Author: Brandon Christensen

The blatant fascism of Bernie Sanders

Brandon Christensen Current Events, Politics , , , , ,

Ezra Klein, a Bruin and also a journalist, recently interviewed Bernie Sanders, an American Senator currently challenging Hillary Clinton for the Democrat Party’s 2016 presidential nomination. Sanders is an old, extremely rich white man who describes himself as a “democratic socialist.” Check this out:

Ezra Klein: You said being a democratic socialist means a more international view. I think if you take global poverty that seriously, it leads you to conclusions that in the US are considered out of political bounds. Things like sharply raising the level of immigration we permit, even up to a level of open borders. About sharply increasing …

Bernie Sanders: Open borders? No, that’s a Koch brothers proposal.

Ezra Klein: Really?

Bernie Sanders: Of course. That’s a right-wing proposal, which says essentially there is no United States. …

Ezra Klein: But it would make …

Bernie Sanders: Excuse me …

Ezra Klein: It would make a lot of global poor richer, wouldn’t it?

Bernie Sanders: It would make everybody in America poorer —you’re doing away with the concept of a nation state, and I don’t think there’s any country in the world that believes in that. If you believe in a nation state or in a country called the United States or UK or Denmark or any other country, you have an obligation in my view to do everything we can to help poor people. What right-wing people in this country would love is an open-border policy. Bring in all kinds of people, work for $2 or $3 an hour, that would be great for them. I don’t believe in that. I think we have to raise wages in this country, I think we have to do everything we can to create millions of jobs.

You know what youth unemployment is in the United States of America today? If you’re a white high school graduate, it’s 33 percent, Hispanic 36 percent, African American 51 percent. You think we should open the borders and bring in a lot of low-wage workers, or do you think maybe we should try to get jobs for those kids?

I think from a moral responsibility we’ve got to work with the rest of the industrialized world to address the problems of international poverty, but you don’t do that by making people in this country even poorer.

There is much, much more stupidity here. The choice between Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders – who is supposedly the representative of a new Left – illustrates well why the American Right is currently the faction of Ideas. This is so stupid that I’m flabbergasted. I am literally flabbergasted.

There is no way this guy represents the future of the American Left. No. Way.

From the Comments: Debunking Myths About Islam and Violence

Brandon Christensen Current Events, Religion , , , , , , , , ,

Jacques, a retired sociologist and university professor, has been repeating himself over and over again for the past fifteen years or so. His gripe? The imminent danger of Islam. Or Islamism. It depends on when you began reading him. Until recently, until the time that Delacroix decided to try and pick on me, Jacques’ venom was directed at Islam. Nowadays, it seems his poisonous arguments are directed at Islamism, the political movement. This is a step in the right direction. And yet, though his target his changed, his argument has not. The argument runs something like this:

  • Most, or much, of the violence in the world today is associated with Muslim groups of some kind or other.
  • Therefore, Islam, or Islamism, has an inherently violent penchant that needs to be removed using any method at the West’s disposal (including torture, a separate judicial system for Muslims suspected of being terrorists, and outright war).
  • In addition, Muslims who are not inherently violent (notice: Islam has an inherently violent penchant, except when it does not) are still responsible for terrorism because they do not snitch to government authorities when their fellow Muslims begin growing beards, and they do not speak out against Muslim extremists.

I have already gone the rounds with Delacroix on this narrative. He has been nothing but obstinately ignorant about his own argument, including the pseudo-facts that they rest upon. Maybe I shouldn’t be taken seriously. I’m just a lowly blog editor, after all, and a self-admitted libertarian to boot. The ‘comments’ of the two guys I’m about to highlight should be taken seriously, though. They are both college professors, and both do not self-identify as libertarians (though I think they are). Here is Dr Khawaja attempting to talk some sense into Jacques:

The first point is predictability versus explanation-in-retrospect, and I think you’re proving my point. I agree with your general account of the traits and biographical trajectory of terrorists. They’re often just as you say they are. The problem is, there are lots of non-violent losers with identical traits and trajectories, and no way to sort out the violent from the non-violent before the fact. The explanatory patterns typically emerge after the fact, which is when people tend to jump from explanation-after-the-fact to predictability-ex-ante. I guess I’m just flatly denying that the trajectory of the non-Islamist crazy is–in Western countries–all that different (ex ante) from the Muslim ones. The only “distinguishing” feature is that the latter are Muslim, and alienated from traditional Islam, and born again into something radical. But an enormous number of people have those traits, and simply waste their lives on being born-again Muslims of that sort without ever doing anything violent. My point is, when people–typically young men–start to move in that direction, it usually causes some concern. But “concern” is not the same as alarm at an imminent or even pending attack, and contrary to your suggestion, there is almost no way to predict those unless you’ve been taken into confidence by the would-be perpetrator. And of course, given what he wants to perpetrate, he’d have to be very incompetent to take a would-be snitch into his confidences.

Proviso: what I’m saying above refers to Muslims in Europe and North America. Things are different elsewhere. In the West Bank, if X’s brother, father, uncle, or cousin has been killed by the IDF, X is likely to commit a terrorist act, and if X becomes very religious, you can infer that he’s a member of Hamas. Similar moves are open to someone living in Pakistan. But those are different contexts than France of the US.

I’m not dogmatic enough to insist that the French cleric you quoted must absolutely be wrong. Maybe he has some way of detecting jihadists. But I really doubt it. The problem with French clerics of that sort is precisely their proximity to the government. They tend to speak with a view to pleasing this or that constituency, and what your cleric says is what the French government and people want to hear.

On immigration, granted that you didn’t literally come out and oppose all immigration by Muslims. But that isn’t quite what I accused you of, either. My point is: here we have a humanitarian crisis involving refugees who want asylum in this country. I’m the first to admit that if we admit a large number, some of this number will be terrorists and will perpetrate attacks on us that wouldn’t otherwise have happened (if we hadn’t let them in). My point is: now that we have this crisis, Americans have suddenly decided that a mass influx of refugees has to be constrained by border controls that would ensure that the mass influx remains a trickle. Imagine facing a potential influx of Syrian refugees and applying your stricture that none of them be Muslim literalists. By the time you operationalized that policy, and hired the border control staff to operate it, the year would be 2023, and the refugee crisis would be over. Or to take your other policy: can you really imagine teaching Syrian (or any other) refugees First Amendment law at their point of entry into the US? It can’t be done. It’s just not the way refugee operations work or can work. Imposing strictures like that on refugees is just a way of ensuring that the US never becomes a sanctuary during refugee crises.

I wouldn’t mind that attitude if only it were accompanied by a little bit of candor about history and politics. The US is committed never to become a large-scale sanctuary for, say, Syrian refugees. But now listen to the way politically conscious Americans talk about refugee crises elsewhere. The Arabs of Mandate Palestine were reluctant to open the borders of Palestine to European Jews? Well, that makes them anti-Semites. Common assertion: “The Palestinians remain in UNRWA camps to this day because the surrounding Arab countries, in their greed, refuse to take them in.” This comes from Americans who would never dream of taking them in. Israel, of course, has a very generous refugee policy (for Jews); that gets praise without any recognition that the refugees then function as demographic chips in the settlement game. West Bank settlements are full of Russian “Jews” who know less about the celebration of shabbos than I do.

Do I think the US has a Muslim problem? What makes the question difficult to answer is not any reluctance on my part to tackle the issue head-on, but an ambiguity in the phrase “a Muslim problem.” In one sense, it means “any significant problem stemming from Muslims.” In another sense, it means “a high priority issue facing the country as a whole and stemming from Muslims.” My view is that it has the first, not the second. There are several million Muslims in the country, and on the whole they don’t constitute a political problem. There are pockets of fanatics among them that do constitute a political (security) problem. France may well be different, but I think things are essentially in good shape in the US, despite this or that conspicuous Muslim atrocity.

To come at your question slightly differently: there is a sense in which Islam has a problem, the problem of reconciling itself to modernity. Given that, wherever you have Muslims who haven’t reconciled themselves to modernity, you’re going to get a problem (or problems). So yes, even if we had an isolationist foreign policy, that problem would remain. But that problem is least pronounced in the US, where Muslims basically run the same gamut as Reform to Conservative to Orthodox Jews. Literalist Muslims are no more (or less) a national problem than Orthodox Jews. I don’t mean to deny that they’re both a problem. But I wouldn’t say we have an Orthodox Jew Problem any more than I’d say we have a Muslim or Literalist Muslim Problem. Some places might, but we don’t.

Sorry, I said something confusing: “I don’t mean to deny that they’re both a problem.” I meant to say, “I don’t mean to deny that they’re both problematic,” i.e., give rise to problems. What I’m denying is that the problems are the equivalent of a high-level security threat.

Dr Khawaja blogs over at Policy of Truth and teaches philosophy at Felician College. Dr Amburgey tries to talk some sense into Jacques using a different angle:

“I said “probability.” It’s the concept we use, consciously or not, to approximate rational decisions in our daily lives: Select this birth clinic, rely on this baby food, travel by car, get vaccinated or not, go for this class rather than another. etc.”

I agree with Jacques. I’ll go further, I agree wholeheartedly with Jacques. I don’t subscribe to silly notions of human rationality like some of my colleagues but doing the best we can to make rational decisions is desirable both individually and in matters of public policy. As a consequence it’s useful to consider probabilities in our consideration of Jacques proposals.

Firstly, how does terrorism stack up against other risks in a probabilistic sense?

“Indeed – as we’ve previously documented – you’re more likely to die from brain-eating parasites, alcoholism, obesity, medical errors, risky sexual behavior or just about anything other than terrorism.”
http://www.globalresearch.ca/non-muslims-carried-out-more-than-90-of-all-terrorist-attacks-in-america/5333619

Even if we set aside the consequences of our choices [lifestyle or otherwise] terrorism is dwarfed by other things that kill us. Is it rational to spend more on the military than every other form of discretionary spending combined?
https://www.nationalpriorities.org/budget-basics/federal-budget-101/spending/

Secondly, given that terrorism is a risk how do different forms stack up compared to one another.
According to Jacques…

“We have terrorists of all inspirations in America, I know. The white murderer of black church people in Charleston was a terrorist, pure and simple. He was home bred and home grown. However, we have many, many more terrorists of foreign extraction, almost all with ties to Islam.”

This is, to put it politely, a counterfactual statement. The various public datasets have different observation windows and methodologies. Right now I’m going to use the 1980-2005 FBI data simply because there is a handy pie chart that I can copy from. In decreasing order…

Latino-42%, Extreme left-wing groups-24%, Others-16%, Jewish extremists-7%, Islamic extremists-6%, Communists-5%

The USA certainly has problems. Does it have a ‘muslim problem’? I’d say the numbers speak for themselves.

Dr Amburgey teaches in the business school of the University of Toronto. He doesn’t blog.

Jacques has still not addressed my questions regarding the implications of his policy proposals, by the way, namely that they echo those implemented by the Third Reich. Political Correctness is a corrupting influence on the free and open society (I suspect, in my infinite kindness and generosity, that Political Correctness is Jacques’ real target when he writes about Islam), but so is cultural chauvinism. Two wrongs don’t make a right!

Liberty or “Security”: An Old Debate, A Familiar Straw Man

Brandon Christensen Politics , , , , , , , , ,

Ho hum. Jacques wants his government to do three things in the name of fighting Muslim terrorism (not to be confused with other, more numerous kinds of terrorism): 1) allow for an armed, perpetually-on-alert military to be active on US soil, 2) allow for a surveillance state that can do as it pleases in regards to Muslims only, and 3) initiate ideological quotas for Muslim immigrants.

The entire ‘comments’ thread is well worth reading, too. Dr Amburgey, who came from the same doctoral program as Jacques, brings the quantitative fire; Dr Khawaja, the qualitative. Jacques has responded to each of them.

The absurdity of Delacroix’ argument speaks for itself. I will come back to it shortly, but first I want to address a couple of his points that are simply made in bad faith. Observe:

(Yes, Mohammed did behead every man of a vanquished enemy tribe on the battlefield. Incidentally, they were Jews. The Prophet then “married ” their wives, he raped them, in others words. Bad example? Talk about this genuine part of Muslim tradition?)

Murdering and raping Jews is a “Muslim tradition”? I am sure this is news to Uighurs in China and the Javanese of Indonesia. I think there is a good case to be made for a present-day Arab cultural chauvinism that rests in part on what could be called “Muslim tradition,” but this is not a nuance that Jacques – the retired college professor – cares to address. I wonder why. If we’re going to go back to the 7th century to find cultural defects, can anybody think of something nasty that was going on in what is now France at the time? In what is now the US? What an odd historical anecdote to include in an argument.

Here, too, is another whopper:

One article of faith among literalist Muslims is that government must come from God. That’s why the Supreme Leader of the Shiite Islamic Republic is explicitly a cleric, couldn’t be an elected civilian or a general. This belief also explains the search for a Caliphate among Sunni jihadists, a polity where administrative and religious powers are one and the same.

What is a “literalist Muslim”? Nevermind. The government of Iran, its structure, is based on Plato’s Republic, not the Qur’an. The “Supreme Leader” Jacques identifies is based on the notion of a philosopher-king, not a Shiite cleric. This was done to protect the new dictatorship from its many enemies, including those loyal to the old dictatorship (the one supported by the United States; the one that Washington installed after helping to remove a democratically-elected Leftist government during the Cold War). The rhetoric of the Iranian dictatorship is explicitly religious, but in reality it’s just plain, old-fashioned despotism.

In a similar vein, “Sunni jihadists” (to use Jacques’ term) do not search for a Caliphate because of a belief that government should come from God, but instead look to a mythical Caliphate that they believe existed from the 7th to early 20th centuries as inspiration for creating a society that cannot be pushed around by murderous Western governments. Pretending that Arab Sunnis want to create a Caliphate in order to strengthen the link between government and God can only be described as “dishonest” when it comes from the mouth of a sociologist with a doctorate from Stanford.

At best, it could be argued that Jacques is simply making these types of points because they are pervasive throughout American society, and thus we – as libertarians of all stripes – have our work cut out for us. Now that I think about it, Jacques’ argument is so silly that it has to be an exercise in critical thinking. Nobody of his stature could say something so stupid, right?

Those are just two examples of, uh, the misrepresentation of reality by Jacques. There are many more, and I don’t think he got those myths from an academic journal. He got them from Fox News. That’s not good. That means libertarians are not taking advantage of their right to free speech, like conservatives and Leftists do. Why aren’t you blogging more often?

I’d like to turn back to his policy proposals. Here they are again:

  1. an armed, perpetually-on-alert military on US soil,
  2. a surveillance state that can do as it pleases in regards to Muslims only, and
  3. ideological quotas for Muslim immigrants.

The first two proposals look like they were copied directly from the playbook of the Third Reich (I hope you’ll reprimand me in the ‘comments’ section if you think I am being overly dramatic, or strawmanning Jacques’ argument). Just replace “US” with “Germany” and “Muslims” with “Jews” and voila, you have an answer for your Muslim (“Jewish”) problem. (RE Policy #3: National socialists, of course, don’t like anybody immigrating to their territories, whereas Jacques, in his infinite kindness and wisdom, seeks only to allow those who think like him into his territory.)

Again, Jacques’ argument is silly. It is both vulgar and unintelligent. It is misinformed. And yet I have to ask: Who is winning the PR battle here, conservatives on the one side or left-liberals and libertarians on the other?

Everyone carries a part of society on his shoulders; no one is relieved of his share of responsibility by others. And no one can find a safe way out for himself if society is sweeping toward destruction. Therefore, everyone, in his own interests, must thrust himself vigorously into the intellectual battle. None can stand aside with unconcern; the interest of everyone hangs on the result. Whether he chooses or not, every man is drawn into the great historical struggle, the decisive battle into which our epoch has plunged us.

That’s from Ludwig von Mises, the libertarian Austrian (and Jewish) economist who had to flee his homeland as the Third Reich took power. Speak your mind!

Around the Web

Brandon Christensen Links , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
  1. GOP Presidential Candidates: The More the Scarier; I didn’t think that political competition could be a bad thing, though. Perhaps it’s only scary to those who are (and especially have been) active, willing participants in GOP machinations…
  2. Paul’s Gospel
  3. Sanders is not like Trump. Sanders is like Rand Paul.
  4. Postcards from Abu Dis: Checking out the Checkpoints (Part Nine); Dr Khawaja has been teaching philosophy in the West Bank this summer, and while I’ve linked to his latest installment, the whole series (nine parts so far) is well worth the read.
  5. Must religious bakers bake cakes for gay weddings?

From the Comments: Greece, the Euro zone, and Russian prowess

Brandon Christensen Comments, Current Events , , , , , , , ,

Dr Amburgey writes:

I just returned yesterday from a week in Athens for an academic conference. There seemed to be a big socio-economic divide in voting intentions. The unemployed and menial workers were definite No votes. The Yes votes were physicians and a few academics. Personally I think they should bag the euro and go back to the drachma.

Brandon: how long do you think it will be before Putin is making deals in Athens? Might be nice to have a friend in the EU when sanctions come up again. Port privileges for the Russian navy would be very conveniently located as well.

Jacques has a good, thoughtful response (“Leaving the Euro zone does not require leaving the European Union”) that I wholeheartedly agree with (and that I’ve blogged about here and here), and it appears Dr Amburgey is in agreement with us (though does he think Greece should stay in the EU?). Contra Dr Foldvary, I do not think there is any need for Greece to leave the EU. If anything, the EU should be adding more states, though not expanding its geographic space.

Regarding Russia, I simply don’t know. Russia – along with Turkey, Iran, and China – is a society that is very hard to understand let alone predict (I would add India/Pakistan to this list, but the states of the Indian subcontinent are traditional post-colonial states and are therefore much easier to predict; the other four were never conquered or carved up by imperial cartographers). The whole Crimea debacle still has me smarting. Nevertheless I’ll add my thoughts to the conversation.

I don’t think Athens will grow closer to Moscow. There are two major reasons:

  1. Greece fears Russia, which is why Athens has remained in NATO for so long.
  2. Most Greeks – even the ‘No’ voters in this recent referendum – don’t want to leave the EU; Greeks overwhelmingly want to be a part of ‘Europe’.

There are couple of minor reasons, too, though I don’t know how minor they are. 1) Greece is not Ukraine. 2) Russia’s economy is in shambles. Greeks have a higher standard of living than do Russians.

On the flip side, the Greeks are always thinking about the Turks. If an opportunity presents itself (though I cannot think of any arising), Athens may start to edge closer to Russia (a traditional enemy of Turkey) if it thinks Ankara is getting antsy about its former province. This is pretty extreme, though. Also, Russia’s economy may be in shambles, but it seems like Moscow always has plenty of money for military expenditures, and rent stemming from a Russian port in the Mediterranean Sea might be too tasty to resist for a country saddled with so much debt.

At this point I don’t think Greece has much clout in European politics, so I don’t see Moscow viewing Athens as a reliable friend in Brussels.

Around the Web: Greece Edition

Brandon Christensen Comments, Links , , , , , , , , , ,
  1. Tyler Cowen has been owning this debate.
  2. Unfortunately, Greek citizens have been too fed up with the rest of the world to listen.
  3. (Perhaps libertarians and their arguments were just late to the party.)
  4. This is still the best concise sociological analysis of Greece and the EU I’ve come across.

It’s worth noting here that the overwhelming majority of ‘No’ voters – the ones who just rejected the EU after their elected, far Left leader walked out of talks days before said talks were scheduled to end – don’t want to leave the EU. Confused? See the Cowen link.

Matthew and I had a dialogue on Greece awhile back here at NOL that might be of interest.

From the Comments: Intervention, Blowback, and Bad Faith

Brandon Christensen Comments , , , , , , , ,

I find the debate they’re having somewhat confused. Your response to Kling is on the right track, but I would question the terms of the debate from the outset.

The relevant question is whether US intervention produces armed resistance, and whether that resistance counts as blowback. It does, on both counts. Whether that resistance/blowback counts as “terrorism” by some narrow definition is really beside the point. And whether the resistance is morally justified is yet another issue altogether.

Kling mentions US intervention in Latin America and claims that there’s been no “terrorism” in response. How would he characterize the Cuban-Soviet precipitation of the Cuban Missile Crisis, which was a response to the Bay of Pigs invasion? Soviet positioning of nuclear weapons system was meant to strike fear in us (and did). “Fear” is a synonym for “terror.” The Cuban-Soviet policy was a response to our intervention. That’s blowback.

Re Asia, you’re right to adduce the Saigon counterexample you come up with, but that understates the relevant point. The relevant point is that the whole Tet Offensive was blowback for our intervention! The NVA and Vietcong may not have attacked the mainland of the US, but they killed more Americans than Al Qaida did, so again, I don’t see the point of a narrow fixation on a particular tactic, terrorism.

While we’re at it, why not try US intervention in…the US? Think Wounded Knee 1973 and generally, the armed confrontations between the American Indian Movement and the FBI in the mid 1970s (which most Americans regarded as terrorism on the part of the Indians). AIM regarded Indian reservations as occupied land and acted in kind. That was blowback for our Indian policy.

This is not to deny that terrorism can arise from causes unrelated to blowback or perceived blowback. Nor is it to deny that Islamist terrorism may have distinctive features. But it’s very misleading to suggest that Middle Eastern terrorism is sui generis, and confusing to distinguish “Middle East” and “Asia,” as you correctly point out in your post.

This is from Dr Khawaja (of Policy of Truth infamy). I found the dialogue somewhat confusing, too. I think the fact that economists, who are used to thinking in terms of costs and benefits, were stepping outside of their comfort zones (something I wish more of them would do, by the way) goes a long way towards explaining why there is so much confusion.

Yet I also think that there is much to learn from narrowing the terms of the debate. Kling wants to talk about “terror” rather than “armed resistance,” and I think it’s good to meet him on his own terms. This way it is easier to knock down ignorant arguments for all to see. Dr Khawaja broke down a complex misunderstanding (or simply Kling’s bad faith) in a straightforward manner, but sometimes I find that arguing on Mr Bad Faith’s own terms  – knowing full well that his argument is being made in bad faith – leads to useful outcomes. Jacques, for example, has become noticeably less hawkish since he first tried to pick on me. He has not necessarily become more dovish mind you, but he has become much more cautious about promoting US militarism abroad.

Kling and Henderson on intervention and blowback

Brandon Christensen Comments, Current Events , , , , , ,

David Henderson, an economist at the Naval Postgraduate School’s GSBPP and also the Hoover Institution, alerted me to a remark made by another economist, Arnold Kling, about libertarian foreign policy. Both posts are worth reading, of course, but in the ‘comments’ thread of Henderson’s post, Dr Kling elicited a terse response from Dr Henderson for arguing the following:

David, the U.S. has intervened in Asia, Europe, Latin America, and the Middle East. We have not experienced terrorism except from the Middle East, and there the role of blowback is not clear–there are plenty of other causes, and Middle Eastern terrorists seem perfectly happy to operate in countries that have not invaded Iraq.

I think you have proved my point. Your preferred policy is non-intervention, and so blowback is your desired cause for terrorism. But you only look for evidence that confirms this. Go through the thought experiment of believing that terrorism is not caused by blowback, and then look for evidence from that perspective. That is what I ask for when someone has a “desired cause.”

You can read Dr Henderson’s response here, but I thought I’d go in a different direction with this. First, though, I’d like to thank Dr Kling for broaching this subject. Few libertarians do so (our own Drs Delacroix and van de Haar being two stubborn exceptions).

What I’d like to do is take Dr Kling’s second paragraph to heart and try to pin down some relevant facts I think are missing from his first paragraph, which I’ll break down, for the sake of dialogue, piece-by-piece.

the U.S. has intervened in Asia, Europe, Latin America, and the Middle East.

Kling left off Africa from his list of places the US government has intervened in. This is a huge omission because there has been plenty of terrorist attacks (successful or otherwise) aimed at US targets on the African continent, from Nigeria in the west to Kenya all the way in the east (a span, via each state’s respective most populous city, of 5,328 km; Los Angeles to New York City is about 4,500 km).

We have not experienced terrorism except from the Middle East, and there the role of blowback is not clear

Again, the US has been the target of terrorism in places other than the Middle East. Aside from Africa (the 1998 embassy bombings being perhaps the prominent examples, though there are more), the US has been the target of terrorism in Asia, Latin America, and Europe. I think much of Dr Kling’s confusion regarding blowback in due to his poor geographic knowledge. The Middle East (or Near East), for example, is also a part of Asia. Pakistan and Afghanistan, where many terrorist attacks against US targets have been undertaken, are not considered to be a part of the Middle East by specialists. Below is a partial list of terrorist attacks against US targets in the past:

  • In 1927, the US embassy (along with other foreign embassies) in Nanking, China came under sustained gunfire from both state and non-state actors, and at least one American died (“the Nanking Incident”);
  • In the 1920s and 1930s, many American institutions – public and private (or ostensibly private) – were bombed by left-anarchists upset over the unjust executions of two prominent Italian anarchists in Boston (“Sacco and Vanzetti”);
  • In 1964 the US embassy in Gabon was bombed twice in the same month;
  • In 1965 a car bomb exploded outside of the US embassy in Saigon, South Vietnam, and Leftist factions claimed responsibility;
  • In 1984 a car bomb exploded outside of the US embassy in Bogota, Colombia, but no faction came forward to claim responsibility (it is largely attributed to one of the drug cartels in operation there);
  • In 1985 a Left-wing terrorist organization attacked the Soviet, Chinese, and American embassies in Peru;
  • In the mid-1980s a Leftist terrorist organization attacked US embassies in Indonesia and Italy.

Again, this is just a partial list. In the spirit of Kling’s argument, what I suggest we do here is divide up terrorist bombings into two segments: 1) the period of 1945-1991 (the Cold War), and 2) everything else. I think this is a fair move because during the Cold War the line between state and non-state actors became especially blurred.

Even if we decide to ignore my suggestion of dividing terrorist attacks into two segments, one picture that becomes much clearer is that all of the attacks are political, and terrorism against US targets does not come solely from the Middle East (or even states with large Muslim populations). I hope these two issues are conclusions that we can all agree upon. If this does not nudge the evidence in favor of the intervention-causes-blowback thesis, I don’t know what does. I think Kling’s next line of reasoning will help us elaborate on this a bit more:

there are plenty of other causes [of terrorism], and Middle Eastern terrorists seem perfectly happy to operate in countries that have not invaded Iraq.

I think this statement actually breaks the back of the hawks’ argument. First, though, when did we move from a discussion about intervention causing terrorism to a discussion about invading and occupying Iraq causing terrorism? Is Kling guilty of the bait-and-switch fallacy here? I am forced to conclude that he is, although in fairness his point was raised in a ‘comments’ thread rather than in a post of its own.

His bait-and-switch aside, Kling’s point about “plenty of other causes” of terrorism is one worth thinking through a bit more. There are four lines of thought that I’d like to explore here: 1) Now would be a good time to draw up a distinction between intervention and occupation. Up until now, we have been discussing foreign policy colloquially and ostensibly in terms of intervention, but the difference between the two concepts I just highlighted is huge and needs a bit of clarification. Some of the fuzziness surrounding the two concepts has to do with Kling’s charge of normative libertarian foreign policy. Dr Henderson, for example, cites the scholarly work of Robert Pape and Ivan Eland (as well as the observations of Paul Wolfowitz) to bolster his claim that intervention leads to blowback, but those guys are referring to the explicit occupation of territory, not intervention. This does not mean Dr Henderson or libertarians more broadly are wrong, of course, but only that dialogue on this topic suffers from a lack of detail. The Cold War-era bombings I listed above can be attributed to intervention. The terrorist attacks pre- and post-Cold War can be attributed to intervention as well, but also to occupation. Does this make sense?

2) While Kling is lazy in his assertion about “Middle Eastern terrorists” being “perfectly happy” with attacking states that did not invade Iraq, he has a really good point, albeit one made unintentionally: terrorism is an international phenomenon, and not something that can be attributed to a specific region (or religion). If we take a step back and look at terrorism more broadly (i.e. not just in a US context, which I think highlights well the consequences of intervention and occupation), what do we see? I don’t know about you, but I see terrorism in Russia, China, India, Pakistan, the US, Europe, all of Africa, Latin America, and, just for good measure, the rest of Asia, too. This leads me to train of thought Number 3: terrorism is political, as even death cults like Aum Shinrikyo in Japan or lone wolves like the Unabomber or the white nationalist shooter in Charleston are overtly political. I know I’ve harped on this already, but Dr Kling’s point helps make this much easier to understand.

Much of the terrorism, if not all of it (I hope readers will provide counter-examples), not directed at the US and its allies (which do intervene and do occupy) is done in the name of separatist movements within a state. While states claim sovereignty over their territories, and use IGOs such as the United Nations to bolster these claims, the separatist movements believe themselves to be occupied by a foreign power. Pape makes this crystal clear in his work on the (nominally Buddhist but militantly Left-wing) Tamil Tigers of Sri Lanka.

If terrorism is political, but it is not aimed at foreign intervention or occupation/separatism, what would terrorists hope to accomplish by murdering people? Given the calculated political nature of terrorism highlighted above, I fail to see how terrorism could be carried out randomly, except in works of fiction like Batman comics or old James Bond movies. The fictional nature of random acts of terrorism leads me in to my fourth and last train of thought, namely that I think Kling is introducing a red herring when he states that “there are plenty of other causes” of terrorism. This is simply not true. Since Dr Kling didn’t provide any examples, and since I don’t want to attempt to read his mind, I can only hope he reads this post and provides me with some examples that I can proceed to debunk.

While I think Dr Kling raises an excellent topic that needs to be discussed way more often, he, like Dr Delacroix, simply does not have his facts straight when it comes to foreign affairs. Ideology and dialogue are important components of the free and open society, but without a good grasp of the relevant facts of a matter those tools for improving our livelihoods become worthless, at best.

From the Comments: Libertarians and Love

Brandon Christensen Comments , , , , , , ,

Rick responds to my question about heartless libertarians:

You’re spot on. There’s a mental image I’ve read (and I’m going to butcher this because I don’t remember it clearly) of a moral gradient (I’m 60% sure that’s what it’s called). The way I fit this concept in my head is that we each have a sort of a topographical map of something hill-shaped. This map represents the moral weight we put on others and ourselves. We’re at the center, and the points furthest away are those strangers from far away that we will never meet in our lives. Different areas may represent different groups of people. Even better, instead of a topographic map, you’re forming it with a finite amount of playdough. Some people might have more or less playdough than others, but they’re usually pretty similar.

Say one person’s hill is shaped like Grinch mountain (incredibly steep) he holds himself in far higher esteem than anyone else, even those very close to him. Someone whose map is a flat plain (or plateau, but it’s hard to tell, isn’t it?) is messiah-like in her even-handedness with humanity; every person is as valuable to her as her mother. Both of these are very different from normal, and we like to see other people be normal. Sometimes quirkiness is acceptable, and I suppose we might admire someone whose map looks like a ridge representing her strong devotion to the children of an African village she visits every year as well as animals of all sorts.

When I compare my moral gradient to the people around me, I notice some important differences. I put a much higher weight on strangers and foreigners. I still probably put a lower weight on the poor than a typical democrat. But that effect is swamped when you account for how much more I care about strangers and foreigners. So if I care more about the world’s poor, then who’s missing out on love? From whence came this playdough? I’m pretty sure it’s my girlfriend’s coworkers. I honestly can’t keep them straight and I can’t piece together the stories I hear about them into anything but the most abstract people.

I think my moral gradient might be pretty typical for a libertarian. Like you, I don’t want to put people out and that can appear stand-offish. But that’s really just me saying, “I don’t know you, but I believe you aren’t simply a solipsist delusion left here for my abuse or neglect.” But other-oriented sentiments come at a cost. I consider people in the abstract, where non-libertarians consider people on a case-by-case basis. Each one is special, but only a few of them actually count. Most people incorporate Dunbar’s number as both the limit of their social network and a limit to the number of people they actually care about. For me, I basically recognize “family”, “friend”, “human being”. I don’t have “second cousin, twice removed” or “friend’s ex-boyfriend’s cool cousin that I still hang out with some times.”

That’s all a very long winded way of saying “egh, their measure for love might have been focusing on love for those in-between strangers whose names I just can’t remember for the life of me.”

Here is the wiki for Dunbar’s numbers (Robin Dunbar is a British anthropologist). Here is more from Rick on the topic. The ‘moral gradient’ Rick speaks of probably has to do with the research of the economists Sandra Peart and David Levy (I’d start here, if you’re interested), but I’m just wagering a guess.

The Lowest Levels of Love (with apologies to Dr Amburgey)

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Different Types of Love scale

The Different Types of Love scale is a 40-item measure of loving feelings toward four different groups. Participants indicate agreement with statements concerning friends […], family […], generic others […], and their romantic partner […]

Results.

Table 4 shows that libertarians showed the lowest levels of loving feelings toward others, across all four categories (although the difference with conservatives on love for friends was not significant).

Interpretation.

Consistent with the results on the Identification with All of Humanity scale, the libertarian independence from others is associated with weaker loving feelings toward friends, family, romantic partners, and generic others. It is noteworthy that differences between liberals and conservatives were generally small (except toward generic others). Libertarians were the outliers.

You’ll always be my bro, though. These results come from a paper by a bunch of moral psychologists, including Jonathan Haidt. I’ve blogged about the paper before, in regards to intelligence. (Libertarians are smarter than conservatives and liberals, remember? It turns out that we are bigger jerks, too.)

My intuition tells me that this is an incomplete analysis, though (the paper’s authors say as much, up front, in the paper itself). It’s not that libertarians are less loving than conservatives and liberals, it’s simply that we show our love in a different way, most likely in a way that isn’t represented in the sampling process. Libertarians could not, for example, be the ardent internationalists that we are without some measure of “love” for humanity.

Here is an example of what I mean. Suppose I am walking down the street and I see a bum with a cardboard sign and a tip jar (a paper cup from Carl’s Jr). The bum is drunk, and a little stoned. I say to myself, “Damn, that guy is in a crappy situation.” I reach into my pockets to see if I’ve got some change or, better yet, a couple of cigarettes. I am comfortable in claiming that most libertarians – sans those raised on the Atlantic coast of the US – go through the same thought process. If I put myself in that guy’s shoes, anything more than what I spare for him becomes a nuisance to me. Does this make sense? So if I’m panhandling, and somebody tries to do more than give me their change or spare me a couple of smokes, they become a pain in my ass. Why would I want to be a pain in our hypothetical bum’s ass?

This same thought process can be attributed to family, friends, and romantic partners. We’re not being jerks, we’re respecting your autonomy. I know for a fact that this can be a shallow admission of truth for some to hear, but it’s the truth nonetheless.

The libertarian’s outlier-ness in regards to conceptions about love may explain why we have such a tough time politically. (Our superior cognitive skills, which prompts us to be more open to getting at the truth of some matter, also goes some way toward explaining why we fail politically, as politics is emphatically about avoiding the truth.)

Morality (“love”) is simply one of a number of different spheres of conception about how the world works (including, say, economics, history, or sociology). However, morality is often the only sphere that people can afford to use to make judgments about this or that policy or social puzzle. This is because the training that is required to understand more complex topics like economics or sociology is expensive (“time”) and hard to come by. So, for example, there are a number of explanations for why foreign aid to Somalia is bad. You can use historical explanations or sociological ones or economic arguments, but the first – and often only – line of reasoning used by most people is moral in nature. Thus:

Giving money to poor countries is morally wrong.

Not exactly a game-winner, right? Look at what a jerk you are. Should we, as libertarians, be spending more time explaining to others why we think the way we do?

New issue of Econ Journal Watch is out

Brandon Christensen Links , , , , , ,

For those of you just tuning in to NOL, Fred is an editor for the journal, and Warren is its math reader.

Evolution, moral sentiments, and the welfare state: Many now maintain that multilevel selection created a sympathetic species with yearnings for social solidarity. Several evolutionary authors on the political left suggest that collectivist politics is an appropriate way to meet that yearning. Harrison Searles agrees on evolution and human nature, but faults them for neglecting Hayek’s charge of atavism: The modern polity and the ancestral band are worlds apart, rendering collectivist politics inappropriate and misguided. David Sloan Wilson, Robert Kadar, and Steve Roth respond, suggesting that new evolutionary paradigms promise to transcend old ideological categories.

Evidence of no problem, or a problem of no evidence? In 2009, Laura Langbein and Mark Yost published an empirical study of the relationship between same-sex marriage and social outcomes. Here Douglas Allen and Joseph Price replicate their investigation, insisting that conceptual problems and a lack of empirical power undermine any claim of evidence on outcomes. Langbein and Yost reply.

The progress of replication in economics: Maren Duvendack, Richard W. Palmer-Jones, and W. Robert Reed investigate all Web of Science-indexed economics journals with regard to matters concerning replication of research, including provision of the data and code necessary to make articles replicable and editorial openness to publishing replication studies. They explain the value of replication as well as the challenges, describe its history in economics, and report the results of their investigation, which included corresponding with journal editors.

A Beginner’s Guide to Esoteric Reading: Arthur Melzer describes techniques and devices used in esoteric writing.

Symposium:
Classical Liberalism in Econ, by Country (Part I): Authors from around the world tell us about their country’s culture of political economy, in particular the vitality of liberalism in the original political sense, historically and currently, with special attention to professional economics as practiced in academia, think tanks, and intellectual networks.

Chris Berg: Classical Liberalism in Australian Economics

Fernando Hernández Fradejas: Liberal Economics in Spain

Mateusz Machaj: Liberal Economics in Poland

Patrick Mardini: The Endangered Classical Liberal Tradition in Lebanon: A General Description and Survey Results

Miroslav Prokopijević and Slaviša Tasić: Classical Liberal Economics in the Ex-Yugoslav Nations

Josef Šíma and Tomáš Nikodým: Classical Liberalism in the Czech Republic

All the links are pdfs. The website is here.

Look at what just arrived in my hands

Brandon Christensen Books, Philosophy , , , , , ,
Van de Haar's "Degrees of Freedom: Liberal Political Philosophy and Ideology"
Van de Haar’s “Degrees of Freedom: Liberal Political Philosophy and Ideology”

It’s Dr van de Haar’s newest book, straight from the Netherlands. You can pick up your own copy here (mine was a gift from Dr V, one of the many perks of being an annoying blog editor!). He’s got more books that you can find either on his ‘About…’ page here at NOL or on the sidebar. Thanks Dr van de Haar!

I know Dr Khawaja (of Policy of Truth infamy) was thinking of getting this book reviewed for Reason Papers, too. I don’t have the training in political philosophy to do the job, but I can say, just by reading through the first couple of pages in his introduction, that I could have benefited immensely from this book if I had been introduced to it in Political Science 101.

Aside from the introduction, I also briefly read through Edwin’s section near the back of the book (pgs. 120-126) titled ‘The Neoliberal Phantom’, and believe that it would be very useful for liberals of all stripes when confronted with poorly constructed anti-liberal arguments (the geographer – NOT anthropologist – David Harvey, for example, gets the full Dutch treatment from Dr van de Haar). It should be noted that this section is probably (again, I don’t have any training in this area) a little less useful for academics confronting more sophisticated attacks against liberalism, but it’s a very good primer for intense undergraduates and graduate students who have to deal with the relentless, poorly reasoned attacks on liberalism in their studies and at seminars.

When I read the whole thing I’ll be sure to post a review here at the blog. If I get word of somebody who wants to review Dr van de Haar’s book for Reason Papers (check out what’s on tap right now, by the way), I’ll try to post the good news here, too.

Secession in Europe (but not the EU)

Brandon Christensen Links , , , ,

NOL‘s roster has blogged about secession within the EU before, but what about dissatisfied regions joining Switzerland’s cantons instead of the EU? Read more, from the WSJ, to find out…

Around the Web

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  1. Olivier Roy on Laicite as Ideology, the Myth of ‘National Identity’ and Racism in the French Republic
  2. Prague ’68 and the End of Time
  3. How To Spot And Critique Censorship Tropes In The Media’s Coverage Of Free Speech Controversies
  4. The Swamping that Wasn’t: The Diaspora Dynamics of the Puerto Rican Open Borders Experiment
  5. A Voice Still Heard: Irving Howe
  6. Borders and Bobbing Heads: Postcoloniality and Algeria’s Fiftieth Anniversary of Independence (so close, and yet so far…)
  7. The New Yorker on the recent scientific fraud, with its epicenter at my alma mater. (Delacroix remains startlingly relevant because of it.)

Bernard Lewis, Edward Said, Facts, Ideology, and the Middle East

Brandon Christensen History, Links , , , , , , ,

I recently came across an excellent interview conducted by Evan Goldstein, who is the editor of Arts & Letters Daily and the Chronicle of Higher Education, with Bernard Lewis, who is an eminent historian of the Middle East from Princeton. There were three things that stood out to me in the interview: 1) the potential for ideological rigidity in academia, 2) the importance of history for analysis of recent events, and 3) the astonishing, obstinate ignorance of foreign policy ideologues when it comes to understanding enemies. Three excerpts from Goldstein’s interview with Lewis can best illustrate my points.

On the potential for ideological rigidity, Lewis – who I first came across from reading Edward Said’s infamous postmodern polemic Orientalism – has much to tell us:

Age has not mellowed Lewis, especially on the topic of the late Edward Said, whose 1978 polemic, Orientalism, upended Middle East studies and placed Lewis in the position of having to defend his scholarship against charges of racism and imperialism. Lewis vividly remembers reading Orientalism for the first time. “Apart from Said’s ill will,” he says, “I was appalled by his ignorance.” […] Lewis and Said met only once, in 1986, for a debate at the annual conference of the Middle East Studies Association. Dubbed the “shoot-out at the MESA corral,” the event drew 3,000 spectators. Whether or not Lewis thinks he won that day’s battle, however, he seems to be under no illusion that he lost the war.

“Middle Eastern studies in this country is dominated by the Saidians,” he says, his voice rising in indignation. “The situation is very bad. Saidianism has become an orthodoxy that is enforced with a rigor unknown in the Western world since the Middle Ages.” This groupthink, he says, taints everything: jobs, promotions, book reviews. “If you buck the Saidian orthodoxy, you’re making life very difficult for yourself.”

In 2007, Lewis and some like-minded scholars, including Fouad Ajami, of the Johns Hopkins University, founded the Association for the Study of the Middle East and Africa. The idea, Lewis says, was to create space for opinions that deviate from the MESA mainstream, “to maintain an independent academic integrity in Middle Eastern studies.”

This is an important argument. I minored in MENAS at UCLA, which has one of the most prestigious MENAS programs in the world, and was never required to read the work of Bernard Lewis. How can this be, especially given Lewis’ towering influence on MENAS in the scholarly world? The answer is, of course, orthodoxy. Dogma. What is most disturbing about orthodoxies that gain a monopoly in a field of study is that truth becomes a political agenda rather than an aim for scholarly research. Those who, as Lewis notes, dedicate their lives to answering questions as best they can are necessarily at odds with the dogmas of the field. Postmodern Saidians have imposed the worst sort of orthodoxy, too: If you are not from the Middle East, or if you are not Muslim, then you are by default an agent – willing or otherwise – of imperial aggression and Western chauvinism. Those who question, or dismiss, Saidian insights into the Middle East and North Africa are “being political” while those who do not question Saidian insights are performing scholarly research. Can anybody else see the fallacy here?

This orthodoxy dominates MENAS scholarship. While interacting with my professors at UCLA I was given plenty of opportunities to subtly acknowledge my adherence to Saidism. I did not. I did not question Saidianism, either. I only expressed an innocent desire to gain insights into the work of the guy called out so often in Orientalism, Bernard Lewis. I was told, on numerous occasions, that Lewis had not been read, though of course it never hurts to gain the other side’s perspective. Could the orthodoxy Lewis identifies and assails be any clearer? (Here is the website to Lewis’ Association for the Study of the Middle East and Africa, by the way.)

Aside from vehemently disagreeing with the patron saint of MENAS, Lewis has also gained notoriety for his connection to the second Bush administration’s illegal invasion and subsequent occupation of Iraq. I don’t want to get into the details of his participation here (Goldstein does a good job of that in the interview itself, and I actually lost a little bit of respect for Lewis because of his evasive answers to Goldstein’s questions about his relationship with the Bush administration), but his insights into how the Middle East actually works should be of particular interest to libertarians and especially libertarians who sometimes read me for my quirky (even by libertarian standards) take on American foreign policy. Careful readers can hopefully recognize my overall argument in Lewis’ intricate understanding of the Middle East:

His disagreement with the Bush administration, he explains with a sigh, was not over the goal (regime change), but the tactic (full-scale invasion). Lewis says he argued for recognizing the leadership in northern Iraq as the country’s legitimate government and arming those forces if necessary. In the decade since the first Persian Gulf war, he says, Kurds and Arabs had managed to build a nascent democracy under the protection of the no-fly zone.

“That was the way to do it,” he says. “Simply to invade was the wrong way to do it, and I thought so and said so at the time.” Why didn’t he speak out before the invasion? “I didn’t feel at that crucial moment that it was right to take a public stance against the war.”

Aside from his inability to own up to his mistaken support for the Bush administration (or making his opposition to its policies public), Lewis is spot on. Look at what he is saying, and remember that his analysis is sharpened by a lifetime of prestigious scholarship on the Middle East: the West should have recognized that the illegitimate borders of Iraq had produced differing modes of governance in different regions, and that it would be morally acceptable to recognize the claims of sovereignty then being shouted out by the peoples of northern Iraq.

I am not even in the same ballpark as Lewis when it comes to understanding the Middle East. He is a retired-but-prestigious historian from Princeton; I am a potential graduate student with a B.A. from UCLA; yet he and I have come to the same conclusion, and it’s not hard to see why (it is also worth asking yourself the following question: Is Lewis right?):

  1. The Middle East is a region of the world with lots of different cultures (this is a truth that many foreign policy experts flatly ignore).
  2. The borders drawn up by the victors of World War I do not line up with these cultures anywhere in the Middle East, save perhaps Saudi Arabia.
  3. These artificial borders, and the international governing institutions that sanctify them, make necessary the presence of a strong man to keep these borders from collapsing.
  4. Since strong men are bad, and bottom-up institutions are good, it makes perfect sense – from a realist perspective and from an idealist perspective – for the West to recognize and incorporate the claims of sovereignty made by these bottom-up, nascent states.
  5. Invading and occupying a country, with the goal of molding it into a democracy, is a stupid idea because…
  6. …democracy cannot do for artificial states what strong men can: namely, keep borders in place without affecting the regional balance of power.

Yet the power balancers, and the realists who think that strong men serve Western interests better than democracies do, cannot adequately explain why these same strong men are so hard to control, and indeed often end up as enemies of the West (Saddam Hussein, anyone?). Lewis’ scholarship explains this well. The ideologues – the Western chauvinists and the postmodern Saidians – cannot explain this or, more likely, are unable to explain this because it flatly debunks their dogmas.

Speaking of dogmas, I have given too much attention to the orthodoxy currently strangling MENAS programs around the world, and not enough to those harbored by Western chauvinists. Goldstein reports:

Lewis pulls a Russian book off the shelf and slowly reads his name, in Cyrillic, on the cover. He smiles. His books have been translated into 29 languages. The Middle East and the West, published in 1964, was even translated into Arabic by the Muslim Brotherhood. Lewis is particularly fond of that edition’s preface: “I don’t know who this person is,” the translator wrote, “but one thing is clear. He is, from our point of view, either a candid friend or an honest enemy, and in any case one who disdains to distort the truth.” Lewis chuckles at that.

There is a common trope in many conservative Western circles that Islamists are so beholden to ideology and hatred of all things Western that they are incapable of understanding other modes of thought. Yet it is very clear from this excerpt that Islamists are interested in understanding other ideologies. Islamists, like socialists in the West, are more interested in molding better human beings than in making us freer. Instead of acknowledging this, many experts in foreign policy circles simply pretend that their opponents are savages and incapable of thinking like a true civilized individual. This mindset, too, contributes to the ongoing violence in the Middle East.

The West has a role to play in the Middle East. If it wants to reduce violence and raise standards of living, then policymakers in Washington and Brussels need to accept the fact that their conceptions of the Middle East have largely been shaped by dogma. Muslims are capable of doing bad things. So are Westerners. The West needs to support bottom-up decentralization in the Middle East until it is no longer possible to distinguish a West from a Middle East or, at least, until the West and the Middle East are as similar as Texas and California (or Germany and France). Until policymakers realize that the Middle East’s autocrats are a direct result of central planning efforts made elsewhere, and until MENAS scholars own up to the fact that their dogmas do more harm than good, peace and prosperity will elude the region.