Amtrack derailment

The New Neo Posted on by

This is a bad one.

I don’t have much commentary or speculation right now, because we know so little about the causes. What we do know is that at least six people are dead and 146 injured in the derailment that affected the entire seven cars and engine of the Washington-to-NY Amtrak train. It occurred as the train rounded a curve in Philadelphia, resulting in a scene of carnage and devastation.

People don’t expect this to happen on the train, and they are correct that it is highly unusual. But the statistics don’t matter for the vicitms today, because it happened to them.

Bearing witness to the Reich

The New Neo Posted on by

I have continued to read Victor Klemperer’s two-volume diary I Will Bear Witness: A Diary of the Nazi Years (I’ve written about the book before, here and here).

Klemperer was in an unusual position in Germany. Although born a Jew, he had converted to Christianity before World War I. He had served in that war, and married a non-Jewish (“Aryan”) woman named Eva. That combination of factors meant that his presence was tolerated in the Reich during the 30s and World War II, although he was treated as a Jew and subject to all the Draconian restrictions Germany placed on those who were allowed to remain (most of them being married to non-Jews; see this for background on why Jews married to Germans were allowed to stay for a while in Germany).

The net was closing in on him as the war went on, however, and but for an unexpected event he would have been sent to the camps. His life was saved, paradoxically, by the Allied bombing of Dresden, which he survived and which gave him cover for leaving the city and claiming he had lost his identity papers.

The following is an entry Klemperer made in his journal much much earlier in the game. It gives you an idea of the quality of the diaries he kept, and their significance to information about the attitude of so-called “ordinary” Germans at the time. For some background, understand that Klemperer was a scholar who depended heavily on access to the library for his intellectual life’s work:

DECEMBER 3, 1938

Yesterday afternoon at the library, Striege or Striegel, who is in charge of the lending section, an old Stahlhelm man of middling position and years”¦[said?] I should come into the back room with him. Just as he had announced the reading room ban [on Jews] a year ago, so he now showed me the complete ban on using the library. The absolute end. But it was different from a year ago. The man was distressed beyond words, I had to calm him. He stroked my hand the whole time, he could not hold back the tears, he stammered [and said]: I am boiling over inside”¦If only something would happen tomorrow”¦”“Why tomorow?””It’s the Day of Solidarity”¦They’re collecting”¦One could get at them”¦But not just kill them””torture, torture, torture”¦They should first of all be made to feel what they’ve done”¦

”¦Even before that (I knew nothing about the ban yet) Fraulein Roth, very pale, had gripped my hand in the catalog room: Could I not get away, it was the end here, for us too””St. Mark’s was set alight even before the synagogue and the Zion Church was threatened, if it does not change its name”¦She spoke to me as to a dying man, she took leave of me as if forever”¦But these few, sympathizing and in despair, are isolated, and they too are afraid.

The following entry was written by Klemperer a couple of years later, as the war was going on and the already-massive restraints on “Jews” like him who were married to “Aryans” were increasing day by day in the Reich:

MAY 15, 1942

”¦Jews with the star and anyone who lives with them are, with immediate effect, forbidden to keep pets (dogs, cats, birds), it is also forbidden to give the animals away to be looked after. This is the death sentence for Muschel, whom we have had for more than eleven years and to whom Eva is very attached. He is to be taken to the vet tomorrow, so that he is spared the fright of being fetched and put down together with others. I feel very bitter for Eva’s sake. We have so often said to each other The tomcat’s raised tail is our flag, we shall not strike it, we’ll keep our heads above water, we’ll pull the animal through, and at the victory celebrations Muschel will get a “schnitzel from Kamm’s” (the fanciest butcher here). It makes me almost superstitious that the flag is being lowered now.

Although taking pets away to be killed hardly compares in severity to so many of the cruelties perpetrated by the Nazis on Jews and others, it symbolizes the persecutors’ attention to detail and the extreme malice with which they operated. Even such a small comfort was forbidden; they wanted that flag lowered.

Free speech is threatened—but of course, you already knew that

The New Neo Posted on by

Perhaps you’ve noticed that the topic of free speech has been coming up again and again and again lately. The battle to protect it has taken on new urgency, in part because too many people appear to have forgotten what free speech is and why it is so vital.

The movement to limit speech took hold in the university community decades ago. I first noticed it in the early 90s when I went back to school to get my Master’s, but I’m told it actually began considerably earlier. Whenever it started, by now it’s a firmly entrenched idea that it is okay to limit speech that is even mildly upsetting if anyone finds it hurtful or objectionable in any way. And who makes the judgment on whether it is or isn’t? The offended one.

People on the left like to characterize conservatives as power-hungry fascists [sic] who are out to control and limit us. But as with so many of the restrictions on liberty, those on free speech are being driven almost wholly by the left. Whether the campaign is against Pamela Geller’s right to repeat the hateful statements of jihadis without being accused of hate herself for condemning them, or whether it’s about remarks defined as sexist or bigoted in general, or whether it’s about the Obama administration’s efforts to condemn the reporting of Fox News or intimidate and investigate reporters it doesn’t like, we need understand that it’s part of a much larger movement described here by Peter Berkowitz, and that much of the press is allied with it rather than against it:

…[M]ost of the elite media””overwhelmingly left liberal””have largely neglected to cover the left’s crusade against free speech. Operating out of newsrooms, as [Kirsten] Powers observes [in her new book The Silencing: How the Left is Killing Free Speech] in which “there is nobody to push back on their biases,” reporters seem unable to detect anything amiss on campuses, in the media, and in the political arena where, after all, the draconian regulation of speech is intended to serve avowedly left-wing causes.

An increasingly illiberal left, according to Powers, has found a ruthless ally in an increasingly illiberal feminism. To oppose abortion, or to suggest that owners of family businesses should not be required by law to subsidize their employees’ purchase of a narrow range of birth control options to which the owners object on religious grounds, or to insist that the accused in campus sexual assault cases be accorded fundamental due process rights is, illiberal feminists declare, to wage “war” on women and to advocate positions that have no place in polite conversation or public debate.

From feminism to the media to the professoriate to the West Wing, the illiberal left has been empowered to curtail freedom of speech by the transformation of liberal education””whose classic purpose was to emancipate the mind and promote toleration””into a means for reproducing progressive dogma and inculcating intolerance of alternative points of view. Because Kirsten Powers is right””our colleges and universities have become ground zero in the fight for freedom of speech””the restoration of free speech depends on the restoration of liberal education.

I’ve criticized Kirsten Powers for many of her positions, particularly on illegal immigration. But on this she seems absolutely correct. As Berkowitz points out, Powers is a liberal on most issues. But on this I’d say she’s a classical liberal, which is another thing entirely, and I applaud her. The trouble is that her fellow liberals (of the non-classical variety) will probably just shrug or berate her and consider that on this she’s been led astray by sleeping with the enemy—that is, her stint at Fox News.

And perhaps they would be right on that latter point—not that she’s gone astray (I happen to think she has been led toward an acknowledgement of the truth), but on the influence of her job at Fox. She says so herself:

Powers grew up in a liberal family but said that interacting with conservatives, and finding God, has given her a new perspective.

“Two experiences unexpectedly put me in a regular relationship with conservatives: working as a contributor at Fox News and a later in life conversion to Christianity. The more I got to know actual conservative and religious people, the harder it was to justify the stereotypes I had so carelessly embraced. In my early days at Fox, I can remember trying to convince a conservative there that George Bush’s nomination of Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court didn’t really count as a female appointment because she was conservative and an evangelical Christian. He was horrified. I was confused as to why he would be horrified. I’m now embarrassed that I ever thought such a thing, let alone said it aloud. Such a prejudiced view was only able to take root because of the lack of ideological, political, and religious diversity,” she wrote.

Powers added: “This intolerance is not a passive matter of opinion. It’s an aggressive, illiberal impulse to silence people. This conduct has become an existential threat to those who hold orthodox religious beliefs. But increasingly I hear from people across the political spectrum who are fearful not only of expressing their views, but also as to where all of this is heading. I’ve followed this trend closely as a columnist with growing concern. It’s become clear that the attempts””too often successful””to silence dissent from the liberal worldview aren’t isolated outbursts. They are part of a bigger story. This book is that story.”

That is the sad truth that I learned, too, after my political change experience. I was so naive beforehand, and had operated in so much of a liberal bubble (as well as having steered clear of political discussions in general in my adult life), that I had no awareness of the phenomenon. I first learned of it from bitter, painful personal experience, when I was the dissenter.

It sounds as though Powers’ book could actually influence at least a few people to change their minds about what’s happening out there. I don’t usually say that about books, which in my opinion seldom influence people in such a profound way, but this one could have a special persuasive force because of Powers’ status as a liberal woman. As I wrote earlier, though, I think it will be easy for many people to dismiss her as tainted by her Fox news experience. Ironically, such an attitude on their part would be in line with the phenomenon she describes in the book. People are frightened of even hearing different points of view lest they be swayed.

Christianity declining in the US

The New Neo Posted on by

Especially among the young. As William Jacobson points out, this is likely to be the result of decades of effort among “progressive” educators and the MSM.

Many people I know consider it axiomatic that religion and science/logic are antithetical, and prefer to cast their lot with science and rationality—although I have noticed that most of those same people don’t seem to be able to talk to me about politics in a rational or well-informed manner. It’s also hard to avoid the impression that liberalism has become a new religion, with its saints and its demons and its entrenched faith.

As for Christianity, the decline is sharpest in the mainline Protestant churches—you know, the ones that have moved further and further to the left. Catholics too. Evangelicals are doing much better, with their numbers actually growing. The Christian-church-affiliated black population has remained fairly stable.

Also interesting is the growth of the “religiously unaffiliated.” It’s not clear exactly who these people are, but they don’t identify themselves as either atheist or agnostic, but prefer “unaffiliated.” My guess is that they are the sort of people who would check off the box “spiritual” if there was one—who profess a sort of vague (or sometimes not so vague, but nevertheless idiosyncratic) belief in something but don’t like churches or synagogues.

Mark Steyn on the reaction to Garland

The New Neo Posted on by

Mark Steyn has some obligatory reading on the “Yes, but…” reaction to the attack on Pam Geller, and he doesn’t mess around:

The Washington Post offered the celebrated headline “Event Organizer Offers No Apology After Thwarted Attack In Texas”, while the Associated Press went with “Pamela Geller says she has no regrets about Prophet Muhammad cartoon contest that ended in 2 deaths”. The media “narrative” of the last week is that some Zionist temptress was walking down the street in Garland in a too short skirt and hoisted it to reveal her Mohammed thong – oops, my apologies, her Prophet Mohammed thong (PBUH) – and thereby inflamed two otherwise law-abiding ISIS supporters peacefully minding their own business.

It’ll be a long time before you see “Washington Post Offers No Apology for Attacking Target of Thwarted Attack” or “AP Says It Has No Regrets After Blaming The Victim”. The respectable class in the American media share the same goal as the Islamic fanatics: They want to silence Pam Geller. To be sure, they have a mild disagreement about the means to that end – although even then you get the feeling, as with Garry Trudeau and those dozens of PEN novelists’ reaction to Charlie Hebdo, that the “narrative” wouldn’t change very much if the jihad boys had got luckier and Pam, Geert Wilders, Robert Spencer and a dozen others were all piled up in the Garland morgue.

Read the whole thing. It’s worth remembering that Steyn himself was charged in Canada under a law against so-called “hate speech,” and that the aftermath of that case was that Section 13, the portion of the law that had banned hate speech promulgated by phone or over the internet was repealed (for now, anyway).

Steyn continues:

Alas, we have raised a generation of But boys. Ever since those ridiculous Washington Post and AP headlines, I’ve been thinking about the fellows who write and sub-edit and headline and approve such things – and never see the problem with it. Why would they? If you’re under a certain age, you accept instinctively that free speech is subordinate to other considerations: If you’ve been raised in the “safe space” of American universities, you take it as read that on gays and climate change and transgendered bathrooms and all kinds of other issues it’s perfectly normal to eliminate free speech and demand only the party line. So what’s the big deal about letting Muslims cut themselves in on a little of that action?

As I said, read the whole thing. And it’s got quite a cartoon at the very end.

Seymour Hersh, Obama, and the Bin Laden raid: liars liars pants on fire

The New Neo Posted on by

My question is quite simple: who’s the bigger liar, Seymour Hersh or President Obama?

A lot of attention is being paid to Hersh’s piece in the London Review of Books that claims that “a single source says Obama lied about the raid, and that it was a joint US-Pakistani operation that was supposed to end in a drone strike.”

The problem is a single unnamed source does not a credible story make, especially when the source is speaking to and filtered through the mind of one Seymour Hersh (see this and this for previous posts of mine on Hersch and his veracity or lack thereof).

I distrust Hersh’s reporting so intensely that even if if reflects poorly on Obama, whom I also distrust intensely, I would be hard-pressed to figure out who’s lying and who is not. My guess is that probably both are lying, but it’s just a guess. So I see no need to waste a lot of time reading Hersh’s article, and I’ll rely on Ed Morrissey to digest it:

The ISI, according to Hersh’s one source, had pulled bin Laden out of the Hindu Kush in 2006 to bring him to Abbottabad, in part by bribing locals to rat him out. The US got confirmation about bin Laden’s location by basically doing the same thing, this time with military aid that went directly to the officers involved in this transaction in the form of protective gear. The problem, according to Hersh, is that the Saudis were spending a lot of money to keep bin Laden hidden because bin Laden was also a Saudi.

This is where the narrative starts to slip off the rails, though, and it brings up an important point. The first issue in any story written by Seymour Hersh is ”¦ Seymour Hersh. He has a habit of running with single-source stories that don’t pan out in the long run, and this tale has a number of red flags. This would be a big one. It’s certainly possible that some Saudi group would have coughed up cash to keep bin Laden out of harms’ way, but it wouldn’t have been the royal government. They were one of bin Laden’s targets, in part because of their alliance with the US, and especially the American military bases in Saudi Arabia.

How much is true, and how much is sheer fantasy? Hersh describes a coordination in the Pakistani military that seems too large in scope to have been a secret for four years, and only uncovered by Hersh’s single source…

That’s probably more than enough to get the idea. It’s common knowledge that Bin Laden and the Saudi government were enemies, for example, and it should be common knowledge that Seymour Hersh is an unreliable source himself.

And yet for some reason he is still being published by many media outlets. Why? Because he writes what they want to hear, and he sounds like a guy who’s really in the know. The famous Seymour Hersh! To me the most interesting question raised by Hersh’s article is: why is the left turning on Obama, at least to this small extent? Or is this just Hersh and the London Review of Books trying to make a sensation and draw readers?

Despite BDS, hate speech laws have no place in a free society

The New Neo Posted on by

I understand the temptation to pass hate speech laws.

But there’s a temptation to do a lot of things that are wrong and lead to an unacceptable loss of liberty. We are not free to do anything that harms another person, but with just a few exceptions (for example, the old yelling “fire” in a crowded theater*) we should be able to say anything. Once speech is made actionable because it expresses hate or harms some group’s feelings, we are already far far down a steep and slippery slope. “Speech” includes propaganda.

But it’s different in Canada:

“I can tell you that Canada has one of the most comprehensive sets of laws against hate crime anywhere in the world,” wrote Sirois.

She highlighted what she termed “hate propaganda” provisions in the Criminal Code criminalizing the promotion of hatred against an identifiable group, and further noted that “identifiable group” now includes any section of the public distinguished by “among other characteristics, religion or national or ethnic origin.”

The article indicates that Canada is considering using these laws against the groups promoting boycotts of Israel.

Now, I happen to be a supporter of Israel, and I am completely against the BDS groups and their lying propaganda, and believe them to be highly antisemitic for the most part although they deny it. In a country with hate speech laws, they would be one of the groups I’d consider it sweetest to prosecute. But I support neither such laws nor such prosecution, because the hate speech laws are still wrong even when used against groups whose work I despise.

More and more and more as time goes on, I think that a large part of American exceptionalism is its attitude towards free speech and therefore its commitment to liberty, which is beginning to seem unique in all the world but is increasingly threatened.

[* See this for the evolution of that doctrine and its present-day manifestation.)

Happy Mother’s Day: mothers and babies

The New Neo Posted on by

[NOTE: This is a repeat of my traditional Mother’s Day post. It was written while my mother was still alive.]

Okay, who are these three dark beauties?

A hint: one of them is the very first picture you’ve ever seen on this blog of neo-neocon, sans apple. Not that you’d recognize me, of course. Even my own mother might not recognize me from this photo.

My own mother, you say? Of course she would. Ah, but she’s here too, looking a bit different than she does today—Mother’s Day—at ninety-eight years of age. Just a bit; maybe her own mother wouldn’t recognize her, either.

Her own mother? She’s the one who’s all dressed up, with longer hair than the rest of us.

The photo of my grandmother was taken in the 1880’s; the one of my mother in the teens of the twentieth century; and the one of me, of course, in the 1950s.

Heredity, ain’t it great? My mother and grandmother are both sitting for formal portraits at a professional photographer’s studio, but by the time I came around amateur snapshots were easy to take with a smallish Brownie camera. My mother is sitting on the knee of her own grandfather, my grandmother’s father, a dapper gentleman who was always very well-turned out. I’m next to my older brother, who’s reading a book to me but is cropped out of this photo. My grandmother sits alone in all her finery.

We all not only resemble each other greatly in our features and coloring, but in our solemnity. My mother’s and grandmother’s seriousness is probably explained by the strange and formal setting; mine is due to my concentration on the book, which was Peter Pan (my brother was only pretending to read it, since he couldn’t read yet, but I didn’t know that at the time). My mother’s resemblance to me is enhanced by our similar hairdos (or lack thereof), although hers was short because it hadn’t really grown in yet, and mine was short because she purposely kept it that way (easier to deal with).

My grandmother not only has the pretty ruffled dress and the long flowing locks, but if you look really closely you can see a tiny earring dangling from her earlobe. When I was young, she showed me her baby earrings; several miniature, delicate pairs. It astounded me that they’d actually pierced a baby’s ears (and that my grandmother had let the holes close up later on, and couldn’t wear pierced earrings any more), whereas I had to fight for the right to have mine done in my early teens.

I’m not sure what my mother’s wearing; some sort of baby smock. But I know what I have on: my brother’s hand-me-down pajamas, and I was none too happy about it, of that you can be sure.

So, a very happy Mother’s Day to you all! What would mothers be without babies…and mothers…and babies….and mothers….?

I only recently discovered this dancer…

The New Neo Posted on by

…and yet Galina Mezentseva has been retired for at least twenty years, and is of my generation.

The minute I watched the very first video that I’d ever seen of her, which featured her performing Odile (the Black Swan role in “Swan Lake”), I was riveted. I’ve seen plenty of dancers, and know the styles of so many that for the most part I don’t even have to see their faces to identify them. They are all a bit different, but they divide into types.

But Mezentseva is different from all of them. She has an unusual combination of qualities that could seem really mannered and affected but does not because some extraordinary conviction, a seamless dramatic commitment on her part, plus a tremendous physical strength that never comes across as delicate or fragile but is still very beautiful and feminine, as well as a musicality that never falters, transcends it all and puts her performance into another realm—the realm of the nearly inhuman.

There isn’t a moment you aren’t assured that her balance will be plumb straight. There isn’t a moment she isn’t fully stretched, particularly her endless (and somewhat thin, even for a dancer) arms. Nothing is left to chance, nothing is unintentional, and everything is of a piece. When upright with arms fully stretched, her fingers seem to extend outward into the space around her—to the ceiling, to the wings—and she gives the illusion of filling the entire stage not just with her presence, but with her body.

I’ve never seen anything like it. And this is a video, never the best medium for dance.

She poses sometimes, and that has a certain stagey element. But I don’t care, because her poses are the fullest, most extreme expression of the music and the ballet I’ve ever seen, and she does all of this without looking like a gymnast or contortionist. Remember that these videos were taken in the 70s and 80s, when this sort of physicality was almost unheard of. At one point she sustained a very severe Achilles tendon injury and was apparently never the same again, according to admirers, and I’m not sure whether any of these videos are after the injury, but they are still marvelous.

There are actually very few videos of her at all, for some reason. Here she is as Odette, the Swan Queen (I’m not keen on the photography here, which features too many closeups, but that’s a small and relatively unimportant point):

This one is a long documentary with excerpts from many ballets—very wonderful. There are a few talking heads here and there; you’ll have to speak Russian to understand them, because there are no subtitles. But there’s a lot more dancing than talking.

There are many other videos at YouTube, if you want to watch more.

George Bush is smarter than you

The New Neo Posted on by

Here’s a good one to send round to all your liberal friends who are still accepting emails from you It’s two years old, but it’s new to me:

I teach a class at Stanford Business School titled “Financial Crises in the U.S. and Europe.” During one class session while explaining the events of September 2008, I kept referring to the efforts of the threesome of Hank Paulson, Ben Bernanke, and Tim Geithner, who were joined at the hip in dealing with firm-specific problems as they arose.

One of my students asked “How involved was President Bush with what was going on?” I smiled and responded, “What you really mean is, ”˜Was President Bush smart enough to understand what was going on,’ right?”

The class went dead silent. Everyone knew that this was the true meaning of the question. Kudos to that student for asking the hard question and for framing it so politely. I had stripped away that decorum and exposed the raw nerve.

I looked hard at the 60 MBA students and said “President Bush is smarter than almost every one of you.”

More silence.

I could tell they were waiting for me to break the tension, laugh, and admit I was joking.

I did not. A few shifted in their seats, then I launched into a longer answer.

Please read the whole thing.