Brown vs. Gown

How did the good people of Cambridge, Mass, home of Harvard the world's most celebrated university (whose motto is veritas) vote in yesterday's Senatorial election? According to this site, 84% went with the state-wide loser, Democrat Martha Coakley, over Scott Brown who won 53% state-wide.

It seems to me here is objective proof that either the Harvard elite know so much better than the ordinary townspeople the truth what's good for all; or it's proof that academe is led by a Gnostic elite who reject worldly realities in favour of a special vision in hopes of a world redeemed by an expert elect, the counterpart to which is a deep resentment of ordinary folk:

You voted for hatred, you voted for ignorance, you voted for Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck and the vomit producing Republican Party...

But as today the blogs are full of invites to Brownmania, of one kind or another, I think Wretchard of Belmont Club (a blog named for the neighboring town to Cambridge, where Wretchard lived in his Harvard student days - Belmont went 59% for Coakley) provides a healthy warning of the dangers evidenced by a nation run by an elite who, in one way or another, have not the power to control events that I think the Harvard elect likes to imagine they have, or at least should have:

the events of the last few weeks in Massachusetts are a perfect example of an “emergent event”. When the conditions favor it something just happens out of the blue. In a complex system the interactions between things become so complicated that a wholly new phenomenon may just pop up.

Only a little while ago, the SS Coakley was sailing along on a calm ocean, without a cloud in sight. She was as good as docked in Washington DC when all of a sudden this rogue wave comes out of nowhere and turns the ship over. Except it didn’t come out of nowhere. It came out the underlying conditions that sooner or later, through some stochastic process was going to kick up a mega wave. Scott Brown happened to be it.

What really terrifies me about the gradually weakening of the West’s margin of strength by those who assume they still have a wide degree of safety is that the complex system is out there — the financial, economic and security universe — and we just assume from vanity that we can handle it. But it is not linearly predictable, especially when the number of variables beyond the control of the West increases. The last 20 years have created a dangerous world, full of failed states, chock a block with politicians with less sense than an ass, led on by jesters, addled academics and confidence men. And the assumption is that tomorrow will be just like yesterday because it always has.

No. Obama seemed to have everything. By every measure he was ahead. But if you looked at the fundamentals you could see he was building a sand castle in the face of a running tide. His measures showed him safe. But his measures were the wrong ones. And what happened is there for all to see. “You can’t win them all”. Ha.

We live in a world that has far more volatility than before. We ought to be increasing the design margin the way a general, with no knowledge of the future, increases his reserves. Instead we’ve gone from money in the bank to living from paycheck to paycheck. Now we’re borrowing our way out of debt. We ought to be shortening our OODA loop, empowering people rather than making them more dependent on tottering hierarchical structures which bleat out “the system worked” whenever you press a button. It won’t go on, because it can’t.

Who knows what the next emergent event will be? The only thing one can be fairly sure of is that Robert Gibbs would not have foreseen it.

Another sign that Copenhagen is destructive of the possibility of a human covenant

Lord Monckton reports:

Outside, in the real world, it was snowing, and a foretaste of the Brave New World being cooked up by “world leaders” in their fantasy-land was already evident. Some 20,000 observers from non-governmental organizations – nearly all of them true-believing Green groups funded by taxpayers – had been accredited to the conference.

However, without warning the UN had capriciously decided that all but 300 of them were to be excluded from the conference today, and all but 90 would be excluded on the final day.

Of course, this being the inept UN, no one had bothered to notify those of the NGOs that were not true-believers in the UN’s camp. So Senator Steve Fielding of Australia and I turned up with a few dozen other delegates, to be left standing in the cold for a couple of hours while the UN laboriously worked out what to do with us.


In the end, they decided to turn us away, which they did with an ill grace and in a bad-tempered manner. As soon as the decision was final, the Danish police moved in. One of them began the now familiar technique of manhandling me, in the same fashion as one of his colleagues had done the previous day.

Once again, conscious that a police helicopter with a high-resolution camera was hovering overhead, I thrust my hands into my pockets in accordance with the St. John Ambulance crowd-control training, looked my assailant in the eye and told him, quietly but firmly, to take his hands off me.

He complied, but then decided to have another go. I told him a second time, and he let go a second time. I turned to go and, after I had turned my back, he gave me a mighty shove that flung me to the ground and knocked me out.

I came to some time later (not sure exactly how long), to find my head being cradled by my friends, some of whom were doing their best to keep the police thugs at bay while the volunteer ambulance-men attended to me.

I was picked up and dusted me off. I could not remember where I had left my telephone, which had been in my hand at the time when I was assaulted. I rather fuzzily asked where it was, and one of the police goons shouted, “He alleges he had a mobile phone.”

In fact, the phone was in my coat pocket, where my hand had been at the time of the assault. The ambulance crew led me away and laid me down under a blanket for 20 minutes to get warm, plying me with water and keeping me amused with some colorfully colloquial English that they had learned.

I thanked them for their kindness, left them a donation for their splendid service, and rejoined my friends. A very senior police officer then came up and asked if I was all right. Yes, I said, but no thanks to one of his officers, who had pushed me hard from behind when my back was turned and had sent me flying.

The police chief said that none of his officers would have done such a thing. I said that several witnesses had seen the incident, which I intended to report. I said I had hoped to receive an apology but had not received one, and would include that in my report. The policeman went off looking glum, and with good reason.

To assault an accredited representative of a conference your nation is hosting, and to do it while your own police cameramen are filming from above, and to do it without any provocation except my polite, non-threatening request that I should not be manhandled, is not a career-enhancing move, as that police chief is about to discover to his cost.

Nor does this incident, and far too many like it, reflect the slightest credit on Denmark. We must make reasonable allowance for the fact that the unspeakable security service of the UN, which is universally detested by those at this conference, was ordering the Danish police about. The tension between the alien force and the indigenous men on the ground had grown throughout the conference.

However, the Danish police were far too free with their hands when pushing us around, and that is not acceptable in a free society. But then, Europe is no longer a free society. It is, in effect, a tyranny ruled by the unelected Kommissars of the European Union. That is perhaps one reason why police forces throughout Europe, including that in the UK, have become far more brutal than was once acceptable in their treatment of the citizens they are sworn to serve.

It is exactly this species of tyranny that the UN would like to impose upon the entire planet, in the name of saving us from ourselves – or, as Ugo Chavez would put it, saving us from Western capitalist democracy.

A few weeks ago, at a major conference in New York, I spoke about this tendency towards tyranny with Dr. Vaclav Klaus, the distinguished economist and doughty fighter for freedom and democracy who is President of the Czech Republic.

While we still have one or two statesmen of his caliber, there is hope for Europe and the world. Unfortunately, he refused to come to Copenhagen, telling me that there was no point, now that the lunatics were firmly in control of the asylum.

However, I asked him whether the draft Copenhagen Treaty’s proposal for what amounted to a communistic world government reminded him of the Communism under which he and his country had suffered for so long.

He thought for a moment – as statesmen always do before answering an unusual question – and said, “Maybe it is not brutal. But in all other respects, what it proposes is far too close to Communism for comfort.”

Today, as I lay in the snow with a cut knee, a bruised back, a banged head, a ruined suit, and a written-off coat, I wondered whether the brutality of the New World Order was moving closer than President Klaus – or any of us – had realized.

In case you are wondering who Lord Monckton is, check out this interview with Michael Coren. Note that Monckton is man of good cheer, the opposite of the "scare tactician" discussed by David Warren in my previous post.

Richard Fernandez at Belmont Club has some provocative thoughts on the dystopian future that may be our fate if we sign on to the belief that our economies need to be ruled and taxed by an unaccountable international elite who claim authority in the name of "climate change".

The West's cult of human sacrifice

(Update: welcome Steyn/NRO readers; feel free to join the discussion in the comments...)

If you ever doubted that the political correctness of the West is a cult of human sacrifice, one that needs a continual stream of victims to sustain its reality-denying pieties, now is the time to watch the MSM. Wretchard, as he so often does, provides some great analysis of the problem, as he responds to MSM reports that the Fort Hood killer, Hassan, was somehow a victim of Muslim baiting, traumatic stress, and "compassion fatigue" (quotes are from comments 47, 110, 132, and 155):

I wonder whether we as a society kept saying “it’s OK” even when it really wasn’t OK. So a guy like Hasan follows the breadcrumbs without apparent consequence. Political correctness denies him any real negative feedback until one day the breadcrumbs lead him over the edge and society comes at him like Gangbusters. The negative feedback comes all at once all in the shape of the SWAT team.

Even after the Fort Hood incident polite society may still be sort of sending the message “it’s OK” by dancing around the jihad issue. This disincentivizes the Muslims who hate what Hasan did by making them invisible men. Society has built a kind of closet for peaceable Muslims to go an hide in. If any of them wanted to come out and call Hasan an SOB they’d be like little kids looking around them in a haunted wood surrounded by thousands of glowing wolf eyes.

I sometimes wonder whether half the guys who decide to go and become jihadis aren’t carried along three quarters of the way by polite approval and reflexive anti-Americanism until all some imam has to do was pick them up and carry them across the finish line. While it’s true Hasan crossed the line all on his own it may be because he had the guts to put some of the toxic points some people only talk about into action. The things he espoused are old hat. You can get any edgy radical to say them. It was the action that was new.
[...]
All democratic struggles, whether in secular society or in a religious context, are between the region +/- 2 sigma from the mean and the tails. In other words, it’s a battle that the ordinary Joe — or Mehmet as the case may be — must wage to preserve daily life against the brilliant kooks on the right hand tail of the distribution and the moron kooks on the left hand tail. It’s between the people who are content to wait for Jesus — or the 13th imam — and those who for reasons of their own, think they are the Messiah — or Mahdi — himself.

One of the reasons political correctness is so damaging is that it shuts everybody up. It creates inaction, and therefore prevents the implementation of small, relatively painless corrections until a huge head of steam is built up; like a boiler at 2,000 psi, just waiting to blow. It constipates every politician; turns public discourse into codespeak, creates a climate of suspicion, enables fruitcakes and in general turns the whole friggin political arena into a funny farm.
[...]
I don’t think it is right to wish for the death of hundreds of millions of people or to hope for mass deportations. But it is precisely for that reason that it is important to restore a rational process that prosecutes the guilty and protects the innocent. When you think about it there is little to choose from between a system of political correctness which treats everyone, regardless of guilt, as innocent and one that treats everyone, regardless of innocence, as guilty. Both have the same net outcome: the goats have no incentive to separate themselves from the sheep.

Political correctness is lynch mob mentality in another guise. The eventual effects are the same. Group innocence flips to group guilt. Eventually anyway. It just delays the lynching until everyone can be hanged. So everything tootles along in a kind of fake normalcy with everyone smiling fakely at everyone else with gritted teeth until the desired and long awaited Der Tag comes along and then it is open season. The beast gets turned loose and look out below.

Now it is precisely because we must avoid nuking this place and that place in response to a nuke in this American city or that American city that a legitimate war on terror must be fought. That UN rapporteur who thinks using Predators is a violation of international law has everything backwards. If you don’t get them terrorists the day will come when it won’t be Predators but B1s and B2s that will be in action. It’s like the national security equivalent of the subprime crisis. Keep kicking the can down the road until you kick it over a precipice and then follow after it. It’s crazy.

What the subprime crisis — and the deficit spending of today — has convinced me of is that many politicians have absolutely no regard for long term consequences. they couldn’t care less. What matters is now. Ahora. En este momento. What happens tomorrow is none of their concern. Sayonara buddy. Been nice knowing you. You’d think it impossible, but we just saw it happen to the economy. Now we think: but surely the politicians can’t be crazy enough to set up a powderkeg that blow up in our faces. I wouldn’t bet on it.

But I think the real enemy — in the sense of the most important enemy — isn’t a bunch of flea-bitten jihadis sitting in a cave somewhere. It’s Western civilization’s craziness. We are setting our hair on fire and putting it out with a hammer.
[...]
What I’m really scared of, especially after watching the self-flagellating clips on TV talk shows, is that the elite are finally on the road to giving the Openly Ridiculous Order. Hasan created a terrible dilemma for the politically correct. If they recognize his existence their whole house collapses; and rather than bend slightly and allow for the fact that America might just be facing an enemy, they’ve doubled down. It’s incredible, but a lot of them are upping the ante on a patently ludicrous proposition. ‘Hasan was just too compassionate. Hasan was just another victim of George Bush’s failed policy’.

And the net result of this, if the PC clowns can get away with their campaign of inversion they will practically ensure two things happen simultaneously. A: they will make any rational inquiry into traitors in the military impossible and B: they will put all Muslims, however patriotic, however brave under a cloud of suspicion from which they can never emerge. It will be like affirmative action in its worst sense all over again. Rather than promote integration it will promote fractionalization. If America doesn’t have a Muslim problem now it soon will — courtesy of political correctness.

But there’s worse.

Eventually you will have situations in which people who are actually not trusted may be put in formal positions of authority simply because they can’t be questioned. This when the Openly Ridiculous Order situation comes in. When an elite starts to issue lunatic directives a certain something snaps. They lose legitimacy. People obey, but they do not comply. In other words, they start to obey only when the bosses are around. The moment the super leaves the room, they all start to laugh at him.

The really perverse thing about political correctness isn’t that they give you slops to eat; it’s that they give you slops to eat and expect you to smile and ask for seconds. The entire exercise is pointless except as an exercise and confirmation of power over you.

Societies don’t last long when their leaders become ridiculous. It’s a dangerous moment. In many ways the damage that Hasan created in Fort Hood, bad though it was, will be as nothing to the cannons he’s untied that are now rolling unsecured around the deck.

Wretchard on fire: testament to the truth of faith

Moving on from his original post on Pope Benedict's recent entreaty to conservative Anglicans, Wretchard of Belmont Club has been leading a discussion with some excellent comments. I particularly like this last:

It is the side-effect of this “otherworldliness” that fuels many of the common notions of freedom. Every worldly religion tends toward a closed system. Part of the power of the Declaration, I think, stems from the idea that the world is even in principle never completely definable by a human agency. It leaves the door open to new information from outside the system, represented by the notation “the Creator”.

Winston Smith attempts to rebut O’brien’s assertion of the Party’s omnipotence by pointing out that O’brien himself was aging; that Party members died; that it could not control the natural laws. O’brien responded with the torture machine. He made the five fingers he held up seem as many as he claimed. O’brien argued that the Party did not seek dominion over nature. It sought dominion over man. The quotes supplied by Storm Rider and cited below are true, but not in the way they are commonly supposed. From a purely secular point of view, what they signify is that for a Kingdom of This World to be complete, it is first necessary that God should not exist. The Universe must be closed. The Party’s word must be final. It is imperative that the Last Prophet should have come. The book is ended and the ultimate words are written, not as an earnest of more to come, but as a grant of absolute power to those who rule on the earth.

“It is not true, as is sometimes said, that man cannot organize the world without God. What is true is that, without God, he can only organize it against man.” Henri de Lubac

“If God does not exist, then everything is permitted” Fyodor Dostoyevsky

What Dostoevsky might have said is that for everything to be permitted to the State, then God must not exist. If God does not exist, then the State is free to organize against man. The ideological imperative of global warmingism is this: even nature must be brought into the political system. There is no “out there” there. Not God, not Nature. Not anything you might want to call the Creator. Everything is subject to the political process. Man must control the climate. If the climate goes bad, it is because our politics is bad. Sacerdotal dictatorships have not advanced much beyond the shamans of millenia past. We still sacrifice for rain. Only we sacrifice jobs, abort children, extinguish our dreams. Nothing is beyond their purview. We should never be allowed to think something the state cannot give or approve of. Hence “hate speech”. More than that, we ought never to be able to even dream of what it cannot bestow. Unless the far green country under a swift sunrise is manufactured by the state, it should never be allowed to enter into our visions. “It’s for the children” refers to us.

All real totalitarianisms are ultimately intellectually sterile, not simply spiritually barren. That is why global warming is in many respects anti-science. Real science has never heard of truth by consensus. Science leaves the door of knowledge open. We continuously learn from what is “not of this world” — in the sense that which is not within our purview yet. We learn from what is over the next hill, across the wide ocean, beyond the gulfs of space; we learn from events that occured before we were born and perhaps of events after we die. The first thing that faith must preserve is wonder; and the second is a childlike curiosity. Freedom stems from the sense of the possible. It believes there’s always a door leading out of the building. A far green country under a swift sunrise.
Oct 23, 2009 - 10:18 am

Belmont Club » The lighting of the beacons

I would only add that given that this faith in open-endedness, in a further truth beyond our present and conceivable human systems, is indeed a real necessity for human freedom; and given that many people today just are not going to be capable of faith in some supernatural "God" as explanation for this reality of an inexhaustible truth (the inexhaustibilty of the ways in which the human might come to know itself in future), this is just the reason, as I was suggesting to Dag the other day, that we need to allow ourselves to explore the anthropology of the human concept of "God", not to diminish the basis for real faith by attempting to reduce what cannot be reduced to systematic knowledge, but to create a greater faith in the human ability and necessity ever to expand the degrees of freedom in our shared systems and forms of sacrality.

So the last of the loony Euro aristocrats have confirmed Obama's deification, giving him the Nobel peace prize just a little too soon

The confirmation of the deification is also its demise. Too much special pleading, especially when it comes before the great sacrifice, even destroys the authority of would-be gods. The Norwegian lady doth protest too much.

It's times like this when the desperate papering over of reality, like the last days of a Ponzi scheme, becomes obvious to even many diehard believers. The reality of human mimetic desire and conflict reasserts itself in brutal ways and it soon enough becomes clear that men who think one builds peace by destroying alliances and national cultures, abandoning the people to imperial pretensions, blaming everything on a scapegoat (the Burning Bush!), and standing down militarily in the face of some very real rivals - one a rather complete Other with a project to destroy the modern global economy - will have to face the new dawn. History waits for no one, however much we attempt to sacralize a dieing vision, and i think today we are seeing the last gasps of a certain phase in the ongoing Gnostic delusion about the nature of humanity. However, in crisis, opportunity exists for those who must rebuild themselves.

Great comments on how the Norwegians have really put Obama in the bind, at Belmont Club.

I am a little amused that yesterday I somehow "thought" to blog on Churchill's speech responding to the Munich agreement and Chamberlain's "peace in our times". How a propos. Everyone should read that speech from top to bottom for a refresher in the human capacity to believe in a fantasy, or just to give up in the face of hard human realities that entail inescapable conflict and the need to stand up - with others, bonded not just by will but by a shared, loved, reality - or give in. A few weeks ago, I half wrote another post anticipating this day. I didn't finish it so I may as well start cannibalizing it. It ended with a quote from Eric Voegelin that seems appropriate again. Voegelin illuminates the failure of the lonely, elitist, would-be-world-controller with a "Gnostic" will to seriously transform reality through force of personality and asking others just to sign on to "the dream". Writing during the Korean War, in The New Science of Politics (1952), criticizing the various "Gnostic" political religions that think they have achieved some rarefied insight, some systematic and controlling knowledge, some expertise, some insight into reality that mere wingnuts will never know, and that will allow an elect to imagine and shape the future, Voegelin already saw what we all should now know the "internationalist" dream of peace in a UN- and expert-mediated world has become:

The prehistory of the second World War raises the serious question whether the Gnostic dream has not corroded Western society so deeply that rational politics has become impossible, and war is the only instrument left for adjusting disturbances in the balance of existential forces.

The conduct of the war and its aftermath unfortunately are apt to confirm this fear rather than to assuage it. If a war has a purpose at all, it is the restoration of a balance of forces and not the aggravation of the disturbance; it is the reduction of the unbalancing excess of force, not the destruction of force to the point of creating a new unbalancing power vacuum. Instead the [American] Gnostic politicians have put the Soviet army on the Elbe, surrendered China to the Communists, at the same time demilitarized Germany and Japan, and in addition demobilized our own army. The facts are trite, and yet it is perhaps not sufficiently realized that never before in the history of mankind has a world power used a victory deliberately for the purpose of creating a power vacuum to its own disadvantage. And again, as in previous contexts, it is necessary to warn that phenomena of this magnitude cannot be explained by ignorance and stupidity. These policies were pursued as a matter of principle, on the basis of Gnostic dream assumptions about the nature of man, about a mysterious evolution of mankind toward peace and world order, about the possibility of establishing an international order in the abstract without relation to the structure of the field of existential forces, about armies being the cause of war and not the forces and constellations which build them. and set them in motion, etc. The enumerated series of actions, as well as the dream assumptions on which they are based, seem to show that the contact with reality is at least badly damaged and that the pathological substitution of the dream world is fairly effective.

Moreover, it should be noted that the unique phenomenon of a great power creating a power vacuum to its own disadvantage was accompanied by the equally unique phenomenon of military conclusion of a war without conclusion of peace treaties. This rather disturbing further phenomenon again cannot be explained by the baffling complexity of the problems that require settlement. It is again the dream obsession that makes it impossible for the representative of Gnostic societies to formulate policies which take into account the structure of reality. There can be no peace, because the dream cannot be translated into reality and reality has not yet broken the dream. No one, of course, can predict what nightmare of violence it will take to break the dream, and still less so what Western society will look like au bout de la nuit

Gnostic politics, thus, is self-defeating in so far as its disregard for the structure of reality leads to continuous warfare. This system of chain wars can end only in one of two ways. Either it will result in horrible physical destructions and concomitant revolutionary changes of social order beyond reasonable guesses; or, with the natural change of generations, it will lead to the abandoning of Gnostic dreaming before the worst has happened.

I see this is a warning not just to the left-liberals Voegelin was directly criticizing, but also to a kind of "right-wing" reaction to them, one that has itself grown up in the Gnostic culture and is variously indebted to it, and that attends the rise of Obama with a mix of conspiracy paranoia, fear, over-done loathing, and a desire for a conflict that will reveal to those with eyes to see the truth of this reality that at present only a few keen seers can divine. But, as Voeglin argued, turning to conflict, without first attending to the totality of human and historical reality, turning to a desire for battle without seriously pursuing questions of how various kinds of "armies" are created, motivated, and supplied, is a sure-fire recipe not for the victory of an orderly reason, but for more destabilizing conflict.
(HT: Catfur)

Does Obama really hope?

Has a deep-rooted Western nihilism, only masquerading as hope and change, in a perhaps final delusion, found its president?

Belmont Club » Beginnings and endings

One of the tell-tales of a growing dysfunction within a system is the collapse of priorities. When small things begin to loom large and truly momentous events are regarded with a dispassionate, almost distinterested attention, it is often a sign that leadership culture has lost its way. The Week describes the strange narratives being emitted by the Obama administration: talking up fiscal packages that they know are ineffectual; making fatalistic references to Depression Era history and Happy Talk in place of real plans.
[...]
It almost seems like one of those movies where paratroopers are telling jokes before jumping into certain death; almost as if the main issues are foregone and so the conversation must turn to something else. Charles Dickens in Oliver Twist caught the obsession with trivia in the midst of an existential crisis perfectly. When Fagin is sentenced to death, he can think of nothing but unimportant things on the brink of his own execution.
[...]
Dickens might almost be describing the Obama administration. Maybe BHO’s grand speeches aren’t really promises to save the world. Perhaps he’s really saying the precise opposite. Here the illusion ends. There is no cake, as one reader wrote to me, “the cake is a lie.” You know when a man really has hope because he’s full of fight; bursting with defiance. In Obama’s case, it is like watching a man go through the motions while the world prepares to go on, almost without him.
[...]
The British newspapers say the President can’t even fake an interest in foreign affairs. Maybe at the end of the rainbow, the one he’s been chasing all his life, was the thing that had been pursuing him.

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.

Studying habits in an age of ignorance

Mike of Then There was Light reports on Toronto's Israel Apartheid Week Event 1 - Preaching Hate to the Converted:

A complete irony that most people in the crowd are probably too thick to have realized is that the moderator of the event had no idea how to pronounce the word Apartheid - she kept pronouncing the th wrong. And this wasn’t an accent issue, she just genuinely had no idea how to pronounce it. It just goes to show you how much they really know about what Apartheid is. If you didn’t even take the time to learn how to pronounce the word, then isn’t it safe to assume that you never even took the time to learn what it is? Apartheid is completely misrepresented by these people, and it’s such a shame to the true victims of South African Apartheid.
[...]
And this brings me to the point I really want to make. The people involved in this movement are all on the fringe extreme left. This kind of talk is, I am sorry to say it, completely out of touch with reality. Who still refers to themselves in Marxian terms?

And I’m not just talking about the organizers and the speakers being on the fringe extreme left. That’s expected. The good news is that a quick analysis of the demographics of the entire crowd really speaks volumes for the so-called success and growth of this movement. The crowd was almost completely made up of two groups: muslim/arabs, and middle aged Caucasian ex-hippies.

As I commented at Mike's, however, we should not assume that the many who would not waste their time at such an event are immune to all the crazy talk about Israel as some kind of "apartheid" state. The scapegoating of Israel has clearly gone mainstream and is the agenda of many states, the media, academy, and NGOs, among others.

However, because the powerful are often backing the "apartheid" theme in today's representations of Israel, they leave themselves open to revelations that they are not in touch with reality. And that is an opportunity for those of us who want to renew our culture's commitment to a shared reality. Two recent blogs touch on this question of how we can now hope to do some creative work by reaching out to those who are starting already to see the failures of the Obama-led world view. See 1) Wretchard's latest at the Belmont Club:

The time for recriminations comes later. Kimball knows this and warns against the Tertullian heresy, which holds that one of the delights in heaven is watching the damned burn in hell. That’s wrong; even professional soldiers know better. They let defeated generals keep their swords. Right now the important thing is to realize we’re in a hole and to stop digging. Paradoxically, the apparent vindication of those who called for a closer look at the Lightworker will make it harder for those who voted for him to get up on national TV and eat crow. It’s just too humiliating. Although Cramer and even Matthews may get to the point where they substantively criticize Obama’s policies, they’ll dance around BHO for a while, because I don’t see them coming on the air in sackcloth and ashes. Nobody wants to say he was wrong in general, but they don’t mind admitting they were mistaken in particulars. For example, Martin Peretz has been on a campaign to attack Obama’s choice for chairman of the National Intelligence Council, Chas Freeman, as a Saudi stooge. There should be no need to go further. That should be enough of a plank on which to build bridges.

If conservatives are astute they should be building mini-coalitions with Obama supporters who have seen the penny — the two million ton penny — drop. On them.

And for those willing to grapple with the discipline of Generative Anthropology, see Adam's latest at the GABlog:

the Democrats had a near-death experience between 2000-2006, when they were shut out of power at all levels of the federal government for what I assume was the first time since the founding of the party, they have never seen the Republican revolt against the New Deal State as legitimate, and they are determined not to go through all that again. The Global Intifada is in the ascendancy and normalcy is on the defensive–who knows, maybe on its last legs. Of course, it will all crash, but when and how can’t be predicted, nor can the precise shape and size of the pieces that will need to be picked up–much less who will be around with the capacity to start putting them back together. So why talk about it?

And so Adam turns instead to a discussion of habits, since we can discuss our habits in a much less contentious way than we can discuss more formal intellectual or political positions. And yet what are these positions but the distillation of our habits, which are in turn our inheritance from past models of human creativity, and which, in their interactions with other peoples' habits, will somehow lead us to create new models and norms in future when the failure of today's reigning ideologies becomes clear.

Discussing our habits in terms of those who accept risk, who are willing to go "first" in attempts to model some new reality, in contrast to those who go last in affirming a new communal norm and who then hold on most incessantly to this favored model of reality, Adam argues:

The first takes risks, but never everything he has except in an emergency, and certainly never what others have–the first needs his credibility so as to see the circulation of the sign through to the end. The last eschews risks, but this might take various forms: the discipline imposed by the poor parent–the unwavering insistence upon the exact imitation of the best models–upon the children who might, in a reasonably open environment, do better, initiate something of their own; or it might be a parasitic set of demands upon “society,” which, after all, is rich enough to support anyone. The most productive errors in an open society where rituals have been mostly replaced by habits (that’s another story, isn’t it?) are precisely those where the lasts make their bid for firstness, and get the model all wrong–thereby transforming it into new models. Meanwhile, the terror of error is reinforced by the alliance between those legatees of firstness who blame firstness for lastness and the worst habits of the last–both participants in this alliance collude in confirming for each other that their errors are nothing of the sort, but an arbitrary exclusion mechanism deployed by the firsts.

So, extricating ourselves from the conjoined and mutually reinforcing crises of the Global Intifada and the financial meltdown, and getting the process started without any expectation of help or good models from our mainstream institutions, involves creating sites of generative interaction between the habits of those who are first on the current scene and those who are last but would be first on some future one. The way to set these (or any) divergent sets of habit in productive interaction is to create assignments–minimal tasks and rules in following which the limits of each set of habits opens it to the other set. A good assignment generates productive errors around which we then gather so as to turn them into a sign. The best way to approach it is to establish a model, transcending both the first and the last, as absolute–our common starting point is then delineating its distinctiveness and establishing a “perimeter” distancing the model from criticism (resentment). We all–first and last alike–then commence to iterate that model, knowing we shall all err, and committing ourselves to the creation of new models out of that array of errors. The beauty of this approach is that we can all follow our own habits slavishly (a key ingredient of happiness) in perfectly good conscience because doing the same thing over and over again (iterating my own eccentric appopriation of the model) keeps making everything different–that is, generating new signs. Together we gather maxims–which I am coming to see as the highest form of thinking–from the process: maxims are translations of the interference of one set of habits with another into rules (both in the sense of discerning regularities and in the sense of obeying a series of imperatives) and are generative of new habits in turn–ultimately, what Charles Sanders Peirce called the “deliberately formed, self-analyzing habit.”

Durban II: yet more proof that antisemitism and the UN is incompatible with constitutional rule, or the freedom of ordinary people to covenant and rule themselves

Anne Bayefsky, The Obama Administration Sacrifices Israel - Forbes.com

The Obama administration's decision to join the planning of the U.N.'s Durban II "anti-racism" conference has just taken a new twist: cover-up. On Friday, State Department officials and a member of the American Durban II delegation claimed the United States had worked actively to oppose efforts to brand Israel as racist in the committee drafting a Durban II declaration. The trouble is that they didn't.

The Feb. 20 State Department press release says the U.S. delegation in Geneva "outline[d] our concerns with the current outcome document" and in particular "our strong reservations about the direction of the conference, as the draft document singles out Israel for criticism." One member of the delegation told The Washington Post: "The administration is pushing back against efforts to brand Israel as racist in this conference." In fact, tucked away in a Geneva hall with few observers, the U.S. had done just the opposite. The U.S. delegates had made no objection to a new proposal to nail Israel in an anti-racism manifesto that makes no other country-specific claims.
[...]
The reality, however, was nothing of the sort. Instead, Obama's Durban II team slipped easily into the U.N.'s anti-Israel and anti-Jewish environs, taking the approach that "fitting in" was best accomplished by staying silent.

On Tuesday, the Palestinian delegation proposed inserting a new paragraph under the heading "Identification of further concrete measures and initiatives ... for combating and eliminating all manifestations of racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance..." with the subtitle "General provisions on victims ... of discrimination." The paragraph includes: "Calls for ... the international protection of the Palestinian people throughout the occupied Palestinian territory." In other words, it claims that the Palestinian people are victims of Israeli racism and demands that all U.N. states provide protection from the affronts of the racist Jewish state.

Furthermore, the new Palestinian provision "Calls for ... implementation of international legal obligations, including the advisory opinion of the International Court of Justice on the wall..." This is a dramatic attempt to change an "advisory opinion" into a "legal obligation"--a status which attaches to no advisory opinion. The ICJ decision, which advises that the Israeli security fence is illegal, has always been rejected by the United States--hitherto. And with good reason. The Egyptian judge had voiced his opinion on the result before the case was even heard, in his capacity as a leading Egyptian diplomat. The terms of reference from the General Assembly who asked for the decision, and the documents they laid before the Court, predetermined the outcome. And as the strong dissent by the American judge and Holocaust survivor Tom Buergenthal pointed out, the Court came to its preposterous conclusion that "the right of legitimate or inherent self-defense is not applicable in the present case" without considering "the deadly terrorist attacks to which Israel is being subjected."

But when the Palestinian delegation laid their new proposal before the drafting committee, what did Obama's team do? Nothing, absolutely nothing. They made no objection at all.

It is impossible to argue that their silence was unintended. Over the course of the week's negotiations the American delegation had objected to a number of specific proposals. They had no trouble declaring "we share reservations on this paragraph," in the context of a demand to criminalize profiling. They "called for the deletion" of provisions undermining free speech like the suggestion to "take firm action against negative stereotyping of religions and defamation of religious personalities, holy books, scriptures and symbols."

Their silence when it came to Israel was, therefore, deafening. It also had the very concrete result of not placing the Palestinian paragraph in dispute, and the diplomatic rule of thumb is that paragraphs that have not been flagged as controversial cannot be reopened for discussion, as negotiations finalize an end product.

The Obama team was not only silent on the new "Israel is racist" language, it also said nothing when faced with Holocaust denial. Negotiators from the European Union suggested on Wednesday a new provision to "condemn without reservation any denial of the Holocaust and urges all states to reject denial of the Holocaust as an historical event, either in full, or in part, or any activities to this end." Iran--whose president is a Holocaust-denier--immediately objected and insisted that the proposal be "bracketed" or put in dispute. The move blocked the adoption of the proposal and ensured another battle over the reality of the Holocaust in April--at these supposedly "anti-racism" meetings. After Iran objected, the chair looked around the room, expecting a response. He said: "Is there any delegation wishing to comment on this new proposal by the European Union? It doesn't seem the case. We move on." U.S. delegates said nothing, even after the prompt.
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Evidently, a U.S. team bent on legitimizing Durban II believed it would be counter-productive to object vigorously to sections most likely to be noticed by Americans skeptical about participation in the conference. They must have figured that no objection would mean no controversy, which in turn would mean there would be no cause for complaint from U.S. observers. That's one way to buy favors on the international stage, but it sure doesn't forward a stated intention of changing the Conference direction. Nor does it promote the ultimate need to change the anti-Semitic and anti-democratic direction of global human rights policy.

The fact that "the Palestinians" have been granted an honorific sovereignty by the manipulators of the UN, that they have a delegation taking a lead in this anti-Israel conference, even though "the Palestinians" have never had a government willing to act like a responsible state, negotiating honestly with the fact of its neighbour's existence as a powerful military and economic and demographic reality, is the greatest irresponsibility. It guarantees the ability of Palestinians to forever encourage their own martyrdom to what cannot be acknowledged, i.e. of avoiding serious recognition of and negotiation with Israel, all the while confident the UN will take on the task the Palestinians cannot achieve in the real world with diplomatic, military or economic means: penalizing Israel, throwing its existence into doubt. The Palestinians don't want to negotiate like a responsible state, accepting its neighbor's existence; they want Mommy UN to impose "justice" on the recalcitrant. This is just another form of taxing and killing the successful to indulge the resentments of a failed ideology or religion. In the long run, this can only lead to a more totalitarian world order, one that erodes the ability of constitutional democracies to allow ordinary human realities to represent themselves and take a full part in governing themselves. Instead of talking seriously about the ordinary economic, social, and political needs of the Palestinians, nothing much can be said other than nothing can be said until Israel is dealt with. This is how an unrepresentative elite commands the stage, as high priests in a drama of human sacrifice. As Wretchard at Belmont Club aptly summarizes:

I think the real issue here is the extent to which self-appointed organizations can create either law or compelling persuasion without any sort of democratic grounding. NGOs and regimes like Syria or Iran for example, are of dubious legitimacy. Yet they are participants, even the ringleaders, in an international attempt to “legislate” the behavior of third parties. Where did they get this power? This issue isn’t confined to racism or reparations. That is only its most egregious form. Whether on climate or social mores, organization like this have created an lawmaking process that is unaccountable. Moreover, they are imputing to themselves the power to tax. Suppose “reparations” became a Human Right, where does it end? Can Filipinos sold to slavery to the Moluccas apply? Can Europeans who were captured as slaves apply? Can Robert Mugabe’s population apply to regimes like his for recompense? Can the people of Darfur apply to the UN for compensation for the suffering occasioned by UN inaction?

No. Because they’re not represented directly at places like Durban.

Although this issue has been represented as an anti-semitic enterprise, it goes deeper than that. This is an irregular proceeding that is taking place outside the constitutional structures of states. Outside the control of voters, except at so many removes that there is barely a connection. I know it will be argued that the states have to “agree” but in the nature of things, these international bullying sessions are an exercise in shakedowns and blackmail.

The solution here is to reform the UN and to put a stop all these nonsensical conferences on climate, racism, human rights, etc which impose huge costs on the taxpayers of the world and are run, moreover, by the worst violators in the issues they purport to care so much about. If the UN really wants to do something it should host a conference calling for the stop to shakedowns like Durban. It’s a waste of money and an abomination.

Today it is Israel. Tomorrow it will be some other cause. And that next imposition will be all the more legitimate because of precedent. Where does Durban II gets its legitimacy? From previous conferences. It’s not Durban II people should be concerned about. It’s Durban III.

Recipe for an Insane World

Mark Steyn:

The Internet will keep Fitna alive in odd corners hither and yon, but only to those who actively seek it out. In the wider world, it goes without saying that such a film is unacceptable, and that this time round the pre-emptive rage (as Diana West calls it) was so successful the next Fitna will have an even harder time: no movie theaters or broadcast networks or obscure cable channels would even consider showing it, and Google and YouTube and the other Internet biggies have grown increasingly comfortable with political speech-policing, and now one more small net operation has learned that, unless you want to be a 24/7 crusader on this issue, it's not a business worth being in. In effect, the Islamobullies have been rewarded yet again for threatening physical violence. The best way to end the debate is to make the price of having one too high.

To reprise Douglas Murray's point below, a film such as Fitna might not even be necessary were the western news organizations not so absurdly deferential toward Muslim sensibilities that they go out of their way to avoid showing us anything that might cause us to link violence with Islam. Even that footage of those depraved West Bankers jumping up and down in the street and passing out candy to celebrate 9/11 appears to have been walled up in the most impenetrable vault of the archives these last six years. Both CNN and the BBC could only bring themselves to show the Danish cartoons by pixelating Mohammed's face - the first time this technique has ever been applied to a drawing, as if the Prophet had entered the witness protection program. At one level, they make Wilders' point for him, but, at another, they make it less likely anyone else will step forward to try to make the point next time.

In reality, it's the small band of people trying to resist the de facto universalization of Islamic prohibitions that have to enter the witness protection program.

Wretchard the Cat:

An ex-Muslim cartoonist is authoring the first R-rated cartoon film showing Mohammed and his 9 year old bride according to the Gateway Pundit. The Sugiero blog writes: "Ehsan Jami decided to reject Islam after the 9/11 terror attacks. Since then he has defended the right of religious freedom, with the usual consequences ... "

Jami is in hiding in the Netherlands. Sugiero remarks that Dutch Prime Minister Jan Peter Balkenende, who "has written a letter to Indonesia's largest Muslim organisation, Nahdlatul Ulama (NU) in which he says that the views presented in the anti-Qur'an film of populist leader Geert Wilders do not represent those of the Dutch government" will be writing a lot more letters. Yesterday for Wilders, tomorrow for Jami, and the day after for who knows who?

In an earlier post I predicted that European leaders, "Human Rights" committees and all the assorted enforcers of politically correct speech would eventually be trapped in a whack-a-mole mode. They'll be busy fighting a cultural counter-insurgency.

If al-Qaeda is smart it will do the unexpected and refrain from issuing any more fatwas; to quit presuming a veto power over Western cultural and political institutions. If Islamic radicals back off, most people will lose interest in these Mohammed parody cartoons, which frankly have a limited market on their own merits and whose attraction is principally that of symbols of resistance. But if groups like al-Qaeda continue with a campaign of intimidation and terror, they will be met with a campaign of blasphemy the likes of which they never imagined possible. And who knows where it goes from there?
[...]
And my guess is that the instruments of political correctness will shatter under the effort of waging a sustained cultural counter-insurgency. They will use up their own jihadi cultural fifth column in futile attacks against never ending targets. Political correctness works when applied in small, gradual steps. What the Mohammed cartoons have done is force political correctness to overreach.

One of the enduring lessons of history is that the worm, tormented long enough, always turns.

People's Cube:

Following the misery inflicted on Islam by a toy bear that ended up with calls for the execution of an English woman, more Muslims are stepping forward with stories of long-suppressed emotional trauma imposed on them by so-called reality. This has led to the creation of support groups and social networks that help followers of the Prophet Mohammed cope with the agony of learning about life outside of their immediate environment, offering assistance with technical resources, practical guidance, and strategies for early intervention and punishment of those who offend Islam.

And there's more at the Cube
Claudia Rossett:

At least Kofi Annan considered it sufficient to style himself merely as “Chief Diplomat of the World.” Ban Ki-Moon has just taken that a step further, offering his services as World’s Chief Film Critic — or, more precisely, Chief Internet Censor. Following the internet broadcast of Geert Wilders “Fitna,” Ban lost no time in personally denouncing the video as “offensively anti-Islamic” and stating — (whatever this quasi-diplo-speak is really supposed to mean) — “I acknowledge the efforts of the Dutch government to stop the broadcast of this film” and “Freedom must always be accompanied by social responsibility.”

For the Secretary-General of the United Nations to start vetting individual video productions seems ill-advised at best. According to the UN charter, Ban’s job description doesn’t actually extend beyond serving as chief administrative officer of the UN — a role in which he has already failed at matters as basic as protecting whistleblowers or fulfilling his own promises of financial transparency. But if Ban insists on exercising the freedom to pipe up from his stage-center UN podium with his opinions on individual broadcasts, then is it responsible — “socially,” or in any other sense — for Ban to focus his attentions so narrowly on Geert Wilders?

If Ban has now appropriated as part of his UN portfolio the job of vetting broadcasts that he thinks might disturb viewers somewhere around the globe, where are the rest of his critiques? Following his targeting of Wilders, surely we now have every right to expect from broadcast-critic Ban a flow of daily, specific, individually targeted condemnations of the videos, TV shows and films emanating from places such as Egypt, Hamas-controlled Gaza, the Palestinian Authority, Libya, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Iran and Hezbollah’s Al-Manar TV. Where, for instance, is Ban’s statement deploring the grotesquely offensive Iranian TV cartoon propaganda series for kids, translated recently by the monitoring service, MEMRI TV: “The Child and the Invader” — ?