Who Do You Believe?

Who do you believe in the recent Atlanta shooting?  A National Guard soldier, Spc. Craig Perkins, claims he was taunted by young Muslim men and was pursued by them to his girl-friend’s apartment.  The young Muslims said they:

were simply out for a walk with two women when they passed through Perkins’ apartment complex. [They] told police Perkins came out of his apartment and confronted them for allegedly looking at him or his girlfriend.

That’s according to  David Simpson in The Atlanta Constitution.

Perkins and his girl-friend lived in an apartment complex whose renters were mostly “refugees of violent conflicts around the world.” Perkins

said he could feel the animosity when he walked by his Middle Eastern neighbors in his Guard uniform.
Women and older men tended to be polite, but the younger men were hostile, he said.
On many occasions, he said, he received signs of disrespect he knew from Iraq.

And then it ended in a confrontation in which Perkins shot one of the Muslims in the leg. 

It’s an interesting story.  Who do you believe?  The black US soldier in uniform whose service in the “National Guard helped him straighten out after a series of scrapes with the law as a young man?”  Or do you believe Tareq Ali Bualsafared, a student from the United Arab Emirates?

The question is, as it always is: Who is the victim?

But, as a conservative, I’m just not qualified to judge.

The Other "Creationism"

One of the great tasks to which our liberal friends are called is to champion the cause of “science.”  They mean by that witnessing for Darwinian explanations of reality against Christian “fundamentalism.” Yet while busily plucking the speck of dust out of the eyes of the creationists and the Intelligent Design activists, David Horowitz explains, they are letting the nation’s universities truckle to a different band of religious activists.

Yet at that very moment professors in American universities were teaching a form of secular creationism as contrary to the findings of modern science as the Biblical claim that the God had made the world in seven days.
...
The name of this theory is “social constructionism,” and its churches are Women’s Studies departments situated in universities across the United States...

These priests and prophets maintain that differences between men and women are not biological but “socially constructed” by a patriarchal society.

Even though it is scandalous to say so in an American university, the science is in on this one.

The scientific evidence is summarized in a recent book, Sex Differences in Cognitive Ability, whose author, Diane Halperin, is president of the American Psychological Association and was a social constructionist herself before reviewing the scientific literature.

Yes, socialization is important.  But underneath it all are biological factors that cannot be explained away as social conditioning.

But you are not allowed to say that at Harvard, at least, not if you are President.

Tom DeLay on Rush

Everyone has forgotten about Tom DeLay, who was “gotcha-ed” last year by the Democrats in the run up to the mid-term elections.

But now Tom Delay has a book out, No Retreat, No Surrender: One American’s Fight, and Rush Limbaugh interviewed him on Friday.  Major take-away from the interview is DeLay’s appreciation of the Clinton machine.

You cannot discount, Rush, the massive, unseen-before-in-my-lifetime coalition that the Democrats have been able to build over the last six years.
...
When they needed an organization, Harold Ickes created America Coming Together, which is a group that has 1400 full-time employees that canvass. They needed somebody to do media for the 527s. They created the Media Fund.
...
They’ve investigated probably every sitting Republican that we know of right now through a group called CREW, and Democracy 21 and Common Cause... To fund it, you’ve got George Soros foundations, hundreds of foundations, like the Ford Foundation and the Gates Foundation, the Soros Foundation pumping money in. The unions.

This, of course is the Clinton machine that is being built to put Hillary Clinton in the White House.  But where are the ideas, the vision of the future?  What they have built is a political machine to do the bare knuckle work of political street fighting to get across the finish line.

RUSH: ... You don’t defeat your enemies; you destroy them.
DELAY: That’s the Democrats. They don’t have any ideas. They don’t have a vision. They don’t have an agenda. How do you think they won in 2006?

That raises the big question.  Suppose the Demcrats get into power in 2008?  What will they do with it beyond just pumping money through to the “programs?” 

The Ancien Regime of the Good Old USA

OK I admit it.  When I read Jacob Aronson’s article Conserving and Consolidating the Progressive Liberal Tradition in TCSDaily, I blew a gasket.  Writes Aronson:

One of the core challenges now facing the Party is the collapse of the New Deal coalition and adaptation to the underlying economic realities that brought it about. Bill Clinton’s rallying cry to "end government as we know it" was an attempt to reform government along private sector lines.

Well, yeah!  But since then the Democratic Party has turned away from Bill Clinton’s attempt to reform it.  It is now driven partly by street brawlers like Markos Moulitsas who want to make the Democrats into a fighting party again, fighting the big corporations that are now more powerful than governments, and partly by the new progressives like Jacob Aronson.

But “reforming government along private sector lines” or using it to fight for the people against the powerful, as Al Gore wanted to do back in 2000, is delusional.  Let us look at government in the United States.  Let us follow the money in this unified table of government spending in the United States in 2004.  It is obtained by combining two spreadsheets, one from the US Census Bureau on state and local government spending, and one from the President’ s budget documents.

Here is the top line result for 2004:

• Programs for seniors: $1 trillion
• Programs for youth: $700 billion
• Programs for defense: $700 billion
• Programs for the poor: $660 billion
• Programs for transportation: $175 billion
• Interest on the debt: $400 billion
• All other programs: $2 trillion

Now it seems to me that the great power, the great interests in the land, the folks for whom we work at our jobs and for whom we pour the most money through our government is: senior pensions and health care, education of children, defense against enemies foreign and domestic, relief of the poor, and transportation.

And this is a huge commitment.  In fact, it is a commitment that can’t be met.

That is what politics is going to be about in this century.  It is a sideshow to talk about management along private sector lines, or using government to punish corporations. 

The question is: how long can we go on like this?

When Multiculturalism Hits the Wall

We should all avoid ethnocentrism and phallocentrism and logocentrism.  That is to say, we should recognize that our own viewpoint on the world is not the only one.

That’s easy to say, easy to demand on a talking head show, easy to write in a blog.  But what about when cultures actually clash in the real world, as in Asian forced marriages in Britain?

Theodore Dalrymple (and it’s high time he was appointed an RMC Chappie) raises the question in reviewing Shame by Jaswinder Sangheera.

Sangheera is the child of Punjabi Sikh parents in Derby, England.

The author’s parents arranged a marriage for her when she was 15 years old, and in order to escape it she ran away with the boyfriend she was not supposed to have. Unusually in this situation, he stuck by her, and tried his best to support her.

The dark side of all this, of course, is that these girls of Asian parents who resist a forced marriage are subject to very heavy-handed persuasion.  Sometimes it ends in death.

When Dalrymple was an inner-city hospital physician in Birmingham, England, he writes, he used to interview young women like Sangheera “several times a week.”

I know of no suffering, short of civil war, greater than that of girls and young women put in the situation the author describes.

But let us look at the big picture.  Arranged marriage was the norm before the industrial revolution everywhere in the world, at least among anyone with property, because the preservation of property (i.e. land) from generation to generation was critical to survival.  But the industrial revolution changed all that.  In Marxian terms, it changed the productive forces, and the social superstructure had to adapt.  Freed from the land, young people can marry anyone they like because in the industrial world anyone can get a job and support themselves.  Land doesn’t matter.

All young women emerging from traditional society into the modern world face this situation.  Socialized into the modern world by their schools and their peers they find that they must rebel against their traditional parents.

It is said that the Broadway musical is precisely about the problem of the American immigrant girl wondering whether to “marry out” of her ethnic identity into the enticing world beyond the ghetto.

Beyond the trite gargling of multiculturalism, “we,” that is you and me, the enlightened, common-sense people of the west, could start doing some serious thinking about how we frame the situation of young women emerging into the modern west from their traditional families.  How much do we say: these are the rules of the west and if you violate them you are going to jail, diversity or no diversity, multiculturalism or no multiculturalism?  And how much do we accommodate people still seeking the safety of their traditional, premodern culture?

If we make up our minds, we could spare a lot of suffering.

Now There's an Inconvenient Truth About Africa

Who would have thunk it?  The government of Canada has issued a report on foreign aid to Africa, according to Jeremiah Norris, and the news is not good.  The Standing Senate Committee of Foreign Affairs and International Trade has issued a report and concluded that:

"Development assistance has been a holding pattern for Africa at best, and a direct facilitator of poor governance and economic mismanagement at worst."

 In numbers, “the per capita GNP in Sub-Saharan Africa [was] at 17.1% of the world average in 1965, falling to 9.7% in 2004.”

In other words, half a century of foreign aid has had zero positive effect on backward Africa.  In fact, it has probably damaged it.

Now what do you think the Canadian Senate committee proposed to do about this?

[Aid] donors should only give assistance to countries that are instilling a pro-growth business environment. Rather than a focus on providing social welfare programs, such as education, Canada should re-direct its assistance on economic development and agricultural productivity.

Moreover,

The Committee also concluded "that international development assistance is not the long-term answer for Africa. Vibrant economies and good governance are the answer for Africa. These are the conditions that can only be generated and sustained from within Africa, not from without."

This is unexceptional, of course.  It dovetails with research at the family level.  In The Millionaire Next Door, Thomas J. Stanley,William D. Danko write about the “economic outpatient care” (EOC) that many parents provide their adult children.  Adult children assisted in this way tend to work less and spend more than similar adults that lack EOC support.

Michael Novak on President Bush

The two hits on President Bus, writes RMC Chappie Michael Novak, is that he has lost the war and that his administration is incompetent.

Certainly, he has made mistakes on the war.  But

the president has now changed strategy, as well as the generals charged with pursuing it. He now has commanders who believe in victory and who, in fact, designed the way to get to it.

You can argue that the president’s strategy to keep as low a profile and let the Iraqis do it was a mistake, since it encouraged local warlords to step into the power vacuum.  But now the president has responded and changed.

The other argument is incompetence.  But let’s be realistic here.

A long-established lesson is that even in the best of times, government is mightily incompetent—and the bigger government gets, the more incompetent it becomes.

The buck stops here, and the president is responsible for every government mistake and miscue.  But let us not forget

the decisive steps President Bush took [after 9/11] allowed our economy not only to recoup the dreadful financial losses of September 11 but also to climb unparalleled heights.

We should not forget the recent epiphany of Theodore Dalrymple, in which he realized that the welfare state is built on the concept of failure, from top to bottom, and that its invariable response is to reinforce failure.

Of course if you believe, with President Bush and Michael Novak that “single most dominant issue we face remains the threat from jihadism,” then the question of whether we lose the battle of Iraq is a minor one. 

The ugly words broadcast by the jihadists may seem mad, but they are matched by steady actions upon a world-wide front. Their stated aim is to convert us forcibly to Islam or to exterminate us until the caliphate stretches around the world: one religion, one polity.

 If we believe that we are called to resist the militant surge of Islam then we have to do something about it. 

In response to the jihadist threat President Bush set out to bring democracy to the Middle East. You can say that he is having quite a struggle. But you can’t say he didn’t have a plan, and you can’t say that he just sat around twiddling his thumbs.