…that when people write articles critical of Obama these days, no one even bothers to call them racists?
The Atlantic revives the “terrorists are idiots” meme
Daniel Byman and Christine Fair bring back a pre-9/11 theme, slightly revised for a post-9/11 world: terrorists are stupid and for the most part ineffective.
The spend a lot of time mocking the Taliban’s suicide bombers for sometimes blowing themselves up inadvertently in a group hug before going off to the mission. And of course there’s the famous Christmas bomber, whom they call the “jockstrap jihadist,” whose attempt could be called “crude” in several meanings of the word. The authors also write things like this, “The United States has spent billions on port security since 9/11, even though terrorists have shown little interest in ports as targets and even less ability to actually strike them.”
It reminds me of the perception most of us had of terrorists—their expertise and goals—right up until 9/11. The 1993 attack on the WTC was widely considered to be an example of their glaring and even laughable ineptitude. Forget the fact that 6 people died, or that the original intent of the perpetrators was to bring down the towers, and that some experts even said that, if the placement of the bomb had been better, they might have succeeded. What was emphasized instead was the almost comical fact that the terrorist who had rented the van in which the bombs were placed subsequently reported it stolen and came back to claim his deposit; that’s how he was caught.
What a bunch of rubes! The Keystone Cops of terrorists—although they got the last laugh, only eight years later.
To be fair to Byman and—umm–Fair, they make the point that emphasizing terrorists’ ineptitude might be good propaganda to discredit the jihadi cause and make fewer people likely to be attracted to it. I’m not at all sure, though; it certainly didn’t work between 1993 and 2001. The terrorists were ridiculed plenty during that period, and it only seems to have caused them to step up the recruiting efforts and raise their game, culminating in 9/11.
It also might just be that efforts such as those aimed at protecting ports, which Byman and Fair see as wasted effort, have been part of the reason terrorists haven’t struck there. It’s a bit like a burglar alarm—thieves will go for the softer target, the house without protection.
Which goes to show that not all thieves are dumb. The successful ones are certainly not—as the surprisingly spectacular and previously unprecedented success and scope of the 9/11 attacks showed.
Those of you who watched last night’s debate…
…(all three of you): who do you think won? And will that same person be ahead a year from now, when the nominations happen?
And speaking of the debate, doesn’t Michele Bachmann look teensy here?
But paradoxically, her diminutive size is one of the factors that helps make her stand out (not the only one, though).
[NOTE: I think the effect of petiteness is accentuated by the fact that Bachmann’s in the middle of the photo, and towards the sides the lens distorts people and makes them look bigger.]
Krauthammer on the debt debate
I agree with Krauthammer:
The people spoke [in the Wisconsin recall election]; the process worked. Yes, it was raucous and divisive, but change this fundamental should not be enacted quietly. This is not midnight basketball or school uniforms. This is the future of government-worker power and the solvency of the states. It deserves big, serious, animated public debate.
Precisely of the kind Washington (exhibit B) just witnessed over its debt problem. You know: The debt-ceiling debate universally denounced as dysfunctional, if not disgraceful, hostage-taking, terrorism, gun-to-the-head blackmail.
Spare me the hysteria. What happened was that the 2010 electorate, as represented in Congress, forced Washington to finally confront the national debt. It was a triumph of democratic politics ”” a powerful shift in popular will finding concrete political expression.
But only partial expression. Debt hawks are upset that the final compromise doesn’t do much. But it shouldn’t do much. They won only one election. They were entrusted, as of yet, with only one-half of one branch of government.
But they did begin to turn the aircraft carrier around. The process did bequeath a congressional super-committee with extraordinary powers to reduce debt. And if that fails, the question ”” how much government, how much debt ”” will go to the nation in November 2012. Which is also how it should be.
The conventional complaint is that the process was ugly. Big deal. You want beauty? Go to a museum. Democratic politics was never meant to be an exercise in aesthetics.
Not just ugly, moan the critics, but oh so slow. True, again. It took months. And will take more. The super-committee doesn’t report until Thanksgiving. The next election is more than a year away. But the American system was designed to make a full turn of the carrier difficult and deliberate.
You will find that those who are criticizing the process (Republicans are terrorists and hostage-takers!) don’t like the result. And those who defend the process like the result.
The same was true, by the way, for the health care reform bill. Remember that? Krauthammer believes that the HCR legislation (plus the stimulus) was the main initial catalyst for the voter revolt against the Democrats. I agree.
Romney: corporations are people
Romney is getting a lot of flack for saying that corporations are people, but even liberal Greg Sargent is defending Romney—sort of, anyway A transcript of Romney’s remarks appears at Sargent’s WaPo blog.
And well, aren’t corporations people?
The whole thing reminds me most of this, though:
Are you…
…going to watch the Republican debate tonight?
On DNA testing and paternity
I missed this when it first came out, but it’s an excellent read with much food for thought. The subject: how DNA testing has affected paternity and child support.
The rioters: Hey, they’re depraved on account they’re deprived
This piece by Seumas Milne in the Guardian is typical of the way the left looks at the riots and their causes:
…[W]here exactly did the rioters get the idea that there is no higher value than acquiring individual wealth, or that branded goods are the route to identity and self-respect?
While bankers have publicly looted the country’s wealth and got away with it, it’s not hard to see why those who are locked out of the gravy train might think they were entitled to help themselves to a mobile phone. Some of the rioters make the connection explicitly. “The politicians say that we loot and rob, they are the original gangsters,” one told a reporter. Another explained to the BBC: “We’re showing the rich people we can do what we want.”
Most have no stake in a society which has shut them out or an economic model which has now run into the sand.
Reactions to the riots have highlighted some of the major differences between left and right. To the former, (a) the poor are never responsible, even for their own bad decision and actions; (b) the rich are always responsible, even for the bad actions of others; and (c) there is no problem that can’t be solved by more social services and/or income redistribution. The right, of course, has a very different idea of personal responsibility—to them, it’s actually personal—and believes the welfare state has been part of the problem, because it helps take away the idea of personal responsibility, dampens initiative, and leads to a sense of unjustified entitlement.
The argument makes me think of this number from the 50s, the song “Gee Officer Krupke” from the musical “West Side Story”. As I watch it now, these “juvenile delinquents” seem as archaic and outdated as the term itself, and nearly as tame as a bunch of Eagle Scouts. As they mock all the excuses made for them by supposedly well-meaning authorities, I note that there are fashions in these things: the bulk of the explanations back then had less to do with not enough money being spent on them and more to do with familial dysfunction, although the song does feature the famous line “Hey—I’m depraved on account I’m deprived!,” which pretty much summarizes Seumas Milne’s article:
Theodore Dalrymple offers a corrective to reasoning such as Milne’s. He even uses that word “deprived” [hat tip: commenter “Denise”]:
The riots are the apotheosis of the welfare state and popular culture in their British form. A population thinks (because it has often been told so by intellectuals and the political class) that it is entitled to a high standard of consumption, irrespective of its personal efforts; and therefore it regards the fact that it does not receive that high standard, by comparison with the rest of society, as a sign of injustice. It believes itself deprived (because it has often been told so by intellectuals and the political class), even though each member of it has received an education costing $80,000, toward which neither he nor””quite likely””any member of his family has made much of a contribution; indeed, he may well have lived his entire life at others’ expense, such that every mouthful of food he has ever eaten, every shirt he has ever worn, every television he has ever watched, has been provided by others. Even if he were to recognize this, he would not be grateful, for dependency does not promote gratitude. On the contrary, he would simply feel that the subventions were not sufficient to allow him to live as he would have liked.
At the same time, his expensive education will have equipped him for nothing. His labor, even supposing that he were inclined to work, would not be worth its cost to any employer””partly because of the social charges necessary to keep others such as he in a state of permanent idleness, and partly because of his own characteristics.
[NOTE: Here are the original lyrics to the Officer Krupke song from the play, slightly different from those in the movie. Also, rumor has it that the song was originally supposed to end with “Fuck you!” rather than the rather tepid “Krup you!,” but it wasn’t allowed in those oh-so-innocent days.]
Governor Walker speaks
London, 1978
Gerard Vanderleun offers some memories of London, then and now.
I’ve got my own memories—although, unlike Vanderleun, I never lived in London. The only time I’ve ever been there was a one-week stay in 1978, accompanied by my then-husband. It was summer, the weather was uncharacteristically warm and sunny, and the food was dreadful, just as I’d been warned.
Back then I was still dancing, and so some of my time in the city was spent in London’s ballet studios. That turns out to be a pretty good way of getting to know a city and its people—at least, its young and artsy people. I was surprised to learn that London’s dance studios were a mess.
Back then, no city I knew (and that included New York) had nice studios; most were in low-rent districts, consisting of a warren of rooms with obstructing posts. But London’s hit a new low of filth. The bathrooms were so disgusting, so full of mold and mildew, that taking a shower was out of the question. The toilet paper was inadequate to its task, more like low-grade wax paper than anything else. And the people seemed angry; testy and sullen.
This hostile affect was hardly limited to the dancers. I noticed it all over London that summer. The very first day my husband and I were there we observed a number of angry encounters between strangers, a phenomenon that became commonplace. And it wasn’t as though I was unfamiliar with big cities and their mores, either. After all, I had grown up in New York, and I’d lived in some of the major cities in the US.
But this seemed different, and it seemed specifically inter-ethnic. However, none of the people involved were white. It was immigrant groups that were clashing: Caribbean blacks vs. Arabs, Indians vs. Asians, you name it and the groups were angry at each other. It didn’t take the form of riots, of course. Rather, we observed screaming matches (and even pushing) over seemingly nothing. We came to expect at least one incident for every subway ride.
Now I look back and I see that as the beginning of something. The British were worn out themselves, their glory days over, but they were trying to absorb the aftermath of an empire that was no more, and immigrants from once far-flung shores and disparate cultures were rubbing up against each other and competing for scarce resources in a manner that boded ill.
How the present riots in England relate to all of this isn’t completely clear, but I think they do. However, a great deal more is going on now, including the effects of several more decades of the welfare state, the disarming of citizens, and a system of law and order that is overwhelmed by the nihilistic population it now faces—clearly, it’s not up to the task.
And I don’t think England will ever be the same again after this; its idea of itself will have been fundamentally changed.
[ADDENDUM: Ace has some chilling must-read stuff on the riots and people’s thwarted attempts to defend themselves:
“We were outside ready and expecting them,” said the manager of Turkish Food Market, who asked not to be named.
“But I felt very panicky because we are not safe from either the rioters or police.
“We put all of our efforts into this shop. It took 20 years to get it like this. But we do not know about our rights.
“I’m scared that the police and the government will attack us if we defend our businesses.
“We are being squeezed between the two.”]
Stock market’s down again…
…and this time they say it’s about trouble with the French banks, which hold a lot of European debt.
My opinion? The market is very volatile, and each explanation is only part of the explanation. The fuller explanation is uncertainty and fear—some of it highly justified—breeding more uncertainty and fear.
I would not be surprised if the market went up again towards the end of the day. I would not be surprised if it plummeted further. No one should be surprised. I learned long ago to try to block out the ups and downs of the market, or they would drive me mad.
Unions try to buy Wisconsin back…
…but fail. For now.
It was a squeaker, but this time the Republicans held on.
And the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel comes out with an editorial admitting that Governor Walker’s policies seem to have helped local Wisconsin governments financially, rather than hurt them. Fancy that:
So it turns out that the sky isn’t going to fall on all local governments in Wisconsin. The numbers now starting to come in show that Gov. Scott Walker’s “tools” for local governments apparently will help at least some of them deal with cuts in state aid imposed by the state budget.
That’s contrary to the expectation and the rhetoric of critics in the spring, and it’s to Walker’s credit. It bears out the governor’s assessment of his budget-repair bill, although we still maintain he could have reached his goals without dealing a body blow to public employee unions.
If the newspaper prints more of this kind of thing, Wisconsin Democrats’ bid to recall Walker might even fail too, just like this recall did.
What does it mean nationally? Maybe nothing. But it’s an indication that the swing in 2010 to the more conservative/Republican side in states such as Wisconsin may be holding, at least for now. And that although money can buy a lot in the voting arena, it can’t buy everything.