Category: Thinkers: Famous and Infamous

Same Old Story, Same Old Song and Dance

I’ve read the same line so many times that I can’t stand it any more. The line, spouted this time by scientist Richard Dawkins, goes like this:

Much of what people do is done in the name of God. Irishmen blow each other up in his name. Arabs blow themselves up in his name….

Thus Dawkins begins an essay entitled “The Improbability of God.” Now, it’s obvious from the title and the opening sentences of the essay where Dawkins is going, but there is no logical connection between the vile acts purportedly committed in God’s name and the existence of God. Sectarian violence of the kind seen in Ireland and the Middle East violates the tenets of Catholicism, Protestantism, Judaism, and most forms of Islam — not to mention Hinduism, Buddhism, and other Eastern religions.

Why single out a belief in God as a cause of violence? What about the “religion of the state” or the “cult of personality” as practiced under Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini, Mao, and Saddam Hussein, among many others of their ilk?

Violence comes from humans. God — or more precisely, religion — is but one excuse for violence. There are many other excuses. The existence of violence neither proves nor disproves the existence of God. Dawkins’s opening is a cheap rhetorical trick, designed to cater to emotion rather than reason. Not very scientific, eh Professor Dawkins?

Peter Singer’s Fallacy

Peter Singer — the Ira W. DeCamp Professor of Bioethics at the University Center for Human Values of Princeton University, a proponent of animal rights, and a bête noire of the right — says this about his ethical position:

…I approach each issue by seeking the solution that has the best consequences for all affected. By ‘best consequences’, I understand that which satisfies the most preferences, weighted in accordance with the strength of the preferences. Thus my ethical position is a form of preference-utilitarianism….

Which his source defines as a

[m]oral theory according to which the good consists in the satisfaction of people’s preferences, and the rightness of an action depends directly or indirectly on its being productive of such satisfaction. Like other kinds of consequentialism, the theory has satisficing and maximising variants. The latter are the more common ones: the more people get what they want, the better. Syn. preference consequentialism

And “consequentialism” encompasses such concepts as these:

…On the “total view”, an increase of the total number of people is an improvement (other things being equal), as long as the additional individuals have a positive welfare or happiness score, however marginal. On the “average view”, the important thing is to seek to increase average pleasure, happiness, welfare, or the like. A situation in which there are a larger number of people would not be better (other things being equal) if the average welfare remained the same.”

That is to say, Singer sets himself up as an omniscient arbiter and weigher of the preferences of billions of individual humans (and other animals), in the belief that he has a formula for determining “the greatest good of the greatest number.” That is a bankrupt formula, as I have written:

…It’s patently absurd to think of measuring individual degrees of happiness, let alone summing those measurements. Suppose the government takes from A (making him miserable) and gives to B (making him joyous). Does B’s joyousness cancel A’s misery? Only if you’re B or a politician who has earned B’s support by joining in the raid on A’s bank account.

Something like “the greatest good for the greatest number” can come about only in a representative democracy, where political bargaining about legitimate government functions leads to a compromise that’s satisfactory to most members of the body politic. An example would be an agreement to have a defense budget of a certain size and to authorize (or not) the use of the armed forces for a particular defensive objective….

Peter Singer joins Cass Sunstein on my list of “respectable” thinkers who seductively espouse serfdom in the name of freedom. (For my take on Sunstein, go here, here, here, here , here, and here.)

Delicious Thoughts about Federalism

A recent post by publius at Legal Fiction (a regressive blog) includes these tidbits (with my comments in brackets):

…From the New Deal on, the courts allowed the legislature to have the final say-so on whether a given law was related to interstate commerce. Maybe the legislature was right, maybe it was wrong – but it was the final arbiter. In the 1990s, the Rehnquist Court (for the first time in over half a century) [unthinkable!] found that a congressionally enacted law did not relate to interstate commerce and was therefore unconstitutional. [Imagine that!] The Court ruled that the law was outside the Article I enumerated powers in a case called Lopez and later in a case called Morrison….

But here’s what was really going on. Lopez and Morrison were less about enumerated powers and more about increasing the power of the judiciary…. [Actually it was about exercising the judiciary’s constitutional power. See below.]

So here’s what’s coming – and this will be the “first front” against the New Deal’s legislatively-enacted regulatory state. [That’s an almost-accurate description, but don’t forget the judiciary’s acquiescence.] If Republicans keep appointing judges, the number of laws found to be outside of the commerce power and Article I will grow. [One hopes.] In the beginning, they will be politically appealing decisions such as striking down federal laws banning medicinal marijuana. [You wish!] But with the principle firmly established, the courts will move on to bigger game. Though I doubt any of them will have the guts [a Republicans-are-racist slur] to declare the Civil Rights Act unconstitutional (it was enacted under the commerce power), they could very well strike down the entire environmental regulatory regime. Jeffrey Rosen (via Kevin Drum) recently wrote an excellent article that outlined just how much the administrative state could be threatened.

In short, the greatest danger from a Bush Court is not the overruling of Roe v. Wade but the overruling of the post-New Deal regulatory state.

That’s 100% correct. Rosen also makes the astute observation that, just like in the political sphere, conservatives scream about social issues like abortion to distract Americans from the economic consequences of approving Republican judges. But Rosen misses an essential point. Things like the EPA and the Endangered Species Act and anti-discrimination laws and workplace protections were all legislatively approved by democratic majorities. [So what, if they aren’t constitutional.] Conservatives cannot get a political majority to overturn the Clean Air Act, so they’re systematically stocking the judiciary with judges who will. It’s exactly what Bork was talking about, except that the judges are thwarting the political process in the economic and regulatory arena as opposed to the social arena. You can see how it works – Lopez and Morrison shift the power to the judiciary to be the final arbiters. [No, the Constitution does that.] Once that principle is established, GOP judges will start using that power to strike down the regulatory state. [Right on!]

So that’s the first front of the battle-to-come. The second front is a revival of Lochner. This is less likely, but as I explained earlier this week, Lochner revivals are stirring. For non-lawyers, just remember what I said yesterday. The Constitution is an obstacle course of sorts. If a law gets through the Article I obstacles, it must then not violate any other part of the Constitution. What a new Lochner would do would be to establish a new obstacle in the form of a “right to economic freedom” that could not be unreasonably infringed upon.

Here’s how this would work. Currently, if you argue that a given law violates your economic freedom (or economic due process rights or equal protection rights), it is reviewed under a “rational basis” test. That’s legalese for “anything goes.” The big point here is that, since the New Deal, courts have decided that the legislature (and not judges) should have the final say-so on the wisdom of an economic law or regulation. [As if the New Deal supplanted the Constitution.]

A new Lochner (or even a new watered-down version of Lochner) would increase the “scrutiny” applied to economic regulations. [Actually, Lochner is bad law; the same result can and should be achieved through the contracts clause, as explained here.] More regulations would be struck down on the grounds that they infringe upon people’s economic freedoms. [True.] But the big point, once again, is that such a move would shift power from the legislature to the judiciary. Judges, and not legislatures, would be the final arbiter of what economic laws are acceptable…. [True, and proper, according to the Constitution.]

If this happened, judges would be thwarting the [unconstitutional] will of the democratic majorities in order to enact their own minority political preferences [actually, their preference for constitutional laws].

If this is all too confusing, here’s the big point. Much of the conservative judiciary has adopted a judicial philosophy that is strikingly anti-democratic [read, anti-socialist and pro-constitutional] in the economic sphere. This philosophy – if enacted – would shift the power to judge economic regulations from the legislature to the judiciary….[What a novel concept: The power to judge would reside in the judiciary. And it would be the power to judge the legislation that authorizes regulations, as well as the conformity of regulations to legislation.]

Now, publius is clearly antagonistic to the idea of judicial supremacy — even though, within the confines of the three branches of the federal government, the judiciary is necessarily supreme. (See here, here, here, and here.) Moreover, publius is clearly antagonistic to the idea that the power of Congress should be confined to the powers enumerated in the Constitution — even though that is plainly what the Framers intended. (See here, here, here, here, and here, for example.)

Given publius‘s leanings I am especially heartened by his or her forebodings as to the demise of the regulatory state. If a conservative or libertarian were predicting that demise, I would say that he or she was smoking a controlled substance (though it wouldn’t bother me). But publius‘s prediction fills me with hope because it comes from the keyboard of someone who clearly begrudges it.

Rather Faint Praise

CBS News, in announcing Dan Rather’s retirement as anchor of CBS Evening News (effective next March), says:

…The triumvirate of Rather, Brokaw and ABC’s Peter Jennings has ruled network news for more than two decades. Rather dominated ratings after taking over for Cronkite during the 1980s, but he was eclipsed first by Jennings and then by Brokaw. His evening news broadcast generally runs a distant third in the ratings each week….

And it only got worse after “Memogate.” That’s the real message here: CBS pushed Rather out the door in order to rehabilitate Evening News and recapture market share (i.e., advertising dollars).

(Thanks to Captain Ed for the pointer to the CBS press release.)

The Face of "Academc Freedom"



Prof. Hamid Dabashi of Columbia University.

Remember the name and face. Here’s why (from the New York Daily News):

In the world of Hamid Dabashi, supporters of Israel are “warmongers” and “Gestapo apparatchiks.”

The Jewish homeland is “nothing more than a military base for the rising predatory empire of the United States.”

It’s a capital of “thuggery” – a “ghastly state of racism and apartheid” – and it “must be dismantled.”

A voice from America’s crackpot fringe? Actually, Dabashi is a tenured professor and department chairman at Columbia University. And his views have resonated and been echoed in other areas of the university.

Columbia is at risk of becoming a poison Ivy, some critics claim, and tensions are high.

In classrooms, teach-ins, interviews and published works, dozens of academics are said to be promoting an I-hate-Israel agenda, embracing the ugliest of Arab propaganda, and teaching that Zionism is the root of all evil in the Mideast.

In three weeks of interviews, numerous students told the Daily News they face harassment, threats and ridicule merely for defending the right of Israel to survive.

And the university itself is holding investigations into the alleged intimidation.

Dabashi has achieved academic stardom: professor of Iranian studies; chairman of the Middle East and Asian languages and cultures department; past head of a panel that administers Columbia’s core curriculum.

The 53-year-old, Iranian-born scholar has said CNN should be held accountable for “war crimes” for one-sided coverage of Sept. 11, 2001. He doubts the existence of Al Qaeda and questions the role of Osama Bin Laden in the attacks.

Though Dabashi and his fellow travelers on the loony Left aren’t necessarily a majority in academia, they’re not far from its mainstream. Consider this report from The New York Times:

…[A] national survey of more than 1,000 academics, shows that Democratic professors outnumber Republicans by at least seven to one in the humanities and social sciences. That ratio is more than twice as lopsided as it was three decades ago, and it seems quite likely to keep increasing, because the younger faculty members are more consistently Democratic than the ones nearing retirement, said Daniel Klein, an associate professor of economics at Santa Clara University and a co-author of the study.

In a separate study of voter registration records, Professor Klein found a nine-to-one ratio of Democrats to Republicans on the faculties of Berkeley and Stanford. That study, which included professors from the hard sciences, engineering and professional schools as well as the humanities and social sciences, also found the ratio especially lopsided among the younger professors of assistant or associate rank: 183 Democrats versus 6 Republicans…

No surprises there.

(Thanks to Instapundit for the tip about Dabashi, and to Marginal Revolution for the pointer to the Times story.)

Re-Fighting the Civil War

In “Still More Trouble for the Lincoln Cartel,” Thomas J. DiLorenzo reviews Born Fighting: How the Scots-Irish Shaped America, by former U.S. Navy Secretary James Webb; and The Fate of Their Country: Politicians, Slavery Extension, and the Coming of the Civil War, by University of Virginia historian Michael F. Holt. DiLorenzo’s review amounts to another salvo at what he calls the “Lincoln Cartel”:

In my [DiLorenzo’s] LRC [LewRockwell.com] article, “More Trouble for the Lincoln Cartel,” I noted how such court historians as James McPherson, and court semanticists like Harry Jaffa, have fabricated an “Official History” of the War to Prevent Southern Independence that is often sharply at odds with historical reality. These self-appointed gatekeepers of America’s Official State History do all they can to censor competing views within academe, but their influence is rapidly waning because of the fact that competing views are now widely published on the Internet, and by commercial and “think tank” publishers.

DiLorenzo prefers socio-psychological explanations and conspiracy theories to a straightforward accounting for the Civil War. Thus, writing about Webb’s book, he says:

So why did the Confederate soldier fight? Because “he was provoked, intimidated, and ultimately invaded” and “his leaders convinced him that this was a war of independence in the same sense as the Revolutionary War” (p. 225). The “tendency to resist outside regression” was “bred deeply into every heart” of the Scots-Irish, and had been for centuries. That’s why they had to fight.

Bravo. But why was the Confederate soldier “provoked, intimidated, and ultimately invaded”? Aha, here it is in DiLorenzo’s comments about Holt’s book:

The North was driven by an agenda that would legally plunder the South. They were pure plunder seekers. The South, on the other hand, was comprised of plunder avoiders. They fought for years in the political trenches to avoid being the victims of the northern political plunderers, whose population was more than double that of the South, implying an inevitable Northern domination in the halls of Congress. As Professor Holt demonstrates, slavery extension was one big smokescreen or “chimera” that clouded the real issues at stake in the period leading up to the war.

I sent my son a link to DiLorenzo’s review. We then had the following exchange:

Son: I don’t think either of us are die hard Confederates, are we? I guess my take on it is: interesting historical revisionism, but I’m not going to try to re-fight the Civil War.

Me: I might prefer more power in the hands of the States, but not at the cost of slavery. It strikes me as one more attempt to throw the Civil War into a new light. Kind of clever, but not compelling. Such theories fail Occam’s test, which tells me that the proximate cause of the war was slavery, and Lincoln was determined to keep the Union whole. Yes, there were a lot of subplots, but that’s the main plot.

Son [referring to the early election returns]: Maybe we don’t need to refight the Civil War, but can we let Canada annex the Northeast?

I’d go along with that, but my Canadian friends who are Red Ensign bloggers probably don’t want to bring more socialist-leaning provinces into the Dominion.

Yeah, But What Does He Know?

Headline from AP, via Yahoo! News: “Scientist Stephen Hawking Decries Iraq War.” But Hawking is the guy who recently recanted his long-standing theory about black holes. If he doesn’t understand black holes, he surely doesn’t understand the truly complex phenomenon of military strategy.

A Reason to Like Tom Wolfe

I’ve read only one of Tom Wolfe’s novels — A Man in Full — which I found overblown and overpraised. But I forgave Mr. Wolfe my disappointment in his writing when I read this:

“Here is an example of the situation in America,” [Wolfe] says: “Tina Brown wrote in her column that she was at a dinner where a group of media heavyweights were discussing, during dessert, what they could do to stop Bush. Then a waiter announces that he is from the suburbs, and will vote for Bush. And … Tina’s reaction is: ‘How can we persuade these people not to vote for Bush?’ I draw the opposite lesson: that Tina and her circle in the media do not have a clue about the rest of the United States. You are considered twisted and retarded if you support Bush in this election. I have never come across a candidate who is so reviled. Reagan was sniggered it, but this is personal, real hatred.

“Indeed, I was at a similar dinner, listening to the same conversation, and said: ‘If all else fails, you can vote for Bush.’ People looked at me as if I had just said: ‘Oh, I forgot to tell you, I am a child molester.’ I would vote for Bush if for no other reason than to be at the airport waving off all the people who say they are going to London if he wins again. Someone has got to stay behind.”…

You tell ’em, Tom.

Cronkite’s "Conspiracy Theory"

Drudge reports this:

…Somewhat smiling, Cronkite said he is “inclined to think that Karl Rove, the political manager at the White House, who is a very clever man, he probably set up bin Laden to this thing.”…

Think of all the lefties out there who will use the quotation without noting that Cronkite was “somewhat smiling” when he said it.

P.S. I’ve noticed that the righties are getting all exercised about Cronkite’s crack. Loosen up, fellas — election’s only two days away. No serious person is going to pay attention to Uncle Walter’s mutterings. Hell, most of CBS News’s remaining fans (all three of them) think he was mummified and glued to the anchor chair. (Oops, that’s Dan Rather, isn’t it?)

Osama Parrots Michael Moore

In the newly released videotape bin Laden also says (via Drudge):

[W]e never thought that the high commander of the US armies would leave 50 thousand of his citizens in both towers to face the horrors by themselves when they most needed him because it seemed to distract his attention from listening to the girl telling him about her goat butting was more important than paying attention to airplanes butting the towers which gave us three times the time to execute the operation thank god.

What was Bush supposed to do, don his Superman outfit, fly instantly to Metropolis, and perch all 50,000 (?) citizens on his shoulders? Or was he supposed to start barking orders left and right, without detailed knowledge of events on the ground and in the air? By the time he had learned all there was to know, it would have been too late to start giving orders.

In this country, we don’t wait for Allah or Premier Stalin to tell us what to do. We rely on free individuals and institutions to do the best they can do with the resources at their disposal.* That concept seems to be beyond the ken of religious and irreligious fanatics like bin Laden and Moore.

__________

* If the FAA and armed forces of the United States were less prepared for 9/11 than they might have been, the blame rests with Clinton as much as anyone. What was he doing on the morning of 9/11, and with whom was he doing it?

Paul Johnson on Election 2004

Paul Johnson, a British historian perhaps best-known for Modern Times, assesses the stakes in the election of 2004:

The great issue in the 2004 election — it seems to me as an Englishman — is, How seriously does the United States take its role as a world leader, and how far will it make sacrifices, and risk unpopularity, to discharge this duty with success and honor? In short, this is an election of the greatest significance, for Americans and all the rest of us. It will redefine what kind of a country the United States is, and how far the rest of the world can rely upon her to preserve the general safety and protect our civilization….

…September 11…gave [George W. Bush’s] presidency a purpose and a theme, and imposed on him a mission….[H]e has been absolutely right in estimating the seriousness of the threat international terrorism poses to the entire world and on the need for the United States to meet this threat with all the means at its disposal and for as long as may be necessary. Equally, he has placed these considerations right at the center of his policies and continued to do so with total consistency, adamantine determination, and remarkable courage, despite sneers and jeers, ridicule and venomous opposition, and much unpopularity.

There is something grimly admirable about his stoicism in the face of reverses, which reminds me of other moments in history: the dark winter Washington faced in 1777-78, a time to “try men’s souls,” as Thomas Paine put it, and the long succession of military failures Lincoln had to bear and explain before he found a commander who could take the cause to victory….[S]omething persuades me that Bush — with his grimness and doggedness, his lack of sparkle but his enviable concentration on the central issue — is the president America needs at this difficult time.

He has, it seems to me, the moral right to ask American voters to give him the mandate to finish the job he has started.

This impression is abundantly confirmed, indeed made overwhelming, when we look at the alternative….[T]here are six good reasons that he should be mistrusted. First, and perhaps most important, he seems to have no strong convictions about what he would do if given office and power. The content and emphasis of his campaign on terrorism, Iraq, and related issues have varied from week to week. But they seem always to be determined by what his advisers, analyzing the polls and other evidence, recommend, rather than by his own judgment and convictions….

…Second, Kerry’s personal character has, so far, appeared in a bad light. He has always presented himself, for the purpose of Massachusetts vote-getting, as a Boston Catholic of presumably Irish origins. This side of Kerry is fundamentally dishonest. He does not follow Catholic teachings…[and] since the campaign began it has emerged that Kerry’s origins are not in the Boston-Irish community but in Germanic Judaism. Kerry knew this all along, and deliberately concealed it for political purposes. If a man will mislead about such matters, he will mislead about anything.

There is, thirdly, Kerry’s long record of contradictions and uncertainties as a senator and his apparent inability to pursue a consistent policy on major issues.

Fourth is his posturing over his military record, highlighted by his embarrassing pseudo-military salute when accepting the nomination. Fifth is his disturbing lifestyle, combining liberal — even radical — politics with being the husband, in succession, of two heiresses, one worth $300 million and the other $1 billion….Sixth and last is the Kerry team: who seem to combine considerable skills in electioneering with a variety of opinions on all key issues. Indeed, it is when one looks at Kerry’s closest associates that one’s doubts about his suitability become certainties….[T]he man Kerry would have as his vice president is an ambulancechasing lawyer of precisely the kind the American system has spawned in recent decades, to its great loss and peril….

Of Kerry’s backers, maybe the most prominent is George Soros, a man who made his billions through the kind of unscrupulous manipulations that (in Marxist folklore) characterize “finance capitalism.” This is the man who did everything in his power to wreck the currency of Britain….He has also used his immense resources to interfere in the domestic affairs of half a dozen other countries, some of them small enough for serious meddling to be hard to resist. One has to ask: Why is a man like Soros so eager to see Kerry in the White House? The question is especially pertinent since he is not alone among the superrich wishing to see Bush beaten. There are several other huge fortunes backing Kerry….

I don’t recall any occasion, certainly not since the age of FDR, when so much partisan election material has been produced by intellectuals of the Left, not only in the United States but in Europe, especially in Britain, France, and Germany. These intellectuals — many of them with long and lugubrious records of supporting lost left-wing causes….

Behind this front line of articulate Bushicides…there is the usual cast of Continental suspects, led by Chirac in France and the superbureaucrats of Brussels….Anti-Americanism has seldom been stronger in Continental Europe, and Bush seems to personify in his simple, uncomplicated self all the things these people most hate about America — precisely because he is so American. Anti-Americanism, like anti-Semitism, is not, of course, a rational reflex. It is, rather, a mental disease, and the Continentals are currently suffering from a virulent spasm of the infection, as always happens when America exerts strong and unbending leadership.

Behind this second line of adversaries there is a far more sinister third. All the elements of anarchy and unrest in the Middle East and Muslim Asia and Africa are clamoring and praying for a Kerry victory….[Bush’s] defeat on November 2 [would] be greeted, in Arab capitals, by shouts of triumph from fundamentalist mobs of exactly the kind that greeted the news that the Twin Towers had collapsed and their occupants been exterminated.

I cannot recall any election when the enemies of America all over the world have been so unanimous in hoping for the victory of one candidate. That is the overwhelming reason that John Kerry must be defeated, heavily and comprehensively.

(From Paul Johnson’s “High Stakes,” National Review, October 25, 2004. Thanks to The American Thinker for the tip, and to the Hispanic American Center for Economic Research for the complete text.)

The Ketchup Lady’s Twisted Logic

THK sez:

The perpetration of certain myths that diplomacy and alliances are a sign of weakness is Neanderthal. I never heard of teaching a child to make enemies so they can get along in the playground.

And I never heard of teaching a child to believe that someone who lies to him or betrays his trust is an ally. But I didn’t have the advantage of Ms. H-K’s “liberal” education.

Remembering Paul Nitze

Paul Nitze died on October 19 at the age of 97. Most readers are probably stumped by the name. Here’s a bit of his bio, from Wikipedia:

Paul Henry Nitze (January 16, 1907 – October 19, 2004) was a high-ranking United States government official who helped shape Cold War defense policy over the course of numerous presidential administrations.

Born in Amherst, Massachusetts, Nitze attended the Hotchkiss School graduated from Harvard University in 1928. After working in investment banking, he enter government service during World War II. In 1942, he was chief of the Metals and Minerals Branch of the Board of Economic Warfare, until named director, Foreign Procurement and Development Branch of the Foreign Economic Administration in 1943. During the period 1944-1946, Nitze served as director and then as vice chairman of the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey….

In the early post-war era, he served in the Truman Administration as head of policy planning for the State Dept (1950-1953). He was also principal author in 1950 of a highly influential secret National Security Council document (NSC-68), which provided the strategic outline for increased U.S. expenditures to counter the perceived threat of Soviet armament.

…In 1961 President Kennedy appointed Nitze assistant secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs and in 1963 he became the Secretary of the Navy, serving until 1967.

Following his term as secretary of the Navy, he served as deputy secretary of Defense (1967-1969), as a member of the U.S. delegation to the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT) (1969-1973), and assistant secretary of Defense for International Affairs (1973-1976). Later, fearing Soviet rearmament, he opposed the ratification of SALT II (1979). He was President Ronald Reagan’s chief negotiator of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (1981-1984). In 1984, Nitze was named special advisor to the president and secretary of State on Arms Control. For more than forty years, Nitze was one of the chief architects of U.S. policy toward the Soviet Union. President Reagan awarded Nitze the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1985 for his contributions to the freedom and security of the United States….

I met Nitze in 1965 when, in his tenure as Secretary of the Navy, he was gracious to a young analyst (me) whom the Commandant of the Marine Corps had called upon to make a dubious case for sending more Marines to Vietnam.

Nitze later served as a trustee of the defense think-tank where I was chief financial and administrative officer. He spoke seldom, but when he did he cut to the heart of the matter.

Nitze was a rare “public servant” who truly served his country. He was hard-nosed, non-partisan, and brilliant.

Nailing a Neo-Marxist

I read an online excerpt of Cornel West’s Democracy Matters several weeks ago, but I decided not to blog about it because I didn’t know where to begin. It is simply one of the worst pseudo-intellectual excretions I’ve ever stumbled into. Luckily, Will Wilksinson was willing to hold his nose long enough to deal with West’s waste, in an essay at Tech Central Station). Here’s a sample of Wilkinson’s take:

…A fellow professor once quipped: “Cornel’s work tends to be 1,000 miles wide and about two inches deep.” In a new book, Democracy Matters,…West promises to examine a triple threat to democracy: “free-market fundamentalism,” “aggressive militarism,” and “escalating authoritarianism.” Despite the occasional insight and illuminating connection, mostly we observe Professor West in his thousand-mile pool, out of his depth, gurgling in dropped names like a baby face-down in a puddle….

…Despite West’s intellectual posturing, Democracy Matters is a prime example of the quasi-intellectualism of the far left, a triumph of moralizing, name-dropping rhetoric over argument. West’s wide-ranging erudition is impressive, but nowhere provides a curious but skeptical reader with a reason to believe that the market does in fact have this kind of distorting effect on our minds, or a corrosive effect on democracy as it is less tendentiously understood. West engages no advocates of the free market, nor does he even deign to knock down straw men. Overestimating the world-making powers of language, West simply slaps negative labels on his opponents and declares victory. The choir is no doubt delighted.

That’s more than enough of Cornel West.

Cutting Krugman Down to Size

Donald Luskin (The Conspiracy to Keep You Poor and Stupid) really, really, really, dislikes Paul Krugman. Luskin responds to a reader who takes him to task for making an issue of Krugman’s shortcoming in the vertical dimension:

…Reader Vivek Rao asks, ” I’m on your side — the side of free enterprise — and try to help in the fight against Krugmanism. But I think that mocking his height is overly personal and detracts from your site. We dislike him because he’s a nasty, dishonest, socialist — not because he’s short. Right?” Fair question, and the answer is “yes.” I don’t dislike Krugman because he is short. But I do dislike him for more reasons than just that he is a nasty, dishonest, socialist (though I admit he is certainly all those things). Another reason I dislike him is his haughty, arrogant pose of infallibility — the snotty, condescending, know-it-all tone he assumes when he writes from the august pages of America’s newspaper of record. I do not intend to ever grant him the authoritativeness he pretends to have, or accord him any respect at all based on his pedigree or position. One way I can puncture his pedigree and position is to constantly show that this man is not the titan he pretends to be. As anyone knows who has seen him on television or in person, he is a short, pudgy, whiny, stuttering, shifty-eyed, ill-groomed, gray little homunculus. Keep that in mind when you read his New York Times columns — it puts everything in perspective. Am I stooping to name-calling? If I am, too bad. The emperor has no clothes, and I intend to keep calling him naked.

Saying that Luskin really, really, really dislikes Krugman is an understatement. It would be more accurate to say that Luskin loathes Krugman — and I empathize with Luskin. Krugman is a lying rabble-rouser of the first order. His presence on the op-ed pages of the Times speaks volumes about the prevailing mentality and standards of that once-great newspaper.

Buckley Cuts Through the Cant

In an op-ed at Yahoo! News, William F. Buckley Jr. says:

LONG LIVE OIL

Thu Oct 14,12:05 AM ET

By William F. Buckley Jr.

Teresa Heinz Kerry’s reference to “greed for oil” can be passed over, and is being passed over, as routine political hyperbole. But maybe the time has come to examine the words and their meaning. This is so because “oil” is widely used as the great engine of human avarice. In years — and centuries — gone by, the devil word was “gold.” It was gold that brought out the reserves of evil in men. It ranked with and even exceeded love and sex. Oil could not, of course, go through hobgoblinization until its uses were discovered. But now it is used as the commonplace agent of evil.

What needs to be said about oil is that it IS worth fighting for. We would all agree that air and water are necessities. Without them life instantly ends. Without oil, life does not end, but life radically changes….

Only the super-rich can afford to be haughtily condescending about things like oil (evil incarnate) and the environment (to be protected regardless of the cost in jobs and GDP).

UPDATED:

Mike Brock takes out similarly minded lefties who begrudge any signs of happiness among Teresa’s “common people”:

[T]his morning, I had a discussion with somebody at a local coffee shop….

“Do you know what really bothers me?” he says, “all of these middle-class people making $40,000 a year, living out in the suburbs thinking their lives are so great. They actually think because they have a house and two cars in the driveway, that they are living on the up and up”.

“Are you aware that you are evil?” I asked him. He responded only with a blank stare.

“You resent that people have found relative happiness in their lives. You would seek to convince them that they should be depressed,” I said to him straightly.

He then announced his theory that the only reason they were happy, is because the bourgeois and corporations had brainwashed them into thinking that they were happy, when they really are not.

I’ve only recently started to pay attention to this mindset among left-wingers, but now that I’m really looking at it, I realize just how evil and shallow some people are. How can you resent somebody for finding happiness on a modest income? What the hell is wrong with these people?…

These people will only accept the happiness of others if it’s happiness in the context of what they deem to be an appropriate way of living. The fact that Joe Anybody doesn’t complain about working 8-hour days, 5-days a week, and enjoys his weekend doing home improvements and going out to dinner with his family, bothers these people deeply. They don’t want these people to be happy. They want to remind them that they live a meager lifestyle, and they are slaves to capitalism, and that they should be resentful of our society….

These people…seek only to lower the spirits [of] and bring grief [to] the average person, in order to satisfy their own personal insecurities.

Yep. Insecurity (emotional if not financial) breeds an unfounded sense of superiority.

(Thanks to Megan McArdle for the tip about Buckley’s piece, and to The Monger for the tip about Mike Brock’s post.)

Taking Andrew Sullivan Too Seriously

Megan McArdle, guest-blogging for Instapundit, devotes a lot of bytes to Andrew Sullivan’s endorsement of Kerry. McArdle skewers Sullivan’s clumsy theory that Kerry would have to hang tough on national security:

The idea that we should trust Kerry, even if we think his previous foriegn policy instincts have all been bad, because he has nothing to gain from failing to pursue Al Qaeda, makes little sense. Surely George Bush had nothing to gain from failing to suppress the insurgency in Iraq, and yet his administration still hasn’t done so. This argument seems to fall into the partisan assumption that if Kerry fails it will be out of malice. But most people who think that Kerry isn’t the right man for the job think he will fail not because he wants to, but because he’s fundamentally wrong in some way in his national security strategy.

Similarly, it doesn’t strike me as very logical to imply that Democrats have abandoned national security issues, and then suggest electing them anyway as a way to force them to “take responsibility” for national security, any more than I would employ a drug addict in a pharmacy on the theory that this would force him to “take responsibility” for enforcing our nation’s drug laws.

But Sullivan shouldn’t be taken that seriously. He’s merely grasping at excuses for his anti-Bush stance, which is predicated on Bush’s opposition to gay marriage.

P.S. Mike Rappaport of The Right Coast seems to agree with my diagnosis of Sullivan’s real issue with Bush.

In the "So What?" Department

UPDATED

Eschaton is atwitter (scandalized? horrified?) at the possibility that the NRA is funding Stolen Honor, the anti-Kerry film about to be aired by Sinclair Broadcasting. I guess that makes Stolen Honor especially unworthy of consideration. Anything associated with the NRA must, by definition, be EVIL!!!

To top it off, Sinclair Broadcasting is exercising its First Amendment right in airing Stolen Honor, and the chairman of the FCC has said that the FCC won’t intervene to stifle Sinclair.

Frustrating days for the left.

UPDATE

Sinclair has backed down, in the face of legal and political pressure. Another example of legislation by litigation. It stinks.

But remember this, lefties, what goes around comes around.

The Remarkable Mind of Roger Penrose

It’s been a while since I read Roger Penrose’s Shadows of the Mind, an exploration of consciousness and the possibility of replicating it in computers. Penrose is a scientist with his head screwed on right, as I am reminded by an article by Martin Gardner in The New Criterion, “Theory of everything.” There, Gardner reviews Penrose’s new book, The Road to Reality: A Complete Guide to the Laws of the Universe.

First, Gardner summarizes Penrose’s views on the replicability of consciousness:

…Penrose’s two best sellers, The Emperor’s New Mind and its sequel, Shadows of the Mind, were slashing attacks on the opinions of a few artificial intelligence mavens that in just a few decades computers made with wires and switches will be able to do everything a human mind can do. Advanced computers, it was said, will some day replace the human race and colonize the cosmos! Penrose disagrees. Not until we know more about laws below the level of quantum mechanics, he argues, can computers cross that mysterious threshold separating our self-awareness from the unconscious networks of computers. Maybe the threshold will never be crossed. Computers of the sort we know how to build obviously are no more aware of what they do than a typewriter knows it is typing….

Amen.

Now, on to physics:

Penrose is frank in admitting that he has “prejudices” which other physicists reject. For another instance, he is not impressed by the “many-worlds interpretation” of quantum phenomena. According to this eccentric view, every time a quantum event takes place the entire universe splits into two or more parallel universes, each containing a possible outcome of the event!

Take the notorious case known as “Schrödinger’s cat.” Imagine a cat inside a closed box along with a Geiger counter that emits random clicks. The first click triggers a device that kills the cat. Some quantum experts, notably Eugene Wigner, believed that no quantum event is real until it is observed by a conscious mind. Until someone opens the box and looks, the poor cat is a “superposition” of two quantum states, dead and alive. In the many-worlds interpretation the cat remains alive in one world, dies in the other. This proliferation of new universes, like the forking branches of a rapidly growing tree, naturally must include duplicates of you and me!

If these billions upon billions of sprouting universes are not “real” in the same way our universe is real, but only imaginary artifacts, then the many-worlds interpretation is just another way of talking about quantum events. Yes, the talk erases some of the bizarre concepts of quantum theory, but with such an enormous violation of Occam’s razor….

And that’s just a taste of the nuggets to be mined in Gardner’s review. Makes me want to buy the book.

Novelists for Kerry

Slate interviewed 31 novelists about their preference between Kerry and Bush. In summary:

Thirty-one novelists participated, with four for Bush, 24 for Kerry, and three in a category of their own.

What do you expect from a bunch of fiction writers? Anyway, here’s my take on the gang of 31:

  • I’ve never read anything by 27 of them (and I read a lot of novels).
  • Of the other four, two (Joyce Carol Oates and John Updike) long ago became boring; one (Amy Tan) has always been boring; and one (Jane Smiley) wrote a passably good mystery about 20 years ago.

Joyce Carol Oates’s comment epitomizes the vacuousness of the knee-jerk pro-Kerry literati:

Like virtually everyone I know, I’m voting for Kerry. And probably for exactly the same reasons. To enumerate these reasons, to repeat yet another time the fundamental litany of liberal principles that need to be reclaimed and revitalized, seems to be redundant and unnecessary. Our culture has become politicized to a degree that verges upon hysteria. And since I live in New Jersey, a state in which an “honest politician” is someone who hasn’t yet been arrested, I have come to have modest, that’s to say realistic expectations about public life.

No wonder her stuff has become unreadable. She has become detached from reality and logic. Maybe she should try “magic realism”.

By the way, the four pro-Bush writers are:

  • Orson Scott Card, a pro-war Democrat.
  • Robert Ferrigno, another pro-war type who says “Most novelists live in their imagination, which is a fine place to be until the bad guys come knock knock knocking.”
  • Roger L. Simon, another pro-war Democrat.
  • Thomas Mallon, who is worth quoting at length:

I’ll be voting for President Bush. His response to the 9/11 attacks has been both strong and measured, and he has extended a once-unimaginable degree of freedom (however tentative) to Afghanistan and Iraq. I am unimpressed by the frantic vilification that has come his way from even mainstream elements of the Democratic Party. The rhetorical assault is reminiscent of—though it far exceeds—the overheated opposition to Ronald Reagan’s re-election in 1984. Back then the intellectual establishment told us how repression and apocalypse would be just around the corner if the American “cowboy” were kept in the White House for another four years. Well (as Reagan might say, his head cocked to one side), I remember a rather different result from RR’s second term. And I’m hopeful about another four years under George W. Bush.

Two of the three agnostics have interesting things to say:

  • A.M. Homes:

Richard Nixon, because I found him so fascinating the first time around I’d be curious to see what he could do from the beyond … ?

  • Richard Dooling:

More than any other election in recent memory, this one reminds me of Henry Adams’ observation that politics is the systematic organization of hatreds.

The left-wing political road rage directed at George W. Bush for being dumb and lying about the war reminds me of nothing so much as the right-wing obsessive invective directed at Bill Clinton for being smart and lying about sex. Rush Limbaugh versus Michael Moore, and let the man nursing the most unrequited rage win. The DRAMA and spectacle of the election will be fascinating to watch, but novelists, even more than actors, should be political agnostics.

The same goes for musicians, Richard.