Were it not for the manner in which such facile sloganeering has been employed to stifle the deliberative business of a republican people, to identify support for specific (dubious) policies and the men who formulate them with a patriotic love of country, to obfuscate the distinctions between appeasement and ordinary diplomacy, to mutilate history for ideological purposes, and to imply that geopolitical realities are always malleable by the omnipotence of the Indispensable Nation, I'd almost feel some pity for the man. As matters stand, however, he has rendered an ironic public service, disclosing to the nation and the world (were it to require a further superabundance of proofs) the intellectual corruption and penury of our public discourse. James' performance should serve as a symbol of our era in American political culture. Laugh, to conceal the pain.
]]>According to this informative BBC profile from 2005, she was a Polish Catholic nurse working for the health and care department of the city of Warsaw in 1940 when its German Governor ordered the confinement of the city's jews to the infamous Warsaw Ghetto. The story continues:
]]> "Since 1939 she had been taking enormous risks giving Jews food and shelter. The penalty for helping Jews in Nazi-occupied Poland was death. It was a threat that was often carried out. But she recruited a group of her social worker colleagues to rescue children from the ghetto. 'I was brought up to believe that a person must be rescued when drowning, regardless of religion and nationality,' she said. Mrs Sendlerowa and a colleague, Irena Schultz, were allowed to enter the ghetto using special work passes. They smuggled children out in ambulances, through the sewers, or through a courthouse on the edge of the ghetto, which had a passage leading to the 'Aryan' side..."In July 1942, the Nazis began the mass deportation of Warsaw's Jews to the Treblinka death camp in north east Poland. During that summer, 300,000 were murdered. Persuading parents to part with their loved ones was particularly traumatic. Mrs Sendlerowa could give no guarantee the child would survive. 'That was when we witnessed infernal scenes. Father agreed but mother didn't. Grandmother cuddled the child very tenderly and, weeping bitterly, said "I won't give away my grandchild at any price"...We sometimes had to leave such unfortunate families without taking their children from them. I went there the next day to see what the whole building had come to and often found that everyone had been taken for transport to the death camps'...
"The children were first taken to emergency safe houses, where they were taught basic Catholic rituals to pass as Poles until a family could be found to take them in..."
Irena Sendlerowa payed a terrible price for her good works:
"...on 20 October 1943, she was arrested at her home. She was taken to the notorious Gestapo headquarters in central Warsaw and tortured. During the sessions they broke her legs and feet but she refused to reveal any names.
"I still carry the marks on my body of what those 'German supermen' did to me then. I was sentenced to death"...
But her colleagues "managed to foil the plan after they bribed a Polish-speaking German officer with a large backpack full of dollars. On the drive to her execution site the officer knocked her unconscious. He stopped the car and left her bleeding on the roadside...The following day, unaware the execution had not taken place, the German authorities put up posters all over the city announcing she had been shot..."
There is much more to her story. The whole BBC profile is well worth your time, as is The Independent's obituary.
]]>We must allow for the possibility that Islam as such is a threat to this country. Even more bluntly: The question of the character of Islamic doctrine — whether it can be tolerated without fatal exposure to its war-making titles — must remain an open question if we are to remain a free people.
Here is the enigma with this whole business. Most Americans, Right and Left, will profess belief in a very robust principle of Free Speech. Thus the idea of curbing discussion on an important topic will arouse their repugnance. I have argued in the past for legislation embracing certain aspects of Islamic doctrine — the dogmas, specifically, of Holy War (jihad), Holy Subjugation (dhimma) and perhaps Sharia law itself — into our current sedition law: in other words, outlawing the promulgation of these dogmas. Even among people favorably deposed toward an aggressive posture vis-à-vis Islam, this is met with suspicion and hostility.
Fair enough — but why abandon this Free Speech principle when it comes to the character of the Islamic religion? There is the perplexity and the frustration. People jealous to preserve a “marketplace of ideas,” where true ideas will “out-compete” false ones in the end, while understandably hostile toward my proposal to proscribe certain forms of Islamic speech, yet exhibit an apparent insouciance about proposals (less overt than mine, to be sure) to proscribe certain forms of speech about Islam.
]]> Now it is a fact that in parts of the Western world (for instance that obscure bastion of the West known as the United Kingdom), it is well nigh illegal to speak ill of Islam as such. Virtually the entire Fourth Estate, including the American press, preferred to sit idly, or worse, when the fury of the Islamic world was aroused against a Dutch newspaper’s chosen manner of Free Speech.Bruce Bawer’s recent essay can be perused for more examples: the Liberals of the West (not exclusive to Europe) are right now busy throwing away their inheritance of principled Free Speech on the subject of Islam. They want to preclude public discussion on whether Islam as such is a threat to the West. Perhaps the reader will forgive me my impatience with this position.
The question of whether Islam is a threat is among the most pressing of all questions right now. The pressure or urgency of this question is, to take but one example, the primary impulse behind efforts to firmly unite the Republican Party behind John McCain. In my judgment it will press upon us for quite some time; likely it will only press harder upon our children and grandchildren. The war made by the Jihad is a very long one indeed. Ask Charles Martel. He was born in 688.
So even if you want no part of my Jihad-sedition law; even if this sort of talk of outlawing speech makes you instinctually wary — I beg you to consider, on your own principles, the damage that could be done, were a regime of stifling PC orthodoxy to confirm its mastery over public debate on the nature of the Islamic religion.
A republic is a bold and wonderful thing: the assertion that even questions as hard as this one, can be properly, wisely, justly decided by the people themselves. No one ever said it would be easy.
]]>
Thus, as I see it, it is a choice between two less than sufficient courses:(a) the continuation of an effort to appoint men and women to the Court who are thought willing to overturn Roe through divisive confirmation proceedings that undermine respect for law and understate the significance of non-abortion issues in a judicial candidate’s evaluation; or
(b) working with a new president who honestly concedes the abortion decision poses serious moral issues which he argues can only be fully and successfully resolved by the mother facing it with the primary obligation of the community seeing to it that she is as well informed as possible in the making of it.
It is a prudential judgment which course is more protective of life.
Frum observes:
Here's what's really going on: Doug Kmiec, a former dean at the Catholic University of America, has decided that quitting Iraq is more important to him than stopping abortion. Fine! His call! It's a free country!
Just say it, man: you oppose the war, and Obama is more likely to end it than McCain (not much more, in my judgment, but there you are). Please, though, abstain from acts of self-deception where abortion is concerned; at least let us be clear about that.
]]>Moreover, in accordance with such principles, those risks should be socialized on a purely voluntary basis, in and through families, churches, and other voluntary institutions established for charitable purposes; there obtain no enforceable claims upon such benefactions, which should alight upon the sick and infirm only insofar as those possessed of health and wealth will it, and only to that degree made possible by the gratuitous movements of their sovereign wills.
Much could be said of this, especially that a species of economistic dogmatism now impels some ranged along the right spectrum of our political culture to war against an inevitably flawed, but fundamentally decent, system, and this in the name of an ideological figment which cannot be translated into reality, and that this intransigence will eventually beget something far worse. The endeavour to fully marketize the domain of health provision, leaving the individual naked, with all of his weaknesses and frailties, before the utterly impersonal and unforgiving mechanisms of the market, petitioning those who clutch their wealth to their breasts like the misers of many a parable for relief, as a pious man might petition the Almighty, will shipwreck on the very structural foundations of modern society. Indeed, the argument has already been sketched:
...since the origin of any thing is, at a minimum, a clue to its nature or essence, we ought to attend to the fact that widespread health provision was originally a ministry of the Church, and founded as a charitable endeavour. Nevertheless, the Church or, more broadly, charitable institutions, can only assume such a tremendous burden - particularly in a more complex modern society - if they can command vastly more social authority than they do presently, exercise more overt social power on the basis of that authority, and command a greater percentage of adherents' resources than those adherents presently provide under our purely voluntaristic models of giving. One cannot recreate a social form without first recreating its conditions of existence.
In reality, total expenditures on health care exceed the wealth commanded by all churches combined; moreover, a perusal of the budgetary statements of the average church - say, a parish like my own - will confirm that there exists no fiscal fat that could be trimmed to pay for 'routine' cancer treatment, let alone every medical necessity that would portend the bankruptcy of a family. The counsel that 'we cannot know unless it has been tried' is not merely an exercise in ideological anachronism, but a declaration that folly is not folly until it has been performed.
]]> Moving onward, of course it cannot be the case that medical need generates an individual claim right, enforceable against any individual who might be supposed to possess the requisite resources. This, not because there obtains a 'right' not to support one's ailing fellows, or to the disposal of every last farthing of one's wealth, but because it would be absurd, contradictory, to have society enforce claims against individual members, when such claims would be both unpredictable and catastrophic. Such a claim-right would enlist society in the destruction of its constituent members, pitting some segment of society against another; and what society can endure if a faction within it claims the right of undermining another? The skein of ordinary and healthy social relations would be rent, and irreparably. But why tarry on this rhetorical trope any longer? No one seriously supposes that such an arrangement would ever be instituted, and it is merely reflective of the histrionics of the sovereign individual when his plenipotentiary powers are challenged.Perhaps, then, there obtain no claims upon society for health provision, just as the libertarian - the dogmatic sort, I should say - asseverates. In that case, it would be perfectly consistent with principle to permit people to perish, willy-nilly: let all men be smitten with disease and infirmity, only touch not the Holy Ark of the individual's sovereign will, and his property rights. This, too, however, would be absurd, and for reasons consonant with those already articulated. If it would be a grievous impairment of the stability and goods of society for any individual to be liable, at any time, for the full expense of some other's infirmities, so also would it be a grievous impairment of society and its goods if the lives and fortunes of its constituent members, individuals and (more importantly) families alike, were to be exposed to the personally and financially ruinous risks of catastrophic, chronic, and unpredictable illness and/or debilitation. In the former scenario, what security in his dealings, plans, and prospects could an individual possess, if at any time, some infirm person could wield the cudgel of the state to secure the means of his care? In the present scenario, then, what surety could any individual, any family, any undertaking, possess, liable as they would be, naked before a pitiless Market, for the entire cost of an infirmity? There could be none, and individuals, families, and their undertakings - businesses and other callings beneficial to society - would stand beneath a proverbial sword of Damocles, and fall to bankruptcy and ruination with regularity. This would foster nothing but instability, inconstancy, a pervasive fear of impassive fate, and the notion that it could be justified by some individual 'right' is merely another claim that society is obligated to enforce the means of its destabilization or dissolution. Let us speak plainly: there exist no rights to the destruction of the social conditions of rights, no rights to destabilize the very foundations of the enforcement of rights-claims.
We must speak, therefore, of a sort of social good, which can be secured only by a collective undertaking, in this instance, private entities which aggregate and pool, thus mitigating, risk. The assertion of a 'right' to a purely individualized system of health provision, such that no wealth need ever be spent involuntarily on the mitigation of the risks and the care of the infirmities of the less fortunate, is another form of the incoherent claim that we ought to collectively enforce a claim-right against collective institutions and agency: society should enforce the claim that there exists no such thing as society. This is a truly peculiar form of intellectual autism.
For those, however, who might find all of these ratiocinations inapposite, there remains a purely pragmatic consideration: the marketization of health provision will exacerbate inequality quite radically, which will be perhaps more destabilizing than our burgeoning economic inequalities, considered in themselves; and confronted by such dismal prospects, people will agitate, not for the old, flawed system of private insurance, but for socialized medicine. And they will receive it. And the sophisters and calculators of the right, ever blinded by some spectral, Cartesian vision of economic rationality, will have enabled it, by making the unreal the enemy of the imperfect, real, and good. It won't be the first time, not by a long shot, and it probably won't be the last time, either.
]]>I want to thank Paul for his leadership and my fellow contributors for all your work. And thanks to our readers, without whom, etc. And once again a hearty thanks and three cheers to Todd McKimmey, our generous site owner.
A happy Mother's Day to all the moms in sound of my cybervoice. And a blessed Pentecost to everyone, too.
]]>Obama rises from political obscurity to verge of history
By CHARLES BABINGTON, Associated Press Writer
"The amazement was on their faces. Hundreds waited for Barack Obama on that evening in South Carolina, 15 weeks ago, to claim victory — a surprising victory, surprisingly large.
"And amazing it was. It made it possible for him to stand today on the verge of being the first black person ever nominated for president by a major party.
]]> "One could guess the thoughts of the blacks and whites in that crowd: Can you believe that our state — South Carolina, first to secede and first to open fire in the Civil War — is now catapulting a black man to the front of the presidential contest in a year that bodes well for Democrats?"'Race doesn't matter,' some began to chant. 'Race doesn't matter!'...
"Now, the entire nation and countless foreigners are absorbing a moment that had seemed decades away, if possible at all. Smart strategists and rank-and-file voters ponder how Obama rose so far so fast, and theories abound. Historians will sort it out someday, but Obama's blend of oratory, biography, optimism and cool confidence come to mind most immediately...
"Maybe the toughest question is this: Is Obama, with his incandescent smile and silky oratory, a once-in-a-century phenomenon who will blast open doors only to see them quickly close on less extraordinary blacks? Or is he the lucky and well-timed beneficiary of racial dynamics that have changed faster than most people realized, a trend that presumably will soon yield more black governors, senators, mayors and council members? Presidential campaigns have destroyed many bright and capable politicians. But there's ample evidence that Obama is something special, a man who makes difficult tasks look easy, who seems to touch millions of diverse people with a message of hope..."
And on and on the puffery goes:
"'He just really electrifies you when you are listening to him, said Lena Bradley, 78, a beauty salon owner in Washington. 'He has something that's leading him.' ...
"Some veteran politicians also see 'something that's leading' Obama, whether they can explain it or not.
"Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill...recalls pulling Obama into a vacant meeting room in Chicago's Union League Club, where both had spoken on a Friday afternoon in November 2006. He felt it was time for his young colleague to decide whether to run for the White House.
"'There are moments in life when you can pick the time,' Durbin said he told Obama. 'But when it comes to running for president, the time can pick you. You've been picked. This is your moment.'
"A short time later, Obama launched his candidacy."
Let me remind you: this is presented not as "opinion," or even "analysis," but as a straight "news" story. From the AP.
I can remember the day that JFK was shot. But I've never seen anything like this.
My favorite detail here is that chant: "race doesn't matter!" I mean, does irony ever get more ironic than that? They might more honestly have chanted "race is all that matters!"
]]>
As regards the new economy of services, high finance, and god-king CEOs, highly remunerative compensation ultimately correlates with cognitive ability - this was the primary thesis of The Bell Curve, for those who remember - and this fact, operating in tandem with deindustrialization and globalization, both increases the rewards accruing to the cognitive elite and decreases returns to the average, who increasingly find themselves in competition with the average masses of nations at much lower levels of economic development. Education can do nothing to alter this reality, inasmuch as cognitive ability is only marginally malleable under environmental influences, if at all. An emphasis upon educational reform in this connection could actually have perverse effects, such as the devaluation of credentials, leading to market demands for ever more credentialization as a condition of employment, and the erection of additional financial barriers to economic advancement, as the demand for higher education drives up the cost, relentlessly. (Snip)In the end, the circle cannot be squared, and the dilemmas of globalization still hold. Structural factors dictate the exacerbation of the new inequality, with all that this entails, and this because those structural factors have essentially marketized heritable qualities not amenable to amelioration; simultaneously, those structural factors have developed concurrently with an increasing pursuit of efficiency through arbitrage and labour substitution.
Are we not doing that with some of the people who are in college now? And furthermore, aren't we shortchanging them when we fail to make allowances for them in the kind of economy we're building? A public schoolteacher friend back in the 1990s railed against free trade agreements because she said these agreements did not consider the interests of US workers who made their living with their hands and backs. It's very easy, it seems to me, for the university-educated meritocratic elite to assume that an economic order in which symbolic analysts are the paradigmatic worker to construct in total innocence a "rational" system that favors their interests, at the expense of manual laborers who are by no means dumb, but whose intelligence is not geared toward academic achievement. Indeed, is that not what we have done?The supposition that makes that kind of economic order seem just is the belief that cognition, and improving cognitive skills, is simply a matter of running people through a diploma mill -- and the conviction that anybody who wants to succeed in school badly enough can. Again, this is what you get when those who have been genetically blessed with cognitive capability -- intelligence, in other words -- don't grasp how unearned their advantages are. (Snip)
What I'm talking about is the taboo we have against admitting that some people are smarter than others, and the contemporary American disdain for the dignity of manual labor, and the gnostic egalitarianism of US culture, which holds that we create our own realities by force of will.
This ideology allows those who have the cognitive abilities to succeed in a meritocratic, information-age economy to disavow social responsibility for those who are not as gifted. This is not to say that the ungifted are to be objects of pity, nor is it to say that they have no responsibility at all for themselves. It is simply, I think, to realize that our ideology prevents us from acknowledging certain truths about the way the world is, and ordering our system around reality, not false idealism that ends up breaking people like Ms. L, and turning people like Prof. X into cynics.
Now, it was assuredly not my intention to post an entry comprised largely of quoted sections of other essays, my own and Dreher's. Rather, it was my intention to post such an entry in order to reiterate that this particular confluence of politics, economics, and contemporary superstition is engendering a legitimation crisis; the contradictions are sharpening, as the distance between the Candy Land rhetoric of the globalizers and the cosmopolitans, and the economic substrate, opens into a great fissure, a San Andreas fault in political economy; the contradictions are sharpening, as the gulf between our romantic/gnostic notions of intelligence, aptitude, and educability, and the pitiless realities of IQ and economic opportunity, opens out upon a fathomless abyss. Such contradictions are always resolved; the only questions concern the timing and the means. An earlier resolution, or even a diminution, is to be preferred, as not even the passage of time and the discharge of copious quantities of evasive verbiage can conform the unalterable realities to the fantasy. As regards the means by which a resolution, or diminution, might be effected - well, as I've argued previously, on occasions too numerous to recount, we could sacrifice the ideological illusions of the establishment to the well-being of our people and the greater stability of our representative institutions, or diminish both in order to perpetuate the myth.
There are no prizes, beyond understanding, for those whose prognostications of the course America will pursue prove correct. Well, understanding and a rarefied aesthetic contemplation of the disjunction between ideology and reality, a sort of stupefied disbelief that our illusions have endured as long as they have, coupled with a bemused curiosity as to how long they can be perpetuated.
]]>to this:
]]> And it took about another hundred years for it descend to this:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3jzSh_MLNcY
Sorry, you'll have to follow the link, on that one. Can't embed it. The Universal Music Group forbids it.
Kanye West is, after all, a valuable commercial property - unlike Gregorian Chant, or even Gustav Mahler.
It's all so sad.
]]>I'm looking for something to add to his essay on the utter insanity of "No Child Left Behind": "The age of educational romanticism" - and, perhaps, in due course, I'll come up with a relevant anecdote or two, since I was working in the trenches of the public schools, while he observed from on high.
But, in the meantime, all I can say is: read the whole thing.
]]> One favorite bit:"Elite white guilt explains much about all kinds of social policy from the last half of the 1960s onward, but especially about education. Until the 1960s, white educators and politicians could look at a class of white children in which a number of students were doing poorly and shrug. The schools try to teach everyone, but some kids can’t handle the material. That’s just the way the things are; it is not a problem that can be fixed. But when the class consisted of black students who were doing poorly, that reaction was not acceptable. These were children growing up in a society where all the odds had been stacked against them, and their failings couldn’t be passed off as 'just the way things are.' Elite white guilt made it impossible to say that a lot of black children were going to continue to fail in school and there’s nothing anybody could do about it. Once it could not be said of black children, neither could it be said of white children. In that context, educational romanticism did not just become fashionable during the 1960s. It became emotionally mandatory.
"And so, beginning with the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965, the federal government embarked on a series of major efforts to improve education for disadvantaged children that culminated in 2002 with the No Child Left Behind Act. Surveying that history, an analogy occurred to me that I offer as a speculative proposition: America’s federal education policy as of 2008 is at about the same place that the Soviet Union’s economic policy was in 1990."
Truer words were never spoken.
]]>For that reason, I suggest that divorced people should pay higher taxes - say a 5% kicker on top of their income taxes - than those who are childlessly single and those who are married to their first spouse. If fault is found in a particular divorce the higher tax rates could apply to the at-fault spouse. If the divorce is no-fault, the higher tax rates could apply to either or both spouses: to whomever chose to pursue the divorce.
How long should the higher tax rate last? Ideally it would last for as long as the damage inflicted on the commons lasted. But given the realities of life in this fallen and mortal world, we are unable to levy taxes on the dead.
]]>If you are in the Las Vegas area, I encourage you to attend. It is free and open to the public.
This is as good a time as any to announce that I have signed a contract with Brazos Press to publish a book about my pilgrimage. I am just about finished with the nearly 65,000 word manuscript. It will be released in November 2008, with the tentative title, Confessions of a Vain Philosopher: Reflections on My Return to the Catholic Church.
]]>
As Ezra Klein notes, this is health insurance for people who don’t need health care. It relies on the idea that insurance should be based on actuarial principles, tying cost to individual risk. Therefore the private market (with products like health savings accounts) can be a very good deal to the young and the healthy, but does very little to those in most need of health care. It is a classic example of where the free market simply does not work, and can be highly unethical. Instead of actuarial insurance, we should strive for social insurance, which is basically risk pooling: the young and healthy subsidize the old and sick, secure in the knowledge that they will be taken care of in a similar situation.
Part of the reason genetic testing is controversial is because by providing greater information granularity it is detrimental to 'insurance' understood under one voice (that of providing low-cost health care to people who otherwise could not afford it) and yet beneficial to 'insurance' under other voices (that of providing on-average-more-expensive care but with protection from catastrophic loss, sometimes employing diagnostic/preventive measures).