Pig Herder

There's only one writer who brings a 2 x 4 onto the bridge of the nose like this:

On the anti-killing side, to one extent or another, are: former Clinton lawyer Lanny Davis, former Gore lawyer David Boies, former O.J. lawyer Alan Dershowitz, Democratic Sen. Joe Lieberman, McGovern and Carter strategist Pat Caddell, liberal blogger Mickey Kaus, Green Party presidential candidate Ralph Nader and Rainbow Coalition leader Jesse Jackson, as well as several of my friends who are pro-abortion and pro-gay marriage but not Pro-Adulterous Husbands Who, After Taking Up With Another Woman, Suddenly Recall Their Wives' Clearly Stated Wish to Die.

If being (a) on a liquid diet, and (b) unresponsive to one's estranged husband are now considered grounds for a woman's execution, wait until this news hits Beverly Hills!

You can't grow peanuts on your own land or install a toilet capable of disposing two tissues in one flush because of federal government intervention. But Congress demands a review of the process that goes into a governmental determination to kill an innocent American woman – and that goes too far!

Polls claim that a majority of Americans objected to action by the U.S. Congress in the Schiavo case as "government intrusion" into a "private family matter" – as if Judge Greer is not also the government. So twisted is our view of the judiciary that a judicial decree is treated like a naturally occurring phenomenon, like a rainbow or an act of God.

Our infallible, divine ruler is a county judge in Florida named George Greer, who has more authority in America than the U.S. Congress, the president and the governor. No wonder the Southern Baptist Church threw Greer out: Only one god per church!

Still can't figure out who slays like this? Hint: initials are A.C. The rest is here.

We're familiar with the Estrich rant that there are too few women in the high echelons of opinion journalism, and that this is the result of discrimination. What is wanted, we are always reminded, is a regime that is free of the reactionary features of a men's club, the results of which are so much in evidence at major newspapers and magazines - well, really, everywhere you choose to look in society. Such a regime, the implication goes, would allow all the talented women writers to rise to their natural place and number, an outcome that is prevented by ubiquitous male discrimination. You could even say that such a regime would resemble the blogosphere, where all it takes is a computer (well, a PC anyway!) and a free registration with any number of blog hosts, and something worthwhile to say - just these barriers surmounted and there is nothing stopping the most underappreciated writer from reaching their natural audience.

But that too would be wrong. Because now we learn that there is a lack of "diversity" in the top 100 blogs; and that this lack must be corrected, presumably by the righteous forces that are battling discrimination in journalism generally. Even worse than the predominance of white males in the top 100 blogs, this development threatens the minority inclusion that has been so gallantly (and successfully) fought for to date.

If you think this sounds like having your cake and eating it too - in other words that a medium where there could be no gatekeepers would be the ideal remedy for eliminating white male discrimination of talented female writers, but that said medium has in fact produced a wholly unsatisfactory outcome; and that this is due to just the thing the medium is widely seen as making impossible - then you will want to read a very fine column by the always astute Heather Mac Donald, in today's NRO.

These diversity grievances follow the usual logic: Victim-group X is not proportionally represented in some field; therefore the field's gatekeepers are discriminating against X's members. The argument presumes that there are large numbers of qualified Xs out there who, absent discrimination, would be roportionally represented in the challenged field.

So isn't the completely open and egalitarian web the perfect means of obviating the hidden barriers to entry and creating the shining city on the hill, where writers rise to the heights their talents warrant?

If the quota mongers really believed these claims, they should welcome the web enthusiastically, since it is a world without gatekeepers and with no other significant barriers to entry. Imagine someone coping with real discrimination — a black tanner, say, in 1897 Alabama. To expand his business, he needs capital and access to markets beyond the black business corridors in the south. Every white lender has turned him down, however, and no white merchant will carry his leather goods, even though they are superior to what is currently on the market. Tell that leather maker that an alternative universe exists, where he can obtain credit based solely on his financial history and sell his product based solely on its quality — a universe where race is so irrelevant that no one will even know his own — and he would think he had died and gone to heaven.

For allegedly discriminated-against minority and female writers, the web is just that heaven. They can get their product directly out to readers with no bigoted editors to turn them away.... In case reader prejudice is a problem, web writers can conceal their identity and simply present their ideas. And there is no established hierarchy to placate on the way to the top. As Levy [Newsweek's technology columnist, Steven Levy] wrote: "Out of the inchoate chatter of the Web, the sharpest voices simply emerge."

So here is the perfect medium for liberating all those qualified minority and female "voices" that are being silenced by the mainstream media's gatekeepers. According to diversity theory, they should be far more heavily represented in the blogosphere's upper reaches than they are in traditional journalism. In fact, the opposite is the case, as the Washington Post's Keith Jenkins pointed out. The elite blogging world is far less "diverse" than the mainstream media.

Why? Could it be that the premise of the "diversity" crusade is wrong — that there are not in fact hordes of unknown, competitively talented non-white-male journalists held back by prejudice? Don't even entertain the thought. Steven Levy certainly doesn't. After fleetingly rehearsing his own previous analysis of the web as a pure meritocracy, he dismisses the argument without explanation and trots out the hoariest trope in the "diversity" lexicon: "the old boy's club." Why is the top rung of the blogosphere so homogeneous? Levy asks. He answers: "It appears that some clubbiness is involved" — that is, that white male bloggers only link to other white male bloggers. (Susan Estrich likewise accused the Los Angeles Times's Michael Kinsley of favoring writers in his old boy's club.)

This is simply preposterous. As any blog reader knows, links are the foundation of the medium's effectiveness. For a blogger to purposely omit linking to other blogs or on-line opinion because the author of a given piece happens to be a woman (or a minority) - when the link bolsters the blogger's argument - is irrational. If it were attempted by one or a few or a dozen they would find themselves outside the top 100 so fast they wouldn't know whether they'd been shot, snake-bit or powder-burned.

Here's a different explanation for why the blogosphere is dominated by white males: because they're the ones producing the best product. Sorry, ladies, but there aren't as many of us engaged in aggressive, competitive opinionizing and nonstop consumption of politics as our male tormentors....

As for minorities, the skills gap in reading and writing means that, at the moment, a lower percentage of blacks and Hispanics possess the verbal acumen to produce a cutting-edge blog....

Here's Steven Levy's minimum prescription for joining the ranks of Alpha blogging: "You have to post frequently . . . link prodigiously," and, like one technology guru he describes, spend two hours daily writing your weblog and "three more hours reading hundreds of other blogs." If you have difficulty reading, you're probably not going to find that regime attractive. Obviously, many individual blacks and Hispanics possess more than the necessary skills to power their way into the top 100 blogs. But diversity zealots don't look at individuals, they look at aggregates. And in the aggregate, blacks and Hispanics lag so far behind whites in literacy skills that it is absurd to blame racial exclusion for the absence of racial proportionality on the web....

No one has succeeded in closing the skills gap yet, but over the years we've developed numerous bureaucratic devices to paper it over. These devices will undoubtedly prove highly useful in addressing what Levy calls the web's "diversity problem." Levy proposes, as an initial matter, that the power-bloggers voluntarily link to some as yet unspecified number of non-male, non-white writers. The history of 'voluntary' affirmative action efforts need not be rehearsed here; suffice it to say, once 'voluntary' race- and gender-conscious policies are proposed, mandates are not far behind.

Well, I think you can see where this is leading. There's lots more to Heather Mac Donald's article, so I recommend reading it even though I have excerpted heavily from it here. It's a goodun.

There's just a blizzard of comment and reflection on the Terry Schiavo case today, the Monday after Easter. The coincidence of Easter with the expiring of Terry's life makes this story so potent; it's easy to imagine this will grip us for some time to come.

There's no shortage of good writing on the many aspects of the case. Wretchard at The Belmont Club follows up his March 26 post, "The Butterfly Takes Wing", with an addendum. (In the first of these Wretchard provides many links to other writing on the affair.)

Mark Steyn, in his Sunday Chicago Sun Times piece, asks "Who are we to know?"

Hugh Hewitt (just start here and scroll, scroll, scroll), who has been tireless (even if at times tiresome) in his advocacy of Terri's right to live, has provided valuable contributions (including this one which has links to much good writing - not least Andrew Sullivan's contribution).

Wretchard (again) wrote on Easter Sunday about what faith means ("Live and be not afraid"), and links to excellent contributions by Donald Sensing (here and here).

Donald Sensing asks, "What about Terri's soul?"

John Podhoretz talks reason on 3/25: "despite the opinions of fanatics on both sides, neither view has a monopoly on virtue."

And in a distinctly less dramatic tone, Michael Barone says that the midnight attempt by Congress and the President to enable the courts to reconsider the feeding tube issue was not a cynical ploy, as critics maintain; it was the acting out of a healthy moral conviction, which this country possesses on both sides of the aisle.

A lot of sophisticated people are clucking at the actions of Congress and George W. Bush that attempted to save the life of Terri Schiavo. This was pandering to the religious right, we are told, a cynical partisan ploy by Republicans, an intervention by an activist, even ayatollah-like, federal government into a state court case and a family dispute.... I do think much of the criticism and condescension is misguided. And I think that the response of elected officials reflects one of the great strengths in our country: a confident belief in moral principles that stands in vivid contrast with what we see in much of Europe and in the supposedly sophisticated precincts of this
country.

A cynical partisan ploy by Republicans? Not really. It is possible that Democrats, if in control, might not have summoned a special session. But this was not a purely partisan issue. Democrats did vote for the bill and made its passage possible....

On the Schiavo issue, most members of Congress, on both sides, were not indifferent but acted on moral convictions in a difficult situation. They were trying to do what they believed was right. They deserve respect, not contempt.

Vic Hanson's recent piece (3/24/05 NRO) on the 7 faces of Ward Churchill, which I mentioned here, got pretty wide play in the blogosphere - not unusual for a Hanson column. I think Wretchard's riff deserves a mention - read it here at Belmont Club. A sample:

In VDH's hypothesis, Churchill was the perfect grifter who understood without a trace of self-deception the entire value system upon which the modern academy was founded and exploited it ruthlessly for his own gain. In a setting where the operative virtues were anti-Americanism, an affection for posturing and the glamor of exoticism, he adopted them all and crowned it with a maraschino cherry: he was as original as a Hollywood plot based on market research and focus groups.

There exists by implication a real Ward Churchill potentially far more interesting than the academics he conned. He would be a man of considerable intelligence, not in a bookish way, but in a street-smart sense, who instantly figured out how the game was played and played it to perfection. He would be bold; and it would hold him in good stead in the sheepfold. He would be tenacious as only adventurers can be. And once he had made the transition to the synthetic creature described by Hanson he would never have looked back; any more than Hernando Cortes after he burned his ships behind him on his march toward the treasure of the Aztecs.

There is a lengthy and interesting piece at Frontpag Magazine today on the Terry Schiavo case. The author clearly comes down on the side of "choosing life." But he goes beyond choosing life when the patient's wishes can't be known, as in the case of Terry, to argue that even where a person has left a living will or healthcare directive, it is really just an act of imperfect human will; that even in competence we cannot say how we would want to be treated if we were to become incapacitated. At least I think that's what he's saying.

Before he makes this argument he identifies two types of liberalism. The first (and by implication the soundest) is "procedural liberalism (discerning and respecting the prior wishes of the incompetent person; preserving life when such wishes are not clear)." This, he says, has [given] way to "ideological liberalism (treating incompetence itself as reasonable grounds for assuming that life is not worth living)."

This ideological liberalism has us asking the wrong questions:

For all the attention we have paid to the Schiavo case, we have asked many of the wrong questions, living as we do on the playing field of modern liberalism. We have asked whether she is really in a persistent vegetative state, instead of reflecting on what we owe people in a persistent vegetative state. We have asked what she would have wanted as a competent person imagining herself in such a condition, instead of asking what we owe the person who is now with us, a person who can no longer speak for herself, a person entrusted to the care of her family and the protection of her society.

That is reasonable enough. But not far on we get this:

For some, it is an article of faith that individuals should decide for themselves how to be cared for in such cases. And no doubt one response to the Schiavo case will be a renewed call for living wills and advance directives--as if the tragedy here were that Michael Schiavo did not have written proof of Terri's desires. But the real lesson of the Schiavo case is not that we all need living wills; it is that our dignity does not reside in our will alone, and that it is foolish to believe that the competent person I am now can establish, in advance, how I should be cared for if I become incapacitated and incompetent. The real lesson is that we are not mere creatures of the will: We still possess dignity and rights even when our capacity to make free choices is gone; and we do not possess the right to demand that others treat us as less worthy of care than we really are.

Is he arguing that the wishes of a person as expressed in a healthcare directive should be ignored when they are a potential indignity? This would throw our entire legal system, not to mention the notion of small 'l' liberalism, into chaos.

Franky, I haven't paid much (okay, I've paid no) attention to the story that has been floating around the blogosphere lately, that the blogs are threatened by the FEC and McCain-Feingold Campaign Finance law. It just didn't register a ping on my sonar.

Well, it turns out that a piss-pot full of money from notorious liberal non-profit foundations has been devoted to advancing the bogus idea that there was a groundswell of public opinion over the last decade that something must be done to reform campaign finance law. One of the main players in this is a guy who in 1994 worked for the Pew Charitable Trust (one of the notorious); he admits now to having scared up out of whole cloth the study that purportedly showed that the public was clamoring for finance law reform.

If you're new to this story, Frontpage Magazine today is a good place to start; lots of links for background info and other opinion on the issue too.

For a complete undressing of Ward Churchill, you've got to read Vic Hanson in today's NRO. This is great fun, and has the ring of truth in its psychological profiling and diagnosis of campus pathologies. He deduces four rules for charlatans which will enable them to pass themselves off as real scholars.

No one knows what to make of [Churchill's] various arrests, boasts of bomb-making, trip to Libya, angry and traumatized ex-wives, braggadocio about petty vandalism, tales of phone threats, and the variety of other sordid stories that surround this fabricated man. Churchill’s presence on campus is like the weaving driver who is pulled over by the state police, who quickly find no license, registration, or insurance, but plenty of warrants — and thus wonder how many other paroled miscreants they’ve missed out there, one accident away from being a public-relations nightmare.

Churchill’s rantings are full of leftist hyperbole, vicious Nazi allusions, and calls for violence against the United States (“more 9/11s are necessary”) and an end to America itself (“There’s no U.S. in America anymore”). Should Churchill have been such a vicious court jester of the Right and slurred gays and minorities as he did the victims of mass murder, he would have been fired long ago.

Rule 1: Profess to be as far left as possible, understanding that extremism in the service of utopian virtue is no vice.

Most academics are retiring sorts. They enjoy the tranquility of the campus and its isolation from the conundrum of society at large. But like peaceful sheep grazing in green pastures, they are easy prey for rapacious wolves. Professors are especially vulnerable to a bully and showman like Churchill, whose record of both oral and written intimidation leaves most disturbed, frightened, or at least convinced to steer clear of this loose loud popgun when he goes off.

Rule 2: Among the nerds and dorks, act a little like a Brando, Che, or James Dean, a wild spirit that gives off a spark of danger, who can at a distance titillate Walter Mitty-like admirers and closer up scare off the more sober censors.

Victimization is essential to academic man. Under the warped tenets into which affirmative action has devolved and the existing protocols of the blame industry, at first glance this put a pink heterosexual American male like Churchill in a seemingly tough bind. What cover or exemption, after all, is there when his scholarship, teaching, or academic citizenship is found wanting?

That dilemma Churchill solved brilliantly when he endowed himself with two new unimpeachable personas: the noble but victimized Native American, and the half-noble but nevertheless traumatized Vietnam veteran.

I won't spoil the fun, be sure to read the whole thing.

Charles Krauthammer weighs in on the Terry Schiavo case, calling it a "legal travesty and a human tragedy." Spend a minute reading the article. Here are a couple of snippets.

Given our lack of certainty, given that there are loved ones prepared to keep her alive and care for her, how can you allow the husband to end her life on his say-so? Because following the sensible rules of Florida custody laws, conducted with due diligence and great care over many years in this case, this is where the law led.

For Congress and the president to then step in and try to override that by shifting the venue to a federal court was a legal travesty, a flagrant violation of federalism and the separation of powers. The federal judge who refused to reverse the Florida court was certainly true to the law. But the law, while scrupulous, has been merciless, and its conclusion very troubling morally. We ended up having to choose between a legal travesty on the one hand and human tragedy on the other.

There is no good outcome to this case....

John Derbyshire, at NRO's "The Corner" blog, is really stirring up some shite, and taking on all comers, in the case of Terry Schiavo. Just go have a look here and here.

Bill Buckley, in an editorial in the print version of National Review, has some words of wisdom for those who feel compelled to dabble in the 'intellectual status of women' controversy. People like Larry Summers of Harvard, or Pig Herder, to name just two.

And what are those words?

JUST DON'T.

David Frum, in his blog at NRO, quotes an article from the Italian newspaper Il Foglio. This paragraph caught my eye. Even if you change the adjectival 'European' to 'American', it still rings true.

The European left has long given lip service to the international support of democracy. And yet, when George Bush adopted this very policy as his own after 9/11, the leaders of the European left began to fret about stability, sovereignty, and the supreme right of local despots to wield power free from foreign interference. After all those years of fulminating against Henry Kissinger, the European left overnight became more Kissingerian than Kissinger himself had ever been.... Is this outcome not ironic? Is it not embarrassing?

I think Wretchard at the Belmont Club is too modest by half. He sums up today's piece, in which he outlines some things a useful UN might peform, by saying that "I don't expect any of these Belmont Club proposals to be taken seriously, but I do hope the concepts and ideas behind them are given some thought. Honestly, I think they are better than Kofi's."

I can't recall seeing anyone go beyond mere criticism ( most of it dead-on, by the way) of the "world body", to actually laying out some proposals that a new UN might undertake. Even if Wretchard himself lands several withering blows on the UN, he attempts to forumlate a coherent set of principles for it. Don't get me wrong, I love the stinging rebukes of pompous elite do-gooderism; but it really is time that some discussion be given to what a functioning and non-malevolent "world body" might look like.

It is hard to argue with these criticisms:

In the time since [the end of WWII], nothing has changed except the entire political landscape. International affairs is still arbitrated by global alliances and politics and the Security Council remains a museum.... One astounding UN weakness, underscored emphatically by the Indonesian tsunami, is how little detailed operational contingency planning that agency performs.... The standard UN approach of sending a "fact-finding" team to find landing fields, port facilities, resources, etc. is a frank admission of unpreparedness for anything.

As for reforms, or rather, since he is really suggesting starting with a blank slate, reformats, these modest and achievable ideas:

Since the General Assembly is essentially a moderated forum the best way to bubble the major global concerns to the top of the stack is to implement an electronic version of just that -- a moderated forum -- complete with supporting policy papers and discussion. This has the potential advantage of returning control of the agenda-making process to the home countries themselves, instead of being cooked up in back rooms at UN headquarters.

Why a moderated electronic forum as opposed to a physical General Assembly consisting of diplomats in colorful costumes or expensive suits? Because progress in a debate on an electronic forum can be followed by anyone in any country whereas not everyone can afford a ticket to New York and an extended stay at a hotel.

Under this arrangement the Security Council will merely be a setting where important international agreements are announced, like a Town Square. This concept has the advantage of always being in tune with world political reality. Security Council resolutions should be the end product of international politics not its arbitrator.

The UN should invest in logistical planning and prepositioning, run simulated field exercises involving member nations -- in a word do on the international scale what a small town fire department does -- instead of going around with a begging bowl after each unanticipated disaster strikes.

What to make of Kofi Annan's new proposal to bring legitimacy back to the scandalized UN? Not much. His report basically says that the world body ought to keep doing what has failed to work for 30 years, only now with a wink and more money.

Belmont Club sees right through the Annan haze.

In my own opinion Kofi Annan's proposals are a recipe for disaster for two reasons. His entire security model is philosophically founded on a kind of blackmail which recognizes that the only thing dysfunctional states have to export is trouble. He then sets up the United Nations as a gendarmarie with 'a human face' delivering payoffs to quell disturbances. This is the "bargain whereby rich countries help the poor to develop, by promoting the Millennium Development Goals, while poor countries help alleviate rich countries' security concerns." Second, his model flies in the face of the recent experience in Afghanistan, Iraq and the entire democratizing upheaval in the Middle East. It is by making countries functional that terrorism is quelled and not by any regime of international aid, inspections, nonproliferation treaties, declarations, protocols, conferences; nor by appointing special rapptorteurs, plenipotentiary envoys; nor constituting councils, consultative bodies or anything else in Annan's threadbare cupboard.

Nor is this clanking monstrosity particularly efficient, even in contemplation. Neither new Security Council model solves the basic question: how can it compel nations with the muscle to act against their interests? Alliances, like political parties, are the building blocks of global politics. Forcing alliances to work within the artificial structure of the United Nations Security Council (A or B) adds nothing to the process. The sole value of the Security Council should be to rubber-stamp what global politics has already decided upon, as constitutional monarchs do in countries with Parliaments.

It was a dictum in Field Marshal Zhukov's Army that a good commander never reinforced failure only success. It is a maxim of the United Nations that progress is achieved by doing everything that never worked all over again. Probably nowhere is the bankruptcy of Annan's vision (and I use that word consciously) more evident than in Paragraph 29, where he lays out the UN vision for a better world. It is a laundry list of all the special interest 'development' goals the UN has acquired over the years where problems of different orders of magnitude and positions in the chain of causality are jumbled together; a bureaucrat's dream and a human being's nightmare.

Even if you're like me, and not standing in candlelight vigils to save the life of Terry Schiavo, the difficulties raised by the whole affair are inescapable. Here's not the place, and this writer's not the guy, to try to wrestle something coherent out of this tangle.

Nevertheless the whole "culture of life" vs. "culture of death" model does have its power. Again, it is beyond my abilities to offer anything insightful. For that let's turn to Mark Steyn, who hardly lets a week go by without knocking a ball out of the park. He's writing for his British audience, in today's Daily Telegraph. He asks, "What's the point of utopia if it only lasts a generation." Take it away Mark.

Almost every issue facing the EU - from immigration rates to crippling state pension liabilities - has at its heart the same glaringly plain root cause: a huge lack of babies. I could understand a disinclination by sunny politicians to peddle doom and gloom were it not for the fact that, in all other areas of public policy, our rulers embrace doomsday scenarios at the drop of a hat. Most 20-year projections - on global warming, fuel resources, etc - are almost laughably speculative. They fail to take into account the most important factor of all - human inventiveness: "We can't feed the world!" they shriek. But we develop more efficient farming methods with nary a thought. "The oil will run out by the year 2000!" But we develop new extraction methods and find we've got enough oil for as long as we'll need it.

But human inventiveness depends on humans - and that's the one thing we really are running out of. When it comes to forecasting the future, the birth rate is the nearest thing to hard numbers. If only a million babies are born in 2005, it's hard to have two million adults enter the workforce in 2025 (or 2033, or 2041, or whenever they get around to finishing their Anger Management, Systemic Racism and Gay Studies degrees). If that's not a political issue, what is? To cite only the most obviously affected corner of the realm, what's the long-term future of the Scottish National Party if there are no Scottish nationals?

Since 1945, a multiplicity of government interventions - state pensions, subsidised higher education, higher taxes to pay for everything - has so ruptured traditional patterns of inter-generational solidarity that in Europe a child is now an optional lifestyle accessory. By 2050, Estonia's population will have fallen by 52 per cent, Bulgaria's by 36 per cent, Italy's by 22 per cent. The hyper-rationalism of post-Christian Europe turns out to be wholly irrational: what's the point of creating a secular utopia if it's only for one generation?

Be sure and read the whole thing.

Liberals have lately been heard trumpeting the notion that conservatives are unpragmatic, and that they live in a magical world of idealism and faith. The flip side of this idea is that liberals occupy the "reality based community"; they soldier on gallantly, taking stock of the real world and acting accordingly.

A closer look will show that reality has yet to interrupt the liberals' fantasy, at least on this score. In noting that in the narrow 51-49 vote to open ANWR to oil exploration the nay votes were nearly unanimously Democrats, Deacon (of Powerline blog), in a new piece at the Daily Standard, observes that Republicans have become the pragmatists.

The real point is that humans should not gain an advantage through the exploitation of nature. It was this doctrinaire position that Senate Democrats attempted to uphold when they voted with near unanimity against developing ANWR.

THE DEMOCRATIC POSITION on exploiting the environment is not unrelated to other positions the party has taken. During the Clinton years, for example, the prevailing view seemed to be that military force should be shunned except where (as in Haiti and Kosovo) its use would not advance any direct U.S. interest, and thus would not undermine our national purity. This aversion to gaining a public advantage at the expense of ideological purity can also be detected in the Social Security debate--thou shalt not benefit from the fact that the stock market works; the debate over public education--thou shalt not benefit from the fact that private schools work; and the debate over faith-based initiatives--thou shalt not benefit from the fact that charitable religious organizations work.

The common theme here is anti-pragmatism. A workable definition of political pragmatism could be this: Public policy decisions should be made based on a weighing of concrete costs and benefits taking into account all interests, but with the interests of Americans outweighing the interests of non-Americans and the interests of living humans outweighing those of buried humans and animals. (Let's leave aside the question of the interests of the unborn.) Ideology can, and inevitably will, inform the way one performs this calculation. However, it is anti-pragmatic to allow ideology to replace or trump the calculation.

In another gem of a column, this one in the current Speccie, Mark Steyn argues that Bush's recent appointment of Mark Bolton as ambassador to the UN is a very good choice indeed. Bolton has the temperament, knowledge and experience to actually do some good there. Bolton's critics, especially those in the vaunted transnational community, would like us to believe that their angst-ridden rhetoric in opposition is nothing so much as the reciprocal of Bolton's history of overt and bumptious criticism of just about every tenet these tranzies hold dear. The trouble for the tranzies is that events have more than vindicated Bolton while making a mockery of the entire edifice of transnational progressivism.

But it's a lot more than a case of tit-for-tat, to be sure. Steyn, it should be pointed out before I excerpt some of his column, has recently enunciated what I think is a very important insight - one that goes a long way toward explaining the contentiousness with which all recent US foreign policy initiatives have been greeted. Perhaps others have said it, I don't know. But I haven't it heard it put so simply and so clearly. It is this: that the greatest threat America faces in the world today is transnational progressivism. Terror, tin-pot dictators, even the crazed mullahs we can and will handle, bloody though it may be. No, the enemy is much stealthier - you could even say viral - than these admittedly thorny adversaries. The infection that threatens us from within and without is the onslaught of the notion- ideology, really - that American sovereignty and interests should be subordinated to a self-appointed global elite that answers to no political constituency.

As a result, any perceived threat to the tranzie ideology must be met with the fiercest opposition and rhetoric. With that said, let's follow Steyn through his characteristically funny yet perfectly logical analysis of why Bolton will be a very good ambassador to the UN. Good, that is, if you define the word as in this case describing a guy who will represent the interests of the US (and oppose the reach of transnational progressivism, or T.P.)

If you’re going to play the oldest established permanent floating transnational crap game for laughs, you might as well pick an act with plenty of material. What I love about John Bolton, America’s new ambassador to the UN, is the sheer volume of ‘damaging’ material.... [W]ith Bolton the damaging quotes are hanging off the trees and dropping straight into your bucket.

The UN?
‘There is no such thing as the United Nations.’
The UN building?
‘If you lost ten storeys, it wouldn’t make a bit of difference.’
Reform of the Security Council?
‘If I were redoing the Security Council, I’d have one permanent member ...the United States.’
The International Criminal Court?
‘Fuzzy-minded romanticism ...not just naive but dangerous.’
International law in general?
‘It is a big mistake for us to grant any validity to international law.’
Offering incentives to rogue states?
‘I don’t do carrots.’

If you were looking to reduce to a few words a position that was guaranteed to tweak the very heartstrings of tranzies, you could save yourself a lot of time and just go with those responses. In fact the New York Times, a key mouthpiece for T.P., in a fit of Dowdian sarcasm, exhibits its pique by speculating that if Bush is willing to appoint Bolton to a position like ambassador to the UN, what could be next? "Donald Rumsfeld to negotiate a new set of Geneva conventions? Martha Stewart to run the Securities and Exchange Commission?"

We rejoin Steyn:

Okay, I get the hang of this game. Sending John Bolton to be UN ambassador is like ...putting Sudan and Zimbabwe on the Human Rights Commission. Or letting Saddam’s Iraq chair the UN conference on disarmament. Or sending a bunch of child-sex fiends to man UN operations in the Congo. And the Central African Republic. And Sierra Leone, and Burundi, Liberia, Haiti, Kosovo, and pretty much everywhere else. All of which happened without the UN fetishists running around shrieking hysterically. Why should America be the only country not to enjoy an uproarious joke at the UN’s expense? ....

[T]he Bolton flap is very revealing about conventional wisdom on transnationalism. Diplomats are supposed to be ‘diplomatic’. Why is that? Well, as the late Canadian Prime minister Lester B. Pearson used to say, diplomacy is the art of letting the other fellow have your way. In other words, you were polite, discreet, circumspect, etc., as a means to an end. Not any more. None of John Bolton’s detractors is worried that his bluntness will jeopardise the administration’s policy goals. Quite the contrary. They’re concerned that the administration has policy goals — that it isn’t yet willing to subordinate its national interest to the polite transnational pieties. In that sense, our understanding of ‘diplomacy’ has become corrupted: it’s no longer the language through which nation states treat with one another so much as the code-speak consensus of a global elite. [emphasis mine -- ed.]

For much of the civilised world the transnational pabulum has become an end in itself, and one largely unmoored from anything so tiresome as reality. It doesn’t matter whether there is any global warming or, if there is, whether Kyoto will do anything about it or, if you ratify Kyoto, whether you bother to comply with it: all that matters is that you sign on to the transnational articles of faith. The same thinking applies to the ICC, and Darfur, and the Oil-for-Fraud programme, and anything else involving the UN.

That’s what John Bolton had in mind with his observations about international law: ‘It is a big mistake for us to grant any validity to international law even when it may seem in our short-term interest to do so — because, over the long term, the goal of those who think that international law really means anything are those who want to constrict the United States.’ Just so.

I'll leave it at that. I recommend that the entire column be read, as it fleshes out other important aspects of this entire debate - not to mention makes a mockery of some of the familiar plaints and prevarications of the global elite. But I think from what I've excerpted you can see very clearly the thing I think is so valuable about Steyn's late insight. We face a determined foe in the form of transnational progressivism; and its cover is blown the louder it agitates against Bolton's appointment.

Jonah Goldberg at National Review just drives liberals nuts. And not because he makes a living by simply tweaking them. 'Tweaking' doesn't begin to describe it. In a long two-part essay ("Liberal Myopia" and "Their Non-Reality Reality") he rides like a saber-wielding horseman through acres of liberal straw-men propped up on sawhorses; heads are falling all about.

To entice you to read it, here are a couple of good blasts. First from part one.

The idea that Iraq could have a democratic "teaching effect" on the region was most vociferously pooh-poohed by the Islamist voluptuaries in academia and by various journalists who either subscribe to anti-American or, more often, anti-Bush views. Maureen Dowd time and again has referred to the "discredited domino theory" as if all she needs to do is say something is discredited in order for it to be so. She's really got to stop believing her own press releases.

And from part two.

[A]t organs that pride themselves on their immunity to feverish impulses, we find instead a haughtiness not often seen outside 17th-century Versailles. Jonathan Chait of The New Republic imagines a hypothetical in which God descends to Earth for the purpose of “settling, once and for all, our disputes over economic policy.”

[W]hat on earth is Chait talking about? He goes on and on about how conservative economists are lacking in respect for empirical data and fact-finding while liberals are the Joe Fridays of economics. I worked in and around the American Enterprise Institute for quite a while. AEI remains the central hive of the sorts of economists Chait despises. I can tell you here and now that most of these guys spent their time talking endlessly about data, “random walks” in the data, the need for more data, the problems with data, and the reliability of that data. You’d think in the comfort of AEI, a few would have dropped the act and I would have heard a few of them say, “Who cares what the data says?” You’d think fewer free-market economists would receive Nobel Prizes since they don’t hand such things out for ideological polemic writing.

Chait’s theory boils down to a very shabby accusation of bad faith. When conservatives are right about reality, it’s by accident. It’s not that “conservatives don't believe their own empirical arguments,” Chait concedes. And it’s not “that ideologically driven thinking can't lead to empirically sound outcomes. In many cases — conservative opposition to tariffs, price controls, and farm subsidies — it does.” But the simple fact is that when it comes to conservatives, “empirical reasoning simply does not drive their thinking. What appears to be conservative economic reasoning is actually a kind of backward reasoning. It begins with the
conclusion and marches back through the premises.”

“Liberalism,” Chait lectures, “is a more deeply pragmatic governing philosophy — more open to change, more receptive to empiricism, and ultimately better at producing policies that improve the human condition — than conservatism.”

And this is true not just of economics but everything. For example, Clinton was a great Pragmatist who “recognized the failure of welfare, previously a cherished liberal goal, to accomplish its stated purpose, and he enacted a sweeping overhaul.”

And here we can see the great flaw in Chait’s wishful thinking about liberal realism. Clinton agreed to welfare reform — over the objections of most liberals, including his own wife — because the Republicans forced him to and he’d have lost the 1996 election if he didn’t. That was the beginning and the ending of Bill Clinton’s fact-finding. The New York Times's editorial page — a better representative of elite liberalism’s worldview than The New Republic, alas — called welfare reform “atrocious” and an outrage. “This is not reform, it is punishment” they declared.

On almost every significant area of public policy the Democrats are atrophied, rusty, and calcified. They're dependent upon old (condescending) notions about blacks, the patronage of teacher’s unions which care very little for the facts, and feminists who define liberation almost exclusively as the freedom to abort pregnancies despite all of the new, inconvenient facts science is bringing to bear. Liberals are not the “reality-based community,” they are the status-quo based community. They wish to stand athwart history yelling "Stop" — in some rare cases, even when history is advancing liberalism in tyrannical lands. The Buckleyite formulation of standing athwart history yelling "Stop" was aimed at a world where the rise of Communism abroad and soft-liberalism at home were seen as linked trends. Today, liberals yell "Stop" almost entirely because they don’t enjoy being in the backseat. If they cannot drive, no one can.

Iowa Hawk blog delivers some of the funniest and most stinging satires I've seen. Recent editions include a parody of Dan Rather seeking revenge against the bloggers that brought him down (here); and an hilarious bit of Ward Churchill spoofing (here). But today he really comes through, in his raging satire of post-modern university professors and their tedious and catastrophic sidearm, deconstruction. You gotta love this.

In case you missed it yesterday, Instapundit linked to a Strategy Page piece that describes the massive shift in Iraqi opinion recently. Insty then posts a couple of emails he received in response. This is great news and should be read by anyone who wants a real sense of what's going on in Iraq - as opposed to what our irresponsible media is peddling. Go and read now, or bookmark for later.

Charles Krauthammer has an excellent piece in today's Washington Post. Here's some of it; be sure to read the whole thing.

Those who claimed, with great certainty, that Arabs are an exception to the human tendency toward freedom, that they live in a stunted and distorted culture that makes them love their chains -- and that the notion the United States could help trigger a democratic revolution by militarily deposing their oppressors was a fantasy -- have been proved wrong.

This [democratic revolution in the Middle East] amazing display has prompted a wave of soul-searching. When a Le Monde editorial titled "Arab Spring" acknowledges "the merit of George W. Bush," when the cover headline of London's The Independent is "Was Bush Right After All?" and when a column in Der Spiegel asks "Could George W. Bush Be Right?" you know that something radical has happened.

It is not just that the ramparts of Euro-snobbery have been breached. Iraq and, more broadly, the Bush doctrine were always more than a purely intellectual matter. The left's patronizing, quasi-colonialist view of the benighted Arabs was not just analytically incorrect. It was morally bankrupt, too.

After all, going back at least to the Spanish Civil War, the left has always prided itself on being the great international champion of freedom and human rights. And yet, when America proposed to remove the man responsible for torturing, gassing and killing tens of thousands of Iraqis, the left suddenly turned into a champion of Westphalian sovereign inviolability.

A leftist judge in Spain orders the arrest of a pathetic, near-senile Gen. Augusto Pinochet eight years after he's left office, and becomes a human rights hero -- a classic example of the left morally grandstanding in the name of victims of dictatorships long gone. Yet for the victims of contemporary monsters still actively killing and oppressing -- Khomeini and his successors, the Assads of Syria and, until yesterday, Hussein and his sons -- nothing. No sympathy. No action. Indeed, virulent hostility to America's courageous and dangerous attempt at rescue.

The international left's concern for human rights turns out to be nothing more than a useful weapon for its anti-Americanism. Jeane Kirkpatrick pointed out this selective concern for the victims of U.S. allies (such as Chile) 25 years ago. After the Cold War, the hypocrisy continues. For which Arab people do European hearts burn? The Palestinians. Why? Because that permits the vilification of Israel -- an outpost of Western democracy and, even worse, a staunch U.S. ally. Championing suffering Iraqis, Syrians and Lebanese offers no such satisfaction. Hence, silence.

Until now. Now that the real Arab street has risen to claim rights that the West takes for granted, the left takes note. It is forced to acknowledge that those brutish Americans led by their simpleton cowboy might have been right. It has no choice. It is shamed. A Lebanese, amid a sea of a million other Lebanese, raises a placard reading "Thank you, George W. Bush," and all that Euro-pretense, moral and intellectual, collapses.

UPDATE: Both Powerline and Austin Bay comment on the Krauthammer piece, and make good contributions.

One might think that an article a week on the perversions of modern feminism would be enough - at least by this writer. Afterall, it might have the appearance of piling on, to refuse to let a dead dog lie. Yet this topic won't die, and it doesn't tire of giving off more and more bad odor, as well as terrific opportunities for exposing fraud.

So on the heels of my piece yesterday, on Applebaum's exposing Estrich's obsession with numbers of women columnists, I find today a very handy expose on the top dog of female columnists, the ever-sophomoric Maureen Dowd of the New York Times. All credit goes to Kay Hymowitz at City Journal for her delightful and insightful contribution to the non-controversy of the paucity of women columnists. She even saves me the trouble of segueing, from my piece yesterday; it is done for me.

As if Susan Estrich hadn’t done enough to set back the cause of women journalists, now Maureen Dowd has weighed in with a column about the dearth of female pundits that will keep closet sexists thinking “I knew it!” until at least the next millennium. Cutely titled “Dish it Out, Ladies,” the column is an illuminating window into the Dowdian confusion between genuine insight and clever sarcasm, between tough criticism and Mean Girl attitude.

See what I mean? An effortless tie-in to my article yesterday; I didn't have to lift a finger (except to hit Ctrl-C and Ctrl-V).

Dowd tries to explain why there are so few female columnists. Her reasoning is characteristically befuddled. Reason one: girls aren’t comfortable voicing strong opinions because it makes people mad at them.... Reason two: “Guys don’t appreciate being lectured by a woman.” It makes them nervous. It makes their testosterone boil. In sum, there aren’t more female columnists because women don’t like being columnists. Or because men don’t like women being columnists. Or both. Or neither. Whatever.

But Dowd deserves singular treatment, apart from her attempt at explanation of the dearth of the fairer sex in the column-writing business.

Confused yes, but Dowd wasn’t hired to think. She was hired to snark. And man, does she deliver! Dowd is the Mean Girl of the chattering class, the alpha female whose power comes from her shrewd sense of her classmates’ social limitations. No one outside a high school cafeteria has a better eye for 11th grade types: the sex-obsessed outsider-nerd (Ken Starr), the spoiled daddy’s boy (George W.)....

Now, everyone loves a good snark now and again, but what makes Dowd so successful is that she taps into people’s visceral longing to belong to the in-crowd, a longing that not only outlives 12th grade, but evidently survives well into the middle years that much of her New York Times readership is now enduring. One of her favorite tactics is inviting her audience to sneer along with her at the social outcast. “Just how much did Karl Rove hate not being one of the cool guys in the 60’s?” Dowd wrote in November. “Enough to hatch schemes to marshal the forces of darkness to take over the country?”

The problem for Dowd is one that Mean Girls have faced since Cleopatra. Much as people are desperate for an invite to sit at her table, they also fear and hate her for her power over them. Dowd has never been especially friendly to feminists—they’re too Birkenstock geeky, I guess—but she’s not averse to playing the victim card when facing the inevitable blowback from her withering stares. “I’m often asked how I can be so ‘mean’—a question that Tom Friedman, who writes plenty of tough columns, doesn’t get,” she complains. Well, here’s Friedman being tough on Bush: “By exploiting the emotions around 9/11, Mr. Bush took a far-right agenda on taxes, the environment and social issues—for which he had no electoral mandate—and drove it into a 9/12 world. In doing so, Mr. Bush made himself the most divisive and polarizing president in modern history.” Now here’s Dowd: “The Boy Emperor picked up the morning paper and, stunned, dropped his Juicy Juice box with the little straw attached.” Why is Dowd, and not Friedman, accused of being mean? Question asked—and answered.

You'll forgive me if this topic (inane hyper-feminism) keeps tying up your time. It's just that it is so symptomatic of the rot that passes for reasoned discourse today. If I wasn't suffering from a macabre pre-occupation with the stench given off by this particular issue, I could choose from a half-dozen others that smell just as bad. And others are really doing my work for me.

Anne Applebaum, MSM columnist and blogger, writes in the Washington Post today about a seemingly obscure kerfuffle that has vast consequences. As a little background, outspoken and often hysterical feminist Susan Estrich has accused Los Angeles Times editorial page editor, the liberal Michael Kinsley, of not publishing enough columns by women. This Estrich vs. Kinsley brawl was leaked to the blogosphere, and we were "treated" to a rather sickening display over the last month or so. (Heather MacDonald links to the many installments of the fight, and provides excellent commentary, in a must-read City Journal piece.)

So Applebaum, with over 20 years in the business, makes the obvious point that counting female columnists, and crying "discrimination" at the disparity in numbers between male and female practitioners, is poison for those women that have actually made their way in this profession.

Possibly because I see so many excellent women around me at the newspaper, possibly because so many of The Post's best-known journalists are women, possibly because I've never thought of myself as a "female journalist" in any case, I hadn't felt especially lonely. But now that I know -- according to widely cited statistics, which I cannot verify -- that only 10.4 percent of articles on this newspaper's op-ed page in the first two months of this year were written by women, 16.9 percent of the New York Times's op-ed articles were by women, and 19.5 percent of the Los Angeles Times's op-eds were by women, lonely is how I feel. Or perhaps the right phrase is "self-conscious and vaguely embarrassed."

This conversation was sparked, as media junkies will know, by a bizarre attack launched on Michael Kinsley, now the editorial and opinion editor of the Los Angeles Times, by Susan Estrich, a self-styled feminist. In a ranting, raving series of e-mails last month, all of which were leaked, naturally, Estrich accused Kinsley of failing to print enough articles by women, most notably herself, and of resorting instead to the use of articles by men, as well as by women who don't count as women because they don't write with "women's voices."

[E}strich.... just launched a conversation that is seriously bad for female columnists and writers. None of the ones I know -- and, yes, I conducted an informal survey -- want to think of themselves as beans to be counted, or as "female journalists" with a special obligation to write about "women's issues." Most of them got where they are by having clear views, knowing their subjects, writing well and learning to ignore the ad hominem attacks that go with the job. But now, thanks to Estrich, every woman who gets her article accepted will have to wonder whether it was her knowledge of Irish politics, her willingness to court controversy or just her gender that won the editor over.

Scott Johnson (aka Big Trunk) at Powerline (h/t to them, by the way, for the link to the Applebaum piece) wonders if Applebaum is willing to extend the analogy of the negative consequences of this kind of bean counting to other situations, specifically affirmative action for minorities. I don't think Applebaum is under any obligation to extend it. Nor does Johnson avoid, by his choice of language, making the connection himself. Rather, I think it is perfectly obvious to all but the mortgaged (to affirmative action political spoils) and the insane that the analogy is nearly a perfect one. Have not rational opponents of affirmative action been making the case for years that legislating equal outcomes has the most pernicious effects on those who succeed by their own efforts? Applebaum's informal survey is just the latest bit of evidence, as if more were needed, that the costs are borne by those who make their own way.

It is only fear and intimidation that prevents a reasoned debate about this effect. Having been granted by feel-good liberals an impenetrable political fortress, race hustlers, and now gender hustlers, snipe with impunity at all comers. But maybe they've gone too far: if saner heads can prevail in knocking down this Estrich atrocity, maybe the entire equal outcome fortress can be exposed as the malignant relic that it is.

Do you think it is just my imagination?

That Lebanese pro-democracy rally-goers are the better half?

Well, it's not just me. Check this.

Welcome aboard! This is Capt. Kim Black, of the 37th Bomb Squadron, our only female B-1 Lancer pilot (9 years). Photo courtesy of Strategy Page. Follow the link for much higher resolution.

Michael Totten is a pretty astute blogger, not to mention that he lives in Portland. He received a comment from one of his readers, who wrote a "Dear Nancy" letter, to Democrat Nancy Pelosi. Totten thought enough of the letter to exhume it from a comment thread and feature it in an original post. The author of the Dear Nancy letter is a Democrat himself, but admits that Howard Dean and the moonbat anti-war left are driving him from the party. Here's just a snippet; it's worth reading the whole thing - as well as Nancy Pelosi's wet blanket reply.

Dear Rep Pelosi,

If I had to pick one guy who was most responsible for driving me out of the Democratic Party and into the arms of the Republicans, it would be Howard Dean. Welcome him to the DNC? I'd just as soon welcome Noam Chomsky, the late Edward Said, or Ward Churchill, or Juan "Israel is always wrong" Cole...

Hey, normally, my being a Democrat would be a lead pipe cinch. Pro choice? Check! Pro Gay Marriage? Check! Pro women's rights, whatever that is these days? Check! Do I have a pro-Democratic voting record? Check! (Voted for Jimmy Carter twice, Mondale, Dukakis, Clinton twice, and even, God help me, Al Gore.)

But the promiscuous, intellectually and morally slutty Anti-War Movement ("We don't care how bloodthirsty the Palestinian Extremist anti-war speaker is, he's a bastard, but he's our bastard" attitude) has driven me out. Now, Howard Dean probably doesn't share all of the above views, but he certainly has legitimized them, and that makes him totally unacceptable to me.

You want me back? It will take a Sister Soulja speech straight to the black heart of the anti-war left.

Thanks and a hat tip to Lileks for linking us to this picture of another worthy entrant in the yet-to-be held Lebanese "Miss Freedom" contest. Typical of Lileks, God love 'im, is his take on the placard in the background of the photo.

But that picture is interesting for a third reason: The words on the placard are from “Braveheart.” That’s what William Wallace shouted to rouse the troops. I’m not quite sure what it means – it’s one of those sentiments that falls apart when you interrogate it too closely, but on the other hand it makes sense, somehow. Except that you would be dead, but free. But Free! But dead. On the other hand, if you quibble about such things, you live in a society where Quibbling is the main intellectual activity, because the real struggles of life took place before you came along, and you’ve inherited peace and stability and freedom, and define “tyranny” as the actions of a town council that votes to ban body-piercing parlors within 1000 feet of an elementary school. Fargin’ fascists, man.

I think the Lebanese pro-democracy rallies deserve our fullest support!

Blackhawk pilot and milblogger "2Slick" has some under (er, un-) reported information from Iraq:

Did you know that 47 countries have re-established their embassies inIraq?

Did you know that the Iraqi government employs 1.2 million Iraqi people?

Did you know that 3100 schools have been renovated, 364 schools are under rehabilitation, 263 schools are now under construction and 38 new schools have been built in Iraq?

Did you know that Iraq's higher educational structure consists of 20 Universities, 46 Institutes or colleges and 4 research centers?

Did you know that 25 Iraq students departed for the United States in January 2004 for the re-established Fulbright program?

Did you know that the Iraqi Navy is operational? They have 5- 100-footpatrol craft, 34 smaller vessels and a naval infantry regiment.

Did you know that Iraq's Air Force consists of three operational squadrons, 9 reconnaissance and 3 US C-130 transport aircraft which operate day and night, and will soon add 16 UH-1 helicopters and 4 Bell jet rangers?

Did you know that Iraq has a counter-terrorist unit and a Commando Battalion? Did you know that the Iraqi Police Service has over 55,000 fully trained and equipped police officers?

Did you know that there are 5 Police Academies in Iraq that produce over 3500 new officers each 8 weeks?

Did you know there are more than 1100 building projects going on in Iraq? They include 364 schools, 67 public clinics, 15 hospitals, 83 railroad stations, 22 oil facilities, 93 water facilities and 69 electrical facilities.

Did you know that 96% of Iraqi children under the age of 5 have received the first 2 series of polio vaccinations?

Did you know that 4.3 million Iraqi children were enrolled in primary school by mid October?

Did you know that there are 1,192,000 cell phone subscribers in Iraq andphone use has gone up 158%?

Did you know that Iraq has an independent media that consist of 75 radio stations, 180 newspapers and 10 television stations?

Did you know that the Baghdad Stock Exchange opened in June of 2004?

Did you know that 2 candidates in the Iraqi presidential election had a televised debate recently?

2Slick concludes, inevitably:

OF COURSE WE DIDN'T KNOW! WHY DIDN'T WE KNOW? - OUR MEDIA WOULDN'T TELL US!... The lack of accentuating the positive in Iraq serves only one purpose. It undermines the world's perception of the United States and our soldiers. I AM ASHAMED OF MY FELLOW AMERICANS WHO WOULD RATHER SEE TERRORISM SUCCEED THAN A REPUBLICAN PRESIDENT.

Here's a handy guide on how to spot a dictatorship, courtesy of Coyote Blog (h/t Instapundit).

...Many on the left bent themselves into pretzels supporting blatant totalitarians in hopes of seeing George Bush fail. Other leftists continue to be strong Marxists, supporting socialist regimes with a blind eye towards their human rights records.

While the socialists are probably a loss, there is still hope for much of the left to craft a freedom- and individual-rights-based foreign policy that libertarians could find compelling -- I handed out some free advice here. However, before the left can really make progress here, the need to learn how to recognize a dictatorship:

You Know its a Dictatorship When:

1. Michael Moore portrays the country as a kite-flying paradise
2. Jimmy Carter sanctioned their last election
3. The UN certifies that there is no genocide
4. They sign friendship pacts with other dictatorships (also here and here and here too)
5. They are a member of the UN Human Rights commission (not 100% foolproof but getting closer every year)
6. They were once a French colony, and/or France is opposing sanctions against it (also here too)

7. Their people are impoverished and they lag the world in economic growth

David Horowitz writes today in his blog at Front Page Magazine that when he decided to become a conservative, after an all-star career on the left, he got a good steer from an eminent neocon (himself a former leftist):

When I first became a conservative I introduced myself to Norman Podhoretz the editor of Commentary Magazine. Podhoretz said to me: "When you were a leftist, David, they let you get away with everything. Now that you're a conservative, they won't let you get away with anything." Truer words were never said.

Bookmark Front Page, and especially the magazine's new feature, Discover the Network. DTN is a massive and thorough catalog of the political left and its actors, and predictably has leftists in paroxysms of rage.

Did you know that you can obtain a college degree in the field of "Cinema Studies"? There's a piece in the NYT about it, from which blogger John J. Reilly quotes:

"People endowed with social power and prestige are able to use film and media images to reinforce their power - we need to look to film to grant power to those who are marginalized or currently not represented," said [a student], who envisions a future in the public policy arena. The communal nature of film, he said, has a distinct power to affect large groups, and he expects to use his cinematic skills to do exactly that.

Oh, that's rich. I'll leave the coup de grace to Reilly:

Look, if your undergraduate or graduate degree will give you the power to cloud men's minds, that's just wonderful. However, please have the grace to employ these dark arts for your own selfish purposes. You at least have some idea what you want, and you can tell when you are satisfied. If you try to do this kind of thing for what you imagine other people want or need, then neither you nor the victims of your benevolence are going to be happy.

Ann Coulter is the bane of all liberals; sometimes even conservatives have to cringe at her rhetoric. But other times she is nearly perfect. Like today, in an article about the near-irrelevance of the Democratic Party, this gem:

Democrats are even pretending to believe in God – you know, as they understand Her.

Does it seem like

there are a helluva lot of

very nice looking

not to say hot

young women engaged in

Lebanon's pro-democracy rallies?

Consider this thought experiment. Toss a coin a thousand times and note the frequency of "heads." If the result is 530 heads out of a thousand, is it reasonable to conclude that the coin is not fair? Perhaps not; the one-thousand tosses doesn't adequately account for a host of potential variables: weather, season, mood or sex of the tosser, etc. We might still have a fair coin.

Well then, have a thousand people (men and women) in a thousand places toss the coin a thousand times. If the results of these one-million tosses were gathered and it was found that "heads" in no event came up fewer than 500 times nor more than 550 times - and in fact averaged 530 - could we still say that the coin is fair?

In fact we could not. We would do what we as rational beings do when faced with empirical evidence of this type: we would say the coin is not fair, and is slightly biased towards “heads”; and further that there is a 53% chance that when tossed again the coin will yield "heads."

But this is nothing like certainty that the coin is unfair, and it may still be technically true to say that the coin is fair. The important distinction, however, is that this is a trivial logical truth; and as such it is fatuous. In spite of its abstract logical truth, we are obliged to infer the probability of heads on subsequent tosses from the frequency of heads in the large and varied sample of tosses already made.

Of course there is no controversy in making any of these statements. Further, it will be agreed that as humans we could hardly get through our days without recourse to this kind of reasoning. But if on the other hand we apply the very same logic, and suggest that women do not possess the intellectual capacity of men; and if we similarly base that observation on the intellectual performances of men and women -- over the whole of recorded history -- the response will be neither abstract nor logical; it will be swift and severe.

Such anyway was the response that greeted Larry Summers, president of Harvard University. Should Mr. Summers choose to make a stout defense of his contested statements, as opposed to buckling to the rigidities of inquisitorial campus political correctness, he could help himself greatly by an afternoon's study of David Stove. It is from Stove that I have borrowed the example of the coin toss, and on whom I rely (and excerpt) in this article. In a very compelling book of essays called Against The Idols of the Age, Stove, an Austrailian philosopher who died in 1994, is seemingly riding to Mr. Summers' aid with an essay called "The Intellectual Capacity of Women." Mr. Summers, if you can hear me, buy this book - and get a spine.

In the first words of the essay Stove, by his choice of language, makes the strongest appeal for clarity in the language we employ:

I believe that the intellectual capacity of women is on the whole inferior to that of men. By "on the whole," I do not mean just "on the average"; though I do mean that much. My belief is that, if you take any degree of intellectual capacity which is above average for the human race as a whole, then a possessor of that degree of intellectual capacity is a good deal more likely to be a man than a woman.

This proposition is consistent, of course, with there being women, and indeed with there being any number of women, at any level of intellectual capacity however high. But it does mean, for example, that if there is a large number of women at a given above average level of intellectual capacity, then there is an even larger number of men at that level.

Observe that he is not saying that women cannot and do not reach levels of intellectual achievement as high as men. But why does Stove hold this opinion, not to mention risk opprobrium to elaborate it? I think it is because he is making a very precise (and defensible) point, and because he sees clearly what we can and can’t know. Since our understanding of the life sciences (genetics, biology, etc.) as potential explicators of the disparity is wanting, we are left with, as in the coin case, having to make inferences from the observed frequencies; that is, “on inferring the comparative intellectual capacities of men and women from their comparative intellectual performances in that large and varied sample which is past human history. .... Human intellectual capacity is a coin which has been tossed, not a million times, but very many billions of times.” [Italics mine -- ed.]

Note the distinction, critical to this line of reasoning: performance is not the same thing as capacity. Nor is inferior intellectual performance proof of inferior intellectual capacity. But not until our scientific understanding catches up to our cultural dilemma – and most certainly not until the pall of political correctness falls away from this and scores of other debates – will we have settled the issue of capacity. Until such time we are thrown back, as with the coins, on “having to infer the probabilities from the observed frequencies.”

Yet the “equality-theorists” will say that there hasn’t been enough variety in the “trials”, adding that there has always been some factor or factors that have hindered the intellectual capacity of women, thereby depressing its frequency below expected probabilities. One reasonably thinks of the burden of reproduction and nurture, a burden that falls exclusively on the female, as a significant limiting factor in the intellectual performance of women.

The recent phenomenon of fathers being present at the birth of their children, and of helping with the diapers, is but play when compared with the “deadly earnest business” which is going on at every moment between mother and infant. The performance of this earnest business is hard-wired into the female homo-sapiens; and while it is of the most vital importance, it cannot be argued that it requires much in the way of intellectual capacity. By contrast, males of the species have, for as long as we have evidence, had to rely on their wit and cunning, in constantly changing circumstances, in protecting and providing for this fledgling family. From these and other performances, repeated over thousands of years, we are obliged to infer capacities.

If a species devotes a large part of its energy-budget to food-getting say, or the defense of territory, or home-making, or reproduction, or nurture of the young, then one sex takes on more of that task than the other does, and it will take on less of some other task [an organic principle known as parsimony]; and either sex will be comparatively or entirely deficient in the capacities required for the “specialisms” of the other sex. [It] is not an invariable rule, but it is the general rule: if you take any major task that a species performs, it is exceptional for the two sexes to be exactly equipped to perform it.

Stove knows where you equality theorists are going right now: it is only because of our hegemonic patriarchal culture that women have been kept from attaining their true and actual capacity. Even absent the histrionics this will not do at all as an explanation. For whatever explanation is chosen it must be consistent with the equality theory. It does no good to say, “The main interfering factor has been the aggressiveness, sexual exclusiveness, and superior cunning of males."

This suggestion, considered in itself, is by no means without merit: aggressiveness, sexual exclusiveness, and superior cunning are definite and detectable things, and I at least believe that they actually do operate in males, and do impede, to some extent, the intellectual performance of women. But of course the suggestion is not one which an equality theorist can adopt, since to ascribe superior cunning to males is to contradict the very intellectual equality for which he contends.

If that familiar line of defense is contradictory and off limits logically, surely there can be no argument that access to education and learning has historically been withheld from women, right up through the present day. Stove has anticipated this argument too.

Wherever some defect has been found or imagined in existing arrangements for the education of females, energetic and ingenious people have always been busy setting up a form of education free from that real or supposed defect. Novel schemes of education, intended among other things to remove obstacles to the exercise of the intellectual capacity of women, are at least as old as Plato, and hundreds of them have been put into more or less widespread practice. Yet despite all this variety in the supposed causes of female intellectual performance, the effects have been singularly invariant. I do not mean that these schemes of education have never had any effect at all on female intellectual performance. I do not know, but it is in any case indifferent to my thesis, whether they have or not. My thesis only requires, what is the case, that educational innovations have never shown any significant tendency to bridge the gap between male and female intellectual performance.

We are left to wonder what change in the frequency and variety of our observations of these disparities would constitute a fair trial in the minds of the equality defenders. If in fact we were to observe, for the next one thousand years and in the widest variety of circumstances, that the intellectual performance of women was on a par with that of men, we would still be none the wiser about how the intellectual capacities of the two sexes compare. This is because certainty is out of reach (for now) on such a question; the only guide we have to intellectual capacity is intellectual performance. Think again of the coins.

Is not this virtually unlimited variety, variety enough? Has it not constituted a fair trial of the intellectual capacity of women? “No,” says the equality-theorist. But this theory now begins to remind us of a supremely silly thing which G. K. Chesterton once said: that Christianity has not been tried and found wanting, but was found difficult, and never properly tried. Now, I ask you: Christianity has not had a fair trial!?! Why, at this rate, nothing has ever had a fair trial, and we can know, or even rationally believe, nothing whatever about the capacities of anything. But this is just an even stronger version of that silly skepticism…that human history can never constitute a fair trial. In fact we know, or near enough know, that Christianity does not have the capacity, which it claims to have, to satisfy indefinitely the religious aspirations of all human beings. And such a case proves, let us notice, that an historical sample of performance can be varied enough, and large enough, to be the basis of a rational inference to capacity, or rather to the lack of capacity.

A comparison between Christianity, and the supposedly equal intellectual capacity of women, is in fact worth pausing over. Equality-theorists are never tired of reminding us of the obstacles which have been put in the way of the exercise of the intellectual capacity of women, at such-and-such a period, in that society or the other; and of course there are countless such cases. Those obstacles, however, have never been more than trifles when compared with the obstacles which, in countless cases, have been put in the way of the practice of the Christian religion. It is a mere abuse of words to speak, as some do, of “martyrs” and “persecution” in the one case as in the other. In both cases, for every instance in which some obstacle was put in the way, there is another instance in which that obstacle was not put in the way. Now, Christianity has sometimes made its way, sometimes without obstacles, sometimes even with obstacles; whereas the supposed equal intellectual capacity of women has never made its way, with or even without obstacles. Yet female intellectual capacity has obviously been tried in a far greater number of cases, and in a far wider variety of circumstances, than Christianity.

Stove admits to having been asked what it would take for him to be convinced that the intellectual capacity of women is equal to that of men. After recourse to the study of historical performance differentials, he believes the question is more fairly turned around: “What would convince you (the equality-theorist) of the inferior intellectual capacity of women?” Owing to the religious quality of the theorist's attachment to their theory, an easy answer would not be forthcoming.

This is a sad state of affairs, but it is, of course, the equality-theorists who are chiefly to blame for bringing it about. For they have created in recent years a climate of feeling in which many men are afraid to deny the equality-theory openly, and even ashamed to doubt it inwardly. Hence the phenomena which are now so observable, of hypocrisy, self-deception, and pious fraud: those inevitable concomitants of a militant religion.

We must pause to admire Stove’s prescience in describing precisely the situation that exists today at Harvard. But surely even he could not have guessed that Summers, for the “thought crime” of speculating that there might be genetic reasons that women are underrepresented in the fields of mathematics and science, would in the year 2005 be facing a virtual auto da fe. Given his wit though, I think there can be little doubt that Stove would be having a sardonic laugh at the prospect of an MIT biologist admitting to this reaction to Summers’ remarks: "I felt I was going to be sick. . . . My heart was pounding and my breath was shallow", as one Nancy Hopkins did.

To conclude the essay, Stove once again asks the equality-theorists: What would convince them of the falsity of their belief? What would they even regard as being some evidence against it?

Any serious answers to these questions would be instructive, but I do not really expect to receive any such answer. The evidence for the inferior intellectual capacity of women is so obvious and overwhelming, that anyone who can lightly set it aside must be defective in their attitude to evidence; and our contemporary equality-theorists are in fact (as I have hinted several times) religious rather than rational in their attitude to evidence. As providing some further indication of this, the following thought-experiment may be of use. Suppose that the historical evidence had been the exact reverse of what has usually been: that is, suppose that the intellectual performance of men had been uniformly inferior, under the widest variety of circumstances, to that of women. Rational people would in that case be as confident of the superior intellectual capacity of women as they now are of the reverse. But would those people who are at present equality-theorists be as confident then as they are now of the equal intellectual capacity of the two sexes? To ask this question is to answer it. The fact is, our egalitarians treat evidence on a basis of heads-I-win-tails-you-lose; indeed, to say so is putting it mildly at that.

Please refrain from giving further proof to Stove’s analogy of the “militant religious” nature of the believers, by stoning the messenger, i.e., me. Be careful to understand Stove’s thesis and the precise language he employs. And remember that outside the cloistered halls of the institutions which have prostrated themselves in the church of political correctness, there are many who will and do support this proposition.