NASA’s advances in personal comfort during those long rides

The New Neo Posted on by

Fortunately, Alexandra Gekas has saved me the chore of doing the research on this one: what’s up with the diaper worn by Nowak in her long voyage to inner space and Florida?

The fact that she word a diaper for the journey puzzled me only for an instant–of course, NASA and those long space flights! I’d read about the diaper phenomenon in space before, although never such a creative land-based use for one. Click on the link and read all about it. There’s a diagram there to study, as well.

Then again, maybe better to skip it. Your call.

Oh Rudy, Rudy, Rudy: Giuliani and LaGuardia

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Giuliani’s no Cary Grant (who, by the way, did not actually say “Judy, Judy, Judy“in any movie). But nevertheless, to an electorate starved for somebody to love, he’s got a certain rough charm.

John Podhoretz thinks (hat tip: Pajamas Media) that Rudy might just be able to capture the Republican nomination for President in 2008 (although that headline, John, seems to be a case of bad timing: surely “right stuff” can’t be the best phrase to use at the moment, in light of recent events).

How long has it been since a New Yorker–a real New Yorker, not a fake one–has had a chance to be President? New Yorkers tend to be out of the running. Too northeastern, too ethnic, too many names that are too hard to spell–whatever. And Giuliani shares those characteristics, including the Republican-primary-unfriendly trait of being a social liberal, at least relatively speaking.

Podhoretz doesn’t think this will hamper Giuliani unduly in gaining the nomination, as he explains in the column. I’d like to think he’s right, although I’m not at all sure. But after all, I’m a social liberal myself.

I must confess that, prior to 9/11, I thought that Giuliani had long since peaked. His personal life was nothing if not messy, and he was somewhat full of himself (in that respect, probably not too different from most politicians). But he had certainly done yeoman’s duty in making New York a far more liveable city than it had been for decades, no small task.

Rudy was a true hero during and immediately after 9/11. He almost lost his life himself that day, but that’s not the heroic part I’m talking about. He struck precisely the right emotional tone for the city and the nation in that time of extreme tension and sorrow; the perfect combination of grit, determination, and heart.

And it all seemed sincere, not some phony act from a politician looking for votes. No crocodile tears; Rudy was the real thing. The fact that he wasn’t running for anything anymore was part of it, but not a big part. His sincerity was clear from his demeanor and his words–and from his behavior, which included an almost ceaseless attendance at the many funerals of those he had loved, respected, and lost. He didn’t have Churchillian eloquence (who does?) but he demonstrated Churchillian courage.

That’s not altogether what a Presidency is about, of course; other factors are certainly required. But it’s a vitally important trait, especially in these times. And Giuliani, perhaps more than any of the other candidates on either side, has shown us true grit in his public life. His ability to handle difficult and messy executive decisions was demonstrated even before 9/11, in his policies as mayor. But 9/11 cemented the deal, in real time. It also made him famous nationally.

It’s early yet, and Giuliani will have many opportunities to put his foot in his mouth and alienate any number of people. But for now, I’m very interested in his candidacy. Full disclosure: I come from a part of New York that was so heavily Italian that names such as “Smith” and “Jones” were exotic and rare. So, Giuliani reminds me of home, as well.

His psychological profile is a fascinating one. Did you know his father was a convicted armed robber? Giuliani’s early reputation was cemented by being tough on crime. Hmmm. The stuff with the divorce from his second wife was very messy, however, as well as needlessly cruel to her.

Giuliani reminds me a bit of Fiorello La Guardia, whose acquaintance I first made on those “I Can Hear It Now” records. He was another Italian Republican New York Mayor who was very tough on crime (although his marital history was decidedly better). Not exactly a typical guy, however; in addition to being five feet tall (no, that’s not a typo: 5 feet tall), and having that extremely odd name meaning “Little Flower,” Fiorello (born in the Bronx):

…was the city’s first Italian-American mayor, but LaGuardia was far from being a typical Italian New Yorker. After all, he was a Republican Episcopalian who had grown up in Arizona, and had an Istrian Jewish mother and a Roman Catholic-turned-atheist Italian father. He reportedly spoke seven languages, including Hebrew, Hungarian, Italian, and Yiddish.

Fiorello shared another trait with Giuliani: he recognized a Fascist when he saw one, knew what they were up to, and wasn’t afraid to say so. In fact, he recognized certain things about Fascism long before others did:

[La Guardia] was also a very outspoken and early critic of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi regime. In a public address as early as 1934, LaGuardia warned, “Part of Hitler’s program is the complete annihilation of the Jews in Germany.”

Apparently, Fiorello believed that someone like Hitler tends to mean what he says, and that we ought to pay attention. Too bad all that most people know of Fiorello these days is getting stuck in traffic trying to get to that airport named after him.

Frost on poetry: “the happy discoverer of your ends”

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Here’s a little relief from politics and its discontents–excerpts from a discussion by Robert Frost entitled “Conversations on the Craft of Poetry” (1959).” Any aspiring poets in the crowd, please listen to a guy who knows–who really knows.

In response to the comment: “I once heard you say that for a poem to stick it must have a dramatic accent,” Frost replied:

Catchiness has a lot to do with it, all of it, all the way up from the ballads you hear on the street to the lines in Shakespeare that stay with you without your trying to remember them. I just say catchy. They stick on you like burrs thrown on you in holiday foolery. You don’t have to try to remember them….

And when people say that this will easily turn into–be set to music, I think it’s bad writing. It ought to fight being set to music, if it’s got expression in it.

And here are some comments of Frost’s that especially resonated with me. He’s describing the process of writing a poem (even Frost’s prose is poetic, isn’t it? His “voice” is instantly recognizable here as his and no other’s, like a fingerprint):

…I could define poetry this way: it is that which is lost out of both prose and verse in translation.

…I have a tune [when writing poetry], but it’s a tune of the blend of [meter and rhythm]. Something rises–it’s neither one of those things. It’s neither the meter nor the rhythm,; it’s a tune arising from the stress on those–same as your fingers on the strings, you know. The twang!

…You know, you know that, when I begin a poem I don’t know–I don’t want a poem that I can tell was written towards a good ending–one sentence, you know. That’s trickery. You’ve got to be the happy discoverer of your ends.

…I’ve often said that another definition of poetry is dawn–that it’s something dawning on you while you’re writing it. It comes off if it really dawns when the light comes at the end. And the feeling of dawn–the freshness of dawn–that you didn’t think this all out and write in prose first and than translate it into verse.

Those who follow this blog know I’ve written about Frost before, here and here in particular. Many who are familiar only with his most famous poems think he’s a sort of Hallmark Card poet. Nothing could be further from the truth.

To prove it, I’ll offer one of his darker poems today, a poem for winter. This one sure isn’t happy. But I bet that, when he finished it, he was nevertheless the “happy discoverer” of its end:

DESERT PLACES

Snow falling and night falling fast, oh, fast
In a field I looked into going past,
And the ground almost covered smooth in snow,
But a few weeds and stubble showing last.

The woods around it have it–it is theirs.
All animals are smothered in their lairs.
I am too absent-spirited to count;
The loneliness includes me unawares.

And lonely as it is that loneliness
Will be more lonely ere it will be less–
A blanker whiteness of benighted snow
With no expression, nothing to express.

They cannot scare me with their empty spaces
Between stars–on stars where no human race is.
I have it in me so much nearer home
To scare myself with my own desert places.

Are all hatreds alike?–becoming “just like them”

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Recently I rented the movie “United 93.” The edition I watched included an addendum to the film, interviews with families of some of the passengers on Flight 93 who’d been featured in it.

This was almost as interesting as the rest of the movie–hearing the differing ways people have coped with the almost unimaginably wrenching and violent loss of a loved one at the hands of international mass murderers dedicated to a political cause, occurring (literally) out of the blue on a bright and beautiful day in September.

One of the interviewees was the husband of a woman who died on that airplane. He seems a wonderful man, and loved his wife very much. He was still deeply grieving at the time of the interview, some years after 9/11.

This post isn’t about him, though, not really; I mean no disrespect to his feelings, nor to his way of dealing with his dreadful loss. It’s a particular thought he expressed that gives me pause, a remark that struck me as representative of a kind of thinking that always brings me up short when I encounter it. It’s an example of one possible way people have of coping with grief, and it stems from a genuinely wonderful impulse: forgiveness, compassion, reluctance to rush to judgment, and the banishment of hatred from the heart.

This is the statement, as best I can recall it:

I don’t hate Bin Laden; I’ve never met him. That’s their mindset–to hate innocent people they’ve never met and want to kill them. If I hated him I’d be like them.

Would he? Are all hatreds equal, and all equally abhorrent? And what is the definition of “innocence?”

I’ve heard this sort of thing from people of intelligence, kindness, and thoughtfulness too often to consider it a singular statement from one man in particular. No, it’s a trend of thought that seems to emerge sometimes from a religious sensibility that emphasizes the necessity for forgiveness and love, sometimes from the influence of various psychotherapies and their focus on the healthfulness of forgiveness and the destructive power of hatred for the individual, and sometimes from postmodern pronouncements that right and wrong are mere concepts in an ever-changing narrative.

But unfortunately there’s a problem: those who espouse the sort of viewpoints quoted here, in their well-meaning and heartfelt flight from emotions deemed destructive to self and others, may lose sight of the basis for and the ability to make necessary making moral judgments.

And that can be dangerous; as the old Talmudic saying goes: Those who are kind to the cruel end up being cruel to the kind.

In what sense can Osama bin Laden be regarded as “innocent?” My guess–and it’s only a hunch–is that the statement relies at least partly on the legal rule of “innocent until proven guilty.” That’s all very well and good for a court of law. The rule is a protection against certain actions that might follow from an improper judgment of guilt in a court case: the incarceration of an innocent person, the rush to judgment of an individual without a mountain of well-documented evidence. It’s a check against sullying the name of a blameless person and restraining his/her freedom merely through the force of rumor and accusation.

That has nothing to do with making a mental moral judgment about the acts of a world figure bent on the mass murder of truly innocent people–random civilians–and even claiming credit for it. A trial isn’t necessary in this case to establish a standard of guilt that’s high enough to make a moral judgment–and a moral judgment is required, I’m afraid, in order to fight effectively against such things.

But what about the well-known words of Jesus, “Judge not that ye not be judged?” Well, if one looks closely at the context, it seems that the subject was the need to discourage making hypocritical judgments concerning others, jumping to conclusions about their shortcomings without looking at one’s own:

Thou hypocrite, cast out first the beam out of thine own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother’s eye.

This hardly seems to apply to making a judgment about mass murderers who purposely target the innocent.

But what of hatred? The emotion of hatred has gotten a bad press lately, for the aforementioned reasons. Here, however, is a defense of the need to feel hatred in the appropriate circumstances. After all, as the article points out, if we’re looking for a religious base for things, Ecclesiastes 3 says:

For everything there is a season and a time for every matter under heaven. A time to love and a time to hate; a time for war and a time for peace.

Both Judaism and Christianity share the “hate the sin but not the sinner” maxim, which originates in a respect for all human life, and the need to keep open the possibility of repentance (take a look at the linked article for a fuller discussion). But Judaism seems to make more allowance than certain strains of Christianity for a vigorous emotional response one might call “hate” towards a person who has moved beyond “ordinary” criminal acts and into the realm of mass murder and power and true evil: a Hitler, a Stalin, a Bin Laden (who, granted, does not rival the first two in terms of numbers, but nevertheless follows the same nihilistic impulses). It is especially appropriate for an unrepetant evildoer.

We can call the emotional response to such acts “hatred,” which has earned a bad rep lately. Or. we could rename it “outrage,” which might make it more acceptable. Although such an emotion is not the same as “love” for the sinner, it does, in a seeming paradox, stem from love: love for humanity, the need to be “kind to the kind” by not being “kind to the cruel.”

Some consider hatred of evildoers to be wrong because they see it as synonymous with the desire for revenge. Not necessarily. Hatred of evil, and of the perpetrators of evil, is one of the emotions fueling the pursuit of justice, which is different from revenge (and also is not limited to the justice of the courtroom). Hatred shouldn’t get out of control or it does become counterproductive, both for the psyche of the hater and for the effectiveness of any campaign against evil. But to expunge it entirely from the picture can easily lead to a paralysis of the will to fight evil and a tolerance for it that perpetrators only see as weak, and which empowers their cause.

It would be wonderful if the example of love and forgiveness could lead to the transformation of evil into its opposite. That’s the hope. And in same cases I do believe that love and forgiveness can work wonders–but only with those who have not crossed a certain line, only with those who share certain underlying values and assumptions. We need to recognize those who are far beyond its reaches; just as a psychiatrist needs to recognize when he/she is dealing with a sociopath, and all the love and understanding in the world is not enough.

Another problem with the sort of thinking evidenced in the quote about Bin Laden is the idea of becoming “just like” the enemy. Even for those who do believe that it’s wrong to feel hatred against someone like Bin Laden, is it really true that an ounce of hatred for a murderous psychopath is the exact equivalent of the evil done by such people and their supporters? Is there no sense of proportion here? Are all hatreds alike, including the one that is harbored in the heart as compared to the one that results in acts of murder? The one that is against the murderer as compared to the one that is against the victim?

This is a good example of a tendency I’ve noticed in our postmodern world: that the part is the equivalent of the whole. Comparisons of degree seem to be impossible for many people who are making judgments. Bush is Hitler, the Patriot Act is the end of liberty in America–or, as an erudite gentlemen serenely stated at a lecture I attended recently–the US is now a theocracy. This man, like certain other champions of so-called “nuance,” seemed unable to make a “nuanced” judgment of relative fault and degree.

Degree matters. Context matters. Not all hatreds are alike. A President whose policies on stem cells is in accord with his religious beliefs does not a theocracy make–ask the Iranians. And hating Bin Laden doesn’t make one like him. I wouldn’t have thought these things needed to be stated, or would be the least bit controversial. But apparently they do, and apparently they are.

My mother: there’s bad news and there’s good news

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Those of you who’ve followed the continuing saga of my 93-year old mother (yes, she just had a birthday) know that she moved back to NY in mid-November. So, how’s it going so far?

Well, she hates it.

But she’s happy.

And if that seems to be a contradiction–I think I can explain.

My mother complains about the place she lives in. Not her room; that, she admits, is beautiful–high-ceilinged and airy and light and…well, roomy. The bathroom, likewise, and the little kitchenette. No, the physical plant leaves little to be desired.

Her assistants (after all, it is “assisted living”) come more or less at their appointed hours, to help her with dressing and getting downstairs and the like. Since her stroke she’d gotten used to having personal caretakers around for about nine hours a day, more or less at her service, and now they come and go only as needed or as called, so I was a bit worried about the change.

But it doesn’t seem to be a problem. Actually, she appears to welcome the return of a certain amount of privacy, an unexpected benefit.

So, what is the problem? Two, actually, but they’re biggish ones. The first is that she doesn’t like any of her fellow residents. What this represents I’m not sure. But I think it’s the fact that my mother’s mind is (knock wood) basically sound, and most of the others are more–as they say–“cognitively challenged.”

And she hates the food. Hates, hates, hates it.

Now, food is an important part of life for most of us, although I hear tell of people who eat to live and don’t really enjoy the process all that much. But for the elderly in institutions–even ones as beautiful as my mother’s–food assumes an even greater importance in the hierarchy of events than it does for most people. That is to say, mealtimes are a big, big, very big deal.

So if she doesn’t like the food, and she doesn’t like the company that goes with it, and she doesn’t like the activities (too elementary, designed to suit the diminished capacity of so many of the residents)–then Houston, we’ve got a problem.

Except that we don’t, exactly. When I speak to her on the phone, her voice sounds more happy and relaxed than it has in years, with a lilt I haven’t heard in a long while. Even her memory–not all that bad to begin with–has improved. She sounds sharper in general.

Reading between the lines, I ascribe her improved mood to the phenomenon I wrote about here: the fact that she’s home.

No, it’s not her old home. But it’s “home” as a community, the place where she grew up, the area she lived in for eighty-eight years before moving to New England to be near me.

And that community–at least so far–has come through for her. She’s had lots of visitors (some of them bring the chocolate to which she’s become allergic, forcing my brother to confiscate it and take it home with him, poor thing). She’s had many more phone calls. She’s been out to restaurants–and, what’s more, they’re not just random restaurants, they’re places she knows and loves, with a long and deep history in her life.

Her room looks out over a highway, not the beautiful trees of her previous place, trees that changed with the dramatic New England seasons and offered the spectacle of nature’s wonder through her many windows. But my mom’s a city gal. Although she appreciated those trees and often remarked on them, now she monitors and reports on the changing traffic and seems happy to do so.

Proving that, in the words of the cliché and Dorothy: there’s no place like home– although the definition of “home” isn’t always what you think it will be.

Compassionate Europe and the death penalty

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I noticed (hat tip: Pajamas Media) that some Europeans may be reconsidering their near-total abolition of the death penalty.

This is surprising news, if true; the recent history of the death penalty in Europe has only gone one way, and that’s in the direction of ending it. It’s been an incredibly successful post-World War II campaign, understandable in many respects in light of the carnage that the war represented, and the desire to turn away from killing. The UN and international human rights groups led the way in the late 40s and the 50s, and all the nations of Europe save Belarus have followed suit. One cannot become a member of the EU without abolishing capital punishment.

It’s another manner by which Europe distinguishes itself from the US–although it should be remembered that the US had its own fling with the European way, abolishing the death penalty (de facto) for a decade from 1967 till 1977 as a result of Furman vs. Georgia‘s Supreme Court ruling that the practice was arbitrary and capricious, and cruel and unusual. Technically, the death penalty wasn’t abolished by the case, but it effectively generated a moratorium while people tried to figure out just exactly what the ruling meant, and how the states should respond to it.

At any rate, the European poll figures are interesting, because–despite the longing of the EU–Europe is certainly far from unitary. As might be expected, Eastern Europe (“new” Europe) leads the way in death penalty support, with 58% of Poles wanting to bring the death penalty back (Poland only came aboard recently, anyway, in 1997), and 56% of Czechs.

But even in France the numbers seem relatively close, and in England public opinion is virtually tied on the subject. England, of course, has a long and colorful history of historically significant beheadings, with the site of many becoming a tourist attraction. And don’t forget the bloodthirsty French Revolution.

But those days are gone in Europe–probably never to return, whatever the people might think. The law, once officially changed, is unlikely to ever change back, despite the fact that the obvious alternative to the death penalty–life imprisonment–is rarely enforced in Europe.

I speak here as a person who is not a strong proponent of the death penalty, although I reluctantly favor it in certain cases. For the individual criminal, its application has been capricious and unfair in too many cases. Life imprisonment–if it actually is life with no possibility of parole–is a decent alternative, often more feared by criminals than death.

But I recognize exceptions, even for individual criminals. For example, a New Yorker article a few years back (can’t find the cite right now) described a multiple murderer who was also a brilliant escape artist. No prison could safely hold him, and he seemed to be the sort who would kill again: an argument for the death penalty if there ever was one. And I always knew that mass murderers of the political sort, such as Hitler (and now, Saddam) cried out for a punishment that was definitive. Keeping them alive after their particular crimes seemed more of an obscenity than killing them.

Most of Europe does not agree. And it’s especially the elites of many European countries who don’t always agree with their people.

In Italy and Spain it’s true that the people are overwhelmingly against the death penalty, to the tune of 72% and 80%, respectively (and Italy, by the way, was the birthplace of the modern movement to abolish capital punishment). But take a look at some poll figures from Europe concerning Saddam Hussein’s execution, widely condemned by the leaders of Europe and the international groups there:

When the German magazine Stern commissioned a poll on whether Saddam should be executed, it found 50 percent of Germans in favor and only 39 percent opposed. A poll conducted last month for Le Monde found that most Americans (82 percent) favored hanging Saddam ”” as did most Spaniards (51 percent), most Germans (53 percent), most French (58 percent), and most Britons (69 percent).

But the rulers of Europe widely condemned Saddam’s execution–not just the form it took, but the fact of it as well.

Here are some more figures:

“Polls show that Europeans and Canadians crave executions almost as much as their American counterparts do,” wrote Joshua Micah Marshall in The New Republic in 2000. “It’s just that their politicians don’t listen to them.”

The figures Marshall goes on to quote (from a 1997 poll) are even more strongly in favor of capital punishment than the figures cited earlier in this post, which showed much softer death penalty support in Europe. But whatever the numbers mean (and we all know about polls and their vagaries), it’s pretty clear that even if the people of Europe were clamoring for a death penalty, the law would be unlikely to change to reflect public opinion. The elites wouldn’t have it, and they seem to be in control.

Its lack of a death penalty is one of the things that distinguishes Europe today. It is part of Europe’s own self-image as an evolved and pacifist culture, leading the way for the world and especially the American cowboys, who are both bloodthirsty and naive. To be the champions of the right to life for even a mass murderer and sadist such as Saddam Hussein is, they believe, the mark of a culture that will lead the world to a better way, where the lion will lie down with the lamb because that lamb’s superior moral force is so extraordinarily compelling.

Would that it were so. Nor do I believe the opposite–that executing someone such as Saddam will dissuade future power-grabbing mass murderers from lusting after the reigns of whatever chaotic and failed countries they can get their hands on. No, I’m afraid that nothing but the proper Constitutional safeguards, and an informed and aware populace, are likely to be sufficient to stop those with such lofty ambitions.

Moving soon: a new neo-neocon address

The New Neo Posted on by

The new blog isn’t ready yet. But since I’ve been having so much trouble with posting on Blogger lately, I thought I’d give the link to the new blog here, just in case Blogger shuts me out later on.

Here’s the link to the new blog site . The URL for it is http://neoneocon.com.

Simple: no hyphen (some prescient capitalist entrepreneur bought up the hypenated name some time ago, while I wasn’t looking).

No need to go to the new site yet. I’ll be using the present blog for the time being, until further notice—or until Blogger gets weirder and more feisty. If the latter happens, and a few days go by without a post on this blog, go to the new one to see what’s what.

It will take some time to get the new site up and running, and till then there won’t be much to see except scaffolding and a few rickety ladders. When it’s ready for unveiling, I’ll post the news here (assuming I can still get here), and then it will be time to change your bookmarks. The old blog should then remain intact at this URL, in case you want to stroll down memory lane.

Oh, and a question: any features you’d like to see on the new blog that this one doesn’t have?

Outdated political definitions: conservatives and liberals unite, you have nothing to lose but your chains

The New Neo Posted on by

There was an argument–that is to say, a lively discussion–in Tuesday’s comments section in the “Cold hubris” post. The subject was political definitions, such as “conservative” and “Left.”

It started about here, and went on–and on and on. Read it if you want some background to the sort of confusion that can reign when trying to pin down what are in some ways outdated and poorly defined political concepts and categories.

I use these terms–liberal, conservative, Right, Left–myself, because they are in such common parlance, but I agree they are misleading. None of these groups are unitary by any means (and hey, whatever happened to that good old epithet from my youth–“reactionary?”) “Fascist” is another one that has come to mean, simply, “bad person trying to do something I don’t like.”

Redefining these terms, or trying to come up with new ones, is a huge undertaking, one I’m not about to tackle this moment.

Besides, plenty of people have done it before me. One of them was Steven Den Beste. Here is his attempt at a comprehensive reordering of the political grid, and here is a description of his own political leanings (he’s conservative because he’s a liberal–read it and it will make sense. And, for those of you unfamiliar with Den Beste, he was one of the best bloggers ever; my paean to him can be found here.)

What I’d like to focus on now is the commonly offered definition of “conservative” as “one who seeks to preserve the status quo.” This definition is wholly inadequate for today’s conservatives, and actually leads to quite preposterous results, as stated here by the commenter “a guy in pajamas”:

Hmmm…. So every administration is conservative, because they try to preserve their own power. I.e., those in power are always conservative. E.g., Clinton was progressive when elected, but conservative afterwards. Hmmm… methinks this is a simplistic definition of ‘conservative.’

Another example: Hitler was progressive when he was trying to change the status quo of the Weimar Republic, but then became conservative when he actually held power and tried to maintain it.

It seems like a joke of sorts–or a meaningless semantic exercise in which a political term “conservative,” which was originally derived from the word “conserve,” has become defined as almost identical to it, which it most certainly is not.

And, lest you think “guy in pajamas” is setting up a straw man–au contraire. In fact, this is the very definition used by the authors of the seminal study of conservatism cited in the Psychology Today article you’ve heard so much about, the Jost study (the other part of their definition of conservative was “tolerant of inequality”–and don’t get me started on that).

Guy in pajamas is merely paraphrasing Jost, et. al, who actually do state that Stalin was originally a figure on the Left but arguably became a figure on the right because he wanted to preserve the Soviet system. Now, just let that sink in: Stalin was a conservative for supporting an entrenched Communist regime–the important word here being “entrenched.”

I think we can all agree–I fervently hope we can all agree–that this is an absurdity. But it’s an absurdity into which many fall, because the original definition of “conservative” on which it’s based is incorrect.

Oh, it may have once been correct in a certain limited set of circumstances. For instance, way back when powerful monarchs were in vogue, those looking to preserve that status quo against those wanting to limit the divine right of sovereigns would have been called “conservative” at the time. But time marches on–even for conservatives–and those olden-day conservatives have virtually nothing in common with most conservatives of today who tend to believe (note that word “tend;” there are always exceptions) in less central government, not more; and in the importance of individual rights and liberties. Just those things those old liberals were fighting for.

After all, libertarians today are conservatives, and they are fairly radical (as in, “extreme,” not “Leftist”–see the quicksand that looms everywhere, waiting to trap us when we try to use these words?) in the changes they advocate. And, of course, no one could accuse neocons of wanting to do business as usual in the international sphere–leave that to the realpolitikers, who now seem to include most of the formerly radical Left. Go figure.

And don’t liberals want to return to–or conserve–many aspects of the glory days of the 60s, or the Clinton administration?

Oh yes, but neocons are “conservative” because they champion the spread of old-fashioned pre-modern (is that the opposite of post-modern?) ideas such as liberty and justice for all (that’s in the Pledge of Allegiance, so it must be conservative, right?) But didn’t liberals used to do that, at least in theory? Once again, you can twist these definitions almost infinitely to try to fit them into a framework where they just don’t make much sense without the gyrations. Which means they’re not all that helpful.

But they are the only words we have at the moment to use, and they at least have some common meaning that we all think we understand. I strongly urge you to read that Den Beste essay in which he suggests some different ways of ordering things. He’s got quite a few dimensions, such as conservative/revolutionary, liberal/autocrat-elitist, realism/idealism, tolerant/conformist/, capitalist/socialist, individual/group, and opportunity/result (yeah, I know, too complicated–it will never replace the old liberal/conservative).

Here’s an excerpt:

This is where Michael [Totten]’s argument, based on a single axis, breaks down. The people he refers to as “liberals” aren’t liberal. For lack of a better term, we’ll have to call them “leftists” for the moment. The vocal leftist movement which has been revealed in the last year in the US manifests as being elitist (i.e. not liberal), idealistic (not realistic) and conformist (not tolerant). There’s a lesser dedication to equality (over inequality) but it’s not totally consistent because it is a side effect of a basic choice of groups over individuals and to some extent of socialism over capitalism. And within the US right now, they’re revolutionaries because they strongly disagree with the status quo. It is because they are revolutionaries that we tend to categorize them as being “leftist”; it has nothing to do with liberalism as such (especially since they aren’t liberal)….

And here’s still another attempt, by Jerry Pournelle, to redo the political classification system, this time with two axes, statism and rationalism. It’s worth a read, as well. And anyone interested in wading into the works of Den Beste (allow a bit of time–his stuff is loooong, but worthwhile), click on any of the above links to his blog, and then look on the right sidebar and click on the “best of” link (I’ve done this instead of adding a direct link myself, because each time I’ve tried to do so Blogger goes nuts and messes up this entire post of mine).

So, what do I think? I think conservatives tend towards the following: especially interested in individual rights, identity, and especially responsibility over group rights, identity, and responsibility; and in general favoring smaller government over big, including a more laissez faire approach to capitalism (which they also favor over other economic systems). Liberals tend in the opposite direction, and Leftists even more so in the opposite direction–including a liking for socialism, and an increased dislike for the US and the West in general.

That’s it, at least for now.

Oh yes–and bigotry, narrowmindedness, rigidity, self-interest, political wrangling, hypocrisy, lies, and inconsistency know no sides–they are equal opportunity characteristics.

It’s that time again: Sanity Squad podcast

The New Neo Posted on by

This week the Sanity Squad discusses the phenomenon of equal opportunity victimhood: demands (by the Muslim Council of Britain, for example) for the replacement of Holocaust Memorial Day with the more inclusive “Genocide Day.” Along the way we discuss a few other items such as Kerry at Davos, the Holocaust against animals, and Jimmy Carter and his “too many Jews.”

Listen to myself, Shrinkwrapped, and Dr. Sanity; and hear Siggy get even more fired up than usual.