calculated correctly, we in the West will all have arrived at the ultimate paradox, the point at which one does not have to be a relativist to ask oneself, "Does a culture that can no longer locate the moral grounds from which to defend its own values deserve to survive?"