Why They Hate Him

I wrote a bit the other day about the ongoing hate speech trial of Dutch politician Geert Wilders.  The Wilders trial, of course, encompasses issues broader than  freedom of speech.  There's an apparently credible allegation (I can't really judge, other than that the Dutch media is covering it in earnest) that his trial has been orchestrated by his political opponents, who hate him perhaps more than his Islamist enemies do.  Despite the fact that his party's platform on every subject but one is mainstream European social-democratic -- which is to say hard Left by American standards -- he and his party are regularly described as "far right" by their opponents and the media.  Why the disconnect? It comes down to that one subject left out: immigration, which in the Netherlands mostly means Muslim immigration.

Wilders is loathed by his political opponents because he dares to argue that European nations should be proud of their cultures and should pursue policies of immigration and assimilation that will maintain and strengthen those cultures for the future.  Why on Earth is this controversial to the point of being labeled hate speech?  Firstly, the practical matter: there is simply no other way for a nation like the Netherlands to remain anything you or I would recognize as Dutch while continuing to welcome immigrants. Secondly, being a culturally-defined nation is one half of being a nation-state, and such cultural definition is positively uncontroversial elsewhere.  The Arab League is made up of 21 countries that proudly declare themselves Arab nations and seek to maintain and strengthen their Arab cultural identity.  The Organization of the Islamic Conference consists of 57 nations that declare themselves officially Muslim and enshrine Islamic jurisprudence in their constitutions.  Is it really so offensive then for a Dutch political party to argue that the Netherlands should be proud of her Dutch culture and Enlightenment political philosophy?  If this is hate speech, Europe is surely doomed.

On Education, and Essentials Thereof

I spent the past long weekend visiting a dear friend, an old Army buddy from all the way back in Basic training, Empty-Handed Army, as well as his lovely and perceptive wife.  We three spent nearly the whole waking portion of three days in deep discussion of a huge variety of topics, usually approaching them from a philosophical angle well outside my own comfort zone of practical applications and real-world historical proofs.  The topic of education popped up again and again, mirroring and developing conversations I'd had with friends during my past month on leave.  What are the goals of modern education?  Who ought to be seeking higher education?  How much does public policy contribute to educational success?  Previous conversations with a wide variety of educators -- Masters of Education students, inner-city "alternative" school teachers, radical unschooling homeschoolers --  all came back to the same point:  the overwhelming contributor to education success is cultural while public policy plays an important but fundamentally marginal role.  I was reminded of all of this by a reader comment shared by Jay Nordlinger:

If you asked a thousand people at random about their favorite teacher, how many would bring up how well the teacher employed education software, or whether she had a master’s degree from an ed school, or whether she took the class on fancy field trips, etc.?

To which Nordlinger follows up a quote from Dr. Gerrit Jan van Heuven Goedhart, a former UN High Commissioner for Refugees:

Many years ago I participated in a discussion on the problem of international education. After many experts had presented their complicated theories, an old headmaster of a certain school got up and quietly said: “There is only one system of education, through love and one’s own example.”

Nordlinger responds, "I don’t think I have ever read anything truer on the subject of education."  I can only agree.  The children of the radical unschoolers I know are well-adjusted and whip-smart.  I have no doubt at all that my other friend's inner-city alternative school students would end up the same if they were brought up in a similar loving environment with good examples, no matter what the outward form of their schooling.  Public education policy cannot solve cultural failings that are antithetical to education.  Meanwhile, a functioning culture can mold successful youngsters even in the most dismal of school settings (cough cough Asians cough).  All of our arguments over education policy that are based on the presumption that the right policy will produce success are just wasted breath.

On Mom's Basement

Over brunch with a college friend, the Soprano in the Real World, we chatted a bit about changing family structures in America.  An interesting point came up: American society in general is not particularly aware of how much we've lost as a culture with the loss of the extended multigenerational family and the enshrining of the nuclear family as the archetype.  Specifically we spoke of the loss of support structures for young people and particularly young parents, and how our culture strangely treats the 1950's-era nuclear family archetype as if it were something deeply traditional, when it isn't at all.  Yet there's very little general awareness that this significant cultural change even occurred, certainly far less than that of other contemporary changes such as women entering the workforce in large numbers.

Also, there's a really strange disconnect at work, where youth are expected to be more or less socially independent of their parents at the age of 18, while it is acceptable for them to remain economically dependent until their mid-20's at least.  I mean, which 26-year-old does our society consider more respectable? The auto mechanic who lives with his folks because he's still single and thus has no particular reason not to, or the grad student who is entering his eighth year of spending other peoples' money?  Living with one's parents in adulthood is often interpreted as a sign of hopeless immaturity, and yet our society doesn't seem to expect financial independence much before the age of 30.  This is almost a reversal of the situation that would have been the norm a century ago, where an 18-year-old might quickly be expected to become a productive member of society (and indeed likely be engaged in productive work much earlier), but would not be expected to move out of his parents' home until he married.

On Congressional Incompetence

Does it strike anyone else that there's insufficient outrage about the complete sham the Congress has become? It has become routine for Representatives and Senators to debate and vote on bills they cannot possibly have read. Congressional leaders sneer dismissively when legislators suggest they'd like a chance to do so. This is appallingly antirepublican, undermining the people's sovereignty and replacing it with a shadow oligarchy of congressional staffers. It's been going on for a long time, of course, but it seems to have reached a new level with the national embarrassment that was the "debate" over the Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade bill.

Pushing for a Read the Bill Amendment seems over the top at first, but then again, an entire branch of our government has more or less abdicated their responsibilities, so perhaps a constitutional amendment isn't overkill. It would certainly have some nice follow-on effects, since it would greatly increase the incentive for concision in legislation, and force legislators to spend more time actually considering legislation and less time at bare-knuckles politicking.

On Free-Range Kids

There are a lot of uninteresting one-cause blogs out there where strident people exorcise their own demons by beating dead hobbyhorses for the edification of the rest of us. Lenore Skenazy's Free Range Kids isn't one of them. It operates on a pretty simple thesis: American parents are driving themselves crazy with concern and smothering their children with illusory safety, all while America is as safe a place for children as it was in 1970. Quite simply, she's out to change the way Americans raise their kids. This interview with Salon lays out the argument pretty nicely. A few excerpts:

What are the statistics about crimes against children? What is the news that we're not hearing?

The crime rate today is equal to what it was back in 1970. In the '70s and '80s, crime was climbing. It peaked around 1993, and since then it's been going down.

If you were a child in the '70s or the '80s and were allowed to go visit your friend down the block, or ride your bike to the library, or play in the park without your parents accompanying you, your children are no less safe than you were.

But it feels so completely different, and we're told that it's completely different, and frankly, when I tell people that it's the same, nobody believes me. We're living in really safe times, and it's hard to believe.

[...]

Then there are products out there that will prevent [anything] from happening. Here is a helmet your child could wear when she starts to toddle, lest she fall over and split her head open and die, or suffer traumatic brain injury.

Kids have been toddling -- it's a whole stage we actually call toddlerhood -- ever since we started walking upright, which has been a pretty successful experiment for the human species. But now you're supposed to think that it's too dangerous for a kid to do without extra protection and without extra supervision and without this stupid thing you can buy.

There are kneepads that you're supposed to put on your kid because crawling is considered too dangerous for the knees, as if knees weren't built for crawling. That's why they're cute and dimpled and fat.

Everything that we do has a product that we can buy that's supposed to make our kids safer, as if they're born without the requisite accoutrements. Then there is something we can do as parents to be more careful, to be more protective. The assumption behind all of that is that if you are a good parent, you should be protecting your child from 100 percent of anything that could possibly go wrong, and if not, you will be blamed and Larry King will shake his finger at you.

I'm probably one of the few single young men reading Skenazy's blog, but I was a Free-Range Kid, and I'll likely have a couple myself someday. Beyond that, the child-safety hysteria is a microcosm of larger societal forces. It is fed by the same psychological quirk that cripples security planning and counterterrorism, namely that human beings are pretty terrible at internalizing probabilities, and particularly terrible at estimating probabilities of things that scare us. Really, Lenore Skenazy is the Bruce Schneier of child-rearing.

On Legalization

I don't think any single writer has shaped my political philosophy as much as world traveler and prison doctor Anthony Daniels, better known pseudonymously as Theodore Dalrymple. It was Dalrymple in such books as Life at the Bottom; Our Culture, What's Left of It; and Not With A Bang But a Whimper who has meticulously proven to me that I am in no way a libertarian and encouraged me to embrace the label of "conservative", though he never labels himself such. The Skeptical Doctor blog provides a convenient portal to Dalrymple's writings in various journals, and this morning reposted his 1997 City Journal article against the legalization of drugs. If any single essay could present a microcosm of Dalrymple's political philosophy, this might be it:

The idea that freedom is merely the ability to act upon one’s whims is surely very thin and hardly begins to capture the complexities of human existence; a man whose appetite is his law strikes us not as liberated but enslaved. And when such a narrowly conceived freedom is made the touchstone of public policy, a dissolution of society is bound to follow. No culture that makes publicly sanctioned self-indulgence its highest good can long survive: a radical egotism is bound to ensue, in which any limitations upon personal behavior are experienced as infringements of basic rights. Distinctions between the important and the trivial, between the freedom to criticize received ideas and the freedom to take LSD, are precisely the standards that keep societies from barbarism.

We'll Call It "Amsterdam Syndrome"

I don't think we've talked about Geert Wilders on the blog. He's a Dutch parliamentarian who believes Western civilization is something worth preserving and that, therefore, current Dutch policy of allowing uncontrolled mass immigration of vocal and occasionally violent advocates of a pre-modern worldview might need a second look. This opinion, of course, has inevitably branded him "far-right" in the eyes of the global media, and gotten him banned from British soil as a hate-mongering racist.

The latest outrage has come after Wilders compared the mindset of Europe's elites to that of the Dutch journalist Joanie de Rijke, who has spoken repeatedly in defense of the Afghan Taliban fighters who abducted and serially raped her for six days. It's a dark, dark metaphor for the future of the West.

On Jihad

Fantastic interview from PajamasTV, with Walid Shoebat and Kamal Saleem, a pair of reformed terrorists. Please do watch the whole thing.

My first thought is a caveat: I do think these men overstate the immediate threat of terrorist attack. Recognize that they're coming from a very particular background, and even if they've rejected the ideologies of their upbringing, it's clear their default level of paranoia about the world is still set at "Palestinian". So while you take their predictions with a small grain of salt, their observations are pure gold (and you'll see by the end of my thoughts here why terrorist attack in and of itself isn't even the most serious issue).

The issue is at heart a conflict of culture, which is inextricably bound with the issue of religion. Both men blame the comparative decline of Christian chaplaincy in American prisons for the increasing radicalization of Muslim prison proselytes, such as those recently arrested plotting to attack synagogues in the Bronx. Shoebat is perfectly frank: the cure for terrorism is Christ.

"When I heard that, 'offer yourselves as a living sacrifice'... it is easy to die: you blow yourself up, you think you're going to go to Heaven. Now it's more difficult to live for the truth, and to live is to sacrifice... I spoke at the Air Force Academy, and I said that conversion to Christianity is one of the best methods that I've known to change terrorists, the media just went wild with articles that we're proselytizing at the Air Force Academy. We weren't proselytizing at the Air Force Academy, we were saying we need to proselytize to the Muslims."

That of course is an even more distressing proposition, from the mainstream media perspective.

I'm struck by the force of their argument that the "jihad" is about Jew-hatred above all else. It's just not part of the narrative, even though it's blindingly obvious when you look at it. Why did the "Newburgh Four" want to bomb Bronx synagogues, of all targets? Because of "Zionism"? Even if New York Jews did support "Zionism", why on Earth should that motivate American converts? And we should never forget how the butchers of Mumbai devoted a large part of their efforts to tracking down and torturing to death the sole rabbi in a city of 14 million.

All of this fits into the most important point Saleem and Shoebat make, which is to stress the centrality of the "cultural jihad". As the irreplaceable Oriana Fallaci never tired of pointing out, jihadist preachers boast openly that they will use the West's freedoms to destroy it. By claiming every right, demanding every entitlement, and litigating every grievance, they will make for Islam a preeminent position in the culture. And does anyone doubt that they have? As Shoebat points out, could Christopher Hitchens have published A||@h Is Not Great? The film Kingdom of Heaven portrayed the Church as genocidal and the Knights Templar as rapacious beasts, yet the likes of CAIR still claimed offense that the depiction of Salah al-Din was not quite saintly enough. And who could have ever thought that Britain would be mulling the merits of allowing a parallel legal system based on sharia? People have taken positions pro and contra, yet where's the "are you bloody serious?!?" that they're even having the discussion at all?

The cultural jihad is a totally different beast than counterterrorism. Successful terrorist attacks are a mixed blessing in the grand scheme of the jihad, after all, as they risk waking the infidels up to the threat. Many jihadist preachers have earned the coveted label "moderate" by renouncing terrorism not as a great evil, but as counterproductive to the cause. Preaching the cultural jihad, after all, breaks no laws, and if Islamists can breed, bribe, and bully their way to cultural dominance, what need is there for terror? And after sharia is enacted through the success of the cultural jihad, beheading nonbelievers will not be an act of jihad. It will simply be proper rule of law.

In this, as in so many metrics of the decline of the West, the United States is perhaps a generation behind Europe. Perhaps the declaration of the Salafi Emirate of the Netherlands or the Mamlakat al-Wahhabiyyah al-Britaniyyah will wake up the rest of those countries that still stand for Western civilization, but I'm not confident. Terrorism will never be an existential threat to the West. The worst imaginable terrorist scenario -- a mushroom cloud over Manhattan or London or Paris -- would do nothing but strengthen our resolve if we still had any. The success or failure of the cultural jihad will determine the future of the West, and if the jihad wins, we will have only ourselves to blame.

Advice for Youth in These Times

As summarized by a biographer of the obscure early-20th century ideologue Albert Jay Nock:

Ransack the past for your values, establish a coherent worldview, depend neither on society nor on government insofar as circumstances permit, keep your tastes simple and inexpensive, and do what you have to do to remain true to yourself.

Sounds good to me.

Well, There's One Way to Look at Things

On the bright side, the end of civilization should be good for the Republicans.

So what do I propose for a Republican Party that will be relevant in the future? I’m thinking we need to work towards becoming a loose confederation of warlords. In the post-apocalyptic wasteland, resources will be scarce and the strong will crush the weak — and frankly, those are conditions in which Republicans should thrive. The Republican Party will need to cement its rule through force, destroy the weak, and take their resources. Back to basics for the party, really.

Creeping Totalitarianism Isn't Funny

There was a time not long ago when it was utterly beyond the pale in American politics to suggest, for example, that one's habitual claims of being one election away from emigration might not be the strongest evidence of a citizen's patriotism. Dissent is patriotic, we were incessantly lectured, even the sort of patriotism that only considers your country worth living in when your team is in charge. Well, that's all out the window now, as Wanda Sykes, in a "comedy" routine at the White House Press Correspondents' dinner, (in which the comedians traditionally roast the sitting president), blusters that Rush Limbaugh is a treasonous terrorist who ought to be tortured. Oh, and she wishes he would die. Painfully. All this because he has stated that he hopes Obama fails. I genuinely can't understand why the Obots have such a hard time understanding this: did these people spend eight years dutifully wishing success upon the policies of George W. Bush? Did any of us expect them to? Good grief! Sykes:

Rush Limbaugh said he hopes this administration fails. So you're saying, 'I hope America fails', you're, like, 'I don't care about people losing their homes, their jobs, our soldiers in Iraq'. He just wants the country to fail.

Leftists blithely equate one politician's ambitions with the entirety of the American enterprise, yet seem completely baffled when people suggest there's something creepily totalitarian about this. This is the definition of totalitarianism, after all, the idea that the entire nation is represented in this one man. I fear for the future.

John Stossel

Does America have a more entertaining libertarian iconoclast than John Stossel? I doubt it. He's been preaching common sense and personal responsibility to America's loneliest timeslot for 18 years. Check out last night's Stossel special "You Can't Even Talk About It", where he argues that anti-discrimination laws support discrimination, we should irradiate more of our food, emergency services should bill people for preventable rescues, we should eat more endangered animals, steroids should be permitted in sports, and we do too much for the elderly. He makes each of these arguments very convincingly and in classic Stossel style, the strongest points for his position generally come straight from the interviewees representing the opposing view. I'd elaborate on the arguments, but you'd be better off watching them yourselves. I'd particularly recommend the "Rescuing Risk-Takers" and "Elderly Rob the Younger Generation" segments. The unthinking sense of entitlement on display in both segments is illuminating.

On Wildfires

California's burning down. Again. Yawn. My apologies to Californians, but the rest of the country's got to be agreeing with me on this: shouldn't wildfires be part of the weather segment rather than a headline story? Don't peg me as a Midwestern chauvinist here, though. I get equally bored by "Flooding in Midwestern Floodplains!" headlines.

FuturePundit does share some interesting thoughts on the wildfires, and throws out some random thoughts on things we could be doing to stop them:

Last night a couple of guys were telling me exactly what I was thinking already: Extremely fast methods of spotting fires in early stages along with very fast reaction times for helicopter tankers could nip somem fires in the bud. Time is of the essence. Could cameras trained on hillsides with image processing software spot fires 10 minutes earlier on average? Then there is the effect of absolutely massive efforts. If 40 or 50 old jumbo jets were converted into water carriers could a fire get put out even after it has reached a couple of hundred acres?

Decline and fall quote of the day:

The America of the 1950s, given such tech, would have tried. The America of today - not so much.

On "Boycotts", Fascism, and the Israel Obsession

If liberal fascism is fascism with a smiley face, this is what liberal Kristallnacht looks like (via PowerLine):



French activists "boycott" Israeli products by clearing a supermarket's shelves of everything labeled "made in Israel". The French have redefined sabotage as a "workers' strike", and now they're redefining destruction of property as a "boycott".

I've got to admit, I don't really get the Israel obsession. Anti-Israel activists assiduously insist that it's the policies of the state of Israel they oppose, and their rage has nothing to do with anti-Semitism. But that argument is increasingly difficult to swallow. If it's the state they oppose, why do "pro-Palestinian" activists always seem to protest outside synagogues and Jewish cultural centers rather than Israeli embassies or consulates? Besides, even if we grant (and I don't!) every argument against the Jewish state, there are unconscionably oppressive regimes and persecuted stateless peoples all over the world. Pro-Tibet rallies aren't anywhere nearly as anti-Chinese as pro-Palestinian demonstrations are anti-Jewish (zombie has an interesting comparison here).

Most neglected of all, of course, are the world's unluckiest: those anonymous multitudes who have the misfortune of being oppressed by "leaders" from among their own number. I speak primarily of Africa, where colonialism never really ended, but was handed from reasonably competent foreign colonialists to incompetent local colonialists. It's crimespeak to say it of course, but even in the darkest days of Apartheid, black South Africans were better off than their northerly neighbors now are under Mugabe. World opinion rightly condemned the Apartheid regime; why are we so much more comfortable when the oppressors look like the oppressed?

Grumpy Old Brits on the Nanny State

The BBC's "Grumpy Old Men" share their dretful scorn regarding the British Nanny State (via Professor Bainbridge). Welcome to the future (PG-13 for language) :

If the Italian Postal Service Built a Car

Chrysler has been "rescued" by Fiat and the U.S. government. The synergy of Italian administration and Beltway engineering will no doubt take the automotive world by storm.

For a preview of government-built cars from decades past, Top Gear drives the automotive masterpieces of the Eastern Bloc:






Come what may, I will never drive a government-built car.

On Pigs and Panic

While the WHO raises the H1N1 situation to level 5 of 6, signifying that a pandemic is imminent, others blow it all off as a media-driven panic. And then there's the guy who argues that panic is precisely the right response.

It's an interesting argument. Panic is a negative word because in most scenarios, panic causes a person to make foolish and possibly dangerous decisions. In the case of epidemic disease, however, panic is precisely the correct response. Everything an irrational fear of disease leads us to do -- avoid personal contact and close quarters, practice extreme personal hygeine, and avoid public places in general -- are all actually effective at preventing the spread of disease. Besides, people don't change their behavior very easily. The overwhelming majority of Americans are responding to this story, if at all, by washing their hands more. This is, of course, precisely what they ought to be doing, and exactly what they wouldn't be doing if all they'd heard was a calm and reasonable statement from the CDC. Even the small percentage who are truly panicked about swine flu are maybe going to pull the kids of school for a week, avoid unnecessary trips, and wear surgical masks in public. The opportunity cost of a disease panic is pretty small, and it pales compared to the cost of a serious pandemic.

Time for the flip side. You've noticed that I'm agreeing that panic on the part of individuals doesn't hurt, and could actually help a lot if the pandemic turns out to be severe. Panic on the part of governments, on the other hand, produces exactly the sort of results one could expect. Egypt has enraged their Christian population by declaring a complete cull of the nation's swine herd, despite assurance from the WHO that swine flu has nothing to do with pigs. Other governments have recommended against travel to the New World and some are mulling full travel bans. See, influenza's a nasty disease, and one of the nastiest things about it is that it's most highly contagious well before it shows any symptoms, making quarantine of the sick pointless. Complete quarantine is the only surefire protection, but such a move could, if the SARS epidemic is any guide, be devastating to a world economy already struggling.

American Stonehenge

Okay, I've already 'fessed up that I'm a sucker for the totally random roadside monuments that add a delightful quirkiness to these United States. SPAM Museum? Been there. Wall Drug? I know it well. World's Largest Ball of Twine? It's on the list. So I'm appalled, appalled to find out that I have lived my life in blithe ignorance of the Georgia Guidestones. Five sixteen-foot granite steles, inscribed with vaguely creepy multilingual New Age advice to the survivors of civilizations' collapse, towering over the hills of northeast Georgia. Built for the psseudonymous client R.C. Christian, a transparent reference to Christian Rosenkreuz, the founder of the mysterious Rosicrucians. How did I not know this existed?? Well, my ignorance has been remedied, and unless something far more compelling comes up (unlikely!), I'll be driving up to Elberton next weekend to see these in person. I'll post some pictures.

To get a bit more serious, what really excites me about this monument are the multilingual inscriptions in granite. No matter the zaniness of the text, these could be very useful to future archeologists. I just wish they had chosen a broader spread of linguistic families for the main text. English, Spanish, Swahili, Hindi, Hebrew, Arabic, Chinese, and Russian break down to just four language families. I do like the touch of incorporating the ancient scripts as well, although a longer and less abstract text would really be a favor to the Michael Ventrises of the future.

Maybe I'll make a lifelong hobby out of engraving multi-lingual texts on stone and burying them for the benefit of future classicists. Hey, there are sillier hobbies out there.

UPDATE: Really, considering my previous post, I can't believe I didn't draw the connection. I guess I'm just in an apocalyptic end-of-civilization sort of mood. My griping post on the misuse of the word "apocalypse" will wait for another day.

There's Bad News...

... and more bad news. What a depressing news day. If you believe there's a glimmer of hope for the economy, you're not just hopelessly wrong, you're probably making it even worse. The Taliban are within striking distance of Islamabad, and Pakistanis just can't bring themselves to care. Oh yeah, and the swine flu will surely kill us all. On the off chance it doesn't, of course, worldwide food riots and geomagnetic storms should do their part in the next few years to help ensure the end of civilization. Good riddance.

Just Sayin'

You know, there was a time not too long ago when strategists contemplating a strike on declared enemies of the U.S. would not have had to concern themselves overly much that the killing of treasonous American citizens who had joined them would cause a "political nightmare". Just sayin'.