Wednesday, November 30, 2005
EXIT STRATEGY
Here's an extended essay describing an 18-month "exit strategy" for American armed forces from Iraq by a political science professor here at Boston's own MIT. The author, Barry Posen, proposes that the US should pull its armed forces out of Iraq and that we should anticipate a civil war among the three ethnic/religious groups there -- Kurds, Sunnis and Shi'ites -- which we should "manage" to a stalemate through "over-the-horizon" military intervention and economic support.
This piece is worth reading because it does do a good job of identifying all the major factors that contribute to the inherent instability of Iraq. But it also highlights through the numerous assumptions it contains just how unpredictable any outcome of the three-way battle for control of Iraq is. I'm not sure Posen is wrong that a disengagement from the Sunni triangle has to happen. This area is functionally ungovernable and I have come to conclude that the idea of a "democracy" in that region is a pipe dream. But there is no reason that US forces would have to completely evacuate Iraq. Why not just pull back to the western desert into highly defensible positions? From there the US could provide a real and immediate threat to those who seek the worst outcomes identified by Posen, especially the establishment of an "Al Qaida state." While the on-going supply of such a bristling redoubt in the western desert would present challenges, I think those challenges could be overcome. At any rate, that's the "exit startegy" I've been advocating since before the "Mission Accomplished" stage of the war.
GB, THHotA
posted by Greg 6:35 AM
ON THE ROAD AGAIN
I'm in Boston for the week for some depositions. Early morning at the Westin Hotel in Copley Square presents a moment for some disconnected blogging.
COFFEE. My friends know me as a Food Philistine. I tend to judge food by quantity rather than quality in an age when sophisticates focus on culinary realms that are beyond my ken. The one exception to this is coffee. I love good coffee and every morning I'm at home grind my own beans. Thus it is that I have come to judge business hotels by the quality of the little in-room coffee service almost all thankfully now provide. I am pleased to report that the Westin in Boston has very tasty Starbucks in the guest rooms. Yum.
BOSTON. Why do the lefties have all the beautiful cities? San Francisco, Seattle, Boston -- the three most attractive cities in America, and just as pinko as you could want. While Houston, arguably the urban capital of the Bush cabal, is (while a truly great place to live and work) nothing to write home about in the pulchritude department. Oh well.
READING. Although I'm having to work a lot on this trip, the flight up and the time before I went to bed last night did provide a bit of time for recreational reading. Before I left, I finished A Peace to End All Peace, about the foundations of the modern Middle East in the collapse of the Ottoman Empire during and after World War I. As I mentioned earlier, this is a really good book -- well documented and detailed -- that sets out just how the artificial boundaries of the countries we now find on the map of the Middle East were determined. This trip presents the opportunity to get a good start on Howard M. Sachar's 1000-page tome, A History of Israel From the Rise of Zionism to Our Time. Published in 1976, it predates the sad conquest of American academic Middle East studies by Edward Said and the pro-Arab multiculturalists. Thus it can chronicle the heroic founding of Israel without being crippled by the current miasma of post-modern relativism. So far, I've gotten up to the beginning of World War I, so the book has served as a fascinating supplement to the one before, providing me with information to fill the huge gaps I had in my knowledge of the founding of the modern Zionist movement.
BLOGWEB. My recent burst of writing here has been noticed by my friend Michael Dougan, and that attention has then spread to software artist and guitar virtuoso Alex Bunardzic. Ain't the web great?
GB, THHotA
posted by Greg 5:14 AM
Sunday, November 27, 2005
FALCON STAYS ON THE PERCH
SpaceX's Falcon 1 rocket stayed on the pad this weekend. The problem was flow of liquid oxygen in the launch pad's plumbing, which couldn't be remdied in time to avoid a cascade of other problems. As SpaceX's founder, Elon Musk said, "the likelihood of an all new rocket launching from an all new launch pad on its first attempt is low." He's right. Even though the Falcon system has been designed to be an order of magnitude simpler and therefore less costly than eisting legacy boosters, these folks are literally building from scratch, including the launch facility on a remote speck of land in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.
These people have real courage and vision. They won't be deterred by this sort of thing. They know that they are the real hope for expansion of humanity off this rock.
GB, THHotA
posted by Greg 9:03 AM
MARLOWE vs. MOHAMMED
In his on time, Christopher Marlowe rivaled William Shakespeare as the greatest dramatist of the Elizabethan age. But his stature is no match for the power of Islam in England today. Marlowe's play, Tamburlaine the Great, has been a big hit at the Barbican theater. But after this summer's suicide bomb attacks in London, the play's producers decided to castrate Marlowe. The play "tells the story of a shepherd-robber who defeats the king of Persia, the emperor of Turkey and, seeing himself as the 'scourge of God', burns the Koran." Well, that last part has been turned into the burning of just a "load of books" that could relate to "any culture or religion." This act of cultural cowardice made the play "more powerful." Right.
GB, THHotA
posted by Greg 8:49 AM
Saturday, November 26, 2005
HISTORY SOFTWARE
I’ve been studying history for 40 years. After all that time I still do learn major facts and ideas I didn’t already know. But a lot of what studying history in the fourth decade (and presumably beyond) involves is making connections – seeing how one thing you already knew relates to something else you already knew. Sometimes these connections are spatial, sometimes temporal, sometimes both. By this, I mean that reading a book about the history of one place or time will bring new insights into how things happened in another place or time. This happens because all historiography is necessarily limited – a particular book represents choices the author has made about the slice through time and space she describes and explores. Human attention is limited, so you have to look at some things, rather than all things. But real history isn’t like that. In a real sense “it’s all connected.” It’s those connections – and learning about new ones – that makes history a lively art for one’s whole life.
For years, I’ve imagined a piece of software that would make this process more vivid and instructive. Basically, I’m envisioning a timeline tool that is also a geography tool. Picture a spreadsheet linked to a map or maps via coordinates. Rows represent events, columns hold characteristics of those events; specifically dates and place coordinates. You could sort these rows by date or place and display them on any map that could accept coordinate or coordinate range input. Ideally, there would be some kind of standard for reading the spatial coordinates so a wide variety of maps could be used. You could also make linear timelines with varying scales, and separate them geographically or conceptually. A tool like this would be very useful for seeing how things happening in one place and time relate to other people and events spatially and temporally. You could use this tool at the earliest primary grades for teaching and study, on through college and beyond.
Wouldn’t that be cool? Somebody ought to do it. If you know of such a tool, email me.
GB, THHotA
posted by Greg 9:04 AM
A PIECE OF THE SKY
The Japanese Hayabusa probe is reported to have successfully touched down on the half-mile-long asteroid Itokawa and collected a sample for eventual return to Earth. In the long run, asteroids like this are the best place to collect useable resources in the solar system, since getting and moving such resources requires less energy than for material found on large bodies like the moon or Mars. So, even though this is an almost infinitesimally small step, it's an important milestone.
GB, THHotA
posted by Greg 8:21 AM
Friday, November 25, 2005
WHACKED-OUT, EH?
Via Drudge, this item: A former Canadian defense minister states: "The secrecy involved in all matters pertaining to the Roswell incident was unparalled. The classification was, from the outset, above top secret, so the vast majority of U.S. officials and politicians, let alone a mere allied minister of defence, were never in-the-loop. ... The United States military are preparing weapons which could be used against the aliens, and they could get us into an intergalactic war without us ever having any warning. ... The Bush administration has finally agreed to let the military build a forward base on the moon, which will put them in a better position to keep track of the goings and comings of the visitors from space, and to shoot at them, if they so decide."
Oooooh Kaaaay ....
GB, THHotA
posted by Greg 4:43 PM
MONEY AT THE MARGIN
A couple of days ago, I posted an obscure preface to some thoughts I've been having about the notion of the decreasing marginal value of money. The key to my perplexity is found in one phrase in the quote from David Friedman I included in that post: "... the reason we want money is to buy goods with it." This is true, but not the whole truth. Some people value money for reasons other than "to buy goods with it." I conclude this from a commonplace observation I have encountered over the years about a certain kind of person who's had a great deal of financial success -- that such people continue to strive for financial gain long after they have amassed a fortune far in excess of what any person could want or need for themeselves or their families. In some cases such people continue to work hard because of non-monetary rewards their occupations provide, and their behavior presents no challenge to the notion of the decreasing marginal value of money. But for some people, it is the money for which they continue to strive. From my observation, there is a kind of person who doesn't derive particularly great satisfaction from their work, but who nonetheless continue to work very hard for the money they make from their work, despite already having a great fortune. For such people, money does not seem to have a decreasing marginal value. If anything, it appears to me that money actually has an increasing marginal value for these folks.
Now, the immediate response to this observation by some is that money actually serves a different purpose in the instances I'm describing. For some people, money is a signal of social status, wholly apart from its function as a medium of economic exchange. Perhaps this does account for the cases in which people seem to have an increasing motivation from money as their fortunes grow -- for them, it counts as a growing indicator of their superior social status, even if in no other way than in their own self-perception.
If the key is status, then in some cases, the status function must be one of self-perception, because some people who experience an upward rather than a downward motivation from marginal increases in wealth don't share the information of their increasing wealth beyond the smallest of circles. Usually, people who enjoy the experience of high status do so as a function of some relevant social group. What to make of those who don't advertise their wealth, but still pursue it for its own sake? To me, it seems like some kind of pathology -- monkey-posturing gone mad.
GB, THHotA
posted by Greg 10:33 AM
EUROSCLORSIS
Here's a good piece in The American Enterprise on how Europe's socialist dreams contnue to slip into nightmares. When I read something like this, I always think about something my American leftist friends seem to say to me when I talk about socialism. It is the constant refrain from the rank and file of the mainstream American left that a continuing focus on socialism as a real threat is a sign of ideological ossification -- that communism and socialism were permanntly discredited with the fall of the Soviet Union and its empire. But that was just the removal of the worst tumor that Marxism generated in the 20th century. The West still has the cancer of Marxism and it is slowly but surely eating away the vitality of Europe. And Marxism is weakening continental Europe to a dangerous level just as it must face the developing life-or-death cultural challenge from Muslim immigration. Sad, sad, sad...
GB, THHotA
posted by Greg 9:13 AM
Thursday, November 24, 2005
SEARCHING FOR MEANING -- FINDING GOD
For many years, good scientific work has been developing increasing evidence that something suspected by the early pioneers of the Enlightenment is in fact true -- that religion and the notion of god or gods that intervene benevolently in the world and human affairs has its basis in the nature of humanity itself and that the program of reason and science has an inevitable uphill battle against this nature. Here is a brilliant essay over at Edge.org that points to a couple of the factors in human nature that are part of this phenomenon. The author, Daniel Gilbert, is Professor of Psychology at Harvard University and Director of the Social Cognition and Emotion Lab. The two factors he points to are the experimentally verifiable tendencies of the human brain 1) to attribute false causes to random events and to accept things that are offered in the form of explanations as explanations for events (when they are not explanations at all); and 2) to spontaneously generate and accept explanations of events that are most favorable to the person seeking an understanding of an event.
The essay is well worth reading because it involves one of the most difficult processes in human experience: Turning a critical eye on the unconscious operation of the human brain itself. The essay isn't susceptible to the criticism levelled by some who find evolutionary psychology threatening, that explanations of human behavior that point to human evolution involve untestable "just-so stories." Here we see experimental work that unveils the human brain's mechanisms for self-delusion at work.
As for those "just-so stories," I've been developing for some time a theoretical framework explaining human religious instincts on the basis of evolutionary psychology. I call it the "Monkey God" theory. The theory is based on three elements of primate behavior that are hypertrophied in homo sapiens. These are 1) the tendency to see intentionality in every dynamic of nature, 2) the hierarchical nature of primate social relations and 3) the anthropomorphic facial instinct. I offer brief explanation of each of these elements below:
Intentionality. Humans instinctively attribute intention to objects in nature. When humans see an animal doing something, we immediately process the information to find and attribute an intention to the animal's behavior. I see a cat is walking from left to right -- why? This question of "why?" is instinctively phrased in our minds as "What is the cat seeking?" Food? Is it seeking escape from a predator? The mammal -- and especially the primate -- brain that is hard-wired to do this has distinct survival advantages. By seeing animal behavior as a sign of intentional action, the primate brain can get much more useful information about its environment. It leads to the development of increasingly refined and accurate models of animal behavior that leads to increaingly successful hunting and the use of observations of animal behavor as indicators of all kind of useful indicators of other aspects of nature, such as weather, the conditions of a whole biological environment, etc. It is also a key element of the second factor, which is the inherently social and hierarchical nature of primate life.
Primate Society. With only a few exceptions (orangutans, for instance), primates live in highly social groups. And these groups tend to be intensely hierarchical. Reproductive success and survival for social primates depends on the ability of individuals to find their place in these social hierarcies and interact properly with other members of their group. Thus, over time, primate brains have evolved to be exquisitely sensitive to their social environment and to instinctively look for and fit into a social hierarchy. Which leads to the third factor, the tendency to perceive faces.
Seeing Faces. Primates have evolved both increasingly sophisticated gestural and facial expression signalling and the neural capacity to perceive and interpret that signalling, all as part of their social nature. As a result, there is the well-documented natural tendency of primates (most especially humans) to see faces in just about everything. Thus the "face of Jesus in an oil slick" or "man in the moon" phenomenon.
These three phenomena interact to powerfully compel humans to the false perception of anthropomorphic supernatural forces. While the perception of intentionality in the case of animal behavior is a good thing for a primate in its natural environment, the brain wiring that makes this possible tends to attribute intentional action to natural phenomena that do not involve any kind of intentionality at all -- for instance in the blowing of wind, the flowing of water, the movements of the earth, etc. It also made it difficult for pre-modern humanity to distinguish between intentional and non-intentional causation in the human sphere as well.
Pressed by his nature to perceive intentionality in nature where there is none, the human mind naturally presses that perception into the mold of a social and hierarchical framework. Thus, not only do we see that nature is moved by intention, but we are compelled by our natures to relate socially with the agent of that action. We perceive a human or human-like actor as the intentional force behind the dynamic operation of nature and we feel compelled to relate to that mystrious, powerful force as if it were a member of our own social group -- a member of that group with superior social status. We see this "alpha monkey god" as having a human face, a set of human gestures and forms in every aspect of nature that can be pressed into that form in our minds. We naturally seek to relate to that high-status person in the ways we relate to individuals with higher status in our real social group: We want to know what it wants and to do that, we seek to avoid its anger, we desire its approval, we intinctively admire it. In short, we worship it.
So, is it any wonder that a short 350 years into the project of the Enlightenment we have made so little progress? Not at all, when you consider that the program of reason is battling tens of millions of years of evolution.
GB, THHotA
posted by Greg 10:01 AM
A REAL HEROINE
If you don't know who Ayaan Hirsi Ali is, you should. Originally from Somalia, she was sent to Europe (Germany, if I recall correctly) as an involuntary child bride. Solely through her own efforts, she escaped that fate, went to Holland, got an education and then became a member of the Dutch Parliament. She became a collaborator with Theo van Gogh in his artistic work to uncover the inhumane treatment true Islam dictates for women. van Gogh was murdered for his work, but Hirsi Ali carries on, and lives under a constant threat of death from the faithful for her troubles.
Here's an interview in English with Ayaan Hirsi Ali in a Danish magazine. I highly commend it to you.
GB, THHotA
posted by Greg 8:18 AM
THE RIGHT WAY TO SPACE
Today is Thanksgiving in the US. If all goes according to plan, we really will have something to be thankful for tomorrow. A relatively small start-up company called SpaceX plans to make the first launch of its Falcon 1 rocket tomorrow afternoon (US time) from a tiny atoll in the Pacific Ocean. Just as Burt Rutan developed SpaceShip One in relative obscurity before its first flight, PayPal's founder, Elon Musk, has been quietly writing checks and providing the vision to SpaceX, which has been steadily working on a new family of rockets. But unlike Rutan's program, which built a suborbital spaceplane, the first SpaceX rocket will achieve orbit on its first flight.
Like SpaceShip One, though, the SpaceX Falcon rocket program represents a revolutionary breakthrough in the most crucial element of space tehnology -- cost. If SpaceX succeeds, they will reduce the cost of access to space by a factor of ten. Such a huge quantitative reduction in cost will surely result in qualitative progress in what can be done in space.
Keep your fingers crossed.
Meanwhile, over at the wrong way to space, the closer you look for the cause of problems with the Space Shuttle, the more problems you find. Thus, the mounting costs of trying to keep the shuttle flying are strangling hopes that the US government space program can make a fresh new start. There is a cost-effective way to deal with these problems, which is to fly the remaining shuttle flights required to complete the space station WITHOUT A CREW. This two-part article from over two years ago explains how easy it would be to do this, and how much money would be saved if it were done. Will NASA take this relatively simple, safe and cost-cutting route? Not a chance.
GB, THHotA
posted by Greg 7:34 AM
Tuesday, November 22, 2005
OUR "ALLIES"
Pakistan:A village council in Pakistan has decreed that five young women should be abducted, raped or killed for refusing to honour childhood "marriages". The women, who are cousins, were married in absentia by a mullah in their Punjabi village to illiterate sons of their family's enemies in 1996, when they were aged from six to 13. The marriages were part of a compensation agreement ordered by the village council and reached at gunpoint after the father of one of the girls shot dead a family rival.How does the old saying go -- "With friends like this ... "?
GB, THHotA
posted by Greg 9:29 PM
THE MARGINAL VALUE OF MONEY
Lately I’ve been thinking about a concept that underlies much of the political, economic and social ideology of the modern world: the decreasing marginal value of money. The basic concept is simple. As is often the case, David Friedman does as good a job as anyone of explaining basic concepts of economics in terms that normal human beings can understand:While we could discuss marginal value in terms of apples, it is easier to discuss it in terms of dollars. "The value to you of having one more orange is $1" means that you are indifferent between having one more orange and having one more dollar. Since the reason we want money is to buy goods with it, that means that you are indifferent between having one more orange and having whatever goods you would buy if your income were $1 higher.What is this supposed to mean in the real world? The strongest and most widely shared understanding of this is that the second dollar you earn has more value to you than the one-million-and-second dollar you earn. At one level, this is obviously true: In many a real human situation in the real world right now, that second dollar is the difference between starvation tomorrow and life tomorrow, while someone earning their one-million-and-second dollar isn’t going to starve tomorrow (so long as they are in a situation in which any food at all is available for purchase).
But I am slowly but surely coming to the conclusion that in the real world the basic assumptions underlying the application of the concept of the marginal value of money hide almost as much as they reveal. With any luck, I’ll have a chance to write more about this over the next few weeks, but for now, I’ll jump to an intermediate conclusion: above some fairly small number, the marginal value of money is so highly variable among individuals in the real world that other concepts become more important and that, therefore, strong reliance on this concept as a guide to policy and action in the real world isn’t a good thing. That may seem like a pretty obscure statement (and as laid out without further explanation, it is), so I hope to be able to explore it in more depth here soon.
GB, THHotA
posted by Greg 7:02 AM
Monday, November 21, 2005
AVIATION VIDEOS
On a meandering surfing expedition this weekend, I came across this link. My friends and regular readers know that I'm an aerospace nut. If you are, prepare to expend a lot of bandwidth and time with this page.
GB, THHotA
posted by Greg 7:32 AM
Saturday, November 19, 2005
TOLERANCE AND RELATIVISM, REASON AND FAITH
Here is an excellent essay by Simon Blackburn. It was the Voltaire Lecture for the British Humanist Association, King’s College London, December 13th 2001. But it is more relevant today than ever.
Here are some highlights from the beginning and the end of the piece:
Most of my readers would call themselves religious, so some of it will be distasteful. I'm sorry.[T]oleration, which is often, although not always, a good thing, is not the same as relativism, which is never a good thing; and it is vital to understand the difference. In the intellectual world, toleration is the disposition to fight opinion only with opinion: in other words, to protect freedom of speech, and to confront divergence of opinion with open critical reflection rather than suppression or force. The first great champion of toleration in this sense was John Locke, and his successors included not only famous liberals such as John Stuart Mill, but men with a rather more direct impact on human affairs, such as Thomas Jefferson. Toleration entered political life with the Enlightenment. It is a characteristically secular virtue: there has never been and never will be a theocracy that can wholeheartedly applaud it. For the religious mind, many sayings are not to be assessed at the bar of truth or falsity, but at that of blasphemy, and to hold that a person blasphemes is to hold that that person’s sayings at least, and the person for preference, must be suppressed.
The west, it is sadly said, has lost confidence in the Enlightenment. It is quite common to see intellectuals state as a fact that the Enlightenment project has been tried and failed. This is a lie. There never was one single Enlightenment project, and of the Enlightenment projects that there were, many have succeeded beyond the wildest hopes of their proponents. The Enlightenment provided the matrix I have talked of, in which scientific enterprises could flourish. Now, our understanding of the world is better because of physical science. Our understanding of ourselves is better because of biological science. We live longer, and we feed ourselves better, and ‘we’ here includes not only people in first world countries, but countless people in the third world. We look after the environment better, and in time we will manage our own numbers better. Outside the theocracies of the east more people have more freedoms and enjoy more education, more opportunities and may even have more rights than ever before. We owe this progress entirely to the culture forged, in the west, by Bacon and Locke, Hume and Voltaire, Newton and Darwin. Humanism is the belief that humanity need not be ashamed of itself, and these are its great examples. They show us that we need not regard knowledge as impious, or ignorance as desirable, and we need not see blind faith as anything other than blind.
GB, THHotA
posted by Greg 7:50 PM
BULLSEYE
I've been following the developing success of missile defense here since I began blogging. Thursday, 17 November marked another milestone: A ship-launched interceptor scored a direct hit on a warhead after the warhead had separated from its booster at an altitude of approximately 100 miles. The opponents of Star Wars used to use simple impossibility of missile interception as an argument -- their weakest. Step by step, that argument is being shown for the error that it was.
The other arguments against missile defense -- that it can be overcome by decoys and sheer numbers, and that it lends itself to an arms race -- are also fading over time. The first argument had more merit during the Cold War, when we faced an opponent capable of mass-producing large numbers of ballistic missiles. That isn't the case now and won't be for a while. The second falls to the same fact. Missile defense is now a tactical weapon with strategic importance, and need only be effective against relatively small numbers of missiles to be meaningful.
Beyond this, the technology developed for interception of ICBMs is applicable on the scale of shorter-range weapons and will become highly significant as it is deployed at the battlefield level and against terrorist rockets in Isael and elsewhere in the war against Islamofascism.
GB, THHOTA
posted by Greg 5:19 PM
Friday, November 18, 2005
THE MAGUS IS GONE
John Fowles is dead. It's hard to describe the impact that John Fowles' writing had on me as a young man. I encountered his masterpiece, The Magus, at precisely the point in my life that I think his book was aimed. I was young, romantic, over-educated and self-absorbed, just like the protagonist of the book, and just a few years younger than that character. The blend of art, philosophy and eroticism that he created in that novel were the exact recipe by which I was living my life at the time, and thus it was one of the few books that I re-read immediately after finishing. I must have been about 19 or 20 at the time.
If I re-read the book today, I don't doubt that I would detect the pretentiousness that has been described by some reviewers in the aftermath of his death. But when I first found it, The Magus hit me like a thunderbolt, among the two or three works of fiction that had the most profound effect on my life.
It's sad to know that the real Magus is gone.
GB
posted by Greg 7:27 AM
Wednesday, November 16, 2005
BLURRY VISION
Kicked off during the funding aftermath of the hurricane season and at the nadir of the Bush Administration's public approval ratings, NASA's new vision, the Exploration Systems Architecture Study (ESAS), has received a tepid response from the space enthusiast community and its unveiling went virtually unnoticed by the mainstream media and the public at large. All of these are very bad signs that the younger Bush's space initiative may go the way of the one put forward by the elder Bush -- i.e. a silent death of neglect as it was superceded by other priorities.
Here's a good round-up of the reaction to the ESAS by the space advocacy community. For those who long for humanity to become a real space-faring species and the US to become a real space-faring nation, this is bad news. The people who most want to make this succeed can't be rallied around the cause, when lots of otgher people can't see the relevance.
I'm not hopeful.
GB, THHotA
posted by Greg 11:15 AM
Tuesday, November 15, 2005
STILL NOT BACK
What kind of a blog is this, where I make posts to the effect that "I'm not blogging"? Who would want to read that? I'm having a "perfect storm" in my schedule, though (isn't that phrase getting overworked?), right now: Three out of town trips in under one week and three mediations, with a short trial now a certainty for December 5.
One of the trips wasn't work-related, though. A group of my partners and friends have an annual bird hunt in the Fall. This year we went pheasant hunting in South Dakota. It was a truly fantastic hunt. Both days we were in the field we had great weather and the birds were, according the the locals, at a 40-year peak Those who were on the trip will know this is true, having experienced my irrational exuberance after my "5-by-5" feat. The pic above is of the group that was shooting.
I swear a solemn oath that I'll be back with my usual incisive commentary and seasoned wisdom soon.
GB, THHotA
posted by Greg 6:07 AM
Thursday, November 10, 2005
COMMENTS SPAM
I had to disable comments this morning -- got hit with some loathesome comments spam. And I'm travelling on an early morning flight, so no time to try to be more selective.
GB
posted by Greg 5:50 AM
Sunday, November 06, 2005
EURABIAN INTIFADA
The very good blog No Pasaran that covers French politics and media, has a piece about how US media is covering the violence in France. The point? That the conceptual tools available to the mainstream media in the West are simply inadequate to express what is happening. The universal mainstream spin that this is about "race and poverty" simply doesn't work. It's about culture and religion, but the post-modernist cultural relativist assumptions upon which the mainstream media's editorial world-view is based can't accommodate this. They can't see what's happening in terms of the real causes and they can't make judgments about the events except in terms they've adopted over the last 40 years of steady corrosion of their moral compass.
LATER .... As the day goes on, I'm continuing to think about what's happening in France and elsewhere in Europe. Whether it's now with these riots or not too long from now when some other crisis comes, Europe will have to come to terms with the real cultural issues here. Will Europe maintain some semblence of meaningful continuity with the liberal Enlightenment, or not? If so, these societies will have to draw clear lines that Muslims in Europe will have to decide to cross or not. Will you accept women as social, political and legal equals or not? Will you accept that Islam must coexist peacefully with other religious and cultural values or not? Will you accept that the public sphere is one that is secular or not? If European governments and social institutions don't define these kinds of clear-cut criteria for membership in their societies, Europe is indeed doomed.
Today, I am not hopeful. Europe has been culturally castrated by 50 years of socialism and denial of its best cultural heritage. The change in mentality and values that would have to happen to give Europe a backbone would be so great that major political and social upheavals would be required. The cultural and political elites of Europe would have toadmit that they have been treading a path to self-destruction for at least five decades. This isn't very likely.
GB, THHotA
posted by Greg 7:42 AM
Thursday, November 03, 2005
PARIS IS BURNING
The mainstream media reports on the week of non-stop rioting in French "subrurbs" (read Muslim ghettos) continues (BBC, CNN, AFP) with a confused and misleading depiction of the causes and issues. The reasons for the rioting are simple: The Muslim culture of the people in these ghettos is what has kept them from assimilating into French society. There are other immigrant groups who have done well in France (I'm thinking especially of the large Vietnamese segment of French immigrant society). The Muslim North Africans haven't assimiliated because they reject the liberal foundations of modern Western society (yes, compared to Islamic society, France is liberal and enlightened). That is not going to change and blaming "poverty" and "discrimination" only masks the real causes of the problem and serves as a Trojan Horse for establishing a Muslim enclave within French society that will be pampered by post-modernist relativism.
France, more than any other country in the West, has at least superficially embraced pomo cultural relativism as inserted into their society by the vector of a continuing, vital socialist mentality. They are paying the price now.
[Only folks as old as me will get the joke in the title of this post]
GB, THHotA
posted by Greg 7:03 AM
