What’s Wrong with the World

I have an exceedingly controversial post on my own blog about the FLDS fiasco, Palestinians, and Lord Acton. (If that doesn't make you curious, I don't know what will.) Given the several different angles from which what I say there is controversial, not to say outrageous, I've decided for now merely to redirect from What's Wrong with the World. Please comment over there.

A Florida kindergarten teacher prompted her students to vote out a fellow student who suffers from Asperger's Syndrome. Alex Barton, as all rational human beings would expect of a 5-year old, particularly one coping with an autism-spectrum disorder, is traumatized:

Alex hasn't been back to school since then, and Barton said he won't be returning. He starts screaming when she brings him with her to drop off his sibling at school.

Thursday night, his mother heard him saying "I'm not special" over and over.

Barton said Alex is reliving the incident.

The other students said he was "disgusting" and "annoying," Barton said.

"He was incredibly upset," Barton said. "The only friend he has ever made in his life was forced to do this."

“I asked (Alex) what the students said, and he said the students said he eats paper, picks boogers and eats them on top of the table and bites his shoelaces,” the report said. “He told me Mrs. Portillo said, ‘I hate you right now. I don’t like you today.’”

I couldn't care less for the teacher's rationalizations - that Alex had to be made to understand "how his behaviour made the other children feel" (the treacly language of therapeutics, as is often the case, here invoked to justify cruelty), and that the vote was only intended to keep him out of class for one day. While a child with an autism-spectrum disorder may not be suited to the routines of a standard kindergarten classroom, this form of discipline - hazing, really - is utterly inappropriate; I can attest from personal experience that the callousnesses of teachers inflicted at that age leave enduring marks on the psyche. Somehow, moreover, given a legal system in which, rightly or wrongly, education is posited as a right, I don't believe the democratization of this decision would fly. In a just world, ie., one in which teachers' unions were somewhat less powerful than they are in this one, the teacher would lose her job. Were I Alex's father, I'd have to settle for slapping her with a civil suit and hoping that it proved financially and socially ruinous.

There has been an interesting back-and-forth over at Taki's Magazine (which, by the way, ought to be daily viewing for any conservative dissatisfied with the Bush administration) concerning the "anti-anticommunism" of John Lukacs.

It all came up because of Lukacs's hit piece on Patrick Buchanan's recently published book, Churchill, Hitler, and The Unnecessary War - which has led to a lot of sound & fury, in the past few days, which I will not even attempt to recount.

Anyway, the most interesting response to Lukacs' review, to my mind, came from Richard Spencer. And the most interesting response to Richard Spencer came from our own Daniel Larison. Please do read both - I think you'll find it worth your while.

In the name of giving yet more fodder to hypothetical unsympathetic readers who might think concern among W4 authors about Muslim activities is exaggerated (and also, in passing, getting out some information that seems to me rather important), I present this story.

In the UK, in Birmingham, a Muslim police officer tells two Christian preachers passing out Christian literature and trying to speak to Muslim young people that a) they cannot preach where they are, because it is a "Muslim area," b) he is going to take them to the police station for their activities (presumably, if they don't go away), c) trying to convert Muslims to Christianity is a hate crime, and d) if they return to the area and get beaten up, they "have been warned." He summons two other policemen, presumably non-Muslims, one of whom backs him up at least to the extent of ordering the two Christians to leave the area and not return. The Christians complain, and the only action taken is that the department defends the Muslim as "acting with the best of intentions." They say that they have offered him "guidance" on what constitutes a hate crime and on "communication style." What that guidance is, we aren't told, nor whether it contains the unequivocal statement that preaching the Gospel is perfectly legal in Britain and that there are no special "Muslim areas" where sharia law obtains and preaching Christianity is illegal.

Just a handful of random aggravations that occasioned minor perturbations of my mental tranquility this morning:

First, I wrote, back in January, that one of the principal purposes of Jonah Goldberg's Liberal Fascism was philosophical surveillance, the attempt to stigmatize dissenters from the fusionist orthodoxy of the mainstream conservative movement, which marries libertarian-ish economic dogmas to an indifferent cultural conservatism, giving obvious preference to the former in practice. The assertion, though not unique on the paleo right, was not uncontroversial. However, Goldberg yesterday posted commentary by a reader of his book, with approbation, that includes the following:

What you've accomplished is, I think, to show that the real poles of political discussion are not left vs. right nor liberalism vs. conservatism but fascism vs libertarianism or classical liberalism.

Second, David Frum critiques one line from Thomas Frank's commentary on Fareed Zakaria's new tome, The Post-American World. Frank, remarking upon the weaknesses of the neoliberal narrative, observes:

In point of fact, the rise of China and India – Mr. Zakaria's own paradigm cases – was possible only because those countries shunned global commercial credit markets in the 1970s, allowing them to avoid the interest-rate shock of the early '80s.

It's rare for a columnist to manage to cram historical illiteracy, economic incompetence, political authoritarianism, and utter disregard for human suffering into a single sentence. But Frank manages it here! Surely that calls for some kind of prize? Maybe the Journal could arrange for him to experience for himself what so many millions of Chinese were involuntary compelled to undergo in Franks' idealized Maoist era: a nice long solitary stay in a village hut, wholly isolated from the appalling ravages of credit, commerce, and trade?

Lawrence Auster, commenting upon the heartening news that opposition to the EU's Treaty of Lisbon, itself merely a repackaging of the constitution rejected by the French and Dutch, is surging in advance of the Irish referendum, observes of the conservative establishment:

I've said this before but I have to say it again. Could there be anything more despicable than American "conservatives" who constantly bleat about FREEDOM, saying that FREEDOM is the greatest thing in the world, that FREEDOM is what America is all about, that we must constantly be on guard to defend FREEDOM, that we must have mass non-Europen immigration to show our belief in FREEDOM, and that we must spread FREEDOM everywhere, even to alien peoples completely unsuited for it, yet who have remained STONE COLD SILENT about the onset of a totalitarian superstate in the cradle of our own civilization?

A few years ago, a friend of ours married the interpreter who acted as a sometime intermediary when my future wife and I first met in Kiev. It so happened that, for whatever utterly inscrutable reasons, they enjoyed watching Sluts Sex and the City, a program I have loathed, from its inception, on account of its superficiality, nihilism, moral corruption, and tendency to promote the most insipid banalities as the very apogee of wisdom. On my personal Scale of Detestation, the program probably ranks up there with all things Quentin Tarantino, which is to say that it is a celebration of the Nothing, and that its popularity is a certain harbinger of The End.

That said, I have found that the smartest take on the new film adaptation of the series is that of Helen Rittelmeyer, who, in a brief comment on the film, manages to encapsulate virtually everything that has inspired my loathing:

Having decided that marriage is not the right lifestyle choice for her, Carrie ends the movie with a question: “Why is it that we’re willing to write our own vows but not our own rules?” That’s right, girlfriend! Marriage is just a bunch of rules that other people made up, and buying into it will only obscure the Inner You. Never mind whether those other people might have been wiser than you are, or whether the transformation might be an improvement.

Or take Samantha, whose life philosophy is summed up in the line “I love you, but I love me more.” She abandons a man who loves her and whom she loves because she can’t stand not to be the center of her own universe. Even the ladies’ four-way friendship, supposedly the show’s moral center, involves so much confessional self-reflection that one is tempted to conclude that relationships with other people are only interesting insofar as they enable self-discovery. Strange—I always thought it was the other way around.

As for the matter of friendship, well, yes - those who instrumentalize sexually intimate relationships as voyages of self-expression, self-discovery, and so forth are bound so to instrumentalize friendship as well; if one first acts as though one is not a body situated in social and relational contexts, but a gnostic Self striving to realize its own True Being in a world of indifferent or malign stuff that must be forged into instruments of the Self, then there is no reason for this to halt at the boundaries of friendship. Why would it? The idea that it might is merely an expression of the idea that sex is somehow special, unique; but the reduction of sexuality to gnostic animality strips it of its uniqueness; and if something considered so critical to personal identity is nothing more than desire objectifying the other, why should friendship be immune? It will be little more than a sounding board for the Self: a chorus of approbation for those who have 'dared' to 'write their own rules' and negate the world actualize the Self to the uttermost. The gnostic Self is a universal corrosive.

From Slavoj Zizek's most recent tome, In Defense of Lost Causes, the concluding passage, in fact:

It is easy, from today's perspective, to mock the "pessimists", from the Right to the Left, from Solzhenitsyn to Castoriadis, who deplored the blindness and compromises of the democratic West, its lack of an ethico-political strength and courage in dealing with the Communist threat, and who predicted that the Cold War had already been lost by the West, that the Communist bloc had already won, that the collapse of the West was imminent - but it is precisely their attitude which was most effective in bringing about the collapse of Communism. In Dupuy's terms, their very "pessimistic" prediction at the level of possibilities, of linear historical evolution, mobilized them to counteract it. We should thus ruthlessly abandon the prejudice that the linear time of evolution is "on our side", that History is "working for us" in the guise of the famous mole digging under the earth, doing the work of the Cunning of Reason. But how, then, are we to counter the threat of ecological catastrophe? It is here that we should return to the four moments of what Badiou calls the "eternal Idea" of revolutionary-egalitarian Justice. What is demanded is:

Apparently, Obama and his wife performing the celebratory 'pound' might be suggestive of terrorism, according to an anchorette on Fox News:

There followed, or so I hear, a conversation with a "body-language expert", which sounds a bit like a pseudo-discipline to me. Who knew that a plausible construal of an action I perform with my toddlers is some sort of sympathy with, or emulation of, terrorists?

In any event, anchorette E.D. Hill, whose program might also be characterized as the Fox News Leg Show, has offered a typical apology - of the sort that admits causing erroneous impressions but not poor diction, let alone the bone-headed thought processes that lead to such usages.

* I suspend disbelief, in order to abstract away from the 567,983 previous times that Fox News has jumped the shark.

In one of my very occasional attempts to join the 21st Century, I have committed a YouTube video! Behold:

Canada persecutes Mark Steyn for writing that Islam is a threat to the West. The New York Times, having ignored that drama for months, takes the opportunity to dilate tendentiously on the uniqueness of American tolerance for Free Speech, implicitly comparing Steyn to Nazis, and naturally burying his response in the last two paragraphs of a long article. The few European politicians and thinkers with the guts to stand up to creeping Islamization, find themselves betrayed and denounced in America, and likewise compared to Nazis and fascists, by prominent bloggers. Readers will recall the pitifully tepid response from the West to the beleaguered Danes during the Cartoon Jihad.

And now we have this, as reported by Josh Trevino: In Kuala Lumpar, at the Third International Conference on the Muslim World, three prominent Muslim leaders called on the West to renounce Free Speech in order to accommodate Islamic sensibilities; and the three Westerns who spoke uttered not a word of protest.

The Supreme Court has issued its ukase ruling in the case of Boumediene v. Bush, finding that the 2006 Military Commissions Act, in its provision in section 7 for alternative legal procedures for 'enemy combatants', is unconstitutional. This, because those alternative mechanisms, as explained by Glenn Greenwald in his gloss on the ruling, were found by the majority to be an inadequate substitute for habeas corpus. Much ink and many pixels have been spilled in praise, and denunciation, of the decision. Not wishing to add needlessly to the choruses singing loudly on either side of the opinion, I hope to suggest that the potential implications of the ruling are perhaps more interesting than those teased out by partisans and detractors. However, first things must come first.

Article III, Section 2 of the Constitution bestows upon the Congress to make such exceptions to the jurisdiction of the judiciary that it deems fitting:

In all Cases affecting Ambassadors, other public Ministers and Consuls, and those in which a State shall be Party, the supreme Court shall have original Jurisdiction. In all the other Cases before mentioned, the supreme Court shall have appellate Jurisdiction, both as to Law and Fact, with such Exceptions, and under such Regulations as the Congress shall make.

However, there is, in my estimation, more at stake than - as Leon Wolf characterizes the matter, "a court which recognizes no limits on its authority". In fact, the entire episode stands as an illustration of the failure of our Constitutional architecture, for all three of the branches of government have covered themselves in obloquy.

In times such as these, I am honoured to trace my ancestry to two European signs of contradiction, Poland and Ireland; though my pride is these heritages cannot be delimited by purely political considerations, in an age dominated by malign political ideologies and their votaries, political considerations are bound to factor more highly than they would in healthier times. Poland catalyzed the resistance to Communist domination in Eastern Europe, and Ireland, in rejecting the Treaty of Lisbon, itself merely a treaty intended to bypass the popular opposition that felled the Euro-Constitution, have shown themselves unwilling to go into that long night without resistance. While I harbour a suspicion that Lawrence Auster is correct in predicting that the Eurocrats will decree that EU treaties cannot be subjected to referenda, this defiance must not go unrecognized. If those of us who purpose to defend the heritage of the West, and the separate heritages of her constituent nations, must walk toward defeat, let us at least do so with eyes open, commemorating each victory wrenched from between the teeth of defeat as a noble triumph. There is nobility in such defiance; there is but shame in submission.

Nonetheless, in an intemperate outburst worthy of a commissar whose prerogatives have been denied, Morning's Minion denounces the opposition to the European Union, insinuating in the process that such opposition is contrary to the Christian religion:

So what went wrong in Ireland? As I said , people didn’t understand it. As they have in the past, people used it to protest against the government in an environment of increasing economic uncertainty. And the “no” campaign was particularly effective with its scaremongering tactics. The Irish were told that the treaty would force them to raise their tax rates. They were told military neutrality would be jeopardized. They were told abortion would be introduced in Ireland. All lies. In the end, every single mainstream political party and social partner supported the treaty. Its opponents were a rag-tag group of Marxists, ex-terrorists, hard-care nationalists, the extreme Catholic right, and a shady unknown businessman with ties to the US defense industry. (Snip)

Ah, but they have already spoken. Completely oblivious to the voice of the Irish church, some US Catholics (the usual suspects) laud the no vote, the the grounds that Ireland has given the finger to “Brussels elitists”. As always, they are reflecting their own political and ideological biases onto Europe. They see the debate through the eyes of the kind of Enlightenment-era liberalism that prizes the liberty of the individual over the common good and solidarity (notice the whole comment is about economics- when the Irish bishops say that is exactly the wrong way to look at it). They are also wedded to a form of nationalism that elevates the role of the nation state above any supranational cooperation. Clearly, the dream of Erasmus and Thomas More for a united, peaceful, Europe was misplaced then…

Daniel Larison's exchange with Richard Spencer which I mentioned earlier has continued here, here, and here.

In his latest, DL argues that, contrary to first appearances, communism was no more "singular and monolithic for the purposes of general discussion and definition" than nationalism. He plays down the unity of communism: "communist movements were not part of an undifferentiated whole, but differed according to national character and reprised old national rivalries among themselves." And he plays up the unity of nationalism: "[o]f course, every nationalism is different in certain ways and bears the characteristics of the people who espouse it, but nationalists tend to have many basic assumptions in common that allows us to describe them as nationalists" - assumptions that he goes on to list.

Trouble is, there's an equivocation here on what sort of unity he has in mind. On the one hand, an historical force can be more or less "singular and monolithic" in the way it acts in the world. On the other hand, it can be more or less conceptually "singular and monolithic."

In the passage just quoted, DL moves too glibly from the one to the other. He points out, quite rightly, that, in practice, communists were not always unified - precisely because of the persistence among them of atavistic national differences and rivalries. Then he observes, again quite rightly, that the word "nationalism" means much the same thing, from case to case.

All true - but so what? Let's compare apples to apples and oranges to oranges. On the one hand, is communism more, or less, "singular and monolithic" than nationalism in the way it acts in the world? On the other hand, is communism more, or less conceptually "singular and monolithic" than nationalism?

Andrew Cusack at Taki's [paleo-conservative] Magazine quotes a fascinating old article from The History News Network concerning the attitude of American conservatives toward the bombing of Hiroshima in the aftermath of World War II:

"...[two days after the bombing of Hiroshima] former Republican President Herbert Hoover wrote to a friend that "[t]he use of the atomic bomb, with its indiscriminate killing of women and children, revolts my soul."

"Days later...the conservative owner and editor of U.S. News...argued that Japan's surrender had been inevitable without the atomic bomb. He added that justifications of 'military necessity' will 'never erase from our minds the simple truth that we, of all civilized nations...did not hesitate to employ the most destructive weapon of all times indiscriminately against men, women and children.'

"Just weeks after Japan's surrender, an article published in the conservative magazine Human Events contended that America's atomic destruction of Hiroshima might be morally 'more shameful' and 'more degrading' than Japan's 'indefensible and infamous act of aggression' at Pearl Harbor.

"...A 1947 editorial in the Chicago Tribune, at the time a leading conservative voice, claimed that President Truman and his advisers were guilty of 'crimes against humanity' for 'the utterly unnecessary killing of uncounted Japanese...'

"A steady drumbeat of conservative criticism continued throughout the 1950's. A 1958 editorial in William F. Buckley, Jr.'s National Review took former President Truman to task for his then-current explanation of why he had decided to drop an atomic bomb on the city of Hiroshima...

"...a 1959 National Review article matter-of-factly stated: 'The indefensibility of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima is becoming a part of the national conservative creed.'"

(I am cutting all kinds of equally interesting stuff - there's much more at the links.)

Morning's Minion offers a spirited defense of the European Union project, characterizing it, essentially, as an attempt to rectify the historical mistake of the nation-state:

But let me raise a rather basic issue here: what attracts me most about the European project is what many Christian Democrats (such as the Bavarian CSU's Edmund Stoiber) dub the "Europe of the regions" -- a loose supranational federation with much power devolved to the regions. What gets taken out is the nation state, which I consider an ugly step-child of the Enlightenment. For the modern nation state usurps powers that rightly belong to subsidiary mediating institutions and wipes out a traditional network of overlapping loyalties in favor of a direct relationship between the individual and the state (how delightfully Protestant!). Now, there are tendencies in Europe that go against this conception of Europe, but these tendencies are highly influenced by nationalism. And here is the rub: so many American critics of the EU are themselves deeply wedded to a nationalist conception of the USA. After all, the idea of a pan-European army would repulse me, and yet we think of the existence of a US army as beyond question (even glorifying it)-- why?

In recent times it has been fashionable to talk of the levelling of nations, of the disappearance of different races in the melting-pot of contemporary civilization. I do not agree with this opinion, but its discussion remains another question. Here it is merely fitting to say that the disappearance of nations would have impoverished us no less than if all men had become alike, with one personality and one face. Nations are the wealth of mankind, its collective personalities; the very least of them wears its own special colours and bears within itself a special facet of divine intention.

Rod Dreher links to this story of indescribable evil, which I'll not attempt to describe or even name. Note Dreher's headline for the blog entry. In an update at the end of the entry, Dreher explains:

Let me explain this. I am against the death penalty, not because I believe that murderers have the right to live, but because I don't trust our criminal justice system to determine guilt with unfailing accuracy. (Snip) This case in Modesto, though, was a clear example of a killer carrying out an especially brutal murder, and being caught in the act of so doing. I can't pretend that I'm not more satisfied that the cop had no choice but to take that child-killing monster out than to subdue him some other way. Maybe that makes me a bad person. But I really don't care.

M. Z. Forrest links to this interesting NPR interactive game, which enables the user to try his hand at balancing the budget while attempting to garner honors in several fields of policy. I succeeded, according to the program, in balancing the budget and extending the date of financial meltdown all the way to 2054. It is, however, impossible to win plaudits in the policy fields while simultaneously staving off the apocalypse. In this respect, the program has considerable merit; given the definitions of success accepted in our political system, the two goals cannot be realized together. The most obvious failing of the program is the weighting of defense-related decisions: the default "pro-defense" position seems to presuppose the imperial architecture; "defense" cannot mean "defending America", but must include the massive commitments to which we've become accustomed. In the end, however, the game is valuable as a demonstration of the incoherence of American politics: we desire big government, but expect it to be cheap, and to go on forever.

Michael Brendan Dougherty and Daniel Larison go after Matt Yglesias' defense of liberal internationalism, which includes an exercise in special pleading, an attempt to distinguish good liberal interventionism from the bad, neoconservative, Iraq-war starting kind, with hammer and tongs. Interventionism of the calamitous sort is not new with neoconservatives and the Bush administration. Respectively:

What about the Korean War or Vietnam? I suppose these aren’t “Iraq-scale,” being that they are much, much larger and helped to discredit the Truman and Johnson administrations respectively. (Snip) We might also consider the much longer list of recent (smaller than Iraq-scaled) blunders supported by the same establishment: the first Gulf War–the sanctions regime and the decade-long bombing campaign that followed there–Somalia, Haiti, and our intervention against Slobodan Milosevic. Can any of these be judged a success? The Iraq War was relaunched. Somalia saw the humiliation of American forces and taught bin Laden a few lessons. No one can explain what has been accomplished in Port au Prince. And Kosovo is in a state of near anarchy and has been linked to every post-9-11 terrorist attack in Europe. Yet Yglesias has the stones to frame Iraq as an isolated freakout? A one-off after decades of uninterrupted, unimpeachable successes of the establishment.

On neoconservatism, Yglesias knows better. Neoconservatism was not some “fringe right-wing position.” The intellectuals that formed that movement were not gathered around totems of extreme conservatism. No, they leapt forth from the heads of center-left Democrats Scoop Jackson and Daniel Patrick Moynihan. Neoconservatism is a variant of the same establishment foreign policy that Yglesias claims to champion.

As those who have been following the case already know, the California court that declared home schooling (and all school-connected satellite study programs) illegal under California law has agreed to rehear the case, voiding its earlier ruling. It's going to get plenty of help this time in the form of amicus briefs.

In my most recent copy of HSLDA's magazine for members, I came upon an important legal point on this subject that I had forgotten about.

Some Years ago, the United Nations published a lengthy and thoroughly documented report on "The Origins and Evolution of the Palestine Problem."

Here is part I.

And Here is part II.

The report is frankly one sided: relentlessly pro-Palestinian & anti-Israeli.

But it can't just be dismissed. In fact, it presents the strongest case for the Pales