Words matter: calling a terrorist a what?

The New Neo Posted on by

When I was getting my Master’s degree in Marriage and Family Therapy, one of the major messages I learned was that words matter. Not just the words that clients use to each other, but the words the therapist uses in speaking to clients. I had always been somewhat careful in the way I phrased things, but I learned to be ultra-careful in a session, because the way something is phrased could have a surprisingly large effect on the course of the therapy.

One of the tools therapists use is something called the “reframe” (go here and scroll down a little more than halfway to find a discussion of reframing). The reframing therapist re-labels or re-interprets a behavior that has been given a negative spin by the family, in hope of changing the family’s perspective to facilitate a positive change. Reframes aren’t Pollyana-ish lies, however; to be effective, the therapist must believe they represent some form of truth.

Therapy was developed in a framework in which punitive judgments of children and other family members were the norm. Even in my childhood—not so very long ago—parents felt very free to call kids “bad” and to predict a dreadful life for them if they didn’t change their wicked ways. It was a big advance when books such as this one by Chaim Ginott came out, suggesting that parents condemn as “bad” not the child, but the behavior of the child.

A very small switch, and one that, I hasten to add, still left plenty of room for judgment, limit-setting, and the need for the child to take personal responsability and to change. What it left open as well, though, was for the child to not feel demeaned and diminished as a human being, judged incapable of change because of some inherent flaw within him/herself.

Like many things that are initially advances, in time this correction became an overcorrection. In my tiresome cohort, the Baby Boomers, many parents relinquished responsibility to guide children with a firm hand and even to condemn behavior as bad and in need of correction. In an attempt to be liked by their children, many set few limits at all on behavior.

And then the growing self-esteem movement communicated the idea that it was every child’s right to have high self-esteem no matter what his/her behavior might be. Ginott’s book wanted children to retain a certain amount of shame about their behavior rather than their basic selves but to foster a sense of optimism about improvement. But subsequent “advances” in the field jettisoned the whole notion of shame, helping to create a sense of amoral entitlement in some children no matter what their behavior.

The whole movement spread somehow to the print media, who decided it would be helpful to third-world players on the international scene to have their self-esteem raised, as well. Oh, I know the connection between this and what therapists do is tenuous, and that this behavior on the part of the MSM has many causes—especially political correctness and in some cases the idea that it’s actually the US that has the most reason to feel the emotion known as shame. But both phenomena are on the same continuum, a road our society has been traveling now for quite some time.

Thus we have articles such as the following AP story, about the recent killing of Islamist-what-have-you’s in Somali. I say “what-have-you’s” because the words used to identify the dead in the headlines are surprisingly variable.

The AP is a wire service that has grown immensely in influence because most newspapers don’t have the capability to cover stories in the Muslim world and rely on it for much, if not most, of their news on the subject. Each newspaper takes the AP story and edits it at its own discretion. Often the papers just lazily place the text in their pages intact, without changing a word. The headlines tend to have the most variety, and if you Google this particular story you will see that the titles it is given by different newspapers vary.

Often the dead are referred to as “militants” (see this from Canada, for example). Sometimes the headline doesn’t mention them at all (see this from Seattle, which calls them “militants” and “insurgents” in the AP-generated text). But the same AP article in the Houston Chronicle calls them “terrorists” in its headline. It doesn’t seem that these choices are the least bit accidental.

Then take a look at the words of the article itself. In the fifth paragraph it reads: …Vice-President Hassan Dahir Mohamoud said eight foreign militants were killed in the fighting and Somali forces were pursuing five others. But a bit further down we have an actual quote from Mohamoud, who says: We have successfully completed the operation against the terrorists who came here and we are chasing the other five. Then in the very next sentence the AP reporter does another “reframe,” and writes: …he [Mohamoud] said the total number of militants was 13.

Pleaes forgive me if I say I doubt that’s what Mohamoud actually said. Every time the man is quoted directly, he uses the unambiguous word “terrorist” to refer to the people in question.

“Militant” and “fighter” are morally neutral words that simply mean “those who are engaged in fighting.” Interestingly enough, in this Web-based definition of the word it says: Journalists often use militant as a purportedly neutral term for violent actors who do not belong to an established military.

Yes indeed, they do. We wouldn’t want terrorists to have low self-esteem, would we?

Kevorkian free—except for his fee

The New Neo Posted on by

Creepy assisted suicide advocate and practitioner Jack Kevorkian has been released from prison after serving an eight-year term.

Kevorkian earned the nickname “Dr. Death” back in the 1950s, well before he became known for his willingness to help non-terminally ill but suffering patients end their lives. It comes as no real surprise that his medical specialty was pathology, and indications are that he evinced a deep and unusual a fascination with death even for pathologists. His interest in prison predates his own sojourn there, as well; he was asked to leave his medical residency at the University of Michigan back in 1958 for wanting to experiment (consensually) on convicts as they were being executed.

It’s a poorly-kept secret that many doctors help terminal patients along on the road to death by treating their pain and discomfort aggressively with narcotics, drugs that help to fatally suppress lung function in a person whose health is already ultra-fragile. It’s difficult (although not impossible) to argue with this practice, which seems to me to be a benign one. But it differs greatly from what Kevorkian advocated, which appeared, as time went on, to partake of more and more of the ghoulish and less and less of the objective disinterested doctor—if in fact his ministrations could ever have been described in the latter terms.

The controversial area Kevorkian staked out was to help the suicides of patients who were extremely miserable but not necessarily dying. Initially he devised a machine to help those who had physical handicaps do it themselves, but then he got more and more cocky—and perhaps more interested in hands-on experience. The death for which he was convicted was of a man with ALS whose suicide Kevorkian performed himself, making it a clear homicide, and which Kevorkian had the hubris to videotape and sent to “60 Minutes,” after which he challenged the previously reluctant prosecutor to take him to court.

Back when Kevorkian was active, it was abundantly clear that many of his patients were suffering from the depression that so often comes with the burden of serious illness and/or chronic pain. Follow the link and you will find some of the shocking details about the undertreatment of their conditions, as well as Kevorkian’s singular lack of interest in finding alternative help for them before he administered his “assistance.”

I am not making light of the pain and misery that even non-terminal patients can be visited with; in fact, for many, living with that kind of open-ended suffering can be worse than knowing death is imminent. The health care system often fails such patients, exacerbating their hopelessness. But one way in which it sometimes fails them is to fail to properly treat their sometimes-undiagnosed depression, or to give them the more powerful drugs that could successfully combat their pain.

The undertreatment of chronic pain is a sad fact of modern medicine; fear of prosecution causes many practitioners to underprescribe the panoply of drugs that can help the situation. Kevorkian often stepped in way too quickly to remedy affairs with a more permanent solution: that of death. And he did so with a grisly eagerness and an arrogance that was utterly repellent, and for which he’s paid the price of eight years behind bars.

Speaking of price, he is apparently about to go on the lecture circuit, to the tune of up to fifty or a hundred thousand dollars an engagement. Not bad for an ex-con whose achievements as a doctor seem to have been modest. But he’s a raging a success as a publicity hound.

Breaking the big stick: removing the threat of war to achieve peace?

The New Neo Posted on by

Sometimes it’s hard to believe Henry Kissinger is still alive. He seemed so old already back when he was Secretary of State in the 70s to both Nixon and his successor Ford.

Odd to recall Kissinger received the 1973 Nobel Peace Prize for negotiating the ill-fated Paris Peace Accords. He is nothing if not controversial, accused of war crimes by Christopher Hitchens and others, and in general resembling (or so I always thought) the blue meanies of the Beatles’ “Yellow Submarine” movie.

That’s to let you know that I’m aware Kissinger isn’t an authority most people cotton to. And yet this op-ed piece of his in today’s LA Times makes some interesting Vietnam/Iraq analogies.

Those who are interested in international law should read this paragraph:

Whether the [Paris Peace] agreement, officially signed in January 1973, could have preserved an independent South Vietnam and avoided the carnage following the fall of Indochina will never be known. We do know that American disunity prevented such an outcome when Congress prohibited the use of military force to maintain the agreement and cut off aid after all U.S. military forces (except a few hundred advisors) had left South Vietnam. American dissociation triggered a massive North Vietnamese invasion, in blatant violation of existing agreements, to which the nations that had endorsed these agreements turned their backs.

So much for Nobel Prizes and peace agreements. The history of Congressional action in that war is—just as Kissinger writes—that after we no longer had fighting forces in Vietnam Congress initiated a step-by-step process that made it impossible to enforce the agreements that had been negotiated, as North Vietnam was well aware.

I detailed that process here, and recently I also wrote about the final reduction of funding to the near-vanishing point for the South Vietnamese. But it’s important to remember that the latter was just the final, pound-foolish act of Congress in the undermining of the South Vietnamese effort; an earlier legislative effort was the Case-Church amendment of 1973 prohibiting any further US military action in Vietnam without the approval of an utterly antiwar Congress, passed about five months after those Paris Peace Accords were signed, and effectively rendering them meaningless and unenforceable.

It was all done for the cause of peace, peace, peace. A worthy goal to be sure—but ironically enough, the means by which it was done made a travesty of the Peace Accords. Whatever the outcome would otherwise have been, such treaties aren’t worth the paper they’re printed on if there is nothing backing them up. What had gotten the North Vietnamese to the table to sign those Accords in the first place was military pressure on them, as Kissinger relates, pressure that was effectively removed by the Case-Church Amendment.

One wonders what Congress actually thought it was doing at the time. I suppose the goal was reining in what it thought of as an out-of-control and warmongering President and Secretary of State (despite that Peace Prize). Preventing unending war and setting up the bitter end, otherwise known as peace.

Peace treaties—unless they are negotiated at the end of a war in which one side is so utterly defeated it cannot soldier on—must have some sort of credible threat of force backing them up. But if that proverbial “big stick” is removed, the enemy knows it has nothing to fear.

Congress is once again intent, I’m afraid, on breaking that stick in half and casting it on the waters of an illusory peace.

“Unending war” and Ferdinand the bull

The New Neo Posted on by

Cal Thomas has written an article at RealClearPolitics entitled “Unending War,” in which he discusses the tendency of Bush’s opponents to ascribe the longevity of the war against Iraq to the President’s warmongering desires. But Thomas rightly points out that the warriors who are really unlikely to give up until decisively defeated are our opponents in this war.

That’s a bit hard to accept, because most of us are not interested in war—although of course war is often interested in us. The old 60s question “What if they gave a war and nobody came?” rests on the assumption that there are fatcat warlords imposing unwanted wars on an otherwise pacifist populace that could simply refuse to fight and all would be well. This is certainly is irrelevant to the situation in which we find ourselves; in which a sizeable, active, and influential minority of Muslims are Islamic jihadis who have internalized the idea of jihad forever—or at least until the entire world is Dar al Islam rather than Dar al Harb.

So, if the jihadis “give a war” and “nobody comes” to stop them, we can answer the question: what will happen is the triumph of Dar al Islam. If you like that sort of thing, by all means don’t fight them. But if it bothers you a bit, you better start showing up for the war,and get ready for a long haul.

This seems so elementary, so very basic, that I find it difficult to understand those who fail to see it. Yes, of course, we can disagree on details. And yes, of course, the war in Iraq may or may not have been considered part of it at the outset. But even if you didn’t consider it a factor earlier in the game, it certainly is now, because the jihadis and al Qaeda are undisputedly there, fighting hard and dirty against both our forces and the Iraqi people.

Some of Pelosi’s supporters who would agree that it’s Bush who’s the eternal warrior are cynical political opportunists. But I have no doubt that many of them are inspired by a sincere desire for an illusory peace against an enemy whose intense lust for war is difficult for them to contemplate and to acknowledge.

I had that desire as well, especially in childhood. In every society, the young are shaped at least partly by the books they read and the tales they are told. Some stories are merely entertaining, but some are clearly didactic, and many have a mixture of both.

When I was very little, for example, I detested the familiar story of The Little Red Hen. Its relentlessly self-reliant dog-eat-dog Protestant-ethic world seemed so chilling. Forget “it takes a village”—this was individualism with a vengeance. And yet, later in life, there were times when I found it necessary to apply its heartless lessons, and to Do It Myself (and she did).

A more benign early childhood book was The Little Engine That Could. This one was about trying, trying again; about having faith in oneself and finally succeeding against huge odds. Being rather little myself, and the youngest in the family, it gave me hope (it’s interesting, also, that the Wiki link mentions the story as being a metaphor for the American Dream; it occurs to me that it could also apply to the jihadi dream).

But a much greater favorite was Ferdinand the Bull. Ah Ferdinand, Ferdinand, he of the fragrant flowers under the cork tree. I didn’t know the word “pacifist” (nor is it mentioned in the book), but the idea of opting out of struggle and strife into a simple life of non-aggression and nature was remarkably appealing.

According to Wikipedia, it turns out that Ferdinand has a bit of a political history. Published around the time of the Spanish Civil War, it was widely seen as a pacifist tract and even banned by many countries. And if you look at the comments at the Amazon listing for the book, you’ll find many people whose lives were quite affected by reading it, citing its “timeless pacifist message.”

I’m not campaigning against the book itself, which I loved. But I wonder how many people never grow past the fairy tale notion that evil will disappear if we would just sit under that cork tree and smell those flowers long enough. As one of the Amazon commenters points out, in a real bullfight Ferdinand’s lack of ferocity would cause him not to be shipped off to pleasant pastures, as in the book, but to be killed–which is the almost invariable fate of bulls in that activity anyway.

Bulllfighting is a blood sport with strict customs and rules. It is about courage and death. In the traditional Spanish sport the bulls are always killed, except for rare occasions when they are allowed to live as a reward for extreme bravery. The activities of the various human players in the arena are designed both to weaken the bull and to goad it into greater ferocity—if, as in the Ferdinand book, the inherently pacifist bull had previously reacted to a beesting by becoming combative, then it is a near-certainty that the ministrations of the bandilleros and matador in an actual bullfight would have the same effect. And a bull who isn’t especially into fighting doesn’t seem to earn a reprieve, he earns the shameful black banderillas (barbs that are usually colorful, and are placed both to weaken and madden the bull at the same time):

If the bull proves to be extraordinarily weak or unwilling to fight, the presidente may order, to the disgrace of the breeder, the use of black banderillas.

Ferdinand is a lovely story, and I wish it well. But it’s not much of a guide to war, I’m afraid—or even to bullfighting.

Post-Memorial Day questions: is the cause honorable, and is it still achievable?

The New Neo Posted on by

This comment by Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle on yesterday’s Memorial Day post makes an excellent point that needs to be addressed:

Suppose that a war is commenced, based on incorrect assumptions which at the time of going to war were not understood as incorrect. However, with the progress of the war, it becomes clear that the assumptions were, in fact, incorrect. In such a situation, continuing to “have the will” to prosecute the war isn’t honorable ”” it’s just stubborn. This logic leads to the mindset that more lives need to be sacrificed just so that the lives sacrificed earlier can be justified. As I hope is clear, this leads to an infinite loop and the war becomes never-ending.

Ninja Turtle is using what might be referred to as the John Kerry argument against “staying the course.” In a 1971 statement before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Kerry famously said of the war in Vietnam (in fact, it may just be the most famous thing he ever said), “How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?”

The argument, then and now, Vietnam or Iraq, hinges on the meaning and definition of that one word, “mistake.”

If you read Kerry’s entire statement you will find a number of assertions that are taken as articles of faith by the Left. I could (and many have) spend a great deal of time attempting to demonstrate that they are in fact, “mistakes”—amassing evidence of errors, evidence that readers could then argue about for the next few decades, as we have for the past thirty or so years.

Suffice to say that Kerry’s statements were primarily based on the testimony of the exceedingly controversial (and probably mostly bogus) Winter Soldier investigations that he conducted, assertions that have enraged many Vietnam vets ever since (see this and this for background on why); that his assertions about the number of war crimes committed by US forces were enormously inflated; that his assertions about the Vietnamese not knowing or caring whether they lived under democracy or communism have been given the lie by the mass exodus known as the boat people; and on and on and on (see this for a more thorough discussion of some of the many myths of Vietnam).

But of course Iraq is not Vietnam, although the arguments used to show it was a “mistake” are sometimes similar. In his/her comment, Ninja Turtle is making the point that the original justification and expectations for the course of the Iraq war were erroneous, and that therefore there’s no reason to keep sacrificing US lives there in order to justify that mistake.

The issues of initial “mistake”(or, at times, “lie”) have been debated ad infinitum and ad nauseum (did Bush lie or was he mistaken? Did Saddam have weapons of mass destruction that were hidden in the long buildup to the war? Would Saddam have had the capacity to reconsitute his weapons program, and was he eager to do so once sanctions were lifted, which they soon would have been? Were the planners of the war too sanguine in their expectations for its aftermath?). We’re not going to solve those issues today, either. What I would prefer to discuss is whether any of this matters now.

Let’s concede for a moment that much of this was error, and that there were no weapons of mass destruction there and that the planners were too optimistic in their projections about the difficulties of reconstruction. This doesn’t obliterate any of the many other arguments for the war: humanitarian, Saddam’s future intent, his violation of UN resolutions and the terms of the earlier ceasefire. And the fact that miscalculations were made in the prosecution of the war and especially its aftermath isn’t a compelling reason for saying the entire endeavor was an error, either. As I’ve reiterated before, mistakes are part and parcel of every war.

The important questions in deciding whether to continue with the sacrifice (for this is the conundrum we now face) are these: is this war being fought for a good purpose, and is it still possible to achieve that purpose?

Those who cry “No blood for oil,” “Imperialism,” and the like believe the answer to the first question is “no.” If that’s true, the answer to the second question is irrelevant, although I’m sure they would answer it the same way: “no.”

I believe the answer to the first question is “yes,” and have discussed the reason for that belief many times. Which brings us to the extremely important second question; I believe the answer to that one is “yes, ” as well (and have written about it at length before)—with the following qualifications: it will be difficult, and it will not be quick. One thing is certain: that purpose cannot possibly be achieved if we lack the will to do so.

That is the context in which I agree with Bush’s words spoken yesterday, Memorial Day, “Our duty is to make sure the war is worth the sacrifice.” If you don’t believe it was worth the sacrifice at the outset, either because the cause was unjust and/or because it was inherently unwinnable, then the sacrifice of more men and women makes no sense, just as Ninja Turtle says. But if you believe the goals to be both just and still achievable—although difficult—then it really doesn’t matter whether mistakes and errors were made, either at the beginning or up until now. Oh, it matters in that we all wish there had been no errors, just as we all wish not a single American life nor a single innocent Iraqi life would have had to have been lost. But none of these are realistic expectations or demands.

Our abandonment of South Vietnam in 1974/1975 was driven by ideas such as Kerry’s that the war there was both a moral error and unwinnable. Note the last paragraph of Kerry’s 1971 statement, in which he imagines that people thirty years into the future might look back on American’s part in the Vietnam War as a “filthy obscene memory,” and that a pullout would be the way to reverse that tide. But one must also remember that when we ultimately did pull out of Vietnam we had no fighting forces left there, and it would have taken just a small sum of money to keep the South Vietnamese army fighting—-money which we denied them, thus sealing their terrible fate. As Melvin Laird has recently written:

”¦during [1973-1975, when US combat forces had withdrawn], South Vietnam held its own courageously and respectably against a better-bankrolled enemy. Peace talks continued between the North and the South until the day in 1975 when Congress cut off U.S. funding. The Communists walked out of the talks and never returned. Without U.S. funding, South Vietnam was quickly overrun. We saved a mere $297 million a year and in the process doomed South Vietnam, which had been ably fighting the war without our troops since 1973”¦.

This guaranteed that the entire sacrifice, both of American and Vietnamese lives, was indeed in vain. And for what? In the end, it came down to saving a sum of money that was miniscule in the grand scheme of things; the cost of further support was small, the stakes high. In that sense, even though the Vietnam War had been going on for a very long time, the final withdrawal was nevertheless premature, penny wise and pound foolish.

Things are different in Iraq. American fighting forces are still involved there and their lives are still being sacrificed; that makes the cost to the US much higher, although the US casualty figures don’t even begin to reach anything like those of the Vietnam era. But the nasty fact (and one that Democrats and other antiwar activists generally fail to confront) is that much is at stake in our participation in Iraq that would be lost by our withdrawal, and not just for the people of Iraq.

Right now there are reasons to believe that the new approach of Petraeus is bearing fruit—for example, the populace seems to be trusting the US soldiers more and informing on terrorists, leading to finds such as this. I submit that any withdrawal in the next few months would be premature by definition,and would guarantee that the previous sacrifices we and the Iraqi people have made there will have been in vain.

Once again, do cry for Venezuela

The New Neo Posted on by

Chavez, that populist champion of the common man, has followed the path of hubris to close the most popular TV station in Venezuela, the 53-year-old RCTV.

Why? He accused the station of supporting the 2002 coup against him, of some apparently trumped-up violations, and of fostering capitalism with its soap operas. The people of Venezuela will now have to be satisfied with the sterner stuff of state TV, which will replace it.

I doubt this particular move will enhance Chavez’s popularity. But since abolishing certain constitutional guarantees and consolidating his power, he no longer needs to be popular, and the people of Venezuela may find they don’t have much to say about it anymore except to protest and have water cannons fired at them.

[Daniel in Venezuela has much more, and it’s not pretty. And Fausta has a podcast.]

Memorial Day: mourning the war dead, honoring the war dead

The New Neo Posted on by

Before Memorial Day became a national three-day weekend in 1971 and the official kickoff to summer festivities, it was Decoration Day.

I’m not all that ancient, but my earliest recollection of the holiday is of the latter name. It was a day on which people brought flowers and flags to graves of the war dead, and maybe held a parade featuring some tottering old vets and their strange hats.

One also might be stopped by an elderly gentleman selling a poppy. Not a real poppy, but one made of crepe paper. This somehow had to do with the whole thing as well, but exactly how I didn’t know. That mystery was cleared up in fifth grade, when our poetry-forcefeeding teacher (see this) made us memorize the poem “In Flanders Fields:”

In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses row on row,
That mark our place…

The poppies had to do with mourning for the dead, this much I knew, and the poem related to a huge battle of World War I, a war that was never given much attention in our American history classes (I had to learn about it on my own, later). Like much of the poetry we learned in grade school, the poem isn’t good poetry; it’s really propaganda verse. But as such it gets its message across loud and clear.

That message is of loss and mourning for the war dead, true enough. But the larger message is that they died for a reason, and the corollary is that mourning then is an empty exercise if it doesn’t take account of the context of their sacrifice and follow through on it:

To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep…

Call it jingoistic, call it hawkish, call it simplistic. But it points out something I’ve been thinking of this Memorial Day, and that is that although mourning the loss of the war dead is absolutely part of the day, that’s not the same as honoring them.

There’s enormous disagreement on how best to do this “honoring.” Some think protests at Memorial Day parades is the best way to “support the troops.” Some (and I am among them) agree with President Bush when he said in a Memorial Day speech at Arlington: “Our duty is to make sure this war was worth the sacrifice.” And part of that process is to continue to have the will to do so, and to change tactics when necessary and give a new approach time to work.

Yesterday I saw a special on Fox News about a group of 80-something WWII vets returning to the beaches of Normandy where they had landed on D-Day. One of the things that caused these tough old guys to tear up as they gazed at the now-tranquil sands of Omaha was speaking of the memory of their comrades who had died all too young on those beaches. The other was receiving the tributes from the locals, including young people who had no personal memory of the terrible ordeal that was WWII. One of the vets waved his hand at the group of smiling children and said that this, this was why we did it.

David Corn explains it all: the Democrats can’t count

The New Neo Posted on by

I wondered here why the Democrats pursued a “withdraw the troops” strategy they knew was doomed to failure with a President who was bound to veto every bill they sent with no hope of override. This particular post-mortem on the Democrats’ “cave,” written by David Corn (a liberal himself), offers an explanation: he says they can’t count.

He writes that the Democrats tried to have it both ways—end the war and support the troops, withdraw and be perceived as not caving, a high-wire balancing act of oxymorons—and that it can’t be done, at least not with the “strategy” they mapped out.

True. But since I believe the Democrats actually can count (and of course Corn was being facetious–wasn’t he?), what really was behind this seeming obtuseness, which has left them looking weak and divided?

Well, as Corn writes, it’s the fact that they are divided. They never had the Republican votes needed to override the veto, but they never even had the Democratic ones, either. In the end, many of their ranks defected in order to avoid being perceived as weak on defense. And the Democratic leadership should have known in the first place that this was going to happen.

Of course, it might be that not only did those Democrats voting for troop funding not want to be perceived as weak on defense, they really wanted to not be weak on defense. I still believe that some members of Congress operate more on principle than on politics, although those who do risk becoming endangered species, for obvious reasons.

What’s behind the Democratic miscalculation, if not a literal inability to do the math? I have come to the conclusion that their leaders aren’t very good at understanding the limits of their own power in their own party.

Why they have this lack I’m not sure, but it doesn’t seem to be a mathematical problem. Perhaps it’s the result of the hubris and pride that often comes to the powerful of all persuasions and all parties. It takes a certain skill to lead a group of legislators and keep them on board, and part of that skill is knowing how far you can take them before they will bolt. That’s more than a matter of arithmetic, it’s one of psychology, and I think Reid and Pelosi may be a bit tone-deaf in that department. They may be able to count heads, but I don’t think they can account for minds.

To the border: the descent of spam

The New Neo Posted on by

My email spam folder grows larger by leaps and bounds; now it takes only a day or two for it to reach the two hundred mark. I enter with hip waders on and quickly skim the subject titles before deleting them, because every now and then a bona fide communication gets stuck in there and I want to fetch it. Otherwise, I’d rather not in go there at all, thank you very much.

But this process allows me to keep track of spam trends, and in recent months there’s been a very disturbing one. Oh yes, the messages from distressed daughters of deceased minor imaginary third-world officials wanting my help (“Beloved one”) to liberate some money are still in there, as well as the canceled e-bay accounts I never had, notices from pseudo-banks, all sorts of stuff about mortgages, and rhapsodies on the benefits of green tea. Oh, and of course, the major ones: buying drugs, sex in general, and a thousand creative varieties of penile enhancement in particular.

But I’m not talking about those. I’ve grown used to those. No, I’m talking about ads for incest. Or, rather, I would assume–since I’m not clicking on them and never will click on them–ads for websites that feature photos of what purport to be incest.

The titles of the emails–which I will not reproduce here–are very graphic and changeable, but they always refer to incest in one of various forms. And I find this development to be exceedingly puzzling because, at least as far as I know, incest is not a source of titillation for most people, but rather a turnoff.

Freud may indeed have felt that some sort of incestuous feeling underlay human sexual motivation, but way underneath, so far underneath that it was turned into something else. Most of us experience revulsion at the very thought.

The fact that spammers have decided that graphic representations of incest would appeal to people is not a good sign. What does it mean? In reminds me of those attempts to serve esoteric foods to revive the faded palates of royals who’ve eaten too many delicacies in their lives and are bored, bored, bored: tongues of hummingbirds, monkey brains, that sort of thing. Whether these culinary stories are apocryphal or not doesn’t matter; it’s the principle that I’m talking about, and that is the fact that the spammers are trying to appeal to the jaded palates of people who’ve grown used to ordinary pornography and find it lacking in pizzazz.

And this reminds me–as do so many things, it turns out–of the work of Milan Kundera, especially the last chapter of The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, entitled “The Border.” The border to which Kundera refers is manifold, but part of it concerns the line where rampant and indiscriminate sexuality (either in the name of hedonism or the name of liberation) becomes stripped of meaning and depth–and in fact, in the end, of sensation itself.

The spammers have crossed the border, I’m afraid.

Muslim moderates, Muslim secularism

The New Neo Posted on by

Here’s a must-read (and it’s relatively short, too) by Robert Spencer on the topic of Muslim secularism.

We often speak of the need for moderate Muslims. And it’s undoubtedly true that some Muslims are indeed moderate. But as Spencer points out, that is no guarantee against a repressive Muslim theocracy such as that in Iran which, once imposed (even if this is initially done democratically), is very difficult to reverse.

Ataturk of Turkey was aware of the dilemma back in the 1920’s and 1930’s, when he instituted a number of exceedingly important reforms there that made it far less likely that the country would ever come under the sway of a repressive Muslim theocracy. And, although there is currently a threat of theocrats taking over in Turkey, so far Ataturk’s institutional reforms have held the line against it.

This was done, as Spencer points out, not by making Turkey a “moderate Muslim” country, but by adopting a nearly Western-style separation of church and state—in other words, secularism. And secularism isn’t really a traditional Muslim concept at all, it is an affront to it. That is why Ataturk represented a huge break with Muslim tradition, and why a similar break is so difficult for other Muslim countries.

Spencer writes:

[F]or peaceful Muslims to prevail over the proponents of jihad and Sharia, they must be prepared not just to ignore, but to reject explicitly, the elements of Sharia that are at variance with accepted norms of human rights and with government that does not establish a state religion.

This is a huge leap. It’s also the underlying reason that democracy, in and of itself, will not necessarily save or even help the Muslim world. I have always tried to be explicit about that by using the term liberal democracy—that is, democracy with protection of human rights, including separation of church and state—to refer to the goals for government in that part of the world and elsewhere. And encouraging liberal democracy is a far more difficult and lengthy proposition than instituting pure democracy, which unfortunately is no bar to tyranny.

UN as toothless enabler

The New Neo Posted on by

Here‘s another reason the UN has become a net liability rather than a plus—not just to US interests, but to the cause to which it purports to be dedicated: world peace.

One of the oft-ignored reasons for the US appeal to the UN before invading Iraq was an attempt (a vain one, as it turned out) to give teeth to the UN’s ability to police the nuclear capabilities of rogue states and aggressive dictatorships with designs on their neighbors.

Previously, Saddam had flouted the UN for years with impunity. And now Mohamed ElBaradei, the director-general of the United Nations nuclear watchdog, has allowed Iran to laugh even louder than it had already been guffawing at the ludicrous antics of the impotent UN. Some “watchdog.” It’s a toothless old chihuahua that not only has no bite, but no bark as well.

ElBaradei’s coddling of Iran has become so flagrant that, in a rare show of unity (a unity that, now that Sarkozy is President of France and Merkel Chancellor of Germany, might become less rare in the future), envoys from Britain, the US, France and Germany will be delivering a protest to Dr ElBaradei. I’m sure he’ll be deeply upset [/sarcasm].