Year: 2013

The Arab Crack-Up: Are New States on the Way?

Brandon Christensen Current Events , , , , , ,

Let us hope so, but I won’t hold my breath. Sharmine Narwani thinks otherwise. She argues that both Western states and “the locals” are now looking at more decentralization in the Middle East as a viable option:

The Mideast will one day need to make region-wide border corrections, but to be successful, it must do so entirely within an indigenously determined process. The battles heating up in Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, Yemen, Bahrain and elsewhere are a manifestation of a larger fight between two “blocs” that seek entirely different regional outcomes – one of these being the borders of a new Middle East.

The rest of the article is fairly atrocious, but it goes without saying that she should read (ha ha) my musings on how to go about decentralizing in a cool, calm and collected manner. Here is the shorter version of my argument: the West should emphatically not go around breaking up the states of the Middle East into smaller ones, but it should recognize breakaway regions as soon as they, uh, break away. This’ll give these states a little bit of breathing room on the international scene and deter older states from trying to reclaim their old territory.

Не все так просто в сказочной стране

Evgenii Grigorev Current Events , , ,

Привет друзья! У меня для вас, пусть и с некоторым запозданием, феерические новости с родины водки, медведей и балалаек. Как известно, в каждой нормальной стране есть Правительство и Оппозиция. Те, кто согласен, и те, кто против. Наша страна ничуть не хуже всех прочих стран мира, так что недовольные текущим политическим режимом есть и в России. Наиболее популярный деятель, как многие наверно знают (его имя довольно известное и часто мелькает в зарубежных газетах как “лидера сопротивления” и “последнего оплота демократического общества без жуликов и воров”) – это Навальный. Лицо и двигатель оппозиции и сопротивления текущему политическому курсу. Так вот, его осудили на пять лет по какой-то статье о воровстве, которое он совершил много лет назад. Фактически, нашему оппозиционному движению отрубили голову. А всадник без головы существует только в сказках! Многие будут утверждать, мол, осудили за дело, так как действительно украл заготовленный лес на большую сумму денег. Но уж больно силен политический аромат у всей этой каши. Безусловно, осудить лидера оппозиции на длительный срок – это выгодно текущему правительству, особенно учитывая, что Навальный помимо своей оппозиционной деятельности баллотировался в мэры Москвы. Параллельно выяснилось, что предвыборная кампания Навального финансируется из каких-то странных источников, не имеющих отношения к России. Дело в том, что в нашей стране есть закон, по которому все те, кто участвуют в выборах на какой-нибудь руководящий государственный пост не должны иметь источников финансирования предвыборной кампании из-за границы. А тут получается, что весь наш чистый, непорочный и “несправедливо осужденный” оппозиционер, пример для подражания, не такой уж и чистый перед законом.

В общем, совершенно все перепуталось. Какая сейчас в нашей стране ситуация по факту:

1. Полумертвая оппозиция во главе с осужденным Навальным

2. Охлаждение отношений с Америкой по причине бегства Сноудена

3. Несколько сомнительных приговоров по резонансным уголовным делам

Таким образом, разброд и шатание в стране. Я не знаю, что из всего этого может произойти. Народ сомневается в правильности решений правительства, сопротивляться уже вроде как нечем. Есть замечательная русская поговорка: “беда никогда не приходит одна”. Вот так и есть все на самом деле.

Little House of Horrors on the Prairie

muricaderp Economics, History, Links

For once, I relay a sick tale that might be about Dennis Rader but in fact is not. Rather, it is about:

a picture of the costs and risks of isolation that never made it into the book series: A baby brother who died at 9 months. A miserable year working and living in an Iowa tavern. A pair of innkeepers who murdered guests and buried them out back. Another pioneer couple who boarded with them during the Long Winter whose attitudes were far more whining than stoic.

Oh beautiful, for specious skies, for amber waves of historical revisionism, for purple prose, volume upon volume of it, above the goober-planted plain. I think I’ll continue to let other people read the Little House on the Prairie series and report back. I never had high expectations for it, but neither did I have any idea that it was so widely regarded, in extreme cases even by publishers, as hackneyed, propagandistic dreck. The back story, though, is quite the maudlin treasury of Randian tropes. Rule of thumb; if it’s derogatory and it’s been said about libertarians, it was probably both lived and said by Laura Ingalls Wilder, her daughter, and her daughter’s lawyer. Read it and smirk.

Eye Candy

Brandon Christensen History , , , ,

Just below the fold…

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Foreign Languages and Self-Delusion in America

Jacques Delacroix Current Events , , , , , ,

I was going to write a book about the topic of foreign language acquisition and about the false stories connected to it. At least, I was going to write a longish essay. It does not look like it’s going to happen: I am too old; I have too many unwritten books already; I am slow; and there are too many women needing my attention.*

First, the context, I believe that every nation has its own specific, common form of mental health challenge. I don’t mean a kind of mental health problem unknown elsewhere; I mean a kind of mental health problem more common in the country of focus than elsewhere. Usually, it’s not a severe mental illness because, if it were, the nation would not have survived. It’s more like a neurosis than a form of psychosis.

So, as an example taken at random, the French form of insanity is the widespread belief that their nation is important in the world. Note that there is a sort of germ of truth in this delusion: France was an important country in the eighteenth century. Then, came the Revolution and then came Napoleon and then, the s— hit the fan and it has never stopped since.

There are several such American delusions. The most important – because it is so widespread as to be nearly universal among the US-born – concerns the mastery of foreign languages: Native-born Americans who were nearly all monolingual, or semi-lingual, until recently**, strongly believe that the world is full of people who know many languages. On the heels of this, they also secretly believe that- had they been given a fair chance – they too would be multilingual.

In support of my allegation, I bring the fact that popular authors, best-selling writers, take it for granted that American readers will not experience as a bump in the road of story telling any absurd assertion concerning language mastery. Below, an illustrative anecdote.

On p. 30 of his popular action novel Choke Point, best-selling author Ridley Pearson shows us a Chinese heroine who speaks routinely in Dutch and who, he mentions casually, also speaks “better than she write”: Italian, Russian and Arabic. Fortunately, she is also “fluent” in German. Count them; that’s six languages. In the remainder of the novel, she communicates quickly in English with one of her buddies. That’s seven language, which seems to be, somehow, the magic number.

There is no such person anywhere in the world. There is no one who is at ease speaking seven languages. There is no one who speaks seven languages even moderately well. It’s an urban myth. (That is, “speak” beyond saying, “Bring me more beer, please.” I can learn to say that in nearly any language in ten minutes. This makes me multilingual?)

On the next page of the same book, an Egyptian overhears someone say something in Farsi and reports it to the police.

Here is the problem: The Egyptian’s native language has to be Arabic. He might understand Farsi, but he is no more likely to than I. In fact, he is a little less likely than I am to understand Farsi. Farsi is related to English, and to French (and to Icelandic and to Bengali). It would be easier for me to learn Farsi than it would be for the Egyptian. Farsi is related to Arabic only in the trivial sense that all human languages are related, somewhere. I suspect that what confused Ridley is the fact that Farsi is written in a modified Arabic script. It does not mean that the languages sound alike at all. Vietnamese is written in a modified Roman alphabet. It does not sound like Latin (or like French, or like Italian). And, by the way, modern Turkish is written in a modified Swedish version of the pan-European Roman alphabet. This does not imply that Swedes can eavesdrop on conversations between Istanbul rug salesmen.

Of course, it’s easy to forgive this novelist for his rank and deep linguistic ignorance (which he spreads, by the way, to his millions of receptive, unwary readers). The question is: Why does he go there at all? The statement about “Italian, Russian, and Arabic” plays no further part in the novel. He uses it only to paint a portrait. It’s a false portrait. Does this big-time, rich novelist not know that he knows nothing or little on the topic of languages? And why does he want to pretend that he does ? Does he pretend to himself or only to his readers. My guess is: to himself. It’s only a guess but I have been around the likes of him. Incidentally, the book is well written is most other respects. The author is no slouch in his own language, English.

This American false belief is contagious. Once, at a social function, another guest insisted on sitting near me during dinner. He wanted to speak French to me. He spoke to me throughout the dinner. Soon, I tried to get away but I failed. The sounds he made resembled French. However, I had no idea what he was saying. I was like a make-believe language children invent among themselves. The strange thing about this self-deluded middle-aged man is that I am sure he was at least bilingual.

He was a Hungarian who had lived in the US for forty years. He spoke Hungarian (Magyar) as a matter of course. His occupation required that he write at least simple English. He spoke English well but with an accent (as do I). When he advertised his electrician’s services on the radio, he mentioned that he was “fluent in six languages.” He did this although multilingualism was not relevant to the services he offered. (In my area, English and Spanish are relevant, and little else.) As a bilingual, he should have known better. His belief belied common sense and it reflected his environment. This immigrant was so well assimilated into American culture that he had made his silly beliefs against which his own life history should have vaccinated him.

Mastery of several languages had become a part of the Hungarian immigrant’s persona. He was so deeply self-deluded that he had no fear of getting caught in a lie (as when he spoke “French” to me for more than an hour.) I am positive this man’s delusion grew here, in America. It does not seem to exist in Europe. On the contrary, Europeans tend to deprecate heir knowledge of foreign languages. I remember going to a pharmacy in Helsinki, Finland. The pharmacist wore a little British flag and a German flag on his white smock. He detected my accent in English and soon switched to quite serviceable French. The point of this nearly pointless anecdote is that he did not wear a French flag on his lapel. He did not think he deserved to.

Yet, he gave me the right medication. At least, I am here.

In America, otherwise honest people routinely lie about their knowledge of foreign languages. I patronize a very middle-class coffee shop where the barristas and I play light flirtatious games involving the French language. I will say, “Bonjour, Liz; tu es si belle aujourd’hui.” (“Good morning, Liz, you are so beautiful today.”) After a while, the whole thing becomes predictable to the girl behind the counter who answers without missing a step, “Ah, merci.” Often, guys in the line – apparently challenged in their manhood – will volunteer that they don’t know French, “only Spanish.” (Hey, this is California!) Being retired, I have time to act the bitch so, usually, I engage them in Spanish. Invariably, they muter and actually step back as if in physical retreat, as if I were threatening them, as if I was about to bitch-slap them too! An astounding percentage of the time, they declare that their Spanish is “rusty.” Apparently, they prefer a stock, accepted answer to being caught in a childish lie about one’s knowledge.

I am describing here. I am not sure of the causes of this peculiarly American form of collective insanity. And remember what you read above: I have not faulted anyone for his ignorance of foreign languages. That would be another topic altogether. I have not even come near it. The present topic is a form of mild but persistent collective insanity. And keep in mind that simple incompetence does not come close to explaining the falsehoods: I couldn’t bat against a Little League dropout but I don’t go around pretending my batting is pretty good though a little rusty. And I don’t pretend I know a bunch of Gitanes-smoking Frenchmen who can bat the hell out of the ballpark.

There is a sort of mystery there.

THIS WAS A PUBLIC SERVICE ANNOUNCEMENT

*Some readers will wonder what my qualifications are to discuss this subject and be too polite to ask. Here they are:

I am able to work in French as well as in English. This includes writing. (I am a sociologist by training and a short story writer by avocation.) Some of my work is published in French, most is in English. I speak Spanish convincingly so long as a the conversation is simple and concrete. I would be unable to teach anything in Spanish without further training. I write in Spanish but badly. I read that language with no trouble. Like all well-educated French speakers with some aplomb, I guess easily at written Portuguese and Italian. Speaking either is touch-and-go. Writing either is not even a no-go. (People with “some aplomb” are those who know what “aplomb “ means.) Like many French-born men, I know enough German so that I might be appointed kapo and so, get double rations if the need arose.

**“Until recently” because there are now many America-born children of Spanish-speaking immigrants with various levels of competence in Spanish (Most can speak, few can read; the number who can write seems to me minuscule.)

The Snowden Reset

muricaderp Law, Politics

Edward Snowden seems to have successfully hit official Washington’s Achilles’ Heel. The political and public responses to his disclosures are still in flux, so I’m hesitant to speak with any confidence as things currently stand, but the pushback against the surveillance state seems to be at or near critical mass.

Rep. Tom McClintock (R-CA), one of the most prominent members of California’s Congressional delegation, has publicly said that Snowden committed crimes with his disclosures but should be pardoned because he is a whistleblower who exposed wholesale subversion of the Fourth Amendment and that he should be answering questions about the surveillance state at home, not abroad. McClintock seemed to imply that he would like Snowden to testify before Congress. As I alluded to, the response to this scandal is growing by the week, so Snowden is conceivably on the verge of simultaneously being under federal criminal indictment for leaking state secrets and under Congressional subpoena to testify about the same state secrets as a whistleblower, not a defendant. This could easily put the Department of Justice in effective, or even official, contempt of Congress for obstructing the sworn testimony of a subpoeanaed witness.

If more members of Congress join McClintock, Justin Amash, Ron Wyden and company in demanding answers, and if the answers that they demand include sworn testimony from Snowden, my guess is that Eric Holder will be a couple of wrong moves away from impeachment. Prior to Snowden’s indictment, much of the Republican Caucus was steaming mad at Holder over the “Fast and Furious” gun-running debacle, and a smaller (and certainly less organized and vocal) contingent of populists from both parties was disgusted with him for failing to prosecute bank executives for fraud in the subprime mortgage meltdown. If Holder continues to vindictively keep Snowden in exile (he almost certainly will) at a time when Congress has called Snowden to testify in person (by no means assured, but likely enough given the rapidly shifting Congressional response to the NSA scandal), the vendetta against Snowden could be Holder’s last major project as Attorney General and an ignominious capstone capstone to his legacy. I’d be highly surprised if Holder manages to talk his way out of that sticky wicket.

On a brief sidenote, I’d say that Tom McClintock is now bar none the strongest prospective challenger to either Barbara Boxer or Dianne Feinstein. California’s Republican primary voters have taken to nominating nobodies to challenge their state’s entrenched US Senators, and much of the state’s Republican establishment at all levels is buffoonish and bloodthirsty. Boxer and Feinstein (especially Feinstein) are authoritarian nightmares, but they have on their side inertia and a hapless opposition; McClintock is in a strong, and probably unique, position to singlehandedly destroy these advantages if he chooses to run for the US Senate.

Snowden’s supporters in Congress amount to a dissident faction trying to subvert the Politburo. The official response from the State Department, the Attorney General’s Office and the White House has been a clusterfuck. The sputtering rage at an exiled dissident has become so extreme and pervasive that the Washington press corps, normally prone to flatter the subjects of its coverage in exchange for access, is barely trying to spin the official response into anything rational. These high officials and spokespeople insulted, in succession, the sovereignty of Hong Kong (for allowing Snowden to lawfully enter and leave its territory in accordance with Chinese immigration law), China (mostly for unrelated geopolitical grievances that were irrelevant on account of Beijing’s delegation of political control in Hong Kong to the territory’s British-style parliamentary government), Ecuador (for offering Snowden asylum), Bolivia (again, for offering asylum, and additionally by grounding the country’s presidential plane to search for Snowden as President Evo Morales returned from official business in Moscow), several Western European countries (by intimidating them into closing their airspace to Snowden), and most recently Russia.

Washington’s belligerence towards Moscow has been especially foolish. The State Department effectively made Snowden stateless by revoking his passport while he was holed up in the Sheremetyevo Airport international transit zone. Moviegoers may remember Tom Hanks in a similar predicament. State decided to reenact Airport, but in another country’s airport. Then various shrill officials took it upon themselves to publicly berate the Kremlin, one of Washington’s most celebrated adversaries, for not deporting a US citizen from a transit zone specificially set up for foreigners who did not intend to clear Russian immigration, for allowing that US citizen to hold a press conference in the transit zone and providing incidental logistical support to escort members of the press through passport control, for even thinking about granting this fugitive dissident asylum, and finally for granting him temporary asylum. Washington is now in the embarrassing position of having an American citizen and political fugitive freely and lawfully living in Russia without a valid US passport but with a valid Russian residency document under the odd name of “Snouden Edvard Dzhozef.” Washington could easily have avoided this embarrassment. It took a month of shrilly berating the very nationalistic government of a major military power, adversary, and oil and gas exporter to get Mother Russia to finally embrace the young man. One does not simply end up with Russian documents.

Notice, too, how calm Vladimir Putin has remained throughout the mess. Jay Carney yelling at a KGB Zen master was never auspicious, and indeed it has been fruitless. Putin was reticent in his public comments, initially calling Snowden a patriot, then describing the tar baby that the Snowden incident had become with a classic Putinism about shearing a pig (“a lot of squealing but little hair”), and keeping mum when, all but certainly on his explicit approval, Snowden was granted temporary asylum. Putin is continuing to let Washington officials do the talking about the White House’s cancellation of one-on-one talks that he was scheduled to have with Barack Obama next month, talks that have admittedly been canceled in part to punish Putin for granting Snowden asylum.

This is nuts. My country’s highest officials are acting like toddlers. For the last two months, they’ve been picking fights with any foreign government that dares cross them by showing or even considering showing mercy to a whistleblower whom they want to jail for exposing unconstitutional wholesale domestic spying. They’re cavalierly destroying goodwill with any country that thwarts their effort to persecute one of their own citizens for embarrassing them and trying to hold them accountable for secret subversion of the Constitution.

Comparisons to the Brezhnev-era USSR are appropriate. Snowden was a refusenik for a month, and the reason he is no longer one is that a moderately autocratic regime centered around a neotsarist personality cult gave him asylum at a time when he was stranded in one of its airports, forsaken by his own government.

We have a balance of powers again. This can’t be the “reset” of relations that Hillary Clinton and Sergei Lavrov sought. Russia is again welcoming American dissidents, much as the Soviet Union welcomed unemployed laborers and disaffected black activists in the 1930s. Angry US officials demand that Russia hand over a political fugitive, Russian officials calmly refuse, and the US officials build up an even stronger head of steam. We’re approaching the point at which Obama bangs a shoe on the podium while Putin quietly smirks and, if he says anything about the outburst, says something unimaginably crude and yet eloquent.

Ed Snowden isn’t exactly a loose cannon, either. Washington picked the most sympathetic whistleblower imaginable to target with its unprecedented campaign of smearing and intimidation. Snowden hasn’t been silenced like Bradley Manning, and he isn’t eccentric like Julian Assange. He’s as normal as they come, and the public knows it. The public also knows that his critics are overwhelmingly a bunch of amoral Beltway careerist freaks.

This huge mess may get resolved a lot more quickly and thoroughly than I had feared.

What are valid criticisms of libertarianism? What are libertarian ideas that you don’t agree with?

Brandon Christensen Liberty

This question was posed to libertarian redditors the other day.

I found this answer, and the threads it spawned, to be the most interesting so far. There is, for example, this:

but I think we are going to strongly disagree on which groups those are.

That’s okay. To disagree in a public forum like this is to perform the fine-stitching of a free society.

Which groups do you think the US government favors? Please, use data to back up your claims. I’m going to use income levels, life expectancy rates, education levels, incarceration rates and employment rates.

Before you answer, though, I think it would be pertinent to remind you that we are now discussing society in terms of groups rather than as individuals. You and I know this is not a good thing, but – I would argue – it is nevertheless where we are at today.

Part of this is because of libertarian intransigence when it comes to discussing the gross historical injustices of chattel slavery and ethnic cleansing. Were we to treat these injustices for what they are – and for what they have done – rather than focusing on who they were done to, we may be able to make inroads in the fight against racism and injustice.

Any thoughts out there?

How persistent are cultural traits? A case study of anti-Semitism in Germany

Brandon Christensen Economics, History , , , ,

Using data on anti-Semitism in Germany, we find local continuity over 600 years. Jews were often blamed when the Black Death killed at least a third of Europe’s population during 1348–50. We use plague-era pogroms as an indicator for medieval anti-Semitism. They reliably predict violence against Jews in the 1920s, votes for the Nazi Party, deportations after 1933, attacks on synagogues, and letters to Der Sturmer. We also identify areas where persistence was lower: cities with high levels of trade or immigration. Finally, we show that our results are not driven by political extremism or by different attitudes toward violence.

That is the abstract from a paper by Nico Voigtlander (of UCLA’s business school) and Hans-Joachim Voth. Check it out.

Libertarian Foreign Policy: A Dialogue on Imperialism

Brandon Christensen Liberty , , , , ,

Why Dr Delacroix, I am flattered. Usually only Leftists change the subject when they are stumped. This argument must hold a special place in your heart.

As I said in a response you may have missed, our discussion is probably useful. At its heart lie the issues of credibility and criticality.

Fair enough.

Congressman Paul; volunteered in a debate that the armed forces spent “30″ billions on air conditioning in Iraq and in Afghanistan.

Um, I guess it’s up to me to let you know that you gave yourself an extra ten billion to work with here. Awwwkkward! You originally stated that Ron Paul used $20 billion, not $30 billion. It is of little concern to me that you fudged this number, though, because I know you are a dinosaur rather than a cheater. Your new criteria, once it is restored to the original $20 billion, states that air conditioning and all of the costs associated with it in both Iraq and Afghanistan account for around five percent of the 2010 budget.

That’s absurd? Really? Have you ever heard of the United States Postal Service? What about the Department of Housing and Urban Development? How about Fannie Mae and Freddy Mac? Five percent.

I note that if the US armed forces spend 6 or 7 % [or even 5%!!!] of the money I give them for military operations on air conditioning, they might have some explaining to do. That fact in itself sure wouldn’t be an argument for pulling out of either country.

You are absolutely right about that. Now, did Ron Paul use the air conditioning numbers to argue that our troops should come home, or did he use them to argue that Washington’s spending is totally out of control?

The reason I think you are desperate, Dr Delacroix, is that you are focused on such an irrelevant statement. I mean, for Christ’s sake, I Googled “Ron Paul air conditioning statement” and got a few right-wing webpages screaming that Ron Paul wanted to stop letting troops have air conditioning. Notice that they didn’t actually argue about the number Paul cited. You are quite possibly the only person on the planet who is fixated on this number.

Accusing libertarians of being dogmatic because they will vote for Ron Paul is disingenuous, too. All one has to do is go over to the ‘comments’ section of Reason magazine’s webpage to find out all sorts of opinions on Ron Paul’s policies. I suspect I know why you accuse libertarians of being dogmatic, and I will get back to this shortly.

But first, I want to make it crystal-clear that you are free to vote for whomever you like. You can vote for the guy who thinks that ObamaCare has been great for Massachusetts. You can vote for the guy who thinks the Taliban will be a part of Libya’s next government. You can vote for the guy who thinks that the earth was created six thousand years ago. Or you can vote for the guy who thinks that a national energy plan would reduce the world’s supply of oil coming from the Middle East.

Secondly, I want to make it crystal-clear that I don’t agree with everything Ron Paul says or does. I think criticism is a good thing. Instead of making an ass out of yourself by hooting and hollering about an air conditioning number he cited, though, I think it would be more constructive to talk about his opposition to NAFTA as being “managed trade.” Or his calls to eliminate birthright citizenship from the constitution. Or the racist newsletters that circulated through the South under his name in the 1990′s. Perhaps these things are enough for you not to vote for him. I hope you will be happy with one of the alternatives that the GOP offers.

But let us speak no more of intellectual dishonesty. Nor should we speak anymore of Ron Paul’s confidence in himself and his dogmatism. Allow me to illustrate this in a not-so-nice-but-illuminating-nevertheless kind of way. You said:

Your rebuttal of my answer to the constitutional issue about who can start a war makes no sense. If two joint resolutions of Congress embodied in two public laws are not constitutional measures, I don’t know what is and I am not equipped to pursue the topic.

*sniff* *sniff*

I smell something…

*sniff* *sniff* *sniff*

I. *sniff* Smell. *sniff* BULLSHIT!

I am not quite ready to make you bleed yet. I do not want to make you bleed, but your dogmatic insistence that we fight every fight around the world and your intellectual dishonesty (or cowardice) concerning the constitutionality of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are too dangerous to let pass. But first:

Congressman Paul’s carelessness in this matter he chose to discuss however is enough of a reason to mistrust his judgment. And, of course,there is always the option of saying quickly,” I misspoke in the heat of the discussion.” This kind of admission usually endears candidates to the general public doing them more good than harm. However, Paul has no doubt. I suspect he has no doubts about anything.

Yours is probably the most articulate criticism I have heard yet regarding Ron Paul’s political positions, so it merits a good, thoughtful response. Keep in mind your newfound ignorance regarding The Rule of Law and your incessant calls for an active – no matter what! – overseas presence when I present my case. Also, keep in mind that you and your readers are free to vote for the guy who wants to implement a national energy plan to reduce the world’s supply of oil from the Middle East.

The idea that Paul knows everything about anything is one that sure does look a lot like dogmatism at first glance. But Ron Paul will be the first to claim that he does not know everything. That’s why he insists that everything go through the Constitutional process – including overseas activities. That is to say, Ron Paul’s idea of dogmatism is to adhere to The Rule of Law. Imagine that!

If you can provide me some examples of him suggesting otherwise, or that he knows better than everybody else and is therefore qualified to flaunt The Rule of Law, then by all means provide it here. Otherwise, I think it would now be a good idea to focus back on the calls made by you to go to war in Rwanda, or the Balkans, or Iraq, or North Korea, or Venezuela at the first sign of trouble.

I want to take us back to issue of dogmatism and intellectual dishonesty really quickly. In a previous reply you stated the following:

On moral responsibility, I chose Rwanda of an extreme case where it would have been easy to intervene productively at little cost or risk. That’s what this country did we respect to the beginning genocide of Kosovars against a much more powerful and sophisticated oppressor.

Your words speak for themselves on the Rwanda genocide.

Your moral indignation towards those of us who would leave the problems of others to themselves may be understandable, but first I have to ask you a quick question (this will be the second time I have done so): which side of the Rwandan war should we have intervened on behalf of? I think it would be pertinent to remember that you are answering the question against the backdrop of a conversation that is centered around dogmatism and intellectual dishonesty. And please, remember that this is a conversation that is also trying to gauge the level humility that each of us has when it comes to recognizing the sheer ignorance that each of us has on any number of issues.

Or would you just simply send our troops to Rwanda with no clear-cut goals, except to stop the fighting between the Hutus and the Tutsis? I think that a demand from libertarians for our politicians to adhere to the Rule of Law hardly qualifies as dogmatic. I think that a demand from hawks for our politicians to do more overseas regardless of the Rule of Law does qualify as dogmatic. Thus to the hawk, the libertarian is dogmatic because he demands that the hawk adhere to the Rule of Law. I can see how you have become confused on the issue now.

Libertarian Foreign Policy: A Dialogue on Imperialism

Jacques Delacroix Liberty , ,

As I said in a response you may have missed, our discussion is probably useful. At its heart lie the issues of credibility and criticality.

Congressman Paul volunteered in a debate that the armed forces spent “30″ billions on air conditioning in Iraq and in Afghanistan. Mr Paul as a congressman and as a presidential candidate is responsible for anything he choses to say. It matters not if the thinks he got this info from a reliable source. You and I equally do not care much about the substantive meaning of the figure. However, if it’s absurd on its face is absurd on its face, his repeating it speaks to his criticality or to his intellectual honesty. Both qualities are important in a presidential candidate, I think. And, of course, I am leery of the dogmatism of Libertarians. Sometimes or often, it makes them unable to spot absurdity. Thus, the discussion of this Paul affirmation is not absurd.

The $30 figure for air conditioning needs to be applied to operational costs of the DOD, not to the total budget. The latter includes research and development and big obligations to military personnel not connected to any campaign, veterans’ benefits, for example. Operational costs properly defined constitute about 60% of total budget. Applying these figures to 2010, a high budget year, I find that the alleged air conditioning expenses cited by Ron Paul amount to 6% to 7 % of military expenditures in Iraq and in Afghanistan, not the 3% you state. That is absurd.

I note that if the US armed forces spend 6 or 7 % of the money I give them for military operations on air conditioning, they might have some explaining to do. That fact in itself sure wouldn’t be an argument for pulling out of either country.

Congressman Paul’s carelessness in this matter he chose to discuss however is enough of a reason to mistrust his judgment. And, of course,there is always the option of saying quickly, “I misspoke in the heat of the discussion.” This kind of admission usually endears candidates to the general public doing them more good than harm. However, Paul has no doubt. I suspect he has no doubts about anything.

I suspect that Congressman Paul’s enthusiastic rigidity accounts for the fairly high poll figures he regularly enjoys. I am guessing that it is also responsible for the fact that his numbers have not moved in months of campaigning. There are zealots and there are others. Again, I regret this situation because we have so much in common in about every other area.

Your rebuttal of my answer to the constitutional issue about who can start a war makes no sense. If two joint resolutions of Congress embodied in two public laws are not constitutional measures, I don’t know what is and I am not equipped to pursue the topic.

Around the Web: The (tits and) ass end of the internet

muricaderp Links

I’ve discussed T&A in these pages before, and I surely will again.

There are websites that discuss sex with taste, manners, morals, that kind of thing. Then there are the kind that I’m about to profile. Some of this stuff is dark, dark enough that Geraldo will wear his sunglasses at night. This is one link dump, however, in which the most gratuitous bit of weirdness will be the least disturbing. Geraldo may not be entirely right, but as we’ll discover shortly, he isn’t as wrong as the kind of people who lead cults of mushheaded feminist ideologues and undersexed shut-ins.

Speaking of tits, I’m just about to link to some: probably not ones that you’d like to see, but if that was one of the search terms that brought you here, you might want to refine your search terms for specificity.

Selfies are wrong. You, too, will look like a damn fool preening at a mirror with a flat phone in hand, and equally a fool for having a forearm awkwardly extended in front of your self-portraits at popular tourist sites because you were too witless or bashful or something to ask anyone else to take your picture. On the other hand, when one is drunk and Geraldo Rivera at 2:30 am, there may not be anyone else present to take one’s nude self-portrait and post it to Twitter. Truth be told, if you have any more taste than I have, you probably don’t want to look at the result, but in consideration of the libertarian ethos on this site, I’ll let individual readers make their own decisions about viewing the masterpiece, on the understanding that they have been given fair warning and consequently bear full responsibility for any psychic damage.

In fairness, notwithstanding his rocking the Transitions Lenses and nothing else, much as Eliot Spitzer loved him some socks, Geraldo’s selfie isn’t nearly as weird as Anthony Weiner’s adventures in the Carlos Danger Zone. Geraldo had a certain confidence, even badassery, about him that Weiner inevitably lacked. Crucially, he also posted his self-portrait publicly instead of addressing it to specific female recipients, the better to freak them the hell out by being an overly familiar weasel.

Of course he’s from Long Island.

Why do I say such a thing about a place that I haven’t even visited? Because its reputation precedes it. #TeshTips: They raise ‘em right on the Guyland. Well, not always. And this. But(t) some names you just can’t beat. 

But let’s move off that terminal moraine while there’s still hope, and find us some even weirder stuff.

Here, Ken White responds to an accusation from Vox that he is a bully of other, slightly less creepy men and a “white-knighting gamma.” In this context, gamma is one of the letter designations used by “game” bloggers to shoehorn men (and, rarely, women) into fixed categories dictating their sexual attractiveness. To these bloggers, anyone below an alpha, or more charitably, anyone below a greater beta, is a loser who will never bed a woman unless she has run out of options and is forced to grudgingly settle for a member of the supplicating dregs of manhood. It’s a crude, paranoid worldview, and one that, judging from comment traffic on these blogs, is disturbingly resonant for a lot of people. It’s a nice pat explanation for why they’re losing out sexually, although the viciousness and crudity of the prevailing jargon on these sites can’t help socialize these guys to the point that women will start finding them attractive. Actually, I know for a fact that it is pernicious: one of the people I follow on Facebook is a dweeb who routinely alienates others by using the same kind of language because he finds it amusing and is too clueless and puffed-up to know when to hold his damn peace.

Vox also has some odd things to say about Bill Clinton and Anthony Weiner, among them, that Clinton isn’t handsome and that Weiner’s wife, Huma Abedin, is a lesbian whom he won over “through traditional Gamma acts of service.” Don’t worry if it doesn’t make any sense.

Next, we have an avowedly Christian mother who unabashedly uses a lexicon that includes “carousel-riding slut” and “whore,” the latter used as a slur with no regard to whether the target has ever used her sexuality in a mercenary fashion. Sunshine Mary’s often understated writing style minimizes the extent to which she’s a shrill Chicken Little authoritarian. The context of the “slut” reference in the second link above was an article in the Daily Mail about a woman who spent fifty years pining after the irresistibly aloof man who took her virginity, the premise being that the woman in question is typical of all women everywhere. Because the UK doesn’t have a gutter press that seeks out the most grotesque people in my country, too, so that it might luridly give their weight in stone. (The last article has been put behind a paywall since I first found it, but I haven’t forgotten about that lady’s custom truck. Or the stone measurements, because my Scotch battle ax of a great-grandmother was always weighed in stone.)

The disappointing truth is that anything less than thirty-stone dysfunction is too boring for the British gutter press. Just because you don’t read about it in the Sun doesn’t mean that it doesn’t exist. Its absence from the tabloids will, however, limit its capacity to influence game bloggers towards something resembling sobriety and away from mouth-frothing idiocy on the basis of cherry-picked examples of lurid brokenness. Women who don’t get ruined into their old age and unto divorce by dormitory Lotharios are so boring.

The Daily Mail story about the woman forever ruined by teh Alpha Fux was originally dredged out of the English gutter and aired in the international manosphere by Chateau Heartiste. CH is more or less what would have happened to Richard Nixon had he become a professional cockhound instead of going to law school: brilliant, but clinically paranoid and all kinds of wrong. The biggest problem, as I’ve alluded to, is that weird guys with limited social stimulation read this sort of moral rot and become fully infected, with no defenses against the evil. I often feel that I should wash my mouth out with soap after reading some of the stuff on CH, and there’s no way that I’m at the socially stunted or socially isolated extreme of its readership. Extrapolating the reactions of the really hard cases is a sad thought experiment; many of those guys, I’m sure, go forth and earnestly regurgitate in public what they’ve read on sites like Chateau Heartiste, not fully grasping that it’s sick shit that they found in a weird cul-de-sac of the information superhighway.

Some of the greatest treats on CH are comments from Great Books for Men, who has parlayed his membership in the Chateau peanut gallery into his own blog. GBFM has been compared to James Joyce, but I think he’s much more readable. He’s a minor literary genius who specializes in strings of neologisms, most often about Ben Bernanke and anal sex.

At the opposite extreme from the manosphere, after a superficial fashion, is Hugo Schwyzer, professor of history and gender studies at Pasadena City College, “male feminist,” and grand lodestone of internet derp. For those who can’t get enough humblebragging from weirdos, he’s a blogger, too. His shtick is to abjectly self-flagellate for being a horndog, dramatically exit stage, then return for some more abject self-flagellation and pornographic luridness.

Even before his most recent quasi-downfall, Schwyzer had some eccentric takes on sex. Here, for example, he earnestly extolled the social benefits derived from straight men submitting to anal stimulation from their girlfriends.  Do we need Larry “Wide Stance” Craig to stand up and call bullshit? Maybe:

Want to make straight men better in bed — and better feminist allies? The path may be simple: fuck them up the ass. According to one brand new book, the path to making men more compassionate, appreciative and playful may be straight through their butts.

In The Ultimate Guide to Prostate Pleasure: Erotic Exploration for Men and Their Partners, Charlie Glickman and Aislinn Emirzian make the case that straight “men who get into anal penetration are among the most secure in their masculinity: because they’ve examined themselves, faced their fears.” Despite the title of the book, the authors make the case that the payoff for prostate play — specifically by a woman using a dildo or other toy — isn’t just pleasure. It’s liberation from the masculine straitjacket, with happy consequences that extend well outside the bedroom.

I feel for men who enjoy their butt play without the politics that Schwyzer and his ilk insist on accreting to the practice.

That’s far from Schwyzer’s career low. This eruption of craven flattery of sophomoric drama queens and inchoate anger was definitely worse:

Remind Girls They Have the Right to Want Sexual Attention From a Select Few.
When harassers are confronted on their behavior, they often offer the same classic defense: “she wouldn’t dress that way if she didn’t want attention.” Of course young people want attention — often sexual attention. Very few (if any) want that attention indiscriminately from every post-pubescent male with a pulse. “We always behave as if it’s a really selfish, dangerous and ultimately naïve way for girls to dress revealingly,” Clementine Ford wrote in an email. “A young woman isn’t allowed to dictate what attention she wants, because that’s her making a judgment on the kind of men she deems good enough for her.”

The virgin/slut dichotomy has long meant that a young woman is given two choices: have sex with no one, or give it up to everyone. One key way to fight slut-shaming is to reiterate that girls have the right to want to turn on whom they want to turn on – and still be treated with respect and care by those whom they don’t. That’s only an unreasonable expectation in a culture that expects very little from men.

In that case, I hereby demand sexual attention from my own select few, specifically, Christine O’Donnell, Mariska Hargitay, and Sarah Palin. I shouldn’t be getting attention only from Betty White types just because I’m chubby, balding and an underemployed farm laborer. Actually, a really cute barista in Orange County had a thing for me a couple of months ago, but that’s no excuse for Mariska Hargitay’s failure to force herself on me. Mariska, you’re pwetty!

I have to agree with Schwyzer’s critics that he’s a moral cretin. I don’t mind if he has Charlie Sheen-style three-ways, but he really should stop trying to atone for his horndog lifestyle by belittling other men and encouraging women to be immature, irresponsible and entitled. He is exactly what Vox accused Ken White of being. Apparently it actually helps him get laid, but it’s a scummy way to go about it.

Finally, I’ve written some other stuff about sex here and here. Not the most dignified stuff, perhaps, but my efforts at self-promotion are a bit more dignified than Schwyzer’s, and you’ll never see a selfie of me in Transitions Lenses. I’ve never owned a pair.

Libertarian Foreign Policy: A Dialogue on Imperialism

Brandon Christensen Liberty , , , ,

What price for imperial peace?

Is it the case that you endorse and confirm the statement Ron Paul made voluntarily, on his own that he armed forces spend $20 billion a year on air conditioning in Iraq and in Afghanistan?

Dude, this is the most absurd subject to be talking about. You’re splitting hairs. You’re getting desperate! However, if I must, I endorse his claim. I cannot confirm it because I do not think I have the resources to do so. If I do have the resources to do so, I do not have the skills necessary to do so. Let’s put this in yet another perspective, since you won’t take a former Brigadier General/West Point graduate/logistician’s rough estimate seriously.

The Department of Defense’s 2010 base budget was almost $664 billion. The former Brigadier General said that $20 billion is spent on air conditioning (he included raw fuel, transport, and security in his estimate). My calculator is telling me, then, that the total amount of money spent on air conditioning in Iraq and Afghanistan consumes about three percent of the DoD’s annual budget (if we are to take the former Brigadier General’s estimates seriously). Given that we have been occupying a state that is located in one of the hottest areas of the world, I do not think that this is such an absurd estimate. However, if you able to provide me with some official figures then I will retract my endorsement of this statement and condemn Ron Paul to a demagogic hell.

About Gingrich’s alleged misstatements, I don’t know what you mean. Please, stop treating as obvious what others may not have seen, heard of, or noticed or may not exist at all.

I confess that I have not watched any of the debates. I go to school all day and work all night. There is no rest for the wicked! Since you want some sort of proof that Newt Gingrich is an ignoramus, I will refer you to his campaign page on foreign policy – oops! I mean national security – for an example. Number 5 on his list of things to do is “implement an American Energy Plan to reduce the world’s dependence on oil from dangerous and unstable countries, especially in the Middle East.” Got that Dr Delacroix? Implement an American energy plan to reduce the world’s dependence on oil from blah blah blah. I am deliberately choosing to bypass the absurdities associated with his calls for “energy independence,” of course.

Just for your readers’ sake, I think it would be a good idea to contrast this with Ron Paul’s official statement on dangerous and unstable sources of oil. First of all, I had to go to the “Energy” page, not the “National Defense” page, to find out about his thoughts on foreign sources of oil.
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There was nothing at all said about foreign sources of oil. Not a goddamn word, Dr Delacroix. Yet you slander him as an isolationist.

However, they take us a long way from your original statement on the illegality, the unconstitutional character of these wars.

I’m going to ask you for a third time (not that I’m keeping track or anything): what part of “only Congress can declare war” don’t you understand?!

Perhaps a different angle can be used to illustrate my point on this issue: the Department of Education was created by an act of Congress, so does that make it constitutional? It’s a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ question (unless you’re a Leftist, of course).

On moral responsibility, I chose Rwanda of an extreme case where it would have been easy to intervene productively at little cost or risk. That’s what this country did we respect to the beginning genocide of Kosovars against a much more powerful and sophisticated oppressor.

Your words speak for themselves on the Rwanda genocide.

Your comparison between the mess in the Balkans and the mess in the African Great Lakes region is, like your comparison between the U.S. and Libya, superficial at best.

I’ll keep this brief. The Balkans are in Europe and neighbor a sizable number of allied states, and we picked sides (losing Russia in the process) before we started bombing.

I may be willing to concede that non-intervention is an immoral doctrine if you can answer me this simple question: which side of the Rwandan war should we have picked?

US Allies in Egypt: Economically Adept or Not?

Brandon Christensen Current Events, Economics ,

It also isn’t clear that the secular crowd is economically more adept than the Muslim faithful. Socialism has been a hard-to-kick drug for Egypt’s legions of nominally college-educated youth, who came of age expecting government jobs. Capitalism has probably got firmer roots among devout Muslims, where Islamic law teaches a certain respect for private property.

This comes from Reuel Marc Gerecht in the Wall Street Journal. This is something that hawks in Washington (and Santa Cruz) have yet to confront. Interventionists – advocates of robust government programs in foreign affairs – want democracy in the Middle East, though they have yet to define democracy for those of us who are skeptics of overseas intervention.

What we do know is that there are two major currents of thought about governance in the Middle East today: national socialism and Islamism. The national socialists get their education from the universities. The Islamists from religious schools. None are friendly towards democracy.

Here is the upside though: democracy is not the end all be all. Liberty is. In fact, democracy is a byproduct of liberty. By liberty I mean, of course, a regime that protects individual rights (including private property), adheres to a system of checks and balances, and is generally favorable towards free trade. By trying to form alliances with various national socialist or Islamist regimes over the past three or four decades, the United States has continually shot itself in the foot. This is because Washington has made the simple mistake of confusing democracy for freedom.

If hawks are really concerned with helping other people (and it is not clear that they are), then it would be wise on their part to slow down and actually start looking at the factions of the Middle East and what they advocate. One thing has become crystal clear over the past 25 years, though, and that is that virtually no political faction in the Middle East – from Rabat to Tel Aviv to Tehran – is friendly to liberalism. This does not bode well for anybody.

Bombing these regions, and supporting dictators in these regions – in the name of liberalism to boot – only makes this hostility that much worse.

Libertarian Foreign Policy: A Dialogue on Imperialism

Jacques Delacroix Liberty , , , , ,

Again, the soup is too rich. I am going to let most of what you say stand except two things:

1 Is it the case that you endorse and confirm the statement Ron Paul made voluntarily, on his own that he armed forces spend $20 billion a year on air conditioning in Iraq and in Afghanistan? I ask because it’s a measure of Ron Paul’s seriousness and of his followers, with respect to simple facts.

In this connection: It’s clear that Herman Cain knows little about anything outside the country. I don’t doubt Congressman Paul knows much more. About Gingrich’s alleged misstatements, I don’t know what you mean. Please, stop treating as obvious what others may not have seen, heard of, or noticed or may not exist at all.

2 Your sophisticated musings about what constitutes the right to wage war may well be worth considering. You make good arguments that they are worth it. However, they take us a long way from your original statement on the illegality, the unconstitutional character of these wars. At the time, you sound as if you were parroting the left-wing yahoos on the topic.

On moral responsibility, I chose Rwanda of an extreme case where it would have been easy to intervene productively at little cost or risk. That’s what this country did we respect to the beginning genocide of Kosovars against a much more powerful and sophisticated oppressor.

Your words speak for themselves on the Rwanda genocide.

From the Comments: How, Exactly, Does One Define Terrorism?

Brandon Christensen Comments, History , , , , , , , , ,

From longtime reader –Rick, who starts off by quoting Dr Delacroix:

“Thanks to your influence, I have become more conscious of what I mean by terrorism. It includes intentionality and blindness toward the (civilian) victims. Thus, I have revised my concept of terrorism. I will be more precise in the future.”

One immediate problem I have with this is the use of force by the Allies in retaliation to the evil and unjustified use of force and murderous policies of the Axis powers in World War II. With “an intentional and blind lack of consideration of civilian casualties”, retaliatory force such as the bombing of Dresden and the dropping of atomic bombs on Japan would not have occurred and as a result, our enemies may have, instead, developed and used such strategies and weapons on us. Without efforts to annihilate the enemy and obtain an unconditional surrender, WWI, WWII, or perhaps even the American Civil war may have ended up with a decades long cease fire form of a truce as we have between North and South Korea that commits America to spending billions to keep troops and support systems in Korea as we shrink our military forces on a global scale.

Your inclusion of intentionality and blindness makes the actions taken by the allied forces in response to similar or worse actions by the enemy nations of Japan and particularly Germany make the Allies no more than terrorists for their defensive actions taken to suppress hostile nations and restore some semblance of peace to the planet.

So, depending on your view of history and warfare necessities, you may need to revise your definition even further – or not.

Dr Amburgey also adds his thoughts on Dr Delacroix’s statistical reasoning. One thing I have noticed, reading through this dialogue again, is that Dr Delacroix and other imperialists are much more interested in wielding arbitrary rules, norms and even definitions to advance their aims. Once the imperialist is called out on his arbitrariness (amongst other things), however, he begins to accuse his debate partners of dogmatism (amongst other things).