Author: Jacques Delacroix

Systematic Evil and our Insensitivity to Evil

Jacques Delacroix Current Events, Politics , ,

Conservative circles are celebrating a new, fairly courageous movie about fanatical, primitive Islamist Iran, “The Stoning of Soraya M.” It’s after the true story of the public execution by stoning of a young mother accused of adultery in a backward Iranian village. The movie sounds well made, affecting, but the story is a cop-out.

It turns out the young woman was framed. She was not guilty of adultery but the victim of machination by her evil husband and weak officials. No commentator or critic I have read has asked what are to me obvious questions:

First, I want to know what is the fate in backward areas of Iran of women who are correctly convicted of adultery. Is Iran a society where the penalty for a woman who has sex with a man not her husband is an especially barbarous form of capital punishment?

Second, I want to know whether or not the same could happen in Tehran or in some other of Iran’s major cities. Even the most civilized societies experience occasional barbarous acts in their backward areas. The question is this: Is the Islamic Republic an uncivilized society?

Third, I want to know how the kind of Islamic law that prevails in Iran defines adultery. I ask, because several years ago, in Muslim Nigeria, a young woman was sentenced to death by stoning for becoming pregnant after divorcing her husband. (Her sentence was eventually commuted and the rest of the world lost track of her.)  Continue reading →

The Mysteries of Nature

Jacques Delacroix Liberty , , ,

There is a big stupid redwood tree in the tiny plot in front of my house. It’s stupid because it would be much better off in the forest with its brothers, less than two miles away, rather than littering the sidewalk and threatening my roof. To make matters worse, the utilities company appears to have the right to trim it any way it wants. So, my sequoia looks like an old toilet brush. The city of Santa Cruz won’t let me cut it down and it has the impudence to ask for a special high fee merely to hear my appeal.

Santa Cruz has no manufacturing. It was all run out of town in past years by the left-wing/Green political class. It’s squeezed between the usually breezy Pacific Ocean one one side and wooded mountains on the other. The wind is from the west, from the ocean, four days out of five. My stupid redwood tree right downtown is essential to maintain air purity, I am sure!

Anyway, the redwood tree has one redeeming virtue: It’s home to an abundant and varied fauna. At the apex is a large population of squirrels. They seem to be divided into two tribes, or two ethnic groups. One tribe is red with a tinge of brown, as you would expect in California. The other tribe’s coloring ranges from jet-black to kind of black. The racial strife between the two groups is incessant. At sunrise, they pursue one another across my roof. All day, they set ambushes and they chase the other guys up and down the tree and on the ground.

It’s not always clear what the squirrel warfare is all about. There seems to be plenty of living space for all (“lebensraum,” in German). Or it’s only the old guys fighting over mating rights. Or the old females just being bitchy. Or it’s the young guys that are aggressive because they seldom get any. I know however what they are not fighting about. They are not merely fighting about food as you would expect ordinary forest-dwelling squirrels to do, for example, that must tear each others’ eyes out for every tiny pine cone seed, even every little bitter-tasting acorn. Continue reading →

Health Care Reform: Paradise Lost

Jacques Delacroix Current Events, Politics , ,

I have been struggling for three days to swim back to the surface and breathe again. Since the monstrous health care bill reform passed on Sunday, furor and something approaching despair have made me numb and mute. As people begin actually reading the 2700 pages, bad news cascade after bad news. I have been looking for the silver lining and found only one: It looks like the portability of health insurance will become a fact. That’s good. It was intolerable that people stayed in jobs they hated and refrained from entrepreneurship because they were too afraid to lose their health coverage. I think that’s all.

The rest of it is a disaster for our future. Note that every other political defeat does not make me feel the way I do now. Alternance in power is a good thing. When the other guys get their way with something I don’t want, I figure it’s the price I pay for stable and peaceful government. Certainly, I don’t want to live in a country where the losers routinely stage coups or start revolutions.

I don’t like most of what I know is in the law. I fear what else is in there that I will only discover later. I am sure the cost of the programs the law creates will undermine severely our future economic development. I suspect hardly anyone one will benefit. Instead, the overall quality of health care will decline. Most of all, I am aggrieved by the process by which the law became law, against clearly expressed majorities of opinion. The process smells of fascism and of the twisted parliamentary (ostensibly legal) methods by which the Communist Party gained control of Czechoslovakia in 1948. Continue reading →

Three Astonishing Women: A Short Short Story

Jacques Delacroix Current Events

I leave my newspaper on the table outside as I dart inside the coffee shop to get more sugar. When I return, three seconds later, a middle-aged woman is walking briskly across the street, holding my newspaper in her hand.

Hey, I shout fairly amicably, I was not finished with my paper.

She turns around and throws the paper on the table near me.

I don’t want your stupid paper, she says. What would I do with it? I am legally blind.

Fact is that she is wearing unusually thick glasses. Point well taken. What do I know?

I drive into an unevenly paved parking lot behind a woman in a big van. When she makes a right-hand turn, I spot a blue handicapped sticker on her windshield. Just as she is about to place her van in the reserved handicapped space, her engine stops. After several useless attempts to re-start it, she steps out of the vehicle and starts pushing.

I am a real sweetheart and also an old-fashioned nice manly man so, my first reflex is to get out and to give her a hand. I abstain because I soon judge her efforts to be fruitless. She is pushing that heavy van up a significant bump. I think there is no way the two of us can vanquish gravity and place the van in its spot.

Then, the woman braces herself; the back of her dress rises and her big calves become like hard river stones; she harrumphs once and the van ends up perfectly parked in the handicapped spot. I learned another lesson: Don’t judge a book by its cover, or even by its title. Continue reading →

L’administration Obama bat de l’aile

Jacques Delacroix Current Events, Politics

Après moins d’un an, l’administration Obama bat de l’aile. Il ne s’agit pas de l’endettement massif du pays qu’il a suscité car ses dimensions échappent au commun des mortels. Il ne s’agit pas non plus principalement du chômage de 10%, pourtant inhabituel aux Etats-Unis, et encore moins des tergiversations du Président sur l’engagement militaire en Afghanistan. Mêmedeux attentats terroristes en deux mois pèsent assez peu dans la balance, à mon avis.

La tentative de réforme de la santé par un parlement à grossemajorité Démocrate et par le Président sont au coeur dudésenchantement vis-à-vis de ce dernier. De plus en plus de politiciens Démocrates ont deja choisi de ne pas se représenter en Novembre car ils sentent bien la colère montante des électeurs. Une commentatrice du Wall Street Journal parle de “la victoire catastrophique” d’Obama sur ce plan.

Pourquoi cette querelle interne devrait-elle intéresser lesétrangers? La raison est simple: Le secteur santé recouvre 17% du PNB américain. Il atteindra 20% prochainement. Or, et contrairement a une impression répandue, l’Amérique, même enétat de crise, demeure la locomotive de l’économie mondiale. Il n’y a pas de solution de rechange. Le PNB de la Chine, par exemple demeure de plus de quatre fois inférieur au PNBaméricain. Quand l’Amérique a la migraine, le reste du monde s’allite. Continue reading →

Four Small Keys to Happiness

Jacques Delacroix Liberty , ,

I have sorted thing out finally and I am old enough to have rid myself of nearly all social pressures on my preferences. I figure there are only four things I really like, four keys to my happiness. Here they are:

I like writing and I like re-writing. That’s any time of day or night that I am awake. I enjoy writing just about everything, including stories, essays, scholarly papers, but also advertising slogans, and even technical “how-to” notices. I write on my PC but also long-hand, even on the back of envelopes. Sometimes, people even read what I write. My friends think I have a self-esteem problem because I am pleased with just about everything I write. I have no clear idea of what they mean. I am mostly happy because I write nearly every day.

I like foods that taste like themselves, beef that tastes only like beef and fish that tastes like fish. There are a few exceptions though. It’s OK for tripe to carry other flavors. That would be cow stomach, served as menudo, in Spanish, for example. In season, I eat fresh cauliflower raw with a little vinegar. I can do that five meals in a row without tiring. As a rule, I will eat anything any other human being anywhere eats as long as it’s distinctive. I make only two exceptions: Ordinarily, I would not consume people, or even dogs whose name I know.

Nouvelle Cuisine is not for me. It’s just putting together foods that don’t belong on the same plate and sprinkling them with raspberry vinegar. California Cuisine just means eating fresh vegetables. My grandmother advised much the same and she was not from California. Almost any wine will do to accompany my food. I have no refinement in that respect (or in any other) and I don’t pretend to.

I am married to an intelligent, resourceful woman who would rather please me than not, at least much of the time. I am a decent cook myself. My tastes are not luxurious. Usually, my food is satisfying. So, I am happy most of the time.

A silvery, bounding fish hooked while trolling under sail on a sunny day at sea, I like desperately. Why “desperately”? Because it’s only happened four times. Each instance occupies an unseemly amount of space in my pleasure memory.

Making love ziplessly to a needy woman who is almost a stranger, I really, really like. It happened more than four times but it was a long time ago so, I am not even completely sure I was involved anymore.

© Jacques Delacroix 2008, 2009

Islamophobia (Part 2 of 2)

Jacques Delacroix Current Events, Politics , ,

In Part 1 of this essay, Islamophobia, I recounted some facts about terrorism that seems linked to Islam and I made some hypotheses about how Muslims in general array themselves with respect to this terrorism. In this second and last part, I divulge some of the bases of my worst suspicions regarding moderate Muslims.

I wish someone with credentials would help me disentangle who is what and in what proportions among Muslims in connection with the varying degrees of rejection of violent jihad described above. In the meantime, I feel intellectually free to speculate within reason and on the basis of other information I have, factual information, that is, not hearsay.

The first helpful element in my speculation is that, of course, I understand violent Muslim fanatics well. Anyone reasonably well versed in European history would, My ancestors used to be just like them. I never tire of repeating on this blog and elsewhere that the First Crusade (1099) massacred everyone there after taking Jerusalem. That massacre followed acts of cannibalism during the siege. And more recently, it’s clear that tens of thousands of witches were burned at the stake in Europe. (Note: The figure of millions advanced by feminists is silly propaganda bullshit.) Violent jihadists and other fanatics hold not mystery to me because I used to be they. Used to be. Continue reading →

Islamophobia (Part 1 of 2)

Jacques Delacroix Current Events , , , , , ,

The backlash that did not happen after 9/11 is taking place now because of Muslim stubbornness, arrogance, or simple lack of articulateness. Americans are tolerant and patient to the point of gullibility but there is a limit. When it comes to the establishment of an explicitly Muslim-anything near Ground Zero, many feel they have been deceived, that their good nature has been taken advantage of. To cap it off, the liberal media accompany some American Muslim spokespersons, and some ordinary Muslims in accusing them of the mysterious sin of “Islamophobia.” (Siddiqui: American anti-Muslim prejudice goes mainstream – thestar.com circa 8/26/10)

I am referring to the majority of Americans who have expressed some degree of opposition to the plan to establish a Muslim cultural center including a mosque near the site of the 9/11 jihadist massacre. I am one of those so accused.

I tend to look seriously at any serious accusation thrown at me seriously. Often, it does not tell me anything about me and my behavior but it gives me an insight into the ways of thinking of the insulter. So, I will look at Islamophobia, the dislike and fear of Islam and, by extension, of all things Muslim, from the standpoint of what I know and then, from that of what I don’t know for a fact but that is plausible. I try to keep the factual and the plausible, the speculative, separate.

In the end, I want to know what I am guilty of, if anything, as an Islamophobic American. I don’t discount the possibility that I am guilty as charged. Continue reading →

Sex: Real Dopes

Jacques Delacroix Current Events, Liberty, Politics ,

The arrest of international banker Dominique Strauss Kahn on several charges amounting to sexual assault has occasioned more discussion of sex on the airwaves than I have heard for many years. Some of the statements I hear are absurd or annoying. Others are downright dishonest. I am trying to sort out the most salient points.

Warning: If you are prudish, don’t read what follows. If you are under fifteen, read at the risk of undermining your healthy sexual development.

First things first: A couple of days ago, the Spanish minister of economy and finance, I think, was one of many female commentators committing a deeply immoral amalgam. One the one hand, she said, there is the presumption of innocence, on the other hand, the charges are so serious, so awful. It’s common thinking in academia among bureaucrats in charge of hunting down sexual harassment, sex discrimination, and in the end, sex differences.

Here is a reminder, girls: The seriousness of an alleged crime, whatever great, has no influence on innocence. Those are separate things completely. Get this: Continue reading →

The Blonde Queen of the Lower Andes: A Story

Jacques Delacroix History , , ,

Thinking all the time about this country’s situation puts me in a blue funk. Here is a story to cheer me and you up. It’s one of my best.

I reached that mid-size Bolivian city in the lower Andes, on a research trip, the day before Bastille Day. I was an old undergraduate at Stanford at the time and still a French citizen. I reported my presence to the French consul, as required by law, as technically a member of the French Navy reserve. The consul was a Bolivian doctor who had studied in France and subsequently married, and then, divorced, a French woman. Bolivia being a landlocked country (bitterly so), the consul was not overwhelmed with naval business. He was glad to see me nevertheless and very cordial. He pressed me to attend the party he would give the next day on the occasion of the French national day.

It was a pleasant but schizoid event, starting with good French Champagne and ending with chicha, the soupy, local artisan corn beer. (Bolivians say that the fermentation of really good chicha starts with the spit of virgins. Just to make sure, they ask tiny girls to spit in the brew.) There was the usual mix of French expatriates and of Francophiles, most of the latter, probably silly unconditional Francophiles, plus some smart freeloaders.

The French expatriates often land in a particular town of a particular country at a particular time for no particular reason. They may have been heading somewhere else and gotten stuck along the way. They always include wives and former wives of natives who may have divorced them, or died. Coming from different epochs (such as before and after WWII), they form historical strata, each remembering a different France, and they entertain disparate and often incompatible visions of the fatherland. They have developed new habits in the country where they live and, without knowing it, they have drifted far from their culture of origin. That culture of origin, meanwhile, is itself changing, but in a different direction. Many expatriates disseminate more or less innocently patently false notions about the country where they were raised. Their French self is forever a young person, or even a child. Their own children are simply natives of their land of residence with a smattering of the French language and no real curiosity, forever strangers to their parents. Continue reading →

One Sure Thing About Globalization – The American Motion Pictures Industry World Hegemony Part 5

Jacques Delacroix Economics , , , , ,

[Editor’s note: this lecture was delivered to the Leavey Institute of Santa Clara University in 2003. You can find it reproduced in whole here]

The Virtuous Global Effects of American Motion Pictures Hegemony

If one concedes the possibility that screen products generate or encourage violence, one must also accepts the possibility that they may affect behavior in socially desirable ways. (One can’t have it both ways: Television and, by extension, the cinema are either impotent or they may exercise a virtuous influence, as well as a pernicious one.) Thus, Curtin (1999) argues that satellite television circulates globally beneficently subversive (i.e. non-traditional), images of femininity, and therefore, alternative ways of being a woman. A moving testimony comes from the Albanian novelist Ismail Kadaré (1999): During the long night of Albanian communism (Albania was the most isolated country on Earth for forty years. Its paranoiac regime ended up cutting off relations with all countries except North Korea), Kadaré comments at length on how frequent exposure to garden–variety Western television courtroom drama ultimately induced among Albanians a distaste for personal blood feuds as old- fashioned or un-modern.

So, I pose the question: What virtuous influence may the ubiquitous American movies have on the rest of the world and, in particular, on the poor and on the downtrodden everywhere?

Even if one subscribes to the idea that movies don’t do much directly to alter either the values or the behavior of viewers, they inadvertently carry factual information, in their settings, as well as in the mundane aspects of their plots. I don’t see how some of that information cannot cumulatively have a liberating effect on those who live under less fortunate circumstances. American movies are shot mostly in the US (sometimes in Canada).They are directed mostly by American directors (or by Americanized Brits). Although Hollywood is one of the world centers of political correctness and of left-wing piousness, Hollywood films cannot help but convey to global audiences important realities of American life (and generic features of life in Western, secular, democratic, capitalist societies, in general). Among these: Continue reading →

Dr D. on Sex, Homosexuality, Language Usage

Jacques Delacroix Comments, Current Events, History , , , , , , , ,

A reader, MM, sent a comment criticizing an off-hand, snide remark I had made in my micro-essay, “Sex Advice.” I welcome the opportunity MM gives me to take him into the alley and beat him to a pulp. His full comment:

Though usually considered much of a stick-in-the-mud regarding language, and especially neologisms, I must offer a cordial disagreement regarding the word “gender” when used instead of “sex.”

Ordinarily I despise changing the language (you should see, for example, my battles with the ignorami who say “healthy” when they mean “healthful”), but when a change improves and clarifies, then I can not only accept but embrace it.

You are right that “gender” was originally intended for language references — more important in French and other furrin tongues — but since “sex” has become such an important, or at least such an ever-present, part of everyday life, having a separate word, such as “gender,” keeps the meaning clear.

I mean, I have compromised my formerly inviolate principles so that now I even use the word “gay” rather than “homosexual,” after swearing I would never degrade the language in that fashion.

But, after all, “gay” is the polite term, the one preferred by the people to whom it applies.

So, if I can change, linguistically, so can you.

MM’s justification for the widespread substitution of “gender” for “sex”makes sense. I agree that it clarifies. However, it ignores the fact that such a change rarely occurs as a result of a technical-rational process. Such changes, this one in particular, are loaded with sociological and, with political importance. To ignore them is to assent. Winning the substitution of one word for another is like winning an election forever, an election in which the winning party never even ran and the opposition never campaigned. What I am going to say about “gender” applies even better to “gay.” Continue reading →

Practical Sex Advice For Dudes

Jacques Delacroix Liberty , ,

I am a frivolous man forced by the boringness of my intellectual betters to keep diving back into serious didactic conduct. I just spent a week and part of the weekend expostulating on serious ideological issues. I almost have a headache as a result. So, it’s time I pleased myself by doing what I do best. That’s giving sex advice to others, of course. This time, it’s to dudes. If you are female, you are required to stop reading here.

Guys, guys! Men who ask what women want are just not paying attention, they are slow-witted or, more likely, they are not using the abundant information around them. If you pick up women’s magazines at the barber, even if only to look at the titles and at the ads, if you keep an eye on women’s morning television shows at the gym, if you ask yourself who is buying all the cheap paperbacks with the lurid, salacious covers, you will soon find convergent answers to the question: What do women want? I am going to shortcut the study for you anyway. The answers below apply only to heterosexual women. (I tried to find out what lesbians want but they threatened to beat me up.)

First, as always, as from “forever,” almost all women want a man to their name. This astounding failure of thirty years of feminism is worth a whole scholarly essay on its own. I will do it some other time. I said “almost all” because I have come across a couple of women who learned from a bad marriage, or from a bad divorce, or more likely, from both, that their own man was more of a burden than they wanted to carry for occasional use. They are content to borrow one now and then, here and there.

Second, women want the man in their lives to declare sincerely how very, very sorry he is. It does not matter what he is sorry about, it’s the intensity of the emotion in the confession that matters. I urge you, brother-men, to not yield to this facile way to get points with your beloved. It’s habit forming; she will want more; there will be no end to it. And after a while, she will despise you for your weakness.

Third, all women want someone else’s breasts. Silly feminists will argue that this horrid patriarchal society has made women un-naturally chest-conscious. Nothing could be further from the truth. Breast envy is hard-wired. Cave women who lived in all-female herds and rarely saw a man used to sneak behind the bushes with a piece of torn mammoth pelt to fashion a Wonderbra of sorts. At any rate, the envy leads to surgery if it’s not checked in time. Don’t allow this barbarous practice; don’t show any tolerance of it, not even unconsciously. If you care at all for a woman, any woman, you don’t want her perfectly healthy flesh to be cut by a sharp knife and then delivered to an always hazardous healing process. Besides, I have seen on television that the results of breasts implant and breast modification are sometimes tragically grotesque. I mean uglier than any naturally shaped protuberances I have ever seen. And I have seen a lot of ugly breasts in my life. I say so without meaning to brag.

Fourth, all women like earrings. They never have enough. Earrings are not dangerous, immoral, or generally threatening to a woman’s reputation. There are nearly no ugly earrings. Almost any woman’s face is lit up by earrings, even mediocre earrings. I have known this for years but almost at a subliminal level. For a long time, I was clueless about earrings, like many men. I thought buying earrings for a woman was an expensive and time-consuming endeavor also fraught with mis-steps. Not so long ago, I began experimenting by giving earrings frequently to a young woman to whom I am close. Specifically, I experimented with price. Amazingly soon, I discovered that there was not floor, no earrings so cheap that they would fail to put the woman in a good mood, at least for a while. I stopped the experiment at the rather shameful but astounding price of two dollars ($2). I stopped mostly because I had trouble finding cheaper earrings. Something else happened during the experiment: I became progressively and palpably better at choosing earrings. I am now so good at it I might just as well be gay.

Here is a good rule of thumb applying to just about everything: If you are sufficiently bad at something, you will improve quickly through practice. This goes for buying earrings the same as it goes for sex, the act.

One Sure Thing About Globalization – The American Motion Pictures Industry World Hegemony Part 4

Jacques Delacroix Economics, Liberty , , , , ,

[Editor’s note: this lecture was delivered to the Leavey Institute of Santa Clara University in 2003. You can find it reproduced in whole here]

Just another National Specialization

The massive asymmetry in films exports between the US and the rest of the world may be the result of any number of factors. The fact that foreign movies occasionally do well in the US market ( in recent years, “Life is Beautiful”, from Italy, “Amélie”, from France. The first, 1999, Pokemon cartoon from Japan grossed US$85.7 , million, according to WSJ 7/19/02:w11, and, as forecasted by same – “Read my Lips”, also from France, will do well) suggests that public preference, and possibly language barriers, are more likely to be issues than American distribution superiority, for example. Yet, language barriers may be less significant than one would guess. Luc Besson’s “Jeanne d’Arc” (“The Messenger”) released in 1999, purportedly produced in English to make it accessible to the polyglot EU markets and to the US market, registered 3.07 million admissions in the European Union in that year, against, 40 million for American-made “ Star Wars Episode 1”, 23 million for “Tarzan”, almost 21 million for “The Matrix” , and 7.4 million for “American Pie”. Even the obscure, American-made “Patch Adams” did better ( EAO 2001: 100). “The Messenger” flopped so badly in the American market that admissions and revenue figures are hard to find. For 1999 also, only one British production and two UK-US co-productions, all in English of course, figure among the top worldwide 50 admission getters. In Belgium where practically the whole population understands French , French-made movies obtain usually less than 10% market share, against an 80% share for American-made movies. (EAO 2001: 96). Finally, the foreign successes of Indian movies, almost all in languages understood hardly anywhere outside India and not everywhere in India, suggest again that language may be a small constraint. Continue reading →

One Sure Thing About Globalization – The American Motion Pictures Industry World Hegemony Part 3

Jacques Delacroix Economics, History , , , , ,

[Editor’s note: this lecture was delivered to the Leavey Institute of Santa Clara University in 2003. You can find it reproduced in whole here]

Broken Promises

Harm to the poor on a considerable scale occurs when rich countries suddenly violate the principles of free trade they publicly support, on the main. The US government and those of other post-industrial countries will periodically make a show of vaunting the merits of free trade on stages (such as the World Trade Organization) that guarantee worldwide publicity. These actions must encourage at least some of the most enterprising poor in poor countries to produce for distant markets they are not in a position to understand.

When the governments of rich and large entities, such as the US, Japan and the European Union, suddenly inhibit the free movement of products, those enterprising poor people in poor countries suffer, and suffer disproportionately. Thus, the recent passing of new American farm subsidies legislation (in 2002) makes it difficult or impossible for small farmers in the Sahel area of Africa to compete on the world ‘s cotton markets with American growers (Thurow and Kilman, 2002)(6). The steel tariffs erected by the Bush administration – with the full complicity of Congress – must have similar effect on steelworkers in some of the Third World and Eastern European steel-producing countries.

Neither of these policies nor the broken promises they imply, can be easily defended on moral or rational grounds. Directly, it can probably be shown that the economic actors of poor countries who embraced free trade end up worse off than they would be if they had toed to a more parochial (“autarkic”) line. Indirectly, such breaches of faith by powerful rich countries contribute to the stagnation of the Third World by seeming to prove wrong those who adopted a stance leading most surely to economic development: embracers of production for worldwide markets. (In my experience, well-educated defenders of national economic ”self-sufficiency” rarely care to argue against free trade in principle; instead, they rely on evidence that there is no real free trade but a poisonous international game where the dice are loaded against the poor in poor countries. Sometimes, they have a point.)

The American Motion Pictures Industry’s Hegemony Continue reading →