Here.
The Confederate flag ruckus
As a specific controversy, the Confederate flag ruckus doesn’t much interest me, so I haven’t written about it although it seems to be the story du jour. I’m not Southern, and I have absolutely no attachment to the Confederate flag. I’m with Mollie Hemingway when she writes:
For whatever it’s worth, I have no nostalgia for the Confederacy and zero positive feelings for flags that reference the Confederacy…
A lot of the surrounding media-led outrage over the flag seems somewhat cold, given the horror of what last week brought. We had nine black people brutally murdered because they were black and sitting in a church with a history of fighting white supremacy. With all due deference to hatred for a Confederate flag on a pole at the statehouse, this seems like an almost childlike attempt to miss the seriousness of the situation. It’s as if they expect us to say, “Congratulations! You oppose the flag of an army that was defeated 150 years ago. We’re all very proud of you, journalists!” This generation seems to excel at inventing controversies, weighing in on those invented controversies, and then patting itself on the back for being so courageous and open-minded…
Coverage has been oddly partisan ”” and in ways that counter reality ”” as the media rush to make this Confederate flag issue a problem for ”¦ Republicans. Funny how it always, always, always works out that way, isn’t it?…
And now the media are hopping all over the place. Within a few hours they had moved on from their noble campaign of (largely meaningless but whatever) flag justice/posturing/attention in South Carolina to every state but Arkansas [in order to exonerate Clinton they spare Arkansas] that is so tainted…
And then within a few minutes, they had moved on to renaming literally everything.
Hemingway describes suggestions by many writers and pundits that we should rename places that reference Jefferson Davis and even Robert E. Lee. Can reparations for a 150-year-old war be far behind?
Hemingway correctly identifies the impulse to obliterate any sort of respectful reference to any Southern hero of that war as being a leftist one:
Listen, it’s great that we’re aiming to be an anti-racist society. That’s very, very good! But it’s bad that we are slowly forgetting how to dislike something without seeking its utter destruction. Somehow we’ve abandoned the aesthetic of Abraham Lincoln for that of Mao Tse-Tung.
And somehow we’ve substituted symbolic gestures for reality, and self-congratulatory back-patting for constructive action. That’s true across the board, and not just in terms of the Confederate flag display.
[NOTE: In that second paragraph I quote from Hemingway, she writes, “this seems like an almost childlike attempt to miss the seriousness of the situation.” I’m not sure exactly what Hemingway meant when she referenced “the seriousness of the situation,” but this is the way I see its seriousness: it is serious because nine innocent (and exemplary) lives were lost to a racist murderer. It has caused serious anguish and grief. The charges against Roof are as serious and grave as they can be. His punishment should be equally serious, which is why so many people consider the death penalty the only reasonable sentence.
If Roof had been part of an organized group intent on carrying out more such murders, and acting on their behalf, that would have been even more serious (if such a thing be possible), but I see no indication of that. Roof’s actions, as I’ve written before, tell us about Roof, but they don’t tell us much (or rather, they don’t tell us anything) about the motivations of anyone else, nor about anyone else’s plans for the future. We have no idea (although I hope the FBI has an inkling) of how many other Roofs there might be, or how many of them are intent on murder rather than mere talk, and the media certainly isn’t able to tell us.
No doubt there are other racists—and even other neo-Nazis—around in this country and many other countries. But blaming all white people or all Republicans (without even knowing Roof’s politics) is a convenient way to make political hay out of the matter, which I deplore.]
Peter Singer and the trap of logic: Part I
Disability activists would very much like to see Princeton University bioethics professor Peter Singer lose his job. The reason is fairly obvious: Singer advocates the killing of disabled infants if the parents request it.
What’s less obvious is why Singer has a job as a bioethicist at Princeton in the first place—although of course I know the answer, and it lies in the politics of today’s universities.
“Sometimes, perhaps because the baby has a serious disability, parents think it better that their newborn infant should die. Many doctors will accept their wishes, to the extent of not giving the baby life-supporting medical treatment. That will often ensure that the baby dies,” Mr. Singer continued. “My view is different from this, only to the extent that if a decision is taken, by the parents and doctors, that it is better that a baby should die, I believe it should be possible to carry out that decision, not only by withholding or withdrawing life support – which can lead to the baby dying slowly from dehydration or from an infection – but also by taking active steps to end the baby’s life swiftly and humanely.”
Interesting how Singer skips from situation A to situation B as though it represents merely a small and logical step, when in fact in the moral, legal, and spiritual sense it represents a gap the size of the Grand Canyon.
Singer’s stance is certainly a chilling one, because although the sort of infants Singer has in mind are so profoundly disabled and undergoing such suffering that we’re not talking about the “merely” blind or halt or lame, it still is a position that smacks of the Nazi “life unworthy of life” campaign and seems (despite his label as “ethicist”) to be just plain wrong:
“The day had to come, just as the day had to come when Copernicus proved that the earth is not at the center of the universe,” Singer told me…“It is ridiculous to pretend that the old ethics still make sense when plainly they do not.”…
“The notion that human life is sacred just because it’s human life is medieval,” he continued, talking about the treatment of the hopelessly ill. “The person that used to be there is gone. It doesn’t matter how sad it makes us. All I am saying is that it’s time to stop pretending that the world is not the way we know it to be.”
Singer clearly thinks of himself as logical and right. But what an odd and revealing analogy, and how much is left out and/or misunderstood! Singer is discussing the work of scientists who are trying to study and describe phenomena “out there” in the physical world, something that we can measure and describe, and is comparing that to rules to guide human behavior in the moral sense, something entirely different. I think it is telling that Singer says we are pretending the “old ethics still make sense,” as though it’s something we could know in that same, factual sense as astronomy. “Make sense” how? To whom? Based on what values?
What is Singer missing? Just about everything. He doesn’t appear to understand—not just human beings, although there’s that—but something about human life itself. He writes as though we are robotic automatons going by the numbers:
Singer argues that proximity means nothing when it comes to moral decisions, and that personal relationships don’t mean much either. Saving your daughter’s life is a fine thing to do, for example, but it can never measure up to saving the lives of ten strangers. If you were faced with the choice, Singer’s ethics would require you to save the strangers. “It makes no moral difference whether the person I can help is a neighbor’s child ten yards from me or a Bengali whose name I shall never know, ten thousand miles away,” he wrote in his essay. Singer believes we are obliged to give money away until our sacrifice is of “comparable moral importance” to the agony of people starving to death. “This would mean, of course,” he continued, approvingly, “that one should reduce oneself to very near the material circumstances of a Bengali refugee.”
It is easy to recognize the leftist origins of such thinking, as well as the denial of nature. Even in animals the maternal instinct is extremely powerful. Why? We are constructed that way; it has survival value. Taking care of our own families first works when everybody does it; it is what love is about, for example, and communities, which also run on love and closeness. It’s not a numbers game, although the “do no harm” prohibition is a good one. But if humans uniformly followed his prescriptions, try to imagine the sum total of love and joy in the world: none. Life would be a sort of utilitarian statist re-education camp where all decisions must be based on maximizing numbers (until overpopulation would change the calculus to a priority for reducing numbers), and no human ties would matter in a crisis (all leftist dictatorships try to weaken family ties, and it’s no accident).
Singer would create incredible suffering to play his numbers game, and require of people that they be saints, which (among other things) has the flaw of being impossible because it goes against human nature and human emotion. If we are thinking of maximizing the good for humanity (based on what criteria? Happiness? Food? Number of lives saved? Or quality of life?) we have to take human nature into consideration and not try to twist mankind into some sort of machine it is not. That is the utopian impulse that always ALWAYS makes for a dystopia.
Here’s more about Singer’s philosophy:
When the death of a disabled infant will lead to the birth of another infant with better prospects of a happy life, the total amount of happiness will be greater if the disabled infant is killed. The loss of happy life for the first infant is outweighed by the gain of a happier life for the second. Therefore, if killing the hemophiliac infant has no adverse effect on others, it would, according to the total view, be right to kill him. Few people will ever consider infants replaceable in the way that they consider free-range chickens replaceable, and Singer knows that…
His philosophy is called preference-utilitarianism. It has a more nuanced version of what Mill had in mind, with personal preferences taking the place of happiness. Singer’s thought is shaped by the assumption that the results of your behavior should agree with the preferences of anyone whom your behavior would affect. For Singer, killing is wrong because when you kill someone who wants to live you make it impossible for that person to fulfill his preferences.
Singer believes that killing those who are so severely disabled that (in his opinion) they can’t be said to have “preferences” is different in some basic way, and ethically okay in some circumstances. But why does he elevate preferences to such a lofty position? What about your own relationship to other humans you should be taking care of? And I won’t even ask what about your relations to God, because that’s a question Singer believes humanity has outgrown, like the idea that the sun revolves around the earth.
[Go to Part II.]
The pretend gun-free zone
Here’s an interesting article about how it might have been a good thing had the attendees at the Bible study meeting in Charleston been armed. That’s not just a fanciful thought; mass murders, even mass murders at churches, have been thwarted before by a good guy wielding a gun and stopping the bad guy (and here I use the word “guy” in the completely non-PC sense that includes “woman”):
Murray had already shot and killed two people in the parking lot when he burst into the New Life Church in Colorado Springs. Before he could pull the trigger again, however, the 24-year-old shooter was gunned down by Jeanne Assam, a volunteer security guard with a concealed-carry permit.
That was eight years ago, but even though Ms. Assam was credited for saving as many as 100 lives that day, a dozen states continue to restrict the carrying of concealed firearms in churches ”” including South Carolina.
There have been quite a few similar cases of a law-abiding citizen with a gun (often an ex- or off-duty police officer, but not always) stopping or even preventing a mass shooting. A list of similar incidents can be found here. That there are not even more is probably due to the fact that mass shootings are actually quite rare to begin with—despite our perceptions that they are common, and despite the fact that even a single one is too many—and so it is not surprising that there are not so very many cases where a witness pulled a gun and even tried to stop such a shooting. Another reason is likely to be that mass murderers understand that they will be more likely to achieve their goals if they attack people in a gun-free zone, and so many attacks occur in such places.
But the shoot-em-up fantasy of someone like MSNBC’s Bob Shrum appears to lack any real-world precedent:
“Now I cannot imagine the horror that could have occurred if people were sitting around with concealed weapons, this thing started, and you have a full-scale gunfight,” said Democratic advisor Bob Shrum on Friday’s episode of MSNBC’s “The Ed Show.”
“You might not even have three survivors,” said Mr. Shrum, a top campaign aide to now-Secretary of State John Kerry during his failed 2004 presidential bid.
So, a bunch of unarmed people who are sitting ducks, completely at the mercy of an armed predator bent on mass murder, would be better off that way than to take their chances having an armed defender? What’s the better percentage deal, do you think?
I actually haven’t been able to find a single instance (although I suppose they may exist) where anything resembling Shrum’s vision has actually occurred—where an armed citizen trying to stop a mass murder already in progress escalated the situation. Even an article appearing in the leftist Mother Jones could do no better than to discover two situations in which the would-be defender was also shot.
The entire idea of a gun-free zone is an odd one. After all, who is going to abide by the law? The only people it disarms are the law-abiding, who were not likely to suddenly slip into mass murderer mode. And the actual mass murderer could not care less about the rule, and what’s more he will gravitate to such venues for his massacre because he knows that’s where he’s likely to encounter the least resistance.
So most so-called gun-free zones are actually what Dave Kopel calls pretend gun-free zones, meaning that the only people without weapons there are likely to be those who wouldn’t think of using them to murder in the first place.
The only true gun-free zone would be one with highly effective metal detectors at the entrance, and even then, unless the entrance is protected by several armed guards (not just one), a determined shooter can just shoot his way past a guard before going through the detector, especially with the element of surprise. Since most venues cannot afford (or do not want) such a complex and expensive arrangement, that leaves us with pretend gun-free zones versus areas in which concealed carry is allowed.
Which would you choose, if you were a gunman bent on doing harm? The pretend gun-free zones, of course, which makes them (paradoxically) the most dangerous environment of all.
A sliver of time
Here’s an excellent post by Bookworm.
Time’s a wasting.
Another way to peel a hard-boiled egg
In my continual quest to solve the Problem of How to Peel the Hard-Boiled Egg (see this and this), today I discovered this video (embedding disabled; you’ll have to use the link), which purports to show you how to peel five eggs at a time by putting them in a container with water, covering it, and shaking. Magic! The peel is pictured as coming off easily and mostly in one piece.
Does it work? Having a yen for deviled eggs today, I was determined to find out. It couldn’t be any worse than my usual experience, which is that, despite following all the myriad instructions—cold water, age of eggs, amount of time to sit after cooking—I still have incredible difficulty with the membrane sticking to the egg and mucking up the beauty of the peeled white, so that I often end up with a pock-marked, misshapen, and sorry mess.
So, how did the new method work? Not quite as in the video, but not bad. Out of five eggs, two went just about as smoothly as in the film; the shell came off pretty much in one fell swoop, membrane and all. Huzzah! A third one was close to that, although a bit more difficult. The remaining two were pretty much the same old same old: sticky membrane, laborious peeling, and a final product that won’t win any beauty prizes.
But they all taste good. I contend, however, that the ones with the smooth whites actually taste a bit better than the others.
Europe the wonderful vs. America the [fill in the blank]
While thinking about my PJ post on Obama’s comparison of mass murders and gun control in the US to the same phenomena in Europe, it occurred to me that part of what Obama has done during his presidency is to capitalize on an already-existent attitude among liberals that everything European is better than everything American.
That’s one of the reasons he can get away with talking about how mass murder by gun is nonexistent in Europe because of gun control. Not too many liberals in this country are going to question that, because of the pre-existing idea that Europe has gotten its act together in so many respects while we falter far behind, alone among developed (or, as Obama said, “advanced”) countries in bitterly clinging to our troglodyte ways, our guns and our religion.
Other things we cling to, and which Obama would dearly like to free us of, include our American exceptionalism, our nationalism rather than internationalism, our rugged individualism, our income inequality, and our idea that “we built that.” Things he’s already greatly improved about America (i.e. Europeanized, at least to the extent we have allowed him, which is not to the extent he would like) are health insurance and our relations with the Muslim world and with Israel.
Not so many years ago the word “liberal” was the political kiss of death; people were running away from that designation as though from the plague. But now it’s back in vogue, according to Dana Milbank of the WaPo (and a number of polls). This is probably thanks in part to the wonders of the Obama years, as well as the maceration of the newer generations in the “progressive” ideology of our school system and MSM. But some of it comes from the notion that Europe is better than we are and we should emulate it in every way—rail system, small apartments and tiny washing machines, long vacations and all. So any change in this country that makes us more like Europe is considered to be a good thing by the growing number of Europhiles among us.
This ignores the profound economic and social troubles that Europe is having. It ignores the fact that Europe has been protected by our weapons and our military, which cost money. It ignores the fact that the demography of Europe is tremendously different from ours, as well as its geography. It ignores the fact that people from all over the world still flock to this country, or wish to.
When a was a schoolchild, our teachers used to make us memorize poetry, almost all of it doggerel and the best of it merely passable verse. But I had an ear for doggerel and verse, and much of what I memorized back then has stuck with me to this day. It is interesting and instructive to remember the sort of patriotic paean that was considered appropriate for an American child back then (even one like me, who went to school in New York City, and a public school at that), such as this poem by the Presbyterian minister Henry Van Dyke:
“AMERICA FOR ME”
‘TIS fine to see the Old World, and travel up and down
Among the famous palaces and cities of renown,
To admire the crumbly castles and the statues of the kings,””
But now I think I’ve had enough of antiquated things.So it’s home again, and home again, America for me!
My heart is turning home again, and there I long to be,
In the land of youth and freedom beyond the ocean bars,
Where the air is full of sunlight and the flag is full of stars!Oh, London is a man’s town, there’s power in the air;
And Paris is a woman’s town, with flowers in her hair;
And it’s sweet to dream in Venice, and it’s great to study Rome;
But when it comes to living there is no place like home…Oh, it’s home again, and home again, America for me!
I want a ship that’s westward bound to plough the rolling sea,
To the bléssed Land of Room Enough beyond the ocean bars,
Where the air is full of sunlight and the flag is full of stars
Antiquated, no doubt. But it meant something to me then, and it meant something to me when I traveled to Europe as a teenager and later, and it means something to me now. I think America still means a great deal to people, as I discovered from a curious video I came across the other day. Unfortunately, I can’t find it right now, despite close to an hour of searching and watching. But it featured short interviews with people all over the world who were asked to describe Americans and what distinguishes them from other people.
Their answers were quite consistent, and perhaps not exactly what you’d expect. I had imagined there would be more negative comments, but the remarks ran about 80% or more positive, and there was a certain unanimity of opinion. Americans were confident, and many people specifically mentioned that they could tell who was an American on the street because of the way they walked—with confident strides, head high, energetic and enthusiastic. You knew they were used to being free and speaking their minds. Many people also mentioned openness and friendliness, as well as kindness. They also sometimes said loud—as in loud voices—but they didn’t say it all that critically.
This video which features interviews in England is somewhat similar, and it’s the closest I could find:
Obama on “advanced” countries, gun control, and mass murder
I have a new article at PJ on Obama’s push for gun control in the wake of the Charleston murders.
[ADDENDUM: Obama keeps pressing gun control in the wake of Charleston. As I wrote in my PJ article, “in the immortal words of Rahm Emanuel, ‘You never let a serious crisis go to waste. And what I mean by that it’s an opportunity to do things you think you could not do before.'”
Of course, in the case of Charleston and so many others, it’s hard to see how gun control (short of taking away all citizens’ guns) would have done a thing to prevent this heinous act. The weapon Roof used to kill his victims was not on anyone’s list of bannable weapons; it was an ordinary 45-caliber pistol, according to most reports. Initially it was asserted that the gun was a gift from his father, but unnamed police were later quoted as saying that Roof stated he had bought it himself after his 21st birthday with money he was given as a gift. Either way, as I pointed out here as well as here, the transaction would have already been illegal in the state of South Carolina, because Roof had pending felony charges against him.
So, should it be made more illegal? Is Obama suggesting a particular gun law change that would make it even more impossible and unlawful for Roof to obtain a weapon he had already obtained illegally? If he’s talking about better enforcement of the already-existing law (such as improving the felony-pending database), fine, but that does not appear to be what he’s suggesting at all.
I realize it’s too much to ask that we introduce any logic into this. But it seems pretty clear to me that criminals—people who are planning to murder other people—are already intent on breaking a rather important law or laws, and it is doubtful that they would let themselves be held back by anything as paltry as gun control. Ever hear of the black market? The most likely scenario for further gun control laws at this point, when we already have quite a bit of regulation, is that they will hamper the ability of law-abiding citizens to defend themselves.]
Belgium slides further and further…
…down the slippery slope of euthanasia.
Why so little concern over the Office of Personnel Management hack?
After all, it’s probably the worst cyber-breach the U.S. has ever experienced, as Megan McArdle points out.
And yet if you were to do a survey of most of your friends on the matter, many of them may be unaware of it, or only vaguely aware, and mostly uncaring.
Why? McArdle thinks the cause is a combination of the fact that Obama doesn’t care and the public doesn’t demand that he care. But that still begs the question: why? Why not care about something so outrageous?
I think the answer is that Obama would care if it had been the fault of Bush or the Republicans. But if he can’t blame them—and if he himself may be at least partly at fault—he’s certainly not going to become aroused. Instead, his kneejerk reaction will be to minimize and coverup.
And the MSM is still his servant in that regard, as well as the servant of the Democratic Party. Be quiet about what implicates them, be very vocal about what implicates the right, and the public will follow your lead.
But there’s more to it than that. The OPM fiasco reflects poorly on the competence of the federal government to handle much of anything. It can’t even seem to put in place the most basic of security in such a delicate and sensitive area. If it can’t do that, what else can it not do? To the left, that’s a dangerous thought.
On the question of cowardice
Commenter “rickl” writes:
[Dylann Roof] shot old women praying in a church while talking about “black rape”.
If he was really so upset about it, then why didn’t he go after young male gangbangers in the hood?
Answer: Because he was a coward, and they would have capped his ass before he got his gun out.
The shooter may indeed have been a coward. In fact, I think he was a coward. But that’s not the only reason he chose the victims he chose, IMHO, rather than some guys in the hood.
I have felt from the start that Roof’s motive was to inflame a race war, and he himself has recently confessed that this was so. To achieve that end, killing a few gang members just wouldn’t do (and yes, they would have probably been armed and would have shot back—he couldn’t have that!)
But why did he choose the particular victims he did? He could have gone anywhere in the black community and started killing people, randomly. But he did not. He chose these particular people, that particular group of people, for the following reasons, in my opinion:
(1) He may have known—and admired—the work of the killers in the KKK who bombed the church in Birmingham in 1963 and killed the 4 little girls. Therefore he may have chosen a church for historical reasons.
(2) Much more importantly, I think, he targeted the most admirable people he could find. People devoted to God, to peace, to love, people just about everyone admired, in order to sow the greatest possible fear and outrage at their deaths. Evil unerringly seeks the good and the innocent to try to wreak the most destructive power and to evoke the maximum rage. If a person wants to inflame a race war, what better way to do it than to target the most beloved people possible?
Whether or not Roof thought this through in a rational manner I don’t know. But I believe that he felt it and sensed it. His impulse (although very different in philosophical origins, and that of an individual rather than a group) was something like that of ISIS: to sow the most horror. The more horror, the more backlash. The more backlash, the more violence. That was the idea.
[ADDENDUM: Reports are that Roof has said that the victims were so nice to him that he almost backed out. In other words, good came very close to conquering even this man’s great evil and preventing the crime by the sheer force of its goodness, but it did not. He clearly recognized, however, how good these people were.]
The MSM can’t get it right: about the gun
And I don’t think they care. Just the narrative, Ma’m, just the narrative.
Case in point: how many times, in how many places, did you read that Roof’s father gave him a gun for his 21st birthday, which occurred in April?
Just about everywhere. The information appears to have originated in an interview with Roof’s uncle.
It seems as though this would be important enough information to have wanted to authenticate it or to at least get a second source on it before printing, because it implicates Roof’s father, who would be presumed to have known that Roof was facing felony charges at the time stemming from his arrest for narcotics possession.
Nevertheless, it was printed, re-printed, re-printed again and discussed as though it were an example of Roof’s father’s negligence and even perhaps a crime on his part.
Now it turns out it’s not true—that is, if we can believe this CNN report (which I happen to think has a decent chance of being more accurate, because this time the information is quoted as having come from two unnamed “law enforcement officials”):
One key part of this horrific scheme — the weapon — came in April, when Roof bought a .45-caliber handgun at a Charleston gun store, the two law enforcement officials told Perez and Bruer from CNN, the first network to report this development. His grandfather says that Roof was given “birthday money” and that the family didn’t know what Roof did with it.
This makes more sense. Perhaps over time we’ll even learn which report is actually true.
I have another question, though. If the above is indeed true, how did a person such as Roof, who was facing felony charges at the time, buy a gun legally?
This article from yesterday mentions that, as an accused felon, Roof would not have been allowed to purchase a gun. The rest of the article operates on the assumption (now disproved??) that the gun was a gift from Roof’s father, and explores the legal ramifications of that. But the initial question remains, and I don’t see many people asking it: how did Roof evade the background check if in fact he purchased the gun himself?
Seems like this would be important to know, because if there’s a glitch in the process of gun purchase that allows those charged with a felony in a pending case to get guns that easily, then it needs to be fixed.