Oderint, dum metuant

In Nablus, a young man is kidnapped by Palestinian terrorists — who then set him free on learning he is an American because they don’t want to end up like Abu Musab al-Zarqawi so recently did.

I am irresistibly reminded of a piece of cynical wisdom from the mouth of the mad Roman emperor Caligula, born of experience in dealing with the barbarians of his day: Oderint, dum metuant: “Let them hate, so long as they fear”.

It is best of all to be loved, of course. But Islamists will never love the khufr; not even the most self-abasing of the postmodern Left’s bootlickers can make that happen. The next best thing is that jihadis should crap their pants when they think about the death-from-above consequences of molesting Americans.

I would actually prefer to have them fear molesting “all civilized people”, rather than just “Americans”. Unfortunately, I don’t see the will to instill the required level of fear anywhere but in the U.S., and I don’t consistently see it here. Not a single Democrat is willing to talk about making the active enemies of our civilization fear its wrath, which is one of several reasons I can no longer consider voting Democrat.

Then there are the practicalities. The U.S. military is implicitly defending all civilized people whenever it waxes a jihadi, but in our world of nation-states it would be a bit much to require it to explicitly retaliate for the death of (say) a Frenchman.

Still…having even bush-league terrorists fear harming Americans is a good start, and as neat a vindication of George Bush’s foreign policy and the war in Iraq as anyone could ask for. The war is not, after all, breeding terrorists; it’s killing the leaders and frightening the small fry into letting go their victims.

Caligula may have been a mad bastard, but understood the barbarian mind and the stringency necessary to deal with it better than most of today’s politicians. Since they will not love us, let them be afraid. Very, very afraid.

1,981 comments


  1. for muslim in mideast do
    if muslim=terrorist; then KILL
    done

    And while we’re using Latin phrases, here’s one I heard at a user’s group.
    “Veni, Vidi, Venti. I came, I saw, I ordered a large coffee.”

  2. I agree with you that these thugs refuse to listen to reason and that hope for peace without war is naive. But fear of our retailiation (as opposed to Israel’s) was not exactly the motivating factor here. His kidnappers were associated with Al-Aksa Martyrs Brigades, and they kidnapped him in order to use him as a bargaining chip to release Palestinians imprisoned in Israel.

    Kidnapping Americans would cause two problems besides simply “death from above.”
    1. Even Al-Aksa knows that without America’s support, Israel will never allow the establishment of a Palestinian state.
    2. Israel would never bother trading Palestinian hostages for non-Israeli citizens, so holding an American hostage doesn’t help Al Aksa.

    Furthermore, on the face of it, fearing our retaliation more than Israel’s makes no sense whatsoever. When was the last time *we* lauched “death from above” against Palestinians? I can’t even COUNT the number of times Israel has committed military action against the Palestinians. Wasn’t attack against the Gaza beachfront less than a week ago?

  3. for muslim in mideast do
    if muslim=terrorist; then KILL
    done

    I’m impressed by your humane acknowledgement that there could be Muslim non-terrorists, but I have doubts about the ability of your code to identify them.

    I don’t think they were worried about Zarqawi’s fate – they just recognised that American goodwill (or relative lack of ill will, let’s not get too ambitious here) is worth more than anything they could have got for him. They wanted an Israeli, and the IDF aren’t exactly notorious for delicacy in such circumstances, although they could probably muster the finesse to deal with the situation without using five-hundred-pound bombs.

  4. P.S. I didn’t mean to write “Palestinian hostages”. I meant “Palestinian prisoners”. I re-worded that sentence several times. I do not consider the Palestinians imprisoned by Israel to be hostages by ANY stretch of the imagination. While I am under no illusions that probably some are regular people caught up in a tragic situation, I do believe that the vast majority are indeed criminals and terrorists.

  5. David, an IDF officer on the case said “Their decision to release him was because they didn’t want to deal with the hot potato otherwise known as the US.” The behavioral evidence says they feared American retaliation more than Israeli. That sure sounds like fear of consequences to me, especially two days after Zarqawi got waxed.

  6. Adrian10, if you had a brother who was serving in Iraq, you would probably want those bastards gone, too. I never said I was being humane.

  7. When I read that, I interpreted the U.S. “hot potato” as the Palestinians’ political inability to enlist America’s cooperation in encouraging Israel to go along with a Palestinian state. I’m not convinced the IDF officer was referring to physical consequences.

  8. Adrian10, if you had a brother who was serving in Iraq, you would probably want those bastards gone, too.

    I’d probably want him home.

    I never said I was being humane.

    I never say when I’m being sarcastic, either. But people are gradually picking up on it.

  9. David makes an interesting point. Yes it is better to be feared than loved, assuming you must choose, but not all fear is equally convenient.

    If you threaten to do something bad to those who harm you, your enemies could still get away with harming you if they struck at a time or in a manner to which you could not retaliate.

    But if you were in a position to simply do nothing, and allow an enemy to be destroyed by not interfering, this is true power. A friend you can whup is a good friend, but a friend who NEEDS you is a friend beyond reckoning.

    The British used to be masters at this. When they first landed in India, there were about 20 different kingdoms vying for supremacy. One hundred and fifty years later there were over 600, each dependent upon British military strength for their very existence.

    So effective were the British at their divide and rule strategy, that it is my understanding that there used to be a saying in the Middle East: “If two fish fight in the water, the British are behind it.”

    Other than our intellectual fifth column, America’s single greatest disadvantage in the Middle East is our lack of that kind of Imperial savvy. We lack it because we never really were an imperial power, and thus never picked up the knack for ruling large numbers of subject peoples with a minimum of troops or fuss.

    If the Palestinians let their American prisoner go because they needed our support to wrest a state from the Israelis, this is a model we might want to try and follow in the future. What else can we get them to need us for? And in perpetuity?

    Much of our weakness in the Middle East stems from the perception that we need, say… the House of Saud, or the Egyptian government, or Iranian “moderates,” a damn sight more than they need us. How can we alter that equation?

  10. On my blog (glenmarshall.livejournal.com), I posted my thoughts…

    The US is doing a shitty job at fighting terrorism. We also need to reduce structural deficits in the US budget. So I offer these modest proposals…

    1. Get rid of the TSA. Make it clear that airline employees and passengers are expected to respond to terrorism directly. Let people bring concealed firearms onto planes. That would make terrorists think a lot more before they tried to act, and would cost the US a lot less.

    2. Send all the prisoners to France. They have an opinion about what should be done, so let them put it into action.

    3. Take the oil. Don’t buy it. This will reduce energy prices and destroy an economic engine that funds terrorism.

    4. Be terrible. Respond a hundredfold to all terrorists acts, bringing painful death and destruction to their family, associates, supporters, neighbors, etc. Make it clear that the consequent costs of terrorism are very high for any gains for their agenda.

    5. Destroy the infrastructure. Scorched earth is a Good Thing. General Sherman set a fine example.

    6. Sow the desert with salt to make sure it won’t grow anything, even if irrigated. Make people dependent on importing US food.

    7. Crusade. Invite Christians and Jews who want to exterminate Islam, and let them bring it on. This will allow the US to bring home troops and save a lot of money.

    8. Rape. Make sure the next generation in the Middle East has a new genetic heritage.

    9. Genocide. The United Nations won’t do anything about it, so let’s use the chemicals and biologicals in our stockpile. That will also save the US the expense of having to destroy the stuff. It’s a real win-win: we win twice.

    10. Nuke them into submission.

    Extreme, of course, but if you don’t have the balls to do all of that, you shouldn’t be fighting the war in the first place.

  11. David, an IDF officer on the case said “Their decision to release him was because they didn’t want to deal with the hot potato otherwise known as the US.”

    It would politically complicate things more than the administration probably wants to have US forces trying to pull off search-and-destroy (or worse, *rescue*) operations in Palestinian areas, even if the technical means exist and the notion of being feared gives you an abiding hard-on.

  12. Another reason, besides cultural and historical temperament, why we don’t seek to emulate the British imperialists, is that the Empire collapsed within living memory. In particular, the British retreat from Africa and India has left a racist stain on the whole imperialist method and enterprise.

    In addition, Chamberlain’s ‘Peace in our time’ debacle was, in part an attempt to delay fighting long enough to let Hitler and Stalin destroy each other. This, too works to discredit the historically VERY effective methods the British used to keep subject peoples dependent on British goodwill.

    Another problem is that we are unable to duplicate the frankly awesome educational system that the British used to create linguistic and cultural experts able to operate effectively as British agents in foreign countries. Sadly, I don’t think the United States could, at present, produce a T. E. Lawrence, or anyone like him, to save our lives.

    Linguists we have, but not enough and none as could join Al Qaeda and make a convincing Jihadi. Pluswise, too many of our Middle East studies graduate students are anti-American Leftists. They are part of the fifth column.

  13. They didn’t fear US retaliation, they discovered that the prize in their hands wasn’t going to get them what they sought, and was screwing what their leader was trying to accomplish on the political stage.

    They couldn’t trade their US hostage for Palastinian prisoners, (Isreal wouldn’t do it) and continuing to hold him would unbalance the tripod (US, Isreal, Palastine) of control of the middle east. Far from fearing violence, the “management” over the group of kidnappers understood that they had a prize of zero value, and that the best way to repair the situation (before they lost US support) was to immediately give him back. “Our mistake, committed by underlings, who will be punished, sorry!”

    Its just that simple.

    Al-Aksa Martyrs Brigades, the group who kidnapped Bright-Fishbein is associated with Mahamoud Abbas, and Mahmoud Abbas is openly challenging Hamas, and needs the US to back him. Abbas last weekend scheduled the referendum on a plan calling for a Palestinian state alongside Israel, implicitly recognizing the Jewish state. Hamas, which is sworn to Israel’s destruction, opposes the referendum vote.

    If you’ll read the rest of the story, its plain that the group who kidnapped him was ordered to surrender him back (indirectly, via the Protective Service (aligned with Abbas) to the IDF:

    “In the end, I got the impression that they were in over their heads and they were going crazy talking on the phone. They clearly had no idea what they were doing. They were not organized,”

    You have to know that this translates to, “You fuck-slime, he’s American. Give him back, or we won’t be getting any more money from the Americans.”

    Moreover, any US rescue effort would have involved the IDF, who would have killed everything that moved that looked even remotely Arab.

  14. >Moreover, any US rescue effort would have involved the IDF, who would have killed everything that moved that looked even remotely Arab.

    That’s not even remotely true. The IDF is so restrained in its use of force that Palestinian children pelt troops with rocks in the sublime confidence that they will survive the experience.

  15. Adrian10,
    Energy Independence.

    Can I have a side order of cancer cure, sprinkled with those little perpetual motion machines?

    We could be a lot closer to energy independence if we could build a few more nuclear power plants. But American Leftists haven’t let any be built since the 1970’s.

    Remember my earlier post about how they demand we solve a problem they help make insoluble?

  16. Palestinian children throwing rocks is hardly a threat to life or limb. The IDF Code of Conduct requres Purity of Arms

    “The IDF servicemen and women will use their weapons and force only for the purpose of their mission, only to the necessary extent and will maintain their humanity even during combat. IDF soldiers will not use their weapons and force to harm human beings who are not combatants or prisoners of war, and will do all in their power to avoid causing harm to their lives, bodies, dignity and property”

    But in a live-ammo firefight, at night, in some dark neighborhood…

  17. We could be a lot closer to energy independence if we could build a few more nuclear power plants. But American Leftists haven’t let any be built since the 1970’s.

    Could it be instead that nuclear power is a money-loosing proposition?

    Building a new nuclear plat costs a lot of money, and the roughly five-year construction period imposes additional large finance costs, delaying any potential ROI. Once the plant in constructed, the operator is saddled with a deadly coctail of high maintenance costs, high costs for “security”, and the reality that nuclear power stations are not “forever”, and thus the costs for decomissioning the plant must be accrued (and paid for out of profits once the investment capital has been paid back.)

    The path toward “energy independence” is conservation, but few in America want to hear that.

  18. Nuclear plants seem to work everywhere else…

    Here in the NW, they just *demolished* a perfectly good nuclear plant, for no reasot that I can tell.

  19. “1. Get rid of the TSA. Make it clear that airline employees and passengers are expected to respond to terrorism directly. Let people bring concealed firearms onto planes. That would make terrorists think a lot more before they tried to act, and would cost the US a lot less.”

    An interesting thought. Make the cockpit area a self-contained impenetrable fortress, and people in the back can do what they like – short of bringing explosives on board. It has a certain elegant simplicity about it.

    As for energy independance, how did Brazil accomplish it? They drew a line in the sand and said from now on make it happen. It took a decade, but they now have it. That 10 years of hard work and learning from mistakes is gone. Forever, theoretically. Now they have their goal, and need only concern themselves with tweaking it. It’s all about drawing that line in the sand and saying, “Ok, we start now.”

  20. There is a really good (one among many) here: http://www.atimes.com/front/DA26Aa04.html

    It begins: “Fifteen years ago, the United States was short vol. Now it’s long vol,” observed an acquaintance who trades options. By this he meant that the United States stood to lose from instability during the Cold War, and stands to gain from it now.

    It seems to me that one of the great strategic foreign policy goals of any nation ought to be to attain ‘long vol’ status. If you can manage affairs so that if things stay the same, your position stays the same, but if things change, you profit, you are in a good position indeed.

    Perhaps, if there is a God, then He could preserve the status quo in amber. But for those of us lacking in Divine Power, entropy always increases.

    If Bush has made one great mistake in the Iraq debacle, it is in placing us in a position where if:
    Iraq turns into a stable, free, secular, pro-America Western style democracy – we win
    Otherwise – we look like shit

    A lesson for future foreign-policy-activist Presidents: Don’t be like W. Set things up so that if all goes well, fine. But if the shit hits the fan, America comes out smelling like a rose.

    If Bush had had the presence of mind to engineer that kind of outcome in Iraq, his poll numbers, and that of Republicans generally, would be MUCH better. Future Republican hopefuls should take note. Idealism in the service of freedom and democracy is a good thing. But it does not trump the need to be able to show the electorate some success for your expensive foreign policy adventures.

    And if the world going to hell makes your policy a success, you need have little fear of failure.

  21. This is OT, but thanks for getting rid of BIG_HACKING. That guy was a real colostomy bag!

  22. For every $0.10 spent to buy a single new nuclear kilowatt-hour (roughly its delivered cost, including its 2004 subsidies, according to the authoritative 2003 MIT study’s findings expressed in 2004 $) could instead have bought 1.2 to 1.7 kWh of windpower (“firmed” to be available whenever desired), 0.9 to 1.7+ kWh of gas-fired industrial or ~2.2–6.5+ kWh of building-scale cogeneration, and an infinite number of kWh from waste-heat cogeneration (since its economic cost is typically negative), or at least several, perhaps upwards of ten, kWh of electrical savings from more efficient use and conservation.

    Its also about the slowest option to deploy (in capacity or annual output added per year).

    Adding 700 nuclear GWe worldwide (roughly twice today’s nuclear capacity) and running them during 2050–2100 would:

    * add ~1,200 nuclear plants (if each lasted 40 years);
    * require 15 new enrichment plants (each 8 million SWU/y);
    * create 0.97 million tons of spent fuel, requiring 14 Yucca Mountain like areas, and containing ~1 million kg (hundreds of thousands of bombs’ worth) of plutonium…
    or
    * require 50 new reprocessing plants (each 800 TSF/y with a 40-y operating life) to extract that plutonium under, one hopes, stringent international safeguards;

    * require ~$1–2 trillion of investment

    Here in the NW, they just *demolished* a perfectly good nuclear plant, for no reasot that I can tell.

    If you’re speaking in reference to the Trojan plant in Oregon (they demoed the cooling tower in May), then it was hardly “perfectly good”.

    Trojan has been offline since 1992, when the steam turbine failed. NRC scientists produced internal documents (subseqently leaked) that declared that the plant was unsafe to operate. PG&E subsequently announced (in 1993) that they would not restart the plant.

    Trojan’s original license would have expired in 2011 anyway, likely requring decommisioning and demolition then anyway.

  23. My historical ignorance is showing here, I’m sure, but is there a good example of an instance where highly escalated retaliation against a hard-to-pin-down insurgent movement had the desired effect? Aside from sating one’s bloodlust, that is. I’m thinking of the Nazis’ razing of two Czech towns after the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich. Churchill wanted to up the ante by murdering a greater number of German civilians, but the allied response was to stop similar assassination plans against the Nazis.

    I take it that the consensus here is that Churchill’s position should have been taken, that the Allies should have, as Hitler ordered his troops to, “wade[d] in in blood” through the captured German countryside?

    It seems axiomatic in this day and age that civilized societies don’t engage in Mongol Horde-style massacres in order to instill terror. (If they do and it’s covered up, it’s clearly not instilling terror.) My question is, has this worked in modern times? And what are the consequences for a civilization that bloodies itself in this way?

  24. “Let them hate, so long as they fear”.

    So the plan for America should be to deprive our enemies of power by instilling them with terror? There’s a word for people who do that, but it escapes me right now…

    OK, so maybe that’s a little simplistic. But it’s close enough to the truth that we need to be careful: we need to make sure that people only fear America if they have done something or plan to do something terrible to America. I think a significant amount of people living in the Middle East isn’t getting that right now – they think if you don’t agree with America, or if you don’t bow to them, eventually they will get you. Those people view us as bullies, and they may cower – or they may think like you do, Eric, and want to fight back. Next stop, terrorist training ground.

    So in the end, the short-term strategy is to neutralize the terrorist groups – but the long-term strategy has to be to convince Mr. J. Random Muslim that “ok, maybe I hate their culture, but the Americans aren’t going to interfere with me/my life/my country/my religion.” You are right in the sense that there should be a deterrent to fucking with America (fear), but that deterrent will not be enough if they percieve a threat. We can’t give them a reason to feel threatened. Declaring Islam to be evil, attacking the religion as a whole, and acknowledging a War with Islam is not the right way to go about that – but that’s just what this blog seems to advocate. But maybe I’ve gotten the wrong impression.

  25. std,
    >to convince Mr. J. Random Muslim that “ok, maybe I hate their culture, but the Americans aren’t going to interfere with me/my life/my country/my religion.”

    Dude, it gets so much worse than that. The best person to read on this is Spengler at Asia Times Online. He explains this FAR better than I can. Nonetheless, here goes.

    Islamic society is inherently fragile. It relies on Muslim women to have about 15 babies apiece (I may exaggerate a little bit) because so many of them die young because Arab medicine is a joke. Part of the reason why Arab medicine is a joke is:
    1) Only female medical personnel can treat female patients
    2) Providing education to girls is frowned upon
    3) Can you say clitorectomy?

    So basically you need for Arab women to remain illiterate because just as soon as they can read the directions on a box of birth control pills, the whole equation starts to fall apart.

    With the spread of everything from pop music, to TV, to the internet we pose a profound, existential threat to the traditional Muslim society. All of the cultural change that the Christian religion has had to endure over the last 500 years, Islam will have to endure over the next 50.

    And this would remain true even if:
    1) The West never bought one more barrel of oil
    2) The West never dropped one more bomb or set one more combat boot on Muslim land.

    There are about 6000 spoken languages in the world, mostly small aboriginal tongues in Africa, South America, or central Asia. Every week, one or two of them vanish as the last native speaker dies. There has not been a Great Extinction of the Peoples like this since the Fall of Rome.

    The English, Spanish and to a lesser extent Chinese languages are marching across the Earth, sweeping all before them. You’ll notice I didn’t include Arabic in that short list.

    If we claimed we posed no threat to them, which we have, many times, they’d have to be fucking idiots not to see through that transparent lie. And they aren’t fucking idiots.

  26. One can loathe many aspects of traditional Muslim society and still feel considerable pity for denizens of that culture.

    They are well and truly fucked. They are fucked because of us. They wish we could be destroyed because they know this and they do not want to see their culture die. I wouldn’t want to see my culture die, either. And neither would you.

    But, even if we wanted to (and I don’t), we have no capacity to unfuck them. The are not doomed because of something we can stop doing to them. The natural processes of our society unfolding, processes which we cannot stop and remain ourselves, are terminally corrosive to the traditional Muslim way of life.

    They must destroy us or die.

    I can simultaneously want for them to NOT destroy us, and still feel very, very sorry for them.

  27. If we claimed we posed no threat to them, which we have, many times, they’d have to be fucking idiots not to see through that transparent lie. And they aren’t fucking idiots.

    I mean a threat as a soverign nation, not a threat as a foreign culture. You’re absolutely right that our culture does present a threat to them – but there’s zero solution for this beyond wiping out one or the other. The problem is that not only does our culture threaten them, but so do our soldiers and bombs. Add these two together, and it looks like America is actively trying to force its culture the same way esr and others on this blog percieve all of Islam (not just the radicals, who are). If our culture spreads, it should be because some of their own kind have taken it in, rather than it being forced upon them. The ideal situation (of course impossible to reach) is one where when an extreme Islamist commits an act of violence against the United States, and cannot point to self-defense because we were invited in. That’s the key – we need to be like vampires! We should at least be invited in before we sink our oil drills right into their petroleum juglar.

    This is all about politics in a foreign country – and we ain’t gonna get no votes if our platform is “Destroy Islam.”

  28. Whether they invite us in or whether they don’t, in the long run they are going to vanish like tears in rain and they know it.

    I don’t think we will have too much success getting them to vote for us, no matter what we say or do.

  29. Energy Independance.

    Two things will do this for us.

    The first is solar power satellites, assuming we can make that first step towards cheap launch capacity.

    The second is using superconductors for power transmission lines, which we could actually do now (albeit at a stupendous up front cost). Roughtly 60-75% of the total electricity generated in the US is lost due to power line impedance heating. (This is what makes cogeneration so appealing.)

    One interesting concept for superconducting lines is to embed them in the pipes needed to move liquid hydrogen around as a fuel for vehicular transport…

    While this is (in many ways) “pie in the sky”, I’ve worked on enough patents for exactly these two technologies to say that it’s possible – it won’t be cheap, but it’s possible.

    I want to be in a situation where we’ve shot the bottom out of the oil market, because we’re exporting liquid hydrogen to the rest of the world, using solar power satellite generated power to desalinate and crack seawater.

    And, hey, as long as I’m dreaming, can we also shift to the alternate universe where Kirsten Dunst is a cute redheaded math geek into game designers? :)

  30. I don’t think we will have too much success getting them to vote for us, no matter what we say or do.

    But if our culture truly is that powerful, it will be because people over there adopt it. Those people that do adopt it will be voting for us. But as it stands now, they are wary of our intentions.

    I think the basic idea is this: it’s a lot harder to lash out at Americans when they are miles and miles away, and your own kids are the ones bringing their culture in. You can try and blow up a big American momument, but that’s not going to get your kids to stop thinking about American music, or crazy ideas like letting women read. All the Americans are doing is existing, and you need a much larger amount of insanity, much higher than I think most terrorists possess, to think that you can stop that. On the other hand, if America is getting in your/your country’s face, it is much more rational to think that a terrorist strike will get them out of it.

  31. The first is solar power satellites, assuming we can make that first step towards cheap launch capacity.

    Given that all the current electricity needs for the US could be met with a 100 mile x 100 mile solar array (at today’s commodity panel efficiencies), why do we need to move the panels into space?

    There is also the “small” problem of getting the power back to where its needed. Solvable, but problematic.

    The second is using superconductors for power transmission lines, which we could actually do now (albeit at a stupendous up front cost). Roughtly 60-75% of the total electricity generated in the US is lost due to power line impedance heating. (This is what makes cogeneration so appealing.)

    Its also what makes distributed PV/wind generate so appealing. Want to reduce transmisison losses? Get rid of the transmission lines, locate smaller plants in each neighborhood or on each rooftop.

    One interesting concept for superconducting lines is to embed them in the pipes needed to move liquid hydrogen around as a fuel for vehicular transport…

    You’ll need to explain how you’ve solved the problem of the liquid hydrogen boiling. (BP −423.188 °F @ standard atmospheric pressure). I suppose you can try to keep it under extreme pressure and insulate the lines, but that seems critically hard.

    Also, in order to cool the hydrogen down, energy equalling 30-40% of that in the fuel is required, subject to some new process being discovered.

    Kirsten Dunst is a cute redheaded math geek into game designers

    Keep dreaming… :-)

  32. Jim Thompson,

    Dude, if you want to be a downer on techno-power, that’s one thing. But don’t try to take away a man’s Kirsten Dunst fantasies. That’s just not cool.

    Not cool at all.

  33. Trojan has been offline since 1992, when the steam turbine failed. NRC scientists produced internal documents (subseqently leaked) that declared that the plant was unsafe to operate. PG&E subsequently announced (in 1993) that they would not restart the plant.

    I said ‘that I can tell’. None of this was in the papers, then or now, and I couldn’t find any info on it when I looked.

  34. Can I have a side order of cancer cure, sprinkled with those little perpetual motion machines?

    Did say it was going to be a long road. The alternative is the enjoyment of continuing to mix it up with Islam.

    We could be a lot closer to energy independence if we could build a few more nuclear power plants. But American Leftists haven’t let any be built since the 1970’s.

    Are you *still* blaming the hippies for this? Since Carter (oddly, a qualified nuclear engineer) my calculations show *four and a half* Republican administrations (not to mention Gingrich’s not-very-eco-friendly tenure under Clinton), one might think enough time for suitable legislation to be put in place, or removed, or whatever. But NOOOooo, the hippies have POISONED THE WELL, and we are POWERLESS IN THE FACE OF THEIR MIGHT.

    Please. What it is. The corporations who are supposed to build the things are leery of the risks involved versus the profits to be made, and are waiting for the government to basically say OK, the taxpayer will underwrite EVERYTHING, PLEASE build some! Also, nobody wants to live anywhere near them, which might admittedly be traceable to hippy dissembling. But there are some cool new designs which look promising.

  35. Dean: The article on Hama says that “never again have Muslim extremists threatened the Syrian government”, according to Thomas Friedman. So, yeah. Huh; I’d always thought Hama was something for Arabs to try as hard as possible to ignore while throwing rocks at the Israelis for each dead terrorist…

  36. I said ‘that I can tell’. None of this was in the papers, then or now, and I couldn’t find any info on it when I looked.

    Here are a few links for you to read.

    http://egov.oregon.gov/ENERGY/SITING/trojan.shtml
    http://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collections/fact-sheets/decommissioning.html
    http://www.nucleartourist.com/systems/rv_trip.htm
    http://www.nucleartourist.com/us/pnw_plants.htm

    But there are some cool new designs which look promising.

    Such as Carlo Ruben’s ‘energy amplifier’? (Nearly all Thorium reactors are based on the same principle.)

    Oh yeah, ESR once called “peak oil collapse” bullshit.

    The peak-oil collapse scenario is not credible for five minutes to anybody who understands market economics.

    There are so many mutually-reinforcing idiocies here that it’s hard to know where to start. As I was thinking of writing about this, one of my commenters pointed out that above $32 per barrel it becomes economical to build Fischer-Tropsch plants and make your oil out of coal. This is old tech; the Germans did it during WWI. At slightly higher price points, MHD generators to burn garbage start to look good.

    If we were (as a society) determined to switch from crude oil to syngas via coal indirect-liquefaction plants, each with an output of 100,000 barrels of synthetic crude oil per day, it would take us approximately 4-5 years (per plant) to build out the necessary plants (and infrastructure for getting the coal to the plants). Current projected prices for building such plants are above $33,000 per bbl per day.

    It would also mean that were the U.S. to replace all its current net crude oil imports of 9.65 million b/d with synthetic crude produced from coal liquefaction it would require about 97 such facilities.

    For those of you following, thats 320 billion USD of capital that has to be paid back to the investors, and they’re not going to want to wait very long, since they’re waiting 4-5 years before the first drop of product is sold.

    Note also that we have to endure price rises in the petroleum market for more than the 4-5 years for construction, unless all the plants are built simultaneously. It may be worthwhile to remember that until the March 28, 2000 adoption of the $22-$28 price band for the OPEC basket of crude, oil prices only exceeded $23.00 per barrel (in adjusted 2005 dollars) in response to war or conflict in the Middle East. You may wish to explore the ‘why’ implicit in this statement.

    More damning, recent work by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory indicates that full fuel cycle greenhouse gas emissions for coal-based synfuels are nearly twice as high as their petroleum-based equivalent. Until we have an effective carbon dioxide (CO2) capture and sequestration process, building and operating these plants will not only violate treaties, but will do immense harm to the environment.

    MHD generators have the potential to be even more toxic.

    Anyway, the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists says different on the subject of “peak oil”.

    Petroleum reserves are limited. Petroleum is not a renewable resource and production cannot continue to increase indefinitely. A day of reckoning will come sometime in the future. The point at which production can no longer keep up with increasing demand will mean a radical and painful readjustment globally to everyday life.

    In spite of that indisputable fact, people behave as if the global petroleum supply is unending. Predictions of the exhaustion of oil reserves seem to have lost all credibility. The public assumes that inexpensive oil will be available essentially forever. The idea that petroleum resources are finite and that petroleum production might peak in the near future seems to have vanished from all discussions of energy policy in Congress, in the press, and even among public interest groups.

    This surreal situation is due to several factors. One, certainly, is that pessimists have cried wolf too often. Forecasts of imminent shortages of oil, food, and other natural resources are confounded by the enormous display of material goods that envelops consumers in the West. For most people, the market price of any commodity is what signals shortage or plenty. Time and again, collapsing oil prices have succeeded rising oil prices, leading to the belief that oil will always become cheap again. That oil supplies are currently abundant and inexpensive and have been for nearly 20 years, and that the models used to predict peak oil production are not easy to understand, appear to ignore economic factors, and are based on proprietary data, explain to some degree the present feeling of permanent abundance.

    In reality, the differential between petroleum production cost and market price is so large that market price cannot be used as a measure of resource depletion. For example, the variation in the average price of oil between 1998 ($10 per barrel) and 2000 ($24 per barrel) had nothing to do with depletion of reserves and everything to do with an attempt to exercise “market discipline” by the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC).

    But the most important reason there seems to be an unending supply of oil is the activity of non-OPEC producers. Oil production is immensely lucrative. Large amounts of petroleum have been and will continue to be produced outside the Middle East at costs that are very low, $5-$10 per barrel, compared to the desired OPEC price range of $22-$28 per barrel. The opportunity to realize extraordinary profits provides irresistible pressure to produce as much oil as possible, as soon as possible.

    Yet oil is a finite resource, and there are only so many places to look for it. Sooner or later petroleum production will decline, so sooner or later the prophets of depletion will be correct. The question then becomes: Can a peak oil forecast be made that is useful to the petroleum industry and to consumers, one that will alert them to the problems and allow for a redeployment of resources?

  37. Reading the post, which is so full of hatred for Muslims, and full of self-pride of being I-am-a-non-Muslim-and-only-non-Muslims-are-allowed-to-live, and also half of the comments suggesting things like “Nuke them”, “take oil” and blah blah, the only thing that comes to my mind is that it is totally useless to expect peace from you guys(hmmm, I must say there are a few sane people too, though). The only way Muslims have is to rise again, gain technological supremacy, and make the cruel fear, again (as they used to do in the caliphate age).

  38. 100 mile x 100 mile solar arrays and desalination plants are:

    1. Too, too tempting terrorist targets, and

    2. Massively centralised single points of failure.

    If the government wants to piss money up against the wall, have them install – free of charge – solar collectors on every single residence with a net surplus capacity, and sufficient underground residential rainwater tanks to eliminate the need for mains water. Now instead of having a handful of electricity production points with the potential to affect millions if they fail or are sabotaged, you have millions of electricity production points scattered uniformly across the country.

    Unfortunately, politicians seem to be uncontrollably attracted to large, shiny white elephants.

  39. 100 mile x 100 mile solar arrays and desalination plants are:

    1. Too, too tempting terrorist targets, and

    No way. Desalination plants are a lot less flammable than oil refineries, and those haven’t proved too vulnerable yet. And you’d need (a bunch of) nukes to make any impression on something 100 miles by 100 miles. No, for true terrorist temptation nothing beats a space elevator.

  40. “Desalination plants are a lot less flammable than oil refineries, and those haven’t proved too vulnerable yet. And you’d need (a bunch of) nukes to make any impression on something 100 miles by 100 miles.”

    That’s the difference between terrorists/guerillas and Americans. All you need to disable these are three guys and some wirecutters. They walk along going snip, snip snip until the security guards take them down. Then it takes technicians a week to work out what the hell they cut. Technology is our achilles heel.

    But I can take a very good guess at why refineries haven’t been targeted. If the terrorists blow up refineries in the west, the west has less refining capacity and buys less oil from the Saudis. And if the Saudis have less money, the terrorists don’t get paid.

  41. “I wasn’t proposing that a 100 mile x 100 mile solar array be built. You would certainly want to distribute it.”

    And the reason you couldn’t distribute it over residential roofspace is…?

  42. BTW, there was an article in today’s Minneapolis Star-Tribune about how many planned wind farms in Minnesota are being indefinitely delayed because of a controversy over one back East – and some may be rendered economically infeasible because of it.

    As for nuclear power, how much fo the cost is due to artifical regulations that seem designed to do nothing so much as make it too expensive to run nuclear plants? As others poited out, they work elsewhere in the world…

  43. Robert Godwin has a review of Shelby Steele’s book “White Guilt.” I just started reading it and am only 1/4 the way through so can’t particularly offer a review as yet, but Godwin’s review prompted me to buy the book. He writes:

    Steele notes that the exploitation of white guilt leads to a perversion of character, wherein the victim can elevate himself above the guilty oppressor, thus creating “an empowering feeling of license.”

    I think Steele’s ideas can to some extent be applied to understanding the issue of Islam vs the World. I would say, in this context, the effects from four decades of politically correct indoctrination have had a greater hand in the “perversion of character” of how the West, America in particular, perceives itself on the global stage. Terrorists step on us because 1) they realize they can and 2) a sizable portion of society actually wants them to step on us.

  44. Pre-claimer: I’m more outspoken on Islamic terror and fundamentalism than will one day be good for me (I have to suspect, I live in Europe).

    Still, given how much more the US meddle in middle-eastern affairs, and for how much longer, than terrorists have ever meddled with the US – especially on US soil! – I really miss proper capitalisation in the unintentionally hilarious phrase “bush-league terrorist”. In the end, you assign different intrinsic value to different innocent civilians based on cultural origin, and that’s deeply collectivist.

    To clarify: As much as I support the vilification of one side on part of ESR (they truly are vile), he simply is objectively un-libertarian, given how much he supports foreign intervention and the necessary increase of the national security and warfare state.

    So, dear ESR, state whatever you want, but give your intelligence the honour it deserves and stop both sailing under false flag as a “libertarian” and thinking with all the cool neutrality of a talking-head style pundit. Note that I didn’t call for “moral relativism” or “neutrality in action”, but a certain neutrality in observation and description would serve you well. This is plain punditry.

  45. GPE,
    Shelby Steele is one of the most important intellectuals we have in the West, precisely because of his work in this area.

    And yes, I am aware that for all of my bashing of intellectuals, to a degree we depend on intellectuals like Steele to clean up the messes that other intellectuals have made.

    This simply doesn’t seem to be something the ordinary schmucks can do for themselves. The dumbfucks out in flyover land can make the machinery work. But they can’t create an overall philosophical framework for deciding whether or not the machinery is GOOD.

    Last night I suggested we do more to make the Muslim world dependent on us. Today, I note morbidly that we, the land of the schmucks, are in some ways dependent on the goodwill of an educated elite to some degree inherently hostile to our interests.

    This is not a good position to be in, and when I suggested we try to put the Arabs in it, I was not being kind.

  46. Er, last I checked, our glorious Republican leaders were not exactly talking like Roman Emperors. For a while they were, up until about Afghanistan, where we cold-bloodedly did the right thing for our country’s interests. And then somehow we got bogged down in Iraq, and now all of a sudden we care about building freedom and democracy in other countries. (Somehow I think I missed the memo about *why* we care about this.)

    In terms of creating and dissuading terrorists, a bunch of points have already been made about why Palestinians are in a very different situation than Iraqis. But also, it almost has to go both ways. When we blow Zarqawi away, some people probably watched and said, “DAMN THE INFIDELS, LETS GET THEM!” while others said (probably to themselves) “Shit, man, I don’t want to end up like THAT.” It’s not like an either-or proposition.

  47. “The natural processes of our society unfolding, processes which we cannot stop and remain ourselves, are terminally corrosive to the traditional Muslim way of life.”

    I can’t accept this. See, there are people all over the world who think something called new American culture – however undefined it is – is destroying their traditional way of living. There are even some of this type in America, like Buchanan or Perot. Still, what we generally see is that most people don’t give a damn about it, others do give, but battle the influence in normal, humane, democratic ways, like the law in France that one day of the week all TV stations must broadcast only national films. Being afraid of a cultural influence is no excuse to blow people up, simply because nobody else is doing it.

    Furthermore, artificially preserving a culture is rarely successful. A great example is what happening in Bhutan. It’s a small, feudal Buddhist country, where the king really tries to preserve the traditions with banning radios and Western clothes and so on. The only thing he achieved is that the traditions lost their content there and are only a rigid outer frame now, without any meaning. Meanwhile, we have an amazingly lively Buddhist culture here in Central, Northern and Western Europes, when five thousands attend to course and are all clever and understanding what’s going on, they are chatting about Nagarjuna’s philosophy with the same familiarity as others chat about Kant, while most Bhutanese have completely no idea who Nagarjuna was. And now what’s happening is that we send teachers from Germany to help people rediscover that content, that meaning that disapperad from their culture, and put the flesh back to the rigid bones.
    Meanwhile, for every Buddhist in Europe there are a hundred new-born Christians in India, it seems the Church is surprisingly successful there. So what’s actually happening is cultures exchanging in a free competition typically find their right places. Artificial preservation never worked.

    I think a lot of Arabs would like to live the way you do. Others will grudgingly accept that the previous ones must have their right to choose, as soon as the militant ones are taken down. Still others will preserve their way of living because they choose to, as we did in Transylvanian villages, and will learn to mind their own business.

  48. GPE & Dean,

    it’s interesting how we have similar problems half a planet away: replace “black” with “gypsy”, and you got an exact replica of what’s goin’ on in America here in Eastern Europe: the situation, the problems, the racist’s ideas, the liberal’s ideas, and the clever guys ideas like this Shelby, and so on. Moreover, you could substitute it with “arab” and you would get Western Europe, you could substitute “bedouin” and you would get Arab countries, and so on.

    The basic pattern is the following. There is a school, where the strong schoolboys terrorize the weak ones: beat’em up, take away their food, humiliate them and so on. Later on, the school gets some strong liberal teachers who put things in order: punish the most aggressive strong boys, therefore the other strong boys learn to behave and everything seems to be in order. For a while. But later on, some weak boys get the idea that it’s their time to strike back, and besides, to profit from the situation, and tell the strong boys “Now, YOU give me your food or I’l tell the teacher you bullied me! And clean my shoes. You don’t want to be punished by the teacher, do you?” And then we have the problem we generally have now with racism, anti-racism and liberalism.

    Sadly, I don’t think there is an easy solution. Maybe it sound weirds, but the best idea I could come up with is to allow the strong boys to slightly oppress the weak boys, only punish those who go over the line too much. Not a very good idea, but I have no better.

    Have you read The Redneck Manifesto? http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0684838648/sr=8-1/qid=1150239678/ref=pd_bbs_1/104-7961509-3747122?%5Fencoding=UTF8

  49. Shenpen,
    >I think a lot of Arabs would like to live the way you do.

    Observe that Mohammed Atta and the other 911 hijackers, Richard Reid, the attempted shoe bomber, as well as Osama himself are not ignorant people. They are not angry with or frightened of a West they do not understand. They are all very familiar with our way of life, it charms, pleasures and benefits.

    But the young Muslim man is in an odd position in Europe or the States. He is in the West but not of it. None of his people ever invented the microwave oven, or the polio vaccine, or the transistor, or anything like that.

    Islam is supposed to be the final revelation of the Abrahamic tradition, God’s ultimate plan for the universe. And Muslims are supposed to be God’s new chosen people, elevated above all others, clearly superior. But them Jews in Israel got themselves a lively and profitable programming industry, and when’s the last time you heard of any Arab software that wasn’t just a copycat of the West?

    It is one thing to come to the West from animist or Christian Africa, realize that you are the bumpkin in the big city, that you have a steep learning curve to climb, and you’d best get after it.

    But as a Muslim, you aren’t supposed to have to learn anything from the Infidel, he is supposed to be inferior to you. If the Infidel had maybe one or two tricks up his sleeve that you could stand to pick up on, that would be one thing. But the God-damned Infidel has created an entire world of wizardry and original thought which your Islamic culture not only did not create, but COULD NOT have.

    That is one very bitter pill to swallow. And many a young Muslim man has felt compelled to vomit it back up. Not all of them become terrorists, but there is one other profound observation to consider.

    Explanations. You can find Western Infidels like me, who attempt to describe the psychology of the Jihadi as well as we can. But looking into Islam itself you will observe a curious thing. Virtually every Muslim intellectual who has attempted to write an apologia or explanation of the Jihadi grievances against the West has subsequently been indicted for helping the terrorists in some way. It is apparently not possible (or at least very difficult) for any Muslim to consider the Jihadi argument closely, but with dispassion.

    I don’t think Islam is like Buddhism, Hinduism, or Christianity. Those other religious traditions can bend in the face of the winds of change. Islam will probably break.

    I say this not to excuse terrorist murderers. I have no sympathy for Jihadis, and I want them all to die. But there are reasons for their murderous passions. Reasons we cannot simply explain away.

  50. And yes, I am aware that for all of my bashing of intellectuals, to a degree we depend on intellectuals like Steele to clean up the messes that other intellectuals have made.

    So basically you are for intellectuals that you agree with, and think we should boot those out that you don’t agree with.

    I’m confused as to what you mean by machinery. Are you saying that non-costal institutions have a poor method of research and academic discussion? What area are you even talking about? Your comment seems to be very out of context, or maybe I am behind in the conversation.

    Secondly, I’m interested in knowing what areas you think we are and are not dependent upon the “educated elite” (or in my mind, the people specializing in certain fields).

  51. Islam gave us the mathematical concept of zero, which constitutes half of the binary code on which our society’s technical wizardry is built. Algorithms are also an islamic invention. Any software engineer will testify to the importance of algorithms in western society.

    What more do they want? A medal? If muslims want to be superior to the west, they might want to stop banning our books and perhaps consider picking one up and reading it. Know thy enemy, I believe is the phrase.

  52. std,
    >Your comment seems to be very out of context, or maybe I am behind in the conversation.

    So sorry. In Eric’s post before last named Massive Intelligence Raids Follow Zarqawi’s Death I yammered a lot in
    the comment section about, as you say, the eeeeevil of pointy-heads I don’t like. I do that a lot. I clearly have issues. Once again, mia culpa.

  53. And the reason you couldn’t distribute it over residential roofspace is…?

    None offered. Its the semi-obvious optimal solution.

    There are 27,878,400,000 ft^2 in a 100 mile^2 array.

    HUD says there are over 60 million single-family homes in the US (using data from the 2000 census.) You obviously come up a little short if you only use single-family homes (you need an average of 4646 ft^2 of solar array on each home, and this exceeds the roof area of your average house.)

    If you include MDUs (apartments, condos, etc) you can probably reach the goal. Including commercial real-estate roofs, then you definitely can reach the goal.

    If we stick with commodity solar panels (like the BP-SX170B) then each has a surface area of approximately 13.5 ft^2, so you’ll need 205 million of them to build out a distributed residential array. These panels are approximately $1,000 each (at retail), so, assuming that the government selected 1 million “solar roofs”, and provided an array for each, (paying 50% of retail (still high) for the panels, and the other 50% for the inverter(s), wiring and installation, the total investment, we’d see a total investment of $205 billion.

    This is $115 billion less than the direct costs (to the US alone) of the Iraq war thusfar.

    Our engagement in Afghanistan has cost another $66 billion (thus far).

    In reality, the direct costs of a million solar roofs would be much lower, since I haven’t factored out transmission line losses, “spinning losses” from all-but-idle generators, spiraling fuel costs, and the simple fact that the “owners” of these roofs might be able to sell any excess power back to the grid (though they should probably first pay back whatever program facilitated the install).

    Never mind the direct and indirect benefits to society of an abundance of very inexpensive electricity, the R&D that would undoubtedly be driven by such an endeavor, the cleaner air, etc.

    But no, we have to let hate and greed rule us.

    Peace

  54. “Never mind the direct and indirect benefits to society of an abundance of very inexpensive electricity, the R&D that would undoubtedly be driven by such an endeavor, the cleaner air, etc.”

    It’s impossible to put too high a price on R&D. A good example was when I visited my cousin in Germany and he was excitedly showing and explaining the magnificent wind turbines they have there. I asked how long it took for one of these turbines to pay for itself. His response was that this current generation of turbines would never recoup expenses over their lifespans. But what the building of them *did* allow was the experience for the scientists to make the next generation profitable.

    Would anyone dare to guess how many unintended beneficial discoveries would be made during the installation of one million residential solar arrays?

  55. Jason Posavec,
    >Islam gave us the mathematical concept of zero, which constitutes half of the binary code on which our society’s technical wizardry is built. Algorithms are also an islamic invention.

    My wife, who was born in Bombay, tells me you are mistaken. The Arabs got the zero and algebra from India. The Hindus invented that stuff.

  56. > My wife, who was born in Bombay, tells me you are mistaken.

    Then she is wrong. The Babylonians had a zero long before the Hindus.

  57. >Islam gave us the mathematical concept of zero, which constitutes half of the binary code on which our society’s technical wizardry is built.

    Jason,

    The zero is dated much eariler, have a look on wikipedia for “0 (number)”.
    from what i can glean the myans or hindus have saved us from total
    barbarity of thought around 4 B.C.

    I should read up on Algorithms Ada Lovelace is a babe!
    see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ada_Lovelace

  58. Ada Lovelace: arguably the first hacker and also hot! Too bad her doctors bled her to death. They would have gotten away with it in the 21st century without Open Source.

  59. ESR, America needs a way to fight the Islamists on an *ideological* level, not a purely military one. (Or memetic level if you prefer that term.) The history of religion is that when a religion gets attacked and persecuted, it tends to make the religion *grow* not shrink. Won’t killing terrorists just make them “martyrs” and make more terrorists? The problem as I see it is that the US, and the West in general, has no answer to Islam. We have no answer to the Islamic *belief*system* and it is the belief system that creates terrorists. If we can’t convince people to abandon Islam there will always be more terrorists, no matter how many the US kills, don’t you agree?

  60. wayne,
    >We have no answer to the Islamic *belief*system*

    Precisely which belief system are you referring to? If you mean the proposition that there is a God who makes moral demands on you and will send you to Heaven or Hell depending on the alacrity with which you meet those demands, of course we have a refutation to it. Just watch the next George Carlin comedy special on HBO. Eric also has a few choice things to say about God and religious faith, right here on this very blog.

    If you mean bin Laden’s allegation that the West has grown decadent and weak, that our wizard weapons are a thing to be feared, but that we ourselves have no stomach for war, that we are rich and comfortable and unwilling to sacrifice or risk anything that might disrupt that comfort, that we are no longer MEN, how would you go about refuting that?

    The essence of the Jihadi argument about us is that we have turned away from God in our pursuit of individual freedom and material wealth, and that the wealth and freedom has turned us into a bunch of pussies.

    Further, that God’s displeasure with us can be inferred from our cowardice as follows: If God wanted us to survive, if we were pleasing to Him, He would give us manly courage with which to identify, face and dispatch our enemies. Since He has made most of us into wimps, one can logically infer that He must want us to die. Quad erat demonstrandum.

    One cannot separate our military conflict with Islam from our ideological one. Ultimately, they are one.

  61. “The zero is dated much eariler, have a look on wikipedia for “0 (number)”.
    from what i can glean the myans or hindus have saved us from total
    barbarity of thought around 4 B.C.”

    In that case I stand corrected. Islam has given nothing to the West. (as opposed to zero). Maybe Dean is onto something, then.

  62. “I say this not to excuse terrorist murderers. I have no sympathy for Jihadis, and I want them all to die. But there are reasons for their murderous passions. Reasons we cannot simply explain away.”

    Asking “why” is the most effective – and most difficult, thus least used – methods of combating a problem. Just like the war on drugs is being waged by targetting the financiers instead of asking WHY so many youths and unemployed are taking them; the war on terror focusses entirely on targetting the financiers and other media-friendly bigwigs, instead of asking WHY an otherwise normal, average muslim would happily give his life away to harm people he’s never met.

    I wonder what the result in Iraq would have been if hot on the tails of the invasion spearhead were thousands of U.S. financed civil construction companies sealing roads, laying water pipes, building cheap modern housing, markets, and mosques. Would the average Iraqi in the street still hate the West, or would he be thinking, “Wow, that’s a fine looking Mosque they’ve built for my family to worship in. And conveniently across the street from a halal McDonalds as well! America be praised!”

  63. Actually, even though the concept of zero was invented much earlier, it was the islamic mathematicians and intellectuals that adopted it and (along with a boatload of greek knowledge the west had lost during the dark ages) brought it back with them to Europe.

    So you’re all more or less right.

  64. “Actually, even though the concept of zero was invented much earlier”

    Then what’s all this rubbish about us having a legacy of centuries starting at xx01 because Dionysius and Pope Gregory weren’t aware of the concept of zero when they invented the Gregorian calendar?

  65. Jason Posavec,
    >the result in Iraq would have been if hot on the tails of the invasion spearhead were thousands of U.S. financed civil construction companies sealing roads, laying water pipes, building cheap modern housing, markets, and mosques

    Your heart is clearly in the right place, but if you think we could ever get good results in a Muslim country by going in and building things for them that they could not build for themselves, that they would receive these things with gratitude rather than humiliation, then I have to suggest you go back to Psych 101.

    “If you pick up a starving dog and make him prosperous, he will not bite you. This is the principal difference between a dog and a man.”
    Mark Twain

  66. Beats me. There’s the legend that Columbus had his proposal rejected because people thought the earth was flat… It’s false, it was rejected because his calculations for distance and time of travel were dead wrong. If America hadn’t been where it is, they’d have had to go back halfway to the real “Indies”.

    The calendar was probably started at 1 because it’s more natural to count from 1 than to count from 0, even though it lead to the stupidity of having Jesus born before year 1.

  67. Jason wrote:

    I wonder what the result in Iraq would have been if hot on the tails of the invasion spearhead were thousands of U.S. financed civil construction companies sealing roads, laying water pipes, building cheap modern housing, markets, and mosques. Would the average Iraqi in the street still hate the West, or would he be thinking, “Wow, that’s a fine looking Mosque they’ve built for my family to worship in. And conveniently across the street from a halal McDonalds as well! America be praised!”

    Jason, much of what you describe has, in fact, happened, though it’s not US civil construction companies. It’s the US Army Corps of Engineers, financing a lot of Iraqi construction companies, often with manpower from US soldiers thrown in when the number of trained Iraqi construction workers in a region falls short.

    The number of commercial buildings with wiring, plumbing and telephony service has roughly doubled since Saddam Hussein’s reign.

    The number of elementary schools has quadrupled, and the number of “middle schools” has grown by 50%.

    The biggest problems right now in Iraqi rebuilding are terrorist attacks from Sunnis on Shia, and the problem of people dismantling things like cell phone towers for the wiring to make chicken coops in rural areas.

    Of course, this reconstruction effort never actually gets reported…just like the fact that most of the terrorist attacks in Iraq happen in areas where it’s easy to get a Western film crew to video tape it, and how most terrorist attacks happen against other Iraqis, because the American Coward Troops are too difficult to get at, and too relentless when they’re let off their leash.

    There are many Iraqis who, having seen our capabilities at Sadr City and Fallujah, wonder why we don’t just go into areas where insurgents are known to hide out, and kill every man between the ages of 13 and 40 there to “solve the problem once and for all” – it is, after all, what THEY would do with that capability.

  68. If you do something for a child, which he couldn’t do for himself, and he might well be grateful, for about 3 seconds before he goes off to play.

    But a grown man, who has religious convictions that he is supposed to be your superior in every important respect? That’s not gonna go over too well.

    If we could get the Islamic world to like us by giving them shit, then how come all the Muslims we saved from the slaughter in Bosnia don’t count for anything? Or our help pushing the Soviets out of Afghanistan? Or how about the biggest gimme of all: making billionaires out of oil sheiks who could never have found, drilled, pumped, piped, and certainly not refined any of that black goop without the industrial West to, well basically, do it for them.

    Why aren’t they grateful? Dude, human nature doesn’t do that.

  69. Your heart is clearly in the right place, but if you think we could ever get good results in a Muslim country by going in and building things for them that they could not build for themselves, that they would receive these things with gratitude rather than humiliation, then I have to suggest you go back to Psych 101.

    This is more a characteristic of males than of Muslims – I remember reading about a whole bunch of aid programs in Africa which were subtly sabotaged by the guys, who found receiving it to be humiliating and girly. Directing it squarely towards women as much as possible is often a better proposition, as it doesn’t existentially piss them off nearly as much.

    The Iraqis have plenty of qualified engineers. Do you think Halliburton took pains to employ them? Some of them have been having a rather surreal time watching how much money has been just *squandered* out there.

  70. On techno-power:

    Those same solar arrays in orbit will generate twice the power per 24 hour period is one reason to put them there.

    Transmission losses on microwave beaming transmission over ground stations are at about 15-25% in some frequency bands, per patents that I was reviewing a decade ago. You just don’t want to be IN that beam path; what we don’t know (yet) is how much attenuation losses for 500 km long beam paths are.

    Making the hydrogen liquid is, indeed, a problem. On the other hand, spending 40% of the energy in the fuel to liquify it is nothing compared to the roughly 150% of the energy in the fuel needed to desalinate and crack seawater.

    The only way hydrogen as a fuel makes sense is if we’re generating so much additional electrical capacity compared to our actual use that we can afford to store it in liquified hydrogen. Replace “liquid hydrogen” with “thermally depolymerized organics” and maybe it works better.

    On the other hand, since we already have high temperature superconductors that merely need cryogenic temps, using the right of ways needed for cryogenic hydrogen lines to also run superconducting power lines…

    Well, hey, a man can dream.

    (Exuent obligatory Kirsten Dunst reference….)

  71. If we could get the Islamic world to like us by giving them shit, then how come all the Muslims we saved from the slaughter in Bosnia don’t count for anything?

    Well, *they* probably like us. Expecting every Muslim under the sun to do so as well is probably a little optimistic.

    Or our help pushing the Soviets out of Afghanistan?

    ISTR we kind of lost interest in them after the Soviets left.

    Or how about the biggest gimme of all: making billionaires out of oil sheiks who could never have found, drilled, pumped, piped, and certainly not refined any of that black goop without the industrial West to, well basically, do it for them.

    They probably have ways of estimating how much of our own development was made possible by decades of cheap energy as well. Trying to pass it off as a huge act of selflessness on our part isn’t going to be hugely convincing.

  72. Ken, who’s paying for all that wonderful stuff? Because if Halliburton is going to present their bills to the Iraqi government at market prices, I don’t think it’s so altruistic after all.

  73. I very much doubt that many here will view this, but I’ll offer it up anyway.

    http://www.archive.org/details/ThePowerOfNightmares

    Three part BBC series which explores the origins in the 1940s and 50s of Islamic Fundamentalism in the Middle East, and Neoconservatism in America, parallels between these movements, and their effect on the world today.

    From the introduction to Part 1:

    “Both [the Islamists and Neoconservatives] were idealists who were born out of the failure of the liberal dream to build a better world. And both had a very similar explanation for what caused that failure. These two groups have changed the world, but not in the way that either intended. Together, they created today’s nightmare vision of a secret, organized evil that threatens the world. A fantasy that politicians then found restored their power and authority in a disillusioned age. And those with the darkest fears became the most powerful.”

    See also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Power_of_Nightmares

  74. adrian10,
    >Directing it squarely towards women as much as possible is often a better proposition

    There is some truth to what you say. A woman’s pride is stung FAR less than a man’s upon the receipt of free shit. There is a downside to that approach, as well.

    One of the greatest home grown tragedies in my country started in the 1960s when the government decided to hand out checks, in perpetuity, to poor black women who had children, on the condition that they were not married and never got married.

    Of course, this did little for the public image of inner-city black women, but the real horror is what it did to the men. They became unnecessary in their own communities, except as sperm donors.

    They had little to do, except get high and get money, through nefarious means, to keep getting high. After all, what else were they needed for? Uncle Sam looked after their bitches and their brats.

    I have read that something like half of all black men in America between the ages of 15 and 35 are either in jail or on probation.

    Free shit always has a cost. It is frequently advocated by the well-meaning, to relieve the suffering of the most vulnerable. But after the advocates have gone home, feeling smug and self satisfied, the most vulnerable often learn whole new ways to suffer.

    Is there any fate that a man can endure that is worse than becoming superfluous?

  75. adrian10,
    >Trying to pass it off as a huge act of selflessness on our part isn’t going to be hugely convincing.

    Dude, are you being deliberately obtuse just to mess with me? Not that I probably don’t deserve it, but still.

    The issue is not whether we were engaging in perfectly selfless Christian charity. It is that they couldn’t have pulled up that oil on their own, for any motive in the human pantheon.

    What difference does it make WHY we did it? The point is that that their religion tells them that they are supposed to be able to do things that we can’t. Not the other way around.

  76. Jim Thompson,
    >Both [the Islamists and Neoconservatives]…created today’s nightmare

    Yeah, yeah. People like me are just as bad as bin Laden. A pox on both our houses. Lefties like you are morally and intellectually superior. Let us all bow down before your brilliance and saintliness.

    I think I may have heard that argument before, maybe once or twice.

  77. Quite so. And I stand corrected. To paraphrase the NRA:
    Communists don’t kill people. Famines, purges and slave labor camps kill people.

  78. adrian and Jim,
    I don’t mean to insult you personally. And I’m pretty sure I have yammered on about this topic before, somewhere on Eric’s blog. But I’m too lazy to dig it out so I’ll just repeat myself like I always do.

    Do you ever think about what it must have been like to be a secular intellectual at the dawn of the 20th century? Other than a few minor peccadilloes during the French Revolution, people like us had never really killed anybody, nor had we been apologists for those who did.

    All the horrors of say, the Reformation or the Inquisition, we could blame on the priests, the religious intellectuals. Not people like us. Nosiree, bob.

    Because of our superior education and eloquence, and the common people’s willingness to ASSUME that we were good people because we talked a good game, we had the people’s respect and, in every moral question, we were given the benefit of the doubt.

    Whether you will ever admit it or not, and I strongly suspect that you won’t, you Lefties fucked us all. Now, when the common people look at us, when we start yammering at them about how they should do this or that, they see a skull and crossbones tattooed on our foreheads and, in our sweet words, they hear the screams of the murdered dead.

    And still you have the gall to insist that anyone who is not a socialist is a ghoul.

    In the name of all secular wordy types everywhere, I say to you, to paraphrase Marlon Brando in On The Waterfront:
    “You don’t understand. I coulda had class. I coulda been a contender. I coulda been somebody, instead of a [murderous] bum, which is what I am, let’s face it. It was you, Charley.”

  79. > Other than a few minor peccadilloes during the French Revolution, people like us had never really killed anybody, nor had we been apologists for those who did.

    That’s just because you never had the power.

  80. Jim: Islamists … Neoconservatism in America, parallels between these movements, and their effect on the world today.

    This sounds absurd on the face of it, as it is another attempt to equivocate between murderous thugs and political idealogues. It’s just an extension of “jihad is caused by an uncaring society,” attempting to explain directed violence by pointing the finger of blame at moneyed, white guys. I’m sure it’s an excellent piece. Perhaps we can suggest another piece to compare Jeffersonian Democracy with the Mexican Revolution in the early 20th century.

    Can we get past this? Jihad isn’t a reaction to political movements in America, or social policies, or lack of support for welfare. It’s a nihilistic intent to gain power by claiming theocratic authority using any means necessary. Neoconservatism doesn’t remotely claim the same authority, pedigree, or have the history of violence and terrorism.

    Moral equivalency doesn’t wash just because the august BBC does a three part series on it.

  81. >That’s just because you never had the power.

    Ok, fine. So we were never meant to rule. I don’t need power. I’d just like it if, when I start to yammer endlessly at people, they find me merely tedious and boring.

    What I hate is knowing that the sensible and imaginative ones can easily visualize me penning soulful soliloquies in praise of murderous tyrants and sadistic monsters while sipping Chablis on a terrace overlooking the salt mines.

    It’s ok if people think I’m boring. I just don’t want them to view me with murderous suspicion just because I have diarrhea of the mouth and pen.

    Do you realize that, if the human race lasts for another million years, we intellectuals will never get our good name back. When they look at us, sensible ordinary people will see Walter Duranty until the end of time.

    When I die and go to Hell, I hope I meet up with Karl Marx just so I can stick a red hot poker up his ass myself.

  82. “…Moral equivalency doesn’t wash just because the august BBC does a three part series on it…”

    But there’s nothing quite like the smugness, from watching PBS or BBCA reruns of limey guff, that fluffs up the ego of contemporary liberals…content in their Antoinette-ish conceit that the common oiks ‘just don’t get it’.

    ;-)

  83. Shenpen : I love the fellas enthusiasm, but in his dissection of ‘the monster’ he utterly fails to mention formal methods…which leaves more than a whiff of ‘half-baked shoddiness’ in the air…but I wish him luck ;-)

  84. Shenpen: LOL! The COSA project is taking us entirely in the wrong direction, since as Jaron Lanier elucidated, the notion of signals is precisely the metaphor that defines, circumscribes, and hence limits all software produced until the present day; and as such needs to be transcended if we are to make progress in software reliability.

    (Holy crap! Did I just say that? I bet I could write a scholarly paper contrasting Savain with Lanier, and get it published in Social Text. Awesome.)

  85. Can we get past this? Jihad isn’t a reaction to political movements in America, or social policies, or lack of support for welfare. It’s a nihilistic intent to gain power by claiming theocratic authority using any means necessary. Neoconservatism doesn’t remotely claim the same authority, pedigree, or have the history of violence and terrorism.

    Moral equivalency doesn’t wash just because the august BBC does a three part series on it.

    Perhaps you should first watch the programme.

    (I’m not (a) ‘leftist’, btw.)

  86. Jim,
    Dude, not to be an asshole about this, but, when you say:
    I am not a ‘leftist’
    with the quotes, it communicates loud and clear.

  87. Do you ever think about what it must have been like to be a secular intellectual at the dawn of the 20th century? Other than a few minor peccadilloes during the French Revolution, people like us had never really killed anybody, nor had we been apologists for those who did.

    So, what is it? I should be apologising for belonging to the same category of person that produced Marx and Lenin (not sure I’d accept Stalin and Mao as intellectuals, they sound like a couple of knonuffs)? Forever promising to keep my mouth shut and never express any of my naughty elitist opinions EVER AGAIN? Constantly acknowledging that people who work with ideas have NO PLACE saying what ought to happen, and devoting myself to exclaiming how the market, with its finely balanced response to every individual’s behaviour (cue distant hollow laughter), is the ultimate populist answer to every question ever asked anywhere?

    I’m more than half expecting death at some point in the first part of this century on a scale which will bring everything the Nazis and Communists did into proportion, anyway. And this time I suspect the pointy-heads will be further from the levers of power.

    And still you have the gall to insist that anyone who is not a socialist is a ghoul.

    Missed where I said that.

  88. >I’m more than half expecting death at some point in the first part of this century on a scale which will bring everything the Nazis and Communists did into proportion, anyway. And this time I suspect the pointy-heads will be further from the levers of power.

    Who do you think will fire the first missle and how many will be sent in
    response?

  89. *repost*
    >I’m more than half expecting death at some point in the first part of this century on a scale which will bring everything the Nazis and Communists did into proportion, anyway. And this time I suspect the pointy-heads will be further from the levers of power.

    Who and when do you think will fire the first missile and how many will be sent in response?

  90. adrian,
    >I’m more than half expecting death

    Yes, with all the loose nukes floating around, plus the frightening possibilities of new technologies, we could very well face Armageddon. But suppose we don’t.

    Suppose, with the pointy heads not trying to run everything, that the ordinary schmucks manage to pull our nuts out of the fire, and offer our children a decent future.

    Would you then be willing to show a little humility? In between the distant hollow laughter?

  91. > Still…having even bush-league terrorists fear harming Americans is a good start, and as neat a vindication of George Bush’s foreign policy and the war in Iraq as anyone could ask for.

    Eric, the manner in which you manage to reconcile that statement with a supposedly anarcho-capitalist value system is beyond my comprehension.

  92. Who and when do you think will fire the first missile and how many will be sent in response?

    Peak oil, not nuclear war, though it wouldn’t be surprising if there was a bit of that as well. Too many people, not enough food. Think of that “balloon game” they used to play in school, only with seven billion in the gondola. Oh, now six point nine…

    Suppose, with the pointy heads not trying to run everything, that the ordinary schmucks manage to pull our nuts out of the fire, and offer our children a decent future.

    I need some scenarios, some parameters that would indicate the the nuts have been pulled a safe distance from the flames. I don’t know what you expect the ordinary schmucks to do in particular. Vote for Jeb in 2012? Install solar barbecues?

    Would you then be willing to show a little humility? In between the distant hollow laughter?

    Of course. I keep saying I don’t *know* what’s going to happen. We’re all balancing baskets of probabilities in our heads.

  93. The issue is not whether we were engaging in perfectly selfless Christian charity. It is that they couldn’t have pulled up that oil on their own, for any motive in the human pantheon.

    There may be historical reasons why endogenous development never kicked off in the Middle East the way it did in the West and Asia, as opposed to the “Muslims are just crap” notions you’re floating around the place. Some of Jane Jacobs’ stuff on cities was interesting – it does sound to me like the city is the natural unit of development, but if certain conditions aren’t met they don’t automatically get going. She also reckoned excessive natural resources can stunt the process.

    What difference does it make WHY we did it? The point is that that their religion tells them that they are supposed to be able to do things that we can’t. Not the other way around.

    What does the Koran say they can do that we can’t, apart from go to heaven and get more virgins than anyone needs?

  94. >the “Muslims are just crap” notions you’re floating around the place

    For the record, Islam provides ephemeral, essentially isolated human beings with a sense of community, connection to the eternal, and above all, comfort in the face of inevitable death. This is what religions are supposed to do, and its longevity is testament to the quality of religious experience that Islam provides.

    If anything, the problem with Islam is that the comfort it provides is too perfect. Observe the ease with which Western Europe has been de-Christianized in comparison to the profound difficulty Turkey has in trying to de-Islamify. Islam answers a call in the human heart, probably as perfectly as any religion ever has.

    But when you have found something which is perfect, common sense tells you not to fuck with it. The trouble with Islam is the vehemence with which it resists change.

    The rap on bin Laden is that he wants a world-wide Taliban, wherein all of humanity will, in perpetuity, continue to party like it’s 1399. It is important to realize, however, that if the vision he offers were not philosophically beautiful, however empirically ugly it might be, he would never be able to attract so many followers.

  95. Alternatively, one could consider Islam, especially the dominant sects in the Middle East, to be the most degrading form of social engineering. It thrives on violently surpressing any intellectual and scientific evolution among the people. This may go some way to explain its longevity, rather than it being ‘too perfectly comfortable’, as well as helping to explain the pathetic absence of endogenous development. ‘Mohammed Q Public’ is sickeningly enslaved in body, heart and mind.

    Where ‘western’ influence has crept into everyday life (eg. Iran), isn’t it strange how there is growing *discomfort* with the status quo…among the young, especially?

  96. Islam is just another mass movement. I couldn’t explain them better than Eric Hoffer did in The True Believer.

  97. Eric, along with many of the commenters here, seem to be mostly of the opinion that religion is, more or less, crap. I am an atheist who does not share that opinion. Religions conveys several profound advantages to the believer, along with some disadvantages. The advantages are as follows:

    1) A Moral Spine-Stiffener. The next time you go to a store, or perhaps a neighbor’s house, and you see something you want, something they would never miss, or never know that you took, why not steal it? One answer is that if things keep turning up missing whenever you are around, people will stop inviting you around. Another answer is that you would, in time, lose your self-respect if you became a thief. But these shields against temptation require imagination. If you believed in a God who was watching you all the time, and would surely punish you for any wrong that you did, that might make it easier to remain honest in situations where dishonesty would be easy, profitable and difficult to detect.

    2) A Way Back. So you have a bad day and decide to go out to the local bar (pub for you Brits) and get drunk. At closing time you get back into your car and head home. But you are to bleary-eyed to see clearly and wind up smashing into another car, killing a little boy. How do you come back from that, and go on to live a good life, ever? You would need forgiveness. Yet, even if they were of a mind to, the boy’s parents cannot forgive you. You took their son, but you took his life. And since the boy is dead, he is not around to forgive you. But God could. He created the boy in the first place, and so he has the authority to grant you forgiveness for killing him. Your only other way out of the guilt would be to hate the kid you killed. But then you’d be a horrible person.

    3) Aesthetics and Dignity. On April 14, 2004 an Italian security guard named Fabrizio Quattrocchi was killed by Islamists in Iraq. He had been captured and was to be executed to make a propaganda/snuff video for the Jihadis. According to Wikipedia:
    Quattrocchi’s kidnappers forced him to dig his own grave and kneel beside it wearing a hood as they prepared to film his death, but he defied them by pulling off the hood and shouting “Adesso (or ora) vi faccio vedere come muore un italiano.” — “Now I will show you how an Italian dies.” He was then shot in the back of the neck.

    I hope I could face death that way in a similar situation. But how can I be sure? One thing I am sure of is that it is easier to face death with courage if you believe that death is not the end. If there is life after death, then the loss of life is not so devastating, and it becomes easier to care about HOW you die, not just when.

    These are some of the advantages of religious faith. There are others, but this post is too long anyway. The most obvious disadvantage is that belief makes you vulnerable to those who might want to take advantage of you for their own ends, e.g. teenage virgin suicide bombers who have been conned into believing that Heaven is a bordello.

    I am not, never have been, and likely never will be a believer. But I cannot find any contempt for those who are. There’s a reason why 95% of the people in the world identify themselves as religious in some fashion.

  98. Dean,

    > 1) A Moral Spine-Stiffener

    Wrong. Religion is the worst source of morality. If you are honest because you fear some gods punishing you, then you are a fucked up individual.

    I won’t even touch on all the *current* and historical examples of immorality –to a rational being– that are perfectly moral things according to the religion advocating them.

    > 2) A Way Back … and so he [god] has the authority to grant you forgiveness for killing him.

    So you advocate self-deception as a way to forget about your mistakes.

    > Your only other way out of the guilt would be to hate the kid you killed. But then you’d be a horrible person.

    Wrong. You can be a man, get your act together, and work so that other people don’t make the same mistake. No need for fairy tales.

    > 3) Aesthetics and Dignity … One thing I am sure of is that it is easier to face death with courage if you believe that death is not the end. If there is life after death, then the loss of life is not so devastating, and it becomes easier to care about HOW you die, not just when.

    I agree in that it is a sufficient condition in this case, but it is definitely NOT a necesary contidion: If you are rational, and with enough testosterone in your blood-stream, you will realize that you have two options, (1) die like a pig, (2) die fighting like a man; and you’ll obviously choose (2). Again, no need for fairy tales.

  99. “…I cannot find any contempt for those who are…”
    Absolutely. My contempt is reserved for the specific [groups of] people that hold *my life* in contempt.

    “…There’s a reason why 95% of the people in the world identify themselves as religious…”
    I suspect it has something to do with having barely descended from the trees…as far as I’m concerned, dumping the need for such illusory crutches (as religion provides) is an intellectually evolutionary step forward.

    Kids feel good believing in santa claus and the tooth fairy…but if they haven’t dumped that crap by adulthood, then they’re just a bunch of burger-flipping monkeys.

  100. Dan Kane: Even adults can get teary-eyed when they see the ending to The Polar Express. And even evolutionarily advanced beings can, I’m sure, feel at times touched by His Noodly Appendage…

  101. Had to look up the “noodly appendage” reference, Jeff. Most amusing… :-)

    As for The Polar Express…never seen it…the trailers *alone* were responsible for depleting the national IQ….both points of it.

  102. Dan,

    while your examples of reasons of religious faith may clearly have real-world examples supporting it, I think this issue is a lot deeper than that.

    The basic problem is the human condition itself: the feeling of a separate “world” and “self”, which causes a deep anxiety.
    Overcoming this anxiety is the deepest, most profound human drive.

    There are different strategies to allieviate this anxiety. You can try to “internalize” as much of the world in the form of trying to get as much money, sex, political power you can, because if it’s successful, the alienation between the self and world will be smaller. You can try to blame this anxiety on someone else “he is oppressing me, without him I would be free”. You can try to dissolve the self into a community. It’s more powerful if that community is a nation, because a nation “internalizes” a significant portion of the world.

    You can try to assume the world hasa eternal, designed laws, where everything has a carefully designed place and right to exist, therefore you existence is not felt as alienating, because you have a place in the world, and someone greater than you put you there. (This is religion, and also these are statist political ideologies.)

    The common ground of these solution is that they don’t really work. One can also try to develop love and compassion and that actually works somewhat better. It does not mean one has to become soft, actually, the most compassionate people are the most macho: the firemen. However, in the long run, nothing else really helps but stopping to label the experiencer as “self” and the experience as “world” and trying to understand that both are parts of the same process. Not an easy task though.

  103. To believe or not to believe that is the question!

    I am in favor of returning to Pagan Sun Worship wherein ones god is visible and gives energy and life in return.

    The major religions give us Holy War after Holy war after Holy War,
    as history has proven…

    and something else to ponder from Bertrand Russell…

    That Man/Woman is the product of causes which had no prevision of the end they were achieving; that his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and his beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms; that no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling, can preserve an individual life beyond the grave; that all the labours of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system, and that the whole temple of Man’s achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins–all these things, if not quite beyond dispute, are yet so nearly certain, that no philosophy which rejects them can hope to stand. Only within the scaffolding of these truths, only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair, can the soul’s habitation henceforth be safely built.

  104. Shenpen,
    You said ‘Dan’ but I think you are talking to me. Please correct me if I am mistaken.

    >stopping to label the experiencer as “self” and the experience as “world” and trying to understand that both are parts of the same process. Not an easy task though.

    Actually it IS rather easy. Get a frontal lobotomy. The part of your brain that makes you human is the part that can imagine “you” as distinct from “the world.” Animals cannot. Thus they do not:
    1) go to church
    2) marry “trophy wives”
    3) join political parties or
    4) take pride in being members of a race

    People do all those things because of the anxiety you describe. But it is not a curable part of the human condition. It is with us for keeps.

  105. davidf,
    >only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair, can the soul’s habitation henceforth be safely built.

    And therein lies the rub.

    People cannot be happy living with enduring despair. When a civilization embraces that despair, two things happen:
    1) the men quit getting married
    2) the women quit having babies

    And soon there is no more despair-based civilization to build any habitation for any souls.

    Civilizational despair is a self-correcting problem. If you don’t believe me, just ask a German (1.3 live births per woman) or an Italian (1.2) or a Russian (1.1).

    But you had better ask them soon, or else you shall be interrogating ghosts.

  106. By the way, once the problem has self-corrected, then a new civilization, untroubled by enduring despair, moves into the lands where the despairers used to dwell. And the despairers are forgotten. And so it goes.

  107. If anything, the problem with Islam is that the comfort it provides is too perfect. Observe the ease with which Western Europe has been de-Christianized in comparison to the profound difficulty Turkey has in trying to de-Islamify.

    There’s a difference between letting something happen over three centuries and trying to make it happen over one. Rising prosperity seems to help corrode religion (parts of America are an exception here) as well, and the devout in Turkey tend to still be pretty poor. Saudi hypocrisy (having all kinds of medieval punishments going on while many of the princes are up to their elbows in debauchery, etc.) can be seen as an attempt to compensate for this, though being responsible for the holy cities also seems to give them a wild hair up their collective ass on the subject.

    Islam is just another mass movement. I couldn’t explain them better than Eric Hoffer did in The True Believer.

    Don’t see it. Hoffer’s all about frustration on the part of creative intellectuals, he’s always on about stuff like all the major Nazis being failed artists/architects and whatnot. Is that the problem in the Islamic world – all the madrassas are full of guys who are pissed off because they suck at graphic design or something? I mean, they *could* be, I’ve just never heard about it.

  108. adrian,
    >Hoffer’s all about frustration on the part of creative intellectuals

    Being a bit of a Hoffer-phile, I have to suggest you go back and re-read. Hoffer used the examples of failed intellectuals because they were very articulate and we have therefore heard of them. The vast majority of Nazi rank and file (or early Christian rank and file, Hoffer’s other example) weren’t all that wordy. But they were just as frustrated.

  109. But they were just as frustrated.

    Economic conditions weren’t a barrel of laughs in early thirties Germany, true. And unemployment in a lot of the Muslim world is pretty high. I remember reading how educating people but not having any jobs for them to do afterwards isn’t supposed to be the ideal recipe for social contentment, now that I think about it.

    The trouble is, instead of blaming innate Islamic retrogressiveness like they should some of them appear to have got this idea that Western support for autocratic but convenient regimes has held the whole region back. Failing to take responsibility big time, I realise, but superficially plausible nevertheless.

  110. >But you had better ask them soon, or else you shall be interrogating ghosts. ~ And so it goes.

    Dean,

    Yes,

    And one might ask if the level of despair in religious/civilization is a
    litmus test.

    Has our religion failed us or have we failed our religion?
    ‘a lot of Muslims might be asking this one!’

    Should we be religious or not?

    What is religion, what is not?

    I think Russell is giving us a starting point a ‘foundation and scaffolding’
    to build new religion and philosophy based on some very sobering facts
    about where we live in the solar system, cosmos, universe.

  111. 3) Aesthetics and Dignity. On April 14, 2004 an Italian security guard named Fabrizio Quattrocchi was killed by Islamists in Iraq. He had been captured and was to be executed to make a propaganda/snuff video for the Jihadis. According to Wikipedia:
    Quattrocchi’s kidnappers forced him to dig his own grave and kneel beside it wearing a hood as they prepared to film his death, but he defied them by pulling off the hood and shouting “Adesso (or ora) vi faccio vedere come muore un italiano.” — “Now I will show you how an Italian dies.” He was then shot in the back of the neck.

    I hope I could face death that way in a similar situation. But how can I be sure? One thing I am sure of is that it is easier to face death with courage if you believe that death is not the end. If there is life after death, then the loss of life is not so devastating, and it becomes easier to care about HOW you die, not just when.

    This may be less due to sincere Catholicism on his part than the fact that he was able to imagine (given the cameras) people remembering what he’d done, and talking admiringly about it, like we are now. Memetic life after death of a sort.

    Odd that they released the video (though Al-J refused to show it), they’re normally pretty media-aware.

  112. davidf,
    >some very sobering facts about where we live in the solar system, cosmos, universe.

    In my opinion, this is the hardest question facing a technological civilization. It’s easy to believe in God when the priests and the faith-healers are doing all the miracles. But when the scientists and technicians are doing all the miracles, religion loses metaphysical credibility.

    I know I’d have been much more likely to be religious in the 18th century, back when the argument from design still held water, before Darwin shot the shit out of it. But when science tells us that we evolved, that our species is just one of many, that our planet is just one of many, that our galaxy is just one of many, that’s a hell of a comedown from being made in the image of God.

    And when that same science goes on to tell us that, as Russell says, we are doomed, how can we maintain hope? And without hope, what is the point of going on living?

    Why would you ever bring children into a world where life had no meaning, except what we arbitrarily assign to it? And if the technophiles have no children, where will the future scientists and technicians come from?

    When bin Laden says we are the “weak horse,” superficially he is being absurd. We have the wealth, the educated population, the wizard weapons, the cultural dynamism. How can he threaten us?

    And really he can’t. But he can get out of our way while we commit cultural suicide. And maybe he can give us just a little bit of prodding in the ass as we rush toward the abyss.

    Nietzsche enjoins us to remember that “when you are staring into the abyss, the abyss is also staring into you.” The question is, in a universe apparently without God, can we withstand the gaze of the abyss?

    Because, if we can’t, then bin Laden is right.

  113. Science might be more tolerable if it stuck to doing what it was originally supposed to do: make the world intelligible to us. But lately, science (particularly physics) has taken to rubbing our noses in our limitations that much harder.

    We want to know, pace Douglas Adams, the answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe and everything. But we have to consider the possibility that, even if we were given the answer, we wouldn’t understand it anyway.

    You are able to read this blog because of the actions of objects governed by the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. What an electron is and what it does just doesn’t make sense. This is because our brains are designed to help hairless overgrown monkeys survive on the Serengeti. No caveman ever needed to understand quarks in order to survive. And so, fundamentally, you don’t and neither do I.

    One quantum mechanical explanation for the existence of the universe is that God didn’t create it, we did. The universe existed only as a superposition of probability waves until the first man (assuming it was a man) looked at a rock and said “What the hell is that?” In that moment, the rock not only resolved itself into a rock, but it became an object that had always been a rock, complete with dinosaur fossils in it. Up until that moment, the fossils were just waves of probability, too.

    Science was conceived of by men who thought that the universe would make sense to them if they studied it enough, because God would not create something unintelligible. Today, science suggests that the universe may well be intelligible, just not to us.

  114. “Even adults can get teary-eyed when they see the ending to The Polar Express”

    This is due to something moviemakers refer to as suspension of belief. It’s something we’re happy to do when we walk into a theatre in order to be entertained.

    Religion, however, wants you keep that suspension of belief up for 24 hours a day.

  115. >Religion, however, wants you keep that suspension of belief up for 24 hours a day.

    People are religious because they WANT to maintain that suspension of disbelief, every day till they die. Because what is on the other side of death, the state of being so thoroughly forgotten that it is just as if you never were, is some major scary shit.

  116. If we did, in fact, create the universe by looking at it, then it stands to reason that any memorial we build to showcase our race’s achievements after our extinction is completely pointless. After the last man dies, the universe will not only cease to exist, it will cease to have ever existed.

    Back to the waves of probability we go.

  117. “Because what is on the other side of death, the state of being so thoroughly forgotten that it is just as if you never were, is some major scary shit.”

    Having not been there yet, I’m extremely unknowledgable about the other side of death. Are you able to quickly bring us up to speed, Dean? What aspect of it remains most vivid for you?

    To be honest, there are probably thousands – if not millions – of philosophers who would be extremely interested in this knowledge you have of the other side of death. Please share!

  118. Jason,
    >there are thousands who would be extremely interested in knowledge of the other side of death

    I haven’t been there personally, though I inevitably will. However, before rushing to flippancy, consider the guy (assuming it was a guy) who first discovered how to make fire. Do you know his name? Me neither.

    Because he lived before anyone invented writing, his name was never noted down. Yet we all owe him a huge debt, which we never can repay.

    Do you honestly think that things will be any different for you in 10,000 or 100,000 years?

    We live for a brief period. We talk; we walk. We sing; we dance. And then we stop. Then our flesh rots and the memory that others retain of us fades. Then they die and we are reduced to photographs and mementos. Then they are lost or thrown away and we come to rest in oblivion.

    Nobody has to come back from the dead in order for us to know what happens after. What happens after is: Nobody ever comes back. That’s it. Fini. The fat lady has sung.

    The Christians believe there’s an exception. Maybe they’re right, but I wouldn’t bet on it.

    Death contains no mystery. Have you ever owned a toaster that quit working? Well, that’s pretty much it.

  119. Because he lived before anyone invented writing, his name was never noted down. Yet we all owe him a huge debt, which we never can repay.

    Fire was probably found (a lightning strike, or whatever) before it was made, and I imagine its domestication was pretty much inevitable. The same could be said of things like relativity – there were a bunch of problems with the old paradigm, and if Einstein hadn’t come along someone else would have.

    Death contains no mystery. Have you ever owned a toaster that quit working? Well, that’s pretty much it.

    For someone who goes on about the unknowability of the implications of quantum mechanics you’re very quick to dismiss the possibilities it could offer. It’s like, “We have no scientific model for how an afterlife would work…so there isn’t one.”

    Sheer hubris.

    Why does not being immortal bother you, anyway?

  120. >Why does not being immortal bother you, anyway?

    Because, as I said, when you’ve been dead long enough, it’s like you were never alive. And there’s no escape.

    And you might reply that the guy who discovered fire is not really forgotten, because even though we don’t know his name, we know he existed, and we still use his discovery, so he is not really in oblivion.

    Fine. How’d you like to be the-guy-who-discovered-fire’s cousin Bob? There’s your oblivion.

    And, barring the existence of a God who’s just playing hide and seek with us, it is the fate that awaits us all.

  121. Because, as I said, when you’ve been dead long enough, it’s like you were never alive. And there’s no escape.

    You’re the one who’s insisting on sending his imaginative viewpoint forward in time to observe this melancholy prospect.

    “My name is Ozymandias, king of kings…”

    It can be useful to try to stay in the present. A lot more gets done there, so I’m told.

  122. If we did, in fact, create the universe by looking at it, then it stands to reason that any memorial we build to showcase our race’s achievements after our extinction is completely pointless. After the last man dies, the universe will not only cease to exist, it will cease to have ever existed.

    If you’re trying to get quantum mechanics involved by using it to explain the above, you obviously don’t really understand what quantum mechanics is all about. That’s just a bunch of mumbo-jumbo amateur philosophers like to spout after hearing ideas from quantum physics. If you believe this paragraph, Dean, then congrats, because you are believing in the supernatural.

  123. >We live for a brief period. We talk; we walk. We sing; we dance. And then we stop. Then our flesh rots and the memory that others retain of us fades. Then they die and we are reduced to photographs and mementos. Then they are lost or thrown away and we come to rest in oblivion.

    Well there is some immortality to us on the atomic level now.
    We may not be immortal but the atoms we are made of are!

    Most of the atoms we are made of have been used or discarded by every living thing that has survived on this earth, even some atoms from all
    current life are within us now, a grandiose recycle of atomic joy!

    The solar system and all of its matter is said to have gone through
    two or three stellar explosions forming most of the exotic elements
    we know of.

    where will nano tech take us? to immortal vistas? space travel?

  124. davidf,
    >where will nano tech take us? to immortal vistas? space travel?

    You are absolutely right. Existential funk is a waste of time. Better to think about the possibilities. The best thing our civilization has going for it is that we (some of us, anyway) have not lost hope. We still believe in a fabulous future ahead for ourselves and our nepots.

    That is the way human beings should be. Thanks for the reminder.

  125. Dean, how can you say comments like:

    “Because what is on the other side of death, the state of being so thoroughly forgotten that it is just as if you never were, is some major scary shit.”

    Followed immediately by:

    “Nobody has to come back from the dead in order for us to know what happens after. What happens after is: Nobody ever comes back. That’s it. Fini. The fat lady has sung.”

    And expect us to be able to follow your line of thought? You’re all over the place there.

  126. Jason,
    >And expect us to be able to follow your line of thought? You’re all over the place there.

    If you want to criticize my line of thought for being morbid, I plead guilty. But impenetrable? Not so much.

    Step 1: You die.
    Step 2: You stay dead.
    Step 3: People forget about you.
    Step 4: You stay forgotten.

    People, who have not yet completed Step 1, like religion because it helps them to not think about Steps 2 thru 4.

    Any further questions?

  127. >Any further questions?

    Just one. What are two (2) examples of the major scary shit awaiting us on the other side, that you refer to in your comment:

    “Because what is on the other side of death, the state of being so thoroughly forgotten that it is just as if you never were, is some major scary shit.”

  128. Jason,
    >What are two (2) examples of the major scary shit

    If you are personally unfazed by the thought of enduring Steps 1 thru 4, and, like adrian, you are untroubled by your mortality, then congratulations. You are a stronger man than most.

    The great majority of your fellow humans, reflecting upon the inevitability of their own deaths, feel some trepidation. It is to this unease that I was referring when I used the phrase “major scary shit.”

    As to concrete examples, I am frankly at a loss. You have the advantage of me, sir. For I foolishly took it for granted that everyone occasionally endures a “long, dark night of the soul” when contemplating the vastness of eternity.

    I stand corrected.

  129. “It is to this unease that I was referring when I used the phrase “major scary shit.””

    Then the mistake may have been more one of syntax. Your sentence made it seem as though were you privvy to some less-than-savoury events that would be awaiting us in the afterdeath. Not the actual thought of death itself.

  130. There is no evidence that dying hurts. Physical damage which often precedes death is associated with pain, but the actual dying part is (as near as we can tell) painless.

    What scares people about death is the prospect of it. The dead apparently fear nothing.

    I sincerely apologize if I was unclear.

  131. where will nano tech take us? to immortal vistas? space travel?

    If you don’t get space travel, you don’t really want immortality.

  132. > If you don’t get space travel, you don’t really want immortality.

    I assume you are referring to the ‘infinite’ overcrowding of Earth. Even if we have not perfected space travel before immortality (higly unlikely since immortality has never been proven to be feasible and space travel has), eventually we would use up all the ready elements for producing new people. The matter to produce new humans does not ‘pop’ out of nowhere.

  133. Unless you sterilized nearly all humans forcibly, they would overpopulate the earth and cause environmental havoc well ahead of the time when we have to worry about raw materials to create new humans. Then you would have to worry about feeding your hypothetical Struldbruggs, there would be famine and mass dieoffs, etc. Not a pleasant picture.

    Some say that we’ve already exceeded Earth’s carrying capacity, what with our unusual longevity and numerousness. But that comes from the U.N. and so is easily dismissed.

  134. >Some say that we’ve already exceeded Earth’s carrying capacity, what with our unusual longevity and numerousness. But that comes from the U.N. and so is easily dismissed.

    The problem with environmentalism, overpopulation hand wringing, global warming and the like is that, even when it enjoys the imprimatur of science, you can’t trust it. Because there is so clearly an underlying element of political power struggle.

    If constitutional democracy and capitalism work reasonably well, then there is not a lot for an educated elite to do, in a supervisory capacity. They play a valuable supporting role, as did Shakespeare or Kipling, but there’s not a lot of opportunity for the pointy-heads to boss people around if the American system is workable.

    But, if the free market leads to bad results, and the people’s representatives cannot be trusted to arrive at a fair result most of the time, then ALL SORTS of possibilities open up.

    Why, then we need a world government, structured like the European Union, where all the important decisions are made by bureaucrats, well insulated from voters AND from the marketplace. Screw that accountability stuff. Forget about “We the people.” Our motto shall be: “We know better than the people.”

    And again, that wouldn’t be so bad if the track record of pointy-heads-with-political-power wasn’t so abysmal and macabre.

    So on the one hand, you have respected scientific establishments telling us that, say, global warming (or is it ‘climate change’ now?) is a real threat, and that the only way to avoid disaster is to scrap capitalism and democracy and put the ecology professors in charge of us all.

    On the other hand, the historically savvy ordinary schmuck trembles with APPROPRIATE terror at the thought of being ruled by professors. Those wordy types have NO MERCY when they control the police. And everybody knows it.

    I like the idea of science. I hope to live long enough to have backup copies. And I want to trust the scientists. But they are trying to sell me on a policy that is guaranteed to be disastrous, regardless of trends in temperatures, weather patterns or ocean levels. And that’s a fact, Jack.

  135. Dean,

    Funny that you should mention “climate change”. That particular buzzwordology is Republican spin, an invention of a GOP consultant named Frank Luntz, who coined it specifically for the purpose of taking the perception of danger out of the phenomenon of global warming (likely so Shrub won’t be called on his profligate energy policy):

    http://www.mediatransparency.org/personprofile.php?personID=123

    The problem with wordy people is precisely that: they’re too damn WORDY. Western civilization has crapflooded the planet with a profusion of words that refer to nothing in objective reality but for its participants stand in the place of reality. From both sides, left and right, the stream of endless words comes, with the net result being that people talk up a blue streak to themselves, convincing themselves of whatever system of *beliefs* lets them go on comfortably the way they were going, with little regard for the ecological or *human* damage necessary to support their lifestyle.

    Lifestyle = politics.

    Though I suspect that the left has nothing like the meticulously engineered, well-funded neocon apparatus for linguistic goalpost-moving, as exemplified by Mr. Luntz…

  136. >Though I suspect that the left has nothing like the meticulously engineered, well-funded neocon apparatus for linguistic goalpost-moving

    Yeah. Ok. Conservatives are the masters of words because all the best wordsmiths lean to the right and are eager to join the Republican party. Because the right is the party of the intelligentsia and that is why poets, playwrights and novelists are always so eager to sing the praises of right-wingers like me.

    Would you be interested in buying a bridge in Brooklyn? How about a beach house on the coast of Colorado? I can get you a real good deal. No checks please. Small unmarked bills are preferred.

  137. I’m not certain it requires particular eloquence; only adeptness at con-artistry and the willingness to use it because of the profit potential that results…

  138. Yeah. Ok. Conservatives are the masters of words because all the best wordsmiths lean to the right and are eager to join the Republican party. Because the right is the party of the intelligentsia and that is why poets, playwrights and novelists are always so eager to sing the praises of right-wingers like me.

    It’s more about discipline and staying on-message – it’s very hard to get a bunch of poets, playwrights and novelists singing from the same hymnsheet. Have you read The Framing Wars?

  139. Dean,

    Ironically, even though you were trying to present a contrary point of view, everything you say is in complete agreement with my point.

    > We have no answer to the Islamic *belief*system* Precisely which belief system are you referring to? If you mean the proposition that there is a God who makes moral demands on you and will send you to Heaven or Hell depending on the alacrity with which you meet those demands, of course we have a refutation to it. Just watch the next George Carlin comedy special on HBO. Eric also has a few choice things to say about God and religious faith, right here on this very blog.

    George Carlin isn’t on Al Jazeera every day. The world’s Muslims have never heard of him. Even if he *was* on Al Jazeera every day, do you think Muslims would abandon Islam when they hear him? He doesn’t even have much impact on Christianity here in the US. And besides George Carlin, to counteract the Islamic belief system, we have … who else? ESR? What percentage of the world’s 1.3 billion Muslims read ESR’s blog?

    See, you have made my point: We have no answer to the Islamic belief system. George Carlin is not doing it. ESR is not doing it. Nothing we are doing is convincing Muslims to change their beliefs.

    If you mean bin Laden’s allegation that the West has grown decadent and weak, that our wizard weapons are a thing to be feared, but that we ourselves have no stomach for war, that we are rich and comfortable and unwilling to sacrifice or risk anything that might disrupt that comfort, that we are no longer MEN, how would you go about refuting that?

    Exactly!!! How indeed?

    The essence of the Jihadi argument about us is that we have turned away from God in our pursuit of individual freedom and material wealth, and that the wealth and freedom has turned us into a bunch of pussies.

    And what do we do to counteract this belief system? What do we do to convince the Muslims that believing in Islam leads to unnecessary suffering and death? That they themselves would be more happy and prosperous if they quit Islam? That their “sacrafice and risk” is for pointlessness, and that they’d all be happier as one of the “decadent” and “rich” and “comfortable”?

    Again, you have made my point: We have no answer to the Islamic belief system.

    Further, that God’s displeasure with us can be inferred from our cowardice as follows: If God wanted us to survive, if we were pleasing to Him, He would give us manly courage with which to identify, face and dispatch our enemies. Since He has made most of us into wimps, one can logically infer that He must want us to die. Quad erat demonstrandum.

    And what do we do to counteract this belief? What do we do to counteract the belief that “God” wants “wimps” to die? That is a stupid belief — every person who won’t kill people deserves to be killed? If it weren’t part of a major world religion with 1.3 billion adherents, that belief system would be considered clinical insanity.

    Again, you have made my point. Nobody here in the West has come up with any way to respond to Islam. We have no answer to the Islamic belief system.

    At any rate, I think the *real* issue with Muslims isn’t that we are “decadent” or “rich” or “comfortable” or “wimps”. The *real* issue is that we are not Muslims. We are *infidels*. We deserve to die for being infidels. That’s the real issue. Muslims believe Infidels should stop being Infidels and become Muslims and submit to Islam.

    And that’s why killing “terrorists” won’t work. Killing Muslims will only get them hailed as “martyrs” and strengthen the resolve of all the other Muslims to fight for Islam. Killing Islamic terrorists will make more terrorists — because the *belief*system* that creates the terrorists is still there.

    Instead, the West has to convince Muslims to abandon Islam.

    And I see absolutely nothing that indicates that this is happening or will ever happen. The West has no answer to the Islamic belief system! So, like I say, I know you weren’t trying to back up my point, but everything you say supports it.

  140. Dean’s points 1-4 are not the complete list.

    Step -1: You are born
    Step 0: You live
    Step 1: You die.
    Step 2: You stay dead.
    Step 3: People forget about you.
    Step 4: You stay forgotten.

    Step 0 is the important part.

  141. Dean, existential dispair is _so_ 19th century. Come join us in the exciting 21st.

    Also, intellectual class warfare is boring. It’s not particularly hard to join the “elite,” as you call them, it just takes a lot of work, money, and time. You too can be a professor, then what will you have to say about it? I personally can’t wait until this goes the way of other types of class warfare that have propped up past political movements.

  142. >that’s why killing “terrorists” won’t work

    >nothing that indicates that this is happening or will ever happen

    So your plan is, if we can’t convince the believers to abandon their belief because of our words, to give up and die?

    I vote No.

    P. S. Recommend reading Machiavelli. “Armed prophets succeed. Unarmed prophets fail.” Of course killing terrorists will work. If we kill enough of them.

    If we can make joining al Qaeda look like a stupid, loser move, we will hamper their recruiting efforts.

  143. John,
    >existential dispair is _so_ 19th century. Come join us in the exciting 21st

    Agreed. Sorry about that. Won’t happen again.

    >intellectual class warfare is boring. It’s not particularly hard to join the “elite,”

    Please do not misunderstand me. I don’t hate intellectual elites. I flatter myself that I am one of them. But, of course, YOU will have to be the final judge of that. What I hate are the wannabe elites who wanna cheat.

    Vladimir Illyich Lenin wanted influence. He wanted to be listened to and taken seriously. He wanted to shape opinion.

    I want influence. I want to be listened to and taken seriously. I want to shape opinion. Otherwise I wouldn’t be commenting on this blog.

    The difference is that I am willing to submit myself and my pearls of wisdom to your judgment. John Locke proselytizes freedom of religion by arguing as follows:
    Even if your religion IS the one true faith, if you FORCE others to join your religion, it doesn’t count. Faith is only valid if it is freely chosen. Virtue isn’t virtue if arrived at under compulsion.

    Lenin rejects Locke. And in doing so he puts a stain on all godless windbags like me, everywhere. Because of people like him, and their apologists, we are all seen as murderers and proto-murderers, willing to waste human lives for the sake of our own egos, for RECOGNITION.

    For this reason only do I hate certain of my own kind; otherwise I quite like godless windbags. I am not filled with self-hatred. I think folks like me are pretty damn terrific, as long as we content ourselves with yammering at people, and not trying to boss them around.

  144. >Jesus wasn’t armed.

    No, but Constantine was. If the emperor had not converted, bringing the Empire with him, Christianity would have been just another cult, vying for mindshare in the late Roman religious free for all.

    To make the big time, your new religion needs more than the ethereal carrot of Heaven. It needs the Earthly stick of Hell. Not a mythical Hell, a veritable Hell, in which unbelievers can be made to suffer in THIS life.

    If you don’t believe me, just ask a Nazi, a Communist, a Muslim or any honest and historically knowledgeable adherent of any big-time religion.

  145. The sad thing about John Locke that you can argue that he is mistaken. Whether or not compelled conversion counts depends on what you mean by “count.”

    If it is sufficient to show, by all outward displays, that you have submitted to a doctrine, and to aid in the persecution of unbelievers and heretics, then compulsion works wonderfully.

    Religions and mass movements of great power and influence have achieved precisely these results by compulsion.

    If you have submitted, under duress, to a doctrine and publicly proclaimed its truthfulness, then the only way you can justify this act to yourself is to force others to do the same.

    It takes a fanatical faith to rationalize our cowardice.

    For this reason you should make no mistake, the fashionable Hollywood Lefties and PC academics who sneer at religion, particularly at Christianity, now, would nail you to a cross while singing Hallelujah! if ever it looked like a smart move.

    John Locke’s argument is only relevant if you care about the ethereal essence of belief, the “still, small voice” of true conviction, as it were.

    If all you care about is appearances, “Death to the Infidel!” is definitely the way to go.

  146. Jesus wasn’t armed.

    He effectively was with the conversion of Constantine,and even before with Augustine’s “Just War.”

  147. One could argue that by the time Constantine was born, Christianity was no longer the religion of Jesus, perhaps the most misunderstood Jewish prophet.

  148. The main reason for all the trouble that the Christians currently face in the world is their decision, made over the last few centuries, to abandon force as a means of proselytization. Instead the Christians attempt to persuade you to their point of view through sweet reasonableness. What a bunch of fucking pussies.

    The Christians used to be willing to burn you at stake for heresy. Nowadays, not so much. Maybe they might glare at you a bit. But not really. No wonder Osama has contempt for them. No wonder the Lefties have contempt for them. Say, is there anybody in the world today who is not contemptuous of the Christians? Why the Hell not?

    The irony is, as Churchill pointed out, that Christianity benefited greatly from science, which it fought tooth and nail, but unsuccessfully. As a result of science, people of Christian heritage have ruled the Earth, culturally and militarily, for the past two centuries.

    But if no one has any cause to fear you, it is ridiculous to expect the world to respect you. If a harmless gentleman like Charles Darwin could write a book calling a central tenet of Christianity into question, and live to tell about it, why should anyone fear Christians? And why not kill them if you an do so with impunity?

    Today, if you insult Islam, there are plenty of people who will stab you to death and pin a note to your chest with the knife, explaining why they did it. And Islam is taken very, very seriously.

    No one takes Christians seriously, because they are clearly not willing to do the same. But Christianity is a 2,000 year old religion. You don’t live that long without being able to adapt to the necessities of the times. It shouldn’t be too long now, before the Christians start cutting off heads. And then everyone will treat them with a lot more respect.

  149. >But if no one has any cause to fear you, it is ridiculous to expect the world to respect you.

    The Communists, of course, understood this extremely well. And they might well have conquered the world, were it not for the Lefties’ favorite imbecile, Ronald Reagan.

    Reagan defeated Communism by demonstrating that their capacity to DESERVE your fear, was ultimately hollow. No religion can long survive this kind of revelation.

    For the Christians to think they could just carry on as normal, while lacking both the will and the military capacity to hurt those who insulted them was just ahistorical foolishness.

    As such, they deserve all the pain they currently endure.

  150. The Communists, of course, understood this extremely well. And they might well have conquered the world, were it not for the Lefties’ favorite imbecile, Ronald Reagan.

  151. The Communists, of course, understood this extremely well. And they might well have conquered the world, were it not for the Lefties’ favorite imbecile, Ronald Reagan.

    (fecking tags)

    He had competent handlers, and an actor’s feel for presentation. But I don’t think the the righties give quite enough credit to the Saudis (and the Iraqis and Iranians), who kept oil prices comfortably low for most of the decade and made it possible for Ronnie to bleed the Soviets dry with arms spending. OK, he supported the muj in Afghanistan, but didn’t Carter think that up? Or Brzezinski, at least.

    Mostly he just arsed about in Central America.

  152. adrian,
    >[Reagan] had competent handlers, and an actor’s feel for presentation.

    Look, it is hardly my place to advise you because:
    1) I hate the Left, and am eager to see it go the way of Nazism. I really did mean it when I said you people fucked us all and I will never forgive you for it.
    2) Even if I wanted to give you a workable solution to your problems, I don’t have one. You fucked us and now you’re fucked.

    But for the record, this thing with Reagan symbolizes all of your current difficulties.

    What Ronald Reagan did was notice a key weakness in the Soviet arsenal, namely economic productivity, and exploit the Hell out of it. He built weapons which the Soviets had to try and match, and ultimately discovered that they just couldn’t. He did this while withstanding nonstop attacks from Soviet sympathizers in the West who proclaimed that Reagan was putting us all on the road to nuclear Armageddon.

    Reagan’s key insight was psycho-social. He concluded that, in 1980, there were no more Communists in the Soviet Union. There were plenty who talked the Commie talk, in order to keep power; but there were none who were willing to die to walk the Commie walk.

    Therefor, as long as America did not interfere with the Party leaders and functionaries looting Russia to pad their Swiss bank accounts, the vaunted USSR would go down without a fight. And it worked.

    So you Lefties proclaim that “Well, yeah, Reagan kicked our asses, but it wasn’t really HIS victory. No, it was, uh, the Saudi’s and Jimmy Carter’s and Gorby. Yeah, that’s the ticket. Reagan had nothing to do with it!”

    A serious movement, made up of serious people would:
    1) readily admit responsibility for defeat
    2) study in detail what went wrong
    3) figure out how to fix the problem permanently and
    4) try, try again.

    You do none of these things. You don’t deserve to rule the world. You tell yourselves that you can use the Muslims to break the capitalist plutocrats, and then take over from the religious raghead fuckwads.

    But those fuckwads seek to learn from their mistakes and refine their techniques EVERY GODDAMNED DAY. They will never cede their victory to you, assuming they win.

    Back in the day, you would have destroyed them in about 5 minutes. You would have spent 4 minutes laughing at their funny head-gear. And then you would have spent one minute gassing them. But that’s not who you are, anymore. Don’t kid yourselves. They may be murderous bastards, but they are serious about taking over the world.

    And you aren’t. And in your reaction to the mention of Reagan, everyone can see the reason why.

  153. Look, it is hardly my place to advise you because:
    1) I hate the Left, and am eager to see it go the way of Nazism. I really did mean it when I said you people fucked us all and I will never forgive you for it.
    2) Even if I wanted to give you a workable solution to your problems, I don’t have one. You fucked us and now you’re fucked.

    I feel like I’m looking around to try to see who you’re talking to here. I’m really borderline left – I’m a lot more concerned about energy and the environment than I am about people, of whom I suspect that there are rather too many (yes, I know, elitism again). I agree with most of what the right says about dependency, as well. Encouraging people to stand on their own feet is good. And I have no time for the Democrats – as sad a bunch of corrupt hypocrites as I’ve seen anywhere. The few with any integrity get treated like pariahs.

    You do none of these things. You don’t deserve to rule the world. You tell yourselves that you can use the Muslims to break the capitalist plutocrats, and then take over from the religious raghead fuckwads.

    I don’t want to rule the world, I just want to be able to get out of the way if it falls over. I wouldn’t be surprised if the conservatives broke themselves (and some of the furniture) striving to contain/suppress the Islamites. And I think most of the problems we’ll be having with them will be blowback from this process, as opposed to the idea that they Will Not Stop until we all convert and don the djellabi or whatever.

    He built weapons which the Soviets had to try and match, and ultimately discovered that they just couldn’t.

    Oh yes they could. It took a while, so they weren’t called Soviets any more, but what’s in a name?

    They may be murderous bastards, but they are serious about taking over the world.

    And you aren’t. And in your reaction to the mention of Reagan, everyone can see the reason why.

    I’m not all that ashamed of not being serious about taking over the world.

  154. >I’m really borderline left

    I realize that you personally are not a Stalinist, and I didn’t mean to imply that you are.

    But people like you used to be the Good Cop counterpart to hard core Lefties who demanded worldwide socialist revolution. Now you are reduced to playing Good Cop for religious nut jobs you would have spat on back in the day.

    Bill Buckley, of National Review fame, became famous back in the 1950s because he was just about the only right-wing pundit willing to go on TV and debate the Dreaded Liberal Intellectual.

    Part of the reason they were Dreaded was because the Right was in intellectual shambles back then and so defending right-wing politics required a lot of mental dexterity. But the bigger reason why moderate Lefties were feared was because they could say, in all honesty:
    “You’d better be nice to us, because if you don’t, you’ll have to deal with the Stalinists and they are MUCH scarier than we are.”

    Right now, moderate Lefties like yourself are trying to play the same game with the Jihadis. The trouble is, at least the Stalinists were theoretically on the same side as you. The bin Ladenites hate you at least as much as they hate me, and probably much, much more.

    The sad truth is, it is not to your credit that you are “borderline left.” You would be better off to either Stop Worrying and Love the Market, as it were, or try to figure out how to resurrect the intellectual respectability of the Hard Left.

    Being a soft Lefty when there are no longer any serious Hard ones for you to play Good Cop to, is frankly just pathetic. It makes you a fading reactionary legacy of the 20th century, as much as anything else.

  155. Right now, moderate Lefties like yourself are trying to play the same game with the Jihadis.

    “People like me” are saying you’d better respect us because if not you’ll have to deal with them? Presenting ourselves as potential *intermediaries* in some way?

    Where? I’m fairly sure I haven’t been.

    What I see myself as doing is looking for explanations for their behaviour, which never goes down well with people who equate explanation with justification, but there’s not much to be done about that. I think a lot of people on the right are trying to talk themselves up to the point where they can contemplate preventive genocide. I don’t *think* you could elect a candidate with such a platform, but after another successful attack who knows.

    Being a soft Lefty when there are no longer any serious Hard ones for you to play Good Cop to, is frankly just pathetic.

    Think you might have a false dichotomy or two there. Mapping politics onto a line is…topologically unsound, let’s say.

  156. >What I see myself as doing is looking for explanations for their behaviour

    Right, but your explanations all take the ‘blowback’ formula. Every atrocity they commit is simply in reaction to something we’ve done to deserve it. If we were to:
    1) Apologize for everything we ever done, for our very existence
    2) Abandon the use of military force to protect our own interests
    3) Turn all power over our foreign policy over to international institutions controlled by Leftists, third world dictators, and their apologists
    4) Pay lots and lots and lots of ‘reparations’ funneled, of course, thru aforementioned international institutions, being sure to make Kofi and his cronies very, very rich and
    5) Throw those Goddamned Israeli Jews to the wolves

    then maybe they might kill us a little bit less. And if not, we could always throw more money at them, funneled thru you, again, of course.

    And why would we do any of that? Because if we don’t, according to you, they’ll kill us even more! And according to you, we’ll deserve it, too.

    The idea that they might be trying to kill us for reasons having to do with their own internal pathologies, is RACIST and I ought to be ashamed of myself for even thinking it.

    And the idea that, maybe they’d be less eager to kill us if they respected, ney, even feared us more, is unthinkable. We must apologize, prostrate ourselves, beg for forgiveness. We must always be asking ourselves “Why do they hate us?” And assuming the answer is because we deserve to be hated. And YOU will be sure to tell us why.

    The truth is, they don’t hate us as much as they despise us. And we DO deserve their contempt. Because we listen to you.

  157. My read on Adrian is that he’s moderately apolitical; he worries about his government locally, and is worried about the impact of ours on the environment (both physical and political) that his operates in.

    Isn’t that ultimately one of the core tenets of Libertarianism?

    Tend to your local politics, keep an eye out on things that could influence your local politics long term?

    I’ll point out that the person who’s been laying on the blanket categorizations and building the attacks on the categorical rhetoric is, putatively, the person on the side of individual freedom.

    For that matter, I think that Jihadism/Islamofascism is going to burn itself out – it’s going to take about 30 years or so for, it and in doing so, it’s going to trigger some history that goes beyond merely interesting to utterly fascinating in the Chinese (or driving by a train wreck) sense.

  158. Hey, Eric – this might make a morbidly interesting blog topic:

    Write, from the perspective of 2030, what the intervening 25 years look like. Do the same competing justification for events that we see here for the ’80s.

    Invite each poster to write up one post on this, ask people to hold off until date point X to post critiques and commentary on it.

    Then, once a year, link back to it, and repeat.

  159. If we were to:
    1) Apologize for everything we ever done, for our very existence
    2) Abandon the use of military force to protect our own interests
    3) Turn all power over our foreign policy over to international institutions controlled by Leftists, third world dictators, and their apologists
    4) Pay lots and lots and lots of ‘reparations’ funneled, of course, thru aforementioned international institutions, being sure to make Kofi and his cronies very, very rich and
    5) Throw those Goddamned Israeli Jews to the wolves

    then maybe they might kill us a little bit less.

    I wouldn’t mind the use of military force to protect your interests, if the latter didn’t seem to have evolved into military domination of the ME and as much of Asia as possible. When I suggest recognising what was done in the past and eliminating interference in other countries people like you just start wailing “They want us to apologise! Munich! Appeasement!” and other silly tropes the Right have battened onto for lack of having anything substantial to say about the matter. Oh, and blaming liberals for not being enthusiastic enough about supporting the war effort, that’s always good for a giggle.

    Reparations? Turn over foreign policy to international institutions? Dunno where those came from. Start controlling your appetite for oil. At least start *trying* to.

    The idea that they might be trying to kill us for reasons having to do with their own internal pathologies, is RACIST and I ought to be ashamed of myself for even thinking it.

    I have no doubt that they have a whole bunch of internal pathologies, but the idea that we are *entirely innocent*, and these pathologies are the *sole* reasons for their attacks, is more comforting than racist.

    It’s as well to be suspicious of comforting memes. They’re just so easy to take on board.

    And the idea that, maybe they’d be less eager to kill us if they respected, ney, even feared us more, is unthinkable.

    You know, this makes an OK soundbite, but the trouble is that you’re talking about people who have *much less to lose* than Westerners. I mean, go on, vote for someone who’s promising to lay some fear about the place, see what happens.

    Let me know when you’ve killed six million, that’s always seemed to me to be a psychologically significant threshold for some reason.

  160. My read on Adrian is that he’s moderately apolitical; he worries about his government locally,

    I’d probably worry more about them if I could understand what they were saying.

    Isn’t that ultimately one of the core tenets of Libertarianism?

    Libertarianism is a fading reactionary legacy of the 20th century. What we need is something a little more up-to-date.

  161. “Jesus wasn’t armed.”

    And he got crucified. There has been no provable evidence of him accomplishing anything since then.

  162. Ken,
    >I’ll point out that the person who’s been laying on the blanket categorizations and building the attacks on the categorical rhetoric is, putatively, the person on the side of individual freedom.

    You have a point. A good one. Last night I was in a bit of a bad mood. I still believe that the things I said were true, but the tone in which I said them could have used some improvement. Maybe a lot of improvement.

    For the third time on this thread, I find myself apologizing. Oy!

  163. So ESR, where’s the daily hate? It’s been a while since your last blog entry, and I’m missing it.

  164. The hose must be kinked. Eric will un-kink it and we’ll get a whole bunch of posts at once.

    Hail Eric!

  165. Dean Says:
    >> that’s why killing “terrorists” won’t work nothing that indicates
    >> that this is happening or will ever happen
    >
    > So your plan is, if we can’t convince the believers to abandon their
    > belief because of our words, to give up and die?
    >
    > I vote No.

    Hey, it’s not my decision, but if it was, yes, I would formulate a plan for convincing Muslims to change their beliefs.

    For now, I’m just pointing out the complete lack of any such plan on the part of the West, and the dire consequences likely.

    > P. S. Recommend reading Machiavelli. “Armed prophets succeed.
    > Unarmed prophets fail.” Of course killing terrorists will work. If
    > we kill enough of them.

    There’s 1.3 billion Muslims. Good luck.

  166. Adrian10: Libertarianism is a fading reactionary legacy of the 20th century.

    Of course that really depends on what you mean by “libertarianism”. There are so many political philosophies lumped under the broad term that is really impossible to use it coherently. I’d say that true liberalism, the philosophy that originated with the early Scottish Enlightenment is not a “fading reactionary legacy”. The American Libertarian Party, however, with its rather noxious mix of 1960’s anarchy and classic liberalism, and almost obscene reverence for specific philosophers who were rather offbase on a couple of items, is definitely something I wouldn’t mind seeing fade into complete oblivion. Unfortunately, anyone that stands for very limited government is currently automatically associated with the ALP, whether they should be, or not.

  167. wayne,
    >I would formulate a plan for convincing Muslims to change their beliefs.

    While you’re at it, formulate a plan for convincing
    1) Nazis to love Jews
    2) Commies to love corporations
    3) Rednecks to love black people
    4) Muslims to love Jews
    5) WASPs to love rednecks
    6) Cats to love dogs
    7) Wives to love strippers and whores
    8) Russians and Irishmen to love sobriety
    9) Englishmen to love the French
    10) Hippies to love the military
    11) Lefties to love G. W. Bush
    12) Righties to love Hillary
    13) Goths and punks to love preppies
    14) Greeks to love Turks, and
    15) vice versa

    Unfortunately, there are things that just can’t be done with words. People invest their egos, their basic sense of identity, into their religions, their politics, their hometown sports team. You can’t talk Cubs fans into becoming Red Sox fans.

    It might be nice if you could. But there are some dreams that will just never come true. Or at least, that is my opinion. It is the opinion that makes me a Conservative.

    >There’s 1.3 billion Muslims.

    Sadly, in 100 years, there almost certainly won’t be 1.3 billion any more. One way or another, that ancient and, in some respects, admirable culture is almost certainly headed for the bone yard. The question of greatest importance (to me, anyway), is whether we will be in the bone yard with them.

  168. Me personally, I would rather see them in the bone yard and us sitting pretty. But it is very unlikely to be that easy.

    As I point out ad nauseum on this blog, Osama bin Laden makes an excellent argument for why we don’t deserve to survive. Even if al Qaeda went belly up tomorrow, it would quickly be replaced by some other group, not necessarily Islamic, to take advantage of the West’s current weakness.

    It’s like we are an aging heavyweight. We still have a right hand that can knock you into next week. But we are slowing down. We don’t bob and weave like we used to. We no longer have the hunger you need to last 15 rounds with a serious contender. And worst of all, looking into our eyes, you can see we are beginning to doubt whether victory is even worth the effort.

    Still, we remain the Baddest Man In The Whole Damn Town, and whoever can be the one to take us down, would get a HUGE credibility boost. So the new gunfighters keep coming, each hoping to be The One.

    Even supposing that the West is swept up in some Hofferian mass movement which, at the price of great evil, manages to reinvigorate us, renewing our sense of ourselves as a civilization young, hungry and on-the-make, in 500 or 1000 years we will still be right back here, wondering if it’s worth it to go on.

    The key to Western formidability is a youthful vigor and vitality that may well be impossible for ANY civilization to maintain forever. We may be reduced to hoping that our descendents in spirit can learn from our mistakes as we try to learn from the Romans and the Greeks.

  169. But make no mistake, our chances of making it into the 22nd century are about 50-50. Islam is looking at big fat goose egg.

    Our vitality is waning. But we can still change. We CAN still bob and weave, if not the nimbleness of the days of old.

    Islam is a traditional culture frozen in amber, striking out violently to ward off a modernity ever encroaching, ever threatening to turn believers into agnostics, and then apostates.

    The perfect picture of the dead end of Islam is the Palestinian suicide bomber. A culture wherein the highest honor goes to those who blow themselves up in restaurants and shopping centers hoping to kill women and children, then ascending into a heaven-as-perpetual-sex-orgy, puncturing hymens for eternity, is a hopeless case.

    The nanotech transhumanists of our society, who hope to upload their minds into computers and amass infinite wealth and satisfaction while living forever, may be kooky and weird, but they are proof that we have not lost hope. Geeks they may be, but they are our salvation. Whether or not their dream ever comes true isn’t the point. The point is we can still produce crazy dreamers.

    Islam produces only crazies. And apathetics who keep their heads down, hoping not to become a target of the crazies. Their race is run. And on the other side of the finish line is oblivion.

  170. Adrian10: Libertarianism is a fading reactionary legacy of the 20th century.

    Of course that really depends on what you mean by “libertarianism”.

    That was really aimed at Dean – he used the expression a few posts further up. Didn’t mean it particularly seriously, though I do find the idea of libertarians backing an overwhelmingly strong military kind of ironic.

  171. The perfect picture of the dead end of Islam is the Palestinian suicide bomber. A culture wherein the highest honor goes to those who blow themselves up in restaurants and shopping centers hoping to kill women and children, then ascending into a heaven-as-perpetual-sex-orgy, puncturing hymens for eternity, is a hopeless case.

    I grant you Mohammad Atta and his crew may have been vaguely motivated by such things, even if they do seem to have spent a surprising amount of time in titty bars beforehand (cultural research, perhaps), but there’s not much evidence I’ve seen that the sort of Palestinians blowing themselves up are the seriously devout Hamas regulars, they’re more ordinary young Palestinian guys (and now girls) who just don’t feel that they’ve got a lot of opportunities in front of them. Of course, far be it from me to suggest that the Israelis have anything to do with this *perception* of lack of opportunity, it’s obviously TOTALLY self-inflicted and they should just get off their lazy islamic butts, read Paul Graham’s essays and start forming new technology startups like the Jews would in their shoes.

  172. Adrian,

    I apprectiate your sarcasm, but I still miss the clear ethical perception of the issue – killing people just because one feels hopeless and despaired is considered high crime in our societies, and actually it is also considered so in Islam societies as long as the victims are also Muslim. It’s the exception Islam takes for non-Muslims is what causes the phenomena: while terrorist are of course not solely motivated by religious zeal, but rather social questions, the basic problem is that Islam does not explicitly forbid this type of behaviour.

  173. Adrian, like most Europeans addressing the problems in Israel and Palestine, you sarcastically refuse to go back far enough to see where the problems really lie.

  174. I apprectiate your sarcasm, but I still miss the clear ethical perception of the issue – killing people just because one feels hopeless and despaired is considered high crime in our societies,

    Is it? High crime sounds like something you can be punished for, and it’s a bit late in the case of suicide bombers. I suppose you could sweep up the body parts and inter them with pork, but it’s a difficult theological question as to whether it would be effective in stopping them getting into heaven.

    and actually it is also considered so in Islam societies as long as the victims are also Muslim.

    Not making much difference in Iraq ATM AFAICT. I suppose they may not consider each other to be Muslims, though.

    It’s the exception Islam takes for non-Muslims is what causes the phenomena: while terrorist are of course not solely motivated by religious zeal, but rather social questions, the basic problem is that Islam does not explicitly forbid this type of behaviour.

    So, like, what do we do? Try to persuade them to rewrite the Koran? Kill all of them?

    I’m in the “stop fucking them around” camp, but this is widely seen as the “Chamberlain option”, and gets no respect from the manly men among us. We all know how Appeasing Tyranny turned out last time, eh? They’d be making us all wear djellabis and performing public female circumcisions across Europe and America in *no* time.

  175. Adrian, like most Europeans addressing the problems in Israel and Palestine, you sarcastically refuse to go back far enough to see where the problems really lie.

    You mean I refuse to place all the blame on the Palestinians, despite the fact that the Israelis have all the power?

    What this was about was Dean’s characterisation of Palestinian suicide bombers as being motivated mainly by a sex-mad afterlife. I find this unpersuasive, especially as before Hamas got elected they were starting to get more and more girls volunteering. Do you think girls find the idea of 72 virgins useful or interesting? I don’t.

  176. > killing people just because one feels hopeless and despaired is considered high crime in our societies

    Hmm… correct me if I’m wrong, but the suggestion by several (well, at least just Dean) of the commentators here seems to be to kill all the 1.3 billion muslims. This seems to stem from a notion that we’re otherwise helpless against the onslaught of Islam.

    I’d further point out that self defense is considered a quite valid excuse for killing someone in our society, though it is certainly a stretch to equate to a suicide bomber with a man defending his home. But a stretch of similar length is made when saying that suicide bombing is simply an expression of hopelessness and despair (obviously this was adrian10’s point).

    Perhaps if we/Israel could stem the influx of money feeding the families of suicide bombers in Palestine in conjunction with convincing Israel’s leadership to be a bit less bloodthirsty, we’d have a good shot of solving the problem (untill the first Arabic or Persian country gets nukes).

  177. Perhaps if we/Israel could stem the influx of money feeding the families of suicide bombers in Palestine

    Has someone taken over Saddam’s old bonus scheme? I don’t think these families are exactly building vast commercial empires with all the money they’re getting from sinister Arab charities. Do you really want to starve them? Kind of adding insult to injury, especially as many of them won’t even have known of their kid’s decision.

    The Israelis already knock their houses down AFAIK.

  178. >(untill the first Arabic or Persian country gets nukes)

    Therein lies the problem. Before 911, we didn’t realize that there was a serious enough problem to warrant taking our eyes off of our celebrities and our political scandals to try and solve. But events brought the situation to a head.

    By the same token, events continue to march along, a little faster than we are prepared to deal with (we don’t bob and weave like we used to), until a new crisis mandates a new level of awareness. Sadly, the (in some ways) well meaning members of the “stop fucking them around” camp are the ones doing the most to enable the next crisis (whatever it turns out to be).

    Those peace-in-our-time loving souls want us to be passive as the situation in the Muslim world keeps changing, certain that if we simply withdraw and do nothing, everything will work out for the best. Because the fault is all on the Western side, and if we stopped provoking them, those reasonable, peace-loving Jihadis would beat their suicide bombs into plowshares.

    And in the aftermath of the next attack which would inevitably follow from a perception of weakness, those well-meaning sophisticates would again council inaction, and again, and again. And with each nonresponse, the follow-up attacks would grow more devastating, because, as I said, if there is no reason for anyone to fear you, the world simply doesn’t respect you. Many Europeans have forgotten this, in their brief time as an American protectorate.

    At some point, an attack would come that the peacenik’s pretty words could not reframe away, and the West would be truly “terrorized,” and the response, when it finally came, would be devastating.

    Ironically, our one hope in preventing this awful scenario comes from leaders like G. W. Bush. Not because the man is a saint or genius, but because he wants to take the fight to the enemy, to shape events in OUR direction. For this he is loathed by the Western-self-abasement crowd, but they have the opportunity to be comfortably contemptuous of him, precisely because they are not listened-to in the halls of power. Of course, all it would take would be one election to change that. For a while.

  179. Adrian,

    but _how_ to leave them alone? Leave Iraq and let Sunnites and Shi’ites wage a civil war? It might be useful as it would avert their attention from the West but not an exactly humane option – even if invading Iraq had been an error, now it’s necessary to clean up the mess before leaving it.

    And even if the troops got called back from Iraq, Israel would still be there. Withdraw support from Israel? The only thing keeps Israelis treating the situation much harder – such as executing a village after each terrorist attack or something like that – that they want to look good in the eyes of the West. If they no more got that support, there would be nothing to stop them from that. Withdrawing support would mean the conflict only became bloodier.

    Besides, current strategies seem to work – Hamas recently hinted on a fifty-years ceasefire, which is, in reality, nothing but a de facto peace offer (with saving some face).

    (A side thought. Maybe it would not be so bad if fuel prices got ten or twenty times as high as they are now. It would nicely solve by itself the ugly problems about globalization. Travel and transport would suddenly become expensive and therefore it would stop outsourcing to and importing from the Far East. Industry would move back to USA/Europe. Hypermarkets would crash and people once again went to Unlce Fred’s Drugstore because that’s closer, and they can get there by bicycle. People and business would move out of big cities. Local markets, local exchange and cooperation once again started to flourish. And so on.)

  180. >[Israelis] executing a village after each terrorist attack

    Look, the Jews are not my people, and I feel a little out of place defending their good name, but that’s just nonsense.

    Jews slaughtering whole villages? They won’t even cut off the water to the West Bank and the Gaza Strip for a DAY after each attack. Murdering scores of innocents? That’ll happen about the time my bald head grows back all its hair, I win the lottery, and supermodels start showing up at my house begging me for sex.

    And as for the effects of a twenty-fold increase in fuel prices? Political upheaval. The unemployment rate throughout the West would skyrocket, and the voters would all “throw the rascals out.”

    If they wanted to keep their cushy new positions, the new rascals would have to knock some OPEC heads together. And there would be repercussions from that.

    Remember that, back in the good-old-days, before globalization, when Uncle Fred’s Drugstore was a going concern, fuel was cheap. It’s technology that changed, not just the fuel costs. If fuel costs were to ascend skyward, the push for greater technological efficiency would increase, not decrease.

    Fantasy worlds are nice places to live in, until you try to build them for real.

  181. The problem with Bush is not that he’s willing to fight, it’s that he’s too damn stupid (or politically/informationally blinded/mislead) to pick fights with the right enemy. While the “axis of evil” may have reasonably chosen, why in G-d’s name did he pick the one of the three that had the least chance of getting WMD? Now that our military is engaged in two war/peacekeeping missions, NK and Iran are free to thumb their metaphorical noses at us and further accelerate their plans to build the weapons that will bring about the end of the world as we know it.

  182. Dean,

    no, they are about halway through _my_ people, I have relatives there, and I know they are hard as steel. Those I know wouldn’t hesitate to shed some blood to stop terrorism, even innocent blood, if they would not be afraid what America will think. After three generations grew up in the shadow of terrorism and war, after five Arab nations promised to destroy Israel in 1948 etc. and then three other wars, the terrorism and whatever, they have little pity left for Arabs. This is why it is important to keep up support, because as long as they count on the support, they gonna keep their anger under control.

  183. >why in G-d’s name did he pick the one of the three that had the least chance of getting WMD?

    Because we had a pretext. Saddam violated the terms of the 1991 cease fire agreement which ended the first Gulf War. Taking him out was both easier to accomplish and easier to rationalize than usurping the somewhat democratically elected government in Iran, or launching a pre-emptive strike against North Korea, which has missiles and artillery within range of Seoul and an mutual defense treaty with China.

    According to legend, vampires can be killed in a number of ways:
    1) wooden stake thru the heart
    2) decapitation
    3) exposure to sunlight

    Any one of these, if you fail to make good on it, will leave you with one very pissed off vampire. So you go with whichever method seems most likely to succeed.

    Vampires are immortal. They heal very quickly. The old ones are very smart. In some stories, they have magical powers like being able to change into wolves and bats or travel on moonbeams.

    Any time you go vampire hunting, you take a big risk of failing and being killed. The only reason anyone would engage in such a foolish endeavor is because the consequence of doing nothing, being continually preyed upon, is worse.

    Furthermore, the really clever vampires will attack your friends and family to avenge your attacks on them. Thus, you risk being hated by those you are trying to save from being food for the undead.

    In modern times, it is possible you may find some well educated souls proclaiming that the vampires are not evil, that they only suck our blood because we were mean to them, what with our crucifixes and garlic and all.

    If we were to simply embrace the vampires as our brothers and sisters, we could all be one big happy living and undead family. We would have Peace. And isn’t that what everyone really wants?

    So, risking the ire of your neighbors, you stake ‘em, behead ‘em, or sun bake ‘em as you can, knowing that if you die, the professors will say that you deserved it, for contributing to the ‘cycle of violence.’ And if you succeed, those same professors will point to the lack of recent vampire attacks as proof that your efforts were never really needed at all.

  184. …and of course, the fact that such patently obvious strategery was acted upon by such an intellectual inferior as Chimpy McShrub (being, of course, the puppet of the Evil CheneyFeld Roving Death Cult), galls our liberal saviors to apoplexy…if only the granite-jawed lurching intellectual giant Poodle had been elected, however, it would have been a stunning display of statesmanlike leadership

  185. I would just like to note, for the record, that I have alleged many times on this blog that Osama makes an excellent argument that we, Western Civilization, deserve to die. There are a number of at least somewhat Lefty Western commentators on this site, none of whom have ever:
    1) attempted to refute my allegation, or even pooh-poohed it
    2) proposed any method for combating Osama’s argument (assuming I am right to insist he makes one)
    3) attempted to defend Western Civilization against Osama’s assertions or
    4) pledged to fight for the West, in order to demonstrate that we are in fact a vigorous and united people, with a will to survive.

    I, for one, find this significant. Not surprising, but significant.

  186. I have alluded to something similar in the past…and ‘they’ do not like having their pants pulled down in such an ignoble manner…

  187. but _how_ to leave them alone? Leave Iraq and let Sunnites and Shi’ites wage a civil war? It might be useful as it would avert their attention from the West but not an exactly humane option – even if invading Iraq had been an error, now it’s necessary to clean up the mess before leaving it.

    It’s called “self-determination”. The ethnic cleansing which is probably going to happen could conceivably be done mercifully – the Greeks and the Turks managed it in the 20s.

    Maybe it would not be so bad if fuel prices got ten or twenty times as high as they are now.

    Except that not many of us could afford to eat. Agriculture is very petrochemical-dependent ATM.

    Hm. Seems images are filtered out.

    Wise, you’d just get disaffected souls posting tubgirl all over the place otherwise.

  188. I would just like to note, for the record, that I have alleged many times on this blog that Osama makes an excellent argument that we, Western Civilization, deserve to die. There are a number of at least somewhat Lefty Western commentators on this site, none of whom have ever:
    1) attempted to refute my allegation, or even pooh-poohed it
    2) proposed any method for combating Osama’s argument (assuming I am right to insist he makes one)
    3) attempted to defend Western Civilization against Osama’s assertions or
    4) pledged to fight for the West, in order to demonstrate that we are in fact a vigorous and united people, with a will to survive.

    I, for one, find this significant. Not surprising, but significant.

    It needed refuting? I haven’t seen many of the corresponding righties pledge to do much to fight for the West other than buying a gun and standing outside their house, miles from anywhere any Muslim will ever go, muttering “No pasaran!”

    Cheap energy made us a vigorous people in the past, but its days appear to be drawing to a close. You seem to think we can make ourselves vigorous again by mere assertion, and sinew-stiffening homilies delivered in blogworld.

    I have doubts, myself.

  189. adrian
    >Cheap energy made us a vigorous people in the past, but its days appear to be drawing to a close.

    Nonsense. Vigor is a spiritual matter. It springs from belief. Cheap petrochemicals were a channel thru which that vigor flowed, not the wellspring of it. (Stephen Hawking is a vigorous man and he can’t fucking move!)

    Beyond that, you do realize that the solar system is awash in cheap energy, don’t you? About 93 million miles from here is a rather large nuclear fusion reactor. Perhaps you’ve heard of it.

    Other than the fact that our elites have given up hope, our main problem is finding scalable technology to inexpensively take advantage of that abundant resource. With sufficient innovation and belief on the part of those who dream big, our era of cheap energy could be just beginning.

    A century ago you Lefties dreamed of a grand future for the human race, under your tutelage and direction, of course. Turned out you were lousy bosses and now you’ve given up on the future.

    Earlier I accused the Christians of being a bunch of pussies. Well, they aren’t the only ones. If you had any balls you’d bounce back from your reversal and try to recapture your dreams.

    There’s a movie version of H. G. Wells’ “Things To Come” with Raymond Massey in it, made in 1936, back when you people still believed. Go rent it at the video store, watch it and try, once again, to be a man of faith.

    Just because Socialism is a dead end, doesn’t mean you have to be.

  190. adrian,
    >I have doubts, myself.

    I know you have doubts, adrian, but a wise man sees beyond them. I know I’m hardly the one to preach at you, given the morbid disputations I’ve been spewing around here lately, but believe me, with all my metaphysical navel-gazing and doom-saying, I still have hope. And so can you.

    Ok, so there’s no God and Socialism doesn’t work. There are still other things to live for, hope for, dream of. You just have to believe.

    P. S. I’ve been really mean to you lately. Perhaps a bit more than you deserve ;-)

    I’m sorry.

  191. >There’s a reason why these days the left calls itself the reality based community…

    For the record, the Left calls itself the reality based community because you don’t believe in God, considering it a bunch of silly, superstitious nonsense. And perhaps it is.

    But you know what else is nonsense? The Labor Theory of Value.

    And while we’re at it, the whole luscious dream of the human ant colony, wherein ‘from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs’ means that to the degree that anyone is able to produce anything, he is a slave, working without payment, and without hope of manumission, for the incompetent who, because they are incompetent, are not even obliged to be grateful.

    If the Christers are fools for believing in resurrection and salvation beyond the grave, what are you for believing that human beings could be organized like hive insects and ruled by philosopher kings?

    When was there ever a decent place for people to live in, organized according to the principles of Karl Marx? That power-mad old whore sold you a utopian fantasy straight out of Gulliver’s Travels and you fell for it hook, line and sinker.

    Reality-based community, my ass.

  192. Dean, you accuse me of being a leftist and I tell you that is not the case; there’s an inbuilt assumption in your rhetoric that I hope to disabuse you of, that being that anyone who finds fault with capitalism to the point of deeming it unsustainable necessarily wants a Soviet-style managed economy.

    In the Trobriand Islands off Papua New Guinea there are matrilineal clans of subsistence farmers for whom yams are an important food crop. They are used like money: traded for goods, etc., and even put on display in large storehouses. Yams are also directly related to political influence; the chief of the clan is the one with the most yams. But you cannot simply grow your own yams and accumulate power that way. You must be given your yams as a gift, primarily by your wife’s relatives. So in order to achieve wealth, status, and power, you must cultivate good relationships with your other clan members from year to year, lest they “mod you down” by not growing any yams for you — and you thereby lose your influence.

    This “gift economy” should inspire pangs of familiarity amongst ESR and other open source nuts. Compare and contrast this with, say, the Hawaiian system of “mana”, or for a really sharp contrast, the system of corporate patronage and glib campaign lies that characterize modern-day Murka.

    The lesson of the Trobrianders’ yams is this: the goodwill of your fellow man is valuable coin. It is, in fact, perhaps the most precious commodity we have. The Trobrianders have another lesson for ya’ll: Thus far you have presented two alternatives: capitalism on the one hand and marxism on the other; both are reprehensible in about equal measure, both require the many to work for the sake of the few. There are other lifestyles, other ways of being that are equally valid, perhaps more so: for you see, our patterns of production and consumption *determine* our lifestyle, and the one you and I enjoy requires such a profusion of energy as not to be sustainable with the resources we have. Cheap energy defines the modern Western experience; cheap energy and a sincere belief that yours is the best of all possible cultures and so it is the epitome of rightness to exploit, assimilate, and/or outright destroy cultures that don’t resemble your own.

    (And if you hit me with “the yam economy doesn’t scale” my response is this: Correct.)

    So, unless a miracle occurs and some scientist somewhere comes up with a hyperefficient solar cell or tokamak reactor or something that enables us to light and air-condition our homes, power our cars and trains and factories and refineries (we’ll still need that oil to make plastics!), etc., without the need for oil, we are looking at a hardscrabble competition for the remaining mineral resources. Now, we’re dealing here with a culture that carefully engineered the notion of “race” in order to forestall a complete collapse of the tobacco economy in the New World colonies. I do not expect it to play nice when the oil dries up and the Middle Easterners, tired of having received the shaft from the West time and time again, withdraw their yams (i.e., their mineral resources).

    But that’s just me. You can keep on believing in fairies if you want to.

  193. One of the interesting assertions I see bandied about and not contested by Left, Right, Center or whatever, is this:

    Western Civilization is In Decline.

    The meme is thus:

    “We are watching the first coamers over the rails of the sinking ship of Western Civilization.

    [Leftist] It’s a sad thing that it’s going under, for it’s provided us a lot of comfort. But, perhaps, once the corpus has sunk beneath the wave, and we’re no longer distracted by its gewgaws of consumptive prosperity, we can leave within our means, not exploiting other peoples, in harmony with the world.

    [Rightist] And while the ship is going down, and the shark fins are clear against the wave, I will stand here with my rifle, shooting the sharks in the hopes of buying One More Day of Western Enlightnment, and I, the heroic invidual on the balustrade of history, will make my Noble Doomed Stand. One day I shall fall, and with me, Civilization As We Know It, but I will Hold My Watch, and try to recruit my heir.

    I contend that Western Civilization is far from doomed. It’s just adapting to circumstances….and some of its poor decisions in the past (Ponzi schemes as health care and retirement programs…) will transform it far more than any internal threat will.

    In politics, as in game design, you get the behaviors you reward. We’re starting to see the results of rewarded behavior in foreign policy (Jihadism) and domestic (Labor policies), and both sides have been grabbing the Levers of Dooom, trying to convince their constituents that they’re The Last Generation That Matters.

    It’s been going on since the ’70s, and it’s a giant mountain of bovine extrement. I think the source of the meme is that people past about the age of 40 are realizing that the world isn’t what was promised to them in their 20s, and this realization makes them think the entire kibosh is swirling down the toilet.

  194. Jeff,
    I confess I don’t really understand most of what you are saying. I get that you are saying that capitalism and Marxism are equally reprehensible. And you seem to be implying that Western Civilization is bad and you expect it to get worse in the future.

    Was there any other point I was supposed to understand? In answering, please assume that I, being a conventional bourgeois Conservative Republican, am no where near as smart as you.

  195. Ken, I’m in my late twenties and nothing was ever promised to me. I’m not even one of the intellectual types Dean repeatedly (and tiresomely) excoriates. I’m just a regular schlub who happens to know a bit more math and C++ and Lisp than the average regular schlub.

    What I impart is not leftist demagoguery, nor is it rightist paranoia. It’s simple, straight-up systems analysis. Systems which rely on overconsumption of resources are not sustainable, must either adapt or perish when those resources dwindle. Given the history the West has of resorting to violence rather than adapting, I cannot expect anything other than the same in the face of the crisis of dwindling energy and still be a reasonable person.

    The problem with contesting the idea that Western civ is in decline is that all such contestations have that nature of the Far Side cartoon wherein a mathematician is deriving a proof and writes, “…and then a miracle happens…

    Well, maybe oil is produced deep within the earth and there’s still plenty left. Well, maybe someone will build flippin’ sweet new tokamak reactors. Well, maybe we’ll perfect space travel, get off this dusty rock, and colonize the solar system and beam our energy to us via satellites. Well, maybe volcanoes or the oceans or something are responsible for the earth heating up and not our own CO2 emissions (in spite of the volumes of peer-reviewed research supporting the claim that global warming is, in fact, anthropogenic in nature and no such support for the other side, except for press releases from Big Oil-funded scientists).

    Well, maybe I’m Peter Pan and I can fly! There’s your mountain of bovine excrement. I have lost the capability to entertain such flights of fantasy; in the immortal words of Leonard Cohen:

    “Your servant here, he has been told, to say it clear, to say it cold:
    It’s over, it ain’t goin’ any further.
    And now the wheels of heaven stop, you feel the devil’s riding crop;
    Get ready for the future, it is murder.”

  196. Ken,
    >Western Civilization is In Decline.

    I don’t think we are necessarily In Decline, as it were. It’s just that we’ve got some issues we haven’t figured out how to deal with yet. Spengler at Asia Times Online argues that the West cannot survive without belief in a just and loving God in Heaven who will Make It All Make Sense one day.

    Modern science, the baby Christianity failed to strangle in its crib, has vastly increased our living standards and life expectancies, but it has undermined our faith in God. Science has thus expanded our understanding and broken our hearts. And no one knows what the answer is. But that doesn’t mean there isn’t one.

    In the 1890s, Americans and Western Europeans were convinced that the city was doomed. They argued that as cities accumulated more residents, following the factory jobs of the Industrial Revolution, more horses were needed to carry those people from place to place. Those horses would all shit in the street, sending up noxious gasses and creating all sorts of health problems. No one could see a solution, though the automobile was just around the corner.

    I think that we can find a solution for our existential woes, also, provided we don’t just give up. My problem with our intellectual elites is, as I said to adrian, they seem to think that if they can’t run things, then life is not worth living, so we should just give up.

    I am reminded of the abusive husband who decides to kill his battered wife when she tries to leave him, saying: “If I can’t have you, no one will.”

    I still want to live even if I don’t get to boss you around. Among self-conscious intellectuals, I seem to be a minority.

  197. >the intellectual types Dean repeatedly (and tiresomely) excoriates

    I know that I am tiresome. If I were not, then people in my real life would be willing to listen to me yammer about this stuff and I wouldn’t have to burden you guys with it.

    And as for all that resource depletion hand wringing, I got 3 words for you:
    Julian Lincoln Simon

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julian_Lincoln_Simon

  198. Jeff, I can’t believe this: Given the history the West has of resorting to violence rather than adapting,

    Are we still harvesting whales?
    Are we still using horses for tranportation (other than those quaint novelty carriages that hover around Central Park for use by star-crossed lovers)?
    Are we still making wheels with wooden spokes?
    Are we still making buggy whips?

    I fear that your thesis is based on a too-small sample size. Perhaps you should conclude less and discover more?

  199. I should clarify further, Dean my friend:

    I am not qualified to tell anyone but myself how to live their life. The most anyone can do is to find a group of like-minded individuals and work together to manifest their common values, dreams, etc.

    I would appreciate it if you stopped projecting your Red Scare strawman onto people like myself and adrian.

  200. Jeff, you realize that predictions that we will “Soon Run Out of Oil” are practically as old as the use of oil itself? At age 13 (1971) I dispaired of ever driving an automobile because US oil production peaked that year. All the news was about how we were running out of oil. We didn’t run out of oil. The popular press always gets these things wrong. Oil experts always get these things wrong, because they don’t understand economics. They only understand oil.

  201. Adrian10: You mean I refuse to place all the blame on the Palestinians, despite the fact that the Israelis have all the power?

    First, much of the modern day problems in the Middle East happen to trace to the really fucked up way that France and the UK dealt with the Middle East, including drawing some really stupid lines on the map, screwing over a variety of different ethnic groups and promoting one tribe at the expense of another. Or, at least by dramatically exacerbated by what was done in the region 70 to 80 years ago.

    Second, much like I found it hard to blame the Russians for being paranoid about Western invasion (given a history of it happening on a regular and consistent basis), I find it really hard to blame the Israelis considering the number of times they have been attacked by someone who declared that they intended to wipe them off the map and proceeded to try.

    Third, the Palestinians have been offered an equitable peace a number of times. If they truly wanted peace and an opportunity to restablish their own country, they could have had it any time they wanted. Of course, it’s not their fault, those damn Israelis keep retaliating after their civilians get killed in suicide bomb attacks.

    Same old crap, different day.

  202. Jeff, have you not studied the history of civilization, and the number of rabbits that have been pulled out of our collective ass? In fact, there have been more predictions of energy depletion, famine, economic catastrophe, ad nauseum than you can shake a stick at for centuries now. Every single one of them on the macro global scale has proven to be overblown, paranoia or dealt with by advances in knowledge and technology. What is it with all you doomsayers? Why aren’t you out there trying to come up with a new solution instead of insisting on neo-luddite, anti-technology, anti-market solutions that are guarunteed to make everyone poor? Why is it that you guys read Adam Smith and you get the surface, but don’t get the deeper philosophy?

    Are you that scared? What is the deal with not believing in the demonstrated capacity of humans to overcome such things?

  203. Jeff,
    >I would appreciate it if you stopped projecting your Red Scare strawman onto people like myself

    I understood you to be defending the Left as the reality based community. I mean I thought you were ENDORSING that view, not just repeating it. If I was mistaken, my apologies.

    But if I was correct in my understanding, and you really think that the Left IS the party of realism, then you don’t just get to redact the Left to mean the parts you like, leaving out the parts you don’t.

    For better or for worse, neither we nor our philosophical assumptions spring into the world, fully grown, as from the head of Zeus. Whether we acknowledge it or not, we belong to philosophical traditions which create a framework for our own ideas. Without that common framework we could not communicate, either with others or even with ourselves. We would have to specify EVERYTHING, and no one live long enough to do that.

    So, as an American Conservative I have to answer for all aspects of Conservatism, even those I don’t agree with. For instance, Liberals love to bash people like me over the head with Race. American Right-wingers once supported segregation, therefore I must bear the stigma of racism and specifically distance myself from it.

    Of course, I could abandon all this and be a Non-Conformist. Meaning I march to the beat of my own drummer down a road that goes nowhere.

    If I want to be a Conservative, I have to carry all the baggage of the Right.

    By the same token, if you are left-of-center, you don’t get to say: “But Comrade Stalin had nothing to do with me. I’m completely different!”

    If you want to be a Non-Conformist, there’s no reason anyone should listen to you, as you would be failing to take into account the ideas of all the many clever people who came before you.

    If you want to be a Lefty, then you have to put up with the Red Scare shit, because the Reds did some very Scary shit.

    You can point out that you are a non-totalitarian Lefty, just like I have to point out that I am a non-racist Righty. But you don’t get to lose the baggage and keep the relevance.

  204. The lefties seem willing to embrace certain realities, at least more so than the righties. Whether they fall flat on their face by accepting other delusions is another story. I myself try to live by values which were once called libertarian (apparently that term is falling out of vogue); and I try not to let those values be compromised by emotional identification with this or that political party, faction, or special interest group — especially when they have a hidden non-libertarian agenda (as the Republicans clearly do). There’s a difference between using point X as a starting point for your philosophical perspective and emotionally identifying with Xists.

  205. P. S. I’ve been really mean to you lately. Perhaps a bit more than you deserve ;-)

    Hadn’t noticed. Please, don’t worry about me, I practice thick skin as well as preaching it.

    Beyond that, you do realize that the solar system is awash in cheap energy, don’t you? About 93 million miles from here is a rather large nuclear fusion reactor. Perhaps you’ve heard of it.

    Now you’re being silly. This has been discussed, the problem is access – specifically, Earth’s gravity well. Given a space elevator we should be able to get solar power satellites up into orbit in sufficient quantities to make a difference. If we have enough time. And it sounds like it needs to be very close to the theoretical maximum strength-to-weight ratio for carbon nanotubes to work. You can put all your eggs in that basket if you like. I don’t necessarily see the endless bounty of human ingenuity solving that one, though I’ll be the first to cheer and admit I was wrong once the first one is up and running. What I won’t do is accept that it’s my fault if it doesn’t happen.

    For the record, the Left calls itself the reality based community because you don’t believe in God, considering it a bunch of silly, superstitious nonsense.

    No it doesn’t, it’s a reference to some hubristic comment allegedly made by some Bush minion.

  206. Jeff, you realize that predictions that we will “Soon Run Out of Oil” are practically as old as the use of oil itself?

    Have I mentioned that Ehrlich has in fact turned out to have been crying wolf? But I don’t know of anyone serious who’s talking about running out. They’re talking about a peak in production, and they’re mainly basing it on the world peak in discovery (1962, I believe). Those who pooh-pooh PO tend to rely on very fishy notions like “reserve growth” (*believe* the Saudi official line, they are your friends etc.).

  207. Two rules:
    1) You have to find oil before you can produce it
    2) Production has to mirror discovery after a time lag

    US-48 discovery peaked in the 1930s, US-48 production peaked in the early 1960s. Total US discovery (including AK) peaked in the early 1960s, total US production peaked in the mid-70s. World-wide discovery peaked in the early 1980s.

    World-wide production, discounting all Middle-East oil peaked in 1997.

    While we are not about to run out of oil, the production of oil is about to reach a peak, if it has not done so already.

    When this production peak comes depends on the issue of two rates:

    First the discovery rate – we now find one barrel of conventional oil for every four we consume, and second the extraction rate which is ultimately controlled by the physics of the reservoir.

    Demand is driven by economic growth and price. Remember that price is not the same as cost. The cost of producing oil remains low, but its price has to reflect tax, scarcity and control of the main sources of supply.

  208. The world isn’t going to run out of oil, because crude is but one method of obtaining oil. While crude is relatively plentiful and cheap, we’ll use it.

    Once crude runs out, we’ll start using the alternative methods available to produce oil, ones that are too expensive to bother with today while there is cheap crude oil.

  209. OMG… it’s SNARKY AD-HOMINEM GUY… ah fuck what do I care anymore…

    We could replace all discussion that has ever occurred on the internet on the matter of politics with “BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH” and we’d probably be at the exact same fucking place in the end, all said and done.

  210. Scarcity is a basic economic principle. There is only a finite amount of anything, including oil. However, the solutions proposed by “environmentalists” are anti-capitalistic vannevars. I think that by the time oil scarcity is a real problem, the fuel equivalent of the microprocessor will moot it.

  211. ” > Remember that price is not the same as cost.”
    “No dude… it is… lord man… P=V=C… it’s such a basic economic… principle…”

    Errr…Pete? Are you joking around? Price is only loosely related to cost…in that I *at least* want to break even, with hopefully some profit for my efforts.

    The costs involved in obtaining the materials to make my widget may be X, but the end price (to customers) may well be 100X…reflecting my widgets value in the marketplace. If my ingenuity and efforts transforming the materials into my widget are not valued any higher than the sum of the materials, then economically-speaking it ain’t worth my while.

    Perhaps you are thinking that costs *are* prices…which is true…but costs exist on one side of an eceonomic transformation, and prices on the other. The price of wood becomes the cost of my lumber supply to make chairs…a product the price of which becomes a cost in somebody elses kitchen furniture suit business…

  212. OMG… it’s SNARKY AD-HOMINEM GUY…

    No no, ad-hom is like this, it’s when you say X shouldn’t listen to Y’s possibly-perfectly-valid claims because of Y’s faults of character. Unfortunately, in this case Y’s principal fault of character is that he insists on saying DUMB THINGS. One example, from here, explaining why keeping people in Gitmo is great, he says that soldiers wear uniforms not only to distinguish them from civilians, but to *protect* civilians – “sanctuary”, he calls it. He then goes on to claim that this tradition goes right back to Babylon where the putative descendants of the Babylonians are violating it willy-nilly by attacking Americans and each other without being properly dressed.

    “And this Sanctuary is as old as human history. The first civilized people on Earth, these very same Iraqis, who had cities and agriculture and arts and letters when my ancestors were living in caves, wore uniforms as soldiers of Babylon. This is an ancient covenant, and willfully breaking it is unspeakably dishonorable.”

    What he manages to imply here is that inter-city warfare in Babylonian times involved great concern for the rights of civilians, whereas as far as I can tell, they massacred them pretty much as they pleased – the idea of trying to spare them is fairly recent. And he does this kind of thing all the time, hence I call him a knownuff, though some of the pretensions on display in “Tribes” might merit saltier epithets.

    But please, by all means pull this apart…unless you get one of those sudden attacks of ennui…

    ah fuck what do I care anymore…

    Thought you’d been quiet. Did you get my email? OTOH, maybe I wasn’t worthy…

  213. However, the solutions proposed by “environmentalists” are anti-capitalistic vannevars.

    That’s interesting, I never knew his name had been made into a term of disparagement.

    I think that by the time oil scarcity is a real problem, the fuel equivalent of the microprocessor will moot it.

    Moore’s Law doen’t apply to energy, I’m afraid. I mean, I’m sure they’ll be able to make some really dinky fuel cells eventually, but they won’t enable the modern lifestyle all by themselves in the absence of new sources, even if they make possible some efficiency gains.

  214. They say that Islam must be rescued from extremists who selectively cite Islamic scripture to justify terrorism. Though Mr. Yusuf and Mr. Shakir do not denounce particular scholars or schools of thought, their students say the two are challenging the influence of Islam’s more reactionary sects, like Wahhabism and Salafism, which has been spread to American mosques and schools by clerics trained in Saudi Arabia. Where Wahhabism and Salafism are often intolerant of other religions — even of other streams within Islam — Mr. Yusuf and Mr. Shakir teach that Islam is open to a diversity of interpretations honed by centuries of scholars.

    Mr. Yusuf told the audience in Houston to beware of “fanatics” who pluck Islamic scripture out of context and say, “We’re going to tell you what God says on every single issue.”

    “That’s not Islam,” Mr. Yusuf said. “That’s psychopathy.”

    link

  215. Once crude runs out, we’ll start using the alternative methods available to produce oil, ones that are too expensive to bother with today while there is cheap crude oil.

    Well yes, but:

    1) the (cheap) crude doesn’t have to run out before costs (and therefore prices) rise. It just has to get more expensive to produce.
    As the cost of production rises, so will the prices, and as demand outstrips production, prices will also rise.

    Techniques for increasing well head product (gas and water injection) tend to accelerate the time to peak of a given field. Worse, they tend to produce production curves with a much ‘sharper’ peak, once the peak occurs, the drop off in production is rapid.

    As Kuwait has finally acknowledged the peak of the Burgan, we’re only waiting on Saudi Arabia to inform us that Ghawar has peaked. Lets look at the world’s top four oil fields:

    Ghawar (Saudit Arabia) 5 million BOPD Peak status unknown
    Canaterall (Mexico) 2.2 million BOPD In decline, 14% per year
    Bergan (Kuwait) 1.6 million BOPD In decline, rate unknown
    DaQing (China) 1 million BOPD In decline, 7% per year

    These 4 feilds produce about 10 million BOPD, or about 12.5% of the world’s 82 million BOPD production.

    A decline rate of 10% in just these 4 feilds translates to a loss of over 1 million BOPD. Per year. You’ll need to make this up somewhere.

    The North sea went into decline in 1999 at a rate of about 14%. The UK became an oil importer late last year. Indonesia also became an oil importer in 2005. Australia use to be supplied by Indoneasia and since Indonesia can no longer supply Oz, Oz also has lined up at the Straits of Hormuz, hat in hand, asking for middle east oil.

    2) We would >soalternative methods available to produce oil you propose. They’re all problematic, and not just in terms of “cost of production”.

    For instance, the Alberta “tar sands” production of approximately 1.0 MBOD in 2005 also used 0.72/bcf (billion cubic feet) of natural gas. Projections are to increase production to 3.3 MBOD in 2015 or so (with $90 billion USD invested.)

    Jim

  216. Pete, Dan: note that P = V = C is only true for commodities after time in a free market. Take any of those constraints away and prices can be above or below costs. Also, Pete, BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH.

  217. “…Pete, Dan: note that P = V = C is only true for commodities after time in a free market…”

    Sure Russell…I can appreciate how this *might* be the case after time…but surely this is an *incidental* truth, not a fundamental economic equivalence.

  218. Eric

    Man – did you consider the ironic implications of your invoking the ‘wisdom’ of Caligula? Who did that mad bastard hurt the worst the barbarians or the Roman citizens he was the presumptive defender of?

    I once took the time to e-mail a response – taking a left journalist to task. This journalist compared the shrub to Caligula. I haven’t noticed W pimping his sisters to the senate at fund raising time. Nor has he murdered and confiscated the wealth of prominent citizens with the help of state apparatus lately. Things could be worse, than the current ‘Pax Americana’ it’s true.

    I do question however, where this contentment to rule by fear leads us. The viral danger of the jihadist meme to the moderate and westernized Islamic public is very real. Are we making things better or worse in the long run with our interventions? Are we Harkonnen or Atreides? Victory depends not on what we think we are but what our enemies perceive us to be.

  219. To be honest, I am getting bored as hell of the topic of terrorism – all arguments and counter-arguments were heard severa dozen times now. Here’s something different. I’ve found an interesting remark about libertarianism here: http://reddit.com/goto?id=3062

    “On the libertarian side, a small group of academics affiliated with the journal Critical Review is quietly working a revolution. They forthrightly acknowledge that neither free-market economics nor moral philosophy have produced a comprehensive argument for libertarianism. Nonetheless, they argue, limited government is still preferable because it mitigates the problem of public ignorance.

    The majority of voters in a mass democracy, they reason, are stunningly ignorant of even the most basic political information. Moreover, to the extent that their voting behavior can be rationalized, they employ heuristics of the most obtuse sort: “Candidate X cares about people like me.” As for the tiny but relatively well-informed elite, they too have limited intellectual resources for understanding current politics. Hence, they rely on naïve heuristics such as “Republicans are greedy, religious fanatics” or “liberals are hypocrites who only care about making themselves feel better.”

    The reliance on such heuristics can perhaps be explained in terms of rational economic decision-making—in that there is not enough time in the day to bother to learn much about politics—but, more deeply, in terms of evolutionary psychology. The human mind is too primitive to understand the complexities of modern politics. Democratic politics thus present a choice between the ideological rigidity of the elites and the sheer incompetence of the masses. We can escape this predicament only by reducing the role of government in our lives. “

  220. Mark Steyn offers a much better defense of limited government, in my opinion. He points out that the mega-welfare states of Western Europe have some of the lowest birthrates in the world, along with lots of home-grown terrorism.

    It seems that a government big enough to give you everything you want is not big enough to convince you to give anything back. The stereotypical European attitude toward the future is: “I don’t care what happens, so long as my Check keeps coming in every month until I die. Then the world can go to Hell, for all I care.” No nation can have a future is this is a majority attitude.

    Pluswise, a young Muslim man on the dole has nothing better to do all day than go down to the mosque and listen to the Saudi sponsored Imam preach about how Western Civilization is an abomination in the eyes of Allah and should be destroyed post haste and forthwith. Thus, if you don’t want your subway car to go ‘boom,’ try to avoid putting young Muslim men on the dole. This is much easier if there are fewer persons of any sort, on the dole.

  221. I am irresistibly reminded of a piece of cynical wisdom from the mouth of the mad Roman emperor Caligula, born of experience in dealing with the barbarians of his day: Oderint, dum metuant: “Let them hate, so long as they fear.”

    A glance over Suetonius would tell you that Caligula had nothing to do with barbarians after the age of six, and when he uttered those words you mention (which he did habitually, quoting the tragic poet Lucius Accius) he was referring to the Roman people, specifically the upper classes — though he did not by any means confine his tortures and murders to any one class, or any one nationality either.

    No, if you are down to quoting Caligula as a source of pragmatic wisdom, you are heading for the Last Roundup. Don’t forget that Caligula was murdered by his own guards after a mere four years in power because as a human being, never mind as emperor, he was intolerable.

  222. Dan, no, it’s a fundamental economic equivalence. The problem is that profits exist in a commons, and are subject to the tragedy of the commons like so many other things. That’s why sophisticated investors are always looking for a franchise which manages the commons and sustains excess profits.

  223. Russell, thanks for attempting to explain this further, but it simply makes no economic sense to me…and I cannot find any texts to support this notion that there is a fundamental equivalence between price, value and cost, let alone the ‘tragedy of the commons’ relating to profits. If you can give me any pointers to credible sources to better explain this to me, I’d be most grateful :-)

  224. Scratch that Russell…I just dug up this that makes your claim (section 2), but it’ll take some chewing to digest ;-) and I don’t think he is asserting a fundamental equivalence either, but rather that in simple economic model, under perfect competition (and knowledge) it will naturally *become* incidentally true that price, value and cost will reach a point of equilibrium.

    In the real world, however…

  225. There seems to be a misunderstanding of the meaning of “price” and “cost.” In economic discussions, “cost” and “price” are two different things.
    In a perfect world, price accurately reflects actual cost. But in an imperfect world, some costs are not accurately reflected in price.

    Armchair Economist: I begin manufacturing widgets in my backyard. Safe disposal of the toxic by-products is very expensive, so I decide to dump the them into my septic tank, avoiding an expense, thereby keeping the *price* of my widgets low.
    The toxic waste then seeps into the ground-water, and from there into surrounding wells and drinking water. My neighbors, my wife, and I incur medical costs (measurable) and loss of quality of life (not easily measurable). Both are external *costs*, not reflected in the *price* of my widgets. External costs (those not included in the price) hide information from the market, preventing the market from reaching an ideal solution.
    The statist solution is to impose Byzantine regulations to prevent the external costs in the first place. Market solutions try to figure out a way to *internalize* these costs into the price of my widgets to ensure that the *price* of my widgets accurately reflects their costs; e.g. some sort of tax on the inputs, coupled with a tax-credit for safe disposal. Either solution fails if I’m unscrupulous, and willing to take personal risk by gaming the system.

    Similarly, I would derive a great deal of enjoyment from a case of 16 year old single malt Scots Whisky. However, I defer that pleasure and instead use the money to buy stock for my retirement. I have incurred a cost, a loss of quality of life (roughly quantifiable by how much I’m willing to pay for a case of single malt). If the company in which I invest earns a profit, some of that profit is returned to me in the form of dividends.
    If the company makes no profit, I will have forever lost the opportunity to enjoy that case of whisky. If my expectation of the long-term, compounded rate of return drops below the level of enjoyment I would receive from cases of whisky, I’ll either find another broker, or start drinking a case of single malt every month. The profit/dividends encourage me to forego immediate gratification, and take a risk in the hope of long-term gain.

    The price of an item must not only reflect the cost of the labor & raw materials, but also cost of attracting investment – in essence, paying me to do something more productive with my excess cash than drinking whisky.

  226. Jeff Read wrote:
    > Thus far you have presented two alternatives: capitalism on the one hand and marxism on the other; both are reprehensible in about equal measure, both require the many to work for the sake of the few.

    Utter nonsense. I think this calls for a few Mises quotes:

    The characteristic feature of capitalism that distinguishes it from pre-capitalist methods of production was its new principle of marketing. Capitalism is not simply mass production, but mass production to satisfy the needs of the masses.

    Capitalism is essentially a system of mass production for the satisfaction of the needs of the masses. It pours a horn of plenty upon the common man. It has raised the average standard of living to a height never dreamed of in earlier ages. It has made accessible to millions of people enjoyments which a few generations ago were only within the reach of a small elite.

    Grumblers may blame Western civilization for its materialism and may assert that it gratified nobody but a small class of rugged exploiters. But their laments cannot wipe out the facts. Millions of mothers have been made happier by the drop in infant mortality. Famines have disappeared and epidemics have been curbed.

    I dare you to challenge the validity of any of those assertions.

  227. Most of the major benefits of “capitalism” described can be more directly attributed to government regulation and programs. Naturally, those programs were made possible because we have a capitalist system that generates mass amounts of wealth, but if not for minimum wage, medicare, free prenatal care programs, free vaccination shots, the masses would not (indeed, did not) find the raised standards of living. We see this play out wherever cheap labor and government unregulation are made available to capitalists. Don’t mistake my point, the broad application of Capitalism has made this possible, indeed may have been necessary, but it was not sufficient on its own.

  228. Rich,

    I think a distinction must be need between “ideal” capitalism – that might be and hopefully will be – reached in the future, and the current state of capitalism.

    Currently, the model of both the society and the economy is not the market, but the factory – hierarchical, driven from the bottom, etc.

    Look at marketing for example. For the large part of the XX. century, marketing mostly meant you produce some “one size fits all” crap and brute force it into people’s minds by massive advertisement brainwashing. The relationship is clearly hierarchical: it’s the big corps that tell people what they should like and choose, and they mostly agree. This is the factory model. The fact that nobody is holding a gun to your head is not yet freedom: media manipulation funded by $million ad campaigns playing your subtle instincts against you I consider but a subtle form of assault and oppression, and the lack of real choice choice in a convenient way – when you actually could choose a product or service which is not from the big playaz, but it would be helluva tiring to find it and go where it is available – , when your natural laziness or lack of free time is played against you I again consider a form of limiting freedom. And when the career choice of everbody who lacks strong entrepreneur spirit or exceptional talents is decided at whim by the fat asses at the top of huge megacorps is not a really free economy. There is a LOT different between theoretical and practical freedom – we have the theoretical one, but often lack the practical one,

    Clearly, the ideal form of capitalism is that of smallholders, small entrepreneurs, and artisans. Adam Smith originally based his theory on a perfectly informed market – unmanipulated by massive ad-brainwashing – and a virtually unlimited number of vendors – not some huge oligopolies dominating the market.

    This is why I agree with the general direction of libertarianism, I consider it somewhat shortsighted: the govm’t is not the only huge, inefficient, bureaucratic monstrosity: megacorps also fell into this category. OK, they don’t have access to guns but the do have access to massive brainwashing – and use it frequently.

    Luckily, there are some positive signs. I mentioned marketing as an example, so I’m gonna continue in this direction. The new hope – not so new, OK, about 15 years old – in marketing is CRM. Not the crappy software the “enterprise” assholes buy happily while it does nothing else but pissing the hell of salespeople, but CRM as a philosophy. The CRM philosophy states that you gotta collect as much information about your customer that finally, theoretically, you can do a one-to-one marketing: to each his own custom product, service, and custom way of communicating it. Some companies actually started to do it, Volvo is a good example. And this is a good direction: customers are slowly starting to get treated as individuals, not as an ad-brainwashed flock of sheep.

    To make it really clear: I don’t want to overthrow capitalism, because I believe that capitalism can correct it’s own errors by it’s natural processes. It’s a self-repairing system. What I do want to mean is capitalism has a helluva lot to self-correct, becase what we have now is the quasi-feudalism of Prince Coca-Cola and Count Pepsi, it seems the real capitalism had barely started to develop.

  229. If the company makes no profit, I will have forever lost the opportunity to enjoy that case of whisky. If my expectation of the long-term, compounded rate of return drops below the level of enjoyment I would receive from cases of whisky, I’ll either find another broker, or start drinking a case of single malt every month. The profit/dividends encourage me to forego immediate gratification, and take a risk in the hope of long-term gain.

    And if you get hit by a bus, your wife will purchase that case of whisky and share it (and herself) with the milkman.

    The price of an item must not only reflect the cost of the labor & raw materials, but also cost of attracting investment – in essence, paying me to do something more productive with my excess cash than drinking whisky.

    Tune in next week with Russell Nelson writes, “Drunks are lazy.”

  230. Capitalism is essentially a system of mass production for the satisfaction of the needs of the masses. It pours a horn of plenty upon the common man. It has raised the average standard of living to a height never dreamed of in earlier ages. It has made accessible to millions of people enjoyments which a few generations ago were only within the reach of a small elite.

    Capitalism would never have got far on the needs of the masses alone, it’s their assiduously-cultivated, ever-changing *wants* that keep the engine turning. Good thing we’ll never run out of resources to stuff into the input end, eh?

    Grumblers may blame Western civilization for its materialism and may assert that it gratified nobody but a small class of rugged exploiters. But their laments cannot wipe out the facts. Millions of mothers have been made happier by the drop in infant mortality. Famines have disappeared and epidemics have been curbed.

    I dare you to challenge the validity of any of those assertions.

    Infant mortality was dramatically cut by government aid programs. It wasn’t very expensive – rehydration therapy and a few cheap antibiotics and vaccinations, hardly major invisible hand stuff. Epidemics have only been curbed by capitalism when doing so has made it worth the while of Big Pharma – the development of retrovirals for HIV is an example.

  231. Philip: Customer Relationship Management. To be honest, I never heard about Cause Related Marketing.

  232. Adrian, the Invisible Hand is a piece of religious dogma. There’s no point in trying to argue with its believers against it’s benevolent will backing all good things that have occurred under its domain.

  233. Adrian, the Invisible Hand is a piece of religious dogma.

    Dunno where I can have given the impression of thinking otherwise.

    There’s no point in trying to argue with its believers

    Sport.

  234. “the Invisible Hand is a piece of religious dogma”

    No, I’d rather call it a natural law, albeit one that works only in specific conditions. For example, if you live in a major city and there are ten Italian restaurants with similar amount of capital, and they are completely independent, and they are close to each other, the Invisible Hand will surely work. But if it’s a small city with only two, or if there are many, but too far from each other, or if one has so much capital that it can offer bargain prices at a loss, pushing the market price down, because due to it’s high capital it can survive loss for a long time, or if they can make some kind of cartel/mafia between each other, then it won’t work. The Invisible Hand is basically a statistical feature of Nature and statistics only works in big numbers – but in big numbers it surely works.

  235. Reasonable Economist story about American/European attitudes to Islam here, will retire into pay-per-view archive in due course.

  236. Adrian10 says: Infant mortality was dramatically cut by government aid programs.

    Government aid programs and infant mortality aren’t even correlated, much less causative.

  237. John blathers: minimum wage, medicare, free prenatal care programs, free vaccination shots, the masses would not (indeed, did not) find the raised standards of living.

    Interesting but wrong. Standards of living for the masses have been rising over the past 500 years. None of the programs you claim caused this change are more than 100 years old. Bzzzzzt, wrong! Thanks for playing; next contestant please.

  238. Dan Kane: in the real world everything is changing all the time. That includes prices, costs, and marginal values. P=C=mV expresses a direction more than a state.

  239. Government aid programs and infant mortality aren’t even correlated, much less causative.

    Got links? Here’s one, usual wikipedia caveats apply. Notice it does say that “the infant mortality rate correlates very strongly with and is among the best predictors of state failure”, which might indicate possible government involvement to some. Yeah, IMR falls as GDP rises, big surprise there. My point was that a lot of the reductions in IMR (and resulting increases in population growth rates, shame on whoever said no good deed goes unpunished) were easy and cheap to achieve, and hence not very profitable or interesting to capitalist entities. But if you can show me how these things were, in fact, accomplished by private companies I’m always open to new information.

  240. Adrian10, saying that government programs don’t correlate with something doesn’t mean anything more or less than that.

  241. Saying it without providing supporting evidence does indeed mean less than that in my book.

  242. With 4.5% of the world’s population, the U.S. consumes 25% of the world’s rapidly-dwindling energy — energy which is necessary to sustain our abundant lifestyle.

    And you expect me to believe that capitalism *doesn’t* favor the few?

  243. Except that you are saying that he implied something that he didn’t necessarily say. All that was said is that there is no correlation between the two things. That doesn’t imply that anything else is being said.

    Jeff, I love the comments about “rapidly dwindling” energy being tossed about. As far as “favoring the few”, there is nothing in the US formula for creating wealth that other nations and cultures cannot do for themselves. That they choose not to means nothing but that they chose not to.

  244. Jeff Read: I’ve heard many people condemn the US with statements in the form “with X% of the world’s population, the US consumes NX% of Y” (where N >> 1). I don’t believe any of them, because they misrepresent the situation. I say instead “with X% of the world’s population, the US produces NX% of Z, which they trade for Y”. Capitalism benefits anybody who is willing to trade.

  245. Except that you are saying that he implied something that he didn’t necessarily say. All that was said is that there is no correlation between the two things. That doesn’t imply that anything else is being said.

    Well, he doesn’t appear to have anything else to say about it in any case. But it seemed like a kneejerk reaction to the very idea that a government could have done something positive. I’d say that there *is* some correlation – infant mortality *was* reduced in many developing countries by a few cheap and easy methods which involved governments. I’m quite open to counterexamples, but I need links.

    As far as “favoring the few”, there is nothing in the US formula for creating wealth that other nations and cultures cannot do for themselves.

    There’s a certain amount of something like first mover advantage, I reckon. Though not if you don’t accept that anything is actually dwindling, I suppose.

    If you’ve got time to read it, I’d be interested to know if you’d accept any of the arguments made here – I don’t agree with the whole thing by any means, but the broad outline seems quite persuasive. It’s not exactly a level playing field in a lot of ways.

  246. Adrian10: Though not if you don’t accept that anything is actually dwindling, I suppose.

    All historical evidence about Malthusian outcomes is that the outcomes predicted by those who believe something is dwindling are wrong. All historical evidence suggests that when faced with a problem that limits growth and wealth creation, market forces and human creativity find solutions that break the paradigm. I have much more trust in those things that have proven to work than those predictions that have failed to come true.

    I started to read the article you referred me to and had to stop at the sentence that said Americans consume far more than they produce. At least he could be economically accurate, don’t you think? By the way, I don’t disagree with the premise that the American government and corporations try to rig things in America’s favor. I have a basic understanding of economics, though, and much prefer to read articles which are reasonably correct economically.

    P.S. about government solving problems. In general, government cannot solve problems or do things. The cheap and easy methods used in developing countries:

    1. would not exist if left solely to the devices of government.
    2. would be far more effective if implemented within a market framework.

    Most “developing countries” are horribly hampered by their government in being able to develop further. Much of that hampering is caused by the insistence of the G8 on continuing to give government aid, which props up corrupt governments and denies the market any ability to be effective.

  247. Russell Nelson,
    “with X% of the world’s population, the US produces NX% of Z, which they trade for Y”.
    Maybe I’m not trying hard enough, but the only legitimate values of Z I could think of are “military might”, “corporate management expertise”, and “Hollywood movies”. That doesn’t exactly make the picture any prettier.

  248. Really Jeff? You can’t, for example, think of computer software and operating systems, cars, trucks, ships, planes, agricultural produce, computer hardware, calculators, phones, paper, books ……… maybe you should try getting out more often.

  249. Oh, that list of products and services could go on for a really long time, I just got bored typing it after a little while.

  250. Right. Software. I forgot about software.

    As for the rest, does the U.S. really produce crucial amounts of these, to the point where it justifies our enormous trade deficit? The best analyses I’ve seen indicated that the dollar was kept strong by our military force holding back the tide of communism, allowing other countries to be more willing to accept American money. That’s how we were able to import all the stuff we have to import to sustain our lifestyle.

  251. Jeff, a trade deficit is a bugaboo to scare you with. There is no such thing as a “trade deficit”. We don’t owe anything to anyone, which is what a trade deficit implies. We are not producing less than we are consuming. Simply put, that’s not possible.

    And yes, we really do produce large quantities of a tremendous amount of widely varied products. Not to mention services. Really, try to be a bit more imaginative. I don’t mean to be intentionally rude, but your list of three items is bogus. You either know it’s bogus and you’re trying to score points or you don’t know it’s bogus and should get out and discover reality. While the CIA, generally, is off base on the level of capability and threat posed by other countries, they are pretty accurate on the types and amounts of economic production. Check out the CIA’s World Fact Book for better details.

    The analyses you’ve seen, I would suggest, have a political orientation and intention. Your best bet is to understand economics and science and then base your political beliefs in their reality, rather than the approach that most folks take, which is to try and twist economics and science to support their political beliefs. Also, population alone is not enough to determine the reasonable level of economic activity for a given nation. You also need to consider available natural resources, productive land, education levels, physical and legal infrastructure, government stability and more. Paul Kennedy, certainly not a conservative or libertarian, suggested that the USA naturally should account for 20% +/- of the world’s economic activity, consumption and production in his book “The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers“.

    The question that should be asked is how other countries and cultures can enable growth and development, rather than taking anyone to task for such things. Unless, of course, you like a world where everyone lives in poverty and depends on paternal governments. If you want to return to such a life, keep on focusing on how to stop such things. I would suggest reading economists in general, rather than reading political economics, which appears to be what you’re doing. Tim Harford’s “The Undercover Economist” would be a good start. Find out why a cup of coffee costs $3.00 and you’re off to a good start.

  252. One more set of thoughts. Go ahead and remove the agricultural production of the USA and see how most of the rest of the world fares. In case you don’t think we are crucial to the production of the rest of the world. Or, take away 25% of the world’s automobile manufacturing and some even larger percentage of truck production, based on carrying capacity. Remove Boeing and DeHavilland from the airplane market. Take away the US steel production. Remove the books that come from US producers. Shut down the US universities. See how any of those things impacts the global market. What percentage of the total production in that global market is coming out of the US, and how will it affect the market if there is suddenly a void.

    At least get the basic facts.

  253. I also have to find it interesting that the Left wants the US to produce more than it consumes, since that is mercantilist economics used to justify the creation of the French, Spanish and English empires. Hmmmmmm, interesting to think about that. Why do you suppose that is?

  254. Capitalism collapses to Monopoly in the same way that Anarchy collapses to Dictatorships. This is the second law of markets and one to be considered before enjoining an anarcho-capitalist philosophy.

  255. “…This is the second law of markets…”
    LOL…are these ‘laws’ in the appendix of your little red book?

  256. Excuse me, corporations in the marketplace collapse to monopolies. This was argued by none other than Adam Smith in the Wealth of Nations.

  257. “…This was argued by none other than Adam Smith in the Wealth of Nations…”
    True (sort of), and in several chapters…he was actually talking about monopolistic tendencies, rather than some natural law of corporate degradation…poorly, I might add…and he never establishes any ‘laws’ either…what’s number 1? Number 3?

    Your reverence for Adam Smith is cute, but try to remember his other stunning gems, such as suggesting that there exists a ‘natural price’ for goods that the ‘market price’ can exceed…wonderful stuff ;-)

  258. John: let’s play the Name the Monopoly Game. You name a market monopoly and I’ll name a government monopoly (one which is propped up by government laws). Last person to name a monopoly wins.

  259. wealth is a better predictor of IMR than is government aid

    Unsuprisingly, Russell Nelson believes that money is more important than people.

    Capitalism benefits anybody who is willing to trade.

    In the simplistic world of Eric and Russell, trade conquers all and “the market” is a God which must be worshiped.

    What Nelson leaves out, obviously, is that while “free trade” conquers all (at least, in the way that its practiced in the world today), it does not “benefit anybody who is wiling to trade equally.

    I’ve summarized Nelson’s weak-minded economics here.

  260. I know who I will place a wager upon in that game, Russell… ;-) In fact, outside countries with various violent ‘cartels’, such as those sadly present in much of South America, I think you’d be hard pushed to name *any* corporate ‘monopolies’ that exist absent *government* intervention. It seems that (here) monopolies exist due to various agencies essentially forming corporate/professional ‘cartels’ (FCC, AMA, FDA, ABA …)

    Even our favorite pinata, Microsoft, isn’t a monopoly in any meaningful sense…it’s big, dominant & successful…yes…but that alone is not sufficient to qualify it as a monopoly, as (unless I am missing something) it has no special power to *exclude* competition. That comes along when you press the right palms in DC.

    PS. I only just read your “Blacks are lazy?” [most refences to it seem to omit the question mark] post (thanks to Jim’s snide link)…and the whole OSI debacle…shocking…you have my sympathy & support, FWIW :-)

  261. JT: Of course, this war is most famous for having effected a mighty change in the management paradigm from a central-owner hierarchical model to a much more decentralized, fluid model

    This is wrong. The Federalist model for government won out – significantly – over the “de-centralized, fluid model” of government advocated by the Southern statesas well as the Northern states of Ohio, Maryland, and Massachusets.

    Related: Jim, I’m not sure if anyone is even bothering to post about your screeds, or if anyone can get a word in edge-wise around here with your let’s-hate-eric-and-russell printing press churning out post after post. FWIW, I find it incredibly boring and sad that you can’t embolden yourself to engage in any other discussion and just let this blog be what it is.

  262. This is wrong.

    Its parody, and the winners write the history books, remember?

    FWIW, I find it incredibly boring and sad that you can’t embolden yourself to engage in any other discussion and just let this blog be what it is.

    What, like this, this, this or this?

    And those are just a few of the ones on this thread.

  263. Yes Russell, insulting people (yes, even those you think are trolls) and using faulty logic (no, a fool doing it doesn’t prove only fools would do it) will _undoubtably_ make your point right. Sure.

  264. While I concede Eric Cowperthwaite’s point that people should make their politics fit science and economics… I cannot help but think that if more people did that, global warming and the energy crisis would be taken a bit more seriously hereabouts.

  265. And, just to bring this thread to a close

    Not so fast.

    I started to read the article you referred me to and had to stop at the sentence that said Americans consume far more than they produce. At least he could be economically accurate, don’t you think?

    Hmm, four paragraphs, doesn’t say much for your stamina. Especially as that bit starts “To appreciate how this works, imagine you are a modern-day Roman emperor…”. A bit of suspension of disbelief can be useful now and then.

    So what’s this idea that it’s impossible to consume more than you produce? There seem to be quite a few economists out there who haven’t been seduced by it, though they’re saying a fairly wide range of things about how it’ll play out. Individuals can do the unsustainable lifestyle thing if they get a good enough line of credit for some reason – why not nations?

    By the way, I don’t disagree with the premise that the American government and corporations try to rig things in America’s favor. I have a basic understanding of economics, though, and much prefer to read articles which are reasonably correct economically.

    I’m afraid I’m unable to treat economics as a science, dismal or otherwise. Psychological component’s too big, possibility of doing repeatable experiments too negligible, though I can see there’s a lot of data and a lot of people happily beavering away at curve-fitting. And they have computer models, which is always impressive.

    They do give good hindsight, I admit.

    P.S. about government solving problems. In general, government cannot solve problems or do things.

    What about during wartime, eg WW2?

    The cheap and easy methods used in developing countries:

    1. would not exist if left solely to the devices of government.

    I didn’t claim they would, though I think sugar, salt and penicillin might have been doable even by communists. Governments normally use private companies for things which private companies are better at, like supplying goods. This is a sensible division of labour as far as I can see. Leaving the decision about *whether* to supply the goods up to the private companies is a nice ideal, but you can hardly blame people in government for not being able to imagine life without government.

    2. would be far more effective if implemented within a market framework.

    Has a pure market framework ever existed? I suspect we’re in the realm of Faith on this one.

    Most “developing countries” are horribly hampered by their government in being able to develop further. Much of that hampering is caused by the insistence of the G8 on continuing to give government aid, which props up corrupt governments and denies the market any ability to be effective.

    I think there might be one or two other things holding them back as well, but you didn’t want to read the rest of the article.

  266. Adriano: did I insult a person? I’m starting to think that the status of membership in homo sapiens should be reserved for the sapients. So, no, I’m not sure that I insulted a person. If somebody is too dumb to think his way out of a bootfull of piss with the instructions stamped on the heel, then I have to wonder why he should have any human rights. After all, chimps are 90-some-odd percent genetically identical to humans, but we don’t give human rights to them. Plus, they’re not stupid enough to ever be found IN a bootfull of piss.

    You’re right about the logic, of course. How about this: “Only
    ignorant fools think that.”

  267. How are you supposed to read the instructions on the heel if you’re in the boot? Chimpanzees wouldn’t be seen dead coming up with a metaphor like that.

  268. Standard argument against markets, as opposed to governments: Has a pure market framework ever existed? I suspect we’re in the realm of Faith on this one.

    Of course it doesn’t matter that I said nothing about “pure markets”, “perfect markets”, etc.

  269. Adrian, Jeff, etc. when we are talking about “consuming more than we produce”, please explain how that happens? I’m interested, since it seems that I can’t actually consume something without purchasing it, in some fashion. I can’t purchase something without having come up with “money” from somewhere, and to get the money from somewhere, I had to produce something of value originally.

    I’m trying to figure it out and spinning my wheels. So, I’m hoping you can help.

  270. And, just to bring this thread to a close: http://geekz.co.uk/lovesraymond/archive/highbrow-my-culus

    Really, the on-topic portion of this thread was closed by this comment:

    A glance over Suetonius would tell you that Caligula had nothing to do with barbarians after the age of six, and when he uttered those words you mention (which he did habitually, quoting the tragic poet Lucius Accius) he was referring to the Roman people, specifically the upper classes — though he did not by any means confine his tortures and murders to any one class, or any one nationality either.

    No, if you are down to quoting Caligula as a source of pragmatic wisdom, you are heading for the Last Roundup. Don’t forget that Caligula was murdered by his own guards after a mere four years in power because as a human being, never mind as emperor, he was intolerable.

    which seems to have gotten lost in the chaff, unfortunately.

  271. std, if no one else did, I remembered that post, which really betrays the monstrosity of hitching your wagon to the neocon agenda.

  272. John: Eric: you may be on welfare, in which case you produce nothing.

    The point being made is one of macro, not micro, economics. The contention is that the USA consumes more than it produces. I’m asking that Jeff and/or Adrian show me how that works since I don’t understand. I don’t understand because, according to all I have read, it’s not possible.

  273. By the way, John, someone on welfare does not, necessarily, produce nothing. They, for example, produce jobs for bureaucrats.

  274. Eric, maybe I’m talking out of my ass, but you can consume more than you produce by “sustaining” it with deficit or by printing money, can’t you? Of course, it shouldn’t last long.

  275. I’m trying to figure it out and spinning my wheels. So, I’m hoping you can help.

    What’s the problem? You borrow the money from someone, quite likely in my neck of the woods, and use it to live beyond your means (not you personally, I’m talking in aggregates here) until such time as the aforesaid central banks start to get unsustainably nervous about all the paper they’re carrying, after which…something happens.

    Don’t you recognise borrowing as an economic activity?

  276. But, you have to produce something of value to repay the loan. Aside from that, the “loans” between the US and various Asian countries are really, at a macro level, part of the exchange of goods and services.

  277. Eric Cowperthwaite, no you don’t. You simply borrow more to repay the loan you already have outstanding.

  278. But, you have to produce something of value to repay the loan.

    Sure, but the question is whether America’s producing enough.

    Aside from that, the “loans” between the US and various Asian countries are really, at a macro level, part of the exchange of goods and services.

    They still have to be either repaid, defaulted on or inflated away (I think that’s the full set of options), any of which will have some kind of knock-on effect on the value of the dollar, among other possibilities.

  279. adrian10 writes “Has a pure market framework ever existed? I suspect we’re in the realm of Faith on this one.”

    We *always* have had a pure market framework. It’s very simple: you just model government as a gang of thieves. Everything a government does can be predicted from this model, as can the victims response to them.

  280. A pure market framework requires rational actors. People are not rational, therefore pure markets can never exist as long as people are involved.

    Prepare to welcome the robotic market overlords.

  281. adrian10: Irony killed God, but God shot back with his last breath; they’re both dead now.

    I’m sorry, you’ve gone *right* over my head with that one. But perhaps you’re being ironic.

  282. Jeff, a trade deficit is a bugaboo to scare you with. There is no such thing as a “trade deficit”. We don’t owe anything to anyone, which is what a trade deficit implies.Simply put, that’s not possible.

    A trade deficit doesn’t imply that we owe anything, it literally means that we’re importing more than we’re exporting. How is it impossible to consume more than we produce? Hypothetically, we could import everything and produce nothing if sufficient imports were available.

  283. Almost a month without a post… ESR’s big secret project which he blogged about in the Cheescake factory blog post must be really up to something in the near future :)

  284. I have heard an interesting conspiracy theory. I type it here without approving or disapproving it simply because I cannot – or too lazy to – check the relevant facts.

    The theory says that on all two oil exchanges of the world (New York and London if I remember the theory correctly) oil can only be bought for USD. This give the USA significant economic advantage – as the rate of the USD was on gold standard in the past, it’s now kinda on oil standard. And one of the reasons of the current tensions with Iran is that Tehran wants to set up an oil exchange where oil is bought and sold in EUR.

    What do you think?

  285. Nobody seems to really know how fragile the dollar is at the moment, with so may people trying to talk it in different directions. But I think it’s not so much what oil is traded in as where the resulting profits are invested, and at the moment they’re heading into the US, though there are a lot of rumours that some people are feeling a little overexposed should there be a sudden rush for the exits.

  286. Shenpen, same with Saddam just before Shrub invaded. Funny old world isn’t it? Next on the list is Hugo Chavez, I’d wager.

  287. Irony killed God, but God shot back with his last breath; they’re both dead now.

    Wow, apracticing Quaker who believes God is dead?

    Given that one of the fundamental beliefs of Quakers is that God is within us (the “Light” within us) all, it makes no sense for people to fight one another. This is known as “The Peace Testimony”.

    “If God does not exist, everything is lawful.” Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoyevsky

    Explains Nixon (who was also a Quaker) perfectly, eh?

  288. Wow, ESR has not written anything for a month and a half. I wonder when he will post another entry to fan the flamewars among Jim, adrian10, Shenpen, Russell, Jeff, John, Dean, et al.

  289. This blog/forum is starting to fall asleep… let’s wake it up – an interesting article:

    http://www.amconmag.com/2006/2006_07_31/cover.html

    “The Democrats’ fundamental weakness is that even after four decades of their strenuously celebrating the moral supremacy of every organized minority, our political system remains, more or less, one of majority rule. It’s hard to win a majority if you don’t personally want to be part of the majority because your ego centers around visualizing yourself as better than the average American. If you don’t like the American majority, either in principle or in person, the majority won’t like you.”

  290. Indeed, Shenpen…and understanding this helps explain why the Democrats’ ‘minority rights’ battle-lines are drawn where they are…

  291. No man with a moustache like that is going down without doing some serious damage on the way ;-)

  292. The dry spell on Armed and Dangerous has made me wonder if ESR is all right. On the gripping hand, if he had gone to the great bit bucket in the sky it would have been all over the tech press. If you’re reading this, Eric, consider this posting a ping. It’s hard to imagine you being quiet given the turn of events in the Middle East!

    Hail Eric! :-)

  293. He’s probably stuck in some bizarre druidic poly-penetrative sexual position and needs the jaws of life to extricate him…

  294. Poly-penetrative? I don’t need to hear stuff like that during my current drought…

  295. shenpen,

    I heard that one* from a pundit, not a caller, on some talk radio show like six months ago… only it was being touted as the reason why Saddam had to be removed.

    * the ol’ “price of oil being based on us dollars rather than the euro” one

    This makes twice. Pretty anecdotal still if you ask me.

  296. Something different. I remember that a few months ago, here in Hungary, hundreds of folks whose houses were washed away by river floods complained on the TV and demanded the goverment to pay for their damages. Some smart reporter found out that these folks built their homes on the floodplains, which is against the law and they even got fined for it by the police… how dumb. Now, what do you think: should the goverment try to protect people from their own stupidity by laws like this? Should the goverment pay for damages caused by stupidity? Of course the obvious answer seems to be a big fat NO but actually… if we say no to such questions, won’t our societies become cold and heartless? One possible answer I managed to find is that the goverment paying for such damages is actually nothing but an enforced charity from taxpayers. And I think such charities should be optional, not enforced. But if we leave all such things to private charity, I think not many people will donate and then not helping people to rebuild houses these dumb folks worked for 20 years destroyed by only one bad decision of theirs looks quite heartless. So I think one could find a middle ground: the goverment not paying, but in some way, advancing, supporting, marketing private charities, private donations. What do you think?

  297. Shenpen,

    This is an excellent question.

    It is similar to the Welfare issue in the United States. Getting pregnant and having a baby with a man not your husband when you are 16 years old and then dropping out of high school is a really stupid thing to do. If you do this stupid thing, should the government then pay you money on a regular basis so that you and your baby don’t starve?

    If your answer is No, then you must expect SOME number of children reduced to begging in the streets. There will be private charity, and people can be quite generous, but it will not be as comprehensive as what the state can provide. But if you subsidize bad decision-making, you will inevitably get more of it. And in a decade and a half, you will have large numbers of fatherless teenaged boys running around committing petty (and not so petty) crimes and making the streets unsafe for decent people.

    What to do?

    I don’t see a sustainable answer other than the Victorian model of widespread belief in a stern Father-God who hates sinful sexual behavior and has no problem visiting the sins of the mothers unto the daughters and sons. But kind-hearted compassionate people recoil from such sternness, especially when it causes innocent little children to suffer.

    One way in which Aristotle defined wisdom was the faculty of knowing what to do when two or more virtues come into conflict. On the one hand, there is the virtue of social responsibility, which demands that anti-social behavior be punished. On the other hand, there is the virtue of compassion, which demands that you relieve the suffering of the innocent.

    There doesn’t seem to be a simple way out of this, which is why being wise is hard.

  298. ESR’s probably coming around from his outrageous viewpoint. He’s going to be posting pinko peacnik position statements in due course.

  299. How much money did Eric have at last count? Maybe he’s just gone “Fuck it”

    Small island, no electricity, no Internet. I know I would.

  300. Small island, maybe, but ESR would probably bring photovoltaic cells and a satellite dish.
    Hail Eric!

    P.S. I wrote a story for my newswriting class on GPLv3, and the prof didn’t know what the “G” in GNU stood for, despite spelling out the acronym in my artcile. I still got an “A” on it though. :-)

  301. Another thing. I think Libertarianism ideally could be closer to a sane Liberalism then to Conservativism. As nowadays Libertarians and Conservatives are incomfortable allies, but allies nevertheless, it can a proof in itself that current Liberalism is insane. For example:

    Question: after you became an expert in some technical field, should you help others for free by writing FAQ’s, blogging, and answering questions at mailing lists?

    Liberal answer: yes, because you learned much from others also for free, so it’s an ethical duty for you to do so.

    Libertarian answer: yes, because you often gain much by sharing than by keeping. People you help for free often find you with well-paying consultancy contract offers or good job offers – or you can just put links to your FAQ’s in your CV and many employers are impressed by that.

    Conservative answer: no. My knowledge is my asset, and I only give it away if I can charge for it.

    See how the Liberal answer is closer to the Libertarian one?

  302. I think most coders would probably share for your libertarian reason rather than your “liberal” one – I don’t know if there are real people who think about their technical skills in that idealistic way, it sounds like a caricature. Dunno if you could extend the metaphor much beyond the programming world without the wheels coming off, either.

    Hey, why don’t we start an argumenta discussion about Lebanon in this thread? Eric’s obviously busy, and I don’t think he’d mind.

  303. Good idea! We can repeat our earlier arguments about Iraq and just s/Iraq/Lebanon/! :-)

  304. Shenpen,
    >Question: after you became an expert in some technical field, should you help others for free by writing FAQ’s, blogging, and answering questions at mailing lists?

    >Liberal answer: yes, because you learned much from others also for free, so it’s an ethical duty for you to do so.

    I don’t think so. As I understand it:

    Progressive Liberal answer: No. You personally don’t have to do a damn thing. You should support government programs to dispense knowledge and pay high taxes toward the same. You should also denounce those who don’t want to pay all those taxes as racist/fascist/misogynist/homophobes.

    Classical Liberal answer: See Conservative answer.

    It seems perfectly reasonable to me that the Libertarians would find the Conservatives somewhat easier to stomach. ESR has stated repeatedly that he thinks Conservatives are villains, but he doesn’t seem to find people like me as distasteful as the Stalinist memebots he rages against.

  305. >Hey, why don’t we start an argument a discussion about Lebanon in this thread?

    I’m up for it, assuming there is something to argue about. Do we disagree on Lebanon?

    Let’s see. I think Hezbollah is a bunch of vicious murderers who use civilians as human shields and who want to see an end to democracy in Lebanon as well as kill all the Jews. I think they are funded by Iran and supplied by Syria, both of whom, from the Lebanese perspective, are up to no good. I think that if the Lebanese government and army had any sense or any balls, they’d attack Hezbollah from the north as Israel attacks from the south and wipe them out. Because if they don’t, and Hezbollah survives, becoming Middle Eastern Jew-killing heroes in the process, Hez will put take over Lebanon with the aid of Syria and Iran.

    And I hope that:
    1. Israel has the balls to and that
    2. Bush will let Israel kill every last fucking one of them.

    Unfortunately I doubt both 1 and 2 very seriously.

    So Adrian, where exactly do we disagree? Let the flame wars begin!

  306. I think Hezbollah is a bunch of vicious murderers who use civilians as human shields and who want to see an end to democracy in Lebanon as well as kill all the Jews.

    They’ve participated in Lebanon’s democracy happily enough until now. I think they mainly want the Israelis out of Lebanon, which includes the Shaba Farms, apparently. The real reasons for the capture (or “kidnapping”, if you want to emphasize Hizbollah’s criminal nature) of a couple of Israeli soldiers which triggered all this (and surely even you must admit that the scale of it means the Israelis were just waiting for an excuse) still aren’t clear, though it seems to have *played* as trying to take pressure off the Palestinians, a Shia-to-Sunni act of altruism which has interesting resonances whether it’s had that effect or not. I mean, Al-Q aren’t exactly fond of Shi’ism, but even they’re starting to make admiring comments.

    Because if they don’t, and Hezbollah survives, becoming Middle Eastern Jew-killing heroes in the process, Hez will put take over Lebanon with the aid of Syria and Iran.

    Well, the Israelis *seem* to be girding their loins for an effort which will preclude any possibility of such an outcome (and the loss of face it would entail), though Jehovah alone knows how far they’ll have to take it to get that result. Have Hizbollah been going around killing Jews in general? I thought they were concentrating on Zionists, within the limits of accuracy of the weapons they have available. They’re not much of a World Terror group, they tend to stay in Lebanon, apart from that one raid which started all this.

    I think that if the Lebanese government and army had any sense or any balls, they’d attack Hezbollah from the north as Israel attacks from the south and wipe them out.

    Turn themselves into a US/Israeli client, IOW? Trouble is, the main current marketing operation for how much pleasure that sort of thing can bring is Iraq, and…there may be scepticism out there, y’know? They’ve already had one civil war, and people can lose their appetite for such things. I also get the impression they suspect, probably rightly, that Hizbollah are so much tougher than them that they (the Lebanese Army) would only get in the Israelis’ way, and have to be embarrassingly rescued or something. Better to leave it to the professionals. Knowing your own limitations is a virtue, I reckon.

    And I hope that:
    1. Israel has the balls to and that
    2. Bush will let Israel kill every last fucking one of them.

    Hey now, it seems like only weeks ago you were telling me how innate Jewish compassion and decency would restrain them from such excesses until the sun grew cold and dim.

  307. About Lebanon: I think Israel exactly is the situation London was in WW2 with the V2 rockets: a large number of cheap, low-tech, highly inaccurate rockets are fired on them. Their real damage is not the actual destruction they do, but the psychological effect: that people can never feel safe for a moment. And just like in WW2, the technology is still missing to defend from these rockets (because they are low-altitude ones). It seems the have the only option that was there in WW2 – go where the missiles are fired and kick butt. I think they have no other choice.

  308. The missiles weren’t being fired until they started bombing everything in response to having their guys captured. They’d been waiting for the opportunity to put Hizbollah in their place ever since they left Lebanon, in what was widely perceived as an ignominious retreat. It’s a grudge match.

  309. >The missiles weren’t being fired until they started bombing everything in response to having their guys captured.
    >(and surely even you must admit that the scale of it means the Israelis were just waiting for an excuse)

    Numerous Hezbollah spokesmen, as well as the Iranian officials who fund them, have stated that their ultimate goal is to wipe Israel off the map. Al Qaeda’s publicly stated ultimate goal is a global Caliphate imposing Islamic domination over the whole of mankind.

    In pursuit of their goals, is their anything that the Jihadis could do to Israel, the US, or any Western nation (including your own), which would break through that insouciant moral equivalence of yours and make you ANGRY? I don’t mean angry at people like me, for contributing to the ‘cycle of violence.’ I mean angry at those who seek to destroy our entire civilization.

    If they nuked Tel Aviv, would you then switch over from the language of tit-for-tat to the language of outrage? What if they nuked Manhattan? London?

    I believe you once mentioned that you were living in Japan (please correct me if I’m wrong). If they attacked the city where you and your family live, threatening their lives, would that be enough to break through your shell of detachment?

    Are you capable of being outraged by any atrocity committed by anyone who is not a Westerner?

  310. “The missiles weren’t being fired until they started bombing…”

    Huh? I’m pretty sure there’s no ‘nuance’ or ‘context’ that can construe that sentence as anything other than utter bollocks. This isn’t even debatable. Homes over there are designed with *bomb shelters* in the basements or elsewhere on the property. There are communal bomb shelters. Public orders are issued to bear arms in preparation for terrorist threats. It is a sad truth that the state of *normalcy* over there is one punctuated by the thud of bombs. What a thoroughly asinine thing to say, even by your standards…

    “…the scale of it means the Israelis were just waiting for an excuse…”

    The ‘straw that broke the camel-jockeys back’ you mean? (OK…bad pun) The scale of it means that Israel is fucking sick to death of Hezbollah’s war of attrition, and the loser bullshit from the ‘international community’. They’re determined to try very hard to stamp out a big source of their problems…I’m not sure they’ve got their entire strategy right, but they’re certainly in the right ballpark, and I applaud them for that. Wipe ’em out.

    “…an ignominious retreat…”

    I thought so too, or at least utterly pointless…but now I’m beginning to wonder if it wasn’t a stroke of brilliance.

    “…It’s a grudge match…”

    Reality != WWF

  311. I feel ridiculous saying something so obvious, but you do realize, do you not, that you can go right on in your blithe detachment and wry mockery of both sides right up until one side cuts off your head with a sword. And, if that happens, we both know which side that will be.

    I understand the sense of moral and intellectual superiority that comes from looking down on both sides of this conflict. If both sides are equally wrong from your perspective, then you can bask in a warm glow of ascended righteousness. For a while.

    But ultimately, neither the Zionist Jews, nor the goddamned Yanks are going to force you to convert or die. The Jihadis, if they win enough victories, surely will.

    Is it your plan to remain contemptuous of both sides until either the Westerners you despise come to your rescue, or the Jihadis you despise exterminate you?

  312. Adrian,
    There were a number of Brits in the 1930s who refused to take the threat of Hitler seriously until he invaded Poland. By that time Germany had the most powerful military machine in Europe and England was in for the fight of her life.

    And we goddamned Yanks had to come to your fucking rescue.

    And your country has never been the same. Your history since 1945 has been one of implacable decline. What, if anything, do you want your future to be?

    I don’t think that there is any more important question for any Westerner to ask himself right now.

  313. I think I have made my position relatively clear. I am a fellow traveler of the TranHumanist NanoTechnoGeek crowd. I hope to live long enough to have backup copies, upload my consciousness onto a silicon chip and live to see the heat death of the universe.

    Is it silly? Of course it is. Am I ridiculous for cleaving to it? Of course I am. But, since I:

    1. Don’t believe in God, angels, heaven or any of that and
    2. I have never, for one second, aspired to live in the Socialist Utopia, then

    Here I stand: There is no god but the Singularity and K. Eric Drexler is its Prophet.

    Of course it is all nonsense (unless, of course, it comes true ;-). But it is something to believe in. A future to hope for. What the fuck have you got?

    And if, as I suspect, the answer is Nothing, then What Are You Going To Do? Is it your plan to stand there and sneer until they kill you? From what you have said earlier, I understand you have a wife and baby. Are you insouciant to their survival prospects as well?

    What’s it gonna take to get your ass in gear?

  314. Dan Kane,
    I’m not looking for a clever riposte. These are questions that vex the shit out of me. I ask them not so much to attack Adrian as to make clear the price we all pay for the blasé moral disengagement that seems so popular today on both the Left and the isolationist Right.

    I am not looking to make anyone feel bad, so much as pointing out the consequences of seeking ONLY to feel good about yourself. There has to be more to life than an elevated self esteem, or else very soon you won’t have a life to feel good about.

  315. It vexes me also…but for my money I turn to John Stuart Mill –

    “War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things. The decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks that nothing is worth war is much worse. The person who has nothing for which he is willing to fight, nothing which is more important than his own personal safety, is a miserable creature and has no chance of being free unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself”

    ’nuff said ;-)

  316. Perhaps it is more relevant in full (written in opposition to the Confederacy) :

    “War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things. The decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks nothing is worth war is much worse.
    When a people are used as mere human instruments for firing cannon or thrusting bayonets, in the service and for the selfish purposes of a master, such war degrades a people.
    A war to protect other human beings against tyrannical injustice; a war to give victory to their own ideas of right and good, and which is their own war, carried on for an honest purpose by their free choice, is often the means of their regeneration.
    A man who has nothing which he is willing to fight for, nothing which he cares more about than he does about his personal safety, is a miserable creature who has no chance of being free, unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself.
    As long as justice and injustice have not terminated their ever-renewing fight for ascendancy in the affairs of mankind, human beings must be willing, when need is, to do battle for the one against the other”

  317. Dean,

    it’s interesting how people can arrive at similar conclusions from completely different reasons. While I more or less agree on your views on these wars, the reason I do is that I totally don’t believe in any kind of bright future [1], a common goal to strive for, because I think suffering is inherently hardcoded in human beings, and the cycles of violence, suffering, greed and hate can never be broken. (Maybe I’m too buddhist.) And one thing is sure, whenever one tries to repair the world, it only causes more suffering. If people are left alone and not forced into artificial ideologies, I think they cause less suffering to each other, and therefore the only thing about politics worths paying attention to is opposing any ideologies that would try to repair the world. Currently, both sides of the conflict do have such ideologies – prez Bush trying to export democracy at gunpoint, and militant islamists trying to install Sha’ria as worldy law. (It’s been said a thousand times but worth repeating that the biggest problem about Islam is that it is a political system as well, as it is one of it’s basic principles that secular goverment cannot be accepted.) Of these two sides, I consider the islamists as the way more dangerous ones, mostly because they cannot be put down by voting. Therefore I have to be on Bush’s side, even though I consider the global democracy exporting views of his pet neocons also a dangerous world repairing ideology, but currently they are the less dangerous ones, mostly because they are controlled by democratic votes. Should the militant islamist disappear in a cloud, I think neocons voted out very fast as there would be no more need of them. Currently, these hawks are necessary “bumpers” – they are antigens the immune system of the body of the West developed to combat disease. So I think it’s hard to find things to stand for, but pretty easy to find things to stand against and say no to. Maybe it’s a bit pessimistic, but at least realistic. Also I think this war will never be won. They will always find more recruits and as long as we keep buying oil from them, they will always find more funds. I think Adrian this is something Adrian gets right: the really effective way to combat terrorism would be to change our economies so that we stop buying oil from them and then they could find no finances for their activities. So I think this war will last for decades or centuries. But that’s normal. Most of human history was one of constant small-scale skirmishes. So it’s completely normal that it continues so more or less forever.

    Sorry for my terrible English today – I have a hell of a hangover and half of my brain is desperately trying to operate through a thick haze of last night’s beer, ale, jagermeister, becherovka, tequila, and all the other stuff I don’t remember… :)

    Footnotes:

    [1] Actually there is a future I hope for: some kind of “artisan’s republic” as big companies competed out of existence by small, human-scale ones as technology can give more and more leverage to small, smart teams. I hope for a future when words like “company policy” and “company procedure” do not exist. But I don’t believe in it. Somebody will surely mess it up. It’s the nature of things.

  318. I’m all up in the hizzy with Hizbollah!

    Come on you guys, it’s not right for anyone except Eric to so erratically change topics.

  319. About Europe’s decline – I hope Europe is just rather taking a nap to gather strength before a great leap. Despite all the faults of the bureaucrats, the basic idea of the EU – unity in diversity, not from diversity like in the US – is still a great one. After a millenia of holding each others throats, in historical scale we just recently started to hold each other’s hands instead. I mean just 25 years ago the joint Soviet-Hungarian military doctrine was that in the event of WWIII, we are supposed to attack the Alps to provide distraction to cover the main Soviet offensive on Germany… Seriously. ( I should make an SPMBT game scenario out of it to show how ridiculous it was. ) So this unity is quite a new thing and therefore it’s hard to tell what will become of the EU. I hope for the best.

  320. Shenpen,
    Sadly, the EU is just another attempt to fix the world. And to fix it by a very historically common means. “We’ll just put the smart people in charge and everything will be wonderful.” The problem being that the demonstrably smart people, which is to say those with superior educations, make the worst possible ruling class.

    Bush’s attempt to export democracy to Araby is probably doomed to failure. But it must be considered in the light of the alternatives. Of course we could just surrender to the Jihadis and their plans to form a global Taliban. Or we could just drop a lot of bombs on Arab cities every time there was a 9/11-style terrorist attack on the idea that “rubble doesn’t make trouble.” But that would mean slaughtering innocent women and children in perpetuity and with no commitment to any outcome other than death and suffering.

    And, of course, there is the alternative of genocide. Spreading democracy is the DECENT thing to do, considering our other options. That it will probably fail simply reflects the tragic imperfection of the world that, as you say, probably isn’t fixable.

    But at their best, the common people, ruling through democratic institutions, are an enormously better ruling class than any of their competitors. In the modern world, the workable alternatives to democracy are landed aristocracy(medieval Europe), theocracy(Iran), and a secular theocracy empowering the rule of the educated(Soviet Union).

    At their very best, neither princes nor priests nor pointy heads make as good a ruling class as ordinary schmucks exercising sovereign power through lawful democratic institutions. Of course if the character of the people is such that the lawful institutions cannot be made to work (the late Roman Republic), then the people must be ruled by one of the alternatives.

    The EU is an attempt to create a watered-down Soviet Union. It lacks the military power of the original, as well as the ruthlessness. It will inevitably fail. You are correct that this is unfortunate. But the people of Europe need to believe in SOMETHING, and the wars of the 20th century have left them unable to maintain any illusions about their own nation-states, at least among the educated classes. They also no longer believe in the transcendent Kingdom of Christ. The Soviet Union failed, so they can no longer believe in the Socialist Utopia. There is nothing left for the European literati except a pathetic bureaucratic EUtopia of unaccountable regulators, bossing everyone around in perpetuity.

    And incidentally, Yes, attempts to repair the world do cause more suffering. But so does doing nothing. I suppose minding your own business is relatively harmless, but the world gets smaller and more crowded every day, so there is no guarantee that you will be allowed to just go your way. Pluswise, as the sexual liberation in the West shows, letting everyone ‘do their own thing’ increases the burdens on society in the form of welfare dependency and other problems.

    The world, as you say, isn’t fixable. Even by those who are not trying to fix it.

    P. S. Your English is fine.

  321. The question in Iraq is whether the Arabs are good enough, in terms of their moral character as a people, to be successful democrats. And sadly, the answer is probably not.

    Which, in terms of dealing with Islamic terrorism, leaves us with one or more of the alternatives I mentioned in the last post:

    1. Surrender
    2. Indiscriminate slaughter
    3. Genocide.

    Does anybody have a serious option No. 4?

  322. Dean, I think that I could substitute Germany or Japan in 1944 for Iraq in your statements above and everyone would nod their heads sagely and agree that we must destroy these enemies, because the alternative is unending cycles of war with them. In fact, we created the circumstances needed to reshape their societies by reducing their society to a survival level and then freely sharing our wealth to rebuild their society.

    That’s option 4. Unfortunately, it is not the path we have followed in Iraq. We have tried to skip over the smashing of society portion of the option and go straight to rebuilding society. This makes the situation very difficult, to say the least. However, if we look at the ultimate outcomes in Korea (and even Vietnam, as bloody as the mess was for 2 decades), there is hope that the rebuilding can be moderately successful over the long haul.

  323. Dean,

    Yeah, the EU has some sovietic features like centrally planned agricultural quotas and so on. But there are also a great many right things like the disappearance of borders, the free movement of people, goods, and capital, a common currency and so on. I think the faults of the current practice can be separted from the long-term goals: dropping the faulty modern concept of states created on the basis of ethnicity – I think the concept of the ethnical nation-state was only a temporal bug in the Matrix – and returning to the federal state concept of that was in existence throughout the major part of the history (Holy German-Roman Empire, Frank Empire, Roman Empire and so on). I think throughout most of the history supra-ethnical federal states (or “empires”, in the old terminology) created the most advanced civiliazations. (Like, the one you are living in.) I think this is the important part of the concept and centrally planned nature of the EU will – because it should – disappear. I think it was just a coincidence, that both the political successes of the social democrats and the founding of the EU happened together and therefore the EU became somewhat social democrat in practice. But I think the long-term goal is not this.

    As for exporting democracy. Why is it so sure that democracy is the best possible way of goverment for everybody, regardless of their level of development and historical customs? Quite a lot of the cases democracy just creates the informal rule of mafia leaders (Ukraine) or warlords (Afghanistan). I think democracy only works when people are mature enough, and in many other cases some kind of enlightened authoritarianism works better for a while – f.e. Chile was much better under Pinochet than Ukraine is now, when in Ukraine it lately turned out that the opposition is but a different wing of the same mafia. People’s need time to learn democracy. There are two very good novels of Lawrence Saunders: The Tangent Factor and The Tangent Objective. These are fictional stories about founding a new federal state in Africa. And the constitution of this state says, like, unlimited presidential power for 5 years, parliamentarism with presidential veto for another 10 years and then fully democratic parliamentarism. I think it was a perfect idea: implementing democracy gradually, allowing people time to get used to it. Or look what Putin is doing in Russia. He is not very democratic, almost like a dictator, but that’s necessary for combating the mafia leader who literally own everything and due to corruption, are above to normal law.

  324. Shenpen,
    Do you think that we should have replaced Saddam with another dictator, one who would hopefully have been more pro-American, as a stepping stone to democracy?

    This is a purely rhetorical question. The United States cannot invade a country to overthrow an anti-American dictator, just to replace him with something more pliable. Though it might be nice, for a while, if we could.

    For a long time, the Romans had this sort of power politics down pat. They crushed one barbarian kingdom after another. After awhile, however, the quality of men they could find to be Emperor fell precipitously, and so did Rome.

    In the martial aspects of foreign policy, the trick is to crush vice in foreigners without becoming too badly infected with it yourself. This is a profound challenge. And even when you meet it, there are other problems.

    Eric Cowperthwaite mentions the Germany of 1944. The Allies did indeed purge the German people of their war-like tendencies. And now they have 1.3 babies per woman. Last year, the population of Japan declined for the first time on record. Losing WWII broke both of their hearts, and likely they will never recover.

    George W. Bush, love him or hate him, attempted to replace Saddam Hussein with an Iraqi democracy because he believed it was the right thing to do. Sadly, in the imperfect world in which we live, doing the right thing is difficult because there are so many ways it can go wrong.

  325. Of course just installing an America-friendly dictator would have enraged public opinion. But installing a semi-authoritarian system which is better to their own people, because is able to keep the mafias and local warlords down, I think the public opionon would have gutted it after a while. This is why I mentioned that novel before: a well-defined, planned, gradual schedule for implementing democracy instead of going right at it. “Change management”, I think this is the keyword. Just like implementing an ERP system at a company: better not go live with all modules overnight, but gradually. Every organizational change works much painlessly, if it’s gradual, if it’s organic, if grows rather than bangin’ in. I think people need to learn civilian and consumer self-awareness, consciousness, before they can be trusted that they can govern themselve. See, we here in Hungary haven’t really learned it in 16 years. Weeks ago I was at a rock festival besides a lake, it’s the typical camping in tents & having a couple of gigs in big stages. The organization was badly blown, therefore people stood in the blistering sun from 12AM to 4PM before they opened the gates, because the armband-tickets did not arrive in time and so on. And the most amazing thing it was that they did not dare to complain. And when I went to the security guards at the gates to object, I was hushed by the others, to not “make trouble” because who knows what might happen. And I was just amazed. I mean they fucking paid for the tickets and therefore had every right to complain and object as much as they want and they just did not dare. Why? Because their consumer self-consciousness is not yet fully developed. People still not understand that as customers, they are the bosses and they can expect to be served. They still felt they need to bow down to “power”. Still having this fucking “don’t speak up to not get into trouble” underdog mentality 16 years after communism. Similarly, when people have not yet developed civilian self-consciousness, they will bow down to mafia leaders, warlords and other local bullies. It takes a lot of time to learn not to be afraid. Especially when one’s defeated in war, people are naturally quite afraid. Therefore they can’t be trusted to govern themselves, but temporarily better be governed by others who have the guts to challenge the local bullies. Being a conscious democratic citizen is a learned ability, and not an easily learned one.

  326. I agree with every word, except for one problem: where in the Arab world would you find a man worthy of being trusted with all that authoritarian power? What Arab could you trust not to become another Saddam? African democracy is “One man, one vote, one time.” How would you keep an Arab-American viceroy in Iraq from becoming another El-Presidente-for-life?

    The hope is that an Iraqi parliamentary system will be able to sustain itself through all the ethnic strife. And maybe it can, though that’s not where the smart money is.

    But if you are going to try to get to democracy step-by-step, who are you going to put in charge during the interim stages?

    “If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself.”

    James Madison

  327. Well, that’s a hard question indeed. Maybe the Saudi royal family – although calling them enlighted rulers would be quite an overstatement.

    There is a strange thing in the history of the last 50 years. Before that, state borders always changed a lot, every minor war between states meant the redrawing of borders like annexing or giving up territories. And nowadays it never happens. Yugoslavia split up alongside the old borders, not moving them an inch, Afghanistan, Iraq staying within the old borders, ETA, IRA achieving considerable autonomy but the redrawing of borders is out of question, Israel never officially annexing any occupied territory after 1948 and so on. It seems the powers that be – I guess the UN – are scared from the idea of redrawing borders, for what reason I do not know. This stuff occured to me just because in Iraq the biggest problem is the danger of civil war and Sunni territories annexed by Saudi Arabia and installing Kurdistan in the north could have been prevented that. After all, Iraq’s borders are completely artifical, drawn by the retreating colonists.People rarely draw completely straight lines in the sand by themselves ;-)

  328. [attempting to post from father-in-law’s computer in Nara]

    There were a number of Brits in the 1930s who refused to take the threat of Hitler seriously until he invaded Poland. By that time Germany had the most powerful military machine in Europe and England was in for the fight of her life.

    Germany was a modern industrial state, whereas your current contenders for a place in this analogy aren’t. They don’t threaten us, not even with a few nukes, though admittedly it would make pushing them around a higher-risk proposition.

    And we goddamned Yanks had to come to your fucking rescue.

    You sound a little young to be one of the Greatest Generation.

    And your country has never been the same. Your history since 1945 has been one of implacable decline. What, if anything, do you want your future to be?

    In this life, many people emigrate, and not only to America. Frankly, I think your nationality constitutes rather more of your identity than I’d personally be happy with. But each to his own.

    I don’t think that there is any more important question for any Westerner to ask himself right now.

    Oh, I’m asking it, have no fear.

  329. [again from Nara – Happy Hiroshima Day!]

    “War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things. The decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks that nothing is worth war is much worse. The person who has nothing for which he is willing to fight, nothing which is more important than his own personal safety, is a miserable creature and has no chance of being free unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself”

    This would be more persuasive if you’d served, as opposed to just, well, being a gun owner and fantasising about having the chance to blow away some mentally ill person who’s managed to tool up. There are things I’d be willing to fight for, they’re just not the ones you think I should be willing to. Get over yourself ffs.

  330. [last one – will resume once (if?) Eric comes back and whitelists my home computer – don’t worry Dean, I haven’t forgotten you]

    “The missiles weren’t being fired until they started bombing…”

    Huh? I’m pretty sure there’s no ‘nuance’ or ‘context’ that can construe that sentence as anything other than utter bollocks. This isn’t even debatable. Homes over there are designed with *bomb shelters* in the basements or elsewhere on the property. There are communal bomb shelters. Public orders are issued to bear arms in preparation for terrorist threats. It is a sad truth that the state of *normalcy* over there is one punctuated by the thud of bombs. What a thoroughly asinine thing to say, even by your standards…

    I’ve been making a special attempt to be civil to you lately, and this is the thanks I get. Of course they have bomb shelters, but they hadn’t been needing to *use* them lately – not until Hizbollah captured the two soldiers and the IDF decided the whole of Lebanon had to be clobbered in return, while the American media sagely intoned how proportionate it was.

  331. Adrian,
    >There are things I’d be willing to fight for, they’re just not the ones you think I should be willing to.

    Who would you be willing to fight, and for what?

  332. Dean, it may be that Germany and Japan will never be the same. But, you asked for an alternative to genocide, surrender, etc. I gave you one. It seems to me that if we truly want to defeat this enemy, we have to be as ruthless as we were in WWII. If not, then we need to go home.

  333. It gets much worse than that. We can’t just go home. When we pulled out of Vietnam, the Viet-cong did not follow us back to the States. The Jihadis will.

    Whether we admit it or not, and far too many of us will not, our situation is win or die.

    One thing that troubles me is that even if the Right manages to pull Western civilization’s nuts out of the fire this time, the Left could still wind up victorious in the aftermath. Winston Churchill defeated Germany for Britain and the Brits tossed him out of office and built a massive welfare-state.

    Sheep are rarely grateful to sheepdogs for protecting them from wolves. Sheep want to forget that there even ARE wolves. And the presence of sheepdogs reminds sheep of something they’d rather not think about. And thus do sheep resent sheepdogs.

    As Shenpen says, the world cannot be fixed.

  334. As I reflect on it, I come to admire Ronald Reagan now, more than I did when he was alive. You need a special kind of heart to be a hopeful Conservative. Eric Hoffer said

    ‘In human affairs every solution serves only to sharpen the problem, to show us more clearly what we are up against. There are no final solutions.’

    If you are some hippy drippy utopian Pollyanna, then it is easy to be optimistic about the future. But the more clearly you see the profound and fundamental paradoxes of our existence, the harder it is to maintain a sunny outlook. Particularly if you don’t believe in a God who will one day violate the Law of Identity on behalf of humankind.

    I said earlier that I would no longer be morbid, at least on this thread. I am embarrassed at how difficult it is to keep that pledge.

  335. The question I often ask myself is if the current batch of left wing, anti-war meme spouters would have the stones to be ruthless if they were faced with Hitler and the Third Reich. 99 times out of 100, the answer I come up with is no. They are a far cry from the Left of FDR’s day.

  336. Of course, if we were fighting WWII now, we’d lose.

    The only thing I can think of is Thank God for Abortion.

    The stereotypical Conservative woman has three kids. The stereotypical Liberal woman has one kid and two abortions. Since the political apple usually doesn’t fall too far from the tree, every baby that gets scraped out of a Liberal womb is one more adult who won’t vote Democrat twenty years later.

    That is the single most horrific thing I have ever heard anyone say about abortion. And, sadly, it is my opinion.

  337. Dean says “our situation is win or die.” Not really. We could laugh at terrorists rather than be scared by them. After all, we kill 20X as many people on our highways, and 10X as many people with guns — and no reasonable person proposes that we ban automobiles or guns.

  338. Remember, kiddos, that the same people currently prosecuting, and giving justification for, the War on Terra are also engaged in covert psyops like this:

    http://abcnews.go.com/GMA/story?id=2273111&page=1

    With so much oil money going into the national-scale project of weaving a web of lies in order to discredit discomfiting truths which hurt the oil industry, what makes you think there’s ANYTHING the Repubs have to say about the Middle East worth believing?

    Remember the three E’s: Energy, Economics, Empire. The threat of dwindling oil reserves and the collapse of the petro-dollar; and the mutually supportive agendas of PNAC and reclamation of Eretz Israel add up to a plan for even more US-Israeli perfidy as time goes on.

    As for Dean’s fourth option the only one I can see — and to me, currently, the only viable option full-stop — is to recognize that Western civilization in its current form will not exist in the very near-term future; and to implement the technological and social structures necessary for humane, sustainable survival of the coming collapse of order. Not a lot of geeks seem terribly interested in this (except perhaps those involved in that Free State Project Eric mentioned a while back; although the situation does get better right around where I am now (Portland, OR).)

  339. “This would be more persuasive if you’d served…”
    In case of failure, resort to fallacy. Good job.

    “…being a gun owner and fantasising…”
    blah blah blah yawn

    “…hadn’t been needing to *use* them lately…”
    That’s right. It was all peaceful until the IDF did their thang. Damn those Jews for starting trouble. The fictional reports of regular shelling were simply to establish Jewish victimhood.

    “…American media sagely intoned how proportionate it was”
    Actually, I recall the term “disproportionate” being thrown around by many, albeit half-heartedly at times…which made me wonder exactly *where* the correct formula for determining a ‘proportionate’ response was defined, and who had signed up to the convention. Then I remembered that all this talk of ‘disproportionality’ was horse crap.

    “…every baby that gets scraped out of a Liberal womb…”
    This may be the most compelling argument for abortion I have heard yet ;-) Last call for the one-way stagecoach to hell…

    “…We could laugh at terrorists rather than be scared by them…”
    I’m more furious, not scared…and I think I’ll be shooting, not laughing ;-) Not that I seriously expect to encounter any…

    “…and no reasonable person proposes that we ban automobiles or guns”
    Quite so, and it would be a truly stupid suggestion were someone to make it. I also propose we don’t ask the ‘international community’ to ‘ban’ terrorism…just kill ’em wherever they are found.

    “…recognize that Western civilization in its current form will not exist in the very near-term future…”
    Isn’t this more-or-less true about *any* civilization, not just Western, at *any* point in time?

    “…humane, sustainable survival…”
    What does this mean? How can survival *not* be sustainable? Since you also qualify this with the term “humane”, I assume you’re not amenable to the idea of taking a global view of the states of civilization, and culling the more medievally-handicapped populations with a bunch of nukes…?

    “…coming collapse of order”
    Oh. I see. You’ve bought into *that* religion…write some sci-fi and get it out of your system ;-)

    “…Free State Project…”
    Y’know, although I am profoundly libertarian, and celebrate this concept…I have to admit that I believe this will turn out to be an embarrassing, laughable failure that will be used as ammo by neo-Liberal pundits for years. I *sincerely* wish to be proved wrong, but my opinion merely reflects the lack of faith I have in peoples’ willpower, conviction and integrity when it comes to accepting the burden of liberty.

  340. So, I said our situation is win or die, and Jeff Read proposes we die. Sadly, he is not alone. If

    1. there is no God and no heaven,
    2. we are never going to live in the Socialist Utopia,
    3. no one can even imagine what life might be like after the Singularity, or if we will survive it,

    Then how is any Westerner to have hope for the future, except for some vague ‘humane, sustainable’ intellectually incoherent nonentity?

    On the other hand, we all know exactly what death looks like: often bloody, but peaceful. Tranquil. Free from responsibility.

    Osama poses that we are the weak horse because deep down we really WANT to die. He therefore supposes that he can make a lot of mistakes (and he has) and still emerge victorious because it is hard not to win a fight to the death with someone who wants to lose.

    As a civilization we have to find something in the future to want, other than an abdication of the burden of responsibility. If we cannot look ahead to anything good, then dying is the most comprehensive way to avoid anything bad. If you are dead when the world goes to hell, then not only need you not suffer through it, but by any reasonable standard It’s Not Your Fault. No one can blame you if you’re dead.

    As a people, what else do we really want, other than to be:
    1. Pain-free and
    2. Blameless

    Do we want to be rich? We are rich. Do we want to be free? We are free. Do we want to be important? We are important. And STILL we are not happy all the time. What else is there for us to dream of? Immortality? What, so we can continue like this forever?

    If we are to survive, there has to be something more. But what?

  341. In case of failure, resort to fallacy. Good job.

    So…where and when, you coy little bugger you, hiding your light under a bushel like that?

    That’s right. It was all peaceful until the IDF did their thang. Damn those Jews for starting trouble. The fictional reports of regular shelling were simply to establish Jewish victimhood.

    Got links to these fictional reports? Hadn’t heard about them, may well have been an oversight on my part.

  342. I think that your “win or die” assertion is *somewhat* a false dichotomy, in the appreciable future at least. I take some comfort in the certainty of the phenomenal magnitude of the effort required to subjugate us into dhimmitude, or whatever it’s called.

    Think about it. How the *hell* can a bunch of backward thugs ever hope to dominate such a vast land mass and population? Especially one so well armed? The logistics are boggling. They can barely control their own territories without butchery…what kind of a platform is that to launch a crusade for world domination?

    There are extremely wealthy sponsors of such regimes, and terrorists, but even these funds are chump change for such a crusade. What amount of wealth, and how many resource suppliers, would it take to effectively rule the world? Or at least the west…far more than they could possibly amass, I suspect.

    What I *do* see as being perfectly possible, is the continued terroristic activities they are engaged in now. It seems that sheeple have a suicidal tendency to roll over at the least sign of danger and surrender their liberties willingly. 9/11 was bad enough, but the self-evisceration that followed was far worse, IMHO. We are our own worst enemy, when ‘the end comes’ it will be a mess of our own design…not merciless slaughter at the hands of mighty camel-mounted jihadis. Not even the spectre of nuclear doom is plausible…sure, a dookie in your backyard is gonna smart…but the reality of nuclear war is not *that* terrifying…and is eminently survivable.

    Nukes and Islamofascists and economically illiterate doom’n’gloom and ‘peak oil’ and ‘climate change’ don’t scare me one tiny bit…*we* scare me…and I sure don’t have enough bullets… ;-)

  343. Adrian wrote:

    n case of failure, resort to fallacy. Good job.

    So…where and when, you coy little bugger you, hiding your light under a bushel like that?

    The fallacy he is referring to is the “chickenhawk” one. The position that one can’t comment on a war unless one is willing to serve in the military and put their life on the line themselves. It’s akin to claiming that only parents can comment on parenting techniques and only women can have any input on abortion.

    You specifically said:

    This would be more persuasive if you’d served, as opposed to just, well, being a gun owner and fantasising about having the chance to blow away some mentally ill person who’s managed to tool up.

    Although it isn’t the full chickenhawk position, it is a partial one. I didn’t comment on it personally because I see no need to tackle your logical fallacy myself.

  344. >Nukes and Islamofascists…don’t scare me one tiny bit…
    >*we* scare me…and I sure don’t have enough bullets

    Amen to that, brother.

  345. The fallacy he is referring to is the “chickenhawk” one. The position that one can’t comment on a war unless one is willing to serve in the military and put their life on the line themselves.

    He can comment all he likes, as do I – wasn’t talking syllogisms. Allow me to revisit what he quoted:
    “War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things. The decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks that nothing is worth war is much worse. The person who has nothing for which he is willing to fight, nothing which is more important than his own personal safety, is a miserable creature and has no chance of being free unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself”

    If he’s going to cast me as such a person unwilling to fight, he’s *implying* (to me, at any rate) that he’s casting himself as one of the “better men” making exertions. And I’m saying his exertions consist of brandishing a piece in his backyard miles from anywhere any jihadi will ever be, and I find them *unpersuasive*. That you don’t strikes me as…pretty indulgent.

    It’s akin to claiming that only parents can comment on parenting techniques and only women can have any input on abortion.

    Non-parents and non-women can certainly comment, respectively, but neither of them exactly deserve the casting vote.

    I didn’t comment on it personally because I see no need to tackle your logical fallacy myself.

    There’s more to persuasion than logic.

  346. Again, Adrian, are you prepared to fight? And if so, whom and for what?

    I understand your criticism of others. Let’s hear your views.

    “The beauty of doing nothing is that you can do it perfectly. Only when you do something is it almost impossible to do it without mistakes. Therefore people who are contributing nothing to society except their constant criticisms can feel both intellectually and morally superior.” –Thomas Sowell

  347. So, Jeff, when the nuke goes off in Manhattan, who should we arrest?

    Shall we dispatch the ACLU to ensure that those Hezbollah fighters who fired those rockets into those Israeli cities receive their right to an attorney?

    Should we have sent in Interpol with a warrant to arrest Osama in Afghanistan in September of 2001?

    I know, I know! We’ll arrest the current president of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, for his role in the 1979 Iran hostage crisis and for trying to make nukes, both in violation of international law!

    I’ll tell you this much, Ahmadinejad isn’t the only one who is nutty as a fucking fruitcake.

  348. We tried the law enforcement route for 3 decades. Now, ask yourself what that route accomplished? What was the outcome of Bill Clinton treating Al-Qaeda’s first WTC attack, Hezbollah’s bombing of Khobar towers, etc. as criminal actions?

    Oh yeah, they were emboldened, convinced we were soft, and planned and executed a massive attack on the USA that resulted in billions of dollars in damage and thousands of deaths.

    Yep, seems clear that the law enforcement route is the way to go.

  349. Oh, and Adrian, one more comparison to try and illustrate how silly the chickenhawk position is. Are police officers the only people who should have the moral position to comment on, and/or make, law enforcement policy? If you aren’t willing to put on a badge and be a police officer does this mean that you can not take a position on the proper way to deal with crime and criminals?

  350. Eric,
    Criminals are victims of society. They only commit crimes because they are oppressed by the free-market Christian white-male power structure. Thieves and murderers deserve an apology from us all and police officers should all be fired, or perhaps jailed themselves.

    If you don’t agree, then clearly you are a bigoted racist fascist homophobic tool of patriarchy and corporate Amerikkka.

  351. Again, Adrian, are you prepared to fight? And if so, whom and for what?

    I’d be prepared to if I saw anyone that I believed needed fighting. It ain’t the jihadis, though, whatever some of them say.

    “The beauty of doing nothing is that you can do it perfectly. Only when you do something is it almost impossible to do it without mistakes. Therefore people who are contributing nothing to society except their constant criticisms can feel both intellectually and morally superior.” –Thomas Sowell

    Heartfelt online enthusiasm for whatever Bush is up to isn’t *that* big a contribution to set against my supposed apathy, you know.

  352. Adrian,
    >I’d be prepared to if I saw anyone that I believed needed fighting.

    What would a person need to do to convince you to take aggressive action?

    Perhaps if they hijacked and airliner and flew it into a building?

    Perhaps if they detonated bombs in front of embassies?

    Perhaps if they planted a bomb on and subsequently blew up a civilian airliner?

    Perhaps if they sent suicide bombers to blow themselves up in markets and cafes?

    Perhaps if they rained down missiles upon cities?

    Perhaps if they attacked a school and held the children therein hostage to the meeting of their political demands?

    There were Europeans in the 1930s who made excuses for Hitler. Those people’s names are now mud. Do you really expect yours to hold up any better?

  353. Oh, and Adrian, one more comparison to try and illustrate how silly the chickenhawk position is. Are police officers the only people who should have the moral position to comment on, and/or make, law enforcement policy?

    Crime, parenting and abortion are all around us, while we’re fortunate that we can arrange to have wars in distant places, so there’s a sense in which your parallels ain’t, quite. But look, I’ve tried as hard as I can to lay out my problem with Dan’s pretensions to sheepdoghood. He talks about those he considers to be on the appeasement-oriented left as though he himself has somehow been tested in the heat of battle against something more substantial than his woodchuck population. I think not, but if you’re prepared to tolerate such stuff it’s up to you.

    The fact that you don’t show any need for such pointless swaggering makes me pay a lot more attention to what you have to say, is all.

  354. There were Europeans in the 1930s who made excuses for Hitler. Those people’s names are now mud. Do you really expect yours to hold up any better?

    Yes, because the parallel is dumb. Germany was a modern state, as I think I’ve mentioned. Your list of Dreadful Outrages make up a coherent whole because that’s how you’ve decided to see them. I haven’t. I mean, really, what have the Chechens and the Palestinians got to do with each other? You don’t appear to see the way the West (and Russia, to cover the Chechen angle) has behaved towards the Muslim world over the past century or so as at all unenlightened or manipulative. I do. To me, your list is just varied blowback, whereas to you it’s a vast coordinated conspiracy in quest of a Caliphate, and my beliefs a festival of self-loathing, failure of assertion and probably low testosterone levels to boot.

  355. Adrian,

    All right, so we have a difference of opinion. Scientific theories are respectable to the extent that they are falsifiable. Scientists proposing a theory explain that if certain conditions are met, either in a laboratory experiment or in the natural world, then the theory is invalid.

    Are your views falsifiable? Is there anything any jihadi could do that you would not consider to be blowback?

  356. Actually, while I would use the same examples Adrian, to show why our old methods don’t work, that doesn’t mean I think it is a single, vast conspiracy. And, really, I doubt that Dean does either. On the other hand, I think it is hiding your head in the sand to pretend that because Al-Qaeda, Hezbollah, Hamas, the PLO, etc. are not all the same organization with the exact same religious beliefs, that there is absolutely no coordination or cooperation.

    We aren’t facing a vast, shadowy conspiracy where every single act is part of a master plan. Instead, we are facing a culture that is diametrically opposed, in most ways, to everything our culture stands for. This culture feels, rightly so, that they have to defeat us or ultimately disappear and be swept under by us. No, they are not a modern nation-state, like Germany or the USSR was. But, two of the greatest empires of all time were defeated by barbarian cultures that, on paper, should not have been able to do so. Nor was the Germanic “attack” on Rome a coordinated, massive effort with a single goal in mind. The WWII examples are used as an illustration of why we think you need to open your eyes, don’t carry the analogy beyond what we are trying to illustrate.

  357. [still being intermittently blocked from posting]

    Scientific theories are respectable to the extent that they are falsifiable. Scientists proposing a theory explain that if certain conditions are met, either in a laboratory experiment or in the natural world, then the theory is invalid.

    We’re not in the realm of science here. Science is when you can control at least some of your variables and run things again. Mind you, most people here seem to think economics qualifies.

    Are your views falsifiable? Is there anything any jihadi could do that you would not consider to be blowback?

    What’s this? I have to imagine an atrocity and say whether or not I think it would be justified? The question is how far (and in what direction) we should go to *avert* that putative nuke in Manhattan that you’re losing sleep over, despite all the liberals it’d vaporise. You seem to think stomping Muslim countries (or maybe nodding approvingly while the Israelis do it) is going to help, whereas I see it as making it more likely. Or, like, we’re not stomping *hard enough* to get respect.

    I think you guys miss the point when you get on a high horse and moralise about fourth generation warfare. This guy is kind of interesting, not that I necessarily agree with his conclusion about the Palestinians, but I think the broader point is sound. I reckon fighting insurgencies is corrosive to morale – intrinsically, not just because there are people like me being cynical about it on the interwebs.

  358. Good grief!…quit your whinging already Adrian!…you know nothing about me or my personal circumstances other than that which I have chosen to share. This constitutes a *rather narrow* slice of my life. The fact that my unashamed stance on personal arms consistently elicits thorny responses from you tells me far more about your insecurities and inadequacies than you will ever possibly know about me.

    Continue to retort in your ‘characteristic’ manner…as I have said before to you – you’re really not that interesting…

  359. “Just because you favor the fighting of terrorism doesn’t mean you have to favor grossly asymmetric, disproportionate violence”

    Interesting site. I have no idea of (or time to verify) the integrity of the data presented there…but I’ll play along for now ;-)

    So…taking the first statistic…121 Israeli vs 763 Palestinian children killed…what does this tell us? What is the ‘correct’ proportion? 1:1? 1:2? None? (well…OK…I’m sure we’d all like to see zero dead children, but let’s get real) Could this statistic possibly betray the contempt that Palestinians have for their own children? Perhaps Israelis go to great lengths to secure their future generations…heck…they’ve have some significant experience of genocide, so I do not find it hard to imagine their priorities. What the Israelis certainly *don’t* do is send their children into harms way…the same cannot be said for certain others.

  360. >I reckon fighting insurgencies is corrosive to morale

    >and my beliefs a festival of self-loathing

    Ok, so we shouldn’t fight any “insurgencies,” defined as people who don’t have an army, but who do lay claim to a piece of territory and are prepared to slaughter civilians in order to legitimize that claim.

    And all such slaughter is legitimate anyway because it is ‘blowback.’

    So we who are civilized should, because we are civilized, hunker down and hope they don’t come after us to kill us. And even if they did, it would be our fault — blowback.

    I know I keep asking you a lot of questions which you do not deign to answer but

    Do you object to my characterization of your position as self-loathing?

  361. On the other hand, I think it is hiding your head in the sand to pretend that because Al-Qaeda, Hezbollah, Hamas, the PLO, etc. are not all the same organization with the exact same religious beliefs, that there is absolutely no coordination or cooperation.

    I’d be very surprised if Hizbollah, Hamas and the PLO didn’t occasionally find stuff to have a chat about, but they seem inclined to act locally, even if they’re thinking globally. Sounds like Al-Q have to hold their noses to talk to Shia, but I’m sure there’ll be a bit of traffic there too.

    My problem is with taking the Caliphate dreams seriously.

    Instead, we are facing a culture that is diametrically opposed, in most ways, to everything our culture stands for.

    Not my feeling from the Muslims I’ve known, though I’m concerned about the way women get treated. And in any case, lacking the widespread libertarian confidence that economics trumps engineering I’m not in sympathy with the way our culture treats energy. But I’ll modulate that if I see suitable replacements coming down the pipeline unfettered over the next few years, don’t worry.

    But, two of the greatest empires of all time were defeated by barbarian cultures that, on paper, should not have been able to do so. Nor was the Germanic “attack” on Rome a coordinated, massive effort with a single goal in mind.

    The Germans just wanted in IIRC, but nobody realised how fragile the whole thing was. Now you seem to be saying liberalism is making us (mainly Europe) fragile, but I see more danger in our energy dependences.

  362. Ok, so we shouldn’t fight any “insurgencies,” defined as people who don’t have an army, but who do lay claim to a piece of territory and are prepared to slaughter civilians in order to legitimize that claim.

    No, we should just recognise the reality of the advantage they hold. Unless we bite the bullet and choose genocide, they can probably outlast us in a lot of cases.

    And all such slaughter is legitimate anyway because it is ‘blowback.’

    The whole concept of legitimacy has to be accepted by both sides in a conflict before it becomes meaningful. Until then it’s mostly whining. “They won’t play fair! Waah!”

    So we who are civilized should, because we are civilized, hunker down and hope they don’t come after us to kill us. And even if they did, it would be our fault — blowback.

    We should stop interfering in their countries, permit them the self-determination we claim to set such store by and try and reduce the energy dependence which is making the region so much more strategically important than it should be. If a few of them still insist on coming after us we can cut down on granting visas and stuff. As a last resort there’s always pogroms.

    I know I keep asking you a lot of questions which you do not deign to answer but

    Which ones? Some of them have a rhetorical glimmer in their collective eye.

    Do you object to my characterization of your position as self-loathing?

    I don’t take it seriously, it’s just a caricature. I’m not passionately proud of the achievements or solidly behind the direction of our civilisation. If that makes me self-loathing in your book, so be it.

    insecurities and inadequacies

    Hee hee hee

  363. >recognize that Western civilization in its current form will not exist in the very near-term future
    >humane, sustainable survival of the coming collapse of order.

    >If that makes me self-loathing in your book, so be it.

    Adrian,
    Jeff Read says that Western civilization will not survive, and seems to be of the opinion that it SHOULD not. Assuming that is his opinion

    Do you agree with it? This is not a rhetorical question.

  364. I thought Jeff was of the opinion that it wouldn’t survive *in its current form*…which seems to me rather like stating the obvious. Never mind the a-rabs, we’ve got enough problems dealing with contemporary liberalism’s corruption of our civilization…given our current course, I daresay we’ll barely recognize America in 20 years.

  365. Adrian: The Germans just wanted in IIRC, but nobody realised how fragile the whole thing was.

    There’s a huge amount of similarity there to the Middle Eastern and North African migrations to Western Europe. Including bringing their own culture along, carving out enclaves and not becoming assimilated. I wonder what will happen when Europe tries to assimilate them? We know what happened to Rome.

    Adrian: Now you seem to be saying liberalism is making us (mainly Europe) fragile, but I see more danger in our energy dependences.

    I do think European social democracy (which is not liberalism, even if you want to call it that) is fragile. That includes, by the way, dependence on fossil fuels. I have advocated getting off of fossil fuels and onto the “next thing” for 2+ decades now. But, fossil fuel dependent economies are not the only thing, or even the primary thing, contributing to the fragility of Europe. I wouldn’t say Europe is fragile so much as brittle.

    I also wouldn’t carry the Rome/German analogy too far. But, it is a better historical precedent than the 1930’s for the actual danger posed. The 1930’s are a good precedent for the outcome of appeasement.

  366. Adrian, some points about the differences I see that cause me to say the two broad cultural sweeps are diametrically opposed.

    1. Their treatment of women is something I find abhorrent. Even the relatively mild practices found in Europe, Canada and the US.
    2. The Middle Eastern/Islamic culture places religion in the driver’s seat for law and government, not rule of law.
    3. This culture places significantly different values on the group and the individual than the West does. From their perspective the differences in individual vs. group that we see between America and Europe are very minor.
    4. The religion itself is no better or worse than Christianity was in the past. The difference is whether religion is superior or subordinate to civil authority. Whether the secular leaders like it, or not, they are in the boat that secular leaders of the West were in during the Middle Ages. Religion drives, civil government follows. That is the reverse of the values we in the West deem important.
    5. Sanctity of life, rule of law, genocide as a policy. These are all things that the West has made very different decisions on than they have.
    6. Individual responsibility and liberty.

    Now, do the individuals you meet seem much like you and I? Yep. Especially after some cultural assimilation. But a culture is more than the sum total of each individual. Individual attitudes, beliefs, values and actions are shaped by the culture they are in. To suppose you can meet a few individuals from the Middle Eastern/Islamic culture, very likely outside their actual cultural setting, and make value judgements about their culture strikes me as a poor position to take with no real bearing on reality. Those individuals are probably good people.

    But, like the Third Reich, we have to ask ourselves if the culture is a good one or a bad one.

    Based on what I’ve laid out, please show me where I’m wrong. Show me how their culture, one that advocates the opposite of the values we find important, civilized even, is not opposed in most respect to ours.

  367. Eric, the larger question is whether a civilization that

    1. Treats women as equals and not as chattels
    2. Places human life, not God’s will, at the center of law
    3. Values individualism
    4. Separates church and state
    5. Chooses not to play for keepsies, ethnically speaking and
    6. Aspires to provide liberty to the individual

    DESERVES to survive.

    Our intellectual elites tend toward the conclusion that it does not. According to Eric Hoffer, they would rather live in something like the Egypt of the Pharaohs, wherein the masses were illiterate and ignorant, and a literate few ruled them with an iron hand.

    If, as seems statistically likely, becoming a learned American makes you an anti-American, then what hope is there for us?

    In the 19th century, the settlement of the Old West drew many potential intellectuals into fields of action. There were so many fabulous opportunities for self-advancement that, as it were, how were you gonna keep them down on the campus, once they’d seen Sutter’s Mill?

    Now that the frontier is gone (at least until we colonize space), the West is just crawling with intellectuals who, while living better economically than any previous generation, NEVER STOP bitching about how much America Sucks(!).

    If we cannot, by any means, both
    1. Capture the intellectual’s loyalty and
    2. Keep this country’s promise to ordinary schmucks

    Then what are we going to do?

    This question vexes me more than any other.

  368. I am asking Adrian: If the choice is the West or the Middle East, and there is no possibility of peaceful coexistence, which do you choose?

    No qualifying the question. The question is simple. Assume it really is a fight to the death. Only one culture comes out alive, the other is tossed on the trash heap of history at the end of the day. Do you choose the West, or don’t you? Why?

  369. No qualifying the question. The question is simple. Assume it really is a fight to the death. Only one culture comes out alive, the other is tossed on the trash heap of history at the end of the day. Do you choose the West, or don’t you? Why?

    I’m a “plague on both your houses” kind of guy, though not for purposes of savouring the sense of moral superiority that Dean accuses me of. I’d choose the West if I believed it was sustainable, but the Middle East isn’t sustainable either. Moreover, I don’t accept the impossibility of peaceful coexistence, or that it would constitute surrender.

  370. Jeff Read says that Western civilization will not survive, and seems to be of the opinion that it SHOULD not. Assuming that is his opinion

    Do you agree with it? This is not a rhetorical question.

    I don’t know if it will or not – I haven’t got enough information. As to whether it should, I regard myself as a spectator. I think that if there is sufficient accessible energy, we’ll get to the Singularity, and all bets will be off, though I don’t necessarily believe that whatever opens its million unblinking eyes at that instant is necessarily going to regard quietly letting humanity upload copies of themselves into an infinite eternal playground as its main priority. But I suspect there won’t be enough energy.

  371. During the American Civil War, there were the Confederate Slaveholders and the Union Abolitionists (simplistically speaking). And there were the spectators who had no opinion on whether black people should be property.

    History has not looked kindly on the spectators of that era, and I suspect it will not look kindly on the spectators of this one, either.

  372. And there were the spectators who had no opinion on whether black people should be property.

    By “spectator” I mean “someone whose actions and opinions are unlikely to affect the big picture in any way”.

    History has not looked kindly on the spectators of that era,

    They must be *so* turning in their graves.

  373. Heh, I told you no qualifying the question. I’m not saying that it is fair and accurate and representative of reality. But, it is the sort of question that is good for clarifying philosophy and moving a discussion forward.

    So, assume the following:

    1. The West is one possible choice.
    2. The Middle East is the other.
    3. They are in a cultural war that will result in one, or the other, being triumphant
    4. No peaceful coexistence is possible (regardless of what you think is actually possible).

    Given that, which one should triumph? Which one would you fight for if that were the sum total of cultural reality? Why?

  374. Adrian: They must be *so* turning in their graves.

    Hmmm, I care about my legacy after I’m gone, even if it is only my children, grandchildren, etc. and their memory of me. This implies that what others think of us after we are gone doesn’t matter. Not sure if that is what you are trying to say, or not?

    Aside from that, we may achieve the Singularity and live forever. Already the increase in medicine’s ability to extend your life is beginning to approach the increase in risk of death based on age. When the former exceeds the latter, the curve on increase in human lifespan will go vertical. You may live to see your legacy used against you.

  375. [Just arrived from a trip to Nürnberg, so I have to reflect to old posts first]

    Dean,

    Actually, I think there is nothing wrong with the general direction of your thinking. You are quite pessimist, but there is a special kind of pessimism that is rather fruitful than depressing: when you start to realize that all human efforts tend to lead to suffering, and you are still able to love life and admire the almost unlimited capabilities of the human mind, I think this is a fruitful kind of pessimism, because sooner or later it cuts right through the fundamental self-delusions of human life. It’s a bit like you’re kinda reinventing buddhism, but I won’t write more about that as I don’t wanna look like preaching. Anyway, just go in this direction, and I think you will arrive to doubting the most fundamental questions, why do we consider existence better than nothingness and of course I don’t mean in a plain simple suicide manner, but rather as a philosophical question on why recognizable qualities, which make up what we call existence, are generally considered better than emptyness or formlessness. And then you gonna find some quite fundamental answers of no-answer.

    As for the survival and long-term goals of Western civilization… I think the Western Civilization does not exist anymore as it existed 50 years before. I think Eastern Europe had a great effect on the EU and Oriental and Latino immigration had a great effect on the USA, and both through immigration and through econimic cooperation the former Western Civ have huge connections to the Far East. It’s hard for me to admit because I hate commies, but it’s still true: from an industrial-enconomical viewpoint, China IS an integral part of Western Civ now. Therefore the question is a little bit more complicated than it looks. It’s rather a global civ than western civ.

  376. … and a bit of an afterthought. The most important thing I discovered in my 28 years of life experience is that happiness almost exclusively depends on human qualities rather than circumstances. It’s a lot more important to ask the question of what kind of people we are and what kind we want to become, than to care about what is happening to us.

    This is my basic problem with the Left – the consciously avoid to ask this question, because they think all questions on human quality lead to discrimination and fascism. The Right often asks this question, but they usually do it wrong as their ideal seems to be some kind of very boring “pray and work” type of person. I think we need to find a better ideal than that.

    I think our greatest challenge is to find new human ideals. We have to rediscover or redefine the concept of “virtue”. Not in the old way, where virtue meant serving the state or bribing the god for getting a pleasant afterlife, but just virtue for itself. Just because the lack of caring about virtue unavoidably leads to unhappiness, because we lose our self-respect and therefore our purpose, our drive to live.

    There is not more important question than that. “How can a 21st century man consider himself virtuous?” I think if we don’t find an answer to that, Osama gonna win, because without rediscovering virtue, we won’t rediscover our will to live.

  377. … and yet another thing. The word “virtue” comes from Latin word “virtus”, which comes from “vir”, which means “man”. I’m kind of convinced that a lot of our current problems came right from feminism. Don’t misunderstand me, as long as feminism is about recognizing that both sexes have the same value and therefore deserve the same rights, I’m in. But feminism had a side-effect of causing that both sexes have naturally different conduct and way of thinking, and the definition of good and right must be naturally different for the gender of healers and the gender of protectors. One of the major reasons of our lack of will to live comes from the fact that we cannot really discover really fitting identities or roles for ourselves because female and male roles were destroyed and washed into some kind of unisex role. I think the first act of rediscovering our values should be this: there must be a completely different feminine and masculine definition of good and right. And the masculine definition needs to contain some amount of warrior, knight, samurai, cowboy, whatever elements, because without that we cannot make right decisions – like, taking up arms when necessary – and we cannot live at peace with ourselves, as we let an important part of ourselves starve.

  378. Shenpen, good thoughts. Some comments for your own thinking on the topic.

    I agree that “the West” does not exist today as it did 50 years ago. It doesn’t exist today as it 40-ish years ago when I was born. Nor did Western civilization exist in 1945 as it did in 1845 or 1745. 5 decades is a long time and change is to be expected. One of the most powerful things about Western civilization has been its ability to not only change, but to desire and produce change, viewing that as a good thing. That is, indeed, one of the foundations of Liberalism. In fact, the majority of the current political leaders and thinkers of “the West” are not Liberal, regardless of what they say about themself. They resist change, are scared of it. That change was occurring long before WWII. The biggest change I see in Europe (Western anyhow) is that the people no longer want change either. Eastern Europe appears to still desire change, as does the USA.

    The point, I guess, is that the West still exists. A place that values change, rule of law, the individual, education, etc. is still here. Yes, it ahs been influenced, it has been impacted by globalization, by communism/socialism, by renewed religious statism. But, it’s still here, although the society has changed over time.

    About your comments and thoughts on virtue. I would recommend reading the early Scottish Enlightenment philosophers. They taught and studied a subject known as Moral Philosophy, which later broke into multiple areas of history, social science, economics and more. You may find what those men, 250 to 300 years ago had to say about virtue and morality. Especially interesting are the ones who did not link virtue to King or Church.

  379. Hmmm, I care about my legacy after I’m gone, even if it is only my children, grandchildren, etc. and their memory of me. This implies that what others think of us after we are gone doesn’t matter. Not sure if that is what you are trying to say, or not?

    Sure I care about what my own family will think of me, it’s just that I have difficulty imagining them scrolling through archives of my old blog postings and getting very involved with the content of what they find. Oooh look, Great-grandpa said something anti-Zionist, how terrible. Anyway, if the West has won they should have more interesting things to do, and if the jihadis have the archives will be unreadable.

  380. Eric,

    the problem is I don’t know jack shit about Scottish Enlightment philosophers. Can you at least name some names to google on?

  381. Shenpen:

    Adam Smith
    David Hume
    Francis Hutcheson

    Those three should get you started. Read “Wealth of Nations” from the perspective that Adam Smith wrote it to explain moral philosophy and human nature. He had no idea that he would found a whole new branch of study called economics when he wrote that book.

    A good introduction the Scottish Enlightenment is:

    How the Scots Invented the Modern World: The True Story of How Western Europe’s Poorest Nation Created Our World & Everything in It – Arthur Herman, 2001

    Just one quote on why the Scottish Enlightenment is so important to the West:

    Voltaire: “We look to Scotland for all our ideas of civilisation.”

    Other Scottish Enlightenment philosophers include: James Burnett, Adam Ferguson, John Millar, and William Robertson

    Also, look at the influence of the Scots on the American education system.

  382. Shenpen,
    In case you are interested, my own recommended philosophy list would include:

    Eric Hoffer (The True Believer, anything else)
    Dennis Prager (Happiness is a Serious Problem)
    Sun Tzu (The Art of War)
    Robert Heinlein (anything)
    Louis L’Amour (anything)
    Machiavelli (The Prince)
    Ayn Rand (Atlas Shrugged, anything else)
    Shelby Steele (A Dream Deferred)
    Thomas Sowell (A Conflict of Visions, anything else)
    Steven Pinker (How the Mind Works)

  383. If you really want to understand what’s going on, I’d also suggest Alvin Tofflers The Third Wave.

  384. Um, the comment thingie munged the underling of the book title. I should have put it in quotes as AP style allows. (Student journalist outed!)

  385. Light Bulb Moment: the terrorists are decentralized and loosely organized, but the U.S. and other governments are using bureaucratic, top-down armies to fight them. Maybe some concerned citizens should just buy some plain tickets for the Middle East and take care of the problem for good. This might not be a good idea, but small groups of indivuals can adapt more quickly than armies that were intended to fight other large armies. Something has to work!

  386. That’s exactly what will happen. Sooner or later. States, which have rules of engagement, and which have to answer to world opinion and “international law,” cannot defeat terrorist organizations which face no such constraints.

    But the West can produce deadly non-state actors as well. Stone killers who don’t give a shit what Kofi or Bush or, for that matter, Congress has to say about anything. Right now such groups would be universally denounced by all right-thinking people. But you let a few nukes go off in American cities, and the government offer some ineffectual “proportionate” response in return, and public opinion will change real fast.

    Do you want to guarantee that this will happen sooner rather than later? Put a Democrat in the White House. If our government decides it does not want to fight this war, while our enemies still do, then something’s gotta give. And what will give will be the Law.

    If the law only exists to protect murderers, then those who wish to live must abandon the law. And become murderers, themselves.

    And then Hell opens up its mouth very wide indeed.

  387. If a Conservative is a Liberal who’s been mugged, a Vigilante is a Citizen who’s been mugged and then watched as his Sovereign did nothing about it.

    Ultimately, this is how Sovereignty dies. And then, pace Mr. Hobbes, life becomes solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.

    Throughout the Western world, the political Left wants to see the status quo fail. They imagine that they will then get a chance to run things as they have always dreamed. For this reason they hobble every effort to defend civilization from monstrous killers.

    What they set loose will be far worse than they can possibly imagine.

  388. Light Bulb Moment: the terrorists are decentralized and loosely organized, but the U.S. and other governments are using bureaucratic, top-down armies to fight them. Maybe some concerned citizens should just buy some plain tickets for the Middle East and take care of the problem for good. This might not be a good idea, but small groups of indivuals can adapt more quickly than armies that were intended to fight other large armies. Something has to work!

    So…volunteer unpaid amateur mercenaries who aren’t trained in unit operations (or the use of the relevant heavy weaponry, by the sound of it) and don’t know the terrain are going to saunter over there and do a more effective job of winkling hardass beardies out of a very well stocked underground bunker/tunnel system than the frigging *IDF*?

    I’d watch that on video, certainly.

  389. No Adrian, volunteer unpaid amateurs will do things like poison the water supply in Mecca, release clouds of poison gas in Damascus, start a SARS epidemic in Tehran.

    In the words of Mark Steyn:
    “when an army goes to war against a terrorist organization, it’s like watching the Red Sox play Andre Agassi: Each side is being held to its own set of rules. When Hezbollah launches rockets into Israeli residential neighborhoods with the intention of killing random civilians, that’s fine because, after all, they’re terrorists and that’s what terrorists do. But when, in the course of trying to resist the terrorists, Israel unintentionally kills civilians, that’s an appalling act of savagery.”

    In that political climate, there is only one realistic solution: create terrorist organizations to fight terrorist organizations. Only what do you do when your terrorists have won the war you would not fight and start to come home? Do you try them for “war crimes”? They’re terrorists! They are not going to submit to the rule of law.

    Soldiers can come home from the battlefield and reintegrate into law-abiding society because they never really left it. They did not abandon the rules, they just went to a place where the rules were different. But when the fanatical killers come back, civilization will reap the whirlwind.

    And you Lefties are the ones that sowed the wind, never you doubt it.

  390. Volunteer unpaid amateur bloggers are already proving they can do journalism better than the professionals. What makes you think Western science geeks can’t do terrorism better than the professionals? The West is not held back from genocide by inability, it is held back by the Law.

    And Lefties like you want to see the rules used for the exclusive benefit of the terrorists, and to the exclusive detriment of those who resist them. To the degree that you are successful, the civilized West will inevitably have to produce uncivilized people, unhampered by the rules, to do the resisting.

    And, as you say, the hardass beardies in their bunkers are not the best targets. The easiest targets are the civilian populations from whence the hardass beardies flow.

    And when the West produces its own hardass beardies who respect no Law, moral or otherwise, then when they come home, they’re going to want a piece of the action. They are not going to return to being good little taxpayers, especially since, the moment they do, people like you will demand that they be put on trial for their murderous acts. Acts you made inevitable through your ‘pox on both their houses’ moral imbecility.

    The Western terrorists will murder their way to victory in the Middle East, then they will come back to do the same here. And as long as Lefties like you retain your influence over public opinion, so that the civilized world cannot fight terrorists through civilized means, then I don’t see any way to prevent it.

  391. This “send a thief to catch a thief” theory is superficially attractive, but suffers (in this instance) from the same drawbacks as ‘they’ suffer from over here…namely, we look different. Sending a bunch of white boys over there to engage in protracted black-ops is suicide…

    Do we have sufficient mid-east-looking people, skilled in sophisticated terrorist tactics, fluent in local dialects, to infiltrate various regions and launch a campaign of terrorism to undermine the Islamo-fascists?

    Be a daisy if we do…

    I favor a low-kiloton nuclear solution myself.

  392. Dan,

    You only have to look at the history of other guerrilla and terrorist wars to see that the “other side”, the one that is nominally civilized, will begin producing very capable, competent terrorists of their own. That usually happens when law and order is no longer perceived as effective and competent by some subset of the law and order side. Look at Ireland, El Salvador, Vietnam for examples.

    To suppose that a population of 300 million cannot produce a number of effective, committed terrorists, including ones that could operate in the middle east, is not very realistic.

    I’m not in favor of this, by the way. I just recognize what reality is.

  393. Eric C,

    I agree with you…I was not suggesting we *couldn’t* produce competent terrorists, only that to be effective *in this particular hypothetical situation* we have to overcome a similar kinda hurdle to the one ‘they’ face.

    Which is also why ‘profiling’ is so critical, and why we’re currently suicidally incompetent not to be fully, and pervasively, engaged in it *right now*…I wonder what death toll will suffice to reject such ‘politically correct’ narcissism? Maybe the intellectually stifling environment of contemporary liberalism has dragged the masses down beyond any hope of realizing this…?

    I suspect many of the regular posters to this blog would make excellent terrorists…

  394. Hello,
    The comments on nuclear power caught me attention. While I am sadened by our lack of nuclear power in this nation (U.S.), I do understand that the plants of yesteryear are a financial fiasco. I remember reading in the newspaper some years back about a Japanese company wanting to install a small, low-maintenance reactor in a remote Alaskan village. A quick google search turned up http://www.adn.com/front/story/4214182p-4226215c.html amongst other stories. The illustration in this article was the one that I remembered from the local paper. While I don’t claim to be an authority on nuclear power, I know that there is newer technology that what the plants constructed so many years ago were built upon. Other nations have a bigger nuclear power program than ours. What are they doing different? I’m simply wondering why we are not seeing more interest in nuclear power being rejuvinated in the United States.

  395. >I’d watch that on video, certainly.

    And make no mistake Adrian. If it goes that far, you won’t be watching it on video. You’ll be watching out your front window. When the world goes insane, you don’t get to be a spectator anymore.

  396. If it goes that far, you won’t be watching it on video. You’ll be watching out your front window.

    Not here, I think – there’s a small Iranian expat community in the big cities but considering the precedents they’d be unwise to strive for a Tokyo Caliphate. The Japanese killed hundreds (possibly thousands) of Koreans after the Great Kanto quake in 1923 on the basis of a few rumours. Hate to think what they’d do with a genuine grievance. I’d be keeping my own head down, that’s for sure.

    My main concern here is how dependent the place is on imported energy, surprisingly enough.

  397. Look at Ireland, El Salvador, Vietnam for examples.

    I don’t know if I’d call the Loyalist terrorists capable or competent compared to the IRA – they seemed to mainly be interested in living large off the proceeds of extortion and drug dealing. They did have lots of friends in the police, of course. In El Salvador, I dunno, do you mean those American-trained dudes who massacred 900 or so men, women and children in El Mozote? Don’t think the Nicaraguan Contras would have got off the ground without generous US funding.

    What makes you think Western science geeks can’t do terrorism better than the professionals?

    Oh, they love *talking* about it, but when push comes to shove I reckon they’ll turn out to be a bit too risk-averse. Lessee, there was the Unabomber, but he was A) a lefty and B) kind of crap.

  398. Adrian, just as plenty of the bad guy terrorists get funding from government and quasi-government sources, so would someone like the Contras. I sincerely doubt that anyone could swing the sorts of campaigns we are talking about without covert government backing, including Al-Qaeda.

  399. Also, albeit with government backing, look at the effectiveness, competence and capabilities of the Hmong tribesmen in the Vietnamese Highlands. A few American special forces types and limited quantities of weapons/cash made them extremely capable. Same story in Afghanistan.

    The lesson? A very small amount of backing by a government entity can create a significant terrorist/guerrilla force. If a private force like that were to come into being, depending on the situation, it seems to me likely that one or more western governments might decide to support them covertly.

  400. Also, albeit with government backing, look at the effectiveness, competence and capabilities of the Hmong tribesmen in the Vietnamese Highlands. A few American special forces types and limited quantities of weapons/cash made them extremely capable. Same story in Afghanistan.

    Ain’t no substitute for that ol’ local knowledge, indeed.

    The lesson? A very small amount of backing by a government entity can create a significant terrorist/guerrilla force. If a private force like that were to come into being, depending on the situation, it seems to me likely that one or more western governments might decide to support them covertly.

    Yeah, but these aren’t Dean’s heavily-armed science geeks parachuted in with Teach Yourself Farsi on their iPods we’re talking about. The only people I can think of in the region who *might* go for it are the Kurds – they’re pretty hardassed and are rumoured to get on well with the Israelis. Sounds like a recipe for all kinds of fun.

  401. I don’t buy into the techno-geek commando bit myself. But, I think that, depending on the situation faced, a terrorist/guerrilla movement that is pro government could easily spring up. I also think the Spanish Civil War provides a clear guide that we could see Americans deciding to take matters into their own hands.

  402. I am assuming that all of the groups listed above came from the (relatively) native populace. The effectiveness of those groups indicates that a large portion of the native people hated our enemies just as much as we hated our enemies. When the shit hits the fan, our ‘terrorists’ will need some place to go to ground, and the natives would like a home-grown force far better than a bunch of foreigners, especially if the foreigners start attacking the populace. Most of the terrorist attacks have occurred in either the Middle East or Europe, where there is a large population of Muslims who do not like the West. The best way to cultivate effective anti-terrorist terrorist organizations would be, ironically, to let in some hippies (the ones who are *TRUE* flowerchildren). Not every liberal/green/progressive/pinkocommiefag forsakes his/her own ideologies when dealing with Muslims just because ‘we’re picking on them’. For one example, you have to look no further than an entry on this very blog. An even better idea would be to inundate the Middle East with even more American movies/television/music/etc. Pop Culture, despite its faults, is very contagious (that is why it is called POPULAR culture) ESPECIALLY to people who are emerging (or possibly about to emerge from) a strict, discipline-oriented culture. If we can win popular support in a few countries, we should find at least a few worthy candidates for our anti-Jihad. Even better, we can wage memetic warfare on the Jihadis and pull their rug of support out from under them. If we can convince some Imams to seriously believe in the ‘Religion of Peace’ memes spread by the Apologists, the masses should follow their intellectual elites in, at least, protesting the terrorist actions (similar to Americans protesting the Vietnam War). If Stalin can do it, why can’t we?

    Dean: We, the West, do not have to justify our continued existence if there is no one around to seriously ask the question. If we can drag the rest of the world down to our level (via Sexual Liberations and Pop Culture), there may not be a strong enough voice to challenge us. I have talked with other young people (I am only 20) from India, Malaysia, Sri Lanka, Japan, and even the UAE, and from what I gather, a lot of people like Pop Culture.

  403. Guerilla warfare, as much as I recall, has been guerillas vs. governments. I can’t think of guerilla vs guerilla warfare. It would be interesting to see how that would work.

  404. Oh, I see from one of Eric’s emails, he should be done with sword camp now, but he’s going to LinuxWorld and the World Science Fiction Convention. So we shouldn’t expect much blogging from him.

  405. Looks like Esr’s going to be in my neck of the woods for LinuxWorld! Unfortunately, since I’m not a computer professional, I’m not able to enter the promised land. :-( hope he visitsone of theLUGS that are meeting that week.(hint,hint)

  406. David Delony: Guerilla warfare, as much as I recall, has been guerillas vs. governments. I can’t think of guerilla vs guerilla warfare. It would be interesting to see how that would work.

    Actually, just about every guerilla war has included irregulars vs. irregulars. Starting with the first modern “insurgency”, the American Revolution. Actually, the earliest example I can think of was Roger’s Rangers during the French & Indian War (the Seven Years War for those schooled in Britain). Roger’s Rangers used the same tactics as the Indians. There was quite a bit of guerilla skirmishing in the West during the Revolution, between Indians that sided with the British and American irregulars. There are quite a few examples of guerillas supported by different allies during WWII fighting each other as well. In Vietnam, the Hmong fought a guerilla war against the Viet Cong.

    Those are just a few examples, off the top of my head.

  407. There is amateur vs. amateur warfare today, but we call the armies “street gangs.”

  408. Heh, that’s existed for quite a while too. The Mafia wars during Prohibition, for example.

  409. or, we can blame modern gang warfare on the War on Drugs that Black, White, Brown and Yellow People Use, but that we pretend are only Used By Black and Brown People. It being might convenient to blame it on the “other people”.

  410. The War on Drugs is really just a make-work program for cops, which happens to be heavily targeted towards minorities. The tradition goes back to William Randolph Hearst’s demonization of the wacky tobaccy and the Mexicans who like to smoke it. I think all substances should be legal. By the way, I was a libertarian long before discovering *nix, The Jargon File, and esr.

  411. The War on Drugs happens to be a great way to pass laws increasing the power of the executive and the number of police officers and the amount of funding the legislature controls and the number of judges needed. All three branches of the government are happy. All the white folks get to feel safe because we’ve confined all of the whacky tobacky, crime and “other people” to ghettos. All the religious types get to feel good because they’ve seen “morality” legislated. It’s a win-win-win.

    Except for personal liberty and property rights. Ooops, pesky darn rights.

  412. Should be noted that the drugs, crime, etc. are not really confined to minorities and ghetto’s. That is just the impression given. The reality is that a lot of drug use is suburban folks driving into the lower class neighborhoods, buying drugs, then taking it home for their fun.

  413. Sounds like you libertarians are coming dangerously close to uncovering discomfiting truths about the central role race still plays in American power politics. Keep at it; I love it.

    For your next trick, you may wish to consider the MSM attention on the crack epidemic of the 80s, and the comparatively less attention being given the crystal meth epidemic of the ’00s…

  414. Jeff, maybe someday you’ll figure out that race is the hidden trump card of the left wing agenda too.

  415. > But Islamists will never love the khufr;
    >
    > …
    >
    > I would actually prefer to have them fear molesting “all civilized people”, rather than just “Americans”. Unfortunately, I don’t see the will to instill the required level of fear anywhere but in the U.S., and I don’t consistently see it here.

    Maybe fear makes you feel safer. But then, having about a third of the world’s population lving in fear somehow makes me loose any hope in the future of humanity. On the other hand, fear of what? Of death? Death isn’t something to fear for people who have lost everything, and as long as there will be death from above there will be such people. Fear of death could not scare off the 09/11 terrorists.

    Assuming that the people in these regions do not listen to reason wihtout knowing them is rightout stupid. However, how would you react if your ill-minded brother in law bombed an Israeli buss, and in return the Israeli army would tear down your home? How about your pregnant wife being shot at a control point for just being somewhat slow in obeying orders? Would fear stop you from doing some irational things?

    Maybe an old oriental story will explain better why I don’t think death from above/fear is an answer.

    Once the wind and the sun decided to do a contest, to see which one is stronger. They both saw a man walking down a road, dressed in a long coat. They agreed that the one who makes the man take off the coat should be considered the stronger one.

    The wind started to blow. And the strong the wind blew, the man just gathered the coat closer to him, holding it with both hands. After a long time, the wind gave up.

    The sun just started to shine. The man was getting hotter every minute. After not so long a time the man took off his coat.

  416. Jeff, another thing you might want to do is consider that libertarians (which I am not, although I’m a fellow traveller) do actually understand the role that race plays in American power politics. As I alluded to in my earlier comment, those of us not within the mainstream of American politics even see through the left wing approach to race. In fact, the “right”, that is the GOP, is less racist, in many ways, than the left. They certainly are not on the “white man’s burden” road that the left is on. But then, the left has always been blinded by their vision of a “radiant future”, which certainly has not changed.

  417. Eric Cowperthwaite,
    >the left has always been blinded by their vision of a “radiant future”, which certainly has not changed

    I have to disagree with you there. The Left’s ‘radiant future’ died in 1989. Right now they are running on bile. They hate men, white people, Christians, (ever increasingly) Jews, and America. Their attitude toward Western Civilization is:
    “Bitch, if I can’t have you, then you should die!”

    The American Right had a lot of the same issues after WWII, being blamed (unfairly) for the Great Depression, and (fairly) for pre-war isolationism. The question for the Right in the 1950’s was:
    “My God! If we could be wrong about the danger posed by Hitler, what else might we be wrong about?”

    Conservatism then suffered through a crisis of confidence that led the worst to rise to the top. That’s when you had the ascendancy of the John Birch Society, other assorted conspiracy nuts, and to a certain extent Joe McCarthy. What saved the American Right was Bill Buckley and the National Review. Not because Buckley was right about everything, but because he booted out the nutcases and redefined Conservatism as an intellectually serious movement.

    The 21st Century Left has no Buckley. All of their worst instincts are given free rein. They are becoming what people like me might have become if the John Birchers hadn’t been shown the door.

    The modern Left’s attitude toward race is MUCH more about hating Whitey than it is about helping Blacks. The Left no longer wants to build, just destroy.

  418. Dean: I have to disagree with you there. The Left’s ‘radiant future’ died in 1989.

    Actually, they still believe in a ‘radiant future’, with a few twists.

    1. Eeeevil corporations, especially oil and power companies, are conspiring to prevent it
    2. Eeeevil politicians on the right are in league (bought and paid for) with the corporations
    3. Stupid people who are interested in video games more than that ‘radiant future’ have been tricked into voting for the eeeevil politicians by the underhanded, dirty tricks of the eeeevil corporations.
    4. The ‘radiant future’ should never have been tried in Russia, which was entirely too backwards and unsophisticated to do it right.
    5. Rich, white men are using racial politics to keep power

    If it wasn’t for all of that, the ‘radiant future’ is possible. It’s still possible once capitalism fails, which it has to because of (take your pick):

    1. conflict between the haves and have nots, which will center around race
    2. the coming energy wars when we run out of oil
    3. global warming

    This is a new dialectic to replace the one created by the earlier socialists. The socialists have returned to their pre-1918 situation, where they have no real base of power and have to use hate, envy and fear to try and gain power and bring about the ‘radiant future’ they dream of.

  419. It should be noted that there is just enough truth to the left’s beliefs about the forces preventing their ‘radiant future’ to cause many people to buy into their conspiracies. There is just enough truth to their reasons why capitalism will collapse to cause many people to buy into their disaster scenarios. Combine that with their fear tactics (if so and so wins election he’s going to kick you out onto the street to starve, with no social safety net) and you have a recipe that explains how they have managed to keep any level of power in the US.

    I think we are beginning to watch the dissolution of the modern Democratic Party as the hard core ‘radiant future’ types go on a secular jihad against the non-believers like Lieberman. Note that Lieberman is fairly far left and follows the vast majority of the left’s platform ……… except for not being dogmatic about the war in Iraq. Because of that one thing, he has to be destroyed, and Dean, Kos, etc. have set out to do just that. If they succeed with Lieberman, they will purge the Party and that will spell the end for them. Once the Party is purged of the heretics and non-believers they will only be able to muster the support of 20%, or less, of the population.

    And yes, I purposefully used both religious and communist terminology. The American Left is a secular religion. Which is where their hatred comes from.

  420. Eric Cowperthwaite:
    >The socialists have returned to their pre-1918 situation

    There is a great deal of truth to what you say, but I think it is worse than that. The pre-1918 Left really did have a beautiful dream to fight for. See Edward Bellamy’s “Looking Backward” (published 1889) for a glimpse of the (in some ways) exquisite vision of the socialist future.

    Today the Progressives have nothing to make Progress toward. They are sort of running on the fumes of idealism, without the substance. The reason we are embarking upon a religious era, wherein the new enemies of the West are believers, as are its chief defenders, is because the end of the Cold War cost the Left a tenable philosophical position.

    Earlier this year, my wife and I traveled to London because she wanted to see The Mousetrap. In a small park near Piccadilly Circus I saw a statue of some 19th century scientist with the quote caption:
    “There is no darkness but ignorance.”

    But is that true? Socrates and his followers took the position that human nature is inherently good, and therefore that the only reason people do evil is because they don’t know what the good is. If they knew, they would do it. People only do evil out of ignorance.

    The ancient Jews, on the other hand, with their vision of a universal God and a corresponding Devil, with an Original Sin born in the Fall of Man, believed that every man, woman and child is born with a yetzer hera, a built-in desire to do wrong.

    In modern psychological terms, you could describe a yetzer hera as a built-in predilection to deceive ourselves about the moral nature of our actions if those actions gain us what we want. If everyone has a yetzer hera, then certain conclusions follow.

    A perfect society, a utopia, would require perfect people to inhabit it. If human nature permits no perfect people, then the potential Progress that can be made through social engineering is RADICALLY decreased. Not only will there never be a Workers Paradise. If we all have a yetzer hera, there will never be Social Justice. That whole beautiful dream is, in the words of Malcolm Reynolds in “Serenity,” a long wait for a train don’t come.

    In my opinion, the new, darker Left results from their collective realization that their train isn’t coming. They are never going to get the chance to build what they love, because what they love can’t be built. The only thing left to them now is to destroy what they hate.

  421. I don’t think Jeff’s and my stuff is exactly redolent of sunny optimism and multicultural metrosexuality, though you might want to have a look at that rapture-of-the-nerds business Dean peddles from time to time. Sounds a bit, er, radiant to me.

    Combine that with their fear tactics (if so and so wins election he’s going to kick you out onto the street to starve, with no social safety net)

    As opposed to Bush fear tactics (if you don’t vote for me or my designated successors eevil men will insert nanojihadis up your children’s bottoms in the still watches of the night), perhaps?

  422. I cannot escape the irony of the Greeks and the Jews. The Greeks, at their best, were rational scientific enlightened proto-humanists.

    The ancient Jews were a bunch of backward, superstitious barbarians. There is not one shred of evidence for the existence of a God, a Devil, or anything resembling a human Soul. And yet that provincial tribe of Hebrew-speaking goatherds produced a better insight into human nature than the best of the Greeks.

    If there is a God, then He is a practical-joking son of a bitch. We live in a universe where the deeper you look into it, the more paradoxes, conundrums and flat out contradictions you find.

  423. Adrian:
    >you might want to have a look at that rapture-of-the-nerds business Dean peddles from time to time

    If you will recall, when I labeled myself a fellow traveler of the nanotech transhumanist crowd, I explicitly acknowledged how utterly silly the whole notion is. Yes, the Singularity, uploading, cybernetic immortality and the whole bit is completely absurd. It will probably never happen.

    It’s just that with no eschatology at all, it is difficult to avoid despair. Make fun of me and my silly ‘radiant vision’ all you want to. But in between your distant hollow laughter, observe that my beautiful dream has never killed one single person. Ever.

    Put that in your pipe and smoke it.

  424. No argument, but our habits are a product of what we do repeatedly. Metaphysical despair, once indulged in, easily becomes a hard habit to break.

  425. >you might want to have a look at that rapture-of-the-nerds business Dean peddles from time to time

    For the record, I never peddled the rapture-of-the-nerds business. I made a statement about my own fellow-traveler status. I have never evangelized the Singularity or any transhumanist ideas. Nor will I ever do so.

    I subscribe to a sort of techno-eschatology simply because I need to believe in something, and I don’t have the constitution to be either a Socialist or a religious believer.

    If I were to make recommendations (which I am not!) I would probably suggest taking up a religious faith, instead of my own views. If you can wrap your head around the magical world-view that religion requires, it provides a far more satisfying spiritual experience than anything I have to offer.

    I would rather not need to believe in anything. As a young man, I was a proud Randroid and entertained no thoughts about the long-term future or the ultimate meaning of life. It was sufficient to me to have a self-directed meaning in my own life. I had no concern for the question of whether life itself has meaning.

    As I have gotten older though, the question of:
    “OK. Then what?”
    continues to haunt me. How can I, pace Atlas Shrugged, dedicate my life to building a transcontinental railroad, when one day we will be moving people and cargo about using Star Trek beaming technology? How can I dedicate my life to my family, when I know there will come a day when all of my children and their children will be dead? How can I be a patriot, devoted to the United States of America, when I know that (with the possible exception of the Jews;-) no nation lasts forever? How can I determine to ‘Save the Rain Forest!,’ when I know that in five billion years the Sun will explode, reducing the Earth to a molten cinder? How can I devote my life to the human race, when I know that one day (hopefully in the VERY far future) the very last human will die?

    How can there be meaning if this is all there is? And how can this not be all there is, if there are no miracles, no witchcraft, no psychic powers and no fairy godmothers with magic wands and bibbity-bobbity-boo?

    How can life matter if this is as good as it gets?

    So I choose to believe that this is not as good as it gets. I am not, however, a salesman. I am not trying to get you to buy anything in this world. Or the next.

  426. Adrian: As opposed to Bush fear tactics

    Why is the answer of the left always to point out some corresponding fault among their opponents that they don’t like or somehow makes them look better? Why not deal with what it is on your part that I’m talking about?

  427. Dean: Yes, the Singularity, uploading, cybernetic immortality and the whole bit is completely absurd. It will probably never happen.

    whenever someone says that some technological thing will never happen, I stop and remember. I remember the prediction that men would never fly, never walk on the moon, never break the sound barrier. I remember the IBM executive who predicted that there would never be a need for more than a half dozen of his computers world wide. I think about the incredible, massive change I have seen in my own lifetime.

    I can remember when there was no such thing as cable TV, when personal computers where a pipe dream, when cars had carbureutors.

    Is the Singularity a pipe dream? I don’t know. Some things that were predicted never came true, some things that came true were never predicted. What I do know is that if it is technologically possible it’s probably going to happen. Even as all the neo-Luddites predict doom and disaster, even as they predict some new “end of the world as we know it” now that oil and the environment are no longer problems. They will live their Malthusian dreams inside a computer and never be able to see that the story of the human race, of life itself, is change, not stasis.

  428. Why is the answer of the left always to point out some corresponding fault among their opponents that they don’t like or somehow makes them look better? Why not deal with what it is on your part that I’m talking about?

    Have you stopped beating your wife yet?

  429. Why is the answer of the left always to point out some corresponding fault among their opponents that they don’t like or somehow makes them look better? Why not deal with what it is on your part that I’m talking about?

    Look, Conneticut Democrats decide to vote out someone who consistently votes with the GOP on a major issue and it’s the end of the Democratic party? Best to keep that sort of wishful thinking private IMO. Bush has been pumping fear for all it’s worth ever since 9/11 – it’s the only thing that makes a dwindling chunk of the population continue to view him as a statesman rather than the less flattering alternatives entertained elsewhere.

    I’ll be interested too see if the Dems can grab even one of the two houses this year, it’d mean an opportunity to start asking some questions which have been studiously ignored by the Republicans on the grounds that not doing so would have been tantamount to appeasement, surrendering to terrorism, etc. etc.

    Have you stopped beating your wife yet?

    She loves it.

  430. First, Adrian, that is a continuing example of the holy war going on in the Democratic Party. There are plenty of less visible examples.

    Second, I wasn’t talking about Bush, I was talking about the Left. I wasn’t talking about specific people at all.

    Third, I have my own views of Bush, but, again, it wasn’t what I was discussing.

    Why are you so busy trying to divert attention from the question?

  431. >Why are you so busy trying to divert attention from the question?

    Because one discusses one’s own problems when one is seeking to correct them. One seeks to correct one’s own problems because one has some kind of ambition, one desires to BUILD something, which requires a higher caliber of moral fiber and physical or intellectual strength.

    One critiques oneself when one sees a great struggle ahead and wishes to, in the words of Winston Churchill, “Deserve victory.”

    If one has no interest in taking part in the struggle for existence, but merely wishes to spoil someone else’s attempt to do the same, then seeking to correct one’s own failures is a waste of time.

    A determined spoiler would, in reason, seek to exaggerate the magnitude of the mote in one’s neighbor’s eye. Never mind the beam in one’s own.

  432. Holy war? Oh pish, you’ve got a one-and-a-half party system and some people would like to make it into a two-party one. Good luck to them.

    Why are you so busy trying to divert attention from the question?

    Which one? Not “Why doesn’t rightwing hypocrisy about fear-mongering matter?”, I hope. Believe what you like about what will happen to the Democrats as a result of jettisoning that sleazebag – I’m more interested in what’s going to happen to the Republicans, who are, you know, actually *in power* at the moment. But perhaps Diebold can save them.

  433. Because one discusses one’s own problems when one is seeking to correct them. One seeks to correct one’s own problems because one has some kind of ambition, one desires to BUILD something, which requires a higher caliber of moral fiber and physical or intellectual strength.

    Build what? All I see going on here is a fearsome amount of jawing (myself included), and I think we will not attain the sunlit uplands by self-hypnosis and positive thinking. Is someone threatening to actually invest money or write software or something?

    One critiques oneself when one sees a great struggle ahead

    Against the beardies and their fellow-travelling cohorts of nihilism, yes…but there’s this…well…credibility problem.

  434. >Against the beardies and their fellow-travelling cohorts of nihilism, yes…but there’s this…well…credibility problem.

    Unfortunately, you are so God-damned right. As civilized Westerners confronting both fanatical non-Western beardies and our own nihilistic fifth column, we have the credibility problem from Hell.

    Credibility is a product of resolve. And resolve springs from BELIEF.

    We, who no longer believe in a supernatural eternity, and have come face-to-face with the limitations of materialism (dialectical and otherwise), are no longer certain what we believe in. Or whether it makes sense to believe in anything at all.

    Our enemies, on the other hand, got belief coming out the wazoo. They look at us and sneer. Our wizard weapons do not frighten them because the see our lack of will to use them. Our army in Iraq is the most capable on Earth. It is, in fact, the most capable in the history of Mankind. And our enemies see it, and us, as ultimately impotent. Because the more awesome our power, the lesser our will to use it.

    The video of guided missiles in the first Gulf War, which stunned audiences with the accuracy of our weapons, actually diminished our formidability. Our accurate super-weapons increased the expectation, in the minds of our own voters, that we would be able to kill our enemies without one single civilian casualty. When the jihadis purposely kill women and children, this is seen as justified because they have inferior weapons. When we accidentally do the same, we are seen, by ourselves, as vicious monsters because our super-weapons are expected to achieve morally perfect results.

    Therefore, the better our weapons, the less likely they will be used to kill our enemies. Those same enemies regard us with contempt. The Viet-cong used to cut off the arms of children vaccinated against disease by the US military. By demonstrating the resolve to commit ANY atrocity in pursuit of their goals, they made themselves MUCH more frightening to the Vietnamese villagers than the Marines could ever be. The courage and professionalism of the Marines, restrained as it was by a sense of decency, was made irrelevant by the ruthlessness of America’s enemies.

    That same dynamic showed up recently in the war between Israel and Hezbollah. Israel has just lost it’s first war. And, as with America in Vietnam, Israel did not lose on the battlefield. It lost on the television screen.

    We have a VERY serious problem.

    And so, Yes, Adrian, our credibility is definitely not what it needs to be. If the West is to survive, something profound has to change.

  435. Please do not misunderstand me. I still believe that Islamic civilization is ultimately fragile. It will not survive the 21st century. The question is: Will we die along with it?

    Islam will not survive because it is too brittle to adapt in the face of change. Our civilization may not survive due to being hollow inside. They will be smashed, and we MAY implode.

    The Roman Empire ultimately imploded. For all their power and wealth, the people of Rome came to a place where they just couldn’t see the point anymore.

    Why bother to go on, if this is all there is?

    What lies in the future, for us to want passionately, today?

    What can we believe in, to form the foundation of our resolve?

    And without resolve, how can we argue that we deserve to survive?

  436. It should be noted that our situation is not precisely that of the Romans. Their moral fiber was rotted by their use of slave labor. In order for a people to survive, they must see themselves as worthy of survival. They must see themselves as Good.

    How can you be Good if you extract your comfort in life from the forced servitude of innocent others?

    What makes us human is our capacity to cooperate, in reason, with other rational beings. If we prey upon our fellow humans, as would a tiger, a falcon or a shark, then in what sense do we deserve to survive as humans?

    This is why we should not invade the Middle East and take all the oil so as to cut off funding to Islamic terrorists. Such a seizure would solve a superficial problem while opening up a much deeper one.

    The Leftists ceaselessly regale us with the Wickedness of the West. But as was the case with the Marines in Vietnam, the proximate source of our contemptibility in the eyes of your enemies is not in our depravity, but in our decency.

    But that decency is also the primary source of our strength. Staring into the abyss of oblivion, we are not sure if there is a good reason to continue to exist, but we remain certain that we deserve to exist, assuming a reason can be found.

    That is why, decadent as we are, we retain the ability to produce magnificent warriors such as the American and British soldiers in Iraq. We need not fear that they will lose heart.

    We need only fear the weakness in ourselves.

  437. the proximate source of our contemptibility in the eyes of OUR enemies, not YOUR

    Sigh

    Proofread before posting.

  438. By the way, Adrian, just to be snarky as all Hell: These last few posts of mine constitute an example of the kind of self-criticism one engages in if one anticipates a challenge to which one intends to rise.

    If you have no intention of rising to any occasion, then all you need to do is bash Bush.

  439. So, having gotten that petty snark out of my system, I now throw open the floor to other commenters. To wit:

    What transcendental hope can we aspire to, which:
    1. Remains plausible within the withering glare of science,
    2. Can sustain our dedication to individual Liberty while offering some solution to our dreadful Treason of the Clerks problem, and
    3. Preserves our dedication to the Good, without lending itself to naiveté?

    Please don’t be afraid to offer up suggestions. I’ve given this issue a great deal of thought and come up empty. At this point I’m willing to give the benefit of the doubt to almost any idea.

  440. There are, however, certain requirements. It seems to me that a valid Rapture needs a doctrine: a description of what life will be like on the other side.

    This is what is insufficient about (pace Adrian) my rapture-of-the-nerds business. You can describe what life will be like in Heaven. You can describe life in the Workers Paradise (see Edward Bellamy). No one can describe what life will be like following the Singularity. That’s what the Singularity means.

    Nope, we need a Rapture-with-a-doctrine. Please look under your couch cushions and see if you can find one.

    Furthermore, you can’t just pull a Rapture out of your ass. You can’t posit that, say, in the future we will all go to live with Puff the Magic Dragon in a land called Honah-Lee. This is because the Doctrine of Puff will not stand up to scientific scrutiny.

  441. Dean, some things dealing with the advent of technology in the 21st century can be predicted. Longevity, for example, is coming in the not too distant future. Nano-technology that results in tremendous reductions in the cost to manufacture finished goods. Just a couple off the top of my head. The point? Well, the old dream, of an increasingly vibrant future where we live longer, healthier lives, where we know more, have more wealth, more leisure time, etc. is still out there.

    More importantly, the time is not that far off, I believe, when we will become god-like ourselves. In many ways we already are. More are coming. We will replace the deity of the bible with technological humanity. Nano-technology, computers, space travel. These things will open up vistas of ability, knowledge and wealth undreamt of, much as the steam engine and internal combustion engine did during the Industrial revolution.

  442. Dean and others,

    about the prediction of the tech of the future: I agree that it’s dangerous to make predictions about what can’t be or can’t economically be invented and built in the foreseeable future, but I think one can derive some trends about how former predictions proved to be false. I think most former predictions generally highly overestimated how far conventional sciences will go or at least how much of their inventions will be economical to build, and highly underestimated how far electronics, IT and software will develop. People predicted flying cars for the year 2000 and in reality, despite all the considerable developments in this field, today’s cars don’t feel so much different from those of the fifties. On the other hand, like, Carl Sagan wrote Contact in 1985 which is, I think, one the most considerable works of sci-fi, it’s about aliens broadcasting the blueprints of a kind of a spaceship to Earth, and even in this novel, this spaceship contains no recognizable computer, it’s purely mechanical and chemical. While in reality, even my lousy Peugeot 206 contains an onboard computer, once I had to reset it’s computer top be able to ignite the car, which is a kind of ROTFL, because I never expected a car can be “repaired” like MS Windows usually is “repaired”…

    I think one of the reasons these predictions failed is because they ignored the people’s reactions to change. It seems people don’t really want to learn completely new things. People learned how to drive a car because they knew how to drive a wagon for thousands of years and the car was similar, only faster, and it’s speed increased only gradually, so the learning was gradual. Some urban legends say the first John Deere or Ford tractors were operated by reins. So the learning process, in each of it’s stage, could be hooked to some formal knowledge. But people don’t want to learn how to drive a flying car, because it can’t be hooked to a former experience. People learned how to write an e-mail, because it’s not so different from writing postal mail on a typewriter. But I can’t convince the IT (Navision) companies in the UK I’m doing job interviews with from here Budapest to use a webcam and Skype for an interview, they stick to the usual phone call first, then personal meeting scenario, simply because video chat has no former habit in history to hook it up to. And of course, the main functions of the PDA’s are almost identical to a pen and paper personal register book, until one installs some other software not in the starting package. So my idea is: only those technologies will soar where the user experience is not so different from some already existing experience.

    We can also look at it from some other viewpoint. From a technological viewpoint, how does our life differ from that of the sixties? If we look at the important things, we can fly anywhere cheap on budget airways, commute long-distance in economical cars, communicate instantly to each other via cell phone, e-mail and instant messenger, and reach information submitted by anyone anywhere and mostly anytime on the web and use it to do biz f.e. ordering books. So what we can say is technology made space and time less of a barrier. So, I think we cam expect the same direction of development from the future – being more able to reach people, things, places and information anytime and anywhere, but the general characteristics of people, things, places and information won’t really change. It gonna be a bit like being able to select any item of the “menu card” unhindered by time and space – but more or less from the same “menu card”.

  443. It should be noted that our situation is not precisely that of the Romans. Their moral fiber was rotted by their use of slave labor.

    Our dependence on machines is similar – they may not suffer, but they have all kinds of impact on our attitudes. It’s all just energy flow.

    If you have no intention of rising to any occasion, then all you need to do is bash Bush.

    I got all kinds of occasions to rise to. Just not this one.

    There are, however, certain requirements. It seems to me that a valid Rapture needs a doctrine: a description of what life will be like on the other side.

    How about an estimate of (what could happen to) the market value of humans in a world where they aren’t the measure of all things any more? ISTR Bill Joy was good on this (warning – not terribly cheerful).

  444. To be more ontopic, I think what happened in Lebanon as of yet, can hardly be considered a victory for Israel and I think we need to think about the surprising effectiveness of terrorists/guerillas. I think the reason behind it that from the invention of the gunpowder, the offensive power of the individual soldier always increased, and his defensive power decreased. This trend increased after WW2, the warrior of today can easily get cheap weapons that have high offensive power and don’t require much training, and on the other hand, has hardly any means to defend himself from a well-placed attack. This means that small-scale battles more and more become like “who shoots first, wins” and this is clearly in favour of guerilla armies as opposed to regular ones. Regular armies should react to this… some way. Any ideas?

  445. Shenpen:
    >Regular armies should react to this… some way. Any ideas?

    Killing the civilian populations from whence the guerillas flow. The Romans used to decimate, meaning to kill one in ten. This tended to make the remaining nine more…tractable. And if not, they could always repeat.

    Next question?

    Excellent post on technology and user experience, by the way.

  446. Adrian,
    >Our dependence on machines is similar

    So, using machines (which can neither think nor feel) is morally similar to using human slave labor? I’m sorry to say that’s not the first time I’ve heard that. I saw it once before in some newspaper editorial bashing Capitalism.

    So you have no problem with Hezzies lobbing missiles into Israeli cities because that’s “blowback,” but a can opener is just like a Confederate slave?

    I don’t think you and I live in the same moral universe, and I don’t know if there is any profit to be had in our discussing moral issues.

    Did I already say Thank God For Abortion?

  447. Eric Cowperthwaite:
    >Well, the old dream, of an increasingly vibrant future where we live longer, healthier lives
    >More importantly, the time is not that far off, I believe, when we will become god-like ourselves.

    All right, so you buy into my rapture-of-the-nerds business. What about issue number two:
    2. Can sustain our dedication to individual Liberty while offering some solution to our dreadful Treason of the Clerks problem?

    One difference between us and Jehovah is that He seems to absolutely believe that it is a Good Thing that He exists. Some of us are not so sure about ourselves. Check out
    The Voluntary Human Extinction Movement
    http://www.vhemt.org/

    Those folks aren’t joking. They are a bunch of Leftists who have reached the (entirely valid) conclusion that the only way to build the perfect world is to build one with no people in it.

    If you believe that the Techno-Rapture will lead to a world where the pointy heads don’t get to boss us around all the time, how do you expect to keep them from trying to destroy it all? And all of us with it?

  448. “Killing the civilian populations from whence the guerillas flow. The Romans used to decimate, meaning to kill one in ten. This tended to make the remaining nine more…tractable. And if not, they could always repeat.”

    Didn’t work as well for the Nazi German army. They still got plenty of “freedom fighters,” “uprisers,” “terrorists,” or whatever you like to call them in the wake of their conquests. The world has moved on in 2000 years. It’s well known that guerilla warfare works even (particularly?) under the most extreme oppression.

  449. >Didn’t work as well for the Nazi German army. They still got plenty of “freedom fighters,” “uprisers,”

    The Russians were a problem for the Nazis, as they were a problem for Napoleon. Conquering Russia is hard. It’s fucking cold! Nobody’s done it since Genghis Khan. There was the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, but most of those Jews were killed within a month. And then there was the French Resistance, which consisted of one guy, a Communist, riding around on a bicycle blowing things up. (In 1950, every single Frenchman was in the Resistance; in 1943, not so much.)

    Had it not been for American and British forces (yes, in concert with Comrade Stalin), Germany would have had no trouble dominating Jew-hating Europe. Hitler had a bitter hatred to share with those he conquered, and they loved him.

    This, by the way, is our single greatest lack in Iraq. If we had a bitter hatred to share with Iraqis, our pacification task would be orders of magnitude easier. But we fucking Yanks don’t hate anybody outside our own borders! When’s the last time you saw a bunch of Yanks get hold a rally to burn some OTHER COUNTRY’S flag? Syrians hold rallies to shout “Death to America!” Have any three Americans ever gotten together to shout “Death to Syria!?” A bunch of pathetic haters (of foreigners) are we.

    American Lefties hate Bush. American Righties hate Hillary. Leaving out Osama, assuming you are an American, can you name one foreigner you really hate? I can’t.

    Except for a few crazed Lefties, we don’t even hate the fucking Jews! And if you can’t even hate the Jews, it’s hard to sustain a hatred of anyone.

  450. Dean: If you believe that the Techno-Rapture will lead to a world where the pointy heads don’t get to boss us around all the time, how do you expect to keep them from trying to destroy it all? And all of us with it?

    They haven’t succeeded in either yet, try as they might.

  451. Actually Dean, the first vision of the techno-rapture I ever read was a short story by Isaac Asimov. I can’t remember the name of it now, but what it boils down to is this. Every computer gets asked the ultimate question throughout history: “How do we reverse entropy?” (i.e. how can we stop death) And every computer is stumped by this question. At the end of time, when the universe is barely alive and entropy nearly maximized, the entirety of the immortal human race is uploaded into the final super computer. It sits and ponders that last question until it arrives at an answer. The answer is the computer saying, “Let there be light” …………….. and there was light.

  452. “can you name one foreigner you really hate?”

    The Mexicans man, it’s always the dirty, dirty Mexicans — swarming our borders and stealing our free health care. And Castro. Yeah. Don’t forget Chavez. And Ahmeninija-whatever.

  453. BTW: fantastic sidestep of my point Dean. You said all that was required to prevent insurrection was intense, disproportionate cruelty, and I pointed out that the Nazis did this and it failed.

  454. Have you stopped beating your wife yet?

    My wife? Do you see a wedding ring on my finger? Does this place look like I’m fuckin’ married? The toilet seat’s up, man.

  455. BTW: fantastic sidestep of my point Dean. You said all that was required to prevent insurrection was intense, disproportionate cruelty, and I pointed out that the Nazis did this and it failed.

    The Nazis were pussies. For true clearcutting disproportion, you’ve got to go back to the Mongols.

  456. So, using machines (which can neither think nor feel) is morally similar to using human slave labor?

    Only in the *dependence* it induces.

    So you have no problem with Hezzies lobbing missiles into Israeli cities because that’s “blowback,”

    That’s lack of decent guidance systems. I’m sure they’d be quite happy to throw them at military targets if they had the accuracy. Their stock’s gone up quite a bit recently, however, so there may be possibilities.

    but a can opener is just like a Confederate slave?

    I don’t think you and I live in the same moral universe, and I don’t know if there is any profit to be had in our discussing moral issues.

    Well, yer always welcome to restrict yourself to discussing such topics with other people who believe the Jews Walk On Water and Can Do No Wrong. Sounds a little sterile to me. I don’t think there’s much point in talking about what *ought* to happen before you actually agree on what *is* happening, and I don’t reckon we’re there yet.

    Did I already say Thank God For Abortion?

    Yeah, and how many kids have you got?

    Did you ever get round to reading Freakonomics?

  457. Dean: So, using machines (which can neither think nor feel) is morally similar to using human slave labor?

    Adrian: Only in the *dependence* it induces.

    What? So, using a labor saving device to make our lives easier, to ensure that more people have more leisure time, to increase wealth, to provide more quality manufactured goods, is morally equivalent to slavery?

    ***walks away shaking my head***

  458. “…I’m sure they’d be quite happy to throw them at military targets if they had the accuracy…”

    Are you “sure” enough to gamble others’ lives while you make such proclamations from the anonymous end of your cozy Internet connection, Igirisujin?

    AFAICT, their concept of a legitimate “military target” is, and always has been, the *entire* Jewish population…so perhaps you’re correct, from their semantical perspective…

  459. Adrian10 writes:

    I don’t know if there are real people who think about their technical skills in that idealistic way, it sounds like a caricature.

    Color me pasty white and put me in a cartoon, then.

  460. It should be noted that our situation is not precisely that of the Romans. Their moral fiber was rotted by their use of slave labor. In order for a people to survive, they must see themselves as worthy of survival. They must see themselves as Good.

    How can you be Good if you extract your comfort in life from the forced servitude of innocent others?

    By shopping at Walmart, wearing Nike and eating at McDonalds?

    We need not fear that they will lose heart.

    Nope. And they won’t change their minds, either.

    I inserted several links, but Eric’s blog engine refuses the post if I insert them. Either that, or I really am banned now.

  461. John Cowan quoted Adrian as saying: I don’t know if there are real people who think about their technical skills in that idealistic way, it sounds like a caricature.

    I’m trying to find the context this quote was pulled from. I’m curious what Adrian thought was so idealistic.

  462. Eric – the context is Shenpen’s post immediately above…or am I missing something?

    “…Question: after you became an expert in some technical field, should you help others for free by writing FAQ’s, blogging, and answering questions at mailing lists?

    Liberal answer: yes, because you learned much from others also for free, so it’s an ethical duty for you to do so.

    Libertarian answer: yes, because you often gain much by sharing than by keeping. People you help for free often find you with well-paying consultancy contract offers or good job offers – or you can just put links to your FAQ’s in your CV and many employers are impressed by that…”

  463. Jim Thompson:
    >By shopping at Walmart, wearing Nike and eating at McDonalds?

    Because there is no moral difference between buying sneakers at Wal-Mart produced in other countries under morally troubling circumstances, and owning Spartacus or Frederick Douglass as a chattel?

    Again, as with Adrian, I don’t think we live in the same moral universe. I must express my condolences at your having gone to college, because I don’t think you could have come by such moral idiocy without rigorous academic training.

    We really do have differences in comprehension. You see things as equivalent, which I see as completely different; and I see things as precisely the same, which you see as totally unrelated.

    There is a war going on between the West and Islamic extremism. Most people understand that. But there is also a civil war going on within the West, between people who think like you and those who think like me.

    My side has most of the guns, your side has the most effective propagandists. The collapse of Communism was a massive blow to the credibility of the arguments of your side. Thus, where you used to advance confidently, you are now treading water.

    But by far the most powerful weapon for my side is demographics. Myself as yet excepted, people on my side tend to have more children than your partisans do. Too many people on my side wish to ban abortion because they believe it is morally wrong. And maybe they are correct.

    But to the extent that people on your side have more abortions, and initiate fewer pregnancies which are not terminated, we may one day reach a point wherein your political opinions are no longer electorally relevant. Thus your social influence will continue to dissipate as the years go by.

    I don’t enjoy thinking like this about my fellow citizens. I wish that I had something better to hope for than for you all to die. But what am I supposed to say to you, who see no distinction between chattel slavery and Wal-Mart?

    I do not wish to believe that you are simply unreachable. But I am at my wit’s end.

  464. Dan: Eric – the context is Shenpen’s post immediately above…or am I missing something?

    Got it. I guess that all the folks I know who do those things, including myself, aren’t on Adrian’s radar.

  465. I guess that all the folks I know who do those things, including myself, aren’t on Adrian’s radar.

    I’m just a hobby coder myself, I don’t really know that many tech people other than through the interwebs.

  466. Why do scientists freely share information and data? The idea of open information long pre-dates computer hackers.

  467. Are you “sure” enough to gamble others’ lives while you make such proclamations from the anonymous end of your cozy Internet connection, Igirisujin?

    Dan, if the Mossad want my email or RL address so they can track me down and pay me a visit it’s available, you know? I’m not gambling anything, I’m just gassing on a blog like you. Most of the bloody things end up in fields and stuff. Apparently the Israelis weren’t using their Patriot batteries because they’re too expensive. Who wouldn’t target properly in those circumstances? Unless you think Hizbullah actually *prefer* killing civilians to troops for some nincompoop reason.

  468. Dean,

    by reading a bit back, about yetzer hera: I think the question whether humans are “ultimately” or “inherently” good or evil simply does not make any sense. People are quite capable of both and that’s enough. Therefore the only really important thing is what habits do cultures and societies form, grow, and nurture in individuals.

    The great error of the Left is not that they think people can be conditioned to be good. Actually they can, simply because they’ve always been. The great error is rather the means:

    A) Liberals think people can be conditioned with purely materialistic means: by giving enough food and sparing them of violence, they will surely be good. This does not work. Without huge amounts of propaganda and brainwashing, directed to wash down huge blocks of habits from their minds, it can’t work. And they never even tried that propaganda. I mean of course they try to brainwash the white middle classes, but they never even tried to brainwash the gangstas of the ghettoes. They think they don’t have strong habits, they are just poor.

    B) The hardcore commies of the past believed that people buy into propaganda that contradicts both with the realities they perceive and their personal wishes. This, of course, does not work.

    Therefore, a socialist utopia might have a slightest chance only if they can provide a very-very-strong total propaganda directed at all parts of society, but one that does not contradict the personal wishes of people and their perceived realities. But as both tend to be wildly different, the propaganda would quickly become self-contradicting and therefore fail, so this slightest chance is I think actually zero.

  469. Dean,

    “If I were to make recommendations (which I am not!) I would probably suggest taking up a religious faith, instead of my own views. If you can wrap your head around the magical world-view that religion requires, it provides a far more satisfying spiritual experience than anything I have to offer.”

    Oh, fuck. I try really hard to not “evangelize” ( :-) ) but damn, you really should check out Buddhism, I mean, the rational schools of it (there are plenty of drooling religious assholes dressed in brown robes who are pretending to be Buddhist but just ignore them), because a non-materialistic theory, practice and experience that does not contradict rational and critical thinking does exist, and I think you need it badly. At least you should read this: http://www.diamondway-teachings.org/content/olenydahl/text/6libact.html

  470. “Dan, if the Mossad want my email or RL address so they can track me down and pay me a visit it’s available, you know?”
    I think you missed the point…that’s not what I was getting at.

    “I’m not gambling anything, I’m just gassing on a blog like you”
    Indeed, no argument there…but if we’re going to have any meaningful discourse, you really can’t hop off the merry-go-round simply because we’re talking hypotheticals. I’m just highlighting how ludicrous *your* hypotheticals are.

    “Apparently the Israelis weren’t using their Patriot batteries because they’re too expensive”
    Quite right too…it would be piss-poor economically to burn up Patriots ™ for katyushas…save ’em for bigger, badder bombs…like nukes, God forbid.

    “Unless you think Hizbullah actually *prefer* killing civilians to troops for some nincompoop reason”
    Nincompoop if ya *don’t* ;-) This is *precisely* what H[e|i]zb[u|o]llah intend. If you think otherwise, then I have to second Dean’s attitude toward ‘you & your ilk’.

  471. Dan and Dean, it’s actually quite pointless. Adrian, like many other folks in the West, insists that Hezbollah (and other such organizations) are much like us. That is, if only they had wonderful weapons like ours they would target only their military enemies. At the same time they also insist that such folks are from different cultures with different cultural standards that we have to be sensitive to. These, often mutually contradictory, situations are expounded upon one after the other, regardless of the conflict between them. These not only don’t seem to see the contradiction, but don’t even seem to care that it is contradictory.

  472. Shenpen,
    >you really should check out Buddhism
    >I think you need it badly.

    Thank you very much for your concern for the welfare of my soul. I tried to read your recommended article, but I fear it is not for me. Should I ever take up a religion, I will either be a conventional evangelical Protestant, or possibly a Jew. For better or for worse, I am a Western man, and Eastern religions just don’t compute inside my brain. But I truly appreciate your kind suggestion.

    Please understand that I am not unhappy. I may drift over into the morbid from time to time, but I soon drift back out. I am not a depressive personality. My stable equilibrium is medium contentment. Pluswise, I have put some work into my general happiness level using ideas I picked up in that Dennis Prager book I mentioned earlier.

    I meant what I said in my petty snark at Adrian. I believe that our civilization faces a challenge. And in my small way, I intend to rise to meet it. I’ve heard that there were American Indian tribes who would measure a man’s strength by the strength of his enemies. Looking upon the challenge of the Abyss, I feel I am in the company of the mightiest of men.

    I don’t know if our problem has a solution. There is a theory that the reason we’ve never been contacted by aliens from outer space, is that all such alien civilizations died out at a technological point not too far ahead of where we are, now. I don’t believe that, but I am not in a position to dismiss it.

    Nevertheless, if the Abyss can be beaten, and I can help in some small way, I intend to do whatever I can.

    I’m not sure I need faith. I’ve never really had any. But again, I thank you for the thought. It was very kind.

  473. Eric Cowperthwaite:
    >These not only don’t seem to see the contradiction, but don’t even seem to care that it is contradictory.

    There’s a Stephen King novel called “It,” about a seductive Cosmic killer that lives in the sewers under a small town in Maine. It draws it’s victims to their death by appearing to them in the form of what they most desire, or what they most fear.

    “It” offers the seduction of death-as-escape. Escape from pain, from frustration, from anxiety, from the uncertainty of living. As one character puts it:
    “I looked into its deadlights, and I wanted to be there.”

    In oblivion, Western civilization and, ultimately, the entire human race faces a similar seduction. It would be so easy, to look into its deadlights and just stop. Stop having to be responsible. Stop having to make difficult moral choices, in a world where nothing ever works out exactly like you hoped.

    Just give into the rot, and soon it will be over. That is the Siren Song echoing in our ears.

    For some of us, it is obviously a much sweeter sound than for others.

  474. I think the Patriot’s were designed to protect against high-altitude missiles and therefore are ineffective against low-altitude artillery missiles.

    On the deatwish of the West: well, I think deathwish is a bit too strong term to describe what we are having now. Genuine deathwish appeared in the first half of the XX. century in the form of Communism and Fasicism, if you remember the “Viva la muerte!” cries of the Phalangists or the skulls and crossbones worn by the SS (OK, these had different explanations, but the subconscious deathwish was still apparent). I think nowadays we are having a gentler form of nihilism: we don’t explicitly want to die, instead we just don’t really want to live. Of course it can be a bit even more dangerous as this kind of decay does not present a clear target to fight. I think the economical part of this letargy is even more dangerous than the military one: we have let the industry of the Far East dominate our markets without even trying to compete and this established a dangerous dependence. In 25 years we will forget how to manufacture cars because if China continues to produce superb cars like the Ssangyong SUV there will be no demand to them. And then what? 500 millon Americans and Europeans living of the service industry? Completely impossible. And did anyone think of that civil industry is the backbone of military industry as cigarette factories can be easily reconfigured to produce 7.62mm ammo and so on, and if we let our complete industry become outsourced, what would we do in a prolonged war?…

  475. Shenpen:
    >we don’t explicitly want to die, instead we just don’t really want to live.

    I believe the essential problem is that we live in a metaphysically bereft era. Our traditional religious view of the nature of existence, as a tangible manifestation of the will of God, is no longer satisfying. It cannot even approach the standard of proof we’ve grown accustomed to receiving from the hard sciences, and from the courts.

    But the materialist world-view, which holds that nothing exists but matter, energy, space and time, is also problematic, for a number of reasons. One is, as I have yammered on here ad nauseum, that it leads to the conclusion that life has no ultimate meaning.

    Another is that, upon exhaustive examination of the physical and electrical makeup of the brain, materialist science seems to suggest that the mind is an illusion. Now you might ask: ‘OK, if my mind is an illusion, then to what is the illusion presenting itself? What or who is being fooled into thinking that they’re me?’ And to this question, science got nothing.

    Pluswise, any man, who makes his living as a neuroscientist, no matter how firmly atheistic, says to his wife: “I love you.” If the mind is an illusion, what do those words even mean? Even those who, for sound scientific reasons, reject the idea of mind, must employ the concept constantly in their everyday lives.

    Another problem with materialism is that the logic of it despises men. If there are no spirits or souls, then there is no qualitative difference between us and the animals. We are smarter than pigs, as pigs are smarter than chickens, but we slaughter and eat pigs and chickens, and there is no material difference, in kind, between us and the critters we consume.

    Therefore, the only thing that prevents us from consuming one another, what makes it possible for us to live together, is the emotional revulsion we feel when we cause pain or death to others. That emotion must be given moral weight, because there is no other material basis for morality.

    Therefore, the people who live closest to their emotions (women), are morally superior to those who live farthest from them (men). You show me a serious moral philosopher who lived in my life time, who has anything good to say about men, as men, and I will show you a religious moralist. The secular ones can only find any moral worth in men, to the degree that we become like women. We have to be “sensitive” in order to be Good.

    Yet for a civilization to survive, it must be based on masculine values. To be worthy of survival, a civilization must have some definition, a set of ideas that it STANDS FOR. These must be arranged in some logical, hierarchical structure, a philosophical system if you will. And with the exception of Ayn Rand, every serious philosophical system builder in human history was male. And Rand herself was a very manly woman.

    No civilization based entirely on the feminine perspective can stand up to serious competition. To the degree that we in the West are completely feminized, we will be Islamicized pretty damn soon.

    Yet that is where the logic of materialism leads us. Only emotion provides a basis for morality. Logic is morally useless because materialism give it nothing to work with. Therefore, to be Good is to be girly. Men contribute nothing but Evil to the world, and if women could reproduce on their own, humanity would be better off without us.

    And last but not least, beyond a certain point, science itself goes completely loopy. Ask a physicist, what is matter made of, and the answer will be: atoms. And atoms are made of protons, neutrons and electrons. And those particles are made of quarks. No one has ever seen a quark, but the math suggests they should be there. And what are the quarks supposed to be made of?

    Well, since the 1970s, a lot of smart people have proposed that, at the bottom, existence is made up of vibrating strings that exist in 11 dimensions, 7 of which are so small as to be invisible. No one has ever tested String Theory. No one can come up with a way to test it. String Theory might be true, it might be mathematically elegant crap, or something in between. We can’t know because no way to test it exists, or has even been proposed.

    Yet, for want of anything better, this notion is being pursued by PHYSICISTS, not postmodern lit crit nut-jobs in the English department. Physicists.

    Materialism not only leads us to absurd beliefs about ourselves, it leads to some pretty wacky theories about the nature of the material world itself.

    But what are we supposed to do? If your child has appendicitis, you don’t take him to a faith healer; you take him to a doctor. Supernaturalism, be it Christian, Jewish, Hindu, Wicca or otherwise, has yet to come up with a cure for a single disease. Cures are the bailiwick of the biologist.

    Do you want to walk on the Moon? Prayers, witchcraft and psychic powers won’t get you there, nor keep you alive when you arrive. But sound astrophysics can.

    It is the scientists and the technicians who are working all the modern miracles. Materialism got more credibility than you can shake a stick at. And yet the logic of it leads to places where we, as a civilization, can not survive. And maybe SHOULD not.

    As is obvious, I am not a big fan of the Left. Yet Lefties are not causeless villains out of a melodrama. They are following a train of logic which I reject, though I cannot refute it.

    The waning of our will to live has a First Cause. If it can be diagnosed, perhaps it can be cured. Or maybe a work-around can be developed. I believe it is possible to solve any problem you can describe in sufficient detail. I’m not sure where a solution for this problem lies, but there must be one out there. Somewhere.

  476. Dean, I’m firmly convinced that cultures need challenges in order avoid the syndrome you talk about above. The challenge cannot be internally focused, but external. Religion is less important than the challenge, the need to overcome something. Unfortunately for the West, we have conquered our external challenges. We conquered the world, defeated the evils of the Nazi’s and Communism, have, more or less, beaten disease and poverty. That is the real issue, there’s nothing out there that is a big challenge.

    The middle east, china, etc. all have their challenge to conquer. It’s us. But, when they succeed, they will find the same nothing beyond it.

    On the other hand, if we would get our shit together and get out into space, we would have that new challenge to face, something conquer, something bigger and badder than we are, tougher, a place that kills the careless, something that kills the weak and challenges the strong. The only thing holding us back is our cultural melancholia.

  477. In other words Dean, I have some disagreement with you on the cause of our cultural issues, but not about the path it puts us on. I really think that everything else is peripheral. The reality is, the West is bored to tears because it beat everything big and bad. To a certain extent Adrian is right, Islamic extremism is not the threat, the challenge, that Imperial Germany, Nazi Germany or Soviet Russia were. If we were mobilized to face this enemy, we would crush it rapidly. Of course, if we continue to ignore it, then it may well be too late when the enemy is strong enough to pose a real challenge.

    But, again, the bottom line is that we are bored.

  478. Eric:
    >Religion is less important than the challenge

    I must profoundly differ from you there. I was serious about the logic of materialism viewing men as morally worthless. With the exception of Ayn Rand and Eric Hoffer, there were no serious secular moral philosophers breathing the year I was born (1970) who had a single good word to say about men, qua men.

    Get up from your computer, and amble over to a bookstore or library. Today. Am I mistaken about the secular moral philosophers? You can find plenty of serious books about how to be a masculine, Good man. In the religion section. The books in the secular philosophy section, that were written in the last 50 years, all advise you to be a girly-man if you wish to be Good. Except for the two authors I mentioned previously.

    As a rational, modern man, you have many good things to say about secularism; but it has NOTHING good to say about you. Check it out, today. If you find I am wrong, send me your address and I will send you a dollar.

    How, therefore, are we to colonize space? It is men who go out, risking life and limb for the prospect of adventure and fabulous treasure. Women are not lacking in courage. They will fight like wildcats to protect their young. But to risk their necks for adventure? They are too sensible for that. And rightly so.

    The same logic that animates that Voluntary Human Extinction Movement website I linked to earlier, also argues that we haven’t the right to pollute outer space with our vile presence. “Get your stinkin’ paws off the Moon, you damn dirty people!”

    To be bold explorers, as to be bold in any other way, we must believe we are Good. Without a sense of our own value, we will never get off this planet. And we won’t survive upon it.

    Religion, or at least philosophy, matters one hell of a lot.

  479. >the bottom line is that we are bored

    Eric, we are not bored with the world. We are bored with OURSELVES.

    That is where our danger lies.

  480. But, again, I don’t think it’s the religion, or lack thereof, that makes the difference. China, for the most part, is not very religious. It’s the challenge of conquering something big and bad, of striding across the world as a colossus, slaying the dragons that keeps the boredom away. Religion contributes to the drive of the Islamic Middle East, but the real deal is to defeat us. They hate us, yes, but religion is just an excuse for the hate. They hate us because we are wealthier and more powerful than they are. Contrary to what the left and the more extreme libertarians believe, we will not end the hate by leaving them alone. The hate is about who we are and what we have, not that we are messing about in the middle east.

  481. Eric:
    >Islamic extremism is not the threat, the challenge, that Imperial Germany, Nazi Germany or Soviet Russia were.

    The way to think about the challenges America faced in the 20th century, is as a set of schisms within the West.

    Every nation that entered World War One saw itself as a Christian nation, and sought to establish itself as the preeminent Christian power in the West. And they chewed each other to pieces and buried their Christian faith with the Unknown Soldier.

    The Nazis were Western people, both in aspiration and reality. But they rejected Christ. They fought for a Pagan worldview; one that placed Race and Blood, not God’s will, at the center of their quest.

    The Communists also want to be Western, and to dominate the West. They were not so much a Christian heresy as a Capitalist heresy. Satanism is a Christian heresy that inverts the moral hierarchy, placing the Devil at the top.

    The ugliest face of Capitalism is the Company Town. Therein, all property is owned by the Company, as are the cops and judges, and there is only one employer. If you wish to eat, you must work for the Company, receive all your wages from the Company, and buy all your supplies at the Company Store. The ordinary person has no chance of getting a fair shake, under such a system. As such it is universally reviled in decent societies.

    The Communist idea was to create the Company-Town-as-nation-state. Because they hated Capitalism so much, the Commies took the worst face of Capitalism, universalized it, and made it their moral ideal!

    Thus was Communism a Western Capitalist heresy.

    The current conflict with the Jihadis marks the first time in centuries that a non-Western civilization has presented the West with any serious challenge. And you are right to say that is only a challenge because we are so decadent. Most of the arguments made by the Jihadis are recycled from the carpings of our own Western Leftists. There are 600 million Arabs. And each year, fewer books are translated into Arabic than into Greek. There are about 11 million Greeks.

    So in that sense, we agree. The problem isn’t them. The problem is us. I see it as fundamentally a philosophical problem.

  482. And, honestly, we are bored because, at least right now, the Middle Eastern fascists are just not that much of a challenge. We know, mostly without thinking about it very hard, that we could crush them without much effort if we wanted to. When we are told what a threat they are to us, we are underwhelmed. Not realizing that the threat is there precisely because we are the enemy to be conquered.

    About the next challenge for the West, which is not to be found on this planet. There are enough people among the billion, or so, Westerners who haven’t bought into the BS of the modern, secular philosophers (anyone who cries “a pox upon both their houses HAS bought into the BS and deserves what they get, which is boredom, ennui and, ultimately, death) to move on to the next challenge, the next adventure. They are working hard at it and, I believe, will put the technology together to make it happen.

    When that happens, just like most Europeans stayed home, most Americans will stay home. But enough will go out to space to tackle the challenge. America, the place, is probably doomed Dean. America, the idea, is not.

  483. By the way, about Soviet Russia. Yes, Communism is a fundamentally Western issue. However, Russia is not a fundamentally Western nation. Soviet Russia may have given lip service to World Socialism, but it was, at the core, the last effort of the East (i.e. Mongols, Magyars, Cossacks, Russians) to finish their migratory conquest of Europe. Combine that with the paranoia of the Russians, the ground in cultural inferiority complex of the Russians and the fear of the East in Europe and you have the root causes of the struggle. Communism then, like Islam now, is the excuse, not the root cause.

  484. Eric, I wish to offer a counter-example to your assertion that it is the challenge, the affront to our pride, and the opportunity to excel, that leads us to rise to the occasion. To this end, I will make the most arrogant assertion of my entire life.

    The Left, as I have pointed out before, was at one time championed by men such as H. G. Wells, G. B. Shaw and Bertrand Russell. Today their champions are, what, Noam Chomsky, George Lakoff and Al Gore?

    If I were to get into a serious debate with George Bernard Shaw, I would get my scrawny intellectual ass handed to me in a heartbeat. Say what you will about his politics, he and his contemporaries were men of genius.

    William F. Buckley made his name in the ‘50s through being willing to debate the ‘Dreaded Liberal Intellectual’ when other Conservatives were scared shitless of the prospect. Back then, the Right was in a shambles and the Lefties were at the top of their game. But these days, not so much.

    I am an anonymous nobody, commenting on the Internet. I have no national stature, and likely I never will. Yet I would not hesitate to debate publicly any Left wing intellectual in the field today. I say this not because I have no reputation to lose, but because I do not fear losing any fairly judged debate.

    I am a nobody, and in my humble opinion, I am more than a match for any intellectual heavy hitter the Left can field today. And my skills are nothing compared to those of Ann Coulter, Jonah Goldberg, Michelle Malkin, Hugh Hewitt or countless others.

    The Liberal Intellectual no longer deserves to be Dreaded. And this constitutes a Challenge. Which the Left makes no attempt to meet. Even when a challenge exists, meeting it still requires WILL. And will comes from someplace deep inside. It does not spring from the outer world.

    This is why our deepest problems are philosophical in nature.

  485. And furthermore, Ann Coulter, Jonah Goldberg and the others I mentioned are middleweights. Our heavyweights, such as Charles Murray and Paul Johnson, have no equal on the Left, and haven’t for decades.

    This is a Challenge for the Left. They could start breeding thinkers capable of going toe-to-toe with our best guys in a fairly judged debate and holding their own.

    But they don’t do it. It is not the challenge that drives us. It is the belief.

  486. Think of it this way Dean. The West was faced with the challenges the human race has struggle with for millenia.

    – Poverty and wealth creation
    – Longevity and disease
    – Individual liberty and social order
    – The barbarians at the gates
    – Education and knowledge
    – Unlocking the mysteries of how things came to be

    And we have, in essence, conquered all of them. The WILL is no longer there because we have had a century, more or less, of ennui and boredom. By the end of the 19th century it was clear that all of those challenges either were, or soon would be, conquered. Soon in a relative sense, of course. After all, what is a hundred years when we’ve struggled with how the universe came to exist for tens of thousands of years? Hell, the Enlightenment came about, in many ways, because the more physical challenges were already conquered. The Easterners and Middle Easterners had been stopped cold, Europe was safe behind her technological might. The New World was conquered and being shaped into a new Europe. Asia was safely locked away in China and Japan. The barbarians were kept at bay and the wealth of Europe was no longer threatened by it. What was next? Understanding the universe, solving disease, creating liberty, prosperity and safety for all Europeans, not just the elite. That’s what the Enlightenment tackled.

    And it succeeded too. The fact is, the poorest person in the West today lives longer, with more leisure and wealth, than 99.9999% of the world’s population ever had. To claim that poverty is a horrific problem in the West today is ludicrous to all but the Socialists.

    We understand far more about how the universe, the earth and humans came to exist today than ever before, and we know that we are on the right track to continue to deepen and broaden that understanding.

    We have conquered disease, or soon will. Longevity is not that far off. We are nearing the tipping point in medicine where we will extend life faster with science than it is shortened by old age. That is, medicine will extend, on average, a 70’s year old’s likelihood of living another year faster than old age will decrease it. When that tipping point is reached (and it already is for people under 70), the promise of scientific longevity will be here and real.

    The Enlightenment succeeded, in other words, beyond the wildest dreams of those philosophers.

    Now, for a century, there has been nothing new but to fend off the barbarians within, and without. Imperial Germany, Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan, Soviet Russia, Red China, they were all stopped, turned back, defeated. We have come to the realization that we cannot be defeated physically, that our culture will triumph over every culture it comes in contact with (look at the transformation occurring in the Middle Kingdom if you doubt that).

    And then we are presented with Middle Eastern Islamic Fascism and our response is “yawn, we’ll win, what’s the big deal? These guys aren’t nearly as tough as the Kaiser, Hitler, Hirohito, Joe Stalin and Uncle Mao were! And we whipped them.”

    A century of no new challenges, nothing big to conquer, of a culture and technology that strides across the world sweeping all before it has left us with no WILL because it’s boring!

  487. Dean,

    about your 9:21 post: the questions you pose are certainly valid. On the personal level, I have found buddhism answers almost exactly these questions for me. So on the personal level all I can say that I wish you find your personal answers as well somewhere. If you want to stay within the Western frame of reference, fine, but I’d suggest the esoteric (in the original sense: “inner circle”) stuff rather than the exoteric: Kabbalah instead of Jewish religion, Meister Eckhardt or Paul Tillich or Simone Weil (f.e. “Gravity and Grace”) instead of established Christianity and so on. Just a question: have you ever took psychedelic stuff like LSD? Becase I think that too much reliance on hard sciences – which I think should belong to the labs and not to our subjective, personal views on reality, life’s too short for that – made us so thick-headed that we cannot look deeper to reality than a certain level without taking acid a couple of times. Only a couple of times, because prolonged use tends to make people superficial, chaotic and soft. Of course I’m not suggesting to anybody to try it – such a suggestion would be illegal by the laws over here – I’m just noting that it sometimes gives an eye-opening experience on this subject. Especially if we look at the biochemistry of how it works – it’s almost like an artificial serotonine, an artifical information carrier material between the brain cells, so maybe all it does it turns on already existing, but sleeping parts of our brain.

    On difference between people and animals: heh. I feel we are still stuck in a very old delusion. We take it for granted that people want to do evil and therefore try to build our ethics on reasons why not to. And one of such reasons is that people are not animals, but something better. I think it’s an entirely wrong direction. We should go to the direction of learning to not wanting to do evil, and then we won’t need any special moral reasons on why not to do evil, and then we won’t need attribute any artificial and unnatural speciality to the human species. All ethics that are based on artificial self-discipline – or external discipline – are far from optimal. Wanting to do evil but choosing not to due to moral reasons is a pain. It’s much better if we recognize that happiness can be attained without doing any evil and therefore we simply don’t need to. And in this case we won’t need to attribute any unnatural and unscientific property to the human species. If we could recognize it, it would be an amazing historical milestone. All ethics of the West are based on (self-)restraint, on what NOT to do. Ethics is considered a negation of evil. Once we could invent a positive ethics, ethics that rather concentrate on saying yes to actions that bring happiness to everybody instead of concentrating on saying no to actions that bring happiness, ethics that would concentrate on what to DO, that would be a breakthrough. As my buddhist teacher said, “Respect people for what they do and not for what the don’t do – the cementeries are full of folks who don’t do anything.”

    Our ethics need to to loose it’s connection with virginity – not in the sexual sense of course, that’s luckily already been lost, but in the general sense: concentrating on what not to do. Just think about it, for thousands of years, we respected the virgin – who refuses to participate in something that’s good – more than the mothers of children and more than the professional prostitutes, it’s something crazy, isn’t it? In any sane ethics, the prostitute would be considered as the closest thing to saint.

    About solutions on the social-national-cultural level – I recently saw the film “The Power of Nightmares” and therefore started to look after the the ideas of Leo Strauss. (Both have nice articles about in the Wikipedia in case somebody would not know them.) I think you know him far better than me because he’s kinda popular in the American Right, through his student Paul Wolfowitz, isn’t he? I think what you are writing is almost exactly like Strauss’s ideas on “deadly truths”. And the counterpoison he suggest, imposing “necessary lies” or in more gentle terms, “necessary dreams and legends”, what do you think about it? I think it sounds like a viable solution.

  488. Errata: instead of “instead of concentrating on saying no to actions that bring happiness” what I meant was “instead of concentrating on saying no to actions that bring suffering”. Sorry, now I’m typing faster than I think because this subject is really interesting.

  489. Eric,

    on challenges: we hardly extended our life expectancy to twice than that of cavemen, we are confined to one planet when there are millions out there, and we couldn’t even find a cure for common cold – I don’t think we are lacking challenges. The problem is rather we don’t really want to face them. Maybe I’ve read too much sci-fi but I think the most powerful dream of humanity could be to go to outer space, it was in the sixties, we just forgot it. When the utter ineffectiveness of the NASA and the ESA becomes obvious to decision makers and private space agencies start to flourish, maybe we will rediscover this dream.

  490. Eric,

    on Communism: generally you are right about Communism, but I’d go deeper than that: Communism was a modern form of feudalism, a feudal-fascist imperialism, and, in it’s essence, actually, right-wing. It had

    – holy books (Das Kapital etc.), prophets (Marx, Engels) ,saviours predicted by the prophets (Lenin), heretics (Kautsky, Trotsky), holy symbols (sickle and hammer, red star) and so on, therefore, a materialistic state-religion
    – imperial conquests
    – strong nationalism (oppressing the minorities in the Soviet Union, imposing mandatory languages, anti-semitism and so on, on anti-semitism, have any of your heard of the Jewish Autonomous Region? I have a story about that.)
    – militarism, a strong emphasis of military virtues
    – distrust of other nations, forbidding citizens to travel
    – a “state capitalism”, big-industry controlled by the state

    I think it was a typical feudal-fascist imperialism. Mostly because it grew in countries that were mostly feudal and only a handful of them was, at best, semi-feudal. Marx predicted the commie revolution to the UK, not to Russia and China. Who knows what happened if he was right. Probably nothing, as it has always been inherently impossible to happen there.

  491. Dean,

    on the Left and Right: what does “we”, exactly, mean? I always thought you consider people like Ann Coulter only uncomfortable temporary allies at best and in the long run, almost as stinking as Michael Moore.

  492. Dean,

    It’s not just the leftists that carp about Western moral decadence. In fact the Christian Right has probably done more such carping; and they tend to get all giddy thinking about some disaster or attack upon this country, seeing it as divine retribution which vindicates all their holy rolling. Google for the phrase “ball of redemption” for an example of what I’m talking about. The Left is all about decadence: the more sex, drugs, and rock and roll the more liberated we will become. Violence, greed, and environmental destruction are the left’s real taboos.

    As for your remarks about Western triumphalism and the notion that the Arabs pose the first real threat to the West in centuries — they certainly won’t be the last. China is rapidly emerging as the world’s new superpower — a company town of more than a billion folks whose regimentation methodology has been honed and perfected since before there even was a West per se. This together with a newly invigorated Russia spells deep shit for the Western cultural paradigm spearheaded by the USA.

  493. Shenpen:
    >All ethics of the West are based on (self-)restraint, on what NOT to do.

    Not so. Aristotle proposed a set of ethics based on virtues, which he defined as a DISPOSITION to do right in a given fashion and context. He posited that we acquire moral excellence the same way we acquire skill with a flute, through practice. Being of the Socratic tradition, Aristotle believed it quite possible to eventually acquire such excellent moral habits as to leave behind all desire to do wrong. The Western ethics of which you speak derive from the Jews.

    >All ethics that are based on artificial self-discipline – or external discipline – are far from optimal.

    But this assumes that optimal ethics are possible. If human nature is inherently good, then we can ultimately purge ourselves of all desire to do evil, and become morally perfect. But suppose the Jews are right, and we all do in fact have a yetzer hara.

    If, within each of us, is a built-in predisposition to lie to ourselves about the moral nature of what we are doing, in order that we might get what we want IN THE MOMENT, then prescribing a moral ideal becomes absurd. People will convince themselves that they are pursuing that ideal when, in fact, they are behaving disgracefully.

    It only makes sense to pursue moral perfection, as opposed to retreating from damnation, if we assume that perfection is achievable. This is the ESSENTIAL question in ethics.

    Why do we do evil? Is it because of ignorance, which can be corrected? Is it because of some outside force, which can be removed? Or is it because of something indelible within us, which must be adjusted to, because it cannot be removed.

    The Left posits that there is no yetzer hara, that we are all born Good. It goes onto suppose that our inherent goodness is corrupted by the society in which we live, its institutions and traditions. THAT is why we do bad things.

    The criminal is not responsible for his crime. He is a victim of society. The murderous Muslim fanatic is not to be condemned. He has been oppressed by Western Imperialism, Christian Crusaderism, Jewish Zionism and white racism. He is merely retaliating, engaging in “blowback.” We, not he, are to be blamed.

    The ancient idea of ‘nobility’ was a product of the Aristotelian view of morality. Virtues were to be acquired through mannered practice and contemplation. Since only wealthy landowners had the resources to pursue a life devoted to courtesanship and reflection, only they could be noble. The common people were to be despised, because they were common.

    I personally maintain a mixed view of the matter. I seek to practice virtues in the Aristotelian sense, but I believe I have a yetzer hara. In my view, in each of our hearts there is a Good Dog and a Bad Dog. Which one is larger and stronger depends on which one you feed more. The Bad Dog is a killer. If you let it get strong enough, it will kill your Good Dog, and morally speaking, that will be the end of you.

    As a proud member of the American Right, I take exception to your depiction of Communism as right-wing. But then again, I recall that you are a European, and the European Right is not exactly the same thing. My Conservatism contains no feudal nostalgia. It has no interest in massive State Capitalism. Its ideal is the corner baker, leader in his (small) church, family man, watches a little too much football.

    The ideal American Conservative does not DISTRUST other nations, he simply has no interest in them. Fewer than one in six Americans has a passport. I’m sorry to admit that I, myself, could not locate Hungary on a map that wasn’t labeled. In that I am quite typical. So I don’t think you and I mean the same thing by ‘right-wing.’

    As for Ann Coulter, she is proof of my moral imperfection. She is a guilty pleasure. She is a firebrand and frequently says things I cannot entirely support. But she pisses off all the people I’d like to piss off, if only I were famous and extemporaneously witty. She is such fun.

    And Yes, space exploration must be fueled by a powerful dream, just as the settlement of the Americas was. Europeans wanted to own their own land. New England Puritans wanted to practice their weird religion, unmolested. Spaniards wanted fabulous Aztec riches. That’s why people get up and go; because they want something they can’t get where they are. And to go far, and at great risk, they must want it with a PASSION.

  494. Jeff Read:
    >Violence, greed, and environmental destruction are the left’s real taboos.

    In the eyes of the Left, violence is only bad if you are White. If you are not White, then violence is “blowback” and it is totally cool.

    >China is rapidly emerging as the world’s new superpower

    In the first place, most Chinese are so heartbreakingly poor you wouldn’t believe it. They’ll be a superpower when their per-capita income is at least a third of ours. And at present growth rates, that won’t be for another 25 years, assuming they can maintain the 7 to 9 percent growth rate they currently have.

    Pluswise, what IS China? America is the Land of the Free. We have a very clear idea of what we stand for. We may not be perfect, but we have a purpose. Suppose you ask a Chinaman: ‘Why does China exist?’ What would he tell you? China’s newfound prosperity will unleash social forces they have no means of channeling.

    You worry about China. I have other stuff to do.

    >a newly invigorated Russia

    Can you say 1.2 children per woman? How about 7 out of every 10 pregnancies end in abortion? In 200 years there won’t be a Russia.

    Go find some new bogeymen, Jeff. The ones you got ain’t scaring me at all.

  495. Shenpen:
    Just out of curiosity:

    1. What does Buddhism say that existence is ultimately made of?
    2. What does Buddhism say that WE are ultimately made of?

    And, when you answer, please remember that I have never done any acid, so please don’t bend my brain too much. ;-)

  496. Dean,

    OK, I used the term right-wing wrong. The definitions of this term are really different – you over there never had a clear ruling class but there was a lot of movement between the middle and upper classes and therefore the right-wing always were middleclassian. What you call right-wing I’d probably call “civic party” over here. On the other hand, why do you sweep conservativism and libertarianism under one common right rug? I think the difference between them should always be maintained very publicly.

    Maybe the Left isn’t so wrong about evil is caused by the society. I mean it’s quite clear that if people who are born in the ghettoes get out of it at baby age and raised outside, they are a lot less likely to commit crimes. Therefore it’s logical that their subculture, their society is a huge factor in their willingness to commit crime. Therefore I think what the Left is really wrong about is how they define “society”. I think they define it as “state”, or “laws” or “ruling classes” or even “middle-class white males”. While in reality, society is simply us, us all. All of us. All of the subcultures. All of the people. I have no problem with blaming society, we just need to find the right societies or subcultures to blame, like, f.e. the ones that preach hatred in Mosques, or where selling crack to buy jewelry is considered cool.

  497. Shenpen:
    >we just need to find the right societies or subcultures to blame

    I can’t go for that. If society is to blame, then it makes no sense to put a murderer or a rapist in jail. Or even to condemn him. It’s not his fault he did it.

    If a puppy accidentally starts a fire that burns your house down, the puppy should not be condemned, you should be. You should not have left flammable materials lying around, to where a puppy might be able to start a house fire.

    If society is to blame for evil acts, then we aren’t human. We are not moral agents; we cannot be held accountable. And we should never be punished. This is why there are Leftist lawyers and social activists who dedicate their lives to freeing vicious criminals. It’s not their fault. Society is responsible. You and I are to blame. We should feel ashamed, because the criminal on Death Row was driven to his crimes by our indifference and neglect. If we had cared for the murderer as we should have, he would never have felt compelled to commit his evil act.

    Because he is a murderer, he should feel no guilt. Because we are not murderers, we must shoulder ALL guilt.

    No civilization based upon those premises can survive.

    That is why the logic of materialism is so destructive to the Western will to live. Neuroscientists, having studied the brain at length, and with great professionalism, have found no organ in the brain, nor any combination of organs, which could produce the phenomena we refer to as ‘free will.’

    They therefore conclude, with some justification, that it does not exist. We don’t really make choices. The ILLUSION that we make choices is an evolutionary adaptation, created in our brains, to better enable us to survive and pass on our genes.

    But we don’t really think; we just think we do.

    This. Cannot. Be.

    Yet the science tells us that it is. It’s a problem.

  498. “1. What does Buddhism say that existence is ultimately made of?
    2. What does Buddhism say that WE are ultimately made of?”

    It’s hard to explain in a few lines – Buddha’s own words make up about 100 books even without the commentaries, and there is 2500 years of meditational research upon that, making up huge libraries… and as the most important principle is that no words even can describe reality, it can only be experienced, so the most I can do is offering a very-very crude model.

    On existence: there are different schools or levels of Buddhism. On the most basic, Small Way level, the view is quite materialistic, everything is composed of atoms and we experience phenomena when the atoms of the mind collide with the atoms of the outer reality etc. There is an unverified, but logical legend that ancient Greek atom theory was imported by the people of Alexander the Great from India, from Buddhists. Then the next level, the Great Way takes it into a very detached philosophical direction – they say that things are “not real, not unreal, not both of them, not neither of them”. This is called the Middle Way, between existentialism and nihilism. They offer a crude model for it, it’s called “emptyness”, which says phenomena do exists, because they are perceptible, but don’t have existence on their own, because everything is related with everything and therefore reality is a big mass, therefore phenomena “exist as being empty”. It’s important to know that the Middle Way scholars were mostly monks with very few meditation experience, they were mostly just speculating. It’s very complicated – I just mentioned only 4 leves of emptyness while it’s said there is 16… Finally, the highest level, the Diamond Way, which is also called Yogacara, yoga-practictioner, because it’s based on meditational experience, takes a sudden turn towards physics. It says phenomena are indeed “empty”, but emptyness itself does exist: it’s simply space itself. It says space rather contains than just separates things, “space is pregnant”, and space itself contains all qualities. Phenomena arise from space as the “free play of space”, phenomena arise from space when the conditions are right and there is a starting cause, play around, and cease to exist. It says no objects, only processes exist, like waves in an ocean. For example, we recognize an apple as a phenomena because it bears the qualities of roundness and redness, but space itself bears all qualities simulteanously, roundness, squareness, redness, greenness. Therefore space is much more like a surging ocean than a big nihil. This is one of the most important characteristic of Buddhism: there is no fear from a nihil, from falling into a black nothingness, because it simply does not exist, the free play of phenomena always goes on.

    On human existence: basically, human beings are like an onion, our subjective egos are composed of different layers or parts like sensory input, memories, emotions, different kinds of concsciousness and so on. There is no lasting essence, no soul found within. Buddha really pissed of the Hindu gurus when he invented this quite radical idea that no lasting soul exists :-) And all this is constantly changing. Reincarnation does not mean a soul finds another body, because there is no soul, it is rather like five people starting a music band and then every three years some member gets replaced: fifteen years later, all the original members are gone and there is no “essence” that would have stayed the same, but there is still a kind of continuity, as a process, and not as an object. This all sounds a bit depressing, doesn’t it? But there is one very important thing. As we are able to experience the phenomena, there is a something within us that is not a phenomena, not an experience, but an experiencer. The experiencer itself cannot be an experience, cannot be a phenomena. Therefore it is not a soul, not an essence, because those would be phenomenas. It is, actually, space itself. That pregnant space described above is actually us, our true nature. The free play of the phenomena are actually the free play of our minds. We ourselves are space, unlimited in nature, devoid of all qualities – or containing all qualities, whichever way you like to say it. This has some interesting implications. If we slowly start to realize we are space, we won’t need no codified ethics as empathy will be natural – we are the same space. We won’t need to do anything special to feel good as happiness is nothing but feeling less contained by our egos, being more one with space and the beings in space, so this realization makes happiness grow by itself.

    Did I manage to sufficiently confuse you by now? :-) Good. I said it’s complicated. It’s either reading a hundred books, or meditating for twenty years – in the later case, one figures out that it’s actually dead simple, because it’s nothing but feeling that everything is truly one. I did neither but the aforementioned chemicals, sometimes, can give a nice demo of it. Unfortunately it’s not lasting, and it has it’s cost in health and especially mental health, so it’s far from me to recommend it to anyone. I would rather recommend meditation, but the point is that it is hard – I can’t get myself to doing it, I rather sit here before the computer now at 1:30AM, drinking wine and reading posts, instead of doing it, meanwhile I know I should because even three times half hours of meditation does wonders to my mood. And I still can’t get myself to do it.

  499. (Referring back to my last post)

    Furthermore, neuroscience cannot even imagine what a free will generating organ in the brain would look like, or what it would do. What, are you going to have a random number generator in your head?

    If consciousness is an emergent property of the function of various parts of the brain, AND NOTHING MORE, then what could cause you to have free will?

    How could you make choices that were not ultimately, mechanically reducible to the various genetic and environmental influences to which your brain was subjected? What organic construct in the brain could give you the power of choice? If the mind is completely reducible to the function of the brain, what would ‘choice’ even mean?

    This, more than the apparent meaninglessness of life, is the aspect of materialism most likely to break our hearts.

  500. I think the responsibility of the individual and the responsibility of their society or subculture is not black or white, it can be shared. It’s kind of hard to be a nice guy when you were raised from age zero that you should despise and hate a certain group of people and harm them whenever you can. And of course 25 years he as a father will be one the most important societial factor of his own child. People reproduce their societies. So it’s a mixed, shared responsibility. Of course some people do manage to adopt better views by an amazing exertion of free will, but they are the heroes, not the common men. So I’d rather concentrate on changing hostile societies or subcultures that transfer evil memes than blaming the individuals. Of course the individuals need to be stopped if they cause harm, even with lethal force, but only for protecting ourselves and not as a kind of punishment or judgement, anger or vengeance. I think protecting others and ourselves powerfully and effectively is possible without thinking the opponent is a bad guy and must be punished. Treat people like a surgeon: forcefully if necessary, but always without anger, and change the hostile societies and subcultures that raise hostile people – that’s my recipe.

  501. What does free will actually mean? Unpredictable behaviour? Not being a programmed machine? From the viewpoint of the external observer, unpredictability can easily be explained by material factors – genes, upbringing and the high-bandwidth sensory input of decades of life can make up for so many combinations that an external observer can confirm it to be random, upredictable, and therefore, free. And from an internal viewpoint? From the subjective viewpont, my two cents are that whenever I made a decision, the decision always seemed objectively the only right or comfortable thing to do. I don’t think free will can be a subjective experience. So if it’s not observable from outside and cannot be experienced inside, what is it, actually? I think free will only applicable with relation to the state, laws, the society, other humans… but it’s not a metaphysical state of being. There is metaphysical freedom, but that’s no will. On this level, I think “free” and “will” are contradictory terms. How could one truly and deeply be free, on the metaphysical level, as long as he has will, and therefore he has something he likes and something he dislikes, and these emotions clearly limit his choices, his freedom?

  502. Shenpen:
    >but only for protecting ourselves and not as a kind of punishment or judgement, anger or vengeance.

    What if stopping the person is no longer an issue? Suppose a man, we’ll call him OJ, has brutally stabbed a woman to death. He is unlikely to kill anyone else. Should he be judged or punished? Should we concern ourselves with the issue of ‘justice’ for the murdered woman?

    If you had a puppy, and the puppy shit on the floor, you might rub his nose in it, spank his bottom and say “Bad Dog!” You would not do this out of cruelty, but out of a desire to train the puppy not to shit on the floor anymore.

    Therefore, punishment is often necessary. When people go to college, they learn that it is not. They learn that sweet reasonableness will solve all problems. The longer they stay in college, especially in the human sciences, the more this is drummed into them.

    Then they leave college and have children. As I understand it, psychologists are the worst parents alive, who are not deliberately abusive or neglectful. Psychologists have been in college for so God-damned long, they have forgotten what common sense smells like.

    But issues of Justice do not always yield themselves to common sense. If you kill OJ, that will not bring back the woman he stabbed to death. But if you let him go, even if you are certain he will not kill again, how is that the right thing to do?

    I saw a bumper sticker once that read: “The Bible says it. I believe it. That settles it.” You can make fun of a person for having such a simplistic worldview, but it does make moral decision making SO much easier. With none of the nagging guilt of: “Did I really do the right thing?”

    I am not a believer, and likely I never will be. But their choices are not stupid.

  503. Well, this is a hard question. Maybe it depends on how we define or regard punishment. In Simone Weil’s “The Need For Roots”, she defines punishment as a honor, as an expression of respect towards the wrongdoer, because by atonement, he can set the balance straight and then become a respected citizen once again. Well, maybe that’s too idealistic, as it almost never happens but that’s one nice definition. From a more practical viewpoint, the real target of the punishment is not the criminal, as he probably can’t really be changed anymore and therefore punishment is like “opening an umbrella after the rain”, but it’s a message to the society, to scare away future would-be criminals. That’s also an acceptable practical definiton. I’m only against punishment as a vengeance in the name of justice – justice is always relative, almost everybody thinks that from his viewpoint, he did right (maybe this is exactly the yetzer hera). Probably we cannot find any higher and absolute viewpoint where we could define an absolute right and wrong from, because it can only be absolute if it’s built into the fabric of the universe and therefore it would require a god, and actually a very anthropomorphic god, which is quite unlikely. (Sometimes I play around with the idea just for fun, not seriously of course, that what if there truly is a god, but an alien race that spans over a million planets are his true children and we are just some preliminary experiment, a feasibility study ;-) ) But on the other hand, we can create ethical codes that are one hand relative in their very nature, we still can consider them more or less universal for ourselves.

    I think the really important thing here is that “right” and “wrong” always require a purpose. We can only tell if something is right if we check out whether it fits some purpose or not. So maybe there is a middle way there – creating ethics that is not absolute by nature, but we still consider them universal for ourselves. You know it’s a bit like designing a car, probably there is not absolute platonic idea of a perfect car, but we still have “best practices” that everybody accepts and upholds. For a while. This is one of the reasons I mentioned Leo Strauss – absolute ethics, while inherently impossible, still can and maybe should be fabricated as a “necessary illusion”. There ain’t no perfect answer, we all are just tinkering. You know I don’t consider the questions the Left asks as inherently wrong. The problem is rather why are they so damned sure about the answers they managed to find.

  504. Anyway, maybe you should be not so pessimistic about our current ethics. Yes, they are too feminine. But on the other hand… remember the awful story of Lee Iacocca and the exploding Fords? It was just a couple of decades ago and now is almost impossible for a similar thing to happen again. Recently I’ve read the ethical code of Adidas before a job interview with them, and I was quite surprised how far they are going to make all their vendors avoid slave-like labour, child labour and so on. There clearly are developments in ethics. Anytime I go to reddit.com there are articles about how scientists proved how happiness is unrelated with money and similar stuff. We are clearly moving towards some important realizations. What if our civilization is like a butterfly? In it’s childhood, it was active like a caterpillar: boldly moving forward and eating all it can find. Then our current lethargy can maybe be just a cocoon state and from it a nice butterfly will be born? We can be proud of the energy of our past but we should not forget how much wrong we did meanwhile. Americans exterminating the Indians. Hungarian-Transsylvanian nobles treating Romanian serf as cattle. All of our nations have a lot of dark patches in their pasts. So it’s clear that the old ways cannot be upheld, and now the cocoon is rebuilding itself… maybe.

  505. One of the most important tasks of the Right is I think to clearly, publicly demonstrate and advertise that the Right does not only entirely consist of people who think like “The Bible says it. I believe it. That settles it.”. You know these guys make it very hard for the “mugged liberals” to go right. I personally find it quite disgusting having to rub shoulders with such folks. It’s an insult to my intelligence. We have similar people over here – people who are members of some negligible uber-neo-protestant Church counting a thousand members at most and still have the nerve to publicly denounce the yearly Gay Pride in the name of the “moral majority” … It’s something hard to gut, and it really required a mountain of stupidity from the Left to leave them and find these folks more accepatable than them. Therefore, the most important task of the Right would be to advertise a lot that there are alternatives to it. The Right should collect those living or dead people whose background was very similar to those of liberals, and they still did not become liberals. Leo Strauss, who was a Jew fleeing from the Nazis. Pim Fortuyn, who was a rich, hedonistic gay professions of socioligy – a typical liberal background and he still not become one. Charles Murray, whom I checked out on Wikipedia after you mentioned him and he also does not look like a stiff-necked rural type. It would be very important to show such alternatives to liberals, to make transition easier for those who have enough of it.

    On Ann Coulter: I think she is a test of maturity. If we would take every word of her dead seriously to the letter, we’d probably run away in horror. But maturity means one can keep a healthy distance from things, one can put things in a great picture, one can understand how subjective authors are and how they don’t always mean every word seriously. She’s a big fan of Dead Kennedys, so how could she bee too serious? :-) She’s from the same stock like the Jylland Posten in Denmark or Istvan Lovas in Hungary – conservative authors who make a big fun of breaching the PC laws and laugh on their fury, but don’t mean it seriously. It’s bit like a teenager rebellion, a nice healthy fuck-off which was never really meant.

  506. Heh. Dean, in the last Dilbert Blog, there is a perfect answer to all your questions:

    “Human Behavior

    If aliens landed in your backyard and gave you one minute to describe everything there is to know about human behavior, what would you say?

    I found an answer to that question today as I was looking through my old e-mails. This story was sent to me by a Dilbert reader.

    — start —

    The maintenance man is moving the thermostat in our office today. I started talking with him about the “Thermostat Wars” [from Dilbert comics]. He told me about one office with 30 women where they could never get the temperature to an agreeable level. At his suggestion they installed 20 dummy thermostats around the office. Everyone was told that each thermostat controlled the zone around itself.

    Problem solved. Now that everyone has “control” of their own thermostat there is no problem.

    — end —

    :-)

  507. A bit more about free will: I think as long as we have will, there is no real freedom. There are two kinds of oppression: external tyrants bossing us around and the internal ego making it’s demands. Of course eliminating external oppression is good, but not such a big thing: it’s a bit like money: it does not bring happiness but at least lets one choose his favourite flavour of non-happiness. (Don’t confuse being content with being happy… real happiness is only there when one’s radiating like 200 pounds of plutonium…) Of course external freedom is favourable, as chosen flavours of non-happiness always feel better than the enforced ones. But it’s just a small first step.

    Of course I guess that you rather meant free will as an ability to make moral decisions. But I think our minds are buried under such a huge mass of learned habits that it very rarely happens that we really choose free, it’s more likely that ethical heroes just managed to find some random bit of a nice habit somewhere in their minds.

  508. Shenpen:
    >One of the most important tasks of the Right is I think to clearly, publicly demonstrate and advertise that the Right does not only entirely consist of people who think like “The Bible says it. I believe it. That settles it.”.

    I could not disagree with you more. THE most important task of the Right, is to hold the line against the terrible logic of materialism until we find a way around, over, under or through it.

    You think I am too pessimistic, and perhaps you are correct. No one can know the future. But I am not a stupid man and I honestly believe that, taken unreservedly, the logic of materialism leads to a place where my civilization, and yours, simply cannot survive.

    I lack the physical capacity, as well as the mental immediacy, to be an effective soldier. But I do have other talents. I have a facility with words. One of my most important tasks in life is to use my logic and eloquence to define exactly what our soldiers should be fighting for, so that they don’t lose hope and lose heart.

    The highest political achievement of the human race is a society in which ordinary people can be the author of their own lives, without being guided, led, directed or instructed by their alleged ‘betters.’ Yet this achievement has prerequisites.

    First, the ordinary schmucks must have the ABILITY: they must have the necessary social and technical skills to get most things DONE without the guidance of experts.

    Second, they must have an answer to the question: “Why bother?”

    Freedom is hard. It means you have to be responsible. It means you can’t blame others. It means that if your life is a mess, it’s your fault. And it means that you must prove your worth anew each day, through productive effort, as you cannot rely on your status at birth, for a sense of personal value. In a free society, no one can be an aristocrat.

    Building a free society is hard. Maintaining one is harder. The logic of materialism eats through the intellectual skeleton of a free society like acid.

    But there must be some way to reconcile the facts of the universe as we find them, with the reality of mind and each person’s capacity to make free moral choices.

    If we cannot reconcile these things, then freedom is impossible. But, as a proud member of the American Right, I’m not giving up. THAT is our task.

  509. But holding the line against materialism cannot be continued by the old ways. See, if you look at the total sum of the intelligence on the left an the right, it’s more or less the same. But it’s distribution is different: on the right, the are a handful of really clever people and a great majority of dumb rednecks, an on the left, people’s intelligence is more or less around the average, with low variation coefficent. Therefore, the right is losing hundreds of thousands of educated people of good mediocre abilities to the left, because they can’t stand the smell of rednecks and they are not yet clever enough to rise above that and look at the really important points. And they MUST be won over, because they dominate the culture, the media, the internet, the music, everything… f.e. why do almost all decent rock music bands from Bad Religion to Rammstein ally with the left? Because they are smart and independent enough to not agree with the “The Bible says it. I believe it. That settles it.” folks, but they are not (yet) smart enough to not ally with Chomsky and Moore.

    Without winning over the intellectual middle class, there is no way to implement a new kind of non-materialism, because they dominate all channels of communication, and they are the role models of the masses. They are the “opinion leaders”. “Opinion leader”, I’m not sure such an expression exists in English, does it? I mean those folks whom political opinions their less educated friends and relatives tend to borrow. You know, being a rebel is considered so cool below a certain level of intelligence and/or materiality, and these folks managed to build a huge establishment and became quite stiff within it, meanwhile successfully maintaing the facade that they are rebels. They are the mainstream and they still can successfully project the image that they are the independent thinkers who are against the mainstream… and this is just too sexy, too popular. Without winning them over, there is no hope for change. And they can’t be won over unless the right gives their non-conventional “stars” a huge amount of publicity. Of course it’s dangerous, as if it happened, then many of the current right voters would rather go for Pat Buchanan, Ross Perot, Le Pen, Jorg Haider or the Vlaams Bloc. But this risk I think needs to be taken.

  510. And now it’s 1 : 1 :-) I mean you found it somewhat insulting that I said the commies were right-wing, and I found it somewhat insulting that you wrote we are living in separate civiliations. We are not. It’s the same NATO, the same churches, the same software, the same music and the intellectuals wrote the same drooling obituaries over the death of Susan Sonntag. It’s quite the same civilization. No offense taken of course :-)

  511. Shenpen, about longevity. Yes, we have “only” doubled the lifespan (probably closer to tripled, if historical evidence is a good indication to what happened pre-historically) of cavemen today. That doesn’t like a whole lot, until you consider that for many tens of thousands of years nearly all men lived no more than 30 years. If we raise the number to 40 years the number of humans that lived beyond that number is so small as to be statistically insignificant. From the day that Homo Sapiens first walked the earth to 1900 AD, such a small number of them lived beyond 40 years as to be a number without value in determining the life span of a human.

    Now, if we consider only the humans who have lived since 1900 AD, that completely changes. The number of humans that live beyond the age of 40 is a significant portion of the population. So significant, in fact, that the typical human born in, let’s say, 1967 will live a span of years close to 80, based on today’s science and statistics. The point at which a human continuing to live becoming statistically insignificant in calculating average and mean is probably more like 105 or 110 years. In other words, the means, averages and ends of the curve have moved by a factor of 2.8, give or take, not 2. That, in and of itself, is an incredible demonstration of the value of wealth creation and science that was unleashed by the Enlightenment.

    Now, for the curve itself. If you were to plot a curve of the change in human lifespan. you would see a line for 100,000 years that was essentially flat, with a sudden geometric change beginning around 1900 AD, give or take a few years. And that curve indicates a line that is rapidly approaching vertical. We can only understand the longevity curve when looked at over all of history, not if we simply consider the changes of the last few years.

    More importantly, there is another trend that is accelerating. Using actuarial tables, we know that a human of a given age has only a certain likelihood of living to be one year older. In the USA, at the age of 5, it is almost certain that a human will live to be 6. This is why buying life insurance for a 5 year old is a very poor economic decision. At the age of 60, it is fairly certain that a US citizen will live to be 61. Not as certain as with the 5 year old, but still a high likelihood. However, at age 70 that changes rapidly. The likelihood, if it was expressed as a curve, that you will die within one year changes geometrically after age 70. It’s important to remember that change in likelihood was at around age 30 for most of history.

    Medicine, less physical labor, better nutrition, more leisure time, better housing, and so on have been responsible for this change. What we are seeing in the realm of medical research and aging science is that the likelihood of dying within one year is changing rapidly at older and older ages. We can plot that as a new curve. That curve is moving further to the right (if the X axis represents age) all the time. As the likelihood that medicine can increase your chance of living another year improves at older and older ages, we have longer and longer lifespans.

    In other words, we are nearing a tipping point in terms of lifespan. It is quite likely that within my lifespan, which is currently capped at about another 38 years, give or take, humans will achieve a longevity far beyond anything that has existed at any point prior to this in history. Including today. Just how far we will be able to take this is, of course, unknown. But, we will be, compared to all the rest of human history, immortal. Compared to cavemen, we already are.

  512. Shenpen:
    When I said ‘my civilization and yours,’ I did not mean that they were not the same, I was just engaging in a bit of rhetorical excess. I am, in that sense, a typical intellectual type: I have diarrhea of the mouth and pen. You should meet me in person. I’ll yak your ear off.

    So: dumb rednecks, the intellectual middle class, and the clever elites. There is a lot of truth to your analysis. I’ll have to think some more about the implications before I make a final judgment.

    I consider myself one of the intellectual middle class. I have no more business being mentioned in the same breath with Charles Murray than I do with George Bernard Shaw. I am a smart guy. But they are on a different plane.

    I think that before the Right can hope to win over a majority of the intellectual middle class, it must have an IDEA to win them to. It is not enough to point out, as I do, the problems with the logic of materialism. You have to have an alternative. You can’t beat something with nothing.

    To patch up the holes in our two problematic metaphysics, we need a third metaphysic. We need a solid foundation for a new worldview, entirely logically consistent, compatible with the facts of science, compatible also with mind, free will, and ultimate moral purpose, upon which new wisdom can be built. And it would be nice if the logic of the new metaphysic had a kind word to say about us Y-chromosome types.

    Developing this third metaphysic is far beyond my meager abilities. I can recognize the symptoms of a civilizational brain tumor, but I have nowhere near the skills needed to remove it, without killing the patient.

    In any event, I don’t think it will be possible, or even desirable, to win over the intellectual middle class with mere public relations. It is not enough to look good, you have to BE good. If you go in assuming that people are stupid enough to be fooled by press agentry and a slick paint job, you have already lost the battle for the heart and mind of the intelligent, ordinary schmuck.

    P. S. I think the rock band thing is influenced as much by the critics as anything else. The Canadian metal band, Rush, used to release songs with lyrics influenced by Ayn Rand, but they quit that because the critics would beat the shit out of them.

  513. Eric,

    this longevity question is very interesting to me – not the length of the lifespan itself, I mean, I don’t really want to be a typical old fart for centuries, but rather the conserving the energy of the twenties until 40, 50 or whatever. I’m 28 and I’m already starting to feel a bit slowed down compared to when I was 18-20. And once I saw some pictures of the body building world championship of the seniors, and the winner of the 60ers age category radiated more life energy than me or most of my friends… and even the winner of the 70ers wasn’t bad… therefore, it seems to me that exercise counts the most. And exercise, well, that’s something humanity always had enough of it in history. Often more than one would like… and if we compare this 60 years old body builder to a 60 years old farmer from 1850, they both had a lot of exercise, the peasant didn’t have and the body builder didn’t really need so it did not really count, so the only real difference is nutrition. Is nutrition really a so important factor by itself or I’m missing something? You know I never really understood why body building exercise makes people shining with energy why that kind of exercise that a poor peasant is doing just breaks them… is it really just for the meat and the vitamins?

  514. Dean, the problem is, really, that the Right has resorted to Conservativism to oppose the Left. The intellectual middle class, generally, recognizes that Conservativism is hollow. It offers nothing new, but merely opposes change. The death of true Liberalism as a force in politics that was engineered by the Conservatives and Socialists, in conjunction with the World Wars and the Great Depression, left us with a choice between two political forces that have clear and significant problems. Liberalism, on the other hand, holds out the promise that you and I can control our own destiny. Buckley, Goldwater and Reagan attempted to fuse Conservative and Liberal philosophy, and for a time they were quite successful. Unfortunately the Bush I (paleo-conservatives) and Bush II (religious conservatives) wings of the Right prevailed, leaving us with something called Compassionate Conservativism, which is really a very mild fascism. Fascism is, regardless of what the Left wishes to claim, a subset of Socialism. So, we are left in the US, and most of the West, with a choice between mild socialism and full blown socialism.

    This, more than anything, is contributing to the moral dilemmas you are discussing. Liberalism, on the other hand, does not have that sort of moral dilemma because it does not try to propose a systemic replacement for individual beliefs. The problem, precisely, that Conservatives and Socialists have is that they have both positioned their political and economic systems as being spiritual systems as well. The typical educated person can see through this. The intellectual middle class chooses Socialism over Conservativism because it, at least, holds out the hope that their desire to be “good” can be somewhat fulfilled within Socialism. They are not silly enough, for the most part, to continue believing in a magical world view required to be part of Conservativism.

    Liberalism’s promise is that you can disassociate government policy and social order from spiritualism. That, indeed, you must because it is not possible to dictate spiritual fulfillment from the outside. This belief that one can dictate the other is the failing of Socialism. The belief in the reverse, that spiritual fulfillment will lead to physical contentment, is the failing of religion and Conservativism. Liberalism says that the two are only linked in one sense. You cannot, generally, find spiritual fulfillment when you are hungry, cold, diseased, etc. And thus, to enable men to find spiritual fulfillment we must provide a system where their physical needs are taken care of. Or, to quote von Mises, talking about this:

    It is not from a disdain of spiritual goods that liberalism concerns itself exclusively with man’s material well-being, but from a conviction that what is highest and deepest in man cannot be touched by any outward regulation. It seeks to produce only outer well-being because it knows that inner, spiritual riches cannot come to man from without, but only from within his own heart. It does not aim at creating anything but the outward preconditions for the development of the inner life.

    To continue along this line, the answer to those who criticize Liberalism for this position is:

    To be sure, to those who, like the followers of many Asiatic and medieval Christian sects, accept the doctrine of complete asceticism and who take as the ideal of human life the poverty and freedom from want of the birds of the forest and the fish of the sea, we can make no reply when they reproach liberalism for its materialistic attitude. We can only ask them to let us go our way undisturbed, just as we do not hinder them from getting to heaven in their own fashion. Let them shut themselves up in their cells, away from men and the world, in peace.

    In other words, I respect your right to believe that a new spiritualism is called for while asking nothing more than a respect on your part for me to believe as I wish. This is the great difference between Liberalism and the Conservatives and Socialists. I ask nothing more than to be left alone to believe as I wish, so long as I do no harm to my fellow man’s life, liberty and property. Conservatives and Socialists wish to proselytize and convert me, usually through some use of force, whether that is social or physical.

  515. Shenpen, nutrition is a crucial piece of longevity. But, remember also that the typical body builder is not laboring in the fields or factories for 10 to 14 hours a day, every day. Exercise is good for the human body, but physical labor without respite is not. It’s not just exercise and nutrition, though. Medical attention, shelter from the elements, leisure time, and more, all contribute as well.

    Healthy and productive longevity is the goal, not just sitting around senile and physically incapable for years, hanging on to life for lack of anything better. Of course, we have already, compared to our ancestors, achieved that. And will achieve more.

  516. By the way Dean, your list of 20th century philosophers that were not nihilistic didn’t include von Mises or Sowell. How come?

  517. Eric:
    I posted a list of philosophical books I recommended to Shenpen. And I listed two 20th century secular philosophers who didn’t hate men. I did not list all non-nihilist philosophers. Thomas Sowell is a national treasure, and one of the conservative heavyweights I should have listed alongside Murray and Johnson. His “A Conflict Of Visions” is one of the few books I would rank alongside Hoffer’s “The True Believer” as an intellectual tour de force.

    I know who Ludwig Von Mises is, mostly through Ayn Rand. She was a big fan. That I am not very familiar with his works is a symptom of my own intellectual inferiority. I have always found him too dry to sit through. That you not only sat through but found him quotable is a sign of your stature. I doff my hat to you, sir.

    As to my belief that a new spiritualism is called for: I didn’t exactly say that. I said we need a new metaphysic. Supernaturalism is entirely lacking. Those telephone psychics you see advertising late at night who want your credit card number are all frauds. I’m not arguing that we need to return to that ol’ time religion.
    1. I’m not that kind of Conservative and
    2. That ol’ time religion got the shit kicked out of it for a reason.

    An helicopter is not a dirigible, nor is it an airplane. Dirigibles and airplanes are fine things, but a helicopter is something different. The kind of new metaphysic I am talking about would do many of the same things that supernaturalism and materialism both do, but it would do other things also. How? I don’t know.

    Now, onto Classical (as opposed to Progressive) Liberalism. It seems to me that CL was built on a fault line between supernaturalism and materialism. To wit:
    “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal and endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights”

    Did you get that? Creator. Yet if we Liberals are going to be all rational and scientific and abandon all this supernatural mumbo-jumbo, then where is this vaunted Equality supposed to come from?

    All men are not equal in height, intelligence or moral character. By any visible measure, some men are better than others. So in what sense are we equal? Because, according to Christian tradition, we all have immortal souls. THAT’S what makes us equal.

    Yet there is no scientific evidence that you have a soul. I’m not saying you don’t have one. I’m just saying that there is no way to locate your soul, assuming you have one, with any laboratory equipment.

    Classical Liberalism, with it’s worship for Reason AND Equality, did not collapse because of some dark conspiracy between me and Professor Chomsky. It collapsed because it was built on the San Andreas fucking Fault. It is a beautiful thing that never had a chance of standing, without some sort of new foundation.

    As for the totalism of the personal and the political in both Socialism and Conservatism, in my opinion that is inevitable. A house divided against itself cannot stand. That is why I believe we need a new metaphysic, forming the basis of a whole new philosophical world-view, which is compatible with Liberty but does not lead to nihilism.

  518. Sadly, Dean, Mises is dry. But still worth reading. Especially because he tackles your issues around equality and spiritualism.

  519. Eric:
    Von Mises may have written on the issue, but if he ‘tackled’ it, meaning he solved the dilemma, I think I would have heard. Perhaps I am wrong.

    If all that exists is material, then you don’t have a soul. And neither do I. And there is no material sense in which we are both equal. Therefore, our Liberal Equality must be immaterial. Yet the materialist metaphysic says that nothing immaterial exists. All consciousness is reducible to brain function. And all brains are unequal.

    Therefore, Liberalism is a joke. There is such a thing as an natural aristocracy (the people with the best brains), and they should be running things behind the scenes like the Jedi in the Star Wars prequels.

    Therefore, democracy, if it is allowed to exist at all, SHOULD be a sham, to fool people into thinking that they are the authors of their own lives, when in fact all the really important decisions should be made by the elites behind the scenes.

    Therefore, as the EUnuchs so often tell us, the United States of America is the most irresponsible superpower in history, because it actually allows We The People to influence public policy!

    To the best of my knowledge, no one has ‘tackled’ this problem. Many have written on it. None have solved it. I don’t know what a solution would look like. Materialism by itself leads to despair. None of the major EU countries are breeding at replacement level. If things don’t change pretty soon, EUrabia will be a reality, not just a slogan.

    The only thing that keeps us going at replacement level is all the immigrants we get. And our Leftist intellectual elites do all they can to keep those immigrants from assimilating. They want to die, and they want to take the rest of us with them when they go.

    I am NOT arguing that we need a ‘return to spiritualism.’ There’s no going back. No prophet, priest or guru has ever:
    1. Cured a disease
    2. Put a man on the Moon or
    3. Made two stalks of wheat grow, where only one grew before.

    We need something else. We need that fucking helicopter. And I don’t know what it looks like or where to find it.

    I see my job as defining the Nature of the Problem, and helping to hold the line against materialist despair until somebody else figures out how to build the helicopter.

  520. Dean, you insist that “tackling” the problem of the material vs. the spiritual requires a new metaphysics. But I disagree. I believe tackling it means describing a means where the two may be separated into their appropriate spheres, where the spiritual is the province of the individual and part of the private sphere. This is precisely one of the things that Mises laid out. If you insist that the problem requires a new spiritualism then you will, naturally, disagree that a philosopher laid down a solution. On the other hand, if you only insist that a solution to the problem presented by religion and Socialism be offered up, then Mises did provide a solution and “tackle” the problem.

    By the way, in general, I would consider “tackling the problem” to mean taking it up and trying to deal with it, whatever the problem may be. That doesn’t mean that we have a solution.

    You might also consider reading Heinlein’s “For Us, The Living”. It’s nowhere close to his best writing, coming as early as it did. It is, however, his first attempt at dealing with the public vs. private sphere. Considering the influence of his writing in a wide variety of areas, I would also consider Heinlein to be one of the great, consistent secular philosophers of the 20th century. He just chose to impart his thinking through fiction rather than as a more classic philosopher. Same goes for Asimov, Pournelle, Dickson and quite a few other science fiction writers.

  521. Oh yes, one more thing. Equality does not mean either existence of a soul or complete physical and mental sameness. That’s a strawman thrown up by religion and socialism, respectively. Not sure why you choose to perpetuate it when there is an appropriate answer to what equality, in social and political terms, means.

    It’s also been shown fairly well that large groups of people, working from the information each possesses, can arrive at an appropriate, workable solution. We call this the market. It works so well that we have begun using virtual markets to arrive at conclusions and solutions to apparently insoluble problems. This is why, regardless of the elite arrogance of the Euro types, American democracy has worked better than their elite solutions. It’s why your suggestion that the masses should be subject to a natural aristocracy has been proven untrue.

  522. And a last comment on Liberalism. You mention words written by Thomas Jefferson to try and show the issues surrounding Liberalism. The problem with that, of course, is that Liberalism is a philosophy of change, unlike Socialism and Conservativism. Liberalism doesn’t require that there be no change in the philosophy over hundreds of years. The basis of Liberalism that you discuss was true in 1776. It does not mean it has to be true in 2006, 230 years later. An important thing to remember.

    Socialism, on the other hand, allows no such thing. Marx, Fourier, Lasalle, Engels, etc. laid down the dialectic and if you don’t adhere to it, you are wrong.

    Religion has the same issues, of course. And predates Socialism. It’s why I characterize Socialism as secular religion. It is, really, nothing more than a replacement for religious feudalism, as Shenpen pointed out.

  523. Eric:

    Shenpen wrote about an intellectual middle class that, he says, usually swings to the Left because the dumb rednecks are so odious. I don’t know that I agree with that entirely. But to the degree to which it is accurate, I don’t think that the intellectual middle class can be swung toward Classical Liberalism by a subdivision of spheres.

    These people are going to want an Answer. Subdividing the personal and political is a kludge. That it is, at present, indispensable to the maintenance of Liberty, I will be the first to grant you. But I believe that the reason that Classical Liberalism is no longer taken seriously in intellectual circles is that the kludge is insufficiently elegant to capture the heart of the pointy-heads.

    The solution, in my opinion, has to be so beautiful that it lures them away from the desire for power that all people like us are prone to. When you talk so damn good, the urge to express yourself by telling other people what to do is virtually irresistible.

    Classical Liberalism, built on the kludge of separation of church and state, lacks the necessary dazzle to draw godless windbags like us away from the Siren Song of political ambition.

  524. And another thing. People are not equal just because they can participate in markets!

    According to the best statistics that I’ve seen, the average IQ among people of Central Africa is 70. Years ago, P. J. O’Rourke went to Tanzania to write an article for Rolling Stone. He hired a guide to show him around the town where he was staying. The guide had recently suffered a family tragedy, when his 10 year old daughter had died from an inoculation.

    The family had taken her to a clinic to receive a vaccine, but the attending nurse accidentally injected her with the wrong substance, and she began to swell and choke. The clinic did not have a doctor and the nearest one was at a hospital in another town 60 miles away.

    So the family hopped into their Jeep (he was a guide) and drove to the hospital. The roads were so bad, the trip took all day. By the time they got there, it was after 5:00 and the doctor had gone home for the day.
    “Get him!” shouted the guide at the desk clerk.
    The desk clerk replied, “We don’t know where he lives.”

    So the family drove around residential neighborhoods in the town, looking for the doctor’s house. While they were driving, the little girl died.

    While O’Rourke was there, he read in the local newspaper about a scandal at the morgue attached to the hospital. There were several hundred dead bodies which had to be buried en masse at the city dump.

    Apparently, the morgue attendants had hit upon a novel idea. They would refuse to release any body that came into the morgue to the family for burial, unless the family paid the attendants a bribe. The problem with this fine entrepreneurial scheme was that the attendants failed to understand the limits of graft. They demanded bribes so high that the families could not afford to pay. They had no plans for what to do with the resultant surplus of dead bodies, so they just piled them out in the hallway. After a while, the dead bodies began to pose a sanitary problem for the hospital, thus the burial en masse.

    From what I understand, this sort of thing is as common as dirt in Africa. Western journalists, from Liberal, politically correct publications, usually gloss over this phenomena when they write of their travels to Africa because they don’t want to paint the specter of the incompetent black African.

    But the reality is that you are not equal, in any materially measurable sense, to those knucklehead morgue attendants. You are not their physical equal, their intellectual equal, and you are certainly not morally equal to them.

    If there is no transcendent non-material SOMETHING which unites all human beings, regardless of capability, then there is no meaningful sense in which you and they are equal at all. Market participation doesn’t cut it.

    As I understand it, one of the greatest problems we have in trying to export our Classical Liberal ideas to Africa is that the local African elites regard us as naïve when we argue that the common, ordinary African can make good social, economic and political decisions without being bossed around by the local educated elites.

    To be sure, those elites seek to retain their power because they enjoy bossing others around. That’s human nature. But they DO regard us as naïve. I’m not convince they are entirely wrong to do so.

  525. Dean: People are not equal just because they can participate in markets!

    I didn’t say that. I said there is an answer to equality that doesn’t require the existence of a soul or physical sameness.

    Dean: the local African elites regard us as naïve when we argue that the common, ordinary African can make good social, economic and political decisions without being bossed around by the local educated elites.

    Ummmm, in most countries in Africa the educated are not allowed to be part of the power elite. What I find interesting is that the Africans who seek to move their countries forward, instead of just raping them, want to use free trade and rule of law to do so. Sadly, they cannot get Western elites to support them in their quest.

    Dean: To be sure, those elites seek to retain their power because they enjoy bossing others around. That’s human nature.

    I’m really not convinced, based on the 39 years experience I have as a military and civilian leader, that this claim is true. The vast majority of people that I have met in my life appear to prefer to have someone else make tough decisions.

    Back to the one way that people can be equal. They can be equal in the application of the law. This is so embedded in our society that we take it for granted. We forget what a radical concept it is, compared to all of history. Yet it is truly the one thing that has brought about the incredible and radical transformation of society and wealth in the last 250 years.

  526. That should say that I’m 39 years old, with about 20 years experience as a military and civilian leader.

  527. WHY should they be equal in the operation of law? You are saying that they should be treated equally. But I suppose that you could treat a cell phone and a potato equally; that would not, however, make them equal in any meaningful sense. Try eating that cell phone and you’re in for a rude surprise.

    If people are not equal in their existential capacities, and they are not made equal by the presence of some spiritual (for want of a better word) essence, then what, exactly.

    And as for people not wanting to make tough decisions, the scariest thing about making them is the prospect of being held accountable if you screw up. The sweet thing about being a ruling class is the opportunities it provides to evade accountability. Lazarus Long put this the best:
    Any government will work if authority and responsibility are equal and coordinate. This does not insure “good” government; it simply insures that it will work. But such governments are rare — most people want to run things but want no part of the blame. This used to be called the “backseat-driver syndrome.”

    And Eric, among people like ourselves, with some facility with words, ‘backseat-driver syndrome’ is as common as rain and as deadly as cyanide. Read your 20th century history books again, if you doubt it.

  528. *laughs* yes, I’m well aware of the pains of backseat driving.

    Dean, a cell phone and a potato are not the same thing. Two humans are, in the very gross sense. Your example would be more in line with treating a human and a dog the same before the law. Africa is the clear example of what happens when we do away with the Rule of Law. The West is the clear example of the best that we have yet achieved with the Rule of Law.

    I realize you believe that without some new existential metaphysics the West is doomed. I, on the other hand, as a good Liberal believe that we are simply in another phase of change. This is neither bad nor good, it just is. If some small, but critical, portion of our society accepts and embraces the change, we will move forward. So far Western culture since the Enlightenment has managed to continue to embrace, accept and promote change. As long as that continues, we will continue to do well and thrive. The countries within the West that are most conservative right now, France and Germany, are the ones doing the worst. There is a lesson there, and it has little to do with needing a new metaphysics.

  529. Doom can lead to change. One day there were dodo birds living upon the Earth. The next day there were not. Change.

  530. Here’s the liberal answer. Nations and cultures that resist change die. For evidence I give you China in the 15th century, a country that found change so abhorrent it would not allow further exploration by the Admiral that discovered South America. I give you the Ottoman Empire. The late Roman Empire. Germany and France today. You talk about the position that those two countries are in and don’t see that they are bringing about their own doom through their refusal to change, to take a risk.

    Life is full of risk, but the biggest risk of all is stasis. Life is full of risk. The reason that the West has succeeded is its willingness to change, to pursue new ideas and things, to take risks. When the West is no longer willing to do that, it will die, as surely as Ming China, the Ottoman Empire and the Roman Empires did.

    Our unwillingness to confront our problems is more about our fear of change and our boredom than anything else. It’s not about needing a new metaphysics, it’s about fear and boredom.

  531. Jeez, I go to Kyoto for two days, and what happens?

    But what am I supposed to say to you, who see no distinction between chattel slavery and Wal-Mart?

    Wal-mart is almost certainly nicer, at least for those who shop there, than chattel slavery, even if some of the people making the stuff sound like they might be experiencing suboptimal working conditions. But the point I would make about them (can’t speak for Jim) is that they’re both modes of using energy, which happen to characterise different stages of human sociotechnological evolution. Slavery was made obsolete by the coming of the industrial age – once machines were available its costs just outweighed its benefits – whereas Wal-Mart…will never be made obsolete because the endless fount of human ingenuity will allow it to run on something other than oil, should that ever be in short supply, which it won’t obviously because Economics has proved that it can’t. Or something.

    But you seem to regard this attempt to look at them both dispassionately as the most insidious form of cultural treason. Perhaps dispassion itself is your bugbear, I don’t know.

  532. “Dan, if the Mossad want my email or RL address so they can track me down and pay me a visit it’s available, you know?”
    I think you missed the point…that’s not what I was getting at.

    So what *are* you getting at? You’ve accused me of hiding behind Internet anonymity before, but I’m sure I’m not that hard to find.

    “I’m not gambling anything, I’m just gassing on a blog like you”
    Indeed, no argument there…but if we’re going to have any meaningful discourse, you really can’t hop off the merry-go-round simply because we’re talking hypotheticals. I’m just highlighting how ludicrous *your* hypotheticals are.

    And a splendid job you’re doing of it, too.

    [examines fingernails]

    “Unless you think Hizbullah actually *prefer* killing civilians to troops for some nincompoop reason”
    Nincompoop if ya *don’t* ;-) This is *precisely* what H[e|i]zb[u|o]llah intend.

    Do you know this because you read it in one of their newsletters, or is it just a product of your carefully-honed Insight Into The Raghead Mindset?

    If you think otherwise, then I have to second Dean’s attitude toward ‘you & your ilk’.

    You mean you’re going to…stop responding to my posts, or something?

    There’s a threat.

  533. Dan and Dean, it’s actually quite pointless. Adrian, like many other folks in the West, insists that Hezbollah (and other such organizations) are much like us. That is, if only they had wonderful weapons like ours they would target only their military enemies.

    Why not, though? What’s the benefit to Hizbollah of waxing a civilian rather than a soldier? Is there some jihadi calculus of relative worth you’re inferring which makes the civilian a *better option*? Why are you so sure that you know what they’re thinking, or not thinking?

    In WW2 civilians were targetted because they were seen as complicit in the crimes of their governments (not quite sure why they were targetted in Vietnam, but I’m sure there was a good reason), whereas now we’ve moved on and it’s generally accepted (by us) that anyone who targets civilians is subhuman scum with no honour or credibility. And we can’t *understand* why groups in less technologically-developed countries can’t just accept this and kowtow to Western interests forever.

    It must be because they have an intrinsically bad culture.

    At the same time they also insist that such folks are from different cultures with different cultural standards that we have to be sensitive to. These, often mutually contradictory, situations are expounded upon one after the other, regardless of the conflict between them. These not only don’t seem to see the contradiction, but don’t even seem to care that it is contradictory.

    Is this me you’re talking about here, or some passing strawman?

  534. Dean: Just so you know, I’m not the only one who talks this way [referring to the need for a new metaphysics]

    Of course you aren’t. This is a fairly common Conservative position.

  535. Adrian, I suppose that we could simply continue to evaluate Hezbollah’s (and Hamas and al-Qaeda and so forth) intentions by what we would do if we were in a similar position. Or, we could take them at their word when they talk about destroying the Jews, driving them into the sea, etc. We could look at their track record of deliberately targeting soft civilian targets instead of hard military targets and conclude that they prefer to do so. If they, indeed, consider all Israeli citizens (including the Arab ones, which is never mentioned, interestingly enough) as complicit in the crimes of Israel (those crimes are, interestingly, pretty well aligned with many of the crimes put forth by the Nazi’s) then we can make a judgement about their morality. Or, do they get a free pass on that because they aren’t us? I consider the firebombing of Tokyo and Dresden to be fairly heinous. I consider the indiscriminate bombings of civilians in WWII by the Allies to be both wrong and ineffective. And I consider the indiscriminate rocket attacks by Hezbollah to be both wrong and ineffective. I wonder why you don’t?

  536. Adrian, as far as I can tell you have made both arguments that I refer to, which are mutually contradictory.

  537. Big A is the quintessential troll, a function which I’d wager extends into his real life operation as well (if such a thing exists). He’s never going to throw the stake in the ground and say “I think that the War in Iraq is immoral, and here are my reasons.” Presumably this is because you could then refute those reasons. Instead, if you lament 9/11, he’s going to say “I wonder what the poor krauts on the receiving end of allied firebombings felt about the matter.” He won’t actually say, “we deserve to get whacked because of some atrocities that occurred during the execution of WWII.”

    This is the MO of a college pinko, which anyone who’s been on a campus recently should immediately recognize. Perhaps it’s been inspired by Michael Moore. The basic strategy is “insinuate everything, let them fill in the blanks, then call ‘straw man’ when they retort and move the goal posts.” It’s not debate or truth seeking. It’s self-important emotional masturbation. Get it? The whole point of everything adrian says is not to change your mind — and he’s certainly not open to having his mind changed. Nor is he looking for a better understanding of the world. All he’s doing is demonizing you, your supporters, and those you support, because it puts you beneath him and makes him feel good.

    Why is he targeting you, and not the patently evil goblins targetting schools and hospitals? Because it requires far less effort. If he were to condemn our opponents as evil, then he’d have to face the fact that strong men need to stand up and fight and die — and he certainly doesn’t want to fight and die, nor does he want to take protective measures for himself and his. But by condemning you as evil, all he has to do is make fun of you, watch “The Motorcycle Diaries,” read Al Franken, and vote lefty.

    Adrian may fancy himself to be a modern man, emancipated from his hindbrain and all the alpha-male urges it has. But the separation is not complete. And he is weak. All this argumentation is just posturing, in an effort to convince himself that he is, in fact, at the top of the heap. Such weakness can manifest itself in other ways — there are people on both sides of this debate who lack true spine — but have no mistake that that is what you are witnessing now.

    If you see something productive coming out of debate with him, I’d be interested to hear it. I admit, it can be fun to stoop to his level and then stomp him into the ground, but it’s not like that’s actually getting us anywhere.

    Food for thought.

  538. Dean, I think that the Belmont post is significantly different from what I’m tackling. It is tactical, not strategic. It is focused on the limited issue of the conflict between Western Liberalism and Middle Eastern Fascism. I’m trying to tackle something bigger, which is whether Liberalism can, and will, survive.

  539. Peter: If you see something productive coming out of debate with him, I’d be interested to hear it.

    The same productive thing I’ve seen coming out of every debate with everyone of similar stripe. We clarify and bring to the table the debate for the benefit of two groups:

    1. Those of us who wish to bring about debate and discussion and deal honestly with the issues that we face.
    2. The silent readers of this blog who are able to use our discussion to their own benefit.

    I have no expectation of changing Adrian’s mind. My comments are only superficially aimed in his direction.

  540. Here. A clear example of nihilism:

    http://www.guardian.co.uk/iran/story/0,,1854796,00.html

    “Ahmadinejad, the articulate champion of Iran’s national rights, is a potent figure. But Ahmadinejad, the would-be visionary leader of a resurgent revolution awaiting the coming of the Hidden Imam, is living a dangerous illusion. And it is Iranians, not the US air force, who should be allowed to shatter his dream.”

    You know, Ahmadinejad’s dream is certainly bogus and hostile to us, but he can be respected in a way, because he at least has a vision. He can be considered an opponent worthy of some respect. And what does The Guardian imply? They write that his dream must be destroyed – which on the practical level I do agree with – but not destroyed by our dream, but simply destroyed by… chaos. By turmoil. By nihil.

    Whenever they see two powerful dreams to collide, to fight… all they can say is that they wish neither of them to win.

    It’s a sad nihilistic position indeed. They don’t even have the nerve to become proud traitors.

    (You guys wrote very interesting stuff today but I’m too tired to answer. Tomorrow.)

  541. Adrian: But you seem to regard this attempt to look at them both dispassionately as the most insidious form of cultural treason.

    Well, I don’t see it that way at all. I see equating mechanical labor to slave labor on a moral level, which you explicitly did, to be ridiculous. You appear to think that because mechanical and human labor both use energy at the direction of other humans that they are morally equivalent. This is roughly equivalent to saying that because monkeys and dogs both live with humans at times and make noises with their mouths they are the same thing. It’s basically a completely silly position that indicates a complete disengagement with the real world.

    You went on to try and clarify that position, but never went back and tackled your statement of moral equivalence. So, I have to assume that you really do believe that mechanical and slave labor are morally the same. I think even you have to see how silly that sounds.

  542. Just to be clear, this is specifically what was said

    Dean: So, using machines (which can neither think nor feel) is morally similar to using human slave labor?

    Adrian: Only in the *dependence* it induces.

  543. Eric:
    >It is focused on the limited issue of the conflict between Western Liberalism and Middle Eastern Fascism. I’m trying to tackle something bigger, which is whether Liberalism can, and will, survive.

    If Liberalism can’t go toe to toe with Islamism and emerge victorious, how then will it survive at all? The Jihadis are Liberalism’s current enemy. In a perpetual fight to the death, you survive by taking on all comers and defeating them, one by one.

    When you can’t do THAT anymore, you soon stop doing anything else.

    >So, I have to assume that you really do believe that mechanical and slave labor are morally the same.

    Don’t be silly. Peter is right. Adrian doesn’t BELIEVE anything. That’s the point.

  544. Adrian, let me ask this: why do you keep on talking about these topics on terrorism where everything that can be told has been told by both parties a couple of times, and it’s getting extremely boring by now – we all know our opinions won’t make any change so let’s don’t talk about topics that haven’t go all the juice already squeezed out of them, and why don’t you participate in this really interesting philosophical discussions started by Dean, replied by Eric and myself from quite different viewpoints? These topics I think are way more interesting. It would also reduce the tension, because it would let others see a different aspect of you way of thinking. Why don’t you send you always-critical part of your mind to a short holiday and say something constructive in these topics? I’d really welcome it.

  545. He’s never going to throw the stake in the ground and say “I think that the War in Iraq is immoral, and here are my reasons.”

    The main one is that I don’t believe democracy can be successfully imposed, the apparent WW2 counterexamples notwithstanding. There the populations were both invested in their governments’ fascist(ic) projects, and were pummelled into a submission from which following their conqueror’s lead was the only option that made sense. They were also both industrialised economies with experience of democracy.

    There’s also the problem of self-interest. In WW2 it was self-evident that America was on the side of the angels. Moreover, the fascists were playing catch-up and never really had a chance against the human and energy resources ranged against them, even if it would have been a lot harder if they’d taken Britain. Now it just looks to most outside observers like all America wants to do is make sure nothing threatens its continued dominance (and that of its main surrogate) of the key oil-producing region of the world, presumably so it can continue to enjoy a life of easy-motoring leisure at any cost.

    Talking about freedom while enjoying cosy multi-decade deals with feudal autocracies you carefully insulate from the exigencies of democracy makes you look like hypocrites, IOW. Oh, and when they do finally get some democracy and vote for Hamas, *bad* choice.

    So, is Eric supposed to refute this? I take it your time is too valuable, or something.

  546. Adrian: They were also both industrialised economies [Germany and Japan] with experience of democracy.

    Well, that’s half right. Neither country had any real experience with democracy, except Germany’s very brief Weimar Republic.

    Adrian: So, is Eric supposed to refute this? I take it your time is too valuable, or something.

    Since I agree with much of it but come to different conclusions about the reality of what is needed, I won’t even tackle “refuting it”.

  547. Dean: If Liberalism can’t go toe to toe with Islamism and emerge victorious, how then will it survive at all?

    Two different issues.

    1. Can the West defeat Middle Eastern fascism and terrorism militarily? Yes

    2. Will Liberalism or Religious Fascism (or whatever the hell we want to call it) be the dominant political/philosophical system when the dust settles? That is a question that has multiple answers, ranging from absolutes to middle grounds. To suggest that one is either or, as compared to the military challenge, is, I think, not an accurate depiction of reality. Although it is certainly how folks like to tee it up.

  548. Adrian, let me ask this: why do you keep on talking about these topics on terrorism where everything that can be told has been told by both parties a couple of times, and it’s getting extremely boring by now

    Well, sorry you feel that way but ISTR restarting this thread to talk about the Lebanon situation. Hezbollah seem to me to be something new out there, though everyone else is giving me back the usual seen-one-raghead-you’ve-seen-them-all shtick.

    Adrian, I suppose that we could simply continue to evaluate Hezbollah’s (and Hamas and al-Qaeda and so forth) intentions by what we would do if we were in a similar position. Or, we could take them at their word when they talk about destroying the Jews, driving them into the sea, etc.

    I asked Dean for specifically Hezbollah-sourced threats to drive the Jews into the sea, and he didn’t give me any links – perhaps you can. I did see one comment from the Sheik that he considered Israel to be an “illegitimate state”, but fucking hell, they practically all think that out there. Hamas and Al-Q are separate issues (Al-Q are *very* separate), I was asking about Hezbollah.

    We could look at their track record of deliberately targeting soft civilian targets instead of hard military targets and conclude that they prefer to do so.

    They’re working with what they’ve got, which is an assload of Katyushas. How much use are they, really, against hard military targets? No guidance system, and a six kilogram warhead or whatever it is? I think they were designed to be used in batteries of twenty-odd for area bombardment. Or are you saying that marching up to Israeli army posts and letting fly with Kalashnikovs and RPGs until the F16s turn up would be the honourable thing to do? Targetting soft civilian targets by suicide bombing I associate with Hamas, who are in a much weaker position. I’m not talking about Hamas here – different group, different goals, even if there is some liason going on between them.

    If they, indeed, consider all Israeli citizens (including the Arab ones, which is never mentioned, interestingly enough) as complicit in the crimes of Israel (those crimes are, interestingly, pretty well aligned with many of the crimes put forth by the Nazi’s) then we can make a judgement about their morality.

    The main crime of the Israelis in Arab eyes AFAICT is indeed aligned with a Nazi one – the quest for lebensraum. I did read about one Arab Israeli whose daughter was killed by a Katyusha. He was…understanding about it. Lamentably so, in your view, I’m sure.

    I consider the indiscriminate bombings of civilians in WWII by the Allies to be both wrong and ineffective. And I consider the indiscriminate rocket attacks by Hezbollah to be both wrong and ineffective. I wonder why you don’t?

    They’ve mainly been ‘effective’ in provoking the Israelis into making repeated incursions into Lebanon which they *really* haven’t enjoyed very much, which I think was the point – the myth of Israeli military invincibility has taken quite a hammering, and they sound worried about it even if you aren’t. I’m sure Goliath thought David’s sling was ‘wrong’ as well. Come here and fight like an alpha male, you cowardly little bastard.

  549. Adrian: They were also both industrialised economies [Germany and Japan] with experience of democracy.

    Well, that’s half right. Neither country had any real experience with democracy, except Germany’s very brief Weimar Republic.

    What about this? Not “real” enough? I mean, what are the parameters?

    Since I agree with much of it but come to different conclusions about the reality of what is needed, I won’t even tackle “refuting it”.

    But stomping me into the ground can be *fun*. Pete does it all the time.

  550. You went on to try and clarify that position, but never went back and tackled your statement of moral equivalence. So, I have to assume that you really do believe that mechanical and slave labor are morally the same. I think even you have to see how silly that sounds.

    Just to be clear, this is specifically what was said

    Dean: So, using machines (which can neither think nor feel) is morally similar to using human slave labor?

    Adrian: Only in the *dependence* it induces.

    I don’t get this. Isn’t it clear that I feel the two are morally similar only in the dependence they induce? Slave labour was *superseded* – it was rejected by people who didn’t need it any more, and the people who did had to find other ways to get by. If mechanical labour turns out to be based on unsustainable inputs, the same thing will happen, though admittedly there won’t be a war to “free the machines” this side of the Singularity, and on the other side…well, it won’t be a very *long* war.

  551. To be fair, I don’t think Adrian is saying what Eric thinks he is. He is not saying that machine labor and slave labor are equally EVIL. He is only saying that they both produced dependency in the ownership class.

    I don’t regard that dependency as a MORAL issue. The difference is between competence and worth. I have lived near a supermarket all my life. Therefore I have no skills as a tracker or hunter. If I were dropped naked into the Amazon jungle, with no choice but to fend for myself, I would surely die.

    That doesn’t mean I am less worthy of living in the moral sense, only that I am less competent at living in a particular context. The distinction is an important one, and I wish that Adrian had the moral clarity to see it clearly. I snarkily speculate that he may have spent too many years in college, with each year exacting a toll in common sense.

    But I’m pretty sure he is not saying that a machine-owner is morally as evil as a slave-owner.

    Adrian, please correct me if I have misunderstood you.

  552. I don’t regard that dependency as a MORAL issue.

    You see, I do. I don’t know if you ever read this interview with Robert Baer, which I think I posted a link to before. There’s one particular passage:

    “In any case, we just use a lot of gasoline, and we depend upon it, just as we depend upon cheap imports from East Asia, from China. All these cheap imports and cheap gasoline, and wood from Brazil, it becomes a dependency. These aren’t my ideas. I talk to a lot of people about the drug problem, and they say, well, with dependency, your perceptions change. And I think the best I can tell is that’s what has happened. It’s as if Saudi Arabia is our boss and is paying us a good salary. It would be difficult to find another job, so we’re not going to really worry about focusing on what our boss is really doing. We’re too dependent.”

    I think where you get your energy from has huge moral implications.

    But I’m pretty sure he is not saying that a machine-owner is morally as evil as a slave-owner.

    Of course not. But there’s a *parallel*.

  553. >It’s as if Saudi Arabia is our boss and is paying us a good salary.

    Adrian, I must once again accuse you of being obtuse. Saudi Arabia is not our boss, WE are our boss.

    We could take the Saudi oil fields from them in an instant, were we prepared to be sufficiently brutal in the confiscation. The Europeans would bitch and moan about our ‘imperialism,’ for about two seconds, until we made it clear they could shut the fuck up or never see another drop. They’d shut up.

    The Chinese would be more of a problem, but as long as we sold them the oil on the cheap, they’d go along. Chinese aren’t stupid. If we decided to stop being the ‘nice-guy super power’ and started playing Rome, they’d go along, at least until they had sufficient power to challenge us, in a generation or two.

    The only thing that stops us from being a conventional imperial power is us. We really do behave better than our enemies would if the situation were reversed. I have given up hope expecting you to see that, but it’s true.

  554. Adrian, from the Wikipedia article on the “Taisho Democracy”:

    Overall, during the 1920s, Japan progressed toward a democratic system of government.

    I read the entire article. Nothing in there struck me as a democracy. It was about on par with the English reforms during the Napoleonic era. That is, some liberalization, but not democratic. You tell me what made that period a democracy, other than the name of it?

    Adrian: I don’t get this. Isn’t it clear that I feel the two are morally similar only in the dependence they induce?

    And Dean even jumps to your defense. But what is there not to get? You appear, although I could be wrong, to believe that dependence is a bad thing when, in fact, the dependence on slavery was not positive for society and the dependence on mechanical labor is a positive for society. To call the two morally similar is to continue in the vein of moral relativism that you have continuously brought to the discussion here.

    Now, on to these issues of “dependency”.

    1. Division of labor (which is a significant contributor to the dependency you speak of) has been one of the most significant factors in the increase of wealth, in all measurable ways, we’ve seen.

    2. You would, apparently, wish to return to each nation being completely sufficient to meet its own needs. That is a regression, with the exception of a few items, a regression of about 200 years, to the Napoleonic Era. That is the last time that all nations on the globe were able to meet their own needs without being dependent on other nations and regions for resources and products and trade.

    3. This horrible dependency has made widespread war less common, not more. The World Wars were both preceded by periods of trade isolation and economic regression. Both periods also saw nations trying to avoid dependency, and such attempts to avoid dependency leading to war. The Victorian Era, on the other hand, with little widespread war, saw a significant increase in trade and “dependency”.

    Dependency is the cry of those opposed to globalization. Ironically, those most opposed to globalization are also the most opposed to war as a means to achieving political ends, regardless of the circumstances. I’m sorry, but your dependency argument is likely to lead to more war, not less, more strife, not less. It is likely to lead to more misery and suffering, less wealth. The reality is that the so called “green” energy sources can never reduce dependency or replace fossil fuels without leading a massive reduction in wealth and a massive increase in misery. There are alternatives, but they will require more “dependency”, rather than less. Of course, as a Liberal (as opposed to a socialist who calls himself a liberal), I think that’s a good thing.

  555. Adrian, I must once again accuse you of being obtuse. Saudi Arabia is not our boss, WE are our boss.

    It’s a simile. “It’s as if Saudi Arabia were our boss”. He’s not saying that they are your boss, just that their influence corrupts the outlook of your policymakers.

    We could take the Saudi oil fields from them in an instant, were we prepared to be sufficiently brutal in the confiscation.

    I reckon having an unobstructed view of the state of Ghawar would scare you more than the Euros.

    We really do behave better than our enemies would if the situation were reversed.

    I tire somewhat of hearing any criticism of American foreign policy rebutted with cries of “Be grateful it’s not the Chinese on top!” It’s like you’re the only thing preserving our women from relapsing into footbinding or something. No matter what the American government does, we’re supposed to extract comfort from the fact that the Chinese would be worse.

    Really inspiring.

  556. >1. Division of labor (which is a significant contributor to the dependency you speak of) has been one of the most significant factors in the increase of wealth, in all measurable ways, we’ve seen.

    I wish I’d had the presence of mind to say that. Bravo.

    There are 6.5 billion people living today. A billion of them are overweight. A billion fat people.

    In the 1800, the Earth could support maybe 300 million. So for us to return to the good old days of little or no machine dependence, only 6 BILLION would have to die.

    A small price to pay to cut our dependence on fossil fuels, I’m sure.

  557. >No matter what the American government does, we’re supposed to extract comfort from the fact that the Chinese would be worse.

    Adrian, just out of curiosity, do you believe that the Chinese really would be worse, or are you one of those Europeans who hates American hegemony so much you’re convinced NO ONE could be worse?

  558. Dean: A small price to pay to cut our dependence on fossil fuels, I’m sure.

    Well, with increases in technology and engineering capabilities, I’m fairly sure that we could support more folks on earth than we could in 1800. Probably on the order of a billion, give or take. So, it’s really not as bad as it seems Dean, since only 5.5 billion have to die, not the 6.2 billion you are thinking of.

    See, the cup’s half full!

  559. Shenpen, my cousin is a plumber in New York City. He is responsible for the HVAC system in a high-rise building. He says that most of the thermostats in the building are dummies; put there as placebos.

  560. Maybe my viewpoint is narrow-minded, but as I see both of you talking about American or other alternative (Chinese) hegemony as matters of fact, I didn’t in fact see many of it in the real world. All I can see in the world is a global economy, people, money, goods, cultural product flowing to and fro. I think it’s superficial to consider this global society having an America-like colour, because I think it’s at least as far from the traditional American way of living as from everything else. It’s just an urban culture. New York. Paris, Tokyo, even Moscow and Budapest, and increasingly, Shanghai… all the same. In this amazingly complicated network of flows, who can tell who the real boss is? Of course there are gross figures and numbers, but… we don’t really see much of it in our day-to-day lives.

  561. An afterthought about the global society: this summer I vowed that I’ll never again go to any city on a holiday, only to countrysides visiting natural sights. In the last two years I’ve been to Copenhagen, London, Nürnberg, Thessaloniki, my friend was in the Silicon Valley, my other friend lives in Denver, another friend frequently visits Shanghai for purchasing, and they are all, all the same. We are really having a global urban society by now.

  562. You tell me what made that period a democracy, other than the name of it?

    Er, lessee…”The public grew disillusioned with the growing national debt and the new election laws, which retained the old minimum tax qualifications for voters.” Sounds like a property qualification, much like the early American republic. Wasn’t that democratic?

    You appear, although I could be wrong, to believe that dependence is a bad thing when, in fact, the dependence on slavery was not positive for society

    Depends. Confederate, or Athenian?

    and the dependence on mechanical labor is a positive for society.

    If it’s *sustainable*. Otherwise we’re looking at the dieoff you’re so derisive about.

    To call the two morally similar is to continue in the vein of moral relativism that you have continuously brought to the discussion here.

    Well, what’s your countering moral absolutist stance? “The West is great and will inevitably inherit the stars, and the beardies are just jealous because their nations have no scramjet designs on the drawing boards”?

    1. Division of labor (which is a significant contributor to the dependency you speak of) has been one of the most significant factors in the increase of wealth, in all measurable ways, we’ve seen.

    As you might expect, the steadily-increasing availability of cheap energy over the last couple of hundred years looks to me like a bigger one.

    2. You would, apparently, wish to return to each nation being completely sufficient to meet its own needs.

    Wishing for something isn’t quite the same as worrying that it may be necessary. It depends on one’s level of personal investment in a particular future, and quite a few of my options are still open.

    The Victorian Era, on the other hand, with little widespread war, saw a significant increase in trade and “dependency”.

    I’m not knocking globalization per se – I don’t think China and India would be dragging large chunks of themselves out of poverty without it. Interdependence leads to all sorts of possibilities for enrichment, but if you’re too dependent on one energy source the whole thing’s at risk if that falters.

    There are alternatives, but they will require more “dependency”, rather than less.

    Which ones?

  563. Adrian, just out of curiosity, do you believe that the Chinese really would be worse, or are you one of those Europeans who hates American hegemony so much you’re convinced NO ONE could be worse?

    Well, they might well be worse, but they’re not in the position so it’s just hypothetical gas. If my aunt had balls, she’d be my uncle, and that. Kind of a sad prospect to offer the world, though – “Stop whining, we’re not as bad as the Chinese would be!”

    Whoop de doo.

  564. Adrian: Sounds like a property qualification, much like the early American republic. Wasn’t that democratic?

    No, the early American system was a republic with very restricted suffrage.

    Further, it’s very clear throughout the article that the Taisho government was not established at the direction of the people, although they did move in that direction.

  565. Further, it’s very clear throughout the article that the Taisho government was not established at the direction of the people, although they did move in that direction.

    Very little in Japan is established at the direction of the people, in fact.

  566. That’s not democracy Adrian. I stand by my earlier position. Japan and Germany were industrialized, but had little to no experience of non-autocratic rule at the end of WWII.

  567. Well, fair enough, but what they did both have was a mighty strong national consciousness and the ability to march in step when told to do so, which was probably just as good (and not very likely in Iraq).

    I don’t have much time for Japanese democracy, AAMOF. There’s something not very sincere about it, like they’ve got the facade in place, but underneath it’s the same old same old. One party in power ever since the war apart from a couple of years…hmm.

    Needless to say, I blame the Americans. :-)

  568. Adrian: As you might expect, the steadily-increasing availability of cheap energy over the last couple of hundred years looks to me like a bigger one.

    The availability of cheap energy is a downstream from division of labor, not an upstream. As the division of labor that brought about the Industrial Revolution took hold, more effective and efficient ways of providing energy became necessary to keep up with the productivity being gain from new ways of organizing work.

    You have the cart in front of the horse.

  569. It may provide short-lived, modest amusement to bat Adrian-esque folks around like a cat toy, but at least they can ultimately be simply ignored at no cost to ourselves. Unfortunately, there are plenty of people in positions of power, that demonstrate similarly poor levels of intellectual horsepower and dearth of critical thinking skills…and these people are empowered and emboldened by the likes of the babbling Adrian-esque masses, and are positioned to bring about the death of large numbers of innocent people.

    This formidable piece by the inimitable Thomas Sowell really captures the gravity of part of our current situation…

  570. The discussion around energy, division of labor, dependency, globalization and the moral equivalence of slave and mechanical labor seems to illustrate your point fairly well Dan.

  571. You betcha…I feel kinda lazy just watching you guys doing all the heavy lifting…but you do it so well… ;-)

  572. Eric,

    “It is not from a disdain of spiritual goods that liberalism concerns itself exclusively with man’s material well-being, but from a conviction that what is highest and deepest in man cannot be touched by any outward regulation.”

    First, let me congratulate you: this was one of the most important participations of the philosophical thread of this discussion. And, I think it’s wrong.

    I think it’s wrong because I think that politics is not only the thermostat ( :-))) ) of the legal system. It also has a lot of effects on the media and the culture, it emits a lot of memes that have their effect on our lifestyles and ways of thinking even when it does not get codified.

    For example, if I’d look purely at the legal part, I’d completely agree with what the liberals say about gay rights. However, from a cultural and social viewpoint, the message they project throughout their fight for gay rights is something like “gay is cool”, and I think that’s sick.

    Also, I think from my previous posts it’s kind of clear that I don’t really think psychedelic/light drugs are devices of the Devil. However, I think they only benefit those who are hungry for spiritual answers and for the others, they just make them soft and confused. But, still, from a purely legal sense, I would completely agree with the legalization of ALL drugs because, if we don’t have complete sovereignity over our own bodies, we are slaves, because that’s exactly the fuckin’ definition of slavery… But, the problem is, during their fight for legalization, liberals emit the meme “drugs are cool”, and that’s clearly not the message I’d like to be emitted to the average Joe.

    There is another thing. I deeply admire that ability of the real liberals, that they can think something is wrong and being still in favour of making it allowed and legal, because they have the admirable ability to separate their subjective moral judgements from objective freedom rights. It’s really an attribute of the noble character. But I think most people, sadly, don’t have this character and whenever something becomes legal, they immediately conclude “then it must be right, because if it wasn’t right, it would still be forbidden”. And that’s a bad thing. Therefore I can’t always prefer going towards the liberal direction, not until people will develop an inner moral compass and will not look at the laws to decide what’s right or wrong.

    And there is yet another thing. Laws have more complicated pyschological effect than making people do or not to do things. Take speed limits for example. Here in Budapest, the speed limit for the typical 2*3 lane roads most people drive on is 70 km/h. Of course, every good and alert driver could safely drive there by 80-90 km/h. But this is exactly what happens. As alert drivers don’t get caught by the police, because they listen to the radio stations telling where the police is photographing and can also spot parking cars that are suspicious of being owned by the police. So, they only catch the non-alert drivers. But non-alert drivers are indeed better to comply with the rules, because they are not good enough to drive at 90 safely. So, the too strict law is in fact realistic and fair because it most of the time is not upheld.

    But back to the topic. Yes, spiritual development does not work by outer regulation. Tibet is perfect example – most hippies think it was a saintly place, a holy land, while in fact it was a hypocrite feudal system, where there wasn’t offical capital punishment as it would clearly be against the logic of Buddhism, but those of too big an annoyance were thrown in prisons where the keepers unofficially saw to it that the population count of scorpions does not decrease… feudalism is feudalism, a few hundred meditation masters can’t change it.

    But liberalism is not only a thermostat of the legal system, but also a culture. Talk with a liberal. Ask him about spiritual development. He will tell it’s your biz, pal. And it’s OK. But then he will shrug and keep talking about gay rights or whatever. They simply as a culture, divert the attention of the public from thinking about or discussing spiritual development. That’s the problem.

    Dean? What do you think? Do you agree? I’m not against liberal laws in personal liberties as much as I’m not against Palestinians having a really independent state. Both of the cases, I’m against their cultural memes.

  573. Adrian,

    I’ve said earlier that the Right has some serious communication issues, and take no offense, pals, but I think it also appears in this topic as well. So I’ll write something I hope complies with the views of many of us, and of course Dean or Dan or Eric or the others will correct me if this assumption is wrong.

    So. We are not simpletons. We do not think the West is inherently right and the Arabs are inherently wrong. We don’t think the Palestinians have no right to be independent and free. We don’t think that even the terrorist/guerrilla guy is inherently evil by nature – after all, Ariel Sharon was really that kind of a guy – just read Herman Wouk’s completely pro-Israeli novels of Hope I – II where he describes him as a pocket Napoleon – that’s not really surpise that quite a lot of folks thought they got to take up arms against him. We are not against Islam per se – 95% of Islam rules and customs are simply not of our business, we don’t care the least how often they bow towards Mecca or why don’t they eat bacon.

    We are not waging wars on the populations of Iraq or Lebanon, and we are not even waging war on poor Palestinian guys who either by religious brainwashing or their real and undeniable supression by Israel decided to take up arms.

    We are waging a war on memes. Memes, that, for example, say it’s OK to handle women as cattle. Memes, that, for example, say that the whole population of your enemy is a valid military target. Memes, that, for example, say, that Israel must not be recognized and therefore must be destroyed.

    Of course, when memes are too deeply rooted in someones’s head and his hand is clutching a gun aimed at us, then there is no other way to fight than to blow that head off. But we never really wanted to do that. We just – must. And we are ain’t happy a bit about it.

    One of the reasons our culture is superior is to theirs that we are not happy to wage a war. Of course, sometimes we sound like jingoists when we are angry, but generally, in our hearts, we are quite sad that we have to wage wars and both take and sacrifice lives. We would accept quite generous comprises should the enemy offer any. But demanding Israel to retreat behind the 1967 borders without recognizing and accepting it’s existence is NOT a compromise to be considered. They never ever even tried to offer anything, any little concession, any little allowance towards our side, our viewpoint – all they have is their demands, threats and attacks. Never, ever tried to reason with us. Remember this difference. We never, ever really wanted to wage these wars. We just feel we have no other choice. I’d be willing to offer six months of my salary to some Arab guy if it would bring lasting peace and understanding between our cultures. But it seems, the obstacles of mutual understanding, peace and cooperation is not us – it’s them.

  574. I’ve just reread what I’ve written “mutual understanding, peace and cooperation between our cultures” – it sounds quite lefty, doesn’t it? I think the last 100 years the centre of politics have slided a LOT leftwards. By the measures of the 1950’s, we, the centre-right, would be a nice, friendly, reasonable left. :-) Looking at the Lieberman-witchhunting, it is also true vice versa: the reasonable left is being bullied until they go right.

  575. Shenpen: But liberalism is not only a thermostat of the legal system, but also a culture.

    Oh man, we have a serious communication gap, sorry about that. I refuse to go along with the modern (since about 1920) usage of the words liberal and liberalism. Liberal is a word with it’s roots in the Latin word liber, meaning free. In other words, a liberal is one that supports freedom. Liberalism is the support of freedom. The mild to full on socialists who have become identified with the term have perpetuated a huge lie on the Western world, and we have allowed them to. John Kerry is a socialist and I am a liberal. I believe in individual freedom and capitalism. I oppose government control of the individual and the means of production.

    The quote from one of my posts that you pull out, Shenpen, is a quote about liberalism, not socialists masquerading as liberals.

    Does that help?

  576. No, it doesn’t really, because what you are talking about is by the modern, widely accepted jargon is called libertarianism, which derives from the Latin “libertas”, freedom. You can call libertarianism as liberalism if you like but don’t be surprised if you get misunderstood. I don’t think it’s a good idea to develop personal or too historical jargons…

    This aside, even in the purely linguisitic sense, I like the word “libertarian” better. It’s quite clear that it derives from “libertas”. No room for misunderstanding. As for liberal… people sometimes say “Hey, I’d like a liberal piece of steak well-done”, so maybe it’s due to my gappy understanding of English, but I never really got what it really means… maybe this word is not so well-defined.

  577. Or maybe your concerns are that libertarianism can be confused by libertinism? I think those people who know both terms don’t confuse it, as they know that liberalism has a lot more to do with libertinism, than libertarianism.

  578. No, really it doesn’t much to do with libertarian vs. libertine. That is just a way of attacking a political movement, much like categorizing all Conservatives as religious and all Socialists as atheists. Libertarianism is a confusing way around the usurpation of the word liberal. As far as what the word means, the modern proponent of liberalism is Von Mises and he advocates the use of liberal rather than allowing the socialists to usurp it. More importantly, the quote that you tackle is from Von Mises and not me. You need to have the context that he wrote that and used the word liberalism to mean “classical liberalism”, not socialism.

  579. And, of course, the problem is that if we continue to call this libertarianism and don’t challenge the socialists to regain the word liberalism we continue to allow them to force us to fight a battle that is good for them and bad for us.

  580. AFAICT, Libertinism is but a few brush strokes apart from Solipsism…most *definitely* far removed from both classic and contemporary liberalism.

    I share Eric’s disdain for the contemporary hijacking of the term “liberal”…it’s as revolting and cynical as their perversion of the terms “progressive”, “tolerance”, “diversity” etc.

  581. The availability of cheap energy is a downstream from division of labor, not an upstream. As the division of labor that brought about the Industrial Revolution took hold, more effective and efficient ways of providing energy became necessary to keep up with the productivity being gain from new ways of organizing work.

    You have the cart in front of the horse.

    They feed each other, I’d say. Cheap energy makes further division of labour possible, unless you have some ideological commitment to seeing energy as the dependent variable.

    I feel kinda lazy just watching you guys doing all the heavy lifting…but you do it so well…

    It’s ‘cos they don’t get emotional about it.

  582. Maybe, but I wouldn’t be so selfish about terms… just as “rock music” meant quite different things from 1960 to now and will surely mean different things in the future, if “liberal” means a different thing today than it used to mean, then let it be…

    I don’t really agree that liberal means socialist today, I think today it’s a fusion of, say, a watered-down liberal viewpoint on personal freedoms and a watered-down socialist viewpoint on economy… if the current jargon says it’s the liberalism of these years, then let it be… as long we have a very clearly defined term, “libertarian”, for the original liberal viewpoint, which is very clearly derived from “libertas” and therefore term itself does not allow any corruption for it’s meaning, so it is to stay for long, it’s fine with me. Things always change. Maybe this terminology change can even justified as the current liberal movement more or less grew out from the minorities civil rights movements of the fifties and sixties which were quite understandable from a libertarian viewpoint as well.

    I think it’s unreasonable to fight change, change is built into the fabric of the universe, and as long the important things – libertarianism – remain the same, I don’t complain.

    From a practical viewpoint – here I’d like to quote a Hungarian author, Gyorgy Moldova. What he said is “Don’t wrestle with a pig in th mud, because both of you get dirty but it will – enjoy it!” Don’t try to fight the mainstream media on it’s own ground. If they say they are liberal, fine. Accept it, as you can’t really do anything about it. Find a different label for yourself – such as libertarian – and advertise the difference. You don’t really have any other chance to get your message through. Recapturing terms like progressive, liberal, tolerance and so on is completely futile. It’s just like in music – whenever the major labels capture and advertise a new genre, you cannot do anything else but name find a different, new genre name for you music to at least have some chance to project it’s different.

    Maybe, in a few decades, we will understand that democracy itself is incomplete until we can only choose freely, but the input for our choices is provided by huge bureacratic mainstream media networks. Till that, the only way to fight them is to be flexible on terminology. Reinvent the same thing over and over, but on a different brand name.

  583. Adrian: They feed each other, I’d say. Cheap energy makes further division of labour possible, unless you have some ideological commitment to seeing energy as the dependent variable.

    I have no ideological commitment in the sense that I must see one before the other to fit a preconceived notion of how it will work. I am not trying to make the real world fit a philosophy. I work from the basis that philosophy has to fit the real world or be scrapped and a new philosophy found. That said, looking at the facts, we see that the idea of division of labor occurred before cheap fossil fuel energy sources. That, in fact, the need for less expensive energy was created by the increased productivity possible with a division of labor. The advent of coal fired steam engines then made further division of labor possible and began leading to a division of labor across regions and countries rather than just locales. That led, then, to another need for less expensive energy. The need for less expensive energy is a downstream from division of labor because that is how it happened in the real world, not because of my ideology. By not seeing it from the historical time line and cause and effect, but instead basing your position on your beliefs about energy, I would say that you are the one tackling this from a preconceived ideological position.

  584. Adrian,

    communication/bridge building attempt No. 2. First, as a disclaimer: whatever I write now, is not meant to offend you. You kindly gave me a lot of useful advices on relocating to the UK and therefore I think you are a man of good heart and noble personality, even though I don’t agree with 90% of your views. So please don’t take what I write now as an offense.

    Several people here wrote you that are a troll. And I’m also starting to think that. But I think this term means some explanation, as you, as far as I know, don’t have much background in the Unix/Usenet cultures. Here, a troll does not means a big ugly monster who punches people in their mouth, just like in Tolkienian or Scandinavian mythology. Rather, in these subcultures, it means a “teaser”. Somebody who teases people, who does not really offer a strong opinion on their own, but only criticizes other’s opinion in a sarcastic way to lure people into becoming angry, rude, who provokes outburst from other while he is alway SO calm and reasonable. Trolling in this sense actually means people who employ sharp but uncostructive critizism to lure people into behaving like Tolkien’s trolls. It does not imply you behave like Tolkien’s trolls, it means by sharpt witticism, you try to lure people into behaving like Tolkien’s trolls. Linguistically, on the usenet, “the one who provokes you to behave like a Tolkien’s troll” is called the troll himself. It’s just a strange linguistic development.

    In this sense, you are trolling. Your posts are smart and polite. But completely unconstructive. You never add any assertion, only a denial of others posts. It’s not really unreasonable to call it nihilisitic.While in the last 50 or 100 posts Dean, Eric and to a lot smaller extent, myself contributed to profound philosophical discussions, you chose not to participate. I don’t think you couldn’t, I just think you didn’t want to.participate anything constructive. Never created dream that compete with ours but still seek to saboutage ours.

    This is why people call you a troll.

  585. We are not waging wars on the populations of Iraq or Lebanon, and we are not even waging war on poor Palestinian guys who either by religious brainwashing or their real and undeniable supression by Israel decided to take up arms.

    I’m perfectly aware that most people here are just supporting wars, not waging them. Perhaps at some point Pete will enlist and the Bessman Baghdad Blog will give us a more direct line to what’s happening.

    We are waging a war on memes. Memes, that, for example, say it’s OK to handle women as cattle.

    Again, you’re overdramatising. Here we’re just arguing, though perhaps some people are taking action in other spheres, who can say. I myself have problems with the Koran’s strictures on women, but expecting them to just edit them out because the West disapproves is not very realistic.

    Memes, that, for example, say that the whole population of your enemy is a valid military target.

    Most Muslims don’t believe this. And certainly, it would be very convenient if terrorists either restricted themselves to (being shot to pieces by) genuine military targets or accepted conquered-people status and stopped bothering us.

    Memes, that, for example, say, that Israel must not be recognized and therefore must be destroyed.

    Well, I don’t see why they should accept a state that’s specifically set up for one ethnic group. Would you, if someone came and tried to do it in Hungary? Or is it just that you can’t imagine that happening? It’s openly racist, and I doubt imposing it on Arabs because of something that happened in Europe is ever going to be accepted unless you manage to get them to give up all their self-respect. Good luck with that, just don’t ask me to lend any encouragement.

    But demanding Israel to retreat behind the 1967 borders without recognizing and accepting it’s existence is NOT a compromise to be considered.

    When was this suggestion made?

  586. Shenpen, this is like the Socialists getting away with defining Fascism as being the opposite of them on the political spectrum. On the Right according to American and English politics. By doing so, they tar their Conservative opponents with the brush of Fascism. By allowing them to claim the Liberal philosophy as well, we have let them get away with the destruction of that philosophy in the political debate and limited ourselves to a philosophical spectrum that is much more conducive to their position, where our choice is between Socialism and Conservativism.

    To understand the importance of this, I highly recommend reading Hayek’s Why I Am Not a Conservative. I also strongly recommend reading Von Mises Liberalism to understand why we should not give in and should, instead, continue to wrestle the pig. A brief quote from Mises:

    Today the tenets of this nineteenth-century philosophy of liberalism are almost forgotten. In continental Europe it is remembered only by a few. In England the term “liberal” is mostly used to signify a program that only in details differs from the totalitarianism of the socialists.[1] In the United States “liberal” means today a set of ideas and political postulates that in every regard are the opposite of all that liberalism meant to the preceding generations. The American self-styled liberal aims at government omnipotence, is a resolute foe of free enterprise, and advocates all-round planning by the authorities, i.e., socialism. These “liberals” are anxious to emphasize that they disapprove of the Russian dictator’s policies not on account of their socialistic or communistic character but merely on account of their imperialistic tendencies. Every measure aiming at confiscating some of the assets of those who own more than the average or at restricting the rights of the owners of property is considered as liberal and progressive. Practically unlimited discretionary power is vested in government agencies the decisions of which are exempt from judicial review. The few upright citizens who dare to criticize this trend toward administrative despotism are branded as extremists, reactionaries, economic royalists, and Fascists. It is suggested that a free country ought not to tolerate political activities on the part of such “public enemies.”

    Surprisingly enough, these ideas are in this country viewed as specifically American, as the continuation of the principles and the philosophy of the Pilgrim Fathers, the signers of the Declaration of Independence, and the authors of the Constitution and the Federalist papers. Only few people realize that these allegedly progressive policies originated in Europe and that their most brilliant nineteenth-century exponent was Bismarck, whose policies no American would qualify as progressive and liberal. Bismarck’s Sozialpolitik was inaugurated in 1881, more than fifty years before its replica, F.D. Roosevelt’s New Deal. Following in the wake of the German Reich, the then most successful power, all European industrial nations more or less adopted the system that pretended to benefit the masses at the expense of a minority of “rugged individualists.” The generation that reached voting age after the end of the first World War took statism for granted and had only contempt for the “bourgeois prejudice,” liberty.

  587. Adrian: I myself have problems with the Koran’s strictures on women, but expecting them to just edit them out because the West disapproves is not very realistic.

    So, you have decided to abandon half a billion humans to their fate at the hands of a chauvinistic, mysoginistic religion?

  588. So please don’t take what I write now as an offense.

    Please don’t worry about offending me. Remember what I said about thick skin.

    Several people here wrote you that are a troll. And I’m also starting to think that. But I think this term means some explanation, as you, as far as I know, don’t have much background in the Unix/Usenet cultures.

    Been posting to Usenet for nearly ten years. Look on Google groups for my email address.

    Several people here wrote you that are a troll.

    They have thin skin. Thin skin is…a temptation to me, I have to admit. And it’s true that a real troll needs to be pretty thick-skinned. Dean and Eric concede my usefulness as a foil, I think, and they’re the ones I’m mainly confining my discussion to.

    I don’t think you couldn’t, I just think you didn’t want to.participate anything constructive.

    It’s just that I don’t know that much about it.

    Never created dream that compete with ours but still seek to saboutage ours.

    What’s your dream, then? Seems to be a world where Islam is thoroughly subjugated. If your dream’s a good one, then I shouldn’t be able to ‘sabotage’ it.

  589. So, you have decided to abandon half a billion humans to their fate at the hands of a chauvinistic, mysoginistic religion?

    No, I just don’t think the way the West is going about it is exactly inducing them to evolve/develop to a higher level. What are you suggesting? Undergo something corresponding to the Enlightenment, or die?

  590. Adrian: Well, I don’t see why they should accept a state that’s specifically set up for one ethnic group.

    You mean like the Czech Republic? Bosnia? Ireland? Germany?

    Or, perhaps you mean Israel, where something like 1/3 of the citizens are Arabs with full citizenship, representation in the Knesset, complete property rights, etc. Which, interestingly, Jews don’t get in Arab countries. They, in fact, get persecuted in Egypt, Iraq, Iran, Syria, etc. ad nauseum. Israel, a country you can emigrate to you regardless of your ethnic group, by the way. You don’t even have to be Jewish. Try that in Saudi Arabia.

    Glad you cleared that up for me Adrian.

    Or, are you suggesting that Czechs, Slovaks, Bosnians, the Irish, Germans, etc, etc should be able to have a home based on their ethnic group and language but Jews should continue to remain in countries that actively hate them and persecute them without anywhere to call home?

    Sorry, but this sort of discussion from a European leaves me feeling vaguely soiled.

  591. By not seeing it from the historical time line and cause and effect, but instead basing your position on your beliefs about energy, I would say that you are the one tackling this from a preconceived ideological position.

    Okay, you could be right about that. But the step to believing that further division of labour will automatically create new sources of cheap energy as if from nothing is…a really difficult one for me. Leap of faith, and stuff.

  592. Adrian: Dean and Eric concede my usefulness as a foil, I think, and they’re the ones I’m mainly confining my discussion to.

    While I may hope to learn something from Adrian, and hope that he will learn something from me, I really view him, as he says, as a foil. He lets me clarify and sharpen my arguments in ways that someone who agrees with me would not. Further, he allows me to oppose my position to something active. This is good for the folks reading this that aren’t commenting. There’s lots of them. They find value in the pattern of thoughts and ideas presented.

    That said, Adrian, at times, you do come across in a troll like fashion. Of course, the folks that rise to the occassion are behaving in a troll like fashion quite often, also (see some of the comments much earlier in this discussion).

    And, to be honest, some of your thoughts I find fairly reprehensible. Your positions on Israel come across to me as being imbued with the mild anti-semitism that one finds throughout Europe. This isn’t particularly abnormal for Europe, but still something that I have problems with. And, once in a while, at the risk of behaving in a troll like fashion myself, I feeled compelled to haul it out in the open.

  593. Adrian: But the step to believing that further division of labour will automatically create new sources of cheap energy as if from nothing is…a really difficult one for me. Leap of faith, and stuff.

    Why? We have 200+ years of historical precedent. I’m curious, if we have seen such a cycle at work for that long, why we would decide that it’s just luck, coincidence, not likely to continue in the future?

  594. You mean like the Czech Republic? Bosnia? Ireland? Germany?

    Those are states that grew organically where they were, and any ethnic cleansings involved in their creation are pretty much forgotten by anyone other than historians.

    Or, perhaps you mean Israel, where something like 1/3 of the citizens are Arabs with full citizenship, representation in the Knesset, complete property rights, etc.

    There’s a widespread feeling that you don’t really get the full benefits of citizenship unless you’ve served in the military, and as this tends to mean having to shoot Arabs some Israeli Arabs have mixed feelings about it. Backward of them, I realise.

    Israel, a country you can emigrate to you regardless of your ethnic group, by the way. You don’t even have to be Jewish.

    You get citizenship automatically if you are, though.

    Try that in Saudi Arabia.

    Who would even want to? But Saudi might be a more enlightened place if they hadn’t signed a cosy deal with FDR way back when.

    Or, are you suggesting that Czechs, Slovaks, Bosnians, the Irish, Germans, etc, etc should be able to have a home based on their ethnic group and language but Jews should continue to remain in countries that actively hate them and persecute them without anywhere to call home?

    Just that if the home they’ve acquired happened to originally belong to someone else I don’t see any reason to expect the displacee to be happy about it.

  595. Aside from that, read Malthus and compare him to the real world experience. Peak Oil is incredibly Malthusian, at its root. We have created wealth from nothing and energy sources from new technologies that were impossible even a few years before they were created. Why is it so hard to believe that human ingenuity, science, engineering can continue to do this?

  596. Adrian: Those are states that grew organically where they were, and any ethnic cleansings involved in their creation are pretty much forgotten by anyone other than historians.

    yep, only historians remember the 1990’s.

    Adrian: You get citizenship automatically if you are, though.

    In Germany too. If you are of German ethnic origin and come from a region that was “historically German”, you are automatically a German citizen. In fact, I can only think of a few countries that grant citizenship based on soemthing other than ethnicity.

    Adrian: Who would even want to? But Saudi might be a more enlightened place if they hadn’t signed a cosy deal with FDR way back when.

    The point is not whether you want to emigrate to Saudi, but that you cannot. Don’t get me started on FDR. You aren’t hurting my feelings at all when you say something negative about him.

  597. yep, only historians remember the 1990’s.

    Mmm…okay, I missed Bosnia. And in fact there are probably still Sudetenland Germans around, for that matter. However, none of these examples has the feeling of a first world group colonising and displacing a third world one that Israel evokes.

    In Germany too. If you are of German ethnic origin and come from a region that was “historically German”, you are automatically a German citizen.

    Do you still get a German pension, too? Boy, I knew some Germans who weren’t very happy about that.

    Don’t get me started on FDR. You aren’t hurting my feelings at all when you say something negative about him.

    Not the point, his agreement has been carried forward by every administration since then, albeit apparently with some doubts since 9/11 (“*Nineteen*, you say?”). America’s been heavily involved in keeping Saudi society ‘stable’, and I think Americans who want to complain about how unenlightened they are should recognise that.

  598. Eric and Shenpen,

    I am reluctantly forced to agree with Shenpen on the Liberal VS Libertarian thing. The best thing that we can do, Eric, is label the kind of politics we support as ‘Classical Liberal.’

    Progressive Liberalism, what you might refer to as soft socialism, is the politics of choice for 90 percent of the educated elites in the West. One might wish it were not so, but it is.

    In my opinion, which I have stated here ad nauseum, the reason for this is that socialism promises to let the educated run things. This is attractive to most of us, because when you have no other talent besides writing and speaking well, you naturally want to express yourself by ordering others about. You don’t necessarily want to be held accountable for outcomes, but you do want to be the boss.

    In the ideal system for the intellectual, according to Eric Hoffer, you would have a military guy at the top, to absorb (and suppress) all criticism, and a bureaucracy managing the day to day affairs of the state. The bureaucrats would exercise the power of the sovereign, with none of that troublesome responsibility. They would have a special status above the common herd of ordinary people. And they would have a guaranteed path of promotion by which to measure their progress in life.

    Also according to Hoffer (and Jared Diamond, oddly enough), the dawn of writing for all civilizations is found in a political environment such as I have described. Such writing tends to be difficult to learn (pictograms), vague, and time consuming. It is only meant for an educated few, with a guaranteed income as a courtesan class. That educated elite begins as a set of accountants for tax collection purposes, and then develops writing to chronicle religious ceremonies, royal biographies, terms of treaties, royal succession and most important of all, civil service promotions.

    This is the world the Lefties want. It is what they are fighting for and they will use any weapon they have to, in order to achieve it. Further, this has been the central political conflict in the West since the beginning. It did not begin with Karl Marx.

    One can make an excellent argument that the true dawn of the West did not come when the Greeks invented philosophy, but when the Phoenicians invented an alphabet that ordinary people could learn and make use of.

    Anyway, Liberal is a term with a proud history. Classical Liberalism is by far the most beautiful political creed humans have ever devised, and it has wrought miracles. It is entirely unfair that we, who remain loyal to the creed to which Liberal has always referred, should have to surrender the word to a bunch of Pinkos who felt they had the right to steal it on the grounds that “all property is theft.” ;-)

    But we Classical Liberals are fighting, as I said, 90 percent of the literate elites in the West. And you gotta pick your battles.

    Having to refer to ourselves as Libertarian or Conservative immediately puts us at a disadvantage. The Lefties get all the cache of a word they haven’t earned, and we have to fight an uphill verbal battle from the get-go. And when we refer to ourselves as Classical Liberals, they get to say that they are PROGRESSIVE Liberals, a label we have to accept, even though the type of society they want to make Progress toward isn’t Liberal at all, and the word usage makes us look like reactionary dinosaurs.

    And, to top it all off, since 1989, the God-damned Progressives haven’t had anything at all to make Progress toward (socialism being a nonstarter intellectually post Berlin Wall) and they STILL get to use the automatic one-upmanship of the word Progressive.

    It is unfair. And ridiculous. But I think we have to face the reality that we are NEVER going to get the word back, while having it remains of any value. We will get it back eventually, when the Lefties have managed to drain it of all positive connotation. By then we will not want it. But while the word still offers some advantage to those who wear it, 90 percent of eloquent windbags in the West will fight to keep it from us. And it doesn’t make sense to fight those odds. There are other things to be fighting for.

    Let them have the God-damned word. With all of the advantages it conveys. Fight the uphill battle they force us to wage. And win. Win the culture. Win the argument. Let them have the word.

    It’s the only way.

  599. “…It’s ‘cos they don’t get emotional about it…”
    Ah. There, I sheepishly concede, you have me. I am indeed an emotional guy. 99.99% of the time I am as cool and measured as any could wish to be, but there’s just *something* about a sadistic death-cult (Islam) that *really* fucks me off.

    Otherwise, apart from your hackneyed lefty drivel, I suspect we could quite graciously share some sake and good conversation ;-)

  600. That said, Adrian, at times, you do come across in a troll like fashion. Of course, the folks that rise to the occassion are behaving in a troll like fashion quite often, also (see some of the comments much earlier in this discussion).

    Like I said to Shenpen, if people are going to wander about being thin-skinned I have a real problem not occasionally reaching out to “touch” them. They might thicken up, after all.

    And, to be honest, some of your thoughts I find fairly reprehensible. Your positions on Israel come across to me as being imbued with the mild anti-semitism that one finds throughout Europe.

    It’s anti-*Zionism*. I know most Jews tend to be pro-Zionist and that it can be painted as anti-Semitism, but there’s a distinction between opposing Jews for their Jewish nature and opposing Israel’s behaviour which is worth making. Sure, you have to police the borders and make sure the real anti-Semites don’t jump on the bandwagon unopposed.

    I’ve known conflicted Jews, too. One guy back in England once told me that he’d fight to defend it in an instant, but that he took seriously the idea that Israel was supposed to be a “light unto the nations”, and he really thought it was going the wrong way.

  601. By the way, if anybody’s interested, the reason we can’t let the Lefties have the world they want is because it requires slavery or serfdom to keep it going. This is because the intellectuals, again according to Hoffer, cannot motivate the ordinary person to work at non-glamorous tasks, without the use of violence.

    In the Soviet Union, the joke among the factory proles was: “The government pretends to pay us, and we pretend to work.”

    The Communists never had any problem getting young men to fight and die for their cause. And they managed to put Sputnik into orbit ahead of everyone else. But producing enough bread and shoes was always a problem for them. Soviet airplanes were held together with bolts, as opposed to the more conventional rivets, because rivets require maintenance, and a bolt with a lock washer will stay in place permanently. They used the bolts because they knew from experience that the maintenance wasn’t going to happen.

    Intellectuals motivate others through beautiful words. Capitalists motivate people by offering them money. People will do glamorous work for beautiful words. If you want them to clean toilets, and you want the toilets to actually be CLEAN, you need to pay cash. Pretty words aren’t going to cut it.

    Therefore, if the pointy heads run things in your society, you will need an oppressed class of ditch diggers and toilet cleaners who are compelled to labor by force, because if force is not used, the labor will not get done.

    The brilliance of the Communists is they made serfs out of EVERYONE who wasn’t a member of the Inner Party. Party members had that guaranteed path of promotion (assuming they weren’t purged), and a clearly marked status above the ordinary citizen. And it was sweet. Soviet pilots would occasionally defect in their Migs to the US or a western European country. But never one of the party elite.

    Today there are American Lefties who wax lyrical about how wonderful it is in Castro’s Cuba. And why, exactly, are all those boat people risking their lives to sail across to Florida? Because they are all Bush-loving, Repugnican, Nazi bastards, that’s why.

    The Egypt of the Pharaohs is the world the Lefties want. They admire a foreign society to the degree that it approximates that ideal. That’s why the Left wanted to preserve Saddam in perpetuity. The Lefties can’t stop talking about the evil of the US and Israel, but Syria was awarded a place on the UN Human Rights Commission.

    Within Western countries, how willing you are to stand up to tyranny is a function of how far you are culturally from the Left. The Lefties only want to stand up to Bush, because they know he won’t hurt them. They say ‘Bush is Hitler’ only because they are CERTAIN that he is not.

    But know this: The world the Lefties want cannot sustain itself without a helot class to do the drudge work. And unless you are willing to sell your soul to their ridiculous lies, that helot class will probably include you.

  602. The reason I say that the West may have begun with the Phoenicians is that they freed literacy from the exclusive provenance of a political elite. Learning traditional Chinese writing, from what I understand, takes decades. It is an elite profession.

    The Phoenician alphabet did not guarantee that the ordinary schmuck would be able to free himself from the oppression of a literate elite, but it did create the POSSIBILITY. Without a simple alphabet, that possibility exists in no other civilization.

    The ultimate reason that the West achieved such dominance over other cultures, is that it made better use of the latent human capital, the human brainpower, at its disposal. The Mandarin peasant might have had the potential to be a Newton, a Locke, a Milton or an Edison. But what difference did it make if there was no way for him to learn to read? And widespread literacy is impossible if literacy takes decades to attain because writing is so damn hard.

    Other than the West, no civilization ever produced a free society, wherein the ordinary person got a fair shake in life. And if I am right, no civilization wherein writing is the provenance of an elite few, ever will.

  603. This is because the intellectuals, again according to Hoffer, cannot motivate the ordinary person to work at non-glamorous tasks, without the use of violence.

    Neither can right-wingers, AFAICT. The answer is…lots and lots of Mexicans, apparently. Whereas here in Japan, the invention of butt-wiping companion robots for the elderly is expected any day now.

  604. >Neither can right-wingers, AFAICT. The answer is…lots and lots of Mexicans, apparently.

    First, Adrian, no one forces the Mexican migrants to work in the US. They are risking their lives to get in, mostly because of a lack of economic opportunity in Mexico. They are not being carried back as slaves by the conquering Yanks.

    Second, ideological Conservatives are against allowing the Mexicans to come here. They want to build a wall to keep the ‘wetbacks’ out (for which they are denounced as racists).

  605. And again, are we comparing (butt-wiping) robots to slaves?

    I defended you last time, but if you remain this obtuse, consider my defense retracted. Eric is right about you. On this issue, you are a moral dunderhead.

  606. First, Adrian, no one forces the Mexican migrants to work in the US.

    For sure, but the “ordinary people” still aren’t doing those unglamorous jobs you mentioned, are they? Not ordinary American citizens, anyway.

    They want to build a wall to keep the ‘wetbacks’ out (for which they are denounced as racists).

    “Give me your poor, your huddled masses…ok that’s enough.” America’s historically done well by accepting immigrants, but the current quantities do look a little hard to digest.

    And again, are we comparing (butt-wiping) robots to slaves?

    Er, no. I’m just making a tongue-in-cheek observation of the contrasting Japanese attitude to a similar problem. But if a helot class is necessary, why not use robots?

    I defended you last time, but if you remain this obtuse, consider my defense retracted.

    Oh, never mind.

  607. >But if a helot class is necessary, why not use robots?

    I don’t even know why I bother to say this but:

    Robots aren’t helots. Helots are human beings, held in bondage, who would prefer, just as you or I would, to be free.

    Robots are mechanical objects with no consciousness, and no desire for liberty.

    They are not the same thing, and in discussions of MORALITY, they should not be compared as if they were similar.

    On the other hand, perhaps I’m just wasting pixels trying to explain this to you. As you said, “Never mind.”

  608. Adrian: America’s been heavily involved in keeping Saudi society ’stable’, and I think Americans who want to complain about how unenlightened they are should recognise that.

    Yeah, I’ve mentioned that a time too when I was still blogging. I could barely agree with the policy during the Cold War. After the end of that, I went from very grudging agreement to opposition.

  609. And Eric Cowperthwaite, I believe I owe you an apology. I said earlier that you were misinterpreting Adrian.

    You were right and I was wrong. Mia culpa.

  610. Adrian, Dean listed three ways that work gets done. Being paid to do it, being coerced to do it, or being motivated to do it. Since the jobs that are being performed by illegals are not paid that well, not performed by coercion and not sufficiently motivating, it’s understandable that the jobs are only done by illegals. I happen to be of the opinion that immigration should be unrestricted. The restrictive immigration policies, combined with minimum wages and such, have created a labor black market. I make no bones about my opinion on this subject. It’s one of the areas that Conservatives and I depart company. The other one, usually, is modern prohibition laws and the War on Drugs.

    All that said, as usual, you twist something in a direction that really is inaccurate.

  611. Adrian: It’s anti-*Zionism*.

    If you were as openly critical, had as many words to write about the behavior of Israel’s neighbors, I’d agree that it was anti-Zionism. But, you don’t.

  612. You were right and I was wrong. Mia culpa.

    Er – Dan, when I said “they don’t get emotional about it”, may have been only half right.

    They are not the same thing, and in discussions of MORALITY, they should not be compared as if they were similar.

    Well, I haven’t really been paying close attention to your moral discussions, so I’ll try and refrain from insouciant interjections without due involvement.

  613. If you were as openly critical, had as many words to write about the behavior of Israel’s neighbors, I’d agree that it was anti-Zionism. But, you don’t.

    Israel is so much more powerful than its neighbours, and has so many more degrees of freedom, that I see them as hardly comparable. Yeah, Syria has pretty bad human rights, but how many options have they got for resolving their situation? Surrender? Say, OK, keep the Golan, here’s a peace treaty? Doesn’t sound very appetising. I think Israel’s neighbours are responding the same way Americans would to a hostile higher-tech colony in their midst – only they can’t imagine the situation, so it can be dismissed.

  614. Adrian: Israel is so much more powerful than its neighbours, and has so many more degrees of freedom, that I see them as hardly comparable. Yeah, Syria has pretty bad human rights, but how many options have they got for resolving their situation? Surrender?

    So, you are suggesting that it’s okay to kill your own citizens, discriminate against someone due to ethnicity, religion, etc. because you are weaker than your neighbor?

    Interesting ethical choices.

  615. >Israel’s neighbours are responding the same way Americans would to a hostile higher-tech colony in their midst – only they can’t imagine the situation, so it can be dismissed.

    I can imagine the possibility. A bunch of Vulcans fly to Earth in a space ship, claim a piece of Texas as their own sovereign territory, and refuse to leave, or accept US sovereignty.

    Would I support a military attack on the Vulcans to get our land back? Yes I would. And if the attack failed, on four separate occasions, over the course of 25 years? Then let the Vulcans have the God-damned land.

    Would I support suicide bombing attacks in Vulcan shopping centers and restaurants. Would I support lobbing missiles into Vulcan cities to indiscriminately kill their civilians?

    Never. If we lose the land, we lose the land. But if the Vulcans, having claimed the territory, make no further claims, do not attack Americans (except in response to our attacks), and are willing to make peace, then we make peace.

    We do not become murderers of children. Not for all the land in the world.

  616. Adrian, Dean listed three ways that work gets done. Being paid to do it, being coerced to do it, or being motivated to do it. Since the jobs that are being performed by illegals are not paid that well, not performed by coercion and not sufficiently motivating, it’s understandable that the jobs are only done by illegals.

    Dean seems to be talking about life in some putative future America where a Democrat has been unwisely elected and has installed a Soviet-style system of domination by intellectuals (and somehow the beardies have failed to take advantage of it yet). But I don’t recognise what he’s saying about oppressed classes of helot ditch-diggers, I don’t recall reading about those in the USSR. Sure, there was forced labour in the gulags (and I believe there might even be some in the US prison system now), but they weren’t spread out all over Russia doing the scutwork nobody else wanted to do.

    It reminds me of the sentiments of “California Uber Alles”. Though I think that may have been satire.

    I happen to be of the opinion that immigration should be unrestricted.

    Brave standpoint. Though it does sound like a lot of them would like to go back and forth if they had the option.

    All that said, as usual, you twist something in a direction that really is inaccurate.

    It was meant as a joke.

    Perhaps we don’t know each other well enough, though.

  617. So, you are suggesting that it’s okay to kill your own citizens,

    Not okay. But life is cheaper for them than it is in Western countries. I’d like to see them get rich and educated and *free* enough that they lose the desire to do that like people did in the West.

    But perhaps, being Muslims, they never will, eh?

    discriminate against someone due to ethnicity, religion, etc.

    Well, I reckon Israel’s doing that. It *is* called the “Jewish State”, you know, even if goyim like me can apply for citizenship.

    because you are weaker than your neighbor?

    I just don’t see why they should give a fuck whether I (or you) condemn them or not. OTOH, the Israelis might. *Because* they’re more powerful.

  618. Ummmm, Adrian, not working in the USSR was not exactly an option. Nor was it optional to have whatever job pleased you. In other words, you did the job because of coercion. Dean isn’t talking about some hypothetical future America. He’s talking about an observed reality that socialist systems depend upon coercion in order for labor to be done because the other options to get labor done (glory, money) aren’t available.

  619. Adrian: Not okay. But life is cheaper for them than it is in Western countries. I’d like to see them get rich and educated and *free* enough that they lose the desire to do that like people did in the West.

    Once again, you excuse behavior.

    Adrian: But perhaps, being Muslims, they never will, eh?

    Wrong person. While I happen to believe that Islam is a significant contributing factor to the culture of hate and discrimination in Middle East I do not happen to believe that it makes them inferior or that change is impossible.

    Adrian: Well, I reckon Israel’s doing that. It *is* called the “Jewish State”, you know, even if goyim like me can apply for citizenship.

    I’m a lot less inclined to condemn a people that have been actively discriminated against for millenia and suffered genocide for that than you, apparently. Especially since you don’t have to be Jewish, either ethnically or religiously, to be equal before the law, or much closer to it than any other nation in the region. In other words, Israel is doing pretty good. Perfect? No. Room for improvement? Yes. Considering the number of times their neighbors have attacked them, the level of terrorism lived with on a daily basis, the declared intent to commit further genocide on the part of their neighbors, are they doing really good? Yes.

    Adrian: I just don’t see why they should give a fuck whether I (or you) condemn them or not. OTOH, the Israelis might. *Because* they’re more powerful.

    Who cares if they give a fuck? The question is, do you condemn them? What are your ethics? Why aren’t you condemning, actively, the much more evil behavior of the other nations in the Middle East? Why only Israel, which is much better ethically/morally than Syria, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Lebanon, Jordan, Iran, etc?

    Everything you are saying seems to imply that you only hold nations that are already reasonably good to a high standard of ethics. If they are ethically reprehensible you just shrug and make excuses for them. What about when Israel was brand new and exceptionally weak? When their Arab neighbors, in 1948, invaded with the publicly declared intention of committing further genocide? Was it bad then but acceptable now that they are weak?

  620. Adrian: Though it does sound like a lot of them would like to go back and forth if they had the option.

    Well, it would be pretty inconsistent to say you can come here, but you can never leave. That reminds me of another song. On a side note, I saw the DK’s back in the day. So, seriously, I stand foursquare for open borders, in all directions.

  621. Ummmm, Adrian, not working in the USSR was not exactly an option.

    There was certainly full employment. But not everyone was breaking their back AFAICT. The selection of consumer goods would have made a Westerner weep, but they’d never known better.

    In other words, you did the job because of coercion.

    They slacked off a lot. That line Dean mentioned – “the government pretended to pay us, and we pretended to work”.

  622. Once again, you excuse behavior.

    Well, I don’t see the point in developed Western countries, with all the advantages that they’ve had over developing ones, saying “Right! You guys! We’ve decided that from now on we’re going to judge you by OUR STANDARDS.”

    If I was a citizen of a developing country, I think I’d just laugh.

    I’m a lot less inclined to condemn a people that have been actively discriminated against for millenia and suffered genocide for that than you, apparently.

    Oh, I’d be less inclined too, if they hadn’t grabbed a piece of someone else’s property and squatted on it for half a century plus, bristling with nukes and testosterone, complaining about how everyone kept attacking them. But at some point my sympathy just dissipated.

    Considering the number of times their neighbors have attacked them, the level of terrorism lived with on a daily basis, the declared intent to commit further genocide on the part of their neighbors

    That’s just how colonised people feel about colonisers IMO. Sounds like the Amerinds felt that way until their spirit was broken. The Arabs aren’t quite there yet.

    Who cares if they give a fuck? The question is, do you condemn them? What are your ethics?

    In any given confrontation between David and Goliath, not to take Goliath’s side without examining the situation very carefully.

    Why aren’t you condemning, actively, the much more evil behavior of the other nations in the Middle East?

    Because I believe they have fewer choices, less intrinsic flexibility.

    Why only Israel, which is much better ethically/morally than Syria, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Lebanon, Jordan, Iran, etc?

    Because I consider them to be a *colony*. Anyway, Turkey has excellent relations with Israel by all accounts, though they’re a bit concerned about them stirring the Kurds up. And if I was going to lay Lebanon’s near-failed-state status at anyone’s door, it wouldn’t be France, you know?

    What about when Israel was brand new and exceptionally weak?

    They weren’t that weak. Loads of them had seen action against the Nazis. One Israeli general, when asked the secret of Israel’s military success, is supposed to have said “Always fight Arab armies”.

    That was before Hezbollah, of course.

  623. From Arthur C. Brooks in the Wall Street Journal:

    “Simply put, liberals have a big baby problem: They’re not having enough of them, they haven’t for a long time, and their pool of potential new voters is suffering as a result. According to the 2004 General Social Survey, if you picked 100 unrelated politically liberal adults at random, you would find that they had, between them, 147 children. If you picked 100 conservatives, you would find 208 kids. That’s a “fertility gap” of 41%. Given that about 80% of people with an identifiable party preference grow up to vote the same way as their parents, this gap translates into lots more little Republicans than little Democrats to vote in future elections. Over the past 30 years this gap has not been below 20%–explaining, to a large extent, the current ineffectiveness of liberal youth voter campaigns today.”

    “Alarmingly for the Democrats, the gap is widening at a bit more than half a percentage point per year, meaning that today’s problem is nothing compared to what the future will most likely hold. Consider future presidential elections in a swing state (like Ohio), and assume that the current patterns in fertility continue. A state that was split 50-50 between left and right in 2004 will tilt right by 2012, 54% to 46%. By 2020, it will be certifiably right-wing, 59% to 41%. A state that is currently 55-45 in favor of liberals (like California) will be 54-46 in favor of conservatives by 2020–and all for no other reason than babies.”

  624. There’s a saying in the military:
    Amateurs talk strategy; professionals talk logistics.

    Discussing ideology is fine, but I thought it might be worthwhile to talk about demography. :-)

  625. Adrian, you’re still saying it’s okay to be immoral if you’re weak. I can come up with a million analogies for you, but you refuse to make a judgement and call someone on their immoral behavior, so what’s the point? This is the logical end result of moral relativism. I’m sure you can’t see either the consequential or principled basis for why this is such a problem, so let’s just drop it.

    One more thing to add, though. Nice revision of 1948.

  626. “…if they hadn’t grabbed a piece of someone else’s property and squatted on it for half a century plus…”
    “…Because I consider them to be a *colony*…”

    Comments such as these, Adrian, confirm your ignorance of the history of the region. Other than the ‘international accord’ that created the boundaries in the first place (conspicuously/conveniently ignored by the usual proponents of “respecting world opinion”), Israel is as ‘legitimate’ as any of the other surrounding states.

    Jews and muslims have always bubbled around in that region for hundreds/thousands of years. It is of mutual historic significance. Israel is no more a ‘colony’ than Lebanon or Palestine.

    The simple truth is that the muslims hate the Jews because of their success. Look at the map. This piss-ant tiny speck of dirt (Israel) surrounded by vast arab lands stands out like burning magnesium…a miniscule oasis of reason, technology and prosperity, dwarfed by a barren wasteland of festering fascistic misery.

    “…bristling with nukes and testosterone…”
    Hardly…but hyperbole aside…they acquire state-of-the-art arms for their oh-so-imminent needs by virtue of their success and wealth, and do so openly through legitimate channels, rather than illegally smuggling them via a linked-list of thugocracy proxies.

  627. Dan Kane,
    >The simple truth is that the muslims hate the Jews because of their success.

    The worldly success is a symptom. It is not the heart of the problem. The Jews’ success is further evidence that perhaps God really does love them best, that perhaps they really are the Chosen People.

    THAT is what makes the presence of the Jews so intolerable. For a people who define themselves in relation to God, and want to believe themselves to be His favorite children, the Arab and Persian Muslims find it inconceivable, and yet undeniable, that the Jews seem to enjoy the greater measure of God’s blessings.

    This. Cannot. Be.

    And so the Jews must be subjugated or die. And preferably die. It’s the only way to be sure that they will NEVER be blessed anymore.

    As Cypher said to Trinity: “How can he be the One, if he’s dead?!?”

  628. I see your point Dean…but I have to admit to considering folks far more cynically than you. I do not believe that ‘the powers that be’ believe all their religious shit…it’s just a their vehicle of choice for slave control.

    The success of the Jews threatens their fabricated reality, so they sell the dumb masses on the idea that the Jews are fucking them in a multitude of ways. Classic scapegoating…with a religious subtext.

    The sad commentary on our species as a whole is…it works…consistently

    The one glimmer of hope may be found in younger generations, exposed to thoughts, values & realities outside their intellectual tombs, that come to realize that the rest of the world ain’t so bad…Iranian youth look promising…

  629. Adrian,

    ” quoted from me ‘Memes, that, for example, say that the whole population of your enemy is a valid military target.’

    Most Muslims don’t believe this.”

    Oh my. Memes are like viri, ain’t they? Surely doesn’t everybody need to have a viral ailment to warrant the search for a vaccine. Sorry, but this is just a too vulgar-left argument. It’s like when somebody uses the term “black/gypsy/whatever crime” and then they cry “but not all blacks/gypsies/whatever are criminals!” . This argument is based on the belief we are fascist pigs and we like to hate groups of people and we are just looking for arguments to justify it. While in actually – as I said, the centre-right of today is kind of a reasonable left of the fifties standard – we don’t really want to hate anybody, we just don’t like to ignore reality. And therefore when we speak of “ethnic crime” we think clearly defining the attributes of a given problem might help in solving it, like, in this example of mine, employing more ethnic policemen. Similarly, why on earth would I need to believe that all muslims are would-be terrorists at worst and happy women-beaters at best? I don’t fucking care how many of them are. It’s not these people who are our enemies. It’s the virus, the meme. You say this virus is not so widely spread? Fine, in that case it’s easier to subdue it by a proper vaccine. Would you want us the ignore the virus just because it’s not yet widely spread? Yes, of course I do believe that when the virus in the head is connected with a gun in the hand aimed at us then the only solution is to blow that head of. But don’t be so short-sighted that it’s all we can think of. It’s just the solution for the extreme case, for a small percentage of the cases. The general vaccine, of course, needs to be a lot more tactile. Do you really think I’m looking for excuses to hate them? Based on what I wrote on spiritual issues before, it has to be clear that I feel sorry for them, because they are building a really bad karma for themselves. Check out the local Zen temple just besides the “Sebun Erebun” supermarket for more detailed explanation on karma :-)))

    “Well, I don’t see why they should accept a state that’s specifically set up for one ethnic group. Would you, if someone came and tried to do it in Hungary?”

    Sorry, but it’s yet another vulgar-left answer: comparing apples to oranges. And I don’t even understand it – are you talking about pre-1967 Israel? Land is a resource in abundance there and it’s worth is not much, as most if it is desert except for the mountain villages of the arabs and the desert turned to gardens by the work of the Jews. Most of the pre-1967 lands were bought by cash from arabs. And, conceding some worthless desertland in return for education and a working economy doesn’t really look like bad biz. But if you really want to force an unreasonable paralellism, then be it: the place today called Slovakia was an integral part of Hungary for a thousand years, and the Slovakians were invitied as hospes after many of the land was left uncropped after the decimation of the populace by the massacres of Tartar occupation. And then they became independent and we learned to put up with it although not easily and not at once, that’s for sure. Have you ever asked those hairy aboriginal folks whose name I forgot who live on some of the islands what do they think of the Japanese taking their place? I think you didn’t and you better not, as the “who was there before” question is entirely silly, childish and completely unhistorical. If both people are there, somewhere, anywhere, then both have a fair right to stay. Either by a Swiss model which is unlikely in that situation, or by sharing the land. Israel retreating behind pre-1967 borders would be a fair share of land – but do you really think they should do it without recognition and acceptance of their existence as a nation there?

    “What’s your dream, then?”

    Well, it’s not something easy to formulate (are any dreams easy to?). A careful balance of the material, scientific, liberal/libertarian care for the needs of the body and the needs of people’s minds to be free and healthy on one hand, and serving spiritual needs of the mind not by politics, but having politics not diverting attention from it on the other hand. You know all good things tend to come from balance, or, in the terminology of game theory, “mixed strategies”. About Islam? I also feel some vulgar-leftism in the question. Do you think my dreams are so limited that all I can think of it is Islam, which leads back to the original vulgar-left assumption: do you really think I want to hate them and just looking for excuses? You know, I’m a cocky stuck-up fucker enough that if I will want to hate anybody, I’ll just do it, without any need for made-up moral excuses for it. I think I’m not a good man but I’m downright enough that whenever I would decide to become evil, I won’t want to make it look right. So whenever I’ll want to hate anybody, I’ll tell it, fer sure. Until, don’t assume it, please. But OK, let’s play along: my dream is pulling the political poison fangs of Islam and separating state and religion at best. Making them understand to leave us alone and accept the existence of Israel behind pre-1967 borders at worst.

  630. Adrian,

    please let me have an innocent quiestion: why don’t you argue with the Lazarus Long quotes at the top of this page? Just because they are about as superficial as most of your comments [1], but from the opposite point of view – it would be a nice, balanced match :-)

    [1] I think you could do an order of magnitude better than this but I think you simply don’t want to spend more than five minutes of thinking with each comment…

  631. Dean,

    just an afterthought of th Yetzer Hera topic. As far as I know, it’s proven that current humanity developed in Africa about 100 000 years ago, and then it spread from there, “replacing” other ancient human groups. Of course, “to replace” in this case I think must mean “to kill”, as I don’t really think there could be much diplomacy. It’s likely that without any knowledge of organized war or organized state, simply the most violent groups won. So, can that be the source of many of problems that we all developed from the most violent group of ancient humanity? Also, there is another interesting thing. Given the obvious racial differences in looks, which are clearly biological reactions to living under different latitudes, I think humanity had spread to quite different latitudes really long ago. And you know, I kind of thing it’s not really self-evident that Fred Flintstone would really like to wander around half of the globe, given that in that sparse population, there could have been enough hunting ground for all in Africa or at most, by the Mediterrean. Therefore, I think maybe that group of humans we all developed from would have hade kind of a lust for adventure. That can also explain a lot of things – like why we get bored without challenges…

  632. Adrian, you’re still saying it’s okay to be immoral if you’re weak. I can come up with a million analogies for you, but you refuse to make a judgement and call someone on their immoral behavior, so what’s the point? This is the logical end result of moral relativism.

    Well, let me try one. In Vietnam, the US was still happily carpet-bombing the civilian population, presumably immorally and ineffectively in your view. By Gulf Storm, they weren’t. Why not? Apart from the fact that they might have realised about the ineffectiveness, and it would have looked pretty bad as well, I’d say it was because they didn’t *need* to any more, thanks to total air supremacy, guided munitions and stuff .

    What you’re saying implies that because America stopped doing something back in the seventies, that now becomes the moral touchstone for all its opponents (and those of its surrogates). Hezbollah (frex) have total air *inferiority*, and no long-distance precision weapons as yet. And I don’t think they’re going to understand why your high-sounding moral strictures suddenly apply to them. Moreover, I reckon their use of rockets was quite *psychologically* effective.

    This seems to parallel the argument about slavery, where advocates of the North get on such an everlasting high horse about their moral superiority over the South when the North didn’t *need* slaves any more, due to the development of industry, and the South was still running a system which *did*. IOW, available technology impacts morality, but no, this is moral relativism, have you no backbone, we need a system of Marquess of Queensbury rules which ensure that those with hi-tech always win against those with lo-tech because otherwise you’re hindering the forward march of progress or something.

    I’m sure you can’t see either the consequential or principled basis for why this is such a problem, so let’s just drop it.

    As you please.

  633. “…And I don’t think they’re going to understand why your high-sounding moral strictures suddenly apply to them…”
    Possible grain of truth here. I actually think they *are* aware of the evolution of warfare practices, as they are not cut off from exposure to the rest of the globe….they see what’s going on, hear the debates…they know the ‘rules’.

    Yet this is their advantage, because they have *not* signed up to these conventions (yes, Geneva et al) and now we’re engaging in absurdly asymmetrical warfare…yet we’re so damned *nice* that we afford people pretty much all the concessions such conventions impose.

    “…Moreover, I reckon their use of rockets was quite *psychologically* effective…”
    You betcha sweet twinklechops, baby. If you wish to economize on syllables, just call it what it is – *terrorism*.

    “…moral superiority over the South when the North didn’t *need* slaves any more, due to the development of industry, and the South was still running a system which *did*…”
    Hugely different industries man. It was quite some time before the South was able to appreciate the kinds of technology that made slavery redundant…until then it was still economically smart to use slaves. You don’t actually believe that slavery *didn’t* continue to exist in the North, do you?!?!?

  634. Shenpen,
    Re: Yetzer Hara

    Certainly it is not the case that sweet reasonableness was always an evolutionary advantage to our prehistoric forebears. This is probably a large part of the difficulty in building a Utopian society. But to me, it is not as interesting as the epistemological issues of What Is Good(?).

    It seems to me that the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle scales up. There are so many things that we just cannot know, or, if it is possible to know them, gaining the knowledge takes so long and is so expensive that it’s better just to guess.

    This is what ultimately doomed the Soviet Union. The central planners in the Kremlin had to set the prices of tens of thousands of consumable items. No human being has the intellectual competence to do such a thing, updated on a continuous up-to-the-minute basis, as supply and demand change.

    The essential problem of Ethics is how hard it is to know what the right thing to do is. Obeying hard and fast rules set by God is easy, but inflexible and often leads to tragedy. “We think she’s a witch! The Bible says kill witches. Let’s burn her!”

    Utilitarianism is unsatisfying, because, if you are trying to do what will bring the greatest good to the greatest number, you still have to define what constitutes Good.

    If you are an ethical egoist, always pursuing your own selfish ends, people will avoid you, and rightly so, as they figure you will lie, steal or even murder if it serves your interests.

    If you pursue a morality of altruism, you are just asking to be a sucker, a victim for every con man with a sob story. You’ll be bled dry and, what’s worse, you’ll be a terrible advertisement for morality. People will look at you and say: “When you try to be good, you just get taken. Nice guys finish last.”

    If you pursue Aristotelian virtue ethics, you must try to approximate the Golden Mean in all your actions. And there is no way to demonstrate exactly what the Golden Mean is, in any particular situation. We can define courage as the Golden Mean between rashness and cowardice, but in any given scenario, what actions count as rash, and which as brave? It is easy to know afterward if you did the right thing. Monday morning quarterbacking is everyone’s favorite sport. But how do you know BEFORE you act, what will turn out to have been the right thing to do?

    We travel through life with a tiny hoard of knowledge, most of it probably wrong in one way or another, trying to steer the best course, knowing that whether we are wise or foolish, lucky or unlucky, in the end we still wind up buried in the same dirt.

    Sometimes it is easier to act if we deny this in our minds. If we believe pleasant lies, instead of the hard truth, it is easier to get through the day. I believe THIS is the essence of Yetzer Hara. Our eminently understandable desire to say:
    ‘I want it, therefore it is.’

    To believe what we want to believe, especially when knowing the Truth is just so damn hard, makes perfect sense, and horrible morality. But it is the way of the Human Race.

    By the way, a religion or ethical system is to be judged by the degree to which it acts against this tendency, thereby making its adherents better moral actors. This is why Adrian and those like him are wrong to make excuses for Muslims because they are weak. Morality isn’t about strong or weak. It’s about right and wrong. The moral advantage of having a Good religion is that it motivates you to find a way to do right, even when doing wrong would gain you what you want.

    Religions are to be judged by the degree to which they produce this motivation, not by the factual truth of their existential claims. A religion which says that the Earth is suspended on the back of a giant turtle, and that it’s turtles all the way down, should be treated with respect if, upon joining the faith, a newcomer to the religion is likely to become a better, more honest, more compassionate, more trustworthy, more DECENT person.

    The problem with Islam right now is that Islam in not a good religion by that standard.

  635. Other than the ‘international accord’ that created the boundaries in the first place (conspicuously/conveniently ignored by the usual proponents of “respecting world opinion”),

    Have you seen *me* going on about “respecting world opinion”?

    Israel is no more a ‘colony’ than Lebanon or Palestine.

    I must have imagined reading about all those migrations, then.

    The simple truth is that the muslims hate the Jews because of their success.

    I’m sure Israeli economic success is irritating, but I think it’s the success at taking Arab lands and holding onto them that really rankles. There’s also a perception that the Arabs have been *held back* in their own economic development, and while I have no doubt that some of this is due to genuine cultural disadvantages which they ought to deal with themselves (treatment of women, etc), when the US has been assiduously supporting convenient autocracies like Saudi and Egypt for this long it gets a little too easy to blame outsiders, you know?

    Hardly…but hyperbole aside…they acquire state-of-the-art arms for their oh-so-imminent needs by virtue of their success and wealth, and do so openly through legitimate channels, rather than illegally smuggling them via a linked-list of thugocracy proxies.

    Not what I heard about how they got their first lot of fissile material. Something shifty involving the French IIRC.

    BTW – don’t know if you’ll manage to sustain it, but props for arguing about the facts and steering pretty much clear of the personal stuff. Always tended to make me dismiss you before.

  636. I actually think they *are* aware of the evolution of warfare practices, as they are not cut off from exposure to the rest of the globe….they see what’s going on, hear the debates…they know the ‘rules’.

    I’m sure they do. And they know which ones are designed to keep them in their place, I suspect.

    Yet this is their advantage, because they have *not* signed up to these conventions (yes, Geneva et al) and now we’re engaging in absurdly asymmetrical warfare…yet we’re so damned *nice* that we afford people pretty much all the concessions such conventions impose.

    Because if we don’t, we’re letting them drag us down to their level, perhaps?

    You betcha sweet twinklechops, baby. If you wish to economize on syllables, just call it what it is – *terrorism*.

    Give it a label, put it in a box…stop thinking about it. Ahhhh….feels good.

    Hugely different industries man.

    I think that was sort of what I meant.

    It was quite some time before the South was able to appreciate the kinds of technology that made slavery redundant…until then it was still economically smart to use slaves. You don’t actually believe that slavery *didn’t* continue to exist in the North, do you?!?!?

    No, but you’re nitpicking. My point was that what you *can* do (technologically) impacts what you *should* do. You can see it particularly vividly in debates on medicine and abortion, but it’s true for military technology as well. And what Eric is saying implies to me that what *we* can do impacts what *they* should do. And if I was in their position I’d just say, well, go on then. Call me a terrorist…but you might want to organise something on the sticks-and-stones front as a backup.

  637. Adrian, let’s be clear. If you are waging war I don’t consider it immoral to do your damndest to kill the enemy’s soldiers, destroy his military infrastructure, occupy his territory, etc. The reason you are waging the war may be immoral, but if you are sticking to targeting the enemy within the limits of your technology and capability, no argument with how you are making war.

    Let’s tackle some examples.

    In WWII the American Air Force flew daylight bombing raids against Axis military targets, which included factories. They designed the most accurate bombsight, the Norden sight, of the day, the best that the technology available could enable. The American war planners accepted a higher casualty rate than any other air force of the day would accept to be as precise in their attacks as possible. That’s pretty darn moral within the context of a war.

    The Luftwaffe flew bombing raids in 1940 that deliberately targeted civilians and civilian infrastructure with the stated intention of causing terror and destruction among non-military targets. The Luftwaffe had the ability to develop bombsights comparable to the Norden sight, fly daylight raids and restrict their attacks to targeting military infrastructure. It turns out that their strategy was both ineffective (it did not break Britain’s will to fight) and seems to be clearly immoral.

    Over Dresden and Tokyo the US and British launched fire bombing raids that deliberately targeted civilians and civilian infrastructure. The result, in Tokyo alone, was more deaths than the atomic bomb attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Like the Luftwaffe strategy, these attacks were ineffective and pretty clearly immoral.

    About Vietnam. There is significant difference between Rolling Thunder and Lineback I and II. Rolling Thunder, for example, was designed to break the will of North Vietnam. This nearly always means targeting civilians, it’s pretty much a phrase that means just that. And was exactly what was occurring in 1967 and 1968. By 1968 the US military was firmly convinced that indiscriminate strategic bombing was ineffective and immoral. This decision led to the drive to develop precision guided weapons, which were subsequently used in Linebacker. Linebacker’s sole purpose was to defeat the NVA’s Easter Offensive. The civilian casualties were much lower and due to the limits of the technology available rather than a deliberate targeting of civilians and civilian infrastructure. Unlike Rolling Thunder, Linebacker was also effective in that it was a major contributor to the defeat of the Easter Offensive.

    You happen to have things backwards about the decisions around the change from more indiscriminate bombing to precision guided bombing. The American military decided that strategic bombing was both ineffective and immoral and proceeded to develop precision munitions. Further, the American Air Force had a tradition going back to 1943 of accepting higher casualties in order to limit their damage to military targets to the greatest extent possible within the limits of their technology available. In other words, the immorality of indiscriminate bombing of civilians didn’t come about because of the advances in technology, it was an established part of US military culture before precision munitions were available.

    That said, McNamara and Johnson were immoral assholes and their conduct of the Vietnam War was both horribly ineffective and immoral.

    Questions about where I stand on Rolling Thunder? My position is consistent. Deliberate targeting of civilians to break the will of the enemy is immoral, no matter who does it.

    Now, back to Hezbollah. I agree that they do not have the same capability for precision attacks that Israel does. If they were deliberately targeting military targets and causing civilian casualties due to the limitations of their technology, no issues. However, they were not. They were using the tactics of the Royal Air Force and Luftwaffe in WWII. Widespread, indiscriminate targeting to cause terror (very similar to Germany’s V1 and V2 campaign, actually), break Israel’s will and win points with certain groups in the West.

  638. Adrian: And what Eric is saying implies to me that what *we* can do impacts what *they* should do.

    Wrong. Targeting civilians deliberately is immoral, regardless of technology available. An ethical choice is to accept higher casualties of your own and more risk of failure in order to protect the innocent/weak. See American daylight bombing campaign over Germany to understand what I’m saying.

  639. Adrian: I must have imagined reading about all those migrations, then.

    No, you didn’t imagine it. Instead, as usual, you are putting carts and horses in the wrong order. Jews lived in the area that is called Israel before a nation was created in 1948 called Israel. Nobody needed to immigrate in order to have a “Jewish State” exist. The emigration after 1948 was by people who wanted to be part of the Jewish State. The emigration prior to that was by people who wanted to live in their historical and religious homeland. They, by the way, purchased their land from the Arabs living there. Those purchases were nice and legal by any set of laws that could be considered applicable. In other words, within the borders established by the UN, there is nothing that fits the traditional definition of colonization.

    What could be considered colonization is the emigration from Israel proper to the occupied territories. Generally, that was fairly illegitimate IF you consider territorial conquest to be wrong. Interestingly, the fact that their enemies intended to conquer Israeli territory is rarely called out as wrong by the folks that are unhappy with Israel. This would be in line with Adrian’s “sticks and stones” comment. It’s hard to consider you simply anti-Zionist when you only take the Israeli’s to task and not the Arabs bent on conquest. Simply put, something is right because it meets a test of morality, which is independent of whether you are weak or strong. It is a principle of most law and cultural mores that if a thing is immoral, the attempt to do the thing also is. If Israel’s conquest and colonization of Arab territories from 1967 onwards is wrong, then so are the four attempts to do so by Arab nations. If the Israeli targeting of infrastructure that is not distinctly military this past month is wrong, then Hezbollah’s actions are as well.

    Unless, of course, you excuse someone doing something wrong because they are the weaker. In that approach it was okay for Japan to attack without declaring war in 1941, it was okay for them to perpetrate massive atrocities against civilians and captured soldiers during the war and so forth. They were, after all, clearly weaker than the US, everyone knew it, including them. So, their brutality and atrocity was just fine because if they played by the rules they couldn’t win. Right Adrian?

  640. (‘Memes, that, for example, say that the whole population of your enemy is a valid military target.’)

    Memes are like viri, ain’t they? Surely doesn’t everybody need to have a viral ailment to warrant the search for a vaccine.

    It’s only an analogy. What would a vaccine be – a counter-meme? I don’t see the “freedom” and “democracy” memes spreading too fast out there right now, it looks like people may have other priorities.

    The flaw I see with it is like I’ve been trying to say to Dan above – the West was attacking civilian targets as recently as the seventies in Vietnam, but now we’ve got nice tech which means we don’t have to any more, and we’re going to judge everyone who does as though they had access to the same tech. And I don’t get this attitude, it seems hugely convenient and self-serving. Advances in technology give you more options, and choosing between them will often mean having to make moral decisions. But to claim that people who don’t have access to the technology yet are then bound by your decisions doesn’t make any sense to me.

    Perhaps someone will explain.

    And I don’t even understand it – are you talking about pre-1967 Israel? Land is a resource in abundance there and it’s worth is not much, as most if it is desert except for the mountain villages of the arabs and the desert turned to gardens by the work of the Jews.

    Israel has over 300 people per square km according to the CIA factbook (6 million people, 20,000 square km), which isn’t exactly empty. And believe me, they’re taking a lot of steps to secure what isn’t exactly in abundance there – the water. A lot of that “making the desert bloom” stuff looks to me like they’re drawing down aquifers at many times the replacement rate – there’s one in the Golan, I believe. I was also told that one chance of a peace plan with Syria foundered on the fact that the Syrians wanted to get back their access to the Sea of Galilee, and that wasn’t acceptable.

    Most of the pre-1967 lands were bought by cash from arabs.

    It’s the ones that weren’t that the Palestinians are making a fuss about, I think you’ll find.

    Have you ever asked those hairy aboriginal folks whose name I forgot who live on some of the islands what do they think of the Japanese taking their place?

    Living in Japan means I’m somehow complicit in the dispossession of the Ainu, eh? Remarkable concept. In fact, the Ainu are like the Amerinds – they’ve given up, their spirit’s broken, so it’s not much of an issue. You may have noticed that this is not the case with the Palestinians. Perhaps they need some more abuse.

    I think you didn’t and you better not, as the “who was there before” question is entirely silly, childish and completely unhistorical.

    Oh, so they’re being *childish* to want their land back.

    If both people are there, somewhere, anywhere, then both have a fair right to stay.

    Sounds like you could make a good argument for theft along those lines. Possession is nine tenths of the law, and such.

    Either by a Swiss model which is unlikely in that situation, or by sharing the land. Israel retreating behind pre-1967 borders would be a fair share of land – but do you really think they should do it without recognition and acceptance of their existence as a nation there?

    I think they’d get those easily enough, if they offered pre-1967. There’s still the issue of the land that was taken away from the Palestinians, but if all parties to the deal could be brought together the issue of Jewish property in Arab countries confiscated in 1948 or later could be set against it and something could be worked out. But I don’t see much momentum towards that.

  641. Eric Cowperthwaite,
    >Unless, of course, you excuse someone doing something wrong because they are the weaker.

    I think that there is a relationship between the issue you are debating with Adrian and my last post, on the difficulty of knowing what the right thing to do is.

    I think we can take it for granted that the Left wants to:
    1. Run things and
    2. Feel better about themselves.

    Given those two goals, it seems to me it would be foolish to concern oneself with issues of Right and Wrong. Instead, for moral guidance, one should view all issues through the lens of Strong and Weak.

    The advantages of such a policy are many:
    1. It’s so much EASIER. Determining who is morally in the right in any serious dispute is difficult, because there are always facts of which you are unaware, or a context you don’t fully understand. But strong and weak are easy to judge.
    2. At least among the Christian and Jewish influenced Western powers, the strong tend to be relatively magnanimous toward their detractors, more so than the weak. Therefore criticizing the strong is usually safer.
    3. Attacking the strong makes you look brave. This is particularly sweet when you know the strong won’t hurt you (see #2, above).
    4. It’s human nature to want to see the Big Man fall down. We all find entertainment in watching the High brought Low. This tends to make detractors of the strong more fun to watch than defenders of the status quo.
    5. Machiavelli advised a prince to crush the strong in a newly conquered province, while uplifting the weak. This is because the strong can get along without you, whereas the weak will continue to depend on your patronage, thus they will be grateful. (Gratitude being defined here as the expectation of future favors).

    Therefore, to the degree that Adrian is a committed Lefty, I think it is pointless for you to exhort him to abandon the moral lens of Strong/Weak, in favor or Right/Wrong or Good/Evil. I don’t see how Adrian or any other Lefty would benefit from following your advice. And since it is not rational to follow advice from which one does not benefit, how, in reason, can you ask a person to do it?

  642. Let’s look to Mises again for some help on defining what is “in reason”. Perhaps that will help to clarify why the position of the Left on this is actually not “reasonable”.

    Reasonable action is distinguished from unreasonable action by the fact that it involves provisional sacrifices. The latter are only apparent sacrifices, since they are outweighed by the favorable consequences that later ensue. The person who avoids tasty but unwholesome food makes merely a provisional, a seeming sacrifice. The outcome—the nonoccurrence of injury to his health—shows that he has not lost, but gained. To act in this way, however, requires insight into the consequences of one’s action. The demagogue takes advantage of this fact. He opposes the liberal, who calls for provisional and merely apparent sacrifices, and denounces him as a hard-hearted enemy of the people, meanwhile setting himself up as a friend of humanity. In supporting the measures he advocates, he knows well how to touch the hearts of his hearers and to move them to tears with allusions to want and misery.

  643. I think we can take it for granted that the Left wants to:
    1. Run things and

    The Will to Power just *oozes* out of my posts, I know. Why am I not standing for public office? Oh, I don’t speak enough Japanese yet, and anyway I’m a gaijin. Shit.

    2. Feel better about themselves.

    I want to feel better about *you*.

    [:-)]

  644. You happen to have things backwards about the decisions around the change from more indiscriminate bombing to precision guided bombing. The American military decided that strategic bombing was both ineffective and immoral and proceeded to develop precision munitions. Further, the American Air Force had a tradition going back to 1943 of accepting higher casualties in order to limit their damage to military targets to the greatest extent possible within the limits of their technology available. In other words, the immorality of indiscriminate bombing of civilians didn’t come about because of the advances in technology, it was an established part of US military culture before precision munitions were available.

    This is admirable enough, but it’s worth remembering that the US has fought all its wars since the Civil War (and a few before then, and probably the latter part of the Civil War to boot) pretty much on its own terms. The other countries involved in WW2 were having to make do with shortages of just about everything (Britain was more a supply conduit than an equal partner), and the luxury of being able to take higher casualties than necessary for any reason whatsoever must have seemed kind of alien to them. Perhaps the Russians were in a surplus situation during their final advance on Berlin, but nobody really expected them to be in a humanitarian mood by that time. OTOH, America’s enormous out-of-bomber-range productivity meant they always had some slack in the system, so they had more choices – and, in line with what I’ve been saying, this gave them the freedom to make moral decisions while everyone else was being a little sleazy by comparison.

    Now, back to Hezbollah. I agree that they do not have the same capability for precision attacks that Israel does. If they were deliberately targeting military targets and causing civilian casualties due to the limitations of their technology, no issues. However, they were not. They were using the tactics of the Royal Air Force and Luftwaffe in WWII. Widespread, indiscriminate targeting to cause terror (very similar to Germany’s V1 and V2 campaign, actually),

    I dunno, I suppose they could have concentrated on trying to aim them at border areas where troops would have been massing. But have you seen some of the bits of Israeli drone video footage on YouTube? I wouldn’t have wanted to spend a long time setting one of those things up carefully, that was fucking dangerous work.

    break Israel’s will

    A little early for that. I’d say they were trying to provoke Israel into hysterical overreaction, something they can’t be truly said to have failed at.

    and win points with certain groups in the West.

    They were really aimed at winning my respect, is it? Touching.

  645. Nobody needed to immigrate in order to have a “Jewish State” exist.

    It wouldn’t have been very Jewish if they hadn’t.

    The emigration after 1948 was by people who wanted to be part of the Jewish State. The emigration prior to that was by people who wanted to live in their historical and religious homeland. They, by the way, purchased their land from the Arabs living there. Those purchases were nice and legal by any set of laws that could be considered applicable.

    You know, nobody denies that some (or even most for all I know) of the land was purchased fairly. But this always gets brought up – “They PAID for it!”

    Not all of it.

    In other words, within the borders established by the UN, there is nothing that fits the traditional definition of colonization.

    Not even the ethnic cleansing, Deir Yassin, stuff like that? Or was it all just folks leaving because the Arab leaders told them to, wilfully and conveniently forfeiting all their property?

    What could be considered colonization is the emigration from Israel proper to the occupied territories. Generally, that was fairly illegitimate IF you consider territorial conquest to be wrong. Interestingly, the fact that their enemies intended to conquer Israeli territory is rarely called out as wrong by the folks that are unhappy with Israel. This would be in line with Adrian’s “sticks and stones” comment. It’s hard to consider you simply anti-Zionist when you only take the Israeli’s to task and not the Arabs bent on conquest.

    It’s a bit like the jihadis bent on a Caliphate. Come and see me when your dreams have been disciplined by an element of pragmatism, you know?

    Simply put, something is right because it meets a test of morality, which is independent of whether you are weak or strong. It is a principle of most law and cultural mores that if a thing is immoral, the attempt to do the thing also is. If Israel’s conquest and colonization of Arab territories from 1967 onwards is wrong, then so are the four attempts to do so by Arab nations.

    Which four? I only know 1948, 1967 (Israeli preemptive, but whatever) and 1973.

    If the Israeli targeting of infrastructure that is not distinctly military this past month is wrong, then Hezbollah’s actions are as well.

    And the massive difference in magnitude between the two in no way means that Israel’s actions are any *more* wrong, does it? Because we must remain blind to relative strength, which is totally irrelevant to all considerations of morality.

    Unless, of course, you excuse someone doing something wrong because they are the weaker. In that approach it was okay for Japan to attack without declaring war in 1941,

    That was a fuckup. The declaration was supposed to arrive a bit before the attack. Somebody forgot to reset his watch or something. I’m sure hara-kiri was involved.

    it was okay for them to perpetrate massive atrocities against civilians and captured soldiers during the war and so forth. They were, after all, clearly weaker than the US, everyone knew it, including them. So, their brutality and atrocity was just fine because if they played by the rules they couldn’t win. Right Adrian?

    Er – as they didn’t play by the rules and *still* didn’t win, doesn’t appear to have helped much. You’ve probably read as much or more about it than me, but the usual story is that the Japanese Army had delusions of racial invincibility and managed to drag everyone else along with them. The Navy looked at the numbers and said, look, we can win for six months or so and then we will progressively get our asses handed to us, but actually mutinying wasn’t really an option. They just don’t do bottom-up out here, it’s a problem. In any case, Japan was a state actor, and could be and was held to account in the usual ways, at least until the Americans decided fighting Communism was more important and most of the guys who’d been running things beforehand were wheeled out of semiretirement and put in charge again. Sometimes continuity is what you need.

    I fail to see a lot of lessons for dealing with Hezbollah here.

  646. Eric Cowperthwaite,
    >Reasonable action is distinguished from unreasonable action by the fact that it involves provisional sacrifices.

    Provisional sacrifices are made for the benefit of the long term future of oneself and one’s posterity. If one has given up on the future, if one wants to die, and one’s only concern is making sure the enemies one hates die along with one, then provisional sacrifices make no sense.

    This is the problem at the heart of any attempt to define a purely rational morality. There is, and never can be, any Reason not to commit suicide. Unless there is an afterlife, wherein one can expect reward or punishment for how one behaved in life.

    All of the preachers and religious moralists who talk about how there can be no morality in atheism are superficially wrong. Atheists can be good people. I flatter myself that I am such a person. But there is still that ultimate question of:
    Why bother?

    As John Maynard Keynes so famously put it, “In the long run, we’re all dead.” One can find reasons, in the immediate moment, to pursue Aristotelian virtue ethics, utilitarianism, ethical egoism and even familial and community-based altruism. But to live an entire lifetime of Loyalty to Truth, spurning all the advantages that might be gained with lies, only to rot in the ground like the basest charlatan, seems pointless.

    Would you do it for pride? Your pride will be interred with you. Would you do it for reputation? In time, after your death you will inevitably be forgotten. Would you do it to be a good example to your children? One day, in the not too distant future, your children, their children and their children will be dead, and you will be a collection of old photographs, collecting dust in an attic somewhere.

    Thus does any moral code which does not postulate (in the complete absence of ANY factual evidence) the existence of individual spiritual immortality, have a gaping hole at the center of it. There is no way to derive Ought from Is, except by reference to a desired quality of life.

    If you have given up on life, morality has no possible hold on you.

  647. “…I must have imagined reading about all those migrations, then…”
    Migration does not a colony make…heck, mankind has been in a migratory flux ever since ever since. America was colonized, ditto Australia

    etc…not Israel. Israel was established and formalized from existing peoples and territories, ditto Lebanon etc. Given the recent turmoil in

    Jewish history, I’m hardly surprised that the establishment of Israel catalysed migration there.

    Actually, I think all the squabbling over “territories” is as meaningless as “race”…rather arbitrary boundaries. Childish “we were here first”

    arguments don’t carry much weight. People migrate, or attempt to, and if successful establish themselves as a populace, or are repelled and

    migrate elsewhere.

    If there’s any criticism to be leveled at ‘the Jews’ (from me) it’s that they’re pussies for allowing themselves to be kicked around for so

    long…but I’m happy to see they’re beyond that nowadays ;-) Go Yids!

    “…Not what I heard about how they got their first lot of fissile material. Something shifty involving the French IIRC…”
    Not having spent my life studiously observing Israeli history, I have no way of knowing whether this is true…but either way…show me a nation

    without skeletons. Rehashing the sins of the past is not constructive. I think the point here is that Israel of ‘today’ *does* respect, and act in

    accordance with, international protocols. And can be trusted to do so.

    “…And they know which ones are designed to keep them in their place, I suspect…”
    Perhaps. They apply to us all, however…yet they seem to think that they should be free to insult such constraints without consequence

    though…when they see the error of their ways, I’m sure they’ll advance…if they survive that long.

    “…Because if we don’t, we’re letting them drag us down to their level, perhaps?…”
    Or maybe we place great value in such standards, and do not wish to cheapen them? Not that I am particularly enamoured with said

    standards, I hasten to add…rules designed by booze-addled clots, far from the cutting edge in comfy armchairs, while being divorced from

    reality don’t inspire my confidence ;-)

    “…Give it a label, put it in a box…stop thinking about it. Ahhhh….feels good…”
    Not at all. Let’s just be honest about exactly *what* we’re dealing with…

    “…My point was that what you *can* do (technologically) impacts what you *should* do…”
    I understand. My nitpicking was simply to highlight your inexact and misleading historical example. Back to your point, though…I think you

    are confusing moral imperatives with economic ones. Sometimes our technological advances afford us the option of a greater range of ‘more

    moral’ (however that is defined at the time) choices, true…like safe abortion rather than perpetuating slumlike squalor and sordid, dangerous practices. Other times we have clear economic advantages to reap…like robust harvesting/spinning/weaving technology that can run night & day without sleep, or complaining about how unfair everything is & burning the mill down. Southern slavery had a clear economic shelf-life…Northern, not so clear.

    So your point is only half made, and it’s a subjective half, at that. No matter how little [parts of] the antebellum south thought of blacks, it

    surely wasn’t enough to risk jeopardizing their economy for. I think it would have been interesting to witness what would have happened

    (economically) without the WBTS.

    “…Call me a terrorist…but you might want to organise something on the sticks-and-stones front as a backup…”
    LOL…indeed…sadly, the UN et al wish us all to use nerf sticks and nerf stones…and strong language.

  648. LOL…indeed…sadly, the UN et al wish us all to use nerf sticks and nerf stones…and strong language.

    The UN don’t matter much. I mean, the Israelis sound desparate to save themselves some face somehow, and Hezbollah’s morale’s gotta be pretty high, and they’re going to represent major investment potential for outside parties, and Israel have to nip it in the bud before they get resupplied with all kinds of disturbingly up-to-date kit…would *you* want to stand between them in a blue hat?

    Mug’s game.

  649. Dean,

    “The essential problem of Ethics is how hard it is to know what the right thing to do is.”

    It simply cannot be known. It can be known whether an intent is good or not, but for the action, it’s just up to opinion. The only thing we can do is to have good intent and be wise & smart and then just hope for good results. I don’t think ethics could be made into a science.

    How to know an intent is good? I think to have good intent we need a “limit value”, in the same sense when mathematicians say “the limit value of this function is infinity”. This limit value is wishing all sentient beings to experience everlasting, infinite happiness and zero suffering. Of course this can never be reached, just as no function with a limit value of infinity can actually return infinity. But having this general intent in mind, and then doing what’s practical and realistic at the moment ensures good intent. There are some benefits of having goals that are clearly defined and understood as being infinite. As one sure knows it’s infinite and the goal itself cannot be reached, one never falls into sentimentalism but is able to do what’s necessary, even when the necessary thing is not very gentle. An absolute, infinite goal allows us to act quite relatively to situations, we won’t be bound by rigid moral codes that are imcompatible with reality. And if one has this, then the only necessary thing is to be smart and then the results of our actions will usually be more or less good.

  650. “…This limit value is wishing all sentient beings to experience everlasting, infinite happiness and zero suffering…”
    What if a certain group of people define *their* understanding of ‘good’ differently? Instead of “all sentient beings”, perhaps they are only concerned with “all members of their tribe”…

    How would we be able to argue that our ‘good’ is ‘right’ and their ‘good’ is ‘wrong’?

    Perhaps we only need to convince ourselves?

  651. Shenpen:
    >wishing all sentient beings to experience everlasting, infinite happiness and zero suffering

    It seems to me that this goal, while being poetically beautiful, is so far removed from anything that could ever actually happen, that it is semantically equivalent to the Lefty’s quest for ‘social justice.’

    The Christians are waiting for Jesus to come back and destroy Satan and initiate a Kingdom of Christ on Earth, which will reign for a thousand years of peace and justice, culminating in the end of the world.

    Yet whenever you see the old bearded fellow, walking the streets carrying the sign saying “The End Is Nigh,” you laugh. You laugh because nothing he is saying is relevant to any moral decisions you have to make, today. That old man is engaged in ‘a long wait for a train don’t come,’ and if the train ever does arrive, it still won’t give you any guidance on how to be a better person, now.

    What actions could you take, today, that would bring us one step closer to perfect happiness for everybody, forever? They say all eras are equidistant from eternity. How could any action you or I could ever take bring us one step closer to infinity?

    I’m sorry, but your proposal is conceptually beautiful but practically useless. You’re better off with “The Bible says it, I believe it, that settles it.” At least the Bible gives you some practical, concrete advice on how to live.

    I don’t believe that you can make this problem go away by postulating an infinity. All infinities are pretty much the same. The greater credibility of the religious view, in my opinion, is that they are more up front about the problem.

    The Lefty who posits that one day we, or our descendents, will live in the Workers Paradise, is ignoring the fact that a perfect society would require perfect people, and there aren’t any, there never have been, and no practical method for creating one has ever been devised. Though, for the record, the Communists in the 20th century did make a hell of a try at perfecting-humanity-through-mass-murder.

    At least the Christers admit that no human, constituted as we are now, could exist in Heaven. Being in Heaven requires that you die, and be transformed into something totally different from what you are now, while remaining exactly the same.

    If, when you go to Heaven, you are simply transformed as a caterpillar is changed into a butterfly, a tadpole into a frog, then YOU aren’t going to Heaven. You will simply die and something that remembers being you will take your place at the right hand of God.

    In order for you to go to Heaven, God will have to violate the Law of Identity on your behalf. The Law of Identity says that a thing is itself. In Heaven, you will be yourself, and at the same time, and in the same respect, something completely different from yourself, a perfect being who could be perfectly happy in a perfect place.

    This is why I respect Christian and Jewish eschatology over anything the Left has ever offered. At least they are honest in their absurdity. The Left insists that it is going to build a Heaven on Earth, wherein your grandchildren will live happily ever after, assuming that you are a good revolutionary, now. How exactly this is going to work, Saint Marx was never too clear on, but the proposition that it would work led to the murder of between 100 and 120 million souls between 1917 and 1989.

    A practical moral goal requires both:
    1. The possibility of actually being realized and
    2. Some kind of plan for getting there.

    With all do respect Shenpen, your proposal lacks both. We need something better.

  652. Dean: I thought that Christianity and other religions believed that everyone has an immortal soul, and the soul is, in essence, your identity. Your body is just a vessel for the soul, and when you die, you shed the husk that is your body just like you take off your clothes when you shower. Maybe you receive a new body in heaven, but this body is still just a vessel. The belief is still somewhat absurd, but it should not violate the Law of Identity.

  653. Phillip,
    >Your body is just a vessel for the soul

    That is an excellent point, but it is not related to the point I was making. Heaven is a perfect place. In Heaven the condition of everything remains as it was for eternity. Even if something does change superficially, its underlying perfection remains unchanged.

    After your first trillion years or so in Heaven, if you were to live there, as you are now, you’d be so bored you’d be eager to go to Hell, just for some variety.

    The only way you could be happy, forever, in Heaven, is if you were perfect yourself. And yet you are not. Therefore, for you to be happy in Heaven, you’d have to be transformed into a perfect being while remaining yourself. And since the person you are now is fundamentally imperfect, thus the contradiction. Thus the violation of the Law of Identity.

  654. I believe that the solution, at least in Catholic theology, is that the soul is perfect but the physical is imperfect. I could be wrong, but I thought I had read that once upon a time in response to the point you are making.

  655. Interesting commentary from the Middle East related to Hezbollah’s “historic victory”, the one that our pal Adrian is going on about:

    “If Hezbollah won a victory, it was a Pyrrhic one,” says Walid Abi-Mershed, a leading Lebanese columnist. “They made Lebanon pay too high a price–for which they must be held accountable.”

    Hezbollah is also criticized from within the Lebanese Shiite community, which accounts for some 40% of the population. Sayyed Ali al-Amin, the grand old man of Lebanese Shiism, has broken years of silence to criticize Hezbollah for provoking the war, and called for its disarmament. In an interview granted to the Beirut An-Nahar, he rejected the claim that Hezbollah represented the whole of the Shiite community. “I don’t believe Hezbollah asked the Shiite community what they thought about [starting the] war,” Mr. al-Amin said. “The fact that the masses [of Shiites] fled from the south is proof that they rejected the war. The Shiite community never gave anyone the right to wage war in its name.”

    Mona Fayed, a prominent Shiite academic in Beirut, wrote an article also published by An-Nahar last week. She asks: Who is a Shiite in Lebanon today? She provides a sarcastic answer: A Shiite is he who takes his instructions from Iran, terrorizes fellow believers into silence, and leads the nation into catastrophe without consulting anyone.

    Some in the political wing [of Hezbollah] expressed dissatisfaction with his overreliance on the movement’s military and security apparatus. Speaking on condition of anonymity, they described Mr. Nasrallah’s style as “Stalinist” and pointed to the fact that the party’s leadership council (shura) has not held a full session in five years.

    In the words of Hossein Shariatmadari, editor of the Iranian daily Kayhan, “Hezbollah is ‘Iran in Lebanon.’

    “Hezbollah won the propaganda war because many in the West wanted it to win as a means of settling score with the United States,” says Egyptian columnist Ali al-Ibrahim. “But the Arabs have become wise enough to know TV victory from real victory.”

    Read the whole article

  656. Interesting commentary from the Middle East related to Hezbollah’s “historic victory”, the one that our pal Adrian is going on about:

    I just admire people who stand up to bullies. It’d be nice if they could be entirely free of bullying themselves, but you take what you can get.

    “If Hezbollah won a victory, it was a Pyrrhic one,” says Walid Abi-Mershed, a leading Lebanese columnist.

    Y’see this is an abuse of the term. A Pyrrhic victory is one where winning the battle loses you the war. Little early to call that.

    “They made Lebanon pay too high a price–for which they must be held accountable.”

    There’s quite a lot of money coming in now, even if some of it is probably earmarked for bunker replacement, and it sounds to me like some of it is linked to Hezbollah’s battlefield performance. And the casualties were a lot lower than in 1982.

    “The fact that the masses [of Shiites] fled from the south is proof that they rejected the war. The Shiite community never gave anyone the right to wage war in its name.”

    Well, sorry but I’d say the fact that the masses fled from the war is mainly proof that they didn’t want to be killed. The ones who were piling back last week seemed to have a lot of Hizbollah flags on display, and I doubt they were *all* to camouflage their real feelings.

    In the words of Hossein Shariatmadari, editor of the Iranian daily Kayhan, “Hezbollah is ‘Iran in Lebanon.’

    It’s a proxy, but with a lot of independence, if not as much as Israel.

    “Hezbollah won the propaganda war because many in the West wanted it to win as a means of settling score with the United States,”

    I’m just going by the Isreali press, really. A lot of them seem to think Hezbollah won the propaganda war too.

    Have you read the Hersh article on the war, btw? He may be a bit of a Bush hater, but he gets to talk to an interesting range of people.

  657. I think the sources of the commentary were very interesting, and not exactly folks that are pro-Israel/America. More importantly, Lebanon appears to be standing up against Hezbollah. What I find most interesting in your commentary, Adrian, is your dismissive attitude towards folks from Lebanon who don’t agree with your perspective.

  658. Oh, and if the reaction of Lebanon towards Hezbollah continues in this vein then it seems likely to become a pyrrhic victory. Especially considering that Hezbollah lost over 500 trained fighters (like most militias, they don’t have that many disciplined, trained fighters), expended (or had captured/destroyed) the majority of their war stocks and brought to light the fact that they are a proxy for Syria and Iran. In the long run, this is likely to mean Hezbollah being marginalized as a factor in Lebanon.

  659. I think the sources of the commentary were very interesting, and not exactly folks that are pro-Israel/America. More importantly, Lebanon appears to be standing up against Hezbollah.

    I’ll believe it when I see Hezbollah get publically thwarted in something they want.

    What I find most interesting in your commentary, Adrian, is your dismissive attitude towards folks from Lebanon who don’t agree with your perspective.

    I don’t doubt that there are loads of people in Lebanon who aren’t happy with Hezbollah. It depends on what they do next.

    The author seems to have his own Wikipedia entry – sounds like some people find him a little suspect.

    Especially considering that Hezbollah lost over 500 trained fighters (like most militias, they don’t have that many disciplined, trained fighters),

    They won’t be wanting for volunteers, though. But apparently they’re *really* choosy about who they take (don’t want to get infiltrated like the Palestinians), so it might take a while to get their strength back.

    expended (or had captured/destroyed) the majority of their war stocks

    Easily replaced IMO. Lot of rebuilding going to be going on there soon, lot of concrete being poured, lot of trucks moving around. Unless you expect the French to check them all.

    and brought to light the fact that they are a proxy for Syria and Iran.

    Most people already knew that. I did, and I don’t exactly get up-to-date State Department briefings.

    In the long run, this is likely to mean Hezbollah being marginalized as a factor in Lebanon.

    Have to wait and see.

  660. Interesting, Adrian is nearly always prepared to point out the negative consequences of actions by the West. He never willingly does so with actions by others.

  661. Mises, while discussing Liberal Policy and Religious Policy in “Liberalism”, wrote: Liberalism, however, must be intolerant of every kind of intolerance. If one considers the peaceful cooperation of all men as the goal of social evolution, one cannot permit the peace to be disturbed by priests and fanatics. Liberalism proclaims tolerance for every religious faith and every metaphysical belief, not out of indifference for these “higher” things, but from the conviction that the assurance of peace within society must take precedence over everything and everyone. And because it demands toleration of all opinions and all churches and sects, it must recall them all to their proper bounds whenever they venture intolerantly beyond them.

    This is the source of the Liberal (Libertarian) opposition to Islam as it is practiced today. Islam is intolerant and seeks to gain power to put its intolerance into practice through political power and violence. You can either be intolerant of this, oppose this, or you can shrug, say “what should I do about those half billion women reduced to the status of chattel” and allow intolerance to continue. It is, of course, your choice to do so. That said, you are certainly no Liberal or Libertarian. The perspective that we should simply allow the intolerance, the use of political power and violence to extend the intolerance, because it does not threaten us, today, in our comfortable home, is a perspective incompatible with Liberalism. It is, in fact, the battle cry of the Conservative.

  662. Eric: I believe that the solution, at least in Catholic theology, is that the soul is perfect but the physical is imperfect.

    I’m not sure about Catholic theology, but I can comment on the theology of some Protestant denominations. What you say is not exactly what they believe, but it is close — the idea is that the believer’s soul will be made perfect, once their sinful body and sinful desires are stripped away at death. (Or at the Second Coming, whichever happens first.) In any case, only perfection is allowed into Heaven.

    Now, as for whether this violates the Law of Identity, I’m not sure. (I’m not very familiar with that law, or indeed with much philosophy at all.) It may be that the law itself is outright incorrect — from what Dean said (“a thing is itself”), the law does not allow for identity to change over time. This is clearly wrong — for instance, twenty years ago I was not a programmer, but now I am. I am still me, but the specific set of traits that make up the concept of “me” have been added to. Now perhaps “a thing is itself” is only *supposed* to apply at one point in time, in which case no violation of that law need happen before people are admitted to Heaven.

  663. Your blog is broken when coming in via a Google REFERER. The body and comments all look like this:

    Oderint, dum metuant

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  664. Bryan:

    Or, when you die you stay dead, and remain completely inert *until* the second coming at some indeterminate future time, at which point you will be magically resurrected and sorted into heaven or hell, as appropriate.

    There have proliferated so many versions of Christian eschatology that I, quite frankly, have lost count of them all but I noted this common feature: I find them all most unpalatable.

  665. Eric Cowperthwaite:
    >It is, in fact, the battle cry of the Conservative.

    One aspect of the Conservative idea is that not everyone is prepared to sign onto the Liberal Ideal. There is more than one way to achieve peace within society. The Liberal Ideal is both the more difficult and counter-intuitive.

    By far the simpler method of achieving peace is the traditional Islamic way. One simply silences all dissenting voices through the unrelenting use of violence and compulsion. There is a good reason why Islam is referred to in Arabic as the House of Peace, and everything outside the Ummah is called the House of War. The obvious outcome of multiple and conflicting values is, well, conflict.

    “I disagree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.” This statement by Voltaire is the most unnatural in the history of Mankind. The Conservative response to Liberal idealism is that not all people are equally prepared to pursue that level of unnaturalism.

    The development of socially widespread martial courage in defense of Tolerance is slow, difficult and strange. A large part the problem, in my opinion, with so-called Progressive Liberalism, is that it simply takes that dedication to Toleration for granted, and seeks to advance beyond it to an even more perfect utopian ideal.

    Progressives see no problem in rending the social fabric of Western society in order to build a new and better world. They take the common virtue of the common people for granted, and assume that under the Progressives’ enlightened leadership we can reach new and greater heights of moral progress.

    This is why they see no problem in redefining Marriage to mean of a union of any two (or more) people, straight or gay, it doesn’t matter. Progressives scoffed when Conservatives warned that the 1960’s expansion of the Welfare State would create widespread dependency and undercut the productive moral backbone of large segments of society, particularly the most vulnerable. But the Conservatives’ warnings came true, and the Progressives learned nothing.

    It seems to me that what defines Progressive Liberalism right now is a total unwillingness to LEARN anything from their mistakes. They are dedicated to their vision of a perfectible humanity wherein all of the lessons we have learned over the eons, at the cost of so much blood and treasure, can be tossed aside with impunity.

    There is no such thing as Traditional Wisdom. Or, in the words of Oliver Stone, there are no wise old men.

    So dedicated are the Progressives to their vision that they are prepared to say goodbye to every nation in Western Europe, with all of the cultural treasures therein, rather than part with it. In a couple of centuries, there will not be a Germany, a Holland, a Sweden or Denmark, a Belgium, a Russia, perhaps not even a France or a Britain. Islam will swallow it all. And the Progressives are determined not even to acknowledge the problem, let alone combat it.

    Hollywood is eager to retell, over and over again, the story of Joe McCarthy and the Hollywood Ten from the 1950’s. Meanwhile, Theo Van Gogh is still dead, and there is nothing but silence.

    But Eric, the Progressives ARE Liberal. They talk nonstop about the evils of intolerance. Of course, the only place they can see intolerance is on the Western Right. But they ARE dedicated to fighting Jerry Falwell’s attempt to preserve the traditional definition of Marriage so as to exclude gays.

    To argue that the Progressives should not be counted as Liberal because they are soft socialists is not entirely fair. They are Liberals, only with selective blinders on. So dedicated are they to tolerance, that they intend to see that the West tolerate non-Western intolerance in the name of Multiculturalism. They cannot see intolerance outside of the West. But they are dedicated to fighting every bit of the Western intolerance they can see.

    My point, Eric, in this overly long post is that Conservatism has something useful to say about the social consequences of human moral limitations. It is good to be idealistic, but it is also good to be sensible. One should not burden the human condition with more weight than it can bear.

    As a Western Conservative, I am accustomed to being demonized. But if I am to be castigated as a sinner, I would ask you to at least place my sins in their proper context.

  666. Why can’t Progressive Liberals see intolerance outside of the West? Because of their revulsion from racism.

    If Progressive Liberals were to apply the Liberal Ideal to all people, that would involve a WHOLE lot of white people telling brown people they’re wrong.

    In my wife’s native India, there used to be a practice called suttee, wherein a widow would be thrown onto her dead husband’s funeral pyre to burn with him. Sir Charles Napier, the British Commander-in-chief in India from 1849 to 1851, signed an agreement with local Hindu leaders that he would respect all their customs, except for the practice of suttee. The Hindu leaders protested but Napier was unmoved:
    “You say that it is your custom to burn widows. Very well. We also have a custom: when men burn a woman alive, we tie a rope around their necks and we hang them. Build your funeral pyre; beside it, my carpenters will build a gallows. You may follow your custom. And then we will follow ours.”

    During the 20th century, many Liberals decided that they were far more disgusted with the rednecks who busied themselves with, in the words of Randy Newman, “keepin’ the niggers down,” than they could ever be with the, at times, horrific practices of non-Westerners, whom they did not take seriously, anyway.

    Part of it, I think, was just politics. A group like Amnesty International might start out in service of the Liberal Ideal, dedicated to fighting for human rights everywhere. But no one cares if Black Africans are mistreated in the prisons of Zaire. People say they care, but no one will send any serious money to put a stop to it. And besides, White Liberals criticizing a Black government of a Black country for barbaric practices? No way, Jose! No postcolonial guilt-ridden Liberal is gonna have anything to do with such goings-on.

    But if Amnesty International were to spend most if its time, money and energy condemning, say, the US and Israel for all of their (somewhat less gruesome) acts of barbarism, that could be more lucrative. In THAT, there is money and self-righteousness, galore!

    So, if you want to be a Liberal, and yet make sure that nothing you ever say sounds the slightest bit racist, and get lots of money and positive attention, it helps to have very selective blinders. It helps to behave exactly like the post modern, multi culti, politically correct Progressive Liberals you see today.

    Eric, the traditional European Conservative view held that:
    ‘People of my race and creed should be treated better than those lesser breeds who are not like me.’

    Classical Liberalism was, in large part, an idealistic rejection of that European Conservatism. It was a rejection of racism. And it offered great moral pride to those Liberals who took up the banner of stamping out racism.

    But to be a Classical Liberal today, you must spend a great deal of time saying things that could easily be interpreted as racist. You must, as (I assume) a White person, spend a great deal of time criticizing the barbaric behavior on non-Whites. The Progressives are simply Liberals who refuse to participate in any such activity. And if that means they have to reject the universal aspects of Liberalism, so be it.

    Liberalism for Liberals, and cannibalism for cannibals!

    Thus you have no right to condemn the Progressives as ilLiberal. They are Liberals, with a slight modification. And American (as opposed to European) Conservatism, is as much a champion of the Classical Liberal ideal as you are. It’s just that we are more pessimistic. We spend a great deal more time than you do looking into the human heart of darkness. And what we see sobers us.

  667. In my last two posts I detected a contradiction in my thought. I have said that I believe that Islamic civilization is doomed, that it will not survive the 21st century, and I said last night that Islam will swallow Western Europe over the next 200 years. What gives?

    The solution, as I discussed earlier, is Western terrorism. In December of 2003, there was an earthquake in Bam, Iran that killed 30,000 people. The day before, there was an identical earthquake that hit central California. It resulted in the deaths of only 3 people when a clock tower toppled over in the town of Paso Robles (population: 25,000).

    The relative poverty, as well as the more relaxed attitude toward corruption (building codes and such), in the Islamic world makes them more vulnerable to murderous mischief, as well as natural disasters, than we are. If the West could bring itself to dispatch ruthless men, able to take advantage of that vulnerability, to commit mass murder, the social structure of Islamic countries could be shattered.

    Thus could civilization be brought down, within the traditional Islamic world. But Europe is a different matter.

    In Europe, Islam is not so much pushing against anything, as it is filling a vacuum. In Europe, few take Christianity seriously anymore. And I’m sorry Shenpen, but no European is going to face death willingly in the name of your Buddhism. So that only leaves European quasi-Marxist Progressivism. And it’s not doing so well.

    Progressivism, now that it has nothing to make Progress toward, leaves people without hope. In a hopeless world, there is no point in fighting for anything Good; it just doesn’t matter. And there certainly is no point in having any children. How could you be so cruel?

    The only thing to do is go out to nightclubs, drink your booze, smoke your hash, and hope to vanish from the world as quietly as possible.

    Islam in Europe is, in essence, fighting against people who want to die. Islam, therefore, can’t lose. If you want to live, and your enemy wants to die, how can you NOT win? If the Sun doesn’t explode, Islam will dominate Europe in the 22nd century.

    I am not sure what the US should do about this. But I am convince that it will become our biggest foreign policy headache in the coming decades.

  668. On the subject of Western terrorism, there is a good short story by Stephen King about an overweight attorney who accidentally hits an old Gypsy woman with his car. Her husband curses him, whispering in his ear the word: “Thinner.” After this the lawyer starts losing weight at an alarming rate.

    As he wastes away into nothing, he grows more desperate. Finally, the attorney calls upon an old client, a professional hit man. The hit man goes after the old Gypsy’s family, killing their dogs and taking their granddaughter hostage. Seeing no other option, the old Gypsy agrees to lift the curse.

    What people like Adrian refuse to understand is that it is not just the poor and backward who can play the terrorism game. Advanced societies can play it too, once we get over our squeamishness. The Romans were masters of Terror.

    No democratically elected modern Western politician will ever sign off on Western terrorism publicly. But after enough nuclear bombs go off in enough Western cities, the politicians will, with plausible deniability, fund the necessary mayhem.

    In the 20th century, various forms of Western totalitarianism killed over a hundred million people. In the 1990’s, we hoped that the end of Communism would bring about ‘The End of History,’ a new golden age of peace and prosperity. It was a beautiful dream, but a foolish one.

    The new century will bring death on a scale to make the 20th century look like the “good old days.” And only the spiritually strong will survive.

  669. Interesting, Adrian is nearly always prepared to point out the negative consequences of actions by the West. He never willingly does so with actions by others.

    Because I see them more as reactions in most cases, as I believe we’ve discussed. But the principle that power brings responsibility will never mean relative power bringing relative responsibility to those who have embraced moral absolutism. This fourth-generation asymmetric stuff Just Isn’t Cricket.

  670. What people like Adrian refuse to understand is that it is not just the poor and backward who can play the terrorism game. Advanced societies can play it too, once we get over our squeamishness. The Romans were masters of Terror.

    What makes you think I refuse to understand it? It’s just that we won’t really be advanced societies in quite the same way after we’ve done it, unless you consider Rome a good model across the board. You reckon we can wipe out half the Muslim world pour encourager les autres and then go back to business as usual and expect other countries to meekly acquiesce as we take over the Muslims’ gently-glowing infrastructure and announce a new world order?

    No democratically elected modern Western politician will ever sign off on Western terrorism publicly. But after enough nuclear bombs go off in enough Western cities, the politicians will, with plausible deniability, fund the necessary mayhem.

    One’d be quite enough to start the pogroms IMO, and put a kink in the forward march of globalisation. But hey, there may be an attack on Iran brewing before the midterms, who knows, perhaps the West can Make A Stand against beardyism.

    At least I’m out of the property market, that’s all I can say.

  671. >we won’t really be advanced societies in quite the same way after we’ve done it

    But that’s just the point, Adrian. We CAN’T go on as we are. The Hezzies lob missiles into cities and you make excuses for them. The official publishing house of the Presbyterian Church (USA) has just printed a new book about Sept. 11 that accuses Bush of carrying out the attacks as a pretext for expanding America’s “demonic” imperial power.

    In Iraq and Afghanistan, America is conducting the first war we’ve ever fought with absolutely no celebrated war heroes, because the media won’t celebrate any, in between stories about Brad and Jennifer. The only thing the media wants to show is pictures of coffins.

    I mentioned, in a previous post, Hollywood and Theo Van Gogh. Do you think there are going to be any studio movies about Van Gogh’s murder coming out next year? Or Pim Fortuyn’s? Me neither. It took them five years to come out with a 9/11 movie, if you don’t count Michael Moore.

    Our entire intellectual and artistic class is caught up in ‘treason chic’ at a time when we are facing a real enemy, an enemy with the same basic ideology as the Nazis, only without the firepower, yet.

    Earlier I asked why anyone should take the Christians seriously, given that no one has any reason to fear the consequences of insulting them. The same basic issue applies to our own internal relationship with the Western intelligentsia.

    Western pointy-heads like Noam Chomsky can become international celebrities speaking the most outrageous calumny of the US, and then hide behind the First Amendment. The New York Times publishes leaked info about secret surveillance on international bank transfers, a program that the Times admits violated no American’s right to privacy, and there is no punishment. Not even a fine.

    We have reached the point where important battlefield victories can be reversed on the television screen, to the profound detriment of our security, our very lives. And most of the talking heads on Western television screens are on the side of the enemy. They are propagandists for Osama.

    I don’t think they do it because they are evil, precisely.

    They do it because they want to feel superior. They do it because there is a certain delicious excitement to thumbing your nose at The Man, especially when you know it’s SAFE. They do it because they can only see evil among our own. Non-Western evil just doesn’t compute for them. When they see it they call it “Blowback.”

    But they are going to have to stop. And since they won’t stop themselves, they are going to have to BE stopped. With violence and terror.

    I wish there was another way, but there just isn’t. We can’t go on as we are.

  672. The Hezzies lob missiles into cities and you make excuses for them.

    They’re using what they have to hand. I’m sorry, to me Israel is an ultra-agressive intruder in the region and I don’t believe they’re a template for anything happening elsewhere. Even if Hezbollah are thinking globally, they’re very much acting locally.

    The official publishing house of the Presbyterian Church (USA) has just printed a new book about Sept. 11 that accuses Bush of carrying out the attacks as a pretext for expanding America’s “demonic” imperial power.

    Not my fault, I’m afraid. America is as full of unbalanced consiracy types as anywhere. There’s a case for accusing Bush of some major negligence, mind.

    In Iraq and Afghanistan, America is conducting the first war we’ve ever fought with absolutely no celebrated war heroes, because the media won’t celebrate any, in between stories about Brad and Jennifer.

    Didn’t you read that thing I posted about asymmetric warfare, by Martin Creveld? There just isn’t that much that’s heroic about using high tech against low tech, it’s all about minimising your own casualties at almost any cost. The corrosive effect on the morale of the high tech side is very much a part of the problem.

    I mentioned, in a previous post, Hollywood and Theo Van Gogh. Do you think there are going to be any studio movies about Van Gogh’s murder coming out next year?

    It hardly needs a massive CGI budget. Why couldn’t independents make it? Mel might not be the best option after his recent pronouncements about Jews, but he can’t be the only one.

    Or Pim Fortuyn’s? Me neither.

    Would either of them make a good story? They seem like depressing scenes from something much larger.

    Narrative is quite important. Which is why the typical Hollywood thing is just easier, that list of films ESR produced that he’d like to see made a while ago notwithstanding.

    Earlier I asked why anyone should take the Christians seriously, given that no one has any reason to fear the consequences of insulting them.

    That’s not the only reason to take someone seriously. I don’t worry much about the consequences of insulting Bush, but he still seems to have his hands pretty near the levers of power, you know?

    We have reached the point where important battlefield victories can be reversed on the television screen, to the profound detriment of our security, our very lives.

    Which ones? The great American and Israeli success stories in Iraq and Lebanon?

    They do it because they can only see evil among our own. Non-Western evil just doesn’t compute for them. When they see it they call it “Blowback.”

    I think it’s about power/responsibility ratios, as I said.

    But they are going to have to stop. And since they won’t stop themselves, they are going to have to BE stopped. With violence and terror.

    Assassinating ol’ Noam probably isn’t going to be the most effective way of negating the message he’s conveying, I think you’ll find.

  673. Dean,

    Considering how closely the Reagan CIA worked with the mujahideen — enough to maintain an extensive database (arabic: al-qaeda) of militants they trained and supported — and considering G-Dub’s political pedigree and financial supporters — you will perhaps forgive me and adrian for not dismissing the demonic neocon agenda as readily as you do.

  674. Er, sorry, dismissing criticisms of the demonic neocon agenda.

    And yes, the adjective is imho appropriate. Supporting and funding thugs to manipulate the balance of power is about as demonic as an agnostic like me can envision.

  675. Adrian,
    >Assassinating ol’ Noam probably isn’t going to be the most effective way of negating the message he’s conveying

    I don’t think you should imagine that these Lefties have courage, moral or otherwise. They want to die easy and comfortable. They don’t want to die painful and ugly. If you murder a few dozen of them in a bloody and spectacular fashion, the rest will shut the fuck up.

    It works for the Islamozoids. It’ll work for us. We just need to be as ruthless and merciless as the Jihadis are.

  676. Dean, what you are repeatedly proposing is preposterous and, quite frankly, sickening. It really betrays the monstrosity that underpins the modern conservative thought — that we should fund thugs, give them our support and weapons and training, to execute our foreign policy abroad — and then when they decide that they have an agenda independent from U.S. interests, and better ways to exercise their capacity for aggression, respond with more thuggishness and brutality?

    I think that the Muslims will be far more resilient to that sort of tactic than you seem to give them credit for. They did, after all, win the Crusades…

  677. I said:

    Moreover, any US rescue effort would have involved the IDF, who would have killed everything that moved that looked even remotely Arab.

    esr responded:

    Eric, still want to take that position, considering the events of the last 5-6 weeks?

  678. I don’t think you should imagine that these Lefties have courage, moral or otherwise. They want to die easy and comfortable. They don’t want to die painful and ugly. If you murder a few dozen of them in a bloody and spectacular fashion, the rest will shut the fuck up.

    Even if you lower ol’ Noam into acid an inch at a time and put the result on YouTube, they’ll still just make a Hollywood movie about it and you’ll be right back where you started, but with less claim on the moral high ground.

    It works for the Islamozoids.

    Which ones, and when? It sort of “worked” for a few Central American countries, I’ll give you that.

    It’ll work for us. We just need to be as ruthless and merciless as the Jihadis are.

    I’d find somewhere private to discuss the details if I were you.

  679. I’m sorry, every time I hear one of you righties spout of about how surely THIS enemy is a relentless band of baby-killers, to a man, who will never listen to any “reason” not painted on the side of a bomb (you know, like the Spanish, the Kaiser, the Soviets… and we never did get to find out about the Japanese), I hear one droning voice:

    “Mandrake, your Commie has no respect for human life, not even his own.”

    Step one in the escalation of violence is to rationalize that your enemy is completely heartless, and you’ve done a fine job. Unfortunately, people like you have also done a fine job of ensuring that if there IS a legitimate grievance underneath all the admittedly ruthless violence, it’ll never be dealt with. And you’ll just keep hauling out every non-sequitur, straw man, and ad hominem attack you can think of against people who try to point out YOU IDIOTS HAVE MADE THIS MISTAKE BEFORE.

  680. Dean,

    about the islamization of Europe:

    This week I’ve been traveling to and fro throughout England, mostly for job interviews. And I can see a striking difference between the big cities and the small towns. You know, I’ve always been a city guy, always living in and travelling to cities. Never ever been more than a couple of days at place under one million inhabitants. Partly because in Hungary the enforcing of kolkhozes 50 years ago quite destroyed everything in the countriside that’s would worth living there. So it’s kind of my first encounter with the countryside way of living.

    And my impression is that you are right about the big cities. Right now I’m at Oxford and all I can see during the night is people trying to get cheap attention with funky clothes and hairstyles. Quite superficial.

    But the small towns are completely different. I think I’ll settle down in Wolverhampton, and I don’t really see any reason why would it ever be islamized. First, people don’t really have a deathwish. Living close to nature, close to history, with family, within communities and on a human scale is simply joyful, and what else you need to wish to live and to wish to have children but joy? City folks simply forgotten what genuine joy is all about. And on the other hand, I can see no possibilities of Islam ghettoes forming in small towns. People are not so tolerant in the countriside.

  681. Dean,

    about the impracticality of the “infinite ethical goal” I mentioned:

    throughout history, people generally had two typical approach towards morals and ethics: either didn’t care much about it, or have set up some rigid code of conduct. Now, there are three big problems about moral codes of what to do and what not to. First, such systems are always too stiff to let themselves easily adapted to the changing realities of life. Second, they tended to make people think they are righteous and bash others whom they thought are not. Third, and most importantly, all code is relative in it’s nature and therefore lacks a real answer of “why”, therefore people will just keep looking for backdoors to go around the code.

    Now, if you just point towards a direction instead of setting a realistic goal, all three problems can safely be avoided.

    The difference between social utopias and infinite ethical goals is that the utopians think they can reach it. The infinite ethical goal can never seriously considered to ever be reached. It’s not a goal, just a direction that goes on forever.

    In other words, it’s a kind of ethics where you never codify what to do and what not, but just rather try to define what your motivation should be and then decide what to do and what not yourself, as you see fit. See, it’s very flexible and never makes people feel too righteous, so therefore it is practical.

    In even other words, you can never bee a good man, because there are not absolute definitions for that. But you can keep trying to be better and better, without ever saying “now I’m righteous enough”, because the direction points towards infinity. It sets a motivation, without setting goals. No fixed goal, just a direction.

    Understand it now?

  682. Shenpen,
    >Understand it now?

    Your idea is, as I said, poetically beautiful. But I think you underestimate the consequence of the human capacity for self deception. Without hard and fast, rigid rules, people can believe anything they want.

    There is a British science fiction television series called Doctor Who. It has been running a LONG time and I grew up watching reruns on public broadcasting here in the States. There was one episode about a scientists who built a powerful robot, complete with a death-ray. The scientist programmed the robot to protect humanity, and to use the death-ray on anyone who threatened humanity.

    Naturally, the scientist was killed and the robot fell into the hands of criminals who used the robot to kill people by convincing the robot that its intended victims were “enemies of humanity.”

    I might well just be chauvinistic about this, but I have much greater expectations about the future of my United States, than I do about Great Britain. I acknowledge the ENORMOUS debt that America owes to England culturally and politically, but it seems to me that we have built a better civic architecture than they have.

    Specifically, the US has a written constitution. Certain things are allowed and others rigidly forbidden by our highest law. Britain has an unwritten constitution. There is simply a common understanding of what political life for the Queen’s subjects is supposed to be like. There are no definite rules about what the powers of Parliament shall be, or precisely how they will be exercised. There is only a general direction towards an ever greater fulfillment of ‘English liberty.’

    But there is no rigid code that prohibits Parliament from, say, abolishing British sovereignty bit by bit, subsuming the UK into the European Union, even over the objections of a majority of voters, if that is what the political elites think is best.

    We know better than the people.

    As much as most American Leftists might want to do something similar in the US, the wording of the Constitution just cannot be stretched that far. It is too rigid.

    And that, in my opinion, is our salvation.

    As to your hopefulness about rural Europe, I hope you are right. But I fear not.

    Cities, not bumpkin villages, created civilization in the first place. And cities ultimately define it. If the city-folk of a nation develop a genuine death wish, the bumpkins will simply be washed away in the tide.

  683. Dean,

    Your attachment to the neocon fantasy world amazes me. Your arguments concerning this country’s constitution would pack a lot more zorch if the present administration weren’t so actively ignoring and flouting its provisions with no apparent repercussions. You simply cannot conduct a policy of aggression the way the PNAC crowd wants to, and not contravene this nation’s codified founding principles — unless those principles are merely civic theater, something I am more and more inclined to believe is the case.

  684. “Your attachment to the neocon fantasy world amazes me”
    Good start…ridicule over reason.

    “Your arguments concerning this country’s constitution would pack a lot more zorch if the present administration…”
    Why is the validity of *Dean’s* argument dependent on the behaviour of others? Address *Dean’s* reasoning rather than ‘ad-hominizing’ things.

    “You simply cannot conduct a policy of aggression the way the PNAC crowd wants to, and not contravene this nation’s codified founding principles”
    Rather than leaving this as a non sequitur, how about qualifying this assertion? What founding/constitutional principal can you highlight that precludes our current mode of warfare?

    “…unless those principles are merely civic theater, something I am more and more inclined to believe is the case”
    Or perhaps other people are operating from a different basis of understanding to your own (a correct one, even?), and you are helpless to rationally counter them, so resort to waffly hand-wavey dismissals like “civic theater”?

    Dean – your brief commentary on Britain was darned astute ;-)

  685. Jeff Read:
    >Your attachment to the neocon fantasy world amazes me.

    My normal reaction to your last post would be ‘don’t feed the trolls,’ but since I have a minute, let me respond.

    For the record, I have not “become attached” the neo-con fantasy world. I am not a ventriloquist’s dummy, or a parrot, mouthing words I have heard from others. I have, on this very blog, in this very thread, made what you would call neo-con arguments, which I have not heard elsewhere, and which I would be willing to bet serious money that YOU have not heard elsewhere.

    If there is, in fact, a Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy, a neo-con cabal, out to take over the world according to the Protocols of the Elders of Straussianism, as it were, then I am part of the conspiracy. I am not Jewish, and I’m not that old, but I am one of the Elders of Zion, don’t you fucking doubt it.

    If you want to hate me, then that is your right. But it makes no sense for you to look down your nose at me, as if you are one of the enlightened cognoscenti, and I am a pitiable rube, with the wool pulled over my eyes. To be blunt, I’ve read all your posts and there is no way you’re smarter than I am.

    If you want to have a “who’s IQ is bigger” contest, then whip it out, dude. Any time you are ready. In the mean time, remember that, from your perspective, I have not been duped by the Evil Ones. Nor have I been paid off. Donald Rumsfeld has never sent me a dime. I merely observe the world and describe it as I see it. And my vision is as clear as that of anyone you’ve ever met.

    I meant it when I said that I, an internet nobody, am fully competent to take on any thinker your side can muster in a fair debate. I am well informed, thoughtful, and sharp as a tack. I have never read or listened to a modern Lefty who is my equal. If you have one, then bring him on.

    If a fascist is someone who is winning an argument with a liberal, then I am the biggest fascist you’ve ever met.

    P. S.
    Dan Kane:
    >Dean – your brief commentary on Britain was darned astute ;-)
    Thanks for the compliment. But be careful; too many of those and I might get a swelled head. ;-)

  686. Dan Kane,

    No ridicule was intended; I really am amazed that a seemingly intelligent, levelheaded guy would advocate such monstrous and horrific things. I also kind of admire him for coming right out and saying that he thinks terrorism is an option the U.S. military should exercise in order to combat the problem of terrorists. Lots of neocons believe this, of course, but they spin it with buzzphrases like “shock and awe”.

    The validity of Dean’s argument is undermined by the actions of the Bush administration simply because a law is no good if not enforced. A government which gets away with breaking the hard and fast rules under which it is ostensibly incorporated to operate is for all intents and purposes no different than a government which rules arbitrarily. As for specific constitutional violations, we could start with the PATRIOT act, work our way through illegal unwarranted wiretaps, and end up somewhere around secret torture camps. But given the documented attitudes of the kind of people currently running this country and prosecuting the war on terror, these details shouldn’t be surprising.

    And again, there’s the whole issue of Reagan-era covert ops funding and arming the mujahideen, only to have the thuggishness of “our son of a bitches” blow back in our face come the end of the Cold War, necessitating (in the neocon view) retailiation with more thuggishness. This kind of foreign policy, while it may not violate the letter of the Constitution, runs afoul of the spirit of all men created equal, endowed with inalienable rights to life, liberty, yadda yadda yadda. Then again we’ve been running afoul of that ideal from the beginning.

  687. >[Dean] thinks terrorism is an option the U.S. military should exercise in order to combat the problem of terrorists.

    For the record, I never said that the US military should engage in terrorism. If you will scroll up a few inches, you will see that I said that Western terrorism would be the inevitable result of a Leftist approach to (not really) fighting Islamic extremism. I said it would be conducted by freelancers, not soldiers. They might be murdering on the government’s dime, but they would not be enlisted in the Armed Forces. The Uniform Code of Military Justice prohibits exactly the kinds of horrific acts which Western terrorists would be engaged in.

    And Jeff, if you are going to claim I said something I didn’t, then you should wait until esr starts a new thread. That way, people will at least have to click on this thread in order to find out what I actually said. As it stands now, all they have to do is scroll upwards. It kind of makes slander an exercise in futility, don’t you think?

  688. Dean,

    I must have misread your argument. But if you s/military/government/ above then you have a plausible account of how your statements might be taken. From your tone you seemed to imply that terrorism is what should be done by Western governments to stave off the encroaching Islamic juggernaut.

    Where you and I are in 100% agreement is that that is exactly what will be done. The tragic thing is that “funding, with plausible deniability, the necessary mayhem” is exactly how we got the Islamic “terrorist” problem in the first place (and we did it the first time around to fight the lefties, remember?); I really don’t see how more of the same will fix the problem instead of making it worse.

  689. Dean,

    on constitutions and other written rules: for example, the constitution Stalin given to the SU was quite a humane and nice one, promising a lot on human rights and autonomies etc. Actually, it was so modern and nice that some large parts of it are still used in the Hungarian constitution right now just because there was no need to change them, they fit a democratic society just well. And yet, this constitution did not cause any difficulty for Stalin for killing tens of millions as about every letter of it was very simply ignored and not used in practice. Therefore I tend to be a bit suspicious of relying on written rules. I think strong democtratic traditions, hardwired in the very instincts of the people can be a stronger foundation to build on.

  690. >I really don’t see how more of the same will fix the problem instead of making it worse.

    Jeff, It WON’T fix the problem. It WILL make it worse. That too, is my argument. I am not saying that Western terrorism will be a good thing. It will be an evil thing. I am saying that it will be necessary to our survival.

    The reason it will be necessary to our survival is because, at present, people who want to pull out of Iraq and do nothing useful on the domestic front (wiretaps and such) to prevent the next terrorist attack, define the Democratic Party in the US. And the Republicans are so muddle-headed and incompetent that the Dems cannot be kept out of office forever. Therefore Leftist policies will sooner or later be pursued, with tragic consequences for Americans.

    Those tragic consequences will produce a reaction which will include the mayhem I described.

    If you really thought, that I thought, that Western terrorism would make things better, I want to be as clear as possible. Extremely evil things will be done to save Western Civilization in the future, because the Left will not allow less evil, but effective things to be done to strengthen the West in the present.

    Forget about the Patriot Act and all the domestic stuff for a minute. Wars are not ultimately won by defense. If the Left would just actively support Bush’s efforts to take the War to the enemy, to make the Jihadis play defense, things would be a thousand times better.

    Islamic terrorism is, I will admit, a difficult thing to reconcile with civil liberties. This is because the terrorists are not combatants in a conventional war. They wear no uniforms, they maintain no front lines that can be attacked. They behave in many ways like criminals. And criminals must be given their day in court.

    But terrorists are not criminals. Criminals generally have limited goals. They want to steal money and flout the laws of the state. They do not seek, in any concerted way, to overthrow the state. Islamic terrorists do. For this reason they must be treated differently from criminals.

    The criminal justice system in Western countries assumes that there will be a large amount of crime. The purpose of the police and court system is to keep it down to a dull roar. Not to stamp it out altogether. This is why the cops show up after a crime has been committed. They do not attempt widespread prevention.

    Stamping out private crime, which is routinely done in dictatorships, requires the use of methods which are incompatible with Western concepts of civil liberty. Criminals must be treated brutally. There must be no probable cause for arrests. Suspects should be held incommunicado and, if it looks like it might prove useful, tortured. There must be no right to face accusers at trial, no right to a speedy trial, and perhaps no trial at all. You just disappear, permanently.

    These things are done for two purposes:
    1. To insure that the state always has better information about the activities of criminals than the criminals have about the state
    2. To inspire TERROR, in the minds of the populace, of the prospect of engaging in criminal behavior, or of aiding those who do.

    The American justice system is designed to make it particularly difficult to convict a person of a criminal act, unless there is overwhelming evidence of guilt. Thomas Jefferson famously said that it is better for 100 guilty men to go free, than for 1 innocent man to go to prison. The American system is designed to produce false negatives (not guilty verdicts) over false positives.

    And when you are talking about knuckleheads who go around knocking over convenience stores to feed their drug habit, that works reasonably well. But Islamic terrorists are freelancers who see themselves as part of a global effort to establish a worldwide Caliphate. They do not obtain their orders from a central headquarters, but their acts are loosely coordinated, in that they all seek the same ultimate POLITICAL goal.

    Terrorists seek to accomplish what armies accomplish, without falling prey to the weaknesses that conventional armies must cope with. Terrorists don’t abide by the Geneva Conventions, though the Supreme Court now says they must benefit from them. They don’t wear uniforms or mass in large infantry formations which can be shot to pieces by American helicopter gunships.

    The lesson of the first Gulf War, for serious anti-Americans everywhere, is that you can’t beat America in a conventional war. Saddam had a pretty good World War One style army. It was Arab, and Arabs tend to lose wars against other peoples, but Saddam’s army was still fearsome by conventional standards. And it was completely routed by the Coalition in 100 hours. Not 100 days. One hundred hours.

    No one has ever done conventional war better than the United States government can presently do it. Taking on the US military using conventional means is suicide. What makes terrorists different from criminals is that terrorists seek to achieve military goals, while avoiding military vulnerabilities.

    For this reason they pose a PROFOUND challenge to our notions of civil liberties. Terrorist acts cannot simply be policed. They have to be prevented. Doing so will ultimately require the use of techniques to which dictatorships avail themselves to stamp out private crime altogether. I can understand if you do not want to see the US government make use of those techniques. It would set a VERY bad precedent.

    But, if you want to prevent that, then for God’s sake take the gloves off when it comes to dealing with foreigners. Allow us to make joining al Qaeda look like a stupid move. Invade whatever countries are necessary to force those bastards to step lively. Make THEM live in fear. Fear of being caught. Fear of being killed. Let us hound them relentlessly, mercilessly, effectively.

    But the Left, at present, doesn’t want the US government to take any serious preventative action on US soil, and it doesn’t want us to do anything truly terrifying to the terrorists abroad. It talks ceaselessly about ‘blowback’ and how we deserve terrorist attacks. The Left wants to use the Law to hobble our efforts to stop these murderers, not empower them.

    I believe it was Prime Minister Gladstone who said that “Good laws make it easier to do right.” The horrible thing about the modern Left is that they want to use the Law to make it easier and safer to do monstrous wrong, and impossible to do right.

    Thus, to the degree that the Left is effective in its efforts, we will inevitably reach a point wherein the people will no longer trust the Law to protect them. Then they will support the use of extra-legal means to fight Islamic terror. Those extra-legal means will not only not be good, they will be horribly evil, and with pernicious long term consequences.

    But they will happen, not because they must in any absolute sense, but because the Left has a death wish, and wants to take the rest of us with them when they go. In the 20th century, the Left, which above all desires power, discovered that it simply could not rule competently. No Communist nation can stand up to a capitalist one in the long run, militarily. Therefore the Communist dream of world domination can never come true.

    The Left has decided that if they cannot rule the world, then let it burn.

  691. Jeff, I implore you, along with all other Leftists everywhere, to give up on the death wish.

    Give up on the pursuit of political power. Give up on the Egypt of the Pharaohs. Stop admiring Fidel Castro. Smother that malicious gleam that appears in your eye when you turn on the news and learn that the Jihadis have once again confounded the US government.

    Pace Obi Wan Kenobi, you have embraced the Dark Side of the Force. But I urge you to renounce the desire to rule others and rejoin the family of civilized men.

    You don’t have to be the master in order to be ENOUGH. You don’t have to be Lenin or Pol Pot. You can be Shakespeare or Kipling. I’m not saying it will be easy. Being Bill Shakespeare is HARD. You have to really, really, really work at it. Whereas being Lenin requires no real effort, merely imaginative ruthlessness.

    But, after surveying the logic of materialism, I have concluded that there must be such a thing as a soul. Even if the mind is an illusion, there must be something to which the illusion is presenting itself. The words “I love you” MUST mean something.

    In the words of the Russell Crowe character Maximus in the movie ‘Gladiator,’ “What we do in life, echoes in eternity.”

    Putting in the necessary effort to be Shakespeare or Kipling is worth it, even if you fail. Being Good is worthwhile, regardless of the existential outcome.

    If you give in to evil, and seek to become Lenin, or an apologist and enabler of him, you may get power in this life. But I am convinced that there is some sense in which you will regret, forever, the tragic choice you made.

    And in any event, the power you gain through doing and supporting evil cannot last. You will ultimately die, and the monuments you build will crumble into dust. There will be no final Leftist victory. Jesus isn’t coming back to build the Workers Paradise.

    Therefore, you cannot continue to admire Fidel and live. I urge you, therefore, to renounce Fidel and embrace life.

    You don’t have to order people about in order to have a good life. Accept the rule of the sensible ordinary schmuck, be grateful for his enormous generosity, and be his helper.

    The Left has embraced Islam because ‘Islam’ means submission, and Leftists want to see the ordinary schmuck forced to submit. But it is we, the intellectuals, who should submit.

    Milton’s Mephistopheles is wrong. It IS better to serve in Heaven than to rule in Hell.

    As long as you remain committed to ruling the human race, or destroying it, than I remain your enemy. But you are the arbiter of your own fate. You can come back. You can be a force for Good in this world.

    Please choose Life. For all its attendant paradoxes and heartbreak, it is worth it.

  692. Let us hound them relentlessly, mercilessly, effectively.

    With *Bush* in charge?

    Invade whatever countries are necessary to force those bastards to step lively.

    Hey, the boy has two more years and a fevered gleam in his eye about Iran. You may get your wish. Hope you like it. But those of us who are expecting a clusterfuck of truly epic proportions will not be kind when you try to blame it on the life-denying cynicism of Internet nobodies and Democrats.

  693. “…But those of us who are expecting a clusterfuck of truly epic proportions will not be kind…”
    Damned if ya do, damned if ya don’t, I guess *shrug*

    I imagine those of you that expect such things will derive much ego-preening pleasure from the inevitable failures…yet you will remain barren of any productive contributions.

    You may point and laugh and slap each others’ backs at the sight of a stumblebum making his way through the icy winter weather to fetch firewood…but at least he has a warm house.

  694. Damned if ya do, damned if ya don’t, I guess *shrug*

    Mainly if you do – the current thinking is that the “don’t” option isn’t going to be exercised, on account of it smells of Chamberlain.

    I imagine those of you that expect such things will derive much ego-preening pleasure from the inevitable failures

    It ain’t going to be that satisfying. I mean, are there any conceivable circumstances under which you would acknowledge that we’d been right? No *way*, you’d shoot yourselves first. Our own knowledge that we had been is probably going to have some of the shine taken off it by the impact the results have on our own lives.

    You may point and laugh and slap each others’ backs at the sight of a stumblebum making his way through the icy winter weather to fetch firewood…but at least he has a warm house.

    Only ‘cos one end of it’s on fire.

  695. >are there any conceivable circumstances under which you would acknowledge that we’d been right?

    Adrian, you have said that you are not on the side of Western Civilization in this conflict. You take a ‘pox on both their houses’ position on the West VS Islam. I must ask you then, on who’s house do you not wish a pox?

    If you want us to acknowledge, under some circumstances, that you were right, what would those circumstances be?

    Who do you wish to see win this war? Would you like to see a resurrection of serious Marxism? What outcome would satisfy you? I ask in all seriousness.

    I will happily acknowledge that you were right under the following conditions:
    1. You name a Grand Strategic objective, an overall goal.
    2. You explain why your objective would be a better outcome for the future of humanity than the triumph of either the West or Islam.
    3. You put forth a program for achieving the objective.
    4. You either successfully enact the program, or demonstrate that if the program had been enacted, that the result would have been superior to what actually took place.

    Is there any chance you will do any of that?

  696. Just to demonstrate that I am a serious man, I will attempt to meet my challenge to Adrian.

    1. I want to see Western Civilization, defined as the cultural fusion of Judaic religious and moral views with Greek philosophy, sweep across the Earth and envelope all of Mankind.

    2. I believe that only the West can create free societies in which the ordinary schmuck gets a fair shake in life. I value such societies above all other social models, and therefore I believe that a complete triumph of the West would be the best outcome for the overwhelming majority of the human race.

    3. I want to see Western values, such as popular sovereignty, rule of law, individual rights, political equality for men and women, jury trials, freedom of speech, religion and assembly, and so forth spread to all nations. I am happy to see this transition take place peaceably if possible. I do not insist that any nation embrace those institutions at gunpoint UNLESS that nation has threatened a Western nation first. Then, if it is expedient to do so, the gloves should come off and all necessary force should be used to impose Western values and institutions.

    4. As for implementing my program, I’m doing what I can. I’ll let you know how it goes.

    So, Adrian. What do you got?

  697. I think it’s too short of a definition of Western Civilization. What surely needs to be added is the legal system derived from the Frank and Roman laws and all the work of the Enlightement, and, most importantly, capitalism, because as money is closely connected woth power, and therefore different systems of trade result in different socio-political establishments. There are two problems with your strategy. First, it looks damn hard to export the results of thousands of years of development of thinking to people whose roots are completely different. The second and larger problem is capitalism. I recently realized that capitalism is not just a culture-neutral optimally decentralized way of making economic decisions. To the opposite, it’s deeply rooted in Protestant and Jewish way of thinking. WIthout such traditions, it’s almost impossible to install capitalism as we know it and therefore install the Western type of social-economic structure.

    Therefore I’d like to suggest and alternative strategy. Arabs are quite pride-driven. Islam had a great age where science, mathematics and construction was very developed. Not only we tend to forget that the very concepts of algebra,algorythms etc. were invented by Arabs – they themselves forgotten it as well. Therefore, we should somehow make the Arabs to channel their pride in rediscovering their great scientific age and rejuvenating it. Like, young folks studying computer science hard with the motivation “I want to prove myself a worthy descendant of Al-Khowarizmi” and so on. Help them rediscover this glorious part of their past and thus channel their pride and interest in science and technology. Try to turn their mindset into a “If we cannot beat the white blokes, we shall try to outcompete them in science and tech – after all, we did that very successfully in the Middle Ages” way of thinking.

  698. “…I mean, are there any conceivable circumstances under which you would acknowledge that we’d been right?…”
    Back atcha ;-)

  699. >Help them…channel their pride and interest in science and technology.

    Shenpen, you have once again come up with a poetically beautiful notion. However, I don’t think you can make someone want to be scientifically or intellectually competitive. The Japanese only decided to try and beat the West at capitalism, after they tried with all their hearts, and failed, to beat us at war.

    Right now, the Arabs have a pretty good claim to be beating us at war. They may not be winning every battle, but the tide is moving in their direction. Observe that after September 11th, the first thing that most Western political leaders did was to visit a mosque, in order to prove that they were not racists in blaming all Muslims for the attacks.

    Observe also people like Adrian, who are essentially an Islamic fifth column within the West. We have a few Muslim apostates on our side, of course. Mostly women. Hirsi Ali comes to mind. But overall their partisans in the West are MUCH more influential than our partisans within Islam.

    Shenpen, they don’t need to out-compete us. They believe that they can CONQUER us.

    Until that belief changes, your idea is just another beautiful dream which has no chance of coming true.

    And just to be really macabre, observe that the Japanese and German populations are declining. They lost the War. They gave up on being Conquerors. They tried to win on the peaceful field of Capitalism. But there they could not win conclusively, and even the victories they did achieve failed to satisfy. Their hearts are broken. They have decided to die.

    Liberals would have you believe that the Great Story of our time is the renewed Western Imperialism of the Bush Cabal. But that is nonsense. The truly extraordinary thing that is happening right now is the unprecedented decision, on the part of large, wealthy, free populations, not to reproduce themselves.

    I can understand giving up in despair, when one’s civilization has been conquered, or wracked by war or poverty or disease. But the people of Europe and Japan, virtually the entire West, outside of the Anglosphere, are committing civilizational suicide, are giving up in despair, despite having virtually everything that every people has dreamed of since the dawn of Man.

    They are rich. They are healthy. They are protected. They are free. And they want to die. And no one knows what to do about it. Most of the influential opinion leaders of our time don’t even think the matter is worth talking about.

    What is killing most of the West, in my opinion, is the logic of materialism. And that logic flows from the bosom of science. That is why your dream, of having the Arabs renounce conquest, and embrace scientific competition, can never come true, Shenpen.

    To truly embrace science in the modern era, one must embrace secularism. There is no scientific evidence for the existence of God, or a human soul. Science views human spiritual immortality, indeed the idea of the human spirit itself, as a bunch of superstitious nonsense.

    We make fun (well, some of us do) of the Jihadi’s belief that if he blows himself up killing Infidels, that he will get to spend eternity in Heaven, puncturing the hymens of 72 perpetual virgins. But this belief is merely a symptom of how sexually screwed up the typical young Arab Muslim man is.

    The idea of Heaven itself is not ridiculous. On the contrary, it provides millions of people with hope for the future. And without hope, most people find that life is not worth living.

    This is what is killing the secular West. And it will go on killing us, until we find a solution, or until we are all dead.

    But don’t expect the Arabs to voluntarily join us on our path to oblivion. They aren’t stupid, you know.

  700. If you want us to acknowledge, under some circumstances, that you were right, what would those circumstances be?

    You’re going all macro on me here, I was specifically talking about the consequences of an attack on Iran. The larger issue won’t be clear in our lifetimes, I shouldn’t think.

    I do not insist that any nation embrace those institutions at gunpoint UNLESS that nation has threatened a Western nation first.

    Or its president has muttered darkly that a Western nation *should be* wiped off the map, perhaps.

    Then, if it is expedient to do so, the gloves should come off and all necessary force should be used to impose Western values and institutions.

    Eh, if we’re going to argue about *expedience* we’ll be here all night.

  701. Dean,

    I have no idea why do you think peope who don’t want to bear children or don’t want to bear more than one, are actually wishing to die. To the contrary. People don’t want children because they want to enjoy life the most hedonistic way possible, without any duty, responsibility for a small one, or giving up financial freedom. So the problem is with the morals, the lack of community spirit, the feeling of duty towards one’s homeland, not a deathwish. It’s simply choosing a cabrio car over choosing a child. It’s hedonism, individualism, egoism, not deathwish.

    Actually there is a deathwish, but it does not manifest in the lack of childbearing, it rather manifests in complaining about heightened security measures.

    What really frightens me is this one: http://donklephant.com/2006/09/06/did-we-just-lose/

  702. Adrian,
    I enjoy your being here because you often say things I can riff on, but doesn’t it ever bother you that, while you are not a stupid man, you are profoundly unserious about the very serious topics we discuss here?

    I am not saying you shouldn’t post here. I’m just saying that if you look at Shenpen’s posts, or Eric Cowperthwaite’s, or mine, and compare them to yours, there is a significant difference. And I don’t just mean ideology. We attempt to seriously analyze, and you snark.

    If I were you, this difference in intellectual caliber of posting would make me want to step up. You should feel free to do as you wish, but I’m just sayin’.

  703. Shenpen,
    As a flesh and blood human being, you will inevitably die. There is no escape from the finality of your fate. However, your existence need not end entirely with your physical death. You can live on in the memory of others. But for this to happen, your CULTURE, or something very like it, must perpetuate itself.

    You can only live on, in any meaningful sense, in the memory of others if those others can understand what it would be like to BE you. There must be enough common cultural reference points between yourself and your posterity that they can identify with you.

    This is why, for instance, Abraham and Moses, Plato and Alexander, Caesar and Augustine, Aquinas and Newton, Jefferson and Locke, Lincoln and Edison, Einstein and Freud, Sinatra and Elvis are still alive, whereas innumerable worthy Aztec, Inca, Mayan and other civilized cultural leaders are dead, dead, dead.

    Their CULTURES did not survive, in any meaningful sense. We have no common reference points by which to identify with them. Thus they are no more.

    If you, as a Hungarian, wish to triumph over death, your Hungarian culture must survive. Otherwise you will have no posterity. Your physical death will truly mean The End.

    Thus is an insouciant attitude toward the end of your culture, expressed through a disinterest in reproducing, the ultimate form of death wish.

  704. Dean – how about substituting an active interest in preserving the *health* of our culture, for procreation? How many childless historical figures remain in our hearts & minds for their noble efforts? How many childless civilians live on in the collective memories of their communities/families because of the lengths they went to?

    What I’m getting at here is that I identify a kinda ‘posterity by proxy’ as being a legitimate non-deathwish alternative to bearing children…

  705. Dan Kane,
    >How many childless historical figures remain in our hearts & minds for their noble efforts?

    This is indeed a great irony in the history of civilization. Many of those who have contributed the most to our cultural life, have done so through an obsessive monomania which precluded devoting any time to raising children.

    For those worthies who wrote great poems, built great temples, won great battles, or invented great new technologies, I grant a certain Papal dispensation.

    Near my house there is a section of roadway which used to be cordoned off for bicyclers. Then a new bike path was built for them, complete with an expensive bridge over an nearby lake, paid for with taxpayer’s money. Most local bicyclers now use the new path, and the road is now available to automobile traffic. There are a few assholes on bikes, however, who insist on continuing to use the road because it is what they are accustomed to. This slows car traffic on that section of road, considerably.

    I do not like those inconsiderate bicyclists. I think they are jerks. But, from what I understand, Lance Armstrong used to do the same thing. He would, while training, ride out on the freeway on his bike and try to keep up with car and truck traffic, just to push his body to the limit. But Lance Armstrong is NOT an asshole. Do you know why?

    Because, according to Wikipedia, Lance Armstrong defended the honor of the United States by winning the Tour de France a record seven consecutive times from 1999 to 2005. These record-breaking feats were accomplished several years after brain and testicular surgery, and extensive chemotherapy in 1996, to treat testicular cancer that had metastasized to his brain and lungs. Armstrong’s domination of the event prompted many Americans to nickname the race the “Tour de Lance”.

    Lance Armstrong can therefore do whatever the fuck he wants, car traffic or no car traffic.

    If, however, you are a Western man with no extraordinary talents or capacities, it seems to me that you have an obligation to be a father, and to be the best father that you can. You should raise at least one child to be a patriotic citizen and a Good person.

    If you do not do this, then you have not entirely done your duty.

    That, for what it’s worth, is my opinion.

  706. In Adrian’s defense: he is unserious because I think he probably thinks what we mumble on the Internet on a site with a couple of thousands of daily hits at most is completely insignificant and we have zero chance to exert influence on what happens, so why take it seriously. Adrian, is that right?

    I myself don’t agree with it for two reasons. First, even if we cannot do a thing, these topics require quite a mental effort, so it’s a good challenge, practice, and also a good way to learn things from viewpoints of others. There ain’t much websites dealing with these issues with such a depth and quality of discussion. Second, I don’t buy into the idea that we are completely powerless. Modern society is much more similar to a network than to a pyramid. Half a year ago, I discovered a very good Hungarian folk-rock music band who published their songs over the Internet. ( http://www.vorosrebek.hu/hallgass.htm and don’t care about not understanding the language, just click on the headphone icons to listen to them). So I sent an e-mail to Richard Stallman because I’ve heard he is quite into Eastern European folk music. And he listened to them and even replied! So an average random Internet nobody can send a mail to a man like RMS and have his attention for half an hour or so! So, why would we be completely powerless? It is quite possible that if we manage to come up with any good ideas we CAN get the message to somebody who has the power to do things, and have his attention for a while, maybe even for long enough to make him do something. Why not?

  707. Dean,

    on death wish: I think you might be right – although a bit too idealistic – but there is a quite a big difference between wishing to die and just being ignorant about death because of short-sighted hedonism. Do you assume all the folks who drive at twice the speed limit wish to crash into a tree?… I think they just rather don’t know/ don’t care / hope it won’t happen / whatever.

  708. Lance may well be an asshole, regardless of his accomplishments ;-) He has, at least, secured his posterity, and shall become an ever increasingly abstract heroic legend to teach future generations about courage and determination. Nice way to be remembered…even for an asshole ;-)

    FWIW, I generally agree with your sentiments regarding raising patriotic Americans…it can indeed be seen as part of our duty as Americans to bolster and perpetuate our civilization and culture.

    Then again, there are Americans with “no extraordinary talents or capacities” that I think should weld their vaginas shut and lop off their bollocks…for the good of the future.

    If, for whatever personal reasons (biological, psychological or otherwise), ones decision is to refrain from having children, then it remains ones duty to reach out however one can to ensure that others’ follow ‘The Good Path’ and become worthy guardians of America’s future…or stay the fuck out of the way of the rest of us.

  709. Dean,

    “Many of those who have contributed the most to our cultural life, have done so through an obsessive monomania which precluded devoting any time to raising children.”

    Just a story. When I was 20 years old, a friend of mine wanted to convert me and therefore arranged a meeting with a Catholic priest-in-training of our age in a bar. The guy actually prove to be really bright. In our debate, I told him why don’t the Catholic priests marry, it’s just stupid. He asked me “If you have an all-important cause in your life for that you give everything, do you think you could be able to give the attention to your wife and children they deserve?…” And I had to admit he does have a point. (On the other hand, I would require every man of any kind of social/political/spiritual/economic power a certificate that they get laid at least once every two weeks as when they don’t do, the often become weeeeird… :-) )

  710. Dean,

    Actually, it’s interesting that even brightest of you – like you – use the word “America” when all other folks from Europe, Asia etc. would rather use the word “mankind”, “humanity”, “world”, etc. I mostly mean it about your 2:45 PM post, above by two. I understand that living in America might easily make one forget about the world, as America has such a high variety of cultures, ethnics, terrains, climates etc. that one might easily forget about the outer world as everything of interest can also be found within as well. But isn’t it dangerous? Doesn’t this make you vulnerable? Seems the reason 9/11 was such a shock even though the casualties cannot even be compared to that on the roads each year is that you found it surprising that danger can come from outside as well. I’ve read somewhere that for example when you channel-surf on any random TV in America you cannot even find a Canadian channel. This kind of isolation can prove dangerous, I think. If it’s true.

  711. Shenpen,
    >This kind of isolation can prove dangerous, I think. If it’s true.
    >The rest of the planet is an unfortunate growth on the arse of America… ;-)

    American isolationism is an inevitable product of our history. Most of our ancestors came here to get away from the World, the rest of Mankind.

    Virtually all European, most Asian, a goodly chunk of Hispanic, and unfortunately few African-Americans are here today because, ages ago, some ancestor of theirs living in a far off land, looked around and said to himself:
    “This place really sucks. I have to do all the hard work around here. I get paid shit and I have no real prospects for rising to a higher station in life, because my father was a poor schmuck just like me. Meanwhile, there are all these rich assholes who’ve never done a lick of work in their lives who get to boss me around just because their fathers were big-shots. I can’t take this shit no more. I’m getting the fuck out of here and going to America, and I ain’t never lookin’ back.”

    So, as a people, we don’t look back. As I said earlier, only one in six Americans has a passport.

    When I say this to you, please don’t take it personally, but most of us resent the world. Except for our intellectual elites, who hope to make us as passive and submissive as you are, in the Old Countries, we just don’t care about you all out there.

    We just want to mind our own business and make lots of money and fuck lots of pretty girls and eat lots of cheeseburgers and drive fast cars. And you fucking foreigners just won’t leave us alone. You keep starting big wars that we have to go and settle. Or you blow shit up or start killing one another for all manner of stupid reasons we will never understand, and we have to go put a stop to it.

    So, every few decades, there’s another war in Europe. And we go fix it. We had to drop nukes on Japan because they bombed Pearl Harbor, for some reason. And then the fuckin’ Commies started takin’ over countries right and left and we had to push them back before they took over the whole damn world and surrounded us.

    Now there’s fuckin’ batshit crazy assholes in Oilstan who are fuckin’ crashing airplanes into our buildings. So we gotta go step on them a bit until they cry ‘uncle.’

    We don’t want to do any of this shit. We wish all you fuckers would just settle down and watch some football. But you won’t stop making messes that we have to go and clean up.

    Shenpen, if the US were as engaged with the world as previous powers were, we would have the same Imperial ambitions that they did. Given our enormous wealth and power, the only reason we don’t have our soldiers stationed in your house to tell you what to do, is that we don’t give a fuck what you do, so long as you don’t bother us.

    Many citizens of the world find the American attitude profoundly insulting:
    “What do you mean, you don’t care what we do? We are important! We deserve to have you Yanks take us seriously! Pay attention to us!”

    If you are one of those world citizens who feel insulted by our parochial attitudes, allow me to apologize on behalf of my countrymen. We mean no disrespect. We just don’t fucking care. We came here to get away from the rest of you yahoos. We are not trying to insult you. We just don’t care.

    Please try to forgive us.

  712. Heh. This is understandable. Actually, I think America was more open a couple of decades ago, given the Soviet menace and the importance of the NATO at that time. (Now, the growing isolationism can also be considered advantageous to us: we don’t really have to be as much afraid of economic competition, because Americans have now quite less idea what people want to buy abroad than they had in the eighties. I mean, like, Wal-Mart closing down in Korea and Germany and so on.)

    But passive and submissive? Who? Where? Over here, nobody gets fined by not having a litter bag in their car, or an open bottle of booze, for that matter. Although pot is theoretically illegal, people practically never get into jail for a joint. People can buy porn magazines at every newspaper stand. They also can buy the booze and the cigarettes in any average grocery. Speed limits are higher. Enforced political correctness is somewhat lower (f.e. the cartoons in Jyllanden Posten). Medicine and medical drug licensing is generally more liberal than that of the FDA’s. Submissive? I don’t think so.

  713. Given our enormous wealth and power, the only reason we don’t have our soldiers stationed in your house to tell you what to do, is that we don’t give a fuck what you do, so long as you don’t bother us.

    There is another reason, which is that it isn’t economic. That’s really why Europe gave up its colonies (though in Britain’s case the US more or less told them to). Occupying countries full of angry people just ain’t profitable. Does Iraq look like a net win for the US treasury to you?

    Many citizens of the world find the American attitude profoundly insulting:
    “What do you mean, you don’t care what we do? We are important! We deserve to have you Yanks take us seriously! Pay attention to us!”

    It’s more to do with a fairly active and intrusive foreign policy on the part of your government, which you then excuse by asking if we’d rather have the Chinese in charge. I don’t care if some fatass rube thinks he’s an ubermensch ‘cos he was born in the US.

  714. People don’t want children because they want to enjoy life the most hedonistic way possible, without any duty, responsibility for a small one, or giving up financial freedom.

    If you read one of the Phillip Longman articles people were posting links to a while ago (this one is quite good), it’s probably more that children are more of a financial liability in an urban setting, and countries like Japan are really *bloody* urban now (there’s countryside, but it’s chock-full of elderlies). There are other factors – the government here reckons the increased insecurity brought on by the adoption of Anglo-Saxon working practices (ie being willing to fire people) is putting people off starting families, but I don’t know how much I trust that because there’s always someone looking for an excuse to bitch about imported Western fashions.

    Also, educated women have fewer kids. One of those tradeoffs you get from increased sexual equality, I guess. Dean likes to go on about cultural suicide as a result of failing to deal with America’s challenge, or some similar desperately unprovable idea, but he may be reading things into it.

  715. >Dean likes to go on about cultural suicide as a result of failing to deal with America’s challenge

    I’m not sure why I bother to reply to this, but for the record, I never said that the Western world is perishing because it fails to answer America’s challenge. America does not wish to pose ANY challenge to the world, or to the rest of the West. As a people, we are far too provincial to have any such ambitions.

    What is killing the West, and may one day kill America, is the challenge of materialism. Materialism tells us, with all of the scientific credibility in the world, that we ultimately have no future. And that we have no SPIRITUAL existence even now.

    If this were merely a crackpot allegation, it would, of course, be dismissed. But science is not crackpottery. ALL of the facts, and everything that we can logically infer from them, suggest that:
    1. There is no God who created us in His image.
    2. We have no souls, which form the source of our free will.
    3. Nothing, other than the ephemeral memory of our peers, will survive us after our deaths.
    4. Since there is no organ in the brain which could plausibly produce our faculty of free will, we don’t actually have such a faculty. Our sense that we do is an illusion, created by our brains, to serve the propagation of our genes. We are in fact puppets dancing on the strings of heredity and environment.
    5. There appears to be no reason WHY the universe exists or why we exist. We contain no ultimate Purpose. Existence just is and we just happened.
    6. As our lives mean nothing, our deaths will ultimately mean nothing. We will inevitably sink into oblivion and be forgotten.

    The more profoundly those eminently scientifically credible ideas permeate your consciousness, the less reason there seems to be for doing anything of consequence. One may party all night in search of pleasurable sensation, but to delay gratification in pursuit of accomplishment seems pointless.

    This is the syndrome that spells our doom, unless we can find a way out.

    I personally, have decided to believe, that if we hold on long enough, Something Will Turn Up. I have no proof of this. It is indistinguishable from a religious doctrine, though I think of myself as a secular man.

    But I have nothing better available to me. Do you?

  716. Further, just to recap all the stuff upon which I have bloviated endlessly in this thread, I have said that I hate the Western Left.

    But I do not hate them for buying into the logic of materialism and choosing to die. I have no right to tell you how to live, or even to live at all. Life in this world is full of paradox and heartache. If you choose to leave it behind, I am in no position to tell you that you are wrong.

    But God-dammit, there are those of us who still have hope, who wish to meet our profound challenges with courage and determination, who wish to meet our fate in a manner WORTHY of remembrance, even if remembrance is unlikely.

    The Left has decided, that not only do they wish to die, but they want to take the rest of us with them when they go. This is why they not only choose to be feckless about the threat of Islamic extremism themselves, but they insist that the rest of us follow suit, on penalty of being condemned as racists.

    This, on top of all their 20th century murders, is their final, unforgivable sin.

  717. Dean – Imagine that you are a singular God-like being, viewing the entirety of existence as one panorama.

    Among the vastness of unbounded energy and matter, perpetually flowing, dissipating, colliding, accreting, in an unknowing, unthinking pageant…there are animate beings, aware of their surroundings, some even aware of themselves, and capable of deriving what they consider pleasure from their existence.

    I suggest it is not *we* that have a purpose in life, but that *our lives* give purpose to existence as a whole, and it is a wonderous thing that (some of us) have the capacity to think beyond our mortality, and wish to provide an existence for future beings to plot their own adventures and augment life’s purpose.

    I’ll put the bong down now…

  718. …so I suppose you could say that I have settled on an answer to the ultimate question – The ‘meaning of life’ is to give purpose to reality

  719. We attempt to seriously analyze, and you snark.

    That’s just an excuse for not answering my points, that is.

    If I were you, this difference in intellectual caliber of posting would make me want to step up.

    It’s a question of the time required to do the background reading in a lot of the cases, but I have to admit that I feel a lot of it is building castles in the air – or maybe starting from the conclusions you want to reach and working backwards to create a plausible supporting structure.

    I’m not sure why I bother to reply to this, but for the record, I never said that the Western world is perishing because it fails to answer America’s challenge.

    It was a point you made about Japan and Germany, specifically.

    4. Since there is no organ in the brain which could plausibly produce our faculty of free will, we don’t actually have such a faculty. Our sense that we do is an illusion, created by our brains, to serve the propagation of our genes. We are in fact puppets dancing on the strings of heredity and environment.

    Kind of reductionist IMO. What you could say is that science has no usable model of how free will would work. Concluding that it doesn’t exist would be hasty – science may just not be ready to deal with it yet. Similarly with the soul. Has someone proven it doesn’t exist? No, they can just say for sure that if it does, they have pretty much no idea how, certain vague quantum mechanical speculations aside.

    I’d say “choose agnosticism”, but it’s clearly too wishy-washy for your needs.

    We contain no ultimate Purpose.

    Up to us to find it, I’d say. One at a time. If trying to rescue Western civ from the underappreciated beardy threat works for you, no reason why you shouldn’t go for it. But there may be some snarkery to be put up with (or perhaps dismissed as trolling).

  720. Adrian,
    >But there may be some snarkery to be put up with

    For the record, I don’t resent the snarkery. I have been known to engage in a little of it myself. Further, like those silly Christers we all love to ridicule, I suppose I still hope to rescue your soul from nihilism.

    I meant everything I said earlier. I hate the Left. And I consider you, at present, to be a Leftist. But I do not hate you, personally.

    You don’t have to let the Dark Side of the Force eat you. I have no faith in God, yet I can still look ahead with optimism and aspiration. And so can you.

    There IS such a thing as free will. None of us are trapped by destiny. There are lots more girls to fuck and money to make and burgers to eat and cars to drive. We can choose to enjoy them all.

    And, in the process, we can find meaning.

    I really do hope to see you step up, Adrian. And as long as you return here to comment, I will continue to engage with you, so as to encourage you to do so.

    Therefore, snark all you want.

  721. Dean says “There are a few assholes on bikes, however, who insist on continuing to use the road because it is what they are accustomed to.”

    No. We insist on continuing to use the road because it’s safer.

  722. Dean (and ESR): you may not like to hear this, but we can and should simply ignore terrorism. To be terrorized is to give them what they want. All war is ultimately about economics. Terrorists want to create, not deaths out of proportion to their numbers, but instead economic disruption out of proportion to the deaths they cause. We need to keep terrorism in perspective. We kill 50,000 people every year on American roads with automobiles. If islamic terrorists were behind that, you’d see a War on Driving. We kill 20,000 American each year with guns. If islamic terrorists were behind that, you’d see a War on Guns. Instead, islamic terrorists have killed about 200 Americans per year, averaged over the last 20 years. There’s no reason to think that number will increase substantially.

    We can and should ignore terrorism. We should spent lives and treasure countering it to the same extent as we do swimming pool deaths. Or do you think we need a War on Swimming Pools? They’re more dangerous than terrorists.

  723. Russell Nelson,
    >We can and should ignore terrorism.

    You’re absolutely right. And you know what else we should ignore? Murders. There were approximately 23,000 murders in the US in 1993, 18,200 in 1997, and 15,517 in 2000 (the latest year for which I could easily find statistics in Google). At no point in the last century was the murder rate up much over 10 murders per 100,000 people. This means that murder is statistically insignificant. There is no need to police it at all.

    At the risk of being snarky, snide, condescending and every other word you can think up for intellectually and morally snooty, may I ask, how many years did you spend in college? You have a graduate degree, don’t you? Because you just don’t get that kind of moral idiocy from a high school education.

    For the record, in my far from humble opinion, when crazed killers blow the legs off grannies, this is an instance of human evil. When someone dies in a car wreck, or an accidental shooting, or drowns in a swimming pool, this is a tragedy. It is not evil. And as for those Americans who get shot with guns on purpose, I would want to know how many of those were the victims of crime, and how many of those shootings were committed by crime victims defending themselves against criminals (women shooting potential rapists, for instance.)

    Except for bona fide public health concerns, and in some cases issues of financial liability, tragedy is none of the government’s business.
    “How small, of all that human hearts endure,
    That part which laws or kings can cause or cure!”
    – Samuel Johnson.

    But human evil, on the other hand, is precisely what the state is supposed to be keeping a lid on. Evil can never be eradicated, of course, because it is found in every human soul. But keeping the consequences of it down to a dull roar, is the principal responsibility of the state. Any state which refuses to even attempt to fulfill that role, deserves immediate regime change by any means necessary.

  724. Russell Nelson,
    >islamic terrorists have killed about 200 Americans per year, averaged over the last 20 years.
    >There’s no reason to think that number will increase substantially.

    There’s no reason at all? Pakistan has nuclear weapons. So does North Korea. Iran is in the process of getting them, and probably will. Hezbollah, an Iranian client, recently fired missiles into Israeli cities. Improvised explosive devices go off every day in Baghdad.

    The Left likes to talk about how Saddam had no WMDs, yet poison gas canisters have been found all over Iraq. And I mean that tens of thousands of them have been found. You never see that on the news, of course.

    Manufacturing nuclear weapons requires both extensive know-how, and high tech facilities, as well as fissionable material. Manufacturing nerve gas requires, at least, the high tech facilities.

    But biological weapons could, in theory, be produced by anyone who had the know-how, with the resources of a high school chemistry lab. It is not as if biological material is difficult to come by.

    The only reason that Manhattan did not go up in a mushroom cloud five years ago today, is that Osama lacked the means. He and his compatriots cannot be denied the means forever, even if the US government were ENTIRELY serious about denying them. And the US State Department, including much of our intelligence services, is much more interested in leaking information to the New York Times to make Bush look bad, than they could ever be about protecting Americans from mass murder.

    So, if we ignore terrorism, there is no reason to think that the number of terrorist murders might increase. Wait a minute. I’m being punk’d, aren’t I? No one could actually be stupid enough to believe that, so you must have just said it in order to bait me. OK, you got me.

    Good joke, man.

  725. Over at the Chicago Boyz blog, http://www.chicagoboyz.net/archives/004407.html
    there is a post from Steven Den Beste, as well as a comment from Shannon Love, which I think deserve a wider audience. Thus, in part, I will repost them here. I did not write either of these, and I am NOT seeking credit I don’t deserve. But each of these are worth a second read:

    Steven Den Beste:
    9/11 didn’t bring us together. It’s true that in the immediate aftermath of the event that we all felt sadness and rage. But not about the same things.

    Some of us felt sadness at the terrible loss of lives in New York and Washington and Pennsylvania, and rage at the killers.

    Others felt sadness at the terrible loss of life amongst those killed by America and its puppets over the decades, in South America and “Palestine” and Viet Nam, and rage at the blind self-centered Americans who had stood by without caring.

    We were all anguished. Some of us were anguished because we feared that there might be further and more devastating terrorist attacks against us. Others were anguished because they feared that this might inspire an entirely new round of bloody military aggression by America against innocent people around the world, and conversion of America into a police state.

    We all saw clearly. But some of us were looking in a different direction. Some of us clearly saw the remorseless and ruthless murderers behind the attack, and knew that they were our mortal enemies who would attack us again if they possibly could, no matter what we did. Others were looking inward, and saw what they viewed as an ugly need for revenge amongst Americans.

    We all vowed never again. Some of us vowed that we would do whatever it took to make sure that the terrorists didn’t strike us again. Others vowed that they would do whatever it took to make America stop doing all the evil things that had inspired the attack in the first place.

    The only consensus on 9/11 was that a terrible tragedy had occurred. There was no consensus as to who was truly responsible. And that is why within hours we began to hear, “Ask yourselves why they hate you.” They knew that America had brought this onto itself; deep down they knew that we deserved it.

    We all knew that reform was needed. Some of us thought it was the Arab/Islamic world which needed to reform. Others knew, deep down, that America was the true problem. To try to force reform onto the Arab world would be to renew the very mistakes which had caused the attack in the first place. And to even make the attempt would inspire more and more young Arab men to become terrorists against us, increasing the danger to us.

    Some of us felt that the “root cause” of this war was Arab failure, and Arab shame at their failure. The others knew that the “root cause” was American failure, and America’s refusal to feel shame at its failure.

    ————————————
    Here is the comment from Shannon Love:
    I think that the Left defaults to the blame American/Liberal-Democracies first argument because it is the only model of foreign relations that grants the articulate intellectual a central role in defining and solving the problem.

    Articulate intellectuals affect the world by influencing the beliefs and behaviors of others through various modes of communication. Western-intellectuals have the most influence within the western developed world itself. Therefore, they seek to define problems as arising from the past or present behavior of the west so that the obvious solution to the problem is to have intellectuals alter western behavior via their persuasive abilities.

    Defining problems as arising from factors internal to non-Western actors defines the problems in terms by which intellectuals will have little ability to influence events. For example, if aliens invaded tomorrow just because they felt like it, what role would articulate intellectuals play in the conflict? Their ability to manipulate public opinion would mean little. Look how small a role that they played in WWII.

    The Left’s model of the Cold War followed this template. I was taught in college that although Joseph Stalin was a paranoid mass-murdering psychopath on matters internal to the Soviet Union, when it came to foreign policy he metamorphosed into a calm, rational realist. It was only the paranoid and irrational behavior of the free-world that created the Cold War in the first place.

    Clearly, the intellectuals adopted this view based not on any empirical observations but on a desire to define the problem in such a way that they placed a central role in resolving it. If the Cold War arose primarily from Communist ideology and the internal dynamics of Communist states then nothing that Western intellectual said would have much impact on the course of the conflict. They would be reduced to the role of mere documenters and the conflict would continue until Communist lost their internal hold on power. (Which is what happened.)

    I think they pursue the same basic model for the same basic reasons in the War on Terror. If contemporary terrorism arises primarily from the actions of Western liberal-democracies then articulate intellectuals will play a central role in solving the problem by persuading us to change or evil ways. However, if the conflict arises primarily from factors internal to non-Western actors (right now, Islamic and Arabic societies) then intellectuals in the West will have little influence on the outcome.

    There is an old saying that when the only tool you have is a hammer, then every problem looks like a nail. The contemporary Left simply cannot contemplate major events in which their hammers aren’t needed.

  726. Dean, we manage to have both police and civil liberties. Every alert regarding airplanes rachets down our freedoms. What’s next? Naked flying? Handcuffing all airline passengers? Medically induced comas?

    Terrorism hasn’t grown in the last five years, but the terrorist industry is thriving.

    I mean…. look at our host, Eric Raymond. Self-proclaimed anarchist is all in favor of governments fighting a war. Now if THAT isn’t an over-reaction; if THAT isn’t being terrorized, I don’t know what terrorism means.

    I’d like to see a little more stiff upper lip and a little less quivering in the basement.

  727. Dean,

    If America didn’t arm and train the mujahideen who would later become al-Qaeda (the CIA “database” of their jihadist proteges);
    If George Bush did not strain really hard to “connect al-Qaeda to Iraq” as a pretext for the invasion of the latter;
    If the present administration did not employ torture, completely in contravention of the Geneva Conventions and of no use in gathering military intel;
    If our rights and freedoms weren’t being eroded by the PATRIOT Act and all its fell spawn;
    If this war didn’t just happen to take place in the middle of a global energy crisis, against nations which just happen to have some of the world’s largest proven reserves, waged by a nation which just happens to be the most energy-hungry, and with the most to lose in the aftermath of the peak;

    then maybe, just maybe, dismissing the left’s arguments as those of a bunch of self-hating, navel-gazing nihilists might be more effective.

    As it is, the left is banging the drum about a Constitution that the right feels it’s fit to ignore. The left is talking about human freedom, the right about “security”. (A particular Franklin quote comes to mind.) It’s a bit like trying to argue against global warming. Sure, Al Gore may be a political opportunist, but the inconvenient truth of which he speaks gets more and more scientific backing all the time. All of the relevant climatological data suggests that anthropogenic global warming is real, and there is no credible opposition to this theory. The iceberg that the anti-Kyoto crowd stand on to make their case is (heh) melting under their feet.

    It’s the same with the War on Terra. The relevant evidence suggests that it was prosecuted by a bunch of incompetent miscreants just looking for an excuse to get their gun off. Whether or not Osama and Saddam were bad guys is, at this point, irrelevant; for we have responded in a manner which doesn’t befit good guys. If we want to try to be Superman, we have a lot more to lose from our mistakes.

  728. Just as a general comment: I admire the patience of the American Right. I mean, as far as I understand, yesterday was a day of grief and rememberance for you guys and I think your compatriots had two ethical choices yesterday: either to participate it in or to be silent about it. But by no means to insult the feelings of the normal majority. And despite that, when I go to Reddit, the 7th ranked link there, voted up to 409 points is “I am so tired of September 11th” ( http://www.easterwood.org/hmmn/?p=88 ) And this is Reddit, quite an elite forum, started by the LISP hacker community, so I can imagine what went on in the popular media and on the streets… So I actually admire you can put with so blatant examples of callousness with patience and restraint… Should something like that happen over here, I think there would be some violence on the streets or something like that. Not that I would approve of that, of course, but I can understand that people sometimes lose their patience when their feelings are brutally insulted. And yet, no reports are on the web that something like that happened over there, so likely it did not. Quite amazing, actually.

    Or maybe I’m wrong, in the sense that the web is not a statistical sample of the real world in such cases, because all the morally insane are now publishing only on the web and the weren’t similar cases in the popular media and on the streets?

  729. But by no means to insult the feelings of the normal majority.

    Looks like a really measured, inoffensive post to me – it even starts off “I’m sorry if this pisses you off”. Anyone whose feelings were brutally insulted by that needs to get out more.

  730. Dean,

    on the deathwish of the Left: I think you got too addicted to this one idea. I mean it has some truth to it, but this is a too one-sided and relative viewpoint. Whenever you have a general idea, it’s a good thing to try to exaggerate it ad infinitum, and if it turns out to be a reduction ad absurdum, then maybe it worths rethinking: something that does not yield itself to be taken to the total extremes, something that needs a compromise in it’s very center, must not be such a great idea after all. And if you take the idea of left-wing = death ad infinitum, what you will finally get is the completely ridiculous ideas of Baron Julius Evola and René Guénon: that humanity lived in the golden age of wizard-kings before written history and all of the written history is one of continuous slipping down into a society consisting of people who are not different from animals. This is the reductio ad absurdum, I think.

    I mean, left and right are quite relative. From a viewpoint of somebody like Lenin, soft left-liberals like Adrian10 would be considered hopelessly bourgois, right-wing traitors of the working classes. And from the viewpoint of a Catholic noble of the 15th century, or a loyal supporter of King George III, or even from a supporter of Franco, your very ideals would be considered left-wing, nihilistic, and have a characteristic of death wish.

    Throughout the last couple of centuries, there was a constant struggle between left and right-wing ideas, and generally, the left-wing won. A lot of things we all consider natural and accepted without question, like, women’s suffrage, have been quite left-wing ideas not so long ago. So should we consider that history does not go on and it was good to introduce left-wing ideas for centuries but we must stop it now, as now we are at an ideal compromise? This is just suspicious, it’s too easy to think our very age to be ideal (or that it was a couple of decades ago). It’s just too easy, you know.

    I think the struggle of left and right has always been one of between realism vs. potential. I mean whenever a left-wing guy sees a terrorist or a criminal, he sees the potential: “This man could have just have been normal had he been raised in civilized circumstances and access to enlightening education.” The right-wing guy thinks “Yeah, maybe, but NOW he is dangerous so we might need to use violence to restrain him.” It’s all about between potential and reality.

    I think both views are necessary. Without realism, we cannot solve the actual, short-term problems. Without a view on the potential, there is no long-term progress. This is actually not a new idea of mine. A couple of years ago, when I was a centre-left college kid – you know I’m just 28 – I actually thought “The best way would be if the left-wing would set the goals of the society and the right-wing would find the practical means to reach it.” And I think this is the most important thing ever occured to me. Too bad it’s impossible in reality. Yeah, I know, poetic beauty. Whatever…

    I agree than in the practical sense we need a bit more realism, therefore rightwingitude in the mainstream media, and in the public opinion. People need to understand that there are cases when negotiation is futile. But in the long run, it’s quite an overstatement to say the left-wing are ultimately, the forces of death. If they are so, why haven’t they been 50, 100, 300 yeares ago? So it just needs to be balanced.

    I can understand that you are shocked by f.e. Russ’s recent idea on terrorism vs. swimming pools but in the big picture, the ideas of both of you are necessary. Your ideas are necessary to keep reminding people of the importance of efficient defense – which is usually a good offense – and Russ’s ideas are necessary to remind people that a society of hundreds of millions must not put the defense against a threat that costed thousands of lives to the highest priority, to above all other concerns. I think if both views are present, what will be is a balanced, rational view: assigning high priority to defense, but not the highest. If the balance tilts in your way, the result will be paranoia, if the balance tilts in Russ’s way, the result will be moral passivity, the lack of understanding of human emotions and therefore a dangerous vulnerablity.

    And, most importantly, not letting it occupy all of our thoughts and mental resources. It’s simply not THAT important. Leave it to the defense professionals, the soldiers, the police, the airport security, the intelligence services.

    This is why I asked ESR repeatedly to stop blogging about terrorism, because it starting to get boring. I would be much more interested in a blog post analysing the IBM decision that all their products will be Open Source unless a good explanation can be found why not, than the topic of terrorism. Everything that could be told about terrorism was told by both sides. Now let’s go on some other interesting topic. There is no more meat on this bone. This topic managed to reduce the number of regular commenters from about 30-40 to about 5-8. Time to take a deep breath and go on to other interesting stuff.

  731. Shenpen,
    You may be right about us needing to find something else to talk about, other than terrorism.

    As to the Left = death wish thing, I do not think that Liberalism (the set of ideas that supported women’s suffrage) is necessarily suicidal. On the contrary, I think it has the potential to offer a better life for all human beings for all time. If you have the courage to take it seriously.

    My problem with the Modern Left, what I would term Progressive Liberalism, is that they don’t take Liberalism seriously. They basically believe that Liberalism is only for White people of Christian or Jewish descent. Everyone else should do whatever they want, and not only are they not bound to Liberalism, but Liberals are forbidden to criticize them! For a White Liberal to criticize a Black fascist or a Brown theocrat is racism!

    I support Liberalism for everybody.

    The Left supports Liberalism for liberals and cannibalism for cannibals.

    THAT is why the Left is, at present, a Western death cult. It need not be a death cult from any logical necessity. Just in its current incarnation.

  732. You are right in this thing but it’s a more general bias, not just a colour or culture bias. There is a term we often use in Hungary, and I can only translate it roughly: “double measure” or “double gauge”. Does that translation make sense? I’d be grateful if you could help me find the right English term for it. I mean it is about morally measuring different acts on different measures, scales, gauges. For example, when Günther Grass confessed that he was conscripted, therefore, forced to serve in the SS at the age of 18 and despite he did not commit any crimes of war, liberals consider it a horrible crime. But when everybody knows here that Demszky, the liberal major of Budapest was an active Maoist 30 years ago i.e. opposing the Commies from a position at even further left, demanding harder Commie rule like that of Mao, then oh, that’s just a little youthful indiscretion. It’s just considered a typical example of the natural rebeliiousness of the youth. I think the liberals over there have generally similar double measures, double gauges to morally measure acts. It’s not just a cultural bias, but a general bias. And it’s not very new either. For example, in the Spanish Civil War, lots of liberals both form the US and from Europe served on the so-called “Republican” side, backed by Stalin’s tanks, fighting against Franco’s troops backed by Hitler’s bombers. Why was it considered so evident that the side backed by Stalin is the righteous side? I think every sane liberal of the traditional sense must have had been neutral in that conflict, understanding that neither of the sides really wants to create a liberal democracy. And so on.

  733. Shenpen, the English term you’re looking for is “double standard”. You were close though.

  734. Shenpen, Reddit exemplifies the maxim (written, I believe, by the author of the ratpoison window manager) that “all the real elite programmers are wobblies”.

    It must be tough to be a conservative geek these days, especially when you hit up your favorite news site and find a laundry list of atrocities committed by “your side”, all modded up to the hilt…

  735. Jeff,

    …and also a laundry list of past atrocities by others, planned atrocities by others (Iran), and attempted atrocities by others thwarted by security measures. Why should this be seen as black and white? I could completely imagine a “geek opinion” that Bush’s approach to security is about as sophisticated as a stone club, but still better than the big fat nothing the Dems have to offer… Or something like that.

    While it’s good to take general, philosophical ideas to the utmost extremes to check if they still make sense, and therefore have a solid foundation, it’s more or less proven by game theory that in practical decisions usually mixed strategies work best. (Also there are plenty examples of that in soccer: Italy could only win the WC after they gave up on the too defensive “catanaccio” tactics and adopting a mixed one of offense and defense.)

    Is that a typical geek trait that practical decisions need to be taken to extremes: if Bush’s strategy is not the best possible strategy one could imagine, why does it mean it needs to be considered as the worst one?…

    Thinking deeper about it, yes, it is typical geek trait. I mean, for example, these Windows vs. Linux geek wars also make me ROTFL as it should be obvious that one should use both, for different tasks, to maximize efficiency and fun… It seems mixed strategies are not really for geeks…

    (Yes, I know it sounds like a contradiction that I advise taking philosophical ideas to the extremes but basing practical decisions on mixed strategies, but I think the most efficient approaches always contain such contradictions, as thinking verbally in a universe based on non-verbal logic, every sufficiently deep investigation of every problem must inevitably lead to contradictions. This might be the reason Niels Bohr chose “contraria sunt complementa” as his motto.)

  736. soft left-liberals like Adrian10

    Don’t be silly. Liberals care about *people*. I care about *systems*. People are in oversupply. But the market will sort it out.

  737. I’ve reading a bit back in this topic, about the discussion about capitalism and sustainaibility, and I think this also needs a balanced view.

    On one hand, it’s completely right to search for alternative systems of economy, as the current form of capitalism clearly has some faults. But until some real answer can be found, which is markedly different from the dysfunctional redistribution systems of the socialdemocracts or lilac dreams about a kibbutz system, leave capitalism alone as at least it works.

    What’s my problem with the current form of capitalism? Adam Smith wrote his ideas in an age when capitalism was inherently personal. People owned businesses and made decisions based both on market factors and on their personal beliefs, morality, religious ethics, patriotic solidarity and so on. Like, for example, railroad magnate Leland Stanford starting a university just purely out of altruism grewn from a grief felt for his dead son. It was a personal decision, he had his wealth and decided to something with it. Adam Smith put the concept of the invisible hand within in a sandbox within the limits of the personal beliefs, wishes and decisions of capitalists as people.

    But the current form of capitalism is highly impersonal. It’s alienated – sorry for borrowing a marxist term but I have to – not only from the workers, but also from the capitalists themselves. Capital became a natural force, like water, which always flows to the lowest areas. Those capitalist persons, who, for example, would say no to outsourcing due to patriotistic reasons simply do not exist anymore, decision makers are usually employees now, reporting to impersonal pension funds and other such organizations. Every kind of personality is removed from the system.

    From the viewpoint of the customer, the consumer, the system is working well. The stores are well-supplied and the prices are reasonable. Almost everybody can buy a Harley-Davidson if they wish to. The reason it is so, is that as capital became an impersonal force of nature, it’s inherent natural law is to gain profits by serving the customer – and nothing else.

    But we are not only consumers – this is the problem. We spend 8-10 hours a day as vendors, selling our work, and only a couple of hours shopping for goods or buying services. The original form of capitalism guaranteed that there will always be a balance between the customer and the vendor, that neither can exploit the other. The current form of capitalism favours only the customer. The reason it is so is that favouring the customer is the natural law of capitalism and it has always been so – $100 in money always worths more than $100 worth of goods, because if you have the money, you can choose from lots of goods, but if you have the goods, you can only choose to sell it for money except for the unlikely case of barter. This why if you buy a car then the next day it worths 90% of the price: the difference is the price of being able to make decisions. Therefore it’s natural that capitalism always favours the customer, but in the original form of capitalism it was balanced by personal decisions. For example, an owner of a business didn’t really want to exploit his vendor as he played golf with the owner of that business every Thursay and therefore wanted to be friendly. So the natural customer-favouring force of capitalism was balanced by old boys networks, patriotic solidarity and so on. Now, there is nothing to balance it. No more decisions made in golf clubs.

    So searching for alternatives is important. But the current alternatives, like welfare states, class struggle or communitarian utopias are clearly wrong, so until a reasonable alternative is found, let’s leave capitalism alone. At least it favours the customer. The current alternatives favour nobody in the long run.

  738. Shenpen,
    >The current alternatives favour nobody in the long run.

    At the risk of being nauseatingly repetitive, the alternatives do favor someone: the politically ambitious intellectual.

    Welfare states are run by bureaucrats. Class struggles are led by Lenin and Mao and Fidel. Communitarian utopias are ruled by Stalin and administered, on a day to day basis, by apparatchiks. It’s win-win-win!

    To be fair, what you said was that no one benefits IN THE LONG RUN. And this is certainly true. But, as the famous Progressive economist John Maynard Keynes pointed out, in the long run we’re all dead. Why worry about the future? Just enjoy your privileges in the moment. Screw your posterity. Maybe you don’t plan to even have any children.

    I am convinced that there is no escaping the connection between a desire to have an eloquent literate elite rule the state, and a death wish. This is why I say that Liberalism is not itself a death cult. One can be a Liberal without being an intellectual elitist. But one cannot be a Leftist, in a post Lenin world, without supporting Plato’s philosopher-king.

    But philosophers make the worst kings of all human types. Our egos are all wrapped up in our WORDS. We want to be listened to and taken seriously more than we want to be RIGHT, more than we want to actually get anything done. A Spartan society, ruled by soldiers, might at least win battles. A Papal society, ruled by priests, might at least save souls. A mercantile society, ruled by traders, at least increases wealth.

    When we run things, we torture and kill. First, we make big promises about how we are going to build a Paradise on earth, where none will suffer. Then, when the state is delivered into our hands, people begin to suffer on a scale unprecedented. This is the nature of the philosopher-king. This is why we should not be kings.

    What I am saying is only controversial because there are so many who refuse to believe it. There is no one alive today, who is paying attention, who does not KNOW it to be true.

    This is the ultimate reason why the Left is a death cult today. Leftists are no longer able to maintain the delusion that they could run the world better than the soldiers, the priests or the traders. They know that if they were put in charge, as they wish to be, the result would be catastrophe.

    So they have decided to embrace catastrophe. If they cannot rule the world, then let it end.

    To hell with the long run.

  739. “But, as the famous Progressive economist John Maynard Keynes pointed out, in the long run we’re all dead.”

    I did not know that man said such things. I tend to admire him for finding a solution to the Great Depression. But this remark is a perfect embodiment of the nihilism of our age – I mean, it’s the same as saying “… and to the hell with the next generation” …

    As for philosopher-kings, well, hm. I’m not really sure the Left wants a society ruled by philosopher-kings. I actually have no problem about Plato’s ideas (neither had Strauss, who really admired Plato’s writing The State). Real philosopher-kings like Shalamon (Solomon?) The Wise, Marcus Aurelius or Austrian Emperor John II (the “Hat-Wearing King”, as he was called, because he refused to be crowned because he wanted to progress beyong the feudal age) didn’t do much harm, they were rather beneficial. The Left as philosopher-kings?…

    It’s hard to imagine those philosophers like Sartre or Chomsky to actually rule anything. And it’s also hard to imagine politicians like Al Gore or Gerd Schröder who actually ruled or almost ruled to have any connection with any kind of real philosophy except as a markting tool.

    I suggest you to find a different metaphor.

  740. Shenpen,
    >I suggest you to find a different metaphor.

    I get your point about Marcus Aurelius. The desire of the Left is not to have an intellectual Messiah, so much as to be an intellectual ruling CLASS.

    The trouble is, I have never been able to find a metaphor for a Leftist intellectual aristocracy. It isn’t precisely an aristocracy, because it isn’t necessarily hereditary. One might use the term “Mandarin” to describe what I am talking about, but how many Westerners would recognize the reference?

    I have used “the Egypt of the Pharaohs,” but, upon hearing that, most people think of the clash between Moses and Ramses, or Cleopatra, not of the priestly elite who ran things in ancient Egypt on a day to day basis. I could say “Soviet,” but there have been so many Leftists lies spread about how life was in the Soviet Union, that most people wouldn’t get that reference, either.

    You are correct. I do need to find a new metaphor. But it’s not that easy. As soon as I find the right one, you’ll be the first to know.

  741. :-)

    Even the term “intellectual ruling class” is incorrect in some ways. If a leftie intellectual would be offered six months of total dicatureship – in the old Roman custom – to do what he will, he would, I think, get scared and not accept the position. They – the intellectuals, not the politicans – don’t want to rule. What they want is that when people vote and when politicans rule, listen to their ideas. They don’t want to rule themselves, just want their ideas implemented by those who rule. They want to be advisors, nothing more, I think.

    “One might use the term “Mandarin” to describe what I am talking about, but how many Westerners would recognize the reference?”

    The educated ones would. And as your ideas are unlikely to be the foundation of any popular propaganda or marketing, they’re being too sophisticated for that, you can allow yourself to care only about the educated ones. You can allow yourself the luxury of being understood only by a few.

    Mandarins, yeah, not bad. Brahmins. Shamans. Most likely shamans. The shaman, who is the guardian of the “ultimate” truth, but does not rule the tribe himself, but he is only an advisor to the tribal chief. And you know what? That’s all right. We need visionaries, we need people, who care about long-term progress. We need the Left. Truly so. Without them, we would be a society without dreams. That would be a sad society indeed. We only need to keep the visionaries in check, to make them not assume ultimate power.

    Therefore we also need tribal chiefs, who, being essentially warriors, listen only about one-third of the advices of the visionaries, which is a good, reasonable balance: two-third for practical, direct solutions of current problems, one-third for long-term vision and progress.

    And this is what we are lacking, the warrior-caste tribal chiefs. Not because they are macho or something like that. But because warriors, soldiers are who are always the most realistic, the most practical – they simply have to be so. Just as Orwell wrote, war and warrior thinking is more or less the only thing that keeps a society being realistic, because one can dream all day, but one cannot dream on the battlefield because he will be beaten. Not that I’d support wars, unless there is a really good cause. But I’d like to see people on the top who were trained in the sober realism of the military and use this kind of realism in civilian issues too.

    I personally like in discussions at my job to describe software development and business development issues in military terms, because the military way of thinking tends to be really realistic. I also surprised myself that the last time I went camping the majority of my equipment was from army surplus stores – I never really thought about that before. I just randomly bought stuff that looked like they will work. And it seems it’s mostly the military stuff that looks like working…

  742. Shenpen,
    >We need visionaries, we need people, who care about long-term progress. We need the Left.

    I completely agree with the first sentence. But I don’t agree that the Left, in its current incarnation, cares about long term progress. I believe that the old line Marxists, or at least some of them, truly believed that Heaven on Earth could be built through social activism and revolution.

    No serious person believes that anymore. Therefore, the Left is composed of people who only want to feel better about themselves. In the present. They are no longer interested in the future.

    To care about the future, Shenpen, you need HOPE. You need a vision of how the world of tomorrow will better meet your needs than the world of today. That vision is precisely what the Left lacks today.

    In my own country, the Left wing party is the Democrats. In the next election, and in 2008, the Democrats want to win. They want to win so they can surrender Iraq to our enemies, and possibly Afghanistan also.

    And then what?

    How do they plan to stop the next terrorist attack? What do they plan to do to engage Islamic fascism?

    Silence.

    Beyond terrorism, what do the Democrats plan to do about our retiree entitlement program? In the US, when you reach a certain age, you are entitled to receive a monthly stipend from the state, for the rest of your life, paid for by contributions from younger workers. The trouble is that when the post-WWII Baby Boom generation of retirees begins to collect this stipend en mass, there won’t be enough younger workers to pay the costs. As a European, I’m sure you are familiar with this problem.

    And what does the American Left want to do about it? The same as the European Left. Essentially nothing.

    What about the birth dearth? Middle class Western women don’t have enough children. Replacement rate is 2.1 children per woman. White Americans average 1.9. That is the healthiest White birth rate in the Western world. Only France and Britain match it. The Germans, Italians and Russians are between 1.1 and 1.3. They have no future.

    What do Democrats want to do about this? Ensure that government subsidized abortion on demand is available to all women, including 13 year old girls, without parental consent or even notification, for any reason or no reason at all.

    White American couples who are looking to adopt children go to China or Cambodia. There are virtually no white babies available to adopt, because the unwanted ones were all aborted.

    The long term future is not on the Leftist agenda. They are not looking to build their World of Tomorrow. They are not visionaries.

    At this moment, like Palestinian Nationalism, the Western Left is a death cult.

  743. Dean,

    these are short-term issues. All of them. Or medium-term, maybe. This is why I wrote before that the perfect configuration would be the Left creating the long-term vision and the Right finding the practical short-term policies. The practical short-term policy is to fight terrorism with as much force as it needs. But it’s good to have some people who believe that somewhere in the future all culture will understand each other, will live in peace and a united humanity will explore outer space (I don’t think we will leave this planet until we become one united culture. Would be too dangerous.) Of course these people shouldn’t have much influence on practical short-term policies. But it’s good to have them around, to remind us all that we should try search for ways to be able to do more than putting fires out.

    As for the age and pension problems, yes, and in Europe the answer seems to be immigration. I mean for example for me, settling down in the UK at the end of this month without having to ask for an explicit work permit, liberal immigration laws are favourabl. I should be glad about it and I am, actually. Intra-EU immigration looks like a good idea. The HR consultant who helped me get a job is from a Polish immigrant family, and his father fought gallantly in the British army at Monte Cassino. Later on many Polish immigrants, retired from the army, worked at the coal mines until Thatcher closed them down, due to some complaints about the ground sinking above the mines. (Yeah, conservatives can sometimes also make stupid decisions, like this one. How the fuck she meant to support the steel industry, therefore shipbuilding, therefore the Navy afterwards?…) So they integrated quite easly. I will also easily integrate if I don’t forget to bring a real coffee machine with me. (Attention all Angle-Saxons: real coffe is made by pressing pressurized steam through the coffee, not just by pouring hot water througout it. Everything else is just a cup of brown water which does not deserve to be called coffee :-) )

    But there a lot of immigrants from North Africa and the Middle East who are not easy to integrate and this is the most serious medium-term problem of the EU.

    It seems the answer in the US is similar: hispanic immigration. Actually you are in a lot luckier situation, I think those folks are a lot easier to integrate: they have no religious reasons or cultural reasons to hate you. Maybe they envy you for you wealth but that’s the very reason they immigrated, so I think this can easily be managed.

  744. (Dean, how comes that we are lots of timezones away, and we still tend to post at similar times? It’s 10PM here, I’m after the usual evening wine and it’s the usual time I browse the web before going to sleep.)

  745. Shenpen,
    >the answer seems to be immigration

    The problem with immigration, both in the US and, to a greater extent, in Europe, is that the Left actively opposes cultural assimilation. The Left endorses MultiCulturalism, which in the US means that Hispanics should not be encouraged to learn English or embrace Anglo-Saxon values, and in Europe means that Arab and North African Muslim immigrants should not be encouraged to learn the language of the European nation to which they have immigrated, nor to embrace ITS values.

    Immigration WITH assimilation would indeed be a transfusion into the West of valuable new blood. Immigration WITHOUT assimilation is simply a prescription for inevitable civil war. Immigration without assimilation combined with a low native birthrate is simply a recipe for the replacement of Western people with non-Westerners in formerly Western lands. Instead of assimilating immigrants, Europe will be assimilated by them.

    I don’t think the same fate will happen to the US. I don’t think that the United States will become the northern provinces of Mexico, but I do believe that the American Left wants to see that outcome, more or less. The American Left doesn’t WANT to be replaced when the current generation of Leftists die. They don’t want to be replaced with birthed children, hence all those abortions, and they don’t want their culture to be carried forth by adopted children, immigrants who become natives in spirit. They want to die and leave nothing behind.

    The environmentalists are always telling us that we are obligated to ‘tread lightly upon the Earth.’ The lightest way to tread is not to tread at all. The Left has looked into the deadlights of oblivion, and they want to be there.

    P. S. We post at the same time because I surf the Web at work, thereby lapsing in my duty to contribute to the American economy. ;-)

  746. > I personally, have decided to believe, that if we hold on long enough, Something Will Turn Up. I have no proof of this. It is indistinguishable from a religious doctrine, though I think of myself as a secular man.
    > But I have nothing better available to me. Do you?

    Thank goodness for Islamo-fascist-terrorism! That’ll give us a Purpose!

    Seriously, though, scientific exploration is a great purpose, improving the world in which we live is a great purpose, and yes, even working to accumulate enough money to buy that house on the hill is another purpose. All of these purposes will keep driving us forward.

    If atheism is so soul-crushing and destructive, why are atheists so greatly underrepresented in the prison system?

  747. Dean,

    Well, I there is one and only one really important cultural difference: people having more children than they can educate properly. This can both be tracked to hispanic Catholicism, to Islam, an to the fact that when there isn’t a functional pension system, raising 6-8 children, even if they are all poor, is a good pension investment. And the old customs die out too slowly, even when there is a functional pension system. And the problem is the subsidizing this behaviour. I think the whole welfare system needs to be rethinked. However, not necesarrily in the anarcho-libertarian low-taxes, low-spendings was, because then the state would lose an important tool of motication.

    Instead, rethinking the welfare system in way that it concentrates on motivation, instead of trying to be kind. For example, as high taxes as are now, but huge tax breaks for the children that regurarly attend school. Writing a kind of contract: huge tax breaks but only if the parents agree to send at least 3/4 of the children to college and having the repay the tax break if they fail to. And on the other hand, very low unemployment charity from the state. This would motivate people to 1) work 2) send their children to school 3) don’t have more children than they can educate to a college degree. Instead of paying welfare charities, use the tax to subsidize those companies who hire fresh grads. Use the tax to move people out of the ghettoes, as if people are more distributed, they assimiliate easier: use tax money to buy the ghetto flats on a higher than market price but only if the seller buys a flat outside the ghetto. And so on. To put it short, use the tax system to motivate people and to boost the economy, instead of just giving it away in charity. This system would be neither libertarian, I admit, but also not progressive, because it would use the tax to motivate, not just to redistribute. I think it would be a bit keynesian.

  748. Yeah, I hope it will convince ESR to drop this piece of a crap of a software that’s powering this page and install some real stuff, like Drupal…

  749. for muslim in mideast do
    if muslim=terrorist; then KILL
    done

    The problem with this code is that you are using an assignment rather than a comparison operator, therefore every muslim in the mideast will be branded a terrorist and then killed. This is a common mistake with both novice programmers as well as inept politicians, though with markedly different ramifications.

  750. Overloading this sluggish WordPress is the least we can do to pay homage to our host…Mr. Fancypants Celeb…who goes swanning off for ages swinging swords around like a prancing queen fairy tiddlekins.

    How dare he acknowledge any other reality than the one we lovingly craft for him within these pages? Of all the bloody cheek…

    ;-)

  751. Dean,

    I invite you to go one level deeper into these subjects. What is the FUNDAMENTAL difference between Left and Right? I think the difference is the reason, or the cause, of human suffering. Left way of thinking states that the conditions of the individual, determined by external forces, are the cause of suffering. The individual simply can’t help it. Even if he behave bad, it’s reaction to the conditons. The Right’s way of thinking is that suffering is usually self-inflicted. Often directly inflicted by the individual, and some other cases, it cannot be attributed to the individual directly, but the general suffering of a given kind of culture or subculture can be directly attributed to the general values held by or the general behaviour of the subculture. “If the blue one suffer, it’s because the blue ones behave bad”, it’s the general idea and yes, it is unjust in way as for example a child cannot really help being born blue. So it’s not really just to help hip responsible for his situation. But the point is, the reason we tend to believe in this general statement is that if we want to help the blue ones, we need to change their values and behaviour, because without it, all attempts of help are wasted.

    The viewpoint of the Left looks scientific. It can be nicely analysed that guy A did something and therefore guy B suffered. But I am not sure it is not a false science, because helping people without changing them usually failed, therefore people must be the major cause of their suffering themselves.

    The viewpoint of the Right I’m not sure has a scientific foundation, it’s rather religious. The Christian Right is basing it on the concept of the justice of Providence and I myself base it on the law of karma, which means (personal) cause and effect. Still, this viewpoint looks more practical.

    I think this fundamental question – whether suffering is self-inflicted or other-inflicted – won’t be solved for a long time. I think it is right in the basket of unsolvable questions, like other questions f.e. are psychedelic drugs harmful or beneficial.

    But at least recognizing this as a fundamental question explains some things. This is why the Right often looks too macho – because a vulgar interpretation of this question is “they are dirty because they want to so why pay respect and why feel compassion?” And this is why the Left often looks too traitorous – because a vulgar interpretation of this question is if there is suffering, and the sufferers are poor and we are rich, then we must be the bad guys, because suffering must be other-inflicted.

  752. Shenpen,
    >What is the FUNDAMENTAL difference between Left and Right?

    Classically, the difference between the Western Left and Right lies with the issue of original sin, or yetzer hera. If human nature is inherently good, then evil must have some external cause, e.g. society. If human nature comes with a built in predisposition toward evil, then immoral behavior, on the part of almost everyone, is inescapable.

    In this view, the Left judges institutions harshly, according to the degree to which they fall short of perfection. The Right judges institutions charitably, according to the degree that they elevate Man above a Hobbesian ‘state of nature,’ in which life for all is ‘solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.’

    The Left believes that people suffer, because of institutions which are not yet perfect. The Right believes that people suffer because of the inherent iniquity of both human nature and the universe itself.

    The Left believes that the ‘root cause’ of poverty is exploitation of the poor by the rich. The Right believes that poor people are poor because, for the most part, they, or their parents, made poor choices.

    The Left looks up and says: “With just a little more effort we can reach the stars.” The Right looks down and says: “If you people don’t quit fucking around with things, we could end up falling ALL the way down.”

    The Left holds that institutions should be organized to achieve Paradise on Earth. The Right holds that institutions should be organized to avoid Catastrophe on Earth.

    The Left believes that civilization is the product of a rational choice which ultimately transforms a person all the way down. The Right believes that civilization is a thin veneer cloaking the savage beast in each of our hearts.

    The Left implicitly assumes that vastly improved social results can be achieved through institutional reform. The Right asks: “When was there ever a reform that didn’t open up a new way to graft?”

    The Left believes you should love what is Best. The Right believes you should love what is Your Own.

    The Left believes that the most important virtue is Sincerity, that is, meaning, with all your heart, the things you say, at least for the moment. Conversely, the worst vice is Hypocrisy, that is, saying one thing while doing another.

    The Right believes that the most important virtue is Fidelity, that is, standing by your promises, doing what you say you will do. Conversely, the worst sin is Treason, that is, betraying your obligation to your own and to the promises you’ve made.

    The Left believes that if you want Peace, you must renounce war, setting a good example for your neighbors. The Right believes that if you want Peace, you must prepare for war, so that your neighbors will believe it dangerous to attack you.

    The Left hopes to abolish war and Man’s Inhumanity to Man. The Right suspects that the only thing holding back the evil in each of our hearts is fear. Fear of the martial prowess of those who we would harm, should we give into our evil nature. Therefore, according to the Right, those who pursue Peace through disarmament, setting a good example, INVITE war from evil men who seek to be predators upon the foolish.

    The Left believes that people hurt each other through ignorance and misunderstanding. The Right believes that people generally understand each other pretty well, and hurt each other because they want the profits promised by evil, more than they want the satisfaction of being Good.

    The modern Left has come to the conclusion that the most important thing is Self Esteem, to feel better about yourself in the moment. The Right remains convinced that survival over the long term is the paramount concern, even if you hate yourself. Better to be guilty and alive, than to be saintly and dead.

    The modern Left would rather be saintly, by its standards, and dead. And so, ultimately, it will be.

  753. The Left displays bumper stickers that say: “I am already opposed to the next war.”

    The Right quotes Lazarus Long saying: “You can have peace. Or you can have freedom. Don’t ever count on having both at once.”

  754. The Left seeks ultimate solutions to the problems that vex us.

    The Right agrees with Eric Hoffer that: “In human affairs every solution serves only to sharpen the problem, to show us more clearly what we are up against. There are no final solutions.”

    Therefore the Right seeks trade-offs, rather than solutions. The Right seeks the best outcome that can be achieved ‘under the circumstances.’ The Left seeks to triumph over circumstances. The essential disagreement between Left and Right, in practical terms, is whether ultimate victory over circumstances can be achieved.

    If it can be achieved, then we must pursue it with all haste, and by any means necessary. If it cannot be achieved, then that pursuit is nothing more than a waste of treasure and lives.

  755. The Christian Right believes that man, by himself, is incapable of achieving victory over circumstances. But, with the aid of Almighty God, such victory can be attained, in God’s own time.

    This is why Right-wing Christian women still bother to have children in large numbers. They have hope for the future.

    The Left, except for the academic crazies, accepts the evidence that has accumulated, which suggests that circumstances cannot ultimately be defeated. Murphy’s Law (if anything can go wrong, it will) is diamond hard, and we, with all of our glorious reasoning capacities, are soft clay. The sane Left accepts that we will never beat Murphy.

    But the Left also rejects the possibility that there is a God, who will one day crush Murphy on our behalf. Therefore all our achievements are pointless because “all we are is dust in the wind.”

    Therefore, to the degree that you are a committed Leftist, why would you be so vicious as to bring children into this world, bequeathing to them an existence without hope?

    Better just to go out to the club tonight and get really, really drunk. The future is for silly superstitious fools who believe in the unproven and improvable.

  756. I was born in 1970. What has changed for the Left in my lifetime is precisely that loss of essential hope. The Western Left is DEFINED by the belief that Man can pull himself up by his own bootstraps and achieve perfection on this Earth, through the use of reason.

    But except for a few wackos, no Leftist on Earth believes that any more. This is why the modern Left is ultimately hollow inside. They retain the shell of radical idealism, but without the core.

    Nowadays, the Left makes a great deal of noise, supporting this and opposing that, but there is a frantic poseur quality to their ministrations. They cough and sputter violently, like an engine that has spent almost all of its fuel and is now running on fumes.

    They used to bestride the intellectual world with power and might, setting the terms of the debate. Now they are reduced to making apologies for Muslims who blow shit up.

    The old Left would never have been a lackey for religious nutjobs. They used to have their own light, their own guiding star.

    But their light has gone out and, having found nothing to replace it, they have decided to embrace the darkness.

  757. The modern Left devotes its efforts to wish-fulfillment fantasies, such as that new British fictional documentary about the assassination of President Bush.
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_a_President

    As for a practical program to combat Islamic terror worldwide in the event that the Democrats were to capture the White House, they just haven’t got the time. They’ll work with the UN, or get France to help, or be nicer to Iran, or something. Trust them. It’ll work out fine.

    And it’s not as if they’ve ever lied to you before, is it?

    The Right is divided between:
    1. the stupid Ann Coulter types: “we should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity.” and
    2. the more nuanced or idealistic types who don’t really know exactly what to do, but believe we MUST do something.

    The Left, on the other hand, will continue making movies about killing Bush. That is their contribution to the debate.

  758. Jeff Read,
    >It’s a bit like trying to argue against global warming.

    I’m sorry for taking so long to respond to this point. I’ve been searching for the right words to say.

    For the record, I remain agnostic about global warming. I believe that the science isn’t conclusive, yet. Remember that as recently as the late 1970’s the same climatologists were warning of the impending Ice Age. Remember also the Club of Rome in the early 70’s warning us about resource depletion and how there would soon be famine throughout the Western world.

    But let us suppose that global warming is a reality. Let us suppose that the Earth is warming by a degree or so every century, and that human action is the cause of it, and that there will be climatological catastrophe at some point if it isn’t stopped.

    What would you have us do about it? Every political ideology is an attempt to coherently answer two questions:
    1. What should be decided? and
    2. Who should decide?

    Who does the ecological Left want to see placed in charge of all our fates? Why, the Leftist ecology professors, of course. And what would the Leftist ecology professors do if they had absolute power over us all? The same thing that Leftist dictators in the last century did. They would kill.

    They would secure their power by murdering innocents on a scale heretofore unprecedented. They would butcher literally more people than you can imagine.

    Now, suppose further that we gave the ecology professor all of our freedoms, in order that they might conquer global warming, assuming it exists. Would they in fact put an end to it? Of course not. Global warming would be the sole justification for their reign. If global warming were stopped, they might have to give up power, and answer for their horrendous crimes.

    No. They would not stop global warming even if they could. And there is serious doubt as to whether or not they could. Getting things done effectively is not what Leftist dictators are known for. The only thing that works efficiently in a Leftist dictatorship is the secret police. Activities like, say, growing food, tend to be subject to tragicomic levels of incompetence.

    And even if they stopped global warming, or if it turned out to be a hoax, do you honestly think those Leftists would ever give us back our liberty? Of course not. For as long as their hand could grasp a whip, we would feel the sting of it on our backs. Count on it.

    So, I am asked to choose between boiling to death as the oceans evaporate, or being the Leftists’ bitch for eternity. I can’t speak for the rest of Mankind, but I choose to cook.

    Fuck your global warming, assuming it exists.

  759. This, Jeff, is the ultimate reason why the Left seeks to die, in my opinion.

    In my last post, I argued that if the college professors were put in charge of us all, they’d murder a huge percentage of us right off the bat. If this were 1906, and I were to say such a thing, people would laugh at me. I would be considered ridiculous for harboring such absurd and macabre notions. But no one is laughing now, Jeff. Not even you.

    Because intellectual-supported megadeaths got to be so common in the 20th century, they were bordering on trendy. This is the ultimate answer to global warming, overpopulation, ozone depletion, pollution, desertification, the dying rain forest, species extinction and all of the other bogeymen the Left taunts us with.

    Even if it were proven, which it is not, that there is some grave environmental threat to us all, which the Right is, for whatever reason, ignoring, that would not justify giving the Left the power to solve it.

    It is not too late for you personally, Jeff. But it is too late for the Left. And to the degree that you are a committed Leftist, then in the name of all decent people everywhere who want to live, I say to you:
    “There is no problem that would best be solved by giving you political power. Whatever the problem is, if the solution involved making you a dictator, we’d be better off letting the problem run its course. Whatever the potential consequences of the problem, they wouldn’t be as bad as the consequences of putting you in charge to solve it.”

    And everybody know it.

    This is why the Left wants to die. For a movement dedicated above all else to the getting of Power, the certainty among all serious people that the Left does not DESERVE power, under any circumstances, poisons the beauty of existence and make life not worth living.

  760. Dean,

    The only thing that works efficiently in a Leftist dictatorship is the secret police. Activities like, say, growing food, tend to be subject to tragicomic levels of incompetence.

    O RLY?

    Even if it were proven, which it is not,

    I say again, O RLY?

    (And before you go throwing out names like Richard Lindzen, realize first that he, like many global-warming doubters who aren’t kooks, is on the take from Big Oil.)

  761. In my last post, I argued that if the college professors were put in charge of us all, they’d murder a huge percentage of us right off the bat.

    Does this possibility seem to be a particularly live one to you? I can’t see it myself. Even if most Americans *do* get the idea of ejecting Republicans in November for their putative incompetence in running things, you’ve still got Diebold on your side. Leninist academics throwing everyone into work camps might not be the most useful thing to be worrying about.

    Glenn Reynolds is drifting away from the party line, apparently.

  762. Adrian,
    >Does this possibility seem to be a particularly live one to you?

    It didn’t seem all that live in 1917 either, did it? But it happened. This is what I mean when I say you Leftists fucked us all. Works like the Black Book of Communism document horrors that ought not to be real.
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Black_Book_of_Communism

    But they are real. And they infect every Leftist proposal that is being made or will ever be made with the stink of death.

    Your movement killed more people than the non-mathematically inclined can imagine. Nobody trusts you now. And nobody should.

    This is the horror that YOU have to face, if you ever want to DESERVE to be taken seriously again. But I don’t think you do. You just want to pretend it doesn’t matter. And because of that, it will ultimately be you that ceases to matter.

  763. Jeff Read,
    re: “Bush Aims to Kill War Crimes Act”
    http://news.yahoo.com/s/thenation/20060905/cm_thenation/20060918brecher

    Given that the Geneva Conventions seem to expand and expand, such that, according to the Supreme Court, we are now required to offer al Qaeda fighters captured in Afghanistan and held in Gitmo the protections of the Geneva Conventions even though:
    1. al Qaeda is not a state.
    2. Even if it were a state, it is not a signatory to the Conventions.
    3. Even if it were a signatory, al Qaeda does not abide by the Conventions, itself.

    Al Qaeda does not require its fighters to:
    1. Wear uniforms so as to distinguish themselves from civilian populations, so as to limit collateral damage, as required by the Conventions.
    2. Organize themselves into a military hierarchy with a clear chain of command, so that one commander can be held responsible for the actions of his subordinates, as required by the Conventions.
    3. Avoid attacking civilian targets, unless they perform a military or support function, as required by the Conventions.
    4. Avoid attacking churches, mosques or hospitals, unless they are being used by the enemy for military purposes, as required by the Conventions.
    5. Treat any captured prisoners humanely, as required by the Conventions.

    And yet the international Left strives with all its might to compel the United States military to accord captured al Qaeda prisoners the privileges of the Geneva Conventions, regardless of what this does to the credibility of the Conventions themselves, in order to hobble the American war effort.

    Of course Bush doesn’t want to see American soldiers brought up on felony charges for violating the Geneva Conventions with regard to Islamic terrorists. The bringing of such charges is itself a travesty. If it weren’t for the Left, its Bush Derangement Syndrome, and its overall hatred of the West and anything that serves Western interest, it would not even be considered legally POSSIBLE to violate the Geneva Conventions, with regard to the treatment of al Qaeda prisoners.

    I don’t mean that the US military should be allowed to torture terrorists for the fun of it. I don’t believe in Animal Rights, but I still support laws against deliberate cruelty to animals. Terrorist prisoners should be treated humanely unless there is a good reason not to. But non-uniformed non-state actors whose modus operandi is to blow the legs off grannies are NOT protected by the Geneva Conventions, unless you are determined to see such protection, not in the plain language of the document, but in the ‘emanations and penumbras’ of your own Western self-hatred.

    Given that the Left is still currently:
    1. Influential in legal circles, and
    2. Suicidally insane,
    Bush naturally wants to protect American soldiers from prosecution for “crimes” it should not even be legally possible to commit.

    This is not a step toward tyranny, it is a step toward sanity.

  764. Jeff, why would a rational actor abide by the Geneva Conventions, with all its attendant burdens, if one could enjoy the protections of the Conventions, without abiding by them?

    Do you Leftists care about the validity of the Conventions themselves, or are you prepared to chuck it all just to throw another pie in Bush’s face?

  765. Adrian,
    Do you remember earlier I discussed Bill Buckley, of the National Review? In the 1950’s and 60’s, Buckley mustered the necessary gravitas to rescue American Conservatism from oblivion by booting out the John Birchers and conspiracy nuts who ranted on about how the UN and the Trilateral Commission were going to send forth black helicopters to steal our precious bodily fluids. Conservatism exists today as an intellectual movement that deserves to be taken seriously because of what Buckley did.

    Yet there is no one in the modern Left trying to boot out the paranoid victims if Bush Derangement Syndrome, who explain how Iraq was a kite-flying paradise before the Bush-Cheney cabal conspired with the Israelis to bring down the World Trade Center so they could launch a war to enrich Halliburton and Bush’s oil buddies. I am not saying that YOU believe this, but those who do make up a significant, perhaps defining, portion of your movement do believe it, and say it all the time, in YOUR name, and no one is trying to remove them.

    Buckley was able to save Conservatism, because there was something worth saving. The Great Depression, Hitler’s atrocities, and later the Civil Rights movement knocked serious holes in the comfortable assumptions of the Old Right. But underneath those flawed assumptions was an understanding of the human condition, and of how to build morally worthy institutions, which deserved a fair hearing. Around that moral core, Conservatism could circle the wagons while it got its intellectual house in order.

    But, Adrian, the moral core of the Left is to be found in that Black Book of Communism. You are still capable of producing glib lawyers and politicians who can parse the meaning of ‘is,’ but the core of the Left is murderous evil, and nothing more.

    Thus, the paranoid Left-wing crazies define your movement today. They are gutting the last shreds of intellectual credibility the Left has, and you can muster no will to stop them. You cannot defend the Left because it is not worth defending.

    The Left offers you your own comfortable certainties, which enable you to feel better about yourself, but it offers you nothing of lasting value. But that’s OK, because you don’t intend to last.

    Your Left cannot produce a Buckley to save you, because you don’t deserve to be saved. And you know it.

  766. Dean: Your analysis of the left leaves out one VERY important (at least, historically) movement of the left: the classic Liberals/Libertarians.

    The Left believes that people suffer, because of institutions which are not yet perfect.
    One could also argue that Libertarians/AnCaps believe that as well; namely, that because we are given no individual choice in the institutions that govern us, there will always be strife caused by those who don’t agree. I do not think that such a simple theory accurately reflects all strife (such as lack of resources and chemical dependencies), but it seems like a good starting point. It seems like Classic Liberals & Libertarians do not have much of a death wish, and the ‘movement’ does seem to be growing, so maybe there is some fight left in the Left after all!

    The Right judges institutions charitably, according to the degree that they elevate Man above a Hobbesian ‘state of nature,’ in which life for all is ‘solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.’

    If this belief was common among conservatives, why would they oppose gun control? If humans were evil murdering psychopaths, then allowing wide distribution of weapons of deadly weapons would be criminally insane! ESR wrote an essay entitled The Myth of Man the Killer that deals with this myth.

    The Christian Right believes that man, by himself, is incapable of achieving victory over circumstances. But, with the aid of Almighty God, such victory can be attained, in God’s own time.

    So, what about the non-religious Conservatives like you, Dean? You said that you wished to believe that, if we wait long enough, something will turn up. Why can’t lefties also believe that?

    In summation, Marxist ideals seem to be a road to nowhere, but they do not embody all opposition to ‘the Right.’ If the Socialists are dying, then they can make way for the Classic Liberals.

    Adrian, I do not think that Glenn Reynolds is a conservative (though all my information on him comes from that article and the Wikipedia page); he seems to be more libertarian in his beliefs, so the article might make sense as a way to curb government power (stop spending money on fighting ‘unnecessary’ wars). I do agree that, while the Middle East poses a threat to the lives of many Westerners, it does not pose an existential threat to the West itself (besides Europe). If the West dies by the dawn of the 22nd century, it most likely will not be because Muslims blew it up.

  767. Jeff, one part of the Harper’s article you mentioned intrigued me.

    “What happened was simple, if unexpected. Cuba had learned to stop exporting sugar and instead started growing its own food again, growing it on small private farms and thousands of pocket-sized urban market gardens—and, lacking chemicals and fertilizers, much of that food became de facto organic.”

    The socialist way seems to usually favor centrally planned economies, and this decentralized system seems to be more in the spirit of a free market (if not capitalist) economy. This does not seem very communist to me, and it gives me more hope for Cuba. Most of the communist governments (like China, Vietnam, and maybe Cuba) start out communist, but eventually it paves the way to a more welfare-capitalist system. Is Communism primarily useful as a stop-gap between a feudalistic system and a (mostly) free market system? This is a very interesting question.

    RE: global warming
    Personally, I do think that some warming trend is occurring (yes, I have watched An Inconvenient Truth), and CO2 and Methane emissions do have something to do with it. However, recent Mars climate data suggest that the problem may be bigger than us (or Mars is just emerging from an ice age at a convenient time for neocons :). The Mars data has not probably not been well researched yet, so I am adopting a ‘wait and see’ approach to the causes of global warming. I think that alternative forms of energy (and cleaner emissions) may help reduce the problem, and if the problem is not entirely anthropogenic, then we need to find a way to DEFEND against the problem.

    Dean, YOU may prefer to burn rather than seeing a leftie in office, but I doubt the majority of voters will feel the same way if the problems become more pronounced (or Al Gore raises enough of a stink). If Conservatives do not seek to counterract the problem, then the people will elect someone who DOES. Leading the charge against ‘global warming’ may even help counterract some negative opinions caused by the perceived failures in Iraq. The MSM may love a good scandal, but a big new event would generate more interest than a three-year-old ‘scandal’. We may have to wait until 2007/8 for this, though.

  768. Phil,
    >It seems like Classic Liberals & Libertarians do not have much of a death wish

    I don’t really understand Anarcho-Capitalism well enough to speak on it with authority. But, as I said earlier, there are two things separating the Classical Liberals from the Progressives, or the Left:
    1. Lack of a fantastically murderous track record, and
    2. The courage to take their idea seriously, and defend its universalism.

    The Classical Liberal believes that Classical Liberalism is the moral and political ideal for ALL people, be they white, black, red, yellow, brown, male or female.

    The Left believes that Liberalism is for white people. All others can and should reject Liberalism with moral impunity. If you are a white Liberal and you criticize non-whites for ilLiberality, you are no different from the Ku Klux Klan. All hail Multiculturalism!

    The modern Left decries as racist, any attempt to proclaim a universal Ideal. The ONLY thing that makes it possible for any Classical Liberal to defend the universal legitimacy of their ideal, in the face of such a charge, is moral courage.

    Goethe said that without courage, all is lost. Aristotle defined courage as the chief of all virtues, because it is the virtue that makes all other virtues possible. Without courage, you cannot be truly compassionate, loyal, honest or proud. And without virtue, you don’t deserve to live.

    To the degree that Classical Liberals retain the will to live, courage is the reason why. That, and the fact that they are not responsible for the murder of tens of millions of innocents.

  769. Phil,

    On Cuba: I think we have a little bit of misunderstanding about Communism.

    1. Marx vs. the Marxists

    I ask everybody to keep an open mind, because what I will write now will be a bit shocking. Marx is one of the most misunderstood political thinkers of history. Almost everybody who calls himself a Marxist has completely different ideas than Marx himself had. Marx’s original idea was to extrapolate the transition from Feudalism to Capitalism, and he thought a similar transition will happen from Capitalism to a new classless society (I purposefully avoid the “Communism” as Communists did quite the opposite Marx wanted to do). Accoring to Marx, Feudalism transitioned into Capitalism because 1) it became rich and developed 2) the nobility lost their reason to be on top: their original reason was military service, but the development of gunpowder required mass armies and therefore they became useless as small military elite 3) bourgoise became rich and therefore educates 4) the bourgoise simply displaced the nobilty and the kings when they got educated enough to govern themselves and there was no mo more reason for the nobility and the king to rule. Similarly, Marx figured that 1) when Capitalism becomes rich and developed 2) Capitalists, as a class, lose their excuses to be on top because their original excuses were motivating the workers for productivity, finding new ways to produce, managing uneduceated workers and so on 3) workers as a class because moderately wealthy and therefore educated and therefore are able to manage themselves, without needing the capitalist class to tell them what to do 4) they will displace the capitalists. Actually, if we look at the direction our societies are going – companies founded by big pension funds instead of individual capitalists, the new upper class of society consisting of managers in employee status, who are, in a sense, “proletarians”, because the major part of their income is from selling knowledge and work instead of earning interest on their capital, and everybody with a good business idea can get VC funding and therefore there is no more a distinct capitalist class, actually, our society is a bit going towards the direction Marx figured. Marx wasn’t against competition, he was against having a distinct capitalist class. He wasn’t in favour of central planning, to the contrary, he wanted the state to be dissolved in the long run. Actually Marx wasn’t particularly stupid himself, it’s the Marxists, who were. Not that I would agree with Marx, but in this way these ideas do make some kind of sense. The problem is, Marx’s ideas were seriously distorted by the Marxists.

    Almost all Marxist in the world clearly and maybe consciously misinterpreted Marx. I think they were simply superficial people who wanted to make revolutions and thought that Marx’s writings are useful as scientific-sounding serious propaganda materials. Partly it was Marx’s fault himself, because while intellectually he was a serious economist, emotionally he a kind of an asshole revolutionary set of emotions, fantasising about “The expropriation of the expropriators” and so on, just like his followers. He was an strange mix of being an economist and a punk like Che Guevara. But one thing is clear, Marx clearly stated that no Communist revolution can be succesful in the long run as long as Capitalism is not rich and developed and the workers are well-off and educated.

    2. Lenin vs. Marx

    Lenin simply disregarded this idea. He was in a poor, undeveloped country, he wanted the power, so he crufted together a theory that’s enough if the Party leaders are educated and the workers will just do as they’ve been told. Almost everybody who considers himself a Marxist is actually a Leninist, because ideas like a centrally planned economy, ruled by the state, state-owned businesses, the revolution of poor, hungry, illiterate workers and peasants led by an dictatoric intellectual elite, violent oppression of the bourgoise, democratic centralism, and most importantly, the general vanguardism, intellectual elitism of the Left are Lenin’s ideas.

    3. Mao and Marx

    Ironically, while Mao was the most bloody-handed Communist dictator and also an amazingly stupid asshole (such as forcing peasants to melt their tools into lumps of steel and giving them to the state to produce machinery and weapons from them, and then, of course, the result was famine that killed tens of millions), this one idea of Marx he understood much more correctly than Lenin. He understood that for a long period of time, capitalist style economy is the most productive and he has to boost production and build up a rich economy before attempting a conversion to Communism. This has always been an integral part and important feature of Maoism, it was called “New Democracy”, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Democracy and the basic idea was that workers, peasants, small bourgoise and patriotistic capitalists have to work together for the development of the economy, instead of displacing the capitalists right at the beginning just as Lenin did. This is the reason there were so many Western Maoists: this seemed to make a lot more sense than Lenin’s stupid pauperism.

    So, Mao, just like Marx, didn’t really want a centrally planned economy right from the beginning. Instead, he thought that let the capitalists develop the economy and it will be nationalised when it’s really developed.

    China and Cuba today

    Therefore, the China’s economic success and more or less capitalistic way of production is not some kind of giving up on Communism. To the contrary, this is the way Mao – and, more or less, Marx – wanted it. Build up a strong capitalist economy first and the install communism on top of that. This was the very idea from the beginning. Therefore, there is no reason to believe China gave up on Communism as a final target.

    As for Cuba, I think they just borrowed some ideas from China.

  770. Yet there is no one in the modern Left trying to boot out the paranoid victims if Bush Derangement Syndrome, who explain how Iraq was a kite-flying paradise before the Bush-Cheney cabal conspired with the Israelis to bring down the World Trade Center so they could launch a war to enrich Halliburton and Bush’s oil buddies.

    Do you mean this story? I’ve never given it much credit, though they could have been a little more decorous about it. The enrichment was probably more a welcome side-effect than anything. They wanted to kick some Arab butt, and a considerable percentage of Americans said “Osama, Iraq – same difference!” and cheered them on.

    It’s probably pointless to blame the education system for lapses of judgement this big.

    I am not saying that YOU believe this, but those who do make up a significant, perhaps defining, portion of your movement do believe it, and say it all the time, in YOUR name, and no one is trying to remove them.

    Jeez, like I have anything to do with Democratic policy over this shit. There are movements which go through their period in the wilderness and remake themselves, and maybe American conservatives did that, I really don’t know enough about the time to say. From what I’ve read of the modern American left, a lot of them are pretty frustrated at the way Bush has been able to play 9/11 to his own advantage, and combined with the secretive nature of the administration this has fed a certain willingness to believe that the American system could be under threat. It’s not only the left, either – Jerry Pournelle has written some interesting things about Republic/Empire transitions and the Bush doctrine of exporting democracy, which he calls “Jacobinism”.

    It didn’t seem all that live in 1917 either, did it? But it happened. This is what I mean when I say you Leftists fucked us all.

    Oh, stop talking like you were in Russia at the time and subsequently got purged with the kulaks or something. Even if I agree with some of the left about some things, I’m no more responsible for the doings of Joe Stalin than your dog is.

    Your movement killed more people than the non-mathematically inclined can imagine. Nobody trusts you now. And nobody should.

    You seem to be attempting to speak for people outside you immediate constituency here. I don’t know why you invest so much energy in beating on your image of the left (which is, as I say, not my movement, though there are indeed a bunch of ideas being peddled by the right for which I have considerable reserves of scorn). If they’re as thoroughly guilty and doomed as you say, what can they do, apart from hand Europe over to the Muslims?

    I sometimes wonder if you’re not trying to convince yourself of something you don’t really believe.

    The Classical Liberal believes that Classical Liberalism is the moral and political ideal for ALL people, be they white, black, red, yellow, brown, male or female.

    But most particularly, be they Muslim, despite a certain level of…consumer resistance there. What to do? More Shock and Awe?

    Worked so well last time.

  771. Phil, thanks for the Myth of Man the Killer link, and Eric, thanks
    for the Military Review article linked from former; the military
    study of “natural killers” is quite interesting. I guess it really
    does take all kinds.

    Dean, I can understand why you wouldn’t want to elect Al Gore
    to solve global warming, given that he’s a mass murdering death
    cultist who wants to facilitate human extinction and all, but that
    doesn’t explain why the Right seems so opposed to the idea of
    anthropogenic climate change. I’m not really sold on the
    doomsday hype myself (not quite sure how a warmer climate and
    slowly rising sea levels will cause “the end of civilization”), but still,
    it’s at least worth looking at. One can imagine ways of mitigating
    climate change which don’t involve a conversion to world socialism
    or voluntary human extinction, if mitigation turns out to be necessary.

    My uninformed pet theory is that the the two dueling doomsday stories, global
    warming and global jihad, fit their respective proponents’ beliefs and political
    goals. Lefties believe history is shaped by mechanistic, impersonal, large
    scale processes like class warfare and climate change. Global warming
    fits their worldview. Righties believe history is driven by heroes, villains,
    and religion. Global jihad fits theirs.

    It also helps that each side can project onto its story all of their
    fears and pet peeves about modern life.

    For the left, we have been brought to the brink of environmental doom
    by consumerism, corporatism, the pursuit of personal wealth, and a general lack of
    motherly community spirit, things they’ve been complaining about all along.
    For the right, it’s our abandonment of religion and the moral decay of our culture,
    culminating in a shortage of white Christian babies, which will allow the Muslim
    hordes to slip through our open borders and cut our throats in the night, until
    we are all dead and once-mighty Rome is a pile of burnt ruins.

    People get what they want from armegeddon.
    I guess that’s as old as armegeddon itself.

    I suppose I’ve answered my own question, about why the Right denies
    climate change. Actually, there are signs that Republicans are starting to
    look at the issue, at levels I probably agree are appropriate (study, not panic
    and sign up to expensive treaties designed by our economic rivals).

    — Tristan

  772. Adrian & Jeff,

    would you like to comment that news article – I quoted it in my previous post – that Al-Queda declared war on France? Does this news change your ideas on what strategies to follow? I mean France really tried to be liberal and moderate and if it clearly does not work, then? Doesn’t it a clear sign of the failure of the liberal strategies on terrorism?

    (It’s a bit strange that I talk about this while there are violent riots on the street here in Budapest, five or so miles from me. You will see it in the evening news of CNN/BBC/whatever. But actually while the demonstrations consist of about 5K people at each location in the capital, the violent ones are no more than a hundred. So it can and will be controlled.)

  773. (Fuck, a couple of hundreds of the violent demostrators managed to storm and seize the building of TV channel, the state-owned one, called MTV. They building was defended by about a hundred of policemen. I’m really ashamed how cowardly and ineffective our police is. They used the waterguns and the tear gas, but wasn’t effective – as usual. These are very uneffective weapons against an angry mob. They should have been using rubber bullets, which are effective – but for some reason they didn’t do so.)

  774. (This mob is interesting. They’ve attacked the policemen with stones and sticks, burned a couple of cars, and even burned a police assault car with policemen still in it… but then rescued the policemen from the burning car, helped the firemen putting the fires out… and the resumed assaulting the TV building which was, later on, successful. Quite strange. They are very violent but also show an amount of conscience. I don’t really understand it. It’s very interesting.)

    Sorry for floodign this topic with news about this completeley offtopic phenomena but I consider it too interesting to not tell about it – just because it’s happening a couple of miles from me.

  775. Shenpen,
    >the violent ones are no more than a hundred. So it can and will be controlled.

    Yes, the violent ones can be controlled, but only if the will is there to do it. If, on the other hand, you see violent radicals as romantics and avengers of the oppressed, then you will not have the heart to punish them. You will want to see them triumph over the forces of repression and conformity.

    But what about the fact that those violent radicals harm innocent people? That’s no matter. We shouldn’t look at the matter through the tired old lens of Right and Wrong, much less the puritanical lens of Good and Evil. The violent radicals, being few, relatively disorganized, relatively poor, and possessed of inferior weaponry compared to the army of a nation state, are the Weak. And the Weak are always to be supported morally over the Strong.

    And if the Weak do evil, well then I’m sure you would too, if you were weak. And if you say you would not, then you are just unimaginative and ethnocentric and probably a racist, too.

    It is not a given that the violent radicals will be suppressed. There are many who wish to see those radicals destroy civilization. They may well succeed. If France and Britain had attacked Hitler with vigor in 1936, when he remilitarized the Rhineland, WWII could have been ended quickly. But many French and British intellectuals romanticized Hitler, and made excuses for him.

    By the time war became unavoidable, Hitler was in command of enormous resources of territory and wealth. If he hadn’t been so stupid and crazy, Hitler might have won the war.

    The Left can’t see Evil, outside of the Western Right. They invariably side with the romantic Weak against the Strong, regardless of the moral character of the Weak actors. But in combat, the Weak are under enormous pressure and survival is difficult. The Good carry burdens that the Evil do not. If the Good Weak were compensated by being given additional support, as a reflection of their superior moral status, they might have more of a chance. But the Left refuses to make any such distinctions. The result is that, among the Weak, only the ruthless survive long enough to benefit from Leftist sympathy. This is an example of why Edmond Burke was correct to say that “All that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing.”

    The problem with not recognizing Evil, of course, is that Evil still recognizes you. And when you demonstrate that you are unwilling to call Evil by its name, you also demonstrate an unwillingness to resist.

    I heard as story once about a serial rapist, who picked his female victims in an unusual manner. He would go to grocery stores and select a shopping cart, which he would push though the aisles. When he spotted a submissive-looking woman, he would test his impression of her by hitting her with his shopping cart. If, after he hit her, SHE apologized to HIM, he would follow her home and rape her. It was a system that worked well for him.

    The appeasing French deserve what they get. They deserved it from Hitler, and they deserve it from al Qaeda.

  776. would you like to comment that news article – I quoted it in my previous post – that Al-Queda declared war on France?

    Al-Q aren’t a state, so declarations of war on their part can be considered as PR exercises until they actually get off their asses and do something, at which point you can enjoy your schadenfreude without onlookers thinking you’re getting ahead of yourself.

    I have said that I think France is in for some pogroms at some point.

  777. Adrian, why does an organization be a state for a DoW to be taken seriously? I think any organization with sufficient funds, troops and weapons will do. The effectiveness of Al-Q lies in the very fact that they are not a centrally controlled army. They are rather just an international organization that provides logistics support to local terrorists. Local knowledge and contacts combined with the tech of the Al-Q is a threat to be taken seriously I think. And no, it isn’t really shadenfreue from my part, it’s rather just a strong argument.

  778. Adrian,
    >I have said that I think France is in for some pogroms at some point.

    What would those pogroms be intended to accomplish? The removal from France of Arab and North African Muslims? This begs the question of why those Muslims were imported in the first place.

    In Europe, and especially in France, the intellectuals get to run things. Their superior eloquence and academic accomplishment secure for them the best, most cushy government jobs, without any of that pesky accountability, as well as a higher social status, above the common herd of humanity.

    But the intellectual’s rule is incompetent at best, and soul-draining at worst. How to get the masses to accept it? I know, we’ll bribe them with their own money!

    We will create a massive welfare state, with lavish benefits for those who don’t produce, paid for by those who do. The Deal between the intellectuals and the masses amounts to: “You rabble shut up and do what your told, and eat your bread and circuses, bitch!”

    And the European masses have generally accepted the Deal, with one caveat: They have no desire to pass that Deal onto any children. So they don’t have enough of them. But the welfare state demands a constant stream of young people into the workforce to pay the payroll taxes. What to do?

    I know, we’ll import fast-breeding foreigners to take up the slack! Of course, high-tax Europe is not exactly the destination of choice for high-producing Japanese, Chinese or Korean immigrants (that would be America). But that’s OK, we’ll get by with North African and Arab Muslims.

    But what if the Muslim immigrants don’t buy into the Deal? The Muslim’s religion tells him that HE is supposed to be at the top of the food chain, where ever he lives, not the postmodern deconstructionist pointy head. The Muslim in Europe (notice I didn’t say the European Muslim) will not be Jacques Derrida’s bitch. He will eat those welfare benefits, of course, but in the long run he intends to eat you too, Adrian.

    Which, from what I can surmise, you don’t have a problem with. You intend to die of old age before you get eaten, and you don’t mind if they eat your corpse. And given your assumptions, I cannot, in Reason, reproach you.

    But given that you have no loyalty to England, English culture, or the larger Western culture, I can’t understand why you would bring a child into the world. Thirty years from now, what do you expect your son to become, other than a forced convert to the Islam you refuse to take seriously?

    It’s one thing to be feckless with your own life, but to play those insouciant games with the life of a child? I don’t know how he will ever forgive you. You should have kept it in your pants, bro.

    Anyway, back to France and the pogroms. If the pogroms were to be successful in driving out the Muslims, then the French people would have to live without their welfare subsidies, there being not enough younger workers to pay for them. There is no evidence for, and considerable evidence against, the proposition that the French have enough love for their posterity to be willing to endure such hardship.

    There won’t be any pogroms, Adrian. Or at least none of consequence. What will happen is, accompanied by ever increasing violence and discord, the Muslims will take over France, and the rest of Europe, without impediment. In order to fight successfully against those who wish to kill you, you have to want to live.

    Oh, and Shenpen, I believe that, vis-à-vis France, the schadenfreude to which Adrian was referring was mine.

  779. In Europe, and especially in France, the intellectuals get to run things. Their superior eloquence and academic accomplishment secure for them the best, most cushy government jobs, without any of that pesky accountability, as well as a higher social status, above the common herd of humanity.

    I do not know very much about European social structures, but I do not think that ‘intellectuals’ have that much power. In Time Enough For Love, Lazarus Long says that there are two types of politicians: business politicians, who only want to remain in power (by keeping their promises) to profit, and statesmen, who seek ‘the greater good’ and do not remain in power long (except during the rise and fall of a civilization) because they break their word thrice before breakfast. I do not think most politicians, even European ones, are ‘intellectuals’. In fact, I think European intellectuals only influence decisions by acting as advisers; Their pointy-headed counterparts in the U.S. have similar powers. Who, apart from pointy-headed windbags, would fill the ranks of the Brookings Institution, the Heritage Foundation, the American Enterprise Institution, the Cato Institute, the Council on Foreign Relations, the Kaiser Family Foundation, etc.?

    Of course, I could be wrong. Shenpen, does this seem accurate to you?

  780. To be honest Phil, trying to conveniently compartmentalize the players/politicians/bureaucrats within the various euro-socialist-statist ‘structures’ is a fools’ errand…much as it is here in the US. Sure, you can make lightweight generalizations, but you won’t find them of much practical use…you just have to focus in on specific structures as-and-when it is appropriate. You’ll find common threads, of course, but nothing (AFAICT) that delivers any consistently insightful patterns…but they do sometimes suffice to generally ‘know the beast’ ;-)

    One thing that I see is that the self-styled ‘intellectuals’ (aka ‘intellectual elite’), both within europe and at home, is that generally their claim to membership of such a class is without any legitmate merit. They’re frauds…but they’re just about smart enough and glib enough and syntactically dextrous enough to hoodwink the dialtone intellects of the masses.

    And then they go out and vote…*sigh*…it’s their *right*, y’know?

  781. Adrian, why does an organization be a state for a DoW to be taken seriously? I think any organization with sufficient funds, troops and weapons will do. The effectiveness of Al-Q lies in the very fact that they are not a centrally controlled army. They are rather just an international organization that provides logistics support to local terrorists. Local knowledge and contacts combined with the tech of the Al-Q is a threat to be taken seriously I think.

    It’s been pointed out that Al-Q is more of a franchise than anything, but you have to remember that they’re looking a bit like yesterday’s men at the mo – we’ve just had the five-year anniversary of their greatest hit, and while it will always be remembered as spectacular television their later product lines haven’t really been walking off the shelves. OTOH, Osama does seem to take a long-term view. I thought this guy was kind of perceptive about him, though the more committed optimists here will pooh-pooh his conclusions.

    I really have no idea what the declaration of war on France means, which is why I’ll be waiting for something to happen before I draw any conclusions.

  782. What would those pogroms be intended to accomplish? The removal from France of Arab and North African Muslims? This begs the question of why those Muslims were imported in the first place.

    Pretty much the same reason there are eight Mexicans living in those bushes near the corner of your property. Well, OK, the original Muslims were encouraged whereas the Meskins are more a product of something like osmosis. But the process is similar.

    I know, we’ll import fast-breeding foreigners to take up the slack! Of course, high-tax Europe is not exactly the destination of choice for high-producing Japanese, Chinese or Korean immigrants (that would be America).

    Asians aren’t exactly fast breeders (that would be the Mexicans). And you’d be surprised at the number of Chinese that want to come to England (in shipping containers). But perhaps there’s some system in place whereby we only get the lazy ones.

    He will eat those welfare benefits, of course, but in the long run he intends to eat you too, Adrian.

    Not allowed according to the Koran. And I’m in *Japan*, remember? They don’t do the immigration thing. If I ever do move to France (for the nukes) I intend to live in the countryside. What you claim this notional Muslim of yours intends doesn’t bother me very much. Yes, there are some wankers who think that way. I don’t consider them to be representative. If I picked the most outrageous Christan Dominionist website and took everything said on it seriously I could probably work myself into a panic as well, but I have better things to do.

    Thirty years from now, what do you expect your son to become, other than a forced convert to the Islam you refuse to take seriously?

    That’s going to be up to him, but it’s because I *don’t* take the threat of ever-expanding-jihad-everywhere seriously that I don’t worry about how he’ll deal with it. It would be cool if he could study nanoengineering, but if he has to be a farmer that’ll be OK too.

    It’s one thing to be feckless with your own life, but to play those insouciant games with the life of a child? I don’t know how he will ever forgive you. You should have kept it in your pants, bro.

    You’re saying anyone who doesn’t believe in *your* vision of the future shouldn’t breed?

    How odd. When are you going to put your, er, sperm where your mouth is, by the way? I recommend it, particularly if your wife is Indian as you say. Hybrid vigour rocks.

    If the pogroms were to be successful in driving out the Muslims, then the French people would have to live without their welfare subsidies, there being not enough younger workers to pay for them.

    I thought the Muslims were supposed to be all unemployed anyway. I wouldn’t imagine any pogroms would be intended (to the extent that such things are planned) to drive them out so much as to cow them into withdrawing support from the beardy faction that thinks it’s going to inherit Europe in the very near future and we’d all better get ready to bend the knee. But the situation there is going to develop over decades, and I’m afraid I regard your certainties about it as rather tainted by wishful thinking. Schadenfreude is a dish best served when it actually arrives at the table.

  783. (Budapest riot report: riots were more widespread last night, but the police performed a lot better. Actually it’s interesting to watch on TV as it seems non-lethal weapon fighting is similar to medival battles: horseback policemen charging with batons against infantry armed with clubs,sticks and pavement stones. I expect the protesters to be a lot calmer this night as hundreds of radicals were arrested. Well-known radical blogger Tomcat were also arrested for damaging a monument of fallen Soviet soldiers of WW2. Other famous radicals, who could assume leader position of the riots are under warrant of caption and in hiding.)

  784. Adrian,
    >Yes, there are some wankers who think that way. I don’t consider them to be representative.

    They do regular opinion polls of Muslim populations, the results of which are available online. Have you by chance done any research (it would only take a few minutes with Google) on what PERCENTAGE of the Muslim population in the West sympathizes with this tiny, insignificant wanker faction?

    Pluswise, if you will recall, a few of those beardies managed to swing an election in Spain, a little while back. I doubt if you consider this as important as I do, but the Jihadis are also the first foreign enemy since 1812 to kill any sizable number of Americans on US soil. Can’t remember the last time a Christian Dominionist did either of those things. Maybe I’m just a pussy compared to you Adrian, but the Jihadis have my attention. I hope to make them regret earning it.

    I doubt if you would give me a straight answer to the question: “What would the beardies have to do, what level of power would they have to demonstrate IN EUROPE, in order to have you take them seriously?” But it’s no matter.

    Whatever level of significant savagery you would require, my tainted certainty is that sooner or later the Jihadis will demonstrate it. They are crazy and evil, but they are not just full of masturbatory talk. And they are a lot more representative than you give them credit for. Check out those opinion polls, Adrian. It’ll take 5 minutes.

  785. They do regular opinion polls of Muslim populations, the results of which are available online. Have you by chance done any research (it would only take a few minutes with Google) on what PERCENTAGE of the Muslim population in the West sympathizes with this tiny, insignificant wanker faction?

    Polls, shmolls. Gimme a link to the one where they ask “Do you agree that Islam will inherit Europe and force its elderly Derrida-reading population into abject dhimmitude, hahaha on your knees infidel dogs?”

    I ain’t got much time for polls. Opinions are like assholes, and polls are like rectal thermometers. Hey, this one’s a little warm, must have been on the curry.

    Pluswise, if you will recall, a few of those beardies managed to swing an election in Spain, a little while back.

    Y’see, the way I remember it was the Spaniards were annoyed that their government tried to blame it on the Basques. Then of course they had you calling them all cowards…bet they’ll be first in the queue to help with Iran, eh?

    I doubt if you consider this as important as I do, but the Jihadis are also the first foreign enemy since 1812 to kill any sizable number of Americans on US soil.

    Never had much time for American exceptionalism AAMOF. I mean, get over yourselves. Everybody else has had shitloads of people die down the years and you get all bent out of shape over 3000 ‘cos it was televisually impressive.

    Maybe I’m just a pussy compared to you Adrian,

    I dunno, they say you are what you eat.

    but the Jihadis have my attention.

    Obsessive attention can make you miss other stuff, alas.

    I hope to make them regret earning it.

    When?

    I doubt if you would give me a straight answer to the question: “What would the beardies have to do, what level of power would they have to demonstrate IN EUROPE, in order to have you take them seriously?”

    What sort of a question is that? You want me to give you some threshold number of deaths after which I’ll say, hmm, you is absolutely right there, we (well, they) have a problem there?

    I’ve *said* I think the French are going to have a problem, and not from Al-Q particularly.

    Whatever level of significant savagery you would require, my tainted certainty is that sooner or later the Jihadis will demonstrate it.

    Must be great to be able to see the future like that.

  786. Adrian,
    >Obsessive attention can make you miss other stuff, alas.

    Other than “Oh my God, we’re fixing to run out of oil!”
    what do you think I am missing?

    Perhaps I’ve grown senile, but I can’t recall you explaining your vision of the future in any detail. If my obsessive monomania about the beardy threat is blinding me to other relevant information, what is it?

    I’m not mocking you, Adrian. I’m quite serious.

    Do you have any hope for the future? If so, in what do you hope?

  787. (Last post about the Budapest riots, I promise – I started blogging about it: http://budapestriots.blogspot.com/ – please send this link to your friends, especially bloggers and journalists, regardless of political views, as I’m investing a considerable amount of work in it so I’d like to have some readers.)

  788. Other than “Oh my God, we’re fixing to run out of oil!”
    what do you think I am missing?

    Any amount of environmental degradation, but you’re a conservative so I suppose it all goes in the roundfile along with global warming…stuff like the Norks, stuff like what’s happening in Pakistan, that stalwart American ally. Stuff like Russia (before demography wreaks its havoc upon them).

    Hardly anything, really.

    Do you have any hope for the future? If so, in what do you hope?

    In what I *can’t* forsee. But then, my crystal ball’s dirtier than yours.

  789. Dean,

    Maybe adrian and I are too concerned with affairs of the present to worry about, or be able to accurately predict, the future?

    I don’t hate you man, matter of fact your eloquence has earned my respect. But you have *got* to take off the neocon blinders.

    The brilliant Stephen Colbert introduced the world to the concept of “truthiness”, that is, statements which sound good and give you hope for the future, even if these little things called facts get in the way. A more succinct and humorous expression of the automatic self-narratization reflex that lulls you back into comfortable sleep when confronted with the terror of the situation, I cannot find. Problem is, every time someone brings up those inconvenient facts, you respond with more truthiness.

    The Guardian carries an excerpt from George Monbiot, who may have discovered the “Halloween documents” of Murkan conservatism:

    http://environment.guardian.co.uk/climatechange/story/0,,1875762,00.html

    The opposition to the idea that anthropogenic global warming is climatological reality has all of the credibility of those Microsoft-funded, cooked “independent studies” proving Windows is more secure than Linux. Writes Monbiot:

    I have no evidence that Fred Singer or his organisation have taken money from Philip Morris. But many of the other bodies that have been sponsored by Exxon and have sought to repudiate climate change were also funded by the tobacco company. Among them are some of the world’s best-known “thinktanks”: the Competitive Enterprise Institute, the Cato Institute, the Heritage Foundation, the Hudson Institute, the Frontiers of Freedom Institute, the Reason Foundation and the Independent Institute, as well as George Mason University’s Law and Economics Centre. I can’t help wondering whether there is any aspect of conservative thought in the United States that has not been formed and funded by the corporations.

    Neither can I, George.

    It begins to make me think discomfiting things like, who paid for the idea of WMDs in Iraq and what kind of profit do they stand to make? What is the market value of the current water-muddying going on concerning terrorism and “Islamofascism”, masking the deeper issues of imperialism and oil? Going further, what kind of price tag might this “The Left is a death cult” nonsense carry? Exactly whose designer meme are you spreading here, Dean, consciously or not — and to what end was it commissioned?

    One really must wonder. Or go back to sleep, plug back in the Matrix in the hopes that the hegemon will reward you with importance or at least the warm fuzzies that you are on the side of “truthiness”. The problem is… choice.

  790. Jeff,
    >who paid for the idea of WMDs in Iraq and what kind of profit do they stand to make?

    Do you understand that there is no logical limit to that sort of thing? Let me provide an example.

    Can anyone prove that the Japanese really attacked Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941? How do we know it wasn’t all a scam cooked up by FDR to start an illegal war, so as to spread American hegemony over Europe and Japan, enrich the munitions contractors, enhance the electoral prospects of his Democratic Party, and make himself America’s first and last four-term President?

    Can anyone say for certain that it was really Japanese bombers who sunk those US Navy ships? Maybe FDR secretly ordered the sailors to plant explosives throughout the ships and, after detonating the explosives, falsely claim they saw Japanese Zeros in the sky overhead.

    Do you see what I’m getting at? Once you start down the “It’s all a big conspiracy!” road, there’s no logical stopping point. They say that Napoleon was a madman who thought he was Napoleon, but at least he had some solid evidence.

    What you have is suspicion that is ultimately indistinguishable from numerology. How do we know that there isn’t really a crashed alien spaceship in Roswell, New Mexico? And Elvis isn’t really dead, you know. That’s just what they WANT you to think.

    And of course, I must be in on it, because I’m trying to talk you out of your suspicions. In fact, I already told you that I was in on it, in a previous post. Further, I know that right now, you are sitting at your computer in your underwear, because I have planted secret listening devices and cameras throughout your house.

    And don’t bother trying to find the cameras, either. They are top secret nano-scale cameras we got from the aliens. Oops, I guess I shouldn’t have told you that. Never mind.

    As I have already said, back when International Communism seemed everywhere ascendant, and Joe Stalin REALLY DID have agents in the State Department, and Communist sympathizers really were cranking out Hollywood movies designed to make the Soviets look better and America look worse, William F. Buckley saved people like me from conspiratorial madness.

    Buckley insisted that the struggle between Communism and (Classical) Liberalism was a struggle of ideas, not merely the dark treachery of unknown faces in smoke-filled back rooms. If Conservatives had let them, the John Birchers would have led us down the garden path to oblivion. And no one would take us seriously now.

    For the American political system to work, we need two functioning political parties. That way, if the stupid Republican politicians get too smug and comfortable in their cushy offices, people like me can threaten to vote Democrat, and mean it. But that can only happen if the Democrats are a responsible party. If they are all a bunch of wing-nuts, ranting about ChimpyMcHitlerBurton and the Jews, then I can’t even threaten to vote for them. No Republican politician would take me seriously if I did. Therefore, the Republican politicians can do whatever they want, and I’ll have to vote for them anyway, just because they’re not insane.

    Jeff, assuming that you are both an American and a Democrat, I ask you to step back from the edge. If you continue forward, on your current path, you are not going to wind up anywhere you want to be. There’s nothing down that road but madness. If you take it far enough, you’ll end up as one of those crazy homeless guys who wander around muttering to themselves about the aliens reading their brainwaves from flying saucers. You see, Bush is covering up the flying saucers, as well.

    He and Karl Rove are actually aliens themselves, you see. And Jeff, I am an alien, too. I’m only telling you that because I know you’ll never believe me. Or will you?

    P. S. Thank you for your compliment of my eloquence. As an arrogant, self-righteous, extraterrestrial, Godless windbag, I take a lot of pride in writing well. It’s nice to know somebody notices. I mean that. Except for the extraterrestrial part. :-)

  791. Jeff,
    >Exactly whose designer meme are you spreading here, Dean, consciously or not

    You realize that the same question can be applied to you, right? Once you start accusing people of being victims of false consciousness, then it must be possible that anyone can be brainwashed into believing anything.

    This is why, if you will recall, I rejected esr’s ‘Jihadi sympathizers are Stalinist memebots’ theme. Certainly, important people in our lives, such as our parents, can have a dramatic impact on our thinking. And I suppose it is possible to get an idea stuck in your head, just like a song or a jingle.

    But ultimately I MUST believe in free will, even if there is no scientific evidence for it. We CHOOSE to accept an idea as true or not. We don’t unconsciously spread designer memes. Unless, perhaps, Richard Dawkins is in on the NeoCon conspiracy, too. And I suppose he might be.

    After all, how do I know that you are not just an unconscious pawn of the Marxist conspirators behind the UN and the Trilateral Commission? How do I know you (or they) haven’t already dispatched their black helicopters to steal my precious bodily fluids?

    I have to go now. I must put tinfoil over my windows so you can’t read my brainwaves.

  792. Well, I just read this interesting article about globalization and world affairs. If what they say is true, then we are in for some BIG problems.

  793. Jeff,
    I meant it when I said that you can come back. You don’t have to go over the deep end.

    Like you, I have no God. This presents me with severe philosophical problems, which I attempt to deal with using Aristotelian virtue ethics, Eric Drexler/Greg Egan eschatology, and a bit of common sense.

    Where you and I differ politically, is that I don’t see any need for eloquent pointy-heads like myself to acquire political power. According to G.B. Shaw, ‘The trouble with the world is that the stupid are dogmatically certain, while the intelligent are full of doubt.’

    I don’t want my President to be stupid, but I don’t want him to be TOO intelligent, either. It doesn’t bother me that Bush can’t speak. I don’t need my leaders to be eloquent. I’m eloquent. That doesn’t mean I’d make a good leader.

    What I want for my leaders to do, is to take ACTION when the situation calls for it. Often times, we face situations wherein following a good enough plan now, is better than following the perfect plan three weeks from now. Because, in three weeks, it will be too late to act.

    When your mind is too full of nuance, action becomes impossible. When, like me, you have to analyze everything to death, you can never reach the level of psychological certainty necessary to take action. You are forever trying to decide. And your faster-moving enemies therefore run rings around you.

    I write and speak as smooth as the devil himself. And I have no business running the country, precisely because my head is so full of beautiful abstractions. Positions of political leadership should go to less intelligent men, with good hearts and good instincts.

    Will those mediocre intellects make mistakes? Of course they will. But survival doesn’t require perfection. If it did, we’d have been wiped out long ago. To survive, you only need to be right a little more than half the time, and you need to ACT quickly, even when you don’t know everything.

    People like George W. Bush should be in charge, Jeff, and people like you and me should be his advisors. It is appropriate for us to seek influence, but not power.

    If you can just accept this one proposition, Jeff, you can be saved both from Leninist evil, and from conspiracy nuttery.

    Just think about it. Please.

  794. And one more thing.
    >But you have *got* to take off the neocon blinders.
    >masking the deeper issues of imperialism and oil

    Imperialists? Us? You’ve got to be fucking kidding me. Did you catch what I said earlier to Shenpen about how only 1 in 6 Americans has a passport? Americans want to go abroad and establish an Empire? That’s absurd. We are the most insular nation in human history. Other than my Indian relatives, the only foreigners I’ve ever spent more than an hour talking to in my entire life to are Adrian and Shenpen.

    On the rare occasion when Americans want to experience the foreign flavor, we go to Las Vegas. They’ve got casinos there like the Venetian, the Sahara, and of course, Caesar’s Palace. It’s like you can tour the world, while staying in a Motel 6 for $29.95 per night, with an all-you-can-eat breakfast buffet.

    And of course, there are all those college boys and girls who go to Cabo San Lucas for Spring Break, so they can get drunk, flash their tits and fuck like bunnies.

    This is not the stuff of which Imperialists are made.

    If somebody is wearing ideological blinders on this issue, my friend, I really don’t think it’s me.

  795. Or think about this for a second, Jeff. George W. Bush as the global Imperialist.

    This is a guy who spends his vacations tooling around in a beat-up pick up truck, mending fences on his ranch outside Crawford fucking Texas, population three farmers and a mule, where they got one stop sign and it says “Whoa,” where the town residents are outnumbered by both the TV reporters and the people camped outside Bush’s ranch protesting his policies.

    The old time British Imperialists were magnificently educated men. They were intimately familiar with the languages and customs of all the myriad peoples they wished to rule. On my recent trip with my wife to London, I visited bookstores where you could buy 19th century volumes written by Englishmen who had spent years in India, Africa and the Middle East, who were fluent in the local languages and had written exhaustive treatises on the history and customs of the local tribes. Say what you will about the morality of the British Empire, those who made it were, in their own way, men of genius.

    George W. Bush only speaks one foreign language: Spanish. And the only reason he speaks that is because he was governor of Texas, where a third of the population are illegal immigrants from Mexico.

    This is the man with the dark Imperial ambitions to establish a global hegemony? I have to ask you, are we seeing the same universe? In your reality, does Spock have a beard?

  796. Last post on this topic, I promise. Jeff, you comment on this blog because you want influence. You want to be taken seriously. You want to have an impact on the course of events. In that sense, you are just like me and every other public intellectual, who has ever been or will ever be.

    Therefore, in your case especially, Conspiracy thinking is a tar pit into which you will sink and never emerge, once you step into it. The Great Conspiracy is a universal explanation for all outcomes. Therefore, it is a valid explanation for no outcomes.

    Conspiracy thinking is the political equivalent of Creationism. As you look out into the natural world, you observe that a mouse is in some ways similar to, and in some ways different from, a seahorse. You may wonder why this is so. And if you are a Creationist, the answer is because God wanted it that way, and “Poof!” that’s the way it was.

    Conspiracy is the political equivalent of “Poof!” It explains everything. And it is therefore completely scientifically worthless.

    Once you gain a reputation for trafficking in Conspiracy theories, your reputation as someone worth listening to, among serious people, will be destroyed. You will die a ranting lunatic, taken seriously by no one who matters.

    Conspiracy perfectly explains why your position hasn’t won the day, even though you are, of course, perfectly right about everything. It is therefore the most delicious dish you could ever eat. But it is poison, and you should step away from the table immediately.

    You must understand, Jeff, that we wordy types can have everything we really need in life, without political power. We can have influence, we can be taken seriously, without having to rule anyone. Our hands were made to hold a pen, not a whip.

    As I have said to Adrian many times, the Leftists fucked us all, and they fucked us hard. The intellectual’s reputation among the common people will never entirely recover from the events of the 20th century. We will never again have the easy public acceptance enjoyed by our 19th century forbears.

    But despite all that, we can have a good life. We can have everything that is really good for us, if we just give up on the things that are really not.

    We don’t have to die, Jeff, if we can just learn to live with a little humility.

  797. This is the man with the dark Imperial ambitions to establish a global hegemony?

    Among the conspiracy-minded it’s broadly considered that W is a tool of Dick Cheney and others in these matters. The PNAC documents seem to presage something less than cuddly along these lines, though as always you’re welcome to unquestioningly accept a much more positive spin upon the whole business.

  798. Adrian,
    >W is a tool of Dick Cheney and others

    Bush has consistently outmaneuvered Democrats, time and again. I believe we have discussed this once before. No less an authority than Machiavelli says that you should never assume that a prince who makes shrewd moves is merely a stupid man who gets good advice. A stupid man will not TAKE good advice. He will go his own stupid way just to prove that he can.

    If a prince outfoxes his enemies once, he might well be a lucky fool. If he does it many times, he’s fucking dangerous and deserves to be taken seriously.

    If, for reasons of ego, you insist on believing that an enemy who consistently vexes you is a fool, then HE’S not the one who is stupid.

  799. Imperialists? Us? You’ve got to be fucking kidding me. Did you catch what I said earlier to Shenpen about how only 1 in 6 Americans has a passport? Americans want to go abroad and establish an Empire?

    Well, you may think it a small matter, but America is dependent on foreign producers for a rather crucial import which you’re not doing that much to wean yourselves off. But there is little need for all the Bubbas to descend on the Caucasus en masse, because they don’t appear to have applicable skillsets. Those of a neocon persuasion would like to do it all with automated high tech, hypervelocity ordnance dropped from satellite within mere seconds upon anyone who even thinks of sporting a beard. I mean, OK, Poindexter’s one strange dude, but this logo didn’t spring from nowhere, you know?

  800. Bush has consistently outmaneuvered Democrats, time and again.

    They’ve been like fish in a bucket, frankly. Bunch of spineless wimps. Please stop assuming I have some connection to them. America is no longer a two-party system, not that it’ll worry you, I’m sure.

    A stupid man will not TAKE good advice. He will go his own stupid way just to prove that he can.

    This is where we come back to our rather widely differing interpretations of the Iraq invasion, I’m afraid.

  801. >automated high tech, hypervelocity ordnance dropped from satellite within mere seconds upon anyone who even thinks of sporting a beard.

    OK, you got me. It’s possible I might resemble that remark. I still don’t know if that counts as Imperialism, though. My definition of Imperialism includes a desire to boss the natives around, right up close and personal. “White man’s burden” and all that. A policy of “Fuck with us and you’re dead, you foreign bastards!”
    doesn’t meet my definition of Imperialism.

    As for the logo, one of my reasons for never voting Democrat is how they gutted our foreign intelligence services back in the 1970’s. The CIA used to be a thing to be feared. Now it is a rotted husk of its former self. The best thing to do with the CIA right now is to abolish it, fire everybody, and rebuild from scratch.

    While I want a healthy respect paid to my own privacy concerns as a citizen and resident of the US, I want my government to know everything you pesky foreigners are up to, to know where all your bodies are buried, and, if necessary, to surreptitiously blackmail you to force you to do things that benefit America. We aren’t the world. We aren’t the children. We came here to get away from you crazy fuckers, and don’t you forget it.

    I don’t really want our troops on your soil, because keeping them there is really expensive, and even when we help you, you foreign fuckers are never grateful. You bitch if we’re there, and you bitch if we’re not, so if we are going to get bitched at anyway, it’s cheaper to keep our troops at home. You should only feel the tread of our combat boots on your neck if you get really outrageously out of line.

    But if you do, we should step on you ‘til you scream.

    Nations don’t have permanent friends, they have permanent interests. And I want it to ALWAYS be in the interests of you God-damned foreigners to act in accordance with American interests. This alignment of interests should be achieved peacefully if possible. But if not, by any means necessary.

  802. My definition of Imperialism includes a desire to boss the natives around, right up close and personal. “White man’s burden” and all that.

    *So* 1800s. But dominating people militarily is what it is, whether you do it up close with bayonets or from thousands of miles away with Rods from God. The Europeans gave it up because it no longer made economic sense with increasingly angry subject populations. The idea that technology has made it practical again is just the same old warmed-over hubris.

    The best thing to do with the CIA right now is to abolish it, fire everybody, and rebuild from scratch.

    Surely it’s the whole State Department you’re looking at purging?

    While I want a healthy respect paid to my own privacy concerns as a citizen and resident of the US, I want my government to know everything you pesky foreigners are up to, to know where all your bodies are buried, and, if necessary, to surreptitiously blackmail you to force you to do things that benefit America.

    This seems naive to me. Why do you think a government which has set itself the task of dominating and maintaining surveillance over the whole world is going to consider the American border (or American citizenship) to be that important?

    I don’t really want our troops on your soil, because keeping them there is really expensive, and even when we help you, you foreign fuckers are never grateful.

    Thing is, you expect us to be grateful *forever* for things your ancestors did, no matter how far your standards and behaviour have diverged from theirs.

    Not on the menu I’m afraid.

    But if you do, we should step on you ‘til you scream.

    Missing the whole point of the 4GW thing is what you are. Now, you step on them till *you* scream. And then you blame liberal fifth columnists.

    And I want it to ALWAYS be in the interests of you God-damned foreigners to act in accordance with American interests.

    Well, if you’re quite convinced Bush’s firm leadership is leading us down that road, keep voting for him and his designated successors, I would.

  803. “…Why do you think a government which has set itself the task of dominating and maintaining surveillance over the whole world is going to consider the American border (or American citizenship) to be that important?…”
    Well, if the American people are collectively stupid enough to allow its government to run amok with such powers, then tyranny is indeed in the wind. However, the whole Constitutional “consent of the governed” thing, unique to America, is sufficient to harness the governmental gorilla…but we the people must always be attentive to who is truly in the driving seat.

    And no, I’m not so sure it’s ‘us’ right now, either…but the balance has not tipped yet… ;-)

  804. Have I just stepped in to a Slashdot clone? This debate has nearly degenerated to Slashdot-style “‘America is the new Nazi Germany’. ‘No it ain’t, and if you keep on talkin’ we’ll nuke yer ass!'” discussions. Does anyone want to talk about the GPLv3 or something? Quite frankly, I am adopting a ‘wait and see’ approach to current world politics.

  805. ‘No it ain’t, and if you keep on talkin’ we’ll nuke yer ass!’

    Phil,
    I think you have a point. I believe I stepped over the line in last night’s last post. I get a little put out with the world sometimes, but I don’t entirely subscribe to Randy Newman’s policy of
    “Let’s drop the big one and see what happens.”

    And I should not have implied that I did.

    If I were a chick, I’d blame last night’s intemperance on PMS; if I were a drunk, I’d blame it on booze. As I am neither, I will say that as a self-righteous windbag, I sometimes get a little carried away in shooting my mouth off. Yet another piece of evidence that I shouldn’t hold the reigns of political power.

    This is not the first time I’ve owed this forum an apology, and sadly, it probably wont’ be the last. Sometimes I speak before I think. My post last night was such an instance.

    I’m sorry.

  806. But dominating people militarily is what it is

    s/it/imperialism/

    Dominating people militarily? That means “winning a war.” Adrian has just defined waging a victorious war to be imperialism, and by corrollary, attempting to wage a victorious war to be an attempt at imperialism. What-evah.

  807. This debate has nearly degenerated to Slashdot-style “‘America is the new Nazi Germany’.

    Hey now, I thought we were managing to have a perfectly civil exchange there.

    I don’t think America is the new Nazis, but the *wherewithal* is there, along with some of the attitudes which would feed the beast. Something really bad would have to happen first though – worse than a suitcase nuke or two IMO.

  808. Dominating people militarily? That means “winning a war.”

    Er…no it doesn’t, actually fighting wars is expensive and should be kept to a minimum. The *threat* of one’s superior technology is supposed to keep the natives from getting too restless. Imperialism is about turning a profit for the home team, and this is where the current business in Iraq is falling sadly short of the ideal.

    But maybe Bush and co were just…practising.

  809. Adrian,
    >Imperialism is about turning a profit for the home team

    Peter Bessman has a point. You are defining Imperialism far too loosely, which is surprising, considering yours is the greatest Imperial nation in history.

    If Empire is just about turning a profit for the home team, then setting up Wal-Mart stores in Mexico City constitutes Imperialism. Politics isn’t just about what gets decided. It’s mostly about who gets to decide.

    This is why Iraq is not an Imperial enterprise for America. We don’t want to boss the Iraqis around in perpetuity. We wanted to get rid of Saddam because Bush saw him, rightly or wrongly, as a threat to a post 911 US. As long as the new Iraqi government poses no further threat to us, they can do whatever they want, as far as we are concerned.

    If we are going to say that Imperialism is morally inappropriate, which I generally agree with, then we have to define it very precisely. In my country there are Leftist ethnic political activists, who seek to define ‘racism’ as loosely as possible. American Whites feel very guilty for our historically disgraceful treatment of Blacks, so we want to put an end out our racist past.

    But what exactly constitutes racism? A systematic attempt to keep non-whites on the low end of the social ladder? OK. How about refusing to rent your garage apartment to a Black person because the crime rate among Blacks is much higher than for Whites?

    How about telling the truth, as the Pope recently did, about the Islamic propensity toward violence? Does that count as racism? There are those who say it does. And what else are we not allowed to speak truth about?

    How can you say that Imperialism is morally repugnant, if you define it so loosely, that in practice it means doing anything that some foreigners might not like?

    In my country, calling someone a ‘fascist’ used to be a profound insult. But Leftists used the word so often against Right-wingers like me that it soon lost any sting. A ‘fascist,’ in current American vernacular, means ‘someone who is winning an argument with a Progressive Liberal.’ And that’s all it means.

    If you want to be taken seriously, as someone who deserves to be listened to, there is no substitute for speaking very precisely. Otherwise you are not an intellectual, you’re just a loudmouth.

  810. Peter Bessman has a point. You are defining Imperialism far too loosely, which is surprising, considering yours is the greatest Imperial nation in history.

    If Empire is just about turning a profit for the home team, then setting up Wal-Mart stores in Mexico City constitutes Imperialism.

    Well, there might also be economic imperialism. But that would be merely analagous.

    This is why Iraq is not an Imperial enterprise for America. We don’t want to boss the Iraqis around in perpetuity.

    It’s about the *military bases*. You want them there, pretty much in perpetuity, having pulled out of Saudi. Though I suppose the Kuwaitis owe you pretty much forever, as they seem to have forgiven 41 for telling Saddam, sure, what the hey, invade, nothing to do with me.

    If you want to be taken seriously, as someone who deserves to be listened to, there is no substitute for speaking very precisely.

    M-i-l-i-t-a-r-y b-a-s-e-s.

  811. Adrian,
    >It’s about the *military bases*. You want them there, pretty much in perpetuity

    Let us suppose that the Iraqi government tells Uncle Sam to get out. No more American troops may be stationed in Iraq, ever. Do you think we would impose those troops’ presence by force?

    Yes, it is in our interests to keep troops in Iraq. We still have troops in Germany, Japan and Korea. But those nations could evict us at any time, and we would go. British troops in India circa 1900 were not there to help the natives form their own state. Their purpose was to maintain British rule.

    The British Empire was an empire. If the subject peoples didn’t want British rule, that was too damn bad.

    Yes, we want the bases. No, we would not forcibly impose them. THAT’S why we are not Imperialists. If the Iraqis don’t want our presence, and make a formal statement to that effect, then our troops will leave.

    To be truthful, if the Democrats win the White House in 2008, our troops will likely leave without being asked. And those Iraqis who assisted us will be slaughtered, just like in Vietnam.

    In any event, ‘economic imperialism’ is crap. If you are not FORCING the natives to accept your presence and your orders, you aren’t creating an Empire.

    This is not rocket science. It’s not about what gets decided. It’s about who gets to decide.

    Honestly, one problem with debating Leftists is precisely their difficulty with these simple distinctions. It’s like, the farther you go to the Left, the more obtuse you become about the simplest things. This makes debating Leftists very frustrating.

    Please try to__u-n-d-e-r-s-t-a-n-d__s-i-m-p-l-e__d-i-s-t-i-n-c-t-i-o-n-s.

  812. I’ll grant you that America isn’t an empire exactly like the old Euro ones. But what America’s been up to and what the Euros used to do are *different aspects of the same thing* (this is what I meant by “dominating people militarily is what it is”). America’s version has been more efficient, unsurprisingly given that they could see what the Euros had got wrong. I kind of like Chalmers Johnson’s definition (from this interview here – warning: he seems to have invented the term “blowback” so you’ll probably consider him to be the apotheosis of Blame America First and be unable to read any of his stuff without having conniptions) : “Empires are defined so often as holders of colonies, but analytically, by empire we simply mean the projection of hegemony outward, over other people, using them to serve our interests, regardless of how their interests may be affected.”

    Does that help? America isn’t an empire in the classical Roman/European style. Breathe deep and savour the sense of moral superiority.

  813. Adrian,
    >using them to serve our interests, regardless of how their interests may be affected
    >Breathe deep and savour the sense of moral superiority.

    For better or for worse, I am a Godless windbag who reads a lot of books. I am not a soldier who fights for freedom, nor am I a doctor who saves lives. I have little claim to MORAL superiority over anyone who is not abjectly evil. But I do believe some sense of INTELLECTUAL superiority might be attainable for me. To wit:

    Not too far from my house is a Wal-Mart store. I shop there sometimes. I use them to serve my interests (the attainment of cheap stuff), regardless of how their interests might be affected (whether or not they make a profit).

    Conversely, they use me to serve their interests (making a profit), regardless of how my interests might be affected (whether all the cheap stuff I buy will actually make me a happier man). Which one of us is the hegemon? I suppose the only political answer to that is: “Which one of us do you Leftists hate more?”

    Back in the early 1990’s, there were several American feminists who wanted to redefine the word ‘rape’ to mean basically, ‘sexual activity between a man and a woman, which the woman later felt bad about.’ This being America, where there is still a small amount of common sense, those women were eventually shouted down. But their behavior is quite typical of Leftists in general.

    I think one reason why the Leftist intellectuals oppose capitalism, is that it makes no sense to them. One reason why capitalism works better than any other economic system, is that under capitalism virtually all property is owned by some individual in particular. And people tend to take care of what they own. Unless they are Leftist intellectuals.

    I have heard a number of Leftists claim that you can’t be a public intellectual, unless you are a Leftist. I believe that is exaggerated, but it’s not entirely ridiculous. Throughout the Western world, probably 90 percent of professional wordsmiths lean to the Left. So in that sense, the Left can be said to own the world of words.

    But do you people take care of words? About as well as you take care of countries and institutions in which you achieve political power. Which is to say, you run them into the ground.

    For people like us, words are all we have. Our superior capacity to express ourselves verbally and in writing is the only basis for our prominence, and for many of us, our source of livelihood. Without words, we are nothing.

    And yet good, useful, necessary words like racist, fascist, imperialist and countless others are used by you Leftists to score cheap political points against those you hate, until the words themselves lose all meaning. If you are so damn much smarter than us redneck Rightys, how come you insist on shitting where you live?

    If Imperialism does not involve the use of force to take away other people’s choices, then it is not morally repugnant, and the word loses all meaning. ‘Imperialist’ thus joins ‘fascist’ and, ever increasingly, ‘racist’ as simply meaning: ‘Someone winning an argument with a Liberal.’

    One wonders what word you people are going to fuck up next.

    I have said many times that, in the 20th century, you Leftists fucked us all. And you did. But you have learned nothing from your moral failures, and so you continue to fuck us. All intellectuals, for all time, suffer because you Leftist intellectuals value your egos, and the scoring of cheap political points, over any loyalty to your kind. Or to words.

    I think the best thing we’ve got going for us is: thank God you don’t breed, at least not at replacement level. You are the party of abortion and you should have more of them. The day the last Leftist dies will be a great day for all literate windbags everywhere.

  814. Not too far from my house is a Wal-Mart store. I shop there sometimes. I use them to serve my interests (the attainment of cheap stuff), regardless of how their interests might be affected (whether or not they make a profit).

    Conversely, they use me to serve their interests (making a profit), regardless of how my interests might be affected (whether all the cheap stuff I buy will actually make me a happier man). Which one of us is the hegemon? I suppose the only political answer to that is: “Which one of us do you Leftists hate more?”

    I *said* economic imperialism, if it existed, would be merely analagous. What Walmart does I think of as kind of like agricultural monoculture – it’s very efficient until something goes wrong, then it could turn out to be a little…fragile.

    But maybe nothing ever goes wrong, eh?

    I think one reason why the Leftist intellectuals oppose capitalism, is that it makes no sense to them.

    I think most of them are more worried about its sustainability. It has this tendency towards positive feedback and untrammelled growth, see…course, if we can get into space in economically significant numbers and survive there then Heinlein’s universe is our oyster. If.

    If Imperialism does not involve the use of force to take away other people’s choices, then it is not morally repugnant, and the word loses all meaning.

    Other countries, and their citizens, don’t really have the range of choices open to America and its citizens. The maximally self-flattering interpretation is that they’re clinging to outdated systems while America has embraced the One True Path. A more nuanced look at the affair can be found here, though Eric C only made it as far as the fourth paragraph before the idea of Americans consuming more than they produce violated his sensibilities and prevented him continuing. But perhaps your immune system is less finely tuned.

    I think the best thing we’ve got going for us is: thank God you don’t breed, at least not at replacement level.

    Give me a chance, we’ve only just started.

  815. I think most of them are more worried about its sustainability. It has this tendency towards positive feedback and untrammelled growth, see…course, if we can get into space in economically significant numbers and survive there then Heinlein’s universe is our oyster. If.

    Of course, the unstated assumption being that the destruction, or rendering uninhabitable by humans, of the environment will act as a regulator to check said untrammelled growth. :)

  816. [from Adrian’s “more nuanced” link]
    “…allow your citizens and only your citizens to consume far more than they themselves produce, and keep challengers down…”

    Yep…my BS flag went up at that point too…perhaps this “international economist” is ‘distinguished’ for his economic illiteracy? Sorry Adrian, but that article was a shoddy ideological rant poorly disguised as economic argument. I made it to para 11 before I stopped wasting my time with it, however ;-)

    Of course, my neo-con blinders are probably preventing me from appreciating all that wholesome ‘nuance’ you lefties keep insisting you’re so enlightened by…

  817. On conspiracy theories:

    A couple of weeks ago a very intelligent and very sane friend of mine surprised me by stating with a serious face that 9/11 might be the work of Bush as maybe he wanted it as an excuse for waging wars. I kind of felt shocked, as this guy tends to be really smart otherwise. All I could say “I simply don’t believe civilized people could be so evil.” Then he said “Yeah, and one would not believe it of Germany in 1930 too and so on?…” So I had to think about it a bit more.

    Clearly, my friend is right in that sense that assuming someone won’t do evil just because we think he is nicer than that is not really an argument. Because ethics is all about numbers and calculation. If stopping cancer and AIDS once and for all would require a human sacrifice of three thousands many people would say yes, because it would be a huge net gain from the viewpoint of humanity as a whole. Througout the history, many people convinced themselves that a litte sacrifice now in order to stop a huge disaster later on is an ethical choice. Every war falls into this category: you cannot wage a war without fully knowing you will have losses. Whenever people think they have to do something very important for the benefit of a lot of people, they are quite capable of evil. So it’s not a good argument indeed. But there is something else: keeping something secret is not easy.

    When I was a child, I often found out what surprise my parents are planning for me for my birthday by eavesdropping, or extrapolating small dropped bits of informaiton (“no, you cannot get another toy gun, you already have three”) or just pleading until they tired out. And this secret was only of two people. Keeping anything secret involving many people is almost impossible.

    It is even true when the conspirators have no reason to have bad conscience, such as when they are guarding a trade secret. Many trade secrets have leaked out. But if the conspirators involve people who must have ethical doubts, one of them tells his wife in a drunken moment or after having sex, she thinks it’s horrible and leaks out to a journalist or whatever… I think it’s close to impossible to keep evil secrets secret.

    Therefore, a grand-scale evil conspiration could only be kept secret if we would assume that ALL of the conspirators are fundamentally evil or at least believe in a goal with unshaking fanatism, without any doubts whatsoever.

    And this is the point where the conspiracy theory enters the realm of fairy tales – or in other words, becomes a typical case of a Fundamental Attritbution Error.

  818. Yes…keeping the lid on this kind of massive murderous conspiracy would seem to be a tad difficult…and, once revealed, may well end with the entire Bush et al families being dragged into the street and executed…as would be fitting.

    But since it’s all a load of bollocks…give your clearly unintelligent and insane friend a black eye for being such a jerk ;-)

  819. Actually I’m implying something more important than the sheer difficulty of the task. My reasoning is that such conspirations are only imaginable if one thinks that the other guys are all ultimately evil or at least 200% fanatic without any exception. Therefore, the philosophical backgrounds of forming conspiration theories are that one has to actually claim that the conspirators are themselves from some kind of entirely different kind of human stock, almost like an alien race… and it’s strange.

    A poetic question: if we all believed that all human beings are actually very similar to each other – regardless of whether its true or not – and we wouldn’t attribute those negative traits to others that we think ourselves don’t really have, what kind of political opinions would remain? Socialism and the Left in general would go instantly out of the window, but so would Dean’s vehement critism of the Left. Actually no much would remain, almost everybody would become a kind of a Centrist, a kind of 75% mild Libertarianism mixed with a 25% of mild, tactful Progressivism :-)

  820. Sorry Adrian, but that article was a shoddy ideological rant poorly disguised as economic argument.

    He’s actually quite positive about the overall effect of American influence if you get to the end. Dean is just offended by lefties use of the term “imperialism” for what America’s been doing. Degraded use of language or something, proof as if any were needed that we can’t be trusted near the levers of power. But the *general outline* sketched in that piece (I don’t agree with all of it either) has some coherence. America doesn’t have an empire in the classical sense – it’s much more sophisticated, involving plenty of carrots as well as sticks. Nevertheless, there’s the little matter of just under 50% of global arms spending. What’s that for, if not domination? And what should we call it? It looks like an evolutionary development of empire in many ways, albeit not to those determined to see it otherwise. The Benevelosphere?

  821. Shenpen,
    >the conspirators are themselves from some kind of entirely different kind of human stock

    A serious Conspiracy theory does assume that living Gods walk among us. This is why they are mostly nonsense. I suppose there are conspiracies on a smaller scale, to commit murder and whatnot. But Conspiracy with a capital C is just wishful thinking.

    >attribute those negative traits to others that we think ourselves don’t really have
    >Dean’s vehement critism of the Left

    But I DO have a certain empathy for the Left. It is just so easy to assume that the reason the world is so fucked up is because people like me don’t get to run it. Often times I will start to lecture people on how I think things ought to be (I’m not much fun at parties), and their eyes will glaze over. But what if I could MAKE them listen? What if I had the power to force those blockheads to take me seriously? Wouldn’t that be sweet!?!

    Noam Chomsky isn’t all that different from me. He’s a yammerhead who found a great paying gig. His shtick is just to take ‘treason chic’ to its logical conclusion. He writes in an entertaining fashion (which isn’t easy, but not as hard as you think, either), and his books become bestsellers. I understand EXACTLY why a man would do what he does.

    They say what we hate most in others is the part of them that resembles what we hate in ourselves. That is precisely why I hate the Left. I know that I could become a Leftist so easily. There’s nothing that Adrian or Jeff has ever said that I couldn’t say better. But it would be false. And ultimately murderous. And I couldn’t live like that. Probably.

    But, on the other hand, if you paid me millions of dollars like Chomsky gets, maybe I could.

  822. Dean,

    Are you sure you’re not broadly using the term “leftist” to mean “anyone who wins an argument with a Bush supporter”?

  823. Noam Chomsky isn’t all that different from me.

    Apart from the fact that you didn’t revolutionise the study of grammar back in the fifties.

    There’s nothing that Adrian or Jeff has ever said that I couldn’t say better.

    Shyeah, if for some reason we were to accept Pete Bessman as judge.

  824. Of course, the unstated assumption being that the destruction, or rendering uninhabitable by humans, of the environment will act as a regulator to check said untrammelled growth. :)

    Trust in Gaia, she won’t let you down.

    Course, for conservatives, stuff like this is just easily-dismissed propaganda.

  825. Dean,

    OK, but please take in mind that it’s easy to replicate the faults of the Left on Right as well. So-called “paleoconservatives” pointed out that the vehement goals of the Neocons to demoncratize the world – which often seems to go beyond what’s necessary for self-defense – have a bit of a Jacobinist, even Trotskyst flavour… Putting a bullet through folks who menace you with deadly force is one thing. Trying to liberalize the whole world is a different thing. I think you should make a clearer distinction between these two. Current events in Budapest and also the toppling of the goverment in Poland and the strange coalition in Slovakia kind of means that Liberal, Parliamental Democracy and free markets are quite hard to learn even for people who have Christian-European history, a strong influence of Classical Greek-Latin culture and a semi-capitalistic background. So how could one reasonably think that kicking the asses of the old rulers of Afghanistan or Iraq would automatically result in Liberal Democracy? It’s complete nonsense. Therefore, what I’d expect from the American Right is a bit more honest approach: admit that these wars were for purely self-interests and you don’t give a fuck what kind of goverments and systems will take place there as long as they keep to themselves.

    You criticize the Left for failing to demand that others should also be liberals. But I think the really Conservative idea would be demanding others to behave liberally only towards you, only in their relations with you and otherwise they can do as they wish. This would be an understandable position of “realpolitik”. But enforcing Liberal Democracy just because you think it suits them, well, this is not so different from the revolutionary ideas of the Left. Conservativism is about organic development. Every kind of enforced change that does not grow naturally by itself is just Jacobinism in different colours.

    But on the other hand it’s not so simple… because if Iraq or Afghanistan has at least a strong minority, at least 20% of the population and say, at least 40% of the economical-intellectual elite that wants Liberal Democracy then in this case, yes, it is your duty and historical mission to assist them. In this case it isn’t Jacobinism. So it’s not really easy to decide. I think a good, moderate practice could be “Defend yourselves but export democracy only if invited.” Or something like that. Remember game theory and mixed strategies: when in doubt, just flip a coin… ;-)

  826. “…admit that these wars were for purely self-interests…”
    In [significant] part, perhaps…sure…why not? Care to name anyone that will look after our interests for us? ;-) But if we’re interested in speaking candidly about the *truth*, then maybe we should state that we are sincerely acting in the best interests of *everyone* also…we may well be the satan-de-jour right now, as far as Islamic terrorism is concerned, but as we continue to hold them at bay, and their humiliatingly destitute situation worsens, who’s to say at whom they will lash out at next? Europe’s sphincter must be twitching, I suspect.

    “…don’t give a fuck what kind of goverments…”
    ‘Not giving a fuck’ is a crass exaggeration. I’d say we care greatly about the governments/systems being established, and the plight of the people that have to live with them. I’d also say that there’s some egotistical ‘legacy-preening’ going on also, which isn’t helpful. I sure Dubya would love it if Iraq renamed itself the “George W Bush Memorial Democracy”…or some such shit ;-) I totally agree with your criticism of ‘liberal democratic expectations’ in such people, btw.

    “…I think a good, moderate practice could be “Defend yourselves but export democracy only if invited.” Or something like that…”
    I consider this to be more-or-less what we are actually, albeit clumsily, trying to shape our gameplan into, and indeed has been our gameplan pretty much consistently throughout modern history. Sure, in the short term, there is sometimes imposition, but ultimately we either go home, and/or maintain a presence *if welcome*.

  827. “…Course, for conservatives, stuff like this is just easily-dismissed propaganda…”
    Well, however others may categorize me, I certainly don’t dismiss this kind of thing. My objection to the whole ‘enviro-eco-freako-plankton-hugger’ crusade is that it has empoverished the otherwise serious debate over environmental issues…and reduced it to a modern-day apocalyptic religious cult. It would be hysterically laughable if they didn’t inflict so much damage.

  828. “…America doesn’t have an empire in the classical sense…”
    In the correctly understood, and historically accurate, sense…no, it does not.

    “…it’s much more sophisticated, involving plenty of carrots as well as sticks…”
    OK…so now we’re trying to define a modern, perhaps more abstract, manifestation of ’empire’…which need not necessarily embody the kind of brutal, immoral imposition that a ‘classical’ empire can. Go for broke…let’s get a concrete definition established.

    However, when I hear/read word of ’empire’ (yes, usually from ‘your sort’ ;-), what I perceive is happening is actually a fallacious conflation of terms; attempting to establish an illegitimate association between the luxury of our virtuous revulsion at ‘classical’ empire, on the one hand, and the socialistic-liberal ideological revulsion at economic prominence, on the other.

  829. Shenpen,
    >Liberal, Parliamental Democracy and free markets are quite hard to learn

    You raise an excellent, excellent point. And I don’t know how to answer it. You have come to the heart of our problem.

    In his latest essay, “What do you do with all the farmers?”
    http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Front_Page/HI26Aa01.html
    the Asia Times Online writer Spengler points out the ultimate reason why there can never be peace between Israel and Palestine: What would all those Palestinians DO, if they stopped killing Jews?

    In the first half of the 20th century, European Jews moved in and bought up farmland in what is now Israel, introduced modern farming methods and made the land profitable. In 1948, 700,000 Arabs who had previously been subsistence farmers or their support structure, were displaced and became wards of the UN. The UN gave them better food and medical care than they’d ever had before, and now there are 4 million third generation Palestinian “refugees” under UN care.

    The Palestinians depend for their existence on Western aid. They get the aid because they pose a military threat to a Western nation. If they didn’t, they’d be Africa and we’d ignore them. If the Palestinians stopped killing Jews, they’d have to disperse. Or starve.

    OK, so the problem is a lack of jobs. If the Palestinians had something to do, that paid them a decent wage, they could live without the Jew-killing inspired aid, right? But what would they do?

    Suppose Uncle Sam went in and spent billions of dollars building lots of modern factories for the Palestinians to work in, producing television sets, computers and cell phones. The Palestinians aren’t the only ones with an agricultural ‘refugee’ problem. The Chinese have to move 12 to 15 million people a year from the countryside to the city. Those Chinese farmers need factory jobs, too. And at least in the US, the average Chinese IQ is five points higher than the average White IQ. Do you really think those Palestinian Arabs could build better computers than the Chinese they’d be competing with? Would those Palestinian factories be economically viable, even if they were a gift, fully paid for?

    Spenger says, in an earlier essay, that America offers the Islamic world freedom and democracy, because it’s what we have to sell. He tells the story of a Jewish shopkeeper who displayed clocks in his window. A customer walks in and asks to buy a clock. The shopkeeper says:
    “I don’t sell clocks here. I am a ritual circumciser.”
    The customer then asks why he put all those clocks in the window. The shopkeeper replies:
    “What do you want me to put in the window?”

    It may be true, that trying to spread Liberal democracy throughout the Islamic world, as a solution to the problems which modernity causes for traditional people, is destined to fail. It may be a stupid idea. There may be no solution, short of genocidal war.

    But we are not a genocidal people. I said earlier that the Western right is torn between the stupid Ann Coulter types and the nuanced uncertain types who, nevertheless, feel that SOMETHING must be done. And spreading freedom and democracy is what we know how to do. If that turns out to be useless, what else have we got?

    Shenpen, you have hit the nail on the head. This is the crux of our problem. And for a self-righteous windbag like me, it is humiliating to admit I have no answers.

  830. “…There may be no solution, short of genocidal war…”
    Or to isolate those subsets of humanity that are not, in our opinion, capable of standing alongside us, and ‘let nature take its course’…they either get their shit together, adapt & survive, or die off…either way, we shed all obligations for their future.

  831. Adrian,
    >Apart from the fact that you didn’t revolutionise the study of grammar back in the fifties.

    So very right you are. When I claimed to be Chomsky’s equal, I was speaking of Chomsky the Lefty Agitation Propagandist, not Chomsky the linguist. Chomsky the linguist is a brilliant man, and his brilliance informs the credibility of Chomsky the Lefty windbag.

    I was merely saying that if I chose to be a Lefty windbag, I’d be a better Lefty windbag than you or anyone else, including Chomsky, judged purely as a Lefty windbag. This is NOT because I am a brilliant man. I am not. I am a mediocre writer and lay philosopher. I’m not Thomas Aquinas. Hell, I’m not even Ayn Rand. And I probably never will be.

    But the Left cannot produce top tier intellectuals anymore. Your fire has gone out. No more G. B. Shaws or Bertrand Russells for you, boy. Nope. It’s Al Gores and Michael Moores ‘til the day you fucking die. You have lost the ability to even aspire to anything better, let alone achieve it. That is why a mediocre thinker like me is the equal of your best. These days, your best just isn’t very good.

    And why? Because, in the 20th century, for the gratification of your egos, your movement murdered more innocent people than one can shake a stick at. Morally and intellectually, you don’t come back from that.

    Did you see the final Lord of the Rings movie? In the end, Frodo succumbs to the power of the Ring, claiming it for himself. Even though the Ring is subsequently, by chance, destroyed, Frodo is finished. He no longer has a place in Hobbiton, or anywhere in Middle Earth. He must go into the West, with Gandalf and the last of the Elves.

    And so, my friend, must you.

  832. Wow, if I were doomed to an immortal existence in the Undying Lands, partying with the god-like Valar for all eternity, I don’t think I’d be terribly upset about it.

  833. Oh, and by the way, Frodo got to go into the West because Galadriel prayed that the Valar might reward him after his ordeal was over; not because he was doomed for being tempted by the Ring.

  834. Jeff,
    I was referring to the movies, not the books. I never read the books. I am a hard sci-fi guy. Literary fantasy is not my bag, baby.

    And as far as the movies are concerned, Frodo wasn’t TEMPTED by the Ring, he gave into it. He chose Evil over Good. And in the movie, that is why he had to go.

    If you want to argue over whether the movies or the books are to be accepted as LoTR cannon, I cede the field immediately. But from the movies alone, the point I was making was dead on.

  835. The tempter tempts, the temptee is tempted…wtf…if this degenerates into a dwarf-tossing contest I’m gonna kick both your arses ;-)

  836. Dean,

    Galadriel meets the same fate — even in the movie continuities — despite not giving in to the Ring’s power (though she, too, is tempted). I’m sorry, but the point you’re trying to make is lost.

  837. The Ring had to be destroyed no matter what, it is the
    story of the Ring of Gyges, that is the theme
    of the movie overall, and one the greatest stories ever with
    the ultimate ethical question to ponder. Furthermore, who should we trust with the most power, the Right or Left in politics?
    I think whoever does the lesser of evil’s in our system and is right with the people “We the People in order to….. etc.”, will always prevail.

  838. projection of hegemony = imperialism ?

    Once again, adrian has taken a definition which means “winning a war” and defined it as imperialism. If, for whatever reason, country A decides to beat country B into submission, it has projected pretty definite hegemony. Conveniently, with adrian’s semantics, all wars are wars of imperialism.

    Let it go, man.

  839. I’m not sure your understanding of “hegemony” is quite right Pete…at least, not from what I can gather by the way you’re using it.

    “…If, for whatever reason, country A decides to beat country B into submission, it has projected pretty definite hegemony…”

    Why should this always be the case? I don’t get it…

    I thought hegemony was an equitable extension of a blanket of protection (typically military) for mutual economic gain. A good essay is to be found here

  840. But the Left cannot produce top tier intellectuals anymore. Your fire has gone out. No more G. B. Shaws or Bertrand Russells for you, boy. Nope. It’s Al Gores and Michael Moores ‘til the day you fucking die.

    Just a minute – who are the corresponding towering intellects writing for the Right these days, to give us some kind of touchstone to judge how far we have fallen. Most of the original full-on Bush fanboys have a rather harried, desperate air about them, if they haven’t jumped ship altogether. I hope Michelle Malkin isn’t one.

    You just don’t get men of letters like Shaw any more, of any political persuasion, as far as I can tell. There isn’t the market for it. I blame television.

    You have lost the ability to even aspire to anything better, let alone achieve it. That is why a mediocre thinker like me is the equal of your best.

    You know, you keep *saying* this, but I just don’t see it. You generally ignore what I consider to be my most salient points, as I’m sure I do yours. I haven’t seen you go head-to-head with ol’ Noam, so your performance there must remain within the realms of speculation for now.

  841. “…who are the corresponding towering intellects writing for the Right these days…”
    I don’t know if these fellas can be correctly described as “writing for the right”, but the two names currently at the top of my list of intellectuals are Thomas Sowell and Lee Harris. When I contrast these guys with what passes for the cream of the ‘intellectual elite’ crop, it’s disturbing to witness how deluded ‘the left’ can be…

  842. I’m sorry to say I’m unfamiliar with his work…thanks for the pointer, I’ll check him out :-)

  843. D’Oh!!! The bell curve fella…OK…I know his name & reputation, but have never read his work.

    *sheepish grin*

  844. I second the adding of Lee Harris to the serious right-wing pantheon. I’ve mentioned Sowell and Murray before, but I didn’t become familiar with Harris’ work until recently.

  845. Wow, from “Uncle” Thomas Sowell to Charles Murray. I’m surprised you haven’t given William Shockley a mention…

  846. Jeff,
    >Wow, from “Uncle” Thomas Sowell to Charles Murray.

    I want to like you, and I will if I can, but you can’t be talking like that and maintain my respect. Michelle Malkin has described how Liberals feel free to say the most outrageously offensive things about non-White Conservatives. She once received an email from a Leftist critic that began with: “You are one sick gook.”

    If we Conservatives said the kind of things about Harry Belafonte that Clarence Thomas’ detractors regularly say about him, we’d be denounced as Klansmen. And rightly so.

    Whether you agree with him or not, Thomas Sowell does NOT deserve to be dismissed as a race traitor who love the White man and hates himself. Sowell is one of the deepest thinkers currently alive in the West.

    I urge you to read Sowell’s “A Conflict of Visions” even if you don’t agree with his politics. It is one of the deepest, most fair minded examinations of HOW people form their opinions that I’ve ever seen. And you know I don’t gush lightly.

    As for Charles Murray, his detractors generally damn themselves in their condemnation of him. His “Losing Ground” single-handedly undermined the rational for the welfare state in America. You don’t achieve anything like that by being a lightweight.

    I have some limited intellectual ambition. I’d like, someday, to write a book as intellectually profound and enjoyably readable as Eric Hoffer’s “The True Believer.” I don’t know that I will ever achieve that, but I hope to.

    But even I, self-important windbag that I am, do not aspire to writing anything like “The Bell Curve” or “Human Accomplishment.” Have you ever read either of those books? In talking with people I meet regularly, I usually feel like I’m smarter than they are, or at least more intellectual. But reading Murray’s work, I’m aware of just how limited my puny brain really is.

    To condemn Sowell or Murray on low-brow Leftist racial grounds is facile, and unworthy of a serious thinker. Please reconsider.

  847. I meant to say the RATIONALE for the welfare state. I forgot the “e.”

    Sigh. Proofread before posting.

  848. Also, Thomas Sowell wrote another book in the late 1970’s called “Knowledge and Decisions” which describes the free market as a global information processing system. If you are interested in reading a serious intellectual defense of Capitalism, there is none better.

  849. “Knowledge & Decisions” is stunning work. “Quest for Cosmic Justice” is remarkable also…and need I mention his economics books?

    If you liked “Conflict of Visions”, then try “Visions of the Anointed” for a thorough evisceration of the left ;-)

  850. Dan Kane,
    >If you liked “Conflict of Visions”, then try “Visions of the Anointed”

    I actually prefer the more high-brow “Conflict of Visions” to the more bomb-throwing “Vision of the Anointed.” The latter is full of Sowell’s venom. I prefer to take in high quality abstract examinations of difficult issues and then spew MY venom derived from it. Venom is like farts, only your own smells good.

    This is why I’ve never read any of Ann Coulter’s books. In small doses, such as in her columns, she is a delight. An entire book of hers is tiring. Pretty much like I imagine too much of me would be. Hence my hesitation to go ahead and write a book.

    And Yes, Sowell’s economic works are indeed superb.

  851. My bookwarez channel of choice isn’t proving very helpful with Thomas Sowell (though I managed to pick up The Bell Curve), so I went foraging in the Amazon.com review section:

    His themes in many of these books is that the liberal elite, anointed, call them what you will has successfully advanced its agenda for many years.

    It’s about Jeff and me! I recognise us by our…er…immense faith in the Democrats?

    If you’re in favour of free-market economics, you’ll find all the ammo you need here.

    Yowza! Lock and *load*.

    He points out that the irony of this growing separation of knowledge and policy is that it reflects the growing influence of intellectuals, particularly in law and politics. The book persuasively demonstrates that, in an environment influenced by intellectuals, actual knowledge gets replaced by assumptions based on an abstract and elitist social vision of what ought to be.

    Getting a feeling of deja lu here too.

    He is a wonderful purveyor of the great maxim: “Capitalism knows only one color: that color is green; all else is necessarily subservient to it, hence, race, gender and ethnicity cannot be considered within it.”

    That’s it! Race, gender and ethnicity are products of *wrongthinking*. Strange that he left out environmentalism.

    Through the apparatus of the state the social visionaries want to stamp their view of what the world ought to be – and they are not hampered by the facts, an understanding of economics or human nature, they will force their view on everyone no matter what.

    They aren’t hampered by the distraction of controlling any of the three branches of the US government either. What a terrible burden it must be for the Republicans to have both hands tied behind their backs like that, having people judge them by their actual performance rather than on the basis of Michael Moore’s clearly expressed desire to see Osama made president of Iraq. If they didn’t have Diebold I don’t know *what* they’d do.

    He does sound interesting, though. And you can’t help what selection of nitwits reviews your books on Amazon, unless you’re John Lott, ahem.

  852. “…The latter is full of Sowell’s venom…”
    That can often provide good fuel for the effort ;-) I think you’re being a little melodramatic to describe it as “venom”, though (hard-hitting, for sure)…although I agree that “Conflict” is deeper, intellectually…

    “…Venom is like farts, only your own smells good…”
    lol…everybody likes their own brand

    “…Ann Coulter’s books…”
    *yawn* Every now-and-then she’ll write a column that provokes a chuckle, but her shtick is *way* beyond ‘tired’. I certainly wouldn’t waste a penny on her books…I might spend a penny on one, though ;-)

  853. There were 917 comments when I started this, whcih means (counting this comment), we only need 82 more to get 1,000.

  854. Ha ha ha, I mispelled “which,” which gives me an excuse to get one comment closer to 1,000.

  855. Finally, I settled down (in Wolverhampton), have Internet again, so back :)

    I checked out this Sowell guy on Wikipedia and found an interesting quote:

    “If you have always believed that everyone should play by the same rules and be judged by the same standards, that would have gotten you labeled a radical 60 years ago, a liberal 30 years ago and a racist today.”

    A couple of hundreds of comments above I hinted that today’s moderate Right could be considered a nice, reasonable Left of the Fifties. I think it’s the same idea.

    And another one:

    “The first lesson of economics is scarcity: there is never enough of anything to fully satisfy all those who want it. The first lesson of politics is to disregard the first lesson of economics.” Looks interesting. Any comments?

  856. Just a short question before I go to sleep. Having bright folks like Sowell, Buckely etc. has to do anything about who wins elections, or the policies put in practice by the ones who win and rule? I’ll explain tomorrow why I’m asking this question.

  857. Shenpen,
    >Having bright folks like Sowell, Buckely etc. has to do anything about who wins elections?

    If I understand your question, the answer is Yes. Intellectual firepower does help win elections, eventually. In the short run, elections are won by the most charismatic candidate. Also, if the economy is strong on election day, it helps the incumbent.

    But if you assume that the economy is a wash, meaning it helps and hurts both parties about equally, then the question is: Where do you get the charismatic political candidates?

    Assume that politicians are like psychotherapists: most of them aren’t very good. They learn a few buzzwords in college, they develop the knack for seeming to care, whether they actually give a shit or not, and they learn how to seem wise, or at least knowledgeable. The good-looking ones then get clients/win elections.

    But a good therapist/politician has INSIGHT. He doesn’t just talk the populist talk, he actually understands the soul behind the words. He “feels your pain” as it were. Such individuals are rare. If you wish to attract such a politician to your party, you must have something to offer him.

    Why do people become politicians? Mostly because they are insecure attention whores who want to be loved and have power. They also want to be remembered when they are dead.

    What does an ambitious politician fear? Looking ridiculous. “There is no throne so high that it can withstand the sound of laughter from below.” What keeps a politician from looking ridiculous in a debate? Ultimately, good ideas. Where do good ideas come from? Smart partisan intellectuals.

    Thus does intellectual firepower help a political movement win elections, in the long run. The good ideas attract the most charismatic politicians, and the most charismatic politicians win, allowing for economic luck.

  858. >or the policies put in practice by the ones who win and rule?

    As for the second part of your question, again the answer is Yes. Good ideas do eventually produce good policies. Eventually.

    It works like this: I can’t speak to the Hungarian experience, but in America, when you are voting for President you aren’t actually voting for the man, you are voting for his support staff.

    In say, Republican party primaries, to select the party’s nominee, party members vote for the man they will nominate. But in the general election, if the Republican wins, he will select his advisors, cabinet secretaries, judicial nominees and the like from a different pool of individuals than a winning Democrat would. This is true regardless of the personal character of the winning Republican politician.

    Essentially, those who want to be cabinet secretaries or judges or whatever, divide themselves into the Conservative team and the Liberal team, and Republican or Democratic politicians each select from their respective teams whenever they have a government job or administrative post to fill.

    Once the election has taken place, the winning candidate will fill his support staff of advisors from the appropriate team, and then attempt to enact some portions of his campaign platform.

    And then some shit will happen.

    No one can predict ahead of time the precise nature of the shit that will happen, but there’s always something. For Bush, it was 9/11. But there’s always something.

    The policies that are followed, in response to the shit that happens, whatever it turns out to be, will depend on the ideas that dominate the respective ideological farm team from which the advisors were picked, as well as upon the character of the politician.

    If the ideas that dominate the farm team are good, then politicians who follow those ideas will tend to perform better over time, and respond better to whatever shit happens, than those of the opposing party. Thus does the party with the better ideas gain credibility over time.

    And the party with the most credibility usually has an easier time attracting the most charismatic politicians, thus winning more elections, again allowing for luck.

    Please let me know if all this makes sense. It’s pretty clear in my head. I don’t know if I’ve made it clear in print.

  859. To illustrate with a real life example: in 2008 we will have another Presidential election here in the States. I am genuinely afraid of what might happen if even the most personally excellent Democrat wins.

    This is because any Democrat, in order to be nominated, would have to make certain promises to the Daily Kos/George Soros wing of his party. If he were to go on to win the general election, he would have to make good on those promises by selecting top advisors and support staff from the Lefty fringe.

    And then some shit would happen.

    I don’t know exactly what kind of shit, but I suspect that Muslims would be behind it, and there would some dead Americans involved. And a response would be called for.

    What kind of response would those Lefty advisors recommend that their political master pursue? One that would be in America’s best interest? I think not. The Left hates America and wants to destroy it.

    Thus, for the first time since I was old enough to vote, I fear the consequences for my country if the wrong party wins.

    I don’t like that at all.

  860. The Left hates America and wants to destroy it.

    That’s just silly. The American left broadly dislikes recent attempts to impose America’s will on other countries (did we point out that there are significant differences from classical imperialism?) and would like to end *them*, and the right would like everyone to think that this would mean giving Osama root on all the Pentagon’s computer systems and a palatial safe house on Martha’s Vineyard.

    Thus, for the first time since I was old enough to vote, I fear the consequences for my country if the wrong party wins.

    Still think you’re good with Diebold.

  861. Adrian,
    >The American left broadly dislikes recent attempts to impose America’s will on other countries

    The American Left did not dislike Bill Clinton’s interference with the politics of Haiti, when he reversed a military coup in order to reinstate President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, an anti-American Marxist, in 1994. What the Left dislikes is the use of American power in America’s interest. When our power is used in ways neutral to or contrary to our interest, the Left has no problem with it.

    As for the Left hating America, it is a bit more complicated than I said. What the Left wants, precisely, is to RULE America. But as I have noted here ad nauseum, the events of the 20th century demonstrate conclusively that the Left cannot rule competently. Rule by Leftists leads to economic stagnation at best, mass-murderous horror at worst. Your options run from Jimmy Carter to Pol Pot.

    The moral quality of the Left is shown by how they choose to respond to this revelation. If they renounced the pursuit of political power, upon learning that they are not fit to wield it, that choice would speak well of their moral character. But the Left does NOT want to give up power, just because they shouldn’t have it.

    The American Left has generally been dragged kicking and screaming to the realization that if they ran the country, they’d run it into the ground. And still they are determined to run it.

    What the Left ultimately hates about Bush’s policies is not what is being decided, but who is doing the deciding. If Bill Clinton had invaded Iraq, there would be some protest, to be sure. But there would not be the relentless condemnation of an effort to bring democracy to a nation formerly held in bondage by one of the worst dictators of the past 50 years.

  862. What the Left dislikes is the use of American power in America’s interest.

    In the Right’s narrow definition of America’s interest, maybe.

    Rule by Leftists leads to economic stagnation at best, mass-murderous horror at worst. Your options run from Jimmy Carter to Pol Pot.

    Carter took up the presidency two years after the oil shock, and I don’t think Gerald Ford would have exactly been doing the Morning in America shit four years early if he’d managed to get elected. That was a seriously difficult time financially. Where does Kennedy fit on the spectrum? Or Clinton, for that matter? Not “real leftists”?

    The moral quality of the Left is shown by how they choose to respond to this revelation. If they renounced the pursuit of political power, upon learning that they are not fit to wield it, that choice would speak well of their moral character.

    This is lunacy. It would be like expecting Republicans to foreswear any interest in power because Hitler was on the right (except I suppose you’d just say he was a closet leftist, according to ESR’s family tree of communofascism). Should everyone just concede all power to the GOP in perpetuity, as they’re the only crew moral enough to aspire to it? Not the feeling I get when I look at them.

    If Bill Clinton had invaded Iraq, there would be some protest, to be sure.

    And if my aunt had balls, she’d be my uncle, as they say.

    But there would not be the relentless condemnation of an effort to bring democracy to a nation formerly held in bondage by one of the worst dictators of the past 50 years.

    Well, if the overall result looked like actually turning out in America’s interest, I think there’d be some grudging acceptance, your conviction that they just want America to lose notwithstanding. But I get the impression that most of them do not see this happy outcome, and moreover have yet to be persuaded that it’s all their fault for not having been enthusiastic enough in their blog postings.

  863. >Should everyone just concede all power to the GOP in perpetuity?

    No. I think I’ve made my position relatively clear. The Left should renounce intellectual elitism and become pure economic populists, leaving the Right to be the party of the plutocrats. Both should embrace an agreement as to Who Should Decide, namely the common people, and simply fight over What Should Be Decided.

    The Right can argue for policies that benefit the rich, and their wannabes, on the theory that a rising tide lifts all boats. The Left can argue for policies designed to benefit the poor, on the argument that:
    “Whatever you do unto one of these least of these, you do unto Me!”

    The Right can support lowering the income tax rate for top earners, ending the double taxation on corporate profits, eliminating the inheritance tax, and so on.

    The Left can support raising the earned income tax credit, revising the bankruptcy laws so creditors, even the IRS, can’t take your house, vouchers so that poor kids can go to good private schools, and so on.

    Both can vigorously support beating the living shit out of Talibanic beardies who fly airplanes into American buildings.

    I don’t demand that the Left cease to exist. I simply ask them to acknowledge that philosophers make poor kings, love my country as much as I do, and focus on being the party of the poor jerk who’s shy half a slug, and not the party of the politically ambitious pointy-head.

  864. Seriously though guys: where is Eric?

    I know you guys are all happy about commenting back and forth to each other until you reach that magical 1000 number, but really: has something untoward happened to the host of this site?

  865. “…has something untoward happened to the host of this site?”

    Maybe that mustache really was an alien entity, that has consumed ESR’s body and is now fluttering its way through the Pennsylvania sewer system looking for higher forms of life…

  866. Now I will write something weird.

    I think there is a global shift in politics, and interestingly, it might have originated in Post – Communist Eastern Europe and now it’s leaking into Britain and America as well.

    The Old Left was characterized by being 1) internationalistic 2) pro-community 3) representing the lower classes and the Old Right was characterized by being 1) nationalistic 2) pro-business 3) representing the upper classes. I know it’s a bit of a simplification, but still not a bad working theory.

    I think there is increasingly a New Left everywhere that’s 1) still internationalistic 2) pro-business 3) representing the upper middle classes and a New Right that’s 1) still nationalistic 2) pro-community 3) representing the lower middle classes.

    In other words, an “international liberal-libertine” New Left and a “christian socialist” New Right.

    Sounds strange? Well, I’ve just read in Daily Mail that the Tories are blaming Blair for selling sports fields of public school for business development. And I think the voters of Kerry might had a higher average income than those of Bush. (Although I think this shift is still a lot more noticeable in Western Europe than in America. I takes time for this to really leak in there.)

    Why do I think it?

    Well, Capitalism has changed it’s colours in the last decades. The nationalistic-patriotistic Capitalism of the Christian Middle Classes of the past is quite different from current global, international Capitalism.

    I think the resistance of Global Capitalism is increasingly based on nationalism than on international activists and workers movements.

    I think if you look at the human ideals Global Capitalism presenting to us – the people in the TV ads, the faces in the music clips of MTV and VIVA, the gangsta rappers and the pop music sluts, the general “be cool, be trendy, be an individual” message of TV ads and thus the culture of Global Business in general – doesn’t it rather fit a Blair-style pro-business New Left, than a traditional Christian-Conservative mindset?…

    I short, in the next 5-15 years, I except a Perot-Buchanan-Le Pen – Haider – style right-wing movement become the major anti-globalist force and the New Left becomes a supporter of Global Business.

    Actually this wouldn’t be a problem itself. It’s just the same old game in different colours.

    But… my nightmare is that the anti-globalist New Right might become allied with Islamofascism. Their archenemy is “immoral libertinism” and doesn’t Islam’s crude strictness look like a strong global opposing force to it? Therefore what I’m really afraid of is a Christian Socialist – Islamofascist alliance…

  867. “…be cool, be trendy, be an individual…”
    LOL…isn’t this mutually exclusive? This is all you see as the “human ideals” face of ‘global capitalism’?

  868. Shenpen,
    >the anti-globalist New Right might become allied with Islamofascism

    There may in fact be some danger of what you are saying, but if so it only further illustrates the complete intellectual bankruptcy of the Western European Right.

    It’s my understanding that in the 1930’s, there were German Jews who hated Communism, and so allied themselves with Hitler because he hated the Commies, too. Since Hitler never made any attempt to hide what he was, or how he felt about the Jews, the best word for those Hitler-allied Jews is: stupid. One can argue that, from an intellectual (NOT moral) perspective, they deserved Auschwitz.

    By the same token, any law-and-order Christian who allies himself with the people who cut off Daniel Pearl’s head, because they both object to internet porn, is a God-damned fool. I am not saying that such fools don’t exist. I am saying that if they follow the program you laid out, they won’t exist for very long. Those Jihadis don’t do peaceful coexistence.

    The West has some serious, existential problems to solve. But the solution to those problems, I am convinced, is to be found WITHIN Western tradition, not outside of it. Jihad contains no hope for the future. It offers no path to reconciling Science and the soul. Islam is a circle of spears, thrusting outward from the traditional society, against the ever-encroaching spread of modernity. It offers no salvation to people like us.

    No Westerner will benefit in the long run from embracing Osama. Of course, there may well be some Westerners on the Right who don’t understand that. There certainly are on the Left.

  869. The Left and the Right can both go to the bit bucket. They both believe, as Robert A. Heinlein put it, that everything not compulsory should be forbidden. They only disagree on *which* things should be compulsory and forbidden.

  870. >Islam is a circle of spears, thrusting outward from the traditional society

    By the traditional society, I mean the kind of social order that virtually all people lived in over the last 50,000 years, up until the last few centuries. In such a social order, no one has any privacy. There are rules prescribing every aspect of human life, down to the most intimate.

    Those rules, usually encased in religion, define the identity of each person in a traditional society. We are the-people-who-live-in-this-place-and-do-these-things. There is tremendous comfort for the individual in such a social order, precisely because he is not required to BE an individual. Each person’s place in the social order is fixed from birth. Barring war or catastrophe, there is no upward social mobility.
    O
    But there is no danger of losing one’s status, either. No one is required to prove his worth anew each day, as in a free society. In a traditional society, you can relax, knowing that nothing is ever going to change, you will never be asked to learn anything new, and your status, however lowly, is secure.

    In a free society, nothing is ever guaranteed. Your income, your social status, the very relevance of your profession or your religion or your lifestyle, may shift unpredictably at any time. You are dependent on your own ability, subject to fortune, to keep your head above water. If your luck, or your pluck fails you, you could fall all the way down.

    The free society is intensely uncomfortable for all but the most able, those with the most resources, internal and external, for making something of themselves. For others, the traditional society is almost an idyllic dream.

    In the 1970’s, most Western economists advocated granting each citizen of a Western nation a guaranteed income for life, whether he worked or not. The White citizens of the Confederate States of America fought like tigers to preserve a social order in which any White man, regardless of his personal moral worth or lack thereof, was still ‘better than a nigger.’

    From a certain perspective, what a wonderful thing it must be to be a Muslim man in say, Saudi Arabia. From the time you are old enough to talk, your society tells you that all women are your inferior. You don’t have to do anything to PROVE your superior value, relative to a woman, you just have to BE. And however low you fall in life, you will ALWAYS be better than a woman, be you a thief, a murderer, a ravisher of children.

    Sadly, this traditional security of status is what Islam ultimately exists to protect. This is what makes Islam an implacable enemy of the West.

    Islam provides millions of people around the world with a sense of comfort, community and purpose. They will not surrender it lightly and, from their perspective, they SHOULD not. But the traditional society cannot coexist with the modern world.

    Every Saudi girl who is forbidden to drive, who can never be seen by any man not her husband or family, who cannot go outside without being covered from head to toe, can now watch reruns of “Baywatch” on satellite TV and wonder: “Why not me?”

    Why must I keep my head bowed down? Why must I submit to those who have status above me, even when they have done nothing to earn it? Why must I be forever hemmed in by rules that constrain my freedom, denying me hope of a better life, when on the TV screen there are women in bikinis laughing and having fun on the beach?

    To preserve the traditional society he adores, Osama bin Laden MUST destroy us. He has no choice. This world ain’t big enough for the both of us.

  871. Not only has Dean hit the nail on the head but he’s also built a gazebo with the wood and the nails! :-)

  872. No. I think I’ve made my position relatively clear. The Left should renounce intellectual elitism and become pure economic populists, leaving the Right to be the party of the plutocrats.

    As opposed to two (marginally) different flavours of corporatism? Could be interesting. Would Peron have been a pure economic populist? I’m not sure I’ve ever seen one of those in the wild.

    I reckon the right are just as elitist, albeit maybe not intellectually so in GWB’s case.

    Both should embrace an agreement as to Who Should Decide, namely the common people, and simply fight over What Should Be Decided.

    But it’s a *republic*. The representatives are supposed to decide, unless you want to go all Switz (or CA) and bury yourself in referenda. You choose representatives who you feel will best serve your interests, pass the right laws, invade the right countries with the right justifications etc.

    I don’t demand that the Left cease to exist. I simply ask them to acknowledge that philosophers make poor kings, love my country as much as I do,

    Who are you to say that they don’t, or to judge how much they love it in the first place? They don’t love a bunch of the actions of America’s government, certainly, but for people like you to say that those actions Represent the National Essence and they therefore Hate America is the height of arrogance. You have no right to define America, except admittedly insofar as they roll over and let you.

    and focus on being the party of the poor jerk who’s shy half a slug, and not the party of the politically ambitious pointy-head.

    Good luck getting the “politically ambitious” bit out, that’s part of the system. Pointy-headedness is AFAICT part of the political culture, and the most effective weapon in the Republican arsenal, they’d probably never get anywhere if they hadn’t managed to convince large swathes of Bubbadom that the Democrats’ contempt for them exceeds the better-camouflaged Republican version.

  873. Adrian,
    >You have no right to define America

    So if we dial the wayback machine to say, 1950, and we discover that there are many Stalinists on the American far Left who wish to transform America into a brutal, totalitarian, Communist dictatorship, I have no right to criticize. After all, there is no proper definition of “America” and how dare I question their patriotism!

    At the risk of seeming drearily repetitive, Adrian, I must say I really, really, really fucking hate you people. You would burn down every good thing in this world, simply because you are not allowed to rule it.

    You use your eloquence not to elevate Mankind, but to debase your gift. In every corner of the world, among all decent people who are paying attention, the name of the Secular Intellectual is mud, and always will be, and as I have said many times, you Leftists are the reason why.

    May God have mercy on your soul, Adrian, because I’m not sure I would in His place.

  874. Pete…tell ESR to provide a big pile of thistle for the goat to munch on as he pounds it…little bastards squirm around otherwise

  875. So if we dial the wayback machine to say, 1950, and we discover that there are many Stalinists on the American far Left who wish to transform America into a brutal, totalitarian, Communist dictatorship, I have no right to criticize.

    Criticise *them*, by all means. But name them first, and include (links to) samples of writings where they detailed how this transformation was supposed to take place. Otherwise I’m going to suspect it’s the usual strawman-bashing. I find your attempts to hold John Kerry or whoever responsible for what some alluded-to-but-not-named asshole may have thought in the fifties really weird.

    You would burn down every good thing in this world, simply because you are not allowed to rule it.

    All I want to rule is myself.

  876. Folks, thanks for mentioning this Sowell guy. Really amazing are the quotes on the Wikipedia, especially this one: “One of the most fashionable notions of our times is that social problems like poverty and oppression breed wars. Most wars, however, are started by well-fed people with time on their hands to dream up half-baked ideologies or grandiose ambitions, and to nurse real or imagined grievances.” Right to the point. Like, Osama himself is exactly that type of spoiled, bored heir of a rich (construction industry) family that the Left loves to hate, but it seems they only hate them if they are white.

    How comes that half of the educated people of Eastern Europe know Chomsky or the late Susan Sonntag quite well but most of us never heard of Murray, Buckley or Sowell?… It seems the American Right is not so adept at marketing and PR… ?

  877. Shenpen,
    >How come…most of us never heard of Murray, Buckley or Sowell?

    As I keep telling Adrian with nauseating frequency, it’s about who gets to decide. Chomsky and Sontag write what European intellectuals want to see American intellectuals write: that America sucks and would be better run by pointy heads.

    Murray, Buckley and Sowell write no such thing. They write about how the American way makes a lot of sense, and how you European proles ought to learn from our example and quit taking so much shit from eloquent, literate power-lusters who think they’re better than you.

    Hence they are not paraded about by the European cognoscenti as authors you should be reading.

    Any further questions?

  878. Not until you learn some politeness :-)

    Actually, do you really think everybody with a university degree is Socialist over here? Did you miss what Thatcher and Berlusconi did and Angie Merkel is trying to do? Forgot late Pim Fortuyn? (One of the smartest practcising politicians of the last decades.) Don’t you think that the Socialists losing an election even in Sweden – the pampared Social Democrat heaven – is a real sign of times turning?…

    Sometimes I feel some of you (you = American Right) really don’t WANT to understand us. Such as last time when Angie visited Bush and he tried to put pressure on her to let Turkey join the EU? Even setting aside the fact that why the fuck should an Asian country quite heavily oppressing Kurds join that European Union whose one of the most important principles is maintaining stability thorugh the fair treatment of minorities — is it right for American airports to perform racial profiling as a terrorism countermeasure, but in the meantime it’s wrong for the EU the be cautious to let an Islam country join for exactly the same cautiousness? Sometimes I feel those of us who are strongly pro-NATO aren’t really rewarded for it – accepting we don’t want Turkey to join as it would mean a wide open gate for further Islam immigration would have been the minimum I would expect…

  879. Dan,

    “LOL…isn’t this mutually exclusive? This is all you see as the “human ideals” face of ‘global capitalism’?”

    Yes, it is. That’s the funny part of it. Like in Brian1s Life: “you are all individuals” “yes, we are” :) The point is, things tend to work only in mixed strategies. As the global elites are pressing the point of individualism without any regard to communities such as tribal/national/regional/town/whatever cohesion, patrotisms or whatever, overstating individualism can lead to a almost such an amount of loss of real individuality than in the communitarian oppressive regimes. You can’t really tell one so-trendy, so-in, so-cool-individual music club chav from the other. Their individualism is what turns them into a mass.

    As for all I can see? Yes, if I consciously restrict myself to the viewpoint of the little guy. What else could one make of the clips, the ads, whatever?

    Have you seen any clip or ad lately – except for the dumbest diapers etc. ads – that would broadcast a message that it’s good to be a mother, for example?

  880. Like, Osama himself is exactly that type of spoiled, bored heir of a rich (construction industry) family that the Left loves to hate, but it seems they only hate them if they are white.

    It’s because we choose to see what he did as an enormous *crime*, not “starting a war”. What’s the point in hating some Saudi expatriate in Pakistan struggling with Second Album Syndrome in whom Dubya has lost interest anyway? Concentrate on people whose agendas you can vote on, even if the voting process might be a little…compromised.

    Dubya, now, he’s the one who used 9/11 as a pretext to start a purely optional war, and although it hasn’t yet turned to shit enough to convince the truly committed, the process does seem to be underway, and if you think fewer carping lefty blog postings like this one would make a difference you’ve really succumbed to delusion.

  881. On ESR, well, I would rather have the goat bugger him with it’s horn :-) I mean how irresponsible it is from him to suddenly disappear for months without any trace two weeks after receiving a death threat, without notifing the readers of this blog that he is well, and letting us worry for his well-being for months?…

    Isn’t a blogger supposed to notify his readers when he is going for a holiday so that they don’t worry for him? Especially if it lasts for months?… Grrr.

  882. As I keep telling Adrian with nauseating frequency, it’s about who gets to decide. Chomsky and Sontag write what European intellectuals want to see American intellectuals write: that America sucks and would be better run by pointy heads.

    Arse. The American *government* sucks, and has quite a bit more potential to impose its suckiness elsewhere, with consequences which have yet to be fully visited upon us. Euro governments, which also suck, are at least relatively impotent.

    I don’t think many of your intellectuals really have much faith in the sad, corrupted Democrats, whatever shape their heads are. But if they’d be marginally less likely to make the clash of civilisations a self-fulfilling prophecy, that would at least be something.

    Sometimes the choices offered by democracy leave a little to be desired.

  883. What’s the point in hating some Saudi expatriate in Pakistan struggling with Second Album Syndrome in whom Dubya has lost interest anyway?

    Sigh. I think it’s the biggest delusion of modern-day Liberals. See, politics is not only about laws and goverment decisions and running the state and whatever. It’s also a culture. It’s about broadcasting a set of values of what’s cool and what’s uncool as sadly, many people have lost their internal moral compass to decide it for themselves. For example, as I have written before, every logical, rational and personal information/experience I have about light drugs would make me support legalising it, which is a typical Liberal idea. But the problem is, alongside the legalisation efforts, Liberal culture is broadcasting the message “drugs are cool”. And this is clearly not the message I would like to broadcast to those folks who are emotionally, spiritually and mentally unprepared to use them for their benefit. Similarly, Liberals as a culture need to express very strongly that Jihadis are uncool in order to get the moral pedestal to criticize GWB from. Yeah, I know it sounds dumb that I want Liberals to make dumb simple statements like “We hate GWB but we have Osama even more.” Yeah, it’s not intellectual. But the point is, human beings are not intellectual. Decisions are based on emotions. We have a fragile human brain installed on top of a huge machine of animalistic instincts. Therefore you got to feed the animal within, that wants very simply to know who is cool and who is uncool or you will compromise those basic instincts that make up our very basic will to live. And then Deans will come and claim you have a deathwish. As for you I think you don’t have, but you ignore those features of the human brain that provide the lifewish. Being smart is not really enough to really want to live. You gotta feed the animal as well. Therefore lack of basic moral statements, however tabloid they might sound, can erode the moral basis of a society. (Sorry for the confusion, it’s getting late.)

    Concentrate on people whose agendas you can vote on, even if the voting process might be a little…compromised.

    That’s interesting. Whose name are you writing this in? As you have expressed multiple times you have no connection with the Dems, I think you are writing it in your personal name only. But I think you, just like me, ain’t an American citizen, therefore you didn’t have more chance to vote on those agendas than to vote on Osama’s agendas. Therefore I don’t really understand it right now.

  884. Shenpen:

    Smoking is uncool.
    Fucking up the environment is uncool.
    Racism is uncool.
    Waging a war on behalf of your oil-exec cronies so that they can accumulate even more profits than they already do… is uncool.
    Prosecuting a war on drugs that has no effective purpose beyond propagating jim crow covertly in the post-civil rights era, and driving prices up so the CIA can bankroll its black ops stuff through drug trafficking… is uncool.

    Liberals understand the whole culture broadcast thing too. (Try reading some Lakoff.) But they have neither the monetary resources nor the machiavellian spin-meister talent, nor the support from the somnambulent Murkan majority, that the conservatives do.

    adrian10:

    As Dean has said, these intellectuals are actually establishing the new base for the Democrats, just as the fundamentalist wackos are the new base for the Repubs. The reason why the Repubs have a majority in Congress, and the White House, is because most Murkans resonate more closely with the fundamentalist wackos than with Chomsky, Sontag, Zinn, et al.

    But then again, as numerous Apple commercials have shown us, the best ideas come from *outside* the herd.

  885. “…Most wars, however, are started by well-fed people with time on their hands to dream up half-baked ideologies or grandiose ambitions, and to nurse real or imagined grievances.”

    *cough*Dubya*cough*

  886. Jeff….tsk tsk tsk…how predictable

    That quote can perhaps be most literally applied to the leaders of various islamofascist cults…take al Sadr, for example…or as Colonel Hunt (of FNC fame) calls him, “the little fat guy”. Plenty of well-fed leaders whipping the monkeys into a frenzy, then sending them off with explosives strapped to themselves…or armed with an AK and about 2 weeks of “Charlies Angels” military training (seriously…have you watched those training videos? fucking hilarious)

  887. Jeff,

    In his post of 11:16 AM yesterday, Adrian accused me of strawman-bashing when I said that there were Stalinists in America in the ‘50s who wanted to turn America into a Communist dictatorship. Where, he asks, are there any records of any mid-century Leftists saying that they wanted to do that very thing?

    And of course I can provide none. Maybe I could if I did a lot of research, but it wouldn’t matter. If I provided an example of a card-carrying member of the American Communist party saying that very thing, Adrian could always claim that it was just one guy, hardly representative of the Left as a whole. After all, would I want to be judged by every ill-considered ranting of Pat Robertson?

    When dealing with American Leftists, you commonly have to argue against the implications of what they are saying, because few of them have the balls to spell out the kind of political outcome they want, except in vague, glowing terms like “social justice.” The Left implicitly assumes that in its ideal world of the future, the nastier aspects of the human condition will have been removed or transcended.

    The best-known example of this is “Star Trek: The Next Generation.” In that future utopian society, the enlightened officers of Star Fleet look down on barbaric 20th century Americans with our stupid, reactionary fear of Communism. They proclaim that they have built a better civilization, with self-improvement, not venal greed, as its prime mover.

    But while we are constantly told that the Federation is a democracy, no one ever discusses what political parties vie for dominance within Federation government, or what ideologies animate those parties. In fact, there is no reference in Star Trek to any kind of loyal opposition at all. It seems all legitimate political disputes, all reasonable differences of opinion on both:
    1. What Should Be Decided and
    2. Who Should Decide
    have been settled. Permanently.

    If you are of the Conservative view that such an idyllic outcome could not be achieved without massive bloodshed and repression, because the darker aspects of human nature cannot be gotten rid of, then you are forced to conclude that the Federation would have to do some pretty nasty things to maintain its utopia. But nowhere are these nasty things explicitly discussed in Star Trek lore.

    A Progressive Liberal will get offended, if you say that some very ugly things would have to be done, given the reality of human nature, to achieve the Progressive’s future political ideal. He will interpret your statement to mean that he is an ugly person with ugly intentions. And frequently he will accuse YOU of being an ugly person with ugly intentions for not supporting his utopian ideals.

    He will never specify how many people would be killed in order to achieve his perfect world. He refuses to consider the possibility that ANY would have to be killed. He implicitly assumes that, with the right people in charge, all of these tedious issues of political and cultural difference would just be worked out. Somehow. They’d hold lots of conferences, and suchlike. People would talk out their differences. Talk settles everything.

    And if you don’t go along with the assumption, that makes YOU a bad person.

    Nowhere will the Progressive say: “I think there ought to be widespread repression.” He simply demands a socially perfect outcome which, in the real world, could not be achieved without massive repression, and assumes that if HE were in charge, the perfect outcome would be achieved expediently WITHOUT the repression.

    And thus would I surely fail Adrian’s challenge to me, were I foolish enough to take it.

  888. >the support from the somnambulent Murkan majority, that the conservatives do.

    Where I’m going with this is as follows: there are some pretty nasty implications in that post before last of yours. You do not spell out those implications. So I will attempt to. If I have misinterpreted what you meant, please correct me. But understand that I am not stupid. If I see dark implications in your writings, others likely do also.

    You seem to imply that American Conservatives are:
    Smokers(?)
    Environmental fucker-uppers
    Racists
    Oil-greedy war-wagers
    Jim-crow propagating drug-warriors

    AND that in all our despicable evil vileness, we have the support of a majority of the American people, whom you also describe as sleep walkers.

    The essential political assumption of the American republic, is that the people ought to be sovereign. That is, the people ought to be the final political decision-makers in the land. But if a majority of the American people support us Conservatives, even in their sleep, and we Conservatives are evil, then how can the American people deserve to retain their sovereignty?

    Wouldn’t it be better if America were conquered and the people had their sovereignty taken from them? The people are not sovereign in Saudi Arabia, the royal family is. If the American government does evil things, in your opinion, and the American people have the final say over what their government does, and they support the evil things done in their name, then shouldn’t they be deprived of their final say?

    Now, who in the world has the political will to do what would be necessary to conquer America, today? Why, it is the Jihadis. Therefore, by implication from what you said, would it not be better for America to LOSE the War on Terror?

    If that is what a reasonable person can infer from what you, as a proud Leftist, have to say, then why in the name of God would any sane American trust the Left with political power?

    Now, please explain why the inferences I drew, were not the implications you meant.

  889. Wow, I only came here to add posts to the big pile. But it turns out a decent conversation is still going on.

    With the allegations of “Iraq’s all about oil” still floating around, I can’t help but wonder how the American left is somehow pro-business. Yes, the oil companies made record profits, but that was largely because of supply problems that led to less oil, and therefore higher profit margins. I really don’t understand the argument “we went into Iraq for the oil, see the oilc ompanies made so much money” when in reality it was the lack of oil that drove up prices. Can anyone explain?

    Can anyone explain how Iraq was clearly about oil?

    And if the left can’t understand that aspect of business, but is largely suspicious because “they make too much money, alhtough I really don’t know what their job description is, or how many people in the entire world are capable of doing that job competently” I don’t think they are on the side of business. They definitely are on the side of government-controled economic planning.

  890. One more thing, Jeff:

    If, in fact, the inferences I drew from your earlier post were inaccurate, what precisely do you want to see happen? How would you go about creating a better America, wherein us Bible-thumping, red neck, racist, misogynistic, homophobic Conservatives, and our majoritarian supporters, would forever be denied power?

    These are epithets I hear all the time from the Left, referring to people like me. Speaking only for myself,
    1. I have never thumped a Bible, nor have I read much of it, outside of Ecclesiastes.
    2. I have no facility for manual labor, and I don’t enjoy being outside, so my neck is pasty white, not red.
    3. In colloquial Leftist terminology, you are a racist in America today, if you agree with Martin Luther King Jr. that a person should be judged, not by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character. Such a view is incompatible with affirmative action, therefore holding it makes me a racist.
    4. Today, a misogynist seems to be someone who believes that men and women are different, not just in the plumbing, but neurologically. Thus no preference in favor of males is necessary to ensure that a majority of top mathematicians are men. Men are, on average, better at cutting-edge math, due to differences in male and female brains. The trouble with this definition of misogyny, is that it now encompasses all of modern neuroscience. Basically, in this definition, the facts of reality, as observed in the laboratory, are misogynist. Count me in.
    5. Lastly, a Leftist defines a homophobe today, as someone who does not think that the definition of marriage, unchanged since the dawn of time, as an institution for joining men and women, should be changed to include same-sex marriage at the whim of unelected judges in places like Massachusetts. I guess that makes me a homophobe.

    So I suppose I meet 3 out of 5 of the epithet criteria to be an evil Conservative. But are epithets enough?

    Unlike virtually every Progressive ideologue with whom I am familiar, I do not simply want to win political victories. I want to deserve those victories.

    And while calling you names would certainly make me feel better about myself, it would not make me fit to rule. In order to deserve political power, I would need to do the intellectual heavy lifting necessary to:
    1. Figure out in detail what needs to be done
    2. Determine how to economically do it, and
    3. Create a back-up plan to implement in case something goes wrong, which it always does.

    No amount of carping or name-calling would make me fit to govern.

  891. For example, as I have written before, every logical, rational and personal information/experience I have about light drugs would make me support legalising it, which is a typical Liberal idea. But the problem is, alongside the legalisation efforts, Liberal culture is broadcasting the message “drugs are cool”.

    Where? Can you give me any concrete examples, or is this just a diffuse aura of coolness drifting around the place like a fart, which someone has traced back to a liberal by DNA analysis?

    And this is clearly not the message I would like to broadcast to those folks who are emotionally, spiritually and mentally unprepared to use them for their benefit.

    See, this is where I see the law as getting in the way of the market. A free market in drugs would *educate* these people. Some might find the process harsh, sure, can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs, but you’d end up with a population worthy of being called adults, at least in this sphere. Having the government decide what recreational chemicals you can and can’t put into your body puts them into a parent-child relationship to you – which can then creep into other areas. Quite apart from the massive amounts of money which the whole thing funnels towards organised crime and probably jihadis to boot.

    Liberals as a culture need to express very strongly that Jihadis are uncool in order to get the moral pedestal to criticize GWB from.

    Feh, says who? Anyway, “cool” is a treacherous concept here. It’s something which ‘authorities’ (whether rightist blowhards or lefties attempting to suck up to them for some reason) don’t get to influence, except insofar as if they praise something it’s likely to become *less* cool. Jihadis will be cool or not in the eyes of their target audience whether or not I (or someone with a bit more name recognition) stand up and say they are(n’t).

    Yeah, I know it sounds dumb that I want Liberals to make dumb simple statements like “We hate GWB but we hate Osama even more.

    I don’t hate GWB. I’d like to see him impeached – I think taking America into an unnecessary war on a false pretext which has had the effect of making it less secure is at least in the same league as, say, getting a blowjob from a consenting adult, but I don’t hold out much hope of the poor spineless Dems getting the House in November so it’s kind of moot. I’d like to see something happen to Osama which would make his message less effective, but I’m not sure that capturing or killing him would do the job.

    And then Deans will come and claim you have a deathwish.

    Dean just gets carried away with the flow of his own oratory. I suspect the influence of Thomas Sowell may be to blame, and have just managed to get my wife to order me A Conflict of Visions second-hand off amazon.jp so that I may peruse some of this legendary prose at its source.

    As for you I think you don’t have, but you ignore those features of the human brain that provide the lifewish.

    There are many sources of passion.

  892. Jeff,

    The question I should have ended that last post with is:
    “What, beyond carping and name-calling, makes you fit to govern?”

  893. Adrian,

    >Having the government decide what recreational chemicals you can and can’t put into your body puts them into a parent-child relationship to you – which can then creep into other areas. Quite apart from the massive amounts of money which the whole thing funnels towards organised crime and probably jihadis to boot.

    That is the most profoundly true thing I have ever known you to say. If I could just persuade you to muster that level of common sense with regard to a few other issues, you’d be a man after my own heart.

    Bravo!

  894. Can anyone explain how Iraq was clearly about oil?

    Some interesting backstory here(warning – French newspaper)…but really, it was about a bunch of things, but cornering the date market probably wasn’t one of them, you know?

  895. OK, so how is Bush getting richer due to the war in Iraq? How is Cheney? Which of Bush’s friends are getting more money?

    I realize you may not have done the research yourself, but by this time I’d expect somebody to have dug up something.

    Are you really arguing that we invaded an embargoed country so that insurgents would bomb the oil fields, so that there would be reduced oil supply, thereby making Bush’s friends rich? Or are you arguing that we actually *are* getting more oil from Iraq today, and that all the “it’s not worth it” claims are made up fantasies? Do you have another scenario that I haven’t thought of?

  896. Dean,

    *I* don’t want to *govern* anyone. I think you expect me and Adrian both to answer on behalf of an abstract collective LiberalDeathCult that exists largely in your own head, and does not realistically reflect the point of view of any liberal I’ve known.

  897. OK, should have read the linked-to article before responding, but:

    Multinational companies – giants such as Exxon-Mobil, British Petroleum, Shell, Total and Chevron-Texaco – have diversified sources of production and have less to fear from a price collapse. But the US administration does not listen to them

    And I thought the big problem with Cheney’s energy policy was that he *did* listen to them.

    Economic reality finally rebutted the neo-conservative plan. … Initially, officials at the Pentagon and the White House assumed that they would be able to recoup the costs of the war by dipping into Iraq’s oil revenues.

    Although I have a hard time believing the French concept of economic reality, it is true Bush sold the war as basically costless because of the oil angle. But it’s one thing to say “we won’t spend money on this war” and another to say “let’s go to war in Iraq, look we can even loot the oil so it won’t cost any money!”

    But the rest of the article seems to argue against the “war for oil” angle:

    But when they did the maths, they made unpleasant discoveries. Expanding Iraq’s production will not only take time, it will also be very expensive.

    Remember, this was *before* the invasion. Why would they invade, for the oil, when “the maths” said it was too expensive?

    Anyone? Anyone?

  898. Jeff,
    >LiberalDeathCult…does not realistically reflect the point of view of any liberal I’ve known.
    >*I* don’t want to *govern* anyone.

    Ok, fine. What do you want to see happen? Every Progressive I’ve ever known, thought that the way Conservatives wanted to do things was terrible, and ought to be scrapped and replaced.

    With what, exactly, would you replace Conservatives and their policies? I have explained what I want to see the Left do, namely drop the intellectual elitism and become pure economic populists.

    Other than die, what would you like to see me do?

    Given my values, do you have any policy proposals that we could both agree on?

    What do you have to offer besides criticism?

  899. Max Lybbert,
    >Why would they invade, for the oil, when “the maths” said it was too expensive?

    If you are going to condemn Bush/Cheney as Imperialists, you have to propose that they sought economic profit from their foreign adventures. This is because classical European Imperialism, as well as Japanese Imperialism prior to WWII, was about squeezing militarily weak foreigners for money.

    If you don’t propose a profit motive, then you cannot plausibly accuse Bush if invading Iraq for Imperial purposes. In that case, the most plausible explanation for his actions, is what he says it was:
    1. The Middle East is a cesspool of tyranny.
    2. The tyrants always were obnoxious but America didn’t interfere, because during the Cold War we needed the obnoxious tyrants as allies against the Soviets.
    3. After the Cold War ended, American foreign policy remained wedded to the goal of “stability” in the Middle East, mostly due to inertia and the racist notion that Arabs don’t want and aren’t fit for liberty.
    4. After 9/11, “stability” didn’t look so good anymore. Those obnoxious tyrants often funded Islamic terror groups, provided those groups directed their hatred outward, toward us, rather than at the tyrants.
    5. The most obnoxious of these tyrants was Saddam Hussein. He had tried to assassinate Pres. George Bush Sr., used poison gas on the Kurds, invaded Kuwait, and was in violation of the cease fire agreement that ended the first Gulf War to liberate Kuwait.
    6. After 9/11, it made sense to “destabilize” those obnoxious tyrants, in hopes that democracy and freedom in the Arab world might reduce the appeal of Islamic terror groups. Saddam Hussein’s bad behavior gave us a pretext for starting with him, even aside from his nuclear weapons program.
    7. Subsequent events have demonstrated that Arab internal politics, and Middle Eastern culture itself, is a lot more complicated than anyone anticipated. Attempting to bring democracy and freedom to that part of the world is still, probably, the right thing to do, but it won’t be easy. There is a good reason why, until recently, the Arab League was the ONLY international body that did not have one, single democratic member state.

    If you are determined, no matter what, to hate George Bush, then the explanation I just gave for his behavior is UNACCEPTABLE. Therefore, there must be some more sinister explanation, and Imperialism is the enemy the Left knows how to fight so, voila!, George Bush, the malapropic rancher from Texas, is a hegemonic oil Imperialist.

    What other explanation could there be?

  900. For the record, I supported the Iraq invasion in the beginning, continue to do so now, and I will support it still, even if Iraq ultimately collapses into sectarian violence and slaughter, which is a distinct possibility.

    The fact is that before the invasion, we had no fucking idea who the major players were in Iraq, Iran, Syria and the like. We knew the names of the official leaders, and our diplomats had their diplomats names and numbers in their rolodex. But there was no significant body of the American public, other than those diplomats, who were wedded to “stability” at all costs, who knew anything about Iraqi Shiite, Sunni or Kurdish culture, exactly why someone might join a group like al Qaeda, or how to make a case for Western Liberty that a Middle Eastern Muslim would take seriously.

    Today we have 140,000 American soldiers who have helped train a new Iraqi army, worked alongside Iraqi civilians, spent time in Arab communities, and walked with Muslims on their way to the Mosque. If Islam, or some significant faction of it, is to be our main enemy in the new century, at least now we know a little about it. Before, we didn’t even know what we didn’t know.

    Sun Tzu says: “If you know your enemy and you know yourself, you need not fear the outcome of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not your enemy, then for every victory you achieve, you will suffer a defeat. And if you know neither yourself nor your enemy, you will be defeated in every battle.”

    Whatever else Iraq has wrought, we now know the enemy better than we ever have before. This is not a small achievement.

  901. Dean,

    are you sure a Socialist society can only come into existence through a Jacobinist/Bolshevik – style “rule of a vanguard”?

    I think given the facts that the distribution of income in society still resembles a pyramid, there are more people under the average income than above and envy is quite an integral part of human nature: if you imagine a “pure” democracy, where the would be no constitution, no human rights, but rather an 50% +1 vote could do ANYTHING including simply slaughtering those of 50% -1 vote and distributing their wealth to the 50% +1, such a system could establish Socialism by itself, by public vote, without any kind of a vanguard. Of course it would be the same horror as a terror established by a vanguard, there is no moral difference, actually, I think this is what Tocqueville warned against. But, what I’m trying to imply is that vanguardism is just a symptome, not the illness itself, because I can quite imagine a rule of terror without any vanguardism, just based on 50% + 1 vote…

  902. Dean,

    Classical liberalism/libertarianism would be a good start.

    I’d like to see conservatives own up to the fact that the values they’ve espoused are not classical-liberal values.

    I’d like to see them kick out the fundamentalists and racists from their core constituency and quit pandering to these people. I’d like to see them embrace science and the scientific community. That means admitting that evolution is fact and that we have caused a problem with the emission of greenhouse gases. I would like to see them implement real educational progress, not phony feel-good No Child Left Behind stuff that’s unworkable in practice. The U.S. is currently lagging behind the rest of the developed world when it comes to basic reading, math, and science skills; this is partially because despite the reputation of “socialist Europe”, European schools must actually compete with one another to produce the best results, which is not so in the American case.

    I voted for Badnarik in the ’04 election; while I had no expectation that he would win, I had kind of hoped that he would show up as a bit more than a blip on the radar, making the libertarian contingent something that one of the major parties would take seriously.

    I have no expectation that any of this will take place, of course, because I do think that the American model is too deeply flawed and easily corruptible by money to yield any real positive change.

  903. For the record, I wish some leftists embraced science as well. Animal testing, nuclear power, and informed human testing are not the devil. Neither are genetically-modified food, or profitable drug manufacturing.

    I’d also like to see a leftist propose school improvement that doesn’t amount to “give more money to the schools and more power to the unions.”

    But that’s just me.

  904. Jeff,

    maybe I misunderstood you, but do you really consider Apple ads as genuine messages of “counterculture” (in this case please let laugh my ass off) or did you mean it as a sarcasm?

  905. Max,

    the trouble is, it’s not easy to see through the agitprop and see the real stuff.

    As for animal tests, I have some friends who are quite activist against it and they showed me shocking stuff, like simple basic cosmetical stuff like body lotions injected into the eyes of animals to check out what happens, and if they *only* get half-blind through immense suffering then it’s considered safe regarding the casual human use where only a lot smaller quanity gets occasionally into the eye. If it would be this way, it would be a moral duty to oppose it.

    The trouble is, I don’t know how often it happens, how much % of the animal tests are from this type, what other measures are there to test such stuff and so on.

    It’s quite possible that these activists are wrong in some sense.

    But how to get through the Left-wing agitprop and the Big Biz agitprop and see the real stuff, the facts?

  906. Thanks, Shenpen, looks like we actually agree. Yes, I was being a smartass. I’m tired of the “only one side does XXX” claims.

    Yes, Republicans are corrupt, and so are Democrats. The Libertarians and Greens don’t get bribed because they aren’t currently holding any real power.

    Yes, conservatives often try to ignore certain sections of science, and yes leftists often try to prohibit certain scientific practices. And so on and so on.

  907. How to see through it? Aside from educating yourself, I don’t know. I do know we’re only 19 comments away from hitting 1000. Something tells me that there’s going to be a wierd software bug at 1024. But we won’t know ’till we try.

  908. Shenpen, the sentiment was genuine; the fact that I cited Apple ads as legitimately conveying it was deliberately ironic.

  909. Shenpen,
    >Actually, do you really think everybody with a university degree is Socialist over here?

    I use it as a working assumption. For every two years of college, particularly outside of the hard sciences, move twenty degrees to the Left.

    >Sometimes I feel some of you (you = American Right) really don’t WANT to understand us.

    Sadly, you are so right. And allow me to apologize once again on behalf of my insular countrymen. We do tend to think of you as “all them foreigners over there.” As for the whole Turkey in the EU thing, I think Bush was sucking up to Turkey to try and create a Middle Eastern Muslim country that likes us. On the American scene, that would be seen as a bit of a foreign policy coup.

    We Americans have a terrible reputation in the world. We are frequently seen as screwing our friends to appease our enemies. We do it because most Americans don’t really GET the rest of the world, and so the domestic political calculus of the moment tends to outweigh long-term considerations in dealing with other nations.

    All I can say is, you have my deepest sympathies. I’m almost certainly not going to do anything about it, but I’m sorry.

    This is one of the greatest policy headaches for every new administration. Every new President must, in order to gain cooperation from other nations, try and repair the damage done by the short-sighted policies of earlier Presidents.

    And every new President goes on to adopt short-sighted policies of his own, which create future headaches.

    The Romans and the British did this sort of thing right. For centuries, their leaders would take the long view in dealing with peoples they wished to subjugate. And their nations built up great empires, as a direct result.

    With us, there is an upside and a downside. The good news is we have no desire to subjugate or rule you. The bad news is we really don’t care if you live or die. If you die in large enough numbers, such as in some natural disaster, that your plight is broadcast on our evening news programs, we will, in the spirit of generosity, send you a bunch of money. Then we’ll forget about you, again.

    But as for having a long-term strategy for improving relations between you and ourselves, we don’t do that. We are a short-sighted, insular people. We want to make lots of money, fuck pretty girls, eat lots of cheeseburgers, and drive the biggest fucking SUVs on the planet.

    Getting us to do anything else for very long requires either a profound threat, such as during the Cold War, or great political genius, such as Roosevelt had during WWII.

    George W. Bush is a man with many virtues which I admire greatly. Great political genius is not one of them.

    Again, I’m sorry.

  910. Looking over my last comment, it appears harsher than I meant. The phrase “aside from educating yourself” wasn’t meant to suggest anyone in particular is not educated, only that people in general need to do the work to stay educated in what’s going on.

  911. Jeff,

    To begin with: Thank you. I asked you to tell me what you wanted me, as a representative of the American Right to do, and you responded. You didn’t obfuscate or attempt to dance around the issue, instead you gave a clear answer.

    Allow me, then, to respond respectfully to your concerns.

    >I’d like to see them kick out the fundamentalists and racists

    If I may take these in reverse order: racists.

    What do you have to do, to qualify as a racist? Must you dress up like a bed and burn crosses in people’s yards? How about proclaiming loudly and publicly the words: “I just hate niggers.”

    If I refuse to rent a garage apartment to a tenant who is Black, because I’ve heard that the crime rate for say, 25 year old Black men, is several times what it is for Whites or Asians, am I a racist?

    Is the Pope a racist for pointing out, as he recently did, that there is a serious problem with Islam and violence?

    Imperialism, in my view, is using military power to extract benefits from foreigners who pose no threat to you. Racism, in my view, is a sort of Imperialism-at-home. You use force or the threat of force, to extract benefits from those of a different complexion, on the view that those others deserve no better. That is racism.

    As a Progressive, I expect you have a more expansive definition of racism than I do. Please explain to me the limits of that expansion, and perhaps we can agree on a definition of the racists that the Right should kick out.

    Now, on to the fundamentalists: If an Amish woman shows up at the Republican Party convention, and asks to be admitted, do we toss that bitch out on her ass? What about an Orthodox Jew?

    Precisely who are these fundamentalists you want us to boot out? How do we recognize them, that we may distinguish between them and respectable regular people?

    >That means admitting that evolution is fact

    Protestant evangelicals have a problem with Darwinism, for reasons I may expound upon in a later post. Their objection is profound and deep and is not something they can just be talked out of. Jews, Catholics and mainline Protestants are generally OK with Darwin, but the nature of Evangelicalism makes it difficult for them to accept some implications of the nexus between Darwinism and their faith.

    Would you have us bar all Evangelicals from Conservatism, and/or the Republican Party? Shall we create a litmus test for membership:
    “Do you agree that human beings evolved, by process of natural selection, from lower life forms?”

    In order to satisfy you, must we repudiate all who answer “No”?

    >we have caused a problem with the emission of greenhouse gases.

    Earlier, I wrote a couple of posts on this issue, outlining my concerns that Global Warming is, whatever its scientific merits, an attempt at political power grabbing by the ecological professoriate. Are you prepared to do ANYTHING to allay my fears, in this regard? I assure you those fears are shared by many voters. Must Conservatism repudiate all, who do not have perfect faith in the wisdom and goodness of the Save-the-Rainforest crowd, in order to satisfy you?

    >real educational progress

    You and me both, brother! But I submit that it is the Democrats who, on the issue of education, behave as if they were a wholly owned subsidiary of the Teachers Unions, for whom competition is an evil word.

    >the American model is too deeply flawed and easily corruptible by money to yield any real positive change.

    With what model, may I ask, would you like to see the American model replaced? In answer, I ask that you PLEASE don’t quote Star Trek at me, or any other fictional utopia, invented by you or anyone else.

    Human nature is a tricky thing. There are only so many ways we can possibly organize ourselves, that will work, for any length of time. In America in the 19th century, there were a number of communes started by Socialist idealists who wanted to create a new kind of society, based on collective ownership of property and free love. The vast majority of them failed within 20 years.

    People just aren’t built to do what those idealistic reformers wanted. Even the Soviets dropped the free love crap. Fathers like to know that their wives’ children are THEIR children, don’t you know. Otherwise they tend to disinvest.

    If you have another social model for the United States to follow, which has been tried and proven to work elsewhere, I’d love to hear it. But before you offer it, consider the following:
    In 1786, the United States of America was a poverty-stricken backwater, culturally and militarily unimportant. Two and a half centuries later, we are the greatest economic, cultural and military power the world has ever seen. No country ever succeeded like America. That’s just a fact.

    If you wish to present us with a model to replace our own, which you think will serve our interests better, it’s going to have to be pretty impressive.

  912. Beyond that, Jeff:

    All those people you want us to kick out have the right to vote. If we boot them out, they will no longer vote for Conservative Republicans. Where will we get new voters to replace the ones we repudiate? Shall we steal them from the Democrats? Which of your voters do you want us to steal?

    Obviously, if we boot out enough voters, we will never win another election. We can sit, pristine in our moral purity, outside of the corridors of power, forever.

    But, assuming you do not wish that fate upon us, and you would generously offer us some of your voters, to replace the ones we kicked out, what shall we have them vote for?

    What policies should Conservatives pursue, which would be consistent with our values and world-view, which would also be acceptable to you?

    I asked you ‘what would you have us do,’ and you replied that we should start purging people. Ok. But after the Great Purges are over, what objectives shall we Conservatives pursue in Stage Two?

  913. You will recall, Jeff, that I never asked you Progressives to boot out the intellectuals, as voters.

    I only asked you to repudiate the proposition that the intellectuals are born, booted and spurred, to ride us all.

    If you can sell them on that, the professors can vote for you ‘til the end of time, with my blessing.

  914. Shenpen,

    >are you sure a Socialist society can only come into existence through a…vanguard?

    I am not. However, I’ve never heard of any nation of sensible people voting in such a thing without a collection of professor types whispering Siren-songs in their ears.

    I am a commoner, both by birth and political sympathy. I have a great deal of confidence in the common sense of the common people. I believe that if the right institutions are provided, to process social information and provide good social incentives, the ordinary schmucks can govern themselves quite well without an elite cadre to order them about.

    Creating those institutions in the first place is VERY difficult. The common people must somehow come by the necessary social and technical skills to accomplish most things on their own, without the help of experts. If experts are needed to get things done, then the social institutions will inevitably be rigged to perpetuate the power of those experts.

    The creation of that initial skill set in the first place is almost a miracle. How will the common people survive if they don’t have the skills or an overlord class to boss them around? Yet if they do have an overlord class, how will they ever develop the skills? It is a ‘chicken and the egg’ problem.

    Once they do have the skills, however, then the necessary institutions can be built. Institutions which both enable and safeguard the sovereignty of the common people.

    And once the institutions are in place, I am confident that the common people will be sensible enough not to fuck it all up, unless they are subjected to extraordinary stress.

    Unless they are:
    1. Confronted with some extraordinary catastrophe AND
    2. Subjected to the Devilish whisperings of power-lusting pointy-heads
    the common people will use their skills to preserve the institutions that make their sovereignty possible.

    That, for what it’s worth, is my opinion.

  915. And I thought the big problem with Cheney’s energy policy was that he *did* listen to them.

    Not the multinationals. They were too…multinational, apparently.

    Why would they invade, for the oil, when “the maths” said it was too expensive?

    Er…because they were a bunch of ideologically-driven knonuffs with no inclination to let any inconvenient facts get in their way, perhaps? Just a suggestion.

    They sound a bit like Dean’s caricature of liberals, in fact.

  916. None of the Opec member states, with the worlds largest oil reserves,
    have any troops in Iraq, excluding Iraq which is a member state.

    Sending troops would be an implicit approval of the invasion, which they pretty much uniformly opposed, claiming it was going to make things worse, a conclusion which can’t be said to have been comprehensively disproved.

    If the Iraq war is about oil why do they not defend their oil supply
    against instability or take over from terrorists?

    They’re probably doing just that. At home. Having somewhere for all the terrorists to go may be useful too, at least until they come home bristling with hands-on experience.

    No one much is saying the Iraq war is *just* about oil. But if you think it isn’t a bigass factor, I really don’t know where to begin…

  917. >No one much is saying the Iraq war is *just* about oil. But if you think it isn’t a bigass factor, I really don’t know where to begin…

    The bigass factor is Opec losing control of the third largest oil reserve in the world
    while playing musical chairs at the U.N…. and the music is playing softly in the background, do you know the tune…?

    >They’re probably doing just that. At home. Having somewhere for all the terrorists to go may be useful too, at least until they come home bristling with hands-on experience.

    When they do come home will the civilized world have to bail them out as well
    after the terrorists come home to roost?, or will they lose another chunk of the big black gold ?

    >Sending troops would be an implicit approval of the invasion, which they pretty much uniformly opposed, claiming it was going to make things worse, a conclusion which can’t be said to have been comprehensively disproved.

    Let someone else take of us and our oil, we just pump it, some body else
    can do all the nation saving we wont need to sacrifice anything more
    will we?

  918. The bigass factor is Opec losing control of the third largest oil reserve in the world

    Would you say the US has actually *gained* control of it?

    Some control.

    I don’t see why you’re so fussed about OPEC. They aren’t calling the shots at the moment, even if they could be again one day, depending on depletion rates and stuff.

    When they do come home will the civilized world have to bail them out as well
    after the terrorists come home to roost?

    I really have no idea. Chances are there’ll be some major repression. But the oil will probably continue to be pumped if they mean to keep eating.

    Let someone else take of us and our oil, we just pump it, some body else
    can do all the nation saving we wont need to sacrifice anything more
    will we?

    Well, you can call it “nation-saving”, but some have a less charitable view of what’s going on out there.

  919. One more thing, Jeff:

    I mentioned earlier issues I had with the Save-the-Rainforest crowd, in terms of goodness and wisdom. I have outlined where I think the eco-freaks may be lacking in goodness. Permit me now to air my concerns over their lack of wisdom.

    The ecological crusaders are clearly engaging in a religious activity. Saving the Rainforests is, for them, a source of comfort, community, meaning and purpose. Mother Nature is the eco-freaky equivalent of Jesus. But there is one difference.

    Jesus promises His worshippers eternal life, beyond the grave. This is not the venue to discuss whether or not Jesus can actually deliver on His promise, only that, within the framework of Christian faith, He makes it.

    Mother Nature makes no such promise. The staunchest ecological crusader must, from a scientific perspective, acknowledge that in 5 billion years or so, the Sun will explode, in a process known as Nova, and scorch the Earth to a cinder. The Rainforest is ultimately DOOMED.

    Saving the Rainforest, for now, may grant you a sort of extended lifespan, as you will be saving something that will endure for ages, merging your identity with its own. But one day, in the distant future, Mother Nature will, with absolute certainty, cleanse this precious blue marble of ours with fire, rendering it sterile forevermore.

    This is one of the great differences between Mother Nature and Jesus. Mother Nature is a pagan god. And all pagans are doomed, even within the logic of their own faith. Simply put, whether it is Isis or Odin, Apollo or Apophis, Baal or Gaia, a pagan god just doesn’t have eternity to give her worshippers, even if she wants to.

    A pagan god may be immortal, in the sense that she does not grow old and die like us humans. But pagan gods DO ultimately fade from the scene, never to return. They are, in that sense, as we are, except they can make lightning bolts come out of their asses.

    To the degree that you are a committed eco-freak, you are worshiping a god who is GUARANTEED to fail you in the end. This, in the modern world, does not meet my definition of wisdom.

  920. Dean,

    I wouldn’t be talkin’ no smack about pagan gods hereabouts, not when our gracious host is a pagan. Or sometimes an atheist. Or a pagatheist? Or sometimes a pagan god himself, when he turns into Randy Pan the Goat Boy

  921. /* [me]Why would they invade, for the oil, when “the maths” said it was too expensive?

    [response] Er…because they were a bunch of ideologically-driven knonuffs with no inclination to let any inconvenient facts get in their way, perhaps?
    */

    Then they would have invaded for the ideology, not the oil. It’s a tautology.

  922. Dean,

    on enviromentalism: I think deep within environmentalism is a naive belief that Nature is the embodiment of Good and mankind is the embodiment of Bad, something like a cancer. And on the emotional side, I can quite understand it. My secret life is to live in a wooden house deep within some beautiful woods and work over broadband. I’m quite fed up with city life, actually.

    But from the rational viewpoint, believing Nature is the embodiment of Good is amanzingly foolosh, because the very reason we can afford to love Nature is that mankind spent thousands of years fighting it and won quite some battles – we can afford to love Nature only because we changed it a lot to suit us – like killing dangerous predators, having signs on the the paths and so on. Without it, we would probably consider Nature as a dangerous, cruel enemy.

  923. Shenpen:

    There are indeed sickos who believe in things like voluntary extinction, including plotting to involuntarily extinctify large swaths of the population (if they can manage it). Forrest Mims III (perhaps best known as author of the little Radio Shack schematic notebooks I read and built projects from as a kid and the first manual for the Altair) recently attended a talk by, and documented the beliefs of, one such kook.

    But first of all, these guys don’t have anything like the resources that say, Al-Qaeda has. Secondly, they do not represent the views of more moderate, mainstream environmentalists (who come from all political and religious backgrounds and persuasions). It is rather like characterizing the abortion debate by taking the people who bomb abortion clinics as an example. Taking steps to recognize and prevent environmental damage is indicative of the good of humanity. We have averted a potential crisis with the ozone layer by banning and stigmatizing harmful CFCs and other compounds which lead to ozone depletion. As a culture we overcame our need for CFCs and all the self-narratization that supports it. We’ve had to convert our cars and air conditioners, which is expensive and an inconvenience, but a small price to pay overall. This was done mainly through political action and cost-benefit analysis — not extremism and ecoterrorism. Such wholesale abandonment of bad habits is plausibly achievable in other areas, both scientific ones like greenhouse gas emission, and social ones such as institutionalized racism. But they will probably only occur at a glacial pace as long as the conservatives maintain majority mindshare. That’s what conservatism is — it’s conserving the status quo.

  924. By the way, this is why though I like libertarianism, I feel it will soon go the way of the dodo: Government regulation has proven to be an effective tool in environmental conservation efforts — especially in areas where nothing else has been shown to work.

  925. I’d like to thank the Academy, and my agent, and Jesus, and all the little people.

    You like me! You really, really like me!

  926. Shenpen,
    >believing Nature is the embodiment of Good is amazingly foolish

    On environmentalism: You have, once again, hit the nail on the head.

    You may love Nature, but Nature most assuredly does not love you.

    She is one cold, heartless bitch. If you don’t believe me, just ask a dinosaur. Oh, right. You can’t.

    Never mind.

  927. Awww…man…Dean bushwacked ESR…I was kinda hoping he’d exercise his prerogative…I intentionally *didn’t* post #1000…

    btw Dean, that Academy statuette is made of poo ;-)

  928. “…She is one cold, heartless bitch…”
    You betcha. Try standing alone in the wilderness proclaiming your “right to life” like anything gives a shit about you ;-)

    In Nature’s domain, there are no ‘rights’…only what you can claw for yourself…she’ll soon teach you how pathetic we flimsy meatsacks are…the good news is that we’re fucking brilliant at playing her at her own game ;-)

    A magically wonderful competition…

  929. /* That’s what conservatism is — it’s conserving the status quo.
    */

    Well, that’s what it’s supposed to be. In the US, at least, the “liberals” set up the current status quo and are the ones trying to conserve it. It’s hillarious, IMO, to see “progressives” arguing that Bush is making too many changes and dismantling this or that.

  930. Great! Where is the goat? :)

    Errata: S/secret life/secrect wish/ of course – quite a “wishful thinking” kind of typo on my part :-)

    Dean,

    on the topic of isolationism: you misunderstand me, I do not accuse your folk of being isolationist, I accusued yourself of being impolite :-) Also, I don’t really believe this isolationism you claim. The only proof you provided was that only 1/6 of Americans have passports – but I think the reason of it is that you got only 1/3 of the holidays f.e. an average German has so you don’t really have much choice than to use this scarce resource to unwind at place you know to be comfortable (Florida, California, the Rockies) than to run around exploring the world. I would do the same if I had so low amounts of holidays, it’s so simple. I’ve heard that about 15,000 Americans live in München (Munich) for example. And remember, whenever you got criticism from abroad, it’s not about isolationism, but about just the opposite: involving yourself in the business of others.

    Therefore I find it hard to believe this isolationism stuff. Yeah, the average car mechanic might never spend 2 minutes of thought to any issue of abroad bu he never actually spends too much time about thinking anyway so it doesn’t really matter. That 5% that counts – the opinion leaders whom others borrow their opinions from – must be reasonably interested in the state of the world, I think.

    Simply because it’s necessary. To maintain cohesion in any community, you need some basis for it. You need to justify your existence for yourself, or you’ll lose the will to live. For most nations, it’s ethno-cultural unity. But as it’s out of question for you, you have to base it on something else. This is what makes America different: it’s based on principles, values, ideas rather than common blood or origin. I think the general idea of the past was to provide a free (and rich) haven for all the folks in the world who were opressed or poor. But as immigration is getting harder and harder, you gotta find something else. If you can no longer afford to import folks who want to live in America, you gotta to export America as an idea, a system, a way of living. Simply because if you don’t do this, you lose the basis of your cohesion. And this is when you get all the criticism. Not from me actually, as for my part the only annoying American foreign policy is trying to push Turkey into the EU. And it does not really matter, we are smarter than to let it happen. Especially Angie. So it’s not really a problem. But from others, all the critism you got is for exporting the way of your living. So I think isolationism is but your own fancy idea, and not a fact.

  931. From Alaska to Hawaii, America captures pretty much any kind of territory one could care to explore recreationally vis-a-vis vacations…why bother spending shitloads of money going anywhere else?

    Of course, there’s the *cultural* aspect…experience of alien cultures is certainly horizon-expanding, but I would question whether having horizons expanded in such a manner is as important as certain people would like us to believe it is.

    As far as “exporting our way of living” is concerned…was it done under duress? Any exportation is done merely because demand for “our way of living” exists elsewhere…

  932. Shenpen,
    >the opinion leaders…must be reasonably interested in the state of the world

    As to our lack of manners, I plead guilty, with one caveat. I invite you to come to America. If you come to Dallas, TX, you can sleep on my couch.

    Here you will find the friendliest people on Earth. I have never heard of anyone coming to the States and being treated badly by the average person. We are nice folks, if you are here.

    While you yet remain over there, however, we are just a bit clumsy. Where is Hungary again?

    Somewhere in Africa, right? ;-)

    Yes, we do have opinion leaders who lecture us all the time about how we ought to be more like the foreigners, especially Europeans. You all are SO enlightened, you know. You have the metric system. You have abolished the death penalty. You have comprehensive gun control. You have lots of very high taxes that fund lots of very Big Government programs that our Progressives salivate over. You get lots of paid vacation days every year. You have an easy time getting on welfare. You can collect unemployment benefits for YEARS. You don’t have any Bible-thumping Christian fundamentalists demanding an end to abortion. Or bitching about Darwin.

    On the other hand, you don’t have any children. You have 1000-year-old cathedrals where a half dozen people worship on Sundays. And they are all old. You have Muslim populations who post blog discussions on:
    Which European country will be the first to establish the Sharia? The smart money says you have no future.

    Our enlightened Progressives elites don’t talk about those last few things, quite so much. But they do lecture us endlessly about how, in Europe, intellectuals are taken very seriously, and how we are a philistine cultural backwater by comparison. Our self appointed ‘opinion leaders’ talk about you like they are the teacher, and you are Teacher’s Pet.

    I don’t think they actually love you. Nor do they know all that much about you, really. They just use you as a club to beat us with.

    But the reason they feel the need to beat us, is that we don’t listen to them nearly as much as they think we should. That’s WHY we don’t have the metric system, but we do have the death penalty. And lots of guns. And churches on every street corner, complete with worshippers! Who mostly bitch about abortion and Darwin.

    As for exporting our way of living, that depends on what you mean. I WISH we had the Englishman’s knack for getting you foreigners to do it our way. Have you ever counted how many countries there are in the world that speak English, are ruled by a Parliament, and use English common law for their legal framework? Or how many countries play cricket?

    Nobody plays American football but us. We’re so lonely.

    We did kick start the whole democratic nation-state thing. In 1776, there was one democratic republic in the world. In 1900, there were six. In 1970, there were thirty. Now there are over one hundred. And we are the world’s oldest continuously operating democracy, despite being one of the younger countries in the world.

    So, we export constitutions, Rambo movies, Madonna, airplanes, aerobics and monster trucks. I don’t think we are trying to change your way of life, so much as we make shit and it catches on. Except for American football.

    When I started out, this post was going somewhere. Now I’m not so sure.

    Anyway, come enjoy some Texas hospitality. We are very nice people at home, if not abroad.

  933. Dean: The reason that Islam requires its women to cover themselves from head to toe is because sunlight destroys folic acid. Folic acid is required by pregnant women to avoid birth defects. Us white folks in the north have no problem; in fact we need white skin to get sufficient vitamin D. Dark skin protects women’s folic acid. People near the equator get selected for dark skin pretty strongly. Some smart Arab figured out that when you protect your (light-skinned) women from the sun, they bear fewer unviable children. Since Arabs started Islam, all Muslim women cover themselves from head to toe even if they’re not subject to desert sunlight. Notice that northern Muslim women usually wear a truncated version: a head scarf.

  934. davidf said:

    >Hooray! Hooray! for Dean! and 1K…

    Eric is is now a Wizard doing white magic!

    The rest of us must keep ship sailing!

    >>>The haiku master just killed my goat!

  935. But from the rational viewpoint, believing Nature is the embodiment of Good is amanzingly foolosh

    Which is probably why you won’t find many environmentalists who believe it, though I have no doubt that there are a few. What some of them *do* believe is that natural systems are pretty complex, and despite all our pinnacle-of-nature chestbeating we neither understand nor are independent of them. So if some of them start to *go down* – and a lot of biologists not directly funded by the Cato institute do seem to think we’re the proximate cause of an extinction event of the sort which used to require whacking the earth with an asteroid – we’re probably going to go down with them. Or at least, the capacity of the earth to support humans could be severely reduced for a while.

    There will, naturally, be plenty of people who will be willing to explain at length how none of it was America’s fault.

  936. BTW: Agree adrian10. Nature is neither good nor bad. Nature just IS. It was here before mankind, it’ll be here after mankind. Mankinds longevity WRT nature is affected by man’s actions with regard to nature.

  937. But they do lecture us endlessly about how, in Europe, intellectuals are taken very seriously, and how we are a philistine cultural backwater by comparison.

    Where do you have to go to get endlessly lectured at like this? Can you point me to any websites? I get the impression the MSM isn’t exactly saturated with these lectures, apart from a certain range of channels watched only by Thomas Sowell.

  938. Then they would have invaded for the ideology, not the oil. It’s a tautology.

    I think we’re kind of splitting hairs here. The ideology seems to encompass domination of the oil-producing areas. Or at least to involve a whole bunch of military bases which I’m told have nothing to do with imperialism, for shame, how could I think such a thing.

  939. Today we have 140,000 American soldiers who have helped train a new Iraqi army, worked alongside Iraqi civilians, spent time in Arab communities, and walked with Muslims on their way to the Mosque. If Islam, or some significant faction of it, is to be our main enemy in the new century, at least now we know a little about it. Before, we didn’t even know what we didn’t know.

    The Mother Of All Fact-Finding Missions, eh?

  940. *I* don’t want to *govern* anyone. I think you expect me and Adrian both to answer on behalf of an abstract collective LiberalDeathCult that exists largely in your own head

    Judging by some of the customer reviews on Amazon, I’m fairly sure it exists in Mr. Sowell’s head as well.

    I shall probe further.

  941. [me]Then they would have invaded for the ideology, not the oil. It’s a tautology.

    [response] I think we’re kind of splitting hairs here. The ideology seems to encompass domination of the oil-producing areas.

    Then I misunderstood your use of “ideology.” I thought you meant “an ideology that everyone must be just like Americans.”

  942. I thought you meant “an ideology that everyone must be just like Americans.”

    By no means. The impression I get is that it’s widely believed that no one *can* be like Americans, except maybe Israelis, other than by emigrating to America and becoming one (and preferably not from Mexico). It’s the Chosen People meme. The PNACkers may have had some fatuous idea that they were going to trigger a chain reaction of democracy-formation across the whole ME, but I think we can safely say they succumbed to a tiny bit of wishful thinking there.

  943. >The Mother Of All Fact-Finding Missions, eh?

    All wars are fact-finding missions. You learn more about your enemies and, more importantly, you learn more about yourself.

    Serious enemies don’t believe you deserve to exist. In war, you learn whether or not they are right.

  944. Shenpen,
    >Lesser, slash, a, greater. Dammit. :)

    That’s why I don’t use HTML. One of the many things at which I am useless is programming. Even the simple kind.

    Though, in my humble opinion, esr should include a preview button for just this kind of problem.

    Just listen to me give advice I don’t know how to implement, and would probably be too lazy, even if I did. :-)

  945. The last long silent stretch from Eric was due to his writing a book. If he’s doing another one, I hope it’s not a new edition of TNHD, because I just bought the dead-tree version!

  946. Jeff Read: Good thing Eric turned on Extended Mode posting!

    In the pre-Directx days, Mircosoft probabaly ruined more birthdays and Christmases than anything else in the history of intelligent design. :-(

  947. “In the pre-Directx days, Mircosoft probabaly ruined more birthdays and Christmases than anything else in the history of intelligent design. :-(”

    I’m not sure I understand it. What has DirectX to do with birthdays?

  948. Phil,
    >uhh Dean, not to be nitpicky, but how the hell are you communicating with us right now?

    Feel free to nitpick. I type and then hit the Submit Comment button. No programming involved. I have never typed any HTML script (for italics, bold print, indentions, links-in-text, etc.) on this blog and I probably never will. Because if I did, I’d surely screw it up and look stupid.

    And that would give lie to all my pretensions to intellectual superiority. ;-)

  949. Not to imply that I thought Shenpen looked stupid in his 1:06 PM post. On the contrary, I admire him for having the courage to risk making a mistake and looking silly.

    My ego won’t let me take those kinds of chances. :-(

  950. I think he means, kid gets a computer game for Christmas, but before he can play it, Dad has to spend hours tweaking CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT so that the game has enough memory to run.

    Dude, remember MemMaker? What a piece of hell that was.

  951. While I certainly admire your contributions to the world of Open Source software, your protestations about Islamist Jihadists are – I feel – more than a little misguided. From my own European perspective the whole thing is a canard fuelled and – to a certain extent – created by American foreign policy. When you talk about freedom it’s almost exclusively America’s freedom. When you talk about rights, they are the rights of Americans. Well wake up! This is a big planet and an even bigger Universe, and the philosophy of isolationist thinking inherent in your viewpoint is, in my view, drastically wrong.

    You can never ultimately rule by fear. Fear and feelings of being marginalised will create more Bin Ladens and suicide bombers than you can ever imagine. As for terrorism, the quickest way to create an act of violence is to sow the seeds of it by dropping bombs on people and ranting about your own precious rights at the same time. This is hypocrisy of the most gross, and barbaric kind that I can imagine. As for quoting Caligula, I fail to see that this can be anything more than deliberate bull-headedness. You could draw on Gandhi, on Einstein or the wisdom of Socrates; but why not defend your argument with the ravings of a homicidal maniac and a mass murderer? You give freedom of speech a bad name when you talk like that. Do you think this is a game? People are dying.

    PS – Apologists for George Bush make me feel sick. He’s patently an idiot, and his days are numbered. Unfortunately his legacy is likely to be a miserable one which the rest of the civilised world – no longer America it seems – will be left to deal with for many years.

  952. MemMaker I don’t exactly remember, what I do remember is that all I had to do back then is to set autoexec.bat to load the driver of the mouse to the extended memory instead of the base one and then all the games ran pretty much well. Though I have to admit my first PC was a 286 and maybe these stuff happened with earlier boxes that did not have extended memory up to 1MB. Before that, I was a Commodore guy and pretty much believe to this day that the Amiga was one of the most brilliant creations in the history of computer and I wish it had attained the popularity of at least the Mac. I always smile when Mac fans go into rants stating the Mac is not just a technological device, but also a work of art – the Amiga was not only a work of art but almost like a living being, almost having a soul. A female one – sometimes and angel, sometimes a nasty bitch, just as it’s name predicted :-)

  953. Take your Commodore Pets, 64s and Amigas and blow them out your arse…Acorn rules.

    (anyone mentions Sinclair and I’m coming to get ya with a hammer)

    Oh…yes…and you old-timers can get bent too if you’re going to pontificate on the marvels of cabbage-fart powered difference engines programmed by whittled sticks ;-)

  954. MemMaker I don’t exactly remember

    I do, because I was the kid in “my kid knows more about these than I do.” Although I can’t recall which version of DOS first shipped with MemMaker. And I’ve never understood the reasoning.

  955. [T]he Amiga was not only a work of art but almost like a living being, almost having a soul. A female one – sometimes and angel, sometimes a nasty bitch, just as it’s name predicted :-)

    “You and me, Lucy, just you and me. We’re gonna show ’em, baby…”

  956. It was DOS 6.0 that first included MemMaker. The rationale was that optimizing memory usage to free up as much of that lower 640K as possible required complicated setups with byzantine flags, so the process should be somewhat automated for regular computer users. In practice, as I recall, MemMaker tended to produce suboptimal results; and some games benefited from having extended memory turned off, whereas the versions of Winders extant at the time required extended memory to be on. This required you to:

    * Run MemMaker once, specifying you want extended memory(3 reboots)
    * Save the config.sys and autoexec.bat files to separate files
    * Run MemMaker again, specifying you don’t want extended memory (3 reboots)
    * Open your editor and stitch the current config in with your previous one, making them both accessible through config.sys menu options
    * Reboot with your new Frankenconfig (1 reboot)

    That’s seven reboots and a whole lot of unnecessary hackery, all so you can run Windows *and* play Space Quest.

  957. >Ithink he means, kid gets a computer game for Christmas, but before he can play it, Dad has to spend hours tweaking CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT so that the game has enough memory to run.

    Yep, but it was more likely myself tweaking the CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT files. ;-)

  958. Oh, so MemMaker was mostly required if you wanted to use Windows! Then I understand. I resisted using Windows as long as I could – something like 1997.

    It’s sometimes funny to watch the Windows vs. Linux battles. I’m not ashamed that I rather was an MS-DOS fan as long as I could. Windows is optimized for ease of use, Unix is optimized for technical excellency and sysadmins – DOS was optimized for sheer productivity. Remember Norton Commander – neither Midnight Commander for Linux nor Total/Windows Commander for Windows came even close. (But FAR Manager is quite a good a clone.) Or the CA-Clipper. Probably the most productive business software framework ever invented, from an end-user viewpoint: Clipper “masks” and “pictures” made it sure that even the dumbest user is able to enter a lot of accurate data fast. (A “mask” is a form where a field is not even visible until you entered data in the previous field and the software accepted it as valid. You could not even exit the field until you provided valid data. And the validity was checked by “pictures” – data formats, a bit like regexps, that enforced f.e. a correct phone. no. field structure and length. It was amazingly useful. You could turn any dumb bluecollar into an effective user in no time.)

  959. I have never typed any HTML script (for italics, bold print, indentions, links-in-text, etc.) on this blog and I probably never will. Because if I did, I’d surely screw it up and look stupid.

    Just another kind of typo, is all it is. I forget to put a slash in an off-tag occasionally. For links I just copy and paste one from the source code of another page and then change the URL and text. HTML is just layout instructions, it’s not a bad skill to pick up, though doing tables by hand is admittedly a PITA. And it doesn’t involve any programming, though it could conceivably be a gateway drug for it, eg if you decide you want tables of any size after all.

  960. DOS was optimized for having an OS to sell to IBM without you know, having to write an OS. Later versions were optimized for backwards compatibility with the original.

  961. Jeff,

    of course I’m not speaking of the OS, but the culture, the bunch of memes that came around with it, begetting third-party software: Norton Commander, CA-Clipper, Personal Editor 2, DBase IV, TurboPascal 5, Ventura (hacking the hardware lock off… haha), Norton Utilities, Norton Disk Doctor, etc… were usually a ton easier to install and learn than the Unix stuff, while a lot more faster and productive to use than the Windows stuff.

    Why did people use Windows before Win95, if it usually meant messing around with MemMaker?

  962. >Why did people use Windows before Win95, if it usually meant messing around with MemMaker?

    Because my dad was too cheap to buy a Mac. Linux was around in the early ’90s, but it wasn’t on the public radar. Messing around with MemMaker and AUTOEXEC.BAT

  963. Oops, I think I accidentally hit “enter” too soon. As I was about to say, configuring MemMaker, AUTOEXEC.BAT, and CONFIG.SYS files was easier than configuring a kernel!

    I was computationally abused as a child. *sniff*

  964. “…Acorn? Never heard about. Did it have any significant demoscene?…”
    Nope…ya got me well and truly beat there. My Amiga friends were always showing that stuff off…but we Acorn geeks kinda scoffed at their kindergarten playpen ;-)

    Acorn computers made a BBC model A & B, Electron & later on, the Archimedes. Top notch hardware.

    I cut my teeth on 6502 assembler and econet. I think the Acorn market may have been limited to the UK…no idea if they made it over the pond into the US or EU (before it was the EU, of course). I had the BBC model B to play with, and a powerfouse it was too, with a 64K ocean of memory ;-)

    Perhaps you’ve heard of the game “Elite” (David Braben, I think)? I think it could fairly be called the watershed moment for microcomputer gaming…an elaborate and exciting 3D interstellar trade and combat game.

    Ahhh….memories…

  965. Acorn computers made a BBC model A & B, Electron & later on, the Archimedes. Top notch hardware.

    Not the bloody Electron, it wasn’t.

    [mutter]

  966. I misspent *my* glorious youth playing Sierra adventure games on PCs. I was too young for Leisure Suit Larry though, but now that Sierra has reissued some of their classic games I think I might see what I missed.

  967. I think that Acorns were the funky boxes featured in the High School computer lab in the movie Hackers. Ahh, thinking about that movie reminds me just how much the 90s sucked. For those of you lucky enough to have avoided it, Phrack #48 had a very detailed review, which can be found here.

  968. As a member of the ostensible target audience of Hackers (I was 18 when it was released), I have to say that I hated it at first, then grew to love it. The ne plus ultra of BCMs (Bad Computer Movies), the very centerpiece of geek-culture kitsch.

    Fun fact: A few years ago I googled for a certain catchphrase from this movie, only to find that the Air Force had set up a training scenario to train IT security personnel with, the target machine of which scenario was actually referred to in the documentation as “The Gibson”.

  969. “…Not the bloody Electron, it wasn’t…”

    It’s a fair cop guv…point well made ;-) I guess I was just being overly-romantic about the golden years…the BBC and Arch lines were stunning though…shame that shitty IBM x86 architecture stormed into the lead. Funny how that works sometimes…Betamax, anyone?

    “Hackers”? I think I was too old for that…is that the utter POS with Jolie as some l33t hax0r? I never waste any of my time on that shitty genre, as they are always written by clueless fuckwits that excrete the same cockless slurry.

    OK…I admit I saw “Swordfish”…but that beginning ‘walking claymore’ detonation scene was fucking cool ;-) That was the one-and-only time I lapsed…honest…

  970. Dan,

    What about Wargames? When I saw it (20+ years after it came out), I thought that movie was awesome.

  971. Don’t forget about Sneakers.

    And I wasted my glorious youth on a Sega Genesis. Followed by a Sega Saturn, then a Sega Dreamcast. So deep was my devotion to Sega that when the Dreamcast was declared dead 5 years ago, I lost all my gaming spirit. But I did start having sex. I guess we could call that one a draw.

  972. My parents thought game consoles would rot my brain, but computers were “educational.” Unfortunately for them, the computer was just a $2000 Nintendo for me and my brother.

  973. “….What about Wargames?…”
    I simply don’t know where to begin… ;-) I think I saw it when it came out, and thought it was kinda cool (hey, I knew no better)…but looking at it not-too-much-later-on left me wondering WTF the filmmakers were thinking.

    “…Don’t forget about Sneakers…”
    Was that the one with Pinko Redford in it? Saw some trailers…gagged…contemplated the utility of fully automatic weapons. I swear if I here some l33t fucker say “pop the firewall” one more gaddamned time I’m going postal in Hollywood ;-)

    My buddies had Sega systems. They certainly had fun with them, but I honestly never understood the attraction of console game systems. Even worse were those poclet-sized ‘donkey kong’ kinda devices…I thought the devotees of such things were mentally flatlined.

    I came around when I got my hands on a Playstation though. I was a Lara Croft addict (no…not because of *that*), and also liked the Die Hard Trilogy (bought a cool gun to use for #2). I graduated to the Playstation2 and became addicted to Gran Turismo (bought an awesome steering wheel/pedals combo w/force feedback). I look forward to the Playstaion3. I think the level of immersion that can be achieved with modern hardware is what excites me…I’m a total Unreal Tournament nut on my PC, for example.

  974. I can respect anyone’s opinion and therefore I hope anyone can accept mine. George Bush Jnr. is nothing more that a pyschopath with dillusions of grandeur rivalling those of Uncle Adolf 60 years ago. His rhetoric is like a broken record as he uses terrorism as an excuse to expand his empire. I am not from the U.S. or Europe but rather from a small island in the Caribbean and while there has been no “terrorist” activity in my country to date, it is alarming as to the extent of damage being done to my little nation because of Bush’s crusade. Tourism is our primary industry and has been so for many decades but now, due to the u.s. president’s warmongering and scare tactics, many are afraid to travel and those who are willing are also afraid to travel to places that they don’t know very well. As one can imagine, this has affected all of us greatly. Increased security makes entering the U.S. a pain at best and impossible at worst and in many cases travellers from Europe are no longer coming as they traditionally flew through Florida to get here. I could rant and rave even more but to what effect? I can only hope that the next u.s. president is strong enough to repair the damage done by this one.

  975. I heard that there were murmurs about NK performing subsequent tests…I have to say, if true, I’m happy to see them burning up extremely expensive ordnance underground.

  976. I wonder if NK faked the whole thing. The equilvalent amount of TNT makes the same big boom and even a mushroom cloud if exploded above ground. It would be pretty easy for the bureaucrat in charge of the nuke program to fake a nuclear explosion. Kimmy would probably just get off seeing a huge explosion without really paying attention to what caused it.

  977. David, do you mean you think there are no Geiger-Müller counters in the U.S. satellites or the spyplanes or anywhere?…

  978. On NK: I think detonating a nuke isn’t a big thing – delivering is the tricky part of the game. I think all they can hit off the continent Japan (poor Adrian10 :-) ) but they don’t really have much reason to do so. They sure don’t want to hit SK as the radioactive mess would go northwards fast enough. Therefore real trouble is if they sell it to terrorists.

    I’m a little bit surprised it could happen. I mean SK agents, who know the language and the culture, armed with CIA training and tech, therefore, being in quite and advantageous position, shouldn’t they have to be able to sabotage it? It should be fairly easy – NK is so backwards that I’m sure an NK policeman checking the ID card of somebody can’t just call the HQ to have them check the records in the computer as I’m sure there is none. I mean, of course, they must have computers, but putting millions of files on it is a different question. As far as I’ve heard, even the FBI has trouble implementing it. Therefore, a well-done fake ID should be a safe pass. So why is the SK Intelligence Agency / CIA team so ineffective?

  979. David,

    >>Why did people use Windows before Win95, if it usually meant messing around >>with MemMaker?

    >Because my dad was too cheap to buy a Mac.

    But why didn’t you just use DOS? If you missed my point, I was quite a DOS fan and tried to keep on it as far as I could (97-98), because it worked very simply and still very well.

    DOS-culture, as a bunch of memes, is luckily still alive. I always use FAR Manager whenever I use Windows, it’s amazing and with the Colorer plugin a very good “IDE” as well. And some friends of mine wrote a Clipper to C++ translator which became a programming langauge on it’s own, now fully WinMFC / Linux FLTK / Java Terminal / Linux GTK (beta) capable, but still having all the good qualities of DOS culture.

  980. >I’m a little bit surprised it could happen. I mean SK agents, who know the language and the culture, armed with CIA training and tech, therefore, being in quite and advantageous position, shouldn’t they have to be able to sabotage it? It should be fairly easy – NK is so backwards that I’m sure an NK policeman checking the ID card of somebody can’t just call the HQ to have them check the records in the computer as I’m sure there is none. I mean, of course, they must have computers, but putting millions of files on it is a different question. As far as I’ve heard, even the FBI has trouble implementing it. Therefore, a well-done fake ID should be a safe pass. So why is the SK Intelligence Agency / CIA team so ineffective?

    One simple North Korean rule, nobody from outside the country goes anywhere without a minder or escort, let alone be involved in government or miltary programs.

    >On NK: I think detonating a nuke isn’t a big thing – delivering is the tricky part of the game.

    The delivering will most likely come through in a international shipping container, the largest shipping ports in the world are in Asia…

  981. I think all they can hit off the continent Japan (poor Adrian10 :-) ) but they don’t really have much reason to do so.

    Indeed – it’s mainly insurance against what happened to Iraq, I’d say. And there are real questions about whether they can miniaturise it enough to make it deliverable.

    Therefore real trouble is if they sell it to terrorists.

    Not much reason to do that either.

  982. Shenpen: I don’t know why people use Windows AFTER Win95 :-)

    I use Mac OS X almost exclusively. The runner-up is Ubuntu.

  983. How could ESR not resist blogging about North Korea? Is he hanging out wth Abe Vigoda or did he eat some bad spinach?

  984. “…Indeed – it’s mainly insurance against what happened to Iraq, I’d say…”
    I sincerely hope you’re right, but I certainly wouldn’t wish to gamble others’ lives on your opinion…I hope the rest of the world acts accordingly.

    “…Not much reason to do that either…”
    LOL…yep…they certainly don’t need the *money*, do they?

  985. Indeed – it’s mainly insurance against what happened to Iraq, I’d say.

    Hm. What was the causa belli in Iraq’s case?… Intelligence reports on having WoMD? Well… :-)

    Besides, waving a .22 into the face of a squad armed with assault rifles doesn’t exactly sound like insurance. Especially if the squad leader is known to be a bit… trigger-happy…. :-)

  986. Shit, I hope this bot won’t find this post we are talking under…

    Anyway, it’s a good topic: I’m interested in the economics of spamming. Why do spammers always send us Viagra / penis enlargement / aphrodisiac pills stuff? Are these stuff too hard to sell (I think for Viagra it mustn’t be the case) or because these are the only stuff those idiots who don’t get angry and rejective when getting spam would buy? If the spam is directed dimwits because everybody else hates it, why doesn’t it try to sell cheap booze or “tax-free” cigarettes or action movies or stuff like that?

  987. Y’know Shenpen, it could all be as straightforward as “they spam because they can”.

    UCE is an absurdly low cost enterprise…thousands, maybe millions of emails per shot…even if the return rate is 0.5% you stand to make considerable money. Never has shoving your wares under the noses of millions been easier. Shit, if I had something marginally desireable and mass-downloadable, I’d almost be a total fool not to…of course, my sense of decorum (yes, I honestly do have one ;-) perversely stands in the way of me rapaciously harvesting profits in such a manner. Ho hum…I’m just a sucker, I guess ;-)

    However, I am resolutely against all legislation that sucks up to the mindless fucktards that demand ‘a solution’ to the ‘spam problem’…and are gleefully pandered to by the politiwhores. Once-upon-a-time I did a formal analysis of the SMTP protocol, and ‘hardened’ it to help prevent the anonymity that spammers rely upon…rather than trying to identify spam (with the concomitant annoyance of false positives) and block it, the idea was to take away the ‘shadows’ and deny entry to the network of MTAs. This would have given ISPs the option of identifying spammers and billing them accordingly.

    If you surmise that I am also vehemently opposed to “network neutrality”, award yourself a gold star ;-)

  988. Dan,

    1. I asked why do spammers especially promote these products, not why they spam. Marketing needs a defined target group and I wonder what target group they have in mind.

    2. That 0.5% is what VC’s call “Chinese Math” : “Hey, we’ll have a market of one bilion, if we only make one guy out of a ten thousand buy our stuff we’ll have a sales of a hundred thousand!…” And of course it’s completely wrong – because marketing is all about defining the target group and sending messages to specifically to that target group. “Shotgun marketing” doesn’t really work, this is the general experience.

    3. Net neutrality – I don’t have enough input to form an opinion on that stuff, but my instinct says as long as we have a chance to battle spam with tech (Bayesian filtering f.e.) it’s better not to resort to regulations neither to allow companies to regulate it.

  989. >Hm. What was the causa belli in Iraq’s case?… Intelligence reports on having WoMD? Well… :-)

    Could the Casus belli have been Iraqi people murdered and flung into mass graves,
    some still alive, or the wonderful oil for food program monies used to keep Saddam in power

  990. Shenpen:

    And of course it’s completely wrong – because marketing is all about defining the target group and sending messages to specifically to that target group.

    That’s only necessary if you incur significant advertising costs. Most advertising messages are sent out on purchased time or space (radio, television, newspaper or magazine or web site ads). In order to maximize the amout of money your message returns to you so as to recoup and maybe exceed your investment, doing the research into demographics and targeting your message is a must, and the better targeted the message the more potential income it can make you.

    Because email is cheap-as-free, the shotgun strategy tends to work in the spammers’ case. Otherwise, people wouldn’t do it. And, targeting the message involves effort that spammers don’t want to go to because targeted spam may net you 0.6% instead of 0.5%, and thus wouldn’t justify the cost of research.

    All of which implies one thing which is almost a taboo in the internet community: the most effective tool against spam would probably be to make e-mail a metered service, much as cellphone minutes are.

  991. Jeff,
    I dont believe those numbers, that’s 655,000 divided by 42 months, whitch gives ~ 15,595
    deaths per month, divided by 30 whitch gives 519 deaths per day. Do you think that is
    correct? I have not heard those numbers in the press…

  992. Jeff,
    I dont believe those numbers, that’s 655,000 divided by 42 months, whitch gives ~ 15,595
    deaths per month, divided by 30 whitch gives 519 deaths per day. Do you think that is
    correct? I have not seen those numbers in the press…

  993. Eric reports “I’m getting a 15Mbps fiber connection today!”, and when questioned about the 1K+ comments said “Yeah, I gotta get back to blogging, but I’ve been SO busy lately.”

  994. *Repost* Correction,

    >The fact that the Bush-led invasion has caused more civilian deaths in Iraq than would have happened under Saddam — in fact, twice as many as have been caused by Saddam’s regime during the past two decades — utterly perforates your casus belli.

    Jeff,
    I dont believe those numbers, that’s 655,000 divided by 42 months, which gives ~ 15,595
    deaths per month, divided by 30 which gives 519 deaths per day. Do you think that is
    correct? I have not seen those numbers in the press…

  995. I sincerely hope you’re right, but I certainly wouldn’t wish to gamble others’ lives on your opinion…I hope the rest of the world acts accordingly.

    The way to gamble would be to attempt to call their bluff by attacking them. I’m thinking there’s no one dumb enough to try it…but I can’t be 100% sure.

    LOL…yep…they certainly don’t need the *money*, do they?

    They print quite a lot themselves – good quality greenbacks afaik. And selling a nuke to terrorists would be a bit counterproductive if there was any chance of it being traced back.

    Hm. What was the causa belli in Iraq’s case?… Intelligence reports on having WoMD? Well… :-)

    Well, that might have been the *official* casus belli.

    Besides, waving a .22 into the face of a squad armed with assault rifles doesn’t exactly sound like insurance.

    Sure, if everyone can be absolutely sure it’s only a .22. Though there’s a lot of doubt about how long they’d need to make it missile-deliverable.

    Could the Casus belli have been Iraqi people murdered and flung into mass graves,
    some still alive, or the wonderful oil for food program monies used to keep Saddam in power

    That was just a handy excuse. Nobody gave a damn when such things were going on in Rwanda.

  996. That was just a handy excuse. Nobody gave a damn when such things were going on in Rwanda.

    Convenient. So obviously, there’s no reason to care about Darfur, because nobody really gave a damn when such things were going in Iraq.

    What a load of fuck.

  997. Convenient. So obviously, there’s no reason to care about Darfur, because nobody really gave a damn when such things were going in Iraq.

    Well, there *is* oil in Darfur…but do you see a massive international coalition being mustered by Dubya to deal with it? I don’t detect anyone queuing up for the privilege. But you carry on caring about it, you big humanitarian, you. And do let me know if you notice any sign of it making a difference.

    wow…belligerent conceit, naivete & cowardice…yikes

    Belligerent, yet cowardly. Hmm. Are you saying I’m too skeered to invade the Norks? I’m a lot closer to them than you are. As for being naive, well, what’s your scenario? I’m thinking Bush isn’t going to hit them. That *could* be naive of me, but he probably doesn’t want to end up being to blame for Seoul being trashed. Sanctions are a tricky one, we’ve got to wait and see how pissed off the Chinese really are.

    It’s worth remembering that we’re all spectators in this. You talk like you’re some kind of player sometimes. You aren’t.

  998. “…It’s worth remembering that we’re all spectators in this…”
    No. This is where you have got it horrendously wrong from the outset. You must correct this absurd stance…ball’s in your court there though…whether or not you succeed in acknowledging the utter falsity of your ‘understanding’ is only of concern to me to the extent that you (or your ilk) manage to obtain some control over the reins of power & influence in the world. Some anonymous shlub at the cozy end of a net connection doesn’t concern me…please stay that way ;-) Same applies to me also, fair’s fair.

    “…You talk like you’re some kind of player sometimes…”
    What has your subjective impression of my stance got to do with this? You’re wrong. Accept that or not…whatever.

    “…You aren’t…”
    Despite the fact that your assumption is wrong, this is a true statement. If I were to become a “player” I assure you that your fantasy world would be dismantled ;-)

  999. No. This is where you have got it horrendously wrong from the outset. You must correct this absurd stance…ball’s in your court there though…whether or not you succeed in acknowledging the utter falsity of your ‘understanding’ is only of concern to me to the extent that you (or your ilk) manage to obtain some control over the reins of power & influence in the world.

    So…you’re not going to tell me how we’re more than spectators? Apart from how your penetrating and insightful postings are inspiring thronging hordes of sturdy lurkers to (quietly) increase their support for the WoT while my cynically corrosive screeds are causing the weaker-willed ones to lapse further into apathy, obviously.

    What has your subjective impression of my stance got to do with this? You’re wrong. Accept that or not…whatever.

    What it is is, you accuse me of belligerence, cowardice and naivete, and when I ask for specifics you…go off on some weird tangent.

    Calling people names is kind of pointless unless you can make them stick.

  1000. “…So…you’re not going to tell me how we’re more than spectators?…”
    Quite frankly Adrian, there’s a limit to which I am prepared to spoonfeed you…I think your error is spectacularly obvious…I’m just giving voice to my opinion here, and I’m pretty damned sure there are plenty of others that understand how wrong you are too. As I said, the ball is in your court…do with it what you will, which in your case is probably “ignore it”.

    “…Calling people names is kind of pointless unless you can make them stick…”
    You say “name-calling”, I say “critcism”…I suppose “toady” might qualify as criticism too, but you kindly haven’t levelled that term at me in quite a while ;-)

  1001. Thanks for the helpful commentary Jeff.

    I simply recall that Pete is into making music with his buddies, and he got totally bent out of shape (understandably) with the linux audio scene (or shitty lack thereof)…and I happened across a positive article about the June 2006 release of Rosegarden, and thought of Pete.

    Don’t think that *quite* warrants getting snippy…

  1002. Dan Kane,

    Pete mentioned Rosegarden *as* he was getting bent out of shape, is the thing. And was rightly critical of it.

  1003. I guess it’s possible that the Rosegarden folks have been sitting there thinking “Pete hates us, let us never cast our undeserving shadow upon a compiler again”…or maybe they have spent some time developing their product?

    Jeez…all this for posting a link *rolleyes*

  1004. Quite frankly Adrian, there’s a limit to which I am prepared to spoonfeed you…I think your error is spectacularly obvious…I’m just giving voice to my opinion here, and I’m pretty damned sure there are plenty of others that understand how wrong you are too.

    I’m afraid I haven’t got much out of Pete’s rather laconic input lately. Shame, he used to add value from time to time. Maybe Dean can expand.

    As I said, the ball is in your court…do with it what you will, which in your case is probably “ignore it”.

    Difficult not to. It’s kind of invisible.

    You say “name-calling”, I say “critcism”…I suppose “toady” might qualify as criticism too, but you kindly haven’t levelled that term at me in quite a while ;-)

    You’ve been kindly refraining from it. Moreover, it annoyed Eric, and it’s his blog. In any case, I was specific. You’re just saying “You’re a belligerent, naive coward…but not a spectator…and the ball’s in your court.”

    Not much to work with.

  1005. Well, there *is* oil in Darfur…but do you see a massive international coalition being mustered by Dubya to deal with it?

    Should there be an international coalition mustered by Dubya to deal with it?

  1006. Dan,

    Unfortunately, Rosegarden in general, and linux audio in particular, still sucks my hairy jewish balls through a straw. I’ve also pretty much dropped music in general in favor of other things — like busty asians. So if you see any of those, by all means, link away.

  1007. Thought you’d been quiet. Did you get my email? OTOH, maybe I wasn’t worthy…

    Didn’t get your email.

    The main one is that I don’t believe democracy can be successfully imposed, the apparent WW2 counterexamples notwithstanding. There the populations were both invested in their governments’ fascist(ic) projects, and were pummelled into a submission from which following their conqueror’s lead was the only option that made sense. They were also both industrialised economies with experience of democracy.

    This doesn’t answer the question of “when is a war just?” At least if it does, it doesn’t provide an answer even I would agree with. Because the only thing I can infer from this passage is that it’s OK to wage war so long as you have a high degree of certainty that you will succeed. Which is fucked up.

    There’s also the problem of self-interest. In WW2 it was self-evident that America was on the side of the angels. Moreover, the fascists were playing catch-up and never really had a chance against the human and energy resources ranged against them, even if it would have been a lot harder if they’d taken Britain. Now it just looks to most outside observers like all America wants to do is make sure nothing threatens its continued dominance (and that of its main surrogate) of the key oil-producing region of the world, presumably so it can continue to enjoy a life of easy-motoring leisure at any cost.

    Again, WTF? Be succinct. I’m left inferring your meaning here. And it looks like you’re saying a war is immoral if people will look down on you for it. But this behavior is exactly as I’ve come to expect from you, and I’ve said as much.

    Talking about freedom while enjoying cosy multi-decade deals with feudal autocracies you carefully insulate from the exigencies of democracy makes you look like hypocrites, IOW. Oh, and when they do finally get some democracy and vote for Hamas, *bad* choice.

    Again, WTF? Be succinct. I’m having a hard time connecting these dots to our current engagement. “Talking about freedom” must mean “you’re not really trying to install democracy in Iraq.” “enjoying cosy multi-decade deals…” must mean “you are morally culpable for supporting a non-democratic Iraq.” The best I can infer is that you still think this is a war for oil, and that we aren’t going to seriously try to create democracy in Iraq, so no wonder people protest our efforts. We could get into an argument over whether or not we actually are going to war for oil, but that’s not the point. The point is that you still won’t provide a clear answer to when you think a war is just. In that context, this passage is absolutely worthless. It’s what magicians call “misdirection” — an attempt to get you to look at anything, save for the fishy behavior going on in your left hand.

    And furthermore, the line about democracy resulting in leadership by Hamas — I don’t even know where to go with that one. It’s like “I know you’re lying, this is just a war for oil, but in case it actually is a war for democracy, well, I still think you’re all dickheads anyway because Hamas will just jack the system.” But since you aren’t succinct and explicit, I have to infer all this, which you can then deny, and then throw in some more misdirection to make it look like you’re still in the fight. In reality, you haven’t even really stepped into the ring.

    In other words, thus far, you are proving me 100% right. Toady.

    Would you like to play a game?

    I would. Let’s play a game guys. It’s called “promulgate your theory of a just war.” All you have to do is post up your theory of when a war is just, and do it as clearly and succinctly as possible. Whoever gets the least questions about their position — in other words, whoever is clearest — wins. I’ll go first:

    A war is just when the present form of a target state doesn’t live up to your minimum standards of good.

  1008. IMHO the concepts of “war” and “justice” are far too abstract for any meaningful theory. You need to tighten it up some.

    There is a scale of warfare, as well as a spectrum of objectives that warfare seeks to accomplish.

    Justice can only be meaningfully assessed from a common standard…if we had such a common standard, perhaps we wouldn’t need to go to war so often ;-)

    So if you’re going to talk about war and justice in the abstract, and expect a formulaic answer, perhaps the best that can be said is “a war is just when its measures and objectives are in accord with a common standard of justice”. Of course, this means that the notion of a war being “just” changes with the varying perspectives on justice…and the islamofascist war on freedom is just as just as our WoT.

    Which kinda makes discussion rather pointless.

    Until you realize, as I do, that it’s not about solving a global equation of justice, and never has been. Our behavior is judged through the lens of our standard of justice. We Americans are the stakeholders in our way of life, and it is up to us to define our civilization and hold ourselves to it. We have to look ourselves in the mirror and decide whether, overall, our civilization’s concept of justice can support a particular foray into war.

    We did a good and just thing by spearheading the effort to rid the world of a couple of particularly insidious regimes, which in turn obligates us to facilitate the transition of the remaining people into a state where they can reap the benefits of such change.

    Some people try to throw the Darfurs of the world in our face, saying “why are you doing jack shit here then?”…of course, this implies that “it is OK to go to war, but we disagree over the target”, but the implication is far from the truth – if we *could* commit to warfare *everywhere* then these same people would squeal about warmongering all the more – you can’t convince these people because they have no grounding principles in common with us…quite simply put, we have to pick our fights carefully, as precious American lives are at stake…and we need to strike a balance between global benefits and the cost in blood & treasure. We’ve done plenty to help the world…you whiners go try clamoring to France to do some heavy lifting in Darfur. Get back to me when you realize that we’re the best thing planet earth has going for it.

  1009. PS. Shenpen – of all the crap I see being thrown at me by spammers, I’ve noticed a couple of things…stuff like pecker-pills/anti-depressants etc is all stuff that people may feel embarrassed about talking to a doctor about, so what better than to provide a cozy anonymous avenue to have such pills sent to your doorstep. I wonder how many placebos are being trafficked? The other thing I’ve noticed recently is the rise in stock info spam…perhaps this is due to the rise in popularity of online trading among the masses, so take a shotgun approach to scooping up some sucker investors. In such an insanely low-cost medium, why the hell not?

    I almost agree with Jeff Read’s comment about metering email…I don’t think the service market favors such models right now. People want all-you-can-eat buffet service plans…pay one fee for your net hookup and leave it at that. Provided the ISPs get their model right, and people generally behave in predictable usage patterns, everything’s fine…but the trick is to catch the people (spammers) that take advantage of the net access, and bill *them* accordingly. That’ll slam a lid on spam PDQ ;-)

  1010. Dan, I’m pretty sure you could pare that down a bit. I’m not interested in the correct theory of a just war, since moral relativism obviates that. Just imagine that your moral compass was the only one that mattered: under what conditions would you consider war just?

  1011. Well…if it’s just simpleminded ol’ me making the call…I’d have to say that a war is just when the cost of engagement results in the greatest reasonable return of good for all allied stakeholders.

    …or if the average hotness of the target state’s female population makes me sweat

  1012. On just wars:

    First, I think there is a category of wars which is neither just nor unjust, only necessary: wars in self-defense. However, the situation these days is a bit complicated, it’s not easy to define who the enemy is and how much collateral damage is acceptable without calling it an overreaction. I think the war on Iraq might not be considered directly self-defensive, indirectly it might be – I think the real reason of it to lure Muslim fanatics into fighting well-trained, well-equiped soldiers instead of civilians – they have no choice, defendig Iraq is a Qu’ranically rightful Jyhad, they simply have to go there and fight the soldiers, they cannot go over the ocean and blow civilians up, because the Q’uran does not allow it. So it’s a tricky question how self-defensive this war is.

    So, self-defense is neither unjust nor just, only necessary. Obviously, a really just war is when one’s intent is to liberate somebody else, not just to thwart the threat from himself. However, I think it can only be decided later on whether it was just or not, because good intent is not enough, it’s too easy to fake. If the other guys 30 later think that that although it was painful, the balance is positive because they are living a lot better, then it was just. If not, then not, then it was either self-defense, or unjust.

    One more thing. Why do both pro-war and anti-war folks think that wars can only have one reason? Why is it considered an either-or case? Genuine idealism to liberate others, self-defense, economic interest for the stability of the oil-producing region and maybe making some cheap deal afterwards – they can all be present at the same time. If something both serves your economic interests, looks necessary from a defensive viewpoint. and can help you think you are a good guy and a hero a freedom, doesn’t that look like a good idea to do? Why believe that Bush and his team had only one of these three reasons in mind, why not all three?

  1013. Still I feeling calling wars moral or immoral is an oversimplification. A war is not one act, but it’s a series of tubesacts that make it up. For a war as a whole, I think we should be very cautious to pass judgements on. Clearly there are some cases where the intent is so rude that it cannot be moral by any sense. There are other cases when the beaten ones were actually grateful a couple of decades later, because they got liberated. This case is clearly moral. Everything else is just in the gray zone usually called “human”.

  1014. I mean, NK, arab world overreaction, etc..etc…

    Remember, he did receive a death threat…..

  1015. davidf,

    The Iraq war fatality numbers were very recently published in The Lancet, a British medical journal. This and the estimate of 100,000 dead Iraqi civilians from 2004 — carried out by the same Johns Hopkins researchers, I think — have been so far the only scientific inquiries into Iraqi civilian fatalities following the 2003 invasion.

    I trust these numbers far more than I trust whatever damage-control spin statistics Shrub puts out…

  1016. Sorry to pick on you Jeff, but I just love the way liberals throw the term “scientific” around, as though it magically embues that which it is associated with unassailable veracity. More often than not, the misuse of the term betrays an ignorance of what science actually is.

    I’m an ex-brit, Jeff, and know the Lancet well (hence not romanced by its invocation)…and am unsurprised it offers you satisfying fodder…but tell me, exactly how “scientific” do you think this study is? Does it involve any mathematical principal more complex than addition? Addition of what? Some numbers…ahhh…now we’re getting down to it…where do these numbers come from, and how have they been verified? Have you verified them? Do you know anything of their origin? Do you think that “it’s in the Lancet, so it must be true” ? No? It’s just a figure, in a journal, with questionable provenance. Still think it’s “scientific”?

    I heard numbers as high as 650,000. WTF?!?!? Somebody put some figures together that suggest we’ve killed nearly 2/3 of a million people?!?!? Color me sceptical. 10,000 – 50,000 …*that* I can perhaps believe, but the high-end is a tad shocking. Trouble is, how are these figures being derived? Are we counting anyone not found with a bomb-belt or AK nearby as a civilian? The post-mortem measure of civilian/combatant status might just be subject to a considerable margin of error…

    Either way Jeff…I think you’re on shakey-as-hell ground putting “trust” in *any* such figures. ;-)

    Show me the source

  1017. Dan Kane,

    The researchers published in the Lancet actually made house-to-house inquiries amongst various populations, and verified death certificates in 92% of the cases. This is in contrast to most other Iraqi death estimates, which relied on press reports, and therefore probably missed a lot of deaths.

    Now, obviously it would’ve been an enormous cost and effort to collect 650,000 death certificates, which is why they made use of something a bit more complicated than addition — called “statistics”: by sampling the population randomly and extrapolating from that data they are able to get an estimate of how many deaths actually occurred. Unless a severe flaw is discovered in their sampling methodology — something which has not surfaced for either this study or the 2004 study, only idle navel-gazing speculation from the Right as to possible flaws — these numbers are relatively speaking, more trustworthy than any other estimate I’ve seen — and certainly more trustworthy than any figures emitted by the Bush administration, which has a track record of appealing more to faith than to science.

  1018. Ahhh yes…the American love of “statistics”…I had no idea how horrific the abuse of such a noble mathematical field could become…

    If, as you suggest, they did some random samples and extrapolated them, these “results” are *junk*…as this is an entirely inappropriate statistical model…not to mention the sampling technique…laughable.

    House-to-house inquiries? I’m having visions of the Monty Python “plague” sketch (“BRING OUT YOUR DEAD!”)

    Back to the sampling…good extrapolation is based on a reasonable expectation of uniformity. Why do you think that casualties are going to be uniform? One emergent property of such combat is that casualties *cluster*. Depending on where they did their sampling, and how widespread their sampling was (what was the total sample size?) such clustering could produce *wildly* inaccurate results.

    Yes…proclaiming “statistical studies” along with “scientific studies” are the treacherously fraudulent bedrock of contemporary liberalism…

    Based on what you’ve told me, *there’s* your “severe flaw”…and it is so trivial to recognize that I barely needed to gaze any further than my navel ;-) It is a nice navel, though…

  1019. Ultimately, if these figures are accurate, and since we don’t do mass-murder Saddam-stylee, I expect that we’ll be seeing evidence of all the graves/markers…

    This figure really is preposterous. Our soldiers kill combatants they encounter, and we’re pretty damned precise with our heavy ordnance…for this figure to be true, it must have been like a scene from “Aliens” at times…

    The desire to believe can be mighty enticing…

  1020. Of course, if these figures turn out to be close-to-the-mark, I will eat my hat ;-)

    But I still say there’s a real bad smell in the air over at the Lancet…

  1021. Dan Kane,

    I should have clarified. Upon closer inspection, it looks like they used a cluster sample method by governorate — selecting 50 clusters from 16 governorates — and. if I’m not mistaken, extrapolated by multiplying the mortality rate in a given cluster by the population of the area represented by that cluster. It wasn’t a random sample willy nilly — they took the clustering of deaths into account.

    You really should log in to the Lancet site and review the results for yourself. They’re quite interesting — and rather than slagging off statistics you may want to look for flaws in their methodology as they present it. I’d be interested to see what you come up with. Their figures will stand or fall on their own merits — not whether the researchers are “moonbats” or not. (Perhaps they are “moonbats” *because* of the disturbing levels of violence caused by the Bush invasion?)

  1022. Firstly, although you know that I am clearly on “the other side”, I assure you that I am not dismissing (or slagging – are you a Brit?) anything for fallacious “moonbat” reasons.

    I will look into this article in greater depth later (I am being paid to do a job right now ;-) …but I just spent a short while skimming over the details…

    Firstly, yes they use the term “cluster sampling”…which is unrelated to the emergent pattern of clustering typical of such combat…this simply means that they selected a cluster of households (40, over what area is undefined) at each of 50 locations. The use of the term “cluster” is only meaningful in the sense that they took a small bunch of samples from each location. This is a sensible technique to use under the circumstances, as it will at least provide a decent average for each location, freaks excluded. (Remember that overall they are trying to recalculate the death rate per 1000 – it is *this* figure they extrapolate *over time* to reach the 650,000).

    Now for concerns…these results are extrapolated from a statistical exercise of 50 (well…47 after 3 exclusions) samples over an entire country…totalling 1849 households (I expected 1880, but no biggy). Not a lot of sampling, to be sure, so we have really got to be convinced that there is reason to expect these samples to be representative.

    Look at the sample selection table. Baghdad itself has approx 25% of all the clusters…see a problem here? Basically they are distributing clusters in some descending proportion to population. I’m not sure I see the rationale there, and given the areas they are sampling, it looks as though it would skew results upwards.

    I would have perhaps distributed clusters to match a pattern of troop/sortie deployment…ie. focus sampling on proportion to where the activity was taking place.

  1023. Finally…did they take the 2004 death rate and this ‘new’ 2006 death rate and interpolate? That’s shonky too…trying to define a death rate curve based on two points…

    I will say this…there’s enough padded waffle in that Lancet article to make most peoples’ eyes glaze and just nod along with the conclusions ;-)

  1024. “…I would have perhaps distributed clusters to match a pattern of troop/sortie deployment…”
    That came out wrong…should have read my own words closer before posting…I meant to say that I would have *adjusted* to take account of such hotspots.

  1025. Dan Kane,

    First of all I’m not a Brit, though I occasionally use Britishisms where there are gaps in American English for what I want to convey, e.g., describing someone as “naff” or saying that someone is “gobbing off”. These days I’m prone to say “smashing”, which probably makes me sound more like Dana Carvey’s fey impersonation of Hugh Grant than anything. :)

    I seem to recall that they interpolated a death rate curve based on a log-linear model and three 14-month intervals.

    They also did not bother to distinguish between combatants and non-combatants in analyzing the death data. The reasons cited was because they felt not enough families would accurately disclose that information to make such a distinction reasonably accurate. Make of that what you will.

    However, the fact that they found most deaths to have violent causes, even if they didn’t adjust their clusters to account for troop deployments, etc. (and I haven’t seen mention of the strategy they used to choose clusters within a governorate) is interesting and… odd. Even if the coalition forces don’t have nearly that much blood on their hands, the data suggest that at the very least, by their invasion they have attracted militants from within Iraq and neighboring countries, inciting them to violence, and being indirectly responsible for tens of times more Iraqi lives than Saddam would have taken in that period.

    If the Iraqis as a people are willing to pay that kind of stiff price, if they are willing to fight to the last man for our casus belli because the only alternative is being ruled by a brute like Saddam or various muslim extremist faction groups… fine. But I am not certain that the Iraqis have that kind of solidarity behind our cause.

  1026. Purple finger, dude…purple finger ;-)

    Interpolating on a logarithmic scale seems a bit far-fetched…to put it mildly…yet another problem of “statistical studies” – the underlying model is *key*. Fuck that up and everything is for shit…just ask John Lott ;-)

    As an aside, talking about statistical studies in the broader context…there seems to be *no* confidence or trust at all between the various ‘sides’ of debates as far as statistics are concerned. Every single time something controversial comes up, there is a blood’n’guts fight tearing into the statistical model. Most people haven’t got a fucking clue about such things, yet they are still having these studies shoved down their throats as ‘proof’…when there is no reason to have confidence in any of them…yet these ‘studies’ have great sway over people – how many conversations have you overheard where “studies show…” this that and the other, nobody understands shit about the actual ‘study’ they’re quoting, if it exists at all – and *voting* decisions are partly based on them. How wise is this?

    I’ll rest my case by saying that this 650,000 figure doesn’t pass a smell test, the statistical model is questionable, and the sample distribution raises my eyebrows…there’s not enough here to give me confidence that this figure is worth a damn. Sticking my finger in the air, I’d be shocked if the *innocent* civilian blood on our hands exceeds 10,000, with an additional 50,000 enemy kills…all coming in under 100,000. I say this simply because we *are* painfully careful about avoiding collateral damage, and combat heresay (troop blogs etc) gives the impression that the primitive monkeys can’t fight for shit, and we’re mopping them up like VC.

  1027. Jeff,
    >coalition forces…being indirectly responsible for tens of times more Iraqi lives than Saddam would have taken in that period.

    From the National Review Online:

    Claudia Rosett writes that if the authors of the Lancet article on deaths in Iraq “really mean to imply that it would be a safer world, or even a safer Iraq, with Saddam still in power —which is the scenario of their baseline assumption — that raises another question. May we hear more about the methodology by which they assured themselves that Saddam — who filled mass graves, gassed his own people, started two wars, and by 2003 via Oil-for-Food had pretty much corrupted his way out from under UN sanctions — would have gone on no new binges of butchery and war?”

  1028. Spot on Dean…good quote…I was wondering something similar myself, but ran out of steam ;-)

    Whatever the multiple is (disregarding the spurious means by which one arrives at such a number), there is an implied equivalence between our enemy casualties (plus regrettable innocents) and the butchery of an innocent subjugated people…and that of the latter, even amidst the mass murder, the remainder are still better off.

    How does that equation scale? Given the starvation and concentration camps of NK…would we be justified in nuking a few strongholds?

    This kind of reasoning is madness…ignorant, sadistic madness.

  1029. Dean and Adrian,

    back to the drug legalization topic, I think I have to explain something.

    I don’t really believe in equality. I like to use Antique Roman Republic as an example, as the problems arised there and the possible answers to them were basically the same throughout the history.

    I think there are always two different kinds of people. The “patricians”, who, through emotional maturity, determination, and will secured themselves their place in society, who have a broad viewpoint because they see at things from the above, who throughout their education and religious belief strongly believe in traditional virtues and the duties of Man, and through their economic success, they lack ressentiment, which would hinder rational thinking.

    The other type is the “plebs”, who are childish and emotionally immature, who always want somebody to take care of them, who always blame others for their faults, and who, when kept unchecked, are quite capable of bloody revenges based on imagined wrongs.

    Now, the point is, tyranny is always an alliance between a tyrant or a group of tyrants and the plebs. Tyrants use the childishness of the plebs as a power base against the patricians as a power base. It always happened this way – Emperors of Rome, absolutist kings of the Late Middle Ages, Hitler, Stalin and the activists of the Academic Left.

    (Although, the Academic Left is not nearly as rude as them. In Roman terms, they could be compared to Marius and the other typical plebian tribunes – they don’t want to impose tyranny themselves, but their ideas and reforms directly question the core virtues of the patricians, rendering the uncapable to defend freedom against tyrants who come later.)

    Therefore, uncontrolled, unchecked democracy always leads to tyranny. Somehow, some way, the rule of the patricians needs to be guaranteed.One way to do it, the American way, is to ensure liberty via formal (constitutional) rules. American Conservatives figure that if the equality of the chances is formally guaranteed to everybody, then those of the patrician mindset will always get to the top, get to make the economic decisions, influce politics through lobby, and therefore the patricians nature of the republic is guaranteed.

    I think otherwise. I think whenever there are formal rules, somebody will figure out how to get around them. Formal rules are relative by their very nature (because language is relative), only informal, unwritten moral rules can be considered absolute. Therefore, you never should formalize your core, dearest virtues. You simply make sure – through some informal Old Boys Network – that only the virtuous patricians get into positions of power and then you can simply rely on their good judgement, good taste, and reason. Recently I started to read Daily Mail and found out to my pleasant surprise, that Tories often tend to think this way – so I’m not alone with this idea.

    Let’s take an business example. You employ five programmers, and one of them is a real star, three times as productive as any of the others. But he likes to drop in to the office around 10AM but still leaving, like the others, at 5PM. Would you object or you would think it’s natural that talent and productivity has it’s priviliges? Equality simply doesn’t make sense even in the most common, day-to-day business situations.

    And now to drugs. Adrian10 and Dean would be right if we would look at drugs from a materialistic viewpoint – that they are another type of entertainment. But my experience is that drugs strongly alter our stiff ideas about reality. And there are some people like Aldous Huxley, Timothy Leary, Terence McKenna and others, who benefited tremendously from it – they gained real, working wisdom. But I know at lot of dumb young guys who get wasted on MDMA in the weekends and learn nothing of it, actually, they just get more and more confused as their minds are not fit to cope with different aspects of reality and still remaining sane. It’s like riding a tiger – it can take you really far, or drop you and eat you. And tiger riding is clearly not for everybody.

    So, I think the best result is if people like Huxley get access to drugs but most people don’t. How can you ensure it? You cannot really codify it as a law. Even if you would set an IQ census or whatever, somebody would figure out how to get around it. The solution is, again, informality. Like most European countries do, you keep drugs formally illegal, but in practice you don’t actively persecute light drugs. Formal illegality is enough to scare most of the lazy plebs away from them and rather into the pub. But smart people like Huxley or Leary will notice it’s just a facade and in practice they can go on and explore their minds without fear of punishment, as in practice nobody really cares, nobody really persecutes it.

    Formally illegal, informally legal – I think this works bests.

  1030. Jeez, making me suddenly go five hundred posts back up the thread before I can even remember the context. What happened to foreplay?

    This doesn’t answer the question of “when is a war just?”

    Was that what you were asking? Hang on a minute…

    He’s never going to throw the stake in the ground and say “I think that the War in Iraq is immoral, and here are my reasons.”

    OK, my bad, I have to admit I wasn’t talking about whether the war in Iraq was immoral, because that’s not my problem with it – I think it was dumb. Ideologically-driven dumb, which is the worst kind. I’m pretty sure it’s viewed as being immoral throughout the ME (and increasingly in Iraq itself), and that is having and will continue to have a major impact on how it plays out, but I prefer to focus on results rather than principles. Dean thinks this means I don’t believe in anything, but it just means that I believe in neither his vision of the future nor the jihadi one.

    In reality, you haven’t even really stepped into the ring.

    Ring?

    In other words, thus far, you are proving me 100% right.

    What about? That I’m misdirecting the reader? Look, I’ve admitted that I wasn’t paying attention to your question, and went off at a tangent…

    Toady.

    …but it can be an idea to look up the meaning of words you aren’t sure about before wheeling out the bold HTML tags.

    All you have to do is post up your theory of when a war is just, and do it as clearly and succinctly as possible.

    When you’ve been attacked, or are clearly about to be.

    I’ll go first: A war is just when the present form of a target state doesn’t live up to your minimum standards of good.

    Kind of gives you an open option on half the UN. How are you going to prioritise? And who actually sets the minimum standards?

  1031. Dan & Pete,

    I think there is a common answer – not really an answer, just a deeper question – to both the questions of how a war can be just and how does casualty equation scale.

    Wars in the past were so simple. Engaging parties considered the whole of the other country as the enemy, vile and evil, to be subdued without any discrimination and distinction.

    The turning point was WW2, which introduced an interesting turn in the way of thinking – while spilling the guts of Hans and Jürgen in Normandy and the Ardennes, enlightened Western combatants knew that Hans and Jürgen is not the real enemy, he is just a poor conscripted chap without a choice, that the only enemy is Hitler and his band, and the reason of the war is not only to liberate Jacques and Stanislaw. but Hans and Jürgen as well. It introduced a strange contradiction: you have to kill people whom you actually want to help! (OK, maybe the soldiers didn’t think this way in the heat of the battle, but the enlightened leaders at home did and 10-15 years after the war, the former soldiers understood it too, I think.)

    This concept, having to kill slaves in a war against slaveholders in order to liberate the slaves, is a completely new, XX century concept.

    Basically, EVERYTHING about moral, ethics, justness and equations needs to be rethinked, because war itself was redefined during and after WW2. You simply cannot judge the war in Iraq using similar concepts, like, for example, the French-Prussian (or Franco-Prussian, is that grammatically more correct?) war.

    We have to reinvent the very definition of war itself. Then can equations and justness come into the game.

  1032. Shenpen, I do not think that most of the plebes would be frightened off by a mere formality. Law enforcement is a lot more strict in the U.S. than in Europe, and it has not stopped anybody from obtaining whatever they want. I think the number of abuses by druggy friends would far outweigh any benefit of giving drugs to Ken Kesey et al. What you are proposing would likely lead to a caste system. People are trained, through millions of years of evolution (or, if you’re a plebe, designed by God in a flash of light :) to prefer their children, and it would be very tempting to use one’s power to benefit one’s own progeny. Caste systems are usually stable, but they MUST oppose any technological advances that would hinder their control (guns, bombs, the Singularity, etc); therefore, they are often overrun by more high-tech societies. To form a stable caste system, one would have to unite the entire world into one state and keep it that way; then, your empire should be secure until either the Earth is unable to support life or aliens invade.

  1033. Shenpen,
    >Formally illegal, informally legal

    I have just one problem with that: prosecutorial discretion. What formally illegal/informally legal means in practice is some people get prosecuted, and some don’t, for committing the same act, according to who they know.

    It is, in the words of Ayn Rand, an ‘aristocracy of pull.’

    I believe that the Law should be written out, in plain language, so that everyone can read and understand it. If the Law is unclear, or leads to socially unacceptable results, then change it. But everyone should know, at all times, what shall be the price of his honor, what is expected of him.

    In human affairs, in our personal lives, ambiguity may often be an excellent thing. It adds mystery and spice to life.

    But in legal affairs, ambiguity is the Devil’s entry point. It must be stamped out. The worst thing about lawyers is their love of legalese: a special language that only they understand, which guarantees their continued importance.

    The Law should be stark and clear and easy to understand.

    And prosecutorial discretion should be kept to a minimum.

  1034. Phil,

    I’m not thinking of a caste system. I’m thinking of a patrician republic, where formal rules guarantee equality to everybody while patricians informally have quite an influence – because both are defensive measures against tyranny. Formal democracy by itself is not a strong enough measure – most tyrants get into power by promising the plebs – who have the numerical majority – an opportunity to strike “back” against the patricians. I think it is different from a caste system.

  1035. Dean,

    the problem with that is that then you must always fix every rule at the level of the least common denominator.

    Because drugs are harmful to commoners, you have to deny it to everybody. Because fast driving is dangerous for the less skilled ones, you have to deny everybody fast driving. Because some folks cannot drive responsibly after 3 beers, you have to deny it to everybody. And so on.

    And yes, formally, you have to, there is no other real choice.

    But. If the policeman turns a blind eye of people smoking dope on the streets if otherwise to look and behave normally… if they turn a blind eye to small amounts of speeding if the driver looks normal… if they don’t test a driver for alcohol if he looks normal and sane, even if there is slight smell of beer… THEN and only then you have a really working, reasonable, sane system, based on common wisdom and common sense.

  1036. There is something funny with I’m writing about these topics. I mean, I assume that what I write must be the most horrible, most disgusting idea ever heard for a Leftie. Because, face it, in reality these are exactly the stuff the Lefties accuse how the Conservative/Capitalist systems work – but the Conservatives are always denying it, because they think that if it would be true, it would be unjust. Not many people do like me, admitting it that yes, it is true and openly supporting it. Probably it sounds like some kind of horribly cynical idea.

  1037. Shenpen,
    >the problem is…you must always fix every rule at the level of the least common denominator.

    All I can say is: You are absolutely right. The Law, done my way, must be about the lowest common denominator.

    I am and will likely always be a secular man. I just don’t find religious arguments credible. But I don’t believe that people like me are the future of humanity. I find arguments for the necessity religion itself just as credible as can be.

    There must exist, in any free society, a widespread culturally normative institution dedicated to elevating the lowest common denominator. You have to make the common people better.

    The problem is, this cannot be done en mass. That was the problem with Communism. It tried to fix society at the macro level. The kind of institution I am talking about must seek to lift up the human spirit, on an individual level, on a mass scale.

    In other words, you need a religion, to lift up the moral aspirations of the common people, in order to make them worthy of freedom. But not just any religion will do. Islam seems to be incompatible with Liberty. The goal of Islam, as I understand it, is to preserve the traditional society in amber, so as to safeguard the immortality of all traditional people, within their enduring traditions.

    New ideas, technologies and social movements, which are incompatible with traditionalism, must therefore be stamped out. The individual must be pressed into absolute conformity with the expectations of his tribe. Liberty is anathema.

    To preserve Liberty, you need a religion which inspires reasonableness and tolerance in its adherents. But tolerance can be taken too far. The Multi-culti Left wants us Westerners to be tolerant of non-Western Muslim intolerance, in order that we might prove we are not racists.

    The trick is to find that balance, that happy medium, between the arch-traditionalist and the libertine. And to achieve the necessary moral ambition to pursue that balance, in the face of ongoing disappointment.

    The price of moral ambitiousness is guilt. If we earnestly seek to be as good as possible, then as imperfect humans we will inevitably fail, and pretty often. To the degree that we are serious about our moral ambition, failure will leave us feeling guilty.

    A valid religion, then, requires a goodly amount of guilt. But if you are drowning in guilt, you cannot function. You will flee into libertinism, just to escape feeling awful about yourself. Libertines, who believe in nothing, can always feel good about themselves. They do not pursue goodness, therefore they never fail in reaching it.

    So, you need a religion which promotes, as well as any human institution can, that perfect balance between too much guilt, and not enough. A religion should make people feel somewhat bad about themselves, in pursuit of making them better.

    This must be done on an individual level, lest the apparatus fall into the hands of Comrade Stalin. And it must do so without making any cosmological claims which science will inevitably discredit.

    And there’s the rub.

    Nobody, at least in the West, knows how to fashion a religion which MEANS SOMETHING, which can muster the moral passion needed to inspire people to be better, which never comes into conflict with science.

    And we live in a scientific age, wherein the researchers and technicians are doing all the miracles. Any reasonable doctrine must yield to science, whenever the two conflict.

    It’s a problem.

  1038. Why can we not fashion a religion which will induce just the right amount of guilt, in just the right way, without coming into conflict with science? Because people demand something from their religion, as compensation for all of the guilt-trips. They demand Eternal Life.

    The worst thing about death is that it does not just end life, it refutes it. When you have been dead long enough, it’s just like you never lived. People have forgotten about you, your monuments have crumbled into dust, your children are dead, even unto the seventh generation. You are undone.

    In return for giving over their lives to a religion which will subject them to an ongoing guilt-trip, the people demand a respite from death, or at least the credible promise thereof. After all, if Hitler and his victims ultimately share the same fate, oblivion, then what is the point of being good?

    But any claim that religion makes, to offer its adherents Eternal Life, is rendered laughable in the face of science. Science cuts through your immortal soul like a hot knife through butter.

    Nobody knows what to do about this. Osama bin Laden argues that we should just reject the whole problem of science, reason, and Hope, in favor of a traditional social model which provides Eternal Life to the individual, not merely in some promised, and possibly illusory, afterlife, but in this life.

    In the traditional society, we-who-live-in-this-place-and-do-these-things will go on living in this place and doing these things, exactly as we always have, forevermore. And anyone who tries to change it will be put to death. If we all identify ourselves with our traditions, and the traditions continue unchanged forever, then we will, in some sense, never die.

    No more struggling to find a balance between the Old Ways and the New Ideas. Banish all new ideas, and the problem is solved.

    Now you might argue that the Western way is better, because it makes better use of human potential. And I would agree.

    But observe that the educated intelligentsia of the Western world, is virtually uniformally opposed to the continuation of Western Civilization. We cannot maintain the loyalty of our college professors, journalists, lawyers, poets or philosophers.

    How can you argue that our way is better, if our most educated citizens, when asked to choose between us and the Islamo-crazy head-choppers, choose the head-choppers?

  1039. You are right, Shenpen, about the existence of the Patricians, as a moral class.

    We would have had to deal with these issues of reason, science and Hope sooner or later, no matter what. But they are becoming critical NOW because of the events of the 20th century.

    Eric Hoffer wrote that the decline of the West could have been delayed for as much as a century, if it hadn’t been for Lenin. When Lenin took over Russia, with the help of the Germans, during the First Word War, he proceeded to slaughter millions of civilians, as the West had never quite seen before.

    Lenin’s victims were not killed in war fighting, they did not die because of some plague or famine, they were murdered, in the name of an openly bloodthirsty ideology, in what was at least nominally a Western nation, and nobody did a fucking thing about it.

    The Western European Patricians, who theoretically represented the pinnacle of Western religious and moral development, stood by and did nothing as innocent people were murdered by the millions. How could they have any moral authority left after that?

    Why should anyone listen to those aristocratic Patricians today? Would you tremble before the prospect of their disapproval? Or would you laugh at them for all their hidebound sensibilities?

    Lenin didn’t kill the West, but in showing up the hollowness of European Patrician moral resolve, he stabbed a Dagger of Doubt that much deeper into the heart of us, that much sooner.

  1040. One last question, Shenpen.

    Does the Buddhist seek Eternal Life through the practice of his religion?

    It was always my vague understanding that the Buddhist does not seek Eternal Life, but instead seeks to be comfortable with Oblivion. If this impression is mistaken, please correct me.

  1041. Vladimir Lenin usually gets a pass for 20th century evil, because he only killed 3 million people, not the 30 million killed by Stalin. But Saddam Hussein probably didn’t kill as many as 3 million.

    And the aristocratic European Old Right who refused to do anything about Lenin were not the cowardly, Jimmy Carteresque, poseur pussies who wanted to do nothing about Saddam. The old European aristocracy believed in the Divine Right of Kings. They believed that Jesus Christ, in his capacity as Lord God of Creation, had ordained them, as it were, to rule over the Earth in Christ’s name, amen.

    But when the moment came for them to step up and defend, in the manner of the God they claimed to adore, the helpless millions in Russia who cried out for salvation, the European aristocrats choked. Why should you, or anyone else, take them seriously, now?

    The trouble with Patricianism is that, in order to make it work, you need Patricians who can walk the morally superior walk, not just talk the talk. You need a Nobility who is actually Noble. And they are hard to come by.

    Remember, Shenpen, that the Roman Patrician class ultimately failed, which is why the common people welcomed Caesar in the first place.

    The solution, I believe, is to make the common people better. You give them a God, of Good Moral Character, whom they can adore, and seek to Commune with. In the process of trying to become One with their good God, the common people will become better human beings. At least, that is the hope.

    And there is no other hope. Education does not make people better. The greatest of the intellectual elite in the US, Noam Chomsky, spent the late 1970’s as an apologist for the Khmer Rouge. Education offers people more temporal options, but there is no evidence that the educated tend to make better moral choices than the uneducated.

    But if the solution is a reasonable, tolerant, good God, such a God has trouble standing up under the harsh glare of modern science. A despotic God, like Allah, has no such problems. His followers simply kill the scientists. Cut off their fucking heads with a sword. That’ll teach those nerdy bastards!

    But a reasonable, tolerant God must answer the arguments of science with arguments of His own. And I see no real evidence of His capacity to do that.

    So what do we do?

  1042. I don’t know what to do, actually. There are always two kinds of democracy – the Bolshevik/Jacobin type that pulls the Patricians down to the level of the Plebs, and the Antique Greek type, which pulls the Plebs up to the level of the Patricians. I can only hope the second type can work todays.
    Looking a the TV shows, the ads and the popular music, I’m not so sure…

    But. On informality. Basically, if you firmly believe in the ultimate rule of the formal to the exclusion of the informal, in the rule of the objective to the exclusion of the subjective, you will lose the battle with the Left in the long run. Because the formal and the objective requires all debates kept within the limits of rationality. And whenever debates are purely rational, the Left is right, because they only and biggest error is that human beings, by their very nature, are irrational, therefore the reality we all experience is irrationally distorted. We have to take it into account. And actually, this fundamental irrationality is where all ethical dimensions live – were humans be fully rational, ethical dilemmas would simply not exists. Not that when I say irrational, it does not mean unreasonable behaviour. It simply means decision making processes that cannot really be described by simple deductive logic, but are rather based on common sense, common wisdom, tradition, virtue, instinctively good judgement – all that stuff. Simply put, rational-deductive thinking is but one of the many capabilities of human mind. Whenever we decide to go fully formal, we limit ourselves within the limits of rational-deductive thinking – and in this field the Left is the ultimate master. Libertarians can challenge them in these fields, Conservatives cannot.

    Or putting it other ways, purely rational-deductive thinking has a huge overhead. I mean the standard process is that the results of rational-deductive debates happened decades or centuries ago usually pass into common sense, common wisdom, and we can accept them to be true without thinking much about them. This frees up the necessary time and capacity to think about new problems. But, if rational-deductive thinking rules unquestionedly, then those old, closed issues will be questioned over and over again and basically we ain’t going anywhere, we are forced to repeat the same stuff over and over again. Therefore we have to accept some things to be true without spending the cost of proving them ourselves again. But in a formal system you cannot put anything into an unquestionable position. You can only do it informally – where you can formally question anything but there are some things that are informally unadvised to question as it would arise public ridicule and shame.

  1043. One short thought, before I go to sleep: in practical politics, I do tend to have a warm place in my heart for Libertarians, as they look a lot better company, a lot more reasonable people to identify with than either left-wing lunatics and right-wing religious fundamentalists. But in theory… in theory I think it’s nothing but a useful short-term antidote to Marxism. For those people who are poisioned beyond repair by the rude rationalism-objectivism-materialism of Marxism, stuff like Price Theory – thanx to Pete for mentioning it’s readable online – is a useful antidote, because it can challenge Marxism on it’s own field. But in the long run we need to move beyond that, as this field is very limited, it only utilizes a very narrow part of the capabilities of human mind… because it’s in the limits of the fact – value distinction – the real question is neither what is nor what ought to be but why ought it to be…

  1044. Shenpen,
    >this fundamental irrationality is where all ethical dimensions live

    The essential problem with reason is that, assuming the material world is all that exists, there can never be any reason not to commit suicide. THIS is where the Left is invincible. Ultimately, any argument against a Leftist position becomes consequentialist:
    “But if we do that, then in the long run…”

    And the Leftist can simply respond: “In the long run, we are all dead.”

    And unless you believe in some unprovable supernatural soul, there is no comeback. The Leftist argument is logically irrefutable. Given materialist assumptions, there is no purpose to existence. And no valid argument against Leftist policies.

    Leftist policies make Leftist people feel better about themselves in the moment. Why should that not be the highest value in the universe? What higher value should we pursue?

    Should the good of the human race be the moral goal of our actions? The human race is a cancer upon Mother Earth, who would be better off if we were extinct.
    http://www.timesonline.co.uk/TGD/picture/0,,351113,00.jpg

    God commands you to be fruitful and multiply, to subdue the Earth and the natural world. And there’s no proof there’s a God. You’re gonna die eventually anyway, and so will the entire human race.

    Why not get it over with?

    It is insidious, and irrefutable. I feel so helpless. Debating is what I do. I want to defend the values of my country and my civilization through logical argument. And, against the ultimate Leftist position, I got nothin’.

  1045. >the real question is neither what is nor what ought to be but why ought it to be…

    But Shenpen, there is no ‘why it ought to be!’ There is no way to derive Ought from Is except by reference to a desired quality of life. You Are (in a certain state) because you do what you Ought. If you have no desire to be, or if you are indifferent to your state of being, then there is nothing you Ought to be doing.

    The desire to be, and to be a certain way, is a priori.

    Only after you have selected an outcome goal, such as Aristotle’s eudemonia, or Christian salvation, can you plan a rational moral course of action. Without a goal, there is no basis for moral decision-making.

    And without a God who hates and punishes suicide, there is no NECESSARY outcome goal, not even life itself.

    This is THE fundamental moral conundrum.

  1046. But when the moment came for them to step up and defend, in the manner of the God they claimed to adore, the helpless millions in Russia who cried out for salvation, the European aristocrats choked. Why should you, or anyone else, take them seriously, now?

    Do you have any idea of how many people had been killed in Europe over the previous few years (and how much loss of faith in Euro-aristocratic leadership had resulted)? Nobody much was going to go on quixotic errands like that, except maybe a few adventurers who joined the Whites. Burnout is far too mild a word.

    Some of your judgements seem to be based on orotund nothingness from time to time.

  1047. >Do you have any idea of how many people had been killed in Europe over the previous few years?

    A shitload. But this, too, undermines the moral authority of the aristocratic European elite. If there had to be some kind of showdown between the English and the Germans, for who was going to be top dog in Europe, then they should have handled it more responsibly.

    They could have had the war around 1900, or so. The weapons would have been technologically inferior, both sides would have been less well dug-in, and there would have been fewer casualties on both sides.

    Better yet, they could have studied Sun Tzu or some other serious philosopher of war. They could have each created a serious maneuverist battle plan, and once hostilities began, whoever could gain the upper hand the fastest could claim victory, become the Imperial Big Kahuna, and shoulder the White Man’s Burden.

    Even if there had to be a showdown, it didn’t have to end in trench warfare, it didn’t have to involve young men charging machine gun nests with bayonets. It didn’t have to be ‘lions led by donkeys.’

    World War One kick-started a great deal of what is wrong with the modern world. If the old European aristocracy were worthy of the Patrician status they once claimed, they would have handled it better.

  1048. A shitload. But this, too, undermines the moral authority of the aristocratic European elite.

    No, it’s primary. After WW1 the European aristocratic elite had no moral authority to invest in Missions to Russia or anything else.

    If there had to be some kind of showdown between the English and the Germans, for who was going to be top dog in Europe, then they should have handled it more responsibly.

    I rather expect to be saying something similar about Bush’s ME policy in due course. To people who won’t be in any position to deny it, I mean.

  1049. Dean,

    trench warfare is always unavoidable whenever defensive technology develops faster than offensive technology, until the later catches up: remember Grant vs. Lee, 1864, Petersburg.

    As for the moral conundrum: but, there is a built-in goal in everything that lives, including plants. Biologists call it the survival of the self and the race. Nietzsche called it the “will to power”. Buddhists call it the wish of happiness and avoiding suffering. In every living being, there is a built-in drive to grow. I sometimes call it the reversed implication of Thermodynamics: if we assume that our lives are not closed systems, there is no reason to believe disorder must inevitably grow.

    What I consider the fundamental moral problem is the following: we are a lot more able to see the effects of our circumstances on our personal well-being than the effect of our actions. I firmly believe that well-being is mostly based on our own actions. You can consider it a (Buddhist) faith I cannot really prove – I simply think it’s true because otherwise basically nothing would make sense. Our actions must have consequences, or else everything is chaos. But, this is very hard to deduct and prove rationally. Therefore we don’t really have much choice but to put virtues that lead to well-being outside the socially accepted realm of debate – to create a culture where questioning them sounds like asking “Don’t you mind if I release a big juicy fart right here?” :) Simply because such debates cannot be won by our current knowledge. This is not a new idea – just 100 years ago, many virtues were considered unquestionable. It’s the nihilism of the sixties where questioning everything has started.

    Meanwhile, I think it’s not fundamentally impossible to define the goal of life and prove the effect of these virtues rationally, just simply our knowledge had not developed to that level. The most promising research in this field is Martin Seligman’s Positve Psychology. It looks likely that in a couple of decades, the goal of life and the means to reach it will be scientifically defined and pass into common knowledge.

  1050. Shenpen,
    >the goal of life and the means to reach it will be scientifically defined and pass into common knowledge.

    I sincerely hope you are right. But right now I doubt it. You and I each look at this problem from a different angle. I think we are both seeing the same problem, you from your Buddhist European perspective, and me from my secular American one.

    From where I sit, however, the Good Life cannot be defined scientifically. Because science can find no evidence of an afterlife. That means that this is all there is. Hitler and his victims DO share the same fate. If you get away with doing evil in this life, there is no post-life reckoning.

    Therefore, even if science can define, in terms of human brain chemistry, the exact components of happiness, there is no guarantee that those who choose vice over virtue will fail where the virtuous will succeed.

    The path of virtue is difficult. Vice is usually the easy way out. To consistently take the hard road, in order to live a more exalted life, one must have some guarantee of ultimate reward. And the material world, which operates on a statistical basis, can offer no such guarantee to the individual. Certainly, in the abstract, peoples who are, on the whole, virtuous tend to do better than peoples who relish evil. But for you as an individual, you cannot prove that virtue GUARANTEES success and happiness because it doesn’t.

    Therefore, in a purely material world, the path of virtue in the pursuit of happiness is not a NECESSARY moral goal. And neither is anything else. Not even life.

    And if you argue that all people naturally want to live, I offer you the statistics on suicide. Animals want to live. Human beings are more complex. We want to avoid suffering. And life is full of suffering. You believe that we are ultimately responsible for our own fate. And some people would do ANYTHING to avoid responsibility.

    Even die.

  1051. And the worst part about the material world operating on a statistical basis?

    Our human brains aren’t built to grok statistics. This is why it is so easy to lie with statistics. We have no instinct for them.

    We have an instinct for reading emotions in the faces of other humans. Small children, with no training at all, can do this perfectly.

    But there are grown men and women, intelligent, competent professionals, who will never in their lives understand a bell curve or the difference between the median and the mean.

    We just aren’t built for it.

    Are brains are designed to solve the problems of our cave-man ancestors, living as hunter-gatherers on the Serengeti. No cave-man ever had to comprehend a standard deviation, and very few of us do it well.

  1052. >they should have handled it more responsibly.
    >I rather expect to be saying something similar about Bush’s ME policy in due course.

    For the record, Adrian, I was referring to both the German and English Christian aristocracy. They BOTH should have handled their conflict more responsibly.

    Bush may have bungled some things in the opening rounds (at least for us) of our conflict of civilizations in the new century, but he could not have managed to have a better war, and you should not hold him to that standard.

    I believe you once wrote that you are married. If you and your wife BOTH want to, you can fight well. By ‘well’ I mean: in a manner compatible with a long term happy marriage. Though you will argue from time to time, about important things, you can fight humanely, remembering that there are some things you should never say or do, no matter how angry you are.

    The Jihadis don’t want to fight ‘well,’ in that sense. They want victory by any means necessary. They blow the legs off grannies to achieve it. They would gleefully nuke cities.

    Bush cannot manage a conflict with such people ‘well.’ Neither could you or I or anyone else. You Europeans, for the most part, hope to avoid having to fight at all. You want to slide into oblivion with as little fuss as possible.

    But we who wish to fight, must understand that our efforts, like all human efforts, will be fraught with error. We are fighting an enemy who respects no moral boundaries. One does not do a thing like that flawlessly.

  1053. Dean,

    the difference is not that you are secular, but that you seem to be stuck in the common materialism of “if it’s pleasant, I’ll be happy, if it’s inpleasant, I’ll be unhappy”. Or in other words, you confuse externally, objectively observable success with subjective happyness. You think f.e. economic success is often the share of the hell-bent ones and I think a man of medium income who is happy with it is subjectively richer and more successful than the insatiable billionare who always craves for more. Or based on your example, the starving slave in the concentration camp must have been happier than Hitler’s last year – without having to take any afterlife or whatever into account: right there, in that reality. Just think about it – being an innocent victim of an irresistible force one can feel like a martyr, and just like in the Nobel prize winner Fatelessness,
    if one is in a situation one is completely incapable of controlling, it can provide a deep feeling of being relieved from responsibility for oneself and can actually cause a weird kind of happyness! Similar to sexual masochism. And then think of Hitler. How worse can be such a fate to see the fronts getting closer every day, your empire slowly collapse and you cannot do anything about it! Waking up each night with the thought “Where have I fucked it up? It looked so good in ’41…” Adding it all together, I consider the victim to be happier than Hitler. And this is no nonsense about the afterlife, it’s right in the here and now.

    (Basically, the only reason I believe in reincarnation is that I think the chain of causes and effects did not just start at our conception or birth because it would mean a newborn is devoid of any self-causation, and I consider that a logical impossibility. But I don’t really care much about it – I care about the causes and effects right here in this life. )

  1054. What happened to foreplay?

    That’s what she said…

    OK, my bad, I have to admit I wasn’t talking about whether the war in Iraq was immoral, because that’s not my problem with it – I think it was dumb. Ideologically-driven dumb, which is the worst kind. I’m pretty sure it’s viewed as being immoral throughout the ME (and increasingly in Iraq itself), and that is having and will continue to have a major impact on how it plays out, but I prefer to focus on results rather than principles. Dean thinks this means I don’t believe in anything, but it just means that I believe in neither his vision of the future nor the jihadi one.

    Ah, well, this is very good to know, and reframes the debate significantly (in my mind, at least).

    …but it can be an idea to look up the meaning of words you aren’t sure about before wheeling out the bold HTML tags.

    What kind of an American would I be, then? Forsooth.

    Now, let’s compare and contrast our just war theories.

    adrian10: When you’ve been attacked, or are clearly about to be.
    Peter: when the present form of a target state doesn’t live up to your minimum standards of good.

    These are quite different. Most likely, there will never be a situation where you think a war is just but I don’t. In the more typical case where I think a war is just, but you don’t, the only useful debate we can have on morality is me trying to convince you that a target state was an imminent threat. As it happens, I don’t particularly think Iraq was. So on the whole, we have to simply agree to disagree about whether or not the war is just.

    This sort of thing is entirely common. Given that morals ultimately have to come out of an individual’s ass, and that the world has a lot of individuals, this isn’t terribly surprising. So how are we to decide what to do?

    Well, my favored course of action is to debate on utilitarian grounds. In other words, instead of me trying to convince you that the war in Iraq is moral, I try to convince you that it’s a net gain. And instead of you trying to convince me that unilateral US action is immoral, you try to convince me that it is a net loss. Make sense?

    If this sounds like a good idea (and it should, because it is), then pick a topic of debate and let’s take it from there. What one facet of the general disagreement is most important to you? Unilateral US action? Pre-emptive warfare? Wal-mart? There’s a lot of options.

  1055. Dan and Jeff,

    As little I know about statistics, I think statistics is a comparative science: figures mean nothing until you compare to them to some other figures. I’m to lazy to research for it as I’m only casually interested of the subject, but if either of you wants to spend some time on it, you could calculate approximately how many Iraqi children will be born in the next, say, 10 years. My uninformed guess is that it must be somewhere between 2-8 millions.

    If those children will grow up in political freedom and in an economy that at least started to develop and develop justly, then cost paid in Iraqi human lives was a sad, but well-placed investment.

    Of course, there is always that big IF. Just like I’ve written to Pete, the war in Iraq is not horrible enough to automatically label it as unjust and not noble and gentle enough to automatically label it as just – we have to wait and see the results, because only the end can justify the means. IF Iraq does not sink into civil war, IF Iraq won’t become an expropriated colony, IF Iraq becomes in 5-10 years something like Egypt, in 10-15 years something like Turkey and in 20-25 years something like Greece, well, THEN it was a just war. And THEN it had worth the cost of lives. I hope Eric Cowperthwaithe is right with his theory of longevity and we will all be around to see it :-)

  1056. Shenpen,
    >only the end can justify the means.

    Someday, when I have the time, you and I are going to have to talk that one out. I so TOTALLY disagree, that I’m wondering where we can begin the discussion.

    For now: Principles justify the means used to achieve goals.

    The trick is in divining the correct principle. Since Reason is ultimately morally neutral, the best principles seem to stem from the axiomatic proposition that there is a God in the sky who loves good, hates evil, and will reward justice and compassion in this life with Eternal Life afterward.

    I haven’t thought this out clearly enough to be able to make the case that good principles can ONLY come from that axiom. I’d be interested in your thoughts.

  1057. I think I’ll have one more go at posting on here. It’s just possible that my last post (which was of course deleted) was mistaken for a troll. I’m not one thank you very much – though of course all trolls say that!

    Assuming that left wing European post-modern bootlickers like me are welcome here, can I ask a simple question? Is it really possible to wage war on an abstract noun? Terror I mean. Also, I’ve seen the word ‘Palestinian’ loosely equated with the word ‘terrorist’ a couple of times. If someone occupied your country and you tried to defend your borders, would that make you a terrorist? The word seems to have desending into a playground rant. You don’t agree with Georgie Boy, you’re a terrorist! You don’t like the war in Iraq? Terrorist, or – worse still – you’re a floppy left wing apologist for terrorists everywhere.

    I think the most likely outcome of the current situation in Iraq is a prolonged civil war. And there’s something I lack which I want one of you to supply for me. A list of all the countries in which the US has intervened militarily and successfully installed lasting democracies.

    Another point occurs to me. Someone mentioned (I’m too lazy to look for his thread) that if another WW2 took place those on ‘the Left’ (we’re the ones with horns and cloven feet by the way: you can’t miss us) would probably wet their pants and run away. In fact a great many people of all political persuasions fought and died in that war … I can’t for the life of me see what it has to do with Iraq. Please enlighten me.

  1058. Dean,

    Good, I think we could have a discussion. Are you GMT-5? I’m GMT. Maybe in a weekend, like, 20PM GMT vs. 15PM GMT-5 looks like a good time. Despite that you live in Dallas, you don’t speak a Jay Leno – style Texan dialect, do you? As my native language is not Indo-European, I have a hard time figuring out dialects of English. (From this viewpoint, Black Country, UK, where I’m living now, is probably the worst place I could choose. Even the Aussies are more understandable… :-) ) Both my e-mail address and MSN/GAIM ID is _+m_i_k_l_o_s_+_h_o_l_l_e_n_d_e_r__++A_T++__g_m_a_i_l__++D_O_T_++_c_o_m_+ (sorry, but those bloody spammers…. remove underscores and plus signs) and my Skype ID is the part of it before the AT.

    Note that it’s not only an invitation for Dean but to all of you who whom I’ve been talking for moths now.

  1059. Shenpen,
    >Note that it’s not only an invitation for Dean

    Is there some reason why we cannot hash this issue out here, where others may participate, if they wish?

    I would be happy to talk over, in private, anything you wanted to keep private, but an abstract discussion of whether the ends justify the means seems like public fodder to me. Is there some aspect of this topic you want to keep private?

  1060. Part of the reason I ask is I have a pathological aversion to checking my email regularly. People who communicate with me exclusively through that medium tend to fall out of my life. :-(

  1061. Well, I just read an interesting this interesting article. Apparently, the IRS is starting to consider virtual (i.e. MMO) assets to be worthy of taxation. I wonder what this means for the future of these virtual worlds if the server admins have to give the IRS oversight into all transactions.

  1062. Dean,

    no. there is nothing privat about the subject – it was you who suggested a personal talk, I just reflected on that.

    As on topic, I didn’t mean the end always justifies the means – I meant it especially for the war on Iraq. It’s not gentle enough to automatically support it and not horrible enough to automatically condemn it, but we have to wait and see the long-term results.

  1063. Dean & others,

    something else: do you know a guy called Grover Norquist? Do you like him? He is said to be a prominent Neocon. I’ve just seen the film Status Anxiety from Alain de Botton, which is supposed to be a documentary about the reasons of modern anxiety. While I don’t really agree with Alain’s conclusions, I respect this work as at least it’s a film about something really important: to not only be successful but to also to feel successful. And this film contained an interview with Grover, and I considered it quite revolting. If I think deep about his ideas, I can agree with 70% of them BUT the guy expresses them in so untactful, rude, impolite, inhumane ways… Can he be considered a typical Neocon or jus ta fringe case?

  1064. People more knowledgeable on Grover Norquist than I:

    How much of his Wikipedia page is accurate? He does not seem to be a very central character if “even fellow right-wingers privately refer to him as “Grosser Nosetwist” and try to avoid being trapped in conversation with him at social gatherings because he never talks about anything other than politics.”

    Also, he believes “that American Jews will never vote Republican in numbers large enough to make a difference in elections, so the party should reach out to Muslims.”

    This guy does not sound like a mainstream Republican to me.

  1065. Shenpen,
    >I didn’t mean the end always justifies the means

    I am partial to the idea that an action is not justified by its outcome, since outcomes are not totally under our control, but by the moral principle on which it is based. If you say that the ends justify the means, then until you know what the end will turn out to be, you cannot know if your means are just or not. Morality then, is not of any use in making decisions in the immediate moment.

    There are, of course, major problems with this view. An obvious one is the Leftist concept of “false consciousness.” Earlier, Jeff asked me if I was unconsciously spreading the meme that the modern Left is a death cult. If it were unconscious, how would I know? What if I THINK I am seeking an outcome in accordance with principle, when in fact I am a deluded tool of the tobacco companies, Wal-Mart, Dick Cheney, or the Jews?

    A more serious problem is that, in order to be good, it is not enough to have good intentions. One needs also the practical wisdom, the deep tacit understanding of how the world works, to probably achieve good outcomes. Of course it won’t always turn out exactly like you plan, but if your plans consistently blow up in your face, and you are an adult, then the fault lies not with this evil world, but with you.

    And lastly, how is one to know what is the appropriate principle to apply in this case? Should we be honest, or tactful? Merciful, or just? Bold, or prudent?

    Aristotle tells us that in order to know what principle to apply in a given context, you need to be wise. But how does one acquire wisdom? Obviously by making mistakes. Morally, how are those mistakes to be judged?

    Beyond that, often times we just don’t have enough information to know what will turn out to have been the right thing to do, yet we must still act on principle, if morality is to be of any use in decision making.

    We live in a world of dilemma and paradox. There’s an old Jewish saying that
    ‘If God lived on Earth, people would throw rocks at His windows.’

    I’d have to agree.

  1066. Dean,

    that’s right in general and in theory – if we only count the number of people who lived too short and too painful lives and endured too miserable deaths just because of the only reason their parents chose to have 6-10 children instead of 1-2, then all the great evils of known history look insignificant in the numbers. Hitler, Stalin, plague, wars, whatever, the numbers compared to the number of victims of overpopulation look insignificant. Therefore, in theory, I agree – one cannot judge anything policy just by counting the number of victims, because the numbers of victims are amazingly low compared to the real horrors of life, which are caused by ignorance rather than ill will.

    But. There are cases when need to look at the outcome as we don’t have any other input. Iraq is this case. It looks quite lame. If the reason was terrorism, then why did Bush choose a secular-Fascist enemy with only limited connections to Islam fanatics instead of, for, example, Iran? If the reason was removing a big evil, why didn’t his daddy do it before and why exactly now, when challenging the Islam fanatics would look a lot more urgent an issue than cracking down on a secular-Fascist ruler? Whatever viewpoint I’m trying to see it, it looks lame. On the other hand, I have a guess that what is really about is 1) luring jyhadis into a battle the cannot win, mostly because the local population is not very religious and does not really support them 2) creating an example country, a western-style developed Arab country, which is a lot easier in the secular Iraq than it would be in Iran for example. I hope these are the real reasons, but you know, these stuff look a bit like a Rube Goldberg Machine to me – too complicated to really trust it. I simply don’t feel the smell of any really ingenious – smart, simple, elegant and effective – idea/vision about this whole issue from the Bush Administration. My impression about them is rather like “Well, huh, let’s just try it as we have not better idea as of yet, and see what happpens.” Therefore I myself cannot really think anything else than “OK, see what happens.”

    Iraq is an experiment, and an experiment you can only judge by the results.

  1067. Oh, I thought that the Arabs let him go when they found out he was American, because they couldn’t afford to feed him.

  1068. Where the hell is ESR? Would it take too much time to poste some random “I’m still here post”.

  1069. On Iraq, I have a “heretical” idea. It seems both the hawks and the pigeons are convinced it’s the US goverment that’s calling the shots. But what if it’s not them? But what if it’s Saudi Arabia? You know I’ve never liked the “it’s just for the oil” arguments, simply because the crude “invade-them-and-grab-their-resources” colonialism proved ineffective in the last 80 years, so I cannot believe Bush would try something like tht. But. Given the facts that the US goverment faithfully supported the Saudi royal family in each and every of their political aims, what if it’s the Saudis who want to mass buy the oil concessions and facilities for an old song? What if it was them who convinced Bush that Saddam’s secular Fascism has strong ties with Islamist terrorism (quite an unlikely idea, actually, if you want to fight real Islamist terroist, you gotta invade Iran instead) because of it? What if it’s Saudi Arabia who is actually behind it all?

  1070. To be more precise, I think the elites of Western countries cannot even think of waging wars for resources, because the reporters are very good in sniffing things out and making big scandals. But if the Saudi elite starts to buy up the Iraqi oil infrastructure for a fraction of what it worths, through four phantom companies and six Iraqi strawmen, it would be a lot harder to find out – and probably a lot less people would care.

  1071. ESR should write a “I’m not dead” post. It would be straight out of “Monty Python and the Holy Grail!” “I feel happy, i feel happy…” ;-)

  1072. Damn, the network infrastructure in this country sucks! I am *SUPPOSED* to have a 1Mbps connection (that I pay $40 a month for), but the best I usually get is ~300kbps. Have we just given up on FTTH and are preparing for ubiquitous wifi or what?

  1073. >Damn, the network infrastructure in this country sucks! I am *SUPPOSED* to have a 1Mbps connection (that I pay $40 a month for), but the best I usually get is ~300kbps. Have we just given up on FTTH and are preparing for ubiquitous wifi or what?

    Phil,

    I think it is crazy not to have a standard for broadband, seems like everyone wants a different
    way to get the most bandwidth for the best price, DSL, ISDN, CABLE ‘copper’, satellite, wifi,
    optical-fiber. I suppose the technology is advancing faster than anyone can keep up with,
    and even when all the fiber-optic cable is in house, we might need something even faster!
    i cannot imagine what, light energy must be the limit for communication.

    Try these bandwidth tests:
    http://performance.toast.net/
    http://homepage.tinet.ie/~leslie/testpage.htm

    I get around ~700kbps on a good day with a 768kbps/128kbps account.
    You might have line noise, bad connections, or great distance from the switching
    station. Call the provider and have them check the line for quality.

  1074. Okay, so I AM getting 942kbps when I download a text file from one of those test servers.
    Apparently, it must be working better than I thought (or the file is small enough that it only involves my burst bandwith).

  1075. Seems these tests are showing a bit unrealistically high figures – I’m getting between 1400 and 2300 on different tests, while there are others in the house using the net too – and I don’t think our landlord subscribed to anything above 2M.

  1076. >Okay, so I AM getting 942kbps when I download a text file from one of those test servers.
    Apparently, it must be working better than I thought (or the file is small enough that it only involves my burst bandwith).

    >Seems these tests are showing a bit unrealistically high figures – I’m getting between 1400 and 2300 on different tests, while there are others in the house using the net too – and I don’t think our landlord subscribed to anything above 2M.

    Well, I went over to http://www.archive.org and pulled down a Big Juicy Greatful Dead .Mp3 file
    and i get 89.8 KB/sec. with firefox, Amazing!

  1077. On my Saudi theory:

    The movement we call Islamofascism today started in the thirties and got recognizable in the fifties – I mostly think of the movements of ideologists Qutb in Egypt and Mawdudi in Pakistan, the Deobandi schools in India and Pakistan etc.

    Their only real political success was the Islamic Revolution in Iran in 1979, but they kept the
    dominant secular-nationalist-socialist Arab goverments under contant pressure.
    Saudi Arabia found himself in a uncomfortable position. Based on their wealth, the custodianship of Mecca and Medina, and their Wahhabite (“Calvinist Islam”) religious “purity”, they wanted to become the leaders of the Muslim world.

    Their intentions were endangered from two directions. First, secular-socialist Arab goverments didn’t like the wealthy Monarchists at all. Second, the aforementioned Islamofascism had strong socalist notions as well – giving alms (zakat) is one of the five “pillars” of Islam and it’s easy to turn into a kind of religious socialism, just as it happened in Iran.

    The Saudi strategy was twofold. First, establish themselves as the religious leaders of Islam by
    financing the building of mosques all over the world, distributing tens of millions of Korans etc. Then use this perceived piety as an explanation of their wealth: it’s Allah’s blessing. By turning the Islam world towards a conservatively religious direction, they could both pit the religious masses to balance the socialist-nationalist leaders (Nasser, for example), and they could deprive the Islamofascists as well of their religious arguments against the Saudi system. The other way was to put down the most radical Islamofascists or to direct and channel their attention to other directions.

    One of these “channellings” was the Jyhad against the Sovient invasion of Afghanistan, which was the first time the US goverment unanimously supported Saudi politics. Then when the afghani veterans proved to be an untameable bunch, the Saudis turned against them – it’s also been completely supported by the US goverment. Remember Sheik Abdel Rahman? The third, most spectacular event was the Gulf War – the Desert Storm started out as a Desert Shield – in the beginning, the US goverment was a lot more interested in protecting the Saudis than liberating Kuwait. The fourth event was when Osama bin Laden, exiled from Sudan to Afghanistan, proclaimed that the Saudi goverment turned “kaffir” by letting American forces into their land, not too far away from Mecca and Medina, and thus lost their religious right to be the custodians of the holy places. Osama suddenly became a pain in the ass for the Saudis, and therefore after 9/11, the Anglo-American war against the Taliban and Al-Queda was quite supported by the Saudis as well.

    In short, in the last 25 years, a groving alliance is observable between the Saudis and the US –
    even though the principles these countries are founded upon couldn’t be further away from each other.

    Therefore, the question is the following: what if the Saudi king figured that if somebody would put Saddam down, they could buy up the oil infrastructure for an old song? What if the secretly informed the US goverment that their intelligence services managed to infiltrate the organization of the ex-Saudi Osama and found strong links with Saddam? What if the oft-mentioned intelligence reports were faked by the Saudis?

    This is a very important question to ask, because currently, the current moral status of the war on terrorism looks a bit like as if the war against Hitler, attacking Mussolini would have commenced because he has strong ties with Hitler, and this all would have commence while being in a strong alliance with Franco. And if it turned out that the reports on these ties were have been in fact forged by Franco – well, that would make the moral position quite to maintain. See my point?

  1078. Pete, wasn’t it your second run of the test, the text already cached by your browser? :-)

  1079. Shenpen:

    This is a very important question to ask, because currently, the current moral status of the war on terrorism looks a bit like as if the war against Hitler, attacking Mussolini would have commenced because he has strong ties with Hitler, and this all would have commence while being in a strong alliance with Franco. And if it turned out that the reports on these ties were have been in fact forged by Franco – well, that would make the moral position quite to maintain. See my point?

    Who is the ‘Hitler’ in the war on terror? I don’t get it…

  1080. Hitler supposed to be Osama – OK, this was a clumsy metaphor.

    It seems the speed tests mentioned above are reliable. Wow! I’m surprised.

  1081. Apparently 51% of Americans want to see George W. Bush impeached.

    Looks like the great neocon hornswaggle is showing signs of tremendous strain. Even Shenpen is shaking off that conservative wine.

    The Democrats look poised for a rout in Congress. If they win the House and Senate, Shrub may be called to account for his crimes. (And I don’t think they’d let Cheney take over either.) One can only hope…

  1082. Jeff, I’m sure you and your ilk are throbbing hard for a good ol’ impeachment…sadly (for you all) it’ll all turn out to be a limp dribble.

    Keep the kleenex handy though…premature excitement is sure to abound ;-)

  1083. Jeff,

    I don’t think I’m shaking off anything, because I never thought I’ve been much influenced by it in the first time. Yes, there are similarities in my way of thinking and in that of some of the US Neocons, but that does not mean direct influence. I’m not sure whether I’m a US-style Conservative, a Tory-style Conservative, a Libertarian, a Centrist, and Old Leftie (trade unionist), a Traditionalist in the Evola-ian sense, or whatever else. All I know is that I’m kind of Anti-Modern-Left. And on the topic, there is a noticable change in recent times to rethink a thing or two about Iraq everywhere. Alberto Fernandez’s Al-Jazeera interview showed that rethinking is also started within Bush’s circles. I think intelligent people never said that this war is is the best possible thing that could have been done and it is managened the best possible way. Look at ESR’s Anti-Idiotarian Manifesto, it does not hide it’s reservations. This war is just a minor episode in the real struggle, and becoming less enthusiastic about it – which is I think started to commence in Neocon-friendly circles as well – does not say much about the the real struggle as a whole.

  1084. Jeff,

    Apparently 51% of Americans want to see George W. Bush impeached.

    Looks like the great neocon hornswaggle is showing signs of tremendous strain. Even Shenpen is shaking off that conservative wine.

    The Democrats look poised for a rout in Congress. If they win the House and Senate, Shrub may be called to account for his crimes. (And I don’t think they’d let Cheney take over either.) One can only hope…

    Where amongst that advertizing propaganda is impeachment mentioned?
    i do not see it…

    Is impeachment the post election plan for the democratic ‘Worms’?
    What will they say to the press when that question slither’s out?
    Have the worms got to your eyeballs or the brain stem?
    I know how to remove the worms if you desire!!

  1085. “…What are they actually going to charge Bush with?…”
    Chimpy McHitler is gonna get it good for all his bad pronunciation…NYOO – KLEE – ER

    Oh yeah…and all that lyin’ and kids dyin’ stuff…and colluding with the oil cartels…and for putting twat-pills in the democrat kool-aid…and being ugly…

    Like…y’know…whatever…

    Pelosi’s reign will be lotsa fun ;-)

  1086. >Chimpy McHitler is gonna get it good for all his bad pronunciation

    This sort of thing is why Karl Rove is smiling, this close to the election. True, the Republicans have screwed up a WHOLE lot, and kind of deserve to lose. But Rove and Bush are certain that, in the remaining days before the election, the Democrats will do something to step on their collective dick in a big way.

    Bush and Rove’s confidence is rooted in experience. They have been through many elections together and the Democrats have never let them down yet.

    They may be wrong this time. But I wouldn’t bet any serious money on it.

  1087. Dan Kane:

    Right, this really is about pronunciation and looking like a chimp. All that stuff about torture, illegal wiretapping, lying about the Iraq war, “the Constitution is just a goddamned piece of paper” and so forth, are mere side issues.

  1088. Jeff,
    Do you believe that the Dems will step on their dicks, within the next two weeks? Something akin to Howard Dean’s “Yeaaaaargh” or some similar meltdown?

    Or, given the nature of modern Progressive Liberalism, do you think they can manage to go for 2 weeks without saying or doing something completely crazy? Something that will snatch their defeat from the jaws of victory?

  1089. I’m Republican and cautiously optimistic about how the elections will turn out. Quite simply, the last two election cycles have shown that pollsters can’t figure out who’s a likely voter. Since conservatives are more likely to vote than “progressives,” I’ve been expecting a small increase on the conservative side, which will be enough to turn a lot of “competitive”races into “almost competetive.”

    ***

    Yes, Dean’s right that the Democrats how some amazing ability to do stupid thngs just before elections. Then again, the Republicans come in a close second on that as well. Either way, we’ve got that “conservatives are much more likely to vote, *especially* in off year elections” demographic.

    Sure, we also have the “six years into a presidency is historically bad for the ruling party” trend, but that trend is tied to the ruling party being Democrat (as it was from the Depression until recently), and thus the upset voters being conservative voters, and also actual voters instead of voting-aged college students.

  1090. Max,
    >I’m Republican and cautiously optimistic about how the elections will turn out.

    Me, too. From a certain perspective.

    On the other hand, I find it very troubling that the Republicans can’t put up more serious politicians. What with the spending and the earmarks and Harriet Miers and prescription drug benefits and campaign finance reform, it’s like they are DARING us to vote them out.

    Their only argument for why they should be allowed to keep their jobs is: “The Democrats would be worse!”

    And that may be true, but for how long, and how hard do they intend to keep milking it? If the Republicans win this election (and I do intend to vote for them), we have to clean fucking house.

    But how can we, given that the Dem politicians are so often insane? What do we threaten the Republican politicians with? Are we gonna vote for Speaker Pelosi?

    The Repub pols need to be beaten with a stick, and we don’t have a stick. This really sucks.

  1091. This does not mean that I am sitting this election out. I intend to go for early voting tomorrow, and vote the straight Republican ticket.

    But I’ll be holding my nose while I do it.

  1092. Dean,

    I think the Dems are not incapable of learning from their mistakes, and so are perfectly capable of going the next 2 weeks or so without screwing the pooch, PR-wise. If they can swing that, they’re well on their way to winning the House and Senate.

    Dean’s little rave was embarrassing, for sure, but it didn’t cost the Democrats the election, and its effect was doubtless magnified by today’s post-Fairness-Doctrine, sound-bite-happy media.

  1093. Jeff,
    >I think the Dems are not incapable of learning from their mistakes

    To the degree that the Dems represent the Left as a whole, I must respectfully disagree with you on that point. Observe that the Democrats, to the degree that they have a direction at all (other than getting power), want the US to be more like Western Europe. Atheist, pacifist, bureaucratic, trans-national welfare states with lots of mandatory vacation days and no babies.

    And Western Europe is dying. How can you have a major party, in the world’s most powerful country, dedicated to implementing policies which have already been tried elsewhere, and not only failed, but are contributing to the fall of civilization?

    According to the wire services: “An average of 112 cars a day have been torched across France so far this year and there have been 15 attacks a day on police and emergency services. Nearly 3,000 police officers have been injured in clashes this year. Officers have been badly injured in four ambushes in the Paris outskirts since September.”

    The Democrats, and the center-Left in general, seem to believe that the natural progression for modern democratic countries is to become more and more like Sweden. America, therefore, is a backward imbecile because it is so slow in moving in that direction.

    When reasonable people are driving down the road and they see a wreck up ahead, they naturally slow down, perhaps even stop. But not the Left.

    Either, as I have said, the Left hates America and wants to destroy it, or they are in fact utterly incapable of learning from their mistakes.

  1094. “…All that stuff about torture, illegal wiretapping, lying about the Iraq war, “the Constitution is just a goddamned piece of paper” and so forth, are mere side issues…”

    *non issues*…as in, they exist in your fantasy world only.

  1095. The one thing voters do have in common is that they love putting rich people in their place. Here in California, there is a ballot measure to tax oil companies to fuel alternative energy. Vinod Khosla is one of the major sponsors.

    On the other hand, there is another measure that will ban eminent domain transfers to private enterprises. Bureaucrats up and down the state are (insert your favorite bodily function) themselves over it. They still have no idea how to build interesting cities. (By the way, I’m reading Jane Jacobs’s “The Death and Life of Great American Cities.” Great read!)

  1096. Dean, I’m not happy that I’ll be voting Republicn either. I had the best campaign strategy: leave the federal portion blank and only vote for state/local elections. Turns out North Carolina’s Senators aren’t up for grabs this year (no matter how much I’d like Senator Dole to face a recall election), and I live in a Democratic district. So the “federal portion” of my ticket will have a single name; and I really like the Republican running.

    On top of that, there aren’t any state elections to speak of! We’ve got local elections — school board, dog catcher, things like that. Which is precisely why I’m expecting the mad liberals to forget to vote. Only the people who actually have shown a willingness to walk five miles in the snow to vote (like my very conservative grandparents) will actually go fill out a ballot that small. Progressive college students will spend the whole day complaining, talking about how great it will be to vote the bums out, and still not get around to voting.

    How can you have a major party, in the world’s most powerful country, dedicated to implementing policies which have already been tried elsewhere, and not only failed, but are contributing to the fall of civilization? …

    The Democrats, and the center-Left in general, seem to believe that the natural progression for modern democratic countries is to become more and more like Sweden.

    The best part is that their vision of Sweden is missing a few inconvenient details:

    Wouldn’t it be interesting if we were urged to adopt some other Swedish policies? Abolish inheritance tax (Sweden doesn’t have one), have a pure voucher scheme to pay for the education system (as Sweden does), do not have a national minimum wage (as Sweden does not) and most certainly do not run the health system as a national monolith (as Sweden again does not).

  1097. Max Lybbert,

    I, for one, welcome our new Viking overlords. :)

    Sweden tends to place at or near the top when it comes to things like scientific or mathematical literacy, or freedom of the press. The United States is invariably near the bottom for the developed world — and has sunk lower since Shrub got into office. A U.S. that was more like Sweden in these regards would be a great change.

    (There was another recent freedom-of-the-press survey… The U.S. came in tied for fifty-third.)

  1098. My biggest problem with these statistics is that I do not like treating a country as large as the U.S. as a single unit. The sheer number of universities, scientists, and research projects that go on here indicate that some level of academic knowledge exists. Also, the survey the freedom of the press survey that Jeff Read mentioned rated the different countries based on how safe from violence/opression/etc. a journalist is. The U.S. slipped because of the detainments of Bilal Hussein and Sami Al-Haj. It goes on to issue a vague summary.

    Relations between the media and the Bush administration sharply deteriorated after the president used the pretext of “national security” to regard as suspicious any journalist who questioned his “war on terrorism.” The zeal of federal courts which, unlike those in 33 US states, refuse to recognise the media’s right not to reveal its sources, even threatens journalists whose investigations have no connection at all with terrorism.

  1099. I enjoy reading about the various surveys, but I take them all with a few grains (or, rather, several grams) of salt. For instance, European education systems generally don’t let the deadwood advance after certain grade levels. So when you compare American high school seniors with European students of the same age, you need to realize that the bottom third of the American students wouldn’t be in school in Europe at all. The US looks a lot better when we compare the top US students with the top European students.

    Although “scientific and mathematical literacy” may refer to a survey of adults. If so, yes, the average adult US citizen has a lot to learn in the science and math departments. For instance, the average adult American believes stem cell research is a sure-fire answer to all genetic diseases, when in reality the *reason* scientists want to do the research is to *find* *out* if that’s the case. Ten years ago scientists wanted to find out if infant tissue transplants would cure these same diseases. They did the research and determined the answer was “no.” Now they want to research stem cells. Many adults seem to think that because the scientists want to do the research, then the research must have answers to all the mysteries of life. That’s not so. It may, and it may not.

    But back to surveys. The freedom of the press survey I saw yesterday was hillarious. The US was given demerits for jailing Judith Miller over Plamegate. Great Britain was considered to have a friendlier legal climate for journalists, even though (1) it has notoriously bad libel laws commonyl used against journalists (but, recent developments may improve that), and (2) Judith Miller was the first reporter in a long time to be jailed, and wouldn’t have been jailed under most state laws (besides, she was jailed on a contempt of court charge, not a “pissing off the President” charge).

    That survey looks a lot like a “gut feeling” of which country is better, and I’m not likely to take it as seriously as, say, comparing the US’s sorry infant mortality rate to other nations.

  1100. Thanks Phil. I forgot that line, which is what first tipped me off to the fact that the freedom of the press survey was a fluff piece.

    Here we go:

    Relations between the media and the Bush administration sharply deteriorated after the president used the pretext of “national security” to regard as suspicious any journalist who questioned his “war on terrorism.”

    So the president/prime minister of a country must be on good terms with the media for that country to have a free press? That’s an odd rule.

    The zeal of federal courts which, unlike those in 33 US states, refuse to recognise the media’s right not to reveal its sources …

    Oh, yeah, the Judith Miller canard. Strangely, the lack of this federal right to press secrecy didn’t stop the media from publishing the SWIFT banking story, the NSA wiretaps story, or several other stories that did have to do with state secrets and terrorism. Name one journalist who was jailed over those stories.

    Sure, CNN is facing consumer boycotts for airing the video of a sniper shooting a US soldier. But that’s not the government getting involved; that’s simply a case of a business losing touch with its customers. Really losing touch.

  1101. Jeff,
    >A U.S. that was more like Sweden in these regards would be a great change.

    According to Worldpress.org, Sweden has a total fertility rate of 1.53 children per woman, compared to 2.06 for the United States. The GDP per capita (PPP) is $22,000 in Sweden, compared to $36,200 for the US.

    So, Swedes are poorer than we, and in the near future there will be dramatically fewer of them. And we should become more like Sweden!

    And you wonder why I refer to you Lefties as a death cult.

    To be fair, you said in “things like scientific or mathematical literacy, or freedom of the press.” But what Sweden is really famous for is cradle-to-grave welfare and outrageous taxation to pay for it. Sweden is synonymous in the public mind with taking the politics of envy to its democratic extreme.

    Such policies are supposed to produce a secular utopia where we all love one another. What they in fact produce is an enervated, feckless menagerie of nihilists who couldn’t care less about the future, so long as they continue to get their Check, until the day they die.

    And after that, who cares?

    This is the typical effect of the policies the Left continues to support. Hence, ‘death cult.’

  1102. One of the saddest truths of the new century is that soon there will be fewer Swedish bikini babes, and the ones that remain will be wearing burkas.

  1103. I’ve wondered why Islam is so memetically insidious. “Believe this or we’ll kill you,” however, is a persuasive argument. The pre-Renaissance West used it extensively.

  1104. I’ve just installed Firefox 2. It has a spell checker for Web forms that will catch your miss takes. ;-)

  1105. David, you could have installed AspellFox for that. It is great to see it in the default package, though. Now, if only they would integrate Adblock, Flashblock, Tab Mix Plus, etc. into the main package . . .

  1106. “…the media’s right not to reveal its sources…”
    Bollocks. Bollocks. Bollocks.

    ‘The media’ have no greater ‘right’ to keep sources confidential than any one of us. If they choose to STFU about where they obtained info, that is a choice we can all make.

    They have *no* ‘right’ to defy a lawful subpoena and stand in contempt of court. That’s what the stupid hag went to jail for.

    Gee…I guess “freedom of the press” *doesn’t* mean that they are a super-constitutional privileged uber-class after all ;-)

  1107. I’m sorry. The line:

    The zeal of federal courts which, unlike those in 33 US states, refuse to recognise the media’s right not to reveal its sources …

    Was supposed to be set off by blockquotes. I don’t believe the press has or needs a right to not reveal its sources. Likewise, I don’t believe the press has or needs a right to ignore laws it finds inconvenient. And, because my beliefs are so different from the guys doing that survey, I’m not persuaded by the survey.

  1108. Ah…gotcha Max :-)

    Quite so…indeed, if one starts thinking about the implications of such a ‘right’, it seems obvious that (a) such a right cannot meaningfully exist, beyond the basic human right to ‘silence’, (b) *artificially imposing* such a ‘right’ would critically undermine our legal system, and (c) ascribing such an artificial ‘right’ to the media (or any subset of the population) would fundamentally violate our founding principles of equality.

    Of course, here I’m using the term ‘right’ to mean “an aspect of sovreignty which may not be arbitrarily preempted by another” rather than its contemporary interpretation (ie. synonymous with “entitlement”).

  1109. Dean,

    “Their only argument for why they should be allowed to keep their jobs is: “The Democrats would be worse!””

    Such a familiar argument. Hungary is exactly the same. Britain, seems to be, too. I wonder why people who know all the stuff about economic competition and the inefficiencies of oligopolies and especially duopolies, put up with a duopolic party system. Isn’t that obvious that’s also ineffective, simply because there is no real competition (the opposition retains considerable political influence and careers are not broken)? And it is so easy to solve: create a system where people only vote on party lists and never on persons, so instead of voting on who should be the Congressman/Senator/Member of Parliament/whatever of their district/city/county/state, just vote on the parties and add up the numbers on national level, determining the percentage of seats this way. This amost automatically ensures a 5-6 party system, where there is real competition: voters can go to a similar party, young talents can go to a similar party if they feel they don’t get enough space and so on.

  1110. Dean.

    don’t be too fancy of the 2.06 fertility rate of the US, chance is that most of it comes from those ghettoes where the only thing people reproduce is poverty and uneducatedness. This would only be methodologically fair if you would determine a yearly income level when one is likely to be able to educate his children properly so that they have a future, and compare the fertility rates of that level and also check how much percentage of the folks falls into this category. Also, if we both agree that a healthy economy is where the middle class is very wide and has most of the wealth of the nation, then you should not only see the average of the wealth – per capita GDP – but also the standard deviation. This is not about left or right politics – it’s about comparing only really meaningful statistics.

  1111. Folks,

    I’d have a question. The really interesting thing for me about the interview of this Norquist guy was that he consideres his radical anti-taxation policy an America-only one, as he believes there all profits were made by ethical means. Even for Western Europe, where is believes some wealths, back in historical past, were made by immoral means, he thinks his policy wouldn’t be completely ethical. Then what can we think of the resot of the world? This made me think. If even one of the most “ultra” Neocons firmly believes that it’s an indispensable condition for Neocon/Libertarian economic policies to be ethically defensible that profits and property must have been made by 100% ethical and legal means, then it arises interesting questions for the rest of the world. I’m mostly interested in Post-Commie Eastern Europe, but the question is also valid for Iraq, Afghanistan, Tunisia, Egypt, countries, that either on their own or by outside, well, “influence”, started a policy of “westernization”. And the most important question is Russia, as their economic stability is an important factor in the political-military stability of the world. As it is a fact that in these countries the ruling elites made their wealth/position by completely unethical means, meaning corruption, bribery, maffiosing, and warlording, what should they do? If we rule out Neocon/Libertarian policies based on what I wrote before, and we rule out welfare state policies both because they don’t really work AND a strong state in a country where the morals are low and corruption is widespread would be disastrous, what else should they try?

    Sorry for using so much bold fonts. The reason I used them is that while on this forum I usually consider most talk only as an interesting philosophical hobby of the evening, this one is a question I’m strongly emotionally attached to – I’d really like to find some working economic concept for my 10M fellow Hungarians. And also to Russians, Egyptians, Iraqis etc. although that part is not so emotional of me, of course.

    What I suggested to my mates is a kind of anarchistic capitalism – strip the state of all it’s wealth, steal it or whatever, and of it’s income, refuse to pay taxes or whatever, and therefore force the immoral elite to start investing, to start producing, because this way they cannot make profits anymore just by sucking more money out of the state as they usually do. However, such policies don’t really look feasible in the real world. Never ever got anarchocapitalists much votes nowhere. This is why I’m looking for a working advice, one that at least has a small chance of getting votes.

  1112. Well Eric – Before the rest of this – I’d like to thank you for the wonderful article on python you wrote years ago. Changed my life as a coder

    Now, please stick to talking about code.

    > Still…having even bush-league terrorists fear harming Americans is a good start, and as neat a vindication of George Bush’s foreign policy and the war in Iraq as anyone could ask for.

    Bonus point – can u name the fallacy inherent in this statement? Hint: look at the premise of the blog article.

    Even should I grant your interpretation of the events, one instance does not a class make – shame on you.

    I can understand your confusion regarding islam (disclaimer – I am not a muslim, nor a christian) But, you seem to start from a premise of islam’s basic barbarism. And this is not a hard thing to “prove” by taking selected portions of the Koran and accompanying it with modern statements by nutcases who practice the religion.

    I would simply request you read, or re-read the bible with the same critical eye. The bible also has a remarkably large number of barbaric statements, rules, etc for society – and God himself commanded the Levi’s to slaughter their brother’s and swore to reward those members of the Levi tribe that had killed their own brothers. It also spent more than a few verses explaining which ways you could sexually abuse hebrew vs. non-hebrew slaves. Main stream christianity may have passed “the hump” on it’s way to modernization – primarliy by ignoring it’s own barbaric verses and scriptures. Muslims are a little bit behind that path. Still it is much more constructive to recognize this, and to encourage those muslims seeking modernization and to ostracize those who would use religion as a shield for their own evil and self-interest. Your inept focusing on the religion, rather than those who subvert the religion to their own evil ends, only makes it harder for those seeking social maturity.

    The war in Iraq will never accomplish the only thing that will actually cause change. That is for people to look internally and recognize their own complicity in evil and barbarism. Instead, we have provided an easy out from self-introspection – It is the american invaders fault, all their fault.

    Why does this seem relevant? Cuz as much as I despise Bush and his policies – if some force came to the US to liberate me from the illegal, evil, barbaric practices of my government – I’d fight tooth and nail to kick them out.

    Co-opting is almost always more effective in the long run than coercing.

    Think about it. And please, stay out of politics.

  1113. By the way, Dean, to get back to what you said about false consciousness. Just because you refuse to believe in implicit bias don’t mean it ain’t there. There’s a whole lot of enculturation going on that ensures that Americans are steeped in some very pernicious memes that are designed to hide themselves from all but the most careful observation.

    One may think of postmodernism and multiculturalism as a ham-fisted, failed attempt to counteract these dangerous memes — but they are in and of themselves not nearly so dangerous as the biases that lurk in the very heart of American psychology.

  1114. Jeff,
    >dangerous as the biases that lurk in the very heart of American psychology.

    Would you agree, that it is a historical fact, that no nation ever succeeded like America?

    Because if you will agree on the historicity of that fact, then one has to ask:
    “How did such a fucked up country manage to do so well in the world?”

    Is the world set up in such a way as to intrinsically reward evil?

  1115. “…There’s a whole lot of enculturation going on…”
    Tell me about it Jeff…seriously….as an immigrant I really want to know what my (future) children will be exposed to.

    Make sure you explain how these memes are a pernicious subterfuge, far worse than the eloquently articulated (Dean) cancer of contemporary socialistic, postmodern, multi-culti liberalism…or I’ll be forced to consign you to the “Deaniac” trashbin ;-)

  1116. BTW…if that arse-bandit ESR doesn’t start posting soon, I’m gonna hunt him down, hogtie him, and sing endless renditions of Barry Manilow’s “Bermuda Triangle” to him until his sanity breaks.

    I may even use a zither…perhaps a kazoo…

  1117. Shenpen,
    >what else should they try?

    I don’t think that there is a ‘one size fits all’ answer. Different peoples, each with their own peculiar histories and temperaments, require different approaches. But, as you allude to, the essential problem is moral.

    The trick is to find a way to improve the morals of the common people. If the people are good, but their leaders are bad, then it is a relatively trivial task to replace the bad leaders with better ones.

    But if the people are bad, they cannot be replaced. They must, therefore, be improved. Yet the state cannot be entrusted to do this. You need some extra-political institution which can inspire the common people to embrace wisdom, justice, temperance, fortitude, faith, hope and charity.

    Since a purely materialistic world view can provide no comprehensive argument for these virtues, given that in a purely material world, the good and the evil share the same ultimate fate, the answer seems to be religion. As an atheist, I find this troubling. But facts must be faced, no matter how distressing.

    If your question is, in the immediate moment, what policies should the government pursue, in order to improve the people, here are my answers.

    1. Seek TRANSPARENCY as the overriding peacetime goal of all government activity. Don’t try to solve poverty, corruption, inequality of wealth, or any other social problem. Just focus on letting people know what is really going on. People have more common sense than intellectuals give them credit for. If people have the facts, then even in the most debased societies, they will do right more often than not.

    2. Make it VERY hard to get any kind of government subsidy at all. If great enterprises are not profitable, let them fail. If little children are begging in the street, encourage private charities to feed and house them, but don’t put them on welfare if you can possibly get out of it. Telling people that they don’t have to be responsible for themselves and each other, because the state will take care of their children, and their aging parents, and their retirement, and their health care, is profoundly morally debilitating. Politicians may have to hand out some bread and circuses in order to stay in power. This is simply a part of the human condition. But try HARD to keep that shit to a minimum.

    3. Structure the laws and regulations so as to make it as easy as possible to start your own business, legally. If the state must issue permits, make them easy to get. Reduce fees and taxes paid to START a business to the minimum. If you find that local bureaucrats, magistrates or cops are shaking down shopkeepers, nail those crooks to the wall by their thumbs. Entrepreneurs are the life-blood of a capitalist economy. Encourage them.

    4. Localize government as much as possible. Set education policy at the local level. Encourage the formation of volunteer fire departments, hospital committees, school boards, neighborhood associations, etc. People make better political decisions when they can immediately see local consequences of their actions. Plus, participating in local politics opens doors to higher office for decent, talented ordinary folks, who otherwise would leave decisions to the political elite.

    5. Try to make it as easy as possible for people to own their own homes. Homeowners have a stake in the future of the nation, because they own a piece of it, that you can’t replicate in apartment dwellers. Homeowners feel RESPONSIBLE for the future of their communities, in ways that tenement dwellers never will.

    That’s my advice, for what it’s worth. A big part of the reason that America has done so well in the world, is that the Founders followed policies such as I have described, and America reaps the benefits to this day.

  1118. 5 exceedingly good observations Dean. If only we can drag America back toward respecting them ;-)

  1119. Dean,

    Would you agree, that it is a historical fact, that no nation ever succeeded like America?

    Depends how you define success. If you mean economic success, then yes.

    Would you agree that there’s real bank to be made if one segment of the population can be exploited and dominated freely with no social repercussions?

  1120. Jeff,
    >one segment of the population can be exploited and dominated freely with no social repercussions?

    Race is your ultimate rhetorical weapon. It is the big club you can hit me with, just as the appalling murderousness of Communist regimes is the big club I can hit you with.

    But that does not mean that our situations are entirely equivalent. If I may pose myself as a right-wing archetype for a moment, and counter-pose you as a left-wing one:

    1. Social justice issues aside, I know how to build institutions that work, and you don’t. When people like me run a country, it prospers; when people like you run it, it stagnates, at best.

    I am keenly aware of my imperfections, moral and otherwise, and that awareness allows me insight into the darkness at the center of the human soul. You have a deep need to feel morally and intellectually superior to your fellow man, and this distorts your vision. For all your vaunted intellect, you are utterly lacking in wisdom.

    Since I can create workable institutions, and you can only criticize and consume them, you cannot exist without me. Beyond that,

    2. It appears you can’t even exist WITH me. Stereotypically, women who think like me have 3 kids (or more). Women who think like you have one kid and two abortions (or more). Hence, in the very near future, there will be dramatically fewer women who think like you. Like the Western Europeans you admire, you realistically have no future.

    I am a secular materialist who cannot find any way to create the community of just and compassionate people I admire, without a just and compassionate God for them to worship, and emulate. This creates profound philosophical problems for me, which will no doubt vex me and my nepots to no end.

    But you, my friend, don’t have any fucking nepots. Your end is coming up real soon, and no matter how many times you call me a racist, that will not change.

    All things considered, I’d rather have my problems than yours.

  1121. Why is race such a good club to beat me with?

    Because, as an American, I am torn between two lovers, and feelin’ like a fool. I love truth, as in the facts of reality. You cannot have a famously American practical, can-do attitude, without a love for facts.

    But I also love the creed which holds my nation of many ethnicities together: ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.’

    And, in some circumstances, by some measuring sticks, that creed, when applied to race, appears to be counter-factual. And nobody knows what to do about it.

    America is torn between what John Derbyshire calls the doctrine of zero group differences (as applied to race), and reality. The average American white IQ is 100. The average American Jewish IQ is 115. The average Asian-American IQ is 105. The average American black IQ is 85. The average IQ among central Africans is 70. In reality, we got group differences coming out the wazoo.

    If you are white, and you want to avoid being condemned as a racist, you must publicly subscribe to the doctrine of zero group differences. But if you want to survive, you must face reality. It’s a problem.

    The next time you are in a fist-fight, try to avoid hitting the other man in the head with your fist. The top of the head is the hardest part of the human body and, if you hit him wrong, the bones in your hand will break before his head will.

    The trick in a fist-fight is to hit him where he is soft: in the throat, solar plexus, and groin. You gotta hit him where it hurts, if you want him to go down and stay down.

    Serious anti-Americans have learned that race is where America is soft. If you hit us there, it hurts real bad. If we ever go down and stay down, race will be the reason why.

    Hence its effectiveness as a club.

  1122. Dean,

    Damned straight it hurts bad!!!

    http://www.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,3604,1059990,00.html

    And I know why it hurts. It hurts because the social construct of race, and that one race is naturally entitled to more rights, freedoms, and basic consideration as human beings than another, is embedded into the very fabric of this republic you identify so strongly with. Before your social automaton kicks in to dampen the visceral pain reaction, consider carefully the locus and source of the pain. On the one hand you have this enculturated notion of America as a city on a hill, a bastion of equal rights and equal freedom for all; and on the other you have some yo-yo keep pressing the race question, which carries with it a lot of annoying but irrefutable baggage about the country you love so much. It kind of causes an impedance mismatch in your brain. At which point, said social automaton sees its cue, and makes ready with all the post-hoc rationalization about how the yo-yo is a LeftyDeathCultist and how “people like him” are responsible for the gulags and the purges and etc. etc.

    I know why it hurts because I was like you once, Dean. I was one of them patriotic conservative naifs. And I used to play the whole conservative guard-your-grill game too which, by the way, was carried out on a massive scale in the sixties. As you say, anti-Americans hit where it hurts, and the segregation/jim crow issue was giving plenty of fodder to the commies. (W.E.B. Dubois was a passionate Stalin supporter.) What transpired after that was what I think of as “civil rights theater” (pace Bruce Schneier), because if you look at one of the big things that America is #1 at — percentage of population incarcerated — and look at the group representation of who’s filling those prisons, you cannot help but come to the inescapable conclusion that jim crow is alive and well. It has been only sublimated in the great guard-your-grill, hide your vulnerability but don’t address it shell game. Because the only alternative is what Cosby and Uncle Thomas suggest: there’s just something wrong with blackfolks. The most significant cultural contributors to American society, bar none — the most influential shapers of our language, music, and sense of fun, and the very inventors of the concept of “cool”, well, they’re just screwed up. To quote Bill O’Lielly, “I don’t buy it.”

    And by the way, not that it matters much but I’m so white that I can’t even retain a decent suntan, so I can’t even speak from personal experience on the race thing. What I know of it comes from knowledgeable blackfolks whose observations of racism are direct and emotional, and who did the research and set the proper psychological, sociological, biological, and genetic context for the aberrant, uniquely American phenomenon we call “race”, which, as it turns out, was a distinctly capitalistic endeavor, implemented with specific profit goals in mind. People like you and like me are blinded to the realities of race, and racism, simply because our skin color automatically, and without our conscious will, confers social benefits upon us. And we would rather remain blinded because the alternative, to confront the truth that we are part of a racialist society which accords more humanity to us than to our more darkly-complected brethren, plays havoc with the structured, interlocking mindset we’ve come to adapt so well to, as a result of being enculturated in said society.

    Race is one of the biggest cultural blindspots we have, but I suggest that it’s just one of a few, perhaps many. If something as antithetical to the notion of “all men are created equal” as race, and racism, can be implanted into American consciousness and survive for three centuries, all so some colonial tobacco growers could make a few extra pounds… who’s to say what else may be lurking in our psychology, and who profits from it? That Big Tobacco is still bankrolling the embedding of comforting lies is either an ironic coincidence or proof that nothing really has changed. And that we have made a phenomenal mess of things in Iraq, still haven’t captured Osama, and are still beating the stay-the-course war-on-terra drum makes me as a rational person think something is amiss and there are hidden gotchas in the neocon psyche, things we’re not supposed to be focusing our attention on, which brings me to another thing.

    One thing that bothers me is how Straussian you sound, Dean. You keep mentioning that you are an atheist but as a hypothetical culture builder you’d get people to believe in something like the Protestant God. Leo Strauss believed that too much truth could tear a people apart, and that it was worthwhile for political leaders to tell the people “noble lies” to keep them functioning as a cohesive unit. Contrast that with what you call the American left, whose political arm is supported by George Soros, fan of Popper and supporter of relentless, dogged pursuit of truth.

    If you are a Christian you believe that the truth will set you free, and that all that is hidden will be revealed. Even if you are an atheist, a society based on “noble lies” carries with it a certain reprehensibility, like a misleading piece of closed-source software. And eventually some dogged pursuer of truth, like a paradigmatic DVD-Jon, is going to dig up those lies and expose them and refute them. Unless you want to silence them of course and then we get into police-state-hood.

    So you can see how the neocon mindset, with its careful preservation of lies and its engaging in misdirection to hide the same, is not sustainable. It will eventually collapse. My concern is how many bullets, bombs, and Diebold voting machines will be used to delay that collapse, and how much loss of life, limb, and dignity members of unpopular “other-groups” will suffer along the way.

  1123. Jeff,
    >the neocon mindset…will eventually collapse.

    Does it bother you that neither you nor anyone like you will be around to see that collapse?

    My mindset may be unsustainable, but your blue-state population is unsustainable. I met a conservative Lutheran woman yesterday, wife of a preacher, who has eight kids. Do you know any Progressive women who would do such a thing?

    For the record, I am not a proponent of ‘noble lies.’ I believe that the manly thing to do is to face the paradox squarely, and try to find its weak spot. Every enemy has one. There MUST be a way around, under, over or through the logic of materialism. We just have to find it. And NEVER GIVE UP until we do.

    But Jeff, in any event, people on your side of the cultural divide have already given up on everything except feeling better about yourselves in the immediate moment.

    I congratulate you on your compassionate concern for the stability of my set of mind. But perhaps you should direct some of that concern toward yourself. You have a few difficulties of your own, you know.

  1124. “…you cannot help but come to the inescapable conclusion that jim crow is alive and well…”
    Odd…I came to the conclusion that black ‘urban street culture’ is dogshit, and that it is an ugly disgraceful stain on black society/culture as a whole.

    Am I racist?

  1125. “…That depends, Dan. Do you go around winning arguments with Liberals?…”

    LOL ;-) I don’t exactly have a travelling roadshow…but I think I must be doing well, as I am spattered with accusations of ‘latent racism’, ‘insanity’, ‘fascist’, ‘hater’ blah blah blah…usually followed by a fist thumping a tabletop and stomping out of the room in a tantrum.

    God I love it when that happens…

  1126. Going back to

    Would you agree that there’s real bank to be made if one segment of the population can be exploited and dominated freely with no social repercussions?

    I would point out that many regimes did exploit and dominate a segment of their population without social repurcussions, and their countries are still poor. The former Yugoslavia comes to mind, just as the Soviet Union, and Tibet, and Sudan, …

    My point is that exploitation does not necessarily lead to riches. In fact, in the modern world, riches usually come from creativity, not exploitation:

    the true source of wealth is not brute labor, or even what you might call brute capital, but the mind. The mind creates new technologies, new products, new business models, new productivity enhancements, in short, everything that creates wealth. Labor or capital without a mind behind it is useless.

    For the record, I am very thankful that the US has a British culture and not a French one.

    ***

    So, back to America, the success of the whole world, and better than anyone else, ready to win any pissing match out there (g): yes we have our flaws; yes we’re trying to fix them (and, given the amount of garbage that’s thrown around in the name of anti-racism, it looks like their really isn’t much to complain about anymore — why get into a huff about the word “mackacka” if people are still blatantly segregated?); and yes, we really do want to get along with anyone else who wants to get along, and ignore anyone who doesn’t.

  1127. Jeff,
    >I was like you once, Dean. I was one of them patriotic conservative naifs.

    I know I have already made this point, Jeff. But if you can repeat yourself, why can’t I?

    You would do better to see me as a villain, rather than a naïve dupe. If you pity me, then logic would lead you to, in the words of G. W. Bush, ‘misunderestimate’ me. And then I would hand you your ass in a debate.

    I am not saying that you are a stupid man, but you should never allow yourself to believe that you are my intellectual superior. And even if you were, that’s not the way to reach me.

    I have looked HARD into the abyss, and I have made my choice, just as you have made yours. I sincerely hope that you will change your mind, just as you are free to try and persuade me to change mine.

    But condescension would be unproductive toward that end, even were it merited. And it is not merited. I am the equal of any Leftist intellectual you’ve ever met, and a damn sight brighter than most.

    You see yourself as a seeker of truth. But I believe the truth you are chasing is an illusion, and that the pursuit of it will lead you down a rabbit hole, from whence no one ever emerges. And I hope you will think a second time.

    But if you are determined to lie still, forever, in the bed you have made, then you are better off regarding me with a bitter, undying hatred which might somehow spiritually survive you.

    For, whether or not I deserve your hatred, I laugh at your pity. And from what I understand of you, there is nothing you dread so much as the prospect of being laughed at.

  1128. Jeff,

    “…there’s just something wrong with blackfolks.(…) “I don’t buy it.”” (…) uniquely American phenomenon”

    Now I’m genuinely surprised. Unique American phenomenon? I thought you are fairly aware what’s going on in the world outside America. All the stuff about Blacks in America is EXACTLY the same with Arabs in Western Europe, Gypsies in Eastern Europe, bedouins in Arab countries, and I’m not sure, but I think, Koreans in Japan.

    Therefore, of course, the reason of the problem is not race, but culture. A mindset, a bunch of memes – and not of the majority, bu of themselves. I think it’s best described as nomadic culture. For a nomad, everything outside the tribe is just the environment, which is simply a category outside ethical norms – something that can be used and abused as one sees fit. Ethics is only defined and understood as towards fellow tribesmen. (Listen to some 2Pac, that guy was a rigorous moralist in his own way as long as it concerns the relations of the fellow members of the ‘hood gang, and a complete moral insane towards everything outside it. Just like the Nazis, who were the most obvious examples of modern nomadism – “our honour is our loyalty”. To the tribe.)

    Nomadism, of course, is a necessary step in historical development of civilization. They didn’t really screw up in the sense you mean the world, they simply have not yet reached the historical development when one learns to think outside the tribe, to use his ethical norms for the whole society. And it, of course, boosts crime. It is really so simple.

    And there is another problem with the nomadic mindset and that is overpopulation. Simply put, in nomadic lifestyle the more children you have, the stronger is the tribe. But in modern society, having more children one can afford to educate properly only reproduces and strenghtens poverty, and poverty produces a crime, and wow, you got your other half of the explanation of the prison population. And this is a common problem of all the people mentioned above.

    And this has nothing to do with race, only with cultural memes.

  1129. Dean,

    thanks for the advice. They look reasonable. Sadly, I don’t one can get people to vote for them, as a populist opponent can very easily exploit these ideas if he comments them as:

    1. Present uncomfortable truths discovered and published by the govm’t as being caused by them – “you ain’t no heard about such stuff when WE governed, do ya?”
    2. “They want you to starve ’cause they themselves already have everything and they don’t care about yout!”
    3. “They wanna put those shady scheming ne’er-do-wells before honest working folks!”
    4. “They want anarchy so they can fish easier in troubled waters!”
    5. Hm, for this one I cannot really come up with a populist slogan but I’m sure they could :)

    You know, the problem is, that whenever the elites are corrupted, people think in poor vs. rich meaning honest vs. criminal terms. And therefore it is very hard to make non-populist ideas accepted, actually, to make anything accepted that cannot be garnished with a good amount of emotional hate towards the upper classes.

  1130. Shenpen,

    Conflict between ethnic groups is nothing new. Nor is slavery. But the dividing up of people into groups based on skin color, and the kind of brutal subjugation blacks received as slaves, started in the Virginia Colony in 1676.

    Ideas about race may be extant in Europe, but they most likely spread from here.

    Your holding forth on nomadic culture is interesting, my friend, and reminds me very much of some reading I’d been doing, namely Thorstein Veblen. Are you familiar with his work?

  1131. Shenpen,
    >a populist opponent can very easily exploit these ideas

    Sadly, you are quite correct. The policies I described WILL tend, over time, to make the people better, morally speaking. But for the policies to be tolerated in the first place, the people must have already reached a minimum moral baseline.

    I can think of no means of elevating the people to that baseline but religion. The people have to worship a God who is just and wise, who loves good and hates evil, whose heart aches for the helpless and the weak, and who rewards His servants for ministering to these unfortunates. That way, if you are one of the losers in the free market free-for-all, you need not fear starvation.

    Only then can you take a chance, and trust that the economically successful will not leave you to die in a ditch, if they are left free to pursue wealth with reckless abandon.

    And a reasonable, morally decent God cannot stand up to the relentless inquisition of modern science. Hence the Richard Dawkins of the world are eating up the social capital that made them possible.
    http://cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi//Dawkins/viruses-of-the-mind.html

    It’s a problem.

  1132. A link worth clicking:
    http://www.brusselsjournal.com/node/1609

    The number of emigrants leaving the Netherlands and Germany has already surpassed the number of immigrants moving in.
    _______________________________

    But there is more to it than the fact that non-religious people tend not to have as many children as religious people, because many of them prefer to “enjoy” freedom rather than renounce it for the sake of children. Secularists, it seems to me, are also less keen on fighting. Since they do not believe in an afterlife, this life is the only thing they have to lose. Hence they will rather accept submission than fight. Like the German feminist Broder referred to, they prefer to be raped than to resist.

  1133. Speaking of “terrorism”…

    One thing that struck me as odd in the days after 9/11 was Bush saying “We will not tolerate conspiracy theories [regarding 9/11]”. Sure enough there have been some wacky conspiracy theories surrounding the events of that day. The most far-fetched and patently ridiculous one that I’ve ever heard goes like this: Nineteen hijackers who claimed to be devout Muslims but yet were so un-Muslim as to be getting drunk all the time, doing cocaine and frequenting strip clubs decided to hijack four airliners and fly them into buildings in the northeastern U.S., the area of the country that is the most thick with fighter bases. After leaving a Koran on a barstool at a strip bar after getting shitfaced drunk on the night before, then writing a suicide note/inspirational letter that sounded like it was written by someone with next to no knowledge of Islam, they went to bed and got up the next morning hung over and carried out their devious plan. Nevermind the fact that of the four “pilots” among them there was not a one that could handle a Cessna or a Piper Cub let alone fly a jumbo jet, and the one assigned the most difficult task of all, Hani Hanjour, was so laughably incompetent that he was the worst fake “pilot” of the bunch. Nevermind the fact that they received very rudimentary flight training at Pensacola Naval Air Station, making them more likely to have been C.I.A. assets than Islamic fundamentalist terrorists. So on to the airports. These “hijackers” somehow managed to board all four airliners with their tickets, yet not even ONE got his name on any of the flight manifests. So they hijack all four airliners and at this time passengers on United 93 start making a bunch of cell phone calls from 35,000 feet in the air to tell people what was going on. Nevermind the fact that cell phones wouldn’t work very well above 4,000 feet, and wouldn’t work at ALL above 8,000 feet. But the conspiracy theorists won’t let that fact get in the way of a good fantasy. That is one of the little things you “aren’t supposed to think about”. Nevermind that one of the callers called his mom and said his first and last name, more like he was reading from a list than calling his own mom. Anyway, when these airliners each deviated from their flight plan and didn’t respond to ground control, NORAD would any other time have followed standard operating procedure (and did NOT have to be told by F.A.A. that there were hijackings because they were watching the same events unfold on their own radar) which means fighter jets would be scrambled from the nearest base where they were available on standby within a few minutes, just like every other time when airliners stray off course. But of course on 9/11 this didn’t happen, not even close. Somehow these “hijackers” must have used magical powers to cause NORAD to stand down, as ridiculous as this sounds because total inaction from the most high-tech and professional Air Force in the world would be necessary to carry out their tasks. So on the most important day in its history the Air Force was totally worthless. Then they had to make one of the airliners look like a smaller plane, because unknown to them the Naudet brothers had a videocamera to capture the only known footage of the North Tower crash, and this footage shows something that is not at all like a jumbo jet, but didn’t have to bother with the South Tower jet disguising itself because that was the one we were “supposed to see”. Anyway, as for the Pentagon they had to have Hani Hanjour fly his airliner like it was a fighter plane, making a high G-force corkscrew turn that no real airliner can do, in making its descent to strike the Pentagon. But these “hijackers” wanted to make sure Rumsfeld survived so they went out of their way to hit the farthest point in the building from where Rumsfeld and the top brass are located. And this worked out rather well for the military personnel in the Pentagon, since the side that was hit was the part that was under renovation at the time with few military personnel present compared to construction workers. Still more fortuitous for the Pentagon, the side that was hit had just before 9/11 been structurally reinforced to prevent a large fire there from spreading elsewhere in the building. Awful nice of them to pick that part to hit, huh? Then the airliner vaporized itself into nothing but tiny unidentifiable pieces no bigger than a fist, unlike the crash of a real airliner when you will be able to see at least some identifiable parts, like crumpled wings, broken tail section etc. Why, Hani Hanjour the terrible pilot flew that airliner so good that even though he hit the Pentagon on the ground floor the engines didn’t even drag the ground!! Imagine that!! Though the airliner vaporized itself on impact it only made a tiny 16 foot hole in the building. Amazing. Meanwhile, though the planes hitting the Twin Towers caused fires small enough for the firefighters to be heard on their radios saying “We just need 2 hoses and we can knock this fire down” attesting to the small size of it, somehow they must have used magical powers from beyond the grave to make this morph into a raging inferno capable of making the steel on all forty-seven main support columns (not to mention the over 100 smaller support columns) soften and buckle, then all fail at once. Hmmm. Then still more magic was used to make the building totally defy physics as well as common sense in having the uppermost floors pass through the remainder of the building as quickly, meaning as effortlessly, as falling through air, a feat that without magic could only be done with explosives. Then exactly 30 minutes later the North Tower collapses in precisely the same freefall physics-defying manner. Incredible. Not to mention the fact that both collapsed at a uniform rate too, not slowing down, which also defies physics because as the uppermost floors crash into and through each successive floor beneath them they would shed more and more energy each time, thus slowing itself down. Common sense tells you this is not possible without either the hijackers’ magical powers or explosives. To emphasize their telekinetic prowess, later in the day they made a third building, WTC # 7, collapse also at freefall rate though no plane or any major debris hit it. Amazing guys these magical hijackers. But we know it had to be “Muslim hijackers” the conspiracy theorist will tell you because (now don’t laugh) one of their passports was “found” a couple days later near Ground Zero, miraculously “surviving” the fire that we were told incinerated planes, passengers and black boxes, and also “survived” the collapse of the building it was in. When common sense tells you if that were true then they should start making buildings and airliners out of heavy paper and plastic so as to be “indestructable” like that magic passport. The hijackers even used their magical powers to bring at least seven of their number back to life, to appear at american embassies outraged at being blamed for 9/11!! BBC reported on that and it is still online. Nevertheless, they also used magical powers to make the american government look like it was covering something up in the aftermath of this, what with the hasty removal of the steel debris and having it driven to ports in trucks with GPS locators on them, to be shipped overseas to China and India to be melted down. When common sense again tells you that this is paradoxical in that if the steel was so unimportant that they didn’t bother saving some for analysis but so important as to require GPS locators on the trucks with one driver losing his job because he stopped to get lunch. Hmmmm. Yes, this whole story smacks of the utmost idiocy and fantastical far-fetched lying, but it is amazingly enough what some people believe. Even now, five years later, the provably false fairy tale of the “nineteen hijackers” is heard repeated again and again, and is accepted without question by so many Americans. Which is itself a testament to the innate psychological cowardice of the American sheeple, i mean people, and their abject willingness to believe something, ANYTHING, no matter how ridiculous in order to avoid facing a scary uncomfortable truth. Time to wake up America.

  1134. My name is Mark Johnson, and I’ve been an avid reader of your blog for about the last six months. I’m a recent UC Berkeley Political science grad and I along with some fellow Princeton alums have been working hard to launch our own internet startup called Rizzleweb.com. Rizzleweb is basically an online political community where people can log on and write performance reviews\comments for congressmen, senators, the president, and various other local and state officials across the country. I was hoping that if it would not be too much trouble you could place a link of our site on your blog. If this is not possible (which we completely understand), we still hope you will check out our site, and post some reviews
    Mark Johnson
    http://www.Rizzleweb.com

  1135. By the way, Dean,

    Do you think maybe the LibrulDeathCult only goes straight for the conservative collective’s delicate bits because said collective keeps exposing them?!?

    Just something to think about…

  1136. Jeff,
    >the LibrulDeathCult only goes straight for the conservative collective’s delicate bits

    It seems that we are talking past each other. You enjoy kicking me in the nuts while you cut your own throat. My nuts will recover from the kicking. Your throat will not recover from the cutting.

    Regardless of what you do, or do not do, to me, your real problem is the way you treat yourself, and your prospects. If you don’t change the way you behave TOWARD YOURSELF now, you don’t have a future.

    As a class, you Leftists don’t have any fucking babies, and you don’t have any fucking courage. Without these two elements, there is no possibility of your being around tomorrow.

    Can I make this any clearer for you?

  1137. Dean

    A couple of months ago I’d agreed with you or Broder on the Islamization of Europe but I’ve read a bit on the topic and now I think it’s not entirely true and the whole problem is a bit more complicated, because there are three different things: political Islamism (Islamofascism), traditionalist Islam, and nomadic ghetto-cultures.

    Islamofascism is in decline, mostly because many countries (Algheria, Tunisia, Egypt, Pakistan) started a secularization process and cracking down hard on them, and the Saudis, whom most of the Muslim world accept as their leaders, don’t support it at all. All the global terrorism is but a group of veterans from the Afghani-Soviet war who desperately want to revive the glorious old times when they were capable to murder Anvar Sadat, start a civil war in Algheria and so on, but they don’t seem to be able to reap the political results of their actions.

    Traditional Islam is not about blowing stuff up (even though one could use the Qu’ran to justify it but it seems most of the ulemas simply don’t want to), but there are other problems, like the oppression of women. This basically depends of the Saudis as the rest of the Muslim world learns from them. Whenever a mosque is built in Europe, whenever Qu’rans are printed, there is usualy Saudi money behind it. So it depends on them. I think maybe they started a very slow liberalization process. I think it’s mostly up to the U.S. to encourage them in this direction, and then European Muslims will follow.

    The third problem is nomadic ghetto cultures. Basically, all the crime and welfare-sucking in the Arab ghettos of European cities are much more connected to general ghetto-nomadism I’ve written about then to actualy religious belief. Of course, people often use religion as a justification for what they do, but it’s not the strongest of motives. I think this part can be solved simply by demolishing the welfare state which will simply make immigrants who are only in for the welfare money either start assimilating or move on somewhere else. This process has already started – Conservative victory in Sweden, Angie Merkel slowly, politely, but firmly turning the steering wheel away from it (a real Iron Lady in nice soft velvet gloves, I really admire her) and so on.

    That said, I think we all could however learn a thing or two from New Zeeland – they seem to doing something amazingly well.

  1138. Shenpen,
    >Islamofascism is in decline

    The point is not: ‘Those darn Muslims are out to get us all!’

    The point is: ‘What are we Westerners prepared to fight for?’

    If Islam went away tomorrow, there’d just be something new coming along to take its place. The problem is that we Westerners have lost touch with any REASON why we want to exist. We can no longer see the point.

    Therefore, we are easy pickings for any predator who comes along.

    The real danger we face is not Osama and his dream of a Global Caliphate. Osama is a strategic lightweight and the Global Caliphate, should it ever be brought into existence, could be smashed fairly easily.

    The real threat is from a man we’ve not yet seen. He may not even have been born yet. We should fear the next great strategic genius who comes along, observes our weakness, and decides to take advantage.

    What we have to fear is the next Hitler, the next Napoleon, the next Alexander. If, when he shows up, he turns out to be white, we might be OK. But if he is not white, then no matter what atrocities he might commit, or what threat he poses, we cannot take any serious action against him, or the Left will denounce it as ‘racist.’

    Thank God all the Lefties will be dead soon. And the sooner, the better.

  1139. “…Thank God all the Lefties will be dead soon…”
    Nah…they’ll institute some socialistic redistribution scheme for quality ‘conservative’ sperm, once their lefty nads have shrivelled away with a metrosexual whimper…

  1140. Completely OT:
    I was just reading the Wikipedia page on the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki when I came across a very interesting quotation that I wanted to share with all of you

    Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson struck Kyoto from the list because of its cultural significance, over the objections of General Leslie Groves, head of the Manhattan Project. According to Professor Edwin O. Reischauer, Stimson “had known and admired Kyoto ever since his honeymoon there several decades earlier.”

    I was flabbergasted when I saw that quotation. It is weird that one man’s honeymoon affected the lives of several hundred thousand people. Sometimes I wonder if a Robotocracy would be the best thing for mankind.

    Back on ‘topic’:

    If there is just one Alexander, then we have a problem; however, what if there are several, and some are on ‘our side’? Dean, weren’t you praising the strategic genius of the leaders of the Iraq invasion? If we can make/train some more people like them, then we should be able to deter any Napoleon Jrs from fucking with us.

  1141. Phil,
    >If we can make/train some more people like them

    You can’t make/train strategic geniuses. Like earthquakes, they happen.

    We all, inevitably, live our mental lives in a web of concepts and tacit understandings which were, at one time, objectively valid. And maybe most of them still are. But some are not.

    And we cannot easily see which ones have lost their connection with reality, because our concepts and assumptions are the lens through which we view reality.

    A huge part of what makes an important strategic genius is that he sees something, that ‘everybody knows’ is both true and important, is no longer either one.

    And then he acts. And the world is never the same.

    In Alexander’s time, everyone knew that Greeks would only fight for their city-states. And that Persia, with its political unity, was and would always be a profound threat to the fractious Greeks.

    In the late 1700’s, everyone knew that Europe was ruled by royalty and aristocracy. Only the old line ‘nobility’ had the moral authority to lead nations and empires into war. A commoner’s role was as cannon fodder, not warlord.

    In the early 20th century, everyone knew that the Western European Imperial powers were models of Victorian virtue and rectitude. I don’t mean that the leaders of these nations were necessarily good men, but everyone knew that they were MEN. They had stout hearts born of Christian faith, and a love of honor and valor. They would never cow before some paper-hanging lunatic turned dictator.

    It’s not the things we are ignorant of that hurt us. It’s the things we KNOW, that are no longer so.

  1142. Dan,
    >they’ll institute some socialistic redistribution scheme for quality ‘conservative’ sperm

    As I have been endlessly lecturing Jeff, their problem is not a lack of sperm, but of willing wombs. The Left is not the party of the limp-dicks, it is the party of abortion.

    Lefties have lots of sex, and spew lots of spunk. What they have a deficit of is babies.

    Their problem is not that they are not amorous. Their problem is that they are irresponsible.

    You can’t redistribute Semper Fi.

  1143. Conflict between ethnic groups is nothing new. Nor is slavery. But the dividing up of people into groups based on skin color, and the kind of brutal subjugation blacks received as slaves, started in the Virginia Colony in 1676.

    Slavery isn’t brutal subjugation?

    Ideas about race may be extant in Europe, but they most likely spread from here.

    Riiiiiiiiight…

  1144. Jeff,

    I wanted to ask you a couple of questions, if you don’t mind.

    You have said that America is, essentially, uniquely and indelibly racist. And you seem to regard racism as the worst possible human sin.

    My first question is: Do I have that right? Do your regard a racist as the worst thing that a person can be?

    For instance, British India was profoundly racist. The white people ruled, and the brown people had to suck it up. In Stalin’s Russia, by contrast, the kulaks he murdered were not a racial group. They were more of an entrepreneurial personality type.

    Also, in Cambodia in the 1970’s, the Khmer Rouge killers were of exactly the same race as their victims. No racism there. Equal opportunity slaughter.

    My second question is: If you do think that America is indelibly racist, and that racism is the worst thing that one can be, do you think America should survive?

    I often taunt you about how you, qua Leftist, have no future. Do you think America should have one?

  1145. Dean,

    “The point is: ‘What are we Westerners prepared to fight for?’”

    A couple of weeks ago I’ve been reading an interesting book of the history of the British armed forces in WW2. Sadly it seems I’ve lost it somewhere, so I cannot tell the author or the title, nor quote exactly what I’m meaning to. But, the most interesting statement I remember in that books was that the situation in 1939 was very similar to these days. Political leaders thought that after the bloodshed of WW1, no more major wars are possible – that peope are deeply fed up with it. Even if there is, offense is immoral, therefore only defensive preparation (the Maginot Line) should be encouraged. The average conscription-age youth believed that the army is a rude place, one is subjugated by contraselected idiot officers who treat them like shit, and all the leaders who preach about honour and glory are liars who don’t care the least whenever they sacrifice many, many lives in strategic mistakes. They believed that political leaders are old farts who are still into militarism and imperialism and this is so inhuman and non-modern.

    In short, it was a very “liberal” age in the modern sense. As far as I know, even in the economic sense – I don’t know much about the Great Depression but it seems to me that it’s major reason was that trade unions didn’t allow lowering the wages to a competitive level. But the whole situation is very familiar, isn’t it? And of course, it resulted in Dunquerque. But… after that, people changed amazingly fast. The soft, spoiled, liberal youth who just years before were complainig about the imperialism of their fathers, turned heroes in the air and later on, in the deserts and in the bocages, amazingly fast.

    It seems, todays softness and laziness is not such a recent phemenon after all. And it seems it can change real fast when it needs to.

  1146. Shenpen,
    >todays softness and laziness…can change real fast when it needs to.

    I so very much hope you are right. But I don’t know. Within HOURS after 9/11, Leftists in America were talking about how we deserved it for mucking about in the Middle East. We were Israel, and the whole Arab/Muslim world was the ‘Palestinians.’ Within hours.

    In my previous post I asked Jeff if he thought America should survive. He has not answered yet. Adrian has already said that, if there is to be a conflict between Islam and the West, he does not side with the West.

    I may be wrong, but I think that the main difference between 1939 and now is that the rot has spread a lot deeper. Hitler had to hide what he was, to a certain extent. In 1939 no one knew about the Holocaust. It was a reasonably well guarded state secret.

    But Daniel Pearl and Theo Van Gogh are well known. Outside Westminster, they got Muslim radicals shouting about beheading the Pope. The president of Iran is making speeches about wiping Israel off the map. There is no attempt at deception.

    If we are not seeking to Commune with a just and compassionate Supreme Being, because there is no God, then what are we doing here? Why should we struggle for liberty and human dignity?

    “I disagree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.” Isn’t that the stupidest notion ever? What good will your right to say what you want do me, when I am dead? If I fight to the death for your freedom, am I not simply a fool?

    But if we cannot find young men prepared to be that kind of a fool, then Western Civilization has no future. And our supply of fools is running dangerously low.

  1147. Dean, do you also remember that the Red Cross had to LITERALLY turn away people who wanted to give blood donations? Also, I heard the military had to turn away people who wanted to enlist to go to war in Afghanistan. I, then a hard-leftie, was shocked at the sudden militarism of the country. I was even part of the 1% (I am sure it was higher than that) who disapproved of Bush even on 9/12/01. Still, it seemed that the rest of the country was not on my side. The intelligentsia may scoff a the U.S., but the common people seem to be able to support it when they feel they MUST support the country. Lack of bravery may be the danger of having a more educated population, so, in the future, this may be a much bigger issue.

  1148. Phil,

    Education gives you more familiarity with the best rational arguments for why:
    Wisdom is impossible
    Justice is a culturally biased fiction
    Temperance is a tool of bourgeois oppression
    Fortitude is pointless
    Faith is outmoded and ridiculous
    Hope is asinine
    Charity requires cutting your own throat so that others might drink

    My wife is reading a book called “The Artists Way” about how to get in touch with your creativity. It contains a quote from Erica Jong:
    “Take your life in your own hands, and what happens? A terrible thing: no one to blame.”

    And it is a terrible thing, too. Being responsible for yourself is HARD. To those with talent, freedom/responsibility offers a greater chance at efficacy. But to those who lack talent, liberty is a sick joke. Can you ever truly relish the freedom to be mediocre?

    For the untalented, freedom/responsibility’s only consolation is that after you die, you may live again in a new world, wherein all are equal, not merely in their opportunities, but in their achieved RESULTS.

    Progressive Liberalism is mostly an attempt to create that heavenly equality of result here, on Earth. But man cannot achieve such a thing. Only God can.

    And there is absolutely no scientific evidence that there is a God. Education familiarizes you with all the arguments for why the lack of evidence for God’s existence means that the proposition that there is a God should be dismissed.

    When God is dismissed, there is no valid argument for virtue. The good and the evil ultimately get buried in the same dirt. Evil usually consists of shortcuts that allow you to get what you want by trampling on others. If there is no afterlife, why reject evil in this life?

    Yes, the rot definitely spreads downward from the educated classes. But the working class is not immune. It just takes them a little longer to realize that there is no purpose to their lives, and no point in fighting for righteousness.

  1149. Dean,

    I think racism as implemented in the USA for three centuries — a tool of complete subjugation and dehumanization of an entire, arbitrary class of people — is very close to as bad as you can get. Probably even worse than the ideological subjugation practiced by the Stalinists, because it’s so arbitrary. We may not have Stalin’s body count yet but we can catch up; as I mentioned above, we are already deadlier than Saddam.

    And to answer Bessman’s complaint, slavery does not equal dehumanization. In most societies where there was a class of people called slaves — including South American colonies contemporary with the British colonies which would become the U.S. — , there were laws which prevented the slaves from being terribly mistreated. No such laws existed in the antebellum south.

    (That link would explain why South American culture is much more africanized than ours; and if the thesis of the page I linked to is true, it would lend support to Dean’s notion that a just omnipotent God really does make a people more moral.)

    I think America, the people, should survive but I am rapidly losing hope that they will if they continue as they have been. I think America the system, America the ideology, and America the psychology needs to be at the very least radically changed at a fundamental level. THAT won’t be easy. Something is placing those implicit biases at the root of our psyche. The biases which lead to racism can cloud our judgement in other affairs, especially world affairs where we have to deal with other peoples, other cultures. Fear of the other completely undermines our success in that regard.

    As long as Americans keep putting Southern-strategy politicians into power, as long as they keep supporting unjust wars predicated on nothing more or less than fear of the other coupled with economic hegemony, they are continuing to seal their fate. Americans will have to do some deep self-examination in order to rout out their hidden biases and prejudices, and become more understanding, compassionate people.

  1150. Dean, to answer some of your other questions:

    Does it bother you that neither you nor anyone like you will be around to see that collapse?

    Yes, but only because of the protracted suffering that will happen as conservatives try to stave off the collapse. Schadenfreude doesn’t do me much good, mainly because aside from my stubborn unwillingness to believe the lies that inhere to conservative politics — I’m one of you guys.

    My mindset may be unsustainable, but your blue-state population is unsustainable. I met a conservative Lutheran woman yesterday, wife of a preacher, who has eight kids. Do you know any Progressive women who would do such a thing?

    Oh yes. In fact one such woman expressed her desire to contribute to counterbalancing the fecundity of “the Stupids”.

  1151. Jeff,
    >one such woman expressed her desire to contribute to counterbalancing the fecundity of “the Stupids”.

    OK, so she expressed the desire. But did she actually squirt out the brats?

    There is all the difference in the world between talking the talk and walking the walk.

  1152. Dean,

    She had four. And is trying for more, though I doubt she’ll get as high as eight.

  1153. Dean,

    Let’s not forget that blacks and hispanics, not exactly the most conservative of voters, are outbreeding whites of any political persuasion.

    It seems as if the “liberal baby bust” story has its own racist taint

  1154. Dean,

    “But Daniel Pearl and Theo Van Gogh are well known. Outside Westminster, they got Muslim radicals shouting about beheading the Pope. The president of Iran is making speeches about wiping Israel off the map. There is no attempt at deception.”

    Yeah, but the point is, it takes only 2 criminals to kill Pearl and van Gogh. It takes only 100 fools to shout outside the Westminster. And it takes only one Ahmadinejad to talk, well, like Ahmadinejad. (Remember, a couple of years ago, there was a strong chance of the liberalization of Iran. Students revolting etc. Temporarily, the fundamentalists won. Will they win forever?) In order to have a real cilivizational conflict, these folks should be supported by the majority of Arab states and Muslims in Europe. As far as we now, neither is true. The first one we know to be false, as for the second one, well, hell knows. There are lots of trouble with the Muslims here, that’s for sure. And it’s not easy tell ghetto crime and welfare demands from religious fanaticism. But I hope we should try to and I hope what we would find is rather ghetto crime and welfare demands a bit disguised in religious robes than real genuine fanaticism. But I’m not sure.

  1155. Dean,

    I found something: http://www.president.ir/eng/ahmadinejad/bio/ – note this line: “During the same period, he also supervised the theses of tens of students at MS and Ph.D. levels on different subjects of civil engineering, road and transportation as well as construction management. ” Hm. Let’s assume it’s true – because lying about academic achievements is not easy to get away with. It seems we’ve got a different kind of fanatism here. It seems it’s not at all about the fanatism of the unwashed camel jockey who wishes the Sharia to rule everywhere just because he never knew anything else. It rather reminds be of the Western intellectuals who also had the nice Ph.D and whatever degrees and were really intelligent, and still got quite fanatic about Communism. We can bet Islamism for him is rather a similar social revolutionary strategy for him as Communism was for Western elites than something instinctual and born. And it’s good news, because it means he might not have much of a popular support.

  1156. Jef, the Hispanic immigrants are also mostly Catholic, and with the Left’s (perceived) attitude in recent times, they might consider voting for the party that respects their religion more (even though Conservatives have usually favored Protestants). Quite frankly, if the Democrats keep heading in your direction, they will one day be about as popular as the Libertarian party.

  1157. Jeff,
    >It seems as if the “liberal baby bust” story has its own racist taint…

    I am absolutely not going to spend the rest of my life trying to prove that I am not a racist. It is profoundly unfair to demand that blacks spend their whole lives trying to prove that they are not inferior. You can’t prove a negative. You twist yourself in knots trying. It’s bullshit.

    That said, I think there is some room for debate as to whether those black and Hispanic Democratic voters are Progressive Liberals. I think they vote Democrat because the Dems promise to give them free shit. Who in his right mind would turn down free shit, paid for by someone else. You’d have to be a fool.

    I would define a Progressive Liberal, in this context, as someone who believes in handing out free shit, paid for by HIMSELF. A Progressive Liberal, in my view, wants nothing more in this world than to feel better about himself. To this end, he will pay 90% income tax rates without (public) complaint. The point is not that this money is used to actually help people of, say, other races. The point is that paying those taxes, without (public) complaint, (sort of) proves that the Liberal in question is not a racist.

    As long as it is whites who are handing out the free shit, and non-whites who are receiving, then the system can continue. But suppose that the blacks and Hispanics were a demographic majority, and were asked to pay those 90% income tax rates themselves, so that, say, poor whites could benefit. Do you think they would vote for that? I don’t. Nor do I condemn them for it. I wouldn’t vote for it either.

    Remember, blacks and Hispanics don’t need to prove they are not racists. Only white Liberals need to do that. Only you have any hope of getting your money’s worth from those outrageous taxes.

    Generally speaking, the only real Progressive Liberals are white. And you don’t breed. Because having kids doesn’t make you feel as much better about yourself as writing anti-American polemics.

    Therefore, the Liberal Baby Bust is as real as taxes.

  1158. Oh, here is a very interesting article that I discovered a few days ago. It appears that the original site is down, so I linked to the Google cache.

  1159. Shenpen,
    >ghetto crime and welfare demands a bit disguised in religious robes

    At the risk of being nauseatingly repetitive, I don’t think it makes a difference. The problem is not with Islam. The problem is with the West.

    It could be the Muslims, or it could be the Goths, the Vandals, or the Huns. Or the Mongols.

    The conflict is between those who have, and believe they should make, and those who have-not, and seek to have by taking. Whether the takers’ motivation is religious, tribal, or some combination of the two is irrelevant. The outcome is the exactly same.

    Mark Steyn gave an interview recently wherein he talked about this Catholic school out in California which had, in response to politically correct pressure, changed the name of its football team from the Crusaders, to the more culturally sensitive Lions. Meanwhile, a nearby Islamic school sported a football team called the Intifada.

    Steyn suggested that in 20 years, if present trends continue, the Muslim schools will sport teams with names like ‘Sword of Allah the Infidel Slayer,’ while the Christian schools will be the ‘Apologetic Self-Abasers.’

    The desire not to be disagreeable, even with those who seek your enslavement or annihilation, is a death wish.

    The Jihadis have proven that they want to kill. The question is:
    To what degree do we want to die?

  1160. OK, Dean, let’s see it from another perspective. We ain’t living in Democracy, we are living in Mediacracy. Because the decision making processes might be democratic, but it’s the media what provides the input for it. Garbage in – no matter what the system is, garbage out. Agreed?

    Now. Let’s assume this life-or-death question doesn’t really needs to be decided now. We’ve got 10-20 years – by each passing year, the problem will become harder and therefore the solution will become rougher, but we’ve got 10-20 years before we reach the point of no return. Maybe even more, maybe 25-30.

    The blogosphere already showed in the thwart the MSM on some fringe cases. Let’s assume that in 10-20 years, the Internet will be THE major source of information – actually, we are almost there. I expect every house will got set-top boxes on the TV with moving from watching TV to your RSS feed with just a button on the remote in the next couple of years. The tech is already here, it’s just still a bit expensive and therefore not so popular.

    Therefore, the input will change. You sit on the couch, watch the PC bullshit on CNN or BBC and with a button on the remote, you switch to the video feed publishing Muslim atrocities or whatever, from independent videoblogger sources. This tech is all around, it just needs a couple of years to spread a bit more, and perhaps all the invention we need is something like RSS for videoblogs. And a bit more bandwith in order to watch high-definition videoblogs with ease. And then we’ve got unlimited independent TV channels. Mediacracy will be overthrown. Genuine information will be available at the fingertips of everybody. Democratic decision making will be based on independent information instead of MSM brainwashing. And without MSM brainwashing, political correctness will be gone, quite soon.

    Just a sidenote. What’s accepted and what’s not is always based on who’s the stronger. Leftism succceded to make people believe that only the strong boys have to restrain themselves and play by the rules, and the weak boys may go over the line, because, hey, they are weak, let’s not bother them, they’re just playing. This is why Crusaders considered rude and Intifada isn’t. However stupid it is – and I guess it will also change real soon now – I think it won’t be long when people start to rething who is the strong boy and who is the weak boy. I think it has already started – people who get bothered to take their shoes off on airports for security check already start to think that maybe now we aren’t really the strong boys. And therefore they might soon think it’s THEM who better start to behave, as they are the strong boys now. In fact, it isn’t true, actually, currently they don’t have much chance overthrowing our civilization while we could bomb their one into oblivion, but they will LOOK the stronger, therefore, the one who must behave. I expect the PC-warriors to jump on them in the next few years.

  1161. Wow, Phil, scary shit. Actually it proves a bit Dean’s point – that while amongst them are folks who willing to change us, we ain’t really have folks who would be willing to change them. A rhetorical question – is always a good offense the best defense, or are we strong enough to defend our way of living without willing to change them? Just because we ain’t seem to be willing to do the later one.

  1162. If only a Muslim Martin Luther would show up and pull the teeth out of the Islamofascists, so we wouldn’t have to!

  1163. I would define a Progressive Liberal, in this context, as someone who believes in handing out free shit, paid for by HIMSELF. A Progressive Liberal, in my view, wants nothing more in this world than to feel better about himself. To this end, he will pay 90% income tax rates without (public) complaint. The point is not that this money is used to actually help people of, say, other races. The point is that paying those taxes, without (public) complaint, (sort of) proves that the Liberal in question is not a racist.

    As opposed to a conservative who supports war, torture, genocide, martial law, trammelling of the Constitution and suppression of our rights, etc. paid for by himself?

    Haven’t you ever seen the Ben & Jerry’s oreo cookie video? We could bring the troops home, improve education and health care many times over, and still lower taxes.

    Look man, “proving I’m not a racist” is not what I’m about at all. What I’m about is:

    * not being a racist
    * not supporting a political architecture which conduces to racism, such as conservative identity politics in the US

    That’s not all I’m about but it’s what’s germane to the race issue.

    Have you read about the theories of Robert Altemeyer? He came up with the psychological profile of right-wing authoritarianism, which is to be found in greater concentration by far amongst Republican ranks than Democrat. Right-wing authoritarianism works by the spread of fear of undesirable outgroups, who are to be blamed for all the ills in the world. These ills can be fixed, RWAs believe, by eliminating the outgroup members, and by submitting completely to ingroup authority. If you look at what drives racism in this country, and things like Nazism abroad, you can see this antipattern at work. Oh, and by the way, the Soviet communists were RWAs as well, according to Altemeyer. Now you may argue that he’s picking his terms so that right wing always equals bad, but to me this proves an important point: Ideology doesn’t matter; psychology does.

    At the end of the day you will have to confront a truth that you will no doubt find painful: the closest psychological kin of the leftists who put people int gulags and murdered millions are not to be found amongst Progressive Liberals but amongst conservatives like yourself. The big difference between you and me is that I have confronted this truth. I never claimed to be your intellectual superior or anything with that. What I have done is gotten over my identification with right-wing authoritarian politics.

    And if you look at the War on Terra, Dubya’s drumming up fear of terrorists who have taken orders of magnitude fewer American lives than we have taken Iraqi lives (indeed, the number of Americans dead in Iraq now exceeds the number dead on 9/11), and his gambits to broaden his power to imprison and torture people, even American citizens without trial, and now his gambit to be able to impose martial law more freely, you see the right-wing authoritarian apparatus at work.

  1164. Jeff,
    >the psychological profile of right-wing authoritarianism

    Do you really think this sort of thing is going to work, when in a couple of generations, people like you will be a tiny remnant of your current numbers? You don’t breed, and I’m the one who’s psychologically unhealthy? What a joke.

    This psychologizing of Conservatives has been going on since well before I was born. In ‘64, didn’t a bunch of psychiatrists release a statement that Barry Goldwater was crazy, without any of them having interviewed him?

    >the closest psychological kin of the leftists who put people in gulags…are…conservatives like yourself

    So your plan is to persuade Right-wing anti-Communists like me, who opposed the gulags, to take the blame for them, while letting Progressives like you, who made excuses for them, off the hook? And that’s supposed to work?

    How fucking stupid do you think I am? I’m going to accept responsibility for the actions of the mass murderers that Noam Chomsky and Walter Duranty whitewashed and defended? And you get to sail smoothly into the horizon, untroubled by any guilt or shame over such goings on? Ha!

    And if you really do think I’m such an idiot, are you familiar with the psychological term of “projection?”

    Beyond that, so you want to NOT be a racist? Fair enough. What DO you want to be? I know I’ve mentioned this many times before, but toward precisely what do you wish to make Progress? There ain’t never gonna be no Workers’ Paradise. So what do you want to build?

    What do you want to do, besides die quietly, while congratulating yourself on how you aren’t one of “the Stupids” like me?

  1165. Sigh… as we all know, politics has at least two dimensions: left-right and authoritarian-antiauthoritarian and even it’s a gross oversimplification I feel quite incomfortable about (I never really knew where to put myself on it, as for each and every question, I’d give a different answer if it’s about what the state should enforce, what the state should teach and encourage, and what would be, in itself, right). Please don’t use authoritarianism-antiauthoritarianism as childish club in Left – Right debates to bash each other with: “No, your side is more authoritarian! No, yours!” as it cannot lead to any useful conclusions as of course, both side has authoritarians and antiauthoritarians and therefore this distorts the whole picture.

  1166. Shenpen, I’m not saying Altemeyer didn’t have an agenda when he chose the name “right-wing authoritarianism” to mean the kind of personality he was talking about; he may have. But it still holds that he found those traits far more frequently in Republicans than in Democrats; and in Canadian Conservative and Reform Party members than in Liberals. Furthermore, appealing to authoritarianism is a big part of the Republican strategy to get their men’s asses into Congressional seats and into the White House.

    I’ll say it again: I really, really have no love for the American Left. But in terms of sheer authoritarian gall, the Right beats them, every time.

    Dean,

    Beyond that, so you want to NOT be a racist? Fair enough. What DO you want to be? I know I’ve mentioned this many times before, but toward precisely what do you wish to make Progress? There ain’t never gonna be no Workers’ Paradise. So what do you want to build?

    A society where the rights ostensibly protected under our constitution are respected would be nice. How about a nation where “all men are created equal” actually has meaning? Hey, while we’re dreaming here, how about a political architecture where people, not dollars, are the prime determiner of election outcomes?

    I’m just like any geek; I’m libertarian as all get-out and what I want is something that reflects those core values of freedom and equality. What I’m realizing is that contrary to what conservative marketing efforts would have you believe, libertarianism is fundamentally incompatible with conservatism at a very deep level.

  1167. Most likely, some Americans (right-wingers especially) view lefties as more authoritarianism because of national experience. F.D.R. was the closest thing to a dictator we have ever had (Shrub does not even come close). Public opinion also might have been shaped by viewing the actions of the Communist regimes in Russia, China, Vietnam, North Korea, Cambodia, and Cuba. For sixty years, the Left had the image of big-government, which seems like an authoritarian ideal.

    How about a nation where “all men are created equal” actually has meaning?

    From what I have always heard, one of the founding principles of the U.S. system is that all men are created equal before the law. It is relatively obvious that not everyone has the same abilities or impediments. Obviously the government should make no laws abridging the freedoms or dignity of any group of individuals, but how much further than that do we need to go. That is where wisdom comes in to play.

    Hey, while we’re dreaming here, how about a political architecture where people, not dollars, are the prime determiner of election outcomes?

    Are you talking about e-voting machines or something else. Last time I checked, every 18+ person (minus felons in some states) had the opportunity to vote. Campaign dollars is where the wealth comes into play; although both major parties have enough money to bankroll even a pauper for president. Yes, that does mean that candidates from less popular parties have to make do with less money (unless they are Ross Perot). I guess we could set-up a lot of funds for all parties, but how would we distribute it fairly?

    What I’m realizing is that contrary to what conservative marketing efforts would have you believe, libertarianism is fundamentally incompatible with conservatism at a very deep level.

    Of course Libertarianism is incompatible with Conservatism. Libertarianism stems from Classical Liberalism, so obviously there are still traces remaining in the Left (however much ‘Progressive’ philosophy has caused it to diverge). Unfortunately, for a good chunk of the twentieth century, ‘Progressive’ Liberalism was a greater threat than Conservatism, so some Libertarians allied with Conservatives to fight a mutual enemy. I think most Libertarians understand that Conservatives are not ideological allies, but they are convenient when one must fight a powerful threat.

  1168. I think this is where Neoconservativism pops into the picture. Correct me if I’m wrong, but I think the whole point of Neoconservativism is to conserve individual/libertarian/democratic/capitalistic/whatever modern values against creeping socialism, islamism, political correctness etc. ? I Neoconservativism does not deny Libertarian values and agrees to many Leftie values as well, and basically with the whole idea of progess, it just says society has progressed enough, the goal has been largely reached and now it’s time to call for a stop, is that correct?

  1169. Correct me if I’m wrong, but I think the whole point of Neoconservativism is to conserve individual/libertarian/democratic/capitalistic/whatever modern values against creeping socialism, islamism, political correctness etc. ?

    That would be Conservatism. From what I glean from the Wikipedia article, the Neoconservatism was a movement started by liberals as a reaction to Communism and (especially) the counter-culture in the U.S. Neocons were characterized by their advocating an aggressive foreign policy of creating liberal democracies, because liberal democracies are less likely to stir-up trouble than authoritarian regimes.

  1170. >Do I hear 2k? Anyone?

    I don’t know. This thread is starting to get a little boring. I mean, what do we do here?

    1. Jeff accuses me of being a villain.
    2. I lay into Jeff for being a doomed, short-sighted fool.
    3. Shenpen tries to find some perspective on both our positions.
    4. Phil, Max Lybbert, and Dan Kane chime in with their own views, usually right of center.

    What are we going to do that we haven’t already done?

  1171. Phil,

    I think “to preserve” or ” to export” can be considered approximately equal on a very rough scale, as both means “to agree with”, with the only difference being to agree with it on the global scale or only on the local scale. Sure there is a difference but probably it might not be the most important difference of them all.

  1172. Besides, be aware that the terminology I use I mean it rather in the global sense than in the purely American sense which I’m not very familiar with, to be honest. So whenever I say Neoconservativism for me it automatically includes Thatcherism as well, and even Silvio Berlusconi to some extent (although that guy isn’t very easy to take seriously) and generally, an “IMF-friendly” or “economics-friendly” way of thinking – the least common denominator of them all. I prefer not to emphasise the political differences of the countries of the West as I think the Leftist movement is quite similar in all of them and I think the self-definition of the Right mostly consists of being doubtful of these ideas rather than having a fully designed, fully formulated set of ideologies. [1] (One could even argue that the whole point of the real Right is not having an ideology at all other than a natural way of thinking and therefore resisting all ideologies. I’d like this one, actually.) I think the Right is therefore much more defined by what they don’t agree than what they agree. And through this I define Conservativism and Neoconservativism as the former being of a denial of the aforementioned memes rooted in the historical past, while the later being the denial of them rooted in the present. Of couse, it is quite possible that my definitions are really out of sync compared to the commonly accepted definitions.

    [1] Ideology: just to be precise, I mean this term in it’s modern meaning, which roughly means a “bunch of memes” and not in that original meaning Marx had in mind when he invented this term, where he meant it as a bunch of memes painfully disguised to be accepted by the public as unquestionable, natural truths.

  1173. I will concede one thing to you, Dean: You may have just gotten your election-forfeiting fuckup on the part of the Democrats. I do not anticipate that John Kerry’s remarks concerning the education level of those “stuck in Iraq” will sit well with said troops, let alone their wives, parents, etc.

    We shall soon see.

  1174. While John Kerry has, once again, proven himself to be a twit, I do not see this seriously impacting the Democrats, unless they agree with him. Hell, if they were smart, they would denounce him to get easy sympathy points.

  1175. >Hell, if they were smart, they would denounce him to get easy sympathy points.

    I don’t think it’s that easy. The problem with Kerry’s remark is it reminded Americans of what he said about Vietnam, back in the ‘70s. And that reminded them of how the Left seemed to enjoy the prospect of America losing a war to our last big enemy, Communism. And that reminded them of their intuition that maybe right-wing nutjobs like myself are correct: maybe the Left really does hate America and want to destroy it.

    This is the sort of hole that Democrats keep stepping into, not because of stupidity or bad luck, but because of some very dark strains in the logic of Progressive thought.

    Simply denouncing the gaffe of one guy, doesn’t solve the problem.

  1176. When is the ubiquitous Malvernite going to chime in? Maybe we should lure him in with some hot sauce.

    While we’re speaking of Lurch^H^H^H^H^HKerry and American soldiers, I mentioned way back at the beginning of the thread that I had a brother over there. The good news is that he’s back in the States. It’s not all doom and gloom on this blog!

  1177. I am really surprised that ESR has been able to avoid posting anything for this long. Lots of important things have happened in the last few months, and I’m pretty sure ESR has an opinion about them.

  1178. OK, let’s try an ESR-bait:

    it’s interesting how the debates in the Open Source software community more and more seem to resemble the Leftist vs. Libertarian political debates. Recently, FSF released an Ubuntu derivative called gNewSense because they found Ubuntu isn’t not free enough: http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20061103-8148.html On the question that why don’t they just concentrate on Debian then they replied: “Debian unfortunately isn’t free as it contains non-free firmware in the kernel, and offer[s] its users the optional non-free component,” and another commenter pointed out that Debian will be including proprietary drivers in the upcoming Etch release. Brazil says that giving users the option to install only free software isn’t enough, because even the optional inclusion of proprietary software in Linux distributions is “directly supporting and encouraging non-free software.”

    As far as I understand, the whole idea of gNewSense is to further the cause of freedom by taking away the freedom of choice from users, by providing them less option. Great, isn’t it? Isn’t it a typical Left-wing idea? Of course, users can always choose not to use gNewSense and therefore it’s not dangerous – but it seems to be the same single-minded doctrinaire passion…

    I have a guess that there will be a spectular split between the Open Source / Free Software folks as obvious moral-political-economical differences cannot be swept under the rug forever.

  1179. RMS and company’s rejection of “non-free” software that fits the Open-Source software (like those filthy software hoarders at Mozilla) sounds like mortification of the flesh. If you want to play 3D games with your ATI card or watch Homestar Runner, you shouldn’t lose any sleep at night. I love Emacs, but the RMS and FSF and other TLAs can go to /dev/null.

  1180. Exempt, because they seem to be quite different. I think the differences are slowly accumulating. A couple of years ago ESR was very moderate, he wrote it’s the same ends, the difference is only more business-friendly marketing. Now I think the situation is getting different and different. RMS being quite strong on GPL V3.0. Linus refusing it. RMS considering Tivo as a danger. Linus having no problem with it. Linus attacking the GNOME policy of improving usability by removing features and restricting the options of users. ESR mentioning in an interview that maybe GPL could be dropped as Open Source could sustain itself by it’s own business merits, without any lega restriction. (Hijackers will be outcompeted, if I understand him correctly.) Every bit of info seems to imply an increasing split in the way of thinking.

    I think an openly admitted split is more and more imminent. It won’t hurt the culture as the success of the culture relies on programming efforts, not on licensing and philosophy. But RMS and the FSF are getting increasingly similar to the Progressive Left: they are limiting freedom in the name of freedom. And this must be challenged, debated and criticized. I think we all had enough of sweeping differences under the rug in the “holy” name of fighting Microsoft. Even this – the concept of The Big Evil – needs to be rethinked. There is no such thing as an ultimate evil as for a private company in a free economy. Open Source needs to take it’s place even in the philosophical meaning within the economy – while in reality it already happened – not outside it, not trying to create some kind of weird alternative economy.

    Sorry if this post was a bit chaotic – it’s almost midnight and I had quite some beers.

  1181. Shenpen,

    RMS is bound by the same economic rules as anyone else, at least in this country. He can be as strict or as lax as he wants but if he is too strict, then he will lose his user base, so even the hard-liners at the GNU project cave from time to time. For example, in addition to the GPL and the LGPL, there are various gotchas and exceptions like the Guile exception and the gcc runtime exception, to resolve the fact that the hard-line stance articulated by the GPL is completely untenable for some situations in which valid and valued users of GNU software find themselves. (For example, you use g++ to compile a program and it inlines functions from libstdc++ right into your executable. Oh noes! Now your whole code must be GPL. Hence, the C++ runtime exception.)

    Now if RMS were to move to Venezuela and persuade his hero, Hugo Chavez, to enforce the GPL nationwide as the standard software license, you’d have a case for him restricting choice.

    As for me, more and more I am simply using the Zlib license for the free software I produce.

    Building an economic case for open source software, as ESR tries to do, is something which I think is fundamentally misguided. Microsoft already won that game. They did it because they supply a complete, compelling platform for users and developers. A ready-made solution. The Unix nerd contingent is already migrating off Linux and onto Mac OS X for much the same reason: It Just Works, Right Out Of The Box.

    The ironic thing is, open source will be only a niche player until it evolves to the point where people don’t care about source code or programming. And even then, it’s a long shot. Microsoft solicits feedback from a broad community of hardware vendors, ISVs, and end users, and integrates this knowledge into its Windows platform and Office products. Apple has a design aesthetic that a loose-knit community of J. Random Hackers can’t match. Open source’s business differentiator is the one thing no one really cares about.

  1182. Software licenses are merely software licenses. Moralizing about them should be considered silly. Developers can set the terms by which you use or redistribute the software, or even if you are allowed to redistribute the software at all. The users can either like it or lump it.

  1183. Peak Fish may be bullshit.

    Peak oil probably isn’t.

    Has anyone considered that ESR stopped posting because his new “relationship” with Linspire requires him to do so?

    I tend to agree with David’s comments on software licensing. If you don’t like the license, re-write the software.

    (we’re over 1300 now, btw.)

  1184. If you don’t like the license, re-write the software.

    Pretty much explains the MO of the GNU project. Unfortunately, there are a lot of cases where “just rewriting the software” becomes difficult:

    * if the software is patent-encumbered
    * if it requires information mere mortals aren’t privy to (e.g., video card drivers)
    * if rewriting the software contravenes other regulation (e.g., wireless network drivers and FCC regulations)
    * if you do not properly indemnify your customers against legal action they could be in trouble too

    So the GNU project also exists to raise awareness about what (RMS thinks) software *should* be, vs. the reality of what it is. Granted, RMS lives in his own little bubble half the time…

  1185. Given RMS’s political beliefs, he and the FSF have managed to make the entry barriers to programming low to nonexistent. I can’t think of anything more libertarian than that. Garage band? Try garage software development!

  1186. Just in time. I should have known they would.

    The Republicans have committed a fuckup far more serious than Kerry’s inclement, insouciant remarks concerning those involved in our Iraqi military imbroglio. Of course, it being so late in the game they may well get away with it…

  1187. The Republicans have committed a fuckup far more serious than Kerry’s…remarks

    You really think so?

    Phone calls to folks on a do-not-call list?

    Far more serious by what standard?

  1188. Oh noes!!!! The Rebublican campaign is surely doomed!
    By the way, I’m pro-liberty and I boat. Wait, is that right? ;-)

    I wonder how many posts before this blog wraps around!

  1189. I wonder how many posts before this blog wraps around!

    Time to write the semi-obvious 5 line script hack to increase the post count to 10K or so.

  1190. Jeff,

    yes. You know, I think the problem is that RMS never really understood the very term of using a computer – who is using it, for what is he using it etc. – changed from the mid-eighties to today. I think that at that age, where the once-free Unix and LISP cultures got choked within the grip of battling corporations and result was not what one would expect from competition, but that they basically managed to fucked each other for good and everything went down, I can completely understand why he decided to concetrate on building licencing rules that protect the free hacker communities that the software they like to play with never once more can be taken away from them. Completely understood, completely reasonable, completely sane and worths every praise. But now it’s completely different. Now as both Firefox 2 and Internet Explorer 7 is available to download at no cost and 99.99% of users does not want to change them, and the 99.99% of that 0.01% is happy to only write plug-ins, add-ons, toolbars – people who actually read licence agreements before clicking on “Accept” are but a stastical noise. The overwhelming majority will just use whatever they feel better. Now only quality matters, nothing, nothing else. Therefore every effort that’s not directed at quality and efficiency but on some vague doctrinaire cause of maintaining the ideological purity of free software will actually harm the movement, instead of helping it.

  1191. Oh smeg…what have the people gone and done now?

    Hello Speaker Pelosi, please aim for minor penetration on our first ass raping…warm us up gently

  1192. Dan Kane,

    Oh smeg…what have the people gone and done now?

    IMHO… nothing less or more than coming to their senses. Perhaps the American people are indeed shaking off the wine of neoconservative deception.

  1193. An anti-war Government elected during a war? What the hell is that? This can only lead to one thing….

    Horror!

    Real Horror, the kind Colonel Kurtz spoke of in the movie Apocalypse Now,
    uses it as a weapon.

    Kurtz explains his motives and philosophy in a famous and haunting monologue:

    I’ve seen horrors… horrors that you’ve seen. But you have no right to call me a murderer. You have a right to kill me. You have a right to do that… but you have no right to judge me. It is impossible for words to describe what is necessary to those who do not know what horror means. Horror. Horror has a face… and you must make a friend of horror. Horror and moral terror are your friends. If they are not then they are enemies to be feared. They are truly enemies. I remember when I was with Special Forces. Seems a thousand centuries ago. We went into a camp to inoculate the children. We left the camp after we had inoculated the children for Polio, and this old man came running after us and he was crying. He couldn’t see. We went back there and they had come and… hacked off every inoculated arm. There they were in a pile. A pile of little arms. And I remember… I… I… I cried. I wept like some grandmother. I wanted to tear my teeth out. I didn’t know what I wanted to do. And I want to remember it. I never want to forget it. I never want to forget.
    And then I realized… like I was shot… like I was shot with a diamond… a diamond bullet right through my forehead. And I thought: My God… the genius of that. The genius. The will to do that. Perfect, genuine, complete, crystalline, pure. And then I realized they were stronger than we. Because they could stand that… these were not monsters. These were men… trained cadres. These men who fought with their hearts, who had families, who had children, who were filled with love… but they had the strength… the strength… to do that. If I had ten divisions of those men our troubles here would be over very quickly. You have to have men who are moral… and at the same time who are able to utilize their primordial instincts to kill without feeling… without passion… without judgment… without judgment. For it is judgment that defeats us.

    He could be right

  1194. Shenpen,

    Quality is rarely a determinant when it comes to which software gets accepted. Social factors are far more important.

  1195. davidf,

    How, in your estimation, will horror be used as a weapon? Isn’t that the modus operandi of the GOP, whose ouster from power we are thankfully bearing witness to?

  1196. davidf,

    How, in your estimation, will horror be used as a weapon? Isn’t that the modus operandi of the GOP, whose ouster from power we are thankfully bearing witness to?

    Jeff,

    Horror is being used against the West as we speak by you know who.
    With recent Beheading of three christian girls and the latest methods
    of power drilling holes in the heads of civilians in Iraq and dumping
    mutilated bodys in the local streets, how much more horror does
    one need to see?

    For you to equate the GOP with that is quite revealing!

    What is your strategy to fight an enemy that uses horror with
    no bounds as Colonel Kurtz realized?

  1197. Should we give all the terrorists the guillotine?
    No not in the French way, looking down at the basket.
    Have them looking up as the shiny metal justice comes down!
    Televised?

    Maby some justice combined with horror would be a good weapon!

  1198. IMHO… nothing less or more than coming to their senses. Perhaps the American people are indeed shaking off the wine of neoconservative deception.

    No, the whip has just been passed. I think this guy says it best.

  1199. “…IMHO… nothing less or more than coming to their senses. Perhaps the American people are indeed shaking off the wine of neoconservative deception…”

    Nah. Look at the numbers. Shitcan all that “American people shaking off the wine…vive la revolucion!” masturbation…the numbers tell a much more damning story than that hackneyed liberal fantasy.

    It’s a cliche, I know, but the Republicans lost the game far more than Democrats won it. The Republican voter turnout numbers alone tell you the disdain that ‘the base’ had for their (now ex) representatives. It’s far from “all your base are belong to us” and closer to “who got stood up at the prom?”. IMHO there is a smart way and a dumb way to spank your politicians, and what just happened was definitely on the south side of “fuckwit”. “Throwing the baby out with the bathwater” doesn’t even begin to capture the reckless, petulant stupidity of a significant slice of the Republican base.

    Dems, credit due, did a fine job getting their vote out. They learned a trick from Rove at least ;-)

  1200. Well, folks, accept my condolences. Might the reason be that Bush might be similar to Maggie Thatcher – who despite all the legends, resigned with a similar total sum of govm’t spending when she started?

  1201. Dan Kane,

    The Republicans lost the game by slowly eording our rights and turning their boy Shrub into a would-be dictator, all the while expecting their base to support them. The great neocon hornswaggle fell apart and even the most dyed-in-the-wool red-stater could see what’s going on.

    Our troops are going to be withdrawn from Iraq. A war with Iran is now politically untenable. And we might just restore some of the diplomatic ties that were severed when Shrub took office — and perhaps find out what really happened on 9/11. Really, what could be better?

  1202. Thanks for clearing that up Jeff ;-) Shrub…Bush…oh now i get it…very witty…think that up on your own? How about “Hedge”?

    Seriously man, you need some new material…I’ve read all this adolescent lefty chunter before…it doesn’t get any truer, or more credible, no matter how many of you are talking among yourselves.

    Bush & co. got deservedly walloped for abandoning Reagan’s legacy…I can only hope that the inherent immaturity of contemporary liberalism doesn’t rot the stars’n’stripes too much before we can get our shit back in order…and save the day…*again*.

    In the meantime, I hope the Dems enjoy riding our wave…

  1203. Back to Pete’s interest in the definition of a ‘just war’…I stumbled across this book review (by Lee Harris) that touches upon this subject while looking at the concept of jihad.

  1204. imho just war theory would be more effectively applied to considerations of the proven reserves of light sweet crude in Iraq, dwindling global energy resources, and the energy-greediness which underpins the American way of life.

    oh wait, it already has — many a time — and the fact that people like you choose to dismiss such calling to attention of the immorality of GOP politics as “adolescent lefty chunter” is precisely why you got your ass handed to you in the last election cycle.

  1205. imho just war theory would be more effectively applied to considerations of the proven reserves of light sweet crude in Iraq, dwindling global energy resources, and the energy-greediness which underpins the American way of life.

    What is your solution? put Saddam back in power? or banter and carp about just war theory,
    energy theory, social theory.

  1206. I have a few ideas, some of which I have elucidated before:

    Withdraw from the war which is based on a pack of lies. We have become an aggressor country, implementing a policy of lebensraum (PNAC); and as such have squandered the good will of the rest of the world. We need that good will back.

    Take a law-enforcement approach to acts of terrorism.

    Make it a federal policy to live light on the land. Humans are exceeding the planet’s carrying capacity and the United States is the worst offender in that regard. This is important because alternative energy sources will not meet our greedy energy requirements; we will have to live with significantly less energy than we do now. It’ll be very very difficult; but still possible.

    Take the money that is used to build up our defense arsenal and apply it to better use: reducing the national debt, implement effective health care and education programs, etc.

    Make sure our public officials comply with the Constitution and all national and international laws.

  1207. “…the fact that people like you choose to dismiss…”

    Ya, ya, ya…more of the same…still not impressed.

    “…Make sure our public officials comply with … international laws…”

    If they do not contravene the first two (the Constitution & national law) then they are at least eligible for consideration…but we are not obligated to comply with any of them.

  1208. >Take the money that is used to build up our defense arsenal and apply it to better use

    What if we do all of the above and the Islamozoids don’t stop blowing us up?

    Do we do more of the same?

    Do we embrace a policy of killing the fuckers?

    Do we just give up and die?

    Do we convert to Islam in hopes that THAT will make them like us?

    What, if anything, is your plan B?

    ——————————————
    At a Labor Party rally where Britain was being urged to disarm “as an example to others,” economist Roy Harrod asked one of the pacifists: “You think our example will cause Hitler and Mussolini to disarm?”

    The reply was: “Oh, Roy, have you lost all your idealism?”

  1209. Jeff,
    >precisely why you got your ass handed to you in the last election cycle.

    I disagree with you as to the reasons why the Republicans lost the election. I think that if the Repubs had actually stuck to their Conservative principles, instead of becoming the kings of pork-barrel spending, their base would have come out in support of them.

    But suppose that you are correct: The people have spoken and what they really want is the same tired old Lefty crap you’ve been advocating since before I was born. Suppose that the American people have decided that they really want to live in EUtopia.

    The Europeans aren’t going to be living in EUtopia, themselves, for very much longer. They are already starting to thin out.
    Item:
    “AMSTERDAM — In the first nine months of this year, almost 100,000 people left the Netherlands to settle elsewhere, 12,000 more than the same period last year. About half of the emigrants were Dutch natives, the national statistics office CBS said on Friday. If the trend continues, more than 130,000 people will have left the country by the end of this year. For the third successive year, the number of emigrants substantially outnumbers immigrants, the CBS said. The net effect means the Dutch population was reduced in the 2004-06 period by 75,000. In the preceding three years, there was a positive net migration of 75,000.”
    http://www.expatica.com/actual/article.asp?subchannel_id=1&story_id=34306

    If the American people have decided that they want to follow your policies, then the people are wrong. And it is our job to persuade them to change their minds. We may succeed or fail in that endeavor, but the task remains.

    The Left is bullshit, Jeff. That it remains somewhat plausible bullshit in the minds of the public, may indeed be our fault. We need to present better arguments and examples to the people.

    But bullshit remains bullshit, regardless of its plausibility.

  1210. >Withdraw from the war which is based on a pack of lies. We have become an aggressor country, implementing a policy of lebensraum (PNAC); and as such have squandered the good will of the rest of the world. We need that good will back.

    If the majority of people in Iraq wanted us to withdraw we would. The problem is who will take full
    responsibility for the fallout of that decision. As far as lies go both sides are guilty of that before
    the war, lies do not start wars evil dictators do and Saddam fucked that part of the world when
    he invaded Kuwait. The PNAC is ink and paper, it does not mean shit in the global political village,
    the geopolitics are not dictated by one country, commerce and G.D.P run the world.
    Good will is commerce and G.D.P between nations thats all, if only Saddam had kept his and
    not invaded kuwait for all the oil!!!

    >Take a law-enforcement approach to acts of terrorism.

    Police-men looking for terrorists? What! guns and billysticks against car bombs, sucide bombers, or worse…

    What?

    >Make it a federal policy to live light on the land. Humans are exceeding the planet’s carrying capacity and the United States is the worst offender in that regard. This is important because alternative energy sources will not meet our greedy energy requirements; we will have to live with significantly less energy than we do now. It’ll be very very difficult; but still possible.

    Switch over to Nuclear Power, The French burn the reactors off peak hours to make hydrogen
    as clean power. replace most fossil fuels with Nuclear Power, coal and oil are the worst polluters as all the waste from them is not contained unlike Nuclear Power. Design new citys for maximum energy conservation, etc…

    Example: Burning coal releases radioactive thorium and uranium into the atmosphere,
    oil has other harmful chemicals to many to list from refinement down to the consumer.

    >Take the money that is used to build up our defense arsenal and apply it to better use: reducing the national debt, implement effective health care and education programs, etc.

    Peace Through Strength! Make defense first, that will always pay for itself.
    Make it mandatory for people to vote such as the voting system in Australia,
    while reducing the national debt, implement effective health care and education
    programs, etc, the people can vote and fix that.

    >Make sure our public officials comply with the Constitution and all national and international laws.

    That is the domain of Supreme Court of the United States.

    Amen.

  1211. >We have become an aggressor country, implementing a policy of lebensraum (PNAC);

    How rich that one is!
    I suppose the next thing we hear from Jeff is PNAC is the cause
    of 911…

  1212. Well, davidf, don’t you just find it a little strange that the PNAC wrote it would take an event like Pearl Harbor to catalyze the implementation of their policies, and then a year later 9/11 happens? It’s a bit too convenient, don’t you think?

  1213. Well, davidf, don’t you just find it a little strange that the PNAC wrote it would take an event like Pearl Harbor to catalyze the implementation of their policies, and then a year later 9/11 happens? It’s a bit too convenient, don’t you think?

    Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence…

    that henhouse bullshit is way to old give it up!

  1214. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence…

    Someone should have told Powell that before he did his little song and dance at the UN prior to our Iraqi invasion.

  1215. Someone should have told Powell that before he did his little song and dance at the UN prior to our Iraqi invasion.

    The Iraq Liberation Act of 1998 was drafted
    and signed into law by the US President Bill Clinton on October 31, 1998.
    On December 16, 1998,
    President Bill Clinton mandated Operation Desert Fox, a major four-day bombing campaign on Iraqi targets,
    and lots of democrats were in favor of the current invasion of Iraq…
    So put that in your smoke and pipe it.

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iraq_Liberation_Act
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iraq_Resolution
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smoking_culture

  1216. They’re really serious about this. Even Duke, the little spade-like fellow introduced to represent Java technology way back when, is joining the ranks of such open source mascots as Tux and Mozilla. I was kind of expecting them to release the code but still keep a tight grip on all of their trademark IP (which I wager they’ll still do with the Java name and coffee-cup logo).

  1217. I don’t know about ESR — I bet he’s overjoyed — but I think this is rather a repeat of the Mozilla source release. Sun is savvy enough to know that Microsoft .NET represents a credible threat to Java, in the enterprise and especially on the desktop. With that in mind, the best hope for keeping Java alive is to make its foundation community property and not proprietary to Sun. Thing about open source is, by playing nice with it you’re courting the developer community that is not owned by Microsoft. It’s a kind of “enemy of my enemy is my friend” scenario, and I think Sun fundamentally recognizes they can’t expand their reach into that community beyond a certain point if they remain closed source.

  1218. To me, releasing Java was the most interesting thing that happened this year. Personally, I don’t give a fuck about Java as a language as it sucks, but Java as a platform is great, and languages like JRuby and Jython can easily become the “standard” for application development in the next few years.

  1219. Shenpen,

    I feel a bit like Bill Hicks. Java? Piece of shit. End of story. Don’t get caught up in that phony fucking hype debate. “But what about Write Once, Run Anywhere? What about J2EE? You know you can compile other languages to JVM bytecode–” adadadadadadadadadadadadadadadat!!! You’re just confused, you’ve forgotten how to judge correctly. Take a look again: Piece of shit. That’s all it is, just walk away.

  1220. I’ve lost count of how many ‘programmers’ I’ve witnessed whining and bitch-slapping various languages in some vain hipster-dufus pissing-contest…I hear more serious criticisms from the ranks of software engineers, however…

    What do you think of COBOL, Jeff?

  1221. Jeff,

    well, I think the problem with language wars is that there are many different areas of programming and usually people tend to overlook the needs of those areas they are not familiar with. I think the three major areas are

    1) scientifiec programming, when you need to compute or model something really complicated: this usually requires expressiveness from the language

    2) business logic, when you model and automate a fairly simple process of human interaction and information exchange, but you usually have to model and automate LOT of processes in a very short amount of time – this requires high-levelness, to be able to concentrate on the process itself, and a language close to English, to be able to read the code almost as if it would be written rules in English and therefore quickly spot if you forgotten to handle some important situation

    3) technical programming, which is I think almost anything that does not fit into the previous two categories, but could be generally defined as a type of programming that would not exist without computers. I mean as for scientific computing, you could and for ages people did it on pen and paper and abacus. and business logic design which is my vocation could and has been done on drawers containing paper files, but you can’t write a webserver for pen and paper. So this is where the line in the sand is, I think. And, technical programming needs stability and sound design, which requires static typing, contract-based design etc.

    Now, I think business logic and scientific programming can find a common ground in language requirements – while a scientific programmer might like LISP or Haskell or Mathematica, and a business logic designer might like VB.NET, Delphi, some kind of procedural SQL, or CA-Clipper (it’s modern version, CCC) or C/SIDE, probably both can be content with something like Python and Ruby. But there is a wide gap between both of them and the technical programmer. A technical programmer is happy to sacrifice expressiveness, readability and quick development for zero fault-tolerance and finding errors early and therefore, stability. Java does that job. For the others, there is Jython and JRuby. If you want to be very expressive, there is SISC. So what’s the problem with Java as a platform? (OK, the UI is the problem. I hate Swing. Plain ugly, even in 1.5 . And SWT is nice, but slow.)

  1222. OK, I haven’t read Jeff’s link before writing the above post. Well. Yes, Java might be in the same position as Mozilla was but Firefox didn’t become a great product and fairly popular? Fairly, I mean. I don’t think dreams on world domination make any good. I think just like in music, where the really popular stuff are crap, but also the I’m-so-underground-only-five-hundred-people-know me music bands suck too. Quality and real fun can usually be found at the second or third most trendy, second or third most popular product, genre or movement. I think it is a general law of life. If I see in a town 70 kids wearing brown pants, 15 wearing blue and 15 others each different color, I have a bet that the 15 ones with the blue are the folks who are the most funs to hang out with, because they strike a healthy balance between sheepish stupidity and there-is-a-cork-in-my-ass snobism.

    BTW what’s that TCO that Scheme-to-JVM compilers don’t do? I thought SISC is a complete implementation, even implementing some features outside the R5RS standard.

  1223. Shenpen,

    TCO = tail call optimization — optimizing tail calls to jumps.

    SISC is awesome, being one of the most R5RS-compliant implementations anywhere — but it is an interpreter — which probably uses a trampoline of some sort to negotiate Scheme procedure calls and returns, at a performance cost. And, to be fair, Kawa which compiles to JVM bytecode can do the same thing. But again, it totally kills performance. The reason is a series of arbitrary decisions by Sun including limits on method size and a lack of tail-call facility within the VM. These decisions were made pretty much because the Java design team condescends to its developer community, and leaves out things which in its judgement are “too complex” for the average programmer.

    This is still going on; there was like a huge debate about the addition of closures to Java, with Gosling himself saying he had “mixed feelings” about the move. The rationale being, of course, that closures are “too complicated”, whereas inner classes, which are ugly syntactical hacks, not as general as closures, and with scoping rules that make less sense than closures, are somehow supposed to be easier.

    Microsoft .NET supports tail-call optimization. Then again, Microsoft is retaining functional-programming researchers who had an interest in making the CLR support functional programming, making it a truly multi-paradigm platform which Java is not. In fact, I dare say .NET 3.0, with the LINQ extensions, is the best thing that ever happened to functional programming because now that Microsoft is doing it, it’s worth taking seriously in mainstream software development.

    As for Mozilla, it took the better part of a decade to bang Mozilla into shape to where it made an attractive end user application. And it really wasn’t until the term “AJAX” came into vogue, about a year and a half ago, that people started taking cross-browser compatibility seriously and realized hey, those W3C guys aren’t just screwing around; before that, IE was still the de facto standard against which everybody developed their Web pages, and Mozilla and Firefox were also-rans which were used by Linux gnurds, or people who were paranoid about spyware and the like.

    Unlike Mozilla, Sun will still have complete control over what constitutes “Java”, as they own the name and marks. The GPLing of the source will produce some interesting forked projects, but it’s unlikely that one of them will achieve the industry-standard status Java has today. And it will take some time for Java to catch up with the rest of the world in terms of VM and language design. Meanwhile, it will be surpassed by .NET, which has already addressed many of these issues.

  1224. Dan Kane,

    The whole Bill Hicks thing was done to call humorous attention to the fact that Shenpen was dithering by saying “Well, Java as a language sucks but Java as a platform is good” which, in my interpretation, conflates “frequently used” with “good” (a common fallacy in the software field). Java suffers from severe limitations both as a language and as a platform.

    Having been in the decision making process for development and deployment of a particular application, I have chosen Java as a platform (and Scheme as a language) to be the basis for the application. But I did not make the mistake of thinking that Java roxxors as a platform: it doesn’t. Rather, things make it more convenient for me to use it — including the fact that just about everybody’s familiar with it and so wouldn’t complain too much about it. In addition the Jakarta project has produced lots of libraries that I could just plug in and wrap with Scheme code. As a platform, Java still loads too slowly, takes up too much memory, and is hamstrung by its sundry artificial restrictions. Just because it’s convenient doesn’t mean it’s good. When I’m horny, my hand is more convenient than a woman, but we all know which I’d *prefer* to have, all other things being equal.

    As for COBOL, it’s a horrible monster that gits ‘r done and lasts for decades; it just doesn’t look pretty doing it. I’m pretty sure that long after my grandkids are gone, quadrillions of Galactic Federation Credits’ worth of transactions will still be processed by software written in COBOL. I really don’t think Java has that kind of longevity.

  1225. I think I’ll reflect on that later on, right now I’m watching South Park Episode 1003 (Cartoon Wars). Do you know this one, guys? This episode describes the problems with extremist Islam and the suicidal answers to that in such a hilarious and yet very smart, very right-on-the-nail… :-) I’m starting to believe that irony is a potent weapon – maybe the only one that’s left.

  1226. which, in my interpretation, conflates “frequently used” with “good” (a common fallacy in the software field)

    But you’re Denying the Wisdom of the Market! It’s elitist! Oh gnoe!

    Sorry, I’ve just been reading Thomas Sowell, I’ll be all right in a while.

  1227. But you’re Denying the Wisdom of the Market! It’s elitist! Oh gnoe!

    Yeah, I guess that makes me a quote-unquote “programmer” instead of a software engineer, i.e., a Real Professional.

  1228. Hey, lets not have any Holy Wars here! All programming languages have thier usages. You should use the right tool for the right job. Except for BASIC.

  1229. Yeah, I guess that makes me a quote-unquote “programmer” instead of a software engineer, i.e., a Real Professional.

    I never understood (being a self-taught hobby coder and that) what distinguishes software engineers from programmers. Do they have more better quality control systems? Do their asses get sued when their work fucks up, like the asses of real engineers do?

  1230. Jeff: Yeah, I guess that makes me a quote-unquote “programmer” instead of a software engineer, i.e., a Real Professional.

    Jeff, you know that all REAL programmers, like Mel code with a hex editor. Only a quiche-eater would use an assembler, or, Knuth forbid, a compiler.

  1231. adrian10:

    Near as I can tell, the succinct definition of software engineering as given by Dijkstra, lo these many years ago — “how to program if you cannot” — still holds true today.

    What appears to distinguish the journeyman programmer from the software engineer is: software engineers can wear the suit and the standard-issue corporate smirk if need be; and their Professional Interest is in Implementing the Software Development Process for ever-changing values of Software Development Process. These days the smart money is on Agile, which means (among other things) programmers have someone peering over their shoulder at all times, or are peering over one of their colleagues’ shoulders, and the management dream of turning the programming team into a panopticon is now glorious reality.

    Phil:

    Hex editor? Hex editor?!?! Bah. Real Programmers write device drivers with “cat >”.

  1232. Jeff: I know the ‘Software Design’ process receives a lot of scorn from programmers, but the results can be amazing. Have you ever read the article, entitled They Write the Right Stuff about the on-board shuttle group? While writing software their way stifles creativity, I can see plenty of advantages to it.

  1233. Phil:

    Here’s the absolute key bit of that article:

    Importantly, the group avoids blaming people for errors. The process assumes blame – and it’s the process that is analyzed to discover why and how an error got through.

    Squishing the creativity out of programming is like squishing the bump out of a toothpaste tube: it’ll only reappear someplace else (or else you left the lid off and now have toothpaste all over you). Creativity isn’t random (at least it wasn’t before the hippies destroyed Western civilization); it’s exploiting feedback in cognition to do usually at a personal level what the NASA group is doing at a group level. The problem is many commercial shops lose sight of this insight, and so looking for errors becomes a sort of blame passing game.

    And I think we’re moving from quality XOR creativity to quality AND creativity. Now mind you, despite what I wrote above I’m actually a fan of open source — I’m just cynical about its widespread adoption. One of the possibilities that open source hints at is a software culture where both qualityand creativity are valued: i.e., it doesn’t matter how you arrive at the goal as long as you hit the mark. Linux kernel development is notoriously ad-hoc — in the days before BitKeeper and git, even our own ESR was disgusted at Linus’s apparent lack of organization — yet from an engineering perspective the kernel has met and even surpassed the quality of many of its commercial competitors, some of whose creators would put Linux source on an overhead projector, pop open the brewskis, and have a good laugh at how those kids didn’t know how to design a kernel.

    One of the insights that made Eric famous, is that Linux by its very existence called into question the idea that you need a Most Sacred and Holy Writ of Process in order to write quality, reliable software — much as Buddhism’s existence calls into question the idea that you need a structured monotheistic religion like Christianity to build a society of decent human beings. Could software be developed Linus-style that’s reliable enough to fly a spaceship with? We don’t know; we haven’t tried it yet! It was only recently that anyone besides a national government has even tried to fly a spaceship. And we all know how willing national government managers are to let their minions manage their own affairs.

    Am I saying there’s no need for professionalism in software? Hell, no. But there’s a vast gulf between professionalism and Professionalism (i.e., posing as a professional).

  1234. On software quality: yes, the article about spacecraft software is right I think. Once I’ve read a blog post of Xah Lee who calculated that a NASA engineer is writing/maintaining 300 lines of code in ten years. Or something like that. That’s it. That’s REAL engineering, in the traditional sense of the word. If we’d be content delivering few functionalities on a very high cost and a huge development time, every software could be perfect. But in the market, the vendor that delivers lots of features quickly and at a low cost, and for it, sacrifices quality, can outcompete the one who delivers zero bug count software with very few features expensively and slowly. Software is bad because the users want it so. -They want the features of a Microsoft Word 2003, for $200 or something like that. If they would appreciate zero bug count instead of features, they’d all be using Personal Editor 2 for MS-DOS. Or if they would want to pay high price, then they would buy Word for $5000 and it still would have the features of Word 97 (I think if Word 97 would have been released in 2003, it’s a good bet it would have very few bugs). But it seems the user doesn’t appreciate quality. Based on their buying preferences, they want lots of features crudely crufted-together as cheaply as they can. So that’s what they get. Therefore, I think there is NO problem with software quality – people just get what they want and are willing to pay for. 260 people writing 420K lines of code? The Compiere ERP system has roughly that many lines of code and 90% of was written by one guy in about six years. Is it a wonder it sucks, then?

    Besides, isn’t it a general trend? Our granddads had doors made of oak. Our parents had doors made of pine. The doors I see in the shops now are usually made of some kind of junk pressed between two sheets of plastic. But they are so cheap…

  1235. “…quote-unquote “programmer”…”

    Jeff…did you just pull off a masterful double-sarcasm-quote on yourself? ;-)

  1236. Jeff,

    on the Java as a platform topic. Well, I think the whole point of Open Source would be the DRY principle on a global level: the elimination of unnecessary parallel efforts. Yes, I know .NET is better in mostly every sense – but those tens of millions of lines in open libraries should be started all over?…

    I’m in the ERP industry. And the weird thing is that despite the $billions poured into the industry, there is AFAIK NO ERP system that could offer a 100% trustable answer to the very simple question “how much money I earned?” – which questions the validity of the whole ERP concept, actually. Because in order to be able to answer that question, an ERP system needs to be able to do that f.e. when you purchase a part, build it into a product, move that to another warehouse, sell it, take it back for repairs, ship it again, and only receive the invoice for a shipment charge associated with that part after that – the cost should still be able to reflected in the reports showing the profitability of that sales order or shipment or customer. And I know zero ERP systems that are able to do this – either the conceptual model is not sophisticated enough or it’s implementation riddled with hundreds of bugs. Now, let’s assume that the Open Source Compiere ERP system, in Java, happens to solve this problem correctly once and for all. Not very likely, as it took f.e. the Navision system 15 years to elminiate at least the most obvious bugs, but maybe they are smarter, or whatever. Then the problem is solved, for everybody, from now to eternity. No more money wasted on this problem, no more angry customers on the phone. No more auditors and tax inspectors grilling companies for unrealistic inventory costs and COGS. This is my dream. :-) The Open Source Java world had solved most of the system programming problems, many of the applications programming problems (Eclipse etc.) and is starting to solve the business logic problems. Why should this monumental effort be started all over in .NET?

    (Besides, I have a hunch that these problems the industry is struggling decades for, a good Schemer at MIT would solve easily in a number of weeks. But somehow they seem to think such problems are below their dignity… )

  1237. Ah, back to the original topic, then? Isn’t it boring yet? Do you expect any other reaction than politely, philosophically and analytically formulated packages containing, basically, “go screw yourself” ? :-) I mean every meaningful bullet that can be shot about these topics has been shot. Either we stick to different topics or the quality of the discussion will go down faster than a ship hit with a nuclear torpedo – because no more sensible arguments are left that hasn’t been said at least twice before, I think.

  1238. Jeff,
    >Hey, I’m not giving up on you guys

    Just out of curiosity, do you really mean that? Do you seriously expect that one day I might convert to Progressive Liberalism, a movement which I believe, as I have stated many times, is leading you toward inevitable doom?

    If you haven’t given up on ME yet, what would it take to convince you that I’m not a potential convert?
    :-)

  1239. Shenpen,

    I have never worked with ERP systems before, but something tells me that the difficulties most likely lie in the MANY different regulations that companies are faced with. Writing an ERP for a local business (i.e. the company is based ENTIRELY in one location, and products never leave that location) would be hard enough, but inter-state and international commerce add new levels to the complexities of the system. The coders have to be aware of the NUMEROUS laws and regulations that vary based on where you are located and where you are selling your products. I once read a Slashdot story about why there were no open-source tax preparation programs, and I can imagine that the same problems would plague an ERP system. If it is difficult to adapt to the changing regulations of just ONE area, then it must be VERY difficult to adapt to the changing regulations of many different areas.

  1240. I just had a (with hope) great idea. The IRS should be responsible for developing an open source tax preparation program that would have the ability to file any kind of tax return (itemizing deductions, etc.). If they are faced with that kind of project, they might decide to simplify the tax code a little bit.

  1241. Well, yeah, that might be another problem for the really big companies, but my experiences are of projects at companies having no more than 50 PC-s, which are therefore always very local.

  1242. How about simplifying the tax code so that one person could hold it in their head?

    How about a flat tax? Or a national sales tax?

    These things won’t happen, because the tax system as it is not only keeps the thousands of IRS employees employed and busy, but also the private-sector CPAs, tax attorneys, consultants, etc.

    There’s BIG money to be had in job-security-through-obscurity. Ah, capitalism!

  1243. Just as a sidenote, I’m planning to write a blog article on how company size effect IT problems in general (because I think the problems I face with ERP are just a subset of it). Say you have a small company of 15 PC-s, and you buy a Smal Business Server from MS, mostly for Exchange. You don’t even need an internal IT, basically anybody with a little bit of tech savvy can set it up and then you can use it happily. You don’t have any problems and you don’t really expect any – why should you have? Therefore you can live in a blissful ignorance that IT is like a truck or a drilling machine – you buy it, it works, end of the story. This is one end of the spectrum. On the other end of the spectrum, a friend of mine is working at Exchange support at MS and he said that they have 10 ranks of support “engineers” – and even the first rank knows more than the average MCSE system “engineer” at an MS partner company. This friend knows more than an average MCSE and it is not enough for him tho rise to the second rank. Why? Because MCSE enables one to configure it if and when it works. And all the knowledge of this huge hierarchy is about all those cases when it does not work – i.e. when you face either bugs or misfeatures in the software and you have to find ways to work around it. He says that for a company of the size of Siemens, 99% of the support they get from MS for Exchange is not of the type they could figure out themselves from the manuals and the trainings, but simply working around errors like if you have more sites than X and more whatevers than Y and so and so on then something unexpectedly crashes. And these support folks find workarounds for it.

    So the moral of the story is, that if you are a large enough company, you cannot believe anymore that software is like a drilling machine – that it usually works and if not then somebody will make a warranty repair for free. To the contrary: you have to pay large sums of money for people to repair or work around errors in it. Which is very strange from a moral viewpoint – buying a new car and paying to repair or workaround manufacturing errors ?! – but it’s the way it works.

    And I think as a company grows, there is a certain level when they have to face it. And I don’ t only mean that IT costs grow non-proportionally to the company size (maybe exponentially, but even if it’s linear then it at least 3X when X is the growth expressed in number of PC-s). No. What I mean is a moral shock – at a certain size, you start to pay people to repair or work around errors in the software. At a certain size, you lose that innocence that software is like your car where manufacturing errors are repaired for free. And this moral shock is quite hard to overcome, I have seen many companies frustratedly switching from one system to another every three years, hoping there is a correct one – it’s very hard to accept that there is none, because when one pays money one expects things to work.

    And this threshold in company size, when you realize that software is not necessarily correct and start paying for repairing or working around errors, I think happens somewhere between 50 and 150 PC’s.

    What do you think about it?

  1244. … and there is one more thing to it. When a friend of mine went to America (California) he said the most surprising experience was the sheer size of things: huge cars, huge roads, huge meals, huge drinks at movies, and so on. Can I safely assume that it is true for company size as well: you don’t know many people who would work at companies who don’t have at least a couple of hundreds of PC’s, do you? (Of course it’s not for knowledge companies, but the usual factories, traders, distributors etc. ) And can it also mean that at designing software, most efforts go in making it able to “scale up”, and there is comparatively less efforts spent in repairing small things that any consultant can repair or work around for a couple of thousands of bucks, because everybody assumes that there are no companies who would find it hard to afford such a cost? Once I’ve read a story about the ERP implemenation at Nestlé $260M. Holy shit! Basically it means that if they just spend $500K on repairing errors, assuming a $1000 daily rate, they have 500 consultant days to spend on it. Say they found a bug in inventory cost calculation, no problem, somebody figures out a solution in two weeks, that’s about $10K bucks – what’s that in such a big project? Nobody even notices it… but if you are a small company and the total budget of your implementation is $100K then you can’t spend $10K on repairing that bug. Is that possible that might be the reason of the big problems “we the world” are facing that this is something nobody taken into account – because there are almost no companies in America who could not spend at least $1-2M on such a project? A guy at the Small Business Server team at MS told me that they were quite surprised when they found out that small companies don’t have less, but actually more requirements than big ones. I wondered what’s so big news about that? It’s always the little guy who has the craziest requirements. But maybe – they only found it out when they started to sell it abroad? What do you think?


  1245. These things won’t happen, because the tax system as it is not only keeps the thousands of IRS employees employed and busy, but also the private-sector CPAs, tax attorneys, consultants, etc.
    . . . . Ah, capitalism!

    Jeff, WTF? How is capitalism to blame for the U.S. tax code? If anything, maybe you should blame the government for interfering in the economy. Broken-window arguments, such as keeping the tax industry in business helps the economy or requiring full-service gas pumps helps the economy, usually come from statist interventionists more than capitalists. Congressmen using the Tax Code to promote social policies is one reason the tax code is so complex. I do not think many free-market promoters would oppose a serious simplification of the U.S. tax code.

    There’s BIG money to be had in job-security-through-obscurity.
    Yes, but how are the congressman benefitting from this? If they are taking kickbacks, then that demonstrates a failure of human’s to govern themselves wisely. If job-security-through-obscurity was a HUGE problem in a free-market society, you would see a lot more programmers writing code in INTERCAL. Usually, governments create job-security for certain individuals by regulating a certain field, such as Medicine or Law, that creates an artificial scarcity.

  1246. My definition of software engineering:

    1. Write shell script.
    2. Make shell script executable.
    3. Run shell script.
    4. Does it work? Great! Play “NetHack!” No? Fix your typos and rtfm. Repeat step three.
    5. Profit.

  1247. Just out of curiosity, do you really mean that? Do you seriously expect that one day I might convert to Progressive Liberalism, a movement which I believe, as I have stated many times, is leading you toward inevitable doom?

    YM subsiding into a sea of angry but fertile Muslims with no technical skills? It’s not the only alternative to your current Weltanschauung, which I suspect is leading you (and us, to the extent that a lot of people agree with you) toward other flavours of inevitable doom as well.

  1248. Just a sidenote: I’m currently reading Atlas Shrugged. I’m about halfway through. And now I’m starting to understand what people mean when they say of a book that it changed their lives. Damn, I have remind myself on almost every page that it’s kind of a sci-fi – because it sounds just too real.

  1249. Adrian,
    >YM subsiding into a sea of angry but fertile Muslims with no technical skills?

    I mean subsiding into anyone who happens to come along, Muslim or not. If you don’t believe in the worth of your own culture, you will not reproduce at replacement rate. Why would you? What, after all, would you want to pass on?

    As I understand it, in 2004, John Kerry won the 25 US states with the lowest population growth rate, and George Bush won the 25 with the highest. If you are an American who believes that America Sucks!, why would you want your country to have a future, and why would you sacrifice time, money and devotion to contributing to that future, through having children?

    It doesn’t have to be Muslims who replace you. It can be anyone who believes in themselves enough to have the children you are not having.

    Normally, information does not travel backward in time, so the future cannot be predicted. But demography is a great exception to this rule. If today there are 30 million infants in France, then in 20 years, there will be no more than 30 million French 20-year-olds. The math ain’t hard.

    If the typical Conservative woman has 3 kids, and the typical Progressive Liberal woman has 1 kid and 2 abortions, then soon there will be dramatically fewer typical Progressive Liberal women. Unless you think you can successfully proselytize.

    This was the point of my question to Jeff. Do you think that people like me are likely potential converts to your way of thinking?

    It’s my understanding that in the 1920’s, the members of the American Communist movement frowned on having children. Children take up time and energy that could not then be devoted to The Cause. Where then were they going to get future Communists? By converting the children of non-Communists to their cause. You don’t need babies to replace you when you die, if you can successfully proselytize other people’s babies to your movement.

    As a moderate Leftist, do you believe in your capacity to do this?

    I intend to have 3 children. Do you believe that you’ve got a good shot at converting any of my as yet unborn children to your Progressive cause?

    I have stated many times, and intend to teach my children, that now that no one believes in the Workers’ Paradise, you Progressives no longer have anything toward which to make Progress. You are living on vanity and wishful thinking. Hence, you have no future.

    Do you believe that you will be able to convince my children that I am wrong about you, that you do indeed have a future, which they should embrace and contribute toward?

    If so, may I ask what will your arguments be? What examples? What train of logic will you ask them to follow? How will you demonstrate that yours is a movement of intellectual seriousness, and not just a bunch of Sixties hippy wannabes spouting jargon in order to feel better about yourselves?

    “You say you got a real solution
    Well you know
    we’d all love to see the plan”
    — The Beatles

  1250. >I think memetic children would influence a lot more people than genetic children.

    I agree. But memetic children must be converted from other belief systems. For you to do that, your own belief system must have either serious intellectual firepower, and/or profound emotional appeal.

    Religion appeals to the emotions by promising a reprieve from the horror of inevitable death. It appeals to the intellect by contrast with a materialism which implies that Hitler and his victims share the same ultimate fate, and therefore that morality is pointless.

    Progressivism, as I understand it appeals to the emotions by making Progressives feel morally superior to non-Progressives, on the axiomatic proposition that Progressives “care” more.

    I am not aware of any Progressive appeal to the intellect, at all, in the modern world. Communism appealed to the intellect through Marx’s Dialectical Materialist view of history. This has since been exposed as a fallacy and fraud.

    What, literally, is Left?

    Apparently, self-righteous smugness that doesn’t seem to lead to a lot of progeny. Absent progeny, where then will the Left’s influential mind-children come from?

  1251. If the typical Conservative woman has 3 kids, and the typical Progressive Liberal woman has 1 kid and 2 abortions, then soon there will be dramatically fewer typical Progressive Liberal women. Unless you think you can successfully proselytize.

    I really wonder about this “typical Conservative woman” you’re bandying about here. I presume you know about the general inverse correlation between the educational level a woman reaches and the number of children she has? I reckon a mighty load of those big breeders are going to be distressingly ignorant fundies, and you’re welcome to them (heartfelt apologies to any highly educated fundies who may be reading this, btw, but you guys are not in the central percentiles according to what I’ve heard). I also don’t place much faith in the statistic you quoted once about political orientation being 80% heritable, or whatever it was. External circumstances could have a big impact on a number like that, I’d say. Plenty of people rebel against their parents, and more at some times than others.

    As a moderate Leftist, do you believe in your capacity to do this?

    I expect circumstances to do it for me, in fact. I’ve told you I consider myself to be largely a spectator to all this.

    I intend to have 3 children.

    Waiting for the right window in the career trajectory, is it?

    Carpe diem, I would.

    Progressivism, as I understand it

    There’s your problem right there. I don’t dispute that there *have* been people given to such exuberantly silly notions as William Godwin (1756-1836), Sowell’s principle poster child for the unconstrained (ie wrong) vision up to the point I’ve reached in the book. But I think you (and he) greatly overstate their influence, in the interest of having appealing strawmen to beat upon. If you really want to read about people with creepy visions you should have a look at this – it’ll make your hair curl.

  1252. Adrian,
    >I expect circumstances to do it [proselytize] for me, in fact.

    The facts don’t speak for themselves. They speak for or against competing theories. A successful theory explains the facts AND appeals in some comprehensive integrated fashion to the head and the heart.

    Religion in the modern world appeals to the head and the heart, it just has a bitch of a time explaining the facts in a scientific age. Hence its current difficulties. I don’t see how Progressivism beats its rivals in explaining facts or giving people an INTELLECTUAL sense of meaning and purpose.

    Progressivism’s purpose in this era seems to be purely emotional, with no significant intellectual component that I can find. It offers no wisdom, only self esteem.

    If your theory cannot persuade, and you expect the facts, unaided, to do all the work for you, then you are engaging in that vanity and wishful thinking of which I accused you.

    “Our theories determine what we measure.”
    –Albert Einstein

  1253. Dean,

    “Do you believe that you’ve got a good shot at converting any of my as yet unborn children to your Progressive cause?”

    Actually, you can almost bet on it :-) It seems to me that every generation wants to rebel against the views of their parents and you know what’s really funny? That teenagers perfectly understand each other with their grandparents, because rebellion against rebellion draws a complete circle. But in the longer run yes, your theory is right, because you’ll either have Conservative grandchildren – as an effect of counter-rebellion – or no grandchildren at all (or just 1-2). Actually I guess one of the reasons Bush got re-elected might be that the grandchildren of the post-war baby-boomers just matured about then – “Generation Y” – and they wanted to protest vote against the mostly Liberal views of their parents – who themselves were the children of the war veteran generation, and I assume war veterans must have been mostly Conservative. But it’s just an uninformed guess. Still, I think with a bit of statistical analysis, one could draw clear cycles of how generations protest vote against the views of their parents, i.e. the Reagan-Thatcher-Kohl-era, then the Clinton-Blair-Schröder-era etc.

  1254. Dean,

    However, as a second thought, you are missing some important factor from the equation. For a disastrous future, it does not necessary that next generation start to believe in some kind of Progressive utopia. It’s quite enough if they believe in nothing. I mean a “deny-everything-life-sucks” mindset, when people believe that all politicians and businessmen are dishonest fraudsters, corporations not generate, but steal wealth, and so on, and the conclusion being that life is not worth living. I’m thinking of a kind of a neo-punk “deny everything” movement. I think it might be possible that such one will develop and spread, as the original punk movement developed in the first Reagen-Thatcher-Kohl Neocon era. It’s quite possible that a neo-punk nihilist movement will develop in this one. Nihilism is quite enough for the civ to collapse, utopian beliefs and fixed ideas are not necessary.

    In order to fight nihilism, you have to find and show youngsters something that makes life worth living. And that’s a damn hard task as the one who asserts must bear the proof of burden, not the one who denies. And the problem is that nowadays it’s very hard to find. I think we no longer believe that just as people did in the fifties that the development of technology will fundamentally change the world, because mostly everybody realized that the real problem is with ourselves, not with our tools. To rediscover some dream that makes life worth living, either a fundamental change in the ontological status of man would be necessary – i.e. rediscovering religion. But I don’t think that’s feasible. Or a fundamental change in human nature itself – finding something like Prozac, mixing that into tap water and that’d make everybody cheerful, optimistic and enterprising. That’s not really likely to happen either. Then what? How fight nihilism? Do you remember the movie Trainspotting and the “choose life” monologue? Do you have any good answer to refute that? I personally don’t have – the only reason I didn’t become a nihilist is that I have a too strong life instinct and have some vague feeling that betraying myself would be a sin against all the ancestors who invested their genes into me. But it’s just an instinct – not a reasonable argument that could be used to convince others.

  1255. Shenpen,
    >Do you have any good answer to refute that? I personally don’t have

    Am I to understand that Buddhism offers you no answer to nihilism? No equivalent to: “Jesus loves you and will save your soul if you sincerely ask Him to.”

    Or: “God made a covenant with Abraham which will grant you eternal life if you keep your end of the bargain.”

    Please help me understand, why does anyone become a Buddhist if it offers no protection against the Abyss?

  1256. As for my own answer:
    “There is no god but the Singularity, and K. Eric Drexler is its prophet.”

    I am a rootless, cosmopolitan, Godless windbag. What the fuck else have I got?

  1257. No. You should just understand it as I haven’t been to a meditation center in the last12 months and therefore forgot almost everything. Because it’s not based on belief but on practice, it works like a gym: 12 months not visiting a gym and all the muscles are gone. Unless one reaches a state that’s unchanging, but that would require about a hundred times more effort I’m giving to it.

  1258. As for your answer (and mine ones) does it practically mean that we have NO means to protect future generations against nihilism except for maybe a handful of people – unless somebody else figures out some really great and feasible idea?

  1259. Yes, as it stands, we’re fucked. For now.

    But I still regard this predicament as a temporary aberration. Earlier generations had what they regarded as solid evidence of God’s existence and benevolence. Our grandparents were the first generation to have any genuine understanding of what the universe is really made of, physically speaking. Our parents were the first generation to grow up post-Freud. We are the first generation to be able to view detailed images of what is going on inside the brain of a living person. We can see our souls, as it were.

    Earlier peoples have faced existential angst, of course. But we are the first to face it with this kind of intensity. Ultimately, assuming we survive, things will shake out and a new worldview will gradually come together which makes sense of the information we’ve gained through our new powers.

    And if we don’t survive, then no worries.

    As for me, I intend to do my part on the side of the angels. Adrian and Jeff will ridicule me and call me a ‘chicken-hawk,’ of course.

    But nonetheless, I have something to do, someone to love, and something to hope for. What else does a man need?

  1260. And probably this mostly is what I meant that a change is required either in our understanding human nature and maybe finding ways to change it. Which I have to hastily add that I by no means mean a top-driven, coercive change but simply finding ways people can choose to change themselves if they want to.

    Personally, I’m investing big hopes in Martin Seligman’s Positive Psychology: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Positive_psychology – that’s from my viewpoint almost 100% pure Buddhism but in a scientific, research-and-proof based way that any skeptic can accept and use.

  1261. A question to everybody: basically, I think despite our differences in political views we agree in one thing: quite lots of people believe in things we consider irrational and false, basically a superstitions, but it takes quite a lot of reading and learning (and also quite some intelligence, by the way) to be able to reach a state of understanding when one can refuse these ideas. I think we only differ in which ideas we consider irrational and false. Agreed?

    Then, the question: as time being the scarcest resource, how can we optimistically hope that the average Joe can find enough time do this reading and learning? If you finish working at 5PM, commute half an hour, do some sports, frequent movies and theaters, go out with friends a bit, do your chores at home, shop, check out that interesting Mongolian restaurant that just recently opened in your town, have some fun at Saturday evenings, generally go to some places to have fun in weekends, and spend as much time with your significant other as she/he deserves – you can consider yourself lucky if you have 15 hours a week for uploading information and informative entertaintment in your brain. And this 15 hours is divided between TV, radio, listening to music, seeing movies, newspapers, mags, the net, and books. It’s just damn impossible to educate yourself without sacrificing fun in your life – all the little I know about science is what I’ve gather in my teen and college years, because I can simply find no time to significantly reduce that long, long list of what I’d like to read. I’m reading Atlas Shrugged for two damnd weeks now and is about halfway through it, because all the other sources of information I listed above always have some interesting bits that take up just half an hour, but all this little times add up and in the end there is simply no time for real self-education. Just think about how much time it takes to read a fatter daily newspaper. Add to it the fact that the average Joe is probably much more a TV-junkie than we are and the result is that most people have ZERO chance to read enough to be able to refute popular superstitions. Therefore, do we have any ground to hope that some kind of “age of reason” might come, sometime in the future?

  1262. The facts don’t speak for themselves. They speak for or against competing theories. A successful theory explains the facts AND appeals in some comprehensive integrated fashion to the head and the heart.

    Spare me yer marketing platitudes. Theories are often after-the-fact justifications for stuff someone wanted to do anyway.

    Progressivism’s purpose in this era seems to be purely emotional, with no significant intellectual component that I can find. It offers no wisdom, only self esteem.

    You keep saying stuff along these lines. I don’t recognise any portion of what I believe in it, though, which is why I call it a strawman.

    If your theory cannot persuade, and you expect the facts, unaided, to do all the work for you, then you are engaging in that vanity and wishful thinking of which I accused you.

    I just don’t have any plans to take up politics beyond arguing about it on blogs, that’s all. I consider myself a green libertarian – that is, I respect pretty much all freedoms except the freedom to externalise costs. I’m sure someone’s going to pipe up and say that’s a contradiction in terms for some reason, but it’s hardly any worse than being pro-war and libertarian.

  1263. As for my own answer:
    “There is no god but the Singularity, and K. Eric Drexler is its prophet.”

    I wonder if anyone’s told Thomas Sowell about the Singularity. Ain’t no vision less constrained that I’ve come across.

    Adrian and Jeff will ridicule me and call me a ‘chicken-hawk,’ of course.

    I tend to reserve that term for politicians with no military experience who are happy to send people off to die, rather than the contents of the peanut gallery as such.

  1264. Shenpen,
    >do we have any ground to hope that some kind of “age of reason” might come, sometime in the future?

    Nope. Ideas as such are the playthings of intellectuals. Ordinary folks got eatin, and drinkin, and fuckin to do. Which is as it should be.

    The duty of people like us, monomaniacs of the psyche, is to serve the ordinary schmucks well in our pointy-headedness. Our spoutings should give them confidence and alacrity in their attempts to do right, and mortification and trembling when they do wrong.

    Above all, our pretty words should never be used to rationalize oppression, cruelty or evildoing on our own part. Honor commands us to light the path of wisdom, justice, temperance, fortitude, faith, hope and charity. Our superior eloquence, combined with the most elementary common decency, obliges us to spread enlightenment, not charlatanism and sophistry.

    Unfortunately our track record sucks.

  1265. >Idea as such are the playthings of intelllectuals.

    At least playthings are fun. Wheee! ;-)

  1266. Shenpen, I have a theory about the U.S. economy favoring large companies. The U.S. has often seen periods of economic booms and economic busts. Unfortunately, when the economy goes south, only the strongest companies survive, and when the economy improves, the strong companies have already consolidated their position (or the U.S. government, fearing loss of industry, has enacted protective measures to keep those companies in business), and competition is not feasible. Take a look at the list of U.S. automobile manufacturers for an example of this phenomenon.

  1267. Phil,

    Confusing certain features of our economy, government, etc. with laws of nature is an easy trap to fall into. For example, I highly doubt that the US economy would favor large companies, were it not for this.

  1268. Jeff, another example of this phenomenon was Prohibition. When the 21st Ammendment repealed 18th(?) Ammendment, the only alchoholic beverage manufacturers left were those who could afford to retain their manufacturing plants, so only the big players were left.

  1269. Life lesson #1,692: If you fuck a girl and her sister, regardless of the temporal and geographic divide between the two incidents, they will find out about it. And you will be made to suffer.

    So what’s up dickbags? Somebody should start a mailing list or a discussion board or something, because this comment thread is becoming un-fucking-real.

  1270. That sounds like a fine tale Peter ;-) Care to indulge?

    Our puppet master has abandoned us, we are all alone in this cold, desolate cyber-wilderness, this thread is all I have left to reassure me that there is intelligent life out there…but even I have to admit that this is getting, as you say, un-fucking-real :-)

    ESR…get yer thumb outta yer arse ;-)

  1271. In my defense, I didn’t know they were (step-)sisters at the time.

    And guys, I’m being super-cereal here… WTF happened to ESR? Maybe he finally bought an Xbox 360 and Gears of War and has decided to completely waste the next year of his life on it. That’s what I’m planning to do, anyway.

  1272. …more likely an XBox and “Dead or Alive Extreme”…along with the pleasures of Ms. Palm and her five sisters ;-)

    Me, I’m a Playstation guy…I’m just waiting for #3 to (a) enter a second/third production run with the bugs ironed out, and (b) the price to drop below ‘anal gang rape’ levels…

  1273. I am thinking about buying a Wii if Nintendo can manage to lure third-party developers onto the platform. Since I just purchased a MacBook, and since I am a poor college kid, I do not have the money to afford a Wii anytime soon. :.(

  1274. Is there any point in buying a console when just putting a strong video card into your PC provides the same thing? I always thought console were invented for those kind of people who are seriously challenged by the complexity of a Next/Next/OK installation of a game on a PC. Isn’t it so? Although the Wii’s controller is tempting, I admit, but I think we’ll see somebody manufacture a similar one for the PC as well in a year at most.

  1275. On the other hand, if one never had a console I think February will be a good time to buy one for really cheap just out of curiosity, because I think about that time will all the kids who gto a PS/3 for Xmas with 2-3 games will get bored of it and put their old PS/2 to Ebay for the price of another PS/3 game or two.

  1276. Shenpen, game consoles are cheaper to produce than computers and they usually cost less than a top-end video card alone.

    I’m strongly leaning towards a Wii. But Microsoft won this round of the console wars. Gamers who are tired of the usual will love the Wii’s gimmicky-in-a-good-way controller, but the gaming demographic cares mainly about one thing: GRAPHICS. And the PS3 has too hefty a pricetag, makes too much heat and noise, and consumes way too much electricity to deliver a graphical experience that is slightly worse than the Xbox 360. The Wii, being essentially an overclocked Gamecube, is completely out of the running along that axis.

    From a developer standpoint, also, Microsoft wins with what John Carmack calls the best dev kit for a console ever.

    Meanwhile, Gingrich considers whether we should continue to enjoy our free speech in light of the War on Terra:

    http://www.unionleader.com/article.aspx?headline=Gingrich+raises+alarm+at+event+honoring+those+who+stand+up+for+freedom+of+speech&articleId=d3f4ee4e-1e90-475a-b1b0-bbcd5baedd78

    Oh wait, GOP contributors and the religious right should have fewer restrictions, whereas the Party’s critics will likely have more. First habeas corpus and ,now free speech. Best thank your lucky stars these bastards don’t have control of Congress anymore… we really were on the fast track to fascism.

  1277. I thought the PS3 had the bestestest graphics performance going…?

    Although graphics and performance can be matched by good PC hardware and plenty of memory, I still rate the gaming experience afforded by being able to recline on a sofa with a fuck-off huge LCD tv and wireless controllers ;-)

    Hunching over my desk for yet another marathon keyboard/mouse UT fragfest can get uncomfortable…

    Actually, if PS added a gyroscopic motion sensor (like those funky mice) into their controller, that would rock…use the analog thumb-stick for large motion (running around etc) and the gyroscopic part for aiming…oh yeah baby…

  1278. PS. Jeff, the article does not say what your feverish mind wishes it to say. Not that it is deep or insightful in any way. You need to become better informed and think more seriously about these things.

  1279. Pete Bessman,

    Well if someone as high-profile as our gracious host were to kick off suddenly, it’d be all over the intertubes — faster even than the Hans-Reiser-as-murder-suspect story broke. All of this can mean only one thing…

    He really is undergoing intensive swordchuck training deep in the Himalayas…

  1280. …without prompting, I will also offer a conciliatory apology to you Jeff, and eat some humble pie…

    Although my criticism was based on that poorly worded article, I hear/see other news reports today that do indeed confirm your suspicions…

    Looks like I’ll have to consign Gingrich to the same shitlist as that other fascist fucker, McCain. They seem to be on the same page regarding *seizing* our freedoms.

  1281. “…Is that facetiousnes I detect?…”

    If you’re referring to my 1414 || 1415 posts…no…I am being sincere. I hope that’s the answer you wanted :-)

  1282. He really is undergoing intensive swordchuck training deep in the Himalayas…

    Fuckin’ a right. Maybe he’s training under my old master…

    RE consoles: there’s a huge “just fuckin’ works” factor. Every 3-5 years, you plop down 3-5 hundred bucks, and you got no-hassle gaming. Also, Dan nailed it with the rockin’ the big couch and big screen from afar dealie. Not getting CTS is kinda cool.

    And my picks for gaming this year are the 360 for yer bald space marine games, and the Wii for essentially everything else. The PS3 is looking like a PC with an identity crisis. Yeah, I’m a geek, but trust me, the ability to install linux isn’t exactly a selling point for my gaming console. FFS.

  1283. Just to share something interesting…

    Here is a direct link to the video

    I’ve been watching that as well. It really does look like a lot of important people don’t even want to *think* about the implications of opening this particular can of worms, let alone talk about it. I was a bit disappointed at the end when they went hard for the New World Order conspiracy stuff, I’d have liked to know more about what the consequences of admitting that the income tax was unconstitutional would be for the government. Not very practical to expect them to pay it all back.

  1284. Pardon my n00bness; what is the definition of ‘Murkan?’ I searched Wikipedia, but the only entry returned, Merkin, was a pubic wig, worn by prostitutes after shaving their genitalia to eliminate lice or to disguise the marks of syphilis. That does not sound like any conservative philosophy that I have even seen! :)

  1285. I tried reading that article, but my bull-shit detectors set near-record heights, so I decided to cool-off with some more rational commentary, like Slashdot.

  1286. Yet more infantile associative denigration.

    Thrill me further with your scathing insight Jeff…

  1287. My point has been, and continues to be, that the War on Terror is an inquisition with both ethnoracial and thermodynamic (think “peak oil”) motivations — and has little to do with terrorism. The fact that members of the GOP’s *base* are committing the same kinds of despicable acts, yet are being neither reported nor tried as terrorists, seems to confirm this suspicion.

    Soi-disant libertarians who are looking for a principled stance on terrorism must clean out their sty, and realize the Republican party has nothing to do with such a principled stance.

  1288. Throwing a little vocabulary around to gussy-up your vapid assertions doesn’t further your paranoid crusade.

    *You* can think “peal oil” all you want, as it seems to play to your psychology…I’ll stick to science and reason thanks ;-)

    As for your “ethnoracial” and “thermodynamic” kerfufftibuggle…see sentence # 1.

    I can get plenty of lefty conspiracy claptrap from Google, should I desire it…do you have anything better to offer?

  1289. Actually Adrian, in this instance (illegal migration) I sincerely believe that Bush *doesn’t* understand the damage his abject failure to enforce the law is having/will have. He is playing the cynical and ignorant game of vote-farming, and I damn him for that…as well as his failure on income tax abolition/reform…and social ‘security’ abolition/reform…the timeline of his political career is insignificant next to the far-reaching implications of such mindless politics.

    If Bush *does* understand the damaging course he’s charting for America with such [non]policies, he should probably be strung up on the White House lawn ;-)

  1290. Only in Murka do we arrest drunks for driving cars, but let them wage wars.

    Liberals aren’t nuts — they’re just unwilling to entrust the largest concentration of military might in human history to a man who is corrupt to his very core — even on a neurochemical level.

    Then again, it’s entirely possible that the pervasive American mindset of “truthiness” serves mainly to fuel yet another addiction

  1291. No…I’ve mulled it over and I truly have no idea what you’re talking about, Pete…did you booze’n’blog? ;-)

  1292. “Lolerskates” seems to be an elaboration of lol. Pete probably wanted to say he was laughing so hard we might be wearing “lolerskates.” I’ve also seen a “rofl-o-copter,” with the notional transportation device represented in ASCII art.

    This should go in the Jargon File. ;-)

  1293. David, it seems like Dan Kane ought to get out more, maybe spend some more time at his neighborhood OMGWTFBBQ.

  1294. You could very well be right Jeff ;-) I prefer to stay inside my cave and clean my guns while muttering about the NWO, however…

  1295. David Delony,

    I was going to suggest that Jargon doesn’t seem like a repository for internet slang… however, it seems as if the prevailing opinion is that Jargon has been debased since coming under ESR’s authorship, and especially since he described his own neoconservative opinions as representative of the “hacker community”, so what the hell? Let’s put an entire l33tsp33k glossary in there.

  1296. Jeff, I think you’re the only one here truly concerned about validating/repudiating the administration. To go anywhere with that, we’d first have to figure out what constitutes a valid/good administration, and that in and of itself is a huge topic.

    And let’s just say you win — the administration is a bunch of idiots who don’t deserve to be in office. Is that even anything new? I’d wager not. And where do we go from there? Just because they’re idiots, every thing they oppose is wrong, so we should uphold Kyoto, nullify NAFTA, submit to the UN, withdraw from Iraq and Afghanistan, nationalize health care, save the rainforests, kill the fetuses, and buy Bob Dole some viagra?

    Let’s stick to the issues. kplzthxbi

  1297. He e-mailed me the other day. He’s probably just playing around with his analytical engine.

  1298. Analytical engine?

    So all this is just because hacking > blogging for the time being? Best news I’ve heard in a while.

    Let’s just hope this analytical engine isn’t part of another config system he’ll crash the kernel party with again to try to get included.

  1299. Pete,

    thanks for the all the hard work invested in making the comment box almost unreadable on your blog :-) But it isn’t perfect. Light green on white – it’s almost readable. Why not light yellow on white? That’d be something :-)

  1300. Our gracious host has co-authored a well-thought-out article on the transition to 64-bit machines and what this means for OS dominance.

    I have mixed feelings about it; it seems to be asking the wrong question, viz.: “How many of our core values must we compromise in order to secure the dominant position?”

    Corporate America is in Microsoft’s pocket. That battle has been lost. Barring a severe gaffe, I think that Richard Stallman and the OLPC project have the right approach: reach out to other countries, especially the poorer ones, and through free software and cheap hardware give them the means to independence and self-sufficiency to create an alternative IT infrastructure independent of American control. Then maybe the Americans will have to yield to more openness in order to participate in the global economy.

  1301. Sorry, above it should read “That battle has been lost, barring a severe gaffe on Microsoft’s part. I think that…”

  1302. hahaha damn..
    what a funny post and fucking hilarious comment trail… you guys are so fucking ignorant! you need to get out more and talk to other people from different cultures. dont let bad apples in every community get you to stereotype the entire community itself. think about it instead of being so fucking arrogant.

  1303. Jeff, you surely know how to make something unpopular :-))) Do you seriously expect your compatriots to buy into an idea that’s expressed and marketed this way? :-)

    BTW on the practical side I think FLOSS is more and more moving to the applications development rather than systems development. To me a box running Windows on the systems side but largely FLOSS on the applications side looks like the way to go. Maybe it was an error that the FLOSS community concentrated their efforts to operating systems, as from the end-user’s viewpoint they might be not so important. Of course they are important from a theoretical software liberty viewpoint but are not so important from the natural viewpoint of the end-user wanting high-quality easy to use software at low costs and not caring much about theoretical liberties. On the OS level, I think the battle is more and more looking like an Ubuntu vs. Mac vs. Windows and basically nothing else – it’s amazing how much just $10M can do. On the applications side many Windows-only, .NET-based FLOSS software like MediaPortal look very promising. Maybe this is the way to go. (Of course, maybe not.) Still, it seems to me the hacker/enthusiasist community is more and more going towards the Mac. (On the other hand, Ubuntu makes GNU/Linux itself move more and more towards the Mac. So it’s not easy to tell…)

  1304. Actually it’s funny that you claim you aren’t really a dedicated left-wing – if I understood you correctly, if not then sorry – and still make that error that’s the trademark of them: misunderstanding human nature. I think human nature is 50% made up of self-interest. Another 30% is made up of pride, of the wish to feel important. Another 20% is made of love, hate and other emotions. The mileages do vary but I think the proportions don’t: in a mostly sane society self-interest tends to be the largest influence factor of decisions and the wish to feel important tends to be the second. RMS has largely based his movement on the wish to feel important. ESR based his one on self-interest. What is your idea based on? To me it seems to be based on a very minor chunk of the wish to feel important.

  1305. How many of our core values must we compromise in order to secure the dominant position?

    If you aren’t a GNU/Hippie, that question isn’t relevant.

  1306. Bessman,

    If you aren’t a GNU/Hippie, that question isn’t relevant.

    If you care about open source or free software and believe it’s a better way of doing things, then the question is very relevant. If you don’t, you shrug your shoulders and use Windows, or pony up the patent license fees the next time Microsoft deploys one of its tried and true, of-course-you-realize-you’re-stealing-our-IP gambits. (They did it to the HCC in 1976, and thirty years later they’re trying again with the Linux crowd in the wake of the Novell/Microsoft deal.)

  1307. Shenpen, Windows doesn’t have much of an open source community. What’s there is mainly dedicated to getting things Linux users enjoy running on Win32: Cygwin, GCC, Emacs, etc. The reason why is simple: Microsoft caters to a culture which strongly favors proprietary software. Microsoft works with hardware, software, and media companies to ensure that their IP and profit streams are protected, by closing the source and implementing other restrictions such as DRM. It’s a fact of life of the culture, and it’s not going away until the RIAA, MPAA, and so forth also go away. This is why Windows will win in America, because the renegade Linux community cannot guarantee the profits to big corporations that Microsoft, another big corporation, will guarantee. This is the thing that the “GNU/Hippies” do not see; they think that with suitable drum-banging people will realize that open source is better.

    Open source has found some pull on the internet and the Web, but it’s only seriously considered in a software-as-a-service context, where the application can be deployed to end users without the bulk of the code running on their computers. That will only get you so far, and that’s about the extent of open source’s serious market pull. In America, open source will largely be confined to the university and the server room. In the rest of the world, there is hope.

    Please do bear in mind that I think it’s great to make a profit. Where capitalism has gone awry in America is when entities — particularly large corporations — expect a profit, and employ all manner of game-rigging in order to guarantee that they are profitable, even when the market has already passed them by.

    Faced with imminent insolvency, oil companies install drunken, belligerent presidents to make war in petroleum-rich nations. We’re seeing the tip of a tremendous iceberg of what media companies will do when faced with imminent insolvency.

  1308. …and still make that error that’s the trademark of them: misunderstanding human nature.

    I think a corresponding error of the right might be thinking they have human nature down (eg Thomas Sowell’s “constrained vision”), often with some evpsych overlay or other. I suspect this is also why many of them are under the impression that economics is a science.

    I think human nature is 50% made up of self-interest. Another 30% is made up of pride, of the wish to feel important. Another 20% is made of love, hate and other emotions.

    Even if these figures related to anything meaningful, they’d still fluctuate from individual to individual and from time to time. Averages wouldn’t tell us much, either, actions would depend on where the parameters stood at a given time.

  1309. Please do bear in mind that I think it’s great to make a profit. Where capitalism has gone awry in America is when entities — particularly large corporations — expect a profit, and employ all manner of game-rigging in order to guarantee that they are profitable, even when the market has already passed them by.

    Jeff, corporate CEOs are supposed to do what is in the best interests of the shareholders. If there is a powerful but easily manipulated entity (i.e. a government) in town, it is in the best interests of the shareholders to manipulate that entity to the advantage of the corporation. A corporation, an artificial person, is acting in its own best interests just like any real person. It seems stupid to have such a powerful organization that can be so easily manipulated (i.e. ‘captured’) by special interest groups.

  1310. Phil,
    >a powerful but easily manipulated entity (i.e. a government)…so easily manipulated (i.e. ‘captured’) by special interest groups.

    A very insightful observation. I wish I’d said that.

  1311. This is why Windows will win in America, because the renegade Linux community cannot guarantee the profits to big corporations that Microsoft, another big corporation, will guarantee.

    So, why the hell is Linux winning in the server space? Corporations are idealistically loyal to one thing: money. If Linux offers a lower TCO, or more growth opportunity, it will beat Microsoft. Even though Microsoft is a big corporation, Novell and IBM are also rather large.

  1312. Phil,

    The article ESR put out is specifically about Linux in the desktop space; and if you read my prior postings you would see that I stated that Linux wouldn’t get very far outside the server room or academia, its enormous progress within these domains notwithstanding. My point is that Linux on the desktop is a lost battle because people want to play their proprietary 3D games and DRM-encumbered, region-locked videos encoded with patented closed-source codecs. The {RI|MP}AA goes to Microsoft and goes, “We need comprehensive DRM to plug the digital and analog holes when it comes to media playback.” Microsoft, not wanting to throw the incredibly lucrative media-PC game entirely, says “Okay” and builds these proprietary technologies into Vista. The Linux and free software community, or as Bessman calls them, GNU/Hippies, not only cannot afford the steep license fees necessary to distribute the codecs, encryption protocols, and so forth which constitute the media-playback stack, they cry foul, citing the demands of the media content industry as inimical to their core values because the content industry demands that users relinquish control over their hardware. So the entire content industry as far as PCs go will be confined to Windows, and probably Mac as Apple makes certain concessions, because Microsoft and Apple will guarantee the content industry the terms under which they will release digital media: terms which preclude end-user freedom. These same companies, of course, many of them use Linux in their server rooms and even on their render farms; but they cannot afford to have the Linux value of complete control over end-user hardware to become dominant on the desktop because it fucks with their business model.

  1313. Jeff,
    >Microsoft and Apple will guarantee the content industry the terms under which they will release digital media

    Not to be left out is the reputation that Linux has for being HARD, at least for end-users. The rap on Linux is that, in order to use it, you must actually understand how your computer works.

    Most people do not want to do this. They want to play games, surf the web, send email, type letters, create PowerPoint slides, etc. They do not want to know what a clock cycle is.

    I once considered joining the local Linux users group here in Dallas. Unlike, say, the Mac people, the Linux hackers were snooty, hard-core geeks. I was ignorant as a stump, and too stupid to live, and they let me know it. And I didn’t go back.

    There is an argument to be made that capitalism makes people nicer. You have to talk sweetly to customers, if you want them to buy. You can only afford to be rude and surly with those who buy from you if they MUST. Thus the haughtiness of the DMV matron.

    But in stores where you are free to take your business elsewhere, the clerks are nice, or they aren’t clerks for long.

    The Linux community has a revolutionary socialist ethos. Commerce is evil. Content should be free. People should create and improve code because they love it, not because they want filthy lucre.

    This attitude goes hand in hand with:
    “Read The Fucking Manual, you stupid n00b!”

    I can’t argue with the righteousness of the stereotypical Linux hackers attitude. Compared to esr, I am a stupid n00b, and always will be. I have some intellectual talent, but programming is not by bag, baby.

    But hackers are not entirely correct to blame Linux’s failure as a desktop OS to the machinations of big bad Microsoft. Or of the evil content distributors.

    When you act like a dick to potential customers, you get fucked by the market.

    That may not be Social Justice, but it is reality.

  1314. Most people do not want to do this. They want to play games, surf the web, send email, type letters, create PowerPoint slides, etc. They do not want to know what a clock cycle is.

    Whose fault is that? It is not like a hacker to brook willful ignorance. If the American market is optimized to cater to and even cultivate willful stupidity, is it the hackers’ fault that they experience initial difficulties operating within the market framework?

    The Linux community has a revolutionary socialist ethos. Commerce is evil. Content should be free. People should create and improve code because they love it, not because they want filthy lucre.

    You’re creeping into Scott McCollum territory. “Linux users are all dirty communist hippies who are in league with Al Qaeda. Buy Microsoft, and help prevent another 9/11!” Really, self-narratization of this short will be the end of you. The Linux community consists of a spectrum of viewpoints ranging from the hardcore, RMS-like types to people trying to make a buck. And that the free software ethos is not that commerce is evil, more like hiding information from hackers leads to ugliness and inefficiency, and that revealing information to hackers helps them improve things, netting long-term benefits for everybody. And that content should be usable by anyone who paid for a copy. I have a really staggering number of DVDs which I paid for, but playing them on a Linux machine requires violation of U.S. copyright law, due more to the whims of the content industry than anything else. Hackers value principles which the market doesn’t necessarily select for. Small wonder, then, that they should look beyond, and sometimes even be critical of, the market. As long as you remain on that machiavellian/randian axis of “self interest”, the entire topological space of solutions which net benefits for both you and the other guy is closed off to you.

    But hey, if catering to and promoting the ignorance of the masses so that the few can continue to profit is really your thing, small wonder you’re a conservative. I suppose as long as everybody’s breeding adequately everything will be hunky-dory, no?

  1315. Jeff,
    >catering to and promoting the ignorance of the masses

    To borrow Neal Stephenson’s phraseology, there are Morlocks with know-how, and Eloi with money. In a market economy, Morlocks who cater to the tastes and desires of the masses get the Eloi’s money. Snooty mandarins don’t. Or at least not as much.

    >the entire topological space of solutions…is closed off to you

    I admit that there are limitations to the capitalist model, but I don’t find it emotionally repugnant. I don’t imagine that there are going to be solutions that satisfy everybody, or that even completely satisfy anybody. I believe that human nature is insatiable, that we are NEVER completely satisfied.

    THAT’S what makes me a Conservative.

  1316. Really, self-narratization of this short will be the end of you.

    That’s like the pot calling the kettle black.

    I have a really staggering number of DVDs which I paid for, but playing them on a Linux machine requires violation of U.S. copyright law, due more to the whims of the content industry than anything else. Hackers value principles which the market doesn’t necessarily select for. Small wonder, then, that they should look beyond, and sometimes even be critical of, the market.

    How does the DMCA relate to a (free) market? The two cannot coexist!

    But hey, if catering to and promoting the ignorance of the masses so that the few can continue to profit is really your thing, small wonder you’re a conservative.

    That sounds like more of a socialist’s bag to me.

  1317. I think Free and Open Source software is the ultimate free market success story. RMS could have simply found a sympathetic politician to force software hoarders to release their source, but he chose to write Free Software and recruit like-minded hackers. Perhaps he realized that a government that could force people to release code could also do nasty things to *him*. He wisely decided it was better to ‘vote with his feet’.

  1318. The olpc runs
    Linux and has a very cool interface. Sugar is the core of the OLPC Human Interface. Its goal is to turn the Laptop into a fun, easy to use, social experience that promotes sharing and learning. Hey, this could change the world, the kids can even fire
    up Python! Wow!

  1319. On Conservativism:

    I think the decisions we make about which side of politics we choose are made much deeper than the conscious functioning of our minds. It’s almost an instinct and I think it can be reduced to one choice: choosing between respect and pity.

    I think Conservatives become of people who like to feel respect. Who like to look up to others who think are better or doing something better than themselves. Beat a Conservative in any competition and you have made a friend. If a Conservative turns on the TV and sees a sports match between two parties he is otherwise not emotional about, he automatically will support the winning one just because in his way of thinking, winning is wired to performance and performance is wired to respect.

    I think Liberals become of people who like to feel pity. Who like to look down to others who are weaker than they and therefore need their pity. Tell to a Liberal you need his help and you’ve made a friend. If a Liberal turns on the TV and sees a sports match between two parties he is otherwise not emotional about, he automatically will support the losing one just because in his way of thinking, losing is wired to bad luck and bad luck is wired to pity.

    To a Liberal, a person, an organization or a country which is strong, successful and rich is automatically guilty unless proven otherwise, while Conservatives do it exactly the other way around.

    It’s something much deeper than choosing between agendas. Probably when you are 14 years old, even if you’ve never ever paid a thought to actual politics, in your subconscious it was already decided. Just think about your early teenagerhood, when you were 12-14. If you tried to dress poorer than you are, meaning hippy, punk, ghetto or consciously poor intellectual fashion, your were already bound to become a Liberal. If you tried to dress richer than you are, meaning disco glitz, or the bling-bling side of ghetto fashion, or tried to dress strong via the eagle or devil-shaped belt buckles and other similar rocker (or cowboy) accessories of the Harley-style, or if you tried to dress like a little businessman or scientist, you were already bound to become a Conservative. And you were such a geek that you’ve just put on any clothes your mother put on your bed and never even noticed what they are, you were probably bound to become a Libertarian :-)))

  1320. LOL…Ouch! Shenpen, that stung a little ;-)

    My mother always laid out very nice clothes for me…

    ..until I grew my hair and started dressing like a metal nightmare ;-)

    Alas…the hair is long gone…and I’ve come full circle back to clothes my mother would approve of…except that they better facilitate concealed carry ;-)

  1321. Shenpen,
    >choosing between respect and pity

    Intriguing analysis. What do you suppose is the psychological basis of the choice? Why does a person prefer one emotion to the other? Is there a deeper reason, in your opinion?

  1322. Dean,

    I don’t really know. It just occured to me that some people like to look at things that they feel are “bigger” than themselves – to feel respect – and some people like to look at things that they feel are “smaller” than themselves – to feel pity – and it explains quite a lot of political ideas.

    I cannot really explain it because whenever I try to think deeper about it I tend to end up with quite similar thoughts those mad “ultra-traditionalists” like Julius Evola or René Guénon who believe that the natural state of humanity is a strict hierarchy with a god-king on top and so on. But I do know it’s so damned insane that it makes Mao look like a shining rational thinker in comparision :-))) so it’s just a sign there is a bug somewhere in my thought process. As of yet I was unable to debug it. (Apparently, ESR was fighting with a similar thought-bug at http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=202 – how to maintain human quality without human suffering? )

  1323. Dan Kane,

    “…and I’ve come full circle back to clothes my mother would approve of…”

    Yes, starting to work in an office environment has a “remotherizing” :-) effect on dressing – but the rules can be bent a little… long hair in ponytail… black suits and black shirts and a slightly grim belt buckle… if one is sitting rather in tech than the sales room of the office, a little bit of “goth” can be added to usual businesswear without attracting too much negative attention :-)

  1324. Intriguing analysis. What do you suppose is the psychological basis of the choice? Why does a person prefer one emotion to the other?

    If you think about it, it maps pretty closely into the set of value pairs correlated to Sowell’s constrained/unconstrained continuum, one of which was loyalty/sincerity IIRC. I can see respect/pity fitting right in there.

    I’m having to give Sowell a second chance as I’ve just found some of his ideas being acknowledged in Pinker’s “The Blank Slate” [mutter, gripe].

  1325. Pingback: buy cheap phentermine
  1326. I just finished reading the Wikipedia page about Sayyid Qutb, and I was intrigued to find parallels between his relationship to the Islamist movement, and Karl Marx’s relationship to the Communist movement. It seems that the radical movement is preceded (sometimes many years) by the person (or people) who lay the philosophical underpinnings of the movement. Maybe we should be on the look out for popular philosophers; they could hold the key to the next series of troubles.

  1327. Yay! PA and VA now have concealed-carry reciprocity! I can now visit Independence Hall without a sense of irony ;-)

    Oh bugger…it’s a National Park…irony reengaged :-(

  1328. “…it maps pretty closely into the set of value pairs…”

    I’m glad to read of your new insight into Sowell’s work :-) Keep up with the ‘second chance’…

    I found Shenpen’s perspective interesting as I’ve also delineated people according to their focus on potential versus limitation…I have a gut feeling there’s an underlying abstract threading all these complimentary ‘value pairs’…

  1329. Phil,
    >Maybe we should be on the look out for popular philosophers

    It seems to me that the world is full of charismatic con men (and they are usually men), who combine a mastery of words with a lust for power, in an attempt to germinate a Hofferian mass movement.

    There are two questions:
    1. How artful is the messianic leader wannabe in bringing together all of the right elements for capturing the imagination of a bored and dispirited public, and
    2. Is there a bored and dispirited public whose imagination he can capture? Even the most perfect seed will fail to germinate in infertile soil.

    In my opinion, it’s not the philosopher we need to be on the lookout for, it’s the combination of the messianic talker and the receptive audience. Destroy one or the other early enough in the cycle, and you no longer have a problem.

    The American Revolution could have been postponed indefinitely if a dozen or so men had been killed in, say, 1765. The Soviet Union might never have been born if the Germans hadn’t sent Lenin back into Russia. And, of course, Adolph Hitler was a text book example of the self-made messiah.

    But in each of these examples, there was a public at first willing, then eager to hear the message these men preached. The New England colonists felt themselves put upon and oppressed by a distant monarchy. They felt that they were losing the freedom they had come to the wilderness to enjoy.

    The Russian peasants observed how backward and primitive their lives were, in comparison to the rest of Europe. They blamed the Russian aristocracy for holding them back from the promise of the modern age. They were afraid that if drastic action was not taken, they might remain mired in serfdom while the world left them behind.

    And, of course, the post-WWI Germans felt their cohesion as a nation slipping away. They had only obtained their nationhood in 1870, and were afraid that without some grand and stirring cause, what was left of their unity and vitality would gradually fade away.

    According to Eric Hoffer, a would-be messiah requires a public that is both dissatisfied and bored. The truly wretchedly poor are useless for building a mass movement. They are too busy trying to find food and shelter. Every day they manage to stay alive gives the truly desperately poor a sense of accomplishment and pride, if you will. And in their constant struggle for survival, the wretched are not bored. Their lives are full of high drama, and they do not feel the need for a diversion.

    Once the messiah wannabe finds a group of unhappy and bored people, he must give them:
    1. A sense of Power, and
    2. Faith in the future.

    The sense of power comes from some new method or technique by which the nascent mass movement can crush all opposition. In Lenin’s case it was the use of modern regimented bureaucracy to facilitate centralized control of modern industry. In Hitler’s case it was blitzkrieg (lightning war), and with the Founding Fathers it was the immediacy and flexibility of local government.

    Faith in the future requires a doctrine, a philosophical system that not only sets about describing the world as it is, but authoritatively describes how events will unfold. In order to march forward with perfect confidence, people must feel that the book of the future has already been read, and is completely known. The would-be messiah’s job is to sell people on the idea of the glorious future as a sure thing.

    This is why Christians take Revelations so seriously. Obviously the best secular doctrine in history was Marxism. The state inevitably ‘withering away’ and all that. Hitler had his Thousand Year Reich, and the Founders had Locke, Montesquieu, and the Rights of Man. The spread of Democracy and Liberty was inevitable, don’t you know?

    One last thing that an aspiring messiah needs, according to Hoffer, is an enemy. Or, more precisely, a Demon.

    A demon is perfectly evil, and can therefore be regarded by the public with perfect hatred. This utter loathing inspires unity within the populace, as all come together to vanquish the vile antithesis.

    Again, according to Hoffer, the ideal demon can be portrayed has having three traits:
    1. Singular: the Demon must be unified in purpose, so that he may be hated absolutely. If there is any possibility that your enemy might have a change of heart, you will want to persuade him, not kill him. You will only feel total hatred toward a perfect Devil, who knows neither remorse nor fear.
    2. Omnipotent: the Demon must be nearly all-powerful, so that any setbacks the movement encounters can be blamed on the Demon, and not on any incompetence within the leadership.
    3. Foreign: the goal of the movement must be to drive the interlopers out. If they enemy is From Here, then he is not an interloper, and justice demands that accommodations be made. Only if he is perfectly foreign, as well as singular and powerful, can he be the center around which a mass movement of hatred can be built.

    The Jews make the ideal Demon, because historical circumstances have made them, essentially, foreigners everywhere.

    I believe that what a Conservative social order needs to watch out for is this perfect storm of a demagogue with the right skills and understanding, combined with an unhappy (yet not destitute) and bored public, which would be receptive to his charms.

    Upon finding such trouble brewing, the Conservative government can:
    1. Kill the demagogue
    2. If diagnosed early enough, the demagogue can be bribed into silence or collaboration with the ruling order, and need not be killed
    3. Relieve the boredom of the people by providing them with a distraction, or
    4. Render the people destitute.

    If one or more of these things are done skillfully, at the right time, no more mass movement.

  1330. Now, which of these methods do I prefer?

    I am neither a bleeding-heart liberal, nor a Christian. I understand how omelets are made, and I have a chicken-hawk’s comfort with bloodshed and necessary roughness.

    But.

    I nevertheless prefer method numbers 2 and 3. Keep a close watch on the public mood. Try to diagnose public boredom early, before it becomes too poignant. And if any would-be demagogues come along to exploit what restlessness there may be, move in quickly to shut them up through bribery.

    The ideal bribe, of course, is a government job. There has never, in the history of Man, been a revolutionary born out of a functioning government bureaucracy. There have been many revolutionaries who radicalized AFTER they were fired from a government job, but never before.

    Give a free-thinker a nice secure pension, a senior place in a respected hierarchy, and a little bit of power, and he will quickly become more Conservative than Thurston Howell.

    If you diagnose an unhealthy amount of public unhappiness and boredom, you must give the people something to DO. As an American, I believe that the most useful activity with which to distract and preoccupy the masses is getting rich. Structure the economic order so as to provide the maximum opportunities to ambitious and talented young people who want to channel their energies into productive endeavors. See to it that those who succeed can make big piles of cash, and become important people in their communities.

    Do this consistently and you will have no trouble from the Lenins and Hitlers of the world. They can preach all they like, but they will never develop a large following.

    And if any such demagogue does start to be successful, again, bring him into the government and give him a cushy salary and a few people he can order about. If you catch him early enough, he’ll be no further trouble.

  1331. Oh, Jeff (and anybody else), you might find some insights from this blog entry about the creation of a neocon. It is rather informative.

  1332. MISSION ACCOMPLISHED.

    Iraq’s massive oil reserves, the third-largest in the world, are about to be thrown open for large-scale exploitation by Western oil companies under a controversial law which is expected to come before the Iraqi parliament within days.

  1333. The thesis presupposes the conclusion, Jeff. Your method of argumentation reminds me of an evangelical under the delusion that quoting scripture will convert an atheist.

  1334. >an evangelical under the delusion that quoting scripture will convert an atheist.

    I’ve recently given this phenomena some thought, and I propose that it is not odd for the evangelical, or Jeff, to do this. Each of us embraces a view of the world that rests on certain axiomatic propositions. Axioms are statements that cannot be proven, and need not be proven, because they are regarded as self-evident.

    The philosopher Ayn Rand regarded the primacy of existence over consciousness as axiomatic. In other words, if a tree falls in the forest, and no one is there to hear it, it nevertheless DOES make a sound, because when trees fall on Earth they make sounds, whether those sounds are heard or not. This gives Rand a real problem with quantum mechanics, and the experimentally validated proposition that the observer collapses the wave function.

    Dennis Prager, on his radio show the other day, was discussion how, as an observant Jew, he regards God’s existence as axiomatic. The universe could not have created itself, therefore there must be a Creator. Further, if there is a God, there must be an afterlife, because a non-material God would not have created a purely material existence. Further still, God must be good, because otherwise there is no moral purpose to existence, or to ourselves.

    To which Richard Dawkins would simply respond: “How do you know the universe could not have created itself? What evidence have you?”

    And, of course, Prager has none. You don’t seek evidence for axioms. They are beyond proof.

    I believe that leftists like Jeff regard the iniquity of the Bush administration, and an oil based explanation of the war in Iraq, as well as the larger war on terror, as axiomatic. To Jeff, one need not prove that Bush and Cheney are villains, any more than you would need to prove the tree in the forest thing to Rand, or God’s existence to Prager.

    Just as one need not seek proof for an axiom, there can be no proof against it either. Nothing could have convinced Ayn Rand that consciousness, by itself, has a direct affect on existence, which is why she NEVER came to terms with quantum mechanics and the two-slit experiment. In her world-view, the observer collapsing the wave function is something that just Could Not Be. So she dismissed it.

    By the same token, nothing that could ever happen would demonstrate conclusively to Dennis Prager that there is no God. No amount of evidence that could ever be piled up would be enough, in Prager’s eyes, to constitute proof.

    I’m pretty sure that if Dick Cheney were to die rushing into a burning building to save orphans and kittens, Jeff would dismiss it as a plot to enrich Halliburton and Big Oil. No fact or imaginable collection of facts can alter the validity of an axiomatic proposition. Axioms are what gives facts their meaning.

    In the words of Albert Einstein, our theories determine what we measure. If a fact cannot be made to fit into our theory of existence, we cannot know it.

    Conversely, if a person is reasoning falsely because they are unaware of an axiom, all that need be done, or can be done, is to quote the axiom. Look at reality. Listen to the Word of God.

    How can you not see?

  1335. Leftist/Progressive axiomatic propositions:

    1. It can be taken for granted that those who support Progressive Liberal causes, unless proven otherwise, are motivated by an idealistic concern for Social Justice.

    2. Virtually everything that non-Progressives do is motivated by economics. Conservatives are either motivated by a desire for money, or duped by those who are.

    3. Conservatives actions which are not motivated by money are motivated by reactionary hatred. E.g., opponents of abortion are motivated by hatred of women. The contrary proposition, that they are motivated by concern for the welfare of the fetus, is unthinkable.

    4. Because Progressives don’t take religion seriously, no one else really does either. People who claim that they are motivated by religion (Osama bin Laden, et al) are actually motivated by Social Justice, money or reactionary hatred.

    5. Motives of actions count for more than the consequences of those actions. A person who does bad things for the Right Reasons doesn’t really count as a bad guy (Fidel Castro). A person who does good things for the Wrong Reasons gets no credit (Bush toppling the Taliban).

  1336. 6. Making profits is a kind of theft, or at least it is above some arbitrary threshold.

    7. When people behave badly it’s because their circumstances are bad, except for straight white males who behave bad just because.

    8. (Borrowed from Jim Goad) a poor, powerless working class straight white male in Alabama or Poland is somehow opressing OJ Simpson, Jackie Onassis, Clive Barker etc.

    9. (Just for this issue here) Saddam deserved, used and spent oil profits better than Exxon or Shell could ever do.

  1337. (Ooops, I’ve just noticed I’m getting demagogic. Sorry. Actually it was an attempt to irony – just that I’m not too good at it.)

  1338. Dean,

    what if all that’s behind this respect/pity, potential/limitations (or risks) etc. stuff is the natural difference between masculine and feminine way of thinking? I mean it’s just natural that f.e. if you start doing some risky sports, then your father will be proud and your mother will worry.

  1339. Shenpen, are you saying that contemporary liberals are girly-men? ;-)

    *the Governator nods approvingly*

  1340. 5. Motives of actions count for more than the consequences of those actions. A person who does bad things for the Right Reasons doesn’t really count as a bad guy (Fidel Castro). A person who does good things for the Wrong Reasons gets no credit (Bush toppling the Taliban).

    Let’s see, 650,000 Iraqi civilian deaths since the U.S. invasion vs. around 350,000 deaths under the last twenty decades of Saddam’s rule. Yet the Americans caused all that mayhem (albeit much of it indirectly) for the “right reasons”.

    And no, sweeping in in a phenomenal display of awesome military might to clean up a mess of American making (remember, the CIA backed both the Ba’ath party and the mujahideen) doesn’t exactly count as heroic.

  1341. Just out of curiosity Jeff, do you recognize the axiomatic issue? Yes, of course, I was making fun of you, but do you see that there are propositions at the base of Left-wing thought, which might be brought into question, but which you are not in the habit of questioning?

    I confess I’m still a fan of Ayn Rand. I am not the hard core Randroid I used to be, but I still love the clarity with which she starts from a clear statement of first principles, and proceeds logically on to the most abstract speculations about morality, politics and esthetics.

    But those first principles of hers don’t stand up to scientific scrutiny, any more than Dennis Prager’s do, even though Rand prides herself on being the consummate rationalist.

    I love the simplicity of her axioms:
    1. Existence exists.
    2. Existence is identity. To be is to be something in particular.
    3. Consciousness is the faculty of perceiving that which exists. Consciousness, by itself, does not create or alter existence in any way. Life is not a dream.

    From those three fundamental statements Ayn Rand weaves an elaborate tapestry of logically interconnected propositions, vast and seemingly flawless. I remain in awe of her intellectual achievement.

    But that double slit experiment fucks it all up, big time.

    Is it possible that you, too, have in your personal philosophy, axiomatic propositions which are also seemingly unquestionable, but which do not stand up to empirical investigation?

    Maybe the axioms I identified for you are incorrect. Perhaps your ideas are founded on different first principles. But can you, like Dennis Prager and Ayn Rand, identify them?

    And further, unlike Prager and Rand, can you imagine the possibility that they might not be valid?

    I am not JUST making fun of you, Jeff. I am beginning to think that the Universe is simply so bizarre and unfathomable that NOBODY’S axioms stand up under the full light of day.

    For a self-righteous rationalist like myself, this is a tough pill to swallow.

  1342. Dan Kane,

    well, it would be oversimplified to put it this way. I’d rather say there might be some fundamental feminine/masculine, yin/yang way of subconscious thinking, but I’d not really connect it with actual gender or even with being a “macho” or a “babe” in the directly sexual way. Actually I don’t really know. It might also be just chemically driven (adrenaline/serotonine?) or whatever. And the important thing is that I don’t think one of them would be right and the other wouild be wrong. Rather these should just work in a balance in a similar way than in day-do-day life probably the conscious balance between courage and caution is the way to go. Let’s make something clear: if the so-called Progressive thought would just disappear in a snap, our world would become a sorry one indeed. I would not wish that. Rather, the problem I think is that the balance in mainstream culture is heavily tipped towards their side and it’s unhealthy. Like getting raised by a single parent. It’s kind of funny to think about that the reason Conservatives still have voters in the US and EU is not because millions are able to see through the half-truths of mainstream culture, but that that many of them are simply so thick-skulled bumpkins that they simply didn’t even notice the messages mainstream culture broadcasts and are therefore safe. Security through ignorance.

    I spent about 8000 comments on a political forum on the Net during 2000-20004 and the most important thing I’ve learned there is that the Left and Right probably has similar average intelligence (or wisdom, or common sense, or emotional stability or whatever else that makes not behave foolishly) but the Right has MUCH larger deviation. And this is something hard to cope with, with all of it’s implications.

    Sorry I know it was a chaotic and incoherent comment, I’m tired and somewhat drunk.

  1343. Oh and by the way, Jeff,
    >Let’s see, 650,000 Iraqi civilian deaths since the U.S. invasion vs. around 350,000 deaths under the last twenty decades of Saddam’s rule.

    Twenty decades?

    That Saddam was one long-lived motherfucker, wasn’t he? A regular Methuselah.

    And would you please stop quoting spurious body counts at me?
    1. I have no way to check their validity, so I don’t take them seriously.
    2. I am an unrepentant ethnocentrist. I don’t really give a fuck how many foreigners die as a result of America’s foreign policy. I only care if, at the end of the day, my country is better off as a result of those decisions. And, with regards to Iraq, the jury’s still out, in my opinion.

    As for the poor dying foreigners, let them look after themselves. They sure don’t give a shit about me. The next time some tornado comes tearing through Dallas, I sure as hell don’t expect to be receiving any charity money from Brazil, or Zimbabwe, or even (sorry Shenpen) Hungary.

    Fuck the foreigners. Let them take care of themselves.

    But understand Jeff, even if I were a Christian, and I cared deeply about every starving child in Africa, as Jesus supposedly grieves for every sparrow that falls, I still wouldn’t take your figures seriously. I don’t trust the source.

    In my opinion, you Lefties would tell any lie, fudge any number, spin any yarn, to bolster your precious self-esteem. You are the party of Walter Duranty, and that I cannot forget.

    That’s just the way it is.

  1344. Dean,

    “I am beginning to think that the Universe is simply so bizarre and unfathomable that NOBODY’S axioms stand up under the full light of day.”

    But wasn’t that always brightly obvious at least in the last few decades? I mean I sort of half-remember Karl Popper demonstrating that every scientific theory will always be proved false in the long run and thus we’ll never arrive to any “ultimate” theory, and also Gödel demonstrating that you can never prove the axioms of a system within the system, but import them from outside. (OK, results in math shouldn’t really be applied directly to stuff like politics – I just suspect a connection.)

    Actually there is a nice puzzle somewhat demonstrating Gödel’s theory a bit. Three friends arrive to a hotel and each pay $10 for a room. They pay at once and go to their rooms and then the receiptionist realizes that for three people there is a $5 group discount which he forgot. He sends the waiter up to give them the $5. The waiter thinks “Oh, I’ll just give them $1 each and keep the remaining $2 to myself.” He does so. And then he wonders “OK, so now they each paid $9 for their rooms. Three times $9 is $27 and the other $2 is in my pocket making it $29 – but where is the thirtiest buck?”

  1345. So I guess one of Dean’s axioms would be:
    1. Lefties lie.

    Hmmm. I suppose I should look into what else I take for granted.

  1346. Nice [truncated] monologue ESR…you should post the whole shebang on your catb.org site.

    I did begin to wonder if your hands were nailed to your kneecaps at one point ;-) Gesticulate!

  1347. Gesticulating too little is not as bad as gesticulating too much, as ESR’s arch-nemeses at Microsoft are prone to do. Ever see an episode of The .NET Show? More hand motion than a lonely bachelor’s bathroom has ever seen.

  1348. Shenpen, let me add that I really like your thought processes on conservatism vs. liberalism. Follow the respect/pity thread to its conclusion and you’ll wind up approximately hereabouts.

  1349. Well, I’m not sure how actually that relates to that.

    First I think when you indentify yourself as Conservative it’s often like saying “electronic dance music” – it’s often not electronic, often not dance and very often not music but hey, you have to call it some name in order to avoid always having to talk in baroque sentences. Similarly, post-hippie right-wing isn’t really Conservativism at all in the traditional sense, but I’m just don’t want to always come up with new terms that nobody understands and therefore accept the term. It’s just a label.

    See, I’m 28. I’m the one of the children of hippie generation. (While it wasn’t exactly easy to be a hippie in a Comminist country, my parents managed to import it with surprising authenticity. My father was playing drums in a teenager band playing Beatles songs in 1965, which might be surprising, because the powers that be of course didn’t approve it at all, but they somehow managed. And of course they became yuppies later on.)

    From my viewpoint, all that was bad in old-style Conservativism such as mindless religious fundamentalism, sexism, racism, jingoistic patriotism etc. etc. was largely done away with the revolutions of the hippie generation of our parents. Which is completely all right.

    But as their job was to demolish what sucked, all they managed to build is a mainstream which resembles a psychological desert and is driven by ersatz-emotions like “tolerance” (in the bad sense – of course tolerance can be a great virtue but not THAT kind of tolerance).

    Therefore I think the job of our generation is to rebuild. Our parents had cut trees that were already rotten and therefore it was OK. We are to plant new trees into the wasteland they created. To look back to the very roots of Western culture – and to other decent cultures as well and here I mostly mean the Far East – which were still healthy under the rotten tree, and make them regrow.

    I’d rather define it as a counter-revolution than some kind of preserving. I think we are very far away from Edmund Burke now.

    Read this if you have some spare time, it’s one possible manifesto of this counter-revolution: http://home.alphalink.com.au/~radnat/debenoist/alain9.html (I wouldn’t say I agree to every word of it, not at all, but it’s a honest attempt on finding new ways).

    And yes, I know that most Conservative voters both in the US and the EU have nothing to do with this kind of post-hippie counter-revolution, with this “children of hippie parents” situation, they are rather quite the pre-hippie bumpkins. But because I’m not a politican, I don’t really have to care about votes.

    *shrug* maybe just every generation needs to rebel against something and that we’ve been left to rebel against is the Progressive mainstream. Besides, I honestly thing they have quite some trouble understanding human nature i.e. the difference between pleasure and happyness and therefore some changes in thinking, mostly a bit towards ancient cultural roots, would be beneficial. I truly think Aristotle understood quite a few things that a Progressive journalist and also my dear old hippie parents probably never will.

    On identity: why, it’s just natural every movement, be that political, musical, cultural etc. is actually about advertising a human ideal. What else?

  1350. Shenpen wrote:

    > Actually there is a nice puzzle somewhat demonstrating
    > Gödel’s theory a bit.

    Not really. The waiter is simply wrong when he expects the
    amount that the guests ended up paying plus the amount that
    he pocketed to add up to the amount the guests originally
    paid. (This is more obvious if the group discount is $20 of
    which the waiter steals $5, in which case $10 would be
    “missing”.)

    It is a fun puzzle though.

  1351. That’ what Gödelian about it: because we usually regard it as an axiom that the questions in puzzles must have solutions – if we wouldn’t have this axioms why would try hard to solve them? In this puzzle the solution is that the axiom is wrong – because it asks you to add up Debit an Credit transactions quite randomly which is wrong accounting. But how many people try hard to solve it! :-) It’s always funny to watch folks writing lines after lines of equations… :-)

  1352. crap! it looks like the law of entropy is at play here again…here i am 13th january, 2007, thinking i’d found another bright, dynamic, ‘right thinking’ website, only to scroll down to the most recent comments on it and find just another cesspool of brainless, pseudo-philosophical leftist faeces (case in point, the incoherent ‘shenpen’ above…can somebody please explain exactly what his/her point is???)…eric, where are you? come back!! kick off these losers and clean up your blog again…would you leave cockroaches in your house??? there are those of us who appreciate a good read without all the pollution

  1353. actually, i must apologise having only read shenpen and the following handful of pigswill…after scrolling back a week or so, you come across the really original and insightful comments of dean who seems to be the lone crusader here fighting off a pack of rabid dogs (odds that lefties love!…i’m surrounded by them in the workplace as well)…the comment about the ‘new left’ is spot on…and something i’ve never really thought about before…it explains a rather embittered, defensive and reactionary leftie i work with who practically foams at the mouth if you disagree with him…the collective left psyche has seen the collapse of their bright and shining experiment in the communist world and now there’s really nothing to build anymore…utopia as they envisioned hasn’t worked, there must have been a snake in paradise…so the snake must be ….wait for it…the right!! so if we can’t build, let’s at least destroy what others have built

  1354. “You guys, I have seen the future, and it is AIGLX”

    Welcome back to the fold ;-) This is how such accelerated support *should* be done…not that crappy Vista hackery

    Still *miles* to go, but the framework is sound and the potential is very exciting.

  1355. Shenpen, Gödel’s theories didn’t have anything to do with “flawed premises yield flawed conclusions”. That much was a big “duh” even before he came along.

    Before Gödel, there was an unstated assumption — not an axiom — that said anything within our mathematical system was either an axiom or provable. We could completely order the world if we so wished, and provided a justification for everything. Gödel proved that you can formulate true but unprovable statements in any formal system strong enough to support arithmetic over the natural numbers. Admittedly he was rather pathological — basically he constructed the statement “This statement is unprovable” in his Gödel numbering scheme — but it is predicated upon correct reasoning, unlike your brain teaser.

  1356. He could have a major case of ‘the hump’ with us, seeing as how we’ve done the blogging equivalent of making ourselves at home, propping our muddy feet on his coffee table, drinking all his beer, and eating all his nachos & salsa ;-)

  1357. I had a guest speaker in my media law class come in and speak on the Fairness Doctrine. A surprising number of students were against it. We’re not all left-wing commies!

  1358. Dan, I’d rather not think about Eric and ‘the hump’, thank you. Especially if it’s with us.

  1359. Sorry std…it’s a limey thang…doesn’t translate too well. :-) “To have the hump” with someone is to be disgruntled/upset/annoyed with them.

  1360. Jeff, if you want to put a gun to my head and force me to pay for the welfare of others, at least be honest about it…leave the claptrap articles out of it. For chrissakes, it even uses the term “viscerally understand”…err…would that be “gut feeling”? Excellent basis for policy…from shitholes like Mexico & India, noneless. Impressive.

    Places like Canada & Britain are wealthy countries, so there is plenty of cash for the government to siphon off and splurge on an inefficient healthcare system, and claim victory. “Living high on the hog” springs to mind. I swear to you that you do not want to require public hospitalization in the UK.

    The US (and Israel, I understand) has the most sophisticated and efficient heathcare system in the world…why do you think Canadians come here for treatment?

    As for affordability…yes, it’s expensive…perhaps we should think seriously about a move in the *opposite* direction and *completely* deregulate the healthcare industry…pharma included, of course…and build a better legal framework for it to stop the plunderers. Maybe?

    It doesn’t have a socialist utopia ring to it…but quite frankly I don’t care…I don’t exist to ‘be my brothers keeper’.

    But still…putting a gun to my head is a strong incentive to see things your way ;-)

  1361. Heard the news? 18 months of unrestricted power to Chavez, voted by the Parliament? Reminds me of Mussolini. Poor Venezuleans. Anyway, for the results will be an interesting lesson, I think.

  1362. I stopped buying Citgo gas a while back…that fat fascist fucker can lick my sweaty scrote…after he’s finished sucking the cocks of every other fascist fucker that’ll give him and his shithole country the time of day.

    A lot of misery can be inflicted in 18 months…the parallels between Chavez and a certain unmentionable stumpy Austrian are so vivd it’s laughable…if it wasn’t so sickening.

  1363. Dan Kane,

    Currently Americans pay more for health care which does less for them, on average, when compared to citizens of every developed nation on Earth (and even some less developed nations). It works great, provided you can afford it. Many Americans can’t.

    Which view is more utopian? That nationalized health care works (proven)? Or that we can somehow turn the corrupt system in the United States into an enlightened free market with cutting-edge medical technology and competitive prices (unproven, largely the result of libertarian speculation, and probably impossible given today’s political climate with fierce lobbying by Big Pharma and Big Insurance)?

    As for the better legal framework, I expect (and hope) that for you that includes a vast rethinking of patent law, specifically forbidding the patents of natural things like gene sequences and patents which enable exclusive private profit from publicly-funded research.

    And as for Mr. Chavez… if he does turn into a Hitler-clone, will Richard Stallman come home with egg on his face or continue to participate in Chavez’s “alternative” media network, teleSUR? The fact that the leader of something most of us support (like open source[0]) is involved with the affairs of someone like Chavez could wind up embarrassing, and even a setback for the movement. (as if GPL3 related flappery weren’t enough.)

    [0]Note: I use “open source” and “free software” interchangeably because while the impetus behind both terms is different, the set of free software and the set of open source software are the same (or intersect vastly). In Lisp terms, open source software and free software are EQUAL, even if they may not be EQ.

  1364. Jeff, there’s so much blind non-sequitur assertion in your response I don’t know where to begin unraveling it. I didn’t have any expectations of convincing you of anything…I was just getting my opinion off my chest. Needless to say, I consider your view of healthcare horrifically warped. I daresay you think the same of mine. Stalemate. :-)

  1365. the parallels between Chavez and a certain unmentionable stumpy Austrian are so vivd it’s laughable

    Well, he’s doesn’t appear to have *that* much intention (or ability) to carve a hispanic version of the Third Reich out of South America and throw who knows who into concentration camps, and Adolf was more beset by energy shortages than otherwise…but apart from that, almost the same, yeah.

  1366. With my limited knowledge of dictatorships (mostly from reading the War Nerd column, which, by the way, contains a fascinating article speculating about the reason for Chavez’s military purchases from Russia), it looks like Venezuela may be ripe for another coup in a year or so. Chavez better not leave the country if he knows what is good for him.

  1367. “…If you think those dudes are going to turn on their drinking buddies from the USAF to back up a loudmouth commie army fuck like Chavez, you’re dreaming…”

    OK Phil…now *that* is pure gold :-)

  1368. Which view is more utopian? That nationalized health care works (proven)? Or that we can somehow turn the corrupt system in the United States into an enlightened free market with cutting-edge medical technology and competitive prices (unproven, largely the result of libertarian speculation, and probably impossible given today’s political climate with fierce lobbying by Big Pharma and Big Insurance)?

    How precisely would we turn the corrupt system into a nationalized system? Let me look into my crystal ball and predict what will happen . . .
    The insurance for the nation will be outsourced to the Big Insurance, and since everyone will have to pay, Big Insurance will be guaranteed a profit for life. I assume that some standardization of medical care (and maybe medical records) will happen by 2013 (these projects take a LONG time). Since we are a VERY rich country, it should not be too debilitating to the common man (though it still will be annoying). Oh, and all the nanny-state fascists will be able to give a fiscally-conservative argument for their “for your own good” laws, such as seat-belt and helmets for sports practices (it’s cheaper than fixing all those broken bones). Along the way, mountain climbing gear will probably be made illegal (too dangerous).

    After this mess clears up, maybe then we can privatize social security.

  1369. My favorite columns are “Why I Hate WW II”, “How To Win In Iraq”, “The Doctrine of Asymmetrical War”, “Gophers by TKO: Lessons from Lebanon”, “American Nationalism”, “Victor Hanson: Portrait of an American Traitor”, and “Make America Roman”.

  1370. Hugo Chavez has two big things going against him from what I can see.

    * He’s stridently anti-American;
    * He’s an admitted socialist.

    Those alone would be enough to get him narratized as a danger to the region who needs to be “neutralized”. Heck, if this were the America of the 60s or 70s, he’d have already been shot and replaced with an American-oil-company-friendly uber-fascist in a CIA-backed military coup. I suspect it hasn’t happened mainly because even Teh Shrub knows he can’t afford to over-egg that particular custard.

  1371. Oh…well that’s OK then…forget about it.

    Consider it done.

    Hey, this War Nerd is *great*.

  1372. Adrian, the more I read the War Nerd columns (and the more I read the American Conservative, the more I began to understand your views (especially your comment about Iraq being a “really stupid” move and the wisdom of limiting immigration).

    Also, I forgot to mention my favorite War Nerd article “Tom Clancy Is Not One of Us”. After reading it, do any of you also want to become warlords? That sounds like a whole lot of fun! Eric, if you ever read this, will you spot me a million or so?

  1373. Just an idea. If the economy was a computer game, say, the good ol’ Railroad Tycoon, then producing enough oil these days is like entering a cheat code: bang, the rules just don’t apply anymore. You know, all these crazy stories about the Emirates building a ski range in the desert and paying every adult male $2K/month without doing any work whatsoever. What if Chavez’s plan of building a mini Soviet Union succeeds because of the cheat code? Succeds means it doesn’t collapse – that the stat is able to keep the economy afloat by injecting subsidies here and there, from the oil money. Won’t it make many other nations all around the world try to imitate it – and fall horribly because they don’t have the cheat code?

  1374. Excellent work, shenpen.

    Now, considering that modern-day consumerist America has no strategy for survival without the cheat code, and not enough useful oil on its own soil, what do you think that means?

    Hint: The CIA has found no evidence of nuclear weapons development in Iran. Yet Iran recently had another huge oil field discovered within its borders. Pay very close attention to the narratization of Iran that is now taking place, in order to formulate yet another phony casus belli…

  1375. Our host once wrote an essay, Fear and Loathing in Caracas, about his trip to Venezuela. This was the part I found most interesting.

    I spend most of that lunch talking with Andreas’s boss, a semiretired mathematical logician and university administrator, Hector somebody whose last name I never catch. His interests in formal systems theory parallel some remembered preoccupations of mine from my student days. We have a lively and interesting discussion. Then he begins to tell me about his attempts to apply mathematical analysis to the sociology of Venezuela. His projection of the future is rather bleak. He thinks Venezuela’s climate and resources have been too kind to humans, never giving them any incentive to build the self-discipline or stock of skills needed to generate wealth once the extractive industries have played out.

    I already know that Venezuela’s economy floats on cheap oil. I know that the easily taxable wealth from extractive industries in the Third World has actually retarded broad-based modernization by encouraging corrupt, lazy and brutal political regimes. What I’ve never seen before is how this process looks from the point of view of a member of the local power elite who’s too honest to blink. This is fascinating!

    The U.S.’s culture is so imbued with Weberian virtue that we take our own ability to make money in any kind of physical environment for granted — so we don’t think much about natural-resource stocks or climate as a determinant of national character. The professor, steeped in Venezuelan history, sees great significance in the fact that Venezuela has always made its wealth from extractive industries (hardwoods, copper, oil) rather than agriculture or industry. And the requisites for survival in Venezuela’s temperate tropical climate with abundant wild foods have been light — proverbially, a hammock and a poncho.

    To the professor, the post-WWII oil boom (and inevitable bust) is just the latest cycle in an old story. The land is too good to its people, so the people are lazy. They never grow the social maturity, thrift, or civic virtue to handle crisis and deprivation. As a result, Venezuela remains a fool’s paradise run by kleptocrats, its long lazy tropical dreams occasionally interrupted by racking fever as it hunts up the next extractive fix.

    If the professor’s dissection of his own country is pitiless, his prognosis for the U.S. is hardly kinder. He admires the American achievement, but believes we have become so used to wealth that we are forgotting the virtues that made us wealthy. When we exhaust the natural wealth of the U.S. (he projects) we will crash. There are obvious holes in his economics, but when I consider the squalid mess our politics and media have become the charge suddenly seems hard to refute.

  1376. Now, considering that modern-day consumerist America has no strategy for survival without the cheat code,

    That’s not *quite* true – there’s a truckload or two of coal in Montana which could in theory be converted to liquids at cost of…well, Montana, if you trust in the market to build a whole bunch of plants fairly quickly. And of course there’s all that [snigger] oil shale, and the huge number of pebble bed reactors that someone will throw up over a long weekend at some point, and solar power satellites, a proven technology with practically negligible costs of entry…

  1377. Adrian, some MIT smarty men recently found that geothermal power could be implemented cost-effectively. Insert standard oil-company conspiracy to railroad the practical application of this technology here.

  1378. (Quoting ESR): To the professor, the post-WWII oil boom (and inevitable bust) is just the latest cycle in an old story. The land is too good to its people, so the people are lazy. They never grow the social maturity, thrift, or civic virtue to handle crisis and deprivation. As a result, Venezuela remains a fool’s paradise run by kleptocrats, its long lazy tropical dreams occasionally interrupted by racking fever as it hunts up the next extractive fix.

    Someone posted a summary of Jane Jacobs’ work a while ago – I don’t know if anyone here would have the stomach for it but what she has to say about excessive natural resources dooming development is fairly on the mark, reminding me of PJ O’Rourke’s comment that “In all the time I was there (Saudi) I never saw any of the natives lift anything heavier than money”. I haven’t read an explanation of how the US managed to escape this fate, but I’ve only read a couple of her books. Her stuff about cities (rather than nations) being the natural units of development seems sensible as well. I’ve heard one or two economists pooh-poohing her ideas, but no reasoned refutations as such.

  1379. Adrian, some MIT smarty men recently found that geothermal power could be implemented cost-effectively.

    Here or in Iceland, maybe. What sort of RoEI were they talking about?

    Insert standard oil-company conspiracy to railroad the practical application of this technology here.

    I suspect they may have suppressed a couple of things in their time, true. But the conspiracy stuff is best left alone, even in the cases where there may be some truth to it.

  1380. I think Jane Jacobs was right on the mark. “The Death and Life of Great American Cities” is more timely than ever. In my geographic region, San Francisco, which has all kinds of mixed development, thrives. Oakland and Richmond, where homes are separated from the taint of commerce, are not places you would want to walk in after dark.

  1381. Interesting obsevation. I too noticed that either the weather is good or the economy works well buth there aren’t many places on Earth that would provide both. But actually it’s logical. This crap of weather here in Black Country, UK, makes me stay in the house and tinker with stuff rather than to go out and have some drinks with friends. Probably this is how Fulton invented the steam engine – the weather was just too crap to go to the pub. It’s too bad that in my case the result is usually just a Yet Another Boring Joomla Website. Hm. Talents differ. :-)

  1382. “And when it does, we have to make it clear to the Ethiopian elite (which is actually Tigrayan at the moment) that they have a free hand. And we want to see that hand develop RSI from machete chops. We want those trigger fingers to ache. We want those shoulders to get bursitis from AK recoil syndrome (ARS, leading cause of complaints in the Horn of Africa).”

    This War Ned guy is just amazing :-) His kind of irony is not of the most refined ones but it’s just terrific :-)

  1383. Actually the War Nerd is up to something here: http://www.exile.ru/2005-November-04/ieds_the_lazy_mans_insurgency.html

    Why does the war looks increasingly unwinnable? Let’s turn the question around – why weren’t partisan armies in WW2 particularly successful? Well the main reasons are I think

    1. Germans and Soviets were much less humane – they had no problem exterminating a couple of villages if they were ambushed. Americans/Brits were probably somewhat nicer but they probably too didn’t care much about collateral damage.

    2. WW2 was generally waged on less populated areas – and wherever it was waged on similarly populated areas it caused so much collateral damage that cannot be allowed today – back to point 1.

    3. Imbalanced technology – an insurgent armed with RPG’s, radio-controlled IEDs and Google Earth is probably much more advanced compared to a WW2 partisan than the US Army is compared to WW2 armies.

    4. Parties accepted much more casualties. What is Iraq compared to Anzio and Monte Cassino? Or to the D-Day? But that was total war. Everybody’s mind was fixed on victory and not on the losses. Today, the Coalition pretends to maintain business as usual while waging a war – nobody is really in a really warlike “no matter what it takes, just WIN”! mindset.

    In short, it’s waging a war while pretending not to – trying to minimize collateral damage, being shocked – instead of enraged and motivated – by a few thousands of friendly losses and treating enemy who is actually quite well armed from the viewpoint of their strategic goals as if they were a bunch of laughable spear-wielders. It just makes reminds me of Nam or the Russkie’s Afghanistan.

    I increasingly think that a decision needs to be made. Start to admit that this is a war which actually means stopping to care whether in the end Bagdhad will look like Dresden, Warsaw, Budapest or Berlin looked in 1945 – or get the fuck out of there. It just won’t work this way.

  1384. I increasingly think that a decision needs to be made. Start to admit that this is a war which actually means stopping to care whether in the end Bagdhad will look like Dresden, Warsaw, Budapest or Berlin looked in 1945 – or get the fuck out of there. It just won’t work this way.

    Thing is, then you have to completely repudiate everything the administration said when they went into Iraq, about it not being a war against the Iraqi people and that. We’re talking catastrophic legitimacy failure here.

    The web is swarming with right-wingers (often panicked by that just-around-the-corner Caliphate) who think the hi-tech Genghis Khan option is a live one. Pointing out that they’re deluding themselves is pissing in the wind, though – the idea of the whole insubordinate third world cowering before a righteous America that’s finally found the conviction to irradiate some deserving target is just too attractive for a certain kind of person.

    Hey, seen this? Goes through three inches of hardened steel at up to 100 metres, and costs bugger-all. I mean, *fuck*.

    Of course, as long as we have asshole commanders like this one, we are totally fucked.

    Fish rots from the head, innit.

  1385. Pointing out that they’re deluding themselves is pissing in the wind, though – the idea of the whole insubordinate third world cowering before a righteous America that’s finally found the conviction to irradiate some deserving target is just too attractive for a certain kind of person.

    The reason for this — and the reason why the War Nerd is so appealing to folks here — is because of the hidden psychological condition underpinning the neocon mindset: the pathological need to get one’s gun off and to destroy anything unlike oneself. Previously I have termed this “normotic illness”, and it is so intrinsic to white identity that one blog commentator once referred to it poignantly as “the cauc’ version of Waiting to Exhale“.

  1386. “The reason for this — and the reason why the War Nerd is so appealing to folks here — is because of the hidden psychological condition underpinning the neocon mindset: the pathological need to get one’s gun off and to destroy anything unlike oneself.”

    Or maybe just a good sense for irony? [yawn]

    Of the second part of your post, of that white identity – is there any specific reason why you serve so high balls? See, despite all the differences in opinion, I think you are a smart guy – it’s your axioms that are different, not your deductional abilities. Therefore you MUST know that this will be understood as inverted racism (or self-hatred or suicidalism or whatever), and a too cheap and easy score would be to replace white with black and normotic well, with something similar and cry doooouble staaaandaaards. You know it will happen. Or at least it would if anyone cared to score a cheap hit. And you also MUST know that it’s almost impossible to defend against. So – why? Or is there a much more refined trap hidden behind this clumsy move which I failed to recognize?

  1387. lol…looks like you’ve solved it all Jeff…congrats

    Oh yes…by the way…what are you babbling about now?

  1388. The reason for this — and the reason why the War Nerd is so appealing to folks here — is because of the hidden psychological condition underpinning the neocon mindset:

    How many War Nerd articles have you read? Read Victor Hanson: Portrait of an American Traitor and American Nationalism
    Extinct Since Desert One
    if you think this is all neocon ramblings. Now, if you want an example of the neocon mindset, read this article.

    the pathological need to get one’s gun off and to destroy anything unlike oneself.
    Uhh . . . yeah . . . or it could be the boy-like love of war and violence. The War Nerd, as usual, says it best in Meet The War Nerd:
    American peace truly sucks. (That’s what I live in and work in: American peace. Fresno. Townhouses in a dry riverbed. Scrub acreage with fancy British names. America the hot and stupid.)

    That’s why we need a war now and then. You can drain your dick at every bondage site on the web, but you can’t really drain your head there, it takes something bigger like a decent war and some of those guncamera shots.

    Previously I have termed this “normotic illness”, and it is so intrinsic to white identity

    Do you really think that Caucasians are the only ones to discriminate? The War Nerd has a few interesting remarks about this:
    This Trujillo was a classic 1930s fascist. He used more skin lightener than Michael Jackson and decided that he and his fellow Dominicans were Aryans, whereas those dirty Haitians across the border were nothing but a bunch of uncivilized blacks. Which is pretty ridiculous, because every Dominican I ever saw was a lot blacker than most blacks in the US are.
    In 1937, just when Hitler was shifting into high gear in Europe, Trujillo decided to have a little holocaust of his own. He ordered the Dominican Army to kill all the Haitians they could catch in the border zone — they bagged about 20,000. One of the ways they could tell they had Haitians was when they asked people to say “Perejil.” If you couldn’t trill your “r”s like they taught you in Spanish class, you got the chop. Literally, because Trujillo told his soldiers to use machetes, not rifles. That way he could say it was enraged local peasants who did the killing. And besides, like the English king said in Braveheart, bullets cost money.

    and If Eritrea is like an African Prussia, Ethiopia…well, Ethiopia is just plain weird. The Ahmaric people who live in the highlands and ran the place till recently, have their own version of racism. They consider themselves the only really white people in the world. The way they see it, “white” Europeans are red, and other Africans — the ones they sold as slaves (slavery wasn’t outlawed in Ethiopia till 1928) — are black.

    and My favorite was this tidbit from the Congo: “Army, rebel and tribal fighters, some believing the pygmies are less than human or that eating their flesh would give them magic power, have been pursuing the pygmies in forests, killing them and eating their flesh, activists said.

    and this one, Nobody worried much about the natives; they were black and uncivilized. The Americo-Liberians were as racist as the slaveowners their ancestors had crossed the ocean to get away from. They sent their kids to school in the US to make sure they didn’t get too African, and didn’t even try to find out who lived in the jungle they’d claimed until the 1860s. By the 1890s, you had the ultimate in, uh, black comedy: Liberian gunboats sailing upriver to bombard savage native tribes who were resisting civilization.

  1389. Therefore you MUST know that this will be understood as inverted racism (or self-hatred or suicidalism or whatever), and a too cheap and easy score would be to replace white with black and normotic well, with something similar and cry doooouble staaaandaaards. You know it will happen. Or at least it would if anyone cared to score a cheap hit. And you also MUST know that it’s almost impossible to defend against. So – why? Or is there a much more refined trap hidden behind this clumsy move which I failed to recognize?

    Considering what we’ve done to brown man here and brown man far away over the past few centuries, I’d say a little “white guilt” is a completely right and proper thing for whitefolks to feel. Yes, I’m fully aware that the neocon/gun-nut “libertarian” response would be to narrate the above as “suicidalism” or somesuch. Maybe it’s just that I’m more of an RMS-type than an ESR-type, more concerned with articulating my values as they are rather than trying to distill them into something more “marketable”. I just feel like the sooner we admit that our vaunted Western Civilization is bugged to hell, in spite of its enormous success (much like Windows), the sooner we can get on with remedying the problem.

  1390. hey… allow me to cut in here please….

    a little “white guilt” is a completely right and proper thing for whitefolks to feel….. I just feel like the sooner we admit that our vaunted Western Civilization is bugged to hell,…. get on with remedying the problem.

    Jeff, are ‘brown man and whitefolks’ going to feel guilty for eye color? is that in your future now?… a remedy?

  1391. >Synthetic Biology could prove to be much more fascinating than even the Computer Revolution was!

    That does sound possible because so many plants produce sugar! They are on to something there.
    Neat!

  1392. Phil,

    Knowing American agribusiness, sugar-based fuels will never make it here; due to a complex combination of trade embargoes and farm subsidies we will instead have a fuel derived from high-fructose corn syrup at the pump. It’s not nearly as powerful and causes your car to knock, but unlike Canada, Britain, and Australia (where real sugar is used) it’ll be cheaper by far in the States to use that than sugar.

  1393. The reason for this — and the reason why the War Nerd is so appealing to folks here — is because of the hidden psychological condition underpinning the neocon mindset: the pathological need to get one’s gun off and to destroy anything unlike oneself.

    I dunno, he’s very anti-Iraq War, he’s against attacking Iran, he doesn’t think that much of the Israelis – I find him pretty clear-headed about a lot of stuff some on the right have inflated into a Great Open-Ended Anti-Jihadi Crusade OhGodThey’reComingForUsWeMustBeResolute yadda yadda.

    Previously I have termed this “normotic illness”,

    It’s just not a real word, normotic.

    Ooo, didn’t know about this.

  1394. adrian,

    I didn’t come up with the term, just applied it to its American instantiation.

    And I’m guessing the War Nerd is against the Iraq War because Bush completely mishandled it, i.e., he didn’t blow enough shit up.

    I actually admire his impeccable logic: either be the ruthless bloodthirsty Western thugs you are or pack up your things and go home. None of this decorum shit. None of this half-baking your destruction.

  1395. OOOOOOOOOHHHHHHHHHHHH SSSSSSSSSSSSSHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIITTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

  1396. Jeff,

    OK, let’s talk about this “normotic” thing seriously. Actually I think the way I think not because I have not yet understood that – but because I think I’ve understood more implications of it than you seem to have.

    The core problem of human existence is the completely artificial distinction between the “I” and the “world” or “everything else”, between the subject and the object. Not that it’s not useful – survival instinct would be impossible without it – but it’s simply not entirely and not always true and therefore has it’s drawbacks as well. This artificial distinction creates a kind of uncomfortable tension in life – and different cultures came up with different remedies to that.

    I think Western Culture started with Aristotle. His logic, the law of the excluded middle, of claiming that A and not-A can never be both true, had a two-sided effect. First, it increased this tension – basically, made us more aggressive. Second, it created a desire, a drive for Truth.

    Therefore, the Western mindset acquired two important attributes. First, a drive to try to ease this tension, this contradiction between the “I” and the “world” by attempting to “internalize” as much of the world as we can, trying to “upload” as much of environment, of the surroundings – especially other humans – into the “ego” as we can – I’m using vague terms here, but hopefully it still can be understood. One can try to internalize the environment by conquering land, transforming the environment, gathering wealth, shopping for fancy stuff or crusading for a religion or an ideology. It’s all the same drive.

    This created a history which would unbelievable to a Tibetan or a Hindu – people spilling each other’s guts on slight religious or political differences and so on. To some extent, I feel ashamed of it. And probably this all which I’ve written up to this point is what you mean as “normotic illness”. Do you agree that up till this point, we both are talking about the same thing?

    But. There are three other points that need to be considered.

    First, if we look at other cultures, we can see basically the same at Arabs. They are so much like our despised crazy-Catholic grand-grand-grand-granddads. We also see a good amount of aggression in Africa as well. More or less the only place on the world where we could learn something from is the Orient – China, Tibet, India, Japan. And nobody else. (Not that they’d lack agression – but they do have remedies against the aforementioned existential tension. That’s a different question how much they actually use it.)

    Second, don’t forget the second effect of Aristotle’s law: it made us honest. We learned to like the truth, say the truth, search for the truth and despise bending the truth. And we are pretty much the only culture that can boast of that. You just cannot imagine how much headache we European Buddhists we had with our Tibetan teachers. These amazingly wise people completely lacked one important trait: the desire for openness and transparency. If somebody is doing something foolish and dangerous, they just don’t go there and tell him. They’d consider that too impolite. They don’t want to offend anybody. Or to lose face by appearing uncivilized. They just rather let it slip. And that’s completely suicidal, of course. Neither an open society nor scientific and technological development can be acquired without an strong inner drive for seeking and telling the truth. Without that, you can only have something like the ancient Byzantine or Persian Empires – a total mess and often a very opressive one.

    Third, (both) our agressive drive to internalize our surroundings and our drive for truth were the very reasons of all the technological development that happened in the last centuries and decades. The tension I mentioned up there is a very creative one. The drive to understand the world and the drive to change the world comes from the drive to internalize the world. Because if we catalogize stuff or change it to bear our stamp, we feel that’s ours and then this tensions eases a bit. And the point is, whatever goals or causes one has in life, one needs means to achieve them – and that’s the greatest part of our culture. Our motives might always been debatable and debated, but providing the means to do things, the means to achieve goals is an unsurpassed feat. IF it turned out that we need to change our goals a bit, that’s still a lot easier feat than creating the means was. (Putting it bery simply and taking it to the extremes, I consider a strong and selfish man much more useful than a weak and altruistic one because convincing the strong man to behave nice I consider a lot easier than buffing up the weak one.)

    Adding this three together, I think our culture has way more virtues than vices. The only thing we need to do is to import from the Orient a bit philosophical/psychological understanding that in reality the middle between A and not-A is not excluded, which would probably make us more and I’d say we’ll be close to achieving as much as humanly possible. And that’s already under way. But even lacking that – if we add up everything up, there is nothing better out there.

  1397. Sorry, I left something out: “which would probably make us more” – “more relaxed and easy-going”, that’s what missing from there.

  1398. First, a drive to try to ease this tension, this contradiction between the “I” and the “world” by attempting to “internalize” as much of the world as we can, trying to “upload” as much of environment, of the surroundings – especially other humans – into the “ego” as we can – I’m using vague terms here, but hopefully it still can be understood.

    To do this effectively requires dissolution of the ego, breaking down the boundary between self and other. This is something well out of the reach of a great many Westerners, who in their aristotelian pursuit of truth upload considerable amounts of lies and distortions due to interference from input crossing the egoic boundary.

    Much of our science and technology has been largely a civilization-spanning paean to our own egos. We are the best, we are what humanity should be, look upon our works ye mighty, and despair! Of course now it’s gotten so bad that to keep our marvellous society running we need to pollute the planet and exploit the poor, and send our boys in uniform in to scoop up and secure the dwindling reserves of nonrenewable resources.

    For a nice geeky example of what I’m talking about, one need only consider the difference between Bill Gates and Richard Stallman. Both wanted to “make the world a better place” through software, a noble statement of intent, but the methodologies of each were wildly divergent; and, even judging based on quality of the resultant software alone, so were the results. Of course things are so bass-ackwards in this culture that Slashdotters keep talking about what a big ego Stallman has for insisting on the term “GNU/Linux”; and Time magazine named Gates man of the year for his “charitable” foundation, which engages in activities like lobbying for drug patent laws to benefit Big Pharma and drive up costs of much-needed AIDS medication. And I bet he believes, all the while, through his egoic information filter that he’s “doing good”!

    Part of the Western problem is that we force things into a sort of object-oriented interface before admitting them into our mentations — and what we really should be doing is letting X be X — especially when X is conscious, like a person, a group of people, etc. A big part of the American normoticity is that before we will admit people’s points of view as worthy of consideration we must make them conform to our point of view. We do not let the vast number of X’s out there be themselves. You can see it all the time, and this can have devastating effects, as on that other 9/11, September 11, 1973, when the CIA-backed coup assassinated Allende and brought Pinochet to power. He was a tyrant but his philosophy was closer to America’s, and by implementing the policies of Friedman and his cronies he nearly crippled the Chilean economy.

    Leading on from that I have to wonder, as adrian does, how much of the “islamofascism” problem is real and how much of it is propaganda spin designed to delegitimize an entire mass of people, who just happen to be sitting on vast amounts of resources we need? And whether, as ESR believes, the effective counter to Islamic righteous fury is whipping up a ruthless normotic fighting force of our own and zerg-rushing their base before they can muster a full-scale attack. I was kind of a neocon once, but now I’m beginning to think this approach constitutes a short-term gain, long-term loss.

  1399. “Much of our science and technology has been largely a civilization-spanning paean to our own egos. ”

    I’ve started to write a lot and deleted it when I’ve realized it’s just incoherent (it’s almost midnight here). So, just a short metaphor. What you basically mean is that the Western mind is like petrol: explosive, flammable, dangerous. And I totally agree to that. But I also think that the Western economical and political system is like a car engine – it takes that dangerous material and turns it into something useful, reliable, and damn productive. And if the material would not be explosive, the car would not go anywhere.

  1400. Jeff, I think you are underestimating the rest of the world. Ideology seems to be the sustenance of the intellectual elite. The rest of us have far more simple tastes. The War Nerd, again, delivers some insight (god damn, this guy is good) in The Doctrine of Asymmetrical War:

    Look around the world and you’ll see that people are divided into ethnic gangs, like the planet’s one big San Quentin. All they want is for their gang to win. If they have any ideology beyond that, it’s more of the God stuff, and you need Thorazine to cure that. Godfearing gangbangers, that’s exactly what we ran into in Somalia, 1993. Half the population of Mogadishu turned on our guys who were trying to provide aid for the starving. They didn’t want peace, democracy or any of that shit. They wanted their clan to win and the other clans to lose. And if stopping the aid convoys from getting food to those enemy clans was the only way to win, they were ready to make it happen, ready to die fighting our best troops backed by attack helicopters and APCs. We killed maybe a thousand of these “civilians” and lost 18 Rangers and Delta operators. And the Somalis made the anniversary of that fight a national holiday. It’s worth giving a moment to let that sink in: these people fought to the death against overwhelmingly superior US forces, because they wanted their clan to win by starving rival clans to death.

    Yes, Grasshopper, you must meditate on the fact that People are superstitious tribalists. Democracy comes about 37th, if that. Nobody wants to face that fact: we’re tribal critters. We’ll die for the tribe. More to the point, we’ll kill for it. We don’t care about democracy. And I’m not just talking here about people in tropical hellholes like Somalia, I mean your town, your street. Most Americans are just like me: old-school nationalists. We want America to be Roman, to kick ass. The rest is for Quakers.

  1401. An interesting perspective, shenpen, and one not without merit. However, I would rather see the energy of the present society put toward bootstrapping a more sustainable one, rather than toward making war against peoples not like itself, to harvest their resources.

    The only thing we need to do is to import from the Orient a bit philosophical/psychological understanding that in reality the middle between A and not-A is not excluded,

    You mean like intuitionistic logic? :)

  1402. ” You mean like intuitionistic logic? :) ”

    Almost (…what a terrible choice of name though…). I always get itchy when people involve terms like “middle” in their discussion of logic.

  1403. Jeff,

    sometime later I’d like to comment on this Bill Gates vs. RMS antagonism which I considere artificial, but it’d be too logn for tonight.

    Intuitionistic logic? As far I saw there were some Greek letters in that article which made me quickly hit Ctrl – W in horror – it looked like math, like something formal and that’s clearly not for me :-) No, I’d certainly not even try to import Orientalism into the hard sciences. That’d exactly lead to the result which the Atlas Shrugged warned against. I’d just import it into philosophy and psychology.

    This is why I feel confused about the Atlas Shrugged. Her strictly objective logic I think works very well in hard sciences, and also in economy etc. as long as we are talking about practical, objective questions. I think trying to put something vague and non-objective into hard science s would be a treason against intellectual honesty. My Oriental – in fact, Buddhist – enthusiasm starts from the following point: whenever a human being is included in the picture, it does not work anymore. Psychology and philosophy – Man’s essential questions about it’s (perceived) existence and about himself – do not obey the rule of objectivity and Aristotelian logic.

    And I said “a” human being, not “an arbitrary number of human beings”. I think regarding large numbers of people, one can use statistics and from the statistics, derive objective economic rules. Just don’t forget these rules don’t really scale downwards.

  1404. Phil, it does look the same, and it must be one of the ‘we are keeping busy’ bills with some fluff
    added for good measure. Oh well, the dem`s now have the Pelosi gavel to listen to and perhaps
    she will drive them all Bat *uck insane. Me, all i want to do is feed my Pigeons!

  1405. Now that this site’s dead we can mosey on over to the herb’s place on the web. Good going with the 1500+ comments! Am on the verge of updating that we may have another “Kennedy assassination-style conspiracy theory” on our hands. (You know: the kind that eventually loses the double quote marks and transitions into a legit theory.) I’m referring to the growing body of information that would compel just about any person of average or better intelligence to think we just may have to re-open the 9/11 case. In other words, it may have been an inside job.

    I’m not saying it was or wasn’t an inside job. I’m saying I’ve been scouting around, and there’re some interesting questions being asked by some qualified individuals.

  1406. Moving away from more dreary stories for a moment, I just read a fascinating article about a tiger named Keetah. I have to say that my eyes were far from dry when I reached the end. I know ESR has previously blogged about animal intelligence, but this story is uncanny! It brings new meaning to the phrase “emotional intelligence.”

  1407. Actually, it’s not really animal intelligence, I’d rather call it empathy or compassion. I don’t like the term “emotional intelligence” – emotional capabilities are completely independent of analytical ones, I think.

  1408. I hope that, in your mentations and mulling over alternative (particularly Eastern) modalities of thought, shenpen, you admit the possibility that there is much more to intelligence than analytical capability.

  1409. Jeff,

    no, I don’t think there is much more to intelligence than raw processing power. I think intelligence is something fairly well defined and measured by the standardized tests. On the other hand, there is much more to mind than intelligence, but that’s a different question. Most importantly, those are almost impossible to measure.

  1410. I’m more and more doubtful about the all the Iraq stuff. Not about the ethical part of it, but about the practical part – whether is it an effective way to reach the long-term goals or not. My theory was that the whole point o the Iraq stuff is to lure terrorists into a battle where they face well armed, well trained soldiers, thus luring them away for attacking much more vulnerable targets in the Western hinterland. But I’m starting to think that Iraq is not only attracting, but also _generating_ terrorists/insurgents in so large numbers that the effort might prove futile.

    Remember this great article our host linked here a while ago? https://www.math.rutgers.edu/~sussmann/papers/occidentalism.html

    “We can expect more “propaganda by action” against the US and US installations, accompanied by crude Occidentalist propaganda. The West, and not just the geographical West, should counter this intelligently with the full force of calculating bourgeois anti-heroism. Accountants mulling over shady bank accounts and undercover agents bribing their way will be more useful in the long-term struggle than special macho units blasting their way into the caves of Afghanistan.”

    It’s just starting to make more and more sense to me.

  1411. No wonder, I’m getting addicted to the War Nerd as well. I think the War Nerd persona is a fake one – he isn’t a data entry clerk in Fresno but a quite capable, professional analyst who, due to a twised sense of humour, decided to make it as a hobby to write some of his stuff in a deceivingly simplistic style under a fake persona.

  1412. Not about the ethical part of it, but about the practical part – whether is it an effective way to reach the long-term goals or not.

    By pondering the practical part of the Iraq War while failing to consider the ethical ramifications you have only half the story — if that. Tell me, what “long term goals” do you suppose Bush et al. hoped to achieve in Iraq?

    Hint: you fail automatically if you parrot the freedom, democracy, neocon kumbaya nonsense. Politics and war are simply economics by other means. What material interest have we in Middle Eastern affairs?

  1413. “Politics and war are simply economics by other means.”

    I agree that war is politics by other means. However, I don’t think politics would be economics by other means. In an ideally pure capitalism these two were completely separate, though I admit that the current, actual version of capitalism economics and politics are intertwined. Still I don’t really think economics would be the major, let alone the only contributor. (And I think when you write economics you actually mean lobby.) I think the motivations of politicians are complex. Short-term maximization of votes. The wish to write history – quite a juicy ego-game. Convictions of voters and personal convictions – especially religious ones. In this peculiar case, probably an urge to show it to Daddy, as well. Word from advisors and from theoreticians. And so on.

    I think the major reason of the Iraq war was the following. After 9/11 there were three choices.

    One, try to appease the terrorists. It would have required quite high sacrifices such as letting Israel go down and probably the Saudis alongside with them – and success isn’t guaranteed even in this case. I think the real reason behind terrorist hate is simply envy, therefore it wouldn’t worked at all, it would had just been a sign of weakness.

    Two, to concentrate on internal security. It would have required outrageous curbing of liberties – much higher than what actually happened and that still caused public outrage, incurrend amazing costs and still would not have worked. It’s simply impossible to search every suitcase always everywhere.

    Third, to wage the war on foreign ground. Select a theater of war abroad and lure the terrorists into it. That has the big advantage of forcing terrorists to battle well-equipped soldiers instead of civilians. It’s a lot easier to maintain considerable security at military camp than at civilian airport and nobody complains about liberties. I think somebody must have read the Q’uran and realized that jyhad at home has always higher priority than jyhad somewhere else and therefore even if they realize it’s a trap, they cannot go to the West and blow shit up, they are obliged by religious law to go and fight in Iraq. So I think the idea was to find an advantageous theater for the clash of the Coalition vs. the Terrorists. I don’t really think they ever hoped the terrorists will give up but I think they planned that the situation will be maintainable practically forever – small-scale perpetual fight in Iraq producing a few dozens of casualities per year and the rest of the West is mostly free from terrorist threats. The only problem is that casualties seem to be a lot higher and the whole thing thus doesn’t seem to work.

    I can’t really think of any alternative strategy though.

  1414. I am sure Jeff will squeal, but I just HAD to share this joke:

    The Saudi Ambassador was ushered into the Oval Office for a meeting with the President of the United States. After a cordial discussion, Prince Turki Al-Faisal leaned over to President Bush to say:

    “Mr. President, there is something that puzzles me about America. Actually it puzzles my son, so I thought I should ask you about it.”

    “Whatever I can do to help explain life in America, I’ll be happy to do so,” responded Mr. Bush.

    The Ambassador lowered his voice. “My son is a big fan of your television show ‘Star Trek.’ He noticed that Captain Kirk is American, Scotty is Scottish, Chekhov is Russian, Sulu is Chinese. The Star Trek crew is quite international, yet there are no Arabs. My son is quite upset about this, and doesn’t understand why there are no Arabs on Star Trek.”

    The President leaned even more closely to Prince Al-Faisal and whispered confidentially, “Well, you see, Mr. Ambassador, that’s because Star Trek takes places in the future.”

  1415. Shenpen,

    Funny how the target we selected to attract the terrorists to just happens to still have so much light sweet crude…

    Here in energy-greedy America on the precipice of the Olduvai cliff (as per Richard C. Duncan), war is almost certainly economics (energy acquisition) by other means, especially when the targets (here, Iraq and Iran) have some of the richest remaining oil fields on the post-peak planet. Anything G-Dub, himself an oilman with House of Saud and Bin Laden business ties, has to say about terrorism strikes me as nothing more than a post-hoc rationalization designed to mask the fact that we need oil and they’ve got more than enough.

    The only moral solution is sustainable development and energy independence. We could get there peacefully, or with much terror and bloodshed. But the Olduvai theory says we will get there, and soon, one way or another.

    Compare and contrast Duncan’s 2000 predictons with post-9/11 reality:

    http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/energyresources/message/2771

    And then tell me he’s just a kook, I dare you.

  1416. Jeff asks “What material interest have we in Middle Eastern affairs?”

    Very simply, we need to break Islam. If you read the Christian Bible, you will see that it has all sorts of insane prescriptions in it. Death penalty for all sorts of innocuous things. Christianity has been defanged. Islam has not. Or, rather, there are a very small number of fanged Christians, and a very large number of fanged Muslims. That’s a problem that needs to be addressed if we wish to leave in peace. Bush has decided to fight that war on somebody else’s land. Maybe he was right to do so, maybe he was wrong — but that is the interest we have in South-Western Asian affairs.

    Where the fuck is the Middle of the East? Is that anywhere near the Center of the North?

  1417. Something different.

    It’s almost considered a “duh!” nowadays that traditional political categories are becoming less and less meaningful. In this discussion some of the Libertarian and Conservative opinions are almost indistinguishable while some other Libertarian opinions (Adrian) are almost indistinguishable from the Left-Progressive ones. Maybe Roger Scruton is right on the money – we are going towards an age of issues-based politics where people choose where they stand on individual issues piecemeal rather than subscribing to all-encompassing political ideologies. Who knows?

    Maybe that’s true but I think we still do need compasses, even if on the more general level. Maybe not ideologies but at least some definition of of our general stand regarding the wider underlying philosophical questions of politics, otherwise we risk that politics degenerates into mere vote-harvesting.

    Therefore now I attempt to define a very wide, philosophical concept of Non-Progressivism which, instead of serving as an ideology, might serve as a wide, general, common minimum of Conservatives, Libertarians and independent non-lefties like myself.

    The Four Commandments of General Non-Progressivism

    1. Thou shalt separate thine personal wishes from thine political goals.

    Probably this is the hardest to follow of them all. This article, linked earlier by our host and a few posts above by me, puts it excellently: https://www.math.rutgers.edu/~sussmann/papers/occidentalism.html

    The common root of every good thing Western Civ has achieved is defining human society as a Gesellschaft, the contractual association of free individuals based on mutural self-interest. It’s damn boring idea, it’s something unbearably cold, and clearly nothing to be enthusiastic about. It’s just natural that every red-blooded human being deeply desires the opposite one, the Gemeinschaft – the brotherhood, the living community. And it is completely OK to do it one’s private life. It’s completely OK to advance the tribal, communitarian way of thinking in one’s private life by organizing communities, donating money and recruiting people and so on.

    There is nothing wrong with that – in fact, it’s weird if somebody has no such feelings and desires.

    But there is a bitter pill we all have to swallow – on the level of the society, the state, the laws, the Gemeinschaft inevitably leads to decadence and laziness in the best case and tyranny, oppression and suffering in the worst. We have to accept and even support that the Gesellschaft must remain the general, codified law of the public and forward the causes of our beloved Gemeinschafts only privately.

    This is very, very hard to swallow. Almost impossible, in fact. It requires conscious self-restraint – you know you believe in something that’s good and still must decide NOT to advocate that the state should take action to make that good thing into common law, and you must limit your efforts to the private sphere. This self-restraint is something painful and tragic, it feels like mining coal with only your weaker hand while your stronger one is idle – but still something we just can’t afford not to do because if we don’t practice this restraint, the results are usually very bad.

    This is the same idea as with religion. Probably everybody who has a religion believes it’s perfect and everybody should follow it- but most people still believe in religious freedom and a religion-neutral state. This is a contradiction, but it’s still the only working approach. Simply project this idea to every other cause you believe in.

    2. Behave like a doctor – at least do no harm if you are not sure you can help.

    Understanding what a horror story the great majority of human history was, and how a rare and precious opportunity is to be able to live in an age and at a place of liberty and plenty, be very, very cautious about suggesting any kind of social change and always ponder all the long-term consequences with a good amount of pessimistic realism regarding human nature. And especially don’t try to pursue change just for the sake of change.

    3. Thou shalt not succumb to moral relativism.

    Moral relativism has several different definitions in philosophy but in this case I mean it as judging actions merely by their results, especially their countable results, usually in the form of “body counts”. For example, considering killing out of accident or even negligence equivalent to premediated murder is moral relativism (Iraq vs. 9/11) The often renewing debate about the number of victims of the Holocaust is also moral relativism – two millions, six, or ten, it does not make any difference. The definition of evil is the attempt to do evil, how successful it turns out to be has zero moral relevance.

    4. Understand that genuine happiness depends less on what happens to us and much more on what kind of people we are

    This is something very hard to put into words, because there aren’t any perfectly working recipes that would be ready for mass production. Human happiness is still subject to research – this idea just wants to denote the suggested direction of the research – care less about shielding people from pain and more about finding ways to boost self-respect. (NOT self-esteem!)

    What do you think?

  1418. Again something else – it’s interesting how Mark Shuttleworth is trying hard to balance the religious zeal of the FLOSS community and providing a full-featured distro that’s a viable alternative to Windows/OSX (especially that I think Vista discourages many Windows users from upgrading as it ususally requires hardware upgrades as well, and I smell a big opportunity there):

    http://www.desktoplinux.com/news/NS6395384305.html

    If I’d be in Mark’s shoes I’d completely separate the two branches – providing a version for the masses that has everything included which is proprietary but useful/cool – meaning, generally and by large, including what most users install via Automatix – and a different, pure version for the FLOSS zealots.

  1419. Russell Nelson scripsit:

    Very simply, we need to break Islam.

    The threat of Islam is a red herring. It is an excuse to wage the energy war so accurately predicted by Richard Duncan seven years ago. Aside from the white man’s perennial need to put the brown man in his place — our need to break anything has yet to be proven.

    Truth be told, we could solve our global-warming, energy-shortage, and terrorism problems in one fell swoop by vastly reducing our energy footprint (currently the largest per capita in the world). Of course that may well mean transitioning to a sustainable agrarian society with localized production of necessities and localized social organization — on the average a positive change for our society, but it means fewer creature comforts and perhaps no more American Idol so don’t expect it to get widespread public support any time soon.

    The life you’ve enjoyed up till now is based on the assumption of high EROEI — energy returned on energy invested. With the world now past the petroleum peak according to some estimates, that EROEI factor is headed for a sharp downturn which will necessitate vast changes in life style; Fischer-Tropsch plants, tar sands, and oil shales do not yield nearly the same EROEI that conventional petroleum does, full stop. The world of the future belongs to those who best know how to manage the energy at their disposal. If that be the Muslims, then so be it. If you want to save Western Civ, then you need to focus on the threat that most directly jeopardizes it: its own energy-gluttony.

  1420. Jeff Little, do you ever get tired of preaching you ‘the sky is falling’? Often people make the decisions they do because they are the ones that yield the best results. Big Agriculture killed the family farm because it was VASTLY more efficient. We have the largest energy footprint in the world because we have the strongest economy in the world. We also have the largest manufacturing economy in the world. Our manufacturing base is GROWING (despite what some anti-Chinese idiots may say). You seem to be reeking of occidentalism.

    Either way, if human ingenuity cannot solve the problem (like it did with Peak Whale Oil), and the answer really is turn back the clock 200 years, then most likely there will be plenty of bloody resource wars. Its not about patronizing or anything like that, it would be about resources, plain and simple. This would be even more true if we switched to an agricultural society. Farm life is hard, and often young boys would want a way out, so they would join the army. Now, you have an army of recruits, so what do you do with them? Jeff, what you seem to be doing is wishing for a perfect world, but the real world just don’t work like that. Morality is something that helps members a tribe come together and sacrifice for one another; when it starts being detrimental to the tribe, then following it is just stupid. Have you ever considered, from a cold, rational point of view, that maybe the West has gotten the way it is because its tribe is superior?

  1421. Big Agriculture killed the family farm because it was VASTLY more efficient.

    O RLY?

    Everyone appears to agree that this new, organic approach is far more efficient than the previous Soviet model that emphasized production at all costs. Fernando Funes, head of the national Pasture and Forage Research Unit, told Harper’s magazine: “In that old system it took 10 or 15 units of energy to produce one unit of food energy. At first we did not care about economics, (but) we were realizing just how inefficient it was.”

    American-style intensive agriculture is only more efficient if you believe there’s such a thing as a free lunch (free energy):

    In a very real sense, we are literally eating fossil fuels. However, due to the laws of thermodynamics, there is not a direct correspondence between energy inflow and outflow in agriculture. Along the way, there is a marked energy loss. Between 1945 and 1994, energy input to agriculture increased 4-fold while crop yields only increased 3-fold.11 Since then, energy input has continued to increase without a corresponding increase in crop yield. We have reached the point of marginal returns. Yet, due to soil degradation, increased demands of pest management and increasing energy costs for irrigation (all of which is examined below), modern agriculture must continue increasing its energy expenditures simply to maintain current crop yields. The Green Revolution is becoming bankrupt.

  1422. Haha. Read, are you on crack? To present Cuba as an example of agricultural production is preposterous. Ever been there? I have. Born and raised. And that article is nonsense. And consequently whatever position you’re trying to support with that article is also nonsense. I’m sure that’s some kind of logical fallacy, but I couldn’t let your useful idiocy go unchallenged. Smells of Stallman around here. He was just there.

  1423. some other Libertarian opinions (Adrian) are almost indistinguishable from the Left-Progressive ones.

    Progressives care about people.

    Have you ever considered, from a cold, rational point of view, that maybe the West has gotten the way it is because its tribe is superior?

    Once we’re established in space, and a future independent of Earth is clearly plausible to people other than right-wing economists, I’ll concede that one.

  1424. Jeff, one passage from that article is very telling:

    he need to expand agricultural production was one of the motive causes behind most of the wars in recorded history, along with expansion of the energy base (and agricultural production is truly an essential portion of the energy base). And when Europeans could no longer expand cultivation, they began the task of conquering the world. Explorers were followed by conquistadors and traders and settlers. The declared reasons for expansion may have been trade, avarice, empire or simply curiosity, but at its base, it was all about the expansion of agricultural productivity. Wherever explorers and conquistadors traveled, they may have carried off loot, but they left plantations. And settlers toiled to clear land and establish their own homestead.

    What do you think is going to happen when the energy efficiency runs out? Remember, the U.S., Europe, and China have vastly superior militaries than any place in Central/South America or Africa. Quite frankly, I am hedging all my bets on alternative energy because I DON’T WANT a return to those times. That you seem to want this to happen to fulfill your communal farming fantasies is very telling; perhaps you have forgotten that nature is “red in tooth and claw.”

    Once we’re established in space, and a future independent of Earth is clearly plausible to people other than right-wing economists, I’ll concede that one.

    I was thinking that Western civilization was more successful because it combined asabiya, entrepreneurial spirit, and scientific rationality.

  1425. > Big Agriculture killed the family farm because it was VASTLY more efficient.

    No, it was because after WWII Big Military had generated a lot of production lines that had built bombs and needed to shift to fertilizer. This huge abbundance of artificial fertilizer created the possibility for Big Agriculture to take off. Once Big Agriculture took off, it was able to get Big Government to give it tons of money in the form of the Big Farm Bill.

    Agriculture in America is uncompetitive because of the immense lobbying power huge agribusiness companies have with the government.

    It’s interesting the note that the most profitable farm in the country is actually a small family run farm in Virginia doing new age crop and animal rotation that uses zero synthetic fertilizer.

  1426. And a heartfelt “don’t let the door hit you on the ass on the way out” from Alan Cox:

    https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2007-February/msg01021.html

    Eric, if you’re reading this, I think I understand the core of your misunderstanding: You fail (or, perhaps, refuse) to understand that freedom and world domination are by necessity mutually exclusive. And that explains a lot of your opinions both when it comes to “open source” software and geopolitics.

  1427. Wow. I tried to convince ESR to switch to Ubuntu via earlier blog comments but without any success. Seems he came to his senses. But… learning a new set of of administrative tools? I’m sort of surprised apt-* can be considered a new thing to a veteran unixist or is it about something else?

    Jeff, actually yes, if both world domination and freedom would be understood dead seriously then of course they would be. I think if both of them is understood metaphorically and world domination is understood mostly jokingly then not. On freedom, I don’t really get why Free Software zealots care so much about theoretical freedoms instead of the practical freedom of being able to get things done. As for domination, if I think deeper into it I think it CANNOT ever be understood in any other way as jokingly as the open architecture ensures that nobody will ever have actual domination or power over large groups of users against the wills or interests as long as there are still 10 good hackers and some marketing budget out there to challenge it. Therefore I think world domination is mentioned so frequently because it’s so absurd that it makes it a good joke, some sort of a Zen koan, like the sound of one hand clapping. I think in the serious sense it simply means popularity. Now, the actual, practical freedom of getting things done as opposed to constant lawyering around licencing questions and popularity – I don’t think these two were mutually exclusive.

    Islam, about that I intended to write more later on, but just one question to you Jeff – if we some other contintent, say, Atlantis, where the mindset would be similar to Europe at Torquemada’s age, would have considerable funds to finance their passions from oil money and a huge overpopulation problem, wouln’t you consider that dangerous? I mean, for example, if we would be playing Civilization 3 in a network – unfortunately my notebook isn’t good enough for Civ 4 and I left the gaming box in Hungary :-( – and I had a civ with these characteristics, wouldn’t you suspect trouble in the near future? (aaaand I’d be pouring 50 shields/turn into the Manhattan Project :-) ) And assuming you would then which part of the example you don’t agree with? Muslims are nicer or more humane or more developed folks than medieval Europeans? If yes, why? Or don’t have enough cash to be dangerous? Or don’t have a huge overpopulation problem?

  1428. I found this quote,

    “Is it possible that software is not like anything else, that it is meant to be discarded: that the whole point is to always see it as a soap bubble?”

    Alan Jay Perlis (April 1, 1922 – February 7, 1990),

    and if Fedora has burst some programmers bubbles, it is doing what it should!

    my philosophic 2 cents.

  1429. Classic, but not as funny as the Bruce Schneier ones.

    “Bruce Schneier proved the infinitude of twin primes — by enumeration.”

  1430. I just don’ get it. At least he could have copy-pasted the Fedora parting mail to the blog – how much does it take, two minutes?

  1431. Eric’s email isn’t down.

    widget:~ jim$ host -t mx thyrsus.com
    thyrsus.com mail is handled by 10 thyrsus.com.
    widget:~ jim$ telnet !$ 25
    telnet thyrsus.com 25
    Trying 71.162.243.5…
    Connected to thyrsus.com.
    Escape character is ‘^]’.
    220 grelber.thyrsus.com ESMTP Sendmail 8.13.4/8.13.4; Wed, 28 Feb 2007 16:48:39 -0500
    HELO foo.bar.com
    250 grelber.thyrsus.com Hello xxxxxxx, pleased to meet you
    quit
    221 2.0.0 grelber.thyrsus.com closing connection
    Connection closed by foreign host.

    It could be any of:

    1) fetchmail broke, and he’s fixing it.
    2) he doesn’t have the e-mail client on Ubuntu configured yet
    3) His new duties @ Freespire keep him too busy to post here and answer email.
    4) Some term in his new contract with Freespire keeps him from posting here (aka “the blog is a liability, Eric, stop it.”)

  1432. New duties @ Freespire? Oh. Let’s go googling… Ah! http://www.desktoplinux.com/news/NS2603651519.html

    If it was at 27 Sept the it must be that ultra-secret project he spent the summer working on.

    But if Lin/Freespire is so cool then why is he using Ubuntu?…

    Personally I don’t know anybody who would use Freespire and I know only 1-2 losers using Linspire who believed the “it’s a Windows-like Linux distro, will be very easy to switch” BS. Remember, this was the product originally called Lindows – a name I consider equivalent to open fraud (trying to position a Linux distro as if it was just a different kind of Windows). I wonder why ESR works for such people. They just look cheap trend-riders to me. Or am I misunderstanding something?

  1433. Hmmm… if Lin/Freespire will be an improved (even less licencing-religious) version of Ubuntu then I understand it, sounds like a good idea. Maybe I should reconsider what I think of Linspire – they might have completely rethinked their strategy after that ridiculous scam called Lindows.

    … although I always got those media components via Automatix in Ubuntu, even though not very legally, but who cares. But it’s understandable that they want to get it clean and straight – if Automatix would get too popular, they could face some lawsuits.

    (Sorry, I have to admit I never really managed to learn to care about all this licencing stuff – I grew up in the European Commodore 64/Amiga culture where piracy was as natural as breathing, approximately.)

  1434. The Linspire CEO has started to perform obvious “damage control”.

    —-
    Eric Raymond’s boot to Red Hat’s head

    TalkBack 7 of 11:
    Next
    Previous
    Linspire CEO Kevin Carmony Responds
    For those wondering…

    1. Eric Raymond doesn’t work for Linspire. He is simply one of many un-paid volunteers of the Freespire Leadership Board. ([HYPERLINK@wiki.freespire.org]) Eric has never been paid or received anything from Linspire (he wouldn’t take it even if we offered). He got involved because he liked Freespire’s work in solving some of the driver and multimedia problems for desktop Linux.

    2. No one here at Linspire, myself included, had any idea Eric was going to do this. First we knew about it was when we read about it in the press.

    3. If Eric was doing this on our account, he would have announced switching to Linspire or Freespire, not Ubuntu.

    4. If Eric were in fact doing this for our benefit, the last thing in the world Linspire would have wanted him to do was him sending his email and upsetting the Fedora community. The Linux companies need to work more together, not less. Linspire has been trying to work MORE with Ubuntu, Fedora, openSUSE, and others, to solve the problems facing desktop Linux.

    Because I didn’t know about this earlier, and haven’t spoken with Eric since, I can’t know his motives. However, I do know Eric fairly well, and he’s not one to do much of anything “for someone else” or just for money. He’s a pretty principled guy, from what my experience with him has been. I sincerely believe he just became unhappy with some things, hit is boiling point, and got so upset he made the switch and sent the email.

    If anyone reading this belongs to the Red Hat Fedora mailing list, I hope you’ll forward my comments along to that group. I’ll certainly will be sending them to the contacts I have at Red Hat, with whom Linspire has always had a very positive relationship with.

    Regardless of what Eric’s motives were, I can assure you, they had nothing formally to do with Linspire.

    Thanks,

    Kevin Carmony
    CEO, Linspire

  1435. I’m not certain that the Quaker pacifist who wants to break islam with guns and bombs has anything like a rational perspective from which to judge the quality of another’s existence.

  1436. Ubuntu’s a great distro. I just hope they’re more receptive to his ideas than others(*cough*Linux kernel developers*cough*). Since the distro is so new, the developers haven’t had a chance to get stubborn. Anyway, if you’re reading this Eric, please make CUPS less confusing!

  1437. Just a sidenote. Isn’t all this fuss about multimedia outdated? When I was a child, there were different computers for gaming (Amiga), working (IBM XT), and the devices we used for media-oriented entertaintment weren’t computers at all (tape stereo, VHS video). Then the working and gaming computer both converged into the Pentium PC. Later on, I found more and more listening to music at my PC simply because pirating MP3’s and DivXes were a lot straightforward than buying CD’s and DVD’s and as I spent most of my evenings before the PC, reading stuff on the net anyway.

    But nowadays the gaming is more and more moving towards the console (which also means the dumbification of games, BTW, less strategy and RPG/adventure, more mindless action) and I can appreciate what some of the commenters above wrote about consoles: hassle-free plug ‘n’ play gaming right on the TV. Although as I’m approaching 30 I have less and less patience for games but otherways, I have found I hardly use any software other but a browser at home (and Skype), as the multimedia experience is steadily moving towards YouTube et al.

    Which means that we are heading a direction similar that was in my childhood: separate devices for separate purposes. I’m planning to move browsing and Skype-ing to the TV – a Mac Mini, perhas, does anybody have any good/bad experiences with it? – and if I can consider this direction universal, then the typical Linux desktop PC in the near future will almost exclusively be used for development and office apps. Which means multimedia might be less important than it seems.

  1438. That’s awful, Jeff…no argument here.

    PS. Please consider dropping the “Terra” jibe…it smacks of the same idiocy that gave us “Repuglicans” and “Demonrats”

    Coz I’m lookin’ out for you (hat tip Bill) ;-)

  1439. JIm, you’re barely coherent even when you take your meds. Please, just lie down when you don’t feel well.

    Jeff Read, please understand that Jim is not in good mental health. He just makes things up to please himself. Don’t expect the real world to match his lunatic ravings. For example, anything he says about Quakers or pacifists is laughably wrong. At least, he’s been wrong so far, and I don’t expect any improvement.

    I saw Eric last weekend. He said (again) “Yes, I need to get back to blogging. I actually have something to blog about now.” but I don’t remember what it was. It was something about a guy and some stuff and a thing, or somesuch.

  1440. Oops, I didn’t realize that link was four years old! It just showed up on Reddit today! But Eric’s opening line is still funny as hell.
    /me crawls under a rock

  1441. I think Eric should be herewith permanently banninated from using AAVE in any way, shape, or form. That even embarrassed my white ass.

  1442. Nelson must have forked his own private version of Quaker, just like he preaches his own private versions of economics and “Open Source”. Course, Tricky Dick Nixon was a Quaker too.

    Nelsons version of his announced religion, hereafter referred to as “Quaker 2.0, the Society of Fiends”, advocates violence, self-interest above all else, and radical white-superiority. Hell, for all I know, Nelson wife-swaps with ESR. While ESR is a has-been, Nelson is a never was.

    Russell, the best part of you ran down the crack of your momma’s ass and ended up a brown stain on the mattress.

  1443. Very interesting, Phil. Indeed, fear and hatred of the other underpin a great deal of conservative rhetoric. I would go so far as to say that the conservative platform in general has masked bigotry as a load-bearing plank. (Consider the “Willie Horton” ads which assured Shrub Sr.’s victory, Ronald Reagan’s “states’ rights” speech, etc. etc.)

    I’m not enough of a scholar of Orwell’s life to decide for sure whether it was true that such masked hatred played a major part in his writing or not, but at first blush it certainly seems so. I’ll look at “Shooting an Elephant” entirely differently now.

    It reminds me of a book that was recently recommended to me: Neither Wolf Nor Dog by Kent Nerburn. We have been hearing, and will continue to hear, rhetoric about how the Muslims hate us. Though it deals with Lakota and not Muslims, one of the central theses of NWND is that hatred towards whites for doing what whites do is a largely justifiable sentiment — but it doesn’t work the other way around.

  1444. I have just finished reading a fascinating article on George Orwell. I want to know what the rest of you think of it. John Dolan is possibly the man behind the nom de guerre Gary Brecher.

    Hey Phil,
    I think George Orwell was a visionary, Christopher Hitchens is a missionary, and John Dolan is a reactionary!

    But what fantastic flair Dolan has:

    But if he never was a leftist, why did he call himself one? For Orwell, the red star was protective coloration. It allowed him to smuggle his hates into print, gave them a fine radical gloss, and spared him the cold, clear readings his essays deserved. (Only academics believe that writers want to be understood. Writers want to be misread to their advantage.)

    Ah, but what about Spain? Orwell put his life fighting for POUM in the Spanish Civil War. He got himself shot in the neck-pretty high risks for a phony socialist. How do I explain that one?

    Actually, it’s simple. Orwell went to Spain to fight for his most deeply held belief, yes. Unfortunately, that belief wasn’t socialism but the nastiest, most puerile of the tribal hatreds English babies learn in the cradle: anti-Catholicism.

    The revolution in Catalonia was unlike any other socialist rebellion before or since. Its fury was reserved for priests, nuns, churches and monasteries, and the anarchists Orwell loved were famous for inventing new ways to kill clerics. That’s what drew Orwell to Catalonia: the chance to help the men who were disemboweling priests in Barcelona and winding their guts around the altars. At last, a chance to smite the bloody Papists, the whore of Rome, Eric Blair’s oldest and dearest hate. Not since Cromwell had an English Papist-baiter had such an opportunity to torment the filthy priests. Naturally, Orwell was on the first ship he could catch. It wasn’t about socialism, it was about the chance to kill “a stinking RC” (Orwell’s description of Wyndham Lewis).

    Orwell’s hatred of Catholics is so blatant that it’s frightening. I wonder what kept his fans from seeing it. Here’s a quick sample of St George in Ian Paisley mode:

    Nearly all our anti-clerical feeling is directed at the poor, unoffending old C of E. If ever a word is raised against Rome, it is only some absurd tale about Jesuit intrigues or babies’ skeletons dug up from the floors of nunneries.

    Here we get class snobbery mixed with religious bigotry: Orwell’s objection to the prevailing brand of Catholic-baiting is that it’s crude, mob hate, not the sleek variant he wants. Note too the sentimental exemption for the dear old Church of England, which never hurt anybody except for a few million Irish Catholics.

    There’s something about Catholics that sets off a chain of atavistic old-maid responses in Orwell, as here, when he jumps from exulting in his chance to smear the bloody Papists to maundering about his garden. This guy is seriously creepy, like Miss Marple if she lived in the Shankill Road:

    I had the great pleasure of reviewing [two pro-Catholic books]:It was the first time I have been able to lay the bastinado on a professional RC at any length. I have got a few square feet of garden, but have had rotten results owing to rain, slugs and mice.

    And again, in a later letter, wandering from the Inquisition to updates on the local hedgehog:

    I found Vacandard’s history of the Inquisition quite interesting:It appears:that the pendulum in Poe’s story was actually used:Torture [was dropped] in the middle of the 18th century, but the Pope did not formally abolish it until 1816. Our hedgehog has disappeared.

    I don’t even want to think about the thought processes that led Orwell from the tortures of the Inquisition to that lost hedgehog. Perhaps the Jesuits got it.

    Back in my naive Anglophile days, these sudden blurts of hate for our Church hurt quite a bit, but nowhere near as much as the sudden fits of vicious anti-Irish hate I came across. Of course, they go together, “Catholic” and “Irish,” which has always been handy for the English bigot.

    Wow! priests guts on altars, baby skeletons, Miss Marple, and garden slugs, i am hooked on this guy!

    After reading it all, i now believe Orwell was a die hard atheist.

  1445. Yea or nay?

    Full text of Bush’s Radio Address

    Good morning. In times of war, Congress has no greater obligation than funding our war fighters. And next week, the House will begin debate on an emergency war spending bill.
    The purpose of this legislation should be to give our troops on the front lines the resources, funds, and equipment they need to fight our enemies. Unfortunately, some in Congress are using this bill as an opportunity to micromanage our military commanders, force a precipitous withdrawal from Iraq, and spend billions on domestic projects that have nothing to do with the war on terror.
    Our troops urgently need Congress to approve emergency war funds. Over the past several weeks, our Nation has begun pursuing a new strategy in Iraq. Under the leadership of General David Petraeus, our troops have launched a difficult and dangerous mission to help Iraqis secure their capital. This plan is still in its early stages, yet we’re already seeing signs of progress. Iraqi and American troops have rounded up more than 700 people affiliated with Shia extremists. They’ve also launched aggressive operations against Sunni extremists. And they’ve uncovered large caches of weapons that could have been used to kill our troops.
    These are hopeful signs. As these operations unfold, they will help the Iraqi government stabilize the country, rebuild the economy, and advance the work of political reconciliation. Yet the bill Congress is considering would undermine General Petraeus and the troops under his command just as these critical security operations are getting under way.
    First, the bill would impose arbitrary and restrictive conditions on the use of war funds and require the withdrawal of forces by the end of this year if these conditions are not met. These restrictions would handcuff our generals in the field by denying them the flexibility they need to adjust their operations to the changing situation on the ground. And these restrictions would substitute the mandates of Congress for the considered judgment of our military commanders.
    Even if every condition required by this bill was met, all American forces — except for very limited purposes — would still be required to withdraw next year, regardless of the situation in Iraq. The consequences of imposing such an artificial timetable would be disastrous.
    Here is what Secretary of Defense Robert Gates recently told Congress: Setting a fixed date to withdraw would “essentially tell [the enemy] how long they would have to wait until we’re gone.” If American forces were to step back from Baghdad before it is more secure, the scale and scope of attacks would increase and intensify. A contagion of violence could spill out across the entire country, and in time, this violence would engulf the region. The enemy would emerge from the chaos emboldened with new safe havens, new recruits, new resources, and an even greater determination to harm America. Such an outcome would be a nightmare for our country.
    Second, the bill would cut funding for the Iraqi security forces if Iraqi leaders did not meet rigid conditions set by Congress. This makes no sense. Members of Congress have often said that the Iraqis must step forward and take more responsibility for their own security — and I agree. Yet Members of Congress can’t have it both ways: They can’t say that the Iraqis must do more and then take away the funds that will help them do so. Iraq is a young democracy that is fighting for its survival in a region that is vital to American security. To cut off support for their security forces at this critical moment would put our own security at risk.
    Third, the bill would add billions of dollars in domestic spending that is completely unrelated to the war. For example, the House bill would provide $74 million for peanut storage, $48 million for the Farm Service Agency, and $35 million for NASA. These programs do not belong in an emergency war spending bill. Congress must not allow debate on domestic spending to delay funds for our troops on the front lines. And Members should not use funding our troops as leverage to pass special interest spending for their districts.
    We are a Nation at war, and the heaviest responsibilities fall to our troops in the field. Yet we in Washington have responsibilities, as well. General Petraeus was confirmed by the Senate without a single vote in opposition, and he and his troops need these resources to succeed in their mission. Many in Congress say they support the troops, and I believe them. Now they have a chance to show that support in deed, as well as in word. Congress needs to approve emergency funding for our troops, without strings and without delay. If they send me a bill that does otherwise, I will veto it.
    Thank you for listening.

  1446. Nay. I think the American people made themselves pretty clear back in November. I think we should withdraw the troops as soon as possible. Iraq is a lost cause.

  1447. >Iraq is a lost cause.

    Perhaps.

    The U.N. does not work it out, nor OPEC nations or any other world powers will send any more help for Iraq. Not even the Iraq people seem to give a damn about the future, unable to police the society for change.
    After four years of fucking hell, it’s butcher, baker, car-bomb maker, & religion first, life second, Iraq third.

    So after we go they can all wallow in the religious bullshit and remain in tribal war for another
    millennium… who cares anymore.

    And on condition of our leaving we promise the U.N. and the rest of the world we will never come back to the Middle East for any reason, from now on you are on your own.
    And when all the oil wells dry up you can eat your sand!
    Allahu Akbar!

  1448. The “Jesuit intrigue” bit reminds me of the reason why cartoonist-missionary Jack T. Chick went into hiding: because he believes that the Vatican has an enormous supercomputer with records on prominent protestants and his name is in their database, marked for death at the hands of secret Jesuit assassin squads. No shit.

  1449. Jeff,

    actually, I’m afraid this is pointless – and this is also a self-criticism – I mean if I quote something from the Wall Street Journal, that certainly will be opinionated towards a direction and if you quote something from The Guardian, that will also be opinionated to another direction. The problem is, it basically separates the “discussion space” – I automatically consider everything as bullshit which comes from The Guarian and I assume you do the same with WSJ. Because these articles don’t contain thorough, detailed evidences due to obvious space limitations, and also, even if they would, the sad thing is that politics is not a hard science: one can summon a hundred evidences for something and also against something, because every evidence is indirect and therefore disputable, basically, it’s just the question of who you like to believe and who not. Political opinions have an “a priori” nature – we generally form our opinions before we would read the papers and we believe those papers that seem to have a similar opinion. Therefore, fruitful political discussion is only feasible if some sort of compromise can be made regarding the source of information – choosing a media whose news and articles both parties can tag as “facts”. Is that possible? The problem is, I’m afraid, not.

  1450. Is Muhammad Saeed al-Sahhaf “Bagdad Bob” Prophetic?

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muhammad_Saeed_al-Sahhaf

    Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf (Arabic also Mohammed Said al-Sahhaf) (born 1940) is a former Iraqi diplomat and politician. He came to wide prominence around the world during the 2003 Invasion of Iraq, during which he was the Information Minister of the country.

    Quotes:

    “There are no American infidels in Baghdad. Never!”

    “My feelings – as usual – we will slaughter them all”

    “Our initial assessment is that they will all die”

    “I blame Al-Jazeera – they are marketing for the Americans!”

    “God will roast their stomachs in hell at the hands of Iraqis.”

    “They’re coming to surrender or be burned in their tanks.”

    “No I am not scared, and neither should you be!”

    “Be assured. Baghdad is safe, protected”

    “Who are in control, they are not in control of anything – they don’t even control themselves!”

    “We are not afraid of the Americans. Allah has condemned them. They are stupid. They are stupid” (dramatic pause) “and they are condemned.”

    “The Americans, they always depend on a method what I call … stupid, silly. All I ask is check yourself. Do not in fact repeat their lies.”

    “I can say, and I am responsible for what I am saying, that they have
    started to commit suicide under the walls of Baghdad. We
    will encourage them to commit more suicides quickly.”

    “I can assure you that those villains will recognize, will discover in appropriate time in the future how stupid they are and how they are pretending things which have never taken place.”

    “We have destroyed 2 tanks, fighter planes, 2 helicopters and their shovels – We have driven them back.”

    “The authority of the civil defense … issued a warning to the civilian population not to pick up any of those pencils because they are booby traps,” he said, adding that the British and American forces were “immoral mercenaries” and “war criminals” for such behavior.
    “I am not talking about the American people and the British people,” he said. “I am talking about those mercenaries. … They have started throwing those pencils, but they are not pencils, they are booby traps to kill the children.”

    “We have them surrounded in their tanks”

    “The American press is all about lies! All they tell is lies, lies and more lies!”

    “I have detailed information about the situation…which completely proves that what they allege are illusions . . . They lie every day.”

    “Lying is forbidden in Iraq. President Saddam Hussein will tolerate nothing but truthfulness as he is a man of great honor and integrity. Everyone is encouraged to speak freely of the truths evidenced in their eyes and hearts.”

    “Now even the American command is under siege. We are hitting it from the north, east, south and west. We chase them here and they chase us there. But at the end we are the people who are laying siege to them. And it is not them who are besieging us.”

    “because we will behead you all”

    “Let the American infidels bask in their illusion”

    “I triple guarantee you, there are no American soldiers in Baghdad.”

    Britain “is not worth an old shoe”

    “we have given them a sour taste”

    “blood-sucking bastards”

    Of US troops: “They are most welcome. We will butcher them.”

    “We will welcome them with bullets and shoes.”

    “We are in control. They are in a state of hysteria. Losers, they think that by killing civilians and trying to distort the feelings of the people they will win. I think they will not win, those bastards.”

    “The British forces which were dropped there have been eliminated mostly on the (battle)field, except for those who fled … It is a complete defeat … Amazingly the Americans have pushed the British to do that. They pushed them ahead as if it is an experiment. The result was very tragic for the British.”

    “We have placed them in a quagmire from which they can never emerge except dead”

    “Washington has thrown their soldiers on the fire”

    “I speak better English than this villain Bush”

    “These cowards have no morals. They have no shame about lying”

    “They’re not even [within] 100 miles [of Baghdad]. They are not in any
    place. They hold no place in Iraq. This is an illusion … they are
    trying to sell to the others an illusion.”

    “Their failure in this regard is abysmal. They want to tell the world changes thought – as a matter of fact, they do not respect the world, they want to tell taxpayers and the domestic public to keep them deceived. We will embroil them, confuse them and keep them in the quagmire. They have begun to tell more lies so that they might continue with the perpetration of their crimes. May they be accursed.”

    “We will kill them all……..most of them.”

    “They are like a snake and we are going to cut it in pieces.”

    “They do not even have control over themselves! Do not believe them!”

    “I would like to clarify a simple fact here: How can you lay siege to a whole country? Who is really under siege now? Baghdad cannot be besieged. Al-Nasiriyah cannot be besieged. Basra cannot be besieged.”

    “That bastard the American Minister of Defense Rumsfeld, and I won’t say shamelessly, because they don’t know what shame means. These are criminals. The whole word can hear the warning sirens. This criminal sitting in the White House is a pathetic criminal and his Defense Minister deserves to be beaten. These criminals lie to the world because they are criminals by nature and conditioning. They consider this a military site! Shame on you! You will forever be shamed! You have ruined the reputation of the American people in the most terrible way! Shame on you! And we will destroy you!”

    “They are trapped in Umm Qasr. They are trapped near Basra. They are trapped near Nasiriyah. They are trapped near Najaf. They are trapped everywhere.”

    Called Americans and Brits “Tarateer”– In Iraqi slang, Tartoor means a guy full of farts (i.e. hot air)

    “they are nowhere near the airport ..they are lost in the desert…they can not read a compass…they are retarded.”

    “They are not in Baghdad. They are not in control of any airport. I tell you this. It is all a lie. They lie. It is a hollywood movie. You do not believe them.”

    “Faltering forces of infidels cannot just enter a country of 26 million people and lay besiege to them! They are the ones who will find themselves under siege. Therefore, in reality whatever this miserable Rumsfeld has been saying, he was talking about his own forces. Now even the American command is under siege.”

    “They tried to bring a small number of tanks and personnel carriers in through al-Durah but they were surrounded and most of their infidels had their throats cut.”

    “Our estimates are that none of them will come out alive unless they surrender to us quickly.”

    “We made them drink poison last night and Saddam Hussein’s soldiers and his great forces gave the Americans a lesson which will not be forgotten by history. Truly.”

    “On this occasion, I am not going to mention the number of the infidels who were killed and the number of destroyed vehicles. The operation continues”

    “Today we slaughtered them in the airport. They are out of Saddam International Airport.”

    “The force that was in the airport, this force was destroyed.”

    “We’re giving them a real lesson today. Heavy doesn’t accurately describe the level of casualties we have inflicted.”

    “Their infidels are committing suicide by the hundreds on the gates of Baghdad. Be assured, Baghdad is safe, protected.”

    “Today I have visited whole Baghdad city, no invaders found. You go and see how we have ousted them from this city. They are cying outside and waiting to receive bullets. They will be killed shortly.”

    “These images are not the suburbs of Baghdad. From what I glimpsed, these gardens with rows of palm trees on the side, which you saw in the images, are located in the south of Abu Ghreib, where we have surrounded the Americans and British.”

    When told coalition troops occupied Baghdad airport –
    “…at Saddam Airport? Now that’s just silly!”

    “The situation is excellent, they are going to try to approach Baghdad…and I believe their grave will be there.”

    “NO”, snapped Mr al-Sahaf, “We have retaken the airport. There are NO Americans there. I will take you there and show you. IN ONE HOUR!”

    “We defeated them yesterday. God willing, I will provide you with more information. I swear by God, I swear by God, those who are staying in Washington and London have thrown these mercenaries in a crematorium.”

    “Please, please! The Americans are relying on what I called yesterday a desperate and stupid method.”

    “They will be burnt. We are going to tackle them”

    “We blocked them inside the city. Their rear is blocked”

    “Desperate Americans”

    “Today we slaughtered them in the airport. They are out of Saddam International Airport. The force that was in the airport, this force was destroyed.”

    “They are trying to fool you. They are showing any old pictures of buildings. They even went into the VIP section of the airport, just because Saddam Hussein may have sat in such and such a chair or slept in such and such a bed”

    “We went into the airport and crushed them, we cleaned the WHOOOLE place out, they were slaughtered”

    “Yes, the american troops have advanced further. This will only make it easier for us to defeat them”

    “Their casualties and bodies are many.”

    [On surrenders] “Those are not Iraqi soldiers at all. Where did they bring them from?”

    “Just look carefully, I only want you to look carefully. Do not repeat the lies of liars. Do not become like them. Once again, I blame al-Jazeera before it ascertains what takes place. Please, make sure of what you say and do not play such a role.”

    “This is unbased”

    “Search for the truth. I tell you things and I always ask you to verify what I say. I told you yesterday that there was an attack and a retreat at Saddam’s airport.”

    “I have detailed information about the situation . . . which completely proves that what they allege are illusions . . . They lie every day.”

    “You can go and visit those places. Nothing there, nothing at all. There are Iraqi checkpoints. Everything is okay.”

    “This boa, the American columns, are being besieged between Basra and other towns north, west, south and west of Basra….Now even the American command is under siege. We are hitting it from the north, east, south and west. We chase them here and they chase us there.”

    “By God, I think this is rather very unlikely. This is merely a prattle. The fact is that as soon as they reach Baghdad gates, we will besiege them and slaughter them….Wherever they go they will find themselves encircled.”

    “They (the U.S.) are deceiving their soldiers and their officers that aggressing against Iraq and invading Iraq will be like a picnic. This is a very stupid lie they are telling their soldiers, what they are facing is a definite death.”

    “Listen, this explosion does not frighten us any langer. The cruise missiles do not frighten anyone. We are catching them like fish in a river. I mean here that over the past two days we managed to shoot down 196 missiles before they hit their target.”

    “Blair…is accusing us of executing British soldiers. We want to tell him that we have not executed anybody. They are either killed in battle, most of them get killed because they are cowards anyway, the rest they just get captured.”

    “They fled. The American louts fled. Indeed, concerning the fighting waged by the heroes of the Arab Socialist Baath Party yesterday, one amazing thing really is the cowardice of the American soldiers. we had not anticipated this.”

    “We will slaughter them, Bush Jr. and his international gang of bastards!”

    “the louts of colonialism.”

    “The forces of American colonialism began to drop containers that produce a sound explosion, a very huge sound. I remind you that they said that their strategy is based on shock and awe. Those failed ones manufactured a type of container that has an explosive substance, which they drop. They cause a very huge explosion in terms of sound, as if the universe was shaken. After a while, you go out and you don’t find anything. You find some nails, screws, pieces of metal, but the important thing here is the sound. Those failed ones think that through the huge sound explosion, people would be shocked and consequently would collapse and be defeated. What happened? The contrary. The fighters…, the masses…, and the heroic sons of the Iraqi tribes discovered this game. They will turn it against the American louts so as to shock them. Wait for surprises, God willing, to see how the US game will fail.”

    “The shock has backfired on them. They are shocked because of what they have seen. No one received them with roses. They were received with bombs, shoes and bullets. Now, the game has been exposed. Awe will backfire on them. This is the boa snake. We will extend it further and cut it the appropriate way.”

    “It has been rumored that we have fired scud missiles into Kuwait. I am here now to tell you, we do not have any scud missiles and I don’t know why they were fired into Kuwait.”

    “As for the mercenaries who advanced to the perimeters of Saddam International Airport, I would like to remind you of something. I will mention something that will make the picture clear for you and help you to understand what took place at Saddam International Airport. Most of you probably saw the American movie “Wag the Dog”. I hope you remember it. Some of their acts that took place at dawn yesterday and today are similar to what happened in “Wag the Dog”. If we succeed in keeping them isolated on that island, and we are determined to do so, we might let them taste a second mini Dien Bien Phu tonight. The European journalists remember it well. Our estimates are that none of them will come out alive unless they surrender to us quickly. They are completely surrounded now. This morning, the number of armoured personnel carriers that were destroyed, along with their occupants, is eight. The number of the tanks destroyed is 11.”

    “Tonight, we will do something unconventional against them. This means: not by the military. We will do something that I believe will become a pretty example for those mercenaries. I would not be giving out a secret when I say that action in the dark against such mercenaries is effective, not through the action of armies. I say that dropping down those mercenaries in a surprise fashion at Saddam Airport without accurate calculations is largely meant for showing things. It’s a showy operation. It is a kind of surprise muscle flexing to the world to show it that the shock and awe operation is indeed successful. May they be accursed. Through this operation [shock and awe], they sent a number of their villains and mercenaries to be butchered. Again, and according to my early estimates, unless the remaining part of their soldiers surrender, the chance for their survival is very slim. The surprising thing is that after they threw their soldiers into a place where they are not aware of the real results, the villainous Americans, like Powell and the others, sat in Europe to discuss how to divide Iraq as spoils after the war [laughing]. This means what’s post-war. The post-war [Iraq] will be the same current Iraq under the leadership of President Saddam Husayn.”

    “We will pursue them as war criminals. We will work with all the free people in the world, and they are many, who want someone to bell the cat [i.e.; to do a daring deed], and now we are belling the cat, according to the famous [Arabic] saying so as to rid the UN of those villains. After Iraq aborts the invasion that is being carried out by the American and British villains, the USA will no longer be a superpower. Its deterioration will be rapid. I say to those villains who are meeting in Europe, thinking of launching psychological war and brainwashing: wait. Do not be hasty because your disappointment will be huge. You will reap nothing from this aggressive war, which you launched on Iraq, except for disgrace and defeat. Iraq will continue to exist. Its civilization is 10,000 years old. It will not be changed by villains like the US and British villains.”

    “W. Bush, this man is a war criminal, and we will see
    that he is brought to trial”

    “I think the British nation has never been faced with a tragedy like this fellow [Blair].”

    “The United Nations….[is] a place for prostitution under the feet of
    Americans.”

    “They are sick in their minds. They say they brought 65 tanks into center
    of city. I say to you this talk is not true. This is part of their sick mind.”

    “We have destroyed 50 tanks today. That 5-ohhh tanks” [while holding up his fingers]

    “They are superpower of villains. They are superpower of Al Capone.”

    Americans are “wild donkeys” (‘ALOG’ in Arabic . Other possible translations offered by M.S.S. – ‘The children of pigs’, ‘Those who have dramatically ugly faces’, or ‘leeches’)

    Americans and Brits are “Sick dogs”.

    “There are no Iraqis disguising themselves”

    “They are retreating on all fronts. Their military effort is a subject of laughter throughout the world.”

    “…they are nowhere (pause)…they are nowhere, really”

    “I can assure you that those villains will recognize, will discover in appropriate time in the future how stupid they are and how they are pretending things which have never taken place”

    “Iraqi fighters in Umm Qasr are giving the hordes of American and Brtish
    mercenaries the taste of definite death. We have drawn them into a
    quagmire and they will never get out of it.”

    “What they say about a breakthrough [in Najaf] is completely an illusion. They are sending their warplanes to fly very low in order to have vibrations on these sacred places . . . they are trying to crack the buildings by flying low over them.”

    “We have crushed the whole force which dared to venture there. Now they’re outside the wall and the heroic Republican Guard is now in control of the whole area. . . . So where are those villainous louts, those mercenaries?”

    “Their forces committed suicide by the hundreds…. The battle is very
    fierce and God made us victorious. The fighting continues.”

    “Yesterday, we slaughtered them and we will continue to slaughter them.”

    “They think we are retarded – they are retarded.”

    (leaflet drops) “I think this is very laughable for a Superpower to be so cheap to drop inside Iraq such poor things and they are printed in Kuwait”

    “…crocodile tears [shed in] .. The gangster Bush’s lair…” (refers to Bush and Blair at Camp David calling for the Geneva Conventions to be applied to all POWs)

    “We’re going to drag the drunken junkie nose of Bush through Iraq’s desert, him and his follower dog Blair…There are 26 million Saddams in Iraq”

    “We will push those crooks, those mercenaries back into the swamp”

    “When we were making the law, when we were writing the literature and the mathematics the grandfathers of Blair and little Bush were scratching around in caves”

    “Those Iraqi fighters are slapping those gangsters on the face, and then when they flee, they will kick their backsides.”

    About Bush: “the leader of the international criminal gang of bastards.”

    “the insane little dwarf Bush”

    “The midget Bush and that Rumsfield deserve only to be beaten with shoes by freedom loving people everywhere.”

    “Rumsfeld, he needs to be hit on the head”

    “Yesterday we heard this villain called Rumsfeld. He, of course, is a war criminal, and he is one of the worst of the American rulers. He said the American mercenaries and the British mercenaries, they are defending themselves inside Iraq. They are in a defensive position. They are engaged in self-defense. They are fighting a self-defense war inside Iraq. Well, congratulations, Mr. Villain, you are defending yourself inside our country. We will show you what defense means.”

    “Bush is a very stupid man. The American people are not stupid, they are very clever. I can’t understand how such clever people came to elect such a stupid president.”

    “Who is this dog Franks in Qatar?”

    “Bush doesn’t even know if Spain is a republic or a kingdom, how can they follow this man?”

    “Whenever we attack, they retreat. When we pound them with missiles and heavy artillery, they retreat even deeper. But when we stopped pounding, they pushed to the airport for propaganda purposes.”

    Any apparent American gains, he said, were a cunning ploy by the Iraqis to lure the enemy into a trap. “Our armed forces, according to their tactics, are leaving the way open”

    “The capital, especially the commandos, are getting ready to wipe them out”

    “We are surrounding them and pounding them. The whole trend has changed and we are going to finalize this very soon.”

    “After we finish defeating all of those animals we will disclose that with facts and figures.”

    “Bush, Blair and Rumsfeld. They are the funny trio”

    “We have shot down 2 Apache helicopters. Have the Americans said yet that they were shot down by their – what do they call it – friendly fire? No? Well… [dramatic pause, then smiles] …not yet!”

    Question: Is Saddam Hussein still alive:
    “I will only answer reasonable questions”

    “Don’t believe anything! We will chase the rascals back to London!”

    “We’re now trying to exhaust them, until our leadership decides the time and method to clean our territory of their desecration.”

    “Those are mercenaries. Most probably they will be treated as mercenaries, hirelings and as war criminals. … For sure, international law does not apply to those”

    Bush “knows that he is standing in quicksand when it comes to his baseless talk on Iraq”

    “This criminal (Bush) in the White House is a stupid criminal”

    “They are not in Najaf. They are nowhere. They are on the moon. They are snakes in the desert…”

    Iraqi opposition leaders are “bats … and a bad American product.”

    “Even those who live on another planet, if there are such people, would have condemned this action before it started”

    “We expect the aggressors to use anything, we don’t rule out that in their depression at being vanquished, those losers will become hysterical and commit even more folly.”

    “They are becoming hysterical. This is the result of frustration.”

    On U.S. General Richard Myers: “He must be crazy”
    His reports are “basic propaganda”.

    Rumsfeld is a “crook” and “the most despicable creature.”

    Rumsfeld is “the worst kind of bastard”

    “Our farmers, they are targeting accurately the enemy.” (shooting at helicopters)

    “The imperialist invading U.S. and British forces are like a snake that slithers all over the place but that doesn’t control anything.”

    “We feed them death and hell!”

    “We besieged them and killed most of them, and I think we will finish them soon.”

    “They are nowhere near Baghdad. Their allegations are a cover-up for their failure”

    “They want to deceive their people first because now they are in a very shabby situation.”

    “It’s a small town [Umm Qasar], it has only a few docks… now they are in a trap”

    “Iraqi forces are still in control of the city, and they are engaging in an attrition war with the enemy”

    “Americans are now in disarray”

    “They are again in the dirt in the desert.”

    “They will try to enter Baghdad, and I think this is where their graveyard will be.”

    “Their objective is to get to the outskirts of Baghdad. So be it.”

    “We will see how the issue will turn out when they come to Baghdad.”

    “We are determined to defeat them and destroy them on the walls of our capital, as we are determined to destroy their miserable armies in every Muslim spot.”

    “Iraq will spread them even more and chop them up.”

    “The Iraqi troops and the Iraqi fighters are in control of all the places, as we have witnessed. No big change in that. We are fighting against them.”

    “They are achieving nothing; they are suffering from casualties. Those casualties are increasing, not decreasing.”

    “Fight them everywhere. Don’t give them a chance to breathe until they withdraw and retreat.”

    “The criminals will be humiliated… To hurt the enemy more, raise the level of your attacks.”

    “They are lying every day. They are lying always, and mainly they are lying to their public opinion.”

    “You think their tanks are in an endless line coming towards us, wrong they are only a few of them and they turn around and then return as if to make a long snake”

    “I can assure you that those villains will recognize, will discover in appropriate time in the future, how stupid they are and how they are pretending things which have never taken place”

    “In a few days, you will all witness something that can only be considered very beautiful against the Coalition forces. That, I assure you.”

    “we managed to chop off their rotten heads”

    “There are only two American tanks in the city.”

    “We are winning!”

  1451. There is considerable evidence in support of the Iranian government’s claim that those troops were entering Iranian territory illegally, and as such are guilty of espionage under Iranian law.

    If the Brits or Americans invade, we will be treading upon Iran’s sovereignty. The past four years have been an object lesson that fucking with another nation’s sovereignty is a bad idea.

  1452. The past four years have been an object lesson that, sometimes, when you think you are acting in the best interests of a proud, decent people that yearn for their sovereignty, you end up realizing that they’re just a bunch of hapless monkeys, and the whole initiative starts to look like a bad idea.

  1453. Dan, do you think we will attack Iran? That idea is looking stupider and stupider by the minute. I would like to step back for a moment and look at the Bush Doctrine in a different light. To understand what I am talking about, you should read this article. Here are some of the highlights.

    The importance of co-operativeness has fallen in and out of intellectual fashion over the centuries. An early advocate of the role of cohesion in history’s cycles was the 14th-century Arab statesman and scholar Ibn Khaldun, who documented that North African dynasties typically began as desert tribes poor in everything but what he termed asabiya or social solidarity. Their willingness to sacrifice for each other made them formidable in battle. But once they conquered a civilized state along the coast, the inevitable growth in inequality began to sap their asabiya, until after several generations their growing fractiousness allowed another cohesive clan to emerge from the desert and overthrow them.

    Recently, Princeton biologist Peter Turchin has extended Ibn Khaldun’s analysis in a disquieting direction, pointing out that nothing generates asabiya like having a common enemy. Turchin notes that powerful states arise mostly on ethnic frontiers, where conflicts with very different peoples persuade co-ethnics to overcome their minor differences and all hang together, or assuredly they would all hang separately. Thus the German heartland remained divided up among numerous squabbling principalities until 1870. Meanwhile, powerful German kingdoms emerged on Prussia’s border with the Balts and Slavs and Austria’s border with the Slavs and Magyars.

    Similarly, the 13 American colonies came together by fighting first the French and Indians, then the British. In this century, two world wars helped forge from the heavy immigration of 1890 to 1924 what Putnam calls the “long civic generation” that reached its peak in the 1940s and ’50s.

    Half a millennium after Ibn Khaldun, Alexis de Tocqueville famously attributed much of America’s success to its “forever forming associations. There are not only commercial and industrial associations in which all take part, but others of a thousand different types—religious, moral, serious, futile, very general and very limited, immensely large and very minute. Nothing, in my view, deserves more attention than the intellectual and moral associations in America.”

    . . . .

    In America, you don’t need to belong to a family-based mafia for protection because the state will enforce your contracts with some degree of equality before the law. In Mexico, though, as former New York Times correspondent Alan Riding wrote in his 1984 bestseller Distant Neighbors: A Portrait of the Mexicans, “Public life could be defined as the abuse of power to achieve wealth and the abuse of wealth to achieve power.” Anyone outside the extended family is assumed to have predatory intentions, which explains the famous warmth and solidarity of Mexican families. “Mexicans need few friends,” Riding observed, “because they have many relatives.”

    . . . .

    Another untold story is the beneficial effect on race relations of the growth of Christian fundamentalism. Among soldiers and college football players, for instance, co-operation between the races is up due to an increased emphasis on a common transracial identity as Christians.

    If asabiya is the main ingredient to the success of the U.S. and Western Europe, then we must maintain it at all costs. The question is ‘what is the best way to maintain asabiya?’ One way to alleviate the problem would be closing the borders to Mexico, thereby preventing the problem from exacerbating, and then working hard to assimilate the current crop of immigrants by enforcing cultural norms. The next way would be to emphasize a common cultural identity, such as, say, Christianity.

    Now, you might be wondering how I ventured from the Iraq War to immigration. Don’t worry; I am getting to it now. The last method for generating asabiya is to fight an enemy that seems to pose a grave, possibly existential threat to a tribe. On 9/11, our culture and way of life was being threatened, but not by Muslims. However, fighting al-Qaeda gave us a clear enemy, and the horrible events compelled Americans into acts of extreme patriotism. If we had kept the borders somewhat closed, (and fought the war more intelligently), the events of 9/11 might have caused everyone to cooperate such that Mexicans would have become just another set of Americans, like the British, Scottish, German, Irish, Italian, etc. immigrants of the past. A cowboy foreign policy could turn world opinion against the United States, and it might spell the death of the U.S.A. as an empire; if the war was not pursued, and no other assimilation tactics were tried, then the U.S.A. could very well balkanize, which would spell the death of America as a 1st world country (and, likely, as an empire as well). The United States had stumbled into a very odd point in its history where, if it was to continue to be a “nation of immigrants”, it needed enemies far more than it needed friends.

    Now, let me stress that I do not think this was an intentional strategy of the Bush Administration. This would require Machiavellian cunning, and I do not think the Bush Administration has that kind of smarts. The Bush Administration’s strategy, best summed-up as “Invade the World, Invite the World“, has a kind of idiot’s logic to it. Right now, the best thing I can think of for generating that kind of asabiya would be an all-out attack on North Korea. God knows we have plenty of motivation.

  1454. “Dan, do you think we will attack Iran?”
    Not because of the recent arrest of the Royal Marines, no. That idea is so stupid it hasn’t even reached the stage of inception…and the preemption of the non-idea is even stupider. This is a purely diplomatic standoff. The marines will be home safely after Iran has huffed and puffed a bit longer. Heck…even *I* would join the anti-Bush chorus if we sent troops into harms way over this…sure as shit Blair ain’t gonna do it alone.

    As for your discussion of “asabiya”…it’s a familiar concept, and I agree that it can (indeed should, by necessity) play a vital part in cementing our future, the way things are. I also tend to largely agree with your “idiot’s logic” quip, although I suspect I do not disparage the administrations smarts as much as you do – I think a large chunk of the idiocy stems from the political pantomime being played out while real lives are at stake.

  1455. Dan, my comment on the ‘smarts’ of the administration was mostly because of the idea that we can keep inviting the world in if we keep invading the world.

    By the way, do any of you watch Battlestar Galactica? I just started watching the beginning of the third season, and the webisodes feature the best portrayal of insurgencies that I have seen.

  1456. Some things will never change
    They just stand there looking backwards
    Half-unconsious from the pain.
    They may seem rearranged.
    In the backwater swirling
    There is something that’ll never change.

  1457. The past four years have been an object lesson that, sometimes, when you think you are acting in the best interests of a proud, decent people that yearn for their sovereignty, you end up realizing that they’re just a bunch of hapless monkeys, and the whole initiative starts to look like a bad idea.

    The trick now is to actually give them their yearned-for sovereignty without looking like you’re surrendering to the forces of EEVUL in some way. Unfortunately W has kind of painted himself into a corner on this one so we’ll probably just have to carry on with the status quo, reading about families who’ve had their main breadwinner kidnapped, have frantically borrowed to scrape together the five grand ransom and, oh look, there’s his body, what a bummer.

    I suspect I do not disparage the administrations smarts as much as you do

    I understand to an extent, nobody wants to admit they voted for dumbasses, even with the excuse that the only alternative was soggy Democrats.

    This thread is starting to look like a cargo cult.

  1458. Adrian10 says: I understand to an extent, nobody wants to admit they voted for dumbasses, even with the excuse that the only alternative was soggy Democrats.

    Dumbass: No; slacker: yes!

  1459. Dumbass: No; slacker: yes!

    Why not both? I’ve read all this stuff about his cleverly concealed genius before, and it never convinces, though it’s clear he’s a champion shmoozer.

  1460. Genius?!?!? What twat(s) suggested W was a genius? ;-)

    Smart enough to be president? Sure.

    I don’t happen to think that that says very much, however…

  1461. Smart enough to be president? Sure.

    If it was a figurehead-type post like with the Texas Rangers, where he couldn’t break anything important, maybe. But that doesn’t appear to be the case with Commander in Chief, according to some people’s calculations.

  1462. Dan,

    just a bit of teasing – “when you think you are acting in the best interests of a proud, decent people that yearn for their sovereignty, you end up realizing that they’re just a bunch of hapless monkeys, and the whole initiative starts to look like a bad idea” – I think I’ll have to agree but there is certainly something darkly funny about hearing an American say that a civil war is a sign of a nation being immature for freedom. (I’m watching Cold Mountain in the other window, this is why it occured to me.)

  1463. Why not both? I’ve read all this stuff about his cleverly concealed genius before, and it never convinces, though it’s clear he’s a champion shmoozer.

    While I do not like shilling for Bush, this article estimates Bush’s IQ to be around 125-130, and it uses Bush’s scores on the SAT and the Armed Forces Qualification Test. 125 is not exactly idiot material!

    here is certainly something darkly funny about hearing an American say that a civil war is a sign of a nation being immature for freedom

    LOL, Shenpen!! Anyway, there are some differences between the American Civil War and the Iraqi Civil War.

  1464. 125 is not exactly idiot material!

    I’m not impressed with the SAT, it’s intended to improve with training, and Bush could afford private tuition for stuff like that. Really, though, being a dumbass is about behavior – you could have a very high IQ indeed (I imagine Cheney does) but if your ideology persuades you to invade unthreatening countries for bad reasons in pursuit of unattainable goals and stay there even when it’s clearly not working, you still get the badge.

  1465. They are so beautiful! I must have one when the time comes.

    I like the ones with the integrated compass, though those look a bit cheap for hanging on the wall – you really want handmade for that. But I’m waiting for one with a GPS unit.

    And the sun always rises in the east!

    Now you’re being silly.

  1466. “…unthreatening countries…bad reasons…unattainable goals…clearly not working…”

    You get the badge of honor for being a legendary non-sequitur machine-gun dude ;-)

    Shenpen – tease away buddy ;-) Firstly, I still challenge the use of the term “civil war” with respect to Iraq *and* America…but even if I am to accept it, there is still the fact that the Iraq civil war is *not* being fought for the same principals…implosion & slaughter can only result from these monkeys going at it hammer & tongs.

    I still stand behind the principals of this war…security, stability and liberty…but quite frankly even I am getting sick of shedding blood & treasure to make a silk purse out of a sow’s turd. If they cannot recognize and appreciate what we’re doing for them…fuck ’em. Let them slide into the crapper. Perhaps we really should get imperialistic and take over…

    PS. It was a ‘war of northern aggression’ (or a ‘war of southern independence’ if we’re playing nice ;-) …and abolition was a political subtext. It was all about economic subjugation and political consolidation. America was intended to be, and should have remained, a confederacy.

  1467. I still stand behind the principals of this war…security, stability and liberty…but quite frankly even I am getting sick of shedding blood & treasure to make a silk purse out of a sow’s turd. If they cannot recognize and appreciate what we’re doing for them…fuck ‘em. Let them slide into the crapper.

    What they would *probably* appreciate is the opportunity to take their destiny into their own hands – you may recall that this was one of the motivations for the Declaration of Independence. Stability will likely come when they’ve partitioned themselves, and the US could do a lot to make the ethnic cleansing less bloody than it might otherwise be.

    Perhaps we really should get imperialistic and take over…

    Don’t know what that would involve that you haven’t tried already. Mass hangings?

  1468. If you think it is wise to hang the stability of a global economy on a “probably”…well…

    “…Mass hangings?…”
    Yyyyyessss…that’ll do it…or was that kinda thing part of what we went into Iraq to end? Or was that a misfired attempt at being droll? ;-)

  1469. If you think it is wise to hang the stability of a global economy on a “probably”…well…

    Oh, Iraq is too strategically important for its people to be trusted with the luxury of self-determination?

    Or was that a misfired attempt at being droll?

    I just don’t know what you mean by “really getting imperialistic and taking over”.

  1470. “…Oh, Iraq is too strategically important for its people to be trusted with the luxury of self-determination?…”
    As is becoming tiresomely typical, you’re guilty of misdirection by exaggeration. However, you are more-or-less thinking along the right lines. The kind of linear intellect that cannot (or will not) comprehend the global significance of unstable economic influences, needs to be exposed, ridiculed, scorned and outcast.

    Like it or not, oil is king. Such a fundamental economic driver cannot be changed overnight…there’s no switching to ‘brand B’. Oil is it…our foundation…as vital to the global economy as food is to humans. Maybe we’ll discover the holy grail of energy, maybe not…who knows?…but we damn certainly have to live with reality today…and that’s oil, baby.

    With the absurd environmentalist pantomime here at home preventing us from ‘feeding ourselves’ with ‘home-grown’ oil supplies…or even from confirming if we’re capable of such self-sufficiency…we can only purchase oil-based energy resources (to make up the deficit) from abroad. The middle-east plays a rather significant role in that market.

    A bunch of medieval goons blowing the shit outta everything so they can establish the supremacy of their own sect of prehistoric drivel is most certainly not the epitome ‘firm economic foundations’. As a sick irony, the brutal and corrupt regime of Saddam at least ensured that there was some (albeit disgracefully sub-optimal) flow of black gold into the marketplace…but is anyone really going to suggest that it was wrong to tear down that crappy shack to rebuild a sturdier house? Ignoring the whole terrorism issue for a while, would we rather have continued funding such a regime? Wouldn’t that kinda be like pumping Iraqi blood into our gas tanks? How long do you turn a blind eye? What kind of people are we that can do such a thing?

    We have finally been forced to make ugly choices to engage in an ugly process to desperately try to pump some wholesome life into the filthy carcass of Iraq…and it seems that there are insufficient numbers of Iraqis that ‘get it’. Perhaps they’re inured to the way things were..perhaps their behavior is so deeply rooted in their culture they know no better…it still doesn’t change the reality that the rest of the world faces. It’s as if they’re so backward they still think it’s OK to defacate upstream…I don’t give a damn if their culture accepts such things – my water still tastes like shit.

  1471. “…I just don’t know what you mean by “really getting imperialistic and taking over”…”
    I was uncertain as to whether I was really serious or not, so I was mulling it over…but I was literally considering whether we should actually conquer the country and declare it American territory. Mercilessly annihilate any ragtag gaggle of fuckers that mess with us, and over the years re-acclimatize the general population to open, secular government, with preemptive human rights.

    Or something…I don’t know…I’m doing a lot of shoulder-shrugging nowadays…

  1472. Dan Kane,

    Like it or not, oil is king. Such a fundamental economic driver cannot be changed overnight…there’s no switching to ‘brand B’.

    Tell that to the Brazilians.

  1473. Dan, I thought our manufacturing processes mostly depend on energy provided by burning coal. The US has the worlds largest supply of coal.

    Though I don’t like involving the government, maybe we should switch to electric cars. If we standardize engines, we could have stations along the highway where one can swap off an engine for another one, and that engine can be recharged. Another idea would be to use superconductors to quickly charge the batteries. If we take away gas, the US should be able to produce enough gasoline for agriculture and plastics.

  1474. Oil is it…our foundation…as vital to the global economy as food is to humans.

    Closer still – without oil agricultural productivity takes a bit of a nosedive. Take out fertilizer from natgas and you’ve got a *real* problem sustaining your output of tasty pies.

    Good thing Peak Oil is a fantasy.

    With the absurd environmentalist pantomime here at home preventing us from ‘feeding ourselves’ with ‘home-grown’ oil supplies…or even from confirming if we’re capable of such self-sufficiency…

    I think if self-sufficiency was a live possibility it’d take more than a few hippies to stop it. American output peaked in the seventies, I’m afraid. There is a lot of coal, but large numbers of Fischer-Tropsch plants don’t necessarily assemble themselves for pennies in times of economic stress.

    but is anyone really going to suggest that it was wrong to tear down that crappy shack to rebuild a sturdier house?

    It’s that ability to rebuild a sturdier house that some people are…still waiting for.

    We have finally been forced to make ugly choices to engage in an ugly process to desperately try to pump some wholesome life into the filthy carcass of Iraq…

    That’s wholesome life you’re pumping in there?

  1475. Jeff…(a) it took ’em 10 years to realign their industry…and (b) why don’t you keep watching those Brazilians…their ‘success story’ is not what it appears. ;-)

    Phil, I believe you’re right…by far the majority of our heavy industrial manufacturing leans on coal in one way or another…but even this is dwarfed by the myriad ways our entire economy leans on the various fractions of oil.

    Again, Adrian, your sarcasm touches on a real issue…it is staggering to consider all the ways we have found to make use of oil…right down to getting the food for our bellies. I suppose that without the energy for large-scale industrial farming, we’d see a resurgence of the small family farm again…a return to the agrarian USA perhaps? What was the historical percentage? 40% employment in agriculture? Now it’s under 5% isn’t it?

    ‘Peak Oil’ is a theory, and as far as I’ve seen, about as poorly constructed as our beloved cheerio-science ‘Global Warming’. Maybe it’s true, maybe not…like the religious zealouts preaching apocalyptic GW doom, the ‘Peak Oil’ menagerie have never stopped to question how they could possibly determine if they’re *wrong*…a bit of a dead giveaway really…one of the hallmarks of charlatan pseudo-science. The End Is Nigh! Repent! The Gods Are Angry! lol :-)

    “…it’d take more than a few hippies to stop it…”
    You *seriously* misunderestimate the situation here ;-)

    “…that some people are…still waiting for…”
    More poignant sarcasm. Why are these people *waiting* around for it to be neatly dropped in their laps? Why aren’t they *contributing*? What will their complaint be? “The USA failed to deliver us a shiny new world to live in!” ‘Some people’ at home need to be supporting the effort, rather than cynically jockeying for political position, and ‘some people’ over there need to get their arses into gear and start *earning* their liberty.

    “…That’s wholesome life you’re pumping in there?…”
    Trying…trying…we shall see…

  1476. Adrian, I believe the U.S. gains most of its power from coal. Oil power plants were created back in the 60s or 70s, but they were mostly abandoned.

  1477. I know, oil is mainly for transport (and diesel for agriculture). The point is that the transition to all-coal isn’t something you can arrange overnight. Waiting for “market signals” (ie for private companies to feel certain of healthy profits/subsidies) to do the job might just bite you on the ass.

  1478. Waiting for “market signals” (ie for private companies to feel certain of healthy profits/subsidies) to do the job might just bite you on the ass.

    I understand that. However, didn’t Congress propose a ‘Manhattan Project’-style bill to fund alternative energy research? I can’t remember about that.

    Anyway, one way to reduce our resource usage would be enforcing immigration law.

  1479. I understand that. However, didn’t Congress propose a ‘Manhattan Project’-style bill to fund alternative energy research?

    Well, people are always proposing such things, but until they get the Administration on board it’s all hot air. And bestowing huge portions of pork on people they don’t know (and who might moreover be hippies) makes Congress uneasy. If it was Halliburton or Exxon passing the hat they’d feel comfortable.

    Anyway, one way to reduce our resource usage would be enforcing immigration law.

    The beaners are driving SUVs now, is it?

  1480. The beaners are driving SUVs now, is it?

    Well, yes. In the words of Brenda Walker, “By rapidly increasing the number of Americans, Washington makes the United States an even bigger engine of pollution and greenhouse gases. Immigrants don’t come for the better recycling opportunities: they want a high-consumption American lifestyle.”

    Things have gotten so bad in California, that the government may need to propose severe water restrictions in the near-future.

  1481. Again, Adrian, your sarcasm touches on a real issue…it is staggering to consider all the ways we have found to make use of oil…right down to getting the food for our bellies. I suppose that without the energy for large-scale industrial farming, we’d see a resurgence of the small family farm again…a return to the agrarian USA perhaps? What was the historical percentage? 40% employment in agriculture? Now it’s under 5% isn’t it?

    If only we had made that transition voluntarily… think of the energy savings! Alas, we instead elected to rely on the miraculous market to redress our energy woes…

  1482. “LOL, Shenpen!! Anyway, there are some differences between the American Civil War and the Iraqi Civil War.”

    Phil,

    of course there are. That’s not what I mean. What I mean is probably because we are living in an age of instant gratification and quickly changing technological and whatever environment we also tend to expect social and political changes to happen overnight. And an especially dangerous subcategory of this phenomenon is that the only requirement is the lack of tyranny for a country to quickly take on the path of Western-style development. While in reality some of them manage to do it with an amazing speed – Singapore f.e. – while some others can’t really get it in almost 200 years – f.e. Equador, Venezuela etc. – and even for the most successful countries – US or France or whatever – it took quite a time, effort, striving, internal bloodshed and other kinds of shit. So while the current military adventure might quite likely turn out to be a failure, don’t be so quick in calling post-Saddam Iraq a failed state and and the whole project of a republican Iraq doomed forever.

  1483. A friend of mine has an interesting idea of these oil stuff – that the trend of globalization might end without any goverment actions or social revolutions or any other kind of bullshit, just by the usual market forces: if the price of the oil would soar, that would mean that the cost of transportation would again be one of the most considerable factors in the cost of goods. Local shops, local markets buying from local farmers would once again replace Wal-Mart, industrial production won’t be outsourced to the Far East and so on. Sounds a bit like a romantic fairy tale , and I’m sure that in reality it would cause a lot of suffering and chaos, but it might have it’s advantages in the long run…

    I know a guy here in the UK who has that classic employment story which so rare today: he is working in the factory his father worked in all his life. And why? Because they are producing cardboard boxes and obviously, this is typically a product where transportation costs count helluva lot even at the current prices, so it cannot be centralized, much less outsourced. I think it’s unnecessary to emphasize how much better place this factory is to work at than some sort of bloated centralized giant of inhuman proportions. Maybe if the cost of transportation rised it would become the rule, not the exception.

    Miracoulous market? I don’t know any exact numbers but I’ve oftern heard American agriculture is heavily subsidized by the goverment. If that’s true and that’s also true that agriculture uses a lot of fossil products then maybe the current situation is the product of goverment interference itself and not pure market forces.

  1484. To break away from politics, here’s an interesting item for discussion: ESR’s Project for the New Linux Century will face a new setback, or at least a wrinkle: AMD is implementing DRM in video hardware.

    The issue is really quite simple: Consumption of media constitutes a large segment of computer usage, just as it does a large segment of much of American life. Users want their 7.1 surround audio and Blu-Ray video premium content. The media industry is all too willing to sell it to them, provided they have a modest guarantee that once Joe User gets his grubby mitts on it, it doesn’t turn up on the Pirate Bay within hours. Microsoft and the hardware companies are willing to do what they can to provide such a guarantee, so that they may continue to sell hardware and software that does what the public wants.

    The Linux community has assumed the stubbornness of an eight-year-old on the DRM issue.

    The future of Linux on the desktop is, if anything, the same as the future of Linux on the PS3: locked down, confined to a sandbox or a virtual machine designed to simulate unprotected hardware while still protecting the premium-content data path. Microsoft is in the process of turning the PC into another Xbox. Why? Because it can, and because people will buy it (and Windows) anyway, and it may even be (gasp!) easier to use for the majority of non-geek users. That’s certainly what helped the Xbox and other game devices sell so well.

  1485. Jeff, we may be looking at a divergence in computer usage. At home, most people just want something to type document, check email, surf the web, manage pictures, edit home movies, etc. Most people play DVDs on standalone DVD players, and standalone players such as the Apple TV might replace the computer for our DVR/iTunes/podcast needs. Computer vendors may soon find that going after the multimedia market is more trouble than its worth. Then the necessity of implementing DRM will not be present, so it will be dropped. Then, Linux will have just as much of a shot as any other system.

  1486. Jeff, the corporate world may also be the one to adopt open source. If the OSS can improve its collaboration utilities and provide some measure of backwards compatibility with Windows, corporations and governments may increase adopting it. In that market, DRM is more of a burden than a blessing. In fact, Vista may be unusable in any medical office because of HIPPA(?) privacy regulations.

  1487. Oh, I have also found a very fascinating article about the rise of Greek civilization, and I have seen striking parallels to the values of my own society. If you have ever wondered where the rugged, individualist usually comes from, its a great read!

  1488. WTF, over?

    ESR’s “project for the new Linux century”, represents nothing more than the deranged, pro-corporate (“can Linspire save us?” phleze!) droppings of a bat-shit insane has-been.

    Look at it! It shows absolutely *no* knowledge of multi-core CPUs, and the heavy-lifting that will be required to (re)-program for them, given performance as a goal, and the lack of linear-speedups on a single core.

    Compiling for 64-bit CPUs is largely a matter of setting compiler switches and running a new kernel. Its not that big a deal. It doesn’t fundamentally change the programming model (though it does allow a larger linear address space.) Further, 64-bit is likely to last at least as long as 32-bit computing did, since its not that the address space has gotten twice as big, its squared.

    OTOH, multi-core CPUs are getting better about as fast as Moore’s law gives the transistors. Intel is on a schedule to bring a die shrink to market every other year, with a new ‘micro-architecture’ brought to market in the intervening years. If 2 cores are the ‘norm’ now, with 4 cores on a die at the ‘high end’, then in two years, 4 cores on a die will be the norm, and 8 cores will be the ‘high end’. Two more years (2010) and 8 cores are the norm (with HyperThreading likely to enjoy a comeback, so 16-32 ‘virtual’ CPUs) and 16 cores per die (so 64 virtual CPUs) at the high-end.

    You can, of course, make bigger machines out of these parts.
    (Witness Apple’s 8-core desktops, built out of a pair of 4 core Xeons).

    But linux doesn’t scale well to a machine with a very large number of CPUs.

    Also, the linux kernel has stalled.

    Version 2.0 of Linux was released on June 9, 1996.

    January 25, 1999 – Linux 2.2.0 was released. (+ 2.5 years)

    January 4, 2001 – Linux 2.4.0 was released. (+ 2 years)

    December 17, 2003 – Linux 2.6.0 was released. (+3 years)

    Its been over 3 years since the 2.6 kernel was released, and there is no 2.7 tree (thus no 2.8 kernel is on the horizon.) Yes, there is further development in the 2.6 tree, but nothing radical, or even pervasive can happen there. The linux kernel may get incrementally better, but won’t undergo major surgery anytime soon.

  1489. RE: the foreign leaders jumping into the fray… I’ll gladly take criticism from a leader that isn’t a hypocrite…

    I’m still waiting.

  1490. Phil,

    I think you have the same idea here that I mentioned a couple of hundreds of comments before – in 1993, I used an Amiga for gaming, a PC AT for studying/programming, a VHS for movies and a tape for music. Now it converged into one PC but I can’t see any reason it has to stay so. Currently the only reason I have Windows is Skype videochat with my parents – Wengo or the others aren’t mature enough for completely nontechnical users. In the long run, I want to move the videochat on the TV – I think that would be cool. Also move web browsing, music listening to the TV – for all those uses that don’t need much keyboard or mouse interaction the TV (or a projector, maybe) is the perfect interface. On the other hand, for the all the programming and writing and related tasks a notebook looks like the most reasonable choice, which will either be an Ubuntu or a Mac. So basically, actually, Jeff can be right, but in this sense – Windows will occupy the TV’s position, i.e. Media Center Edition. Let them have it. Who cares?

    OTOH, generally about DRM – I think the RIAA nor the opponents are right in this debate. The basic problem is, most things we own have an ongoing use value, at least for a while. 99% of media content is one-off – watch it once or listen to it a coupla times and afterwards it’s useless. Simply because really ingenous, reusable products like the Godfather are rare. RIAA is right you should not own it without paying. Torrent users are right – if they bought it, they want to maximize use value by providing it to others. Solution? Very simple. You don’t really need to own them, just rent. Like lovefilm.com – they have about 65000 movies and for 15 quids a month I can rent as many DVD’s as I want to (3 at any one time, when I send one back, they send another from my wishlist). So in this situation why care about all the DRM – RIAA – whatever stuff? Media supposed to be a service, not a product to own. Miraculous market in action :-)

  1491. Here’s the one-act play written by the deranged VA Tech shooter.

    I can’t help be reminded of that pipe-bomb-in-the-mailbox guy. I wouldn’t be surprised if they find a shitty rock band in this kid’s past also.

  1492. Phil,

    Jeff, we may be looking at a divergence in computer usage.

    And I think that’s exactly what Big Content and Microsoft want. The roles which in the past were occupied by the PC will, in the near future, be occupied by a variety of special-purpose “appliances”: STBs (including to some extent game boxes) or smartphones for Web, chat, and e-mail functionality; iTV or Viiv players, or portable iPod-type devices for digital media; consoles for games; etc. And desktop machines with software library restrictions for office work. Think the ignominious return of the Displaywriter; or better yet, the scenes with Y.T.’s mom from Snow Crash. All of which are effectively locked and only run OSes and software approved by the manufacturer. This could even be Linux (think TiVo), but it would only be an approved build of the kernel, and the machine would not run end-user-installed programs.

    The general-purpose computing machine, together with free software, represent a big part of the freedom to tinker in the digital realm, and are inimical to the wishes of Big Content. People who care about the freedom to tinker constitute such a vanishingly small segment of the population as to be ignored in marketing considerations. Microsoft has done such a sterling job in triangulating between IHVs, ISVs, and the mostly non-tinkerer user base that they will continue to determine the future of the desktop for the foreseeable.

  1493. Jeff,

    the reason I don’t agree to this analysis is that I think it might have been a mistake that we started to use PC’s for watching movies, looking at pictures and listening to music – a task they are not really suitable for, because the desktop or notebook ergonomy, which was designed for working (and gaming) is simply suboptimally comfortable for these uses. I think the only reason it got popular is (usually illegally) downloadable content. As I mentioned before, the win-win solution of the debate of copyright protectors and file sharers is renting media. (Which renting could actually also happen online – if a set top box on a TV is connected to the net and the server makes it sure you delete some of the downloaded content before downloading a new one. Yes it can be cracked but does not worth the cost.)

    Now, if media moves to the TV and the iPod etc. then why would hardware manufacturers be interested in limiting the choices of PC users? If Microsoft would be able to bribe hardware vendors to tie the hardware to Windows they would have done it long ago – they could have done it in 2000 when their OS and Office product line was on the peak of it’s quality (after that it became annoyingly bloated) and Linux was close to being useless. (I just found my first SuSE 6.3 install disk from 1999 and the memories came rushing back… what a worthless crap it was.) Currently Vista is much less popular than they expected it to be and Ubuntu is gaining momentum. Fast. Sensible hardware vendors simply will not consciously limit their market. Actually the facts show the opposite – Dell is seriously considering selling notebooks with Ubuntu preinstalled. Also a hardware vendor can be more competitive if the OS costs nothing and it can provide the same performance with less hardware as Vista. As far as I know hardware is a really ruthlessly price-driven market where every dollar saved counts a lot.

    Besides, it seems to me that Microsoft’s general direction is rather opening up than closing further down. Important software free of charge (Visual Studio Express, SQL Express etc. ). Shared-source licences (IronPython). Opening up the specs of .NET, paving the way for Mono. They could have sabotaged the Mono project long ago if they really cared. Server-side software usually run fine on Mono. They are starting to understand that the nineties are over.

  1494. Note – the PC ergonomy is generally and by large, is the same as the dumb terminals of the eighties. Designed for data entry clerks – hunch over the keyboard, enter screen after screen of payroll data. Really, we must have been nuts to starts using it as a Hi-Fi and movie player. I have a prediction – the next big success will be those media-oriented websites that are especially optimalized for use on TV, with a remote. Nothing hard, just AJAX with the heavy use of OnKeyPress events. Imagine a reddit on the TV, where up/down moves between the links and left/right votes up and down. How easy would it be to do make it happen and how cool it would be. And how popular.

  1495. I just want my neural interface, is that too much to ask? Just get chipped, jack in, have a virtual holographic 3D display as large as my field of vision (maybe larger?)…and a bluetooth interface for ‘mentally’ communicating with external devices…like a targeting system on my guns.

    Yeah.

  1496. :-) The basic problem of neural interface is that while we are quite able to have conscious control over our hands (most civilized people can usually avoid the urge to punch someone they don’t like), we are much less able to control our speech (sometimes we say things we don’t really mean) and are almost unable to control our thoughts. This is why I think keyboards will stay with us for long. Even if we get voice-operated software working we will soon be tired of having to always take care what we say. And don’t even dream of a thought-operated gun: it would get you in jail quite quickly. It’s easy to not do it, it’s harder to not say it, but to don’t even think it… quite a task.

    Actually, on the other hand, it would make us Buddhists the most productive workers of the world :-) There was an interesting device at the Hamburg Expo 2000: a mental agitation-operated table football. It worked this way: you and your opponent put on a helmet measuring brainwaves – EEG or something like that. The machine-operated “ball” moves towards the goal of the player who is more agitated, anxious, nervous or excited. Now the tricky part is that as you see the “ball” move towards your opponents goal you get excited… :-) A guy beaten everybody for a while: he was an elementary school teacher, and boy, those folks really learn to be patient :-) But then some of our friends from the local meditation center arrived and then the poor guy had no chance :-)

  1497. LOL…good story :-)

    Actually, I didn’t mean a thought-controlled gun…heck…I’d be a walking whirlwind of lead ;-) …no, I meant only a targeting system on the gun connected to my neural interface via bluetooth…so I could ‘see’ where the gun was aiming without having to acquire a sight-picture. True shoot-from-the-hip funkiness.

    I think it just moved…

  1498. Dan Kane, you mean like a wet-wired Reason?

    a) that would be bad-ass; b) Stephenson is a frickin’ genius.

  1499. Ah, I see. Actually, that could work for computers too – being controlled by thoughts but the dangerous decisions would still have to be confirmed by manually pressing a button.

  1500. The problem with websites is that they were originally designed to convey static documents. They were never designed to be used as ‘interactive applications’ and all the technologies that make them interactive seem like hacks to me. That is why I think technologies like Second Life or Croquet will replace webpages for ‘online applications’ in the near future. You can just do more with this stuff than you can with a static webpage.

  1501. Totally agree. It’s so weird that we have amazing server-side technologies for web apps (like Rails) while on the client side users usually still suffer with forms that were originally designed for signing up to a mailing list or making an entry to a guestbook. I try to resist as hard as I can the trend to move ERP/CRM/etc. systems to the web – with usual web applications it’s horrible to key in a f.e. an order consisting of 50 item numbers. (Of course the point usually is that you shouldn’t key it in as everything supposed to be integrated with everything – but the point is, in reality, you still have to.) Actually, of course, it is possible to make it easy (see Google Spreadsheets) but it’s simply unlikely it will happen. It’s just too much effort.

    Something else. I think somebody mentioned here he has a German wife? Can you recommend be a few good blogs or whatever in German? I’d like to practice the language a bit.

  1502. OT: Here is another very interesting article about the EU. Here is the best paragraph:
    What the malaise of the EU tells us is what patriots have already known. Democracy and free markets are not enough. Dry documents, no matter how eloquent, abstract ideas, no matter how beautiful, do not a nation make.

    What makes a people and a nation is a unique history and heritage, language and literature, songs and stories, traditions and customs, blood, soil and the mystic chords of memory.

  1503. Phil,

    well I think it would be better to put the EU into perspective. On one hand, central control, central planning, non-elected leaders, too many controls, lack of emotional attachment, lack of common traditions etc. etc. make it look like a bad ide. But there is something else. Globalization creates large centers of power – the US and China which springs first into the mind and then OPEC for example. European countries are simply too small and weak to survive alone. And actually there is an even deeper problem. This weakness comes from a moral decay. When one of the British sailor captured by the Iranians wasn’t ashamed to tell the media every night he cried himself ot sleep because the Iranians 1) confiscated his iPod 2) repeatedly called him Mr. Bean, and that’s a professional, not-conscripted voluntary serviceman fergossake, well I think that does not need to be commented on… or that my friend here has a Master of Physics in Oxford and he never EVER studied calculus because some asshole thought that’s too hard for the students, let’s just keep things easy and comfy… well, it’s quite obvious we are living in a dying culture. But sticking these dying countries together can hopefully elongate the agony. Can make the zombie go on. And that’s the only thing really, that can be hoped for – either that these countries bound together in a funny parody of a superpower Europe can survive that 30-60 years I expect to live (I’m almost 30) or maybe in the best case, during that time someone comes up with an idea how to save it.

  1504. Shenpen, I think there is some hope for France at least, especially if either Sarkozy(?) or Le Pen are elected. Patriotism is a key ingredient for the success of a country, and the EU does not encourage patriotism; actually, the EU decries patriotism as ‘reactionary’. Europeans need to rediscover patriotism if they hope to survive.

  1505. I have just read an Onion article that highliths one of the great mysteries of our time: how does RadioShack remain in business? The more I think about it the more I cannot understand how a company that mostly sells equipment for amateur electronics projects can remain in business in 2007! Do any of you hackers know?

  1506. Phil,

    or to reinvent patriotism on a federal/continental level. As today’s culture, thoughts and goods are non-local, we cannot find anymore any significant differences between Copenhagen and Pisa (actually I stopped going to holidays to cities because they are all the same to me, except for the historical buildings). Thus there are no more exclusively local hooks to bind patriotism to. Just think of a Pennsylvanian patriotism as a parallel, for example – wouldn’t that be silly? Obviously losing identity means a society losing one of it’s most important cohesive forces, but OTOH identity does not necessarily have to be fixed the ethno-national, local level, actually, during history, supra-ethnical empires were rather the rule than the exception. In the near past, languages provided a natural barrier. But this have disappeared. OK, I think I have to explain something to you. Because you were born in an English-speaking culture, probably it’s not so obvious to you how English became the Latin of our age, a second language of everybody who consider themselved educated (or at least mean to make money). Many scientist over here don’t even bother to publish in their native language. It’s just unnecessary duplication of the effort. Thus, we are back again to a similar world, like, in the Middle Ages, when there is one common language of all the educated classes all over Europe. Thus, language ceased to be a barrier and therefore ethnicity ceased to be a firm base to build upon. Today, again, it’s only the oceans and the borders of the major religions act as filters, the other barriers have disappeared. And in today’s world globalisation forces everybody to think on larger scales again. Of course that’s a different problem that the current elites probably wouldn’t understand a word of what we are talking about right now :-) but that’s a different problem. OK, so to get it straight: I think the EU consists of two parallel projects. One of them is a natural response to globalisation and to WW2, and also as a natural way growing that together which, before Napoleon, always belonged, more or less, together. The other project is a soft-Soviet superstate. Naturally I don’t like the second one but in the first one I do, even if, in the end, it might just be a panacea to prolong the agony.

    Sarkozy is OK I think but Le Pen is of the same obnoxious sort as LaRouche and Perot. However if deeper structural and cultural changes don’t happen soon, Sarkozy won’t be able to do much. I think he is mostly a man of short-term firm-hand-style solutions – getting more police on the streets and so on – rather than a reformer with a long-term vision.

  1507. RadioShack is the poster child for the migration of electronics in general from tinker-friendly devices to proprietary consumer-grade junk. I believe they stay afloat by aggressvely pitching cellphone plans and remote-controlled cars for the young’uns. For the most part they left the hobbyist market behind sometime in the late 80s or early 90s.

  1508. Excellent find, Shenpen. Now add in the mass defection of American racists from the Democratic party to the Republican after LBJ took office — a contingent which the GOP relies upon to win elections — and you have a potent dangerous mix indeed. A xenophobic, trigger-happy base which considers force to be the first and only resort against threatening brown men…

  1509. Are you in therapy Jeff? On medication? You live in a peculiar world inside your head…very troubling…

  1510. Jeff,

    I don’ t really think this article was about this… seems to me you are trying to squeeze every idea that confers any amount of criticism towards the current administration into your, quite radical set of ideas, which I consider a distortion. It is also dangerous. I think critical thinking means one looks at everything from many possible perspectives and tries to build a full, rounded picture. As we very rarely find anything to be either perfectly good or perfectly despicable, thus probably the sane view is to see everything as “on one hand – on other hand”, intelligent and constructive debate can only commence if all participants are willing to see the subject of the debate as something relative, something that can be approached from multiple angles. If you insist on seeing something as utterly evil, of the manifestation of something purely and perfectly Wrong, you quickly bore all those participants out of the debate who have a relativistic and thus realistic viewpoint, knowing that no human creation can be absolutely good or absolutely evil. So what you will be left in the end is to debate only with those who represent the polar opposite, who have a dumb, unthinking belief in the absolute, maybe even divine goodness of the very same subject you despise. To put it more simply, the fruit of this behaviour in the long run is that the only people willing to debate with you will be the unshakebly pro-W religious fanatics. I think that’s not what you want to achieve.

    Going back to the artictle, although from this side the ocean II can’t realistically comment on what it says on the practical side of the things, I find two ideas in this article worthy of attention on the more theoretical side:

    1) Conservativism or right-wing is very often vague and undefined. Within different systems of reference right-wing can either mean Ayn Rand, Roger Scruton and Lyndon LaRouche – there people with radically different ideas who agree(d) in very little. We could use a bit of cleaning up of what is what.

    2) Conservativism indeed often deserts it’s real goal – ideologylessness – to degenerate into a hobbesian ideology which isn’t any way better than the other ideologies. It gets back up to 1) – we should change on vocabulary, subclass the too abstract, too general Conservativism or Right-Wing classes in the OO sense and stick to using the subclasses to avoid confusion.

  1511. Shenpen, the form of conservatism described in the article employes its neo-Hobbesian enforcement disproportionately against certain segments of the population, certain darkly complected segments. This is fact, and has been backed up with studies and statistics showing that the U.S. imprisons many times more blacks than whites, and that law enforcement treats blacks differently for the same types of crimes. For an example that makes the disparity glaringly obvious, consider the difference between the handling of the methamphetamine epidemic (primarily among rural whites) vs. the handling of the crack epidemic (primarily among inner-city blacks). With crack the users were treated as criminals and punished harshly, often jailed; with meth the users were treated as victims, and the law was structured to make the component chemicals difficult to obtain rather than to put emphasis on punishing use or trafficking.

    Now, to draw the terror connection, do you think that such a regime can be trusted, as the right has demanded, to wage war against an enemy defined in large part by its ethnicity (Arab Muslims)? I have some serious doubts.

    This may be one of those practicalities you wouldn’t have much direct knowledge about, but it is a reality that conservatives (and distressingly, many libertarians) would rather sweep under the rug.

  1512. This is fact, and has been backed up with studies and statistics showing that the U.S. imprisons many times more blacks than whites, and that law enforcement treats blacks differently for the same types of crimes.

    Just like Global Warming. Pshaw.

  1513. One of them is a natural response to globalisation and to WW2, and also as a natural way growing that together which, before Napoleon, always belonged, more or less, together.

    Are you sure about that? Granted, European history is not my strongsuite, but I do not think Europe has been unified since the Roman Empire collapsed. The British Isles have always been separate (both geographically and culturally) from the Continentals. France has always had its own thing going on (I don’t know much about Burgundy). Spain was a Muslim colony until the 1400’s. Germany was split up among squabbling nationalities until the 1870’s. Italy was (and still is) more of a country due to cartographical convenience than anything else. The Austrian Empire was also around, but it was losing ground to Russia (I think); do you consider Russia to be part of Europe? Let’s not even talk about the Balkans and the Caucasus! Do you really consider such a diverse mass of people to have ever belonged together?!

    Since the Roman Empire collapsed, I do not think Europe has been ‘unified.’

  1514. Microsoft has released Silverlight, a rich internet applications platform which goes a long way to ensuring that even as applications move to the Web, they will still run on a Microsoft platform. Though they have conceded dominance of the browser market and offered versions for Firefox and Macintosh, there is no Linux version.

    Still optimistic about the chances for Linux on the desktop?

  1515. Jeff, what about the Croquet project? That still seems like a more promising project, and it has the support of several large companies backing it. I am not sure if Microsoft’s vendor-lockin trick will work this time.

  1516. Phil, Croquet is a brilliant idea and an awesome experiment, but in the world where the bulk of software development takes place, the world inhabited by people like Shenpen who contend with n-tier architectures and humdrum boring data entry applications, it’s a no-go. The only competitor is Adobe’s Flash/Flex platform, which I foresee as being the mainstay of artists and designers, people who like sizzle with their steak (and who typically carry around non-Windows laptops adorned with fruit logos). So Homestar Runner won’t move to Silverlight, but developers of the next generation of dynamic Web applications of a more ordinary bent will probably consider Silverlight a very attractive platform: it will come with Windows (or else be a very small download) and will enable them to leverage their existing Windows and .NET platform experience. It could mean the difference between deploying your application today and deploying it weeks or months from now.

  1517. We’re now closing in on the anniversary of ESR’s last posting to this blog.

    Still…having even bush-league terrorists fear harming Americans is a good start, and as neat a vindication of George Bush’s foreign policy and the war in Iraq as anyone could ask for. The war is not, after all, breeding terrorists; it’s killing the leaders and frightening the small fry into letting go their victims.

    With 20/20 hindsight, its easy to see how foolish that was.

    I say we stick a fork in it, its done.

  1518. Speaking of things being done, so is Blair’s term as prime minister. He announced his resignation today.

    With any luck, Bush ‘n’ Dick will do likewise, especially now that one of their biggest supporters has seen the writing on the wall regarding the continued wasteful and illegal prosecution of their oil war.

  1519. “the world inhabited by people like Shenpen who contend with n-tier architectures and humdrum boring data entry applications, it’s a no-go”

    Boring data entry applications… I accept that one. Yeah, that’s my daily job to develop these. However, please, come down from the clouds. These sort of applications, however boring they might seem, make our world run. I spent most of last week polishing the interface between a product configurator (Eden) and an ERP system and the manufacturing planning functionality in the ERP system, especially the way material shortages are handled, in a door factory. Nothing heroic, no smart hackerdom, nothing to be really proud of. But I expect that the result will be that quite a lot of building societies will get their doors twice as quickly as they did before. You know, Jeff, it all boils down to the egos. This sort of thing does not make my ego feel cool, it’s not like writing something like Twitter, it won’t make me a hero or a celebrity. But it, in it’s humble, practical, down-to-earth way does make the world a better place a little bit. But I can understand disagreement in this thing. Maybe this material sort of benefit can’t compete with the psychological benefit the “cool” applications deliver. I can accept that. However…

    N-tier architectures… For that I have to beg for veto. Not the least. See, my job is around the Navision ERP system. And the reason I choose to work with it was it’s wonderful simplicity. I mean if the client, during a training, requested a button to throw all products supplied by the current vendor thrown into the current purchase order, I could call for a coffee break and implement it in 5 minutes because it was just adding a button and code behind the button as:

    Item.SETCURRENTKEY(“Vendor No.”);
    Item.SETRANGE(“Vendor No.”,Rec.”Buy-From Vendor No.”);
    IF Item.FIND(‘-‘) THEN REPEAT
    CLEAR(PurchLine);
    LineNo+=10000;
    PurchLine.VALIDATE(“Document Type”,Rec.”Document Type”);
    PurchLine.VALIDATE(“Document No.”,Rec.”Document No.”);
    PurchLine.VALIDATE(“Line No.”,LineNo);
    PurchLine.VALIDATE(“Type”,PurchLine.Type::Item);
    PurchLine.VALIDATE(“No.”,Item.”No.”);
    PurchLine.INSERT(TRUE);
    UNTIL Item.NEXT=0;

    and when they came back from the break it was done. Extreme programming at it’s best, complete lack of waterfall. And I NEEDED to have tools that can do this because most of my clients had a total yearly sales (sales, not margin!) less thant $5M so they couldn’t afford lots of superfluous consultancy. They usually wanted this sort of stuff for free.

    Later on Microsoft bought Navision and now it’s called Microsoft Dynamics-NAV and yes, it is turning towards an N-tier bullshit… maybe I’ll do a career change and become a Rails or PICOLisp developer.

  1520. Shenpen, I wasn’t trying to disparage you or the work you do, only indicate that for some types of development things like Croquet won’t work.

    I still maintain my position that excessive amounts of tedium (including data-entry tedium) is like excessive layers of management, or excessive amounts of “filler” in TV programming: it’s not necessary, but everybody thinks it’s necessary and rushes to defend it because they’ve never thought it could be any different. Accounting and ERP software is the way it is because back in the 60s and 70s when the earliest systems were pitched to accountants, they wouldn’t buy it unless it looked exactly like the pencil and paper system they were already using (and even then it was a monumentally hard sell). This is true even for things like the lowly spreadsheet, all attempts to fundamentally improve which (like the amazing Improv) have failed massively.

    But that’s a debate for another way. With my original point (which is that massively cool geek toys like Croquet cannot compete on anywhere near the same footing as workaday NotDet for the vast bulk of programming tasks), I’m sure you will wholeheartedly agree.

    Furthermore, all apps with a client front end and a server back end are n-tier. Heck, for the degenerate case of n=1, all software is n-tier! I don’t think it’s bullshit; separation of concerns is A Good Thing. But there are a lot of snotty consultants trying to sell overengineered solutions, that’s for sure.

  1521. Yaaargh! It seems Croquet isn’t a very Google-friendly name :-) Can you give me a link?

    I too dislike overengineered monstrosities – I think most of the major vendors can’t think out of the COBOL/RPG box even if they use something more modern. The thing is, the definition between programming and configuration isn’t very clear – f.e. some crazy guy proved a while ago that sendmail’s config file is actually Turing-complete. You can have a plain config file at first which only assigns values to variables, then you make the file have conditions in it to make it more flexible, like f.e. routing e-mails from mailing lists to different folders, which most e-mail clients can do, and then you only need to add loops and boom, you have a programming language. Or an algorythmical configuration language.

    The trick of this trade is that the tasks are usually trivial but they need to be done in very little time – the usual unit of measure is the hour, not the day or the week. For this one needs as much simplicity and flexibility as possible and I think all those projects who try to write business logic in a general purpose compiled language (Compiere, GnuEnterprise etc.) are doomed to fail. Therefore I don’t really believe in .NET as well – .NET can be useful for writing the interpreter of an algorythmical configuration language (Greenspun’s Tenth Rule? I mean why not have the configuration language in a tree format so it can easily be parsed as data -> PICO Lisp) which should run in an inversion of control environment in order to avoid generated boilerplate code and so on, but if one tries to write the business logic in .NET or Java one usually will have to wade through thousands and thousands of lines of generated code in order to maintain it. It can’t really compete in the long run, I think. Outside the Navision world the closest thing to this simplicity and flexibility is Rails I think (and PICOLisp, to some extent), I think if I would start a new ERP system from scratch Rails would OK for the back-end. But HTML isn’t good enough for the frontend, at least not without tons of JavaScript OnKeyPress handling in order to speed up the data entry. I think Mozilla XUL would be seriously cool for the front-end and I just can’t understand why f.e. GMail doesn’t have a XUL front-end. It would be really easy to do and really lovely to use.

    As for whether heavy-weight data entry is really necessary or just a legacy from the pen and paper age, I think the whole point is complying with accounting regulations and the wishes of auditors. In order to produce a Balance Sheet, you can’t avoid having G/L transactions. If the auditor points to the inventory value account and asks why it is so much, you have to be able to show a ledger of inventory transactions, goods receipts and shipments with value, and with a document number so that you can, at the auditor’s request, pick up and show him the actual, printed, signed, legally proving document from the shelves. What happens, then, if you receive goods, receive the invoice, and later on the vendor figures out the price was wrong and sends a corrective invoice of 10% discount? You can’t just change the value on the inventory ledger because you have two invoices for the same goods receipt, and both document numbers need to be recorded with their actual values, in order to preserve the audit trial and please the auditor. So you end up with a system where there are two inventory ledgers, one of them records goods receipt and shipment in quantities, and each entry can have N entries in the other ledger which show the associated value(s) of the physical movement and the value of the stock movement is the SUM of them all. So we are having three tables now just for the inventory value account in the balance sheet, with complicated business logic connecting them, and none of them is avoidable. These expectations define the skeleton of such a system. Now, if you also decide you want to know where those goods actually are in the warehouse, in which bin or shelf, you’ll probably end up with a fourth ledger. This isn’t expected by the auditor, but if the rest of the system works this way then why come up with a different strategy, it would just be confusing. (You could consolidate this all into one table but 1) that table would have way too much records and the system would be slow unless you can come up with a really clever partitioning scheme 2) it would have 200 columns and it would really be hard to write reports).

  1522. Oh, I forgot the important point, the conclusion of all – I think Microsoft and and the other large vendors aren’t really a threat because they can’t really understand the small is beautiful principle. Sure, they will rule the Fortune 500 market, but I think the vast majority of business, the ones under a yearly sales of $10-20M will use any opportunity to move towards development environments that are simple and flexible. And Microsoft jus cannot understand it – they are bastardising Navision into something bloated which will trigger a major exodus in the next few years, or look at Microsoft CRM – it has some nice idea, but if you want to extend it by a very simple functionality, f.e. of issuing a warning if you try to enter a new Contact where that name already exists in the database, you have to juggle casting strongly typed BusinessObject objects to Contact objects etc. – which directly translates into a fat bill to the customer.

    See, in the business applications world the reason the small vendors are disappearing (f.e. ever heard of the small, beautiful Maconomics?) is that ususally a few people are sitting on a closed code base and they can only provide so much amount of support and maintanence. Usually not enough. Therefore they are moving towards the big ones because if there are hundreds of reselling partners with access to the code base, you can be more sure someone will always be able to support you. I mean one can usually figure out only from the code that if this setting is set this way then you can’t post something that way because the documentation tends to be scarce. But this security has it’s price in money, size, and inflexibility. I think the market is not so far away from figuring out that FLOSS gives even more security because any programming-savvy kid next door can look at the code and figure out answers from it.

    Finally, some general points. The reason I’m not a dedicated Microsoft-hater is that I think Microsoft generally does the best work within the possible limits of closed source. Others are much worse – think of IBM’s Lotus for example – but the ones I really hate is those small software houses where three people are sitting on a code base of some horrible MS-DOS or FoxPro-based “vertical solution” crap and generally it takes months to answer the simplest of support questions. I don’t mind at all if Microsoft puts them out of business. Microsoft is I think stretching the quality possibilities of closed source as far as possible and therefore they themselves can only be put out of business by a paradigm change – FLOSS. At some markets it’s already happening – small clients won’t accept a 50-day quote for an ASP.NET application when they can get a 15 day quote from a Rails-based company. I think more of it will happen in the coming years. So I don’t see it as a battle between FLOSS and Microsoft. I rather see it as a gradual development. First better quality closed source (Microsoft) defeating bad quality closed source (like Lotus or those horrible “verticals”). Then even better quality FLOSS defeating Microsoft. I see the last 15 years as a continuous improvement of quality. If we assume it won’t stop – and why would it – then the paradigm change is near.

  1523. Damn, I forgot the most important thing: the very reason Microsoft is providing better quality than the small closed-source software houses is that the quality advantage they have over them is EXACTLY THE SAME as FLOSS has over Microsoft – due to thousands of developers in-house and the “eating the own dog food” policy they have massive amounts of peer review, sharing, an integration between applications. It’s a mistake to imagine MS being the same as the software house down the corner, only bigger. That might be true for IBM, but not for Microsoft. MS is fundamentally different – great people like Raymond Chen wouldn’t work there if it would be the same. I think it’s a closer model to view it as an artifical world within a huge walled garden, and within this artifical world the method is definitely FLOSS-style cooperation and feedback. Therefore for the industry as a whole it’s rather an evolution than a battle! Therefore the next step of this evolution can only be moving from using the products of a FLOSS system from an artificial world in a walled garden to using the ones from the real FLOSS of the real world. There is simply no other direction to move.

  1524. Let’s see a practical example of the above.

    The FLOSS TinyERP system can print really beautiful reports from the database, so you can f.e. set up a report for printing a sales quotation that looks really professional. And the way it works is that you fire up OpenOffice, design the report to as pretty as you want it, and put in some tags which will be replaced by data from the database. It’s a templating language, similar to the many templating languages used for web development f.e. Cheetah. Now, the point is, OpenOffice is available for free, the libraries for parsing an OO document are available for free, the PostGresSQL database is available for free, the Python libraries for PostGreSQL are available for free, PDF printing libraries are avaible for free, so all they needed to do is to replace the tags with the results of SQL queries and the job is done. And even that they didn’t really have to write themselves because they could just look at any stable templating engine f.e. Cheetah and modify it for their needs. So something really clever and cool was done with very little work. I think is the real power of FLOSS, not just peer review.

    The point is, Microsoft has basically the equivalents of all the above applications in-house so basically they could do the same thing in-house. While a small closed source software house would have to write everything from scratch – usually with much worse results. Therefore Microsoft’s world is much more similar to the FLOSS world than to the small closed software house.

    This example also tells why Microsoft will lose – because they could do the same thing, but they don’t want to. Simplicity is missing fro their culture. So instead in the last version of Navision they generate Word documents by horribly complex XSLT transformations. Which means we would have to quote days for customizing them while a TinyERP reseller can quote hours for it. Hours for teaching that simple templating language to the client, that is, and then they do it themselves for ever and ever. I will have to move out from the Navision world in the next few years because it’s just something we can’t compete with.

  1525. This is true even for things like the lowly spreadsheet, all attempts to fundamentally improve which (like the amazing Improv) have failed massively.

    Seen this about Improv? Sounds like the demand for what it offered may have been overestimated.

  1526. Sounds like the demand for what it offered may have been overestimated.

    Which is exactly why Microsoft blatantly copied it and incorporated it as the “pivot tables” feature of Excel. Improv’s fate was probably sealed when its authors chose the NeXT as a development platform.

    Sometimes I wonder if Spolsky is half as clever as he thinks he is; in the next paragraph he praises Deja.com for making the move that led to their undoing (and subsequent acquisition by Google, primarily for their Usenet archive).

  1527. I should rethink what I said. If Microsoft was ripping off Improv’s features then there’s some room for innovation in the spreadsheet space. But my original point was that accountants were very resistant to new representations for their data, and that probably had a hand in Improv’s demise. By and large that sector is a pink-plane sector, with only very few opportunities for blue-plane innovation (which tends to be more accepted if Microsoft forces it on everybody).

  1528. Thanks, Phil. Google is a b*tch – it somehow decided, probably based on which link people choose from similar queries, that because I’m in the UK I *must* be interested in croquet the ball game and listed pages and pages of irrelevant crap… :)

  1529. “…but I only watched Will and Grace one time, one day; wish I hadn’t ’cause TiVo now thinks I’m gay…”

  1530. Wow… Microsoft prepares to sue linux, and esr is nowhere to be found?]

    Linux evangelist Eric Raymond seems to think the patents at issue fall under the latter category. “It is nearly as certain that those patents are all junk,” he said in an e-mail interview. “If Microsoft had sound and critically relevant patents to assert, they wouldn’t need to screw around with vague threats. They’d simply publish the patent numbers and it would be game over for Linux.”

  1531. Wow… Microsoft prepares to sue linux, and esr won’t post here?]

    Linux evangelist Eric Raymond seems to think the patents at issue fall under the latter category. “It is nearly as certain that those patents are all junk,” he said in an e-mail interview. “If Microsoft had sound and critically relevant patents to assert, they wouldn’t need to screw around with vague threats. They’d simply publish the patent numbers and it would be game over for Linux.”

  1532. On Idiocracy – there is something about these reviews I don’t understand. Mike Judge is said to be here a paleocon, even a populist paleocon – as far as I know this term usually depicts stiff, pessimist, boring moralists like Pat Buchanan. How can such a man come up with something as hideously funny and just too true as Office Space? Or maybe this “paleocon” term is just a media label for him which simply isn’t true, the same way as Pim Fortuyn was depicted by the media as a right-wing extremist which was simply wrong?

  1533. “…Nothing heroic, no smart hackerdom, nothing to be really proud of…”
    Yes there is Shenpen…good code is good code, regardless of application…and I salute you for it ;-)

    Keep the faith bro…and ignore the wannabe twatbags

  1534. “…Mike Judge is said to be here a paleocon…”
    Let’s face it, they’ve gotta shove him into *some* box or they’ll be right outta their comfort zone…doesn’t matter if it’s bollocks.

    Who knows about Judge? He seems to me to be a guy with a rather acidic “WF? How did y’all get so dumb?” view of the world. I think his work sinks a pointy-toed boot up the ass of planet earth… ;-)

  1535. Phil, the bad news is that consumerist America is already ruining its crop yields in a way that’s arguably even stupider than watering with Gatorade: The bees are disappearing because of the proliferation of cellphone towers.

  1536. Yeah, I’m going to withdraw the bee comment above; a bit of fact-checking yielded the result that the terrible connection being drawn hasn’t any basis in scientific study.

  1537. Thanks, Dan :)

    Something else – there’s some of you here who have a strong interest in economics and there is a weird phenomena in economics I don’t really understand. For example, a Toyota Camry is about $20K in the US, $30K in Ukraine, $40K in Hungary and $60K in Turkey. WTF? Economic theory says if the demand is low, prices should go down. Demand can be, I think, roughly modeled as the size of the population times the average income. Therefore here we see an inverse relationship with demand and prices – the less is the demand, the higher are the prices. It’s just crazy, it’s totally aganst economic theory as far as I know it. And it’s not the only example. My father in Hungary buys on the Interent his cigars from Portugal and tires from Germay at one-thirds of the price in Hungary, I often buy designer clothes like Armani Jeans in Italy at one-half of the Hungarian price and at one-third of it here in the UK at TK Maxx (OK, that’s an outlet, but they still have quite good ones). $30 for a Moschino long-sleeve shirt here, it’s just crazy, it would be $100 in Italy and $150 in Hungary if available at all. How can it be explained by economics theory that where peope have less money, the prices are higher? I don’t think it’s the Veblen effect. And especially – how can we explain to people living in poorer countries that it is fair and just that the same goods cost less in richer countries – I think it’s a bit hard to justify? I mean going to a country for shopping which is richer than yours sounds crazy, but this is what many people actually do because the prices are lower. My experience is that at least half of the perceived affluency of Western Europe and especially America comes not only from higher incomes but very often from much lower prices.

  1538. Shenpen…contrast the embedded transaction costs of selling that Camry in the US vs Turkey. The supply/demand thing isn’t the whole economic story, only a facet.

    Demand for anvils is practically non-existent…now try finding a decent one for under $500 ;-) I know whereof I speak…

  1539. Shenpen, Steve Sailer’s biases are well accounted for. What he has to say about Mike Judge has no bearing on the man himself…

  1540. Quite frankly, Jeff, that entire biography is a bullshit screed. His comments on New Orleans were very informative and profound. If you do not like it, please try to refute it.

  1541. I especially like the last two paragraphs of that article:

    Governmental bodies naturally decay rapidly in competence, especially when free discussion of unpleasant realities is suppressed.

    New Orleans should remind us that we still live in a harsh world. The make-believe that passes for public discourse, even at the elite level, simply isn’t adequate for protecting American citizens.

  1542. Something else – there is an aspect of American politics I have not yet thought about and if I do think about it, actually it makes me quite critical of the Bush goverment:

    1) In politics the law of action – reaction ususally works. It means that whenever a goverment is mostly moderate and centrist even if the lose the next election, the people usually elect fairly moderate guys of the opposition because during a moderate goverment vociferous opposition politicans look like untrustworthy troublemakers to the public. This is quite visible over here with Blair and Cameron. However, whenever a goverment goes far away from the center, then quite likely the public will elect opposition politicians who are just as far away from the center to the other direction. And it is easy to tell when did a goverment go too far away from the center: when the public opinion is deeply split, when most people find it impossible to stay neutral but they think they have to take sides, it means they did go too far away. Thus, I’m fairly sure the next Dem goverment will be much further left than f.e. Clinton’s was.

    2) Goverments rarely reduce the power they inherit. After all, they became politicians because they like to govern. Even if those rare cases when they seem to reduce one aspect of their power – like the Reagen-Thatcher era – if you look closer you see they increased some other aspect of it. Goverments are just happy to use the power they inherited and use it for their own agenda.

    Adding 1) and 2) together the outlook is that the next administration will quite far left and will happily use the power the Bush administration increased for the case of the war against terrorism for their on means – quite likely they will use it for their war against “hatespeech”, political incorrectness and ultimately, free speech. And that’s one chilling prospect. Therefore I think the Bush administration is committing a horrible mistake to increase their power in times when it’s quite likely they will lose the next elections.

  1543. Phil, I’d say Sailer’s biggest flaw in his New Orleans article is basing it on the assumption that blacks are untrusting, untrustworthy and prone to criminal, violent behavior, therefore in need of Whitey’s policing in order to be kept on the straight and narrow. The truth is that ever since the segregation era, blacks have developed their own webs of trust, completely separate from and independent of the hostile dominant culture in which they were embedded. The evidence that these complicated networks exist is not hard to find; some of the terms blacks use amongst themselves, e.g., “brother”, “sister”, etc., are epiphenomena of these webs of trust. And when you hear blacks calling one of their own out as an “uncle tom” or “house n*gger”, it’s not racism; it’s an indication that the target of the attacks has violated the web of trust by attempting to curry favor with Whitey instead of working for the respect of his fellow blacks who made him what he is. All of which makes Sailer’s article even more infuriating since he deliberately chooses to ignore this evidence and justify his ignorance with pseudoscientific racist rhetoric.

    Shenpen, the Bush administration had turned an American experiment in proxy warfare (Al-Qaeda) into a bogeyman used to justify egregious human rights violations here and abroad, an illegal war, and massive attempted resource appropriation for the profit of private interests. That’s gonna be a tough act to follow by any of the Democratic candidates. A “war on hate speech” won’t have nearly the dire effects that GOP manipulation of prevailing beliefs has had on the country these past few years, especially if it means cutting off the poison spewing from the likes of Sailer, Limbaugh, and Imus at the source.

  1544. Phil, I’d say Sailer’s biggest flaw in his New Orleans article is basing it on the assumption that blacks are untrusting, untrustworthy and prone to criminal, violent behavior, therefore in need of Whitey’s policing in order to be kept on the straight and narrow.

    He never specifically said blacks needed ‘Whitey’s policing.’ He said that black society flourished with a heavier emphasis on family values. From my vantage point, it seems that some of the more successful African societies have been Muslim. The Somali Bantus discourage promiscuity so much that they perform female genital mutilation to keep women ‘more docile’.

    A “war on hate speech” won’t have nearly the dire effects that GOP manipulation of prevailing beliefs has had on the country these past few years, especially if it means cutting off the poison spewing from the likes of Sailer, Limbaugh, and Imus at the source.

    What about Farrakhan and Sharpton? Their comments on the Jews are particularly disgraceful. The last 30-40 years have been characterized by White racial guilt and ‘recompense’ (in the form of affirmative action). It looks like this policy is unraveling. The rise of Christian fundamentalism and ‘redneck’ culture is just a backlash by whites to defend their way of life. I highly doubt any ‘political correctness’ will make it go away. If anything, these laws usually make the problem worse.

    Shenpen, the Bush administration had turned an American experiment in proxy warfare (Al-Qaeda)

    If you are talking about the Mujahideen, then you’re wrong. The Mujahideen was not a proxy army because they could actually fight.

    into a bogeyman used to justify egregious human rights violations here and abroad

    Well, they did knock down two buildings (and a section of the Pentagon) and kill 3000 people. It is better evidence of a threat than Clinton had with the Branch Davidians.

    and massive attempted resource appropriation for the profit of private interests

    That is different from the ‘privatization’ that occurred in the US and Russia after the Cold War . . . how?

  1545. The rise of Christian fundamentalism and ‘redneck’ culture is just a backlash by whites to defend their way of life.

    Right, and it had nothing to do with opportunistic hucksters (like the thankfully dead and buried Jerry Falwell) exploiting the stubborn, rampant stoopidity, hypocrisy, and resentment among American whites. Which is not to say that there aren’t black hucksters. They just don’t have access to the annals of power the way the Falwells and Robertsons do. This is due once again to the historical systematic exclusion of blacks from participating in the exchange of physical and social capital, which exclusion affirmative action was implemented to hopefully help reverse.

    Whatever the case, with rapidly dwindling oil supplies and nasty secondary effects like global warming, to say nothing of the geopolitical backlash, said way of life is in for an abrupt halt; the only question is how much damage it will do in the meantime and whether it can be contained.

    Well, they did knock down two buildings (and a section of the Pentagon) and kill 3000 people. It is better evidence of a threat than Clinton had with the Branch Davidians.

    On whose orders? With what motivation? Considering the longstanding business relationship between the Bushes and the Bin Ladens, I don’t think the standard “they hate our freedoms” is going to fly.

    That is different from the ‘privatization’ that occurred in the US and Russia after the Cold War . . . how?

    Well, for one thing, in that case there wasn’t a military conflict with the intent of acquiring oil, with lies and distortions deployed by the ruling government to justify it, at least not on our side.

  1546. Something else. I found a quote in my files from the political philosopher Istvan Bibo. I find it very insightful for many situations I have seen, and not only political ones, but many others as well. F.e. it even fitted the situation of the flamewar between the subcultures of the fans of two fantasy/RPG mags. But it’s generally political. I’ll try to translate it. And a question – do you like it and if you do, have you ever seen situations where it was true?

    “For leading a community – just like for every other kind of constructive work – one needs to have two abilities. One of them is practical realism to be able to determine what is feasible, and the other is an insight into the real inner workings of the problems to solve. Whenever a community gets stuck in the dead end alley of a great lie, the first consequence will always be that they won’t find people who are both realistic and insightful, to make them into their leaders. Instead, on one hand, they will find practical people who above all want the opportunity to do practical work and/or to be successful or to climb on the top, and in order to achieve this, they are willing to be “realists” in a sense that they accept the currently existing and ruling consctruction of the aforementioned lie as “reality”. Thus their realism will make them objectively support and strenghten a fundamentally false construction and make them keep trying to maneuver between the false conditions of real possibilities. And on the other side those people who are gifted with the insight to see actual truth or reality, will either go find other forms of expression or will retreat into small communities or subcultures, will more and more become isolated, find refugee in general ressentiment, offendedness, or acting like fierce prophets. Therefore in such a case it will be the job of freaks, weirdos, nuts and fierce prophets to tell the truth.”

  1547. I think I’m starting to understand why the left-wing way of thinking is so popular – because very often it’s an inseparable mix of genius and crazyness. Consider this article: http://www.worldchanging.com/archives//006428.html The idea is very clever, the execution is very practical and the intent – of helping the homeless in a really meaningful way instead of just giving them money which might just been spent on booze – is really admirable. But just about halfway through the article, when you’d start feeling really good about the whole thing, things start to get crazy: “While these shelters were being used, they functioned not only as a temporary place of retreat, but also as a station of dissent and empowerment; many of the homeless users regarded their shelters as a protest device, and would even shout slogans like >>We beat you Uncle Sam!

  1548. opps, half of the post was left out – maybe because using Opera instead of the usual Firefox? Anyway:

  1549. ” and then “Could we wake up one morning to find these encampments engulfing buildings like ivy?” and so on…

  1550. std, ESR is only one board member and could have been voted against. Though that seems doubtful, as it seems that one of the things at issue is Microsoft’s patented, proprietary media codecs — and purchasing legal access to the same is right in line with the PNLC agenda…

  1551. Via Linspire, esr either sold out, or got sold down the river. I can’t decide which, though Jeff is correct in pointing out that ESR called for the licensing of MSFT’s patented, proprietary codecs, and that slipper slope ahs to include Microsoft’s “other” IP.

    Course Microspire’s CEO backed away from ESR when ESR made the big, flaming switch away from Fedora.

    redhat and ubuntu have vowed to stand-up to MSFT in any case.

    And now ESR is firmly in the Cathedral, and his only way out is to retire from Freespire’s board or lead a palace revolt. But then, that was predicted, and only partly came true.

  1552. To be fair to ESR, he’s on Freespire’s board, and Freespire isn’t covered by the Linspire/MSFT deal:

    Will this new option be available in Freespire?

    No, for the most part, this new agreement doesn’t affect Freespire, only Linspire. Like the DVD player and other software options Linspire offers, Linspire must pay a per-unit fee when distributing this new option. Since Freespire is a free distribution, we are not able to include it with Freespire. If Freespire users want these new features (TrueType Fonts, Windows Media 10, etc.), they always have the option of moving to Linspire. It should be pointed out, however, that this agreement does include some things, that will be included with Freespire, such as better interoperability with OpenOffice and Microsoft Office.

    link

  1553. To be honest I don’t see much wrong in this. There are two important points to consider:

    1) The most basic problem is that for 95% of the people the very idea of using a computer equals using Windows. I’ve often seen that many people can’t even imagine the concept of a different operationg system or even the concept of an operating system in general it’s just “the machine”, and “the machine” equals Windows. Any alternative that helps soften this up helps in the long run. Even a competing closed source OS would be a tremendous help if it’s popular, because people would get used to the idea of being able to choose between OSes. And that’s the first step, and that first step is still very far away.

    2) There are so many distros that the FLOSS community can easily bear to lose one or two. Let’s assume the worst case, that the whole Linspire becomes some sort of a dancing-in-straightjackets projects, where every step is influenced by MS. So what? Linspire is still nothing but a facelifted Ubuntu with extra whipped cream. Why can’t we consider it a kind of strategic sacrifice chess players usually take? Loss of one distro in exchange for a great many of new converts?

  1554. 3) Mark Shuttleworth seems very adamant, and his personal wealth and the general financial health of Canonical makes Linspire look like a dwarf in comparision.

  1555. Loss of one distro in exchange for a great many of new converts?

    except, of course, that Linspire is #3, behind Xandros and Suse/Novell…

    OTOH, the patent game is played like so:
    1) assert patents covering someone else’s popular ‘technology’
    2) get several ‘deals’ for IP rights done, typically with smaller companies
    3) sue the larger companies, showing that “other companies thought the IP claim was valid”.
    4) ???
    5) profit!

    Shuttleworth is adamant because he believes in Software Freedom, not (just) Open Source.

    Jim

  1556. Jim,

    according to DistroWatch.com Linspire is #55, Xandros is #22 and Ubuntu is #1

    BTW don’t take offense, but your 5 steps sound like sheer insanity to me. Do you seriously think that the courts base they decisions on IP rights on “other companies thought the IP claim was valid” ?

  1557. Shenpen, litigation is expensive in the United States. In some cases Microsoft needn’t even sue these companies, only threaten to sue; the protracted legal expenses alone might be enough to get some of them to settle out of court, and the fact that other companies are involved in this IP deal makes ponying up a more rational, and attractive, option.

    Eben Moglen explains it better than I can and suggests that Microsoft’s maneuvering appears to be an attempt to placate the large businesses who depend on Linux by giving them an “out” in the form of one or more “approved” distributions in order to threaten and undermine open source at the root level: the developers and the small-time users.

  1558. according to DistroWatch.com Linspire is #55, Xandros is #22 and Ubuntu is #1

    But of course, I meant that LInspire was the third distro to do a deal with MSFT for patents which “read on” linux.

    And yes, the courts (especially a trial by jury) can be swayed by the fact that “Other companies chose to license the patent(s), rather than infringe.”

    You betcha.

  1559. Jeff,

    on expensive litigations – three questions:

    1) But if the defendant wins all their costs are covered by the other party?

    2) As if the defendant wins I assume it would provide such a milestone precedent that would make it practially impossible for someone else to lose in such a situation that the company could reasonably count on the other such companies to participate in the costs because of their own interest? They could even form some sort of a consortium, to agree that the costs of legal action against any of members would be shared, as because of precedent law there would probably be only one such legal action.

    3) Mayve the GrokLaw would provide a lawyer for free – exactly because they want one successful precedent?

  1560. Oh, we forgot to celebrate the anniversary on 12th June – now it’s one bloody YEAR ago he visited his blog the last time.

  1561. I’m not really sure there is “a” topic anymore, after a year of absence of ESR. It just became a chat page, which is roughly the only thing we can do with it, I think.

  1562. Actually, this page taught a very important lesson to me. Especially during last summer, this is the place where I had the most interesting online conversations on politics. No forum site known to me compares (suggestions are welcome). The important point is that from a technical point of view this page/site is completely lousy to use it as a forum – you can’t create topics, you can’t reply directly to one post which means conversation threads are hard to separate. The page is slow to load, no preview, which is especially bad if you had a few drinks and forget that less-than and greater-than signs will be understood as HTML tags, which is the reason of the shameful mess I made above. Still, it is the best political forum I’ve seen last summer. So basically it means technology is a lot less important than attracting intelligent people to the site, which mostly requires interesting content. So the lesson is – if you start a new website, and your goal isn’t really to attract a lot of people but rather to attract smart people, make sure it looks clean and readable but generally, don’t worry much about the functionality – concentrate on the content. I have built a Drupal and a Joomla site in the past with all the bells and whistles one can imagine but it didn’t get popular in it’s intended niche, because I’m not a good writer and I was unable to attract good writers who would, in turn, attract interesting commenters. So the lesson is to don’t worry much about the functionality and especially don’t expect functionality will do any good by itself.

  1563. Shenpen writes: It’s just crazy, it’s totally aganst economic theory as far as I know it.

    That should be a strong indicator that you don’t understand economics at all. Given your support for various socialistic schemes expressed here, that follows like a hand in a glove.

  1564. Jeff: I wouldn’t put too much stock in that; certainly I wouldn’t go so far as to use the phrase “collectivist societies produce more understanding people”. After all, what kind of understanding do you mean? Understanding of kernel hacking, of particle physics, of Kantian ethics? Fortunately, the article you link to is more explicit: “Chinese students outperformed their US counterparts when asked to infer another person’s perspective”. Which is a kind of understanding, to be sure, although the way in which the Chinese have put that understanding to use may not be to their credit, of course.

    But is the observed increase in “understanding” even due to the degree of collectivism or individualism in a society? That relationship seems to be pure speculation by the author of the study, probably included to make his work provocative and headline-friendly. Mandarin was the native language of the Chinese students in the study, but not of the US students – isn’t that an equally probable contributer? One of the links on the very page you referenced (as of July 15, 2007) is a story relating native language to math skills, by the very same New Scientist author! This study also makes use of native Mandarin speakers from China, and native English speakers from Anglosphere countries – so why explain one effect as due to collectivism, and another as due to different native languages?

  1565. Russel,

    that’s quite possible I don’t really understand economics, even though I try to work on it (reading mises.org) etc. But I’ve yet to find something that would adeaquately explain how can high demand put the prices down. OTOH I have to refuse that I have socialistic ideas. I’d rather say I have anti-bureaucratic ideas, against both state and corporate bureacracies. (Although I do understand the merits of economies of scale.)

  1566. Jeff,

    before I answer, I have to explain a bit of a background: in the last few months, I’ve been heavily influnced by the thoughts of Theodore Darlymple and a few others, thus I’m more and more moving towards a kind of a “cultural conservative” direction. (It might sound weird that my views are subject to significant change in a matter of months but I’m still young (29) and still sort of a newcomer to Western political thought.) To put it short, these writings convinced me – and this is sort of a half-answer to Russ as well – that economics is important, but culture is a lot more significant. Culture can be defined as our perceptions of good – one might ask, as these perceptions are intrinsically personal and private, what does it have to do with politics, which is, by definition, the debate over what the state should do? The answer is that perhaps this is one of the fundamental wrongs of the modern world that our perceptions of good, our thoughts regarding the res publica are so closely tied to the most direct, vulgar aspects of politics – to govermental bans, regulations and incentives or the removal of them.

    There are two other things to mention before I get to the topic. First, as a practicioner of Tibetan Buddhism I don’t really need to elaborate much how I loathe the Chinese Commie goverment and system. They’re still trying to fuck with us via the most ingenious and loathesome ways. Second, I’ve just recently picked up a copy of NewScientist at a petrol station and it quite looked to me as just a thinly disguised political pamphlet. Almost all of their articles looked politically-emotionally charged and therefore of a classical example of “manipulation by careful selection”. But as I have no means of disproving this article I’ll play along and assume it’s sound.

    So. China has five millenia of history and created and maintained one of the most amazing cultures in the history of mankind. Maoism was certainly a disaster in every possible ways, but maybe six decades of Maoism could not entirely eradicate the cultural heritage of five millenia. It’s quite possible that this sort of empathy or understanding is a cultural heritage of Lao-Ce and Confucius that survived despite of, and not because of, Maoism. Given the fact that the Chinese youth in 2007 does not really live in an entirely collectivist system, and although that system is still grossly oppresive and disregarding of human rights, but this is something they are used to for millenia and therefore common people might have their inherited counter-strategies against the crushing of their souls, it’s not entirely impossible that in shady corners where the apparatchiks don’t look deep into the inertia of that pre-Commie culture is still present.

    Eiki, a minor point – I wish English had the same clear distinction between “verstehen” (empathic understanding of another human being) and “begreifen” (intellectual understanding or grasping the workings of a complex system) that German has. I think this topic is mostly about the first one.

  1567. It’s quite possible that this sort of empathy or understanding is a cultural heritage of Lao-Ce and Confucius that survived despite of, and not because of, Maoism.

    precisely…

    The conception of individual as part of larger society is so intrinsic to Chinese thought that they have a one-syllable word for it: ren (perhaps also the chief virtue of Confucianism, btw). It should be obvious to all and sundry the efficacy of ren as part of a long-term survival strategy. The longevity of American-style individualism, with the individual (self) as the highest end, which leads to the sort of hypocrisy that prompted Jefferson to pen the words “all men are created equal” yet still hold human beings in bondage, is not so certain. What we do know is that long before Ayn Rand’s bloviations about “rational self-interest” ever saw ink, Machiavelli proposed encouraging this same self-interest as a means for rulers to control vast numbers of people in the absence of religious strictures (he foresaw the post-Renaissance downfall of the Church of Rome as dominant social order) fulfilling that purpose.

  1568. When he discusses economics, there is something in Russell’s hand, but its not a glove.

    In a nearly literal sense, Nelson is jacking (you) off when he portends to understand “economics”. When you engage with Nelson, you’re engaging in a bit of a circle jerk.

    Ignore him, for he hasn’t a clue.

    As an example, I once sent him large sections of writing from E.F. Schumacher’s “Small is Beautiful”, which Nelson rejected out of hand, as my “not understand(ing) Economics”. Of course, Schumacher was the Chief Economist for the UK National Coal Board for two decades (1950 – 1970). By any measure, the man was, in fact, a world-class economist.

    Schumacher also wrote for The Economist and Resurgence. Has Nelson?

    Quoting the Wikipedia entry for Small_is_Beautiful:

    In the first chapter of ‘Small Is Beautiful’, “The Problem of Production”, (sections of which I sent to Nelson), Schumacher points out that our economy is unsustainable. The natural resources (especially fossil fuels), are treated as expendable income, when in fact they should be treated as capital, since they are not renewable and thus subject to eventual depletion. He further points out that similarly, the capacity of nature to resist pollution is limited as well. He concludes that government effort must be concentrated on reaching sustainable development, because relatively minor improvements like education for leisure or technology transfer to the Third World countries will not solve the underlying problem of unsustainable economy. Schumacher’s philosophy is a philosophy of enoughness, appreciating both human needs and limitations, and appropriate use of technology. It grew out of his study of village based economics, which he later termed “Buddhist Economics.” He faults conventional economic thinking for failing to consider the most appropriate scale for an activity, blasts notions that “growth is good”, and that “bigger is better,” and questions the appropriateness of using mass production in developing countries, promoting instead “production by the masses.” Schumacher was one of the first economists to question the appropriateness of using GNP to measure human well being, emphasizing that “the aim ought to be to obtain the maximum amount of well being with the minimum amount of consumption.”

    BTW, the name for my blog (which was once a company) is smallworks.com. Nelson tries to make this into “small dick”, but from the above, I think the intent of the name is clear.

  1569. Market fundamentalists aren’t going to swallow that, are they? After all, economics has proved (I forget where) that large numbers of extremely clever people (who are not economists) will perforce invent technology which will enable us to bypass all resource constraints *so long as* they are not prevented from doing so by smelly hippies and Jimmy Carter.

    Say, where’s Dean? My second son has just been born, name of Noah, no specific global warming reference, it’s just hard to find names which work in both English and Japanese. Already I’m whispering Chomsky to him at night, the poor thing.

  1570. That is interesting, though Brad Delong’s the only one I’m really familiar with. I’m sort of agnostic on immigration. Japan’s choice on the matter (“No, thanks”) has easy-to-see benefits (they *like* homogeneity here), but the downsides (not being open to other ways of thinking, frex) are more subtle.

    One thing I don’t understand about development politics is the opposition to protectionism in developing countries, when it’s quite clear historically how America and then Japan (and later the tiger economies, I think) used tariff walls to protect their fledgling industries until they’d got off the ground. I don’t see why people think the need for that’s changed, and surely one of the biggest drivers of immigration is the stagnation of development in the source countries. I’ve also never come across any economist who takes seriously Jane Jacobs’ work on the role of cities in development.

  1571. Some thoughts on managed economies: I think there’s a world of difference between Soviet-style managed economies and regulation against companies reaping profits while externalizing some of their costs onto society. In the latter case regulation has already proven itself effective where other approaches have proven useless. The conservative gut-punching tactic of lumping modern progressives and environmentalists in with the Bolsheviks just doesn’t wash in light of these facts.

    In fact, a truly enlightened economist would understand that today’s economy is as managed as the Soviet economy — by powerful multinational conglomerates in concert with complicit governments. A truly free economy would look as Jim Thompson described, inspired by Schumacher — small. This, like so much in the human sphere, is due to neurobiological reasons: human beings only have a “monkeysphere” of about 150 people they ever engage in significant communion with. Functional human societies do not really expand much beyond this number. Only identity politics scales larger, and the Republicans have that game mastered. The counterparts of identity politics in the economic sphere are mass marketing and pop culture — and we in the U.S. are all too familiar with the effects of those.

  1572. OK, here’s the latest from esr: http://opensource.org/node/192

    There’s been a lot of debate in the community about how OSI should properly handle Microsoft’s planned submission of some of its licenses for OSD certification. That debate has been been going on within OSI, too.

    OSI’s official position, from the beginning, which I helped formulate and have expressed to any number of reporters and analysts, is that OSI will treat any licenses submitted to Microsoft strictly on their merits, without fear or favor. That remains OSI’s position. But…

    But I find that my resolve is being sorely tested. Because Microsoft’s behavior in the last few months with respect to OOXML has been egregious. They haven’t stopped at pushing a “standard” that is divisive, technically bogus, and an obvious tool of monopoly lock-in; they have resorted to lying, ballot-stuffing, committee-packing, and outright bribery to ram it through the ISO standardization process in ways that violate ISO’s own guidelines wholesale.

    If Microsoft succeeds (which is beginning to look likely) they will have not merely damaged the prospects of open-source software, they will have ruined the good name of ISO by corrupting its people and processes. Because if OOXML, with all its huge flaws, really does pass, no one who has been conscious while this was going on is going to believe the process it passed through wasn’t a charade bought and paid for by Microsoft marketing.

    There is always, of course, a certain amount of corporate gaming of technical standards. But, generally speaking, the process works; it creates conditions under which users get more choices and markets clear more efficiently than they would without the standards.

    That’s why the destruction of ISO’s reputation would be a calamity. The trust it has built up over many years is an asset worth all of the billions of dollars in friction costs avoided by standardization and thus not paid by the entire community of computer and telecomms users. Microsoft, in an attempt to preserve its Office monopoly, is making a determined effort to destroy that value.

    This is not behavior that we, as a community, can live with. Despite my previous determination, I find I’m almost ready to recommend that OSI tell Microsoft to ram its licenses up one of its own orifices, even if they are technically OSD compliant. Because what good is it to conform to the letter of OSD if you’re raping its spirit?

    Hoisted by his own petard, I’d say!

  1573. Regardless of whether Eric was hoisted by anything, the next-generation Web just got 0wned by Microsoft. Companies are going to descend upon Silverlight/Moonlight like flies on shit. because it helps them develop a next-gen rich-client buzzword-client interface NOW instead of waiting for the open source guys to get their shit together with the kind of customer focus and aggressive marketing that Microsoft has mastered.

    Say it with me: DEVELOPERS! DEVELOPERS! DEVELOPERS! DEVELOPERS!

  1574. Which is why I hope that the Moonlight project succeeds, since its adoption would imply that Microsoft has to keep the platform “open” and consistent.

    On the other hand, it could be argued that the open source guys got their shit together and made Moonlight, only it is _also_ compatible with Silverlight. Hardly a drawback, is it?

  1575. Adriano,

    No. It doesn’t imply anything of the sort. Part of the Silverlight spec entails the use of closed-source, proprietary, patented video codecs. Microsoft is making these codecs available to Linux users under bizarrely restrictive terms, even for them: the codecs are only licensed for use in a Web browser. Load them into MPlayer and you run afoul of the license.

    There are a number of problems with this setup too, especially the “chasing taillights” effect. Microsoft can change the platform arbitrarily and break it for all users but their own; the Moonlight dev team will always be perpetually a few months and one release, at least, behind. This is currently the case with Mono.

    Microsoft would not generously offer Linux support like this if it weren’t absolutely sure that control of the platform were securely under its thumb. And it is.

  1576. Jeff,

    Agreed, but I think you have to look closer. Microsoft is desperate to ‘own’ the very term “Open Source”. All the current efforts (at OSI, Moonlight, etc) are targeted at Microsoft being able to legitimately claim “We’re Open Source”, without “loosing the farm”.

    Eric even sees it coming, and that is what is so sad and funny. If Microsoft has their way, and kills “Open Source”, leaving only “Software Freedom” to stand, it will be due to Eric’s bench-pounding promulgation of the term “Open Source”, along with a whole host of heaven’s angels, including Tim O’Reilly.

    If it all comes to tears for Eric, at least he got his, eh?

  1577. Jim Thompson,

    Actually I think Eric was absolutely right in one regard, which is the whole reason why he started his “bench-pounding promulgation” of the open source nomenclature, namely: nobody gives a fuck about software freedom. They want something that works right now, even if it was written and is viciously guarded by one company who seeks to make a vendor-lock killing, rather than waiting around for “standards” or “open process” or “community development”. Which basically rules out anything where you have to tweak config files, compile shit, or hit Control-Alt-Meta-Cokebottle to copy or paste because “if technology doesn’t work for people, it doesn’t work”. Think about it: What’s the alternative to Silverlight? Answer: I don’t know, but it involves Adobe Flash.

    Sure, people like you and me care about software freedom. But we’re weirdos. Even Linus is more of a pragmatist than we, as he’s more than willing to accept proprietary solutions (*cough* binary-only drivers, BitKeeper *cough*) if they fill an immediate need that no free solution can. So for the foreseeable future, Microsoft technologies will win over the vast bulk of the American population. The rest of the world has a better chance, because the rest of the world has a vested interest in avoiding encroaching American influence.

  1578. So for the foreseeable future, Microsoft technologies will win over the vast bulk of the American population. The rest of the world has a better chance, because the rest of the world has a vested interest in avoiding encroaching American influence.

    I don’t know about that, Jeff. If the Dems, gain control of the Presidency, and keep control of Congress (which is looking less and less likely by the day), they could make life hell for Microsoft. This article mentions, that since the antitrust suit, they have donated mostly to the Republicans. Since the GOP could be out of power, a Democrat-controlled Justice Department could make life hell for them out of spite. As for foreigners, I don’t know. The most enthusiasm I have hears was from governments, such as Germany, Venezuela, Cuba, and (maybe) China, moving PCs to various distros of Linux. I have not seen that much enthusiasm from populations as a whole. Plus, Microsoft does seem to be making Silverlight available for Linux. Also, what happened to SVG? Wasn’t that supposed to offer many of the same capabilities? Bah! I still think Croquet is a vastly more exciting project. Maybe, someone with government connections could get a grant for those guys to do some serious work? Pete Bessman, know anybody?

    Also, check out this interesting article about Nerds. This article raises a serious problem. What are we, as a society, to do about the classification of Nerds as Hyperwhite? This classification negatively impacts black nerds, whose peers (and possibly elders) mistake their natural nerdy demeanor as “acting white”, thereby retarding African-American progress in Science and Technology. I have seen this happen even on this forum, where Thomas Sowell was denigrated as an Uncle Tom. Maybe, he his just a black nerd, as his education suggests.

  1579. “Sure, people like you and me care about software freedom. But we’re weirdos.”

    On one hand, true enough – f.e. what I tend to like about Linux is that it’s Unix, and freedom is much lower on the priority list.

    On the other hand – let’s have a simplified model of three different ways to distribute software: 1) FLOSS 2) free of charge but closed source 3) charge licence price.

    2) I think is moving out because it does not generate sufficient revenue from secondary source to be able to successfully challenge the bazaar effect. In orther to challenge that one needs a large group of experienced developers, testers etc. which can only be mainainted from 3).

    Today one can get SQL Server Express (up to 4GB) and Visual Studio Express at no charge which would have sounded crazy 5 years ago. Everybody was so used to the fact that closed source means hundreds of bucks. Maybe with a 30 days of free of charge trial.

    And 3) is slowly moving out either as once there is a free of charge alternative either 1) or 2) it’s quite hard to justify the cost. I don’t anybody ever will able to charge licence price for a web browser. And not even Microsoft can afford to divert enough programming resources to IE7 to compete because there isn’t any direct revenue to justify the cost. This is exactly the case when the typical bottom-line way of thinking of corporate execs becomes counterproductive.

    I see a trend here. First many products become free of charge as they find it hard to compete with FLOSS. Then they find out that this way they can’t put enough resources on the project to compete with the bazaar.

    On Silverlight – I guess it will be XML based like all the other similar products, won’t it? So what’s hard about writing a tool to translate from Silverlight XML to OpenLaszlo XML which can generate both Flash and DHTML? I don’t see much of a trap here.

  1580. Silverlight is a stripped down version of the .NET framework. All your web are belong to MS.

  1581. Jeff, even rms will use a non-free program if its necessary to advance the cause of Software Freedom.

    In Christian countries, the cathedral was the source of ecclesiastical power, and to some extent it remains so today. As a political power, however, its role has gone from all but central to mostly non-existent. Nobody is building Cathedrals anymore.

    In Islamic countries, the bazaar, (which is seldom, if ever, co-located with any related job-producing construction projects), remains the center of ecclesiastical power. To sell in the bazaar, you need a license from a Mullah. In Islamic Republics, the bazaar is therefore the center of economic power, period.

    Its entirely probable that the religious overtones in his choice of the term Cathedral was Eric Raymond’s allusion to what I and other see as his pointage to the outcry from RMS (playing the Pope), versus the more freewheeling style of Linux development were deliberate. That is, if OSI had its way, in order to “sell” software branded as “Open Source”, you would need a(n) “approved license” from the mullahs on OSI’s board.

    We’ve already seen that linux has had to become much more disiplined about acquiring copyright assignments for contributions as a result of the SCO mess. If you want evidence that both the bazaar style and the term “open source” are easily corrupted and/or prone to self-destructive, dogma-inspired holy wars, you need look no further than Microsoft and its most recent moves.

  1582. Jim Thompson,

    I won’t argue with you that the term “open source” is easily corrupted and co-opted; that will remain true as long as we see headlines like this. Nor will I disagree that Microsoft is likely involved in a program of such corruption.

    Where I disagree is in Eric’s intent with open source. I don’t think he was trying to replace the concept of software freedom as you seem to, but rather make it more palatable to business managers — a necessary step if you want to promote it, again because nobody gives a fuck about software freedom. “Open source” is buzzwordy and sound-bitey, and that’s really the only purpose the term — and the concept — really serves. The term “free” is far more vulnerable (“Download Internet Explorer FREE!”, “Download Flash Player FREE!”, etc.) and this ambiguity cannot be resolved without getting into things like the four basic software freedoms, etc. By then you’ve bored your audience half to sleep. If “open source” is completely debased and leaves business managers with a wrong-headed interpretation of free software, so what? They would have had a wrong-headed interpretation of it anyway. I still remember the mid-nineties when server software you didn’t pay thousands of dollars for was no good at all because “you have to have someone you can sue”. If it weren’t for Eric’s little buzzword and cute infectious memes, that’s where we’d be today: still sneaking Linux in the back door. I don’t see much of an improvement today, where being an “open source company” means building overwrought proprietary “enterprise” blog and wiki software in Java using Apache Jakarta tools, but it is something.

  1583. I think you both might oveestimate the effect of ideas and persuasion of business decision makers. It generally boils down to one simple economical question: opening up the source might be advantageous if something else offsets the lost revenue from licence prices. Eric’s classical example is the scratching the own itch kind of software which the developer wouldn’t run much around trying to sell it anyway so every fix that comes in is a gain with nothing lost. Other successful models are selling support (Red Hat), selling consulting (gazillions of web frameworks) or selling hardware (Sun). Of course someone needed to open up the eyes of decision makers to this way of thinking. But afterwards it’s just goes on it’s own. It might be a good fun to try to smell conspiracy in every corner but MS isn’t nearly as powerful as you’d imagine, I think. They are challenged in every possible market. Gaming boxes were almost exclusively Windows-based, now they are usually consoles where the XBOX is just one of the three major players. Enterprise server space is increasingly moving towards Java which is weird as .NET is better I think but somehow a lot of consultants managed to convince people Java is somehow more enterprisey. The only real turn seems to be the enterprise desktop sphere but f.e. look at these XML-based Office files – they are fighting hard, and not only they are losing it but actually it wouldn’t matter much even if they won it as it’s not particularly hard to translate from one XML format to another. In Silverlight, starting from a horribly disadvantegous position as compared to Flash/Flex – to imagine they can possibly subvert it and take it over looks like quite an wild idea to me. To me they are looking like a company past it’s golden age desperately trying to survive. In 2004 when the 4.0 version of the Navision ERP system was released an MS project manager told me the real reason it requires Office 2003 is that half of the installed base is still on 2000 having no real reason to upgrade. And that’s their major revenue source and was a huge revenue they counted upon and needed and it didn’t come. They have astronomical costs and increasing competition in every key market except the enterprise desktop – I think shady attempts to acquire lock-in are something of the past, they can’t afford it, being to busy trying to survive.

  1584. Shenpen,

    On Windows these days several applications can be playing sounds at once and they will be mixed automatically to the speakers. Windows has had this capability for more than a decade now.

    On Linux it’s still a crap shoot which app will find itself locked out of the audio device because it’s still trying to open /dev/dsp or some stupid shit like that. It’s 2007 and audio still won’t function properly on Linux.

    For Windows and Mac OS, there’s somebody (Gates and Jobs respectively) who has a pretty good idea of what an OS should do and how it should behave (or at least how it should not behave, like falling prey to random arbitrary audio-device contention). You’re a developer and you don’t follow this vision, Gates throws one of his temper tantrums, and your ass is fired (provided you survive one of Ballmer’s legendary chair throwings). Linux doesn’t have this direction. It’s “do what you want, you’re on your own”. Lord of the Flies type shit. Stone knives and bearskins.

    Granted, Ubuntu has done a sterling job of bringing a veneer of civilization to this creeping horrorshow of chaos and confusion but at the end of the day, people want to get shit done which means the details of the OS working as a sane human being might expect it to work are taken care of for them.

    The reasons why the future of the web belongs to Microsoft are many and tangled. But the open source crowd hasn’t got its shit in its sock in 2007 and my confidence that they ever will is seriously flagging. The Asperger’s-afflicted FLOSS collective is optimized to construct awe-inspiring software edifices of remarkable complexity, yet when it comes to things like “common fucking sense” their brains are horribly broken. As for open source CRM, tax, and accounting, or anything where you have to follow social rules even more complex and intricate than common fucking sense… forget it.

  1585. Jeff,

    why have I never needed to have several applications playing sound at once? Sorry, maybe I’m just too clueless to think about some good use cases, but when I listen to music or when I play a game I don’t really want anything else to mess with it.

    About the rest of what you wrote, you know, actually I agree. This is why I’m in this weird position that I like FLOSS stuff yet I work with a Microsoft ERP system at work. I tried hard, checked out Compiere, TinyERP, found loads and loads of good ideas in them but not the very basic things Navision had 10 years before (like, be able to put in a lot of G/L accounting records purely with the keyboard, like on a spreadsheet, without messing around with the rat). It’s sort of funny how elegantly and beautifully Rails solves the wrong problem: it helps a lot with CRUD and plain business logic but I believe these sort of applications should not be web-based, or if they are they have to use something like Backbase or OpenLaszlo but pure HTML will not cut it, not even with a bit of Scriptaculous magic. And for real web apps, for those ones you really want to put on the web, CRUD and plain business logic aren’t really the highest of worries. I believe the business market will belong to Microsoft for a long time, especially that Navision 5.0 (they are calling it MS Dynamics-NAV but fuck it, I don’t really want to accept it as they bought it from Navision A/S in Denmark and they invented all the good things in it so I think I must respect their original brand name) will deliver some really SAP-killing stuff.

    But, setting that aside, the business sphere aside… how the heck would they dominate the web? I believe not they, but not even Rails, Scala/lift, Haskell Server Pages, half a dozen Common Lisp web frameworks, that newLISP framework I will write when I get some free time etc. will dominate the web. The point of the web is that it’s very democratic, very distributed… always aiming for the least common denominator. Something that somebody with almost zero programming knowledge can cruft together. That’s PHP. That is dominating the web. And I think that will continue too. We all can talk about slick and nice and smart stuff all the way we want but 90% of the people people just want to cruft together 10 built in functions and be done with it. I believe even adding OO to PHP was a bad idea. The great majority of PHP people will never understand it. They just think, I call a “command”, pass in two variables, it does the job, that’s it. I think the web will always be dominated by inferior and simple technologies as there are so many amateurs. And maybe it’s a good thing.

  1586. On the backstab stuff: yes, it’s an old story. Very often used, even by Hitler about WWI.

    But. Viet Nam.

    See, I’m looking at this stuff from the outside. I don’t know much about it. But I never understood why a superpower had to lose this match. Can’t it be that the anti-war movement eroded the will to fight? I mean, come on, what was the Viet Cong compared to Imperial Japan?

    I’ve seen quite some bar brawls and it’s not the stronger guy who wins. The one who wins is the one who wants to win at all costs, who doesn’t care if loses an eye and ends up with a broken arm but he wants to WIN at all costs. Yeah, it is creepy. This sort of people tend to be repulsive lowlifes. I avoid them of course and I almost never fight unless there is a girl to protect and no other way to protect her.

    But the simple fact is that these people win. Always.

    Similarly, the most important asset of an army is it’s will to win, it’s morale. Couldn’t it be that the anti-war movement undermined the soldier’s belief in the reasons for the war, their enthusiasism, their will to fight at all costs? And can’t it be happening now? I mean c’mon, if you are fighting in a war, the way of the least resistance is to hate it. Of course. It IS ugly. It IS easy to hate it. It IS natural to hate it. It takes a LOT to overcome it. A lot of willpower, faith and enthusiasism. And it’s easy to loose this faith, this will. These are simple psychological stuff.

  1587. If PHP dominates the web tomorrow than by next Tuesday it will be pwnt by script kiddies.

    Gmail is already having a tough time with security.

    And speaking of getting one’s shit in one’s sock, the Linux development community has certainly not wised up concerning copyright issues, as the whole flap with the OpenBSD free Atheros drivers confirms.

    Again, stone knives and bearskins.

  1588. Everybody, I have to ask everyone: what is your opinion of Lyndon LaRouche? Quite frankly, from reading his Wikipedia article, I can’t help but think the guy is a nutcase. What are your opinions?

  1589. Jeff,

    Slashdot posted an article today about a comparison among Blender and other 3d modeling applications, and one of the most frequent comments is that, while Blenders interface was not ‘industry-standard’, it was very intuitive, and its many keyboard shortcuts allowed a lot more work to be done than if the mouse was used. So, maybe there is hope for OSS yet.

  1590. Frankly speaking, I think LaRouche does not really worth the time to comment on his “ideas”.

    I’d just like to remark that y’all should be happy that these sort of people are fairly rare over there. Amongst Hungarian right-wing bloggers this type rather seems to be rule than the exception. I just had an argument with one of them who claimed that the system of loaning money or offering credit on interest is the work of Satan working through the Jews… and he praised the barter practiced in villages in around 1400 AD as a more humane and just alternative with a straight face… *sigh* if I could at least work these people up to the Russel Kirk level, which would still suck, but even that would be a huge achievement compared to this. I’m trying to blog for them about ideas I learned from Robert Conquest’s The Dragond of Expectation and Theodore Darlymple’s Life At The Bottom and Ferdinand Mount’s Mind The Gap and other “Conservativism 3.0” topics and nobody has the slightest fucking clue about what the hell I’m talking about…

  1591. Phil,

    I agree about Blender. I wish GIMP would differentiate itself that way.

    Ex.: A mode to basically commandeer the whole display, with the exception of a little pie menu on the corner that let you select tools, etc. Other activities (managing layers and that) could be accessed through pop-in subdisplays that occupied only a small part of the screen. Best of all, everything could easily be driven with mouse only or with keyboard + mouse.

    The 2.0 to 2.2 interface change brought much clunkiness and I’m a bit disappointed. A Tablet PC, although ideal for drawing, exacerbates the clunkiness problem.

  1592. Phil,

    LOL! And from a man whose “Human Biodiversity Institute” is to human diversity what the PATRIOT Act is to patriotism…

  1593. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/10/05/AR2007100501041.html

    Beware of stereotypes based on ideological assumptions. As Europe’s economy has surged, it has maintained fairness and equality. Unlike in the United States, with its rampant inequality and lack of universal access to affordable health care and higher education, Europeans have harnessed their economic engine to create wealth that is broadly distributed.

    Whoever said socialism doesn’t work?

  1594. Shenpen,

    why have I never needed to have several applications playing sound at once? Sorry, maybe I’m just too clueless to think about some good use cases, but when I listen to music or when I play a game I don’t really want anything else to mess with it.

    They don’t even have to be playing sound at the same time. All that is necessary is that one program be hanging onto the sound device when another tries to access it. In the case of Flash Player for Linux, it will see that /dev/dsp or /dev/snd/pcmC0D0 or whatever is blocked and turn off sound for the rest of the browser session. You must then resort to trial and error or using lsof to find and kill the offending program, and then restarting Firefox.

    Also, as I mentioned above, if the future of the Web doesn’t belong to Silverlight it will almost assuredly go to something using Flash, whether that be Flex or Laszlo or whatever. The fact that Flash is, effectively, a proprietary format which requires a proprietary player is a deal-killer on Linux, as Adobe can’t be arsed to keep Flash player up to a reasonable level of non-bugginess on the Linux platform. FLV playback will still randomly hang Firefox, and the best option for YouTubing on Linux is to install Wine, and put Win32 Firefox and Flash in the virtual Windows environment Wine provides.

    Flash bugginess is nothing new of course; time was, for versions of Flash up to and including 7, that I seemingly couldn’t get it working properly on any platform save for Internet Explorer on Mac OS 9. On Windows, OS X, and especially Linux it would be either slow, choppy, or exhibit gradual audio/video desynching, or some combination of the above.

    If the “Lively Kernel” (a rather sophisticated, Squeak-like environment built on SVG and JavaScript) ever gets ported respectably to more browsers and becomes viable, that could be an interesting alternative, but as it is the promise of Rich Internet Apps requires deployment of proprietary software with bugs unfixable by the community and/or onerous license terms. Bad for the internet, bad for us. Well, not bad for the internet; the internet ceased being ours long ago and now belongs to teen- and twenty-somethings blinging out their MySpace pages, or rather, the media billionaires making a fortune off the same.

  1595. Jeff,
    To play Devil’s Advocate, do you think the lead Europe has in GDP could possibly be from the higher population? Last time I checked, the US had a population of 300 million and Europe had a population of 6-700 million.

  1596. I won’t deny the impact a larger population might have on GDP. But the ideologically based idea that “Europe has embraced socialism, therefore it’s circling the economic drain” so beloved of conservatives and libertarians (of the American stripe) doesn’t have any basis in reality.

  1597. Yes, but the opposite isn’t true either. What actually happened over here is that the system is slowly moving towards a more free market oriented direction and that shows it’s results. Heard about Carl Bildt, for example?

    I think what we’ll all see is a regressions towards the mean: the long battle of capitalism and socialism finally becoming settled somewhere in the middle, though somewhat closer to capitalism. And it will mean the US will become somewhat more welfarist, the EU become somewhat more free market-oriented. Ferdinand Mount’s “unlock and allot” (keep redistribution but eliminate the bureaucracy) ideas seems to be the idea with the most momentum here in modern Conservative circles.

    Take healthcare for example. The fully nationalized British NHS is the second largest employer of the world after the Chinese army. There is, of course, no reason why it must be so, it’s completey crazy. It must be rethinked, I believe. On the other hand, as far as I see the US will move towards a more welfarist healthcare, so in the long run, the general solution everywhere will be a semi-capitalist, semi-socialist model, albeit closer to the capitalist one.

    It seems to me the great debate of economic systems that was so important in the XX. century is finally settled, there is a growing consensus towards something like a state that does interfere, but does not try to change the nature of capitalism, but rather helps people to become competitive in the market, creates new markets etc. etc. Instead of fighting the market, the new consensus seems to be a state that supplements the market. And then the whole story is basically closed, a few harcode socialists and hardcore libertarians will always argue but the big parties on the left-centre and right-centre will just settle for it.

    As far as I see young people get bored if anyone talks about economics. The young hotheads aren’t into economics anymore, like, nationalizing stuff and like that. They are interested in enviromentalism and fair trade to the third world, and could not care less whether the railroads are owned by the state or by private investors. Of course enviromentalism might become the most dangerous anti-capitalistic movement ever created – we’ll see. It’s sort of in a flux. Sometimes they praise powerful electric roadsters and stuff like that, which is OK to me. Some other times they damn the whole idea of getting around by car and try to push soul-crushing mass transport systems that supress individuality which is, of course, not. I don’t really see why anybody likes that. OK make it electric or hybrid or whatever you want, but leave it to be my vehicle, to take me where I want to go and to express my social status etc. with it.

  1598. Microsoft got two of its licenses approved by the OSI.

    Jim Thompson’s qualms about what Microsoft will do with this cachet notwithstanding, it’s wrong to set forth a definition of “open source” and then reject certain applicants who meet the criteria because of who they are. I’m glad this decision has been made.

  1599. Jeff wrote: LOL! And from a man whose “Human Biodiversity Institute” is to human diversity what the PATRIOT Act is to patriotism…

    I am not so sure about that. I don’t think anybody who is a racist (or racialist) would have wrote this article.

    Some highlights: Think intermarriage is a positive good for American society? Demand immigration cutbacks.

  1600. Here are my thoughts on Congress’s attempts to classify the Armenian Genocide as a ‘Genocide’.

    I think it is a masterful stroke of Machiavellian politics (as distasteful as that brand of politics is, sometimes it is necessary). The Democrats have proven that they are unable to mount a direct attack on Bush by defunding the war (god knows why, but they are), but they know their main constituency wants the US to withdraw from Iraq, so they have decided to resort to sabotage. A good chunk of the US’s supply route goes through Turkey, so if Congress pisses of the Turkish government enough, they may retaliate by blocking the supply route, which will make the Iraq occupation incredibly difficult. Congress will achieve its objectives without taking the blame for any repercussions, since the Turks will be the ones to end the occupation, and Congress will get brownie points from the Armenian Lobby for looking like Human Rights Crusaders. While the Turks were great allies in the Korean and Cold War, both of those wars are over (notwithstanding NATO’s idiotic efforts to restart it), and if Turkey loses its cool too much, the Eurocrats will use that as an excuse to deny it EU membership, which Shenpen should like. Eisenhower also played this game of Machiavellian politics, and while it did not always work out like planned, sometimes it is the best recipe for a bad situation.

  1601. Well, the current Turkish bombings in Iraq’s Kurd region – I’d like to call it Kurdistan, they’d deserve it – I believe might qualify as “losing the cool”. Damn. I don’t really understand what’s really going on in the region and what effect it will have on the Iraqi operations, but I’m with the Kurds. They are like the Jews were 60 years ago: they’ve suffered enough that now they should be left alone, preferably in their own independent state.

    And yes, I’m fairly sure EU membership is now out for quite a long time. I believe the European public opinion is mainly pro-Kurd.

  1602. I have to comment on the Watson affair, because it is just disgraceful. I cannot believe that there appears to be not outrage over this modern-day Gallileo affair. There was a very good article about what this could mean for America.

  1603. I don’t see anything, Phil, but yet another scientist (in the vein of William Shockley) whose Ph.D.s have failed to mask his ingrained, mendacious biases.

  1604. Some other times they damn the whole idea of getting around by car and try to push soul-crushing mass transport systems that supress individuality which is, of course, not.

    Well, if riding on mass transport is enough to crush your soul you might want to try some exercises to make the poor little thing a little more robust. We’ve got damn fine trains here in Japan, and I’ve greatly enjoyed being carfree here the last three years, much more than I would have done in England (where the roads are a lot more bike-hostile to boot). The environmentalist case is roughly that if everybody has maximum freedom to drive the system will clog itself (and if everyone in China and India who wants one gets one the resource pressures are going to be something to behold). I know cars are very seductive, your own little mobile space which you don’t have to share with other unwashed and undereducated people, how delightful! Not the sort of individuality I have much time for.

  1605. Hey Adrian, did you read those links I posted above?

    Anyway, could anyone analyze my evaluation of the Chinese-Taiwan situation.

    China believes Taiwan to be a part of China, but a steadily growing portion of the country (the Green Coalition, I think they are called) disagree and want independence. I think this sentiment stems from the fact that Taiwan saw little Chinese influence until the 16th or 17th century. I heard there was even an independence movement in the 40’s that was ruthlessly crushed by Chian Kai-Shek and the Kuomintang. Now, it is starting to gain momentum again. Now, after the 2008 Olympics, it is likely that China will again focus on the issue. Ok, now here is how I see it. From a pure cold-blooded self-interest position, I think a Chinese invasion of Taiwan would be good for the United States, similar to a Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. If the Chinese occupied Taiwan, and the Taiwanese resisted, China will have shown weakness, and the Tibetans and Turkestanis will probably exploit the situation. Also, there appear to be great social strains that would be exacerbated by the predicaments. Plus, the vast flight of capital from the two countries that would inevitably follow such an action would be beneficial to the millions of American workers, who would get their jobs back. What do you guys think? I have been thinking about this situation for a while.

  1606. Phil, so will we send in spooks to train, arm, and fund the most vicious brutal zealot thugs in Taiwan to drive back the Chinese only to have it blow back at us a decade or two down the line when they blow up landmarks in LA?

  1607. Shenpen wrote:
    The point of the web is that it’s very democratic, very distributed… always aiming for the least common denominator. Something that somebody with almost zero programming knowledge can cruft together. That’s PHP. That is dominating the web. And I think that will continue too. We all can talk about slick and nice and smart stuff all the way we want but 90% of the people people just want to cruft together 10 built in functions and be done with it. I believe even adding OO to PHP was a bad idea. The great majority of PHP people will never understand it. They just think, I call a “command”, pass in two variables, it does the job, that’s it. I think the web will always be dominated by inferior and simple technologies as there are so many amateurs. And maybe it’s a good thing.

    However, it’s rather weird that the best programming language for this is left out: COBOL. There was an interesting post on isteve about COBOL and the ‘evolution’ of programming languages.

    As computers got faster, why did we move from slower but easier programming languages like COBOL (created by a woman, perhaps not coincidentally) to more difficult languages like C?

    “COBOL was designed so that low IQ people could write code that would run (sometime slowly, but it would run) essentially forever with no maintenance. I know more than a few people who were professional programmers who had some COBOL responsibilities that would save the COBOL work to the end of the day when they were tired and their brains were working more slowly so that they were “programming at COBOL speed” and could write code that verbose and sluggish without getting annoyed. And it worked. Or they would have a stiff drink and get back to the terminal. COBOL was designed so that a kid out of the motor pool in the Army could take a job shuffling punchcards and work his way up to programmer in a few years and do that for 30, then get a pension. I can probably find the original documentation for that; I have seen it on-line. That is not to say that a good (normally high IQ) programmer would do better in COBOL — IBM said that 10x the work or the same work running 10x faster was a good rule of thumb — but rather that programming is, after all, the development of a logical series of actions to get a result, and if you aren’t really, really dumb and the requirements are limited, you can program as well as a really smart guy, just slower. I remember those days and those people, and frankly a lot of them did solid work, reliably, without complaint. I kind of miss that.”

  1608. Jeff wrote: Phil, so will we send in spooks to train, arm, and fund the most vicious brutal zealot thugs in Taiwan to drive back the Chinese only to have it blow back at us a decade or two down the line when they blow up landmarks in LA?

    No, I did not say that. We don’t have to do a thing. I was assuming there would probably be a perfectly acceptable insurgency to do the job for us, like in Vietnam and Iraq. The Mujahideen was NOT a proxy army of the US (far less than the VC were a proxy army of North Vietnam). Gary Brecher spills the bean on ‘proxies’ in this article:

    Notice how in the first sentence he says “Hezbollah terrorists” are rocketing Israel, but in the next one he says “Iranian militants” kidnapped the IDF soldiers. I’ve searched all over the Internet, and I can’t find anybody who claims that Iranians took those soldiers. Everybody in the world except Michael Evans says Hezbollah did it. And Hezbollah is not Iranian. It’s pro-Iran, but that doesn’t mean it’s Iranian any more than the Iraqi Kurds are Americans just because they (sort of) support us.

    Hezbollah’s membership consists of Shi’ite Arabs from South Lebanon and Beirut, people who were born a few miles from the Mediterranean—a thousand miles west of Iran—and can’t speak a word of Farsi. You would think a so-called “Middle East expert” like Evans would know the difference.

    I suspect he does, actually. He’s just trying to persuade his Bible-oriented readers that Iran is threatening the Holy Land. So he plays this shell game with the suckers: one minute it’s Iranians capturing Israelis, next minute it’s Hezbollah. Eventually he compromises by calling Hezbollah “a proxy of the Iranian government.”

    That’s another lie, of course. Even if you don’t know recent Middle Eastern history, you should be able to see through this “proxy” nonsense. If there’s anything that recent military history shows clearly, it’s that nobody, not even a superpower, can create a proxy army that will really fight—and Hezbollah proved pretty clearly that they can fight.

    America and the USSR tried creating proxy armies all through the Cold War years. The only time it worked was when the locals had their own reasons to want to fight. In those cases, it’s just a matter of sliding the cartons off the C-130’s and cracking ’em open. Local war-lust will do the rest.

    But when the locals are only fighting because some foreign power pays them, they’re worthless. I hate to bring up painful memories, but anybody remember our old pal ARVN—the Army of the Republic of Viet Nam, aka South Vietnam? We poured so much blood and money into the South Vietnamese Army that it still hurts to think about it. At its peak, ARVN had 544,000 soldiers, one of the biggest and definitely one of the best-funded armies in the world. But without U.S. combat troops to provide some spine and USAF sorties to run their offense, ARVN collapsed as fast as Enron—and for pretty much the same reasons.

    The Soviets tried the same technique in Africa and Afghanistan, with the same results. It’s hard to believe now, but back in the 1970s people thought the USSR was going to take over Africa because those Soviets were funding so many proxy wars. All those African safaris got the Russians were tropical diseases and a huge cash drain. Most of the money went right into the pockets of the commanding officers of these proxy armies, and the armies either never existed in the first place or melted away the first time they met real troops.

    That’s exactly what happened to our worst-ever proxies, the Contras. They were supposed to be our Latin American version of the Colorado kids in Red Dawn—freedom-loving rebels who would overthrow the Sandinista commies. Instead they spent your tax dollars on fast boats and clothes—they were the only insurgents in history who dressed like extras on “Miami Vice.” And as for how they behaved, it was more like Tony Montana, who would happily talk about how “I keel a Commyunis’ fo’ fun!” but then lose interest after the coke money started flowing.

    So let’s drop the nonsense that Hezbollah is just a stand-in for Iran. You can tell stand-ins by the way they fight, or rather don’t fight. And Hezbollah has proved again and again that it’s a serious army. It was Hezbollah that drove the IDF out of Lebanon in 2000. It was Hezbollah that launched the first suicide-bomb attacks on the IDF, long before any Palestinian even dreamed of doing anything that extreme. And in the 2006 border-war Evans is writing about, Hezbollah defeated much better equipped IDF units. Even Israeli soldiers returning from the front admitted their admiration for the Hezzies who were willing to rush into IDF automatic fire in hopes of capturing another Israeli soldier. That’s not how proxies fight.

    It wasn’t Iran that made the Shi’ites of southern Lebanon so tough. It was Israel. Before Israel invaded Lebanon in 1982, the Shi’ites of southern Lebanon were the quietest, most peaceable tribe in the whole crazy country. There’s no faster way to turn submissive peasant-types into kamikazes than by grabbing their land, and that’s what Israel did, declaring a “security zone” in southern Lebanon. It was Israeli occupation that turned those Shi’ite peasants into the best soldiers in the Middle East, not Iranian cash. Cash just makes Contras; occupations make fighters.

    If you want an ultra-painful example of that, just compare the Iraqi army before we occupied Iraq—a bunch of cowards who were surrendering to news crews—to the hardened insurgents we have to deal with now. That’s what the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon did. In 1982, the Shia were still mostly humble farmers trying to scratch a living out of the dry hills of southern Lebanon. Then the IDF swooped in, killed a bunch of people, seized their land, and installed their own proxy army, a strange group called the South Lebanon Army (SLA) whose members were recruited from diehard Lebanese Christian clans, to keep the Shi’ites down. It went about the way you’d expect: the locals turned nasty, the proxy army dissolved, and Israel ended up abandoning its “security zone” in 2000.

    Plus, I don’t think you can say that we intentionally gave money and aid to Osama Bin Laden. According to Wikipedia, the US government did not directly fund his organization Makhtab al-Khadamat, although we also did not try to stop them from fundraising inside the United States, either. Of course, with a sane immigration policy, the repercussions would not be as bad.

  1609. Phil,

    COBOL – true enough. Java was the new COBOL for a while. Now it’s getting smarter so likely something will take it’s place.

  1610. Phil, Shenpen,

    COBOL was designed by committee, with all the horrors that entails. Though Grace Hopper developed one of its predecessors (FLOW-MATIC), significant chunks of which were incorporated into the end product, later in life she would express dissatisfaction with COBOL as it actually turned out.

    The point of the web is that it’s very democratic, very distributed… always aiming for the least common denominator. Something that somebody with almost zero programming knowledge can cruft together. That’s PHP. That is dominating the web. And I think that will continue too. We all can talk about slick and nice and smart stuff all the way we want but 90% of the people people just want to cruft together 10 built in functions and be done with it.

    Yes, and while we’re being all democratic, why don’t we let people with zero building knowledge design houses? We can talk about layout and materials and fire hazards and plumbing all we like but most people don’t need Rosecliff, you know, they just want to cruft a few rooms together and be done with it.

    This is why “the Web” is looking increasingly like the shambles of a Washington, D.C. from Idiocracy. I don’t think it’s a vision even Steve Sailer would subscribe to.

    Aren’t we supposed to be building the rabble up instead of dumbing everything down to their level? Wasn’t that supposed to be the utopian dream of Cyberspace? How about, instead of pretending the goal is to make people with zero knowledge immediately productive, we shift our focus instead to putting powerful concepts in their hands and give them a safe place to experiment and learn? Computing is a great place to do this. From a PL perspective that means some form of Lisp, Smalltalk, or maybe even Haskell. Heck, even JavaScript would suffice. (I consider it a damn shame that server-side JavaScript never really caught on; the language has first-class closures and a powerful object system similar to Self’s. Instead we had to force our brains to evolve special decoding wetware in order to read Perl or else wear our fingers to stubs writing gigabyte-sized repositories of Java code full of FrobnitzFactories and BlarghContainers.)

    Thomas Jefferson was of the opinion that democracy required education. To be truly democratic in a computing context, we need to take the most powerful bits of computer science out of the ivory tower and make them amenable to discovery by anybody through an easy-to-use interface. We’ll worry about productivity once they’ve learned.

  1611. Actually on second thought Idiocracy will be too good a fate for Murka. In the movie intellectuals were only considered pretentious and faggy. In the police state — er, I mean, homeland security state we have today, people with smarts are considered downright dangerous:

    http://www.cnet.com/surveillance-state/8301-13739_1-9782861-46.html

    Note this bit of arrant cockwaving by the fuzz:

    In a press conference following the incident, state police Maj. Scott Pare said that Simpson is “extremely lucky she followed the instructions or deadly force would have been used. She’s lucky to be in a cell as opposed to the morgue.”

    I read an article by Mark Steyn, I think, said the left learned everything about war from movies about Vietnam. I’m beginning to suspect that the right (or at least its law enforcement/terror arm) learned everything about bombs from Die Hard movies. “Durrrr, this Particular Individual was caught with a bomb, an we think it’s a bomb ‘cuz they got circuit boards and wires and shit, and you gotta cut the wire before the timer runs out, and stuff.”

    This is what we get when we paramilitarize our cops, teach them to have the discrimination skills of paranoid psychotics, and then tell them to go for the blacks and Hispanics (and later, Ay-rabs) first. Come to think of it, I’ve seen pictures of the young woman in question and noticed that she’s rather darkly complected. Would she have been treated the same way if she fit Steve Sailer’s racial profile for a smart person?

  1612. “Thomas Jefferson was of the opinion that democracy required education.” – Wow, Jeff, you are just about to become a Neoconservative :-) Keep up the good work :-)

    I think the motives behind COBOL and PHP were fundamentally different. When COBOL was born it was clear that this is all about programming – those common businesses required algorithms, required calculations, required programming, so the wanted to dumb programming down. Yet, it was clear all the way through that this is progamming, these people will become programmers.

    PHP addressed an entirely different niche. Web designers didn’t want to program, they just wanted to issue some commands to the computer, and maybe add a few conditions or wrap the whole thing in a loop if they must, but the emphasis wasn’t on algorithms, it was on issuing commands. Not calculating stuff but rather telling the computer to do stuff. This is why functional languages didn’t get popular: most common programming tasks aren’t really about calculating or computing stuff, but about telling the computer to do this, then do that, then do that another thing, then leave me alone because I hate you. :) Really. Many people do program, who don’t really like to but they must. Therefore the programming language with the most built-in “commands” (functions) that applied to the problem domain won. I think if any programming language would have built-in functions for moving a 3D object on the screen loads and loads of people would write games in it, regardless of how good or bad as a language it is.

  1613. Lately I was thinking about ERP systems the LISP way: what DSL would I like to write them in? And the funny thing is that it’s surprisingly COBOL-like. F.e. as 70% of the code is error-handling, I’d love if the code code be alert()-ed to the user as an error message, so my DSL would be:

    Customer: OnDelete
    Errors Section
    MustNotHaveAny(Order) Where Order.IsOpen: “Please close them first!”
    End
    End

    Which would result in an error message of ‘Must not have any: orders where order is open: “Please close them first!” ‘ (i.e. it would parse the code itsel to a human-readable form, turning camelcase, parens and dots to spaces)

    What do you think?

  1614. “Aren’t we supposed to be building the rabble up instead of dumbing everything down to their level? ”

    Is that possible? I doubt so. There are natural barriers of intelligence. Basically you are suggesting to try running advanced software on crappy hardware. Not gonna work.

    I think the good solution is the EMACS way: to build systems that have gradual levels of customization. Some users just set checkmarks on the screen, which would turn into assignin values to variables. Some more advanced users can set conditions in a config file, like e-mail filters. Some others might also add some simple loops and IO to it, basically, scripting. And some others would use the full features of the language. I think the only effiicient way to do is if it all turns into LISP code – but really, we really need much better implementations. Last year I tried a few and really… newLISP is the closest thing to something that is both actually useful and fits into the XXI century, but even this has crazy stuff like by-value passing style and that every bloody hashtable requires a global identifier…

  1615. Is that possible? I doubt so. There are natural barriers of intelligence. Basically you are suggesting to try running advanced software on crappy hardware. Not gonna work.

    There may not be much hope for most Americans. But I think that’s more arrogance and stubbornness (indeed, pride in their ignorance) than lack of native intelligence.

    REPEAT 4 [FD 50 RT 90]

    You can get a lot of computer science and differential geometry into a kid’s head if you couch it as simply “telling the turtle what to do”. It doesn’t make it cease to be programming and we certainly don’t have to restrict the language or the kid’s view on what is possible. (Logo is in fact rather powerful; a Berkeley professor swears by it for teaching CS to adults).

    newLISP is a rather dreadfully redundant case of wheel-reinventing. Python is closer to your mark; and has a rather extensive and sane user community.

    Customer: OnDelete
    Errors Section
    MustNotHaveAny(Order) Where Order.IsOpen: “Please close them first!”
    End
    End

    What? No condition system? :)

  1616. Honestly, I have no idea why do you have such a low opinion of your nation. Well actually I’ve never been there so really I don’t really know what’s going on, but a close and trusted friend of mine spent a few weeks in California and his general impression was America is a society designed by geniuses[1] for the use of idiots. And if it’s correct then it actually increases my respect for it as the great majority of people are idiots everywhere, but Americans seem to be able to utilize this resource much more efficiently than others. And that’s quite a feat and could explain most of the success.

    You know, in the first 25 years of my life I was something sort of a Liberal. And the most important thing I understood that drove me from it is the fundamental inequality of human capabilities. I’ve realized that there is a huge difference between the quality of people, in mental, intellectual, spiritual, moral, ethical things, well ,generally in everything. Not sure why – there must be a lot of factors. But it means there must be a class system, that results cannot be equal, it means you can’t tell the same truths to different people, that there must be different levels of truth, etc.

    I’ve teased and annoyed you quite a lot, in fact, I’m somewhat surprised you are still willing to talk to me. I guess you must have a thick skin regarding these sort of things. So it’s important to point out that the question I’m about to ask is not about starting another argument, not about criticising your beliefs, but pure curiosity: honestly, isn’t most of your bitterness comes from the fact that deep inside you think or hope that people should be equal, that they should have equal capabilities, that it’s only society’s injustice that keeps it from happening and if it weren’t so everybody should have roughly the same amount of success, because they have the same amount of talent or at least they could have? You still have not learned to put up with the huge differences between the quality of people? You still hope that these differences maybe not will, but at least should and could be reduced? That they are purely conincidental? That a society full of intelligent beings is a reasonable theoretical possibility?

    Maybe I’m not really expressing myself very clearly. I’ll tell a story and I think it will make it clear what do I mean. Recently a friend of mine got really freaked out that 40% of the university students in the UK believe in Intelligent Design. How horrible! But I thought, well, of course I wouldn’t want a biology researcher to believe in this shit. But a lawyer? A civil engineer? A water engineer? Who will get hurt if they believe in stupid things about biology when they don’t actually work with biology? Nobody. So why should we force-feed the truth into them? The point is that 95% of the people simply do not know enough biology to intelligently refute and disprove ID. If they happen to believe in evolution, it’s just a superstition for them, just like ID is for others, because they just accept it, but they don’t really know why, they cannot really prove it, cannot really understand it. Science is only science when you yourself can prove stuff, or you are using that stuff in practice and can check whether it works or not. Otherwise it’s just religion, superstition: accepting something just because a person of authority said it. Even if it happens to be true, it’s still superstition. So knowing and accepting that 95% will ALWAYS have superstitious beliefs about biology even if those beliefs happen to be true, but they don’t use it anyway, what’s the problem with having wrong beliefs that makes them feel more secure and perhaps happy?

    So based on this example: do you wish and hope that nobody would believe in ID? As I think you don’t just want people to have superstitions that happen to be true, I think you secretly hope sooner or later people will be able to understand the scientific proofs. But why? That would require a complete genetic reeengineering.

    Sorry if this comment is a bit chaotic – we’ve been boozing a bit.

    [1] I guess I should have written “genii” but I think this grammatical rule is not really being used anymore

  1617. Jeff, I second the opinion that you take the country a little too negatively. You’re always mentioning ‘Murkans’, but the fact of the matter is, that a good chunk of our population does fairly well on standardized tests:

    Immigration is not the only factor in US underperformance. The test score gap between U.S.-born whites and Asians and their Black and Hispanic counterparts range from 19 percent to 25. Take out immigrants along with native-born Blacks and Hispanics, and our international rankings soar—to second highest in verbal, and fifth highest in math, on a test administered in 17 high income countries.

    As for ID, I am not sure how seriously Americans take their view that God created the world in seven days when they are not answering opinion polls:

    While Henry Morris, president of the Institute for Creation Research, denounces children’s dinosaur toys and the movie “Jurassic Park” as “propaganda for evolution,” his logic certainly didn’t seem to hurt Stephen Spielberg in the wallet. The public is also fascinated by the discovery of proto-human skulls in Olduvai Gorge, the possibility of cloning that 20,000 year old wooly mammoth, and so forth. Nor have I heard of anybody refusing to take the new antibiotics that drug companies have had to invent to combat the ever-evolving strains of penicillin-resistant bacteria.

    Darwin seems to lose out with the public primarily when his supporters force him into a mano-a-mano Thunderdome death match against the Almighty. Most people seem willing to accept Darwinism as long as they don’t have to believe in nothing but Darwinism. Thus, the strident tub-thumping for absolute atheism by evolutionary biologists like Richard Dawkins, author of the great book “The Selfish Gene,” is counter-productive.

    The funny thing is that most of the American’s I see decrying Americans’ stupidity usually are the stupidest ones of all. Like Eli Roth, who directed the movie Hostel.

    The movie has been subject to harsh criticism in both Slovakia and in the Czech Republic. It portrays Slovakia as an undeveloped, poor and uncultured country suffering from high criminality, war, and prostitution. To many people, Hostel appears to be misplaced, both culturally and geographically. Roth claims he used Slovakia to point out the ignorance of Americans, and that the film is not meant to be an actual description. The tourist board of Slovakia invited Roth on an all-expense paid trip to their country so he could see it’s not made up of run down factories and kids who kill for bubble gum.
    Tomas Galbavy, a Slovak Member of Parliament, recently commented: “I am offended by this film. I think that all Slovaks should feel offended.” In the same article, Roth defended his work by saying “Americans do not even know that this country exists. My film is not a geographical work but aims to show Americans’ ignorance of the world around them.”[4]
    In his defense, Roth said he did this intentionally to portray Slovakia with old stereotypes representing the backpackers’ general ignorance of their surroundings.[5] Roth said the film was meant to show American stereotypes of Eastern Europe, while the Americans in the film are portrayed accurately.

    So, to show Americans’ ignorance of the world, he portrays Slovakia as a haven of youth gangs and criminal corporations and is dumfounded when some Slovaks take offense to his portrayal of their country.

  1618. Shenpen wrote: think if any programming language would have built-in functions for moving a 3D object on the screen loads and loads of people would write games in it, regardless of how good or bad as a language it is.

    I think Dark BASIC can do this.

  1619. Shenpen, here’s my position. I think it’s important to have a basic level of programming literacy. There was a time — not long ago in our history — when most people couldn’t read. Now most people (in the developed world at least) can. There was a time when most people couldn’t do a mathematical operation as simple as multiplication; now they can. So just to get where we are today we all had to become smarter. With computers placed in the position of controlling more and more of the machinery of our lives, it is important that people understand at a basic level how they work instead of considering them spooky and magical. I think this is what Alan Kay meant when he said “The computer revolution hasn’t happened yet”.

    I admit that not everybody can be John Carmack or Linus or Guido van Rossum. That’s fine. But the thing is, if you do not like programming or just find it such an insurmountable mental hurdle, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it. I think designers should stick to design and let programmers do their jobs. The idea that such an important task be arbitrarily performed by any random idiot is the one that I have a problem with. We certainly don’t let any random idiot plan cities or perform open-heart surgery.

    That’s why I think all people should get smarter about programming. They need to realize what it is that programmers do. It’s not a menial brick-laying task. It requires a certain mindset, and if you don’t want to think hard about all the little details that go into the design of a good program, you should know enough about the discipline to find some other way of contributing to the project.

    I like your statement about the American political system being designed by geniuses for use by morons. It sounds a lot like the design principle of the Macintosh.

  1620. “The idea that such an important task be arbitrarily performed by any random idiot is the one that I have a problem with.”

    With that I wholly agree. But I don’t think it’s possible to educate large masses of people about programming as long as programming stays what it is today: a largely open-ended discipline where you can do just about anything and hope for the best results. What I generally miss is standards. See, car designers don’t put the steering wheel on the ceiling or replace it with a joystick. Not for mass produced cars at least. So everybody has a general idea of how to drive basically any car. Everybody has a basic idea what your job is you say “I’m designing the steering wheel for the new Toyota.” People will correctly assume your job is about deciding whether it will be covered in black or beige leather. NOT about making it square, triangular, replacing it with a horizontal slider or eliminating it altogether and make the car beeing steer by whistling into a microphone.

    I believe in order to make it approachable the app my aunt is using for burning CD’s should display the songs in exactly the same grid widget at the same place on the form as the grid widget used in the payroll software she works with, or the instant messenger she chats with, and after she learned that in the instant messenger adding a new contact is in, say, the Actions menu at the top of the form, and in the payroll software adding a new employee is in the same place, she would look for the command to burn a CD at exactly the same place and would find it. In other words, we have to turn programming from an open-ended research kind of work to real engineering, that churns out software gadget with the same UI, logic and behaviour, just like a factory producing DVD players and ghetto blasters.

    And of course it would everybody would use the same function calls, and of course it would mean there would be generally accepted best practices, and then programmers could be trained to the job just like mechanical engineers.

    In my day job hacking Navision ERP there are lot of things I don’t like, but what I actually do like is that the limitations of the system and the hundreds of already existing forms, tables, code etc. gives a structure to the whole thing, which we could change, but we don’t. Every form has a menu that’s called the same way as the form itself and the first menu item in that is List etc. We often reject requests for change which would make perfect sense but “unnavisionic”, suggesting other changes instead that are less perfect, but “navisionic”. The result is that whenever a user calls and says hey I want to be able to enter such and such data which is automatically copied somewhere else and then summed up and printed on some report, she can quite reliably predict how this things will look and work on the screen because they always look and work the same. Which also means I know exactly which functions I will call even before writing a line of code, which means I can estimate accurately, and also can train someone with little programming background to do it well, usually just telling them “do thing X exactly the same way the standard system does thing Y”.

    Of course this is something hackers would never stomach.

  1621. I’ve just read The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress because I was interested in what ESR means by “Political SF”. And, frankly speaking, I’m disappointed.

    First, this is very far away from what I’d call good fiction. What I consider good fiction is Ian Watson’s Warhammer 40K series – Space Marine, Inquisitor, Harlequin. These books are breathtaking fast-paced and spectacular, like a good movie. Compared to that, TMIAHM is like history book thinly wrapped into a fiction, it just describes a series of events as plainly as possible.

    Second, if it a Libertarian manifesto then I’m clearly not Libertarian. Basically it’s all about a small cabal manipulating a large, discontent but passive population into a revolution more or less against their will. Social engineering of the most dishonest sort, awfully similar to Lenin’s vanguardism. At least they don’t imply they are doing it “for their own good”, that would be highly immoral, lacking that it’s only amoral.

    Thirdly it looks awfully similar to those Soviet SF’s I was unlucky enough to read in my childhood. The main problem with both is I think the totally misunderstand human nature. I believe the human mind has a large animalistic part, more or less rational part, and a bit of spiritual part (where “spiritual” is a general rug we can sweep everything which is nice but not fully understood under). Our goals come mostly from the animalistic part and sometimes, rarely, from the spiritual part. Our rational part is but a tool, it just decides how the goals set by the other two part should be attempted to be reached. Therefore humans are mainly a bunch of irrational impulses, fight-or-flight reflexes, irrational hatred and attachment and so on. Perhaps the worst but yet most widespread fault of human nature is distrust: we don’t necessarily want to hurt others but we don’t believe that they think the same way. The Cold War was a spectacular case – two superpowers neither wanting to start a nuclear war, but still spent awful lot of money on making sure the other won’t do it either. This distrust is everywhere, in partner relationships, in business relationships, in politics, and if a fully rational race of aliens would visit Earth, I think this distrust is what they’d find the most typical and most irrational part of the human psyche.

    Heinlein’s characters don’t even resemble real people. They are simply put, too rational in every sense. For example, the idea that convicted prisoners in a highly dangerous environment develop a very polite culture due to natural selection is a laughable child’s dream – in reality people very rarely learn from their own mistakes, and almost never from other’s. In reality it would be most likely small settlements of fairly normal people trying to hold out against the hordes of techno-barbarians.

    This is idea, of a society composed of rational beings seems to be a surprisingly common – and wrong – idea both in Libertarian and Socialist sci-fi.

  1622. It’s weird how you mentioned the ‘forced’ nature of revolution. In fact, that seems to be the only way to cause a revolution. People don’t like the chaos that occurs, so they will not often rise up unless forced to the brink of deprivation, so successful revolutionary groups must FORCE the people to rise up. Our old friend Brecher has an article on Nepal that details Mao’s method of forcing a revolution.

    Perhaps the worst but yet most widespread fault of human nature is distrust: we don’t necessarily want to hurt others but we don’t believe that they think the same way. The Cold War was a spectacular case – two superpowers neither wanting to start a nuclear war, but still spent awful lot of money on making sure the other won’t do it either. This distrust is everywhere, in partner relationships, in business relationships, in politics, and if a fully rational race of aliens would visit Earth, I think this distrust is what they’d find the most typical and most irrational part of the human psyche.

    Trust is a very powerful thing. Sailer actually wrote an incredibly powerful article on the nature of trust and how it shaped America’s destiny.

    Heinlein’s characters don’t even resemble real people. They are simply put, too rational in every sense. For example, the idea that convicted prisoners in a highly dangerous environment develop a very polite culture due to natural selection is a laughable child’s dream – in reality people very rarely learn from their own mistakes, and almost never from other’s. In reality it would be most likely small settlements of fairly normal people trying to hold out against the hordes of techno-barbarians.

    I am not sure about that. Australia turned out pretty well. :)

  1623. More on Libertarianism:

    Empirically, most people don’t actually want absolute freedom, which is why democracies don’t elect libertarian governments. Irony of ironies, people don’t choose absolute freedom. But this refutes libertarianism by its own premise, as libertarianism defines the good as the freely chosen, yet people do not choose it. Paradoxically, people exercise their freedom not to be libertarians.
    The political corollary of this is that since no electorate will support libertarianism, a libertarian government could never be achieved democratically but would have to be imposed by some kind of authoritarian state, which rather puts the lie to libertarians’ claim that under any other philosophy, busybodies who claim to know what’s best for other people impose their values on the rest of us. Libertarianism itself is based on the conviction that it is the one true political philosophy and all others are false. It entails imposing a certain kind of society, with all its attendant pluses and minuses, which the inhabitants thereof will not be free to opt out of except by leaving.

  1624. Phil,

    that really a great article. I’m constantly trying to find out why I’m making four times the money with much less stress for the same work here in the UK than I did in Hungary. The most shocking thing to me that I thought a better functioning society/economy must be more competetive, more on the sharp edge. And it’s the other way around: it’s more cooperative, more relaxed, lazier and less organized.

    My first culture shock was buying some books from Amazon and finding them on the ground before my door on the open street. I didn’t have to sign anything, they just dropped it there. Anyone could have stolen it. Or I might have lied that I haven’t received them and get another copy for free, I guess. I just couldn’t understand it. Isn’t it the most basic thing that if you’ve delivered something, you make the customer sign a paper to be able to actually prove it’s been received? Apparently they don’t bother to do it with shipments of small value. I can understand the logic behind it – better lose a hundred books a year than piss of the customer by forcing him to be at home or go the post office. Completely reasonable – just weird to me. It’s a kind of a “worse is better” way of thinking: better service can be provided by not trying to cover your arse every time, all the time, by not trying to enforce the theoretically right way of doing things. So different in Hungary – being able to prove you delivered the goods is first priority, it’s simply the way people think: if you can’ prove it it did not happen.

    The second culture shock was at work – being asked to customize undocumented code at once, without the time to study it. I was, like, “How can I take responsiblity for it this way?” They were like “You are not responsible for anything – I am responsible for doing what I can to fulfill our contract with the client as I have signed it. IUn this case, by asking the only developer currently in the office, you.” Me: “But if it does not work how do you know it does not work because I’m an idiot or because it’s undocumented and no time to study it?” Them: “I don’t really care whose fault is it if it does not work. I can choose between having a chance to get it right, if you attempt it, or not having a chance, if you don’t. ” It again was a kind of shock – completely reasonable, but so different from the cover-your-arse, pass-on-the-responsibility, scapegoating way of thinking I was used to. It’s so weird they are not trying to judge me. I have a feeling anybody with a convincing personality and zero knowledge could work as a developer here indefinitely, changing jobs every 18 months. Completely impossible in Hungary – there is always personal responsibility and failure usually means the sack.

    There are many similar stories – people looks so naive to me, so trusting, and a lot of people actually abuse it, by being quite lazy. Yet the system works very well – if it can pay much more for the same job from the ERP consultant down to the unskilled factory worked, I must conclude it’s a better system as it produces more. It seems to me we Hungarians in our quest to force things for maximum arse-coverage, or in more generally, for maximum personal benefit, destroy each other’s achievements, that’s our problem. For example, taxi drivers work the following way in Budapest: the dispatcher announces an address. The driver who hits the button on the radio first gets it first. However he must get there in 5 minutes. If he is late a second – banned from work for two days. Of course those other drivers who weren’t quick enough to hit the button on the radio will drive to the address and spy on the lucky one, and they will tell him in if he is late a second, because if he is banned for two days, then of course, less competition for two days. Of course it’s a horrible system, makes everybody stressed out and angry. Yet people don’t seem to be able to relax it – cooperation, forgiveness is simply not in the culture.

    So I’m now in the country where Capitalism was invented and still I see waaaay more cooperation, and no, I don’t think it has anything to do with the Labour rule. I can’t think of any way taxes and statutory redistribution of wealth could make people more voluntarily cooperative in their professional and private lives. That wouldn’t make any sense. Maybe it’s the other way around: there is an old, inherited system of honour – the remnants of a moral capital inherited from a religious past. It’s my guess – but I’m not sure.

    Still, it seems to me, cooperation, albeit a voluntary, not an enforced one, is the real recipe of success. Competition now seems to me a secondary question – I think only the two ends of the social spectrum, the big managers and the very lazy bums see any of it. For an average middle-class employee, there isn’t much competition.

  1625. Phil,

    Interesting read about libertarianism. It’s important to bear in mind that the term libertarian is European in origin and meant, originally, what we might today call an anarcho-communist.

    Much like the term hacker it was co-opted by some very unsavory individuals (Murkan right-wingnuts in this case) and underwent such semantic drift that the original meaning and spirit is all but lost now.

  1626. Jeff wrote: t’s important to bear in mind that the term libertarian is European in origin and meant, originally, what we might today call an anarcho-communist.

    Much like the term hacker it was co-opted by some very unsavory individuals (Murkan right-wingnuts in this case) and underwent such semantic drift that the original meaning and spirit is all but lost now.

    The problem with this idea is that the term originated in a non-English language. Here is the origin of the term from Wikipedia:

    The first known use of a term that has been translated as “libertarian” in a political sense was by anarcho-communist Joseph Déjacque[18], who used the French term libertaire in a letter to Pierre-Joseph Proudhon in 1857.The word stems from the French word libertaire (synonymous to “anarchist”), and was used in order to evade the French ban on anarchist publications.

    Many anarchists still use the term (e.g., terms translatable as “libertarian” are used as a synonym for anarchism in many non-English languages, like French, Italian and so on), and in the English language socialist anarchism and communist anarchism are often referred to as Libertarian socialism or Libertarian communism respectively to distinguish it from authoritarian Marxist varieties of socialism and communism.

    As liberal came to be identified with Progressive policies in several English-speaking countries during the 1920s and 1930s, many of those who espoused the original, minimal-state philosophy began to distinguish their doctrine by calling themselves “classical liberals”.

    So a foreign language word can be translated as libertarian (but it can also be translated in other ways as well). I think this is just another example of different languages having different words for the same concept, not necessarily a co-option.

  1627. Sometimes labels are meaningless. Bin Laden, in his own culture is a religious conservative wingnut – it’s just the wing has a “long tail” there :) You just sometimes can’t compare things, it would lead to meaningless results.

    Here is a riddle. Say there is a town with a nice, old, historical centre. And an entrepreneur wants to tear that down and build a mall. A Leftie would probably say: well, yeah, that old stuff is so uncool, it’d be better to have a modern building there, but I still don’t like this idea, because it’s based on the profit motive. We should rather build a modern sports centre for the masses. And a Conservative would probably say: well certainly a mall would do a lot to vitalize the business and commerce in the town, but I don’t like the idea of tearing down historical heritage buildings. Now, there are also people, who say something like “Aaargh! The judeo-globalist plutocrat-mafia wants to destroy the spine and lifeblood of the town and deprave us conscious patriot Christians to become mindless consumer zombies easy to manipulate to the service of the Mammon! You can’t both serve Christ and the Mammon!” You’d probably call such a person a Fascist, a Populist, or a Paleocon of the more radical type – sadly this idiocy is all too common in the Eastern European Right. However, the interesting thing is – what about the opposite? People who say “Hey, it’s so cool! Progress is cool, modernity is cool, old stuff sucks, business is cool, commerce is cool, investment is cool, technology is cool, malls are cool, this idea is oh so cool! Let’s do it!” Would you call them Libertarians? Because it’s closer to Libertarianism than to the Left or to the Right but no – most Libertarians, I think, don’t think this way. And this – is the way of thinking of the Eastern European Left. And – I think this way of thinking is completely missing from America and from Western Europe. No, I don’t mean nobody thinks this way – just not the political thinkers. It’s not Left, Right, or Libertarian. And perhaps – that’s one of the reasons these nations are successful. So keep it folks. (F.e. the British New Labour is getting dangerously close to this way of thinking.)

  1628. No, I don’t mean nobody thinks this way – just not the political thinkers.

    Two words, Shenpen: Ron Paul.

    Currently the darling of the Reddit Left because he’s the least dangerous Republican, he’s still a nutcase.

  1629. Shenpen, another problem is that in the American system at least, candidates for political office — whether legislative or executive — will try to strike a balance between the extremists and the moderates in their party. An example is Reagan’s speech about “states’ rights” in Philadelphia, MI in 1980 — widely thought to be a tacit nod to the (very large) racist constituent of the Republican party that went under the radar of the more moderates and liberals Reagan was trying to court. So if extremists seem to be ill-represented in American politics, more than likely it’s because one mainstream candidate or the other is putting on a show of representing extremist views more than the other guy.

    The term “triangulation” is most often associated with the Clintons, but in reality any career politician does it; Mr. and Mrs. Clinton are just very good at it. Once he/she is in office, the career politician will usually, through their actions or lack thereof, make known his/her true allegiance: to the moneyed corporate interests whose influence in America is disproportionate. Mr. Bush has shown himself to be rather poor at masking this allegiance; then again, a president elected by the people and not by a combination of oil-company largesse, vote fraud, and Supreme Court fiat would feel more compelled to at least put on a show of acting on their behalf.

    So what you say may be true about Britain and Canada and Western Europe, but the American system is broken and has long ago been r00ted by special interests with gobs of cash.

  1630. Actually I think there might be something more about Ron Paul. I think the important point isn’t that he combined socially conservative ideas with a libertarian approach to the economy and foreign policy. I rather think there are phases in history where established ideologies shred the illusion of being real – they are never real but often look so – and this might be such a time. ESR has shown in many posts how the Left lost it’s vision and drive. I think the same might have happened to the Right in the last two years or so: there isn’t really much optimism and vision left. Such times require people who have a general “question everything” approach towards lots of practical issues, even if they don’t question their own cultural-philosophical values, and Ron Paul might be such a man. Culturally and philosophically, he is nothing new, but on practical questions he seems to have a skeptical attitude, which in such times might be a good thing.

  1631. An example is Reagan’s speech about “states’ rights” in Philadelphia, MI in 1980 — widely thought to be a tacit nod to the (very large) racist constituent of the Republican party that went under the radar of the more moderates and liberals Reagan was trying to court.

    If the GOP’s ‘Southern Strategy’ was racist, then why did it double their percentage of the Southern black vote?

    Once he/she is in office, the career politician will usually, through their actions or lack thereof, make known his/her true allegiance: to the moneyed corporate interests whose influence in America is disproportionate.

    Microsoft, at the time the darling of the tech industry, was hammered by antitrust rulings during the 90’s. Granted, they did not give much money to politicians at the time, but still.

    So what you say may be true about Britain and Canada and Western Europe, but the American system is broken and has long ago been r00ted by special interests with gobs of cash.

    Ah yes, our election system. It is bad, but it has plenty of room to get much worse.

    However, while corporate elites do exert a great deal of influence, the corporate elites (and the elites in general), seem to change quite rapidly.

    Out of the Top 20 US Corporations of 1967, only 11 remain in the Top 60 today. In Germany, meanwhile, 15 are still in the Top 20. France, on the other hand, seems to have a military/industrial/congressional complex that puts Halliburton to shame.

    Also, in a lot of the world, nepotism is the norm. The US is one of the few places with rather weak dynasties. Currently, only two dynasties (the Bushes and the Rockefellers) have managed to maintain either economic or political power into the fourth generation. The most promising American dynasty, the Kennedy’s, do not seem to be heading anywhere fast. Where are the Roosevelt’s, Carnegie’s, Vanderbilt’s, Washington’s, Adam’s or Jefferson’s? The best they seem to come up with is yet another disease-charity letterhead.

  1632. Y’all probably already guessed that I’m not a big fan of tuxdeluxe.org – but this article just rocks: http://tuxdeluxe.org/node/38

    Actually what I’m always trying to do when I read an article like this one is to connect the dots, try to get the deeper causes, reasons. I think if this one could be cracked – that why did the idiotic idea of bulletpoint slideshows so persuasive that everybody from OOo to Google imitates Microsoft on this one – we could have a deep insight on quite a lot of other things as well. Jeff, none of that anti-corporate BS now please – I mean, corporations are managed by people like you and me, forgossake, not by some sort of alien race, so the real cause is rooted in human nature. The big question is always why don’t human being behave rationally as a group and in the long run – I mean human beings by themselves and in the short run often behave rationally, that’s no problem. How does group behaviour in the long run lead to irrational behaviour like this one – that’s the really good question.

  1633. Jeff, none of that anti-corporate BS now please – I mean, corporations are managed by people like you and me, forgossake, not by some sort of alien race

    So was the SS and the KGB. So is the Bush administration.

    Anyways, I think McNealy has a point. The best corporate presenting I’d ever seen was done at a whiteboard. I think PowerPoint is really about the peacock/peahen display instinct more than productivity or anything else. These prezos are made to impress — not necessarily to get anything done.

  1634. Which is why OOo named their PP-alternative Impress. Of course presentations are all about impressing people – otherwise they would be called “lectures” or “talks”. But that’s not the point. What I’d like to know how decisions are made. Or, more correctly, how phenomena that are clearly irrational at group level can grow out from individual decisions that are rational at the point where they were made.

    I think the main reason might be the law of diminishing returns. The left hand side of the graph – where small investments bring great results. It’s not hard to see how a 15-minute PP prez with a nice background and animations could have improved one’s ability to impress at the time the usual alternative was the whiteboard. Of course when it became the norm you needed a 30-minute prez to achieve the same effect etc. This can explain other weird phenomena like the popularity of PHP. When all you care about adding some simple thing to a website NOW, to be finished by 10PM, then a readable language and an all-in-one pack of 8000 built-in functions are a rational choice over better designed programming languages where one needs to learn some theoretical stuff first and/or find the correct libraries for doing the job.

  1635. An initial version of this post was going to read “PHP is the Springfield Monorail of web programming — it looks slick in the brochure and during the initial phases of deployment, and it’s not until it’s too late and everything’s running that people realize how many corners were cut and it’s likely to go pop at any time.”

    Now that I think on it some that Simpsons episode is exactly illustrative of the sort of collective irrationality that can overcome large groups of people that you were talking about, Shenpen. Except when it happens in real life the consequences are not so funny and much more horrible. Think Spanish Inquisition, Holocaust, War in Iraq…

    I mean human beings by themselves and in the short run often behave rationally, that’s no problem.

    A lot of people would take issue with that. Gurdjieff held that most humans are a sort of automaton which react automatically and unconsciously to external stimuli and that it takes years of enormous effort and struggle to even know what you’re doing and why when you do it — “to be able to be”.

    Is there any hope for rationality in a world clogged by marketing messages and lies bought and paid for by corporations to have the authority of truth? At this stage I don’t know.

    This is why I say that if you hate postmodernism, it behooves you to despise the Republicans as they are the most postmodern party. They really believe that you can create your own truth out of whole cloth. The euphemism “climate change” for global warming was not coined by Democrats but by Republican spin-doctor Frank Luntz, who wanted to de-emphasize the deleterious effects the fossil-fuel companies which put Repubs in power are having on the atmosphere. The crunchy granola liberal-arts professors in the universities are not engaged in something nearly so sinister — they are trying to raise awareness of these multiple conflicting truths through critical analysis of media and messages, trying to find the hidden agendas the Frank Luntz types are marching to.

  1636. Phil,

    Will probably be busy with my OLPC. Waiting for the Slackware Multics distro to come out.

  1637. Why Slackware? I did not think they released an operating system for anything besides the Linux kernel. Are you thinking of Debian, or maybe Gentoo?

  1638. You’re right, Debian or Gentoo would be more appropriate. I mentioned Slackware because Linux didn’t really take off until Slackware started packaging stuff for it in easy-to-install packages.

    I’m certain Multics has a complete userland which obviates the immediate and urgent need for a third-party distro that Linux had.

  1639. “Is there any hope for rationality in a world clogged by marketing messages and lies bought and paid for by corporations to have the authority of truth? At this stage I don’t know.”

    Is there a hope for rationality in a world where when people start to think about genuine happiness they quickly arrive to praise taxes? http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/12/opinion/12mon4.html?_r=2&oref=slogin&oref=slogin

    I can understand your problems with the big-corporate world. Personally, I have a firm decision to always work for small, family-owned businesses as I just could not stomach corporate culture as such. But don’t you see how much irrationality there is in the big-goverment world as well?

    I’ve proposed before that the anti-goverment attitude of Libertarians and the anti-corporate attitude of Liberals might be equally wrong – because the problem might be size itself. I think every organization gradually becomes idiotic as it’s size grows. So instead, we could just be anti-big – both anti-big-goverment and anti-big-business.

  1640. Another idea. It’s quite clear that the small goverment idea of Libertarians won’t get widely accepted in the short run at least. So what about trying to get a consensus between Libertarians, Liberals and Conservatives the following way: instead of small goverment: simple goverment? Keep the size (in monetary sense) but reduce bureaucracy. For example: abolish income, capital gain etc. taxes and keep only Sales Tax (or VAT over here which is, I think, BTW, a better idea, as it does not punish small-margin resellers). The basic idea is that the same income for a single man or a for a single mum with three children means totally different quality of living. Therefore they shouldn’t pay the same amount of taxes. Currently goverments try to solve it by a diverse mix of tax exemptions, welfare handouts and so on. However, it could be simplified a lot. The single mum will spend most of her income on staples while the single man will spend a lot on entertainment. So only by setting a small Sales Tax rate on staples and a bigger one on other products Liberals can achieve all the social engineering they want, but the system would be a LOT simpler. Nobody would ever have to report their income to the state – it would only get taxed when they spend it. That woul be a huge improvement – lots and lots of IRS/HMRS/etc. bureacracy could be eliminated and so on.

  1641. Shenpen, abolition of the IRS and eventual replacement with a sales tax or similar scheme has been an LP plank for as far back as I was aware of their existence. It is even floated by some (non-Ron Paul) Republicans from time to time, and factors into the reason why out of the two major parties I used to favor the Republicans. Sometimes I still feel as if Democrats (and liberals in the general sense) consider government the way Homer Simpson considers alcohol: “the cause of, and solution to, all of life’s problems”.

    However if you look at the motley crew being paraded around for the 2008 presidential election cycle, there are only two candidates from either party a sane person would vote for and they are both Democrats: Dennis Kucinich and Bill Richardson.

  1642. Shenpen, I have seen plenty of articles with similar themes for the past seven years. It just does not seem that Linux is anywhere near adoption.

  1643. There is no reason why, for ordinary desktop use, you should choose any operating system besides Windows or, if you loathe Ballmeroth of Throwchairreroth that much, a Mac.

    Linux isn’t there yet. The only compelling reason to use it is if you want total software freedom, and as I keep saying, no one gives a fuck about software freedom. They don’t want to be free. They want their computing lives to be easy. Microsoft and Apple provide that; Linux does not.

  1644. That’s true – I don’t really care much about software freedom myself – when I first take a look at Linux (SuSE 6.3) ten years ago that was because a virus has destroyed all my Word documents and picture files.

  1645. Another thing: there are loads of really slick FLOSS apps for XP. VLC Media Player. Paint .NET. MediaPortal. SharpDevelop. Often the same app has a nicer installer, is generally slicker and easier to use: compare PostGres installation, Instant Rails, WAMPServer, and so on. XP with FLOSS apps sounds like a good “best of both worlds” scenario. The problem is Vista. Sooner or later it has to be Vista. And that means DRM. And that’s when many people will have to make the final decision. Right now I’m happy with the best of both worlds scenario as I can run most of the best FLOSS apps I used to run on Linux on XP and have the additional benefit of Paint .NET etc. and games like the amazing Europa Barbarorum, but when it comes to Vista, inevitably, I don’ think I can live with that. I will have to do the final switch and I can just hope by then there will be either Skype Video for Linux or a suitable, mature equivalent. Then I’ll only use the Vista partition for gaming.

  1646. Something else, back to politics. Recently I’ve been reading some blogs, both Progressive and Libertarian ones, and as far as I can see they both have blind spots, and they are very good in pointing out each other’s blind spots, but they don’t see their own. Progressives talk about “the public”. The public should monitor and regulate dangerous corporations and so on. Libertarians are right to point out “the public” is a fiction, it does not exist in this context, “the public” is just a slogan for politicians, bureaucrats, and intellectuals who want more power for themselves. Every historical experiment to give more power to the people in the end just gave more power for these three castes. Libertarians talk about “the market”. However in 2007 the economic lessons of the baker selling bread to the shoemaker etc. are not valid anymore, there are massive corporate conglomerates of money and brainwashing power.

    I think both “the public” and “the market” are BS in 2007, both Progressives and Libertarians should be more honest and outspoken.

    The real decisions we have is either: power to the corporations, or power to the politicans, bureaucrats and intellectuals. There is no third choice, no other feasible alternative. All we have is to choose between these two, and also we have to take it into account that often it’s not separate as the corporations can often buy the politicians, the bureaucrats and the intellectuals.

    So – corporate power or goverment power. Choose one – you have to, you must. It is either-or.

    I think I’d rather choose corporate power. For corporations, I can not only vote every 4-5 years but every day I buy something, I usually have more that two alternatives, competition is stronger, there is closer relationship between what I pay for and what I get, and fraudsters are more likely to be punished. It seems to me the lesser of the two evils.

    Any better ideas?

  1647. … but evils they both are nevertheless. Still, we can’t have perfect choice, all we can choose is a lesser evil: insert all the Conservative ideas about human nature (Burke etc.) here.

  1648. Shenpen, the choice is only so narrow if you consider civilization — with its inherent need for centralized control, concentration of power, and class hierarchy — an inherent good. Derrick Jensen presents some pretty good reasons why you should not necessarily consider it so.

  1649. Jeff, from what I read on Wikipedia, those reasons are crap.
    He seems to base his assumption that ‘civilization’ (whatever that means) is based on violence, yet all societies (human or otherwise) are based on violence. Killing a wild pig with a spear is no different than killing a pig in a slaughterhouse; it is just a lot less efficient. Also, if he thinks ‘civilized societies’ are the only ones capable of violence, he should wonder what happened to the Wooly Mammoth, which became extinct in the Americas around the time the Indians showed up. Also, skull thickness has been diminishing ever since the invention of agriculture, probably because humans get whacked upside the head less than they used to. In short, I think the argument is bullshit.

  1650. The problem is Vista.

    NO. The problem is proprietary software, which lets companies “pull a Vista” on their users at any time. Apple did the same thing with “Leopard”. But… nobody gives a fuck about software freedom. And from their perspective (i.e., software is something that nerds care about, I care about what results it brings to the table for me), there’s no reason why they should.

  1651. Vista represents the problems with playing nice. Everybody used to upgrade to the latest Windows OS, because it was a vast step-up from the previous one, since Windows OSes were so crappy. Windows XP, on the other hand, was a pretty good system, especially after several Service Packs. People did not need to upgrade to Vista, because XP satisfies their needs, and they are worried about compatibility with their applications. In short, Microsoft, like Intel before them, has created a platform that even they cannot kill. Of course, this also means that Apple and Linux cannot kill it either. NT 5.1 & Win32 will be the dominant standards. This gives a stable platform to the ReactOS project, and soon they may develop a viable alternative to Microsoft Windows.

  1652. True enough, Jeff. I don’t really care for software freedom, but I do care for information freedom. I have a parallel for it: I don’t really care that we are buying cars in a “push-system”: having to choose from a fairly few number of almost identical models. After all a car is just something to go to places and for me the same is software, except the ones that I write. But I’d be really pissed if I was forced to accept a similar “push-system” in information – it’s infinitely more important. I’d hate to see computers & the net to become a controlled medium like TV. Perhaps I have different reasons than you – my nightmare is a pop-up window in the browser 10 years from now: “You are not allowed to view this website: it contains politically incorrect content” – but it was always the nature of liberty that the lack of it can be abused a thousand different ways. So if you want people of a pragmatic approach to buy into a 100% free, non-mixed software environment – which would be pretty hard, see f.e. codecs or games – I’d suggest to concentrate on DRM and Treacherous Computing rather than the freedom to read and modify the kernel source…

  1653. Shenpen,

    Thanks to the efforts of Nicholas Negroponte and other brilliant folks, with the support of generous and curious geeks (like myself, mirabile dictu), hundreds of thousands of kids will come into receipt of a little green laptop. This laptop has, among other things, a special key which presents the source code of whatever is running.

    The message of this key is the message of the free software movement: This is your computer. There are many like it, but this one is yours. And it operates by way of symbolic instructions which any human can read, understand, and most importantly change. To be able to change the words that dictate instruction to your computer are what, ultimately, make it yours.

    Yes, DRM is bad. Yes, treacherous computing is bad. In the current proprietary software ecosystem, however, there is one company which the media cartels and governments need to threaten in order to get this implemented. If the users of each machine were on equal footing with the developers of the operating system — true for open source but not for proprietary OS’s — such threats would be far more difficult to make.

    So software freedom — the freedom to read and change the instructions which govern your computer and furthermore to distribute these instructions in the hopes that others find them useful — is woven very tightly with information freedom in the digital world.

    Oh, and happy birthday Eric. To another 50.

  1654. This is your computer. There are many like it, but this one is yours.

    It is not their property, you know. It is the property of whatever government agency runs their schools. I guess this is a parody of the USMC’s chant about weapons.

  1655. Phil,

    Yes, I slipped a reference to the USMC rifle chant in there.

    It’s worth mentioning that many aspects of the XO-1’s design, including the unique interface and system software, are intended to convey a feeling that the machine is for the child, as opposed to the Windows machines which may be found in the adult world (should there be any), despite the fact that the child doesn’t own the machine outright. The view-source button and the open-source nature of the system give XO-1 users easy access to and knowledge of their machines of a kind that Windows cannot give its users.

  1656. The view-source button and the open-source nature of the system give XO-1 users easy access to and knowledge of their machines of a kind that Windows cannot give its users.

    What about ReactOS? It may not be Microsoft Windows, but it is still Windows.

  1657. “Windows” is a trademark for the operating system family released by Microsoft. This trademark was successfully defended in court against what is now Linspire.

    Even if an OS be compatible with the Win32 API, or even the low-level driver API, as ReactOS is, it cannot be called Windows.

  1658. The “Rifleman’s Creed” has some applicability to XO-1 and computer administration in-general. We really need a new paradigm to replace today’s “help desk”. Consider for a moment the number of ‘rifle technicians’ found in a Marine battalion. Certainly there are armorers in the Marines, but there are only a few (

  1659. This is why Linux will never succeed on the desktop.

    Moving forward one of two things will happen:

    1) Everyone will be forced onto Vista
    2) Microsoft will backpedal the way Intel did away from their Pentium 4 architecture, and take the Windows desktop in a new, XP-based direction

    Either way, they pwn the desktop now and for the foreseeable future. Pack it in and reformat your hard disks, guys — even hardcore nerds are running Linux or BSD servers with Windows desktops, even if so they can play BioShock. Evil has won because good is dumb.

  1660. “And it operates by way of symbolic instructions which any human can read, understand, and most importantly change. ”

    Any human COULD read, understand, and change. Of course, it’s a matter of education, IQ, and perhaps, most importantly, desire, interest and determination. I like you enthusiasism but if I think back to my classmates, hell, even myself… maybe 1 out of 100 would take any interest in it and rest (including me, I remember what I did with my first Commodore 16) would just be like “hey, cool, it has games”.

  1661. Well, does that mean the Laptop can be changed? Does that mean the students will be given the root password, which would likely be required to modify the kernel.

  1662. Phil, on my XO-1 a simple “su” from the Terminal Activity gives you a root prompt — no password needed.

  1663. Are the XO-1s exactly the same as the model given to students? So students have root access to their laptops? (A lot of the laptops given to school students usually do not give Administrator access)? What if the screw it up? Are they given media to quickly reinstall if they have fuXX0red it?

  1664. Are the XO-1s exactly the same as the model given to students? So students have root access to their laptops? A lot of the laptops given to school students usually do not give Administrator access. What if they screw it up? Are they given media to quickly reinstall if they have fuXX0red it?

  1665. Phil,

    There may have been some sofware updates to the lappies rolled out to the kids, I don’t know. But they do get root access. The original OS image is stored in the machines’ flash memory; this is not accessible without a special developer key.

    By disabling a security feature in the system you can change the OS files (whose changes are stored in a copy-on-write fashion), but the original image is safely preserved and when you enable the feature again it will be restored from scratch on the next boot. At least such is what I could glean from the Bitfrost spec. It really is an amazing system that promotes complete openness while simultaneously presenting an advanced security model.

  1666. Does anyone know what is preventing FLOSS 3D Nvidia Drivers?

    What information is Nvidia not providing that would allow one to write FLOSS drivers for Nvidia cards? I am not an expert on this topic. A modern graphics card is basically a piece of hardware that can do matrix and vector operations very quickly, and modern graphics cards are programmable with shaders. I know that Nvidia graphics cards use the GPU assembly language, whose instructions are available and form the basis of writing shaders. I also know that X.Org has an open-source Nvidia driver for basic (i.e. not 2d or 3d accelerated) operation of the graphics card. Could someone take the Mesa OpenGL library and write a shader or set of shaders for every OpenGL function that the card should accelerate? What am I not seeing that would allow this to work?

  1667. Phil,

    Historically both NVIDIA and ATI have seen fit to keep their Linux OpenGL drivers closed and proprietary. From what I can tell, this is because of extreme conservatism within the companies with respect to intellectual property rights: that is, taking the position that the less you expose to developers the bigger the advantage you have over competitors. To your average developer, exposing the registers and code that instruct the card to perform some operation like filling a polygon, applying a light source, or mapping a texture or applying a shader function doesn’t tell you anything about how the card actually does these things, therefore from the company’s standpoint their IP should be secure.

    But average developers aren’t in the position of power to make IP decisions on behalf of the company; management is. And it seems that from a management perspective, a binary driver to expose an abstract API such as OpenGL or, preferably, Direct3D, is enough for any third-party developer to write a game or CAD software package that targets their hardware. Opening up the hardware any more might enable hackers to reverse engineer their hardware, and that would be Bad. So it simply is not done. It’s rather the same mentality that drives the RIAA and the MPAA to do their thing: considering their customers as potential threat vectors. Protecting the IP comes before serving the customer because no IP, no company with which to serve the customer.

    ATI has actually reversed its decision and agreed to work with the open source community to release open source drivers to support the latest ‘n’ greatest on their video cards. Whether this was a result of their merger with AMD I really can’t say. It’s probably a good move, too; as a big part of the reason why NVIDIA was historically the preferred chipset on Linux was not because of hardware but simply because the OpenGL drivers for ATI chipsets — both Win32 and Linux — sucked.

    Anyway, be thankful that you have gotten the concessions to Linux that you did from both manufacturers. Some hardware outfits — such as high-end audio equipment vendor Mark of the Unicorn — have a standing Linux support policy of not just “no”, but “HELL NO”.

  1668. Phil, it’s also worth noting that neither ATI nor NVIDIA equipment is guaranteed to support the ARB instruction set natively — the driver may, in fact, cross-compile the bytecode to a native code format for the card. This native code is subject to change is also, presumably, protected IP and factors into the reason why open source drivers are so slow in coming.

  1669. Jeff,

    http://reddit.com/info/644gu/comments/

    That’s an amazing example of what I as an outsider think the problem is with the American Left on the Internet. All that talk about change, change, change, without ever defining what change is in formal ways. Your Founding Fathers did define what change they wanted in a formal way (Constitution), and this is why it became a successful revolution. If you have a formal goal, you have a chance of creating something that makes sense. Think of unit testing or whatever. But what do these “revolutionaries” want? Clearly they don’t just want to heal the wounds in that formal system: in that case they could just cheer for Ron Paul. “Change” just for the sake of change, even without specifying what exactly to change, overthrowing “the system” without telling what “the system” is and telling what should come after it – can you agree with these folks?

  1670. Shenpen,

    No one knew what should come after the British monarchical rule either. The early United States had to try a couple of approaches before coming across something that worked.

    The American revolution was such a success because it was, in a way, the essence of postmodernist political praxis: think globally, act locally. By penning grandiose inspiring phrases like “all men are created equal” the framers were able to rally support for their cause, and then they applied themselves one step at a time, successively, to the problems of overthrowing British monarchical rule over the colonies, framing a new system to replace said rule (in the Articles of Confederation), and re-framing that system in the body of the Constitution when the first system failed. Even then we weren’t quite rid of the threat from the Brits; we had to beat them again in 1812.

    I think one of the great failures of the left is this glorification and romanticization of revolution. It’s a slow, arduous, and oftentimes bloody process, fraught with times of uncertainty about what to do next, or uncertainty even about survival to the next day. This overnight, storm-the-bastille, cast-down-the-oppressors-and-there-will-be-milk-and-honey stuff is sheer adolescent fantasy.

    And you’re by far not the only one to notice the undirectedness of modern progressivism. Read some George Lakoff sometime; one of the points that he keeps hammering home (and it has been repeated by Naomi Klein) is that if they want to get anywhere, progressives have got to be just as good as the Right at staying on message until the message becomes part of the language of discourse. And the Right is frighteningly good at this, mainly because they have a virtual monopoly on that old standby ideal that rallied us in 1776: “freedom”. For that reason I have sort of a grudging respect for Ron Paul: despite his Republican affiliation he has used the language of “freedom” to rally many on the left and the right against the common enemy of the unholy big-government/big-business alliance that is the root cause behind the Iraqi occupation, torture at Gitmo, militarization of our police, burgeoning surveillance state and much other scary stuff going on. If Ron Paul weren’t such a paleocon troglodyte I would even vote for the guy.

  1671. I hereby proclaim 2008 the Year of the Linux Desktop.

    After the disappointing release of Vista, users flocked to Mac OS and Linux, reducing Windows’s market share by a whopping 1.26%!!!! Mainly Mac OS but still this is the year Linux desktop usage rose above statistical noise.

    http://marketshare.hitslink.com/report.aspx?qprid=9&reddit=1

    Go open source!

    Seriously, it’s been 24 years since the GNU Project announcement, 17 years since the initial Linux release. 10 years ago, The Cathedral and the Bazaar was written, in the hopes that the values articulated therein would usher in a more open, responsible, and community-oriented future for software.

    BUT… THE FUTURE REFUSED TO CHANGE.

  1672. Jeff,

    I believe there are simply different kinds of revolutions. There is the French type – basically that was the archetype of everything wrong happened after it, from the totalitarianisms of the XX. century to today’s crazy progressives. We could talk a lot about it – but basically I agree with Eric Voegelin, the basic problem is a reintroduction of a Gnostic idea: that it is possible to have perfect knowledge, and with that, to build a perfect world:

    “He identified the root of the Gnostic impulse as alienation, that is, a sense of disconnection with society and a belief that this lack of concord with society is the result of the inherent disorder, or even evil, of the world. This alienation has two effects:

    * The first is the belief that the disorder of the world can be transcended by extraordinary insight, learning, or knowledge, called a Gnostic Speculation by Voegelin (the Gnostics themselves referred to this as gnosis).
    * The second is the desire to implement and or create a policy to actualize the speculation, or as Voegelin described to Immanentize the Eschaton, to create a sort of heaven on earth within history.

    Voegelin’s definition of Eschaton would be more toward the idea that Gnostics are really rejecting “Christianity’s” eschaton of Heaven and Hell and replacing it with a human form of salvation through revelation by mystical ritual or practice.[2] This understanding would be completely compatible with the Gnostic concept that the truth lies inside man and not in the Judeo-Christian God or demiurge.”

    On the other hand, the American revolution I believe was of a completely different type. As far as I know many of the ideas of the founders can be almost directly traced back to English common law. It’s no wonder that the founder of modern Conservativism, Edmund Burke, who was generally quite opposed to revolutions and quite keen on preserving tradition, esp. the French one, sympathized with the colonial revolutionaries and seeked conciliation. I believe that in fact it was the stupid decrees of King George V. which was actually counter-traditional from an English common law point of view, and the American Revolution can be seen as a way of restoring that tradition – different framework but very similar ideas.

  1673. On Linux desktop: now only if Ekiga or other Skype Video alternatives worked well… this is perhaps the only field, aside than gaming, where Linux lags behind. And this is of essential importance.

  1674. I’ve just posted it to Reddit, I’d be interested in your opinion:

    “From here (Europe) the worst thing I fear for America is the following. The problem with Obama is that there is much to disagree with his views if one is Conservative or Libertarian but it’s generally accepted, that his character is impeccable. He is, to put it simply, a honest person and from my Conservative point of view he was just misguided by Liberal intellectuals, but otherwise a really great person. McCain is not – basically nobody with some Conservative authority likes or accepts him, and problem is not his views, but his lack of principles, in other word, his character.

    So basically an Obama vs. McCain match taking the low popularity of Bush & his party into account would almost certainly mean Obama wins. And I don’t even consider it the worst possible outcome. A honest Liberal is better than a dishonest Conservative – especially that a dishonest Conservative isn’t actually a Conservative, just a dishonest person who happens to support some Conservative ideas. Conservatvisism is a mindset and a methodology and a certain character, not just a set of opinions or goals.

    So in such a situation what can McCain do and what will he probably do, as he isn’t really a man of character? Well think about it. Obama Hussein Barack. What an unfortunate name. And he is black. And he isn’t very handsome. Wouldn’t be too hard to find a picture where he looks creepy, I mean there are thousands of pictures, some of them must be unfortunate. John McCain. What a very typical name, almost like a name from a Tom Clancy novel, it suggest establishedness, familiarity, reliability. And with some make-up he can be made to look like a very American, very patrician, very gentleman kind of person.

    So imagine a TV ad. First pic, a creepy pic of Obama, the name Obama Hussein Barack, then John McCain smiling jovially, patricianly, and then something like “Choose America”. Nothing else. A very simple ad – and how devastating can it be. It could make Obama lose.

    Then you have three problems. First, a dishonest president. Second, a dishonest victory. Third, liberals enraged beyond all recognition. I mean I can see here and on Kos and Huff that they are pretty much enraged right now. How enraged they would be is beyond my imagination. Maybe they would break out in armed resistance or something. Just horrible.

    But this is what is likely to happen. A honest black with a Muslim name vs. a very American candidate who isn’t of strong moral character – a disaster waiting to happen.”

  1675. He is, to put it simply, a honest person and from my Conservative point of view he was just misguided by Liberal intellectuals, but otherwise a really great person.

    Well, it really depends on your preferences. Steve Sailer, in a review of his 1995 autobiography gives some examples that could make one pause. Of course, that was a long time ago, and things could have changed. He is not sleazy or anything, but he is a very talented manipulator of people’s perceptions of him.

    And he isn’t very handsome.
    I don’t know about that. A lot of females, like Obama Girl seem to think otherwise.

    So imagine a TV ad. First pic, a creepy pic of Obama, the name Obama Hussein Barack, then John McCain smiling jovially, patricianly, and then something like “Choose America”. Nothing else. A very simple ad – and how devastating can it be. It could make Obama lose.

    The problem is that McCain seems to have become addicted to the media’s fawning press coverage of him, and I (and Steve) doubt he would risk horrifying his Bigfoot Media friends by waging a Lee Atwater-style campaign against Obama.

    Of course, there could be a 5-15% chance McCain will not be running for President in November, so maybe a better candidate could run.

  1676. BTW what about those Fischer-Tropsch plants that would supposed to be profitable at $32/barrel? I’m thinking about investing into coal… although the price of the coal increased too…

  1677. Well, if you are looking for ESR, the best place to try is Google. Just do an advanced search for the phrase “Eric S. Raymond” in pages that are at most a month old (or a week). Here is the URL for this search:

    Here is a TinyURL version: http://tinyurl.com/2obr6p

  1678. Shenpen, coal mining is destructive to the environment and dangerous to the miners. If the future of American economy depends upon coal, that economy deserves to lose.

  1679. Any damage done to the environment can be mitigated using the energy. As for workers, they can be well conpensated and replaced as much as possible with robots. In this regard, the traditional ‘Murkan” approach has proved the best of all.

  1680. Phil,

    Open Look and Motif are both dead, the latter only persisting in legacy apps. And X desktops still look like ass compared to the Mac or even Windows and have virtually no sensible usability policy in place.

    By enforcing policy, the Mac and Windows have encouraged application developers to work well together, with a single user interface framework supported by many decades and millions of dollars’ worth of human-computer interaction research. Software authors must sacrifice considerable freedom, using the UI controls, policies, and the system APIs for the same provided by the OS vendor but what they gain is enormous: ISVs make more money, and users are happier. Let me repeat that: despite bugs, crashes, malware, etc. users are happier with Windows than they are with Linux. Otherwise, Linux would have more than 2% market share by now. On the Macintosh the phenomenon is magnified despite the small user base: a desk accessory that performs even a trivial task could fetch a substantial price per copy on the shareware circuit simply because it has a neat, Mac-like interface which makes users’ lives easier. They become fans of it, and gladly purchase the software. This is roughly analogous to the social democracy of Europe, Canada, and really virtually all of the developed world, so decried by American conservatives. By structuring around policy instead of mechanism, the government brings net benefits to all in the form of healthier, longer lived citizens, lower crime rates, etc.

    Jay Hanson describes the same phenomenon but frames it in a different way when he speaks of “process politics” vs. “systems politics”. In process politics, a law, judgement, etc. that was arrived at according to correct procedure is inherently correct. In systems politics, desirable goals are elicited from the people and the government is structured to achieve those goals. Process-politics governments like the U.S. government have no defined desirable goals, leaving a power vacuum: the goals are often specified by lobbyists, special interests and large corporations looking to consolidate their power base, and the people convinced that because it conforms to the process, it is correct and even desirable from their perspective. This is the heart of Gramscian “false consciousness” today. Meanwhile, the rich get richer, the poor get poorer, energy resources are dwindling, pollution is increasing, the Fed bails out Bear Stearns on the taxpayer’s nickel (remember, the Fed’s created money becomes your debt), but doesn’t give one cent to the little guy, and when Barack Obama has the solid brass ones to get up and say the little guy is hurting and bitter and frustrated, he’s shouted down as an “elitist” by the Right Wing Noise Machine. But we are expected to believe that all is as it should be, because no laws were actually violated (according to Bush DoJ’s interpretation of the laws) and it’s just Market Forces At Work, for the greater good.

  1681. Oh, and Phil,

    Marxist-Leninist science and Lysenko are phenomenal red herrings when it comes to the sound debunking that shoddy, racist scholarship like The Bell Curve received. We’ve known since 2003 now that IQ heritability is largely income-dependent. At the end of the day, educational opportunities count for more than genetic brainpower gifts.

  1682. First pic, a creepy pic of Obama

    Those are kind of in short supply. What are they gonna do, color him blacker like they did with OJ?

  1683. This is roughly analogous to the social democracy of Europe, Canada, and really virtually all of the developed world, so decried by American conservatives. By structuring around policy instead of mechanism, the government brings net benefits to all in the form of healthier, longer lived citizens, lower crime rates, etc.

    There are problems in Europe, ya know. This post gives a good overview of the problems. The wildest rumors about Haliburton PALE in comparison to the stuff that goes on over there. Of course things have gotten better, mostly because of liberalization.

    Process-politics governments like the U.S. government have no defined desirable goals

    This can be a good thing, because it is much easier for the government to change with the times. I think very few people would be happy with the government having the same enshrined goals as the Washington administration did (although he did have a lot of good ideas). This helps preserve a tradeoff between ideology and stability (which is a very nice thing to have since frequent instability seems to benefit nobody).

    leaving a power vacuum: the goals are often specified by lobbyists, special interests
    Jeff, is every belief you hold held by ALL other Citizens or Residents of the United States of America? If not, then you are a member of some (at least one) special interests? I am currently taking a class on American Government to pad my extracurriculars, and I learned that the largest special interest groups are retirees, labor unions, farmers, etc. Of course, lobbying could be solved by TRUE campaign finance reform, which would be a mechanism, not policy approach. Another benefit of this approach is that it tends to benefit people who can eschew blind ideology and craft feasible solutions to problems. The most respected POTUS of the 20th Century is FDR, who was not an ideologue but an experimenter, who tried multiple solutions to the problem of the Depression until he came up with a workable one. No, it did not satisfy the ideologues (neither the laissez-faire liberals nor the hard-lined socialists), but it did seem to satisfy the American people.

  1684. the Fed bails out Bear Stearns on the taxpayer’s nickel (remember, the Fed’s created money becomes your debt), but doesn’t give one cent to the little guy,

    Well, the feds are considering a Nordic-style nationalization of banks. As for bailing out homebuyers, the question is do they really want to be bailed out?

    and when Barack Obama has the solid brass ones to get up and say the little guy is hurting and bitter and frustrated, he’s shouted down as an “elitist” by the Right Wing Noise Machine.

    What, do you mean those comments about Pennsylvania? They may have been true, but I can see how some people would perceive them to be insensitive.

  1685. Phil, who would take control of the beleaguered banks if such a plan were implemented? The government? Or the Federal Reserve (a private, for-profit corporation)?

  1686. You do realize the Federal Reserve is only partially private? The Board of Governors are appointed by the President.

  1687. Democrats from Eric’s home state of Pennsylvania are voting in a crucial primary tomorrow. Think that’ll spur him back into blogging here?

  1688. I think I understand why Dean, Peter, Eric et al. hate lefties so much. I think their idea of the typical lefty is something similar to this guy. After watching that video, I hate those guys too. Now, I know that this guy is a character from a movie, and it is partially a strawman, but still.

  1689. I don’t know about the others but I’m pretty sure Eric hates lefties because he considers them all to be morally equivalent to Josef Stalin.

    That video is, if anything, a leftist parody of leftist fluffbunny rhetoric. The singer exhorts us to “do something” about the situation in the world instead of providing us with specific problems and specific, actionable goals with measurable results.

  1690. “users are happier with Windows than they are with Linux. Otherwise, Linux would have more than 2% market share by now.”

    Sure. And the Chinese must be happy with their government, or they would have overthrown it by now. Or they would have emigrated elsewhere, all 1.6 billion of them.

    “I learned that the largest special interest groups are retirees, labor unions, farmers, etc.”

    What, no mention of business? Oh, I forgot: business *is* the general interest.

  1691. John, the difference is that no one is using force of arms to keep people on Windows. Microsoft’s money, as powerful as it is, is simply not the same thing. Blame them for playing dirty to get things that way but right now, Windows (up through XP at least) still delivers a much better end-user experience than Linux.

    I don’t like it either. I wish free software could solve all the world’s problems. But a proprietary-software ecosystem is important because without it, there would be no incentive to deliver functionality that end users (as opposed to developers) want. Even the OLPC people realize this, as they are in the midst of a switch to Windows.

  1692. Jeff,

    on this policy vs. mechanism thing: but isn’t it exactly what Bush is doing: ignoring the constitutional mechanism in the name of an anti-terrorism policy?

    So basically it seems to me the reason mechanism is important is that people don’t agree on policies and the mechanism should prevent the currently ruling party from being to carried away in their policy. As long as there are wiiiide disagreements in the policy to follow, it’s better to do little and ineffective, than to do much.

    May I ask an evil question? Aren’t your pro-policy views based on the assumption that your policy in the broad sense is the only correct policy, and competing policies are so insane that it’s not really that the mechanism should prevent them, but first they must somehow be rooted out and then when there is only right policy, then the mechanism should not inhibit those?…

  1693. Shenpen,

    I’m going to answer your question by talking about the American Civil War. Republicans are fond of telling me what a moral triumph the American Civil War was for the Western world, and how it was America, and particularly the Republican Party, that achieved the moral deprecation of slavery in the civilized world.

    Of all the lies that Republicans tell, this has to be one of the most risible. Slavery was abolished in England and Mexico decades before the Civil War, easily, with the stroke a pen. (I believe the Mexicans passed a law upon gaining independence from Spain, and English abolition was achieved by a ruling from what would today be called an “activist judge” by the right.) In such a case, mechanism (the organization of the country as a loose confederation of states) got in the way of good policy and led to much unnecessary bloodshed.

    Some would argue that as long as mechanism similarly impedes bad policy, it is justified. I would contend that all the mechanism in the world will not long impede those who act in bad faith. It’s like DRM, it’s a severe hindrance to legitimate users, not so for pirates. The United States consistently scores higher on major corruption indices than EU countries. Consider also the 2000 and 2004 elections and all the vote fraud that went on to get Shrub elected. I have no doubt that ol’ Sludge Vohaul will try to pull a similar rabbit out of his hat before and during the general election.

  1694. Well, this is odd. I know Eric is out there, because he’s approving comments, but he didn’t approve mine. I’ll assume it’s because I addressed it directly to him, and he no longer wants to participate in his own blog. Fair enough then, I’ll pose the question to the group, as a point of general discussion. Perhaps Eric will approve it now:

    Hello all! Eric said: “Not a single Democrat is willing to talk about making the active enemies of our civilization fear its wrath, which is one of several reasons I can no longer consider voting Democrat.”

    Posed in the form of an argument, what he’s really saying is:

    P1: The current crop of elected Democrats is unsatisfactory.
    P2: ???
    C: Therefore, all future Democratic candidates will be unsatisfactory.

    The question for the group is: What might the second premise be, by which he’s drawn his conclusion?

    I have a personal disdain for the Democratic Party, for reasons of my own that I can go into if this comment is approved, but Eric’s argument still jumped off the page at me as incomplete and potentially fallacious.

  1695. … and keep them loaded in their homes.

    While progress, this is hardly “bare”, which would involve SCOTUS forcing “shall issue” carry permit laws, or better, overturning any state or local prohibition on carry (concealed or open), except for convicted felons and a few other classes that have proved they don’t deserve the right.

  1696. Jeff, I do not know if you are still paying attention to this thread, but I have to point a few things out.

    Slavery was abolished in England and Mexico decades before the Civil War, easily, with the stroke a pen. (I believe the Mexicans passed a law upon gaining independence from Spain, and English abolition was achieved by a ruling from what would today be called an “activist judge” by the right.)

    Yeah, and the Brits immediately replaced them with Asian coolies who were slaves in all but name. Mexico had the support of the regional power, the United States, in its independence movement; the United States had no such thing in 1776. Slavery was a fact of life in the southern regions (and the slave trade was a fact of life in the northern region), and to achieve unity, concessions had to be made. Yes, the abolition of slavery in the United States took longer and was more bloody, but once it was gone, it was GONE. I believe an ‘activist judge’, Chief Roger B. Taney, made a ruling that did not solve the issue and probably made things worse. Like it or not, the ‘market’ had ruled slavery in the tropics an ‘economic necessity’, and it took incredible force to dislodge it.

    (the organization of the country as a loose confederation of states)

    The United States was only a confederation under the Articles of Confederation. The Constitution created a federation.

    The United States consistently scores higher on major corruption indices than EU countries.

    I am not sure if I trust those rulings. All the ones I have seen have relied on the ‘perception of corruption by businessmen’, which does not take into account cultural perceptions of corruption. American businessmen are a notoriously whiny lot, and what others might see as necessary regulations or commonsense rules of thumb, they would see as ‘profoundly corrupt.’ Also, this article and this article support my point a bit. The largest problems with corruption stems from campaign contributions, and the Skeleton Closet has a very good mechanism way to fix this problem.

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