Decline of the West

Posted on May 7, 2011 by Andrew Stuttaford

Writing over on the Corner, I’ve put up a few posts on the hand-wringing in Europe over the allegedly unseemly American response to the death of bin Laden, not to speak of the (manufactured) outrage over the the failure to bring him to trial.

As one might expect, England’s idiot savant Archbishop of Canterbury has been prominent amongst the hand-wringers, but it’s his German brethren who have really taken the lead, prompted, it seems, by a few mild words from Angela Merkel.

The Financial Times has a useful summary here:

Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, is a cautious and risk-averse leader who normally chooses her words with great care. Above all, she avoids saying anything to alarm the supersensitive German electorate. On the subject of the US operation that resulted in the killing of Osama bin Laden, however, she has risked the wrath of many voters to demonstrate her solidarity with Washington.

It is good news. I am happy that they have succeeded in killing bin Laden,” Ms Merkel declared at a press conference shortly after his death was announced on Monday.

Ever since, she has been the target of criticism from all political parties, including her own, as well as from representatives of leading German churches. Alois Glück, president of the central committee of German Catholics, called her words “mistaken and very annoying”. Martin Dutzmann, army bishop for the Protestant evangelical church, said: “It would have been good news if he had been arrested, leading to a proper judicial process.”

From within her own Christian Democratic Union – a party that boasts strong Christian roots – came sharp words from Siegfried Kauder, brother of the party’s parliamentary leader Volker Kauder, and chairman of the legal affairs committee in the Bundestag. “The principle that the end justifies the means has no legal foundation,” he said.

Eberhard Schockenhoff, a Catholic theologian, whose brother Andreas is the foreign affairs spokesman for the CDU in parliament, said: “The violent death of a man should never be a cause for joy.”

These people really need to get over themselves.

Posted in politics | Tagged , , , , | 11 Comments

Trouble in the Asylum?

Posted on May 7, 2011 by Andrew Stuttaford

Cross-posted on the Corner:

Via the Guardian:

Close allies of Iran’s president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, have been accused of using supernatural powers to further his policies amid an increasingly bitter power struggle between him and the country’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Several people said to be close to the president and his chief of staff, Esfandiar Rahim Mashaei, have been arrested in recent days and charged with being “magicians” and invoking djinns (spirits). Ayandeh, an Iranian news website, described one of the arrested men, Abbas Ghaffari, as “a man with special skills in metaphysics and connections with the unknown worlds”.

Posted in politics | Tagged , , , | Comments Off on Trouble in the Asylum?

Too much of a good thing

Posted on May 7, 2011 by David Hume

There was a time when a modicum of corpulence was a signifier of a life relative leisure and comfort. Not so in our day and age. Rather, in the United States and many other nations corpulence is a signifier of low social status or the perception of sloth and lack of self control. Though more than half of Americans are defined as “overweight” as per the body-mass-index, of more genuine concern are the “obese,” who form about 1 out of 4 Americans. Their distribution varies by locality and social station, but they are not a peculiarity on the American scene.

The interweaving of politics and obesity is particularly subtle and often confounding. Some conservatives in other domains who might point to the importance of personal responsibility and self-control (gluttony is a sin!) dismiss the the blandishments of cultural elites on the perils of obesity, albeit Leftish ones, as snobbery, classism, and nanny-stateism. But there’s another component of the ranks of those who man the battlements of the fat, a particular type of cultural Leftist who perceives the obese to be individual self-actualizers and part of a “victimized” class. The “fat acceptance movement” has borrowed all the language of Left-wing identity politics movements.

This particular strain of Lefty fat-acceptance is clear in this Village Voice piece, Guys Who Like Fat Chicks:

Continue reading →

Posted in culture | Tagged | 2 Comments

Happy Birthday, Mr Hume!

Posted on May 6, 2011 by Bradlaugh

The Great Empiricist was born 300 years ago this weekend (May 7, 1711, N.S.)

Posted in philosophy | 3 Comments

Which universities send traffic to Secular Right

Posted on May 5, 2011 by David Hume

Over at one of my other weblogs I looked at university traffic. So I wanted to check Secular Right. The blog’s been around for over 2 years now, and here are the universities which sent more than 500 visitors:

 

Continue reading →

Posted in Blogs | Tagged | 8 Comments

Meaning

Posted on May 5, 2011 by David Hume

The last post:

Here it is. I’m dead, and this is my last post to my blog. In advance, I asked that once my body finally shut down from the punishments of my cancer, then my family and friends publish this prepared message I wrote—the first part of the process of turning this from an active website to an archive.

If you knew me at all in real life, you probably heard the news already from another source, but however you found out, consider this a confirmation: I was born on June 30, 1969 in Vancouver, Canada, and I died in Burnaby on May 3, 2011, age 41, of complications from stage 4 metastatic colorectal cancer. We all knew this was coming.

That includes my family and friends, and my parents Hilkka and Juergen Karl. My daughters Lauren, age 11, and Marina, who’s 13, have known as much as we could tell them since I first found I had cancer. It’s become part of their lives, alas.

Posted in culture | Tagged | 1 Comment

Your Ancestors Were Zombies

Posted on May 5, 2011 by Bradlaugh

At a gathering the other day I mentioned Julian Jaynes, who caused a stir back in the 1970s with a very odd book about religion and human consciousness.

Roger Kimball was present.  He later forwarded to me an essay on Jaynes by the Australian philosopher David Stove.  I thought the essay so interesting I have put it on my website here.

Posted in philosophy, Religion, science | 2 Comments

The emerging counternarrative

Posted on May 4, 2011 by Heather Mac Donald

John Yoo claims that Obama ordered the killing rather than capture of OBL in order to avoid having to make hard decisions regarding his detention and interrogation:

Mr. Obama’s policies now differ from their Bush counterparts mainly on the issue of interrogation. As Sunday’s operation put so vividly on display, Mr. Obama would rather kill al Qaeda leaders—whether by drones or special ops teams—than wade through the difficult questions raised by their detention. This may have dissuaded Mr. Obama from sending a more robust force to attempt a capture.

 

Really?  I am perfectly willing to grant that Bush-era interrogation policies may have yielded information on which this raid was partially built, but I think that Yoo, whom I respect and who has been unfairly personally demonized for his good faith service to the country,  may be entering fantasy-land here.  It strikes me as highly unlikely that this military strategy was devised simply to avoid the possibility of interrogation, with its alleged “difficult questions.”

Posted in Uncategorized | 7 Comments

Western vs. Moderate Muslims

Posted on May 3, 2011 by David Hume

Since 9/11 the term “moderate Muslim” has been a catchall for Muslims-who-aren’t-bad in the everyday parlance of the USA. But the term is only marginally useful. First, there is a huge range in the term “moderate Muslim”. Some non-violent moderate Muslims still espouse a separationist ideology and are explicit proponents of future Islamic dominionism through proselytization and procreation. Other moderate Muslims are relatively assimilationist and don’t give much conscious thought to the idea of a universally Muslim world. These moderate Muslims though need to be distinguished from liberal Muslims, who are often dissenters who are trying to change Western Islam from within. These liberal Muslims are totally intelligible to Western religious sensibilities, especially of the universalism of the cultural elites. In contrast, many moderate Muslims don’t exchange intellectual “cash” in the same currency as the Western elites, rather, they work with the same currency as conservative Western Christians. Though a moderate Muslim and a conservative Protestant naturally have strongly disagreements on the details of their religion and its implications, they both accept a broad framework where their own views are clearly the Right views, and that there is One Truth View, and that there are the saved and the unsaved, of which the former consists of those who properly adhere to the One True View which they espouse.

 

Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged | 6 Comments

What will Rush say?

Posted on May 2, 2011 by Heather Mac Donald

And Mark Levin and Sean Hannity.  Their dilemma is acute:  how acknowledge the accomplishment of their decade-long desideratum–the killing of Osama Bin Laden–without giving Obama credit?  Arguably, Obama doesn’t deserve credit: he is the beneficiary of the continuous workings of the intelligence and military bureaucracy and just happened to be at the right place at the right time: at  the country’s head when the opportunity to kill OBL finally presented itself.  But the right-wing punditocracy has already in theory ruled out that position, having blamed the Obama intelligence community for having nearly missed the would-be underwear bomber, even though most of the relevant personnel responsible for that oversight undoubtedly were hold-overs from the Bush days.   So if Obama deserves the blame for failures of military intelligence, he should in theory deserve credit.   We’ll see.

Rush update:

Rush’s strategy:  ostentatiously, with unctuous noblesse oblige, give credit to Obama for maintaining Bush anti-terrorism policies which made—per Limbaugh–the Osama assassination possible, while mocking the press for pumping up the momentousness of the event and mocking the Obama Administration for allegedly spinning the killing as an accomplishment of the Obama Administration (Rush: “Listen to him; it’s all ‘me, me, me’”).   In other words, the hall of mirrors quality of modern politics continues unabated.  If Rush is right to ironize the media coverage and to detect in it a political agenda, is there any doubt that had Bush killed Osama, the right would be celebrating it as a Bush victory—and assessing its effect on the next presidential election, something which Rush, in his new, “I’m above politics” mode, now scorns? 

 
Limbaugh has been reassuring his listeners that this event does not improve Obama’s election chances—probably rightly so.  But his efforts to focus attention back on the economy are particularly amusing: “In fact, five and a half million Americans will lose their unemployment benefits this week.  Five and a half million Americans shut out.”  This lachrymose dirge from a long-time opponent of extending unemployment insurance.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged | 25 Comments