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I’m back from Washington, and I have an announcement for readers of the blog: Eunomia will be shifting over to The American Conservative’s site here. This will be the last post at this site (the redirect will be set up soon), and all future Eunomia blogging will be at TAC.
Perhaps, but having a trio of “philosopher-bloggers” talk about the fortunes and future of the conservative intellectual movement is not blogging. I will be at CPAC for an ISI-sponsored Friday panel from 1:00-3:00 in Congressional Room A.
P.S. It appears that the President will also be coming to CPAC on Friday. That should be an interesting sight.
My apologies for the last few days. As you would have seen had you checked in the last few days, the site used up its bandwidth allowance for the month and was just re-set a moment ago. Elsewhere, I have some new posts. Specifically, at Taki’s Top Drawer I have three new posts on McCain, Huckabee’s foreign policy, and some random thoughts on that apocryphal “better to be ruled by a wise Turk than a foolish Christian” quote we have seen so often in recent months.
The latest TAC is online. In it Austin Bramwell has an utterly devastating review of Goldberg’s book:
Instead, lacking even the excuse of ignorance, he chose to sling the term “fascism” around as casually as the most vulgar leftist. It does not speak well of Goldberg that, by his own admission, he wrote his first book not to enlighten but to exact revenge.
You’ve waited for it, and now here it is: First Principles, ISI’s web journal, is online.
Considering how little of any real worth he contributes, I’ve never understood why Jamie Kirchick has been part of respectable conversation, but I haven’t made much of an issue out of it. If he would like to continue embarrassing himself with this pathetic obsession, that’s his business.
Since last May, Eunomia has added another 1,300 posts. Since the blog began over three years ago, I have been averaging about 1,600 per year. I hope you continue to find Eunomia worthwhile and interesting reading in the future, and I will strive to keep producing commentary worthy of your attention. Thanks to everyone who has helped make Eunomia a success, especially the regular readers and commenters.
Have I forgotten to mention that I have an article on the crazed primary schedule in this month’s Chronicles? If I have, I apologise. The current issue has some excellent contributions. I particularly recommend Dr. Fleming’s article on a politics driven by interests.
This may be my last post in 2007. As always with Eunomia, you can never be sure that a blogging hiatus will, in fact, be a hiatus, but I do intend to keep it to a minimum. Tomorrow I begin my trek home for Christmas, and I probably won’t be checking in while on break. This is what the blog-as-pastime has become: something from which sane people must take extended vacations. Ilyen az elet. Merry Christmas to you all, and Happy New Year! S Rozhdestvom i S Novim Godom!
Today has been a strange day. The day began with Mitt Romney, which was bad enough. (I am working on a column on the Romney/anti-Mormonism topic, so I am going to hold off on commenting on the subject for a while.) Driving to work, I was side-swiped by a van that was dodging out of the way of one of Chicago’s many horrible taxi drivers. Let’s just say that my car has looked better. As I walked in to lecture this morning, the seats of the lecture hall were festooned with Ron Paul brochures (and I had nothing to do with putting them there–the Revolution flourishes at UIC on its own). This afternoon I received an automated call from New York City telling me to apply for a Post Office job. Apparently, the Post Office is hiring in New York right now. I’ve heard of some pretty weird wrong numbers, but this is ridiculous.
We Magyars of the world are mighty disappointed. “Is France a country?” she asked. Well, yes, and in France they have people who are just as ignorant about other things.
Via Stephen Pollard
I wish all of my readers and colleagues a very happy Thanksgiving. There will likely be no more blogging over the holiday weekend, and at least for the next few days all of us should be doing something more edifying or at least more sane than blogging and reading blogs.
The latest TAC is now online. Articles available online are Kelley Beaucar Vlahos’ good cover story on private military contractors, Peter Hitchens on North Korea, Kara Hopkins’ devastating review of Gerson’s Heroic Conservatism, plus Leon Hadar and my column on Islamofascism.
Congratulations to my readers:
Not that I put much stock in these measurements of blogs, but of the blogs and sites I checked only The American Scene, What’s Wrong With the World, Dan McCarthy’s blog, the group blog Exit Strategies and The New Atlantis receive the same result. I hope this is at least partly a measure of the quality of Eunomia and not simply a function of my sometimes difficult and long-winded writing style.
November 5 wasn’t just an outstanding day for Ron Paul’s fundraising–it was also the issue date for the latest TAC. The new issue has Michael’s report on the New Atheists, James Bovard on Bush and torture, Dan McCarthy on Barry Goldwater, Jim Antle on Obama, my column on the genocide resolution and much more.
Incidentally, while I’m on a somewhat related subject I’d like to state once more that V for Vendetta was an absolutely terrible movie. The one downside for Ron Paul in having this fundraising effort on 5 November is that many news stories inevitably include references to Vendetta, which might give the impression that Ron Paul fans are also fans of really bad, dystopian pseudo-anarchist fantasies. We are not, or at least some of us are not.
Naturally, in keeping with Ron Paul’s excellent disinterest in mass media products, he hasn’t seen the movie.
But every time you are somewhere that means you are not somewhere else. ~Fred Thompson
Before it became a tourist trap for lunatics and sci-fi geeks, I used to live in Roswell when I was very young. Unfortunately, after the “incident” became fodder for crackpots Roswell eventually decided to capitalise on its odd reputation, and a “museum” was opened up (followed by a painfully non-New Mexican show on the WB that seemed intent on reminding us just how far removed from New Mexico the show actually was). Since taking the helm in Santa Fe, old Bill has made it something of a pet cause to “get to the bottom” of the “incident.” He has continued in this fine tradition:
If he wins his bid for the White House, Democratic presidential candidate Bill Richardson may be just the man to get to the bottom of the 60-year-old Roswell UFO mystery.
My hunch is that Richardson is just trying to be his usual, crowd-pleasing, avuncular self in this case. Even so, he does keep talking about it often enough that you begin to wonder whether he’s serious.
Sullivan points out that the Atheist Alliance International has chosen a symbol for atheists:
Atheists Who Are, Unfortunately, On Earth
Atheists In Space!
The November Chronicles looks excellent, as usual. There are several good articles on conservation by Dr. Landess, Tobias Lanz and Gregory McNamee. Mark Shea has a fine piece on the miraculous and the materialist dogmatism of Matthew Parris. There is much more besides that, and I do also happen to have a book review of Colin Well’s Sailing from Byzantium in the same issue.
After an awful lot of genocide and genocide resolution blogging, I will fortunately be away from Eunomia for a while. Tonight the CSO is putting on a performance of Mahler’s 6th Symphony. It’s not exactly a symphony that inspires light-heartedness, but it is a promising diversion all the same.
P.S. The Wiki entry’s reference to the “shatteringly pessimistic…outcome” cheers me up a bit.
Call me a cynic, but it seems to me that the significance of winning the Nobel Peace Prize in these latter days bestows as much credibility and glory on the recipient as “winning” the Darwin Awards. That is, not very much at all. It is therefore strange that anyone should care that Al Gore has won the prize. For people who already admire Al Gore, this is a nice trinket that confirms why they admire him; for everyone else on earth, it is pretty meaningless.
Even so, this is a rather strange post, since it links to a page that records massive melting of the northern polar ice cap while also recording massive ice expansion in Antarctica. I suppose the upshot is that the two phenomena might seem to balance out, but if the goal is to say, “Global warming isn’t happening, la la la la la,” linking to this information doesn’t really get the job done. What the information seems to show is that global warming isn’t having the same effects at both poles at the same time (and skeptics, including myself, will note that it was only a few years ago that everyone was freaking out over the disappearance of the Antarctic ice shelf). That doesn’t necessarily mitigate or deny effects of climate change on countries in the Northern Hemisphere. Of course, what remains to be demonstrated for skeptics is why such change is inherently bad or worrisome.
Via Clark
And of course most bloggers are, um, not sunny and upbeat people, so it’s no surprise that a far more common approach is to ignore the “good” and hound the “bad.” ~Reihan
If I might add a characteristically gloomy and disgruntled addendum, the reason why bloggers ignore the “good” and hound the “bad” is, broadly speaking, the same reason why journalists “fail” to report the “good news” and tend to report the “bad news.” It’s all very well to encourage people on the right path, but it helps more if you keep them out of the ditch in the first place, and one way of doing that is to warn them off of the advice and counsel of those who have had an impressive record of being (in the opinion of the critic) very wrong. When error and injustice, or simply stupidity and ignorance, abound, it makes less sense to pat one another on the back in a mutual appreciation society and congratulate each other on our cleverness. Emphasising the ”good” has not been helped by the tendency of people with absolutely awful policy ideas to engage constantly in accentuating the positive (a.k.a., propaganda).
The reason why someone like, say, Joe Klein earned contempt of the netroots in the beginning is that he consistently advocated and espoused ideas that they regarded as absolutely terrible. From the perspective of the critic, it is not incumbent on him to make nice to someone who has routinely demonstrated bad judgement, but rather it is the latter’s job to make up for his past errors. Maybe the person in question is not going to be budged from his views–all the more reason to not waste any time trying positive reinforcement with an implacable opponent.
Critics aren’t parole officers who are overseeing the target’s rehabilitation. Indeed, in some sense, most blogger critics are not even trying to win over the target of their scorn (obviously), but are trying to persuade everyone else to stop listening to the person they are ridiculing. It’s just like heresiology: the goal is not so much to persuade the heresiarch that he has gone astray, since he has already been condemned for his stubborn persistence in error, but to alert everyone else to the danger of the heresiarch’s false teachings. We don’t read out the Synodikon just to give Nestorios a few posthumous kicks, but to remind the people to steer clear of his mistakes. On a much more mundane, much less significant level, blogging critics aren’t really concerned with vilifying this or that pundit or journalist–they are trying to warn other readers away from someone whose track record on the issues these critics care about is dreadful.
P.S. Reihan says at the end of his post:
Because Matt has an ironic sensibility, he understands why this approach fails.
But does it really “fail”? It doesn’t persuade the target of the criticism, but that was never the purpose of the criticism. No one engages in polemics as a means of persuasion of the target of the invective. Polemic is a device for rallying the faithful and demoralising the opposition. It is a device used to win over the undecided and the uninformed to one’s own side. The last thing that the polemicist–which is what many bloggers are–wants is to bother with winning over his opponent. First of all, he doesn’t think it very likely that this will happen, and more to the point the polemicist isn’t even speaking to him (even when he seems to be addressing him directly). The polemicist speaks to the audience watching the dispute: persuading them is what matters. To the extent that a Joe Klein (or a Michael O’Hanlon or whoever else) is regarded as less authoritative or worthy of attention by a larger number of people, this method not only has succeeded, but it has achieved exactly what it set out to achieve.
My mother is not an illegal immigrant. ~Sam Brownback
The GOP has unveiled the convention logo for next year:
Apparently the GOP is going to try to destroy 2008 before 2008 can destroy them. They’re taking Giuliani’s message to heart–stay on offense!
Is the message of this logo that the Republican Party is drunk (the stars)? Depressed (hence the blue)? Insane? Perhaps the message is that the party’s being chopped to pieces, or gradually erased from existence and disappearing into the background?
Past GOP convention logos have never been what anyone would confuse with aesthetically pleasing, but no recent one has been quite so ridiculous. Consider ‘04:
While it does appear as if the elephant is possibly threatening to step on the Statue of Liberty’s head, the elephant itself appears quite normal.
2000 was a year of a tame, sane blue elephant, which was nonetheless trampling on the flag:
While the year itself loomed overhead, the ‘96 convention had a much more subdued, reasonable-looking elephant.
I wasn’t able to find images for 1992 in Houston or for the 1988 New Orleans convention logo, but I did find this description for ‘88:
It consists of the stylized three-star elephant used by the Republican National Committee since 1968, with its back reshaped to represent the Superdome where the Republican delegates will gather next August.
It doesn’t sound that great, but almost anything would be better than the blue rampaging freak of nature on display this time.
Apparently, I’m Lucius Vorenus, which makes a lot of sense.
TAC’s 9/10 issue is available online, including my column on Obama and foreign policy. Also online are Jim Pinkerton’s cover essay on a revived Christendom, Michael’s article on Huckabee, and Fred Reed’s column. The print issue has some very good pieces as well, such as Clark Stooksbury’s review of Elites for Peace and Trita Parsi on the causes of U.S.-Iranian rivalry.
And I thought I had trouble when I was a kid with people who couldn’t spell my last name properly. This is just bizarre. Good to know that the Chavistas are tackling the crucial problems of the day.
Via The Plank
Below are belated links to many articles that will be of interest to regular Eunomia readers:
Now online from recent TAC issues:
From the current online issue: Prof. Kurth’s fine article on the effects of demographic change on foreign policy and international order, Nicholas von Hoffmann on Clinton, Michael on the Christian Zionists of CUFI, Paul Belien on the effects of past immigration amnesties in the Netherlands, Claude Salhani on Chinese electronic and satellite warfare and Pat Buchanan on the “ideological war.”
From the previous issue: John O’Sullivan on immigration politics, Caleb Stegall’s much-discussed review of Deep Economy, Paul Robinson on the “surge,” and James Bovard on legal challenges to administration detention and torture policies. I have previously mentioned Michael’s article on Rick Santorum and William Lind’s argument for rapprochement with Iran, but I’ll list them again anyway.
New in the last couple of weeks at the Chronicles’ site:
Dr. Trifkovic has a new article on the demographic impact of current immigration levels, another on Pakistan, another on Kosovo, and another on the current situation in Iraq. Mr. Buchanan writes on U.S. de-industrialisation, and writes here on the Newark killings and here on Karl Rove. Paul Craig Roberts writes on China and U.S. media hyping “the China threat.” From the August issue, Fr. Hugh Barbour has an article on Josef Pieper and liberality as the basis of culture. Here is Tom Piatak on Harvey Mansfield’s “Straussian piffle.”
Strange but true: the Stars and Bars adorn this Pakistani fruit-seller’s stand (via Cliopatria). What’s Urdu for Deo Vindice?
Take two from the world-famous Miss Teen South Carolina:
Personally, my friends and I, we know exactly where the United States is on our map. We don’t know anyone else who doesn’t, and if the statistics are correct, I believe there should be more emphasis on geography and our education, so people will learn to read maps better.
We already know that Reihan doesn’t like Ramachandra Guha’s new book, so what would he make of his utterly bizarre op-ed (via Chapati Mystery) from a couple weeks ago? His op-ed told me that Mr. Guha does not much care for Punjabi landlords or crowds of Pakistani Muslims. Very enlightening.
For those keeping track, another August 22 has passed without any sudden world-ending apocalypse, just as it passed without incident last year. I’m sure that comes as a relief to all of us.
ChroniclesMagazine.org is having their fundraising drive. Support the outstanding work they do there and help cover up Frum’s face.
Is it just me, or is this Yglesias post about his first ever visit to West Virginia this weekend really strange? I suppose it’s really not that important, but it strikes me as a little unusual that someone who has been living in D.C. for years would have never gone to, or at least through, West Virginia at some point at least once. This jumped out at me since I have driven through WV at least six times in the last ten years, and I was usually starting a bit farther away than Washington. A New Yorker-inspired joke might be appropriate at this time.
Poulos’ predicted showdown now has a soundtrack and video starring Obama Girl (via Sullivan).
Intensive Arabic has been going pretty well, but as we are now on Day 18 of 45 I have started to feel a little run down. In fact, after reading a short article about a Dubai Islamic studies graduate student today, I just so happened to find a UAE dirham in my pocket that had been given to me in change for my tea earlier that day. The single dirham coin is the same shape and colour as a quarter, so it might easily pass for one if the cashier didn’t look closely enough. When I first saw it, I thought I had started hallucinating Arabic writing on money. That may give you a sense of my state of mind. The good news is that I can make out everything on the coin.
Tomorrow we finish the equivalent of one nine-week quarter of elementary Arabic. Subhan’allah. It has not been as overwhelming as I expected, but it will be getting more demanding as we go forward. My initial promises of no blogging were a bit premature, but they were not entirely false. There is a class I have to start preparing for the fall, dissertation chapters to write, plus the column. I will try to keep my different blog homes updated as and when I can, but I can make no guarantees about the regularity of posting.
Regardless, go take a look at my first column (not online) in the July 2 TAC.
I have some new Scene posts on: Alan Wolfe’s attack on Russell Kirk, the Ethiopian invasion of Somalia, Bill Bennett’s ideas about history teaching. In addition, there are my post on foreign policy traditions, my two most recent criticisms of the Fred Phenomenon, comments on consolidation, a post on the Pashtuns, a Fourth of July week reflection on the Loyalists, and my remarks on an article in Foreign Policy on the “ideology of development.”
As many of you may already know, this week Ross will be blogging from the “Ideas Festival” in Aspen whose content I hope is not nearly so odd as its name. He tells us that the main events begin tonight and continue thereafter. Many of the participants whose names are familiar don’t seem that interesting to me (I do so anxiously await hearing about the contributions from Rahm Emanuel and Jim Wallis), but perhaps the gap will be filled by the others. Queen Noor might give a stemwinder about Palestine, which would at least make for some fireworks.
The “blog rating” system, using the categories of the MPAA, provides some amusement, though its standards are so rigorous that all but the most fastidious would be likely to have some number of objectionable words in them. For instance, National Review’s The Corner received an NC-17 rating. Meanwhile, Eunomia and The American Scene both received G ratings.
At the Scene, I have some new posts on Kurdistan, the continuing diversity debate, and finally one in which I attempt (apparently to no good effect) a joke about trite political rhetoric.
From George Ajjan and another commenter at the Scene, I have learned that the Arabic for blog is mudawwinah. You never know when a piece of information like that may be useful.
The new American Scene is up and it is looking good (or tayyib, to use a word I have heard about 100 times in the last week). My first posts there should be up before too long.
Starting tomorrow, a massive group blog headed by the one and only Reihan will take over where the team of Douthat and Salam left off at The American Scene. The site will be redesigned, there will be a cast of thousands (okay, more like a dozen or so) and, most importantly, it will still retain Reihan’s idiosyncratic and fun style. Along with many far more worthy, entertaining and interesting colleagues, I will also be joining the Scene. Some of the faces, or rather names, will be familiar to you, and some will be relatively new or unknown, but I think it should be a very good mix. In his characteristically broad and eclectic way, Reihan has drawn in friends and associates from across the spectrum and from across different areas of interest. The new American Scene–it’s not just for policy geeks and indy rock fans anymore!
Well, don’t I feel stupid! The Rumi referred to in my Arabic workbook is Ibn al-Rumi, a fact which I completely ignored as I was writing my earlier post. That would explain why they refer to him as being of Byzantine background, because Ibn al-Rumi was of Greek descent and did live in the 9th century.
In fairness, this Ibn al-Rumi was, as I have discovered, a native of Baghdad and has a rather indirect connection to Rum in any case. This makes the claim about a “Byzantine background” for him a little odd. Next time, I’ll be a bit slower to jump to conclusions. Such are the perils of the blog.
Young Zeitlin continues to impress (even though I suspect Ms. Franke-Ruta will not be pleased with the comparison).
Am I only the only blogger/writer/person with a pulse in America who has never watched a single episode of The Sopranos? It seems to be the case. However, I have been unable to avoid the avalanche of post-series finale commentary, which seems to be literally everywhere. From all of this I have gleaned that David Chase is very clever, the show was apparently well done and I have absolutely zero interest in watching it in the future. Michael gives his impressions here.
Meghan O’Rourke didn’t have to do much to convince me that the diamond engagement ring tradition is a sham, since I have come to instinctively, viscerally loathe diamond sellers and their horrible, manipulative marketing. (Yes, all marketing is manipulative by design, but there has to be a limit somewhere.) Forget all of the elaborate talk of gender equity–it’s a scam, pure and simple, and the fewer people who are parties to it the better. It seems to me that buying a diamond ring signals to the woman not so much everlasting devotion as it announces to her and anyone else around, “I am easily conditioned and will do what the people on TV tell me to do.” Perhaps this is what prospective brides are looking for–how should I know?
WORK FOR THE HARDEST-HITTING MAGAZINE IN AMERICA!
Chronicles is seeking a full-time, on-site assistant editor/editorial assistant.
Successful candidates will
—possess superior grammatical skills
—have some experience with copyediting and/or proofreading
—be familiar with Chronicles
—not be offended by the rich smell of pipe and cigar smokeSend résumé to:
Assistant Editor Position
Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture
928 North Main Street
Rockford, Illinois 61103Applicants may also send letters off inquiry and résumés via e-mail to: jobs@chroniclesmagazine.org.
Thanks to the invitation of Dr. Ralph Luker, in the near future I will also be starting blogging at History News Network’s Cliopatria. It is a group blog of historians and history students, who cover all manner of topics from the strictly academic to the contemporary political scene, offering an historical perspective on current events. I am looking forward to it.
Finally, after all these years of hard work and sacrifice…a break! ~The Writer/Comedian (Bill Murray), The Lost City*
Later this summer, I will have a review of Colin Wells’ Sailing from Byzantium in Chronicles. Here is the table of contents for the May issue, which has, in addition to many fine meditations on the importance of property rights and the dangers to them, a good Joe Sobran piece on George Will and the state of conservatism and Joseph Fallon’s article on the military buildup for a potential attack on Iran. The June issue considers the phenomenon of Americanism. In that issue, Dr. Fleming smashes a number of standard “conservative” idols in his “Establishing Christian America”:
If America were, in fact, a basically Christian or moral nation, Hollywood would be out of business, and so would most colleges and universities.
Among many other excellent contributions, the June issue also has an article by George Ajjan on the question of “foreign fighters” entering Iraq and Iraqi and American border security.
TAC has its new May 21 issue out, which is now online. The following issue will have a piece I have written on neoliberalism (as well as Michael’s profile of Ron Paul), and the issue after that one should see the beginning of my regular column there.
*Like The Writer/Comedian, I am kidding about the hard work and sacrifice.
Since some liberals have (only half-jokingly) sometimes spoken of Obama in messianic terms, and his childhood associations with Islam have become fodder for discussion, it is probably not helpful to him to talk about him by using Muad’Dib references. (Link via Yglesias)
Young Zeitlin has some interesting thoughts on liberaltarianism. He is also wise beyond his years.
As a young fogey who supports the aspirations of whippersnapper bloggers (isn’t that a redundant description?) to trouble the more esteemed and well-known pundits, I point you to the blog of Matt Zeitlin:
I’m a high school student in Oakland, California. I have zero qualifications to write about anything of importance besides the fact that I have a computer, internet access and spend too much time reading. I am Mickey Kaus’ Worst Nightmare.
In the way it is often used, whippersnapper carries the connotation of obstreperous youths showing no respect to their elders, and this is how Kaus has used it, but the word often actually refers to someone of no importance (at least in the eyes of the person labeling him a whippersnapper) presuming to have a certain importance. It is in one sense a perfect word to use for all bloggers, who are, in the grand scheme of things, pretty insignificant and who also presume to hold forth on matters great and small, but it might just as well be applied to all columnists and pundits. An important part of good blogging, it seems to me, involves reminding better-known pundits and columnists that they are not necessarily all that important and authoritative and that they have no monopoly on driving the debate.
Since August 2006, Eunomia has increased by over 1,900 posts. That’s an average of 250 posts per month since last August. Since Eunomia began in December ‘04, it has averaged 120 posts per month. Here’s to the next 3,500.
My colleagues continue to do fine work at What’s Wrong With The World, and I am pleased that my initial effort over there seems to have been generally well-received. Thanks to that post, Mark Shea and Ross have proposed a showdown between me and Christopher Hitchens. Actually, I think Douglas Wilson is doing just fine without any help from me, and makes the crucial point (the one that atheists will contend against until their last breath because they know a large part of argument hinges on it) that if the atheists are right about God then there is no transcendent moral order, no imperatives of justice or requirements of conscience that are any less subjective or arbitrary or more authoritative than the “man-made religions” Hitchens ridicules. Morality is then not only purely conventional and contractual, but inevitably exists only as a function of social control by the few over the many for the benefit of the former. Hitchens has in no way remedied the control of thought and act that he finds so obnoxious in religious societies, but has simply denied the religious legitimisation of this control.
Hitchens’ exquisite moralistic outrage at the crimes of the religious or at least the nominally religious is all very interesting, until you consider the problem that there is nothing authoritative or meaningful or ultimately important about the morality he claims to defend (not that this devotion to this morality stops him from backing wars of aggression and lionising communist murderers, but, hey, nobody’s perfect). Men who do not fear God, because they think He does not exist, will usually have no compunctions against committing the most horrific atrocities, along with a whole range of crimes, if they believe they have sufficient self-interest to do so. If atheists were right, and there is very often no justice here below, the morality that condemns the genocidaire and praises the almsgiver is as ephemeral and ultimately meaningless as the religious rites they regard as absurd. In such a world, one man’s genocidaire becomes another man’s national hero and, if the atheist is right, there is nothing to which men can appeal as an ultimate authority against such depredations (except to the entirely arbitrary conscience of other people, who would feel no sense of moral obligation to help anyway).
Human dignity quickly evaporates when man becomes concerned with survival and naked interest, as men usually will when they have no vision of the eternal before their eyes, whether it is a Dean Barnett talking about “getting our hands dirty” or a Stalin talking about making omelettes. Monistic materialism, which is the inevitable destination of an atheist, cannot invest man with any special dignity; theoretically, he would be no more morally significant than the bacteria we kill off with disinfectant. The paths to a thousand genocides are opened, because men are already prone to such deeds and without some confidence that these things are not only absolutely wrong but the cause of damnation the temptations of power will very often win out over what native goodwill may reside in fallen, unilluminated men. To this the atheist, if he is honest, will happily agree and say, “That’s just the way it is. Get used to it.” But not only does no sane person want to live in such a world, our very natural horror in the face of such things tells us that a world entirely without meaning cannot be the reality.
It is not precisely the purpose of revelation to bring ethics to the world (though the life of virtue is tied together with participation in divine Life), and it was certainly not the main feature of Christ’s life and work to be an ethics instructor, but to bring life to the world, yet without God ordering the cosmos and giving men the just fruits of their works in eternity there is no particular reason to regard one ethos as more desirable than another, except by some arbitrary and equally man-made standard that can be challenged, deconstructed and subverted by means of the reason that built it up. Paradox and mystery stand beyond the ken of reason, and so offer man the hope of meaning that cannot be emptied of content.
Take a look at the newly redesigned Chronicles website, including Dr. Trifkovic on the recent French presidential election, Dr. Wilson’s latest, Dr. Fleming on the war, and the table of contents for the May issue.
In America, even the Satanists embrace triangulation. ~Reihan
Viewed another way, though, this might be the ultimate confirmation that triangulation is just the sort of diabolical method that some of us have always considered it to be.
At first, I thought my improved rank in the TTLB ecosystem had something to do with the greater attention Eunomia had received lately (and, of course, all the fine content that you are being provided). It seems that I was kidding myself. The entire ranking system seems to have gone haywire. I was alerted to just how wrong things were when I noticed a few impossibilities: Don Surber was in the top ten, and Instapundit, Michelle Malkin and The Corner had all dramatically dropped into insignificance. Goodness knows we all hope for such a day, but I think we have to assume that there was a major glitch somewhere.
In future, keep an eye on the new group blog to which I will be contributing. It is called What’s Wrong With The World, and it is the successor of Enchiridion Militis.
Update: My first WWWTW post, responding to the first excerpt of Christopher Hitchens’ atheist/anti-religious tract, is now up.
Many thanks to both Dr. Ralph Luker and Peter Klein for kindly tagging Eunomia with the Thinking Blogger Award. Each named Eunomia as one of the “five blogs that make me think” on the same day. It is gratifying to know that Eunomia has such respect as a worthy and interesting blog in the eyes of the readers. The award began here. It is now my turn to tag five other blogs. For those I tag, the rules are:
1. If, and only if, you get tagged, write a post with links to 5 blogs that make you think,
2. Link to this post so that people can easily find the exact origin of the meme,
3. Optional: Proudly display the ‘Thinking Blogger Award’ with a link to the post that you wrote (here is an alternative silver version if gold doesn’t fit your blog).
In no particular order, I tag: James Poulos’ Postmodern Conservative, The American Scene, Gene Expression, In Media Res and Leon Hadar.
Thinking Blogger: Not necessarily a contradiction in terms!
I am reminded of that memorable line from Cameron Crowe’s Singles when I look at the breakdown of my readership. According to Alexa, Jordan, Egypt and the UAE still provide approximately one-fifth of my readers, and Bulgaria provides another 6%. It was encouraging to find in a set of other statistics for the site that I had received visits from such diverse places as Ethiopia, Armenia, Singapore, Saudi Arabia, the Maldives and French Polynesia (and, yes, Belgium and Italy, too). You are all most welcome.
The ISI/Liberty Fund colloquium for graduate students on federalism and constitutionalism held at the Russell Kirk Center in Mecosta was a great time. We had two fine discussion leaders in Profs. Carey Roberts and Jim Bond and an interesting mix of law, history and political philosophy students to work through some choice readings from The Federalist, Anti-Federalist writings, the Hayne-Webster debate, Calhoun and more modern texts (sections of the European Constitution and several Court rulings of the past decade or so). I had the privilege and honour of meeting Mrs. Kirk at the Center, and she was good enough to have us into her home on a couple of occasions. She is a charming and engaging lady, and a great hostess. The Center certainly keeps her busy–she was in Indianapolis last week, where Rod Dreher, Max Goss and others spoke, and as I understood it she will be at another ISI event next week as well.
As a Byzantinist, I was something of the amateur among those who did their work on political theory and American history, but I enjoyed being part of the discussions both during and after the sessions. I also made a trip over to the used bookstore there in town, finding a few nice volumes, including the reminiscences of Anna Dostoevsky and a Defoe title I had never heard of before. The weekend was very pleasant, and I look forward to a chance to do something like that again, though I will be glad to be through with the conference season in a few weeks. All of the events I have gone to this year have been excellent, but I will be glad to be traveling a little less after next month.
I’ll be away from Eunomia for a bit. Between work that needs to get done and another few weeks of traveling hither and thither, there just isn’t time right now for any more posting. There should be some interesting things to report from an ISI/Liberty Fund conference up at Mecosta later this week. We will be talking about federalism and constitutionalism. Regular posting may resume sometime next month, or perhaps a little sooner, depending on how quickly I can get some things done. Right now I have to get ready for my Sayat Nova session.
Update: Ross and Reihan will have lots of interesting things to say while they and Megan McArdle substitute for Andrew Sullivan during his vacation, so go read them while I’m away.
My traffic rankings in the UAE and Egypt are excellent, and my readers from there evidently currently constitute almost one-fifth of my readership. Is it the result of all the Nawal al-Zoghbi links I have been putting up lately? I don’t know.
This was good to see.
Update: It is also worth noting that today Pope Benedict shares a birthday with my mother. Happy Birthday, Mom!
Today I retrieved my car from impound, which is so far to the south that it is actually beyond the Southside and in that empty gap past the point where the two highways that previously made up the Dan Ryan split off from each other. The actual retrieval process was fairly easy, as such things go, though the possibilities for Kafkaesque delay were everywhere. Strangely, the cop who had issued me the ticket had told me that I needed to present proof of ownership to access my car at the impound, which was rather difficult…since my registration was in the car that had just been towed away. Fortunately, this guy was either just having me on (thinking that I was some New Mexican tourist because of my license plate) or enjoys misleading people or was himself confused about the procedure, since I needed no such proof, as I learned from the people at the lot when I called. Anyway, that little episode is over.
To help unwind at the end of the evening, I therefore offer this combination of Lebanese pop and salsa, which at least Michael should find amusing.
There’s no telling what you will discover in the world of foreign blogs. For instance, here is a striking post from a Syrian blog (via a link at George Ajjan’s blog) that revealed to me the existence of the Arabian oryx, a creature that I normally associate only with Africa and one that I honestly didn’t know existed.
What else do you not know about Syria?
Just try listening to Newt Gingrich as he butchers the Spanish language with one of the worst Yanqui accents you have ever heard. If you can endure more than a minute, you are truly heroic. As someone who has an appreciation for foreign languages properly spoken, and who strives to avoid hideously bad accents like this, I think Hispanics should regard this little display as far more insulting than any loose talk about ghettoes that prompted this painful speech. This display of horribly pronounced Spanish might convince all Hispanics that they should accept English as the official language of the United States, if only to make sure that they do not have to suffer more Anglo politicians attempting (and failing) to speak their language properly.
On the bright side, at least he didn’t cite Castro and talk about how inspiring a commie slogan was!
So I will leave this post as the tombstone for this ugly little blog that brought out the vilest in me and has now left me in deep shame for the rest of my life. ~Ilkka Kokkarinen, c. September 2006
Apparently, he got over the vileness and the shame, since he has been regularly blogging for the last month here beginning with this random post. I don’t hold it against the guy that he came back to blogging–she is a powerful mistress, as I well know–and I don’t mind that one of the sharper bloggers has returned to regular posting, but I do find it a bit odd that he departed from the ’sphere with the huffy self-righteousness of a grand opera prima donna who has screamed at the conductor that she would no longer work with such mediocrities and yet he has re-entered this world without so much as a brief explanation of why he now thinks blogging is something other than the desecration of humanity that he seemed to regard it a mere six months ago. We don’t need much, but just maybe a word or two on “Why blogging is not nearly as vile and evil as I used to think.”
Ross and Matt Yglesias attempt to redeem vlogging, and rehash the recent arguments while making many smart and funny remarks.
So there is now some argument over whether vlogging (i.e., video-blogging) is worthless or not. Is it as efficient as good, old-fashioned blogging? Everyone seems to be saying, “Not really.” Is it entertaining? Everyone who has bothered to weigh in on this vital matter seems to be saying, “Yes.” In the wake of the eruption of Ann Althouse, which Bob Wright explains in more detail here, could there have been any other answer?
It is probably not the best time to point out, then, this incredibly tedious conversation between Bob Wright and Michael Kinsley in which they bat back and forth the merit of the anti-Mormon arguments of Linker and Weisberg, despite the fact that neither of them had read the Linker piece and only one of them had read Weisberg. In twelve minutes, they managed to establish that 1) intolerance was bad; 2) more tolerance would be good; 3) neither of them had read the Linker piece; 4) neither of them knew very much in detail about Mormonism or any other religion (quoth Wright on Catholicism: “that second whatever thing, the pronouncement they had about thirty years ago or so”). If anyone wanted a chief exhibit for the anti-vlogging position, this section would have been it. Personally, I enjoy watching “diavlogs,” as they are rather absurdly called, but there are times when they try the patience of the most faithful viewer.
So I’m thinking of taking intensive Arabic this summer, since facility with that and related Semitic languages has obvious importance for Byzantine studies, and I have been dabbling a little with it so far. My early dabbling reminded me that the Arabic word for ‘right’ or ‘correct’, sahih, was taken into Hindi (presumably by way of borrowings from Persian and/or Islamic influence) along with its antonym, galat, which I happened to come across also in my Armenian reading earlier this week. The main reason I know that these words are in Hindi is that I have seen Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jayenge, everyone’s favourite Bollywood movie, so all those hours spent watching Indian flicks have not been entirely in vain.
On a lighter note, here is where Lebanese pop meets Bollywood: the pop star Nawal al-Zoghbi singing Gharib el-Ray. There are more random foreign locales than in a Yash Raj spectacular (I guess because she is wandering, gharib). Here is a video filled with apparently random scene changes–now she’s in Prague, now she’s surrounded by badly rendered computer-generated helicopters. Perhaps if I spoke Arabic, it would make more sense? At least the music’s enjoyable. Meaningful blogging will resume later.
Because you are all dying to know what other words Armenian and Hindi share, I will tell you another one. Reading Namus (yes, I’m still reading Namus ever so slowly), I came across the colloquial expression ghalat chari, which is apparently still used in Armenia today and which is basically an imperative phrase that means, “Don’t do something wrong/bad.” The word sounded familiar to my Bollywood-trained ears, and sure enough my first intuition that ghalat was the same as galat in Hindi was confirmed when I checked my Hindi dictionary. To someone hearing it pronounced in Hindi for the first (or even the fifth or sixth) time, it sounds an awful lot like ghaland, but that is not actually what they’re saying, much as zarur (of course) comes out sounding to English-speakers (or at least to me) as zerul.
Language bleg: Does anyone happen to know which language galat originally comes from? Arabic, maybe?
Update: Yes, it does come originally from Arabic.
Before January 31, I hadn’t flown in over two years, and since then I have already been on five flights and will be on at least six eight more before the end of spring quarter. Friday I fly to Charlottesville for ISI’s conference on liberty, community and place, where I will be meeting several of my blogging and TAC colleagues in person for the first time. This will be the fourth conference I have attended since October, and there are at least two more before the school year is over. Perhaps for true conference-going veterans, this is a light load, but for me this is an unusually busy schedule.
After some aggravation thanks to Friday’s snowstorm, I made it back last night only about five hours later than I should have been here. The delay from my cancelled flight wasn’t that terrible (especially compared to the epic incompetence of JetBlue a few weeks ago), so I suppose I shouldn’t complain, but let me just say that I’m not a big fan of La Guardia. The airport, that is. Judging from the absurd-looking statue of old Fiorello that they have put up in the Marine Air terminal, I would say that the people who run the airport don’t much like the former mayor. Neither am I pleased with the horrid Northeastern habit that people have of automatically putting milk in your coffee. I didn’t even ask for a ‘regular’ coffee, which I understand is Northeasternese for, “Please ruin this perfectly good coffee with some milk.” No, apparently it’s simply taken as a given that coffee should never be good and there is no need to consult the person ordering the coffee. Even leaving aside the question of Lent, such coffee will go from an unpleasant ordeal to being simply undrinkable in a matter of minutes. This is one of those amusing regional customs, rather like the default of putting sugar in tea in the South, that I find a little tiresome after a while. (Southerners, being generally more hospitable, do understand that they should ask whether you would also like to have your tea ruined.) I don’t begrudge people their regional customs, but I do reserve the right to point out that they are ruining their coffee and tea. I should say that Brookline was very nice, and I’d be glad to go back there anytime. Boston, however, left a different, sour taste in my mouth.
The conference itself was a great time. As I had briefly mentioned in one of the comments, it was on the campus of Hellenic College and Holy Cross Theological School. It is an unusual experience for me, as I imagine it is for most people, to be able to go to a campus chapel and find an Orthodox church. The daily Orthros (albeit in a very shortened form) and Vespers were very good ways to start and end a couple of the days. The weather was not entirely cooperative with us, leading to the later problems of traveling home, but the atmosphere of the conference, which was one made up entirely by graduate students, was very cordial and pleasant. There was one contentious session on Hesychasm, which didn’t surprisingly create an argument between Orthodox and non-Orthodox participants (since Palamite theology is usually seen in all Orthodox-Catholic exchanges as a fundamental disagreement). Ironically, it was a paper arguing that St. Gregory of Thessalonika had turned what could have been a “dialogue” into a “polemic,” which was unfortunately the effect of the paper on that topic. Instead of sparking confessional dispute, it set off a strong intra-Orthodox quarrel between one Orthodox speaker (who, curiously enough, had also gone to my alma mater) and the other Orthodox students. The poor Protestant seminarians and other non-Orthodox in the room seemed to be mostly at a loss as to why this paper had generated such intense feelings. Gatherings of Orthodox academics should come with a warning label: “Danger: Converts and Greeks may create a combustible and unstable situation.” However, this particular debate wasn’t one of converts vs. cradle Orthodox or Americans vs. Greeks, but really was a debate between the one speaker, who was taking a very hard line against Palamas over a single response that he had made to Barlaam the Calabrian, and everyone else fairly sputtering and gasping in disbelief. Several of the people in the audience did make what I considered quite solid replies to the paper’s argument, but the session had definitely gone from being a venue for exchange and inquiry and had become a more fundamental and visceral argument over the place of monks in the Church.
My own session generally went very well, and I think the session in which I was giving a response was fairly productive. All of the papers I heard were interesting, though the one mentioned above would undoubtedly have done better with some less provocative language about St. Gregory, and it made for a good opportunity to meet some of the rising early Christian studies, patristics and Byzantine scholars. What was remarkable was how many had either previously gone, were currently going or were considering going to Chicago. Officially, we had four speakers participating in the conference, which put us behind the folks at Notre Dame, but our “unofficial” representation including former students and other attendees put us closer to nine out of a group of roughly forty-five. Somehow or other Chicago attracts or produces quite a few people interested to one degree or another in church history. I have no idea whether this is actually above average or not, but it certainly seems unusual for a place normally associated with its economists, lawyers and businessmen.
The strangest thing I saw on the entire trip was on the Boston T on the Blue Line. As I was riding in from the airport, I looked across the way to see a big, prominently displayed advertisement for “Guaranteed Swahili.” Is there a great need for Swahili speakers in the greater Boston area? It wouldn’t exactly surprise me, given that there is plenty of immigration from Africa in several of the major Eastern cities (as I understand it, Washington is the largest concentration of Ethiopians outside of Ethiopia), but I am a bit more used to seeing ads for learning Spanish where I’m from. I suppose some gradual cultural takeovers seem a bit less bizarre than others.
An interesting discovery was a new academic press, Gorgias Press, that had put some of its books out at the conference. I was looking at their book collection last night after returning, and they have an impressive number of publications or reprints of many things related to Syrian and Persian Christianity and early Christianity generally. The reprints are often quite expensive, but in the case of the book I found at the conference, The Maronites in History, it would have been worth the full, non-conference price. The book on the Maronites is a recent reprint of a 1986 work that apparently went out of print (how could that have happened when the book talks extensively about monotheletism?). In it, the author, Matti Mousa, lays out quite clearly and, I think, mostly accurately the history of the Maronites as a distinct religious community. I assume that many Maronites do not like this book, because it is a pretty relentless debunking of the extremely shaky myths Maronite apologists have woven around their origins as a religious group. Mousa’s control of the Byzantine material is a little shaky, and therefore his dating sometimes just follows that of the Syriac sources, but it would appear that he knows the Arabic and Syriac sources very well. From all of this he reconstructs the duration of monotheletism in the Maronite church, which was actually much, much longer than I had ever thought. Most accounts seem to assume that monotheletism ended soon after the Maronites submitted to Rome in the 1180s, but Mousa claims, based on ongoing Italian missionary work to Lebanon, that Maronite service books and doctrines remained formally and materially monotheletic into the late sixteenth century, if not longer. This is an even longer duration than Fr. Louth allowed for in his fine book on the Damascene, but unfortunately the footnote for this particular point is actually missing from the bottom of the page (even OUP makes mistakes, I suppose). If that is accurate, it is even more important for the historian of monotheletism (who, at this point, seems to me, given that there are so very few competitors for the title) to get into the study of the Maronites, who represented the continuation of monotheletism for more than ten times as long a time as monotheletism existed in Byzantium. It is fascinating to think that monotheletism endured well into the early modern period in at least one small corner of the world. Perhaps if there were more attention paid to this continuation a greater interest in understanding monotheletism would develop.
Can it really be that the nauseating Marty Peretz has the gall to mock someone (in this case, his nemesis Matt Yglesias) for a typo? Yes, he does have the gall. This is the ignoramus who didn’t even know which party is in power in Australia when he writes a post about Australia. This is the sorry excuse for an observer of world affairs who didn’t know anything about the internal politics of Thailand in his post about Muslim violence in Thailand. This is the illiterate who doesn’t know the meaning of the words ultramontane and chiliastic and uses them to refer to Muslims! This is the remedial English speaker who does not know the proper time to use ‘fewer’ instead of ‘less’. The man has no shame. I suppose we knew that, but this is sad even for Marty. How pathetic do you have to be to snipe at your enemy for a typo?
Blogging isn’t a complete waste of time and energy–it improves your knowledge of made-up blogger vocabulary that no one else will understand. Take “Rethug,” for instance. As in: “Compared to most Rethugs, Huckabee’s a socialist.”
I don’t really know now what it means anymore than I did when I first saw it, but it seemed at first to be a reference to social conservatives or evangelicals or some combination thereof. Any explanations or speculations are welcome in the comments. Is it a play off of the word Republican, which I guess is the most obvious explanation, or is there some more arcane meaning that I’m missing?
Update: The author of the post cited above writes later on:
The kingmakers in the Republican Party are more like David Frum, who wants to economically stress the middle and working classes so that they will develop good moral character…
To be blunt, when did David Frum ever care about anyone developing good moral character?
I have seen some bad campaign swag in my time, but this has to take the cake:
I don’t like the implication that there is a flow of things and that it goes in the direction of increasing agglomeration. Why isn’t greater independence and individualism among bloggers a good thing? ~Ann Althouse
I wouldn’t dispute Prof. Althouse’s view that greater independence and individualism among bloggers are good things. As I have said before, there is something bizarre about the way blogging has tended to replicate the fairly predictable and partisan conformity of other kinds of media. Rather than serving as a healthy corrective to the other echo chambers, blogging tends to reinforce the ideological patterns that can prove so stifling to interesting discourse everywhere else. It is almost unavoidable that a blog becomes much less interesting as it becomes a vehicle for political activism, because at that point the blogger stops offering his take and begins repeating someone’s official line. This may be why campaign bloggers are such strange, delicate hybrids that cannot do very well in harsh climates: there is a certain contradiction in being an independent writer of potentially interesting, irreverent and (let’s hope) incisive commentary and being a campaign functionary, whose job it is to write uninteresting, fairly staid and predictable posts that boost the candidate’s tax plan. Whether or not bloggers are actually hired by campaigns, they usually become terribly dreary and sometimes even unreadable once they have started relentlessly pushing a cause. It is possible to advocate for a certain policy without ceasing to be witty, amusing and insightful (indeed, good political satire would not work without all of these qualities), and sometimes these things will help the cause in question. However, it is much harder to maintain the right balance between doing good blogging and staying on message. Happy is the blogger who does not even try to stay “on message.”
I also happen to agree that, as she comments on part of my post, ”general outrage about the state of the world is pretty uninteresting too.” The argument I was trying to advance in the post that Ross cited is not that this outrage is terribly attractive or interesting, but that it helps explain what makes blogs on the left relatively more successful as political activist operations–it also helps explain why some of these blogs, such as Daily Kos, came into existence in the first place. Perpetually outraged people who believe that politics can fix most anything will be more motivated to become activists and they will be more inclined to pursue political activism through any and all means available. In my view, this activist mentality is a kind of impairment or flaw and not something that conservatives should want to imitate. Unfortunately, if Hewitt’s Victory Caucus is any indication, there are many on the blog right who would very much like to try their hand at successfully imitating it.
Prof. Althouse prefers “what Larison seems to mean by “celebrity-blogging.” And I’m quite happy to see that bloggers have trouble succeeding in their collective activities.” As it happens, I don’t like collective blogs and would normally rather read the “celebrity blogs” than wade through reams of Kossack drivel. My point was that “celebrity bloggers” on the right should not be surprised when their attempts to translate their style of blogging to political activism (e.g., Hewitt’s Victory Caucus) fail miserably because they lack the qualities or motivations that make political activist blogs successful.
So a friend of mine here at Chicago recently recommended that I see Fanaa, the 2006 Kajol-Aamir Khan vehicle that saw the stunning Bengali actress return to the screen as if no time had passed since her last appearance in 2001. Two days ago I did happen to watch it, and I was impressed. Once you allow for the melodrama and improbable plot devices, which are inevitable, it is possible to appreciate it as a quite decent telling of a tragic love story. The story is one that our 24-obsessed nation could enjoy: will love win out over jihad? One of the songs has a line that is striking, and quite in keeping with what I understand to be part of a long tradition in Islamic and Indian religious and love poetry:
tere pyaar me.n ho jaa’uu.n fanaa
May your love annihilate me!
Apparently, as I discovered recently, the state of Gujarat banned the film in response to Aamir Khan’s comments on the state of some farmers displaced by a dam project. So, while I was up tonight at the local Dunkin’ Donuts, I got to talking to the man behind the counter there, and it turned out that he was from Gujarat. That reminded me of the story about Fanaa. From there we launched into a discussion of the movie and Kajol (the cousin of everyone’s favourite, Rani Mukherjee), pictured just below.
We then came around to the latest Bollywood news about the engagement of Abishek Bachchan and Aishwariya Rai, which everyone seems intent on bringing up each time I talk about Indian movies. If the Indian popular press is as unimaginative as ours, they will have already coined some hideous name like Abishwariya or Aishshek to describe their relationship.
It’s odd the sorts of conversations you will have in this neighbourhood, but then I suppose it is rather odd that I would have known enough about Fanaa to use it to start a conversation.
I was reminded of the line in the title (which is translated, “Strike and kill me, you have the right!”) from Sayat Nova’s Nazani, one of his finest love songs, while reading this First Things piece by the University of Chicago’s own Prof. and Mrs. Kass on Erasmus’ Colloquy on courtship. Sayat Nova is frequently urging his beloved to engage in some kind of violent disembowling or stabbing with a knife, and this is one of the better-known examples. The beloved is sometimes cast as a sultan or khan dealing out summary justice to the poor, suffering lover. This is very similar to themes of the Colloquy, as indeed it echoes most other love poetry; Sayat Nova took conventional and commonplace imagery and created amazing songs.
Another great, time-honoured ashugh pick-up line: Eshkemet hivandatsil im (”I have grown sick from your love”). (Note: These lines do not work! Do not try on your own!)
This is very plain in the creationism-evolution debates, whose anti-outgroup subtexts are, on the one side: You are inhuman brutes determined to rob us of our spiritual consolations and sweep away the moral foundations of our civilization, and on the other: You are obscurantist ignoramuses who’d like to shut down progress and drag us all back to the 16th century, with kings and priests telling us what to think. Neither subtext has much relation to reality, in my experience—I mean, I know a couple dozen people on each side of this, and none fits either description. The scientists are not looking to convert Notre Dame into a Temple of Reason; the creationists aren’t plotting to burn heretics at the stake. ~John Derbyshire
Quite right. I think you’ll find that it should be the 11th century (living pre-Investiture Contest is a must!), and you can’t convert heretics if you’ve already burned them. Now Manichees are a different story…
In fact, most creationists and even those odd ducks, such as myself, who somehow manage to think that evolution describes something about the created order that has no great bearing whatever on the existence of God are not concerned to drag anyone anywhere (and we don’t even have a time machine). We would all prefer, I think, to have certain outspoken scientists refrain from making bold metaphysical claims (e.g., God does not exist) as if they were obvious proven facts, when they are contestable philosophical claims like everybody else’s and we would just as soon be spared tiresome lectures about how the Church impeded and handicapped science for ages, when it was principally the Church that sponsored and encouraged all branches of learning for the better part of our civilisation’s history. That might improve relations between the groups a bit.
I don’t know how important it is, but thanks to a new feature on Alexa you can see the traffic ranking of websites in different countries if they are in the top million. (Eunomia has, alas, fallen on hard times and doesn’t currently qualify for this new feature.)
The Japanese, for instance, love Steve Sailer out of all proportion to the amount of time he spends on anything related specifically to Japan. Curiously, Chronicles‘ website is much more popular in Georgia than here, which is slightly odd, since I don’t know of much in the magazine that has pertained directly to Georgia. But I knew that ordinary Georgians had to be decent folks. Hurrah for Sakartvelos! In spite of your language’s baffling internal conjugation rules, I salute you! Perhaps a little less inexplicably, American Conservative’s website is relatively beloved in Bulgaria and Switzerland. I guess the Swiss-Taki connection makes sense, but Bulgaria? Regardless, they are all most welcome.
If I were as silly as Andrew Sullivan, I would do just what he does whenever the target of his criticisms “fails” to respond: I would take his “failure” to respond to my review of his book as definitive proof that I have completely overthrown his entire argument. It would be obvious to me that I have already anticipated his every reply and decisively routed him, so much so that he is embarrassed even to talk about it. I would say things like, “Why is there such a deafening silence from Andrew Sullivan? Clearly, he knows that I have his number! Ha ha!” But no one else could ever be as silly as Andrew Sullivan.
France is in trouble. It’s a choice between more taxes and less social benefits [bold mine-DL]. Simple. No, complicated. I don’t know enough about the specific circumstances of la belle France. ~Marty Peretz
I know you’ve all been dying to read my Intercollegiate Review book review of Andrew Sullivan’s The Conservative Soul. Now you can (PDF).
Well, my view is predictable—romance is only a good thing if everyone in it is having a good time, which is not true for women who are in romantic relationships with men who beat or rape them. ~Amanda Marcotte
Of course, one might quibble with the designation “romantic relationship” in the case of rape.
Go take a look at my latest article on Putin, Russia and Western opposition to both here. Also in the magazine, Taki has some choice words for the Saudis, F.J. Sarto writes on Putin’s speech in Munich and John Zmirak also has an outstanding and very funny Screwtape Letters-style piece on immigration.
Not everyone is sold on using politics as a filter for love. Janis Spindel, the legendary matchmaker known for searching nationwide for bachelorettes on behalf of her upscale, all-male clientele, balked when told about political online dating.
“Oh my gawd! What next?” she exclaimed in her signature New York accent. Asked why she doesn’t approve, she responded with a question of her own: “Are people looking to fall in love or are they looking to find a political match?” ~Samantha Slater, The Politico
Wasn’t it the old rule that one of the things you don’t talk about on the first few dates was politics? Now it’s practically an entry requirement. Count me as a confirmed skeptic of this entire trend. As if our political associations haven’t become clannish and insular enough, we need to subject our social relationships to a political pre-screening! What a depressing thought. It may satisfy a very small niche market of political operatives, for whom this sort of match may really be a top priority, but for most people who use these services I suspect it will prove unsatisfying and unsuccessful.
There is a certain logic to the idea of matching people according to their descriptions of their personalities, preferences and even politics. For some very political people, there is some kind of logic for focusing especially on finding the right political match. It just happens to be astonishingly bad logic. First of all, and you don’t need me to tell you this, many people are unusually bad at characterising themselves. It is also the case that many of the things that people think they prefer or actually do prefer are not at all the things they actually need to be happy. Finally, people who place great value on the politics of their prospective dates ahead of other considerations are people who don’t even know what the question is.
Most people prioritise the wrong things all the time–such is the comedy and tragedy of man–and nothing could better demonstrate this habit than the rising popularity of services geared towards people convinced that they must find their political match in order to even contemplate the possibility of a committed relationship. I understand how bitterly unsatisfying this habit is because I used to be quite given over to it.
It is one of those hazardous side-effects of being a political junkie that some of us can fall into without thinking about it, and as political junkies we can cook up all sorts of plausible arguments why this preoccupation with finding reasonably similar politics is not the dreary, abstract dance of death that it is. “It’s important to find someone who shares your view of the world!” the political junkie will say to his bewildered friends, who place such a low, low priority on their mates’ politics that he, in turn, is baffled. “How can you love someone who supports NATO expansion?” he yells at no one in particular. (Of course, most sane people don’t spend their time worrying about NATO expansion one way or the other, so it isn’t one of those burning questions that fills the lovers with anxiety.) More likely it will be something like, “How can she like Hagel? Doesn’t she understand that he isn’t really antiwar?” And so on. For the record, this is often fairly stupid.
As an Orthodox reactionary who admires the cause of the Confederacy, lauds Bolingbroke and waits for the day when the Greeks reclaim Constantinople, I hold out little hope of finding such a match, so I may be either the worst person to comment on this trend or one of the best-prepared. The absurdity of these political match services becomes more obvious to people on what I suppose must be called the political “extremes,” especially when it is actually only too common to find many personal and political affinities between far-left greens and far-right traditionalists or even reactionary “blacks.” These are people who would, according to the rubrics of these services, supposedly be completely incompatible with one another–they are on “opposite ends” of the spectrum.
There are cases where you have two people with diametrically opposed and mutually exclusive worldviews that make any sort of sane and stable relationship impossible, but then you would think they would usually recognise this conflict fairly early on. The communist and the monarchist will run out of things to talk about pretty quickly. So I suppose the only virtue of these matching services would have to be in eliminating the possibility of accidentally getting set up with a Satanist. Otherwise they just endorse a rather weird and sad idea that enduring love can only exist between people who are in agreement about virtually everything.
As the wise Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn reminded us in Leftism Revisited, love is the embrace of the radically Other (most powerfully expressed in mystical love for God); as the Fathers might put it, true love is kenotic and desires the good of the beloved even to the complete sacrifice of the self. When people invoke the famous citation from Ephesians in which the Apostle commands women to be subject to their husbands, they often forget the other half of the citation, which is that the husbands should be willing to sacrifice themselves for their wives as Christ did for the Church. (This would be the passage that some radicals think prove that Christianity is hostile to women, when it seems clear that it is men who are called upon to live up to a perfect example in this particular way.) Inasmuch as this preoccupation with finding political mirror images of ourselves is simply self-obsession, it has nothing to do with love and so will not satisfy the natural yearning for love that the people subscribing to these services believe they will find.
Taki Theodoracopulos, co-founder of The American Conservative, has brought out a new webzine, a much-expanded Taki’s Top Drawer that will start shaking some of the rot out of contemporary conservatism and giving the usurpers who have run conservatism into the ground a good hiding on a regular basis. Taki already has had quite a few things to say this month. He is joined by Paul Gottfried, Justin Raimondo and F.J. Sarto, who is also the managing editor of the webzine. Before too long, you may see another familiar name showing up over there. More updates in the future.
I realise that I have been negligent in linking to Joseph Pearce’s blogging at Small Is Still Beautiful. See what he has to say about land, democracy, direct action, and bogus democracy and its relationship to centralism.
Update: F.J. Sarto says of Giuliani:
Nevertheless, we must give this much to Giuliani: He may have cheated on his wife flagrantly in the mayor’s house, appeared in drag with a disturbing frequency, gone to live with two male homosexuals for almost a year after divorcing his betrayed wife and adopted positions indisintinguishable from those of Hillary Clinton, but we cannot take this from him: On Sept. 11, 2001, he did not cry like a little girl. Nor was he reading “My Pet Goat” or hiding in an “undisclosed location.” So perhaps he will be something of an improvement.
Ross and Reihan have been selfishly guarding their well-kept secrets and hoarding their witty insights for a month now (on the lame pretexts of “having work to do” and “employment”), so it will soon be time for them to come back and share the wealth. Sen. Webb would approve.
This will be good news for many, but especially for my readers, since I will be going on a similar hiatus for the duration of February (it is the shortest month of the year, so I’m not depriving you all quite as much as the lads at the Scene have). Conference papers don’t write themselves, and conference attendance this weekend will be swallowing up four days that might have gone towards something more productive. (This is where I’m obliged to say that all academic conferences are terribly productive, appropriate uses of our time–chiefly because it gets us here in the Midwest out of seemingly near-Arctic temperatures and forces us to go to sunny California.) Actually, I will probably get more reading done on this trip than I have managed in several weeks, but none of that will bring my dissertation chapters to completion.
Eunomia has never been dormant for this long, so it will be interesting to see how many readers will still be here when I “get back.” Technically, the hiatus doesn’t begin until tomorrow, but there are preparations to be made for the L.A. jaunt and some things that need to get done before I leave. I may pop back in this evening for a final word. If not, then hajoghut’yun.
To answer Spencer “Democrat Party” is a slur just because it’s wrong. ~Matt Yglesias
This is about as “inside baseball” as blogging can get, and will therefore probably be of interest to all of twelve people, but let me make a few remarks. As you will have noticed, Republicans nowadays like to refer to the Democratic Party as “the Democrat Party.” Mr. Bush did this the other day in the SOTU, and Republicans have been doing it for years before that. They do this, yes, to be insulting by refusing to call the party by the name its members use, but they also want to insult Democrats by effectively denying the Democratic Party’s claim to being a party of the people. That is, they want to deny its claim to being democratic (a dubious honour that they, the Republicans, have decided to start claiming for themselves), so they refuse to call it the Democratic Party.
This is bound up with the many contortions that the party of corporations and the moneyed interest has gone through to make itself into the vehicle of populist resentment (without, mind you, actually doing anything to address populist resentments or desires) against “elites.” That the Democratic Party of the last seventy-odd years has been increasingly a party run by a political and cultural elite for the interests of that elite to the detriment of many Americans hardly helps to rebut these charges of not being a party of “the people,” but leave that aside for now. If you were to press some Republicans on this usage, “Democrat Party,” they would probably assure you in great earnestness that this has either always been the name of the other party (which is wrong) or that it is now the appropriate name for the party of elitism. One basic problem with the new name for the opposing party favoured by Republicans is that it is simply illiterate: democrat is a substantive, democratic is an adjective, and they should be used in the proper way by those who would like to be considered functionally literate English-speakers. Since Mr. Bush is the foremost representative of the GOP these days, I suppose it is understandable that they would begin to imitate his special facility with the language and would start using the wrong words for the wrong things.
Since my cold keeps me from getting any sleep, while I wait for this dreadful TheraFlu to kick in (it tastes horrible, but does the trick) I will post here a few random items that may interest you all.
On the shameless self-promotion front, I have a review of Adrian Goldsworthy’s Caesar: Life of a Colossus in the latest TAC (1/29/07).
On a random music note, I am currently listening to Sting’s impressive album of songs, Songs from the Labyrinth, written by the late 16th/early 17th century English composer, John Dowland. Apparently, he even learned to play the lute to accompany the professional lutenist, Edin Karamazov, on one of the songs. Dowland’s late medieval sound and lyrics, by turns melancholy and irreverent, are always beautiful. Sting intersperses excerpts from a letter from Dowland to Robert Cecil, Lord Burleigh, in which Dowland, a confessing Catholic, was attempting to bring to the attention of the English court a plot against Elizabeth I while vowing his loyalty to England. This has the interesting effect of recounting Dowland’s life as his corpus of work unfolds (the songs seem not to be in strictly chronological order). By far, my favourite has to be Can she excuse my wrongs? (1597). Here is the first stanza:
Can she excuse my wrongs with Virtue’s cloak?
Shall I call her good when she proves unkind?
Are those clear fire which vanish into smoke?
Must I praise the leaves where no fruit I find?
Los Angelino Eunomia readers, be mildly intrigued: the “Dark Lord of Paleoconservatism” will be visiting your city next week to speak on a matter historical, ecclesiastical and Armenian. I am unsure whether I will have any time away from the scheduled events at the colloquium at UCLA, but if anyone is in the vicinity and would like to hear a talk on monotheletism (who wouldn’t want to hear a talk on monotheletism?) I imagine that you would be most welcome to attend. Come and confirm that I am not, in fact, a disembodied brain who blogs via ”sheer Mental Power.”
To answer Peter’s important question (sorry, I mean, truly important question), I would have to say that my bet’s on Romney. The old BSG-Mormon connection can’t have just been a fluke, can it?
Since no one has yet offered me a large pot full of treasures that would keep me otherwise occupied, I thought I would point readers to an interesting article (via Razib) about the Alevi sect in Turkey. This is one of the many sects that fill the fissiparous and wildly diverse universe of Shi’ism. Somewhat like the Druze, they have roots in Shi’ism, but have developed into an entirely different religious group.
Speaking of fairly obscure Near Eastern sects, I was introduced indirectly to the existence of a small religious minority in Armenia through reading the beginning of Namus, one of the works of Armenian author Alexander Shirvanzade. Namus, as I have discovered, is a Mediterranean and Near Eastern code of honour, and would seem to form part of the Pashtuns’ pushtunwali surveyed by The Economist late last year.
What was the obscure sect I discovered? The Malakans (as transliterated from Armenian) or Molokans (as transliterated from Russian). Not to be outdone by anyone else, the Molokans have their own webpage. From what I have been able to learn about them so far, you could not find people less likely to follow anything remotely resembling pushtunwali than the Malakans, who appear to be the very embodiment of meekness and longsuffering.
Relating this to some current events here in America, I would note that Molokans apparently also were supposed to have had a tradition of plural marriage at some point and were either pejoratively identified or otherwise associated with Mormons in the 19th century. According to a 1993 New York Times article, the Molokans “comprise a rather late Russian sect that emerged at the close of the 18th century.”
The article continues:
Like other anti-clerical movements in Russia and in Europe, Molokan preachers focused on immediate personal contacts with God, refuting ritual and reverence for saints and icons as idolatry. They recognize as the sole fountainhead of truth the Holy Scriptures, emphasizing that both Old and New Testaments are to be viewed metaphorically not dogmatically.
Basic is meeting for prayer which reduce to hymn singing and the joint reading and interpretation of Scriptural texts. There is no hierarchy, with the congregations chaired by an Elder, usually one of the older and better educated members of the community. They resemble more the western Quakers and Baptists.
Apparently, along with other dissident sects, the Molokans were resettled in the Caucasus under Nicholas I. This is presumably how they entered into the history of Armenia.
Update: Somehow I forgot to mention this earlier. There is also a movie called Namus, which is based on Shirvanzade’s story. There is now a restored version available. From what I have heard about the story’s melodrama, it sounds as if it will be Armenia’s answer to a Bollywood plot. Unfortunately, it is a silent film, so there won’t be any big song-and-dance numbers.
Is this man not an utter nutcase, a dangerous nutcase. After all, he is the leader of a quarter of a million Muslims in Australia.
How did the Labor prime minister, John Howard, react? “He played down the seriousness of recent statements made by the clergymen, describing it as a mere joke.” That’s perfectly clear although it comes from the garbled translation.
Will some of you out there concoct of a negotiating plan for dealing with this man? ~Marty Peretz
While The Plank offers some interesting commentary from time to time and occasionally even some real humour, The Spine, TNR editor Marty Peretz’s blog, seems to offer nothing but the blogging equivalent of nails across a chalkboard. I almost never look at it, but this evening I saw the title of the latest post, “Exposed Meat,” assumed (correctly) it referred to the Muslim cleric in Australia who referred in a rather unflattering way to unveiled Australian women and went on to read it. I thought to myself: “Let’s see what he has to say about this one.” I would have said that it was a surprise that the post was an error-ridden, poorly-written jumble, but then I remembered that this is Marty Peretz we’re talking about. Quick, Marty, use ultramontane in a sentence!
For the record, Mr. Peretz, Howard is the Liberal Prime Minister of Australia. The Liberal Party is Australia’s center-right governing party and their closest equivalent, to put it in American terms, to the GOP (no offense intended to any of our Liberal Party friends). The Australian Labor Party, led by Kevin Rudd, has a less-than-flattering picture of PM Howard on its main page that would have told Mr. Peretz after about ten seconds of research that John Howard was not a Laborite.
In response to this, I hereby announce Larison’s Second Law Of Foreign Policy Commentary (see the First Law): If you do not know the basic political landscape of another country (i.e., which party is which, whether it is a republic or a kingdom, etc.), you are unqualified to comment on anything related to that country’s politics.
Unknown to most of you and to the rest of the world, New Mexico is recovering from what may well be its worst snowstorm of the last 100 years. I was fortunate to be able to get out of the state on schedule, but not without some difficulty. The highway between Albuquerque and Clines Corners remained extremely icy and had created a massive traffic jam backing up across town almost to the Rio Grande by the time I left on Monday morning, which forced me to take the alternate route via I-25 and down a state highway to reconnect with I-40 east of the mess.
Northeasterners and Midwesterners will probably chuckle that a mere foot or two feet of snow can cripple most of an entire state for a full weekend, but for us this was the Great Blizzard of ‘06. In the high desert, much of it well over a mile above sea level in elevation, the snowfall made road travel extremely treacherous. Thus it was that both interstates were closed for at least two days, and I-40 east of Albuquerque was shut down from Friday until Monday with only a brief reopening Saturday. Not that you would have heard peep about it from NPR or The Weather Channel or any news network. The old “one of our fifty is missing” joke wears a little thin when mild rainstorms in Philadelphia merit more attention on national weather news than the paralysis of an entire state. Colorado was not ignored in this way, perhaps because it had already suffered such a powerful and overwhelming storm the week before. But the same problems that plague our neighbours in Colorado are also plaguing New Mexico: like their ranchers, ours are cut off and their herds are getting stuck in snowdrifts; as in Colorado, the National Guard has been mobilised to help bring supplies to those who are stranded; as it is in eastern Colorado, travel around much of northern and central New Mexico has been virtually impossible for days. With a few exceptions, the county governments back home did an effective job recovering from the storm, and the city government of Albuquerque should be commended on getting the city up and running almost immediately. The state did fairly well in responding to the storm. What will remain with me from the last few days is the complete and utter indifference of people outside the state about what happens in New Mexico. I realise there aren’t that many New Mexicans, but it might be worth mentioning when one of the major commercial corridors in America gets shut down by a freakishly large snowstorm in a desert state that typically sees less than 10″ of precipitation in an entire year.
A friendly critic, some years ago, told me that Chronicles could never succeed, because, although we are often right, we are right much too early. To have spoken about the Islamic problem a few days after September 11 made you look like a prophet. We had been warning about the danger for over 15 years. We were also right about the significance of the Balkan conflicts, immigration, and multiculturalism, but we were always so far ahead of the curve that, on every issue, we went through the same cycle: initial ridicule, a brief instant of respect, then a dismissive ”Oh, everybody knows that now!”
The saddest issue on which we have been proved correct is the war in Iraq. We said, from the beginning, that the evidence did not justify an invasion, and, that even if it did, the result would be a quagmire of violence and chaos from which it would be difficult to extricate ourselves.
By now, even Bill Buckley knows we were right. What did we know that was not available to Don Rumsfeld and the neoconservative chickenhawks who egged him on? In one sense, nothing; in another, everything. It is often not technical information we need in order to make up our minds about a political issue, but historical and moral understanding. Our “reading” of Iraq was derived from the study of history going back to the postcolonial formation of the country, to the Ottoman and Byzantine empires, all the way back to the ancient Sumerians and Assyrians of Mesopotamia.
Today, virtually everybody knows. Even the Dallas Morning News has conceded the truth:
Prior to the commencement of hostilities in Iraq, a small but vociferous faction of paleoconservatives and foreign-policy realists argued that the United States was careening into catastrophe. Some argued from prudential grounds that attacking Iraq would cause more problems than it would solve. Others argued from traditionalist conservative convictions about the nature of men and societies that it was delusional to think that America could, by force of arms, impose liberal democracy on a nation that lacked the cultural and institutional capability for it. These thinkers were not only ignored, but some were anathematized from the right as unpatriotic.
As the writer who headed the list of David Frum’s “unpatriotic conservatives,” I am entitled to brag, on behalf of my colleagues. America needs Chronicles, if only to inject a little musty old-fashioned air into our national debates. If you have already made a gift this Christmas season, please accept my thanks. If you haven’t yet sent a contribution, please help us to keep the voice of conservative sanity on the web by clicking here. All donations to ChroniclesMagazine.org are tax deductible, so don’t delay. ~Thomas Fleming
I cannot urge everyone strongly enough to contribute to the support of Chronicles‘ website. It is one of the very few voices of sanity available online, and it is to my mind quite clearly the best and most insightful commentary written in this country.
It is something of a compliment for Eunomia that my unexplained cessation of blogging for four days has caused some of my faithful readers to question whether I am, in fact, still alive. (Then again, it may be a sad commentary on the regularity of my blogging that some assume that only the sweet release of death would keep me from giving my opinions on current events and other matters of interest.) Rest assured that I have not vanished from the face of the earth or crashed my car into a tree. I am back home in New Mexico for Christmas (on a slower Internet connection), and travel and family gatherings have drawn me away from regular blogging for the last few days. The coming of (New Calendar) Christmas and other work will probably take up most of my time this week, so blogging will be very light. I regret that some of the most active conversations in the comment threads have been happening during my trip, as they all seem to be very good and spirited, but it was unavoidable.
It is good to see that my absence from blogging has not dulled interest in Eunomia. I would also like to thank Ross Douthat for his kind mention of one of the points in my recent post on libertarians and the GOP on bloggingheads during his latest sparring session with Matt Yglesias. I will have a post here and there on news items and commentary that strike me, but I must first take care of some academic conference-related work and some things I am working on for ISI. Perhaps later this week, when most of this is out of the way, I will be able to post a little more often.
Greg Pollowitz, very definitely missing Sixers, informs me that Steve Young is the great-great-great grandson of Bringham [sic] Young.
But I bet everyone who watches Monday Night football knows that. ~Kathryn Jean Lopez
Yes, I suppose we did already know that about Steve Young. Those of us who grew up with WAC/Mountain West college football against BYU also know that the name is Brigham Young.
But it is true that Young’s first name is frequently pronounced as if it were spelled Bringham, which is what reminded me of the old and very anti-Mormon joke I heard when I was younger. It went something like this:
Q: What did Brigham Young say about women?
A: “I don’t care how you bring’em, just bring’em young.”
It’s a terrible joke, I know. (I have discovered that it was originally an old Rodney Dangerfield line–that helps explain why it was so bad.) But that is just the tip of the iceberg of the sort of grassroots anti-Mormonism you will encounter when Romney starts his campaign.
The Wire doesn’t just “evade” arguments over solutions, it posits that no solutions actually exist. ~Peter Suderman
I have never seen The Wire (I don’t own a TV, much less do I have a cable subscription), so this is one of those facets of popular culture that is completely unknown to me. (I was a great fan of Homicide when I was younger, particularly enjoying the references to Poe and the all-around cynicism of Richard Belzer’s Det. Munch, and I was actually very upset when it was cancelled.) But, if Peter and the other critics are right, it sounds like an unusually smart television show, which it would have to be to carry on in the tradition of Homicide. (Trivial aside: Homicide was among the first to consistently use the hand-held camera documentary conceit to lend the show a more ”realistic” flavour, and the use of a similar effect in the new Galactica is part of that show’s tremendous success as a more “realistic” approach to the obviously fantastical genre of sci-fi.)
From what I read, it seems that it does not try to do what every other television show does: bring things to tidy resolution. Whether it is in an arc-plotted series or a single episode, TV usually tries to provide us with more or less nicely wrapped story packages. Almost every kind of television does this: the sitcom, the miniseries, the sci-fi series, the Dallas-style one-hour primetime, non-crime-related drama (a lost art form known for the most part only to those of us watching in the ’80s), etc. Soap operas are probably the one form of television that never really try to provide resolution, but only the illusion of it, which allows the story to continue indefinitely and take endless twists and turns. This is one reason, in addition to the acting and writing, why they are generally considered bad television: it just never goes anywhere! This is also why soap operas can be addictive, because there is an implicit promise of some sort of conclusion without any payoff.
People like finality and resolution, which is why writers typically structure stories with some kind of resolution. Narratives without some obvious ending, a conclusion, seem incomplete–this much just seems like common sense. Finish the story, we say. That is why real life agitates us so much, because resolution often eludes us. Things happen, and they do not always make a great deal of sense nor do they seem to tend towards anything in particular. (This is why the pessimists seem so compelling to people who are paying attention, and why they would be entirely right but for the truth of revelation.)
But it is a terribly modern and optimistic way of looking at the world to see “problems” that have “solutions” rather than burdens to be born, and we know what I think of modernity and optimism. This does not mean that we ought not try to alleviate suffering or rectify certain injustices, but that we are fools if we think we can “solve” these things that arise from the structures of our existence. There are no solutions, only ways of making the best of what we have.
Television routinely tells us that we can solve the injustices or difficulties of life, which may be the main reason why television is the most pervasive source of confusion about reality that exists. If there were more shows that did not indulge this happy falsehood, we would probably all be better off for it.
Pithlord has announced that he will be suspending his blogging to make more time for his family, as the heir to the Pithlordship will soon be born. Congratulations to Pithlord and family. His wit, commentary and insight into matters Canadian and legal will be missed, but he sets aside the blog for the best of reasons. We here at Eunomia wish him and his family all the best. We look forward to his possible return at some point in the future.
As you will have noticed, Eunomia was out of commission yesterday, thanks to continued server problems. It seems to have been resolved now, and I hope there will be no more interruptions. I have some “posts” that I wrote up while the blog was down, but it will take a little while to add the appropriate links.
For those who attempted to visit here earlier on Sunday and found someone offering to hire out audio and video jukeboxes, here is an explanation: my hosting service was switching between servers in a big move today, so for a few rather nervous hours Eunomia seemed to have vanished. My apologies for the disruption. Posting will resume shortly.
For those who might be interested in some contemporary Armenian music, I heartily recommend the new album of Anush and Inga Arshakyan, Tamzara. It has some slightly modern-sounding songs, but all of the songs are adaptations of Armenian folk (or zhogovortakan) songs and the ballads of famous traditional goosans, or bard-poets. I had picked it up about a year ago, but had only listened to it once before coming back to it this week. For whatever reason, the music resonated with me much more this week than it had before. Ari, lsenk’!
| What American accent do you have?
Your Result: The West
Your accent is the lowest common denominator of American speech. Unless you’re a SoCal surfer, no one thinks you have an accent. And really, you may not even be from the West at all, you could easily be from Florida or one of those big Southern cities like Dallas or Atlanta. |
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| The Midland |
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| Boston |
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| North Central |
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| The Inland North |
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| Philadelphia |
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| The South |
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| The Northeast |
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| What American accent do you have? Take More Quizzes |
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Via Dave Weigel
Lowest common denominator, indeed! I prefer to think of it as foundational.
As Eunomia’s success grows, the list of people to whom I owe this success necessarily grows ever longer. As always, I am particularly indebted and grateful to Jon Luker, who did me the service of providing the “space” for Eunomia gratis for well over a year and a half. He was responsible for transferring the site–and my old Polemics posts–to the new Wordpress format. Were it not for him, Eunomia as you know it would not exist.
Next I owe special thanks to Michael Brendan Dougherty, the new Assistant Editor at The American Conservative, the recent token conservative at Comedy Central who made a little news of his own when he broke the Rumsfeld firing story, and an all-around man-about-town who combines stern truth-telling and penetrating wit with uproariously entertaining tales of mild vagabondage and well-timed paeans to the virtues of his charming and beautiful ladyfriend.
The last three months have been, by my standards, a monumental success. September saw an improvement on August’s outstanding numbers with 7,550 unique visitors. October has been the best to date with just over 9,000. November has not continued the upwards trend, but it did see the second largest readership for Eunomia since I began here in December 2004 with only 37 readers short of 8,000. In the last three months, Eunomia has had over 94,000 visits and 637,000 hits, dwarfing everything that has come before. I would like to see the final month of ‘06 be the best month of the year and of Eunomia’s short run, but the requirements of other writing and my actual academic responsibilities may make that impossible.
My sincere thanks go out to Steve Sailer, Rod Dreher, Clark Stooksbury, Chris Roach, Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam, Mark Shea, and Right Reason for a steady dose of links that have brought many new readers to this site, all of whom, I am hopeful, will continue to return to read more. Andrew Cusack and ParaPundit’s readers have been coming to this site in great numbers, and I am grateful for the permanent links and the readers’ continued interest.
Caleb Stegall and Scott Richert, two very supportive editors who have brought my work to publication at The New Pantagruel and Chronicles respectively, have continued to be extremely helpful in their steady encouragement of my writing. Unfortunately, tNP has shut down, but Chronicles is an excellent publications, and if you are not subscribing to Chronicles you are missing out on some of the best writing on moral, cultural, religious and political topics in the country. I am also grateful to Dan McCarthy and Kara Hopkins for bringing my writing to The American Conservative, a great magazine I have also enjoyed and supported since its appearance in the fall of 2002. Thanks to Rod Dreher for bringing my writing to The Dallas Morning News. Thanks also to Josh Trevino for bringing me on board at Enchiridion Militis, and Paul Cella for his encouragement and past links to Eunomia.
The list of others who have contributed to building up Eunomia in one way or another is fairly lengthy, so I will put down some of the names without any further comment. If I happen to leave someone out, it is an unintended omission and not a commentary on the value of your contribution or a measure of my appreciation. Thanks to Dan McCarthy, Jim Antle, A.C. Kleinheider, Andrew Cunningham, Joshua Snyder (The Western Confucian), Leon Hadar, James Poulos, Pithlord, Prof. Arben Fox, Kevin Michael Grace, Kevin Jones, Glaivester, John Theresa, Dennis Dale, Carey Cuprisin, Mild Colonial Boy, the Russian Dilettante, Jeremy Abel, M.Z. Forrest, Timothy Carney, Gene Healy, J.L. Barnard, Peter Klein, Michael Courtman, the League of the Scarlet Pimpernel, Ordo et Traditio, The Inn At The End of the World, Leading The Next Inquisition, and Will Hinton. Many thanks are due to Peter Suderman for the many links he has provided and for our many engaging disputations over matters of film and conservatism. I also owe Ramesh Ponnuru thanks for directing a large number of readers here in October.
Finally, thank you to all my many readers from around the globe who have made Eunomia something of a small success. I hope that I am able to continue to provide the kind of worthwhile and intelligent commentary that you expect.
Most traditional notions of honor, good manners, and the like seem to be aimed at addressing exactly these kinds of problems. For example, if everyone were like Mr. Pink, the entire profit model of waitressing would break down. ~Chris Roach
Women also speak more quickly, devote more brainpower to chit-chat - and actually get a buzz out of hearing their own voices, a new book suggests. ~The Daily Mail
Via Mark Shea
I’m so obviously American that I don’t think the question merits any navel-gazing or serious thought. But my parents come from a part of the world where there’s a powerful stigma associated with being a dark-skinned Muslim. This is part of what prompted partition, the sense that the Hindu clerisy in eastern Bengal was so economically and culturally dominant that it was retarding social progress among the Muslim majority, a plausible if obviously explosive claim. So why the heck would I stop identifying with other dark-skinned South Asian Muslims? ~Reihan Salam
So, as I read this, Reihan continues to identify himself as a Muslim out of a sense of loyalty to his parents and his ancestral people in Bangladesh. This is not “unadmirably tribal.” This is what I might call quite natural.
Andrew Sullivan, presumably without any sense of the delicious irony of it all, cites this quote from Thomas Merton:
He who attempts to act and do things for others or for the world without deepening his own self-understanding, freedom, integrity and capacity to love, will not have anything to give others. He will communicate to them nothing but the contagion of his own obsessions, his aggressiveness, his ego-centered ambitions, his delusions about ends and means, his doctrinaire prejudices and ideas.
Does the phrase “contagion of his own obsessions” ring any bells for Sullivan?
A homeowners’ association in southwestern Colorado has threatened to fine a resident $25 a day until she removes a Christmas wreath with a peace sign that some say is an anti-Iraq war protest or a symbol of Satan.
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The association in this 200-home subdivision 270 miles southwest of Denver has sent a letter to her saying that residents were offended by the sign and the board “will not allow signs, flags etc. that can be considered divisive.”
The subdivision’s rules say no signs, billboards or advertising are permitted without the consent of the architectural control committee.
Kearns ordered the committee to require Jensen to remove the wreath, but members refused after concluding that it was merely a seasonal symbol that didn’t say anything.
Kearns fired all five committee members. ~CNN
Via Clark Stooksbury
You have to admire the pettiness of people in these little positions of power. It will accomplish nothing of value, but Kearns has made his point and established his authority over the subdivision!
A wreath in the shape of a peace sign is so innocuous and inoffensive that it probably ranks among the more neutral symbols one might put up to express the desire for “peace on earth, goodwill towards men.” Were this to happen on a university campus and a professor or student were prohibited from having some sort of explicitly Christian symbol or message on his office or dorm room door at Christmastime, you had better believe that we would be hearing about religious discrimination and the godless oppressors of academe (and these critics would have a good point). But it does not require much imagination to guess that the response from the professional War on Christmas watchers will be one of silence or only the mildest of rebukes. The assumption that a peace symbol during the Christmas season must have overtly political meaning is simply amazing. This makes roughly as much sense as those who think that creches on public property are the first step towards theocratic domination.
More depressing in a way than this pointless attack on a harmless wreath is the deadening uniformity that this association can impose on the subdivision’s homeowners. Leave it to naturally conformist Americans to create private bureaucracies and committees to ensure homogeneity and uniformity of appearances. This reminds me of nothing so much as Californians and other transplants who move into semi-rural or small-town locations in the Southwest and set about trying to regularise everything and bring it up to their own codes of zoning and restrictions. Rustic and charming have their limits, after all.
Update: Bob Kearns is really out on a limb–even Don Surber realises that Kearns is being a fool.
A leading Kazakh writer has nominated actor Sacha Baron Cohen for a national award for popularizing Kazakhstan.
Novelist Sapabek Asip-uly called on the Kazakh Club of Art Patrons to give Cohen its annual award, according to a letter published by the Vremya newspaper Thursday.
Cohen’s fictional Kazakh character Borat “has managed to spark an immense interest of the whole world in Kazakhstan — something our authorities could not do during the years of independence,” said Asip-uly, who chairs the writers’ guild “The Land and Destiny of Kazakhs.” ~CNN
Over the next three centuries, the Pilgrims’ ancestors and others fought and bled to improve the “civil” world they fled. The Revolutionary War took nearly 4,500 lives. The Civil War, a half-million lives. The combined dead in World War I was more than 116,000, and World War II’s U.S. battle deaths to defeat Germany and Japan were close to 300,000. After all that, the United States became the foremost part of “the civil part of the world.” ~Daniel Henninger
Now we all make mistakes in writing, myself included, and sometimes they can be quite egregious, so I will go fairly easy on Mr. Henninger on this one (his copy editor, however, deserves a good thrashing!). Where Mr. Henninger said “Pilgrims’ ancestors,” he obviously must have meant “Pilgrims’ descendants.” That is clear to all.
But let’s not be too quick to criticise. It can be so easy to mix the two up when you have such reverence for the national heritage as the leading voice of open borders and the free movement of people has. Ancestors and descendants flow together in one unbroken continuity in a nation that was obviously not dedicated to a proposition in such a way that one might accidentally confuse one for the other. I can understand how the folks at The Wall Street Journal, ever that bastion of atavism and ancestral attachments (dangerously subversive attachments at that!), would be so overwhelmed by their deep appreciation for the Burkean contract between the dead, living and unborn that they would get ancestors and descendants all mixed up.
But, Mr. Henninger’s defenders will protest, these criticisms are valid only according to our limited non-Aymara conceptions of past and future! Lousy linear-time, teleological Western cultural imperialist that I am, I have failed to appreciate Mr. Henninger’s deeper insight here. Perhaps I have misunderstood Mr. Henninger entirely. Perhaps, like the Aymara, Mr. Henninger also has some unusual way of understanding time, in which my Puritan ancestors (and “others”–a nice ecumenical gesture to the vast majority of colonial Americans who had nothing to do with the Pilgrims and Puritans) are actually in some sense living ahead of their descendants–because they have lived in what we call the past, which as everyone knows is known and therefore stands before us while the unknown future lurks behind us. Our ancestors really are ahead of us, because they are in the past. Henninger here must conceive of what we think of as the past as the future and think of time in exactly the reverse way we do, so it must make some kind of sense to say that someone’s ancestors come after them, or are ahead of them, in time.
It must be meaningful that Daniel Henninger and Choquehuanca can see the world the same way! There is hope of greater understanding and cooperation between the hub of neoliberalism and the Bolivian Foreign Secretary. Already I feel the season of goodwill toward men breaking in upon us, and we have Mr. Henninger, ambassador of cross-cultural understanding, to thank for this.
What’s that, you say? You say that this was an article dedicated to defending the Bush Doctrine? Nonsense. I think it was an article dedicated to defending the Bush Doctrine’s antecedents, which are yet to come!
Update [11/27]: The article has finally been corrected to read “Pilgrims’ descendants.” So much for the great meeting of minds between Henninger and Choquehuanca–I was really looking forward to it!
Dennis Dale kindly links to my recent TAC article and mentions that a version of his outstanding satirical post that I quoted here will be appearing in the forthcoming issue of the magazine. Curmudgeonly bloggers are making our mark.
Generally, I do not indulge in the grosser Francophobic passions of the crowd, but as we are going to have a woman as Speaker of the House for the next two (?) years we might make an attempt to understand how we should properly address her. That is, of course, when we’re not calling her Nancy Nitwit or That Woman. Some people think that we live in France and in the future are supposed to address Pelosi as “Madame Speaker,” when in English-speaking countries the proper title has been and presumably long will be Madam. This is very straightforward and has to do with the most basic usage of our own language. Essayions souvenir cette idee tres simple!
A museum director in this military town removed an art exhibit that featured several deep-fried American flags.
Art student William Gentry said his piece, “The Fat Is in the Fire,” was a commentary on obesity in America. “I deep-fried the flag because I’m concerned about America and about America’s health,” Gentry said.
Customs House Museum executive director Ned Crouch took down the artwork Wednesday, less than 18 hours after it went up in this community next to Fort Campbell.
“It’s about what the community values,” Crouch said. “I’m representing 99 percent of our membership — educators, doctors, lawyers, military families.”
————————-
The exhibit featured three U.S. flags imprinted with phrases such as “Poor people are obese because they eat poorly” and more than 40 smaller flags fried in peanut oil, egg batter, flour and black pepper. ~CNN
You don’t see something like this every day. I suppose I can understand what the “artists” were trying to do, and their message seems to be worth hearing (and certainly more people have heard about it thanks to their choice to deep-fry Old Glory) but one does wonder sometimes about how people come up with ideas such as these. Are they sitting at home eating french fries and then bam! it hits them that they simply must put the American flag in the fryer to say in one simple symbol what it took Super Size Me well over an hour to say? Presumably their next trick will be to complain about government corruption by bathing the flag in the grease taken from the fryer where they fried the other flags.
There is something so profoundly misguided and simply weird in doing this that I fear I am at a loss for words.
Congratulations to Michael on landing the position of Assistant Editor at The American Conservative. Those of us in the Surfeited Inner Circle have known this was coming for a little while now, and it was made public knowledge during his stint as the token conservative at Comedy Central on Election Night (where he just happened to break the biggest news story of 2006), but one of the rules of the Inner Circle is…well, you’re not members of the Inner Circle, so I can’t tell you any of the rules. What it does mean is that the whippersnapper, age 24, will be saying, “Jump!” and his elders, including poor blogging graduate students, will say, “How high?” It should be fun.
Update: Necessarily, this means that Dan McCarthy will be leaving his editor position at TAC and moving on to other work, but he will still be contributing to the magazine.
Unfortunately, Milton Friedman passed away last night at the grand old age of 94. He was one of the great, venerable figures among the monetarists, a powerful proponent of sound monetary policy and an admirable defender of human liberty. His writings introduced me to the principles of libertarian economic thinking, and Capitalism and Freedom was the first work on any aspect of economic theory that I had read (as I am reminded reading over the remarks about him, the book had another edition, Free To Choose, which was followed by a PBS miniseries that disseminated the arguments of the book). His arguments were extremely important for providing a coherent opposition to the expansive state in an era when the ability of the market to provide goods and services was in some ways as derided and underestimated as it is now (excessively) celebrated. More recently, he opposed the invasion of Iraq, recognising aggression when he saw it and warning against the expansion of government power that always follows the outbreak of war. As he said in an interview with The Wall Street Journal in July:
As it happens, I was opposed to going into Iraq from the beginning. I think it was a mistake, for the simple reason that I do not believe the United States of America ought to be involved in aggression.
Reihan also has a post remembering the impressive man, a “genuine American hero.”
The Wall Street Journal interview from earlier this year with Milton and Rose Friedman is available here.
When Andrew Sullivan starts comparing something you wrote with his dreadful little book, it’s a good bet that something has gone terribly wrong somewhere. When others believe that there is a more than passing resemblance between what you wrote and Andrew Sullivan’s dreadful little book, you may have a bigger problem still.
I have returned from St. Louis. Blogging will be very light this week, but there are some things now available that should be of interest to regular and occasional Eunomia readers.
The American Conservative’s latest issue is now online, including Austin Bramwell’s already much-discussed article, Jeffrey Hart’s indictment of the movement’s ideological turn and my article, The Gospel According to Bush, among other things.
I just got in from a very interesting session of graduate students and faculty talking with filmmaker Atom Egoyan about his film Ararat, and this has brought a number of things to mind that I want to get into in more detail in the coming weeks. However, I am rather pressed for time this week, and will also be away from the blog starting tomorrow afternoon until Sunday. (And, no, for those who are worried, my cessation of blogging for more than a day is not a sign of the end times.) But, to whet your appetite, here are some ideas that I will try to get to by the end of the month:
* Discussion of the Ararat session, the Armenian genocide and the recent law passed recently in France outlawing denial of the genocide.
* Another response to Austin Bramwell’s provocative and interesting American Conservative article with more attention to the questions of ideology and programmatic politics (and why conservatism doesn’t have either).
* The political use of atrocities in the creation of hegemony and in the opposition to the same.
* Possibly some posts related to my experience at the Byzantine Studies Conference
* Reflections on the election, and the obligatory (attempt at an) answer to the question, “Now what, Larison?”
But Larison wants to do more to conservatism than restore its principled approach to government. He wants us to see it as a way of life. For that I give him credit; where most folks are content to take the bus into town alone, Larison wants to rocket to the moon and take the entire conservative movement with him. Presumably, once we’re there, we’ll set up a Catholic-run organic farm community and devote lots of time to slow-cooking moon-pies and rocking, zero-G style, on our lunar porches. And there will be government there; good, ordered government, no matter what that nutty Heinlein guy thought. ~Peter Suderman
Obviously, were I to launch such a rocket, it would have to be bound for Malacandra, which would be free of the destructive influence of the Bent One and populated by benevolent races, such as the happily un-fallen otter-like creatures (the hrossa). There we would dwell under the benevolent oversight of the Oyarsa of Malacandra, and the mission’s philologist would quickly be able to decipher the otters’ language and reach an understanding about the importance of sacramentality and asceticism, which they, not being fallen creatures as we are, would grasp intuitively. But then we would realise that John Elton was right all along when he said, “Mars ain’t the kind of place to raise your kids,” and we would pack up our expedition and return to the place where we came from, realising that we had been foolish to try to transplant our rooted way of life to the craggy recesses of the Valles Marinis.
Michael has also managed to work his way into the inner sanctum of Stewart and Colbert and be named the ComedyCentral.com InDecider Blog’s token conservative. Congratulations (yet again) to Michael on this one. He will be blogging on the election there tonight in his appropriately irreverent style.
If anyone can give tokenism a good name, we know that Michael will be able to do it.
Michael has also landed an article in the current Washington Monthly. Congratulations (again) to Michael on the article.
The overwhelming lesson of human history, and the second law of thermodynamics, is that Russians are right and Americans are wrong. ~Pithlord
I may not be a good American.
I have never watched a Super Bowl or an NBA championship, never been to Las Vegas, never willingly listened to rap, hip-hop, or heavy-metal music. San Francisco strikes me not as beautiful but as bleak, ugly, dirty, and alien. I feel more at home in many places in Europe than I do in New York City or Los Angeles. I like the French and find most Germans very uncongenial—too much like a certain type of American—intellectually and ethically challenged self-important bullies. (Think Earl Warren, Donald Rumsfeld, Bill Bennett.) ~Clyde Wilson
It gets even better in the rest of the article.
Michael Brendan Dougherty tells us about the current state of dandyism and how some dandies are trying to reclaim dandyism for real men.
The Economist is blogging the midterms on their politics blog Democracy in America, some of which just highlights the magazine’s own election coverage in the new issue, but they do also include some posts drawing on other sources, such as National Journal’s Jonathan Rauch on the virtues of divided government. (Via Kevin Drum) They also have an economics blogs called Free Exchange, which I’m sure all the paleos and traditional conservatives will just be rushing off to read.
Drum, for his part, fears a Sports Illustrated jinx-like effect in the magazine’s call for Republican defeat, since The Economist often endorses the candidate/party that ends up losing. They were tepidly for Kerry in ‘04. But in this case I am not sure that even bad Economist vibes can keep the Democrats down this time. Funniest thing I’ve read this week: according to Drum, The Economist has a “tiresome conservative tilt”! No more, I can’t take it!
Rachel Morris at Washington Monthly’s election blog, Showdown ‘06, notes that Rep. Doolittle in CA-04 is once again in hot water thanks to allegations of taking a junket from nonprofits that were actually fronts for corporate interests operated by the lobbying firm Alexander Strategy Group. (Morris’ commentary is interesting, but all her links seem to be broken.) Here’s the Post story (via MSNBC) on the Group and why Doolittle is in trouble:
Records show that the Korea-U.S. Exchange Council was funded by the Hanwha Group, a South Korean conglomerate. The stated goal was to enhance the influence of Hanwha’s chairman, Seung Youn Kim, a controversial figure once jailed for violating Korean financial law in his purchase of Sylvester Stallone’s Hollywood mansion. Lobbyists for the U.S.-Malaysia Exchange Association filed reports stating that their funds came from a Malaysian energy firm and that the work was “on behalf of the government of Malaysia.”
Federal law prohibits members of Congress from knowingly accepting overseas travel from foreign governments except as part of a cultural interchange program approved by the State Department. The travel in this case was not part of such a program, government officials said. House rules ban members from taking trips paid for by lobbyists or foreign agents. Nonprofits and their officers are prohibited under federal tax law from using a charitable organization for private commercial gain.
Once a major lobbying firm, Alexander Strategy Group closed down early this year. Its owner, Edwin A. Buckham, former chief of staff to now-departed House majority leader Tom DeLay, is under investigation in the Jack Abramoff lobbying scandal, according to lawyers and witnesses with knowledge of the probe. Authorities are also reviewing Buckham’s use in the 1990s of another nonprofit, the U.S. Family Network, the sources said.
The fatal grip of Abramoff continues to pull Doolittle into an early political grave. Will this latest revelation be enough to sink the drowning Doolittle once and for all? We’ll see in four days.
The December Washington Monthly, perplexed as to how to handle post-election coverage when the issue is put together before the election, has articles on the consequences of both a Dem victory and GOP survival. Notable among the latter was Mark Schmitt’s view of what would follow continued GOP control, in which he imagines the McLieberman secession from both parties to form a third party and then moots it as a preposterous alternative:
One faction of a splintered party might even lead to the creation of a third party: One can imagine McCain, if rejected by social conservatives for the Republican presidential nomination, allying with Lieberman on an independent candidacy. With the Democratic Party in crisis, and a Republican nominee markedly too conservative for the country (Newt Gingrich, for example), such a third-party ticket—made up of people who can claim they were rejected by the ideologues in both their parties—would have a superficial appeal. The problem with it is simply that it would be a very, very conservative party, not a centrist alternative at all. McCain is no moderate, and never claimed to be one. And Lieberman’s strained relationship with the Democratic Party, it has become apparent, has nothing to do with the party and everything to do with his own journey toward deep neoconservatism.
I have said more or less the same thing about McCain-Lieberman fantasies for some time. That doesn’t stop some people from hoping, of course, but it is a bizarre thing to hope for in any case. Gingrich will never get the nomination (consider that my first reckless prediction of the next election cycle!), and there are probably all kinds of people whom folks at the Monthly think are too conservative for the country who are only too likely to get the nomination and win in a general against a Clinton or Biden. The only trouble is that none of them is running for President this time around.
Hanna Rosin at Slate describes the bizarre way in which “the Christian right” has been viewed up till now:
All the election tick-tock stories hint that the drama is yet to come. Any day now Karl Rove will unlock the cages and poke the beasts out of their slumber. Any moment the right court decision, or medical ethics case, or sex scandal will have them storming the polling booths and taking back the country. This is the zombie paradigm that has been applied to the Christian right ever since its forces entered politics in the late ’70s, and in fact for most of the century: One minute they’re dead asleep, and the next minute they’re biting your head off.
This is a funny view to hold, but it would make a lot more sense of the sheer dread some people seem to have of politically active conservative Christians. It does make a certain amount of sense that their political opponent would regard them as attack zombies since that is exactly how the horrendously bad ’70s remake of Night of the Living Dead depicted them. In any case, zombies or not, Ms. Rosin claims that “the Christian right” has “peaked” and has actually become largely establishmentarian and mainstream. Perhaps, but Ms. Rosin would do a lot better than invoking Rick Warren of Purpose-Driven Life fame and juxtaposing him with Pat Robertson, since both are as representative of “the Christian right” today as I am of New Mexican politics.
At The Plank, Noam Scheiber notes that Bush has committed to keeping Rumsfeld through 2009. Apparently there will be no post-election recriminations and firings for this President!
Ron Rosenbaum manages to overthink his review of Borat’s use of anti-Semitism way, way too much.
CQPolitics has shifted NH-02 to No Clear Favourite from from Leans Republican, and notes that even in NH-01 GOP strength is waning.
Pat Buchanan has a new article, Why the GOP Is Losing.
Fr. Neuhaus mocks Alan Wolfe’s review of David Kuo’s book and manages by the end of it to intimate not too subtly that the crowd at The New Republic is basically espousing an elaborate anti-Semitic conspiracy theory (with an anti-Catholic angle to boot). To wit:
On the surface of things, it might appear that the threat is the religious right, composed of the great unwashed of vulgar evangelicalism. But they are only the foot soldiers manipulated by clever Catholics. And at the very center of these developments are those Jewish neoconservatives. At stake in these sinister goings on is, according to TNR, nothing less than the identity of America. And it is true that there is a long and darkly shadowed history of people who view America in terms of naïve Protestants being manipulated by devious Catholics and even more devious Jews. In the past, however, those who propounded such views did not usually go by names such as Wieseltier, Wolfe, and Heilbrunn.
Last, but certainly not least, Hotline TV has their anticipated predictions episode. See what Todd and Mercurio have to say about the coming “wave” or whether there will, in fact, be a wave at all.
This morning I was in Armenian class, reading a part of Hrant Matevosyan’s Kanach Dashte (The Green Field), one of his shorter short stories about a mare and her foal in, well, a green field. As often happens in Armenian stories, bad things have started to happen and there will be an unhappy ending. My conversational Armenian is still rather weak after neglecting it all summer (which is true of too many of the languages I have studied and supposedly “know” how to speak), though my reading seems to have come back quite quickly.
We finished Raffi’s Anbakht Hripsime (Unfortunate Hripsime) last week, which had a very unhappy ending, as the title would suggest, and which reminds us to regard all melikner and malikah with suspicion and distrust (this is especially true when the name is Maliki!). Mi yusak ishkhannerin, mardi vortiin, vori mot prkut’yun ch’ka! (Ps. 146:3)
On the lighter side of blogging today after all of the terribly grim Kerry and Iraq news, I thought it was about time for another dose of Rani Mukherjee. Here she is in the number Kangna Re from the amusing Paheli. Grimly serious blogging will resume later on.
Yaar ki koi khabar lata nahi.
Daam labau par hai nikal jata nahi. ~Kiran Ahluwalia
(Before I breathe my last breath I wish someone would bring me news of my beloved.)
As I was listening to Ms. Ahluwalia’s premiere CD, it occurred to me that the word in Hindi for news, khabar, is the same word for news in the stories of Raffi, Hakob Hakobyan, that I was reading recently for my Armenian class. I had not made the connection before reading Raffi’s stories, but then suddenly I recognised that the same word was being used. This is just one of the many interesting borrowings and similarities between Hindi and Armenian, which both draw heavily on Persian vocabulary. I often find such fascinating connections between the two Indo-European languages and two cultures in which I have some considerable personal interest.
For example, today I learned what pantechnicon means, as in the sentence: “Mrs Clinton comes with a pantechnicon full of baggage.” Just try inobtrusively working that one into a conversation!
As I was passing the conference room this morning the President called me in.
“D____. C’mere. Check this out.” He said, sounding surprisingly upbeat. I allowed myself the hope that he was going to say we’d be leaving the bunker soon. “Have I shown you this?”
He had been leaning over a scale model of a city. He stepped back and smiled proudly, spreading his arms in presentation.
“What is it sir?” I said, dutifully disguising my disappointment. The room was a shambles; it appeared as if everything had been hastily tossed to the walls to make room for the model, which occupied a place of well-lit preeminence in the center of the squalor.
“It’s Baghdad.” He said, delighted.
“Oh, of course.” I said, still feigning enthusiasm.
“See, here’s the airport; here’s the road to the airport; see the cars? Everything’s safe and secure. See the people? They’re voting.”
“What’s that sir?” I was sorry the moment I asked, but the futuristic structure on the outskirts of the city was clearly out of place, clumsily cobbled together with what appeared to be the modified parts of a child’s toy.
“That’s the Bush Freedom and Liberty Mosque.” He said, his enthusiasm quickening. “It’s going to be open to muslims and shi’ites alike. Let me show you—“ ~Dennis Dale
I received my absentee ballot today (the ballot requires that we use a No. 2 pencil) and I cannot find my pencil sharpener to save my life.
Update: No pencil sharpener yet, but I did find an already-sharpened pencil! Now it’s time to vote.
Second Update: The pencil I found just broke. I am now using just the piece of graphite that broke off. Voting is harder than I remember it being.
Hey, seven years of mandatory Spanish didn’t go completely to waste! (Note: I make no claim that the Spanish title above is anything like proper or accurate Spanish, but I gave it a shot.)
The November issue of Chronicles, The Disappearing Border, has many articles on the state of the border, immigration and its consequences on society, culture and the natural environment. In that issue Tom Piatak, fellow blogger who writes at Cultural Revolutions Online, has a review of Pat Buchanan’s State of Emergency. Clark Stooksbury, our man in Knoxville, reviews Beating the Powers That Be by Sean Scallon. Of interest to a great many, I think, will be Andrea Kirk Assaf’s Letter From Rome about “Lebanon, Israel and the Holy See.” Be on the lookout for the new Chronicles, or better yet you can subscribe.
Now comes the lame self-promotion. I have a short article in the new Chronicles for November on the possible political significance of the likely election of Keith Ellison in MN-05 as the first Muslim in Congress and as a politician with close personal ties to the leadership of CAIR. (Hint: it aint good.)
On the recommendation of ISI’s Mark Henrie, whose New Pantagruel essay can be found here, I picked up Andreas Kinneging’s Aristocracy, Antiquity and History: Classicism in Political Thought (Transaction, 1997). I will probably get to reading it fairly soon and may have some posts related to it in the next few weeks.
As I mentioned before, Jim Antle, Doug Bandow and Leon Hadar have pieces in the new American Conservative. Michael Brendan Dougherty also has a new article in the same issue, a fun review of Jeans: A Cultural History of an American Icon, but he got his last article online, so this one is not available electronically.
What in the name of blackest reaction has been happening to the Scene? Ross and Reihan’s blog disappeared for a couple days, then returned briefly, and then disappeared again, and just when the blog was getting attention in the respectable blogosphere of the Big-Named Magazines and Journals. Someone jealous over their prestigious Playboy ranking as one of the best political blogs must be having them on.
Update: Our great national nightmare is over. They have returned (again).
But he is clearly attracted by the US ideal of democracy. In one telling passage he compares French roads, with their unofficial fast lanes from which slower drivers move away when approached by those in a hurry, to the American ones, where no such informal rules exist. Drivers of fast cars are treated like everybody else, he notes admiringly, and in this respect America is more egalitarian than France. ~Allister Heath, The Spectator
Of all the characteristics to admire in America, BHL picks the most aggravating habit of American drivers? You would think the man could appreciate the principle that the left lane is for passing only, but apparently that doesn’t register with hordes of drivers in this country who believe they have a moral right, nay, an obligation to putter along in the left lane–at the speed limit, no less! Simply terrible. Naturally one of the worst features of American life would win BHL’s praise, and it would have to be because it is “egalitarian.” If it is, chalk that up as one more reason to be against egalitarianism.
If Muslims are apparently outraged by “Apple Mecca,” they must really be incensed at the portrayal of the Mahdi Paul Muad’Dib in Frank Herbert’s Dune series. I mean, obviously, Herbert has been distorting Muad’Dib’s teachings of peaceful inner struggle and has been giving people the idea that the Fremen are a bunch of fanatical warriors with glowing eyes. He has been getting away with misrepresenting Muad’Dib’s jihad for decades! Where will the madness end?
This just in from the Green Zone in Baghdad: The hot new polo shirt in the zone is white with a diplomatic security badge on it and stitching below that says “Resistance Is Futile.” ~The Washington Post
Via Kevin Drum
Now Drum assumes that this is an example of “triumphal jackassery” familiar to us from earlier stages in the war, but I think we may all be getting the wrong impression from this Borg slogan. Maybe it’s actually a message to other people in the Green Zone that their continued resistance to reality is futile and that eventually, one day, the catastrophe that is Iraq will penetrate their isolated little world. Anyone buying that one? No, and neither am I. Note to war supporters: it might help your cause of being outraged about alleged Cylon/American parallels in Battlestar Galactica if the government’s own guys in Iraq weren’t consciously imitating the rhetoric of the equally nasty cyborg enemies of humanity from another sci-fi show. I guess the Borg phrase was catchier than “by your command, Imperious Leader.”
This is not a joke–well, it isn’t intended to be one…
Via I, Ectomorph
Here is the explanation of what this charming piece of modern heraldry means.
The New Iraqica plotline may have started heavy-handed (no doubt in part to get a lot of press attention), and it certainly broke the wall between the audience and the BSGverse, but as the reader above notes, the show’s creative team would have to be complete idiots to sustain this strained and absurd moral equivalence throughout the season. And, they certainly demonstrated in the first two seasons that they aren’t complete idiots. ~Jonah Goldberg
As I read over Goldberg’s reaction to the third season premiere, I was surprised at how seriously he took the supposed parallelism with Iraq. (Then again, I suspect that I am not alone in being amazed that anyone associated Roslin’s attempt to steal the election with the 2000 recount–unless, of course, one thinks that Roslin is Bush, in which case it was a harrowing counterfactual storyline showing us the horror of a Gore presidency!) Now, as I said in my earlier response to Peter, I haven’t seen the premiere, so maybe I should hold off commenting any further until I have, but if Goldberg was giving us the damning evidence here he failed to convict. Isn’t it odd that war supporters should be so touchy at possible backhanded references to their war? War opponents, last I checked, were not beating their heads against the wall when BSG showed the Colonial peace movement as a front for Cylon infiltration and nuclear terrorism. Maybe it’s a space opera. Maybe it is just a story. Yes, it draws on parallels from our own experience, because, well, that’s what all interesting stories do. If you want otherworldly fluff and nonsense, Stargate is still available. If you want gritty, more realistic science fiction, quit your whining about BSG.
Update: A different NRO reader’s take on the show:
I think viewing the episodes as trying to mirror Iraq is at least a little bit of defensiveness from conservatives. I was real worried about the moral equivalence before seeing the episodes, but after viewing it I think it reflected the French resistance (no easy jokes) and Vichy French rather than Iraq. The last scene with the prisoners being allowed to stretch their legs and then being gunned down by surprise is almost a stereotype from WWII Nazi films.
Anyone trying to draw equivalence with Iraq will inevitably look like a fool trying to defend it for just a few of the reasons you have already listed.
I must say that I agree with the remark about defensiveness. Opponents of the Iraq war do not see this as an allegory about Iraq, because they do not assume that Americans are Cylons. Why is Iraq the first thing that leaps to mind? After all, isn’t it 1938? Aren’t the fascists everywhere? If you read NRO regularly, you would think so. So, come on, folks, stick to the script you have been given!
Second Update: As if the BSG-Iraq parallel needed demonstration of its silliness, here is a gem from Battlestar Galactica Blog:
They needed Baltar to be as much like Saddam Hussein as possible in order create an analagous situation. The United States took over Iraq in order to liberate the Iraqis from Saddam Hussein. The Cylons liberated the humans from Baltar. If the humans had a well functioning democratic government, then the similaritiy between the two situations would be a lot weaker.
Um…what? Gaius Baltar may be many things, but a stand-in for Saddam Hussein? Please. A lecherous egomaniac who has gone rather mad, yes, but hardly a brutal dictator. Note that this comes from someone who thought that Baltar was an all right sort of guy until the mean, old writers turned suddenly transformed him into a womanising creep, as opposed to the charming idealistic man of virtue we knew from before. Say what? Furthermore, there was no “liberation” from Baltar; as I understand it, Baltar is still around, working hand-in-glove with the Cylons. But this does raise the important question: if New Caprica is Iraq, who was supposed to be Hussein? The question points out the absurdity of the entire parallel.
In the October 23 TAC issue several of my paleo and traditional conservative blogging colleagues have articles that merit your attention: Jim Antle writes about how some conservatives believe they can win through GOP defeat this fall; Doug Bandow writes on the indifference of evangelicals towards Iraqi Christians in the evangelicals’ support for the war; Leon Hadar takes apart Bush-as-Churchill rhetoric and other poorly devised WWII comparisons. Last, but not least, Michael Brendan Dougherty reviews James Sullivan’s Jeans: A Cultural History of an American Icon. The new issue isn’t online yet, but this should give you an idea of what you’ll find in the issue.
Simple: He’s a glory hog who unfairly receives credit for the accomplishments of others and who skates through school by taking advantage of his inherited wealth and his establishment connections. Harry Potter is no braver than his best friend, Ron Weasley, just richer and better-connected. Harry’s other good friend, Hermione Granger, is smarter and a better student. The one thing Harry excels at is the sport of Quidditch, and his pampered-jock status allows him to slide in his studies, as long as he brings the school glory on the playing field. But as Charles Barkley long ago noted, being a good athlete doesn’t make you a role model.
Harry Potter is a fraud, and the cult that has risen around him is based on a lie. Potter’s claim to fame, his central accomplishment in life, is surviving a curse placed on him as an infant by the evil wizard Voldemort. As a result, the wizarding world celebrates the young Harry as “The Boy Who Lived.” It’s a curiously passive accomplishment, akin to “The Boy Who Showed Up,” or “The Boy Who Never Took a Sick Day.” And sure enough, just as none of us do anything special by slogging through yet another day, the infant Harry didn’t do anything special by living. It was his mother who saved him, sacrificing her life for his. ~Chris Suellentrop, Slate
However, as the man said, I’d rather be lucky than good. Everyone who enthuses about Harry Potter does so because they, too, would like to be the pampered Golden Boy. (The flood of hate mail can now begin.) Well, that, and because the stories actually are fairly entertaining. Read the rest of this entry »
A reader writes to Jonah Goldberg at The Corner on the new season of BSG:
Ever since the astounding conclusion of last season’s BSG, I was pumped for this year’s new episodes. However, I’m getting a very bad vibe about it being a multi-episode Iraq war bashfest. In particular, the webisodes - which, in all honesty, I’ve only seen the first five or six - draw complimentary parallels between the jihadi “insurgents” and the human resistance forces on New Caprica.
Plus, there’s a story on Zap2it.com where Mary McDonnell, in discussing this season’s plot arc, commends the BSG brain trust for their “brave and beautiful act” in putting together this year’s series.
A “brave & beautiful act,” I believe, is vapid actorspeak for “speaking truth to power.” To quote Krusty the Clown, “Oooooo, this is always death.”
Is there nothing Iraq war supporters won’t politicise? I have seen some odd things politicised in my time, but can we please leave the new Battlestar Galactica out of this debate? Incidentally, you have to have a very low opinion of the U.S. military to automatically assume that Ron Moore intends to criticise U.S. foreign policy by aligning America with the Cylons. It’s rather like the people who assume the depiction of Orcs and Uruk-hai in The Lord of the Rings was aimed at insulting minorities because the evil races had darker-hued skin than the Elves, Hobbits et al. Of course, it says quite a lot about what those people think of minorities that the first thing that came to mind when they saw an Orc was, “This is an insult to black people everywhere!” Similarly, if you think Colonials fighting the Cylons = jihadis fighting Americans, you have your wires crossed somewhere. The Cylons are the inhuman religious fanatics, remember? Or maybe, just maybe, it’s science-fiction and doesn’t have to have an immediate political application. Maybe BSG is a more fundamental story of human survival and, as many good sci-fi stories have been, a study of human nature in the extraordinary circumstances of a fantastic alien situation.
Update: A reader has helpfully pointed out this interview with BSG creator Ron Moore. Here is a relevant exchange from the interview, which acknowledges parallels with the Iraq war, but which does not propose to take sides in favour the tactics of the insurgents/Colonials (interviewer’s comments in bold):
In those opening episodes, there are so many parallels, not just to Iraq but to the occupation of France, to any occupation, to Vietnam. But the episodes are especially resonant with so many specific things that have happened in the last few years. Was that something you did consciously?
“It was definitely in my mind. There were a lot of situations and occupations that we talked about in the writers’ room, Vichy France and Vietnam. You know, Iraq is happening right now, so it’s hard not to have overtones of it. The trick for us was not to make it a polemic, to not say, ‘We know what’s wrong with the Iraq situation, here are the answers.’
“It was more about, why is it such a complicated mess? Certain things just have no easy answers, just have no good ways out for anybody involved. This is one of those situations.
“We were aware of the parallels and wanted to play it as truthfully as we could, given the situation. But the same time, we’re always a little more interested in watching how our characters respond to a situation, more than we are in delineating a certain political idea about this situation.”
In other words, Moore is more interested in the character-driven drama, as he always has been, and trying to understand how people would act in such a situation than he is interested in trying to push a political morality tale. He has been throwing these sorts of wrenches into the story since the beginning, starting with whether Cylons should be treated as humans (Roslin gives the pragmatic, basically smart answer of, ‘No’, but the show is always throwing up obstacles that try to keep you from accepting that simple conclusion). If you want lame political morality tales in your sci-fi, Episode III lies on the shelf gathering dust and awaits your viewing.
…that I was writing on Harriet Miers’ lack of qualifications to be nominated to the Supreme Court and the poor quality of Mr. Bush’s judgement:
He has wanted no contentious battles because, as he has shown with almost all of his nominees at least since the pitiful support shown Mr. Estrada, he will never rise to their defense or risk his own position on any domestic question of any size. He has shown that he will always keep his precious “political capital” tightly in his hands, like Smeagol grasping the Ring.
I must amend that last statement. Mr. Bush has expended political capital on one domestic initiative–amnesty for immigrants. Little wonder that I call his party the Party of Immigration, Imperialism and Insolvency.
For a month I’ve been dreaming of the following. Reyes and Wright versus Jeter and A-Rod. Delgado versus Abreu. Randy Johnson versus Tom Glavine. Mariano Rivera versus Billy Wagner. The world does not want a subway series. Met’s fans want vengeance for 2000. However, there is a problem. My grandfather loved the Giants. My grandmother, the Dodgers. I love the Mets. My ladyfriend’s house is Yankee territory. ~Michael Brendan Dougherty
If love can transcend the mutual hatreds of the teams of the Bronx and Queens and their respective loyalists, it can overcome anything. Except perhaps the divide between Cubs and Sox fans. Some divisions probably just run too deep. Here’s wishing Michael and his ladyfriend a happy reunion, complete with numerous Mets victories.
James Poulos celebrates his blog’s anniversary today at Postmodern Conservative. He offers an entertaining quiz to recap the last year.
Metal Storm was reaching the final prototype stage after successful testing by the US military, he said. “We expect production to start in 12 to 24 months.”
Hailed as a revolution in weaponry, Metal Storm’s firing mechanism is initiated electronically rather than by the traditional percussion method. It has almost no recoil and no moving parts, meaning that stoppages are less common than in normal firearms.
Bullets or grenades can be fired at a rate of one million per minute, either from a single weapon or multiple barrels grouped together in pods.
In comparison, an Uzi machinegun fires at a rate of 3,000 rounds a minute.
The company claims the technology can be applied to almost any calibre of weapon. Much of the project is secret, but it is believed that hand-held or remote-controlled weapons would be powered by long-lasting battery packs.
“You’d get multiple firings from one battery and they’d last a long time,” said Ian Bostock, an analyst with Jane’s Defence Weekly.
“Very few firearm revolutions have taken place in the last 60 or 70 years but this is one of them.”
A multi-barrelled Metal Storm gun would direct withering fire at an enemy infantry or tank advance, or enable a warship to fend off a missile attack. ~The Daily Telegraph
No wonder the Chinese want to get their hands on this technology. I’m hardly even an amateur when it comes to military matters, but it seems to me that possession of guns like this would significantly lessen the advantages of air power and significantly improve defensive positions. If one side possessed such weapons and the other did not, battles could become very lopsided. What came to mind when I read about this was the effective shield against missiles created by rapid gunfire that appears in the new Battlestar Galactica.
Clearwater is known as the town Scientology built … or at least the town Scientology almost completely redeveloped. Clearwater is also home to Narconon, L. Ron Hubbard’s homemade rehab program.
And it turns out Foley was no stranger in Clearwater.
At a 2003 Scientology meeting, Foley gave a speech and was photographed happily accepting “leatherbound copies of Dianetics and The Way to Happiness.”
In 1999, Foley joined three other Scientology-friendly politicians in condemning Germany for outlawing Scientology — German law is very strict about cults, because of previous problems.
The Clearwater Scientologists also held a fund-raiser for Foley’s aborted Senate run; he dropped out after the gay thing was mentioned.
And on Friday, the Creative Loafing blog in Tampa reported that Foley attended a Scientology gala in Los Angeles five years ago. ~Ken Layne, Wonkette
Ahmadinejad’s Got Nothing On This Guy
Clearly Foley has some serious engram problems–get Tom Cruise on the case!
Conservatives, let’s pretend that the U.S. just outright stole Hawaii and Puerto Rico, the way Saddam Hussein stole Kuwait. ~John Zmirak, The American Conservative
John has many more fun and challenging experiments in his latest TAC article for progressive and conservative alike. Here’s another exercise all can try in the interests of amity and the general peace: conservatives, don’t call your political opponents appeasers for at least a week; progressives, lay off the fascist comparisons for an equal period of time. Just imagine how much better your arguments will be when you have to start actually making arguments!
A few readers have mentioned in the past few months that Eunomia was difficult to read because of the lightness of some of the text, and I now realise that the blockquotes would appear in extremely small font and be very difficult to read on certain monitors under the old version. So we’ll give the new look, which is actually a reversion to an older model (entirely appropriate to a reactionary blog), a chance and see how it goes. Unfortunately, one of the casualties of the change is the wonderful quote from Bolingbroke’s paper, The Craftsman, but I’ll see if I can’t restore that. Please let me know if you prefer this new appearance or the previous theme.
Blogging is a highly competitive, heavy attrition environment. Rival blogs that seek to do harm to Untethered are many. Therefore, I will not wait for other blogs to attack, but will concentrate on identifying threats not only before they reveal themselves, but before they develop; before they even exist. In today’s environment of heightened competitiveness, it is necessary to anticipate not only your competitor’s next move, but his next thought as well. I will destroy potentially hostile rogue blogs before even they know they are a threat. Indeed, many will not realize that they were destined to be threats. ~Dennis Dale
I gave a ten minute discourse to someone on the difference between liberal universalist ethics and Christian morality as they relate to our politics. The one person audience said, “I know you are drunk, but this is rather brilliant.” Later, this same person uttered the strange words. “When you were drunk, you promised to give me a ride home.” Of course by this point it was nearly five in the morning and I had been sipping on delicious tap water since the gin ran out some hours earlier.
On the way home I thought it was funny how the partisans of tradition party it up. Our bodies hot, and our insults cold. Not a thing about it was lukewarm. And nobody that I witnessed was vomiting. ~Michael Brendan Dougherty
ουτως οτι χλιαρος ει και ου ζεστος ουτε ψυχρος μελλω σε εμεσαι εκ του στοματος μου ~Apocalypse 3:16
At 4Pundits, Jim Antle rhetorically asks if Mark Foley was a defender of Internet decency and Doug Bandow gets in the reckless prediction game and supposes that the discussion in “Foleygate” will turn to whether Hastert will still be Speaker by mid-month; he goes on to discuss the significance of the scandal for the GOP majority. Mr. Bandow also has a post on an interesting excerpt from a biography of Colin Powell. Between the two of them they seem to be keeping 4Pundits afloat well enough, so that the perpetually missing pundit and the “half-missing pundit” are the ones missing out.
My Enchiridion Militis colleague Joshua Trevino now also blogs at The Claremont Institute’s The Remedy. In spite of my own disagreements with Claremont’s other bloggers, I congratulate Josh on the position and I can say with certainty that he will bring excellent insights and writing to Claremont’s site.
Tagged by James Poulos
1. One book that changed your life?
Dostoevsky, Crime & Punishment
2. One book that you have read more than once?
Dostoevsky, Crime & Punishment
3. One book you would want on a desert island?
Xenophon, Cyropaedia
4. One book that made you cry?
Lauro Martines, Fire in the City
5. One book that made you laugh?
Demetrios Bathrellos, The Byzantine Christ
6. One book you wish had been written?
How The Byzantines Created Western Civilisation by Sir Steven Runciman
7. One book you wish had never been written?
Karen Armstrong, A History of God
8. One book you are reading currently?
Isaac Kramnick, Bolingbroke & His Circle (obviously)
9. One book you have been meaning to read?
Doderer, Demons
10. Pass it on
So I will leave this post as the tombstone for this ugly little blog that brought out the vilest in me and has now left me in deep shame for the rest of my life. Always remember this, kids: you may not really be as witty and edgy as you think you are; the Internet amplifies everything, especially your most ridiculous stupidity, so don’t go writing callous things even during those days that you happen to feel depressed and like shit and you need that feeling of not caring; limits usually exist for a good reason; your imaginary enemies are not the same as the real breathing people; groups are not monolithic so that all their members equal the one you hate the most and who may or may not return the favour; and finally, remember that regardless of their labels, all people are individuals with feelings, fears and hopes that you really, really should always respect. ~Ilkka Kokkarinen, Sixteen Volts
Deep shame for the rest of my life? Is the man serious? So maybe he crossed the line and said some rude things on a few occasions–for this he will feel “deep shame” for the rest of his life? That’s ridiculous. If he believes he has seriously done wrong, he can give up the blogging (as he has done) and change his ways–but why would he feel “deep shame” for the rest of his life? I can see it now: Kokkarinen in his dotage some decades hence is sitting out in his backyard staring off into the distance, his face drawn in a look of anguish, his eyes haunted by the thoughts of…his mean blog entries! Oh, the humanity! If there is one thing we can all agree on about blog entries, it is that they are fairly trivial. If he made a mistake with some of them and he feels bad about that, so be it, but it is just about as serious and shameful as shouting at someone in anger on the highway. You shouldn’t do those things, but if anyone feels “deep shame” for the rest of his days because he has done either of those things he has bigger problems than being mean to people on a blog. It sounds more like his woman has laid a heavy guilt trip on him for which he will be paying for the rest of his days–and that’s the real shame.
Also, why would you “always” show everyone respect? As a general rule, yes, you should show people respect until they give you a reason to do otherwise, but respect is not some automatic, permanent given thing that everyone can expect no matter what. There are people who have not earned respect or who have lost it, presumably by doing things a fair sight more shameful than writing a zinger on a blog about overweight lesbians. Good grief.
Update: Glaivester has a nice, succinct post called Stop Your Sniveling and Groveling, Ilkka. Amen to that.
Is it just me, or has the conclusion of the lonelygirl15 episode coincided with a surprising amount of discussion on blogs about the perils and pitfalls of modern relations between the sexes? It started with Steve Sailer’s first post on the social implications of the success of the lonelygirl15 charade:
I’m reminded once again of how little effort young men and young women in modern America put into connecting with each other mentally. There’s a gigantic number of high IQ lonely guys out there desperate to meet a girl who wants to talk about the things they like to talk about.
Now The Corner is abuzz with Ally McBeal references (see links above) with the Derb commenting:
The following (edited to protect the innocent) is typical of many.
“Derb—-I suspect that when the smart, attractive 34-year-old woman says ‘I can’t find a man’ she means she can’t find a man who is up to her standards. I also suspect those standards are pretty high. Just check out some of the profiles on yahoo.com to see what I’m talking about.
“I started looking through those a few years ago after my wife died and I couldn’t believe the exacting specifications most of these women had for a mate. I was excluded from at least 75 percent of them just by the height requirement. I’m [unimpressive height] and 5′9″ seemed to be the minimum. I soon figured out that finding a woman willing to marry a [fifty-plus]-year-old man with an adopted [preteen]-year-old granddaughter was going to be an exercise in futility if I went the domestic route.
“Which is why I’ve been married to a beautiful [East Asian female] for two years now. She’s also the best mother any daughter could ask for. She’s only [really unimpressive height].”
Reading emails like that—I’ve just read a bunch of them—it’s pretty plain that the unattached women of America are wilfully ignoring a huge stock of first-rate potential husbands. Their loss.
Which reminds me of Steve Sailer’s observation that Asian women have several advantages in the “marriage market.”
Presumably if you could get all the Ally McBeal impersonators and all the “high IQ lonely guys” together, and then convince them all to stop being so self-involved and ridiculous, the problem would virtually solve itself. The main problem seems to be getting past the second step in this process.
…Damon Linker now has a blog (hat tip: Rod Dreher). This should be fun to watch as he takes on the FT crew while also possibly making wild and unfounded statements about religious conservatives in America. Best of all, what does Linker call his new blog? What else? “The Apostate.” So, irony aside for a moment, the choice Linker poses seems to be between the supposed fanaticism of the Neuhaus crowd and apostasy. Not exactly a tough choice for most believers.
The name of Linker’s blog reminds me, on a completely different, personal note, of the name of a short story I wrote back in high school. It was not a good short story (it was a very abstract story that was supposed to be critiquing the conformity of individualists, or something like that–no, really, it was), but I thought the title was one of those clever, late modern conservative “I’m really more subversive than you subversives are” uses of language, which was The Apostate of the Heretics.
My creative writing teacher didn’t get the joke in the title, partly because she didn’t know what apostate meant, which I found a little hard to believe. I’m not sure if she got the joke when I explained what it meant. Then again, when I wrote another story based loosely on the 21st chapter of the Gospel of St. John and used St. Peter’s Aramaic name, Cephas, in the dialogue, she didn’t know who Cephas was, so I guess being an English teacher at a high-level private school requires you to know some things more than others.
One of the advantages and disadvantages of living in Hyde Park is the opportunity to browse amazing bookstores that serve the University community–between the Co-Op and Powell’s, you are likely to be able to find any new or used book you might want to find (barring highly obscure, long out-of-print or very specialised technical texts), which also means that you are likely to be tempted into getting quite a lot of books when you visit either store. Today brought such a fortunate and catastrophic visit to Powell’s, which has a modest Byzantine collection (but even a modest Byzantine collection is awesome compared to the piddling selection at most chain stores), a passable theology collection and an astonishingly broad history section all together. Looking for the complete works of Bolingbroke? You can find them there. Need a primer for Old English? There it is. I was less impressed with their theology section, which runs heavily to the modern, lacks any real representation of Orthodoxy and which, oddly enough, contains a copy of Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn’s Liberty or Equality?, which is hardly a theology book. But even given these limitations it still surpasses the religion sections at Borders, which run heavily to the DaVinci Code debunkers and the 987 books of Thomas Merton (it only seems as if there are that many, when there are, I believe, really only 852)–for a Trappist, the man is unusually verbose.
So the haul at Powell’s was quite interesting, and constitutes my leisure reading list for this year (whether or not I will get to most or all of these is another question). Since other bloggers sometimes regale their readers with their latest reading choices, I thought my selections might be of interest to readers of Eunomia, so here they are by category.
Theology & Church History
J.E. Merdinger, Rome and the African Church in the Time of Augustine
Ernst Renan, Averroes et l’averroisme
Nova & Vetera: Patristic Studies in Honor of Thomas Patrick Halton
Frederick J. McGinness, Right Thinking and Sacred Oratory in Counter-Reformation Rome
British History
Hugh Douglas, Jacobite Spy Wars
Isaac Kramnick, Bolingbroke & His Circle: The Politics of Nostalgia in the Age of Walpole
Byzantine History
Paul Alexander, The Patriarch Nicephorus of Constantinople: Ecclesiastical Policy and Image Worship in the Byzantine Empire
Georgina Buckler, Anna Comnena: A Study
Strangers to Themselves: The Byzantine Outsider
Near Eastern History
Meir Zamir, Lebanon’s Quest: The Road to Statehood, 1926-1939
And if I were trying to become rich and famous, I would not be in graduate school or working as a non-partisan critic of political spin, both of which pay virtually nothing and attract far less attention than partisan vitriol. ~Brendan Nyhan
It is certainly rich to see Kossacks accusing someone else of seeking glory and power, since Daily Kos and associated blogs exist for virtually no other purpose than to mobilise and organise (and whine) in the pursuit of Democratic power–power that the chief Kossacks undoubtedly expect will benefit them once they have driven the craven centrists out of their midst and cleansed the party in a purifying fire of maniacal raving. They like to make noise, and they like to get noticed–it is part of the blogger persona, though it seems to have developed a mutant strain with those folks. They have some real influence, but I bet they also expect that influence to profit them. I’m not holding that against them, but it is peculiar that they would set about making a reasonable, non-partisan critic into some kind of gold-digging shyster, as if there was big money to be made in hacking off two thirds of the population and alienating the most politically hyperactive people on the Web. What this entire episode, which began here, has shown is not so much that liberal magazines are easily intimidated by the blog left, but that the blog left chooses to crucify the oddest people for seemingly spurious, frivolous reasons and thus reveals their own shocking frivolity.
So Nyhan said that it was stupid to compare the administration to fascists–well, it is stupid, just as it is stupid to compare ever third-rate dictator on the planet with Hitler. He also said that calling a book about Ann Coulter Brainless was, well, rather brainless, since Coulter may be many things but a person lacking in intelligence isn’t one of them. What bothered the Kossacks in the first case and the TAP editors so much with the others was that Nyhan was perfectly right in both of these cases and all they could do was throw a hissy fit.
No, there is no reward for even-handed or judicious or intelligent criticism if it does not exempt your “side”–and you simply must have a side–and in pointing out precisely those flaws that plague all partisans you will mostly receive scorn from both sides in due course. Today the GOP bloggers are saying soothing, conciliatory things about Mr. Nyhan, but that is because he was “defenestrated” by liberals for saying things critical of liberals; were he to make the same sort of dismissive remarks about Islamofascism at NRO, they wouldn’t be able to get him out of the window fast enough.
It sure makes a noticeable difference to wake up in the morning when you know that from now on, you are going to be a good person, and all that cynicism and biting sarcasm and automatically fixating into finding weaknesses in things is gone. This feeling is probably the secular version of what the religious people feel like after their conversion. ~Ilkka Kokkarinen, Sixteen Volts
I had earlier noticed this part of Dr. Kokkarinen’s final post, but had wanted to say something about another aspect of his explanation for giving up blogging. On behalf of sarcastic cynics and critics everywhere, I have to say: give me a break! Sarcasm, especially bitter sarcasm, is sometimes just the needed antidote for the pretensions of public intellectuals–such people thrive on the air of seriousness and self-importance they bring to their work, and nothing punctures that overinflated balloon faster than a shot of sarcastic wit. Who are we bloggers to puncture that balloon? Well, if not us, who? Who will hold up the claims of these people to scrutiny? The regular media? That’s a good one. Their colleagues? Unlikely.
Critique serves a vital function in any discussion, and must perforce be rather negative, though that does not have to make it purely destructive. There is something rather tiresome in the assumption that by giving up writing blog entries in a sarcastic, cynical vein you have thereby become a better person. If you were a bad person for doing these things before, you have not significantly reformed–you have simply stopped broadcasting your views to the world–and if you were not a bad person for doing these things there is no sudden “conversion” from being a bad, cynical blogger to a good, positive non-blogger. Some people are more prone to see flaws than others; you cannot turn this off with a snap of the fingers. If you have a knack for withering criticism, it is part of who you are and not something that you can simply shut off; it will simply be expressed in a new form.
Dr. Kokkarinen is, of course, free to do as he pleases and doesn’t need to justify ending his blog with some appeal to moral reform–he could simply say that he wants to focus all his energies on teaching, which would be admirable enough and would have exposed him to less scorn from those sarcastic cynics who remain. But it doesn’t say much in his favour that he has chosen silence and the least path of resistance when he came in for some heavy criticism because of things he wrote; even if he was wrong in what he said or how he said it, there is a certain principle that ought to make him insist that his writing does not hinge on the approval of the people he criticises.
It says even less that he thinks that by shutting down his blog and silencing himself he has therefore become a better person. If an academic wants to be done with polemic, criticism and even sarcastic negativity, he may as well go into another line of work–these things are part and parcel of the competitive atmosphere of the academic world, as it should be in a world that ought to thrive on vigorous, serious and, yes, respectful debate. These aspects of academia can sometimes become excessive and degenerate into fruitless vendettas between scholars and researchers, but this kind of rivalry has existed for a very long time. Anyone engaged in inquiry and active in “the life of the mind,” whether in a professional capacity or in his free time, will sooner or later find himself confronted with critics and those who would just as soon see him silenced. The odds are that if they wrap themselves up in the mantle of the injured victim, the less merit their objections have. How mistaken it is, then, to yield to the complaints of such people, who, in all likelihood, have no good retorts to his criticisms and have had to resort to this kind of PC harrassment.
The flight of Kokkarinen has prompted many comments across a great many blogs, most of which touch on similar points: 1) freedom of speech in Canada seems rather weak when something like this happens; 2) PC-mania is out of control; 3) Kokkarinen was wrong to capitulate and scuttle his blog. But no post I have seen expresses all of this with the contempt that Mr. Ellila musters up here:
Lame.
This “apology”, which is a thinly veiled parody, is a pathetic attempt by Ilkka to lick the jackboots of feminazi thugs in order to keep his job at the Soviet university by making the thoughpolice believe he genuinely repents his thoughtcrime.
Ilkka reminds me of the ghetto Jews who cooperated with the SS in the false hope that they would save their own asses.
In stark contrast, when Hans-Hermann Hoppe, professor of economics at the University of Nevada, was attacked by the thoughtpolice for saying homosexuals are less interested on the average in planning for the future as heterosexuals because the former generally don’t have children and the latter do, he refused to surrender, and successfully sued the university for breach of job contract, and managed to get a lot of positive public attention, thereby humiliating the Soviet-style inquisitors who wanted him to give up his Goldsteinism. ~Mikko Ellila
Over the top? In some ways, possibly, but Mr. Ellila hits on this as an aspect of what I have been calling the inquisitio nova–the dedicated persecution of the thought crimes of various kinds of prejudice in an attempt to maintain a sense of ideologically defined moral purity and control over the definitions of what is and is not acceptable thought.
If Dr. Kokkarinen really believes that his blog was nothing but an exercise in nattering negativism and cynical hostility, it is strange that he should have started commenting on matters of controversy at all. Any blog that touches on cultural and political topics, if it is not to become an echo chamber for the partisans of the state or the ruling party, has to be contrarian, oppositionist and frequently dissident. A certain degree of cynicism is unavoidable when confronted with the endless waves of half-truths and deceptions that flow from the official sources of information, the pretentious theories of academics and the governments of the world.
Frankly, I think cynicism, like pessimism, has received a bad name from people who benefit from ignoring its criticisms, mostly because these people frequently confuse it with nihilism–a belief in nothing–when it has been at its best a kind of humanist critique of the pretensions and idols of this world. A Cynic motto was: Deface the coin (which had clear associations with ruining counterfeit currency–”deface the coin” was a call to cut through the webs of fraud and deception). The Cynics themselves were often personally quite objectionable people, and their contempt for all convention was excessive and unbalanced, but in this they also possessed a keen eye for recognising cant and denouncing frauds when they were put in places of honour. It seems to me that this could contain perils for the person who assumes the Cynic pose, and certainly contemptus mundi without the love of God can become nothing but a purely vicious resentment, but in their detachment from the glories of this world the Cynics (exemplified by Diogenes meeting Alexander while seated in his bathtub) possess the first half of the wisdom of the later ascetics. The second half of wisdom was, of course, to leaven the bitter bread of criticism with the fullness of the Truth. The obvious corollary of defacing the (counterfeit) coin is to respect the legitimate coin. There is nothing wrong with naysaying as such; it is when there is never anything to which one would say yea that a habit of criticism can become soul-destroying. Yet, in my experience, those who object to paper schemes, ready-made answers and the armed doctrines of this world have strong commitments to an affirmative vision of order that they are trying to protect against the sophists and schemers. I would much rather be among those calling it as we see it, who pull at the loose threads of ideological tapestries, who mock those who have position but not authority, than to be one of the legion of excuse-makers and apologists for the powerful of this world, who, I’m sorry to say, make up a surprisingly large proportion of the allegedly independent media of blogs. In the end, it is far better to speak the truth mixed with some bitterness than to speak deceitful words smoother than oil and sweet to hear.
I’ve just become aware that some of the opinions and observations expressed in this blog may have offended various individuals or groups at one point or another. I apologize, and promise that it won’t happen again. I’ve been such a stupid jerk.
I came to this realization last night. As I struggled to explain the male-centered “principles” behind “logic” to my child I realized that it was I who needed to be taught. What I had been conditioned by a racist and sexist society to view as “learning” and “knowledge” was nothing more than a social construct designed to oppress and humiliate womyn and minorities. Feminine ways of knowing, magically connected to the Goddess by a great invisible web of compassion and empathy, veiled by my euro/phallo-centric mentality, will no longer be suppressed in our household.
Reflected in the eyes of my young daughter was the image of intolerance, bigotry, racism, ageism, ablism, regionalism, exploitation, homophobia, sexism, and speciesism that I have come to embody. How could I not see? It was a terrible epiphany. I’ve let this child down horribly by not confronting the appalling white male privelege that, through the violence of my inaction and unwillingness to confront and denounce others like me, has made me complicit in the oppression of others, excuse me, the Other. I have been made to see the horror of my white-hetero privelege, and I renounce it. ~Dennis Dale
Here Dennis Dale has an outstanding, hilarious piece of satire aimed squarely at Ilkka Kokkarinen’s final post.
After a three year run, The New Pantagruel is closing shop. Our incursion was never intended to be a long one. We are not careerists and had no intention or ambition to become part of the media establishment, Christian or otherwise. We did wish to demonstrate that such populist anti-liberal incursions were possible, and occasionally desirable. Against a chorus of establishment naysayers, The New Pantagruel succeeded on a shoestring budget and without any insider access in garnering national attention and influence, particularly within the elite Christian press and some political outlets. Our voice was primarily a voice of dissent, and it has been heartening to know that such voices can still capture the spirit of a large number of diffuse people and perspectives in today’s managed climate of “centrist” opinion.
Ours can largely be summed up as a localist, decentralist, anarcho-Christian and authentically conservative approach to politics and culture. As we have written previously, we believe that to suffer one’s place and one’s people in the particularity of its and their needs is the only true basis for finding love, friendship, and an authentic, meaningful life. This is nothing less than the key to the pursuit of Christian holiness, which is the whole of the Christian adventure: to live in love with the frailty and limits of one’s existence, suffering the places, customs, rites, joys, and sorrows of the people who are in close relation to you by family, friendship, and community–all in service of the truth, goodness, and beauty that is best experienced directly. The discipline of place teaches that it is more than enough to care skillfully and lovingly for one’s own little circle, and this is the model for the good life, not the limitless jurisdiction of the ego, granted by a doctrine of choice, that is ever seeking its own fulfillment, pleasure, and satiation.
Taking that charge seriously, The New Pantagruel has, essentially, argued itself out of existence. This is a good thing. In the end, we are pessimistic romantics. We believe life is eucatastrophic: a joyous catastrophe. Instead of spending endless hours before the faceless void of the “new media,” we will be engaging the tragedies and necessities of raising families, rebuilding neighborhoods and small towns, and fighting to preserve and save that which we love. As we dive back into the particularities of our places and people and their needs, we hope you will do the same. And remember, Fr. Jape is watching you. ~Caleb Stegall and Dan Knauss, The New Pantagruel
Caleb and Dan’s gain is our loss. The New Pantagruel contained some of the most interesting commentary online (and I don’t just say that because I once wrote an essay for it), and the world of webzines and blogs will be greatly impoverished as a result of tNP’s disappearance. No more will Jape’s carrier pigeons fly to bring us the latest in curmudgeonly wisdom, and no more will neo-Calvinists and Lutherans have to fear the biting wit of the old Jesuit. The enemies of the Permanent Things can rest a little easier now. The sophisters, economists and calculators can rejoice (if economists are capable of real joy). But one suspects, in good Pantagruelist fashion, that the last laugh will be on them.
This is not some underhanded attempt to grovel because I am afraid of losing my job or something. Because I’m not, as far as I know. And even if I were, that would be peanuts compared to the idea of the woman you love looking at you and you see how she is disappointed of you, asking you why you would want to write mean things. I would rather shovel shit for living every day than have to come up with an answer to that. Because there really is none. ~Ilkka Kokkarinen, Sixteen Volts
The end of Dr. Kokkarinen’s blog has become something of a hot topic these days. Not having been a regular reader of Sixteen Volts, I cannot be sure just what sort of “mean things” “offended” and “hurt” so many that would compel a blogger to throw in the towel as a matter of profound shame (his word). Steve Sailer notes that his university employer objected to his “skepticism about the intellectual consistency of lesbian-feminist theory,” which it deplores as “sexist” and “homophobic” (natch). But apparently what really did it for Dr. Kokkarinen was that his woman said he was being mean.
This is of interest to me because I have remarked in the past on the futility of blogging, and others have noted the harmful effects that blogging can have, but I have never before heard of a blogger giving up on this particular pastime because his girlfriend/wife wanted him to be a nicer person.
There are undoubtedly better ways to spend your time than by blogging. No one is more keenly aware of this than I am. You could read. You could listen to edifying, beautiful music. You could write the Great American Novel, or at least a cheap knock-off of the same. You could, as Michael does, go salsa dancing. You could, as I actually have done recently, help out at your local church. If you felt fairly unmotivated, you could watch a movie and probably still have found the time better spent.
But if you are going to blog, then surely the point would be to make some kind of substantive contribution to an ongoing debate. People who are afraid of being “negative” in blogging are the sorts of people who eventually don’t want to have vigorous debates of any kind for fear that someone, somewhere may be offended by a strong view. Personally, I have never been a big fan of people who say things like, “Accentuate the positive,” and I honestly don’t know what a “positive” political blog would look like. Would it simply be entry after entry where you quote someone and say, “I think this is just great. I agree wholeheartedly. Good job!”? There is a time and place for those sorts of posts, though usually statements of approval can be pretty redundant, but there has to be more meat to a blog if anyone is going to read it for substantive commentary.
Obviously if a blog became your entire life–which, happily, Eunomia has not, despite what my frequency of posting might suggest–there would be something seriously wrong. If you delighted in writing posts that denigrated people for who they were, rather than critiquing or even ridiculing their absurd, offensive or dangerous ideas, you probably do have a problem of some sort. In my case, I admit that my criticisms tend to be fairly dripping with contempt and sarcasm, but I make no apologies for being a relentless critic of people who routinely endorse the nuclear massacre of civilians, torture or aggressive war. I try my best to keep the criticism focused on the quality of the ideas in question and never let it stray too much to the people, even when these people endorse some of the most despicable things. If I have crossed that line, it was probably a mistake, but I would not expect my readers to take my arguments seriously if my posts were focused unduly on people rather than their arguments. To take that other path of ad hominem attack is to embrace fallacious arguments and embark on a journey bound for insanity and the derangement of the Kossacks. But I seriously doubt that Dr. Kokkarinen was making ad hominem attacks–usually when people claim to be “hurt” by someone else’s reasoned opinion, it is because they cannot take rational criticism of their own ideas and choices in life.
If people take my criticisms of, say, Islam as an example of being “mean” towards Muslims, when they are nothing of the sort, there is nothing I could do about that, since this sort of reaction is irrational and cannot be seriously debated. In just the same way the hysterical reaction to Pope Benedict’s comments about Islam in the context of his Regensburg address on faith and reason should not merit an end to criticism or a compromising of what one believes to be true. It would appear from Steve Sailer’s post that the reaction to Dr. Kokkarinen’s blog is of much the same kind–visceral, emotional, irrational and very PC–so it is a shame that he has chosen to accept other people’s characterisations of his writing as “mean” and hurtful, especially when it seems clear from the laments of his readers and other bloggers that his is a voice that had something worthwhile to contribute and a voice that will be missed when it is gone.
On a lighter note, Steve Sailer offers an intriguing way to evade the PC brigades that would have appealed to Tolkien:
Perhaps this suggests that the survival of freedom of speech in the West rests with the Finnish language. Maybe we should start studying Finnish to use as a secret language for the discussion of ideas forbidden to be mentioned in English?
This would be an interesting thing to try, but it would probably be difficult to do. Do you know how many cases there are in Finnish? Something like fifteen. Fifteen cases! The Hungarians, whose language is distantly related to Finnish, have much the same problem with a language loaded down with different case forms. When the Hungarian national anthem begins, Isten aldd meg a magyart (God bless the Hungarian), part of the reason for this prayer must be an appeal to God to have mercy on a nation that has such a complicated language. Oh well. Ilyen az elet, as my cousins say.
Update: Contrast this unwillingness to be “mean” with the simple, straightforward refusal to bow to conformity here.
But, if Lamont becomes the U.S. Senate’s newest rock star–and America’s most popular preppy–pardon me if I pour myself a gimlet and set sail for Wellfleet. ~Michael Crowley
As someone who grew up in what I suppose must be the sunbelt (it is very sunny in New Mexico, though you don’t run across many Goldwater fans) and who attended what I suppose one must call a prep school (to be appropriately pompous, we could call it a preparatory academy) for seven years, it might seem that I should be of two minds about the Preppy Revival (less dangerous than the Shia Revival, more comical than Evangelical Revivals, but undoubtedly with better drinks than both). Except that, my enjoyment of Prep-Unit notwithstanding, I personally could never stand the people at my school who embraced the preppy ethos or fit the profile. They were the people who lived in the Northeast Heights of Albuquerque and whose parents still voted for the Democrats; they were the ones who were by turns personally obnoxious and also preciously PC, in keeping with the school’s commitment to “diversity.”
My exposure to the Southern version of preppy at Hampden-Sydney did not improve my impression. They were the slackers from private schools in Richmond and Midlothian who came to H-SC for the networking angle, the guys who wore the classic combination of khakis and the buttoned shirt untucked in the back seemingly at all times, but especially on game days and at parties, who drove SUVs and referred to different people variously as “your boy” or “my boys.” These were people, like those at the Academy, who took skiing trips and some of whom actually went to Aspen for vacations. [Full disclosure: I was at Vail once–and not to ski–when I was about eight, didn’t like the place and have never been back.] These were people who listened to Phish and thought it was good music.
Maybe it’s because of who my ancestors were–small-town New Jersey businessmen and ministers, Midwestern farmers and my Scots-Irish railroad worker grandfather–but I cannot now separate the whole preppy lifestyle and mentality from the depradations of the Eastern Establishment and the various and sundry perfidies of Yankee misrule, both Republican and Democratic, that deformed the Republic into what it has become. These folks had their chance at running the country, and they didn’t do especially well as far as I’m concerned. Dobeleve is perhaps a mutant strain of the breed, combining the confidence of a Southerner with the shallowness of an Easterner, but he still belongs to that world and represents what it is capable of doing. Finally, the New England preppy is the one I have a particularly hard time understanding. I mean, I don’t even know what half of their lingo means (I suppose I could look it up, but what the hell is a topsider?). That’s okay. I’m not that interested in finding out.
Lamont is good on the war, but I wouldn’t want to go to his country club.
One of the big advantages that Asian women have in the American marriage market is they don’t seem to think like this. They see some guy at a party that none of the white girls will talk to because he seems like a nerd, so they start talking to him, and, sure enough, he wants to talk about physics. And they think roughly to themselves:
Physics is hard. Not many people have a logical enough brain to understand it. Logical talent is always in short supply, so it’s paid well. Men who are paid well make better boyfriends and husbands than men who aren’t paid well. Okay, maybe physics doesn’t pay well, but he looks like the kind of guy I could talk into going into a more practical career without him ever really noticing it wasn’t his idea. Sure, he’s shy and nerdy and my girlfriends won’t be impressed by how sexy he is, but that also means he won’t be out in bars picking up other girls all the time. Every Friday night he’ll come home to me (and, eventually, the kids), and with his paycheck.
So, I’ll pretend to be interested in physics. I always kind of wanted to be an actress, so it will be fun! It will be like playing the beautiful lady scientist in one of those science fiction movies he’s probably crazy about. He’ll be so astonished a pretty girl likes physics that he’ll be eating out of my hand. And, he is kind of cute. He has a very masculine mind, which makes him rather interesting.
Am I being manipulative? Of course, but it’s for his own good. If some smart woman doesn’t manipulate him, he’ll waste his life going to Firefly conventions by himself.
And, having a 49 point advantage (half a standard deviation) on the Math SAT over the average white girl gives the average Asian girl more ability to fake being excited about nerdy topics. And maybe this stronger logical ability helps her think more logically about her own self-interest?
Meanwhile, the lack of effort millions of males put in to finding females is similarly striking. Guys, have you ever gone to an art gallery opening? Tried reading a novel that girls like? (Okay, granted, The Da Vinci Code will rot your brain and make you want to become a monk on Mt. Athos to get away from the kind of thinking that appeals to the largely female audience for TDVC, but Pride and Prejudice is better than any sci-fi novel you ever read.) ~Steve Sailer
It shouldn’t be surprising that someone who believes that religion deserves no quarter in a decent world radiates condescension and hostility from time to time. “You believe that your religious concerns about sex, in all their tiresome immensity, have something to do with morality. And yet, your efforts to constrain the sexual behavior of consenting adults . . . are almost never geared toward the relief of human suffering. . . . This prudery of yours contributes daily to the surplus of human misery.” Does anyone else find it odd that someone thinks sexual morality should be “geared toward the relief of human suffering”? Not just me, then. Harris has opened himself up to counter-attack here. Obviously it is not people following Christian sexual morality that are spreading STDs, which cause so much suffering. In fact, it’s high time we start questioning the theological propositions held by cads and sluts. Where is their concern for human suffering? ~Michael Brendan Dougherty
Michael does a fine job reviewing–and poking holes in–Harris’ work, and does so in his admirably irreverent style. Speaking of irreverence, Michael’s blog, Surfeited with Dainties, will start becoming less and less surfeited with dainties or much else unless it receives the support of readers like you. At the very least, save the world from one more lawyer and lend your support.
Who else but Michael will be able to tell us how to be The Guy and not be the Guy? Who else effortlessly weaves together pop culture references, distributist thought, conservative social thought, Catholicism, immigration restrictionism, economic nationalism and advice on the suitable fashion, dance and drink of (slightly-roguish-but-undyingly-faithful-to-their-ladyfriends) gentlemen? Who else so stylishly mocks the inanities of neoconservative foreign policy? Lend your support and keep Surfeited with Dainties a source of refinement, solace and refreshment in the vulgar and crass desert that is the blogosphere.
My apologies for the recent disabling of Eunomia. There was some sever problem, which does not seem to have resulted in any loss of data. Posting will resume soon.
Men need food to survive. Men need myths for the same reason. Why then do we say that the myths are untrue?
* * *
Some people say that nations are defined by their shared ideals. Are you descended from ideals or people? Some people say that soil is unimportant to who we are. On what other ground do they live?
* * *
Almost everyone likes “religious moderates.” They are pleasant, reassuring, non-combative. Far fewer people like clumsy surgeons or inattentive parents.
* * *
If it is people who do not learn from history who are doomed to repeat it, is this why only people ignorant of history think that history repeats itself?
* * *
The 20th century was the great century of man’s emancipation. The 20th century was the century of more servility than at any other time in human history. The one is the reason for the other.
* * *
Even if History has a direction, what is to stop us from going in a different direction? History? But it has its own navigating to do and cannot be worried about us.
* * *
If every man wishes to be free, why have so few been free? If every man wishes to be happy, why this deep sorrow?
* * *
It has been said that no man is an island. But even the islands are connected to the mainland beneath the surface of the seas and are formed by the movements of the whole earth. So perhaps every man is an island.
* * *
Democracy, at least nominally, gives the people power, but each time this happens they give it away to someone else. Likewise, when the people are given freedom, they strive mightily to be rid of it. What have these ingrates ever given in exchange?
* * *
When men kill their king, whom they can see, will it be long before they start ignoring their God, Whom they cannot?
* * *
#2: The Good War
#3: Government accountability
#4: Crimes against humanity
#5: Compassionate conservatism
#6: Democratic freedoms
#7: Free government
#8: Islamofascism
#9: Theoconservatism
#10: Moral clarity
#11: Moderate Islam
#12: Reformed communist
#13: Judeo-Christian values
#14: Equality of opportunity
#15: Revolutionary justice
#16: Humanitarian war
#17: Business community
#18: The right to choose
#19: The right to life
#20: The right to die
As Eunomia’s success grows, the list of people to whom I owe this success necessarily grows ever longer. As always, I am particularly indebted and grateful to Jon Luker, who continues to do me the service of providing the “space” for Eunomia gratis and was responsible for transferring the site–and my old Polemics posts–to the new Wordpress format. Were it not for him, Eunomia as you know it would not exist, and I would not be pestering the world with my every opinion–but don’t blame him for that last part.
Next I owe special thanks to Michael Brendan Dougherty, a blogger of style and rare charm, who has opened many doors for this surly reactionary and who has also spread the word about Eunomia to a great many people. Someone clever once said (I paraphrase) that a fanatic and a humourist are really two sides of one man, and that the fanatic and satirist are both necessary to rescue the world from its doldrums, and it is in precisely this sense that Michael provides the good humour, irreverence and joie de vivre that no doubt seems lacking here and provides the absolutely necessary complement to this blog. Man was not meant only for fasting, akribeia and rigour, but also for joy and feasting, as fast and feast are part of the same sacred order and belong together. In appreciation of Michael’s blog, let me say, as As Adam Wayne said to Auberon Quinn, “You have a halberd and I a sword, let us start our wanderings over the world.”
Michael is currently having a fundraising drive at his own blog, so go look at his attractively redesigned site, if you haven’t already, and perhaps you will see why it is the essential complement to Eunomia and thus why his work is worthy of your generous support.
August was, by my standards, a monumental success, both in terms of productivity and readership. With 406 posts last month, I dedicated my time to making this into what I believe has become a front-line blog for paleoconservative and traditional conservative ideas. With over 5000 unique visitors and a significant boost to Eunomia’s Alexa ranking, August was far and away my most successful month, but it would not have been possible without the generous links and praise from many others whose own efforts deserve no less admiration and appreciation. My sincere thanks go out to Steve Sailer, Rod Dreher, Clark Stooksbury, Chris Roach, Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam, Mark Shea and Right Reason for a steady dose of links that have brought many new readers to this site, all of whom, I am hopeful, will continue to return to read more.
I must also thank Steve Sailer for an embarrassingly generous post praising this site, which has already brought an amazing number of new readers here, and express my appreciation to the equally generous words of Jeff Martin, who is a regular contributor at the group blog Enchiridion Militis to which I sometimes also contribute. Thanks also to Josh Trevino for bringing me on board at EM, and Paul Cella for his encouragement and past links to Eunomia.
Caleb Stegall and Scott Richert, two very supportive editors who have brought my work to publication at The New Pantagruel and Chronicles respectively, have continued to be extremely helpful in their steady encouragement of my writing. Both magazines are excellent publications, and if you are not reading tNP or subscribing to Chronicles you are missing out on some of the best writing on moral, cultural, religious and political topics in the country.
The list of others who have contributed to building up Eunomia in one way or another is fairly lengthy, so I will put down some of the names without any further comment. If I happen to leave someone out, it is an unintended omission and not a commentary on the value of your contribution or a measure of my appreciation. Thanks to Dan McCarthy, Jim Antle, A.C. Kleinheider, Andrew Cunningham, Joshua Snyder (The Western Confucian), Leon Hadar, James Poulos, Pithlord, Prof. Arben Fox, Kevin Michael Grace, Kevin Jones, Glaivester, John Theresa, Dennis Dale, Carey Cuprisin, Mild Colonial Boy, the Russian Dilettante, Jeremy Abel, Andrew Cusack, M.Z. Forrest, Timothy Carney, Gene Healy, J.L. Barnard, and Peter Klein.
Thanks are also due to Peter Suderman for the many links he has provided and for our many engaging and, I hope, generally friendly disputations.
Finally, thank you to all my many readers from around the globe who have made Eunomia something of a small success. I hope that I am able to continue to provide the kind of worthwhile and intelligent commentary that you expect.
That wasn’t likely to make short people feel good, but the latest explanation is worse. In a new study, Anne Case and Christina Paxson, both of Princeton University, find that tall people earn more, on average, because they’re smarter, on average. Yikes. ~Slate
On behalf of tall people everywhere (I’m 6′4″), I would like to say that this is only fair, since for as long as I can remember my height has often been met with the irritating comment, “You’re too tall.” There is no good way to respond to this, since no one considers it poor form to belittle tall people for their height, but people do consider it very poor form to return the criticism to short people. So it seems only fair that tall people should be compensated in some way for this never-ending hassle.
There are, of course, more serious things in the article that are worth reading, such as:
So, why did height at age 16 bear a stronger relationship than adult height to adult earnings in the earlier study by Persico, Postlewaite, and Silverman? Case and Paxson point out that kids who are tall at age 16 are those who have experienced their adolescent growth spurts at a relatively early age. And they point out that these kids turn out to be the well-fed and nurtured kids of parents who are on average smarter and richer than the rest, and who also pass on extra IQ points. The 16-year-old taller kids end up earning more for reasons apart from their height.
Andrew Sullivan has returned from vacation, depriving us of the combined blogging excellence of Ana-Marie Carr, Michael Totten and Dave Weigel.
I will be putting together a complete post acknowledging and thanking everyone who has contributed to the success of Eunomia (the past month was a big step up for this meager blog), but I first wanted to put up a note of appreciation acknowledging Mark Shea and James G. Poulos for taking seriously and also generally agreeing with my objections to Islamofascism/”Islamic fascism” and my preferred alternative, jihadi. It is gratifying to see that my arguments have been persuasive to some people.
But here is where the issue of media bias comes in. Nearly all reporting of the issue is framed by a loaded term: the solar system. Notice that this phrase presupposes the Copernican theory, the idea that all the planets revolve around the Sun. This threatens to become the whole premise of the debate. Question this theory, and you’re effectively shut out of the controversy, disfranchised, “outside the mainstream.” So much for pluralism.
The Copernican theory is just that — a theory, not a fact. It has a strong appeal to those who are too lazy to do the complex calculations required by the older, commonsense Ptolemaic view. But for generations, the simplistic Copernican spin has been tirelessly inculcated in our public schools — to captive audiences of impressionable children — by secular humanists and other self-hating Earthlings. Parents have had little say in the matter. ~Joseph Sobran
Mr. Sobran speaks up for Ptolemy and the lord of the underworld better than anyone else could.
And I suspect that what you’ll see, Toby, is there will be a momentum, momentum will be gathered. Houses will begat jobs, jobs will begat houses. [sic] ~George W. Bush
And, lo, the jobs smote unemployment hip and thigh with a great slaughter! And Bernanke spoke unto the people: ”Thus saith the Fed, fear inflation and touch it not. You shall have no loose money supply among you, but a higher reserve rate ye shall keep all the days of your life.” And the people murmured against Bernanke and grew sullen against the king.
That’s Michael Brendan Dougherty’s engaging opening line in his very good, very smartly written article on the effects of immigration on his hometown in the latest issue of The American Conservative. Congratulations to Michael on the publication of the article–and in print, no less!
The experts cited in his story think that professional women are more likely to get divorced, to cheat and to be grumpy about either having kids or not having them. But rather than rush to blame the woman, let’s not overlook the other key variable: What is the guy doing? ~Elizabeth Corcoran, Forbes
What? Rush to blame the woman? Good grief. Why is it that no one can ever make observations about statistical trends without someone else feeling oppressed by these observations? Young men might resent having it pointed out to them that, on average, they engage in riskier and more reckless behaviour than almost every other demographic and consequently must often pay higher insurance premiums. Naturally, the young men who are not particularly reckless will find this annoying, but it is eminently logical that the rates should be what they are. You don’t hear a lot of complaints about how we shouldn’t rush to “blame the young men.” We’re talking about compilations of data. The statistical analysis is not making accusations or laying blame. They represent trends based in the study of the real world, where it is more likely that marriage to career women will be a less happy and less stable arrangement than others. We’re talking about probabilities, not iron laws that apply in every case. Who can say that in all or even most of these cases the career woman is the one to bear most of the blame? Indeed, where has this language of blame and guilt come from? It wasn’t in the original article. Its introduction in the rebuttal is a tactic to make the author of the original piece–and those who took his report seriously–feel like a heel for attacking the poor, defenseless career women. This is not a real argument.
The rest of the rebuttal is, near as I can tell, a dedicated effort to ignore most of the significant claims of the article and show all the ways that marrying career women can be “exciting”! Yes, well, divorce and unhappy marriages can be their own kind of excitement, I suppose. And it should be said that men who govern their choices in life by careful statistical risk assessment are usually considered rather odd (for a pop culture example, see Ben Stiller in Along Came Polly), but that is no reason to shoot the messenger when he brings you information about the potential risks of choice A rather than choice B.
Ross Douthat makes the best point on a movie topic I’ve seen all month: Starship Troopers is terrible and stupid. It is a simple point, but a powerful one that needs to be made every once in a while. When I was in college, a friend of mine dragooned me into driving him and our friends to Richmond to go see this catastrophically bad movie. Between making numerous laps around the city thanks to poor directions and the frustrations of being stuck in Friday night traffic, I was positively thrilled to reach the theater after an exceedingly long drive and I was actually initially glad to see this wretched waste of two hours of my life. Of course, by the end of those two hours, my enthusiasm had dissipated completely.
It isn’t just that Robert Heilein’s vision of the militaristic future of humanity is boring (of course, no one has ever before imagined a future where people would be trapped in an oppressive state that ruled by war propaganda and media control), or that, as Mr. Douthat notes, the movie’s attempt to be clever falls flat and bores you still more, but that it is impossible to enjoy any movie that thinks the ideal casting for the nefarious propaganda bureaucrat in the film is Neil Patrick Harris. Doogie Howser as Goebbels? Please. Denise Richards as a front line shock trooper also requires a little too much willing suspension of disbelief.
What is sad is that this is not a bad movie in the Sam Raimi bad-in-order-to-be-funny genre of the Evil Dead movies (now those are great silly movies, made greater by Bruce Campbell’s slapstick and comic timing), but that it fails on every level. ST is not funny in spite of itself, and it is not intended to be funny, so it generally manages to push you more and more towards sympathising with the bugs in the hopes that they will put the main characters out of their–and our–misery. Did I mention that I didn’t like it?
My copies of two fairly new ISI books arrived today. I will be getting around to reading them soon, and then I will probably have some remarks or perhaps even reviews (if time permits) about Philippe Beneton’s Equality by Default and Chantal Delsol’s The Unlearned Lessons of the Twentieth Century. Mr. Buchanan’s State of Emergency is on its way, and I am sure I will have some more to say in connection with that once I have finished it.
Today Doug Bandow discusses the depredations of SLORC, the meeting of cultures in northern Thailand and the delights of “highly seasoned dog.” Says our man in Thailand: “It tastes a bit like pork.”
Pat Buchanan’s newest book, State of Emergency: The Third World Invasion and Conquest of America, is now available and has already shot up to #1 at Amazon today. Also take a look at his new blog.
Today the 1,600th post of Eunomia (including my 70 old Polemics posts) was put up in a little over two years since I first began blogging at Polemics and then moved over here in December ‘04. It is rather shocking to think that almost a quarter of that production has come in the last month, but that is the case. Here’s to the next 1,600!
As regular readers will have noticed, I have added a number of new permanent pages to the sidebar. These categorise and arrange the posts I consider the most worthwhile and (I hope) edifying in several broad groups. Solon’s Favourites, the oldest of the permanent pages, still includes the posts from the last two years that I consider to be among my best. However, I have taken many of the more philosophical posts and placed them in The Agoge page, referring to the rigorous educational regimen imposed by the ancient Spartans on their young men (on account of Sparta’s tendency to prefer eunomia as a principle of government). Posts related to the Lebanon war may be found in Burning Cedars (this has not been recently updated in the last week); posts related to my defense of The Passion of the Christ are available in Passio Christi; posts pertaining to the work of M.E. Bradford are in A Better Guide Than Reason; posts on my anti-Whig, “Jeffersonian Jacobite” views of Anglo-American constitutional history are in The Whig Party’s Treason. The continuing series of posts on The Rockford Institute’s summer school will be collected in The American Agrarian Tradition. There are also pages for essays and articles that have appeared elsewhere, and a page for a couple of poems that I have offered for your consideration.
Thanks to Jim Antle at 4Pundits for drawing attention to my Lebanon article and Michael Dougherty’s review of Size Matters in a post called “Young turks.” As for the appellation, well, see the above.
Our enemies set out their goal with neon clarity. ~Michael Gerson
Neon clarity? What? This guy was a speechwriter?
Everyone is dead wrong. I have to get this out before the influence of the gin fades away. Guys DO NOT want the indie girl - the “manic depressive, without the depressive part.” They do want the girl who will save them from themselves but it boils down to this: Any man worth his salt wants a woman who will lift him up when he has cast himself too far down, and who will put him down when he is on cloud nine. Men do not want our women to be nerds. Men want women to redeem us from our nerd-dom. Instinctively we know that women are emotional on the outside; they want “connection”, and “to be on the same wavelength” - etc etc… But at their core - women are calculating. First and foremost, they have to protect themselves and their children from men who are stronger than they are. When all the lovely trappings of civility are stripped away: when the man has lost his job and seems unwilling to find work, when he can’t pay the bills, when he proves himself a third or fourth time to be irresponsible with the resources needed to maintain the lives of the woman and the children - she will make the cold rational decision to leave. Men, on the other hand can survive, as Dave Chapelle wisely noted, in a cardboard box. The only reason we get dressed, the only reason we shave, or buy furniture from Crate and Barrel; the only reason we love wine, or learn about sports, or politics and philosophy is to impress you. It may be indirectly. You may not care about philosophy. But you care that we took the trouble to learn about Descartes and Kant; that we can out duel each other in our ability to explain these things - and on and on. The only thing we do for ourselves and our own enjoyment is start and maintain blogs. ~Michael Brendan Dougherty
Well, folks, I’ve been blogging pretty furiously for the last two weeks, racking up an unconscionable 258 posts since the start of the month. That is more than most professional and paid bloggers do in six months, and I’d like to think that most of the posts have been of sufficiently high calibre that they were not entirely a waste of time. Before I go on a brief hiatus away from Eunomia to do some other writing (the dissertation isn’t going to write itself, after all), I will leave you with a selection of the best posts of the last week. Here, then, are what I consider the fifteen best examples of the last week’s work. Please also visit Brainwash and read my article on Lebanon.
I am a sick man. … I am a spiteful man. I am an unattractive man. I believe my liver is diseased. However, I know nothing at all about my disease, and do not know for certain what ails me. I don’t consult a doctor for it, and never have, though I have a respect for medicine and doctors. Besides, I am extremely superstitious, sufficiently so to respect medicine, anyway (I am well-educated enough not to be superstitious, but I am superstitious). No, I refuse to consult a doctor from spite. That you probably will not understand. Well, I understand it, though. Of course, I can’t explain who it is precisely that I am mortifying in this case by my spite: I am perfectly well aware that I cannot “pay out” the doctors by not consulting them; I know better than anyone that by all this I am only injuring myself and no one else. But still, if I don’t consult a doctor it is from spite. My liver is bad, well–let it get worse! ~Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes From The Underground
If you haven’t had enough of my Lebanon commentary, I have distilled some of my thoughts into an article at AFF’s Brainwash.
If x were to represent how reactionary you were, and you were to take the limit of x as it approaches an arbitrarily large number, you couldn’t be as reactionary as Larison. ~Pithlord, “You Can Learn Something From a Paleocon,” Pith and Substance
Many thanks to Pithlord for a very fine compliment–that’s probably the best thing someone’s said to me all summer. I’m also pleased to hear someone say that paleocon arguments and ideas, at least on Iraq (and I would hope a few other things as well), are making sense on their merits.
When you read and write as many words as someone with my acute case of logorrhea does, certain words begin to bother you because of the frequency with which people use them, often seemingly unaware of how bizarre or cacophonous they sound. Two of these are nowadays commonplace, the third is beginning to make the rounds (unfortunately) and the fourth is a technical scholarly term that is fairly obscure but deserving of scorn all the same. These are Islamofascist, Judeo-Christian, theoconservative and miaphysite. Read the rest of this entry »
…”the old-money way“, even though he is not from old money? He is from Greenwich, after all.
Michael Brendan Dougherty has two new posts that take us away from the dreary obsessiveness of this Larison fellow into the realm of literature and oinophilia, including a short post on Evelyn Waugh that includes Chilton Williamson’s assessment of the author. He also ponders quality wines and the problem of which sort he should be pouring on his ladyfriend’s neck at a picnic. So, as you can see, Michael has a lot more fun over there than we do here at Eunomia in our Spartan seriousness, so go and refresh yourself before returning to your next lesson in the agoge.
I haven’t even posted this yet and Larison has already typed 2,300 words in response. ~Peter Suderman
You’d better believe it.
Thanks to the wonders of YouTube, I can inflict my weakness for Bollywood music on those readers inclined to listen. On a lighter note, here is the beautiful Rani Mukherjee from Mangal Panday, an otherwise unremarkable Indian nationalist retelling of the outbreak of the 1857 Mutiny.
Overlooked amid Mel Gibson’s rebellion against law and custom is his affront against good taste. Sure, Mel Gibson drove drunk. Sure, he invoked a cop’s religion and declared that practitioners of that faith lurk behind all wars. Sure, he created his own unmentionable name for a female cop. But what about his choice of booze? The man had an unsealed bottle of tequila in his car. Tequila?
Tequila is gross. It’s not as gross as the tequila-flavored beer Tequiza, but as far as the big five go–gin, vodka, whiskey, rum, tequila–tequila is dead last. It is disgusting straight, leaving behind an unsavory flavor that tastes like Jose Cuervo and all of his cousins vomited in the back of your mouth. Gentlemen prefer rubbing alcohol. ~Dan Flynn
Via Jim Antle
Being somewhere just this side of William Jennings Bryan’s teetotalism myself (a fact that will no doubt shock and horrify friends and colleagues), I cannot say much on this with any confidence. But it does sound like an item that would be perfect for someone else’s comments.
If this alternate history teaches us anything about our own timeline, it is that the Union victory was a heaven-sent blessing. The timeline Turtledove constructed on the basis of a CSA victory is a much darker and nastier place, but it is a very plausible and convincing counterfactual. If the South was able to justify slavery and Jim Crow, it’s not hard to imagine a CSA that loses World War I churning up a Hitler-clone with plans for a black Holocaust. Lincoln was right: The CSA had to be beaten to preserve the last best hope. ~Prof. Bainbridge
I should go easy on Harry Turtledove. He is the only man I know of who got a degree in Byzantine studies and then went on to become very successful writing fiction novels, proving that there is life after a Ph.D. in Byzantine history and offering hope to all graduate students who have chosen to teach in a field that is only slightly more popular in the United States than French New Wave cinema.
As a Byzantinist, Turtledove did a competent job translating into English an important section of the Chronographia of Theophanes Confessor, but then went on to fame and relative fortune as the author of a series of counterfactual historical novels that played out the consequences of a Southern victory in the War of Secession. Whenever people ask what I plan to do professionally, I say, of course, that I intend become a history teacher. Shortly after that fails to interest them, I will add: “Of course, Harry Turtledove became a novelist, so you never know….” But, for all that, I have never been moved to read his counterfactual stories, because they seem to be irredeemably unimaginative in their overall structure. As Prof. Bainbridge summarises well enough, Turtledove takes what actually happened in Europe from the unification of Germany through WWII, changes the names, identifies the Confederates with the presumed Bad Guys of our history and basically retells the same story, but with the CSA, not Germany, as the locus of all evil. Read the rest of this entry »
This is a bit of a belated post on the wedding I attended on Sunday, but it wouldn’t hurt to break up the Lebanon/Passion/Lebanon/Passion theme that I have had going for the past few days. My two friends from St. Innocent’s parish, Tom and Julia, were married at the Holy Virgin Protection Cathedral in Des Plaines on Sunday, and everything was done beautifully. The cathedral’s priest and our parish priest served together, and our parish reader also took part in the ceremony, reading the traditional selection from the Apostle’s Epistle to the Ephesians. Most of the assembled people were friends or relatives of the bride and groom and most of them were not Orthodox, so they were probably somewhat disconcerted by the lack of chairs, but they all seemed to manage fine (there were a few chairs for the elderly and those overwhelmed by the heat, which came in handy for the maid of honour). None of us was able to see who stepped on the white cloth, which according to pious custom will determine who dominates the marriage, but I believe I heard that they stepped on it simultaneously. The church itself is a spacious domed cruciform church, though not so spacious as the name ‘cathedral’ might suggest to some of you. The entire interior is decorated with frescoes with cycles from Genesis, the Evangelists and massed arrays of saints. On the right side, where I was (though it is customary for men to stand on the right in Russian churches, at the service the crowd was entirely mixed), I looked over to see Sts. Constantine and Helen looking back at me amid a crowd of other saints and martyrs. St. Constantine stood out from the crowd with his crown and the True Cross he was holding, and I was briefly reminded of the strong Byzantine influence on Russian Christianity all these centuries later.
Once the ceremony concluded, we filed through the receiving line and congratulated the new couple. The ushers then had us go outside in the sweltering 90-odd-degree heat while we waited for the bridge and groom to exit the church. There I met two friends from church who live in Evanston.
As an aside, the only funny line in the otherwise unexceptional Proof, filmed on location at UofC, was the question of one of the characters: “Why would anyone want to live in Evanston?” This is a question that will probably only seem funny to UofC students, and actually makes no sense when you compare Hyde Park and Evanston as places to live, but there it is.
My friends had just returned from their trip back east, but it had not been, as they had planned, a pilgrimage trip all the way back East to the Holy Land. Though the pilgrimage group had gone ahead despite the war, they decided against going and went to Quebec instead. It had been in my mind as I was hearing about the war that they would have been going there right as it was starting, but I had had no way to contact them to see what was happening.
Once at the reception dinner, my friends at our table were particularly eager to start the custom of shouting “Gorka!” as often as possible, and I believe our table distinguished itself in being the one to shout the most. Gorka means bitter, so whenever someone shouts it the groom is obliged to kiss his bride to make it sweet, which is not such a painful custom to observe, but it can become troublesome if the two are very far apart from each other–the crowd can get quite unruly if they are not appeased quickly with the sight of a kiss.
Dougherty says he doesn’t want to start a blog war. Okay, neither do I. Larison, on the other hand, doesn’t want to start one—he wants to finish it. Holy bloody Caviezel, kids, that’s an avalanche of prose, and I’m having a hard time breathing under the sheer weight of it all. You dash out a blog post, catch a bit of shut-eye, then wake up to find out that a verbose doctoral candidate has done an Ender Wiggin on you, shock and awe style. Does Daniel Larison ever sleep? Has he done away with keyboards and mastered thought-blogging? It sure seems like it (though he’s probably one of those guys who’s troubled by cyborg technology). ~Peter Suderman
I have to thank Mr. Suderman for his post. I don’t remember the last time I have laughed this much (mostly at myself in this case). Unfortunately, I am still reliant on the old keyboard, and I am actually more disturbed by developments in nanotechnology (I had started writing a dystopian novel about a nightmarish AI/nanotech future, but then The Matrix came out and I realised that that particular ship had sailed), but I appreciate the compliment. As it happens, the last few days have brought together a change in my sleeping habits, which were thrown off by attending a wedding reception this past weekend, rather hot weather in Chicago that has made it difficult to sleep for long periods of time in my one-ceiling-fan apartment and the hook-up of my DSL service. The new connection has allowed me to unload blog posts with the speed of a Howitzer rather than my traditional preference for artillery barrages and, as Mr. Suderman has suggested, cluster bombs, while my odd schedule allows me to blog at night so as to take everyone else unawares. With any luck, my shock-and-awe attacks will have happier results.
Via Andrew Cusack
If the stakes in the Near East are the “hearts and minds” of the people there, which we are trying to win, what will they get if we lose the card game? Do they get our hearts and minds, or do we write them an IOU?
The same is true of “World Trade Center.” It is undeniably powerful, an immensely affecting and well-meaning real-life tale of two Port Authority policemen trapped in the rubble underneath the collapsed concourse between the North and South Towers.
Nonetheless, because “World Trade Center” tells a story of joyous survival rather than a story of death, it is a fundamental falsification of the meaning of 9/11 - even though the story it tells is true. ~John Podhoretz, New York Post
Via Michelle Malkin
So, in Little Pod’s estimation, even a film that is widely regarded on the conventional NR-bandwagon right as a good and uncharacteristically decent Oliver Stone film must hew to some political line of what 9/11 means or else it becomes false (even when it is true)? Leave it to some neocon to be a killjoy and impose the requirements of their stale ideology on something that, by all accounts, they ought to be able to appreciate. Podhoretz reveals what really bothers him about the movie at the end:
“United 93″ ends with a plane crash. “World Trade Center” ends with a smiling child. One wonders what Stanley Kubrick would have made of that.
Perhaps it is meant to say that life goes on, or perhaps it could mean that terrorists do not get to have the last word in dictating how we live. It could mean any number of things, but because WTC does not end on a note of grim horror it has somehow failed to convey the horror of the day. That, I would suggest, says more about the problems with Mr. Podhoretz and the warped world he inhabits than it does about any of the merits or flaws of this particular picture.
Hey everybody. Sorry for the hiatus. I’m currently in Oklahoma City — at the Biltmore Hotel no less. We’ll be on the road by early morning, heading off to New Mexico. ~Jonah Goldberg, The Corner
The summer school on American agrarianism at The Rockford Institute over the past week was a great time. We were regaled by wonderful tales of the Fugitives and Mel Bradford by Dr. Tom Landess, who also discussed I’ll Take My Stand at some length in other talks, and delved into the Christian roots of Chesterton’s Distributism and the importance of imagination in training men’s vision with the guidance of Fr. Ian Boyd, editor of The Chesterton Review. Dr. James Patrick, Chancellor of Thomas More College, spoke on the agrarian ”English resistance,” of which the painter Ruskin was an important member, on Allen Tate and the real mind of the South, and on the ideals of the South as expressed in Scott and rejected in Twain. Dr. Fleming led us through the history and thought of the Greek, Roman and early American agrarians, Scott Richert gave a sympathetic critique of Wendell Berry, Wes Jackson and Rod Dreher and Aaron Wolf told us of the life and career of agrarian populist, William Jennings Bryan, noting in his conclusion many of the same objections about Populist policies that Caleb Stegall made in his much-talked-about (but normally poorly understood)