Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Social Commentary, War Commentary

“A Refuge Under Siege”

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A leftist Irish film maker discovers the truth about Israel:

He talked slowly about his time in Gaza. He spoke about 20 Arab teenagers filled with ecstasy tablets and sent running towards the base he’d patrolled. Each strapped with a bomb and carrying a hand-held detonator.

The pills in their bloodstream meant they felt no pain. Only a headshot would take them down.

Conversations like this are normal in Tel Aviv. I began to experience the sense of isolation Israelis feel. An isolation that began in the ghettos of Europe and ended in Auschwitz.

Israel is a refuge — but a refuge under siege, a refuge where rockets rain death from the skies. And as I made the effort to empathise, to look at the world through their eyes. I began a new intellectual journey. One that would not be welcome back home.

The problem began when I resolved to come back with a film that showed both sides of the coin. Actually there are many more than two. Which is why my film is called Forty Shades of Grey. But only one side was wanted back in Dublin. My peers expected me to come back with an attack on Israel. No grey areas were acceptable.

An Irish artist is supposed to sign boycotts, wear a PLO scarf, and remonstrate loudly about The Occupation. But it’s not just artists who are supposed to hate Israel. Being anti-Israel is supposed to be part of our Irish identity, the same way we are supposed to resent the English.

But hating Israel is not part of my personal national identity. Neither is hating the English. I hold an Irish passport, but nowhere upon this document does it say I am a republican, or a Palestinian.

Oh, that’s just crazy talk. Crazy fascist.

Science And Society

Real Climate Science

2 Comments

This is what it looks like:

Although the origin of these YDB markers remains speculative, any viable hypothesis must account for coeval abundance peaks in NDs, magnetic impact spherules, CSps, and charcoal in Lake Cuitzeo, along with apparently synchronous peaks at other sites, spanning a wide area of Earth’s surface. Multiple hypotheses have been proposed to explain these YDB peaks in markers, and all but one can be rejected. For example, the magnetic impact spherules and NDs cannot result from the influx of cosmic material or from any known regular terrestrial mechanism, including wildfires, volcanism, anthropogenesis, or alternatively, misidentification of proxies. Currently, only one known event, a cosmic impact, can explain the diverse, widely distributed assemblage of proxies. In the entire geologic record, there are only two known continent-wide layers with abundance peaks in NDs, impact spherules, CSps, and aciniform soot, and those are the KPg impact boundary at 65 Ma and the YDB boundary at 12.9 ka.

And note, this, like volcanic events, isn’t the sort of thing amenable to modeling.

History, Media Criticism, Philosophy, Political Commentary

The True Meaning Of The Killing Fields

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Some questions about Cambodia:

…what happened in Cambodia is what happened in the French Revolution, and in Stalin’s purges and mass collectivization campaigns, and in Mao’s Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution, only on a proportionately larger scale. It was mass murder in the name of equality. It wasn’t “genocide”; it was Communist utopianism carried to its logical extreme. The Khmer Rouge, who called themselves Maoists, believed that the most important social and political value was equality and that in order to create their new, classless society in which everyone was equal, it was necessary to exterminate anyone who might be smarter, or better educated, or wealthier, or more talented than anyone else. Thus, they killed the educated, the bourgeoisie, the middle classes, and the rich; movie stars, pop singers, authors, urban residents, and workers for the former government; and anyone who protested — as well as the families of all the above. Towards the end, they also killed cadres who were thought to be a political threat. Whatever their crimes were, the Khmer Rouge do not seem to have been motivated by racial, ethnic, or religious hatred.

Why then do Cambodians and the world call the mass murders by the Khmer Rouge “genocide”? I can think of several possible reasons. One is the superficial similarity to other mass slaughters — as noted earlier, the pictures of the Cambodian killing fields look very much like the pictures from the German concentration camps. Surely many people who are largely ignorant of history know only that similarity. Another reason is the fact that the victims of genocide are sympathetic. The U.N. creates commissions, and wealthy countries send money. Cambodia today is filled with NGOs bringing aid of various kinds. The desire for international sympathy might explain why Cambodians use the genocide label.

However, I suspect that the most important reason for the usage worldwide is that many people in the international media, international agencies, and international NGOs (not to mention academia) are reluctant to face up to the crimes committed by Communism in the name of equality. To do so might call into question the weight attached by them to equality as the most important social value and undermine the multicultural faith that evil is predominantly the product of inequality, racism, ethnic hatred, or religious fanaticism. That cannot be permitted, so such crimes must be either ignored or mislabeled. And, of course, the remaining Communist regimes in the world are only too happy to cooperate in characterizing the killing fields as the products of irrational paranoia on the part of Pol Pot and his gang rather than the perfectly rational result of the quest for perfect equality.

It’s useful to remember (or to be aware, if one wasn’t) that Pol Pot was educated (so to speak) in Paris. That was where he was radicalized, another child of the malignant Rousseau.

And when you hear some of the hate and misanthropy coming from the American Left (and too many of the Watermelon Greens), it could easily happen here as well, if they ever are given the power they crave. Particularly if they ever achieve their ongoing goal of disarming the people.

Business, Economics, Education, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Social Commentary

If You Can’t Learn From Detroit

18 Comments

You’re probably incapable of learning:

When American cities embraced the high cost, high regulation statist model two generations or so ago, they were often the richest and most dynamic places in the country. Increasingly “progressive” policies, with higher wages for unionized teachers, bigger bureaucracies enforcing tighter regulations, more “planning” by qualified technocrats and more government services and benefits to improve the quality of residents’ lives were supposed to take the American city into a new golden age.

It’s hard to think of many social experiments that have more disastrously failed. Now many of these once flourishing cities are hollowed out shells, while around them suburbs and increasingly exurbs flourish away from the deadening influence of urbanist politics. None of this affects the hold of progressive and urbanist ideology on true believers; if anything, they believe even more passionately in the cause. Obviously the problem is that we haven’t spent enough on enough tenured teachers, haven’t written enough new regulations and established enough new bureaus to enforce them, haven’t published enough white papers by enough credentialed planners, haven’t extracted enough taxes and provided enough services. If we could just tax the suburbs and exurbs more heavily and spend more of the money in the cities, all would be well.

It’s a classic case of the definition of insanity.

[Noon update]

No, it’s not just Detroit.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Popular Culture, Space

“Ishtar Lands On Mars”

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This is a cruel headline at the Gray Lady.

I haven’t seen the movie (we were actually thinking about seeing it this weekend, but a combination of Patricia being under the weather and sticker shock at the prices for the 3D/Imax kept us away for now. But nowhere in the article does it really say, or at least support the notion, that it’s a bad movie (a Ishtar undeniably was, in addition to being a box-office flop) — it’s a business failure in that they spent too much in making it. The criticism that it “…was a bewildering mash-up, starting during the Civil War and moving to the Old West before leaping to a planet called Barsoom (Mars), home to tusked, four-armed creatures called Tharks,” sounds just like the book to me, which is an SF classic and the inspiration for much of the great SF in the twentieth century (including Star Wars, to the degree that it’s more than space opera). It seems as though perhaps the critics aren’t capable of handling complex story lines. Certainly, John Miller thinks differently.

Anyway, I hope that it does make its money back — I’d like to see it have sequels.

Oh, and speaking of SF, Sarah Hoyt has a review of (occasional commenter) Rick Locke’s new book, which looks like a good read.

[Late Sunday evening update]

Bruce Webster has a more extensive, mixed review.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary

Bambi Versus Godzilla

1 Comment

Watching Mark Steyn go after Sandra Fluke is almost, but not quite enough for me to take pity on her:

…the most basic issue here is not religious morality, individual liberty, or fiscal responsibility. It’s that a society in which middle-aged children of privilege testify before the most powerful figures in the land to demand state-enforced funding for their sex lives at a time when their government owes more money than anyone has ever owed in the history of the planet is quite simply nuts.

…Insane as this scenario is, the Democrat-media complex insists that everyone take it seriously. When it emerged the other day that Amanda Clayton, a 24-year-old Michigan million-dollar-lottery winner, still receives $200 of food stamps every month, even the press and the bureaucrats were obliged to acknowledge the ridiculousness. Yet the same people are determined that Sandra Fluke be treated with respect as a pioneering spokesperson for the rights of the horizontally challenged.

Like him, I pass.

Biting Commentary about Infinity…and Beyond!