Drudge holds a grudge?
Matt Drudge called Miller and asked for some explanation for Miller's mockery of Rush Limbaugh some years ago. Miller replied that Limbaugh is iconic and that he occasionally rubs him the wrong way, hence as a professional comedian he converted this into some humor. It seems that some conservatives will welcome Miller, others will find him less than idelogicaly pure. Miller and Schwarzenegger can comisarate at a fine LA eatery.
One curisity from my point of view is the seeming reverence for Limbaugh. I listen to as much talk radio as I can get, but ultimatly I am a text person, and would attach far more reverence for a writer than for a talker. This may be nothing more than a matter of preference, but its my analysis that the most complex thought requires writing (even if only later to be spoken). Limbaugh, like Miller, is at least part entertainer, and the rise of infotainment means most talk radio hosts are at least partially entertainers, and Ben Stein reveals you can wear multiple hats, but Stein is a substantial thinker who can also entertain. Limbaugh is less so, and so I cannot rever him.
Friday, August 29, 2003
Dennis Miller guest hosting for Sean Hannity
When O'Reilly ended at 2pm local, it took me a few minutes to get to the radio (cooking) and lo and behold, when the next program in the broadcast array hit my reciever the voice of Dennis Miller appeared. I had heard that one of his rants defended John Ashcroft (local boy, by the way, the AG attended high school here in town, as did Brad Pitt) so I was intrigued. The first segment was a hilarious introduction of his political views and his drift rightward. I am certainly enjoying this show and looking forward to the next two and a half hours.
Miller's transformation as an explicit conservative comic has attracted quite a bit of commentary. Criticism in the Boston Phoenix. The blog one good move is not happy. Here is the rant on civil liberties. Dennis on Norman Mailer in the WSJ.
When O'Reilly ended at 2pm local, it took me a few minutes to get to the radio (cooking) and lo and behold, when the next program in the broadcast array hit my reciever the voice of Dennis Miller appeared. I had heard that one of his rants defended John Ashcroft (local boy, by the way, the AG attended high school here in town, as did Brad Pitt) so I was intrigued. The first segment was a hilarious introduction of his political views and his drift rightward. I am certainly enjoying this show and looking forward to the next two and a half hours.
Miller's transformation as an explicit conservative comic has attracted quite a bit of commentary. Criticism in the Boston Phoenix. The blog one good move is not happy. Here is the rant on civil liberties. Dennis on Norman Mailer in the WSJ.
Thursday, August 28, 2003
To Protect and Take Care of the Force
The New Republic has a good article by Lawrence Kaplan. Such analysis confirms my own contention that we have returned to the values of the highly trained professional service. We have invested a lot into these soldiers, and we don't want to lose them. Welcome to warfare in the age of lace. Read 19th century (post Napoleonic) criticism of 18th century warfare to understand our current era.
The New Republic has a good article by Lawrence Kaplan. Such analysis confirms my own contention that we have returned to the values of the highly trained professional service. We have invested a lot into these soldiers, and we don't want to lose them. Welcome to warfare in the age of lace. Read 19th century (post Napoleonic) criticism of 18th century warfare to understand our current era.
Rice urges a "generational commitment"
Bill Kristol and Robert Kagan elaborate on Rice's summons at the Weekly Standard. They are concerned that sufficient effort is not being made, given the stakes. Success in Iraq is essential, and we must make the commitment to get it right. Take a look.
Bill Kristol and Robert Kagan elaborate on Rice's summons at the Weekly Standard. They are concerned that sufficient effort is not being made, given the stakes. Success in Iraq is essential, and we must make the commitment to get it right. Take a look.
Numbers of male teachers continues decline
According to the NYTimes, "Men made up one-third of the teaching force in the 1960's, 70's and 80's. Their numbers slid through the 90's and hit 21 percent, a low point, in 2001." When I look at the faculty of schools, I see that nearly everyone got their degrees and certification in the 70's or the 90's. Very few teachers teaching today started in the 80's. Part of this was the relative teacher glut of the 80's. What I think these statistics hide is the fact that an even larger decline has taken place in the number of male teachers entering the profession in the 90s'. Counting practicing teachers still includes male teachers who started teaching in the 70's. What I want to see
The article also said, "Six in 10 teachers said they would choose teaching again if they could go back to their college days and start over." Again, consider this in light of another statistic that, "About one-third quit during their first three years, and almost half leave within five years," according to this CNN item. Is the 4 in 10 who would not choose to teach again the new teachers who are still about to leave?
The NEA puts a more positive spin on these statistics, and provides some more from the base report, as well as linking to that report as a pdf.
According to the NYTimes, "Men made up one-third of the teaching force in the 1960's, 70's and 80's. Their numbers slid through the 90's and hit 21 percent, a low point, in 2001." When I look at the faculty of schools, I see that nearly everyone got their degrees and certification in the 70's or the 90's. Very few teachers teaching today started in the 80's. Part of this was the relative teacher glut of the 80's. What I think these statistics hide is the fact that an even larger decline has taken place in the number of male teachers entering the profession in the 90s'. Counting practicing teachers still includes male teachers who started teaching in the 70's. What I want to see
The article also said, "Six in 10 teachers said they would choose teaching again if they could go back to their college days and start over." Again, consider this in light of another statistic that, "About one-third quit during their first three years, and almost half leave within five years," according to this CNN item. Is the 4 in 10 who would not choose to teach again the new teachers who are still about to leave?
The NEA puts a more positive spin on these statistics, and provides some more from the base report, as well as linking to that report as a pdf.
Neocon 101
Nice explanation of the Neocon position at the Christian Science Monitor. There are several links to follow and a quiz to see if you're a Neocon too.
Nice explanation of the Neocon position at the Christian Science Monitor. There are several links to follow and a quiz to see if you're a Neocon too.
Dare the School Build a New Social Order?
Two days ago I commented on the Farmington high school international affairs class. I thought it might be profitable to write more generally on progressive education. The headline above is the title of collection of three papers written by George Counts. Counts began as a student of John Dewey, and advocated shifting the focus of education from the curriculum to the student. In 1931, his examinations of foriegn (non-American) school systems led him to Soviet Russia. That year he wrote The New Russian Primer, Soviet Challenge to America and, A Ford Crosses Soviet Russia. It is the following year that he presented Dare the School Build a New Social Order? where ever he could get a hearing. It was an age in which many idealists where infatuated with the Soviet experiment, and many continued to be despite growing evidence of Soviet totalitarianism. Counts had become commited to social reform on the Marxist model. Dewey's own 1920 book, Reconstruction in Philosophy had advocated a role for the schools in progress, but his emphasis had been on democratization of teaching methods, not social revolution.
A whole group, known as the "Frontier Thinkers" (click here for a somewhat alarmist account) formulated a social reconstructionist model of education and set about advocating using to schools to create a new social order. Needless to say, it didn't take. The Frontier Thinkers had their hayday when interest in and acceptance of the Soviet experiment was at its hight. When the WWII alliance collapsed and America fell into its second Red Scare, the communists, their sympathizers, and fellow travelers went under ground. As support for the 1948 candicacy of Henry Wallace reveal, there was a small, determined minority who wanted to continue to learn from the Soviet experience. More importantly, perhaps, similar thinkers in Europe in the Frankfurt School continued to carry the torch. They felt free to modify Marxism, rejected direct obedience to Moscow, but kept historical materialism central to their thinking. European radicals took education as indoctrination much more seriously than Americans did.
As the New Left took hold in both America and Europe in the mid to late sixties, there was a resurgence of social reconstructionism as a vogue in American education. A nice description can be found in The New Republic's article "The Passion of Joschka Fischer" (scroll down about half way) of such a venture in Germany. As resistance to the Reagan military build-up and both Gulf Wars have revealed, the New Left destroyed itself electorally, but not as a social movement. The New Left included in its ideology the notion that revolutionaries belonged in schools, welfare offices, and advocacy groups advancing the revolution even when not in the street. As the New Left lost the Vietnam War as a cause, it embraced enviromentalism and consumer protection as causes. Both had the advantage of being easily used for anti-capitalist purposes. It is no coincidence, for example, that Earth Day is Lenin's birthday.
The social reconstructionists as educators take the whole New Left agenda into the classroom. Fundamentally distrustful of bourgeois society, anti-capitalist, sure that the foriegn policy of capitalist countries is 19th century Imperialism with a new set of clothes, sympathetic to the under-dog like the PLO, Vietcong, Black Panthers, or IRA, and therefore fundamentally at odds with most Americans who never really embraced to socialism, even as practiced by western Europeans. Social reconstructionists want to vote for Dennis Kucinich, but might feel the weight of pragmatism and go with Howard Dean. If Dean doesn't get the nomination, or if pragmatism doesn't bite, its the Green party that gets their vote. They see the schools as a fundamental part of their social reconstruction, and have no difficulty pushing their own view on students despite the fact that their views are distinctly unpopular. In subjects like math and science, their influence is mostly, like Dewey, in the form of teaching methods and classroom enviroment. In literature, they select the polar opposite of the "great books" looking for the voices of the disenfranchised. Women, people of color, the poor, and authors from outside the country are sought out. However, it is in the social studies where the social reconstructionists have the most to alter in the classroom. History and social analysis are taught from a hard left or new left perspective, again the indiginous people are celebrated and the Europeans are condemed (until they lose their empires and embrace socialism), capitalism is portrayed as a poverty creating earth destroying system, and the American political system is described a corrupt and controlled by malevolent elites.
A great deal of such teachers are "soft" social reconstructionists. They picked up their ideology in college, and colleges of education are often more social reconstructionist than public schools are - indoctrinate the indoctrinators. They haven't examined their assumptions with rigor, and can generously be seen as the character from the Alicia Silverstone movie Clueless, Miss Toby Geist, who is always shown trying to get the students involved in various causes. A small minority of teachers are "hard" social reconstructionists, who are committed and can usually point to some defining moment when they realized the system was corrupt and embraced social reconstruction. Here is an example.
Given the rather abundant evidence that the examples of socities admired by social reconstructionists are failures on a variety of measures, this can be regarded as a pernicious philosophy of education. Society can improve itself, and a certain awareness of the social issues raised by this philosophy is appropriate to a classroom. However, if teachers were ever successful in undermining student's broader commitment to American institutions, to republican government (rule by elected representatives), and capitalism, the consequences globally would be catastrophic. Parents and community leaders need to pay closer attention to what goes on in the classroom. A large number of the "soft" social reconstructionists would do little harm, would probabaly do some good, and would not need to be purged, if parents and community leaders simply held them accountable to present broader values (community, state, and national) along side their own agendas in a fair and balanced way. Some of the more extream stuff needs to be saved for college, and some soft, and probabaly all hard social reconstructionists would be unwilling to make these changes. They are more than just a "fifth column" of European style social democrats. They are to the left of the social democrats, and represent a greater danger to the progress and prosperity produced by American capitalism and democracy.
Update: See a libertarian view of Counts here.
Two days ago I commented on the Farmington high school international affairs class. I thought it might be profitable to write more generally on progressive education. The headline above is the title of collection of three papers written by George Counts. Counts began as a student of John Dewey, and advocated shifting the focus of education from the curriculum to the student. In 1931, his examinations of foriegn (non-American) school systems led him to Soviet Russia. That year he wrote The New Russian Primer, Soviet Challenge to America and, A Ford Crosses Soviet Russia. It is the following year that he presented Dare the School Build a New Social Order? where ever he could get a hearing. It was an age in which many idealists where infatuated with the Soviet experiment, and many continued to be despite growing evidence of Soviet totalitarianism. Counts had become commited to social reform on the Marxist model. Dewey's own 1920 book, Reconstruction in Philosophy had advocated a role for the schools in progress, but his emphasis had been on democratization of teaching methods, not social revolution.
A whole group, known as the "Frontier Thinkers" (click here for a somewhat alarmist account) formulated a social reconstructionist model of education and set about advocating using to schools to create a new social order. Needless to say, it didn't take. The Frontier Thinkers had their hayday when interest in and acceptance of the Soviet experiment was at its hight. When the WWII alliance collapsed and America fell into its second Red Scare, the communists, their sympathizers, and fellow travelers went under ground. As support for the 1948 candicacy of Henry Wallace reveal, there was a small, determined minority who wanted to continue to learn from the Soviet experience. More importantly, perhaps, similar thinkers in Europe in the Frankfurt School continued to carry the torch. They felt free to modify Marxism, rejected direct obedience to Moscow, but kept historical materialism central to their thinking. European radicals took education as indoctrination much more seriously than Americans did.
As the New Left took hold in both America and Europe in the mid to late sixties, there was a resurgence of social reconstructionism as a vogue in American education. A nice description can be found in The New Republic's article "The Passion of Joschka Fischer" (scroll down about half way) of such a venture in Germany. As resistance to the Reagan military build-up and both Gulf Wars have revealed, the New Left destroyed itself electorally, but not as a social movement. The New Left included in its ideology the notion that revolutionaries belonged in schools, welfare offices, and advocacy groups advancing the revolution even when not in the street. As the New Left lost the Vietnam War as a cause, it embraced enviromentalism and consumer protection as causes. Both had the advantage of being easily used for anti-capitalist purposes. It is no coincidence, for example, that Earth Day is Lenin's birthday.
The social reconstructionists as educators take the whole New Left agenda into the classroom. Fundamentally distrustful of bourgeois society, anti-capitalist, sure that the foriegn policy of capitalist countries is 19th century Imperialism with a new set of clothes, sympathetic to the under-dog like the PLO, Vietcong, Black Panthers, or IRA, and therefore fundamentally at odds with most Americans who never really embraced to socialism, even as practiced by western Europeans. Social reconstructionists want to vote for Dennis Kucinich, but might feel the weight of pragmatism and go with Howard Dean. If Dean doesn't get the nomination, or if pragmatism doesn't bite, its the Green party that gets their vote. They see the schools as a fundamental part of their social reconstruction, and have no difficulty pushing their own view on students despite the fact that their views are distinctly unpopular. In subjects like math and science, their influence is mostly, like Dewey, in the form of teaching methods and classroom enviroment. In literature, they select the polar opposite of the "great books" looking for the voices of the disenfranchised. Women, people of color, the poor, and authors from outside the country are sought out. However, it is in the social studies where the social reconstructionists have the most to alter in the classroom. History and social analysis are taught from a hard left or new left perspective, again the indiginous people are celebrated and the Europeans are condemed (until they lose their empires and embrace socialism), capitalism is portrayed as a poverty creating earth destroying system, and the American political system is described a corrupt and controlled by malevolent elites.
A great deal of such teachers are "soft" social reconstructionists. They picked up their ideology in college, and colleges of education are often more social reconstructionist than public schools are - indoctrinate the indoctrinators. They haven't examined their assumptions with rigor, and can generously be seen as the character from the Alicia Silverstone movie Clueless, Miss Toby Geist, who is always shown trying to get the students involved in various causes. A small minority of teachers are "hard" social reconstructionists, who are committed and can usually point to some defining moment when they realized the system was corrupt and embraced social reconstruction. Here is an example.
Given the rather abundant evidence that the examples of socities admired by social reconstructionists are failures on a variety of measures, this can be regarded as a pernicious philosophy of education. Society can improve itself, and a certain awareness of the social issues raised by this philosophy is appropriate to a classroom. However, if teachers were ever successful in undermining student's broader commitment to American institutions, to republican government (rule by elected representatives), and capitalism, the consequences globally would be catastrophic. Parents and community leaders need to pay closer attention to what goes on in the classroom. A large number of the "soft" social reconstructionists would do little harm, would probabaly do some good, and would not need to be purged, if parents and community leaders simply held them accountable to present broader values (community, state, and national) along side their own agendas in a fair and balanced way. Some of the more extream stuff needs to be saved for college, and some soft, and probabaly all hard social reconstructionists would be unwilling to make these changes. They are more than just a "fifth column" of European style social democrats. They are to the left of the social democrats, and represent a greater danger to the progress and prosperity produced by American capitalism and democracy.
Update: See a libertarian view of Counts here.
Wednesday, August 27, 2003
Hugh Hewitt comes to Branson Radio
Since first mentioning Hewitt in early may, I have become attached to KPLA streaming audio. Prager, Medved, and Hewitt consitiute a fine nine hours of radio, generally enough to fill any day by any computer. Any by streaming, I can start listening after work and hear it at my convinience. But a new convinience has entered. Hewitt is now on KIDS AM 1340 in Branson. This means I have Hewitt in the car as well in the afternoon. The only thing left on KTTS is Bill O'Rielly and before noon the libertarian Neal Boortz. The fact that I can stream Dennis Prager during the Savage Nation on KRLA means I listen to O'Rielly on the radio, otherwise its all streaming all the time. Still, its great to be able to get into the car and listen to talk without being driven to the FM side of the spectrum.
Since first mentioning Hewitt in early may, I have become attached to KPLA streaming audio. Prager, Medved, and Hewitt consitiute a fine nine hours of radio, generally enough to fill any day by any computer. Any by streaming, I can start listening after work and hear it at my convinience. But a new convinience has entered. Hewitt is now on KIDS AM 1340 in Branson. This means I have Hewitt in the car as well in the afternoon. The only thing left on KTTS is Bill O'Rielly and before noon the libertarian Neal Boortz. The fact that I can stream Dennis Prager during the Savage Nation on KRLA means I listen to O'Rielly on the radio, otherwise its all streaming all the time. Still, its great to be able to get into the car and listen to talk without being driven to the FM side of the spectrum.
Tuesday, August 26, 2003
Nation Review misguided in its attacks on Specter
In this latest installment in the NR's attacks on Arlen Specter, John J. Miller makes the mistake of focusing only on Specter's lack of support for the party's agenda. First off, I'm not inclined to engage in purges until we have ideological purity. Second, Specter is better than democrats because he doesn't pander to the left. In a two party system, predominatly liberal states will produce liberal republicans as an alternative to leftist democrats. Just as in predominantly conservative states, we will find conservative democrats and right-wing republicans. Being a northerner living in a border state, I am acutely aware that where left and right exist from state to state vary's considerably.
In this latest installment in the NR's attacks on Arlen Specter, John J. Miller makes the mistake of focusing only on Specter's lack of support for the party's agenda. First off, I'm not inclined to engage in purges until we have ideological purity. Second, Specter is better than democrats because he doesn't pander to the left. In a two party system, predominatly liberal states will produce liberal republicans as an alternative to leftist democrats. Just as in predominantly conservative states, we will find conservative democrats and right-wing republicans. Being a northerner living in a border state, I am acutely aware that where left and right exist from state to state vary's considerably.
High School Teaches anti-Americanism
Little Green Footballs links to this Fox News story about a High School class promoting an anti-American agenda. Lets have a close look, shall we?
Tuesday, August 26, 2003
Some parents in Farmington, Mich., are crying "anti-Americanism" over a high school international affairs class.
The course is offered to juniors and seniors in the Farmington School District and focuses on America's role in the Middle East. But it's not the topic that's angered some students' parents. It's the class readings, many of which come from left-wing Web sites like Alternet.org, Indymedia.org, Progressive.org and War-times.org, that vigorously attack the Bush administration.
As LGF writes, "who’s who of the radical left." Two issues are here, one is balance, the other is the extream nature of these tests. There are two theories of education. One is that education should transfer the tradition of society to the children, so that they share the same body of knowledge and values as the previous (lets say taxpaying) generation. Another is that children should be taught to be able to correct the errors of previous generations, to overthrow their old assumptions and create progress. Such sites will strongly tend to favor the later theory. Lets call the first theory Traditional Education because its purpose is to transmit the cultural tradition, and the second theory Progressive edcuation because its purpose is human progress.
"This belief that we have to show that every concept out of that society can be understood and excused is really a problem across the country," said Farmington father Don Cohen. "We are bending over backwards and by doing so, we're misrepresenting and misinforming our children and our society." Cohen and other parents banded together to press the school board to hold off on the new elective. But the school year has officially begun and the class is on the roster. The board approved it by a narrow four-to-three vote.
I would suggest to Mr. Cohen that the question is not the coverage of a very wide range of ideas, but rather the amount of time given to them. I have, in the classroom, had to explain the rise of the New Left in terms of the anti-Vietnam war movement. My classroom would never be taught from a New Left perspective. Given a full semester in an upper level high school class, you can cover quite a lot. But, that doesn't mean you should privledge a political point of view inconsistant with community standards, that is unless you are a progressive.
Farmington superintendent of schools, Robert Maxfield, defended the course, saying high school juniors and seniors should be critical thinkers and should be exposed to many points of view.
This sounds nice, but is really an excuse to teach racism, sexism, ludditism, creationism, marxism, paganism, fascism, or whatever wacky thing you want to under the guise of exposing them to new ideas. It ignores the fact that a critical thinker first needs a critical apparatus, then afterward is capable of invalidating false ideas when exposed to many points of view. Without a critical apparatus, too much information is just bewildering. I would suggest to Mr. Maxfield that high school students do not possess a critical apparatus capable of heavy lifting. A few have a relativly strong critical apparatus, but the fact that it will develop and flurish so much in college demonstrates how undeveloped it is in high school. Part of this defect is an insufficiently broad base of study. How can one's critical faculties be prepared for any critique of economics without a full economic preperation? Part of a critical thinker is the ability to employ a wide range of tools in the service of a particular inquiry. The tool box of well prepared high school students is very shallow indeed. The best and brightest of students are only begining a process toward critical thinking with anything remotely like rigor. Too many students still form their moral reasoning by trying to please others, whether their peers, their teachers, or their families. The fact that my teacher is a socialist doesn't qualify as a reason for me to emrace socialism from a critical thinking perspective.
"You can never teach kids the facts about everything," Maxfield said. "What you can teach kids is how to recognize points of view, how to understand sources of conflict, how to understand that there are forces that have driven world affairs for hundreds of years."
This is an excuse not to do what I have just described as neccesary for critical thinking, followed by an inflated claim of what they have accomplished. What they have taught is a single theoretical approach (or maybe nothing at all). Focusing on a single theoretcial approach may really be something best left to graduate school, when hopefully so much water has passed under the bridge that students won't buy the swamp. That may not work as well as we would like, but if not graduate school, when?
And he believes kids should know about how some people feel about the U.S. "They need to understand that people hate Americans," Maxfield said. "They need to understand that sometimes there are reasons for that."
Somehow this seems like its going to be a critique of US action, not foreign reaction. I suspect that resentment of our success, hatred of our freedom, fear of our modernity, and resistance to reform of anti-democratic institutions won't get much coverage. Of course, "You can never teach kids the facts about everything."
Pro-Bush materials, such as government Web sites like WhiteHouse.gov, were added to the class' reading list — only after parents complained that the course was an exercise in political correctness. The extra sources help balance the course's curriculum and offer support to President Bush's policies and America's role in the Middle East. "That's on the media every day," said parent Susan Kahn, referring to the defense of Bush administration policies. "We hear that all the time and I think that's perfectly OK for them to hear as long as we balance it."
What this reveals is that these lefties don't even know where to look for a point of view other than the government or their own lefty circles. No libertarians, no neoconservatives, no realists? Where are sources like The Weekly Standard or The National Review? What they have set up is a target that Alternet.org and Progressive.org are going to attack. Of course no one will suggest that the official government sites don't bother attacking the radical fringe. No one will suggest the relative weight that these points of view reprsent. I very much doubt even the so-called teachers have ever done serious voting analysis with statistics. And by avoiding sites that argue different points of view ouside the Red-Green alliance, students recieve an impoverished edcuation, something that amounts to indoctrination.
Still, the school board stopped short of removing author Noam Chomsky's controversial book "9-11" — in which he writes about why he thinks the U.S. is a terrorist state — from the list of course materials. "That's the bias inbred into this curriculum," Cohen fumed.
I'm sure Ann Coulter's reply, Treason, isn't part of that reading list. Why anyone would foist Chomsky or Coulter on students I could never fathom, but Mr. Cohen is right about the fact that too many educators are too far to the left.
Too many teachers are too far to the Progressive side, thinking that the taxpayers who support them are not fit to shape policy. You see the taxpayers all generally agree with the teachers, but are duped by corporatist advertising.
Little Green Footballs links to this Fox News story about a High School class promoting an anti-American agenda. Lets have a close look, shall we?
Tuesday, August 26, 2003
Some parents in Farmington, Mich., are crying "anti-Americanism" over a high school international affairs class.
The course is offered to juniors and seniors in the Farmington School District and focuses on America's role in the Middle East. But it's not the topic that's angered some students' parents. It's the class readings, many of which come from left-wing Web sites like Alternet.org, Indymedia.org, Progressive.org and War-times.org, that vigorously attack the Bush administration.
As LGF writes, "who’s who of the radical left." Two issues are here, one is balance, the other is the extream nature of these tests. There are two theories of education. One is that education should transfer the tradition of society to the children, so that they share the same body of knowledge and values as the previous (lets say taxpaying) generation. Another is that children should be taught to be able to correct the errors of previous generations, to overthrow their old assumptions and create progress. Such sites will strongly tend to favor the later theory. Lets call the first theory Traditional Education because its purpose is to transmit the cultural tradition, and the second theory Progressive edcuation because its purpose is human progress.
"This belief that we have to show that every concept out of that society can be understood and excused is really a problem across the country," said Farmington father Don Cohen. "We are bending over backwards and by doing so, we're misrepresenting and misinforming our children and our society." Cohen and other parents banded together to press the school board to hold off on the new elective. But the school year has officially begun and the class is on the roster. The board approved it by a narrow four-to-three vote.
I would suggest to Mr. Cohen that the question is not the coverage of a very wide range of ideas, but rather the amount of time given to them. I have, in the classroom, had to explain the rise of the New Left in terms of the anti-Vietnam war movement. My classroom would never be taught from a New Left perspective. Given a full semester in an upper level high school class, you can cover quite a lot. But, that doesn't mean you should privledge a political point of view inconsistant with community standards, that is unless you are a progressive.
Farmington superintendent of schools, Robert Maxfield, defended the course, saying high school juniors and seniors should be critical thinkers and should be exposed to many points of view.
This sounds nice, but is really an excuse to teach racism, sexism, ludditism, creationism, marxism, paganism, fascism, or whatever wacky thing you want to under the guise of exposing them to new ideas. It ignores the fact that a critical thinker first needs a critical apparatus, then afterward is capable of invalidating false ideas when exposed to many points of view. Without a critical apparatus, too much information is just bewildering. I would suggest to Mr. Maxfield that high school students do not possess a critical apparatus capable of heavy lifting. A few have a relativly strong critical apparatus, but the fact that it will develop and flurish so much in college demonstrates how undeveloped it is in high school. Part of this defect is an insufficiently broad base of study. How can one's critical faculties be prepared for any critique of economics without a full economic preperation? Part of a critical thinker is the ability to employ a wide range of tools in the service of a particular inquiry. The tool box of well prepared high school students is very shallow indeed. The best and brightest of students are only begining a process toward critical thinking with anything remotely like rigor. Too many students still form their moral reasoning by trying to please others, whether their peers, their teachers, or their families. The fact that my teacher is a socialist doesn't qualify as a reason for me to emrace socialism from a critical thinking perspective.
"You can never teach kids the facts about everything," Maxfield said. "What you can teach kids is how to recognize points of view, how to understand sources of conflict, how to understand that there are forces that have driven world affairs for hundreds of years."
This is an excuse not to do what I have just described as neccesary for critical thinking, followed by an inflated claim of what they have accomplished. What they have taught is a single theoretical approach (or maybe nothing at all). Focusing on a single theoretcial approach may really be something best left to graduate school, when hopefully so much water has passed under the bridge that students won't buy the swamp. That may not work as well as we would like, but if not graduate school, when?
And he believes kids should know about how some people feel about the U.S. "They need to understand that people hate Americans," Maxfield said. "They need to understand that sometimes there are reasons for that."
Somehow this seems like its going to be a critique of US action, not foreign reaction. I suspect that resentment of our success, hatred of our freedom, fear of our modernity, and resistance to reform of anti-democratic institutions won't get much coverage. Of course, "You can never teach kids the facts about everything."
Pro-Bush materials, such as government Web sites like WhiteHouse.gov, were added to the class' reading list — only after parents complained that the course was an exercise in political correctness. The extra sources help balance the course's curriculum and offer support to President Bush's policies and America's role in the Middle East. "That's on the media every day," said parent Susan Kahn, referring to the defense of Bush administration policies. "We hear that all the time and I think that's perfectly OK for them to hear as long as we balance it."
What this reveals is that these lefties don't even know where to look for a point of view other than the government or their own lefty circles. No libertarians, no neoconservatives, no realists? Where are sources like The Weekly Standard or The National Review? What they have set up is a target that Alternet.org and Progressive.org are going to attack. Of course no one will suggest that the official government sites don't bother attacking the radical fringe. No one will suggest the relative weight that these points of view reprsent. I very much doubt even the so-called teachers have ever done serious voting analysis with statistics. And by avoiding sites that argue different points of view ouside the Red-Green alliance, students recieve an impoverished edcuation, something that amounts to indoctrination.
Still, the school board stopped short of removing author Noam Chomsky's controversial book "9-11" — in which he writes about why he thinks the U.S. is a terrorist state — from the list of course materials. "That's the bias inbred into this curriculum," Cohen fumed.
I'm sure Ann Coulter's reply, Treason, isn't part of that reading list. Why anyone would foist Chomsky or Coulter on students I could never fathom, but Mr. Cohen is right about the fact that too many educators are too far to the left.
Too many teachers are too far to the Progressive side, thinking that the taxpayers who support them are not fit to shape policy. You see the taxpayers all generally agree with the teachers, but are duped by corporatist advertising.
Saturday, August 23, 2003
NYTimes restricts archives
Not too long ago, the Times Archive was free out to 30 days for registered users. Now the free period is 7 days. On the other hand the price for access to an article seems of have fallen. Unfortunatly, I too frequently want to go back into the deeper history of a story and that was often within the 7-30 days window which I seem to have lost free access too. More evidence that more often change is unwelcome than its reverse?
Not too long ago, the Times Archive was free out to 30 days for registered users. Now the free period is 7 days. On the other hand the price for access to an article seems of have fallen. Unfortunatly, I too frequently want to go back into the deeper history of a story and that was often within the 7-30 days window which I seem to have lost free access too. More evidence that more often change is unwelcome than its reverse?
More on Religion: Justice Moore and the Ten Commandments
Yesterday I mentioned the strict monotheism of early Jews and Christians. I'll mention another in more detail with an eye towards my take on the Ten Commandments contraversy, and another opportunty to point out Sean Hannity's simple mindedness. Pontius Pilate is known for three things. He introduced Roman military standards bearing the Roman eagle into Jerusalem. The eagle signified not only Rome, but also Jupiter, one of the city's patrons. He used temple funds to build an aqueduct, a situation used for humorous effect in Life of Brian. And he presided over the crusifixion of Jesus the Nazorean. Its the introduction of the Roman standards that interests me here. Pilate took it for granted that a display of the dominant Roman iconography was a good thing to do in Jerusalem. For a Roman, such an act said that Rome provided peace, justice, and protection here, all of the benefits of proper to a state. But the Jews were canny in teasing out the embeded religious meaning in such acts and recognized that the standards themselves bore the eagle, a symbol of Jupiter, a god whose aspects included those of the soveriegn function, providing peace, justice, and protection. Who precisely was providing this peace? Was it Rome or Jupiter. Ultimatly this was a muddled question for the Romans who though they might be drifting towards indifference toward their Indo-European pantheon, would have still conflated the state and the state religion. That the soveriegn symbol of the state should be a symbol of the god of soveriegnty seemed natural. In the case of America (or Germany) the use of an eagle as its symbol does not reflect our belief in Jupiter as the source of a good polity, but the traditional meaning of the symbol as a soveriegn icon. How does a state like Rome respect the religious sensibilities of minorities like the Jews when its public iconography is intertwined with a specific religious interpretation? Pilate found the Jews in protest, brought in troops, but the Jews refused to yield. Unwilling to massacre the protesters over this, Pilate withdrew the standards. In doing so, he respected the religious sensibilities of the locals.
The United States in this respect is like Rome, as it is in so many other ways. We have a dominant religion, closely associated with our founding, which has a privleged place in the public square, or should I say forum. Prayers by clergy open legislative sessions, our money professes our trust in the monotheistic God of Abraham, and the Decalogue graces many a public building. As such we occasionally offend those citizens not subscribing to the majority faith, and so the state gives offence to its citizens. Should a moden Pilate coerce acceptance, as Justice Moore intends to do, or should that modern Pilate withdraw such symbols? The question is comlicated by two fundamental changes in the relationship of the state to its people since the founding. First, the American people have become more diverse. Second, the role of the state has become more ubiquitous. The American religious sensibility has grown more eccumenical in responce to that growing diversity, shifting from a Protestant sensibility to a Christian sensibility to a Judeo-Christian sensibility. One might resonably conclude that it would be possible to include Muslims one day in this formulation. But, diversity has grown faster and reached farther than simply diverging interpretations of the God of Abraham. Further, it is probabale that this trend will continue and that future American generations will see more citizens who do not derive a spiritual sense from the Bible. All of which suggests that the very presence of the our Judeo-Christian assumptions (actually the assumptions are more of a Christianity which sees its roots in Judaism, and which Jews find sufficiently welcoming) in state iconography will continue to give effence.
Meanwhile the role of the state has grown considerably since the founding. If the state did as little as it once did, and was strictly purged of all religious entanglements, sufficient to satisfy the most prickly atheist, Christians could hardly say that the public square had been shorn of its religiosity because the state occupied so little of the public square. For a long time, the public square was in a small town, and the three institutions of town, school, and church cooperated toward common goals under a broad consensus. See a fabulous description of this and the changes being wrought in this article by Peter Beinart. The state was remote, and communities opperated according to community standards, reflecting local sensibilities somewhat imperfectly, but always locally. Enter the mighty state as provider of an interstate highway system, federal welfare programs, money for education, and a the federalization of many crimes which brings more and more people before federal courts. The great federal government does a far poorer job of respecting local sensibilities. This was intended to be one of the strengths of a federal system of government, by which each level of government would attend to the concerns that manifest at its own level. But, the federalization of so much of state and local life has brought in the national sensibility to every local community. Since the government at the federal level is most encumbered by the 1st ammendment's establishment clause, the intrusion of the federal government into so many spheres of public life means that the sensibilities of the whole nation must be respected in every community. A diversity of community approach to religious sensibility is lost when the public square is dominated by the federal government. One approach is demanded, a national approach. Just as we have a national approach to drug policy which can be imposed on states that consider alternatives, we have a national approach to religous displays.
How the do we treat the question of mixed symbols, like the Roman eagles, a symbol that has a religious and secular meaning? As Slate has produced in a slideshow, we have generally adopted two related tests. Does the display have secular intent, and is it presented as special, or one of many sources of law. As Judge Napolitano said while guest hosting on the Radio Factor on the 21st of this month, when asked why he installed the Decalogue, Justice Moore could have replied that it forms a basis for our law, but instead replied that it was his religion. This is the wrong answer, and Judge Napolitano was right to suggest that in doing so, Moore was looking for a fight. Sean Hannity, on the other hand confuses these two, or perhaps just recognizes no distinction between a secular and a religious purpose. He argued that the country was founded on a Judeo-Christian basis, and so should feel no difficulty violating the establishment clause if we remain inoffensive within that tradition. Or, to return to my Pilate example, the eagles will be imposed by the coersion of the majority, and the minority can just lump it. This misreads the purpose of the Bill of Rights, the establishment clause, and the founders fear of a majority which does not respect the minority. I take the position of John Adams and respond that the best way for me to enjoy the Free Excercise clause of the 1st Amendment is not for government to assist me by placing a decalogue at my courthouse (though I have no objection to a decalogue enjoying display for its historical purpose) but to get out of the way so I can enjoy my own choice of religious sensibility unencumbered. This means the state should not be encouraging me towards a majoritarian religious sensibility, it should be silent.
That said, the state should not silence anyone either. That vilolates the free excercise clause. If a quote from Stonewall Jackson praises God for a victory at a battle in northern Virginia, its a historical statement by an important figure making a comment on an important occassion. We are not obligated to agree with Jackson any more on his attribution of victory than we are on his ideas of greater loyalty to a state than to the union, or on slavery, or any other topic. The statement allows us to understand the past, past actors, and past situations. It does not require our agreement. Likewise statements made about the Grand Canyon, the Gettysburg Address, or any other usage or invoication of the Christian God. They are not violations of the establishment clause, they are part of the historical record. If their purpose in being posted, plaqued, or carved is to tell us about our history, they serve a good and noble public purpose. If their purpose is to advance Justice Moore's own ideas abouthis religion, they do violate the establishment clause and should be withdrawn.
Yesterday I mentioned the strict monotheism of early Jews and Christians. I'll mention another in more detail with an eye towards my take on the Ten Commandments contraversy, and another opportunty to point out Sean Hannity's simple mindedness. Pontius Pilate is known for three things. He introduced Roman military standards bearing the Roman eagle into Jerusalem. The eagle signified not only Rome, but also Jupiter, one of the city's patrons. He used temple funds to build an aqueduct, a situation used for humorous effect in Life of Brian. And he presided over the crusifixion of Jesus the Nazorean. Its the introduction of the Roman standards that interests me here. Pilate took it for granted that a display of the dominant Roman iconography was a good thing to do in Jerusalem. For a Roman, such an act said that Rome provided peace, justice, and protection here, all of the benefits of proper to a state. But the Jews were canny in teasing out the embeded religious meaning in such acts and recognized that the standards themselves bore the eagle, a symbol of Jupiter, a god whose aspects included those of the soveriegn function, providing peace, justice, and protection. Who precisely was providing this peace? Was it Rome or Jupiter. Ultimatly this was a muddled question for the Romans who though they might be drifting towards indifference toward their Indo-European pantheon, would have still conflated the state and the state religion. That the soveriegn symbol of the state should be a symbol of the god of soveriegnty seemed natural. In the case of America (or Germany) the use of an eagle as its symbol does not reflect our belief in Jupiter as the source of a good polity, but the traditional meaning of the symbol as a soveriegn icon. How does a state like Rome respect the religious sensibilities of minorities like the Jews when its public iconography is intertwined with a specific religious interpretation? Pilate found the Jews in protest, brought in troops, but the Jews refused to yield. Unwilling to massacre the protesters over this, Pilate withdrew the standards. In doing so, he respected the religious sensibilities of the locals.
The United States in this respect is like Rome, as it is in so many other ways. We have a dominant religion, closely associated with our founding, which has a privleged place in the public square, or should I say forum. Prayers by clergy open legislative sessions, our money professes our trust in the monotheistic God of Abraham, and the Decalogue graces many a public building. As such we occasionally offend those citizens not subscribing to the majority faith, and so the state gives offence to its citizens. Should a moden Pilate coerce acceptance, as Justice Moore intends to do, or should that modern Pilate withdraw such symbols? The question is comlicated by two fundamental changes in the relationship of the state to its people since the founding. First, the American people have become more diverse. Second, the role of the state has become more ubiquitous. The American religious sensibility has grown more eccumenical in responce to that growing diversity, shifting from a Protestant sensibility to a Christian sensibility to a Judeo-Christian sensibility. One might resonably conclude that it would be possible to include Muslims one day in this formulation. But, diversity has grown faster and reached farther than simply diverging interpretations of the God of Abraham. Further, it is probabale that this trend will continue and that future American generations will see more citizens who do not derive a spiritual sense from the Bible. All of which suggests that the very presence of the our Judeo-Christian assumptions (actually the assumptions are more of a Christianity which sees its roots in Judaism, and which Jews find sufficiently welcoming) in state iconography will continue to give effence.
Meanwhile the role of the state has grown considerably since the founding. If the state did as little as it once did, and was strictly purged of all religious entanglements, sufficient to satisfy the most prickly atheist, Christians could hardly say that the public square had been shorn of its religiosity because the state occupied so little of the public square. For a long time, the public square was in a small town, and the three institutions of town, school, and church cooperated toward common goals under a broad consensus. See a fabulous description of this and the changes being wrought in this article by Peter Beinart. The state was remote, and communities opperated according to community standards, reflecting local sensibilities somewhat imperfectly, but always locally. Enter the mighty state as provider of an interstate highway system, federal welfare programs, money for education, and a the federalization of many crimes which brings more and more people before federal courts. The great federal government does a far poorer job of respecting local sensibilities. This was intended to be one of the strengths of a federal system of government, by which each level of government would attend to the concerns that manifest at its own level. But, the federalization of so much of state and local life has brought in the national sensibility to every local community. Since the government at the federal level is most encumbered by the 1st ammendment's establishment clause, the intrusion of the federal government into so many spheres of public life means that the sensibilities of the whole nation must be respected in every community. A diversity of community approach to religious sensibility is lost when the public square is dominated by the federal government. One approach is demanded, a national approach. Just as we have a national approach to drug policy which can be imposed on states that consider alternatives, we have a national approach to religous displays.
How the do we treat the question of mixed symbols, like the Roman eagles, a symbol that has a religious and secular meaning? As Slate has produced in a slideshow, we have generally adopted two related tests. Does the display have secular intent, and is it presented as special, or one of many sources of law. As Judge Napolitano said while guest hosting on the Radio Factor on the 21st of this month, when asked why he installed the Decalogue, Justice Moore could have replied that it forms a basis for our law, but instead replied that it was his religion. This is the wrong answer, and Judge Napolitano was right to suggest that in doing so, Moore was looking for a fight. Sean Hannity, on the other hand confuses these two, or perhaps just recognizes no distinction between a secular and a religious purpose. He argued that the country was founded on a Judeo-Christian basis, and so should feel no difficulty violating the establishment clause if we remain inoffensive within that tradition. Or, to return to my Pilate example, the eagles will be imposed by the coersion of the majority, and the minority can just lump it. This misreads the purpose of the Bill of Rights, the establishment clause, and the founders fear of a majority which does not respect the minority. I take the position of John Adams and respond that the best way for me to enjoy the Free Excercise clause of the 1st Amendment is not for government to assist me by placing a decalogue at my courthouse (though I have no objection to a decalogue enjoying display for its historical purpose) but to get out of the way so I can enjoy my own choice of religious sensibility unencumbered. This means the state should not be encouraging me towards a majoritarian religious sensibility, it should be silent.
That said, the state should not silence anyone either. That vilolates the free excercise clause. If a quote from Stonewall Jackson praises God for a victory at a battle in northern Virginia, its a historical statement by an important figure making a comment on an important occassion. We are not obligated to agree with Jackson any more on his attribution of victory than we are on his ideas of greater loyalty to a state than to the union, or on slavery, or any other topic. The statement allows us to understand the past, past actors, and past situations. It does not require our agreement. Likewise statements made about the Grand Canyon, the Gettysburg Address, or any other usage or invoication of the Christian God. They are not violations of the establishment clause, they are part of the historical record. If their purpose in being posted, plaqued, or carved is to tell us about our history, they serve a good and noble public purpose. If their purpose is to advance Justice Moore's own ideas abouthis religion, they do violate the establishment clause and should be withdrawn.
Friday, August 22, 2003
The Bible and homosexuality
A good portion over the debate on homosexual clergy and the church's acceptance of homosexuality in general is going to revolve around Bible's teaching on the matter. As I mentioned on Aug 6, there are those who argue that the the core texts of Christianity are not generally applicable to the modern world. I'm not quite sure what these people mean when they call themselves Christians. There are, however, two important readings of the Bible which stake out two opposing sides on the issue of homosexuality. First off, I don't have a dog in this fight. I regard the Bible as a source of ancient wisdom and have studied it for that wisdom. I don't hold it to be a better source than Aristotle, Confucius, Seneca, Zeno, Diogenes, or a host of other sources of ancient wisdom. If it doesn't agree with me I am OK with that. I do want to know what the book says for its own sake, and that's how I present it here. I rather think that many disputants on this issue will tend to select the outcome they want and then select the interpretation that agrees with their desired outcome.
One interpretation holds that what appear to be injunctions against homosexuality are in fact attacks on temple prostitution in foreign religions. Being strictly monotheist, neither the early Jews nor Christians get along well with those worshiping other gods or people as gods. It was the early Christians refusal to humor the emperors that got them condemned to the lions, you may recall. Likewise with eating meat with gentiles, fashioning golden calves, and marrying foreign women. Early Jews had observed that in a sufficient number of cases, adopting foreign customs led to worshiping foreign gods. So an injunction against behaving like they do in cult X or temple Y is not a criticism of homosexuality itself, but in adopting the customs of those who worshiped false gods.
The other interpretation is that we are commanded to be procreative. Certainly there are texts that fit this case. But are they specific or general? Its one thing to be fruitful and multiply in a frontier area like 19th century Utah or 2nd millennium BCE Galilee. Its another thing to be pro-natal all the time. If we are commanded by the deity to have children, then at best homosexuality is not proscribed conduct, at worst it is against the right order of things. Then again so is a celibate priesthood.
Which of these interpretations is primary? I'm willing to grant that both have some truth. What is harder to discern, and will take further reading is how general are these principles, does one have primacy over the other? Possibilities logically incude the following:
1) Both are general rules, we must not be homosexual and we must procreate
2) We must not be homosexual, procreation is optional (the Catholic anti-sex position, sex is a product of the fall, its an easy route to sin, unless procreatuve)
3) Procreation is mandatory, homosexuality is acceptable as long as it doesn't prevent procreation (or bisexuality is OK, exclusive homosexuality isn't)
4) Procreation is not required, but is good, homosexuality is fine, unless it leads to the worship of false gods.
What is most important in terms of the text is to know what the text actually says. Pretending it says what you want it to day is intellectually dishonest, even if you regard it as no more sacred than Sapho's poetry.
A good portion over the debate on homosexual clergy and the church's acceptance of homosexuality in general is going to revolve around Bible's teaching on the matter. As I mentioned on Aug 6, there are those who argue that the the core texts of Christianity are not generally applicable to the modern world. I'm not quite sure what these people mean when they call themselves Christians. There are, however, two important readings of the Bible which stake out two opposing sides on the issue of homosexuality. First off, I don't have a dog in this fight. I regard the Bible as a source of ancient wisdom and have studied it for that wisdom. I don't hold it to be a better source than Aristotle, Confucius, Seneca, Zeno, Diogenes, or a host of other sources of ancient wisdom. If it doesn't agree with me I am OK with that. I do want to know what the book says for its own sake, and that's how I present it here. I rather think that many disputants on this issue will tend to select the outcome they want and then select the interpretation that agrees with their desired outcome.
One interpretation holds that what appear to be injunctions against homosexuality are in fact attacks on temple prostitution in foreign religions. Being strictly monotheist, neither the early Jews nor Christians get along well with those worshiping other gods or people as gods. It was the early Christians refusal to humor the emperors that got them condemned to the lions, you may recall. Likewise with eating meat with gentiles, fashioning golden calves, and marrying foreign women. Early Jews had observed that in a sufficient number of cases, adopting foreign customs led to worshiping foreign gods. So an injunction against behaving like they do in cult X or temple Y is not a criticism of homosexuality itself, but in adopting the customs of those who worshiped false gods.
The other interpretation is that we are commanded to be procreative. Certainly there are texts that fit this case. But are they specific or general? Its one thing to be fruitful and multiply in a frontier area like 19th century Utah or 2nd millennium BCE Galilee. Its another thing to be pro-natal all the time. If we are commanded by the deity to have children, then at best homosexuality is not proscribed conduct, at worst it is against the right order of things. Then again so is a celibate priesthood.
Which of these interpretations is primary? I'm willing to grant that both have some truth. What is harder to discern, and will take further reading is how general are these principles, does one have primacy over the other? Possibilities logically incude the following:
1) Both are general rules, we must not be homosexual and we must procreate
2) We must not be homosexual, procreation is optional (the Catholic anti-sex position, sex is a product of the fall, its an easy route to sin, unless procreatuve)
3) Procreation is mandatory, homosexuality is acceptable as long as it doesn't prevent procreation (or bisexuality is OK, exclusive homosexuality isn't)
4) Procreation is not required, but is good, homosexuality is fine, unless it leads to the worship of false gods.
What is most important in terms of the text is to know what the text actually says. Pretending it says what you want it to day is intellectually dishonest, even if you regard it as no more sacred than Sapho's poetry.
Wednesday, August 20, 2003
President Bush gets it
Reading his website I quickly clicked the National Security tab, and the President there promices to defend, preserve, and extend the peace. His description of defending the peace involves, "seeking to extend the benefits of freedom and prosperity across the globe." That linkage of freedom and prosperity is key in actually accomplishing the objective at hand. One does not take firm root without the other. When both are in place, both flurish. The recipe for them are democracy and capitalism, what I have refered to as free societies and free markets.
Reading his website I quickly clicked the National Security tab, and the President there promices to defend, preserve, and extend the peace. His description of defending the peace involves, "seeking to extend the benefits of freedom and prosperity across the globe." That linkage of freedom and prosperity is key in actually accomplishing the objective at hand. One does not take firm root without the other. When both are in place, both flurish. The recipe for them are democracy and capitalism, what I have refered to as free societies and free markets.
Monday, August 18, 2003
EU warns of sanctions against Germany
Well there is a bizzare headine if I ever saw one. Germany, one of the great economic engines of the gloabal, not to mention the Eurpoean economies is not vibrant enough for its neighbors. Germany has lost control over its currency and cannot use the same tight money policies for which the Bundesbank was so famed in pre-Euro decades, and so she adopts basic Keynesian strategies to encourage growth. Having lost the levers of monaterism (broadly) she is sanctioned for trying Keynes. Aparently Germany should be realizing that it should be extending its own recession by adopting a contractionary spending policy. Chancellor Gerhard Schröder is pushing for through structural reforms, and I would hope that the Christian Democrats (the center right party) find a Thatcherite, or Reaganite, reconsideration of the generous social programs. Such ideas have made the press in France. For years it had been assumed that without the set-back of the 70's (Germany mostly dodged that bullet) Germans never had any inclination to turn to a Thacherite reconsieration of creeping socialism. This may well be that reconsideration. I do wonder whether the Social Democrats (center left), leading a Red-Green coalition, can do this.
Well there is a bizzare headine if I ever saw one. Germany, one of the great economic engines of the gloabal, not to mention the Eurpoean economies is not vibrant enough for its neighbors. Germany has lost control over its currency and cannot use the same tight money policies for which the Bundesbank was so famed in pre-Euro decades, and so she adopts basic Keynesian strategies to encourage growth. Having lost the levers of monaterism (broadly) she is sanctioned for trying Keynes. Aparently Germany should be realizing that it should be extending its own recession by adopting a contractionary spending policy. Chancellor Gerhard Schröder is pushing for through structural reforms, and I would hope that the Christian Democrats (the center right party) find a Thatcherite, or Reaganite, reconsideration of the generous social programs. Such ideas have made the press in France. For years it had been assumed that without the set-back of the 70's (Germany mostly dodged that bullet) Germans never had any inclination to turn to a Thacherite reconsieration of creeping socialism. This may well be that reconsideration. I do wonder whether the Social Democrats (center left), leading a Red-Green coalition, can do this.
Sunday, August 17, 2003
Foreign Policy Immaculately Conceived
Adam Garfinkle writes an article in Policy Review Online on what he called the immaculate conception theory of foriegn policy. He defines it in this paragraf. Take a look.
"The immaculate conception theory of U.S. foreign policy operates from three central premises. The first is that foreign policy decisions always involve one and only one major interest or principle at a time. The second is that it is always possible to know the direct and peripheral impact of crisis-driven decisions several months or years into the future. The third is that U.S. foreign policy decisions are always taken with all principals in agreement and are implemented down the line as those principals intend — in short, they are logically coherent."
Adam Garfinkle writes an article in Policy Review Online on what he called the immaculate conception theory of foriegn policy. He defines it in this paragraf. Take a look.
"The immaculate conception theory of U.S. foreign policy operates from three central premises. The first is that foreign policy decisions always involve one and only one major interest or principle at a time. The second is that it is always possible to know the direct and peripheral impact of crisis-driven decisions several months or years into the future. The third is that U.S. foreign policy decisions are always taken with all principals in agreement and are implemented down the line as those principals intend — in short, they are logically coherent."
Francis Fukuyama offers best explanation so far of WMD absence
Noted political economist Francis Fukuyama provides a compelling case at OpinionJournal.com. He argues that in an effort to avoid an intelligence lapse, the intelligence community produced a false positive. Given the surprise at the extent of the WMD programs found after the First Gulf War, inspectors and intelligence analysts were convinced that there was in Iraq a will to produce WMD's. In a closed society it is diffiuclt to percieve what is really going on, so there was a question about what was really going on there. They proceeded from an assumption of "better safe than sorry", a reasonable proposition. What happened over the past decade is that this assumption became mistaken for a truth. There are two reasons for this. One is that any assumption acted upon for a long period of time, especially by a succession of individuals will tend to harden into a presumption. Second, Saddam Hussein acted like he had WMD's and wanted more. Fukuyama provides a good argument that a lot of internal lying in Iraq took place as scientists and bureaucrats avoided telling the dictator and his two mad sons that they could not get what they wanted. Also, it makes sense for Saddam to pretend to have more in his hand than he did, even while denying there was anything there at all.
Fukuyama goes on to argue that the media fixation with the supposed "lie" about the Iraqi WMD's is misplaced. The President followed the intelligence estimates as well as the assumptions of his predecessor. Clinton's defence of Bush on the Larry King show on the matter of the 16 words reinforces this. The real problem, Fukuyama argues, is the intelligence failure. How could we have been so wrong about these matters?
This raises an interesting question, addressed excellently in the book Military Misfortunes: The Anatomy of Failure in War by Eliot A. Cohen and John Gooch. They argue that there are failures to learn, to anticipate, and to adapt and that are the cause of institutional failure. Fukuyama claims, "The failure is not one of dishonest politicians and officials, but of a broader institutional process involving multiple intelligence agencies and the U.N." This kind of analysis is exactly what Cohen and Gooch provide. There was clearly a failure to learn, in this case learning what was real and what was presumed. Assumptions need to be tested rigorously, not adopted blindly. There was plenty of evidence about the nature of things and yes the wrong conclusions were drawn. Second there was a failure to anticipate that this could be a ruse to make Saddam look stronger than he was, or to anticipate that the Iraqi regime was so disfunctional as to be able to decieve itself, perhaps completely. This produces, according the Cohen and Gooch, aggregate failure. The failures described in Military Misfortune lead to great military defeats, not great military successes as happened in Iraq, but the instituions in question here is not the military, but the intelligence community.
That said, there remains no doubt that the regime in Iraq wanted WMD's and so the international community could never have turned away from its rigorous containment of Iraq, and rigorous containment was becoming politically less viable as countries like France and Russia wanted to do business in Iraq. That terrorism is the product of tyranny and failure in the Arab world and that reform had to be imposed on a significant part of the region to tip the scales in favor of general reform and liberalization. The status quo was going to produce the status quo. In a war on terrorism, the heart of terrorism, dysfunctional muslim states, had to be, and still need to be compeled to change. In a happy world, the mere example of Iraq would be sufficient to complete this process of reform in the Arab and broader muslim world. See Thomas Friedman's column today for good news in that direction. Most probabaly more will have to be done. One hopes that this "more" will be something less than more fighting, that it will be limited to persuasion, pressure, and support for the right ideas. As I wrote last week, we need to employ the assumption that we might have to fight again, because we are better safe than sorry. This time, let's remember that that is an assumption and that further war is not inevitable to see reform in the muslim world. The war was neccesary. What emerges as a cruel irony is that it was probabaly not possible without the UN's own assumptions that WMD's and WMD programs still existed in Iraq. This speaks, I think, to the dysfunction of that organization. See this post from the same day last week.
Noted political economist Francis Fukuyama provides a compelling case at OpinionJournal.com. He argues that in an effort to avoid an intelligence lapse, the intelligence community produced a false positive. Given the surprise at the extent of the WMD programs found after the First Gulf War, inspectors and intelligence analysts were convinced that there was in Iraq a will to produce WMD's. In a closed society it is diffiuclt to percieve what is really going on, so there was a question about what was really going on there. They proceeded from an assumption of "better safe than sorry", a reasonable proposition. What happened over the past decade is that this assumption became mistaken for a truth. There are two reasons for this. One is that any assumption acted upon for a long period of time, especially by a succession of individuals will tend to harden into a presumption. Second, Saddam Hussein acted like he had WMD's and wanted more. Fukuyama provides a good argument that a lot of internal lying in Iraq took place as scientists and bureaucrats avoided telling the dictator and his two mad sons that they could not get what they wanted. Also, it makes sense for Saddam to pretend to have more in his hand than he did, even while denying there was anything there at all.
Fukuyama goes on to argue that the media fixation with the supposed "lie" about the Iraqi WMD's is misplaced. The President followed the intelligence estimates as well as the assumptions of his predecessor. Clinton's defence of Bush on the Larry King show on the matter of the 16 words reinforces this. The real problem, Fukuyama argues, is the intelligence failure. How could we have been so wrong about these matters?
This raises an interesting question, addressed excellently in the book Military Misfortunes: The Anatomy of Failure in War by Eliot A. Cohen and John Gooch. They argue that there are failures to learn, to anticipate, and to adapt and that are the cause of institutional failure. Fukuyama claims, "The failure is not one of dishonest politicians and officials, but of a broader institutional process involving multiple intelligence agencies and the U.N." This kind of analysis is exactly what Cohen and Gooch provide. There was clearly a failure to learn, in this case learning what was real and what was presumed. Assumptions need to be tested rigorously, not adopted blindly. There was plenty of evidence about the nature of things and yes the wrong conclusions were drawn. Second there was a failure to anticipate that this could be a ruse to make Saddam look stronger than he was, or to anticipate that the Iraqi regime was so disfunctional as to be able to decieve itself, perhaps completely. This produces, according the Cohen and Gooch, aggregate failure. The failures described in Military Misfortune lead to great military defeats, not great military successes as happened in Iraq, but the instituions in question here is not the military, but the intelligence community.
That said, there remains no doubt that the regime in Iraq wanted WMD's and so the international community could never have turned away from its rigorous containment of Iraq, and rigorous containment was becoming politically less viable as countries like France and Russia wanted to do business in Iraq. That terrorism is the product of tyranny and failure in the Arab world and that reform had to be imposed on a significant part of the region to tip the scales in favor of general reform and liberalization. The status quo was going to produce the status quo. In a war on terrorism, the heart of terrorism, dysfunctional muslim states, had to be, and still need to be compeled to change. In a happy world, the mere example of Iraq would be sufficient to complete this process of reform in the Arab and broader muslim world. See Thomas Friedman's column today for good news in that direction. Most probabaly more will have to be done. One hopes that this "more" will be something less than more fighting, that it will be limited to persuasion, pressure, and support for the right ideas. As I wrote last week, we need to employ the assumption that we might have to fight again, because we are better safe than sorry. This time, let's remember that that is an assumption and that further war is not inevitable to see reform in the muslim world. The war was neccesary. What emerges as a cruel irony is that it was probabaly not possible without the UN's own assumptions that WMD's and WMD programs still existed in Iraq. This speaks, I think, to the dysfunction of that organization. See this post from the same day last week.
Saturday, August 16, 2003
Remember Katie Roiphe?
Katie Roiphe is a year younger than I, and I suspect our mothers grew up before some critical watershed. I identified with the kind of feminism she describes that she was raised with. My mother was a professional woman and expected to have the same opportunities as men, she didn't want to be a man and she didn't fear men. Reading Roiphe's 1994 book, The Morning After: Sex, Fear, and Feminism was both familiar to me and a moment in which I became aware of a change in my own thinking. Along with other books of the time I formed my opinions on the sexual comming of age of my generation. And here I am talking about something that happens at 27, not 17. Its the formulation of ideas about things. Reflections on observations, not impulses or the acting upon them. Wendy Shalit's book on the new modesty, A Return to Modesty: Discovering the Lost Virtue, in many ways was the completion of that journey. It will hardly surprise anyone to learn that we who abandoned our youth in the 90's concluded that our parents and the their world had left us with a pretty screwy sexual culture. For those of us a bit older, our parents seemed to have been at the beginings of that change, incompletly reflecting it, sympathizing with it, but lacking the characteristics of its excesses.
Those reading James Lileks' bleat on a regular basis will recogize his comments on the selling of sexuality to younger and younger people. Stuff like this:
"All I ask is that Old Navy not sell thongs for three year olds. If they want to put gigantic Calvin Klein underwear ads in Times Square, go right ahead - that’s what Times Square is for. But don’t put up big pictures of half-naked 13 year olds; that’s not what this culture is about. Yet. And don't make every square inch of America what Times Square used to be."
I also minored in anthropology and find evolutionart psychology or socio-biology persuasive. Helen Fisher or E.O.Wilson make sense to me. Men insure their fitness by spreading their genes as widely as possible. Women insure their fitness by insuring that their considerable investment in offspring bears its own. So male sexual culture has a bit more of the drive for promescuity. Women are more selective.
But fallout from women's liberation and the sexual revolution, two related but different social movements, has led some women to think that being equal to men means being like men, including in their approach to sex. As Barbara Kay put it in the Canadian newspaper the National Post, (link from Innocents Abroad):
"[The] lesson was that women, in order to be truly equal in value to men, must assimilate a man's sexual behaviours and instincts. Are men obsessed with sex? Great. We're there. Are men aggressive in pursuit of sex, promiscuous, and emotionally detached from their conquests?"
Advocates of the new modesty argued that this left women feeling empty. It also leads to raising the stakes to obtain the pursued goal. Kay's article concerns this embrace of a sexual culture long associated with adult males with young girls. For a good bit of history people have been torn between resignation and condemnation over male sexual culture. For the good of society it was best that man devote themselves to his children, and that was best accomplished by way of their mother, his mate. Now we find a creeping of this pattern of behavior, no longer confined to adult males, working its way to younger and younger girls. The precise consequences will take years to be seen in full, but I am certain that one prediction will bear fruit, and that is that some young girl today will go on to write a book as important as The Morning After in the next dozen years.
Katie Roiphe is a year younger than I, and I suspect our mothers grew up before some critical watershed. I identified with the kind of feminism she describes that she was raised with. My mother was a professional woman and expected to have the same opportunities as men, she didn't want to be a man and she didn't fear men. Reading Roiphe's 1994 book, The Morning After: Sex, Fear, and Feminism was both familiar to me and a moment in which I became aware of a change in my own thinking. Along with other books of the time I formed my opinions on the sexual comming of age of my generation. And here I am talking about something that happens at 27, not 17. Its the formulation of ideas about things. Reflections on observations, not impulses or the acting upon them. Wendy Shalit's book on the new modesty, A Return to Modesty: Discovering the Lost Virtue, in many ways was the completion of that journey. It will hardly surprise anyone to learn that we who abandoned our youth in the 90's concluded that our parents and the their world had left us with a pretty screwy sexual culture. For those of us a bit older, our parents seemed to have been at the beginings of that change, incompletly reflecting it, sympathizing with it, but lacking the characteristics of its excesses.
Those reading James Lileks' bleat on a regular basis will recogize his comments on the selling of sexuality to younger and younger people. Stuff like this:
"All I ask is that Old Navy not sell thongs for three year olds. If they want to put gigantic Calvin Klein underwear ads in Times Square, go right ahead - that’s what Times Square is for. But don’t put up big pictures of half-naked 13 year olds; that’s not what this culture is about. Yet. And don't make every square inch of America what Times Square used to be."
I also minored in anthropology and find evolutionart psychology or socio-biology persuasive. Helen Fisher or E.O.Wilson make sense to me. Men insure their fitness by spreading their genes as widely as possible. Women insure their fitness by insuring that their considerable investment in offspring bears its own. So male sexual culture has a bit more of the drive for promescuity. Women are more selective.
But fallout from women's liberation and the sexual revolution, two related but different social movements, has led some women to think that being equal to men means being like men, including in their approach to sex. As Barbara Kay put it in the Canadian newspaper the National Post, (link from Innocents Abroad):
"[The] lesson was that women, in order to be truly equal in value to men, must assimilate a man's sexual behaviours and instincts. Are men obsessed with sex? Great. We're there. Are men aggressive in pursuit of sex, promiscuous, and emotionally detached from their conquests?"
Advocates of the new modesty argued that this left women feeling empty. It also leads to raising the stakes to obtain the pursued goal. Kay's article concerns this embrace of a sexual culture long associated with adult males with young girls. For a good bit of history people have been torn between resignation and condemnation over male sexual culture. For the good of society it was best that man devote themselves to his children, and that was best accomplished by way of their mother, his mate. Now we find a creeping of this pattern of behavior, no longer confined to adult males, working its way to younger and younger girls. The precise consequences will take years to be seen in full, but I am certain that one prediction will bear fruit, and that is that some young girl today will go on to write a book as important as The Morning After in the next dozen years.
Neo-Conservatism reviewed by Innocents Abroad
John Coumarianos produces an interesting review of Irving Kristol's book, Neo-Conservatism. Those interested in the neo-conservative movement as I am should take a look both at the review and the book.
John Coumarianos produces an interesting review of Irving Kristol's book, Neo-Conservatism. Those interested in the neo-conservative movement as I am should take a look both at the review and the book.
Friday, August 15, 2003
Surfing in typical internet style - Instapundit recommends Six the Movie, watch the trailer, click on a link to the Violent Kids Information Site and click on a link to telling kids about terrorism. Having just written the previous post, I come across this paragraph and am struck by its commentary on the subject of my post:
"When America is faced with tragedy, we will do anything to alleviate our fear, not the least of which is constructing irrational thoughts about ourselves and the external world. In years past people knew that tragic events like the attack on Pearl Harbor happened, but we tended (with some exceptions like the internment of Japanese Americans) to use rational thought to bring about a solution, not mass hysteria. But the climate has changed. In the new Oprah and Rosie O'Donell culture, our first instinct is to make ourselves feel better rather than to find a solution that works. "
The article is a good one and worth reading. The site is interesting and worth checking out.
"When America is faced with tragedy, we will do anything to alleviate our fear, not the least of which is constructing irrational thoughts about ourselves and the external world. In years past people knew that tragic events like the attack on Pearl Harbor happened, but we tended (with some exceptions like the internment of Japanese Americans) to use rational thought to bring about a solution, not mass hysteria. But the climate has changed. In the new Oprah and Rosie O'Donell culture, our first instinct is to make ourselves feel better rather than to find a solution that works. "
The article is a good one and worth reading. The site is interesting and worth checking out.
Educators hope to encourage self-loathing
A teacher writes into the NCSS (National Council for the Social Studies) listserv and asks, "for some type of article or handout that describes the help or aid that the Native Americans gave to the early settlers in the colonies." A fine question.
So far the replies have suggested Rethinking Columbus by Bill Bigelow and Bob Peterson and Native Roots: how the Indians enriched America by Jack Weatherford. Rethinking Columbus is the book that proposed and explains how teachers can put Columbus on trial, "and celebrates over 500 years of the courageous struggles and lasting wisdom of native peoples." This book does not propose to teach children about the encounter of two peoples, especially in the context of similar encounters at other times and other places. It celebrates one people and denigrates another. In the reality in which I dwell, this is racism. Bigelow and Peterson probabaly live in a happy reality where this is multiculturalism and celebratory. Weatherford is an anthropologistm, and not a teacher of children, and has a much more balanced book. Its true that he sometimes overstates the contributions of native peoples, but he seeks not to exhault one people and condemn another.
School starts around the corner and the Left establishment within the education establishment is hard at work. The Left runs most of the professional organizations in education. In my own experience, a good many teachers are apolitical or very moderate. A sizable group is liberal, a small minority Leftists. Conservatives of one stripe or another number about half that of all those left of center, but is also possible that a fair numer of the moderates or apolitical folk are either more conservative than they appear or would drift right outside the influence of their profession. More simply put, teachers more or less look like America (in general terms and with the expectation that there are closet conservatives). But the professional organizations are profoundly to the Left.
The books, websites, teaching aids, lesson plans, conferences, and speakers of the teaching establishment seems to come from the deepest, most radical Left. Teaching children to regard people who built the society they live in, look like their leaders, and often look like themselves as bad people worthy of condemnation is to create in them a loathing of themselves. Why not just direct teachers to berate the students directly? For those students who identify with the native Americans, its not helpful to play this game either. See two posts ago a link to John McWhorter's article on this kind of thing in another context. Best for all concerned that students learn 1) that man is capable of doing great harm to one another, and that this is more common than its opposite. This is normal, though unpleasant. Evidence for it in history is overwhelming. 2) All people do wrong, they lie cheat, and sometimes steal. Its the frail human condition. This is normal, although unpleasant, and we should make efforts to improve ourselves. 3) It is in the liberal societies (those who embraced free markets and free societies) not the traditional or totalitarian that social improvement and a respect for conquered people, minorities, foriegn peoples, and difference has fundamentally changed the way liberal societies interact. Our society, our leaders, and our history is the history of human progress, not human oppression. We are flawed, imperfect beings, and to forget that and attempt to create a utopia has been the source of the worst and most terrible oppression and tyranny. See the world as it is, not as you wish it was. With the knowledge of how the world is, perhaps we can make efforts to change it into, by degrees, the world we wish it was. Pretending that it already creates the pathology in which we regard evidence of our error as evil and seek to put it on trial.
A teacher writes into the NCSS (National Council for the Social Studies) listserv and asks, "for some type of article or handout that describes the help or aid that the Native Americans gave to the early settlers in the colonies." A fine question.
So far the replies have suggested Rethinking Columbus by Bill Bigelow and Bob Peterson and Native Roots: how the Indians enriched America by Jack Weatherford. Rethinking Columbus is the book that proposed and explains how teachers can put Columbus on trial, "and celebrates over 500 years of the courageous struggles and lasting wisdom of native peoples." This book does not propose to teach children about the encounter of two peoples, especially in the context of similar encounters at other times and other places. It celebrates one people and denigrates another. In the reality in which I dwell, this is racism. Bigelow and Peterson probabaly live in a happy reality where this is multiculturalism and celebratory. Weatherford is an anthropologistm, and not a teacher of children, and has a much more balanced book. Its true that he sometimes overstates the contributions of native peoples, but he seeks not to exhault one people and condemn another.
School starts around the corner and the Left establishment within the education establishment is hard at work. The Left runs most of the professional organizations in education. In my own experience, a good many teachers are apolitical or very moderate. A sizable group is liberal, a small minority Leftists. Conservatives of one stripe or another number about half that of all those left of center, but is also possible that a fair numer of the moderates or apolitical folk are either more conservative than they appear or would drift right outside the influence of their profession. More simply put, teachers more or less look like America (in general terms and with the expectation that there are closet conservatives). But the professional organizations are profoundly to the Left.
The books, websites, teaching aids, lesson plans, conferences, and speakers of the teaching establishment seems to come from the deepest, most radical Left. Teaching children to regard people who built the society they live in, look like their leaders, and often look like themselves as bad people worthy of condemnation is to create in them a loathing of themselves. Why not just direct teachers to berate the students directly? For those students who identify with the native Americans, its not helpful to play this game either. See two posts ago a link to John McWhorter's article on this kind of thing in another context. Best for all concerned that students learn 1) that man is capable of doing great harm to one another, and that this is more common than its opposite. This is normal, though unpleasant. Evidence for it in history is overwhelming. 2) All people do wrong, they lie cheat, and sometimes steal. Its the frail human condition. This is normal, although unpleasant, and we should make efforts to improve ourselves. 3) It is in the liberal societies (those who embraced free markets and free societies) not the traditional or totalitarian that social improvement and a respect for conquered people, minorities, foriegn peoples, and difference has fundamentally changed the way liberal societies interact. Our society, our leaders, and our history is the history of human progress, not human oppression. We are flawed, imperfect beings, and to forget that and attempt to create a utopia has been the source of the worst and most terrible oppression and tyranny. See the world as it is, not as you wish it was. With the knowledge of how the world is, perhaps we can make efforts to change it into, by degrees, the world we wish it was. Pretending that it already creates the pathology in which we regard evidence of our error as evil and seek to put it on trial.
Thursday, August 14, 2003
Lybia accepts responsibility for Pan Am 103
KRLA just reported that Lybia will present a letter to the UN accepting responsibility for the mid-air bombing of Pan Am 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland. The Pan Am 103 news site isn't reporting anything yet, though they do have reports from March that cover talks leading to this announcement. It certainly suggests that American diplomacy has terrorism on the run. This is as much a product of the Iraq war as it is the long sanctions against Lybia. Its sufficiently apparent to Lybia that we're winning that they want to make nice rather than hold out for an al Qaeda victory ot a Ba'athist restoration.
France complains that another bombing should get similar compensation (10 million). The Australian Broadcasting Company reports, "The United States has criticised France for expressing reservations over a deal which would see Libya pay compensation to families of victims of the Lockerbie bombing." See this story at KVOA's website. There is also the CNN site.
KRLA just reported that Lybia will present a letter to the UN accepting responsibility for the mid-air bombing of Pan Am 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland. The Pan Am 103 news site isn't reporting anything yet, though they do have reports from March that cover talks leading to this announcement. It certainly suggests that American diplomacy has terrorism on the run. This is as much a product of the Iraq war as it is the long sanctions against Lybia. Its sufficiently apparent to Lybia that we're winning that they want to make nice rather than hold out for an al Qaeda victory ot a Ba'athist restoration.
France complains that another bombing should get similar compensation (10 million). The Australian Broadcasting Company reports, "The United States has criticised France for expressing reservations over a deal which would see Libya pay compensation to families of victims of the Lockerbie bombing." See this story at KVOA's website. There is also the CNN site.
Rapsheet
John McWhorter writes about the pernicious effect of rap music on the black community. McWhorter is always worth a read.
John McWhorter writes about the pernicious effect of rap music on the black community. McWhorter is always worth a read.
The Difference between Assault Rifles and Submachine Guns
The assault weapons ban irks me. Its way too broad. I can understand banning submachine guns. I was once at a museum/reinactment center where they had booths. Someone was selling a Mac 10 in some condition or other for $150. I was in high school and had not the funds. Alas. Nevertheless I can see why this weapon would offend the sensibilities of my neighbors. It has no purpose other than to spray over a thousand rounds per minute of pistol ammunition (actually you would unload a clip in about a second). Its for crime or a well armed insurection. While a well armed populace is a free populace, a well armed criminal element is a dangerous criminal element.
The Mac 10 is a submachine gun. On the other hand, an M-16 is an assault rifle. It is a 22 calibre rifle just like the kind you might take hunting. In its civilian incarnartion as the AR-15, the weapon functioned as a 22 rifle. Rifles are good for putting bullets on a target at hundreds of yards away. They are not good in bank robberies, subway hold-ups, or schoolyard shootings. In close, you want a pistol. Or, the decendent of the pistol, the submachinegun.
The submachinegun is a pistol that is configured to fire like a machinegun - rapidly. Early submachineguns were actually pistols with large clips and the ability to fire like a machinegun. It didn't take forever for people to start designing submachineguns to be used exclusivly like a submachine gun without the notion that they would ever be used like a pistol. Their small size and high calibre pistol ammunition make them ideal weapons for laying down a lot of lead up close and personal. They are handly in even the tightest spaces. They are indoor weapons, useful around buildings, or built up areas. They are designed to be used in cities. We don't need such a weapon. Rifles have long barrels, fire long rifle ammunition, and are clumsy in tight areas. They are long range weapons. I am content to think that law abiding people can do just fine with pistols and rifles.
And yet we have an assualt weapons ban. In the rose garden in 1998 President Clinton spoke about "Byrl's 17-year-old son ... killed with an AK 47." My responce, could have been any rifle. Gun accidents will always happen if we have guns. Much like the fact that car accidents will always happen if we have cars. If there is no special reason that the AK 47 is an unsocial weapon, then its just another rifle. Clinton went on to say, "As everyone knows, you don't need an Uzi to go deer hunting. Youdon't need an AK 47 to go skeet shooting. These are militaryweapons, weapons of war." Here is our problem. The Uzi and the AK 47 are distinctly different weapons. The SIG - 210 is a military weapon. Is it any less lethal than the AK 47? Under the conditions children will encounter weapons under, its far more dangerous as a matter of fact. If the press reported that a child was killed with a 7.62 rifle you wound't know whether it was an AK 47 or a Springfield M 1903 bolt action repeater, and there is very little difference between them. Machine guns and weapons which can fire as automatic weapons have been outlawed since the gangster era of tommy guns. If the AK 47 is not capable of automatic fire, its just another rifle. One designed for simple maintenence and durability, and yes, a military weapon. Nearly all weapons are designed to kill stuff. Aside from its original purpose, how is a deer rifle functionally different from the civilian models of military weapons? The deer rifle is probabaly more accurate. Sounds like its the more dangerous weapon to me. What good is served by banning assualt rifles? None that I can think of.
Submachineguns have no civilian purpose. This is not to say that they should be banned. Gas masks have no civilian purpose either. That in itself is no reason to outlaw an object. I can see that submachineguns are well suited to criminal enterprises and do not protect civilians better than pistols or rifles. Assualt rifles, under the laws established in the National Firearms Act of 1934, are the functional equivelents of hunting weapons. The differences are either cosmetic, have a design for military purpose that does not create a danger (military weapons are often lighter because you have to carry it all the time, they include bayonet mounts - and don't tell me that the terrible bayonet deaths require their ban), or are already covered by previous legislation.
Submachineguns are the design offspring of pistols, fire pistol ammunition, and are are little more than big pistols designed to fire a lot of rounds often innaccuratly. Rifles have long barrels, fire rifle ammunition, and are designed to kill at range. I can understand a move to ban submachineguns. Banning assualt rifles is daffy. Here are some good sites on the subject:
Lies and Self-Loading Rifles
The 1994 "Assault Weapons" Myth
The Assualt Weapons Scam
The assault weapons ban irks me. Its way too broad. I can understand banning submachine guns. I was once at a museum/reinactment center where they had booths. Someone was selling a Mac 10 in some condition or other for $150. I was in high school and had not the funds. Alas. Nevertheless I can see why this weapon would offend the sensibilities of my neighbors. It has no purpose other than to spray over a thousand rounds per minute of pistol ammunition (actually you would unload a clip in about a second). Its for crime or a well armed insurection. While a well armed populace is a free populace, a well armed criminal element is a dangerous criminal element.
The Mac 10 is a submachine gun. On the other hand, an M-16 is an assault rifle. It is a 22 calibre rifle just like the kind you might take hunting. In its civilian incarnartion as the AR-15, the weapon functioned as a 22 rifle. Rifles are good for putting bullets on a target at hundreds of yards away. They are not good in bank robberies, subway hold-ups, or schoolyard shootings. In close, you want a pistol. Or, the decendent of the pistol, the submachinegun.
The submachinegun is a pistol that is configured to fire like a machinegun - rapidly. Early submachineguns were actually pistols with large clips and the ability to fire like a machinegun. It didn't take forever for people to start designing submachineguns to be used exclusivly like a submachine gun without the notion that they would ever be used like a pistol. Their small size and high calibre pistol ammunition make them ideal weapons for laying down a lot of lead up close and personal. They are handly in even the tightest spaces. They are indoor weapons, useful around buildings, or built up areas. They are designed to be used in cities. We don't need such a weapon. Rifles have long barrels, fire long rifle ammunition, and are clumsy in tight areas. They are long range weapons. I am content to think that law abiding people can do just fine with pistols and rifles.
And yet we have an assualt weapons ban. In the rose garden in 1998 President Clinton spoke about "Byrl's 17-year-old son ... killed with an AK 47." My responce, could have been any rifle. Gun accidents will always happen if we have guns. Much like the fact that car accidents will always happen if we have cars. If there is no special reason that the AK 47 is an unsocial weapon, then its just another rifle. Clinton went on to say, "As everyone knows, you don't need an Uzi to go deer hunting. Youdon't need an AK 47 to go skeet shooting. These are militaryweapons, weapons of war." Here is our problem. The Uzi and the AK 47 are distinctly different weapons. The SIG - 210 is a military weapon. Is it any less lethal than the AK 47? Under the conditions children will encounter weapons under, its far more dangerous as a matter of fact. If the press reported that a child was killed with a 7.62 rifle you wound't know whether it was an AK 47 or a Springfield M 1903 bolt action repeater, and there is very little difference between them. Machine guns and weapons which can fire as automatic weapons have been outlawed since the gangster era of tommy guns. If the AK 47 is not capable of automatic fire, its just another rifle. One designed for simple maintenence and durability, and yes, a military weapon. Nearly all weapons are designed to kill stuff. Aside from its original purpose, how is a deer rifle functionally different from the civilian models of military weapons? The deer rifle is probabaly more accurate. Sounds like its the more dangerous weapon to me. What good is served by banning assualt rifles? None that I can think of.
Submachineguns have no civilian purpose. This is not to say that they should be banned. Gas masks have no civilian purpose either. That in itself is no reason to outlaw an object. I can see that submachineguns are well suited to criminal enterprises and do not protect civilians better than pistols or rifles. Assualt rifles, under the laws established in the National Firearms Act of 1934, are the functional equivelents of hunting weapons. The differences are either cosmetic, have a design for military purpose that does not create a danger (military weapons are often lighter because you have to carry it all the time, they include bayonet mounts - and don't tell me that the terrible bayonet deaths require their ban), or are already covered by previous legislation.
Submachineguns are the design offspring of pistols, fire pistol ammunition, and are are little more than big pistols designed to fire a lot of rounds often innaccuratly. Rifles have long barrels, fire rifle ammunition, and are designed to kill at range. I can understand a move to ban submachineguns. Banning assualt rifles is daffy. Here are some good sites on the subject:
Lies and Self-Loading Rifles
The 1994 "Assault Weapons" Myth
The Assualt Weapons Scam
More on Media Transparency at Home
James Lileks blogs about this MSNBC story in which an attempt ot turn a suspected al Qaeda weapons dealer was blown by a BBC story. Its nice when the police get the criminals, including the ones higher up the food chain. But I can't help comming away from this story happy that the press here is free to speak the truth, even when its inconvienient. The price of terrorism is extramly rare and sometimes catastrophic. The price of censorship is constant and potentially every bit as catastrophic. Not that I am against the "dispatch [of] some of the grim men who can kill you with a shoelace and a thumbtack from sixty paces," as Lileks puts it. Its just that when when the press gets a hold of it, they get to tell us. I haven't seen anyone connected to this story say otherwise, that's just what I get from it. Read the whole bleat, as always.
James Lileks blogs about this MSNBC story in which an attempt ot turn a suspected al Qaeda weapons dealer was blown by a BBC story. Its nice when the police get the criminals, including the ones higher up the food chain. But I can't help comming away from this story happy that the press here is free to speak the truth, even when its inconvienient. The price of terrorism is extramly rare and sometimes catastrophic. The price of censorship is constant and potentially every bit as catastrophic. Not that I am against the "dispatch [of] some of the grim men who can kill you with a shoelace and a thumbtack from sixty paces," as Lileks puts it. Its just that when when the press gets a hold of it, they get to tell us. I haven't seen anyone connected to this story say otherwise, that's just what I get from it. Read the whole bleat, as always.
"About 200 U.S. Marines Land in Liberia to Back Aid Mission"
The NYTimes reports this headline this morning. Two pictures and a map accompany the article. As I noted nearly two hours ago, we probably could not afford thousands of troops. Two hundred is something we can manage, even indefinatly.
The NYTimes reports this headline this morning. Two pictures and a map accompany the article. As I noted nearly two hours ago, we probably could not afford thousands of troops. Two hundred is something we can manage, even indefinatly.
What Would Wilson Do?
Instapundit links to this Washington Times article on media transparency. The noted blogger editorialized, "It is also a reminder -- as if we needed one -- that far from being a Parliament Of Nations imbued with respect for all that's good, the United Nations is, in fact, a dictators' club whose chief role is protecting the perks of dictators."
Its worth looking at Wilson on such matters. It is as much to him as anyone else that we owe for such an institution. In a subscription-required-article at TNR John Judis looks at Wilson and has useful things to say. One is that while Wilson was committed to a "Parliament Of Nations imbued with respect for all that's good", in Instapundit's words, Wilson also did not accept the legitimacy of non-democratic regimes. Hence, we should expect that Wilson would be as offended by "the joke that Libya chairs the human-rights commission" as anyone else. After all, in Wilson's conception the League of Nations was an attempt to extend democracy into the Hobbsian international arena, not to grant the cloak of legitimacy to dictators.
Instapundit links to this Washington Times article on media transparency. The noted blogger editorialized, "It is also a reminder -- as if we needed one -- that far from being a Parliament Of Nations imbued with respect for all that's good, the United Nations is, in fact, a dictators' club whose chief role is protecting the perks of dictators."
Its worth looking at Wilson on such matters. It is as much to him as anyone else that we owe for such an institution. In a subscription-required-article at TNR John Judis looks at Wilson and has useful things to say. One is that while Wilson was committed to a "Parliament Of Nations imbued with respect for all that's good", in Instapundit's words, Wilson also did not accept the legitimacy of non-democratic regimes. Hence, we should expect that Wilson would be as offended by "the joke that Libya chairs the human-rights commission" as anyone else. After all, in Wilson's conception the League of Nations was an attempt to extend democracy into the Hobbsian international arena, not to grant the cloak of legitimacy to dictators.
Fiscal Conservative and Social Liberal
I woke to Michael Savage on KRLA today (streaming, I live in the midwest) ranting about how it was impossible for Schwarzenegger to be both a fiscal conservative and a social liberal. He defined social liberalism as expensive social programs. Yes, well given that definition its quite a contradiction. However, as someone who sees himself as a fiscal conservative and a social liberal, I find the road easy to manage. I simply don't define socially liberal as expensive programs. In fact I don't equate it with programs at all. When I say socially liberal, and when many apply this to Schwarzenegger as well, what they mean is that on social issues (homosexuality, divource, prayer in schools, abortion, &c) liberals feel that its OK, it should be easy, its not desirable, and it should be available, respectivly. The way we should achieve this is by getting government out of the business of using the power of the state to coerce certain behaviors sexually, maritally, religiously, and procreativly. Getting government out of peoples lives is generally taken as conservative, not liberal, but on social issues social conservatives want the state to affirm. You might describe this as libertarian, but I'm not gonna make that call. Too many places I am an avowed statist to embrace the libertarian label myself.
I am, however, an avowed Aristotelian on the subject. Aristotle said that the purpose of the polis was to create the conditions where everyone actualized themselves. Since this is best accomplished when government gets out of the way than often, that is government's job. There are exceptions, including the common defence, establishing a judiciary, internal improvements, and I'll so so far as to include a safety net. There are many things government does poorly or creates harm despite doing well. Regulating social behavior fits into one or both of these catagories depending on the issue. Let the government provide for the circumstances which foster peace and prosperity domestically while providing for the common defence abroad. Such a policy is to my mind fiscally conservative because it seeks to spend little and tax little, and it is socially liberal because it rejects the traditional connection beween a specific set of moral conduct and the power of the state.
As for Savage, I try to remember to re-play one of the earlier shows rather than stream savage, even if I am not listening. I figure that its so easy to count the number of people streaming the various shows, I should cast my consumer's voice for one of the shows I do like and not the one's I don't. Its sleeping through the end of Hewitt and missing my opportunity to switch to someone else that got me in this boat.
I woke to Michael Savage on KRLA today (streaming, I live in the midwest) ranting about how it was impossible for Schwarzenegger to be both a fiscal conservative and a social liberal. He defined social liberalism as expensive social programs. Yes, well given that definition its quite a contradiction. However, as someone who sees himself as a fiscal conservative and a social liberal, I find the road easy to manage. I simply don't define socially liberal as expensive programs. In fact I don't equate it with programs at all. When I say socially liberal, and when many apply this to Schwarzenegger as well, what they mean is that on social issues (homosexuality, divource, prayer in schools, abortion, &c) liberals feel that its OK, it should be easy, its not desirable, and it should be available, respectivly. The way we should achieve this is by getting government out of the business of using the power of the state to coerce certain behaviors sexually, maritally, religiously, and procreativly. Getting government out of peoples lives is generally taken as conservative, not liberal, but on social issues social conservatives want the state to affirm. You might describe this as libertarian, but I'm not gonna make that call. Too many places I am an avowed statist to embrace the libertarian label myself.
I am, however, an avowed Aristotelian on the subject. Aristotle said that the purpose of the polis was to create the conditions where everyone actualized themselves. Since this is best accomplished when government gets out of the way than often, that is government's job. There are exceptions, including the common defence, establishing a judiciary, internal improvements, and I'll so so far as to include a safety net. There are many things government does poorly or creates harm despite doing well. Regulating social behavior fits into one or both of these catagories depending on the issue. Let the government provide for the circumstances which foster peace and prosperity domestically while providing for the common defence abroad. Such a policy is to my mind fiscally conservative because it seeks to spend little and tax little, and it is socially liberal because it rejects the traditional connection beween a specific set of moral conduct and the power of the state.
As for Savage, I try to remember to re-play one of the earlier shows rather than stream savage, even if I am not listening. I figure that its so easy to count the number of people streaming the various shows, I should cast my consumer's voice for one of the shows I do like and not the one's I don't. Its sleeping through the end of Hewitt and missing my opportunity to switch to someone else that got me in this boat.
Discard all ideas of the draft
I hear talk of the draft whenever talk of our many commitments comes up. My reply is always the same. We will never see a draft. You see, the draft was part of the modern experience. Its as much a thing of the past is is high paying, unskilled factory work. Mass institutions were based on uniform technology distributed to everyone in identical fasion. This was possible because specialization was mostly, just not a part of these mass institutions. Anyone could be trained to do the work of anyone else. Mass conscription produced large, reasonably effective armies which must have one primary mission. Multiple missions requires specialization and that is the enemy of any mass institution. Today's military is highly specialized. Talk to recruiters, the requirements for new recruits are very high. This is because today's soldier must be make into a specialist. The Air Force requires potential pilots to bring their own pilot's licence to the table. The GED, once introduced by the Army, is no longer acceptable to the Army.
All volunteer armies are capable of highly specialized and difficult operations. The Second Gulf War was the product of one such volunteer army. A draft army would require figuring out how to fight wars with lower quality troops. This is the same as the old Landwehr debates in Prussia. Rely on a small, highly trained professional force or a large less well trained force of conscripts. The industrial revolution, with mass production as its great principle, put the winning chips behind mass conscripts. Consider the American Civil War. The South had the tradition, the bulk of the good officers, and the quality troops. The north had factories and a huge conscription pool. That combination wins.
Today's military is the 18th century army. Small, highly trained, professional, vastly superior man for man to any conscript force. Its principle problem is its size. A secondary problem is that it develops doctrine that takes advantage of its highly trained professionals to do what conscripts cannot. Again we return to the 19th century. During the French Revolution, when conscription was first introduced in a modern fashion, they abandon the drill manual. Conscripts could not perform the manouvers or handle themselves as described under fire. Rather than fighting in line and emphasizing firepower, the Revolution fought in column and emphasized mass. Our army has developed doctrines that will not accomodate mass conscription. We would have to throw away the book and imagine a new way to wage war.
The height of the age of conscription is WWI and its hallmark a series of battles such as Verdun and Somme. This is what conscripts can do. Those familiar with the American Civil War can see the same process at work. Large armies that clumsily run at each other with much death resulting. Our present military draws on the opposite methods of war to use highly trained troops with high morale to win wars without much bloodshed on either side in the best of cases and at least much less bloodshed on our side when things don't go so well.
This has several implications:
* The military can not grow quickly, new recruits have to be converted into highly trained, highly motivated soldiers and that takes time.
* The military cannot shift from a small professional force into a large conscript force without a long period of learning the hard way. How long is a function of how much hard there is. France in 1793-1795 was constantly at war, lost a lot of battles against less than determined foes and by 1796 had devised a new way to fight. On the other hand, tanks were introduced at the end of the First World War and from then until they were employed again in battle in 1939 people were guessing about how they would best be employed. Most of those ideas turned out to be wrong, very painfully for some countries.
* If the military cannot quickly turn recruits into professional soldiers, and we cannot shift to a large conscript force, then the troops we have now are the troops we'll have for the forseable future. That means we have to use them wisely. Deployments have to do one of two things and preferably both. They either need to stabilize a region, so that we can make sense of what kind of commitments we need to make there (rather than haveing to keep a worst-case scenario reserve to deal with it); or they need to reduce the treat directly. To put this another way, deployment must reduce either a direct threat or a potential threat. Preferably both.
Take Liberia. The New Republic has argued for intervention in Liberia for several weeks now. Their latest article is here, and key articles can be found here, here, and here. In fact most of the TRB columns in the past several months involve Liberia. From a Wilsonian perspective, intervention to end the civil war and the suffering it creates makes perfect sense. In the abstract I have no problem with such intervention. Its Wilsonian, but I prefer them as advocates of the American foriegn policy rather than critics. However, under the current circumstances I need them to meet a higher test. Will this directly advance the war on terror or reduce the threat of terror in west Africa sufficiently as to make the commitment of troops a sound investment because we free up troops we had to keep in reserve. Since I doubt very much we were keeping any such troops in reserve, they have to answer the first part of this requirement. Ryan Lizza tries to make this case here, but I am not convinced. Liberia is a long term commitment and with the war on terror still unresolved (as I expect it to be for some time) we probabaly cannot afford to put several thousand troops there for several years.
If we can put American command and support troops on top of a force of west Africans and who ever else can be induced to garrison Liberia, I am happy to see that go forward. Hudson Morgan makes a good case that the west Africans won't do a good job themselves. Ideally, we could hand the job of supervising the garrison over to someone else if we needed to use those specialists elsewhere.
Who knows what will happen in Iraq, Iran, or anywhere else in west Asia. North Korea is not put to bed. We can't over-reach and leave ourselves vulnerable should a crises develope in either of those places. Lets do what we can do without leaving ourselves vulnerable, and in the meantime, lets build another light division. By the time its available we well may need it.
Note: some of the links to TNR require subscription, other so not.
I hear talk of the draft whenever talk of our many commitments comes up. My reply is always the same. We will never see a draft. You see, the draft was part of the modern experience. Its as much a thing of the past is is high paying, unskilled factory work. Mass institutions were based on uniform technology distributed to everyone in identical fasion. This was possible because specialization was mostly, just not a part of these mass institutions. Anyone could be trained to do the work of anyone else. Mass conscription produced large, reasonably effective armies which must have one primary mission. Multiple missions requires specialization and that is the enemy of any mass institution. Today's military is highly specialized. Talk to recruiters, the requirements for new recruits are very high. This is because today's soldier must be make into a specialist. The Air Force requires potential pilots to bring their own pilot's licence to the table. The GED, once introduced by the Army, is no longer acceptable to the Army.
All volunteer armies are capable of highly specialized and difficult operations. The Second Gulf War was the product of one such volunteer army. A draft army would require figuring out how to fight wars with lower quality troops. This is the same as the old Landwehr debates in Prussia. Rely on a small, highly trained professional force or a large less well trained force of conscripts. The industrial revolution, with mass production as its great principle, put the winning chips behind mass conscripts. Consider the American Civil War. The South had the tradition, the bulk of the good officers, and the quality troops. The north had factories and a huge conscription pool. That combination wins.
Today's military is the 18th century army. Small, highly trained, professional, vastly superior man for man to any conscript force. Its principle problem is its size. A secondary problem is that it develops doctrine that takes advantage of its highly trained professionals to do what conscripts cannot. Again we return to the 19th century. During the French Revolution, when conscription was first introduced in a modern fashion, they abandon the drill manual. Conscripts could not perform the manouvers or handle themselves as described under fire. Rather than fighting in line and emphasizing firepower, the Revolution fought in column and emphasized mass. Our army has developed doctrines that will not accomodate mass conscription. We would have to throw away the book and imagine a new way to wage war.
The height of the age of conscription is WWI and its hallmark a series of battles such as Verdun and Somme. This is what conscripts can do. Those familiar with the American Civil War can see the same process at work. Large armies that clumsily run at each other with much death resulting. Our present military draws on the opposite methods of war to use highly trained troops with high morale to win wars without much bloodshed on either side in the best of cases and at least much less bloodshed on our side when things don't go so well.
This has several implications:
* The military can not grow quickly, new recruits have to be converted into highly trained, highly motivated soldiers and that takes time.
* The military cannot shift from a small professional force into a large conscript force without a long period of learning the hard way. How long is a function of how much hard there is. France in 1793-1795 was constantly at war, lost a lot of battles against less than determined foes and by 1796 had devised a new way to fight. On the other hand, tanks were introduced at the end of the First World War and from then until they were employed again in battle in 1939 people were guessing about how they would best be employed. Most of those ideas turned out to be wrong, very painfully for some countries.
* If the military cannot quickly turn recruits into professional soldiers, and we cannot shift to a large conscript force, then the troops we have now are the troops we'll have for the forseable future. That means we have to use them wisely. Deployments have to do one of two things and preferably both. They either need to stabilize a region, so that we can make sense of what kind of commitments we need to make there (rather than haveing to keep a worst-case scenario reserve to deal with it); or they need to reduce the treat directly. To put this another way, deployment must reduce either a direct threat or a potential threat. Preferably both.
Take Liberia. The New Republic has argued for intervention in Liberia for several weeks now. Their latest article is here, and key articles can be found here, here, and here. In fact most of the TRB columns in the past several months involve Liberia. From a Wilsonian perspective, intervention to end the civil war and the suffering it creates makes perfect sense. In the abstract I have no problem with such intervention. Its Wilsonian, but I prefer them as advocates of the American foriegn policy rather than critics. However, under the current circumstances I need them to meet a higher test. Will this directly advance the war on terror or reduce the threat of terror in west Africa sufficiently as to make the commitment of troops a sound investment because we free up troops we had to keep in reserve. Since I doubt very much we were keeping any such troops in reserve, they have to answer the first part of this requirement. Ryan Lizza tries to make this case here, but I am not convinced. Liberia is a long term commitment and with the war on terror still unresolved (as I expect it to be for some time) we probabaly cannot afford to put several thousand troops there for several years.
If we can put American command and support troops on top of a force of west Africans and who ever else can be induced to garrison Liberia, I am happy to see that go forward. Hudson Morgan makes a good case that the west Africans won't do a good job themselves. Ideally, we could hand the job of supervising the garrison over to someone else if we needed to use those specialists elsewhere.
Who knows what will happen in Iraq, Iran, or anywhere else in west Asia. North Korea is not put to bed. We can't over-reach and leave ourselves vulnerable should a crises develope in either of those places. Lets do what we can do without leaving ourselves vulnerable, and in the meantime, lets build another light division. By the time its available we well may need it.
Note: some of the links to TNR require subscription, other so not.
Tuesday, August 12, 2003
Check out Jeff Jarvis' BuzzMachine on the balance between freedom and security.
Too much of the intoxicant means more jail time than you were hoping for
My brother has a good post on a friend and his alcohol consequence incident.
I share his reaction to our mother's smoking. The addiction struck me as such an irrational weakness, I developed a generalized hostility to addiction. Stories like the one he recounts of his friend's visit to the jailhouse strike me as tales which suport this view. Addiction, especially those connected to intoxicants, leads to irrational behavior with unhappy consequences. He ends the post with this observation, "CALL A CAB!!!! 10 dollars or 10 months in jail!!!!!" He's got a point. Give ita read.
My brother has a good post on a friend and his alcohol consequence incident.
I share his reaction to our mother's smoking. The addiction struck me as such an irrational weakness, I developed a generalized hostility to addiction. Stories like the one he recounts of his friend's visit to the jailhouse strike me as tales which suport this view. Addiction, especially those connected to intoxicants, leads to irrational behavior with unhappy consequences. He ends the post with this observation, "CALL A CAB!!!! 10 dollars or 10 months in jail!!!!!" He's got a point. Give ita read.
Iraq still struggles
The news from Iraq is good, the restance declines, the reconstruction moves forward, and free institutions are built. The "Support Demoncracy in Iraq" link remains current, because the work there remains unfinished, despite obvious progress. There are those who cling to every piece of bad news, either because they hope for failure, or because they are in the bad news business (the media), but we cannot forget that despite the news of an attack here and a shooting there, the work is valuable, neccesary, and productive. It must continue to become permenent. That is an obvious statement, but the presence of those who would abandon it requires that it be said.
The news from Iraq is good, the restance declines, the reconstruction moves forward, and free institutions are built. The "Support Demoncracy in Iraq" link remains current, because the work there remains unfinished, despite obvious progress. There are those who cling to every piece of bad news, either because they hope for failure, or because they are in the bad news business (the media), but we cannot forget that despite the news of an attack here and a shooting there, the work is valuable, neccesary, and productive. It must continue to become permenent. That is an obvious statement, but the presence of those who would abandon it requires that it be said.
AOL asks parent company to drop AOL from "AOL Time Warner"
I never liked this curious amalgum of corporate identity. I would be glad to see a return to "Time Warner", which is no worse that 20th Century Fox, which is an old familiar identity. Of course Fox seeks to shed the "20th Century" bit because it no longer sounds current. Never mind that film was obviously a medium that really took off in that century, and the name has historical roots. Like Time Warner, 20th Century Fox was a name formed by amalgmation. William Fox was one of those movie moguls who built vertical integration, producing content (both feature films and Movietone Newsreels), owning theaters (many cities have an old Fox movie palace, some of which are converted for stage today), and the distribution from production to theater, all of it called the Fox Film Corporation. Fox allied with Daryll Zanuck who left Warner Brothers and in 1933 formed his own 20th Century Pictures. This alliance gave us 20th Century Fox in '35.
Zanuck started off allied with United Artists and Joseph Schenck, but Zanuck got into a fight with UA. Schenck was caught in the middle and ultimatly sided with Zanuck. Zanuck was a movie producer (he had been head of production at Warner Bros), and had needed distribution of his pictures (which was fragile without theater ownership). When UA demonstrated a lack of commitment to its alliance with Fox (the dispute was over a stock swap), Zanuck turned to Fox.
Fox was a business man who organized his vertical movie business and had some capacity to defend and support innovative technology. As movie making became more sophisticated, Fox needed someone to handle that end of the business. After the earliest days of the movies it was no longer sufficient to get movies into theaters, you needed to get patrons into theaters too. Fox had the business and technical ability, he needed a movie producer. Enter Zanuck.
They merged their studios, and with them their stables of contract players. Fox offered a movie distribution network so complete it was charged with monopolism as well as technical innovation thorughout the movie-making process. Zanuck offered quality product. Shortly after the merger, the charged of monoplism brought Fox into court. The businessman tried to defend his hold on the market, but remained embattled throughout the late 30's as the control of the studio drifted over to Zanuck. Caught bribing a judge, Fox spent a few years in prison and was never allowed to regain his foot hold in Hollywood.
All of which has far more charm than the amalgumation of AOL Time Warner, which produced far less synergy than the amalgum of Fox Film Corporation and 20th Century Pictures.
I never liked this curious amalgum of corporate identity. I would be glad to see a return to "Time Warner", which is no worse that 20th Century Fox, which is an old familiar identity. Of course Fox seeks to shed the "20th Century" bit because it no longer sounds current. Never mind that film was obviously a medium that really took off in that century, and the name has historical roots. Like Time Warner, 20th Century Fox was a name formed by amalgmation. William Fox was one of those movie moguls who built vertical integration, producing content (both feature films and Movietone Newsreels), owning theaters (many cities have an old Fox movie palace, some of which are converted for stage today), and the distribution from production to theater, all of it called the Fox Film Corporation. Fox allied with Daryll Zanuck who left Warner Brothers and in 1933 formed his own 20th Century Pictures. This alliance gave us 20th Century Fox in '35.
Zanuck started off allied with United Artists and Joseph Schenck, but Zanuck got into a fight with UA. Schenck was caught in the middle and ultimatly sided with Zanuck. Zanuck was a movie producer (he had been head of production at Warner Bros), and had needed distribution of his pictures (which was fragile without theater ownership). When UA demonstrated a lack of commitment to its alliance with Fox (the dispute was over a stock swap), Zanuck turned to Fox.
Fox was a business man who organized his vertical movie business and had some capacity to defend and support innovative technology. As movie making became more sophisticated, Fox needed someone to handle that end of the business. After the earliest days of the movies it was no longer sufficient to get movies into theaters, you needed to get patrons into theaters too. Fox had the business and technical ability, he needed a movie producer. Enter Zanuck.
They merged their studios, and with them their stables of contract players. Fox offered a movie distribution network so complete it was charged with monopolism as well as technical innovation thorughout the movie-making process. Zanuck offered quality product. Shortly after the merger, the charged of monoplism brought Fox into court. The businessman tried to defend his hold on the market, but remained embattled throughout the late 30's as the control of the studio drifted over to Zanuck. Caught bribing a judge, Fox spent a few years in prison and was never allowed to regain his foot hold in Hollywood.
All of which has far more charm than the amalgumation of AOL Time Warner, which produced far less synergy than the amalgum of Fox Film Corporation and 20th Century Pictures.
G.I.'s Kill 2 Pakistani Soldiers
Pakistani military's public relations department said in a statement that American troops had fired on a Pakistani patrol at a border post in the Waziristan region, some 160 miles southwest of Islamabad, the capital. A Pakistani official said the American forces had mistaken the patrol for Qaeda or Taliban fighters. (AP)
Call me cynical but I suspect that the Pakistani soldiers in question may have had links to al Qaeda or Taliban fighters. "wrong place, wrong time" is certainly possible, but so is wearing two hats.
Pakistani military's public relations department said in a statement that American troops had fired on a Pakistani patrol at a border post in the Waziristan region, some 160 miles southwest of Islamabad, the capital. A Pakistani official said the American forces had mistaken the patrol for Qaeda or Taliban fighters. (AP)
Call me cynical but I suspect that the Pakistani soldiers in question may have had links to al Qaeda or Taliban fighters. "wrong place, wrong time" is certainly possible, but so is wearing two hats.
Archives are now listed
There is now an archive list over yonder, though getting old pages over there remains a mystery to me. For now, it seems the archives start with this month and the rest are dead links. In time I will either figure out how to post the archives correctly or remove the dead links.
There is now an archive list over yonder, though getting old pages over there remains a mystery to me. For now, it seems the archives start with this month and the rest are dead links. In time I will either figure out how to post the archives correctly or remove the dead links.
Family resemblence at the Lileks ancestoral home
The young Gnat bears a particular resemblence to her father in this this picture (scroll down almost to the bottom).
The young Gnat bears a particular resemblence to her father in this this picture (scroll down almost to the bottom).
Friday, August 08, 2003
EU military force not ready, should wait to deploy until unneccesary
NATO's top military commander has expressed doubts over the European Union's readiness to launch a peacekeeping operation in Bosnia. He predicts that as the rule of law takes hold, peacekeepers will be replaced by "tough" police. The SAC, Marine General Jones's comments are likely to create anger in Brussels. However it is not the first time NATO officials have expressed doubts about EU readiness to take over the mission. Check it out at EUobserver.
Meanwhile, Belgium continues to press for a rapid reaction force for the EU. The unit would be based (guess!) in Brussels. The unit would have airlift capability to actually fulfil the rapid deployment role. Something to keep an eye on from the faction that gives serious consideration to idea that the world would be a better place if America had a rival.
NATO's top military commander has expressed doubts over the European Union's readiness to launch a peacekeeping operation in Bosnia. He predicts that as the rule of law takes hold, peacekeepers will be replaced by "tough" police. The SAC, Marine General Jones's comments are likely to create anger in Brussels. However it is not the first time NATO officials have expressed doubts about EU readiness to take over the mission. Check it out at EUobserver.
Meanwhile, Belgium continues to press for a rapid reaction force for the EU. The unit would be based (guess!) in Brussels. The unit would have airlift capability to actually fulfil the rapid deployment role. Something to keep an eye on from the faction that gives serious consideration to idea that the world would be a better place if America had a rival.
American Tourism to France off 40%
The EUobserver writes: '"Let's fall in love again", appeals the French tourist site, Francetourism.com, somewhat wistfully as statistics show an unprecedented decline in the country's tourists.' The French have seen a fall off from American, German, and Asian travelers. The Asian decline is attributed to SARS. The French ministry of tourism apparently attributes the decline in German tourists to a "loss of fondness" an then there are the Americans. So France tries the heavy sell in America. Good luck.
The EUobserver writes: '"Let's fall in love again", appeals the French tourist site, Francetourism.com, somewhat wistfully as statistics show an unprecedented decline in the country's tourists.' The French have seen a fall off from American, German, and Asian travelers. The Asian decline is attributed to SARS. The French ministry of tourism apparently attributes the decline in German tourists to a "loss of fondness" an then there are the Americans. So France tries the heavy sell in America. Good luck.
Thursday, August 07, 2003
R2-D2, intellectual and super-genius
This week's poll at starwars.com asks what would you like to see R2 do in Ep III, the results are:
In Ep III, I would like to see R2-D2...
Poll Dates: 8/5/03 - 8/12/03
Fly 4%
Torment C-3PO 30%
Save the day 16%
Get a droid girlfriend 26%
Transmit an important message 24%
I think the evidence is pretty strong that R2-D2 is in fact the smartest, and indeed most consistently heroic, character in Star Wars. Hence the correct answer is "save the day". Starwars.com does not tell us the total number of voters. R2, is a cunning judge of situations and gives a great deal of evidence that he has never had a memory wipe. Only Obi-wan has as much collective memory of the events of Ep I-VI, subject to the failings of human memory. We know that Obi-wan does not recognize R2, but it is unclear whether R2 recognizes Obi-wan or not. There is a great deal more, as any avid student of the corpus will attest, but perhaps the most telling is the manner of speach of the intellectual driod. R2 is incomprehensible to non-intellectuals or droids programed for ettiquet and protocal.
This week's poll at starwars.com asks what would you like to see R2 do in Ep III, the results are:
In Ep III, I would like to see R2-D2...
Poll Dates: 8/5/03 - 8/12/03
Fly 4%
Torment C-3PO 30%
Save the day 16%
Get a droid girlfriend 26%
Transmit an important message 24%
I think the evidence is pretty strong that R2-D2 is in fact the smartest, and indeed most consistently heroic, character in Star Wars. Hence the correct answer is "save the day". Starwars.com does not tell us the total number of voters. R2, is a cunning judge of situations and gives a great deal of evidence that he has never had a memory wipe. Only Obi-wan has as much collective memory of the events of Ep I-VI, subject to the failings of human memory. We know that Obi-wan does not recognize R2, but it is unclear whether R2 recognizes Obi-wan or not. There is a great deal more, as any avid student of the corpus will attest, but perhaps the most telling is the manner of speach of the intellectual driod. R2 is incomprehensible to non-intellectuals or droids programed for ettiquet and protocal.
Wednesday, August 06, 2003
Episcopal Church abandons the central premise of the Protestant Reformation
The Protestants abandon the idea that the Church tradition was a source of Truth. Only the Bible was a source of truth. This shift de-emphisized the role of the clergy, and led to a huge rise in literacy in Protestant countries. There was an assumption that the authors of the holy text was guided by the Holy Spirit, but that decisions of the church afterward was not. Early Protestants actually thought of themselves as re-establishing the early Church.
Now many Episopalians arguing that Robinson is not a problem because the ancient texts were written for a different people and the Holy Spirit has lead the ecclesia to the understanding that homosexuality is a gift from god. This is a reversal of the Protestant emphisis. The scripture can be dispensed with, because it doesn't apply to us, and we are back to church councils being able to change doctrine. This is not new. Its been creeping up on us in various forms for two hundred years. The several Great Awakenings and then later the rise of Fundamentalism are responces to this tendency. As I mentioned yesterday, this is the kind of a thing liable to produce schism.
Robinson's election and confirmation may or may not be a good thing depending on your views, but it certainly is an abandonment on this issue at this point of the primacy of scripture. As long as they refuse to admit this, they are not being honest with themselves or with the broader public.
The Protestants abandon the idea that the Church tradition was a source of Truth. Only the Bible was a source of truth. This shift de-emphisized the role of the clergy, and led to a huge rise in literacy in Protestant countries. There was an assumption that the authors of the holy text was guided by the Holy Spirit, but that decisions of the church afterward was not. Early Protestants actually thought of themselves as re-establishing the early Church.
Now many Episopalians arguing that Robinson is not a problem because the ancient texts were written for a different people and the Holy Spirit has lead the ecclesia to the understanding that homosexuality is a gift from god. This is a reversal of the Protestant emphisis. The scripture can be dispensed with, because it doesn't apply to us, and we are back to church councils being able to change doctrine. This is not new. Its been creeping up on us in various forms for two hundred years. The several Great Awakenings and then later the rise of Fundamentalism are responces to this tendency. As I mentioned yesterday, this is the kind of a thing liable to produce schism.
Robinson's election and confirmation may or may not be a good thing depending on your views, but it certainly is an abandonment on this issue at this point of the primacy of scripture. As long as they refuse to admit this, they are not being honest with themselves or with the broader public.
Savage declared Schwarzenegger unqualified
On his radio show, Micheal Savage said he could never vote for Schwarzenegger because the man never held public office. He paused and added that he had not written a book either. Nice save. If Savage thinks he is any more qualified to hold public office than any other celebrity, he's off hice rocker. This should not be taken as evidence that I think he's on his rocker. He already appears to be saddled with rockerlessness.
Amusingly, Hugh Hewitt is running a promo in which he suggests to a caller that if Savage were a contender, it might drive voters to Davis. The caller suggests that given such a choice, he'd just move.
On his radio show, Micheal Savage said he could never vote for Schwarzenegger because the man never held public office. He paused and added that he had not written a book either. Nice save. If Savage thinks he is any more qualified to hold public office than any other celebrity, he's off hice rocker. This should not be taken as evidence that I think he's on his rocker. He already appears to be saddled with rockerlessness.
Amusingly, Hugh Hewitt is running a promo in which he suggests to a caller that if Savage were a contender, it might drive voters to Davis. The caller suggests that given such a choice, he'd just move.
Tuesday, August 05, 2003
Car Bomb in Indonesia
The news in most outlets has not been much more than recounting the events. Good analysis is found here, at the Australian Financial Review. The Australian papers (who are in the neighborhood, and therefore are really the go-to source here) have made mention of how often Australian officials have used the Marriott for official purposes.
Without the internet, we'd be relying on local and major newspapers and the news networks. Go back ten years further, and the news networks numbered three. My how the world of news has changed in my lifetime.
The news in most outlets has not been much more than recounting the events. Good analysis is found here, at the Australian Financial Review. The Australian papers (who are in the neighborhood, and therefore are really the go-to source here) have made mention of how often Australian officials have used the Marriott for official purposes.
Without the internet, we'd be relying on local and major newspapers and the news networks. Go back ten years further, and the news networks numbered three. My how the world of news has changed in my lifetime.
Golden Oldies
Sometimes I think about those wacky fads that exite the kids. Hula-hoops. Doing the mashed potato. Belly shirts. Going to Iraq to be a human shield. Nose rings. Things things come and go like the fashion ripples they are, superficial and meaningless, but they get the kids all worked up while they are the hot thing only to be forgotten after the shooting starts.
Sometimes I think about those wacky fads that exite the kids. Hula-hoops. Doing the mashed potato. Belly shirts. Going to Iraq to be a human shield. Nose rings. Things things come and go like the fashion ripples they are, superficial and meaningless, but they get the kids all worked up while they are the hot thing only to be forgotten after the shooting starts.
Word that Iraq had a dirty bomb, North Korea pursues enrichment, and now Iran
Boy the Clinton administration was asleep at the switch while the nuclear proliferation gremlins were busy at work. Good thing the Kellog-Briand pact outlawed war in 1928, because these multilateral agreements always keep the rogue states in line.
Boy the Clinton administration was asleep at the switch while the nuclear proliferation gremlins were busy at work. Good thing the Kellog-Briand pact outlawed war in 1928, because these multilateral agreements always keep the rogue states in line.
Monday, August 04, 2003
Lieberman stands up for good sense
Lieberman, "warned Democrats that abandoning the policies that helped elect Bill Clinton in 1992 and 1996 would result in a terrible setback for the party." The good Senator speaks the truth. Unfortunatly, the dems are channeling the spirit of Eugene McCarthy and George McGovern. Wouldn't it make more sense for the party to try to channel Truman and Kennedy? While it is true that they were hawkish, anti-communist, and fairly conservative, they also got elected.
Lieberman, "warned Democrats that abandoning the policies that helped elect Bill Clinton in 1992 and 1996 would result in a terrible setback for the party." The good Senator speaks the truth. Unfortunatly, the dems are channeling the spirit of Eugene McCarthy and George McGovern. Wouldn't it make more sense for the party to try to channel Truman and Kennedy? While it is true that they were hawkish, anti-communist, and fairly conservative, they also got elected.
The Episcopal consideration of a gay Bishop runs afoul of allegations out of the blue
The WaPo has an article which includes the following:
"One of the allegations was raised in an e-mail sent to some of the bishops by David Lewis, an adult from Manchester, Vt. He alleged that he had been sexually harrassed by Robinson, whom he said repeatedly touched him inappropriately when they talked at a church convocation."
I'd very much rather that no one's career every be derailed by an e-mail unsubstantiated by something more solid. Anyone can send an e-mail saying anything. The fact that this happens at the 11th hour is suspicious to say the least. Lets hope this is resolved responsibly.
On the other hand, these kinds of things are going to divide Anglicans, and Christians more broadly, across a north-south divide. See, for example, this article in The Atlantic.
update: The Episcopalians have delayed their confirmation vote.
The WaPo has an article which includes the following:
"One of the allegations was raised in an e-mail sent to some of the bishops by David Lewis, an adult from Manchester, Vt. He alleged that he had been sexually harrassed by Robinson, whom he said repeatedly touched him inappropriately when they talked at a church convocation."
I'd very much rather that no one's career every be derailed by an e-mail unsubstantiated by something more solid. Anyone can send an e-mail saying anything. The fact that this happens at the 11th hour is suspicious to say the least. Lets hope this is resolved responsibly.
On the other hand, these kinds of things are going to divide Anglicans, and Christians more broadly, across a north-south divide. See, for example, this article in The Atlantic.
update: The Episcopalians have delayed their confirmation vote.
Talk of the next Bush Administration
Speculation has begun about who will continue in the presumed second Bush Administration. Put me down for Condi Rice as VP. She meets the qualifications for succession better than most, her policy is post on. Also hoping to see Rumsfeld as SecDef for life. The Post article suggested that Wolfowitz was under consideration for State. Again, hard to imagine a better choice.
Speculation has begun about who will continue in the presumed second Bush Administration. Put me down for Condi Rice as VP. She meets the qualifications for succession better than most, her policy is post on. Also hoping to see Rumsfeld as SecDef for life. The Post article suggested that Wolfowitz was under consideration for State. Again, hard to imagine a better choice.
Sunday, August 03, 2003
Liz Phair
The new issue of Entertainment Weekly (the website is now only for subscribers) puts Liz Phair's new record as #9 on the "must list". They say, "Maybe you've heard the bad buzz but we've heard the actual album, and its a wippersnapper." Its been the only thing in my CD player since I got it. Admittedly I listen to a fair amount of music on-line, but I do play Liz Phair about once a day. Check out the site at http://www.lizphair.com/. There are videos and a few songs. I give it a 10.
The new issue of Entertainment Weekly (the website is now only for subscribers) puts Liz Phair's new record as #9 on the "must list". They say, "Maybe you've heard the bad buzz but we've heard the actual album, and its a wippersnapper." Its been the only thing in my CD player since I got it. Admittedly I listen to a fair amount of music on-line, but I do play Liz Phair about once a day. Check out the site at http://www.lizphair.com/. There are videos and a few songs. I give it a 10.
Ann Coulter
Two things are at work here, neither one of them pretty. On the one hand, Coulter is a product of the vitriol between the partisanship we saw since the collapse of the American politican consensus (I date this consensus to 1942-1967). In this vein, put her in the tradition of other poison pills. On the other hand, the country has been attacked and is sensitive to even seeming anti-Americanism. What would have been written off as he ravings of a cook before 9/11 is now a potential source of comfort as we circle the wagons. The poison pills are bad for the political health of the country and should be shunned by responsible politicians and media. Having circled the wagons there is always the risk of shooting at anyone outside the barriade for fear that it is attacking savages. My fear is that she's not going away soon. Perhaps we should accuse her of being a fifth column for the terrorists, intending to divide us from within. Its no more absurd than some of Coulter's claims.
Two things are at work here, neither one of them pretty. On the one hand, Coulter is a product of the vitriol between the partisanship we saw since the collapse of the American politican consensus (I date this consensus to 1942-1967). In this vein, put her in the tradition of other poison pills. On the other hand, the country has been attacked and is sensitive to even seeming anti-Americanism. What would have been written off as he ravings of a cook before 9/11 is now a potential source of comfort as we circle the wagons. The poison pills are bad for the political health of the country and should be shunned by responsible politicians and media. Having circled the wagons there is always the risk of shooting at anyone outside the barriade for fear that it is attacking savages. My fear is that she's not going away soon. Perhaps we should accuse her of being a fifth column for the terrorists, intending to divide us from within. Its no more absurd than some of Coulter's claims.
World Bank concerns legitimate
Instapundit links to this NYPost article on World Bank concerns about the government of Iraq. Ralph Peters oped at the Post is pure hyperbole and Reynolds' headline of hypocracy is misplaced. The question at hand isn't that the present government is seen as illegitimate, but that everyone knows that its temporary. Once the new government is in place, will they respect deals done by the current Governing Council? Contracts certainly, establishing rule of law is one of our objectives. But look at our own government. Clinton talked tough about Iraq, but limited himself to cruise missiles. Many in the world mistook Bush for more of the same, but the government had changed and it took policies the previous administration would never have taken. Why is it unreasonable to recognize that business may be desirous to wait until it sees how things will shake out before it gets in? Looking at things through the investor's lens, I would wait until the Governing Council gave way to an elected government and that new government gave some indication of its policies (tax, fiscal, regulatory) before investing. Anything else is speculatory, and very risky. Business is wise to wait until the new government is in place, and until investment begins to flood into the country, reconstruction is not happening as fast as it can. We have a political bottleneck. Its a reasonable thing to point out.
Instapundit links to this NYPost article on World Bank concerns about the government of Iraq. Ralph Peters oped at the Post is pure hyperbole and Reynolds' headline of hypocracy is misplaced. The question at hand isn't that the present government is seen as illegitimate, but that everyone knows that its temporary. Once the new government is in place, will they respect deals done by the current Governing Council? Contracts certainly, establishing rule of law is one of our objectives. But look at our own government. Clinton talked tough about Iraq, but limited himself to cruise missiles. Many in the world mistook Bush for more of the same, but the government had changed and it took policies the previous administration would never have taken. Why is it unreasonable to recognize that business may be desirous to wait until it sees how things will shake out before it gets in? Looking at things through the investor's lens, I would wait until the Governing Council gave way to an elected government and that new government gave some indication of its policies (tax, fiscal, regulatory) before investing. Anything else is speculatory, and very risky. Business is wise to wait until the new government is in place, and until investment begins to flood into the country, reconstruction is not happening as fast as it can. We have a political bottleneck. Its a reasonable thing to point out.
Supergirl DVD extras
Cause let's face it, the movie isn't that much of a draw. My brother has reviewed some material here. I'll say that the documentary on the making of, and the film commentary are hillarous in that unintended way that makes it all the more funny. I don't come down too hard on the last two Superman films or Supergirl. They just didn't know what they were doing. Converting comic books to film was pioneered by Superman in way that after Spiderman/X-men/Daredevil just looks hokey. Those later Superman films made the mistakes that later comic adaptors learned from. The director of the first one and three quarters of the superman films didn't have a better sence of translating comics to film, but for reasons more happy coincidence than anything, his vison worked for superman. Hence the first two Superman films are good. As an example, check out some of the extras on the first Superman disk, in which in tests, Lois identifies Clark's identity by shooting him with blanks and judges Clarks reaction to being "shot". Much more the clever reporter than the hand in the fire that the replacement director on II replaced it with. Richard Donner's removal from the Superman series seems to have doomed it. Its his work directing the first one and three quarters of the pictures that we enjoyed. I think that in part, he is a good director, and in part he was lucky that what he wanted to do worked. No one knew how to make the translation from comics to film, but Donner was a good bet to have a good idea. He had worked on four episodes of the Twilight Zone in the 60's, did much direction for the series The Fugative, and just before making Superman had made the Omen. All work that while not in the comic book venue shares some qualities and works in related genres. As a final note, twenty years later, Donner produced X-Men.
Cause let's face it, the movie isn't that much of a draw. My brother has reviewed some material here. I'll say that the documentary on the making of, and the film commentary are hillarous in that unintended way that makes it all the more funny. I don't come down too hard on the last two Superman films or Supergirl. They just didn't know what they were doing. Converting comic books to film was pioneered by Superman in way that after Spiderman/X-men/Daredevil just looks hokey. Those later Superman films made the mistakes that later comic adaptors learned from. The director of the first one and three quarters of the superman films didn't have a better sence of translating comics to film, but for reasons more happy coincidence than anything, his vison worked for superman. Hence the first two Superman films are good. As an example, check out some of the extras on the first Superman disk, in which in tests, Lois identifies Clark's identity by shooting him with blanks and judges Clarks reaction to being "shot". Much more the clever reporter than the hand in the fire that the replacement director on II replaced it with. Richard Donner's removal from the Superman series seems to have doomed it. Its his work directing the first one and three quarters of the pictures that we enjoyed. I think that in part, he is a good director, and in part he was lucky that what he wanted to do worked. No one knew how to make the translation from comics to film, but Donner was a good bet to have a good idea. He had worked on four episodes of the Twilight Zone in the 60's, did much direction for the series The Fugative, and just before making Superman had made the Omen. All work that while not in the comic book venue shares some qualities and works in related genres. As a final note, twenty years later, Donner produced X-Men.
Saturday, August 02, 2003
Star Wars Galaxies
Ack! Unfinished. They relased the game too soon, and did not wait to shake out the remaining problems with server stability, fixes to professions and the economy, and my personal pet peeve - the combat operations do not make combat easy. For example, changing targets is difficult and sometimes impossible. A few months more work would have been ideal. Many players of such games have argued that they all are released with a whole set of problems. My argument is that the fact that such a thing is common does not make it acceptable. When one sells a product it should be complete, not merely slouching towards completness. Patches and updates seems to make game companies all to willing to put stuff out too soon, relying on patches and fixes to make it good later.
Ack! Unfinished. They relased the game too soon, and did not wait to shake out the remaining problems with server stability, fixes to professions and the economy, and my personal pet peeve - the combat operations do not make combat easy. For example, changing targets is difficult and sometimes impossible. A few months more work would have been ideal. Many players of such games have argued that they all are released with a whole set of problems. My argument is that the fact that such a thing is common does not make it acceptable. When one sells a product it should be complete, not merely slouching towards completness. Patches and updates seems to make game companies all to willing to put stuff out too soon, relying on patches and fixes to make it good later.
Is Higher Education Compatible with Patriotism?
An interesting panel discussion put forward by the National Association of Scholars Forum Higher Education & Democracy in Peace & War, and broadcast on C-SPAN. Of course I watched via the web. Go to www.c-span.org and search education, the program originally aired on may 31st of 2002. What's that? Its fourteen months old? Well, the internet is asynchronous. The panel is two hours long and there are a pair of speakers from the right and a pair from the left. Gertrude Himmelfarb chairs the panel. One of the speakers drew a distinction between patriotism based on mine-ness and on goodness. He advocated the primacy of goodness.
In a related note, I have been intrigued by the catagorization of Walter Russell Mead of American policy into Jeffersonians, Wilsonians, Jacksonians, and Hamiltonians. You can read a discussion of his book and its thesis between the author and James Fallows in the Atlantic unbound. Well, I came across an artical by Mead in The National Interest. Mead argues that it is very difficult to sustain policies in America without the acceptance of the Jacksonains. And the Jacksonians have a patriotism based on mine-ness.
This reminds me of a lost article in one of the conservative journals in which the author dwelled upon the differences between a conservative writer for a magazine, living on the east coast, a member of the establishment, and someone who sat next to him at an event who represented the middle American conservative. This, I think is the contrast between Jacksonians and, say Hamiltonians. This distinction is the one I am most aware of, identifying with Alexander Hamilton, rather than my neighbors who are Jacksonians. Being well versed in Stoicism, and the principle of the brotherhood of man, being well educated in European history and therefore prone to cosmopolitanism, I am attracted to a patriotism of the goodness of America. We promote free societies and free markets. Our principles are very good, and even our practice, I will argue, is demonsrably good. Our less good practice is the result of neccesary comprimises in difficult circumstances and are often the result of competing goods (say victory over communism in a fourty year death struggle). The patriotism of mine-ness seems to me to lack a certain amount of reflection. Like the author I cannot cite, who acknowledged the electoral neccesity of an alliance between establishment conservatives writing for magazines in New York and the many middle American conservatives who are much more socially conservative, I as a Hamiltonian see the neccesity of the Jacksonians, even though I sometimes see their preferences as regretable. Ultimatly, my preference for democracy trumps my ideological preferences and I think that the will of the majority should be policy even when its not always the best policy. It is simply up to those with the best policy to convince the majority, not to impose their better judgement through administrative or judicial fiat.
An interesting panel discussion put forward by the National Association of Scholars Forum Higher Education & Democracy in Peace & War, and broadcast on C-SPAN. Of course I watched via the web. Go to www.c-span.org and search education, the program originally aired on may 31st of 2002. What's that? Its fourteen months old? Well, the internet is asynchronous. The panel is two hours long and there are a pair of speakers from the right and a pair from the left. Gertrude Himmelfarb chairs the panel. One of the speakers drew a distinction between patriotism based on mine-ness and on goodness. He advocated the primacy of goodness.
In a related note, I have been intrigued by the catagorization of Walter Russell Mead of American policy into Jeffersonians, Wilsonians, Jacksonians, and Hamiltonians. You can read a discussion of his book and its thesis between the author and James Fallows in the Atlantic unbound. Well, I came across an artical by Mead in The National Interest. Mead argues that it is very difficult to sustain policies in America without the acceptance of the Jacksonains. And the Jacksonians have a patriotism based on mine-ness.
This reminds me of a lost article in one of the conservative journals in which the author dwelled upon the differences between a conservative writer for a magazine, living on the east coast, a member of the establishment, and someone who sat next to him at an event who represented the middle American conservative. This, I think is the contrast between Jacksonians and, say Hamiltonians. This distinction is the one I am most aware of, identifying with Alexander Hamilton, rather than my neighbors who are Jacksonians. Being well versed in Stoicism, and the principle of the brotherhood of man, being well educated in European history and therefore prone to cosmopolitanism, I am attracted to a patriotism of the goodness of America. We promote free societies and free markets. Our principles are very good, and even our practice, I will argue, is demonsrably good. Our less good practice is the result of neccesary comprimises in difficult circumstances and are often the result of competing goods (say victory over communism in a fourty year death struggle). The patriotism of mine-ness seems to me to lack a certain amount of reflection. Like the author I cannot cite, who acknowledged the electoral neccesity of an alliance between establishment conservatives writing for magazines in New York and the many middle American conservatives who are much more socially conservative, I as a Hamiltonian see the neccesity of the Jacksonians, even though I sometimes see their preferences as regretable. Ultimatly, my preference for democracy trumps my ideological preferences and I think that the will of the majority should be policy even when its not always the best policy. It is simply up to those with the best policy to convince the majority, not to impose their better judgement through administrative or judicial fiat.
State Budget Shell Game
There is a very good article in The New Republic by Gregg Easterbrook on state budgeting. He argues, as I have (take my word for it, I have no archives), that the current practice of states recieving additional money from Washington is good for no one. He fails, however to answer my fundamental question: what would state borrowing look like? Because the Federal government has so much more control over various levers of the economy, it is safer for them to run a permenant deficit. If states could run a deficit, they probabaly would. And permenant deficits might just result in the current state deficits on top of what ever dept they were carrying. That's not good. What mechanism would lead states to avoid deficits as a general practice, but adopt them when there was a compelling reason? This is probabaly a good place to mention Tyler Cowen's excellent daily postings on macroeconomics over at The Volokh Conspiracy . On the final post of July 29, 2003, he observes that "State budget cuts are extending our recent recession," through contraction of government spending. Some new model of state budgeting must be devised.
There is a very good article in The New Republic by Gregg Easterbrook on state budgeting. He argues, as I have (take my word for it, I have no archives), that the current practice of states recieving additional money from Washington is good for no one. He fails, however to answer my fundamental question: what would state borrowing look like? Because the Federal government has so much more control over various levers of the economy, it is safer for them to run a permenant deficit. If states could run a deficit, they probabaly would. And permenant deficits might just result in the current state deficits on top of what ever dept they were carrying. That's not good. What mechanism would lead states to avoid deficits as a general practice, but adopt them when there was a compelling reason? This is probabaly a good place to mention Tyler Cowen's excellent daily postings on macroeconomics over at The Volokh Conspiracy . On the final post of July 29, 2003, he observes that "State budget cuts are extending our recent recession," through contraction of government spending. Some new model of state budgeting must be devised.
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