Monday, February 28, 2005

Rees-Mogg Ain't All Bad

One of my earliest posts was a thrashing for William Rees-Mogg. But in this piece he is spot-on regarding the European Constitution.

Tuesday, February 22, 2005

Larry Summers Should Be Fired

No, I don't agree with the idiot critics of Larry Summers's comments that ignited the recent firestorm. They are intellectual Soviets who wish to air-brush any fact that puts their absurd worldview to lie. And the way they do that on campuses is by intimidating those with opposing viewpoints, so that those viewpoints are silenced, which is what is happening to Summers now.

Had Summers simply responded that his conjectures were out in public for refutation by science and research, and that anyone who didn't want to address the subject in that way should find another place to work or matriculate, I would have defended him wholeheartedly.

Instead, he caved. He threw the whole notion of the university being a place where ideas are spoken and debated openly and civilly right out the window in an effort to save his cushy job by pandering to the shrill censors attacking him.

This statement, from one of his many apologies, is particularly galling:
As I said at our Tuesday meeting, if I could turn back the clock, I would have spoken differently on matters so complex. Though my NBER remarks were explicitly speculative, and noted that "I may be all wrong," I should have left such speculation to those more expert in the relevant fields. I especially regret the backlash directed against individuals who have taken issue with aspects of what I said. In this University, people who disagree with me - or with anyone else - should and must feel free to say so. I know of no community as committed to free inquiry as this one, and no institution with a greater responsibility to uphold it.

This is sheer stupidity. His critics are not attacking his statements or the evidence that supports them. They are attacking his right to say such things. To "regret the backlash directed against" them is to regret the very concept of the university itself. Dr. Summers has shown what's most important to him: a nice, easy seven-figure salary, and open debate and respect for the view of others be damned. Your community is committed to free inquiry? Give me a break, Summers.


Meanwhile, his critics say things such as this:

"What bothers me is the consistent assumption that innate differences rather than socialization is responsible for some of the issues he talks about," said Howard Georgi, a physics professor who has been part of a successful effort in Harvard's physics department to recruit more women for tenured positions.

"It's crazy to think that it's an innate difference," Professor Georgi added. "It's socialization. We've trained young women to be average. We've trained young men to be adventurous."


Hey, y'know what, Professor Georgi? Gather the scientific evidence for your view over Summers's, and publish it! Have it out in an open debate of ideas! It's not "crazy to think that it's an innate difference" -- it's conjecture and study to think that -- something we call "SCIENCE" -- which is your freakin' job, you twit!!

Fire the lot of 'em, I say. What absolute appalling incompetence. The inmates are running the asylum.

Sunday, February 20, 2005

The Larry Summers Thing: Leftist Stupidity and Intolerance

Here is the complete text of Harvard president Larry Summers's comments that have led to a firestorm, which may well result in his dismissal.

Summers spoke a mix of theory, truth, and scientific fact. There was much that was debatable in his comments, and there was much more that was not. But this episode has become a high-profile example of what happens on our campuses every single day. The left-wing takeover of higher education has stifled free thought and censored any idea that challenges its absurd but dangerous ideological worldview.

The people who were upset that this discussion took place have no understanding of what the university is for. The women who left in a huff because Summers would say such things are intolerant, ridiculous children who have no place in the adult world at all.

That these people are being taken seriously is a serious indictment of our culture.

That Summers has cowered before and grovelled before these odious monsters says much about the "men" in the academy today.

More Lessons

Here's another marvelous story from Iwo Jima.

This is the most significant passage:

In the days that followed the flag-raising on Mount Suribachi in 1945, Wood wrote his mother about the part he had played in providing the now famous flag. Mrs. Wood, in turn, wrote to the War Department, explaining her son’s involvement. Alan Wood later heard from Brig. Gen. Robert L. Denig, director of the U.S. Marine Corps Division of Public Information in Washington, who requested details.

Wood once again told his story, heaping praise on the Marine combat troops. He wrote on July 7, 1945: “Because we were the first LST to beach at Iwo, and because we experienced a little of the deadliness of the Jap fire there, the crew of the 779 is, naturally, proud that our flag was flown from Suribachi. However, speaking for myself—and yet I am sure there are many others aboard who feel the same—the part we played in the invasion of Iwo Jima was pretty small compared to the willing and simple heroism with which the Marines did their bloody job. The fact that there were men among us who were able to face a situation like Iwo where human life is so cheap, is something to make humble those of us who were so very fortunate not to be called upon to endure any such hell.”


This goes straight to the heart of the incomprehension and disgust I feel with the rich and idle anti-Americans who get so much attention these days. How can these people, who've gained so very much from this nation and given so very little, miss the fact that their success is built on the sacrifices of millions before them? What sickness of their spirit makes them so obsessed with our imperfections, yet so blind to the wonder of the wealth and freedom America has to offer?

Saturday, February 19, 2005

The Lessons of Iwo Jima

Sixty years ago the assault on the tiny island of Iwo Jima in the South Pacific began. Few of us alive today can imagine the hell the troops went through.

Bravo to The Wall Street Journal for this excellent editorial on the subject by historian Arthur Herman. Read the whole thing.

This passage, though, is key:

Yet even this valor and sacrifice is not the full story of what Iwo Jima means, or what Rosenthal's immortal photograph truly symbolizes. The lesson of Iwo Jima is in fact an ancient one, going back to Machiavelli: that sometimes free societies must be as tough and unrelenting as their enemies. Totalitarians test their opponents by generating extreme conditions of brutality and violence; in those conditions--in the streets and beheadings of Fallujah or on the beach and in the bunkers of Iwo Jima--they believe weak democratic nerves will crack. This in turn demonstrates their moral superiority: that by giving up their own decency and humanity they have become stronger than those who have not.

Free societies can afford only one response. There were no complicated legal issues or questions of "moral equivalence" on Iwo Jima: It was kill or be killed. That remains the nature of war even for democratic societies. The real question is, who outlasts whom. In 1945 on Iwo Jima, it was the Americans, as the monument at Arlington Cemetery, based on Rosenthal's photograph, proudly attests. In the jungles of Vietnam and Cambodia in the 1970s, it was the totalitarians--with terrible consequences.

Would that we understood this lesson of history today. Indeed, the women during WWII were tougher and more resilient than the men of today. Today, while our enemy hangs the bodies of murdered civilians from bridges and hacks off the heads of kidnapped innocents, our "intellectuals" wail and gnash their teeth over the "torture" at Abu Ghraib and the horrendous fiction that our military men targeting journalists.

We will have to learn the lessons of Iwo Jima. Or we, like the many invincible powers that came before us -- the Egyptians, the Babylonians, the Greeks, or the Romans -- will see all we've built fall to ruin.

So Why Help Pay Their Bills?

I don't go to movies much. It's hard to find one nowadays that doesn't just completely suck, I think.

But there's the reason I don't go to pro sports events, too -- prices are far too high for what you get, and the performers are paid ridiculously just for fooling around! Sorry, my cash is for more important things, like beer and bicycle stuff.

Just as with my point months ago about universities, if people don't like the politics of an institution, why do they give it money? The lockstep-left-wing "institutions of higher learning" survive on alumni donations. Why fork over the cash to support the self-important and childish worldview of the typical socialist college prof?

Same with Hollywood. As this Fox News report says, the politics of movies is equally one-sided as in our universities. So surely your money can go to more worthwhile causes, like purchasing firearms.

And why provide a paycheck for the shrieking anti-American actors of today? If the actor Sean Penn, or the actress Leo DiCaprio, want to belittle the US, that's their right as Americans -- more power to 'em. But you're the one responsible for the fact that they're doing it from hillside mansions in Malibu, with an endless string of hotties on their arms. Those two should be delivering pizza and dating heifers.

Go here to read about the real heroes of Hollywood -- people who could not only act, but could also put their wealth-accumulating aside and take up arms to defend freedom. Their kind, like the elves at the end of Lord of the Rings, have passed from this land.

Sunday, February 06, 2005

America's Fading Glory, Part 157,917...

They seem to come in waves, these assertions of the ongoing demise of the West (by which the writers always mean the US -- funny how Europe is still going to be a star player despite its already moribund economies, its coddled, idle populations, and its complete lack of military anything).

Here's yet another, by Martin Jacques from The Guardian. This one is particularly idiotic on at least two points. The first is in his comparison of America with Europe:

This was something that Europe learned the hard way: two world wars, the rise of the United States and the Soviet Union, and the anti-colonial struggle have taught our continent the limitations of its own power. That is why Europe today, with the partial exception of Britain and France, and exemplified by Germany, is so reluctant to use military force. The United States, of course, is the opposite. It measures its power not by its relative economic and technological prowess, which would suggest restraint, but its military unassailability, which implies the opposite.

Nor is this attitude simply a product of the neoconservatives. It also draws on something deeper within the American psyche. The birth of the United States and its expansion across the American continent - the frontier mentality - was an imperial enterprise, involving, most importantly, the subjugation and destruction of the Amerindians. This is lodged in the national genes, it is part of the American story, and it helps to inform and shape its global strategy and aspirations.

What a sick joke. No, Martin, it is not some deep wisdom gained by Europe that leads to its refusal to use force. It is the fact that Europe has no force, and no backbone. This is not a recent phenomenon. In the World Wars, Europe had the backbone but not the military might to throw off its potential conquerors, and it was left to the Americans alone in the First, and America and the Soviets in the Second, to come to Europe's rescue (though in the case of the Soviets, they were also a third set of potential conquerors.)

During the Cold War, most of Europe's remaining military might dissolved, and its backbone disappeared entirely. The waning years of the Cold War saw Europeans cozying up with the Soviet conquerors of its Eastern reaches, and protesting against the American military power that preserved its freedom. The Soviets lost nonetheless, but the hangover of that long conflict (perhaps unavoidable) is an entire continent that continues to rely on the US for its defense, while explaining its weakness away as a superior understanding of the world. How absolutely pathetic.

Finally, for a European to assail America for its imperial ambition is jaw-droppingly bold. It's also incorrect, insofar as Jacques explains it. The conquering of what is today the contiguous 48 states was not imperial; Manifest Destiny, for all the apt criticisms it might attract, was a program of creating a political continuity on the continent. This is not empire. Indeed, Jacques's critique here smacks of a sad projection.

The second is in his discussion of the rise of Asia, particularly India and China. This passage comparing China with the US is telling:
The contrast between China and the United States could hardly be more striking. The former dates back thousands of years, the latter not much more than 200; the former is a product of an ancient civilisation, the latter an invented nation whose citizens bear allegiance to a political document, the constitution. It is little wonder that Americans constantly need to reinvent themselves: the Chinese, unsurprisingly, have no such problem, they know exactly who they are. The profound cultural differences are already being played out in a cinema near you: Hollywood versus the new breed of popular Chinese films. This is just a taster for the future, the beginning of what will later come to dominate the 21st century. American - and western values - will find themselves contested like never before.
Jacques's assertion that somehow China, because it's an "ancient civilization," has been firmly unchanging in its culture and its politics while the immature America has blown in the wind is inconceivably daft, and betrays a profound lack of understanding of what makes a country tick. China's recent history in particular has been a comedy of political and cultural cluelessness, with its Communist Party grasping feverishly at one program after another to keep its grip on political power and keep the masses from revolt. America, meanwhile, has certainly rolled with the changes -- but its fundamental politics have remained amazingly constant, Jacques's sneering at us as "an invented nation whose citizens bear allegiance to a political document, the constitution" notwithstanding. (By the way, Mr. Jacques, it's Constitution. But then to expect any respect from you is a tad silly.)

India and China are succeeding today primarily to the extent they adopt those values that the US will continue to instill wherever she can: free speech, free enterprise, and the rule of law. China in particular, its ancient civilization notwithstanding, has radical changes yet to make if it's not to suffer the same ignominies as Japan. But Martin Jacques certainly will never understand any of this.

Saturday, February 05, 2005

Childbearing Smarminess

I used to despise everything about childbearing, sneering at those with or expecting children as the "babymakers" (not meant in any way positive, let me tell you!)

Okay, I got over it, and now I'm one of the previously vilified "babymakers" myself, with my first son due in a month.

Still, even if I can now admit the positives to the whole thing,I also know there's a lot of idiocy around the process. For example, what the hell is it with the penchant for laboring mothers to be bare-ass naked? First, I'd like to point out that this is Seinfeldian "bad naked," and don't make me count the ways. But second, there's more than a whiff of '60s hippyishness about it, and I'd so hoped we'd finally gotten past that. But go to any childbearing class (most of which are themselves given over to a lot of the idiocy around the whole thing), and there in most of the videos are grunting, pallid, fleshy, NAKED women, with hairy heads poking out of you-know-where! AAARRRRGH!

As an aside, I find myself to be wholly un-squeamish about the blood and goo and such. So don't even lay that on me as a defense; no, it is just the barenaked ladies themselves who are so off-putting, and that should be the case for any discerning human.

But even more odious and idiotic is what is fast becoming an ironclad rule of referring to the unborn baby as "she." This seems to arise from that branch of feminism that dreams of manless world, and I shudder to think of those dopes taking control of the whole birthing process -- what with that meaning the end of mankind and such. For now, though, they seem only to control the childbearing-industrial complex, especially the publishing end. I've vowed that any information about childbearing or children that hews to this moronic language standard will be immediately discarded, unread past that first encounter with the feminine third person pronoun.

Sadly, of course, that means that I've learned next to nothing about this "magical moment" for which I'm inexorably headed. Ah well, sheer ignorance worked for our ancestors, so it'll just have to work for me.