On liberty

The New Neo Posted on by

[I’ve been too busy to write today, so in honor of the Fourth, this is a repeat of an old post. See you tomorrow.]

I’ve been visiting New York City, the place where I grew up. I decide to take a walk to the Promenade in Brooklyn Heights, never having been there before.

When you approach the Promenade you can’t really see what’s in store. You walk down a normal-looking street, spot a bit of blue at the end of the block, make a right turn–and, then, suddenly, there is New York.

And so it is for me. I take a turn, and catch my breath: downtown Manhattan rises to my left, seemingly close enough to touch, across the narrow East River. I see skyscrapers, piers, the orange-gold Staten Island ferry. In front of me, there are the graceful gothic arches of the Brooklyn Bridge. To my right, the back of some brownstones, and a well-tended and charming garden that goes on for a third of a mile.

I walk down the promenade looking first left and then right, not knowing which vista I prefer, but liking them both, especially in combination, because they complement each other so well.

All around me are people, relaxing. Lovers walking hand in hand, mothers pushing babies in strollers, fathers pushing babies in strollers, nannies pushing babies in strollers. People walking their dogs (a prepoderance of pugs, for some reason), pigeons strutting and courting, tourists taking photos of themselves with the skyline as background, every other person speaking a foreign language.

The garden is more advanced from what it must be at my house, reminding me that New York is really a southern city compared to New England. Daffodils, the startling blue of grape hyachinths, tulips in a rainbow of soft colors, those light-purple azaleas that are always the first of their kind, flowering pink magnolia and airy white dogwood and other blooming trees I don’t know the names of.

In the view to my left, of course, there’s something missing. Something very large. Two things, actually: the World Trade Center towers. Just the day before, we had driven past that sprawling wound, with its mostly-unfilled acreage where the WTC had once stood, now surrounded by fencing. Driving by it is like passing a war memorial and graveyard combined; the urge is to bow one’s head.

As I look at the skyline from the Promenade, I know that those towers are missing, but I don’t really register the loss visually. I left New York in 1965, never to live there again, returning thereafter only as occasional visitor. The World Trade Center was built in the early seventies, so I never managed to incorporate it into that personal New York skyline of memory that I hold in my mind’s eye, even though I saw the towers on every visit. So, what I now see resembles nothing more than the skyline of my youth, restored, a fact which seems paradoxical to me. But I feel the loss, even though I don’t see it. Viewing the skyline always has a tinge of sadness now, which it never had before 9/11.

I come to the end of the walkway and turn myself around to set off on the return trip. And, suddenly, the view changes. Now, of course, the garden is to my left and the city to my right; and the Brooklyn Bridge, which was ahead of me, is now behind me and out of sight. But now I can see for the first time, ahead of me and to the right, something that was behind me before. In the middle of the harbor, the pale-green Statue of Liberty stands firmly on its concrete foundation, arm raised high, torch in hand.

The sight is intensely familiar to me–I used to see it almost every day when I was growing up. But I’ve never seen it from this angle before. She seems both small and gigantic at the same time: dwarfed by the skyscrapers near me that threaten to overwhelm her, but towering over the water that surrounds her on all sides. The eye is drawn to her distant, heroic figure. She’s been holding that torch up for so long, she must be tired. But still she stands, resolute, her arm extended.

Who’s afraid of the big bad terrorists?

The New Neo Posted on by

Police speculate that three recent car bomb incidents in Britain are related. Perhaps al Qaeda is part of the picture, perhaps not. But all three car bombs had a similar modus operandi to one another, and the outcomes of all three were exactly what you would want from a terrorist attack: no one was hurt, or it was only the terrorists themselves that were injured.

This allows us to add these particular events to the fairly long list of what you might call the Keystone Cops school of terrorist activity—would-be perpetrators who don’t seem to be able to do much more than harm themselves. It also allows those on the Left who are so inclined, to pooh-pooh the threat of terrorism and to mock those who take it seriously (I’m not going to link to the particular Leftist blogs in question and add to their traffic—but if you’re especially interested, a typical such site can be found if you follow the appropriate link here).

I’ve written at some length previously on the topic of the Left’s accusations that the Right is motivated by irrational fear. What interests me more right now about the current terrorist activity in Britain, and the reaction of the Left to it, is the use of the “incompetence” meme.

Until 9/11, Islamic terrorists in Western countries had a reputation as bumblers. This despite their deadly success on foreign soil: the Khobar Towers, Pan Am Flight 103, the US Embassy bombings in Tanzania and Kenya, and the USS Cole.

This “bumbler” reputation should have been put to rest by 9/11, but it was not. And the long list of exceedingly successful attacks on Western allies since 9/11 ought to indicate a very serious intent and threat, as well: the London subway bombings, the Bali nightclub carnage, and the Madrid train bombings, to name just a few.

But the lack of major attacks in the US since 9/11 has allowed many people to think of that day as an anomaly, and to focus instead on failed attempts. Successful terrorist attacks may not be easy to execute perfectly, but there’s absolutely no reason to think they cannot and will not be, simply because so many fail. The pattern is to try, try again if unsuccessful, till they get it right. In that respect 9/11 itself is a good case in point.

The WTC attack of 1993 was an extremely serious one that killed six people and injured over a thousand others. But it was not taken all that seriously by many in the general public because the number of people murdered was so small compared to the grandiose plans of the perpetrators, and because of certain details of how they were caught—particularly the fact that one of them was arrested while trying to collect a deposit on the rental van involved in the explosion (a “Saturday Night Live” touch if ever there was one).

But the intent was every bit as deadly as the 2001 attack that toppled the buildings. In fact, the intent was the same—mastermind Ramzi Yousef fully intended to destroy the towers, and only missed accomplishing that goal by a slightly faulty placement of the bomb, according to the WTC architect’s testimony in the trial.

The difference between a plan that can be viewed as farcical and almost comical, and one that is as horrific and deadly as 9/11, can be surprisingly small. If something had gone wrong with the terrorists’ plans and/or execution on 9/11—bad weather, perhaps, or a greater ability of the intelligence community to connect the dots—they would have seemed to be incompetent bumblers like the earlier plotters. And the same might have ended up being true, in reverse, of these most recent would-be terrorists—if they’d been just a bit more technically competent, they might have perpetrated a horrific mass murder.

Nothing prior to 9/11 prepared us for that day, although many things should have. Nothing subsequent has indicated terrorists have given up on attacking us.

One thing is certain: if another large attack occurs, we cannot say it came as a surprise, or that the perpetrators were incompetent fools.

On-topic and off: letting go

The New Neo Posted on by

I was asked here why it is that I tolerate so many off-topic comments on this blog. Why not delete them, or at least admonish people to stay on-topic?

As far as I’m concerned, the comments section here is for everyone. I mostly let go of the result, except for the most overt and abusive trolls (usually that’s redundant). People will go off-topic; that’s what people do. I spend many hours writing what I imagine to be some carefully crafted post, with tons of nuance and masses of critical thinking, and then people talk about something tangential or even unrelated.

Sometimes, of course, the comments are wonderful, better than the piece. Sometimes not. My portion is something I fling out into the world without knowing what will happen later; I just try to do my part as best I can. The research and the learning that go into writing the post interest me in and of themselves. In the process of writing I often crystallize and organize my thoughts, or even truly learn what I actually think about the topic in the first place. At any rate, once people start commenting, it’s out of my control, except for weeding out the really offensive ones.

Weeding, hmmm—now that I think of it, I’ll say that the garden’s that way, too (life, too, most probably). Everything we do we can’t control, and sometimes things crop up that you don’t expect—some of them good, some of them not so good. And everything we do we ultimately have to leave.

And yet we do it anyway, and for what? For love, for beauty, for knowledge, for fun, for curiosity, for our descendants, for ourselves, for whomever might happen by to appreciate what we’ve done (or to criticize it).

Which reminds me—here’s my garden, about a week ago. And it’s okay if you go off-topic:

irises10.jpgirises8.jpg

The surge: “Hello we must be going…”

The New Neo Posted on by

Groucho Marx had a signature greeting song, always good for a laugh: “Hello I Must Be Going:”

Hello, I must be going
I cannot stay
I came to say
I must be going
I’m glad I came
But just the same
I must be going…

In relation to the surge, Congress is Groucho Marx, although not nearly as funny. That surge we’ve heard so much about, headed by counter-insurgency expert General Petraeus—originally held in such high bipartisan esteem—is only about a week or so into full deployment.

But of course it’s failed. Or, rather, it will fail. Inevitably, indubitably.

Because the pundits and the members of Congress know much more about such things than General Petraeus. No need to wait around to see what actually happens by the short-sighted September deadline. When last I checked it’s only late June right now, but what more could possibly happen in a couple of months? Why bother? We all know the outcome, don’t we?

The MSM made much of Senator Richard Lugar’s speech on the subject (and please actually read his words rather than the MSM reports of what he said) since it represented a defection from the Bush line by a prominent Republican. The gist of Lugar’s speech seemed to be the following: the Iraqis are no good, our military is tired, and neither the American people nor Congress has the patience and will to even try anymore, so let’s leave before we even discover the results of the surge.

Senator Lugar’s rationale for suggesting abandonment of the surge now rather than waiting any longer is predicated on the fact that we are more likely to get truly bipartisan cooperative policy going if we start sooner rather than waiting to accomplish it during a contentious election year.

Sorry, Senator, you may not have noticed, but it’s already rather late for that. Actually, it’s been too late since the election of 2006. In fact, it was probably too late even earlier. As you yourself noted in the first few paragraphs of your speech [emphasis mine]:

The prospects that the current “surge” strategy will succeed in the way originally envisioned by the President are very limited within the short period framed by our own domestic political debate. And the strident, polarized nature of that debate increases the risk that our involvement in Iraq will end in a poorly planned withdrawal that undercuts our vital interests in the Middle East….The current debate on Iraq in Washington has not been conducive to a thoughtful revision of our Iraq policy.

Bingo, Senator Lugar. And that includes you.

Here’s an outline of the way the surge is supposed to work, if successful. You’ll note that its main thrust is not expected to occur until this summer—that’s actually where that September timeline for a report on the undertaking originated.

In fact, the surge is an example of what Lugar is asking for, “a thoughtful revision of our Iraq policy,” drawn up by a general who is the country’s expert in the field, newly appointed and approved (the latter unanimously, I might add) for the very purpose of implementing it after the architect of the old policy, Secretary Rumsfeld, was ousted subsequent to last year’s election.

Oh, details, details. And, as J.D. Johannes points out in this article, the four goals Senator Lugar has outlined for our policy in Iraq and the greater Middle East:

…are being advanced, some of them dramatically, by the surge strategy of Gen. David Petraeus ”” the very strategy that Sen. Lugar would scrap in favor of “downsizing and redeployment.”

Johannes has recently returned from three months in Iraq, and his article offers a strong critique of Lugar’s speech. Johannes notes that the surge has already accomplished important things, even prior to its being at full strength:

The principal accomplishment of the surge to date is solidifying the “Anbar Awakening,” the significance of which has been under-reported by the media and ill-understood by the public. If any piece of territory in Iraq qualified as a “terrorist safe haven,” it was bloody Anbar. This province of little over 1 million people ”” 4.5 percent of Iraq’s population—has accounted for 34.6 percent of U.S. casualties….The virtual extinction of the insurgency in the province ”” a victory that I was privileged to witness first-hand ”” represented not some momentary quirk of tribal alliances, but a diligent application of the revised tactics that coalition forces have implemented under skilled, battle-proven officers and Gen. Petraeus.

It’s not hard to predict that whatever gains may occur this summer as a result of Petraeus and his “skilled, battle-proven” officers and troops will likewise by “under-reported by the media and ill-understood by the public.”

And that’s because the fix is in, and the song is being sung: Hello, we must be going….

What price diversity?

The New Neo Posted on by

Today the Supreme Court has handed down this decision blocking attempts by the public school administrations of Seattle and Louisville to reassign students solely on the basis of race in an attempt at greater diversity.

Here’s the NY Times’ summary of the ruling, which was a close 5-4 decision breaking along the expected Supreme Court lines, with the usual conservative/liberal split among the Justices. In the majority opinion, the Court wrote that the districts had failed to meet the burden of justifying the “extreme means” they chose to right the perceived racial divisions.

I haven’t had time to read the full opinion with all the dissents, although I hope to do so later. But I have several preliminary observations, two based on memory, one based on social science.

The first is that I lived in Boston back in the days of the controversial institution of busing, and although I was (and remain) extremely sympathetic to the plight of African-American students in inner cities with virtually segregated schools, I thought busing opponents had understandable objections. Yes, yes, I know, some were motivated by racism, but others were motivated by the principle of keeping young children in local schools and not making them be guinea pigs to social science experimentation ordered by courts under the aegis of academics (the busing plan was based on a PhD thesis by Harvard student Charles Glenn).

In the case of Boston, busing went both ways, and white students (in predominantly poor neighborhoods, naturally) were forced out of their own districts on sometimes lengthy rides to predominantly (and often substandard) African-American schools. This was supposed to foster equality of opportunity and greater racial understanding. It may have done the former—an example of “a lowering tide sinks all boats”—but it certainly didn’t lead to the latter, as this fascinating history of the busing experiment will attest.

In fact, the result was not only increased racial turmoil, but helped lead to the effective desegregation of Boston public schools as whites pulled out of the city (or the public school system) and the student body become approximately 85% minority. Perhaps this would have happened anyway, but the process supposedly was accelerated by the busing crisis.

Busing in Boston effectively ended in the late 1980s, when school choice—which seems to have been a comparatively effective and successful solution—was instituted. But that was found unconstitutional by the courts at the turn of the millennium, and the Boston public schools are now unable to use either method to balance schools racially (perhaps moot, considering the racial demography that exists today among the public school student population).

My second memory is of the college I attended back in the mid-to-late 60s. When I started it was a large coed school with an almost totally white student body, its black students mostly athletes on scholarship. Two years later the African-American student population there had increased enormously to approximately 15% or so, but I noticed (I had transferred, but was back for a visit) that there was virtually no mixing. When the number of blacks had been small, they were well-integrated into the student body, but now the dining halls were utterly segregated, seemingly by choice. In other words, the black kids stuck together and so did the white kids.

It’s easy to say that enforced integration of these two types certainly has not led to racial harmony. And yet something has—at least, relatively speaking. Those of us who grew up in the 50s and 60s can readily tell the difference, and it is profound: African-Americans are far more integrated into our society, and far more visible in positions of power and influence than ever before. In addition, the sort of seething racial turmoil that one could feel simmering—and often erupting—seems to have diminished. So perhaps, in the long term, some of these solutions “worked.”

That brings us, however, to my third point. Recently there has been some interesting research indicating that, in the short-and even the medium-term, increasing diversity ends up fostering problems more often than not. Well-known Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam, the author of Bowling Alone, has found over five years of research that:

…immigration and ethnic diversity have a devastating short- and medium-term influence on the social capital, fabric of associations, trust, and neighborliness that create and sustain communities. He fears that his work on the surprisingly negative effects of diversity will become part of the immigration debate, even though he finds that in the long run, people do forge new communities and new ties.

This conforms almost exactly with my observations, but there’s more. Diversity leads to a general lack of trust and withdrawal from community activity, a kind of “hunkering down” effect, lower confidence and investment in community, less charitable giving, lower happiness. This is true whatever the economic level of the community is, by the way.

Putnam himself was disturbed enough by his own findings that he “delayed publishing his research until he could develop proposals to compensate for the negative effects of diversity.” A very odd course of action for a scientist—but this is a social scientist, after all. At least he published in the end, although he has yet to make the details of his research available and has only released a summary.

But the results indicate that diversity has profound negative consequences in the short and medium runs, and so we should not be surprised if we notice that is exactly what has happened. And, by the way, for those who think this is primarily a phenomenon of the big bad old USA, it is not. The result apparently holds true in studies of communities in Australia, Sweden Canada and Britain as well.

I’m not suggesting we go back to the days of segregation, or that we ban legal immigrants. But I am suggesting that the idea that the enforcement of diversity at all costs is no panacea, and is not going to lead to the results even its proponents are hoping for. At the very least, expect a very bumpy ride for decades along the way.

A mighty poor documentary

The New Neo Posted on by

I haven’t seen it and probably won’t, because I don’t go to the movies often and this one doesn’t sound very good. And reading this review of the Danny Pearl story “A Mighty Heart” only reinforces that notion.

Daniel Pearl’s friend and colleague Asra Q. Nomani seems incensed that the movie doesn’t portray anything like the Danny she knew, respected, and platonically loved. She cooperated with the film’s development, thinking the movie “had the potential to be meaningful” and would explain Pearl’s passion for reporting as well as tell the story of the team that searched for him so vigorously and yet futilely. Nomani also hoped the movie would spark what she refers to as “a search for the truth behind Danny’s death,” which she feels has not yet been learned (not sure about that last part, but I’m fairly certain it doesn’t involve George Bush; she sounds like a relatively sensible woman).

Sensible yes, but naive about Hollywood. Please, someone, let me know when has Hollywood ever done right by a true story?

The fact that, as Nomani points out, the movie has been turned into a vehicle for star Jolie, and Pearl has become, as she says, “a cameo in his own murder”—and a bland, boring cameo at that, unlike the exceptionally witty and charismatic Pearl—is hardly surprising. Nor is the fact that details of the kidnapping are botched to make it seem more dramatic and simplistic, such as having Pearl receive (and ignore) a series of three warnings not to meet in a public place with the man he was due to interview.

Never happened, says Nomani. But it makes for a more easily “readable” story line, so who cares if it trashes Pearl’s memory by insulting his intelligence and caution?

Not the movie industry. Nor should the somewhat naive Nomani have expected it to. After all, this is the same Hollywood that cast the non-athlete (and left-handed) Tony Perkins as right-handed Red Sox player Jimmy Piersall, that simplified and distorted Gandhi’s life with tremendous inaccuracy to the tune of eight Oscars, that provides a home for Oliver Stone’s “historical” shenanigans. Why would Daniel Pearl’s story be any different?

If war is not the answer, what is?

The New Neo Posted on by

You’ve all seen those posters and bumper stickers: “War is not the answer.”

You’ve also seen discussions of why those sporting them are incorrect; war has solved some things and provided answers to certain questions—such as whether, for example, there would be a 1000-year Reich.

I’ve spent some time puzzling over the use of the “war is not the answer” mantra. For some people—the less thoughtful—I think it’s merely a kneejerk catch phrase, a method to decorate a car in a way that says, “I’m a good person, not a bloodthirsty sonofabitch like those who advocate war.” This group (and I have no idea what percentage of the whole it might represent) has no particular understanding of history, especially the history of warfare, and no real thought about the limitations of the perfectibility of human nature.

And then there are those who really don’t have much interest in pacifism, but have an ultra-Leftist political agenda that an alliance with pacifists serves. These people see pacifists as a subset of the category “useful idiots” that they’ve found so very helpful over time.

That leaves us with the third category, the one that interests me most, the committed and relatively thoughtful and well-meaning people who sustain a hope that, although war will sometimes happen, they can promote a set of programs that will lead to a world in which war will be resorted to less and less. I will summarize their position by saying that, although they understand that war sometimes has provided short-term answers to certain questions (such as the one posited above about the Third Reich), it has never provided a long-term answer to the problem of human intra-species aggression on a large scale, and each war has introduced new problems in its wake that lead to further war.

In other words, when members of this third group say “War is not the answer” their accent is on the word “the.” War isn’t not the final answer to the problems of human conflict, and although it may appear to solve some things, other problems are bound to arise that will lead to future wars.

Well, excuse me but: duh. Or to put it more politely: there are no solutions to the problem of human conflict that will eliminate the need for force at times, just as there are virtually no large-scale societies that can do away with police or prisons.

The advent of the atomic age gave pacifists—and their hopes for a way to end war—a boost, and understandably so. As dreadful as war has been in the first half of the twentieth century, with the invention of nuclear weapons it became far worse to contemplate. Early on in the atomic age the hope was that nations would be sane enough that the prospect of mutually assured destruction would be a powerful deterrent to any war, and that therefore—paradoxically—the very power of the weapons would be the reason they were unlikely to be used in the future.

Amazingly enough, so far that hope has been borne out; Hiroshima and Nagasaki are still both the first and the last times nuclear weapons have actually been detonated on a populace.

But that does not mean war has ended; sub-atomic conflicts have regularly sprung up around the world, and many of those are presently of the asymmetrical variety, involving terrorism and/or guerilla warfare and insurgencies. Another common type of war in recent times has been the internecine inter-tribal, inter-ethnic, and/or inter-religious conflicts of the third world, particularly Africa.

As for nuclear weapons, unfortunately they have recently become tools that seem more likely to be used. We now have an enemy who is less obviously interested in life than in death, and motivated at least in part by apocalyptic religious thinking (example: Iran). We also have another and related enemy that is not a state and therefore has no nation of people to protect, would be difficult to trace a bomb back to, and is driven by the same aforementioned religious motivation and otherwordly emphasis, (examples: al Qaeda and its spawn).

All of this fuels the depth of the desire to find an alternative to war—an alternative that provides not only “an” answer, but “the” answer, in a way that war never can. If you go to websites that promote pacifism, such as this one run by a Quaker lobby, you’ll find attempts to explain what that alternative solution should be.

What you find there, of course, is not “the” answer, either. This is no surprise, because if you hold the more tragic (and, I believe, more realistic) view of human nature that I happen to, then you’re not looking for “the” answer, because you believe there never can be one.

There is really nothing so terribly wrong with the “solutions” offered there (except for reliance on the corrupt and/or incompetent UN), at least as far as they go, which isn’t all that far. The Quaker website stresses the idea of prevention, of nipping things in the bud before they ever get to that point. Nice idea, and I’m sure in some cases it works, but the programs described mostly focus on preventing one type of conflict, the so-called “mass humanitarian crises” such as the Rwandan slaughter. Although the role of the UN and NGOs in Darfur doesn’t indicate things have been going very well in this regard, there is some evidence of success (follow the link and scroll down to number four) in a very limited and circumscribed number of cases, none of which involve the so-called “war on terror” or Islamic totalitarianism.

But let’s not fool ourselves. Pope John Paul II negotiating a deal between Argentina and Chile over the Beagle Channel, or a social service society soothing the seething shantytowns of Ahmedabad in India through street plays and festivals—laudable though such things may be—aren’t about to give us “the answer” to the current question of what to do to counter the threat that militant Islamic fundamentalist totalitarianism represents now, including both its national and its terrorist manifestations.

Prevention is wonderful, and I’m all for it. It’s good to exercise aerobically, to eat healthfully, try to avoid carcinogens, and to get your vaccinations. The disease model dictates, however, that although an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, human beings rarely follow all the rules, and even those who do can end up with the shock of cancer or some other dread disease. When that happens, cure is worth many ounces of prevention, because prevention is no longer possible. And treatment must occur quickly.

Does that mean that someone who is diagnosed with cancer should give up practicing good health habits? Of course not; the two—prevention and treatment—work in tandem, and healthful practices can make treatment more effective. That’s why the “treatment” known as war does not preclude peace efforts such as those described on the Quaker website, as well.

War as a treatment? Yes—an exceptionally drastic one that should only be resorted to when there are no good alternatives, or when time has run out on the ones that might have worked in the past (the problem, of course, is deciding when that has happened). And like all drastic treatments it has many side effects, and can backfire and cause worse problems than those it attempts to address.

With war, every now and then there’s a cure, of course—World War II as a “cure” for Nazism, for example (although of course small pockets of that particular disease remain). But although World War II “cured” Nazism on a worldwide basis, the side effects were profound and devastating, and its aftermath fostered the growth of another already-existing disease: Communism.

Yes, indeed, war is not the answer to the problems that bring about armed conflict, and war is probably the least benign “treatment” on earth. But when prevention (and our very incomplete knowledge of how to accomplish it) has failed, sometimes it’s the only answer.

[ADDENDUM: In one of those examples of simultaneity in which the blogosphere is especially rich, Shrinkwrapped writes today on the psychological underpinnings of this sort of ultra-pacifist point of view.]

Who put the Cialis in socialism?

The New Neo Posted on by

Ymarsakar asks why my blog refuses to accept any and all comments featuring the word “socialism.”

Well, I certainly had no idea! It was never my intent! I wasn’t even there! Blame it on WordPress! Blame it on….Cialis.

Cialis? The erectile dysfunction drug? Whatever does being “ready when the moment is right” have to do with socialism—or socialists, apparently another word inadvertently banned from this site?

One could make an argument for some sort of link between the two: for an awfully long time, socialism has been waiting—and ready—for the moment that has somehow never quite come (and yet has seemed to socialists to be on its way), the moment that will prove once and for all that socialism is the superior method of running a country.

But no; the true connection is the fact that (as most of you may have figured out by now) the word “cialis” is embedded in the word “socialism.”

I currently have blocked about fifty drug names on this site; if I hadn’t done so, there might be upwards of a fifty or so pharmaceutical spam comments here a day. Cialis, of course, is one of them, and the unintended consequence of blocking Cialis is to block socialism.

So as an experiment, and in the interests of free speech (wouldn’t want to be accused by the Left of blocking that), I have temporarily and experimentally unblocked Cialis. Therefore you are free to discuss socialism and socialists to your hearts’ delight, without resorting to such ruses as soci@list.

And you’re free to discuss Cialis as well.

The unintended consequences of teaching expurgated history

The New Neo Posted on by

I don’t know about you, but I hated the subject “history” in school. School history courses were almost uniformly boring, and this is a source of wonder to me because history itself is almost unfailingly fascinating and even gripping. To make history dull, one has to work at it.

But work at it they did. They purposely left out (and continue to leave out—although what is deleted now is different than it used to be) the good stuff.

In my day, what was left out was anything that was too complex, and also anything that conflicted with the perception of America as a righteous and near-perfect place—which included any personal foibles and imperfections of the Founding Fathers (and of course, anything remotely related to sex). What’s left out today is anything that isn’t politically correct on either side (which of course is virtually everything of truth) and anything that might make the US look good (I’m engaging in only a slight bit of hyperbole there, I’m afraid).

In short, anything of interest is left out, as well as anything that would meaningfully connect the teaching of history with the problems we are facing today—which would be what would make it most interesting and most helpful.

The consequences of putting history into a blender and turning it into bland, featureless, and easily digestible pap is not just having students who are bored to tears, although that would be bad enough. Nor is it just that history textbooks now have a strong bias on the Left, although that isn’t a good thing either. The worst effect is that such an approach to the teaching of history creates an ignorant and naive populace that is even more condemned than would otherwise be the case to repeat history’s errors.

I’m convinced, for example, that failure to properly teach the history of the wars that we have fought in the past—their complications, controversies, and errors, as well as what led to them and what was accomplished by them—has led to unrealistic and simplistic expectations of warfare itself.

And, come to think of it, perhaps this is not an unintended consequence; it’s possible that the current overarching Leftist bias of the writers of today’s textbooks include a pacifist agenda, of which this is part.

Or perhaps not. I’m not sure it matters all that much, because the effects are the same: a populace that cannot understand what is happening now because it cannot intelligently analyze its own past and apply it to the present. Of course, how to apply that past to the present is a subject on which reasonable—and even well-informed—people can and will differ.

But even though we can never know the truth of what happened in the past with absolute certainly, we can most definitely approximate that truth far better than we’ve been doing so far in our classrooms. Our future may depend on it.

Getting to the pointe

The New Neo Posted on by

This is a pair of my old pointe shoes.

They are from about twenty years ago, the last time I took a ballet class. I threw out the innumerable other ones, myriad shapes and sizes and makes purchased in my longstanding but unfulfilled quest for the perfect pointe shoe.

Dancing on point (or, in the French terminology of ballet, “en pointe”) is one of the elements that distinguishes ballet from other forms of dance in most people’s minds. And yet most ballet training occurs in soft shoes, and men ordinarily never go on pointe. But it’s the thing that most little girls who start ballet lessons dream about, as well as probably being the most misunderstood, painful, and transformative aspect of ballet.

Pointe shoes help a bit in enabling the dancer to perform the strange feat of rising to the very tips of her toes. But it’s actually the foot itself that must be trained and shaped in such a way as to be strong enough to support the entire body on that tiny pedestal. And not just support that body, but support it as it moves through space in an extraordinary way, twists and pivots and turns and balances and even throws itself purposely off-balance at times. And, although dancers are thin, they still have enough bulk and bone and sinew and muscle that their poor feet—and especially the toes—become sorely battered in the attempt.

Nevertheless, the little girl who studies ballet looks forward to the day she will get her first pointe shoes. For me it happened around the age of nine, after several years of training. We waited patiently in a line while the ballet teacher traced in pencil the bare feet of each of us on a special paper she’d laid on the floor, signing each outline with the name of the girl whose foot it represented. The handmade shoes (usually by Italian artisans) arrived a month or two later, shiny and pastel pink satin, and as yet untouched and unmarred. That would not last long, nor would the pristine state of our feet.

Pointe shoes, as you can see from the above photo of mine, are not really foot-shaped. Like the Chinese custom of foot-binding, the idea is to alter nature rather than bow to it. The toes are stuffed into the tapering box and conform to its sleek shape. A typical result is here (not my feet, by the way, I’m happy to report):

Although the effect of dancing on pointe is esthetically pleasing, you can see that the naked unadorned ballet dancer’s foot tends to be anything but. It’s a demonstration of a dirty little secret: like many aspects of ballet, going on pointe hurts. For some aspirants, this is the point (pun intended) at which they leave the study of ballet, perhaps to make a lateral move to modern dance (ordinarily barefoot), perhaps to the pursuit of sports or even couch-potatohood. Others master the discipline of dancing on the tips of their toes and come to ignore the pain for the incredible sensation of having a body that has mastered something both difficult and transcendent.

Is this masochism? It can be, but for most dancers it’s not. Not just ballet, but all sports and many arts (such as, for example, playing a musical instrument) are inherently physical, and they nearly always put the body through movements that are unnatural and stressful for the sake of achievement, or beauty, or both. Human beings seem to be constructed to strive for that sort of thing.

For the duration

The New Neo Posted on by

In my series on al-Marri and beyond, I made some suggestions for taking prisoners in this conflict. They involved the concept of incarcerating people “for the duration,” a standard practice in warfare. But we face a special problem in this particular struggle: how is end of the “duration” going to be determined, and are we prepared to detain people in a conflict that could easily last decades?

It’s true that for any war we never know the length of “the duration” in advance; not exactly, and sometimes not even generally. WWI is a case in point, and a typical one for its times: initially it was thought by most on both sides it would all be over quickly, and yet it dragged on and on, and was ended only by armistice. But it did end after “only” five years (although some would say WWII in some ways represented the unfinished business of WWI).

Our attitudes have changed so much that nowadays, when a war begins, people shout “quagmire” before (or shortly after) the first exchange of hostilities. But there’s a certain point they are making, absurd as it may seem, and that is that the current run of asymmetrical wars against an implacable and religiously fanatical foe, dealing not in regular armies but in guerilla and terrorist tactics, dictate that the wars in which we engage these days will ordinarily be very long, even if the formal warfare between the ordinary armies that might be involved tends to be very short. Failure to recognize that the “informal” hostilities will go on and on (and I think that, in some ways, the Bush administration failed to recognize that in its behavior, even though it paid lip service to it in its rhetoric) is a grievous error.

In addition, the duration is long partly because of the broken societies and political systems involved in places such as Afghanistan and Iraq, and the need to rebuild and change those systems in some basic ways. When WWII began, the Marshall Plan to rebuild Europe was not envisioned as being part of it, nor was the long occupation of Germany and Japan. If you take these events into consideration, that war was very long indeed (we already know it was very harsh and bloody), and the aftermath, of course, included the Cold War and the long struggle involved in the division of the world into free and Communist.

This article about the legal fine points of the war against Islamic totalitarianism points out that, whatever we call the incarcerated terrorists/militants—illegal enemy combatants or POWs (a status they do not qualify for, but could receive if we decided to bestow it)—the “for the duration” conundrum comes into play, and raises the specter of keeping them indefinitely. This is certainly a unique prospect in recent history, and a disconcerting one that makes many (including myself) uneasy. And yet it is difficult to see a way out of it.

We may not be happy with the prospect of a lengthy duration for the hostilities is facing us. But that’s the way it is. The timetable has been set not by us, but by an unusually patient enemy who sees history in terms of centuries, not years.

Abbas and peace: fed up with “dialogue?”

The New Neo Posted on by

Do I detect a new tone in the rhetoric of Mahmoud Abbas, or is it just wishful thinking on my part?

He’s reported to have issued some stinging criticism of his former “partners” in the ill-fated “unity” government of Palestine, Hamas.

Maybe it’s the murder of so many colleagues. Maybe it’s that it got very personal this time—“this bomb’s for Abu Mazen [Abbas],” a video shows men purported to be Hamas assassins (oh, sorry, “militants,” according to the linked CNN article) saying as they plot his murder. Maybe it’s that he sees his opportunity to get some traction as head of the West Bank, a traction that utterly eluded him before as the titular head of the coalition government.

We’ll see. But one sentence certainly had me (and his audience, his followers in Ramallah) applauding: There will be no dialogue with Hamas no matter what.

Sounds about right. Of course, dialogue with Fatah (of which Abbas is the head, heir to founder Arafat), used to be contraindicated as well, and led inexorably to fake peace talks in which Arafat could not accept reasonable offers, and then the horrifically bloody terrorist excesses of the Second Intifada.

Now chickens, as they say, have come home to roost for Abbas and Fatah. They were content to wink at the violence as long as it wasn’t directed at them. I take no joy in this, but my hope is that something about being the target of the viciousness they spawned will cause some sort of sea-change in Fatah itself. A person can hope, right? It would be good to have a true partner for peace, after all these years.