Neuro-Conservative

Hooray for Pallywood!

2005-09-19T21:23:00.000-07:00

My gosh -- has it been nearly two weeks? Sorry for the lack of posts.

I'm sure you will all forgive me, however, after I direct you to your own private screening of "Pallywood," a new documentary showing how Palestinians stage casualties for the benefit of a gullible (at best) Western media. Not surprisingly, 60 Minutes and the French co-star in the role of "useful idiots." A not-dead Palestinian has a great cameo as "dead Palestinian." The 20-minute documentary is freely available for download at a great site, The Second Draft. More info here, here, and here (h/t: Belmont Club).

Now, here's the interesting twist: CBS has just started a new "blog" (I use the scare-quotes because: a) it's likely to be just a post-Rather corporate CYA maneuver; b) they only allow readers to make comments of 500 characters (!) or less. The test of their sincerity and openness may come in the next few days, when they sponsor a Q&A with "60 Minutes" Producer Rome Hartman. So far, I am the only reader to have submitted a question publicly online, and I submitted a longer (>500 characters!) version in an email (slightly redacted below):

Dear Mr. Hartman,

How often do you rely on foreign stringers or videographers with a fighting interest in a conflict? Please respond to the "Pallywood" documentary (http://seconddraft.org) which demonstrates how 60 Minutes was duped by staged Palestinian "casualties." Similar charges have been raised about Iraqi photogs who seem to "coincidentally" find themselves at the location of terrorist attacks.

As I wrote in response to the Public Eye's piece on the detention of CBS Iraqi stringer Ameer Younis Hussein, there are serious ethical issues involved in working with foreign stringers. In fact, I think there is a serious risk that the MSM could find itself unwittingly abetting terrorism. There are two key ingredients to successful terrorism: 1) the explosion itself, which is propaganda-of-the-deed, and 2) someone able to capture this propaganda on film and willing to broadcast it to the world, to instill fear and despair. As documented by the Belmont Club, there have been far too many instances of unnamed Iraqi "stringers" potentially being enemy operatives. CBS and other American MSM have not taken this risk at all seriously.

Thank you again for your new forum.

Sincerely,

Neuro-con

Let's see if, and how, they respond.

NY Times Disses Eerily Prescient Blogger

2005-09-06T21:31:00.000-07:00

Greetings Luskinites and TimesWatchers!

No time for a long entry tonight, but I thought you would enjoy this correction (scroll all the way down). In the context of a largely positive article about blogger Brendan Loy, who issued a series of increasingly urgent warnings about Katrina days before the storm hit the coast, the Times managed to (inadvertently, I assume?) diss his fiancee:

An article in Business Day about Brendon Loy, the Notre Dame student who was one of the earliest to sound the alarm about the potential threat to New Orleans from Hurricane Katrina, misstated the name of Mr. Loy's dog. It is Robbie, not Becky (which is his fiancée's name).

While that is merely amusing, I was not quite as happy about the lede:

One of the earliest and perhaps clearest alarms about Hurricane Katrina's potential threat to New Orleans was sounded not by the Weather Channel or a government agency but by a self-described weather nerd sitting on a couch in Indiana with a laptop computer and a remote control.

Now, what other major institution failed to sound the alarm, but is somehow not mentioned here? Hmmmm.....

NY Times: Eerily Non-prescient

2005-09-04T22:14:00.000-07:00

In the post-Katrina blame game, much has been made of the eerily prescient articles in the New Orleans Times-Picayune and Scientific American, predicting with deadly accuracy the disaster awaiting New Orleans. No less an authority than the New York Times' famed meteorologist Maureen Dowd, with her trademark blend of mature insight, clever wordplay, and sober analysis, offers this nugget of now-conventional wisdom:

Who on earth could have known that New Orleans's sinking levees were at risk from a strong hurricane? Anybody who bothered to read the endless warnings over the years about the Big Easy's uneasy fishbowl.

An unsigned NYT editorial dispenses with Dowd's qualification that people needed to actually read the "endless" warnings, stating that "everyone knew [the disaster] was coming." [emph added]

Everyone, that is, except New York Times readers the day before Katrina slammed into the Gulf Coast. Because the Times did not run a single article on Katrina on Sunday the 28th! Readers of the paper of record only learned of the storm's potential with their Monday morning coffee, as Katrina was making landfall.

Remember (as NY Times editors won't)-- George Bush was already actively preparing the federal response, and urging the governor and heel-dragging mayor to order an evacuation on Saturday the 27th, as detailed in the New Orleans Times-Picayune:

President Bush declared a state of emergency in Louisiana, authorizing federal emergency management officials to release federal aid and coordinate disaster relief efforts...New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin followed at 5 p.m., issuing a voluntary evacuation. Nagin said late Saturday that he's having his legal staff look into whether he can order a mandatory evacuation of the city, a step he's been hesitant to do because of potential liability on the part of the city for closing hotels and other businesses.

These dramatic developments, along with the rapid intensification of Katrina, went completely unreported in the hundreds of pages in the Sunday New York Times (though bloggers such as Brendan Loy and Instapundit were on top of the story on Saturday).

The paper was not devoid of references to hurricanes that Sunday, however. A Lexis-Nexis search turns up three (in retrospect, bizarre) hits with the keyword "hurricane":

An eerily non-prescient review of a book entitled "FALSE ALARM: The Truth About the Epidemic of Fear," By Marc Siegel.
An eerily non-prescient warning of a major hurricane that might devastate -- Long Island!
A women's fashion feature, titled "IS THERE A DIVA IN THE HOUSE?"

I guess we were supposed to read between the lines.

(for more NY Times hypocrisy, see this Powerline piece, via NRO's Media Blog, by way of Don Luskin, courtesy of EU Rota)

Katrina Blogburst

2005-08-31T22:50:00.000-07:00

Resources and info here, here and here.

Please make a donation of money, time, and information today.

Strike Three!

2005-08-29T22:40:00.000-07:00

Back to blogging in this space tomorrow.

In the meantime, check out these threads I have been participating in...

ShrinkWrapped

Neo-neocon

The Belmont Club

and, of course, PressThink.

Also, check out this great trifecta from the Weekly Standard website.

Two Violations in One Night

2005-08-25T21:02:00.000-07:00

One more and my blogger's license will be suspended! As I mentioned in my post immediately below, I wrote two essays over on Jay Rosen's open thread that I am reprinting here. The second is in response to Jay's comment that he is not actually a member of the press, even though he is often called to account for perceived media bias. To which I wrote:

Jay --
I, for one, don't hold you accountable for the content of the media. However, I would like to hold your feet to the fire on the consequences of your ideas.

In the last two days (actually nights), I have spent a fair amount of time perusing your archives. And I think it is clear from my comments that I find your approach to the press "religion" quite insightful. But I find that some of your essays stop just short of drawing a full conclusion.

For example, your discussion of the contasting coverage of Abu Ghraib (wall-to-wall pictures) vs the Nick Berg video (self-censored) very skillfully demonstrates the logical inconsistency at play. But you then express a hope/expectation that the media might show the Berg video after a brief delay for "absorption," and then launch into a lengthy attack on the bias-hunters.
You conclude with a diagnosis with which I fully agree (quoted below), but I would like to hear your thoughts on possible prescriptions for the patient, Dr. Rosen:

Way, way underneath these debates I find a disturbing fact. Even the smartest people in the major news media—and this is especially so in television news—have not really determined for themselves or explained to us exactly what their role should be in the worldwide fight against
terrorism...Terrorism can be many things, but it is always an attempt at communication; and a free press in an open society “completes” the act.

I would argue that this problem goes far beyond the airing of a single gruesome video, into just about every decision that the political and international press must make everyday, including the conduct of White House press conferences. In this context I would like to ask you to respond to my comments about Vietnam and Tet, to which you refer in passing in the Nick Berg essay.

More broadly, do you have any thoughts on the following observation?: Many core precepts of the press religion that you have identified are actually intellectual residua of the last two centuries of Leftist thought. Thus, is it possible that the bias-hunters, while perhaps focusing too much on the ephemera of specific "gotcha" moments, are actually pointing towards a deeper phenomenon?

Violating the Blogger Prime Directive

2005-08-25T20:49:00.000-07:00

Never put your best stuff in other blogs' comments!

I have just written two essays in response to comments by Steve Lovelady and Jay Rosen over in the ongoing PressThink debate. I will reprint the first comment below -- it is in response to Steve's point that

the real bias...it's a function of corporations seeking a more favorable opinion of their stock price on Wall Street

My reply:

It is true that most people in most professions, including journalism, worry about what their bosses and the bean counters in the back office will think about their work vis-a-vis the bottom line. But that only goes so far in this dialogue because:

It is not a given that the corporate masters will necessary want to "prove [their] macho chops," especially if they have the majority of their eyeballs coming from overseas. When CNN runs a viciously anti-Israel piece, are they proving their "macho chops" to their intended audience? How does Al Jazeera fit into this debate -- what is its PressThink, and should they be granted the same professional and social status as American press outfits?
Moreover, sometimes the top of the corporate culture is run by elites who do not well understand the American public: Indira Nooyi may know a lot about which artificial sweeteners taste better but she does not exactly have her finger on the pulse of American public attitudes; more directly, I'm not sure that Pinch Sulzberger is strictly interested in maximizing the bottom line if it leads him too far away from his social goals. From accounts I have read, the NYT has tried to eat its cake and have it by attempting to find more like-minded readers in other cities rather than diversify their content.
Even the best corporate bean counters cannot instantaneously alter the accreted rituals of a professional religion which limits creativity and diversity of thought. This is why much of the freshest reporting and commentary today is coming from sources who are not indoctrinated in this religion. And the audiences have responded, while many oldthinkers can only scratch their head; it is literally unthinkable.
One approach, comforting only in the short run, is to blame the audience for being so dumb and/or primitive as to not understand the teachings of the priestly class. Patronizing the audience is the one intellectual space where both the “clerics” and the bean counters (who form an often-misguided corporate elite) can see eye-to-eye, although each may seek a different means of redress.

In sum, I don’t doubt that there are considerable financial pressures that affect moment-to-moment decisions every day. But that hardly explains the story of how Americans have lost their trust in conventional media, or how Fox News has built its audience starting with cheap sets and second-rate talent.

Thanks, Jay

2005-08-24T22:17:00.000-07:00

I greatly appreciate that Jay Rosen has opened up a new thread (see here) in place of the old one I discussed Monday. Jay also took time out to respond to an e-mail I sent him, and he explained that his lack of participation in the prior thread was largely related to practical difficulties of getting to an internet connection while on his family vacation. I suppose that sometimes bloggers are actually human after all.

While I still do not fully understand what was going on his mind while he was reading that thread, I thought of the following analogy: Perhaps he felt he had invited people over for drinks, and instead they came in, raided his refrigerator, ate all of his food, and then complained when he tried to kick them out of the house at midnight ("Hey -- you invited us over here!"). I don't know to what extent blog etiquette handles the issue of staying on-topic (mind you, I didn't perceive the comments as being very far off-topic, though Jay might have).

In any event, please see my comment in the new thread here. I am not cross-posting it here, as it is somewhat tied in with other comments over there, but I will post more about the topic in this space tomorrow.

Thinking about Rosen

2005-08-23T21:12:00.000-07:00

The title of this post is not merely a tag but actually indicating what I am doing right now. I will not post a detailed follow-up tonight, as I am busy reading Rosen in his own words. He has been quite prolific, and I admire his commitment to long-form blogging. In the posts I have been reading tonight, he provides at least some of the answers about his perspective that I wish he had been able to provide in this weekend's debate. If your interested, check out here, here, here, and here for starters. I am particularly interested in this posting on Abu Ghraib and related matters, as it gets quite specific and speaks to a larger issue that I am working on for my next post.

I also would like to quickly respond to Dean Esmay (thanks for the link, by the way! -- and thanks to neo-neocon as well). I truly appreciate Dean's point, reminding us of the simple humanity of individual bloggers, something that is easily forgotten in the digital realm.

For me, I write just about every entry with a superego in the back of my mind, in the imagined voice of my best friend whom I have know since childhood. I would describe him as an independent thinker, libertarianish (generally anti-war, socially liberal, pro-free market, but certainly well to the left of me), and scrupulously honest (both personally and intellectually). I don't always listen to that voice, just as we don't (can't, and shouldn't, I might add) always follow our superego's dictates in daily life. But I think it's a great thing for bloggers and commenters to have, to keep the blogosphere civil and constructive.

Like many on the right, I think the blogosphere represents a tremendous opportunity to construct a more positive discourse in this country (as compared to the old MSM monopoly), but we must uphold our end of the bargain as well. There is plenty of room for satire, passion, and a well-deserved hardcore fisking, but there is already more than enough snark and rudeness in our culture. At the same time, I don't think that that was at the heart of the problem with the PressThink thread -- I think it can be more accurately described at the level of ideas (which is what I am pondering tonight). More to come...

Don't Press, Don't Think

2005-08-22T20:33:00.000-07:00

A very strange debate on the appropriate relationship of the White House to the MSM has unfolded over the last several days at Jay Rosen's PressThink. It has been Prof. Rosen's contention that the White House is inappropriately trying to "roll back" the media, and he had invited Austin Bay to guest post on the topic (crossposted at Austin Bay Blog here). As could be expected, Bay provided a long and thoughtful post, rich with historical allusion, in which he took both sides to task for a dysfunctional relationship. What made the debate strange was that Jay (who usually seems quite fair-minded) has shut it down with a rather odd tua culpa. I quote in full his final comment, with which he closed the thread:

I'm embarrassed that this thread appeared at my weblog. I'm embarrassed that something I wrote and edited was the occasion for it. I embarrassed that the letters "edu" appear in the Web address at the top of this page, since most of this is the opposite of education. I'm embarrassed for having entertained, even for a second, the notion that Austin Bay, a Bush supporter and war veteran, might get a hearing for some of his warnings from those who agree with him on most things. And I've had enough of anonymous tough guys with their victim's mentality raging at their own abstractions...Those who wish to continue can head over to Austin's thread, where the story is pretty much the same. But four days of this pathetic spectacle is enough for me. Thread closed. My advice: Go home to your wives and children, and breathe some truth.

I have the feeling that this thread will be talked about in the blogosphere for some time, as another one of those new media/old media watersheds. While I doubt that Jay's cri de coeur will be seen as a death rattle of Old Media's power monopoly, I think it will come back to haunt him. At the very least, he owes his audience an accounting of how he arrived at his dire conclusion. I think for most of us watching the debate, it seemed to confirm that he was in such a different memetic universe that communication was more difficult than we imagined. But it is notable that communication only became impossible when Rosen pulled the plug.

I agree with the analysis offered by neo-neocon here (as well as that of several commenters on her boards):

Understand that the comments section on the thread had not degenerated into the sort of overwhelmingly vicious nastiness that sometimes occurs on so many blogs... Yes, some of the comments may have overstated the case (on either side), and the comments were certainly polarized. But that's hardly remarkable in a comments section; in fact, it is to be expected...

What is most strange about this reaction of Rosen's is that his post contains a critique of the Bush administration for supposedly shutting off the flow of information to the press in retaliation for what it perceives as press bias against it. But in the very same thread Rosen threatens to close his own comments section for engaging in free speech that doesn't quite suit him, apparently because it doesn't go in the direction in which he wants it to go.

Now, I came to the party very late, and actually read almost the entire thread in one (long) sitting last night. I have tonight gone back and re-read the entire thread, including the original postings from Rosen and Bay, re-reading certain comments multiple times, as well as looking back through the last few threads at PressThink for context. And I have tried to analyze exactly where the debate turned so sour for Jay. First, a bit of background, then a careful parsing of his reaction is in order:

I understand that Jay has repeatedly announced his disaffection with bias-hunters of all stripes, and takes the philosophical view that bias is unavoidable. In the past, he proposed this solution:

Get into the habit of making these two distinctions:One: Treat the press as political, and argue about its politics. On the whole, this is a good thing, necessary to a free press. But when you argue about the press and its politics—which we should do—things cannot get politicized. And when they do, there is emptiness.Two: The press is not supposed to heed the people. It’s supposed to feed and sustain the public.

It seemed to me, and I assume a majority of the conservative commenters, that arguing about the press's politics was a central aspect of the thread. I can only assume that Jay found the discussion to be politicized, and hence, empty. But he failed to demonstrate how he drew that distinction in his first comment, in which he announced that the thread was "depressing" and petulantly threatened to shut down debate, without in any way offering an alternative focus. His second comment, after more than 40 more hours in which he failed to offer any substantive re-direct, declared himself at a loss for words -- until he found the words to accuse someone (everyone?) of "untruth in layers" and "meaningless" "self-infantalization." In his third comment, he finally added some substance to his critique, by picking off some of the more hyperbolic statements scattered across the comments and declaring "Every one of these statements is a fantasia. It isn't possible to argue with them." [emph added]

Of the comments he targeted, several were hyperbolic, but in some cases merely by painting with too broad a brush, using words such as "only," "doing everything possible," when of course a more measured statement would be more accurate. Yet, Rosen ignored the fact that such measured statements were often made by the very same commenters, at times in the very same comments. In fact, I scoured the first several dozen of the comments for hyperbolic statements, and mostly found that the posts were balanced, fact-based, and at times lengthy and even-handed almost to a fault. In his responses, Rosen also slightly alters a couple of the comments, to make them sound more extreme.

Most importantly, though, Rosen misses the point of the very first commenter, who stated (inter alia) ""the goal of such a press is Public Relations against Bush, implicitly supporting the death squad terrorists in Iraq." To which Jay responded: "Did you hear that? The press, in effect, supports the death squads who are murdering innocent Iraqis-- and journalists!" In the context of his post, Rosen seems deeply offended, as if the MSM has been accused of explicitly or deliberately supporting the terrorists, and as if he has never heard of Orwell's critique of the pacifist Left in WWII and its applications today. Moreover, Rosen ignores the following balanced statement (and others like it) in the very same comment:

Bush is failing in not explaining what Building a New Iraq really means. Not finding out what it means is how the press is failing. It seems that the speeches Bush gives don’t tell enough, and the questions the press asks don’t clarify what is known and not known, enough.

In a comments thread of more than 35,000 words, Rosen could not find a single critical comment worthy of his standards?

By contrast, I found that the first post which both explicitly and implicitly (in tone) brought the thread towards unproductive sniping, without offering a positive alternative, came from CJR's Steve Lovelady:

Already the thread has degenerated into "What the press reports doesn't correspond to my world view (of the White House, of Iraq, of Vietnam, of whatever), so it must be wrong. "It's too bad, because Austin Bay actually had some interesting things to say. Now he knows what it's like to be obliterated in a tidal wave of static. Welcome aboard the Fantasy Express, Colonel.

Too bad that Steve never found the time to make a productive comment on the interesting things Austin Bay had said; his tone throughout the debate tended to alternate between the pedantically nit-picky and the smugly dismissive. In an act of projection, he introduced the terms "faux-macho" and "posturing" to the debate. And he bizarrely criticized several commenters for the use of a nom de plume. I can just imagine his critique of the authors of the Federalist Papers:

We've had quite enough of tough-talking patriots swathed in anonymity. Do you guys show up at community hearings wearing Hallo'ween masks and using voice-distortion technology? [Publius?] ... enough already! Is this junior high ? Put your money where your mouth is.Then we can begin. Until then, it's all posturing.

At no point do either Rosen or Lovelady seriously attempt to engage their interlocutors. I take particular umbrage at the fact that my (admittedly late) attempt to redirect the debate to Austin Bay's original post (and his historical analogy to the Cold War) was completely ignored by both. I intentionally began and ended my post with a (verbal) peace offering, which was not taken up in the remaining 15 hours that the thread was open.

More importantly, I think that Rosen himself is responsible for the direction of the thread, after his summary of Austin's piece begins with a "gotcha" headline and meme that is popular amongst the MSM today: "Republican criticizes Bush," while ignoring his criticism of the press, giving short shrift to the overarching framework of the Cold War analogy, and never once picking up the NY-DC-LA gauntlet that consitutes the heart of the piece.

I know that this post has been long, even by my rather verbose standards. But I wanted very much to give all participants in this train-wreck the benefit of the doubt. I would love it if Rosen would publish a substantive explanation of his reaction. I would greatly appreciate it if Steve Lovelady would adopt a more congenial tone -- I suspect he has an interesting story to tell from his experiences. Most importantly, I hope they can understand that many of us are deeply worried about the potential for the MSM to unintentionally damage our national security through a repetition of the Vietnam template, and that we have come to our conclusions independently, without ever once receiving a fax from Karl Rove. Why, I've never even given him my fax number.

Gaza: Winning the Meme Battle, Losing the Meme War

2005-08-18T22:09:00.000-07:00

Interesting debate in the Belmont Club about the tactical and strategic merits of the Israeli withdrawal from the Gaza Strip. As I probably made clear in my last post, I am not too sanguine about the wisdom of the forced evacuation.

I would argue that the Israelis have made four unnecessary and strategically disastrous memetic concessions, in addition to the physical concession of the (relatively worthless) land in Gaza:

1) They have demonstrated that terror has successful consequences, as elaborated by Lee Harris. Despite the successful decapitation attacks against Hamas leaders last year (which had made me optimistic), this withdrawal will be no different in its impact on the terrorist mindset than the Lebanon fiasco of 2000, which directly led to the second intifada.

2) They have consistently failed to put on the table the issue of Jewish refugees. For example, there were 137,000 Jews driven out of Iraq, primarily between 1948 and 1951, and again after the Baath takeover in 1968. Why shouldn't their "right of return" to Iraq be part of the nascent Iraqi Constitution (obviously this is a rhetorical question, but I am talking about rhetoric and meme wars here).

The Israeli government could make a big PR production over the number of Jews expelled, then inflated that number by their presumed offspring and relatives (as the Palestinians do), and calculated a dollar figure to compensate for seized assets. Then they could make a grand gesture of waiving the rights of return and compensation. That dollar figure (and population total) could then be permanently placed on the scales to balance out competing Arab claims.

3) Every day that goes by is a missed opportunity to broadcast subtitled MEMRI feeds across Israeli and Western television. The Palestinian pledge to eliminate incitement is the most easily-monitored and most flagrantly-violated treaty obligation since the Germans pledged not to invade Russia. The entire Israeli Foreign Ministry could be dismantled and sold for scrap, and the proceeds more effectively used to fund paid broadcasts throughout the US, until the Palestinian terror-muppet was as well-known as Elmo.

4) Most disastrously of all, and a moral abomination, they have endorsed the principle of Judenrein. The Israeli government has ethnically cleansed the land of Jews. Alternately, a trade for the transfer of Israeli Arabs could be (rhetorically) offered and dismissed, given that the Jews of the Palestinian state will of course be offered the same rights of worship, expression, and voting as the Israeli Arabs.

Contra Shrinkwrapped (with whom I normally agree), I don't think the media will cut the Jews any slack on any of these points, when the Palestinians make their next set of demands.

Judenrein

2005-08-16T22:31:00.000-07:00

"The blood of martyrs has
led to liberation."

So, it has come to this.
There is now a place on the Earth
where Jews are forbidden.

Back to Blogging

2005-08-15T21:13:00.000-07:00

Tomorrow...Work and family commitments have been hectic...

In the meantime, please read this post from Varifrank -- one of the best I have read in a while.

Getting out of the Corner

2005-08-09T21:38:00.000-07:00

Two great follow-up posts at the Corner continue the stem-cell debate in a direction I find very appealing. Iain Murray's post about the "scientization" politics continues on exactly the "naturalistic fallacy" theme I was hammering yesterday:

When people appeal to science in political arguments it is generally either out of an attempt to steal lightning for their preferred policy position (the "science says we must" argument) or in an attempt to introduce uncertainty where ever increasing numbers of scientists will argue over ever more complicated issues that fail to provide the certainty politicians say they need (the
precautionary argument). In either case, politicians have abdicated their responsibility to debate the moral and political aspects of the issue, which may well come up with a solution that doesn't need science. And the logical outcome of the scientization of politics is handing over much of policy to technocrats.

In an earlier post, John Hood demonstrates the kind of political (in the best sense of the term) reasoning that appeals to me, which avoids the false certitudes of scientism:

...my proposal is intended simply to find a criterion that seems likely to attract a political consensus. It doesn’t pretend to achieve anatomical precision, or to address at all any religious or spiritual conviction as to when the soul enters the body (or, indeed, whether it is created at conception or instead pre-exists the body)...The fact that lines may be blurry or even somewhat arbitrary does not constitute an argument against drawing them, or against their practical usefulness. Sometimes you just have to draw the line as best you can in a way that satisfies the largest number of interested parties...The best government can do right now, it seems to me, is to a draw an admittedly arbitrary line at some point in the average pregnancy at which a functioning brain is evident.

This kind of pragmatic, approximate approach to hot-button social issues can make use of the available scientific data without reifying it, and seems to me to be more likely to generate workable political consensus while moving society in a moral direction; in fact, this approach calls on society not to abdicate its moral authority to the technocrats (or theocrats), and thereby in itself may represent a moral good.

Is You Is or Is You Ought?

2005-08-08T23:25:00.000-07:00

One month after the British subway attack, it finally feels right to get back to an issue at the interface of modern biomedical science and political theory: the embryonic stem cell debate. I intend to return to specific GWOT (or should I say SAVE?) issues in the near future, but today's post draws on some of the same ideas I invoked in my prior discussions of causality and moral agency.

The fireworks over at the Corner these last few days on the stem cell issue once again seems to get down to the is-ought problem, sometimes referred to (not entirely accurately) as the "naturalistic fallacy." Most sophisticated thinkers, such as those at NRO, are well aware of this longstanding conundrum, and are quick to abjure its use. Nevertheless, both John Podhoretz and Robert P. George seem to help themselves to a handful of Is in their attempts to get to Ought. In both cases, I think that they are seeking answers in Science that are to be found elsewhere.

Robert P. George, a legal scholar and member of the President's Council on Bioethics, opposes any destruction of human embryos for scientific purposes, on the grounds that: 1) all human life is entitled to equal dignity and basic rights; and 2) human life begins at conception. He directs his opening thrust at those who agree with 1 (whom he implicitly assumes includes most conservatives) yet are unsure about 2, and are asking: "When does the life of a human being begin?"

Where do we go to find the answer? Not to the Bible, which says nothing about human embryos... Not to the Koran. Not to our "moral intuitions." Rather, we go to the standard texts of modern human embryology and developmental biology...When we consult these works, we find little or nothing in the way of scientific mystery or dispute... Let's leave religion out of this. Let's agree to resolve our difference of opinion strictly on the basis of the best available scientific evidence as to when the life of a new human being begins.

In his subsequent post, Prof. George then recites the standard scientific account of the developing embryo from union of sperm and ovum to single cell to two cells, etc, reaching the conclusion that "the human embryo, from the zygote stage forward, is a distinct, unitary human organism--a human being." However, a subtle philosophical slippage is evident between the sharp analysis with which he begins his first post and the scientific detail of his second, and reflects a linguistic conflation between scientific and moral terminology:

Anyone who wishes to know when he or she as a distinct living member of the species Homo sapiens came into existence need only open any of these books and look up the answer. So I have a proposal for people of goodwill who wish to affirm the inherent and equal dignity of all human beings but disagree with those of us who are opposed on moral grounds to embryo-destructive research [emph added]

I would argue that Homo sapiens is a term developed by biological taxonomists to classify a certain kind of animal, whereas "human being" has a far longer (and richer) philosophical history, with frequent application to the fundament of moral agency and value. In explaining the inability of the "root cause" Left to identify evil as a motive force, I previously wrote that

any complex phenomenon can only be explained in the context of its relevant frame of reference. And the one frame of reference that has been written out of Western scientistic discourse is the moral dimension.

Similarly, it would seem that Prof. George does not believe that strictly moral considerations can be brought to bear on question 2. But I believe that his search of cellular activity for the "root" of human-ness is analogous to the search of brain scans for the root cause of crime. In his book The Ethical Brain, which I promised to review last month (just before the 7/7 attacks), eminent neuroscientist Mark Gazzaniga makes a critical, and quite humble point:

neuroscience will never find the brain correlate of responsibility, because that is something we ascribe to humans - to people - not to brains...the idea of responsibility, a social construct that exists in the rules of society, does not exist in the neuronal structures of the brain. (pp. 101-2)

Gazzaniga makes an analogy that I would apply to George:

optometrists can tell us how much vision a person has (20/20 or 20/40 or 20/200) but cannot tell us when someone is legally blind or has too little vision to drive a school bus

Similarly, embryologists and molecular biologists can provide tremendously important information about the division of cells, but will necessarily fall short in answering the key moral dilemmas opened up by the field of embryonic stem cell research.

It seems to me that, by the end of the day, John Podhoretz realized that he had been painted into a corner (forgive the pun) by George's initial setting of the terms (biological) of the debate. Podhoretz's e-mailers have already chastised his own multiple commissions of the naturalistic fallacy, as he played the miscarriage card and the twin card, so I will not belabor the point here. Moreover, I don't think he wanted to be in that position, as he self-mockingly confesses he did badly in science, and most importantly states:

the thought of that 25-percent failure rate killing off human life "naturally" is a matter of horror to me...and I need something more than nature to make it tolerable. I need faith. I need the sense of a divine plan. I need the sense of something more, something larger...I think it is a demonstration of the limits of logic. And this is the crux of the problem with your assertion that we can use science and logic alone to find our way out of the embryonic stem-cell conundrum. [emph added]

I would probably say that it demonstrates the limits of scientistic reasoning as applied to moral dilemmas (rather than the limits of logic). I should also note that I do not have a firmly settled position on human embryonic stem cell research. Still, I obviously am inclined to agree with Podhoretz's point in his last post, which admittedly leaves us in very murky territory. Prof. George would seem to suggest that it leads to a slippery slope of Peter Singer-ism. Having thought about these issues for a long time, I must admit that, for practical purposes, he might be right. It is very hard to draw a clear distinction between forms of humanness that leave a bright line between acceptable research and, say, infanticide. And it is very possible that other technologies may moot the point.

But that doesn't mean we can't or shouldn't keep trying to find a moral language that can reconcile our Western traditions and moral sensibilities with the technological possibilities created by those very traditions.

Finally: isn't it ironic, that it is the "pro-life" debater appealing to science, and the somewhat more pro-choice (as relates to embryonic research) writer who appeals to religion?

How the Left was Lost (pt. 3)

2005-08-04T23:42:00.000-07:00

Stalling for time, yesterday I posed the question: "What happens when a mentally unbalanced but brilliant homosexual French intellectual with a death wish finds himself in the middle of an Islamic revolution?"

Let's listen to Foucault's own answer: "It is perhaps the first great insurrection against global systems, the form of revolt that is the most modern and most insane." Bear in mind that this was intended as the highest possible compliment.

A recently published book, nicely summarized in this Boston Globe article, argues that the Iranian revolution

appealed to certain of Foucault's characteristic preoccupations — with the spontaneous eruption of resistance to established power, the exploration of the limits of rationality, and the creativity unleashed by people willing to risk death. It also tied into his burgeoning interest in a "political
spirituality"..."Industrial capitalism," he said, had emerged as "the harshest, most savage, most selfish, most dishonest, oppressive society one could possibly imagine."

This last quote firmly establishes Foucault as having had either the most impoverished, or the most expansive, imagination of the 20th Century. And yet, Foucault here does us the favor of making explicit a set of assumptions that have not only seized the "blame America first" Left, but also provide one key intellectual foundation to the post-60's counterculture. While most American leftists and liberals would not agree with such a stark and explicit condemnation of our society, a diluted version is figuratively in our drinking water: the romanticized Che of T-shirt fame (not the sadistic murderer, mind you), the celebrated "authenticity" of hip-hop artists like Tupac Shakur ("Thug Life"), to Oprah Winfrey's website, which urges the reader to Live Your Passion, and exhorts the reader:

Are you screaming on the inside?
Everyone feels it. Get in touch with your ire power!

Now, as pop culture phenomena these trends are fairly innocuous, but they demonstrate why we are intellectually unprepared to meet the challenge of Islamofascist terror. The notion that our bourgeois society smothers our authentic selves, leaving no outlet for our stored-up rage and passion, leads to a simultaneously romanticized and patronizing view of the Other, as expressed in the headline of this NY Times analysis of the 7/7 bombers:

Seething Unease Shaped British Bombers' Newfound Zeal

And how else to account for this humdinger which begins that same article:

[The bombers] ... turned their backs on what they came to see as a decadent, demoralizing Western culture. Instead, the group embraced an Islam ... focused passionately on Muslim suffering at Western hands. In many ways, the transformation has had positive elements: the men live healthier and more constructive lives than many of their peers here, Asian or white, who have fallen prey to drugs, alcohol or petty crime.

This romanticized "noble savage"-ism brings us back to Foucault on political Islamism:

a notion of coming back to what Islam was at the time of the Prophet, but also of advancing toward a luminous and distant point where it would be possible to renew fidelity rather than maintain obedience. In pursuit of this ideal, the distrust of legalism seemed to me to be essential, along with a faith in the creativity of Islam.

Here Foucault is equating the rule of law ("legalism") with grim obedience, and contrasting these with the "luminous" creativity of the Islamic revolution. Thus, the far Left's utopianism is no longer focused on economic perfection, which in any case has been rather better achieved in the vast aisles of the local supermarket than in the entirety of the Soviet experiment, but instead on a spiritual redemption. Foucault called this a "political spirituality."

As for the reach of these ideas, ask yourself: What baby-boomer parent today would encourage in their children a faith in legalism and a distrust of creativity? Yet these are essential underpinnings of conservative political thought: certainly the Framers of our Constitution understood that politics was a realm to tame passions, not exalt in them; that spirituality was expressed in houses of worship and in our homes, not in the streets and in the legislature; that creativity was to be expressed in science, literature, and art, not in mass rallies.

Does our society tamp down on opportunities for Dionysian ecstacy of the sort exalted by the late French philosopher? Of course, and sometimes too much so. But better to err on the side of the Apollonian, the rational, the predictable, then to be left intellectually unarmed against the post-modernist worldview of Karlheinz Stockhausen, the German composer who famously said of 9/11:

"That characters can bring about in one act what we in music cannot dream of,that people practice madly for ten years, completely fanatically, for aconcert and then die. That is the greatest work of art for the wholecosmos."

How the Left was Lost (pt. 2)

2005-08-03T22:59:00.000-07:00

(........musical interlude...........)

Due to pressing work commitments, today's installment of "How the Left was Lost" is postponed until tomorrow. Stay tuned to find out what happens when a mentally unbalanced but brilliant homosexual French intellectual with a death wish finds himself in the middle of an Islamic revolution!

(....resume musical interlude.....fade out.......)

How the Left was Lost (pt. 1)

2005-08-02T22:33:00.000-07:00

Yesterday, I discussed how the new anti-Semitism on the Left is borne of hostility to the rationalism and moralism at the heart of Western Civilization (and the American idea); these building blocks of the uniquely Western worldview have been described by Thomas Cahill as the Gifts of the Jews. Given that the Left prides itself on its history of anti-anti-Semitism from the Dreyfus affair to the Holocaust and the founding of Israel, this represents a strange turn of events. Stranger still, considering that rationalism and moralism were also essential components of Leftist movements from "scientific Marxism" to the New Deal. How did the left pivot to an anti-rationalist, anti-Western view which can find sympathy with, or at least excuses for, our Islamofascist enemy?

I think that one pivotal moment occurred during the the Iranian revolution in 1978 and '79. Geo-politically, its tectonic significance is obvious. But a critical intellectual shift could be seen in the reaction of the leading French philosopher of the time, Michel Foucault. As a quick background on the man, this scorching polemic actually manages to leave out the two most damaging (though never proven) accusations that have been levelled against him, which I will not repeat here.

A sarcastic and fiercely intelligent depressive, he took LSD, repeatedly attempted to kill himself, drove a Jaguar and attended sadomasochist parlours in California. He was also one of the first famous casualties of Aids. Foucault loved being outrageous. He publicly urged inmates of French jails to escape from prison, and supported the Ayatollah Khomeini's revolution as well as Baader-Meinhof terrorists. He also declared that the happiest day of his life was in July 1978, when he was hit by a car while high on opium. "I had the impression that I was dying, and it was really a very, very intense pleasure," he later told a journalist.

Prior to the near-death experience in 1978, he had described his greatest experience as his first LSD trip in 1975, which he claimed had only one rival as a peak experience: sex with strangers. (This was from a nearly 50-year old man.)

This Weekly Standard article provides a quick take on Michel Foucault's Excellent Iranian Adventure (actually more of a Bogus Journey); tomorrow I will try to explore it in a little greater detail.

THE RELATIONSHIP between postmodernist European leftism and Islamic radicalism is a two-way street: Not only have Islamists drawn on the legacy of the European Left, but European Marxists have taken heart from Islamic terrorists who seemed close to achieving the longed-for revolution against American hegemony...Foucault was sent by the Italian daily Corriere della Sera to observe the Iranian revolution and the rise of the Ayatollah Khomeini. Like Sartre, who had rhapsodized over the Algerian revolution, Foucault was enthralled, pronouncing Khomeini "a kind of mystic saint." The Frenchman welcomed "Islamic government" as a new form of "political spirituality" that could inspire Western radicals to combat capitalist hegemony.
Heavily influenced by Heidegger and Sartre, Foucault was typical of postmodernist socialists in having neither concrete political aims nor the slightest interest in tangible economic grievances as motives for revolution. To him, the appeal of revolution was aesthetic and voyeuristic: "a violence, an intensity, an utterly remarkable passion." For Foucault as for Fanon, Hezbollah, and the rest down to Osama, the purpose of violence is not to relieve poverty or adjust borders. Violence is an end in itself. Foucault exalts it as "the craving, the taste, the capacity, the possibility of an absolute sacrifice." In this, he is at one with Osama's followers, who claim to love death while the Americans "love Coca-Cola."

Leftism and Anti-semitism

2005-08-01T22:36:00.000-07:00

Neo-neocon considers the "root cause" of the Presbyterian Church USA leadership's call for divestment from Israel: anti-semitism or "merely" fashionable leftism? My initial instinct was to disagree with her, and to suggest that no mere sanctimonious or self-congratulatory pose of victimology could explain or excuse the many errors of fact, lapses of logic, and fundamental lopsidedness of the divestment effort. This impulse was bolstered by my recollection of the long history of the Arab boycott campaign, and its relation to the unremitting effort of the Arab nations to eradicate the lone Jewish state. On the other hand, a perusal of the PCUSA (fitting acronym, no?) website supported the notion that these people were too woolly-headed to be hardcore anti-semites.

Upon reflection, however, I think neo has hit upon an uncomfortable reality that has been explored at some length (see links here), and yet still not enough: there is an intrinsic ideological link between contemporary Leftism and the new Anti-semitism. (It is important to emphasize that this is not meant to tar individual leftists, many of whom are well-meaning if misguided, but to expose the intellectual currents that unavoidably underly today's discourse).

As noted in "Anti-Globalization, the New Anti-Semitism,"

Controversial right-wing Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi notes a "strange unanimity" between Islamic terrorism and anti-globalization protestors -- both "enemies of Western civilization."

although the authors curiously attempt to soften this conclusion in the remainder of the quote below, it is clear that they are pointing out a classic chicken-and-egg example of reciprocally-reinforcing influences:

This is overstepping the mark. The association between the Arab world and the anti-globalization movement has its roots in a common opposition to American "domination." Israel and the Jews represent American capitalism. Thus attacking Israel gives the movement a good excuse to vent its anti-Semitic frustrations.

In his essential thesis on the new anti-Semitism, Natan Sharansky quickly dismisses the root cause-ism of those, presumably including the PCUSA leaders, who would point to Ariel Sharon as the instigator of Jew-hatred:

The Jewish state is no more the cause of anti-Semitism today than the absence of a Jewish state was its cause a century ago.

Sharansky goes on to show that fear of Jews as carriers of frightening ideas, such as monotheism, individualism, personal responsibility for moral choices (for an excellent exegesis, see here), has been at the root of anti-Semitism for 3000 years, and has only become worse.

The Jews were the only people seriously to challenge the moral system of the Greeks. They were not an "other" in the ancient world; they were the "other"--an other, moreover, steadfast in the conviction that Judaism represented not only a different way of life but, in a word, the truth... The (by and large correct) perception of the Jews as rejecting the prevailing value system of the ancient world hardly justifies the anti-Semitism directed against them; but it does take anti-Semitism out of the realm of fantasy, turning it into a genuine clash of ideals and of values.

Now, which contemporary American political movement is fundamentally opposed to monotheism, individualism, personal responsibility for moral choices? Sharansky makes the link explicit:

Decades before "occupation" became a household word, the mood in European chancelleries and on the left turned decidedly hostile... as anti-Western, anti-"imperialist," pacifist and pro-liberationist sentiments, fanned and often subsidized by the U.S.S.R., took over the advanced political culture... Behind the new hostility to Israel lay the new ideological orthodoxy, according to whose categories the Jewish state had emerged on the world scene as a certified "colonial" and "imperialist" power, a "hegemon" and an "oppressor."

And then closes the link between Leftism, anti-Americanism, and anti-Semitism:

Despite the differences between them, however, anti-Americanism in the Islamic world and anti-Americanism in Europe are in fact linked, and both bear an uncanny resemblance to anti-Semitism. It is, after all, with some reason that the United States is loathed and feared by the despots and fundamentalists of the Islamic world as well as by many Europeans. Like Israel, but in a much more powerful way, America embodies a different--a nonconforming--idea of the good, and refuses to abandon its moral clarity about the objective worth of that idea or of the free habits and institutions to which it has given birth.

Evil Speaks -- Will the Left Listen?

2005-07-29T22:11:00.000-07:00

The must-read interview of the year is in the new issue of the British magazine, Prospect. According to the subhead, the subject is "Hassan Butt, a 25 year old from Manchester, [who] helped recruit Muslims to fight in Afghanistan [against the Allies]. Like most of the London bombers, he is a British Pakistani who journeyed from rootlessness to radical Islam."

This lengthy interview paints a portrait that is, by turns, chilling, banal, despicable, and pathetic. Conducted last year, well before the recent London subway attacks, it provides an insight into the terrorist mindset that resonates all the more strongly today. While I cannot more emphatically urge you to read the whole thing, here I want to highlight a few key quotes, and place them in conversation with ideas typically heard on the Left, some of them even put forward by the ambivalent, and at times clueless, interviewer.

Left: Terrorist acts are a reaction to specific policies, such as Tony Blair's role in the War in Iraq. They are not an attack on our values or way of life.

In Britain, the majority [of Islamic extremists] I know are of Pakistani descent and really are fed up with the British way of life, British standards; they are even fed up with un-Islamic Pakistani culture and traditions.

Left: Islamists merely want to be left alone in the Middle East, and are responding to the occupation of Iraq and other Arab countries by the West. They have no aggressive intent.

The idea is that Muslims in Britain need to keep to their Islamic identity and work for the re-establishment of an Islamic caliphate, or khalifah as they would say, based upon the first four caliphates of Islam...I don't see why the rest of the world, the White House, 10 Downing Street, shouldn't come under the banner of Islam.

Left: The word "terrorist" is biased, judgemental, and racist. It is more respectful to use the term "insurgent," "bomber," or "radical."

I would agree to being called a radical and one day I may even be called a terrorist, if Allah permits me. That is something it would be an honour to be called...There is a speech by the Prophet in which he says: Allah gave me five things. One of them was the power to strike fear, to strike terror into the heart of the enemy from a mile's distance...in the Koran the word irhab is the root word for terror in Islam, and irhabiyun is the word for terrorist. Allah mentions the word in the Koran many times—the one who strikes terror into their hearts is an irhabiyun. If I could have that title Islamically then I would be more than happy to take it and be proud of it.

Left: The Patriot Act is an unjust infringement on civil liberties that doesn't even impact terrorist activities. The European model of civil liberties is preferable.

Britain is a very liberal country in comparison to America where Muslims don't have many rights. This is the type of country where you do have a lot more rights. Now with Afghanistan gone, the Muslims don't really have a place where they can come back to and regroup, have time to think and relax, without the authorities breathing down your neck.

Left: This rise of extremism among British Muslims is rooted in economic disadvantage.

I think that's a myth, pushed forward by so-called moderate Muslims. If you look at the 19 hijackers on 9/11, which one of them didn't have a degree? Muhammad Atta was an engineer [he was actually an architect and town planner] at the highest level. His Hamburg lecturer said, “I didn't have a student like him.” These people are not deprived or uneducated; they are the peak of society... Even Osama himself, Sheikh Osama, came from wealth that I could never dream of and he gave it all up because it had no value to him. Who can say he came from an economically deprived condition? It's rubbish.

Left: Suicide bombers are driven by unhappiness and desperation.

There is a difference between suicide and martyrdom. Suicide is about unhappiness, depression. That's not what these people are. These people have an urge to be with Allah, to be with the Prophet, live among him, to be close to him. They are happy before committing these actions. They are probably at the highest level any human being can be before doing this. They are the most peaceful and content.

Left: It is demeaning to suggest that suicide bombers are driven by crude visions of the afterlife.

I know that if I was to pass away in my sleep, then I would not have the mercy of Allah upon me because I have been such a bad person. And I don't see myself in any way as getting into heaven that easily, except through martyrdom.

Left: Immigration policy has no relationship to risk of terrorism.

Immigration is lax in Britain—you know as well as I do that London has more radical Muslims than anywhere in the Muslim world...There has to be a place we can come...America is much more difficult to get into than Britain—it's so far from the rest of the world.

Left: The media neutrally reports the facts about terrorist attacks and terror groups.

My role is someone who tries to use the western media to get our message across...I realised that the media was probably the most powerful tool, even more powerful than military warfare: using the media you can change nations, public opinion—you can get your message out there. Ayman al-Zawahiri actually propagates that: “Yes, you can be a martyr, but you've only done half your job unless you get your message out there.”

Left: Islam means peace.

And this is what we believe: we are going to set the foundation for Islam bringing true peace, true security to the world. [Interviewer: Will there be a lot of killing?] I can't see it not happening.
UPDATE: Welcome Watchers! I am honored and flattered to be nominated by the Council -- feel free to stick around and check out some of my follow-ups. I think you will also enjoy this fisking, if you haven't seen it already.

Physics Doesn't Lie

2005-07-27T20:39:00.000-07:00

So says a NASA engineer in this NY Times account of the shuttle debris fiasco. By implication, this (necessarily anonymous) engineer suggests that perhaps humans at NASA were not as honest as the physics: "It's an ugly story. It's a mess." Unfortunately, the lengthy NYT article, which uses 55 words to describe the crew's wake-up music, does not dig much deeper into the "root cause" of this ugly story.

I'm a neuro-conservative, not an engineer (dammit Jim!), so I'll admit right up front that I might be wrong in the speculation that follows. But this story, which has circulated the right blogosphere for a while now, seems conspicuously absent from both the NYT article and NASA's official explanations. As summarized by Paul at Wizbang:

The 7 members of the Shuttle Columbia crew lost their lives because of a needless environmental law...in 1997 NASA was forced by environmental regulations to use a different method to apply the foam to the tank. The old method used Freon...Following the change, the November 1997 mission had 308 ceramic tiles damaged. The usual number was 40.[emph in original]

According to this Reuters account, it was precisely the application of the foam, which caused bubbling (thereby causing weak points that detached as debris), that was at fault in the Columbia disaster.

While it is certainly possible that my understanding of the Columbia report is off, or that something else entirely caused Discovery's current foam problems, doesn't it seem strange that the NASA spokesman states "We'll put our best people on it, and we'll figure out something to do." Representative Sherwood Boehlert is quoted as saying "it's back to the drawing board." And most curiously of all, the intrepid NYT reporter allows these comments to sit there, floating in space if you will, without providing the reader with any of the background cited above.

Is it unspeakable to consider the possibility of returning to freon for the shuttle? How much ozone would be lost? Is it worth the lives of the crew and the costs involved with derailing the entire manned space program? Or is it unthinkable, because, as Michael Crichton has stated, "Environmentalism seems to be the religion of choice for urban atheists...It's about whether you are going to be a sinner, or saved. "

Blogging Will Resume Tomorrow

2005-07-25T21:31:00.000-07:00

My work project has overflowed its intended deadline (ie, I procrastinated).

In the meantime, please check out Irshad Manji's website.

(Not) Beyond Good and Evil

2005-07-19T21:34:00.000-07:00

I have previously written that any functional philosophical structure must have, at its core, the understanding of evil as a powerful causative agent, a theme that Dymphna pursued further over at Gates of Vienna. This view stands in sharp contrast to the reductionistic vocabulary of the "root cause" Left, for whom the only causally-active motive forces in the world are Western racism, sexism, classism, and colonialism.

Today, Michael Ledeen reminds us that, beyond the fact that the 7/7 bombers were not poor, oppressed, indigenous peoples, they were not the first of their kind:

The executioner of Daniel Pearl was a textbook British Establishment sort, having been well raised and educated (he had studied at the prestigious London School of Economics) by a good family. He went to secular schools, he was exceedingly upward-mobile, he did not suffer any deprivations or traumatizing slights from infidels. One day, in a mosque, he made a free decision to become a terrorist.

Moreover,

Mohammed Bouyari, the assassin of Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh, was born and bred in the Netherlands. And our own "Johnny Jihad" was the product of wealthy families in a stylish neighborhood in San Francisco, who went to Afghanistan to kill fellow Americans.

Ledeen reminds us that millions of highly civilized Germans and Italians, lovers of Beethoven and Verdi, were gripped by the fascist impulse; thousands of educated Japanese students from normal families flew airplanes into American naval vessels on suicide missions. The lesson?

[The terrorists] are not misfits or sociopaths. They are people who find it fulfilling to kill us and destroy our society. As time passes, we will meet more and more of them. And, in the fullness of time, we will remember that Machiavelli warned us half a millennium ago that "man is more inclined to do evil than to do good," and that the primary role of statesmen and other leaders is to contain the dark forces of human nature.

The Most Important Story of The Year

2005-07-18T21:00:00.000-07:00

Might just be this. Prayers for Ganji and all the captive people of Iran.

Busy with "Real" Work

2005-07-18T19:52:00.000-07:00

Check back later in the week -- I have several planned posts but no time right now to do them justice...

In the meantime, check out this piece by Michael Ledeen, providing evidence that the 7/7 terrorists were not intending to commit suicide in the course of their attack. It got me to thinking how the suicidal component serves to mystify the act, contributing to the search for "root causes." If they were just a bunch of murderous cowards, perhaps it is easier to recognize their naked evil?

None So Blind

2005-07-15T22:39:00.000-07:00

ShrinkWrapped had an insightful post yesterday about the MSM's "blind spots" in its reportage of the 7/7 terrorists' backgrounds. As he watched two chattering heads on CNN trying to explain the bombers' motivations, he noticed that there was one word that they never mentioned. SW may not have seen this article in the NY Times, but it proves the point so achingly that you don't know whether to laugh or cry. This one sentence says it all:

Hasib Hussain, 18, who lived nearby, was the impressionable one, a charming young man who had been drifting into a reckless teenage life until religion set him straight. [emph added]

A complete takedown of the article is here. I will leave you with the question that the Times poses, yet is utterly unable to answer:

What kind of radical force threw the three men together, with another bomber, to commit such a heinous crime against their country, the one they rooted for in soccer matches, and their people?

Radical force indeed.

A Thought Experiment

2005-07-14T21:39:00.000-07:00

Imagine four ordinary-looking young men from a small town in central Texas, near Waco. Each one has a somewhat different background, and they live apparently separate lives: one is described a something of a loser, bullied by his older brother; a second was known for his love of sports; a third is an immigrant with a bit more shadowy background; and the last is a family man and a teacher.

Most people who know them don't realize their "hobby" -- they have each taken up membership in a "right-wing militia" group, and have participated in numerous "training" sessions in the woods, involving heavy weaponry. Their enthusiasm and zeal, while alarming some of their fellow militia men, bring them to the special attention of a mysterious "squad leader" with a German-sounding name. They are kicked out of the militia, but continue their affiliation with the squad leader.

In private sessions, this charismatic man drills them not only on the use of the weapons, but their ultimate purpose: to bring Heaven on earth by hastening the apocalypse as described in his idiosyncratic interpretation of the Book of Revelation.

After the horrific bombing of a federal office center in a nearby metropolitan center, killing over 100 people including children in a day care center, one of these four young men is reported missing by his family. A search of his apartment, and later those of his "buddies," turns up copies of the Left Behind series, as well as Nazi paraphernalia (including membership documents for the Aryan Nations).

What would the sophisticated classes say was the "root cause" of their behavior? Who would they condemn: the evil Nazi fundamentalists, or the government whose policies made them feel oppressed?

And wouldn't the leader of the Democratic Party say something like the following, and wouldn't his party and the media rally behind him?:

When they talk of hatred, we must stand against them. When they talk of violence, we must stand against them. When they say things that are irresponsible, that may have egregious consequences, we must call them on it. The exercise of their freedom of speech makes our silence all the more unforgivable. So exercise yours, my fellow Americans. Our country, our future,our way of life is at stake.

Root, Root, Root Against the Home Team

2005-07-13T20:07:00.000-07:00

Normblog knocks it out of the park today (hat tip: Roger L. Simon), demolishing the (il)logic of the "root cause" doctrine promulgated by the enemy's apologists on the Left. Here's the play by play:

Rounding first, he points out how any true empathy for the victims of terrorism is crowded out by a self-congratulatory (dare I say narcissistic) intellectualism:

No words of dismay or regret, let alone sorrow, mourning, could be allowed to pass these people's lips without the accompaniment of a 'We told you so' and an exercise in blaming someone else than the perpetrators.

Sailing past second, he notes the "selectivity" of the apologists' empathy, which somehow never attaches itself to Westerners, especially Jews (Is there a word for that? Hmmm...):

Did you ever hear a Jenny Tonge who empathizes with the Palestinian suicide bomber also understanding the worries of Israeli and other Jews - after the Holocaust, after the decades-long hostility of the Arab world to the State of Israel and the teaching of hatred there against Jews, after the acts of war against that state and the acts of terrorism against its citizens?

In a previous post, I said that "evil cannot be reduced to a set of physical properties or sociological phenomena." Hot-dogging it around third, Norm makes an outstanding analogy to illustrate this point:

In circumstances he judges not too risky, Bob, an occasional but serial rapist, is drawn to women dressed in some particular way. One morning Elaine dresses in that particular way and she crosses Bob's path in circumstances he judges not too risky. He rapes her. Elaine's mode of dress is part of the causal chain which leads to her rape. But she is not at all to blame for being raped.
The fact that something someone else does contributes causally to a crime or atrocity, doesn't show that they, as well as the direct agent(s), are morally responsible for that crime or atrocity, if what they have contributed causally is not itself wrong and doesn't serve to justify it. [emph added]

As he charges home, Norm brings this critical philosophical point back to the familiar Bush-bashing ground of the Left (see here):

To shift part of the blame for the London killings and maimings on to Blair and Bush...you further have to reckon that what was wrong about the war not merely caused the anger of those bombers but made their response, in some sort, morally appropriate rather than (what it in fact was) criminally excessive.

In the our Oprah-fied culture, we have seen all sorts of sociologic, economic, and psychological explanations of behavior, used as excuses for criminal and deviant behavior. These explanations may have some degree of relevance as description, but it is a fallacy to replace these descriptions for moral judgment. In the field of neuroscience, this form of fallacious reasoning actually requires two steps: first, the observed correlation between criminal behavior and certain biological variables (such as prefrontal brain volumes), must be seen as causal; second, this "causation" (which is really just a description of explained variance) is allowed to crowd out any conception of personal responsibility, free will, or moral agency.

As this has been a long post on a theme to which I will return, I will give the last word to the always-pithy Dr. Sanity:

Psychological health requires that adults take full responsibility for their behavior and actions.

War as Rorschach

2005-07-11T23:24:00.000-07:00

Once again, I take the excellent work of The Belmont Club as my starting point. Wretchard contrasts several post-hoc analyses of the 7-7 bombings, each trying to understand how the attacks reflected the enemy's tactics, strategy, and (ultimately) worldview.

I will not reiterate the details of Wretchard's analysis here; read the whole thing, as they say. Instead, I want to take a step back and notice that the debate is much like a Rorschach, as each viewer struggles to make sense of the limited and conflicting data available to tell a coherent story. In this case, our own styles of manifesting anxiety might tend to lead us to give greater weight to the evidence suggesting a cunning enemy, or a blood-thirsty and unstoppable enemy, or an enemy with much reserve strength.

I do not write this to denigrate any of the views noted above; in fact, I find much of value in each of the three analyses. A commenter on The Belmont Club also noted that the enemy may be multifaceted, which makes a lot of sense to me. There may be key differences between an educated Jihadist from Hamburg and a 16-year Islamist fighter brought into Iraq from the West Bank by way of Syria. Most importantly, I am not taking such a "nuanced" view that there is no enemy, or that we merely misunderstand him and need to accomodate his grievances. I feel perfectly comfortable judging both types of terrorist to be equally evil, even if we understand them differently. By contrast, I think the explanatory mode of denial and self-blame manifest by the some on the Left misses the mark altogether, as I have written about previously.

I hope to have more to say about this tomorrow, for I feel that I am falling short of what I am trying to say. While I think these efforts to understand the enemy are important and necessary to decide on our next tactical move, I think the larger battle is still within our own society, as I discussed yesterday. Strategically, we are in the position of the poker player holding 4 aces, who can only lose if he convinces himself that his opponent has a straight flush. We will only lose this war if we fold, and I analyze the Battle of London as a tactical defeat for the enemy, as it (fortunately) has not led to a weakening of our resolve.

I might add that, even if we understand the vast difference in backgrounds of the educated Hamburg Jihadist from the 16-year old Palestinian, the same strategies might apply to fighting both: We must be both the physical (military) and ideological (memetic) "strong horse." A blood feud can only be maintained if both sides share the same horizon of imagination. What George Bush seeks is to open a new horizon of imagination to the Muslim mind, one that is more compatible with our continued existence.

Belief and Will

2005-07-10T21:47:00.000-07:00

Wretchard at the Belmont Club describes the courage and dedication of our soldiers fighting in Afghanistan, and suggests that bin Laden must be shocked that he is not refighting Mogadishu, but instead is facing another Guadalcanal.

In my undergraduate military history survey, the professor began the first lecture by stating: "The history of warfare is the history of technology." Throughout the semester, he elaborated his belief that technological innovations (from the crossbow to the atomic bomb) were the decisive factors in battle.

I think instead that the decisive factors are belief and will. Belief in the rightness of your cause, and the will to keep fighting. The atomic bomb only brought about the Japanese surrender after the second use, and required a successful bluff by Truman that there were more to come. Technological superiority, kill ratios, tactical maneuvers, and the rest are only relevant to the extent they impact the enemy's will to continue the fight.

Unfortunately, there are large segments of our society today that have neither belief nor will. Fortunately, the enemy is not monolithic in this regard either.

Still, I often think of the Battle of the Bulge, in which the Allies took 80,000 casualties (including 19,000 dead) in a 6-week period, just months away from final victory in Europe, and wonder how the media of today would have reported the outcome.

Moderate Muslims

2005-07-09T19:43:00.000-07:00

In a followup to my first Fisking last night, ShrinkWrapped takes note of a key line in Robin Cook's appeasement plan:

The more the west emphasises confrontation, the more it silences moderate voices in the Muslim world who want to speak up for cooperation.

ShrinkW responds:

The sad fact remains that there are almost no Arab "Moderate Muslims" speaking out anywhere in the world. There are no "Moderate Muslim" governments willing to support and protect the semi-mythical "Moderate Muslim" who has the temerity to speak out against the terror murderers and enablers.

I think that this is a major goal of Operation Iraqi Freedom that is rarely remarked upon, as compared to the geo-political goal of creating the first democratic Arab state. Ayatollah Sistani and others of the "quietist" school of Shia thought can provide both religious guidance and political cover for the "silent majority" (or minority, if you think I am being overly optimistic) of moderate voices. These voices can hold international sway on Muslim opinion, just as the Iraqi elections had international ripple effects in the political sphere.

Of course, a critical goal for OIF is to see similar figures emerge from the Sunni camp. Here again, I think SW is correct in citing bin Laden's famous "stong horse" comments. If it is clear that the interim Iraqi government is to be the strong horse (with unwavering support of the US & allies), we will inevitably start to see Sunni leaders wanting to jump on board. This is why the British stiff upper lip is, for the immediate moment, the strongest weapon in our arsenal (and why Robin Cook is dead wrong).

My First Fisking

2005-07-08T22:38:00.000-07:00

Last night I went to bed thinking I had been a bit harsh in my postings yesterday. Surely the Left would, at least temporarily, be sufficiently stung to turn away from their self-destructive path. Or at least take a moment for reflection along that path?

The answer to that question, a resounding no, arrived in this morning's Guardian, in a lengthy editorial from the former British Foreign Secretary, Robin Cook. The title alone tells the tale: "The struggle against terrorism cannot be won by military means." Subhead: "The G8 must seize the opportunity to address the wider issues at the root of such atrocities." The article is exceptionally long(-winded), so I will use some judicious editing in this fisking.

The first two paragraphs describe the mood in the House of Commons and across England. I include below only the key adjectives and nouns. Notice that nowhere to be found are outrage, resolve, determination, nor any active verbs except "recoil":

silent...solemn...grave... united in shock and sorrow... empathy with the pain of those injured and the grief of those bereaved. We recoil ... unexpected disappearance of partners, children, and parents...pain...acute...affection.

Unexpected disappearance? Like losing your keys under the couch? (And we are sadly far beyond the point that any sophisticate could be caught dead using the more fluid-sounding "husbands and wives, children and parents".)

It is arbitrary and therefore an event that changes whole lives, which turn on the accident of momentary decisions. How many people this morning ask themselves how different it might have been if their partner had taken the next bus or caught an earlier tube?

Ah, I see, the events were arbitrary, like a tornado or natural disaster. An accident -- and yet perhaps it was truly, subtly, the fault of a bad decision by the victims to choose the wrong form of transportation.

But perhaps the loss is hardest to bear because it is so difficult to answer the question why it should have happened... What purpose is there to yesterday's senseless murders? Who could possibly imagine that they have a cause that might profit from such pointless carnage?

At the time of writing, no group has surfaced even to explain why they launched the assault. Sometime over the next few days we may be offered a website entry or a video message attempting to justify the impossible, but there is no language that can supply a rational basis for such arbitrary slaughter. The explanation, when it is offered, is likely to rely not on reason but on the declaration of an obsessive fundamentalist identity that leaves no room for pity for victims who do not share that identity.

Rarely does denial announce itself so clearly. Despite the fact that the terrorists have declared repeatedly (including yesterday) their goals and motives, these are to be ignored because they do not comport with what the Right Honourable Mr. Cook deems to be "rational." Such motives are not only irrational to Mr. Cook, but he deems them literally unimaginable ("who can imagine?) and unspeakable ("there is no language") and therefore unthinkable.

Yesterday the prime minister described the bombings as an attack on our values as a society. In the next few days we should remember that among those values are tolerance and mutual respect for those from different cultural and ethnic backgrounds. Only the day before, London was celebrating its coup in winning the Olympic Games, partly through demonstrating to the world the success of our multicultural credentials. Nothing would please better those who planted yesterday's bombs than for the atrocity to breed suspicion and hostility to minorities in our own community. Defeating the terrorists also means defeating their poisonous belief that peoples of different faiths and ethnic origins cannot coexist.

Wretchard handled this one very well yesterday. When multicultural tolerance extends to permitting the growth of a cryptofascists subculture seeking the institution of sharia law within the Queen's dominion, tolerance has hit the brick wall.

In the absence of anyone else owning up to yesterday's crimes, we will be subjected to a spate of articles analysing the threat of militant Islam. Ironically they will fall in the same week that we recall the tenth anniversary of the massacre at Srebrenica, when the powerful nations of Europe failed to protect 8,000 Muslims from being annihilated in the worst terrorist act in Europe of the past generation.

This one is just bizarre. Why no mention of Western action in Kosovo, for which Cook patted himself on the back in his cabinet resignation speech?

Osama bin Laden is no more a true representative of Islam than General Mladic, who commanded the Serbian forces, could be held up as an example of Christianity.

But there were plenty of Christian leaders who denounced him, and no shortage of Western, mostly Christian forces who ultimately fought and defeated him.

After all, it is written in the Qur'an that we were made into different peoples not that we might despise each other, but that we might understand each other.

And the Koran also says, "Therefore, when ye meet the Unbelievers (in fight), smite at their necks." (Sura 47:4)

Bin Laden was, though, a product of a monumental miscalculation by western security agencies. Throughout the 80s he was armed by the CIA and funded by the Saudis to wage jihad against the Russian occupation of Afghanistan....

This hoary myth has been thoroughly debunked, but is necessary if you believe that only the US has the power of agency to bring evil into the world, as is further demonstrated in the next paragraph, which speaks from the essence of appeasement:

The danger now is that the west's current response to the terrorist threat compounds that original error. So long as the struggle against terrorism is conceived as a war that can be won by military means, it is doomed to fail. The more the west emphasises confrontation, the more it silences moderate voices in the Muslim world who want to speak up for cooperation. Success will only come from isolating the terrorists and denying them support, funds and recruits, which means focusing more on our common ground with the Muslim world than on what divides us..

Cook then spends the remaining paragraphs urging the West to provide more support and funds to exactly those governments that have bred the terrorists:

The G8 summit is not the best-designed forum in which to launch such a dialogue with Muslim countries, as none of them is included in the core membership. .. We are not going to address the sense of marginalisation among Muslim countries if we do not make more of an effort to be inclusive of them in the architecture of global governance.

But the G8 does have the opportunity in its communique today to give a forceful response to the latest terrorist attack. That should include a statement [issue a statement!--that will scare them!] of their joint resolve to hunt down those who bear responsibility for yesterday's crimes. But it must seize the opportunity to address the wider issues at the root of terrorism.[emph added]

In particular, it would be perverse if the focus of the G8 on making poverty history was now obscured by yesterday's bombings. The breeding grounds of terrorism are to be found in the poverty of back streets, where fundamentalism offers a false, easy sense of pride and identity to young men who feel denied of any hope or any economic opportunity for themselves. A war on world poverty may well do more for the security of the west than a war on terror.

Another hoary myth, debunked literally millions of times by each of the Africans who are not blowing up subways, and by each dollar bill plunked down by Mohammed Atta and his well-educated buddies at that strip club in Vegas. And, of course, the final myth is now the defining myth of the Left, Iraq=failure, which permits them to simultaneously wallow in defeatism and blame terrorism on its true root cause, namely George W. Bush:

And in the privacy of their extensive suites, yesterday's atrocities should prompt heart-searching among some of those present. President Bush is given to justifying the invasion of Iraq on the grounds that by fighting terrorism abroad, it protects the west from having to fight terrorists at home. Whatever else can be said in defence of the war in Iraq today, it cannot be claimed that it has protected us from terrorism on our soil.

As it is getting late (why did I pick such a long essay to fisk), I will let Wretchard handle this one as well. (And I hate to say I told you so, but there you have it...)

From the Archives of the Belmont Club

2005-07-07T20:41:00.000-07:00

One of Wretchard's darkly prophetic statements:

The Left will wake up one day, on the morning it is led down a dark corridor to a cell floored with rubber mats, sloping curiously down to a corner where a single drain waits to carry fluid away. The walls will be bare but for a banner with the words 'Allah is Great' opposite a video camera whose tripod legs are protected with a drop cloth. On a table will be a single knife. And then they will know. Then they will see.

I hope it does not have to come to that for all of us.

Root Cause

2005-07-07T19:38:00.000-07:00

The contemporary Western mind has been conditioned by a century or two of scientific reductionism, coupled with decades of misapplications and inversions of this method in the social sciences, to look for root causes of terrorism. But such an endeavor is no more likely to succeed than the attempt to find the cause of violence in a brain scan, or the cause of George Bush's re-election in the quantum state of an electron in a voting machine in Ohio, or the cause of Hurricane Dennis in the attitudes of Floridians towards storm preparation. Any complex phenomenon can only be explained in the context of its relevant frame of reference.

And the one frame of reference that has been written out of Western scientistic discourse is the moral dimension, which is critical to understanding this fight.

The root cause of terrorism is evil. We must reclaim the ability to perceive evil as a motive force in the realm of human affairs; it is one of the oldest pieces of wisdom of our civilization, yet has been relentlessly denied by the most "civilized" in our intelligentsia. Evil can be characterized in somewhat more specific ways; for example, Lee Harris has written eloquently about the ruthlessness of our enemies, who take advantage of our civilized ways, which they perceive as timidity. But make no mistake: evil cannot be reduced to a set of physical properties or sociological phenomena.

Civilized men have long had difficulty accepting the presence of evil in the world; "the problem of evil" has literally bedevilled theology since its inception. But one recent example with devastating consequences: Before the Holocaust, many Jews could not accept the possibility that their compatriots would devour them; ever after, Jews have questioned how God could allow such evil into the world. This difficulty has reached the level of utter negation of the word in contemporary philosophy. I have previously referred to Mark Lilla's book, "The Reckless Mind: Intellectuals in Politics," which documents how the most important philosophers of the 20th Century were not only intellectually unequipped to reject evil, but actually wholeheartedly embraced the most despicable totalitarianisms of all time. As I mentioned in that post, this was the first nonfiction work I read after 9/11. Since that time, I have come to the conclusion that any functional philosophical structure must have, at its core, the understanding of evil as a powerful causative agent.

We Stand Together

2005-07-07T17:21:00.000-07:00

Presidential IQ

2005-07-06T21:56:00.000-07:00

One aspect of left/liberal thinking that is a pet peeve for me, especially around election time, is the notion that the more "intelligent" candidate would make the better president. There is, of course, a self-congratulatory air about this pronouncement coming from the intellegentsia, combined with a childishness in the put-down of the opponent's perceived deficits.

Let's take a look at the list of the 20th Century presidents who, by virtue of their verbal skills, academic record, or prior accomplishments, are generally agreed to have had the highest IQs:

Clinton

Carter

Nixon

Hoover

Wilson

Taft

T. Roosevelt

Contrast this with an equal number of presidents derided by their contemporaries as "amiable dunces" or worse (ignore for the moment whether the scorn was fair or accurate):

GW Bush

Reagan

Ford

Eisenhower

Truman

FDR

Harding

Which list would you choose?

Right on Left on Right

2005-07-05T22:39:00.000-07:00

One of the most provocative (to me, anyway) topics in the blogosphere has been the attempt by the Right to understand why the Left demonizes us. Two important contributions have been offered today by ShrinkWrapped and neo-neocon. I will add a few observations:

1) I believe that part of the explanation is to be found at the sociological level. Within the intellectual class, the Left is the overwhelming majority, and acts like a bully because it can. It is far easier to demonize than to be challenged by an equal, and many on the left have had the luxury of never having to accept the challenge. So, they demonize because they can (the same excuse Clinton offered for his treatment of that woman, Miss Lewinsky). While not an admirable trait, it is very human.

2) Further, many on the left might not even recognize a conservative argument if they saw one (like Pauline Kael, who was baffled that Nixon could have won the 1972 election, since "nobody I know voted for him). By contrast, all conservative intellectuals have had long years of toughening themselves against best the Left has to offer; many even had been liberals or leftists before. (Notice that there are vanishingly few neo-liberals or neo-leftists -- almost everyone who migrates, migrates rightward).

3) The combined result of 1 & 2 might lead a liberal to quickly feel very threatened when forced to confront a conservative, or when confronting the reality of their own lack of power in the larger society. Shrinkwrapped put it well: "People have powerful emotional investments in their political arguments and often react with fury when they are on the losing end. We can see everyday in the arguments of many on the left that losing power is not easily and gracefully negotiated."

4) To the extent that there is a fundamental (as opposed to reactive) psychological component to the Left's demonization, I think that Dr. Sanity was on the right track with her Narcissism and Society series. Please read the whole series, but one aspect in particular is captured in this quote from Part II:

Narcissistic Idealism is a compensatory mechanism (usually later in the child's development) when an idealized person (such as the Parent) fails to live up to expectations (which inevitably occurs).Not able to adequately deal with this truth, the Self immediately transfers its idealization to a new SelfObject. Rage is kept at bay by focusing on the new person/SelfObject who now receives the excessive awe or admiration withdrawn from the previous Object.

My take is that the Left, which accuses conservatives of Manicheanism in our approach to the War on Terror ("Only a Sith deals in absolutes!"), actually has a complementary Manicheanism, based on this narcissistic rage at the imperfect Parent. Here, the rage is displaced onto the US Government, which takes on the role of the imperfect parent ("You didn't protect the Iraqi museums!") or even the abusive parent (Gitmo). The compensatory Narcissistic idealization is then directed outward towards the enemies of the US (Castro, Che, Ho Chi Minh, Michael Moore's "Minutemen", etc). This process is on Technicolor display in today's column by Ted Rall.

5) A related psychological phenomenon is envy, which has often been attributed to the Left. Again, we can see that envy is both displaced (from parent onto US gov't) and projected (from self onto Terrorists or other "Others"). Michael McCanles, a frequent commenter at the Belmont Club, had this to say:

The left's dominant narrative--what one might call "narrative template"--is the unfolding of the logic of envy: "whatever someone possesses that I don't possess has been taken away from me and is owed me. When the possessors are dispossessed and I get what I don't possess, then 'social justice' has been done." "Fear of envy" (i.e., the "evil eye") is for anthropologists a major embodiment of this narrative's central obsession. Thus: Islam must hate us because "we" have robbed them of something that they want: thus the incongruous overlay of the marxoid group-conflict model on top of terrorist motivations. The nice thing about this narratival explanation is that it allows the teller a hidden modicum of control. If we can say "they are attacking us because of something that we have done, then all we have to do is correct it by giving them what they want, and all will be well. Thus we control the situation because our actions are the root of the evil being done us." This is why leftists are so dedicated to scapegoating and fingerpointing.

6) Finally, I want to emphasize that even these psychological observations are not meant to be taken as pathologizing individuals on the Left. I actually am inclined to see points 4&5 as a sociological phenomenon that is analogous to the psychological concepts of narcissism and envy, or that calls upon the fundamental narcissism and envy that is part of all of us. (I think Dr. Sanity also stated a similar caveat). I am not attempting to argue that there is on average a greater level of psychopathology in liberals relative to conservatives.

Most of all, I am trying (very hard) not to engage in the very kind of demonization I am seeking to explain. I hope that I have at least been successful in that attempt.

Extremism in the Defense of Science

2005-07-04T20:48:00.000-07:00

In my recent post on Elite political biases, I suggested (following from ShrinkWrapped) that a lack of common sense and a tendency to push rationalism to the extremes led to an embrace of Utopian political extremes. This tendency is also apparent in the approach to science taken recently by an increasing number of writers of popular nonfiction (for a common-sense review, see here). Whether this is out of a boost sales through sensationalism, or a genuinely unhinged (or misinformed) tendency to fall off of slippery slopes, I don't know. When I shake off this summer cold that has laid me low this weekend, I will discuss a more balanced book that I have just finished reading, in which an eminent neuroscientist tackles the intersection of the scientific and the political without (for the most part) going to extremes.

Happy 4th!

2005-07-04T12:08:00.000-07:00

"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness..." ---T. Jefferson, July 4, 1776

"Americans are a free people, who know that freedom is the right of every person and the future of every nation. The liberty we prize is not America's gift to the world, it is God's gift to humanity." ---G.W. Bush, January 28, 2003

Unfortunately, these truths are not always evident to our enemies, and God's gift sometimes comes with a hefty delivery fee, so PLEASE VISIT HERE TODAY.

Elites: Rebelling or Merely Revolting?

2005-06-30T04:59:00.000-07:00

ShrinkWrapped has picked up the ball on the relationship of the Elites (scientists, in this case) to Leftism. He suggests:

1) that the immense effort required to master specialized knowledge tends to crowd out a general understanding of politics, history, literature, etc;

2) the lifestyle required is sufficiently "uncommon" as to supplant common sense;

3) that most physicians, neuroscientists, etc. go into their fields with a "do-gooder" desire;

ERGO:

The combination of wishing to do good and social naivety creates a crucial predisposition to Utopianism. Since the intellectual elites are too often not well versed in common sense and have given little thought to political philosophy, they are easily convinced by superficially coherent Utopian ideologies... I suspect very few members of the intellectual class can explain why they are leftists. It takes intellectual work to develop a political philosophy and if all one's time is spent contemplating the ways in which neural networks form and change in response to input, there is not much time and energy left for the mundane tasks of everyday life.

In the comments section, "Judith" responds that such an explanation is too benign, and that leftists are motivated by power: "Their job, as they see it, is to mold, shape and direct. To *manage* -- and we are to be the managed. "

I think that this debate on the motivations of the intellectuals is extremely important for those of us who wish to deprive the left of that power. At a personal level, this topic is important to me for two additional reasons: First, I am increasingly troubled by the response of commenters and private e-mailers, all of whom are uniformly in favor of anonymity for academic conservatives, and express a fear of a truly malign wrath from the predominant intellectual establishment. Second, I would hope to avoid the name-calling and imputation of dark motives that seems to characterize much of the contemporary left's critique of George W. Bush. (Can't we all just get along?)

Hayek might present a compromise view, consistent with both ShrinkWrapped and Judith's surmises. As many readers are probably aware, Hayek argues that a "rationalist error" (the belief that "man is able to shape the world around him according to his wishes") forms a "fatal conceit" at the root of the socialist impulse. Intruigingly, Hayek had a more than passing interest in neuroscience and psychology. His understanding of complexity and self-organizing systems was critical to his view of both society and the individual mind, and has been instrumental in shaping my own worldview.

In passing, I would also like to point out Mark Lilla's thoughts on the political temptations of the intellectuals are relevant in this regard; it is not coincidental that this was the first (nonfiction) book I read after 9/11 . (In brief, Lilla's book describes the embrace of totalitarianisms of the left and right by a number of the leading intellectuals of the 20th Century, including Heidegger, Sartre, and Foucault). It would be an interesting exercise to confront any major university intellectual with a list of the political crimes documented in that book. It is not merely the magnitude of the errors committed, but the uniformity in their totalitarian nature.

The 10 Commandment Decisions and Neuroscience

2005-06-28T17:30:00.000-07:00

Shortly before he died, Christopher Lasch diagnosed a fundamental disorder in our democracy: The Revolt of the Elites. While I don't agree with his argument in toto, the 10 Commandments decision (and for that matter, the Kelo decision) reveals the stark divide in mores between the self-serving intellectual constructs of judicial elites and the common sense of the average American. At this point, the Supreme Court is at the cutting edge of the culture wars insofar as it represents the pinnacle of power achieved by the elites (and here I refer to the intellectual avant-garde amongst the elites, not the entire managerial class). And these elites have, of course, attempted to stack the deck in their own favor.

I am certainly not the first to point out that the culture war tracks the rise of the New Elite. And it is clear that the main battlefronts are those social spheres in which the Elites dominate, including the media, arts, and academia. As I noted in a previous post, these are (for some) calculated power grabs in the Gramscian mode. And the tightening of the reins of power in these domains is accomplished, in part, by an esotericization of knowledge and discourse, effectively blocking participation by "ordinary" citizens. These trends ultimately lead to deeply anti-democratic calamities such as the EU Constitution crisis.

With the rise of the blogosphere, we have seen the counter-revolt of the citizenry (note that I will not use the term "masses"). So far, this movement has been most effective in domains nominally concerned with the polis, namely politics and political coverage in the media. The blogosphere's greatest impact on the academy has been the exposure of the Ward Churchill scandal(s), which has direct overlap with the blogosphere's primary concerns. To date, the left's dominance over the substance of the curriculum has been untouched. Just ask Larry Summers.

And in Larry Summers' dilemma, we see the link to neuroscience. As I have hinted in previous posts, the level of complexity encountered in the study of the brain and of the genome raises the possibility of an intellectual elite serving as the guardians of special knowledge. For sociological and historical reasons that are still not entirely clear to me, these guardians are nearly as uniformly leftist in ideology as the other Elites.

The foremost purpose of this blog is to provide a link between a common-sense conservative understanding of ethics and politics, and the exponentially expanding knowledge base of neuroscience, including brain imaging, psychopharmacology, and genetics. It has been my continuing observation that le plus ca change..., and that these new discoveries need not fundamentally undermine a traditional understanding of human nature and its political needs.

10 Commandments and the West

2005-06-27T22:44:00.000-07:00

While I am fairly conservative, I do not identify myself as a Christian conservative, and I am coming from more of a libertarian background intellectually (it is amazing how high school Randianism takes so many years to shed, even long after you have forgotten the name of the guy who was left to die in desert).

Nevertheless, I think today's Supreme Court decisions on the 10 Commandments will have a potentially profound (and profoundly negative) impact on our society. While I leave the legal commentary and political analysis to others, I have an observation that I haven't seen elsewhere today, one that has been stinging at my brain since last fall.

As many of you will recall (unless you get your news from the MSM), Dutch filmmaker Theo Van Gogh was brutally murdered on Nov. 2, 2004. The motive: he directed a documentary exposing the mistreatment of women in Muslim culture.

What was even less widely reported in the US was (as Paul Harvey would say) "the rest of the story":

In the Netherlands, artist Chris Ripke reacted to the murder on Theo Van Gogh by an Islamic fundamentalist by painting a mural with the text "Gij zult niet doden" ("Thou Shalt Not Kill"), one of the ten commandments of the Christian religion. But because the head of the nearby mosque complained to the police that this was 'offensive' and 'racist', the cops came and sent in city workers to sandblast the mural. A local journalist, Wim Nottroth, who wanted to protest against this by standing in front of the mural was arrested.

Are we really living in a society in which the Koran must literally be treated with kid gloves, in which all manners of speech (including flag-burning) are to be tolerated, yet the 10 Commandments are singled out for special opprobrium? There is a word for this.

Chilling Effect

2005-06-27T22:19:00.000-07:00

This is the term frequently invoked by liberals to describe the Patriot Act's impact on free speech, or Congress' latest empty threats on PBS funding or some such. Somehow, despite all these chilling effects of our "fascist" regime, the liberals and leftists that I know are never chilled out -- they're always yelling their opinions from the mountaintops, comparing Bush to Hitler, and so on. Somehow, it seems that conservatives like myself are the ones who must remain anonymous for fear of political retribution, particularly in academia.

Today, I literally got a chill down my spine when a commenter (the first to arrive via neo-neocon), told me to watch my back:

dave s said...
the more you say, the quicker folks will figure out who you
are. look at what happened to the adjunct at Southern Methodist. leave it alone
- your research area is too small a town. [link added]

On the other hand, I did get a very nice e-mail from a closeted conservative academic at a prominent medical school encouraging me to keep going (but keep secret). I wrote back to him about the profoundly alienating feeling I often have, like a Jew secretly roaming an old-school country club or a homosexual caught in the middle of insulting locker-room banter, when politics comes up in work conversations and words like "fascist" and "disgusting" (or much worse) are thrown around.

Please comment or e-mail me your thoughts and experiences, especially if you are a (closeted or out) conservative academic. Sometimes I wonder if I am just being paranoid, and I might actually be accepted as a quirky novelty. Other times, I am absolutely sickened by some of the things that I hear, when others make the casual assumption that I automatically agree with them.

Pull the Shower Curtain

2005-06-27T19:35:00.000-07:00

Cue the shrieking music: neo-neocon has dubbed me a psycho-blogger! Actually, many thanks to neo-neocon for her kind introduction to the world of blogging; hers is one of my favorite new (to me) blogs, and served as an inspiration for the title of this blog. I also find that I am gravitating more to the long-form and serialized think-pieces for which she has such proficiency (curse you for making it look easier than it is!). Today she has a must-read piece on the motives and methods of the anti-war left -- it is absolutely vital to recognize that the most critical battlefield in this war is the American living room television set. As Arnaud DeBorchgrave concludes in this brief history of the coverage of the Tet Offensive and its role in the ultimate fall of Vietnam:

Bui Tin, who served on the general staff of the North Vietnamese army, received South Vietnam's unconditional surrender on April 30, 1975. In an interview with the Wall Street Journal after his retirement, he made clear the anti-war movement in the United States, which led to the collapse of political will in Washington, was "essential to our strategy." Visits to Hanoi by Jane Fonda and former Attorney General Ramsey Clark and various church ministers "gave us confidence that we should hold on in the face of battlefield reverses." America lost the war, concluded Bui Tin, "because of its democracy. Through dissent and protest it lost the ability to mobilize a will to win."

Keep up the good work, neo, and thanks again.

The Politics of Genetics (intro)

2005-06-26T19:04:00.000-07:00

I have discovered that one of the pleasures of having a blog is receiving thoughtful and provocative correspondence from total strangers. The downside is being scooped by one's own comments section! R.L.A. Schaefer of Dubuque Iowa posted a comment on the politics of genetics that anticipates my own thoughts.

His key point to start the discussion: Opinions on the nature/nurture debate are shaped by one's take on Original Sin, with leftists tending to believe in the perfectability of man through social engineering. Conservatives "tend to conclude that humans are not easily changed; thus the potency of nature is in that sense stressed." Thus, liberals are more likely to be skittish about genetic research and its political implications. This fear is made explicit in the lengthy and apologetic discussion section of the APSR article discussed in prior posts.

Conservative vs liberal views on equality point in the same direction. Conservatives emphasize equality of opportunity, and are far more comfortable with Aristotelian notions of justice ("that justice involves treating equal persons equally, and treating unequal persons unequally"). However, the liberal ideal of egalitarianism is threatened by noticing individual differences, especially if they appear to be "hardwired" and not amenable to social engineering. (Group differences are to be celebrated, but only to the extent they are culturally constructed and can be thus deconstructed.)

Finally, the left's (self-acclaimed and somewhat romanticized) historical role in opposing Nazi ideology, which of course included eugenics, additionally points in the same direction. Nevermind the fact that in pre-WWII America, eugenics was a "progressive" idea, endorsed in varying measures by Woodrow Wilson, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and Margaret Sanger; even Planned Parenthood has to deftly apologize for their founder. And I think that the left's own fantasy image of itself is a critical determinant of its current reactions to events (see here and here).

I think that these three ideological trends are fairly obvious to those familiar with political philosphy and Conservatism 101; Jonah makes some related points more cleverly in his most recent article. Still, I think these ideas set the stage for much of what I will have to say in future posts on this topic (yet another promissory note!).

Does anyone take medical advice from

2005-06-24T19:46:00.000-07:00

Tom Cruise?

Especially about mental health?

I was going to write a rebuttal, but I think that his "argument" rebuts itself.

Or else his behavior does.

Still, I am concerned that the general public still has a very mystified understanding of the essence of psychopharmacology, and is easily scared by Newsweek cover stories about teens committing suicide on Prozac and the like.

One common misconception is stated emphatically by Cruise (can he state things any other way?): "But what happens, the antidepressant, all it does is mask the problem."

Of course, no blanket statement applies in all cases. But for many, many patients, antidepressants are the first step towards being able to face one's problems. If someone with severe depression (or OCD, etc etc) is gripped by suicidal thoughts, or compulsive behaviors, or is sleeping 12 hours per day, he is not facing his problems, he is consumed by them. Depression itself is a sort of mask; many patients report a deadened feeling inside. A course of antidepressants can often provide the opportunity to reduce self-destructive or self-defeating thoughts and behaviors for long enough to pro-actively tackle one's larger life-problems with concomitant psychotherapy.

I doubt that Tom Cruise has too many spiritual followers anymore, but this meme is a persistent one, which has probably served many people as an excuse not to take that first step.

Junk Science as Trojan Horse

2005-06-22T20:33:00.000-07:00

for left-wing MSM memes.

Shrinkwrapped has a great post today on a brief Yahoo news piece, entitled "Brain sees violent video games as real life -study."

I think he does a great job separating fact from fantasy (in several meanings of that phrase), most importantly in his observation that the whole news story is truly devoid of scientific content, serving merely as a vehicle for spreading left-wing memes.

This little story provides a crystal-clear example of a cascading effect I have noticed in science reporting. In this case, it appears that the researchers themselves probably got the ball rolling with a seemingly frivolous fMRI study designed to either to promote an agenda, amuse themselves, or garner attention (probably all three). Either way, the MSM gets a hold of it and proceeds to drain all relevant detail from its reporting. This serves to transmit the relevant meme (eg, violent video games are bad) with authoritative imprimatur, and simultaneously to disarm the non-expert reader from any ability to critically evaluate the meme. In a case as egregious as this little gem, there is not even a published study for the diligent reader to turn to. As with politically biased MSM reporting, the opinions of the reporter are placed into the story by means of an oddly pithy quotation from a participant, in this case the scientist. Finally, the headline writer then disregards any actual content of the story at all, including even the minimal caveats inserted in the piece by the reporter, and simply writes a falsehood.

Are these guys really that stupid and lazy, or are they actually diligent in their propaganda mission?

More on Political Genetics

2005-06-22T19:25:00.000-07:00

Greetings, Cornerites! In lieu of the promised post on the politics of genetics, I want to emphasize a point made in my original post on the genetic basis of political belief. An e-mailer posed the following well-put question:

Is it possible that the study’s findings can be explained by there being a genetic predisposition to certain traits that in the particular circumstances of today leads to an affinity with one of the parties? For example, let’s say that timid people tend these days to be [conservatives] and reckless people to be [liberals], and that these underlying traits were strongly influenced by genes. Would it then make sense to say that that party affiliation is inherited, or that these traits are?

The e-mailer's point is spot-on, and can be taken even further. It is of course absurd to claim that genes would directly impact one's political beliefs (ie, natural selection has not had a long enough time to act on that basis), and the APSR article is careful not to suggest that. The NY Times article on the other hand, well -- don't get me started. In any discussion of genetics, it must always be emphasized that genes code for protein manufacture -- behaviors only emerge after a long chain of biochemical events lead to a functioning brain.

Still, certain basic behavioral tendencies (particularly evolutionarily more primitive traits such as recklessness/timidity, as in an example given by ), likely are influenced to some extent by genetic variation, and are likely correlated to some extent with political beliefs. In the APSR article, the authors invoke a construct of absolutism vs contextualism as two opposing personality traits that might be under genetic influence. I will let you guess which one is ascribed to conservatives, and which one is cast in the more favorable light. (HINT: The last sentence of the article is: "As loathe as contextualists and absolutists are to admit it, the presence of the other orientation may make society stronger.")

While the authors clearly are either flattering themselves or catering to their presumed audience, I think that consideration of putative "intermediate phenotypes" between biology and political ideology can be an interesting exercise. However, as Jonah and Derb realized pretty quickly, there can be no simple, one-to-one mapping of personality to politics. As a simple example, a contrarian personality raised in a conservative household (or community, or society) might turn out quite differently than one raised on a commune. Not to mention those individuals whose politics are actually idealized inversions of their own characters (I think of certain gluttonous, narcissistic movie directors and Senators whose politics are oh-so-selfless)...

Optimism, Pessimism, Conservatism

2005-06-22T02:04:00.000-07:00

It occurs to me that the temperamental difference I observed between Jonah Goldberg and John Derbyshire may reflect an interesting interplay of optimism and pessimism in the conservative mindset. Put very crudely (which is all that I am capable of at this hour), I see Jonah's conservatism as being affectively optimistic and cognitively pessimistic, which I think is a distinctively American mode of conservatism. For example, I think that the Founding Fathers, while intellectually fully aware of the limitations and frailties of human nature, were gut-level optimistic that these could be successfully managed by the proper governmental arrangement. John's pessimism seems more affective, though he can convince himself intellectually that we will somehow muddle through, if only through sheer orneriness ("We shall find out that our cherished beliefs about the Self are largely illusions, and we shall come to terms with that somehow -- but we'll protest every inch of the way there"). This feels more consistent with some elements of the British conservative tradition.

The Genetics of Politics

2005-06-22T00:43:00.000-07:00

Great discussion over at the Corner on this NYT article, (misleadingly -- surprise!) entitled "Some politics may be etched in the genes." I think it is most interesting, and (meta-)relevant to this discussion, that the distinctive political personalities of Jonah and the Derb were so clearly manifest in their debate. Although each made good points and the two ultimately had much agreement, I saw Jonah as being characteristically more dismissive of this sort of novelty, and thus more optimistic about the study's low likelihood of undermining his ideals, while John's conservatism often appears born of his inclination to see things a bit more darkly, and accept that his ideals will and must struggle against a hard reality. (NOTE: I hope I am being fair to each, as I tend to oscillate between these two conservatisms myself.)

So far, though, only My Pet Jawa seems to have read the actual article in American Political Science Review (Jonah's e-mailer had the article in front of him, but unfortunately mischaracterized the contents in several ways). Jawaprovides a pretty detailed summary of the article, which compares monozygotic (identical) twins to dizygotic (fraternal twins) on a survey of political attitudes. To make a long story short, the authors of the article demonstrate that MZ twins, who are genetically identical, have much greater "ideological" agreement than DZ twins, who are only as genetically similar as any 2 siblings (about 50% genetic similarity on average).

I think that the findings themselves appear to be robust, as the sample size is enormous, and the findings are generally well-replicated in a second sample of Australian twins. Further, the influence of parental attitudes is accounted for (albeit in a very narrow statistical sense, and only for a limited subsample). I think it is indisputable that the study shows that MZ twins have more political agreement (on certain survey items phrased in a particular way) than DZ twins.

So, the sticky wicket is the interpretation. The authors use a mathematical approach to defining heritability that has been widely-used in behavioral genetics (though never before in political science per se), but is very controversial philosophically and is prone to misinterpretation. In a nutshell, the mathematics superficially ascribe discrete packets of causality (percentages of variance explained) to genes, shared (familial) environment, and external events (unshared environment). Yet it is a fundamental philosophical error to reify these constructs, and a whopping scientific error to ignore the centrality of interaction effects. Any of these potential subtleties are, predictably, almost completely lost on the hapless NYT reporter, as ShrinkWrapped correctly details.

However, the authors of the APSR article are actually much more sophisticated in their approach than the NYT, especially in their introduction. They clearly point out how genes "provide instructions for the production of proteins," which then are expressed in the brain, leading to a cascade of biological events that may ultimately be manifest in behavior; thus, it is absurd to infer that genes would ever specifically encode for substantive policy beliefs. Moreover, they use examples from the most up-to-date psychiatric literature to emphasize the role of gene-gene and gene-environment interactions. For example, a particular variant in the serotonin transporter gene only results in increased risk for depression when the individual is exposed to highly stressful life events. Individuals with the risk variant who do not experience as much trauma do not manifest depression. (Another popular example, not cited in the article, is the role of genetics in smoking behavior. Several decades ago, when most men smoked and very few women were smokers, smoking behavior was less genetically determined than today, in which a very different social environment has made it more likely that predisposed-women will smoke, and non-predisposed men will not.)

These points cannot be emphasized enough, and at some point the MSM is going to have to figure out how to convey them. As I hinted in a previous post, there are certain newly-emerging biological facts that the public will soon be forced to reckon with, and the MSM need to be the first to do so or must step aside. At best, it will be like that period in 1997-98, when the NY Times had to slug the same stock paragraph explaining "The Internet" into just about every article.

Where the authors go off the rails is in their conclusions, where they seem to have been swept away by their own data, and ignore the caveats of their own introduction. They also seem to have two pages worth of liberal propaganda, which reveals either their own biases or was required by the journal's editor and reviewers for publication. The following quote, picked up also by Jawa, is illustrative:

Similarly,if a Republican president had committed adultery with a young intern or if a Democratic president had dramatically worsened the deficit and taken
the country to war in a far-off land on the basis of undeniably incorrect beliefs about the opponents' nuclear and chemical weapons capabilities, the positions of most voters on the acceptability of these conditions would be completely reversed.

It is getting very late, and this post is getting very long, so I will pick up on this point later, in a post to be entitled: The Politics of Genetics.

Of course

2005-06-15T19:26:00.000-07:00

I'm really grateful for the Corner-lanche and all, but why did it come before I installed my site-meter? How will I ever be able to cash in on my blog-millions?

Damn you, Corner! Damn you all to hell!

Thanks

2005-06-15T18:33:00.000-07:00

to Jonah and the gang for some helpful comments, that have allowed me to get a little more un-stuck. I agree with Jonah that Freud's political progeny have been entirely unfortunate, and I suspect that the cause of this phenomenon is embedded in a future answer to my original question. I will ponder that further.

In particular I want to thank Rick for pointing me towards a most beautiful poem, that puts my apologia for Freud better than I will in 10,000 blog posts.

He wasn't clever at all: he merely told
the unhappy Present to recite the Past
like a poetry lesson till sooner
or later it faltered at the line where

long ago the accusations had begun,
and suddenly knew by whom it had been judged,
how rich life had been and how silly,
and was life-forgiven and more humble,

able to approach the Future as a friend
without a wardrobe of excuses, without
a set mask of rectitude or an
embarrassing over-familiar gesture.

Thanks also to my new e-mail friends. Receiving your e-mails has been a delightful part of this new experience for me. I will be responding to each of you in the next day or so. Shout out to Adam and Kathy.

In case you were wondering...

2005-06-15T00:52:00.000-07:00

That much-ballyhooed "sacred" commitment to academic freedom at today's universities is why this blog must remain pseudonymous. I need to continue to earn a living, and I don't have tenure.

Freud and Conservative Discontent

2005-06-14T21:54:00.000-07:00

Just one week into my blog and I have already recycled the same title pun. This is either a sign of a perseverative frontal lobe syndrome, or at some point I am going to need to write a lengthier treatment of the subject of Freud and conservatives.

Tonight I noticed that Jonah Goldberg, a favorite of mine, has casually tossed Freud in with Marx, while separating him from Darwin. I think that Freud has much more in common with the latter (both substantively and meta-theoretically).

I have spent a lot of time wondering why there is universal disdain for Freud on the right (which is more than equalled by the disdain for the right amongst contemporary psychoanalysts!). To be sure, in the context of Victorian society, Freud's impact was radical. However, I would argue that his fundamental understanding of human nature as tragic is one that is shared by most conservatives today, and interestingly is rejected by many (if not most) contemporary analysts.

I am by no means a Freudian, nor am I suggesting that Freud was a conservative. However, I would at least say that: 1) many of his views, like Darwin's, are neither liberal nor conservative and should be evaluated in a non-politicized context; 2) while his critique of religion may understandably offend many on the right, he was not advocating a total societal revolution, or revaluation of all values, in a Nietzschean or Marxist fashion; and 3) there is at least room for dialogue between Freud's insights and today's conservative thought.

Comments policy

2005-06-14T21:51:00.000-07:00

For the time being, I have comments disabled. I am not sure if I will have the time to monitor them for civility, spam, etc. Let me know what you think by e-mail:

neuroconservative@yahoo.com

Also, if you are a blogger, please let me know your experiences with comments, good and bad, since I am rather new at this.

If they build it ...

2005-06-14T21:10:00.000-07:00

What ghosts will come to this abomination? Jeff Jarvis has it right -- don't build it. Not on hallowed ground.

Please visit takebackthememorial.com.

Putting one or two more token conservatives on the Board of Advisors is not going to change the fact that Gramscian leftists at "leading universities" (including Charter member -- the University of Cape Town!) will control the debate, according to this press release from the IFC, from which I quote below without comment:

The character of a university allows for this form of “sacred space.” John Sexton, the president of New York University, describes the role of the great universities as “modern sanctuaries…sustaining and enhancing scholarship, creativity, and learning.” Universities, Sexton believes, have a special “commitment to free, unbridled, and ideologically unconstrained discourse in which claims of knowledge are examined, confirmed, deepened or replaced.” This commitment parallels the Center’s own commitment to a full and open exchange of ideas. President Sexton helped conceive the new Consortium.

Actually, I can't help myself -- I must comment. Perhaps you actually believe that the IFC will somehow show less Anti-Americanism and Anti-Semitism than the faculty of Charter member Columbia University. Or that the IFC itself is/will be more balanced than the sum of its institutional advisors. Then I recommend you look at the FAQ: "With respect to the importance of this work, Archbishop Desmond Tutu may have put it best..." Tutu's quote is pure pablum, but what sort of person, when thinking about 9/11, America, and the theme of freedom, would first turn to Desmond Tutu for a quote?

The long march through the institutions...

2005-06-07T23:55:00.000-07:00

ends in downtown Manhattan.

Perhaps the most important function of the blogosphere so far has been to call out the extreme left's (until now successful) efforts to destroy our culture's sustaining values by its near-total control of the mass-informational establishment (including the media, academia, and the arts). This Orwellian effort to corrupt our society's memetic structure has met its challenge in the citizens' media, but that hasn't stopped them from this latest insidious assault:

The World Trade Center Memorial Cultural Complex will be an imposing edifice wedged in the place where the Twin Towers once stood. It will serve as the primary "gateway" to the underground area where the names of the lost are chiseled into concrete. The organizers of its principal tenant, the International Freedom Center (IFC), have stated that they intend to take us on "a journey through the history of freedom" -- but do not be fooled into thinking that their idea of freedom is the same as that of those Marines. To the IFC's organizers, it is not only history's triumphs that illuminate, but also its failures. The public will have come to see 9/11 but will be given a high-tech, multimedia tutorial about man's inhumanity to man, from Native American genocide to the lynchings and cross-burnings of the Jim Crow South, from the Third Reich's Final Solution to the Soviet gulags and beyond.

Please see Little Green Footballs here and here for more details. I will be contacting Mayor Bloomberg, Gov. Pataki, Sens. Clinton and Schumer first thing in the morning. I strongly encourage you to do what you can. (Hint: BLOGSWARM!)

Mental Illness as Identity

2005-06-07T23:24:00.000-07:00

Compared to denial, the alternate extreme is to embrace (or even exalt) one's particular mental illness as a fixed identity. This stance is as contrary to the ideal of the "examined life" as denial, and equally represents a retreat from the ambiguities of our humanness. I see the pro-ana movement as an extremely regrettable and destructive manifestation of our contemporary identity politics, which turns victimhood into an immutable identity, thereby reifying our miseries and denying our own free will to overcome adversity.

Psychiatry and its Discontents

2005-06-07T20:37:00.000-07:00

According to a series of studies, the prevalence of mental health problems has been vastly underestimated. When it hits too close to home, the topic of mental illness inspires its usual mix of dread (as evidenced by the headline writer at the NY Times: "Most will be mentally ill at some point, study says"), and denial. The latter is reflected in this quote by Dr. Paul McHugh, whom I have long admired and often agree with (I'd like to think the Times writer has taken him out of context):

"Fifty percent of Americans mentally impaired - are you kidding me?" ... "Pretty soon," he said, "we'll have a syndrome for short, fat Irish guys with a Boston accent, and I'll be mentally ill."

On the other hand, I think that the studies' lead author, Dr. Ronald Kessler, puts the matter into perspective:

"If I told you that 99 percent of Americans have had a physical illness, you wouldn't blink an eye," he said in an interview. "The fact is that there is a very wide range included here, with the equivalent of many psychiatric hangnails. We don't want to demonize those, but we don't want to trivialize them, either, because we know in many cases they lead to serious problems later on."

Even the illness metaphor itself can be very misleading, since some mental suffering is a condition of our living in civilization (as Freud said, the goal of psychoanalysis is the transformation of "hysterical misery into common unhappiness"). Analagous to the role of genes in our lives, which I posted on previously, it seems difficult for many in today's society to accept that psychological problems are part of the fabric of life, an essential part of our humanity. Some are fleeting, some are enduring; some are ennobling, others, crippling. Not all problems deserve the attention of mental health professionals, but all of us could probably benefit at one time or another from guided introspection with the help of a caring and knowledgeable other.

Still, the fact that everyone gets the flu doesn't mean that everyone will get Ebola; the fact that some die of Ebola does not mean that I am doomed if my temperature goes above 100. And while I don't enjoy hangnails, broken bones, or the flu, I wouldn't trade them for an android body. Why do so many want to believe that they have an android's mind?

Levi's Genes

2005-06-07T20:29:00.000-07:00

This story has been getting a lot of attention in the blogosphere, and I will address the substance of the article in future posts.

My first impression, though, is to note that reputable, scientific inquiry in this area is actually as old as the hills, yet it is always clouded by the disreputable and/or despicable political purposes to which it has been yoked. Regardless of the specific claims made in this particular article (which might be right or horribly wrong), the general public is going to have to get used to more and more of these articles popping up in the scientific literature. Specific genes that impact upon cognitive performance have already been identified; this kind of research is not science fiction (or Nazi propaganda), even if it has nothing to do with the medieval history of the Ashekenazi Jews. By the same token, individual effects of any single genetic variant are very modest, do not rule out environmental effects, may be offset by other effects of the same gene, etc. Most importantly, none of these findings, nor the sum of them, will ever diminish (or even speak to) any individual's human dignity.

The way I see it, we are entering a period in which we will see story after story about such research, and ultimately the general public will come to understand that "genetically influenced" does not mean "fully determined," "doomed," or "deserving to be weeded out of the population". Hopefully, along the way, the issue will not be needlessly polarized.

Bottom line: Don't panic. If you were smart before you read this article, you are still smart, whether or not you are Jewish. And if you are Jewish, and your Aunt Gertie is dumb as a stone, she still is.

Who am I?

2005-06-06T21:36:00.000-07:00

A very large question, one that might take a while to figure out.

For now, just let it be said that I am a conservative with a Ph.D. in psychology, working in the field of neuroscience research.

Welcome to my blog.