NYT and WaPo Vote Against "Manliness"

Anyone for Manliness? No thanks, old chap, say the book reviewers at The New York Times and The Washington Post in their review of Harvard professor Harvey Mansfield’s Manliness. Writes Walter Kirn in the NYT Book Review:

Mansfield seems stuck in a semantic time warp in which it is still possible to write sentences like "Though it's clear that women can be manly, it's just as clear that they are not as manly or as often manly as men."

And in the Washington Post Ruth Marcus sneers

"The problem of manliness is not that it does not exist," Mansfield concludes. "It does exist, but it is unemployed." Well, um, excuse me, but I think -- it's just my opinion, now, maybe you disagree, and I'm sure we could work it out -- Mansfield has it exactly backward. Manliness does exist. The problem is that it's overemployed -- nowhere more than in this administration.

You can understand the problem. Professor Mansfield argues that manliness is “confidence in the face of risk.” The whole point of the liberal project is to create a world without risk, a world in which you would not need people with the quality of dealing with riskiness. So we’ve got to put a stop to this right away.

But if you go to the reviews on Amazon, the shock and outrage isn’t quite as thick. Here’s a self-described “free-thinking, liberal, confident female” who agrees with Mansfield.

I absolutely agree with Mansfield's opinion that being a man is about having "confidence in risky situations".
...

However, when a man is not courageous or confident, he simply cannot feel like a man, and loses self-respect -- which has a disastrous effect on his life, in his raltionships with women in particular, but also in relation to men; and that negatively affects his overall functioning in society.
...

I also agree with Mansfiled's assertion that a man cannot be a gentleman until he is a man first.

Yes. Well, that is not the sort of thing that a president of Harvard is allowed to say in public. And evidently, just to be on the safe side, it is not something you would want to write in the pages of The New York Times and The Washington Post.

Is it permissible to suggest that the world needs the complementary masculine and feminine attributes of manliness and womanliness? We need people who can take calculated risks and not lose their heads. And we need people who focus on nurturing and caring. Both skills are needed in the central task of life, getting fledglings off the nest.

The core of the great western project is the socialization of men to the team instead of the gang. It is this achievement, getting men to work in productive, profitable teams instead of destructive gangs, that has raised the west to world-historical domination. As Lee Harris wrote in Civilization and its Enemies, the war on terror is a conflict between the western team and the “eternal gang of ruthless men.”

To beat the trickery of reckless, ruthless men and their gang you need a team of trustworthy men trained and confident in the face of risk.

That is something that our liberal friends just do not understand. That is why they have been in a consistent funk over the war on terror, forever talking about exit strategies. That is why they want to take risk out of the workplace, replacing the employment at will contract with worker protections, tenure, benefits, and regulation. That is why environmentalists want to impose the “precautionary principle” on economic actions. They don’t want to be exposed to any risk.

Unfortunately the world don’t work that way.

Stupid Left Tricks

Which is worse? To have journalists jump down your throat every time you say something foolish? Or is it to have journalists politely ignore your stupidity?

Whenever TV evangelist Pat Robertson says something foolish, it gets on the nightly TV news, and we understand from the reporter’s tone of voice that this time preacher Pat has really demonstrated that he has got a screw loose.

But when a lefty does something stupid, we don’t get the same reaction.

For the last week French students have been rioting because the government wants to take a small step away from the policy of lifetime employment. The government wants to allow employers to fire employees under 26 during their first two years of employment without giving a reason. In the Anglo-Saxon countries this is called employment at will. But the French students are livid at losing the protections that they have not yet obtained. And so, writes Mathieu von Rohr in Der Spiegel “It's youth against the establishment.” But socialists are on the side of the students.

Ségolène Royal, the left wing's likely presidential contender, announced that employers in her départements would no longer receive government funding if they signed what she called "cheap contracts."

OK. A century ago you could still have argued that without protection the workers would be shockingly exploited by the bosses. But not now. We now have 200 years of capitalism and we know that the workers, especially well-educated students at the university, are not helpless. And we know that a rigid labor market, such as the one in France, is a labor market that doesn’t create jobs. Rigidity leads to stagnation; flexibility leads to prosperity.

If French students have not learned this, then someone has been hiding the truth from them.

Then there’s the stupidity going on in South America, with Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez playing the cacique and distributing low-cost heating oil to left-wing groups all over the Americas. According to Jorge Rueda from the Associated Press “Venezuela agreed Monday to sell fuel oil under preferential terms to an El Salvador association created by a group of leftist mayors.” This is similar to a program he has set up to send low-cost heating oil to the poor in the United States. And while he was at it Chavez lashed out at free trade, using

Monday's signing occasion to criticize U.S.-backed free trade agreements such as the one El Salvador joined March 1.

"They're making deals with the devil, the devil himself," Chavez said.

It’s a pity that when lefties say things like that nobody in the media responds in with lofty scorn. Because we know, as well as we know anything, that the road to prosperity is paved with free trade, low taxes, secure property rights, and an absolute minimum of special subsidies.

At least Pat Robertson gets to hear it when he says something stupid.

The Vision of Hope for Iraq

On the third anniversary of the invasion of Iraq, blogger Mohammed of Iraq the Model relives his experience.

First of all there is the experience of living under the regime of Saddam Hussein.

Life stopped and time stopped when Saddam ruled Iraq, actually that totalitarian regime was moving backwards and dragging us with it and nothing could stop the deterioration that began the moment Saddam came to power.

Then the Americans invaded and suddenly Iraqi and American were face to face.

Now the two strangers had to work together to accomplish a goal Iraqis knew almost nothing about; they knew that America wanted to topple Saddam and secure the oil fields but that's all they knew while America was thinking of a huge transformation for the entire Middle East with Iraq being the key to that transformation.

It’s a humbling thing to think how the Iraqi people were suddenly to become the guinea pigs for the US plan for the Middle East, the plan to rip up the old order and try to plant something else in its place.

Will it all work and will Iraq come through its present sufferings?

We will not be defeated and orphans of the dark past will get what they deserve and our sacrifices and the sacrifices of those who stand with us shall not go in vain, our sacrifices will pave an easier road for those want to follow us when they decide it's time for them to change.

Mohammed is a brave young man, and we must hope that he and his generation will live to plant a society of hope and freedom in the suffering Land Between the Two Rivers.

Nancy Pelosi Champion of Free Enterprise

When they passed the Sarbanes-Oxley Act to stop the Enron debacle from ever happening again they estimated that it would cost about $1.2 billion a year for corporations to fill in the forms to comply with the new law.

Actual outcome? “Recent estimates from the American Electronic Association, for example, show that U.S. companies are spending $35 billion annually” to comply with the law, according to Mallory Factor in OpinionJournal.com.

Guess who is outraged by this dreadful burden on public corporations? Why the long time friend of private enterprise House Minority Leader and Democrat Nancy Pelosi.

Ms. Pelosi acknowledges specifically the need to "ensure Sarbanes-Oxley requirements are not overly burdensome," and endorses reform. Meanwhile, the scourge of Wall Street, New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer, is criticizing Sarbanes-Oxley's "unbelievable burden on small companies" and its possible role in "preventing some initial public offerings."

Factor credits Pelosi with being “quicker to recognize what many traditional champions of free enterprise have been slow to see: the law's disastrous consequences for our nation's ability to compete.”

Actually, I doubt that. I’d guess that up to now the “traditional champions of free enterprise” have been afraid to talk because they expected to be mau-maued by liberals, Democrats, and the TV news.

But now that the Democrats have come out for reform, that’s great! Let’s go for it. Let’s have a bill out by Memorial Day and on the president’s desk by the Fourth of July.

And could we try to learn a lesson from this? It was already illegal to defraud investors before Sarbanes-Oxley and its onerous reporting requirements. The problem was that people that saw illegal things going on didn’t have the courage to do something about it. And accounting firms, now the beneficiaries of Sarbanes-Oxley, were working both sides of the street, doing consulting for the firms they were supposed to be auditing.

Dems Seek Votes from Singles

Everybody knows that the Republican Party is the party of white, religious, married people. And the Democratic Party is the party of non-white, secular, single people. For instance, Bush won in 2004 by 57-42 percent among married people. He lost among single people by 58-40. That’s a pretty big “marriage” gap. But married people represented 63 percent of the voters and single people 37 percent. Which group would you go after?

The Democrats have decided to win in 2006 by focusing on single people, according to Peter A. Brown of the Quinnipiac University Polling Institute in RealClearPolitics.com.

The Democrat’s group Women’s Voices analyzes the single vote in an 80 page report.

It goes into great detail about how unmarried people are likely to be poorer and more alienated than their married counterparts - with the obvious implication that these are prime Democratic targets.



And, no doubt they are, except for a big chunk of the group, single white men, who are probably the most Republican of all demographic groups.



But the vast, vast majority of the rest fit the profile of Democratic voters. They are either female or racial minorities or low income, or all three.

It is striking that Democrats don’t really even attempt to think about how they could appeal more to white, married people. Instead they see their future in ginning up higher turnout among single women.

Can that really be the path back to power?

Crunch Time in Iraq

Most great battles seem in retrospect to have been forordained. But Waterloo was reported by the Duke of Wellington as a close-run thing. And many other battles could have gone one way or another.

So we can say that the Battle of Iraq is approaching decision time. Some people are saying that it is all over. In Time Joe Klein quotes all his friends who say that the Iraqis are ungovernable and that “the only plausible reason for remaining in Iraq is to prevent an even greater catastrophe.”

Then in the Sydney Morning Herald Miranda Devine says that it’s the media that has lost its head.

The violence of revenge attacks on Sunnis across Iraq, after last month's bombing of the Shiite Golden Mosque in Samarra, led many commentators to declare the civil war they have been predicting for three years had arrived. But others point to signs the crisis has spurred Iraq's political leaders to sort out their differences and work to form a national unity government, three months after their third successful election.

Former Iraqi Prime Minister Iyad Allawi tells the Daily Telegraph that things are at a crisis:

"We are losing each day an average of 50 to 60 people throughout the country, if not more," he said. "If this is not civil war, then God knows what civil war is. Iraq is in the middle of a crisis. Maybe we have not reached the point of no return yet, but we are moving towards this point.

Iraqi dentist Mohammed of Iraq the Model is optimistic and thinks that Operation Swarmer to clear out an area near Samarra is really a training operation for the Iraqi Army. And he wonders whether the intervention of Iran and Syria in Iraq has really been a benefit to them.

The truth is that the Battle of Iraq is at the crucial stage. All the parties to the conflict are making their final effort: Saddamites, Shi’ite militia leaders, Iran, Syria, and Al Qaeda. Every month allows the Iraqi government security forces to grow stronger, and the Iraqi government to increase credibility. The insurgents must win soon or lose the battle.

Fifty Years of the Shipping Container

In case you forgot, this year we are celebrating the 50th anniversary of the shipping container, that ubiquitous item that is forever traveling on ships, trains, and trucks across the oceans and continents.

It has provoked an explosion in world trade. And the reason is the same it always is. The container has radically reducing the cost of shipping.

When the first container ship, the Ideal-X, a converted World War II oil tanker, made its first trip in 1956 from Newark to Houston with 58 containers aboard, it reduced the cost of loading by over 95 percent. According to the Economist (needs sub) of London, the cost of loading loose cargo into a medium-sized ship back in 1956 was $5.83 per ton. It is estimated that it cost $0.16 per ton to load the Ideal-X.

That is a big deal. John D. Rockefeller merely reduced the cost of illuminating oil by 90 percent. Andrew Carnegie was a piker. He only reduced the cost of steel by about two-thirds.

Of course it has been rough on the dock workers. They used to do pretty well enjoying the odd “breakage.”

But the change opened up all sorts of possibilities.

Instead of manufacturing goods locally, a company could afford to replace its overcrowded multi-storey factory in Brooklyn with one in Pennsylvania, where taxes, electricity and other costs were lower, and then ship its goods to New York in a container. Later the factory might move to Mexico; it is now probably in China.

Here’s a factoid to think about. The new container ships on the drawing boards “ill be able to carry enough containers to fill a line of trucks 68 miles long.”