A Challenge to John McCain

Mark Tapscott lays it on the line:

With a 3-3 vote featuring Democrat commissioners supporting the silencing of political speech against congressional incumbents and Republican commissioners in favoring of allowing it, the Federal Elections Commission has now made it official - As required by the McCain-Feingold Bipartisan Campaign Finance Reform Act of 2002, there can be no paid political broadcast ads criticizing incumbent Members of Congress for the two months prior to the Nov. 7 election.

* * * *.

I say it again - if the Republican Party nominates Sen. John McCain, R-AZ, for president in 2008 without his official apology for and repudiation of McCain-Feingold, plus introduction of legislation to repeal that monstrous outrage against the First Amendment, no conservative, libertarian or honest liberal can support him for the White House.

There is NO room for compromise on this issue. Either you believe in the First Amendment right to freedom of speech or you don't.

I might not go that far, but the whole Campaign Finance Reform thing is pretty misguided.

It (and especially the Supreme Court decision in Buckley v. Valeo) has led to a series of unancipated and adverse consequences; self-financed millionaire candidates (Perot, Bloomberg, Corzine), "soft" money, the massive paper-pushing burden on campaigns, the 527s.

I respect John McCain in many ways--he's articulate, without a lateral /s/, thoughtful, made great sacrifices for the country, is sound on fiscal and security matters--but his position on CFR troubles me greatly.

We should repeal all these laws and replace them with a reporting requirement with prompt posting on the Internet.

Theodicy and the Skeptic

As those who follow this blog must know, one of my favorite bloggers is a Seattle urologist, who goes by the name of Dr. Bob, and calls his blog The Doctor Is In. Dr. Bob thinks deeply and obviously polishes carefully everything he posts.

Dr. Bob is also a convinced Christian. Those who follow this blog probably also know that I am a skeptic, but a “fellow traveler” of Christianity. That is, I skeptical not only about theology and organized religion as it has often appeared in history, but about a life lived and a society run without convictions that date from way back and are encoded in ritual, in song, and in scripture. It seems to me that if we manage at all it is because we are relying upon the moral capital of forbears who were believers.

Aside from my upbringing my skepticism is founded on three issues. First, applying Occam’s razor, insofar as we have information about the origins and development of the universe, life on earth, or our species, naming a Creator or Intelligent Designer doesn’t increase the explanatory power of any of our theories. If there is such a Designer, He is outside the scientific world of negatable hypotheses.

Second, wherever human knowledge has increased, the traditional scriptural descriptions and explanations of events have been falsified. Thus, scriptural explanations of astronomy, evolution and prehistory have turned out to be inaccurate. Who can believe in the terracentric universe, surmounted by a firmament; a flood in which all species were preserved in a single vessel; or a human family tracing its eponymous ancestors to the extended family of the descendants of Noah?

Third, there is the question of theodicy, or divine justice. As Edward FitzGerald put it in his paraphrase of The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam:

Oh, Thou, who didst with Pitfall and with Gin
Beset the Road I was to wander in,
Thou wilt not with Predestination round
Enmesh me, and impute my Fall to Sin?

In short, there is the difficulty of reconciling the claimed infinite power, infinite justice, and infinite mercy of God.

The most extended Biblical treatment of this question is in the Book of Job. Job, caused to suffer by God on a dare from Satan, ultimately does question God, who in one of the richest poems in the Bible points out to Job that he’s a whole lot smaller than God, and also a lot less wise. The poem, which goes on for quite a while, starts this way in Job 38:

1 Then the LORD answered Job out of the whirlwind, and said,

2 Who is this that darkeneth counsel by words without knowledge?

3 Gird up now thy loins like a man; for I will demand of thee, and answer thou me.

4 Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth? declare, if thou hast understanding.

5 Who hath laid the measures thereof, if thou knowest? or who hath stretched the line upon it?

6 Whereupon are the foundations thereof fastened? or who laid the corner stone thereof;

7 When the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy?

8 Or who shut up the sea with doors, when it brake forth, as if it had issued out of the womb?

These passages are great poetry, and if one comes to the issue with a conviction of the existence, power and majesty of God, as did Job, go along way to persuade one that to cavil is beside the point. Today, as St. Paul says, we see through a glass, darkly, but one day, face to face.

If, however, you don’t come to the issue with these convictions, the poetry, although moving in a literary way, does not convince.

Dr. Bob has come up with one of the best-written and thoughtful treatments of this issue that I have seen. Here's an excerpt:

Judaism and Christianity both imply that some such evil may be consequential, the result of punishment or predictable consequences for the malfeasance of man. A more robust theology is less accusatory and thereby more coarsely granular — maintaining that such evil has entered the world because of the fall of man. Under such design our divine divorce has corrupted not only behavior, but our very natures, and all of creation. Yet such theology is of little comfort to those who are the objects of such seemingly random evil; we demand to know of God, “Why?” — and in particular, “Why me?” Yet there is no answer forthcoming, and we are left assuming a God either powerless to stop such evil or unwilling to do so.

Yet the problem of a good God, an omnipotent God, and an evil world of His creation is not entirely insoluble. Much lies in our projection of human frailty onto the nature of the Divine, and the impreciseness of our definitions of good and omnipotent. When we say God is good, we tend to mean that God is “nice” — that he would never do anything to cause us pain or suffering. Yet even in our limited experience, we must acknowledge that pain and suffering, while not inherently good, may be a means to goodness. We choose to have surgery or chemotherapy, though painful and debilitating, that our cancer may be cured. The halls of Alcoholics Anonymous are filled with men and women who, having faced both personal and relational destruction, have used their former liabilities as a gateway to a new, more fulfilling life — one which could not have taken place apart from their harrowing journey through alcoholism. To a misbehaving child, the discipline of a loving father is not perceived as good, but such correction is essential for the development of personal integrity, social integration, and responsibility. Our inability to discern the potential for good in pain and suffering does not by necessity deny its presence; there are many who, when asked, will point to painful, difficult, and unbearable times in life which have brought about profound, often unexpected good in their lives, unforeseeable in the midst of their dark days. There surely is much suffering which defies our capacity to understand, even through we strive with every fiber of our being to find the goodness therein. But the fact that such inexplicable suffering exists, and that answers are often lacking, does not preclude the possibility that God is good, or that such suffering may ultimately lead to something greater and more noble than the pain endured.

Dr. Bob goes on to criticize two tendencies in Christian thinking--the belief that suffering is a punishment for sin, and the belief that if only we have have enough faith and affirmation, prosperity and fulfillment will inevitably be ours.

In the end, of course, Dr. Bob is back to Job.

Christianity has some answers, but it does not fully answer the question:

Our lives have both purpose and a proper time: we live for that purpose, and we die when that purpose is fulfilled. That those who are left behind cannot grasp that purpose — and appropriately suffer profound pain and loss at this separation — does not negate that purpose nor impede its culmination.

We live in a time when our expectations of health, of prosperity, of a pain-free life are increasingly met in the physical realm, while we progressively become sickly, impoverished, and empty in the realm of the spirit. Despite our longer lives, we live in dread of death; despite our greater health, we obsess about our ills; despite our comfortable lives, we ache from an aimlessness and purposelessness which eats at our souls and deadens our spirits. Though we have at our command the means to kill our pain–to a degree never before seen in the history of the world–yet we have bargained away our peace in pursuit of our pleasure. The problem of pain has never been an easy one; in our day, it has not been solved, but rather worsened, by our delusions of perpetual comfort and expectations of a trouble-free life. Until we come to terms with suffering, we will not have comfort; until we embrace our pain, we will never have peace.

Eastern Orthodoxy rejects a purely intellectual approach to these matters, which some of its thinkers regard as the core Western heresy, that infects both Roman Catholicism and Protestantism. We are not simply to reason about the goodness of God and the meaning of suffering, we are to live sacramentally. "Theology" is thus not merely a set of categories and arguments, but an experience of theosis, the gradual healing of our selves, wounded by sin, and a gradual approach to God. Although he's not Eastern Orthodox, as far as I know, Dr. Bob is saying that we are not merely to reason our way to a solution, but to experience our way to it. The dead metaphor "comprehend" or "grasp" describes a physical seizure of an object, not a merely mental process.

When I say that I am a skeptic, it is not to say that I am a convinced unbeliever. I do not believe in unbelief.

It is, of course, fair to say that this skeptic has no better answer to the question of why we suffer. The existentialist could say no more than that in an empty universe it falls to us to create our own meanings. The best of these, of course, are echoes of the traditional ones that come from traditional religion, at least in the West, especially from Christianity.

It’s usual to wrap up a post with a wry aside, or a coda that gives the conclusion we want the reader to reach. The truth is, I don’t know the answers. I do know that Dr. Bob’s essay is well worth reading, worth printing out and reading more than once.

UPDATE: Completed sentence and added one to fourth from last paragraph.

Apostasy from Marxism

There's a guy with the implausible name of Louis Proyect who blogs as "The Unrepentant Marxist." I forget why I happened upon his blog, but he's in some ways an acute observer in spite of his claim still to adhere to that philosophy. So I read him.

Recently the UM posted about a Senegalese film, Xala. UM makes the film, which is about the downfall of one of the postcolonial new rich, seem quite interesting.

The review ends, though, with this postscript:

Once again I am reminded of the quote from Engels’s “Origins of the Family, Private Property and the State” that I incorporated into my review of “Mandabi”:

The modern individual family is founded on the open or concealed domestic slavery of the wife, and modern society is a mass composed of these individual families as its molecules… Within the family, he [the husband] is the bourgeois, and the wife represents the proletariat.

This coda seemed to me a bit gratuitous, and I commented thus:

This post, including the quotation from Phoebe Koch, makes me want to see the film, and captures some of the ironies and complexities of life among the waBenzi of postcolonial Africa.

What puzzles me is the quotation from Engels at the end, which seems to me disconnected from everything that went before. In some times and places, no doubt, the wife pays more than the husband of the costs of what Marxist jargon rather coldly calls “social reproduction,” Engels’s metaphor (husband is to wife and bourgeoisie is to proletariat), however doesn’t seem to me correspond to the lives more subtly portrayed in the movie (as described in the review).

I won’t undertake the almost certainly futile and thankless task of trying to lure you into apostasy, but in this particular instance, if the coda fits the composition, I don’t get how.

Another commenter responded:

GOM, it’s really annoying for you to suggest that abandoning Marxism is “the next and final step” in political consciousness. Whether it is or isn’t there are enough substantive critiques in here of the heavy price many people pay for the sake of profits.

If your belief system finds that ‘collateral’ damage acceptable, fine. Some of us don’t. This is simply a question of one’s personal morals and how much they are willing to affect the lives of others in whatever way.

Tell me — seriously — if Afghanistan wouldn’t have been, in the long run, better off being run by a group that put the first man in space versus the acid-in-face-throwers. It was your side that made that decision for them.

I can’t help but think that you feel any Marxist revolutions that take place around the world are unjustified, as opposed to people voting with their lives.

I tried twice to respond in the comment thread, but the internet or the blog software ate my comment twice. I am therefore reduced to responding here.

First, annoyance is inevitable when basic political and philosophical differences emerge. I promise to avoid being snarky (repeat three times, hand on heart). Marxism, despite its many faults and errors, can be a serious system of thought, when it's not turned into slogans, and when offered seriously, merits a serious response. Read this guy, for example.

To respond, I invoke Marx's chestnut that "Capitalism is revolutionary." It is. And especially when it's new, the consequences aren't pretty. Some, or course, are positive, like vaccination, imported food in time of famine, and sewers. And even mature capitalism has many effects that are unpleasant or worse.

If we are looking at consequences, we can't flinch at looking at the consequences of self-proclaimed socialist revolutions: oceans of blood, bureaucracy, droughts, famines, and gulags. It's what happens when declassé intellectuals mobilize masses of people to change society according to a blueprint in someone's head, or from a book.

As for Afghanistan, which wasn't capitalist, even in the sense Bolívia, a provider of raw materials, has been. Just Google Pushtunwali. One could write an alternative history in which Brezhnev and Najibullah win. Would the 2006 chapter resemble Kyrgyzstan or Chechnya, Iraqi Kurdistan or Somalia?

No one knows, but we do know it wouldn't have been the rocket scientists, but the KGB that would have run the experiment.

As for Marxist revolutions, if there are any around, the question is not whether the anger and hope that drove them was "justified," but whether, in the middle and long run, they are wise.

I think not.

All Things Considered, I'd Rather Not Be In Philadelphia

Courtesy of Gateway Pundit comes this statistic, taken from the WaPo:

But one can also find something equivalent to combat conditions on home soil. The death rate for African American men ages 20 to 34 in Philadelphia was 4.37 per 1,000 in 2002, 11 percent higher than among troops in Iraq. Slightly more than half the Philadelphia deaths were homicides.

That doesn't make things in Baghdad hunky-dory. But it provides some perspective.

For one thing, it's foolish to ignore the black crime issue.

For another, whatever Iraq is, it isn't a Vietnam or a Korea, whete the death rates and totals were far higher.

Numbers would be poweerful things, if only we understood them.

A Hot Dog In Its Beak

Before I moved there from New York, a young assistant professor told me Southern California was "a three-story-high plastic Donald Duck clutching a hot dog in its beak."

Here's Wretchard's take on a piece by Niall Ferguson on the wars of the 21st Century:

Yet those effete-looking internationalists probably grasp Niall Ferguson's point at a gut level: without an American gorilla under "internationalist" direction, The Next War of the Worlds may be in the offing. Yet to America, as the Ring was to Tom Bombadil, empire is too much of a burden. America's mystical faith that all countries desire freedom may partly be at bottom a wish that the world would leave it alone; leave it alone to watch a baseball game with a cup of weak beer in one hand and soggy hot dog in the other, neither knowing nor caring where Iraq or Kazakhstan was. And so it was until the airliners crashed into Manhattan in 2001. Who knows what it is now?

Still too much of a burden, is my guess.

Could It Be--Good News?

The MSM columnist David Ignatius is no Bushophile.

Consequently, this piece, containing a smidge of good news from Baghdad, gains credibility (Abizaid is the Arabic-speaking US general:

Abizaid and his commanders decided to focus on Baghdad, the eye of this hurricane of violence. They crafted a new plan called "Operation Forward Together" in which U.S. troops, backed by Iraqi forces, would wrest back control of the city's most violent areas. This new battle of Baghdad began on Aug. 7, led by Maj. Gen. James D. Thurman, a bristly, rough-hewn Oklahoman who commands the 4th Infantry Division and has been dubbed "the Thurmanator." He was Abizaid's guide yesterday into two of the three neighborhoods that have been cleared so far: Amiriyah in northwest Baghdad and Doura in the southern part of the city.

As we entered Amiriyah in the late afternoon of a 115-degree August day, the streets were almost deserted. When the cleanup began, the area was cordoned off and then searched house to house by U.S. and Iraqi troops. People live behind their gates; through the metal fences, you can see well-tended gardens, despite the trash in the alleys. Surprisingly, perhaps, there was little resistance. People were fed up. In the two weeks since the crackdown began, there has been a 44 percent decline in violent attacks compared with the previous month and an 83 percent drop in murders.

A long way to go.

But--a flicker at the end of the tunnel? Inshallah.

A Different Take on Andy Young

I'm an admirer of Steve Sailer, although I'm far from agreeing with him much of the time. In addition to movie reviews, interesting analysis of politics and demography, and occasional screeds against neo-Wilsonianism in foreign policy, Sailer writes about race both in its genetic and evolutionary aspect and in its social and political aspects. The insidious fog of political correctness has made discussion of such topics the ultimate taboo.

Although nowadays, Lady Chatterly's Lover is less shocking than Tales of Uncle Remus, human evolution has continued right down to the present and there are important at least partly inherited differences between human breeding groups not just in skin, noses, and hair, but in digestive abilities, susceptibility to disease, specialized athletic ability, and yes, Virginia, IQ. Sailer has the guts to write about these matters and thus earns the enmity of those for whom any mention of such matters is heresy.

Sailer has a very interesting post on the vigorously anti-immigration VDare site wherein he says that Andy Young's recent excursus on immigrant retailers in black neighborhoods was "right," if impolitic. I, on the other hand, called Young a "fool" in this recent post.

Seemingly, Sailer and I can't both be right.

And yet . . . we agree about many of the facts. Here's Sailer:

Needless to say, the fact that mom-and-pop stores in black neighborhoods are seldom owned by blacks has more to do with black entrepreneurial failings than with the moral failings of middle-man minority shopkeepers. And the stores' high prices and poor selection more reflect the risk of operating in crime-ridden neighborhoods and the inherent inefficiencies of small shops than any nefarious plot against blacks.

If blacks owned those stores, the bread would presumably be even staler and the prices even higher.

Here's me:

His equal-opportunty bigotry conceals an ignorance of economics. Where there is a higher risk of crime and many people don't have cars, stores must be smaller, and as a result charge higher prices, or they won't make a profit. Small stores also give credit informally, which "big box" stores don't. Ethnic groups with active extended family structures and a work ethic make more effective small merchants than those who lack both. Their children become Americanized and join the meritocracy, and the old retail enterprises either disappear or get passed on to the next ethnic group.

And last time I looked, black folks were allowed to open businesses under the same terms as immigrants.

So where's the disagreement?

Sailer makes two points, which are also not wrong. First, the small merchants often sell liquor, and their demise, when it happens, may mean less liquor availability in the ghetto, which the ministers, at least, favor. Second, the big box stores, with their discipline and hierarchy, offer blacks more job opportunities than the familistic and distrustful ethnic merchants.

Sailer also notes, as did I, the ubiquity of the "middleman minority" phenomenon, of which Jewish, Korean and Middle Eastern retailers in the ghetto are an instance.

So, why does Sailer call Andy Young "right," while I call him a "fool"?

This paragraph is key, it seems to me:

That the advancement of African-Americans, who are our fellow citizens, would diminish immigrants' profits is just one of those uncomfortable truths that you aren't supposed to mention—even if you are a civil rights icon.

In other words, Young is right, says Sailer, to point to the conflict between the advancement, or at least the profits, of immigrants, and that of black folks.

There is such a conflict. I'm convinced, as is Sailer, that low-wage, low-skilled Mexican immigration is an unmitigated political and economic disaster for poor blacks. To Sailer, for whom the immigration issue is central, at least when he writes for Vdare.com, Young is right to point to the conflict, and being right on that issue is the main thing, because it's an argument against immigration.

To me on the other hand, where Young acts the fool is to place moral blame on immigrant merchants, who are just filling a somewhat unattractive economic niche, useful in its way to the communities they put their stores into, for this conflict. Some may cheat and some are rude, no doubt, and some are ignorant of the culture of their customers. But if their prices are higher than Wal Mart or Albertson's outside the ghetto, there are reasons grounded in economic reality. If blacks pay a risk premium to merchants because their community has a high crime rate, or they need or want the convenience of a small store on every corner, that's basic economics.

Noticing the tension and conflict is fine; urging that Wal-Mart be allowed to compete is fine, too. Fanning the flames of an ethnic conflict that already exists isn't. With Sailer, I'm prepared to accept the view that one of the remedies for the conflict is restricting immigration.

But I still think Young's economics is that of a fool, and his cheap demagoguery does him no honor.

UPDATE: Here's Thomas Sowell on Young's comment. He agrees that Young knows nothing about economics. Sowell doesn't comment on the immigration issue.

UPDATE II: John McWhorter, no race-card player he, opines that Young's remarks are no hanging offense, and people should stop being so damn sensitive, about Andy Young, George Allen, and Mitt Romney.

A Tall Drink of Water

The ever-surprising Steve Sailer blogs on the tallest famous people outside of basketball and came up with Leka of Albania, pretender to the Albania throne, son of the late King Zog, who is depicted above.
Zog was the target of no less than 600 blood feuds. Leka, in the Balkan tradition, goes about armed, and has fought off kidnappers from the door of his airplane.

Leka has also tried to take over Albania a couple of times, and lives in Tirana:

Back in 1967, Jerry, Stefan Possony, and then-Crown Prince in Exile Leka (or Laika) organized an invasion of Albania by exiles to overthrow Communist dictator Enver Hoxha. King Hussein of Jordan agreed to provide air cover to wipe out the small Albanian air force to allow the invaders to cross the channel from Corfu, where they were training in the King Constantine of Greece's palace. Jerry spent a lot of time in Jordan training their pilots on how to pull off a sneak attack and wipe out the Albanian planes on the ground. Then, in June 1967, the Israelis pulled off their own sneak attack and wiped out the Jordanian air force on the ground, so the liberation of Albania had to be called off.

Decades later, Jerry met the President of Israel, Ezer Weizman, who had been in charge of the Israeli Air Force in 1967. Jerry explained how Weizman had wrecked his invasion of Albania. Weizman exclaimed to the effect that You were that foreigner who was training the Jordanians how to pull of a sneak attack? We thought you were a Russian training the Jordanians to attack us!

His son, also named Leka, among other things, appears to be a tall drink of water as well.

So Sad

Lileks on Gnat's first day of school.

No more mornings together.

We raise them to leave us. They're on loan.

So sad, as they used to say at the Montessori school. So sad, but stuff happens. So sad, but you'll get over it.

Sad.

Dimwits

Here's a story about the ACLU in Louisiana complaining about a Katrina memorial on private land because it will have a cross on it.

St. Bernard Parish President Henry “Junior” Rodriguez’s . . . response to the ACLU?

“They can kiss my ass.”

Link here. Apparently they don't have enough to do down there.

Source: here.

Thud

We live 20-odd miles from the Marine base at Camp Pendleton.

Sometimes they practice their artillery. Today is one of those days.

It's annoying but not disturbing, because I know they aren't aiming at us. It's loud enough, though, to make imagining what it's like to be in a war zone: scary.

Thud.

Thud.

Thud.

Once a Fool, Always a Fool

Andy Young put his foot in it by claiming that first Jews, then Koreans, and now Arab small merchants are exploiting black folks in their neighborhoods. Hired as a spokesman for Wal-Mart, he had to quit.

The minority-controlled UCLA Law School student government invited this fool as the commencement speaker back in the stone age when I graduated.

His equal-opportunty bigotry conceals an ignorance of economics. Where there is a higher risk of crime and many people don't have cars, stores must be smaller, and as a result charge higher prices, or they won't make a profit. Small stores also give credit informally, which "big box" stores don't. Ethnic groups with active extended family structures and a work ethic make more effective small merchants than those who lack both. Their children become Americanized and join the meritocracy, and the old retail enterprises either disappear or get passed on to the next ethnic group.

And last time I looked, black folks were allowed to open businesses under the same terms as immigrants.

I remember years ago in DC, after the MLK assassination riots had burned out the small retailers, a black cab driver (one of the last non-Africans to drive a cab in that city, perhaps) told me how stupid it has been to burn out "the Jew stores."

All over the world there are mercantile minorities--Lebanese in West Africa and the West Indies, Chinese in Polynesia and Indonesia, Jews all over the place a generation or two ago, East Indians in East Africa--who always fill a necessary function and also become the objects of resentment. Thomas Sowell has it nailed.

Andy Young, on the other hand, is an idiot, who has been pimping off the legacy of the very dead civil rights movement for years.