Demosophia

Islam and Democracy Reprise

OK, I did some coding last night and obtained the latest Freedom House Indices for 2006 as well as some numbers for the percent of the population that's Muslim for 164 countries. Although I have some fairly consequencial objections to Rusty's methodology regarding this data, I thought I'd go ahead and run some correlations and a quick regression using both of the composite Freedom House indices that I calculated. (Basically it's just the mean of civil liberty and political freedom, so doesn't include press freedom.) I'm not sure how to present the regressions, but since they show essentially the same picture as the Pearson correlation coefficients I'll just post those first.

Correlation between % Muslims and the 2001 Freedom House Index = 0.6044
Correlation between % Muslims and the 2006 Freedom House Index = 0.5650

For those not familiar with correlation, anything over 0.5 is considered large. But things at least seem to be moving in the right direction. As one might expect since the regression is on only one variable it shows pretty much the same pattern as the correlations. The raw coefficient for the percent Muslim for 2001 is 0.031. That means that for each increase of 1% in the percentage of Muslims in the population the level of freedom goes down by 0.031 points on a scale of 7. (Roughly 1 in 200.) The relationship is also highly significant.

In other words, the relationship has positive slope. (Remember that the dependent variable isn't freedom, but repression, because the higher the score the less free the society.)

Now, using the 2006 index the coefficient for the percentage of Muslims goes down a bit, to 0.029. However both numbers are within a 95% confidence interval. For those used to thinking in terms of beta coefficients, the betas are mathematically identical to the Pearson coefficients above, for a simple regression like this. Unlike the raw coefficients these are scaled to variation, which is why they're called "standard coefficients." They provide a little better sense of what's going on: about 0.04 for 5 years, or about 0.01 per year. (I guess it depends on when you start counting.) That's not very much in absolute terms, but it'd be interesting to know whether it's greater or less than the previous 5 year period. Is the trend toward freedom in the Ummah accelerating or decelerating?

I used only one set of numbers for the percent Muslim, because it was all I could find. For anyone who'd like to duplicate this effort, and possibly retain a few more cases, the data are here. They're for 2005 so the change in percent Muslim from 2001 to 2006 probably doesn't explain why the coefficient has dropped, since the percentage of Muslims has been growing. For the 2001 regression the percentage of Muslims is overestimated, so the actual coefficient would he greater relative to the 2006 number that this analysis shows. In other words the resistance to freedom in the Muslim world may be dropping faster than this suggests. It's hard to say how much greater unless one finds the percent Muslim data for 2001, which I don't have. But assuming the drop is real and significant (the coefficient for a "dummy variable" for 2006 is negative and almost significant at the 90% confidence level with a coefficient for the percent Muslim of 0.30) it's reasonable to suppose that the change is either part of a long term trend toward freedom, or it's a result of policies followed by the US. At any rate this analysis certainly doesn't support the Left's notion that Bush is making things worse. (We sort of knew that though, right?)

The bottom line is that Islam puts up considerable resistance to civil and political freedom, but that resistance is at least not increasing over time, and it is probably decreasing.

Well, make of it what you will.

(Cross-posted to The Jawa Report)

Is Islam Compatible With Democracy?

I started out tapping out a comment to Rusty's post on this topic, but it grew to the point that I decided to publish it as a separate essayette. Rusty graciously establishes the empirical parameters of this thesis, but I don't think they necessarily address the issue:

If one were really interested in seeing whether or not there is a relationship between Islam and liberalism, I would suggest the following. In fact, I dare any one to run the following analysis.

Hypothesis: there is a strong correlation between the percent of a nation's population that is Muslim and the extent to which that country's population is free in the liberal sense of the word.

Null Hypothesis: there is no relationship between the percent of a nation's population that is Muslim and the extent to which that country's population is free in the liberal sense of the word.

Plot a simple OLS regression model with the two variables. The first variable would simply be % Muslim. The second variable would be the Freedom House numbers. Since the Freedom House Numbers are coded negatively the following results should be found.....

If we are agreed that the above is a moderately fair way of empircally testing the relationship between Islam and tyranny, then the gauntlet has been thrown. I personally do not have the time to run the numbers, but perhaps some enterprising blogger with moderate experience using SPSS would like to give it a go?

The problem with this method is that, while it's a reasonable way of testing the relationship between Islam and political freedom, that's not the research question that's being considered.

"House of War"

Histories and commentaries about Islam often mention the ironic labels that Muslims place on the two "houses" that define the two parts of humanity, as they see them. In this cosmology the realm of the infidels is referred to as the "House of War" while the sphere of Islam is called the "Ummah" (roughly, the community of the virtuous and faithful). The implication is that the West is condemned by their failure to "submit to the will of Allah" to a process of internecine struggle. This has been a useful fiction for the Ummah because not only does it provide a sense of moral superiority, but serves as a figleaf to hide the Ummah's private shame. The term "House of War" manages to convey the notion that the long struggle for justice, freedom and responsible government in the West was the mere pathology of an inferior and faithless people. But the current "cartoon crisis" informs the confused that what the Ummah has really been in submission to for these many centuries is not Allah's will, but a long tradition of tyranny that oppresses in the name of Allah. Avoidance by the Ummah of the kind of struggle that, for centuries, plunged the House of War into a bloody-but-purifying crucible has left the "House of Mankind" contaminated with dross.

And threatens to plunge us all, this time, again into the crucible.

(Cross-posted to The Jawa Report)

The Moral Middle

All of the appeasers, and at least a few of the agitators, in the comment section of this post at Samizdata (h/t: Wretchard) are missing the point. When the author refers to the editors of UK periodicals who refuse to publish the cartoons as "craven" he doesn't have in mind a matter of whether they're worried about "offending religious believers," because things have gone far beyond that. What he means is that these editors are so far behind the curve that they believe it's still a matter of giving or taking offense. They're craven because they fail to recognize that there's no legitimate moral or ethical ground standing between I am Spartacus" and the illegitimacy of "discretion is the better part of valor." With one possible exception, discretion is cowardice and foolishness.

That exception? There's something largely missing from this debate, because there would seem some ground upon which principled Muslims might have stood. They could have made the argument that the Danish cartoons could not have depicted The Prophet, regardless of the intent, but must have been of a False Prophet honored by Al Qaeda and the Salafists. What does it mean that most of the Ummah assumes Al Qaeda honors Muhammed? Are there any Muslims with the view that the controversy is over a False Prophet and a false Islam? Maybe the few who take this position need an amplifier to be heard over the "street din?" Come to think of it, giving those Muslims a larger voice might still be the better part of valor.

(Cross-posted to The Jawa Report)

Kabuki Outrage

Strictly Speaking this sort of thing doesn't bother me all that much. I mean, it's true that western media are kind of bending over backwards, matrix-style, to placate muslin sentiment, but the backdrop is that we're more afraid of what we might do, than what they might do. Consider that human beings, as a rule, are not really that different from one another in spite of modest differences in local and regional culture. We basically all have the same sense of fairness and usually recognize the same constraints against the First Commandment. And the thrust of history that substantiates the reform and progressive movements in Western Culture (individual freedom, anti-slavery, anti-totalitarianism) are not merely "Western" but human, in a sense that's vastly larger than the regional appeal of a Seventh Century Prophet who "shall not be disobeyed." And while the world of Islam has been offended, yet again, by our iconoclasm, we have yet to see the awakened offense of Western Culture to the affront of being challenged and blasphemed by the regional superstition of "low Islam," before it has even awakened itself to a righteous indignation about chattel slavery: a conflict that cost the United States in excess of a million untimely deaths. (And in my own case, almost 50% of the progeny of our Arkansas hillbilly family.) If the sense of Jacksonian offense at being taken for granted by a lesser cultural light is ever genuinely awakened, the modest threats tossed out by the Islamic world as a thin figleaf against its own shameful past will seem anemic and pale by comparison to the wrath that will be loosed on that poor excuse for "progress."

Do not get me started...

(Cross-posted to The Jawa Report)

Michael Yon Gets Shortchanged

OK, this is just a matter of lawyers getting in the way of sentience. Some senior staff officer had better step in to dispel the insanity, and use a rolled-up newspaper on the JAG's nose while they're at it. Dumber than a bag of rocks...

(h/t: Instapundit)

The Emperor's Clothes

OK, I'll just get this second post in under the wire if I'm lucky. And I wouldn't even bother were it not for the fact that I think the state of academia is important to the emergence of a New Liberalism (in the classic anti-statist sense). A friend of mine at the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions posted the following link to an article in Inside Higher Education that's about the details of a rather smarmy movement. I mean you really have to keep your wits about you to suss out what these folks actually intend, which is the educational establishment equivalent of selling a bullet-to-the-head as a cure for migraines. Excerpting:

Rather than critiquing those national studies [that show a gap between perceived abilities of students and their actual academic attainment], he [Ross Miller] said, educators should accept that “there is something going on here that is not quite right” and that ultimately “we don’t have a good idea of how well we are doing.”

"Not quite right?" In the way that a toilet isn't "quite right" as a source of drinking water, I guess. Doesn't a study that finds a "gap" between actual and expected academic ability imply an empirical scale of ability? How else would a gap be perceived? So why not use that scale to "get a good idea of how well we're doing?" The real issue, the vague "something" that's wrong (as opposed to the obvious "something" that's wrong) seems to be that these folk think the scale of excellence implied in the study isn't just wrong, it's bassackwards:

Just as educators have to accept that their student bodies are diverse these days, so they need to accept that the values of their students (not to mention parents, legislators, the public) are diverse. “We can’t assume homogeneity of social or ethical values,” he said. That means colleges need to engage in more public discussion about what values they are promoting and why, he said.

You could be forgiven for thinking these people are actually interested in "values diversity," if you fail to read between the lines, but what they're really saying is like Hannibal Lector being "helpful" by slicing through your femoral artery. The idea that they'd allow the "values" of these students (not to mention their parents, legislators and the public) to be accepted, or (God forbid) actually cultivated, is hilarious. The subtext here (manifested in their "people who lead us into wars are the best educated" statement which follows this paragraph) is that they feel compelled to undermine the set of ideological principles that, as a rule, we fight for; and that define the crosscutting American Identity. These values are what make us a "nation," as opposed to a debating club. The intent of this wing of the American Association of University Professionals is to pull on the same thread they've been attacking for years through "diversity demands"--but faster, until the tapestry that makes the US something quite different from every other ethnically-identified "nation" on Earth is nothing more than a pile of soggy string. This is entropy defined as "progress."

We all sort of intuit that academia has become the enemy, rather than a critical resource. It may be a rather impotent enemy at the present time, but the fact that it isn't a vital resource to be reckoned with by our enemies is partly due to folks like these at AAUP. And anyone bold enough to point out the nonexistent nature of the Emperor's clothes risks their career.

For what it's worth.

(Cross-posted to The Jawa Report)

After Plowing

I've been shirking a bit in the culture wars, mostly because I'm in the midst of a career shift and engaged in an almost constant round of job interviews. Ugh! It's tough, but as James Buchanan used to say, just about anything is "better than plowing," albeit not necessarily by much. Traipsing in from the field with my wheat-farmer Dad after a day of weeding, seeding or plowing--so caked in dust and fine dirt that it would have been a horrifying hallowe'en disguise, made the feeling of showering and heading to dinner clean as a newborn all the more glorious. So, the main thing I appreciated about plowing was the transition to afterplowing. And that's sort of the way I feel about looking for a new job. It's the aftershower that I look forward to, and that lets me appreciate the value of the toil.

I'll be back as soon as I get cleaned up...

(Cross-posted to The Jawa Report)

The Iran Dilemma

Well, my first impulse after reading Strategic Forecasting's attempt to untie the Mullahs' Gordian Knot was that the Geneva Convention should have banned tortured logic. The author of the report, George Friedman, believes that Iran isn't actually serious about developing a nuke. They're faking it for strategic reasons. Friedman's conclusion in the Stratfor piece, that Iran's new belligerence is intended to reclaim their mantle as the supreme leader of the Islamic Revolutionary Movement, inappropriately bestowed on those Al Qaeda pikers, has the same kind of appeal as our apparent misread of Saddam's intentions. Well, the truth is I don't really understand the totalitarian mind very well, and I certainly missed the boat when Saddam chose to act as though he was concealing WMD even though he didn't actually have diddly. So maybe I'm misreading the Iranians in the same way. I really hope he's right, but just can't quite swallow the pill. For one thing, the analysis rests on the following dubious premise:

Having enticed Iran with new opportunities -- both for Iran as a nation and as the leading Shiite power in a post-Saddam world -- the administration turned to Sunni countries like Saudi Arabia and enticed them into accommodation with the United States by allowing them to consider the consequences of an ascended Iran under canopy of a relationship with the United States. Washington used that vision of Iran to gain leverage in Saudi Arabia. The United States has been moving back and forth between Sunnis and Shia since the invasion of Afghanistan, when it obtained Iranian support for operations in Afghanistan's Shiite regions. Each side was using the other. The United States, however, attained the strategic goal of any three-player game: It became the swing player between Sunnis and Shia.

I know that Iran had agents in southern Afghanistan and that they were nominally opposed to the Taliban, but they've also had players in Central Asia for quite awhile according to Robert Kaplan, and have sought, themselves, to play the "swing" role in the region in order to become a major regional power. Whether or not this is entirely commensurate with Friedman's analysis I'm not sure, because I can't follow the strands all the way the ends. It may be that Iran gave up trying to play the swing role, having been outclassed by the US... which begs the question of why they adopted that strategy in the first place. Doesn't seem all that savvy to me. What it suggests is an internal struggle within the country's elites very much like the one that was going on in China during Tiananmen. However, I'm not sure the battle between the moderates and hard liners in Iran was ever much of a contest. I could be wrong. Hope so.

Friedman goes on:

Typhoons of Change

As a rule I don't usually drop Instapundit-like references to another blog. Nothing wrong with that, but I tend to think of myself as a short-winded essayist. However Winds of Change has two extremely provocative posts about the Iran dilemma, that are both long and well worth the effort:

"The Case for Invading Iran" - Thomas Holsinger

and the even more pessimistic,

"Our Darkening Sky: Iran and the War" - Joe Katzman

Bottom line: There aren't any "good" options left, only bad, very bad, and very very... From Joe (who is Canadian, by the way, if you're not familiar with WoC):

The Al Qaeda "Truce"

Rusty and Howie have already commented on the latest communique from Dr. Demento (or his stand in) but I thought I'd like to make a further observation about the lack of political acumen that this proposal suggests. It reveals someone who doesn't have the slightest idea how alliances and factions work within a democracy. The "truce proposal" makes the critical mistake of simply adopting all of the MOVEON/KOS talking points:

1. The US effort in Iraq is a "disaster" for the US, and only serves to antagonize the locals.
2. US troop morale is terrible, as exemplified by idiosyncratic and out-of-context evidence that runs counter to what the troops actually say in milblogs, during interviews, and in polls of military personnel. We (Al Qaeda) get stronger as you (the US and pro-democracy Arabs) get weaker. [Actually the evidence says the opposite, and the primary negative influence on troop morale appears to be the defeatist attitude and rhetoric of our own fifth column left.]
3. If the US leaves, abandoning its imperialistic ways, the turmoil in the Islamic world will eventually resolve itself. It's only our intervention that keeps things stirred up.
4. The Bush administration is lying to Americans, both about the condition of the war and about their own intentions. The majority of Americans now agree with this assessment and want to skedaddle. [Note: Since the polls no longer suggest this, the tape may well have been produced some time ago, as Howie, Rusty and a number of others suggest.]
5. The US has split its resources, allowing Al Qaeda to become stronger in Afghanistan as well as Iraq.
6. The primary beneficiaries of the US war in the Middle East are the Halliburtonesque war profiteers and the oil capitalists.

Even though he makes all these points without attribution to Moore, Galloway, or Zuniga the effect cannot be viewed as beneficial to the cause of our domestic masochists, because it makes the task of distinguishing their positions from those of the Islamofascists nearly impossible. The association delegitimizes them in ways that none of their political opponents could possibly manage on their own. This makes the following offer startlingly ironic:

We are a nation that Allah banned from lying and stabbing others in the back, hence both parties of the truce will enjoy stability and security to rebuild Iraq and Afghanistan, which were destroyed by war.

Without realizing it Dr. Demento has thrust a knife in back of his ally, making the idiotarians less, rather than more useful to him. Bad move. Not that he had any good moves left, mind you.

(Cross-posted to The Jawa Report)

Toward A New Liberalism

My friend Patrick Joubert Conlon (Born Again Redneck) inspired me with this post to rattle the marbles around in my head by speculating what I really have against socialism. I actually have nothing against the goal of socialism, to tell the truth. That is, I have no investment at all, on a personal level, in whether all boats rise at the same rate or at different rates. Furthermore, if work has intrinsic value then there's something rather admirable about the notion that work-as-labor might be divorced from income sources. People work for reasons other than money, otherwise no one would become a teacher or a college professor.

Besides, it seems to me that it may well be necessary to provide people with income during periods when the economy is unable to place them where they can best contribute by exploiting their labor, at least to a level that sustains SFC (shelter, food and clothing). Not doing so might well be less efficient than we imagine, since the economy doesn't need the same skills at the same rate throughout its history. Thus, if we lose certain people whose labor we don't happen to value at the moment they won't be available when their contributions are important, or even critical, to everyone's survival. The only other option would be to issue humans an "off" switch so they might go into hybernation during periods when they aren't needed. But the Creator didn't see fit to provide us with those, so "social insurance" makes some straightforward sense. After all it was a Republican administration that proposed the "guaranteed minimum wage" suggested by Milton Friedman's "negative income tax."

Nose Drama Redux

Apparently Raymond Flowers, one of John Hawkins' readers, has noticed a pattern that might explain the "nose drama" phenomenon I posted about a few weeks ago. It hadn't occurred to me that it might be evidence of yet another dark Bush conspiracy, but the RWN reader doesn't seem to be aware of the use of the "nasals" in older Americans. Heh.

Has anyone noticed the use by George W. Bush and Jeb Bush and the republican party of nasal control implants in children as their family continues to re-entrench itself from World War II where it used the control technology on the German population running the yes sir Nathan Hales of the Hitler youth.

They use stories to continuously bombard students creating day dreams producing what is commonly called attention deficit disorder in addition to hyper activity and they even produced dyslexia using the nasals to get the visual from the optic nerve and a Hewlett-Cray-Motorola computer did a dictionary look up for the current pattern which was regenerated weekly in some locations and is the reason that words written very poorly didn't jumble as the primitive software couldn't figure out what the word was and either left it alone or broke connections between letters to re-arrange what looked like components between humps or risers on the letters.

Well, that sure explains why Mary Baker Eddy is barking at me in Louis Farrakhan's voice. It's a software glitch!

(Cross-posted to The Jawa Report)

What's More Annoying Than a Braindead Senator?

So, what I'd like to know is how come, with 435 Representatives and 100 Senators, nobody thought to suggest that Arlen Specter might be a senile old fart with his head stuck where "the sun don't shine?" This is such an assinine piece of legislation that anyone but a Hollywood actor could see it defines folly. Yet we have 535 elected legislators who apparently thought it at least reasonable?

Well, I'm ready to get rid of whoever is in office who couldn't see their way clear to pointing out such utter nonsense, not so much because the folly itself offends me, but because it offends the very principles of the nation that I consider my own, not to mention civilization itself. I mean, did anyone tell Arlen or the half-wits that stood silently behind the old coot that the Federalist Papers were anonymous? Huh?

Jesus H. Christ!

And yeah, Arlen, I do mean to offend you... you foolish old twit! Although I could hardly do as good a job of it as you've done yourself. Apparently the damage done by mercury-amalgam fillings is irreversible.

Spam, Spam, Beautiful Spam!

You know, the one really cool thing about fatwas is that if a prominent religious leader issued one against spammers they'd mess their pants, which would be just plain joyous to contemplate. Sometimes all this whiggish tolerance for individual deviance is just too tedious to be tolerated.

I'm just sayin'...

(Cross-posted to The Jawa Report)

Reflections on a Policy Void

It used to be that it took over 50 years in power for one of the major political parties to become so corrupt that they had to be replaced, and during that time the opposition was compelled to actually learn something of benefit to the culture in order to deserve the mantle. But the Abramoff scandal comes barely ten years after the Republicans finally achieved power in Congress... and even that wasn't absolute. Even as late as 2000 the Democrats were competitive, and even now Democrats have a slight edge in party registration. Yet, the Republicans have managed to manifest one of the most profound corruption scandals in US history and the democrats will have to re-assume control of congress without having introduced a single new idea in 50 years, and during an era in which most Americans simply don't trust them (with good reason) with the security of the nation.

A year ago I would have said that the Democrats were on the verge of extinction as a party, and that by 2008 the future would involve a single-party "unity" government that would eventually spilt into two competing factions, both of Republican origin. Moreover, I don't regard the failure of the Republicans as a misreading of history. They have failed. As far as the economy is concerned they've simply demurred, barely even bothering to pay lip service to some good ideas (originally introduced by a Democrat, Patrick Moynihan). There really is no such thing as the "ownership society" you know, nor is there likely to be within our lifetime. And not only have they done nothing to diminish the deficit, they've done nothing to so much as recognize the primary challenge. For all the good they've done, they might as well have been Democrats.

While it's true that most of the new ideas in governance have come from Republican think tanks, they haven't even addressed the central issue: the comparative nonproductivity of US labor compared to a combination of technological capital and offshore labor. So we now have a situation, in the midst of what appears to be a genuine war (and not, as Michael Moore would have us believe, a "war mirage") where we'll be compelled to switch from one barely competent party, to another decidedly incompetent party, simply because we have no other options. The "engine of competitiveness" has simply not worked and both parties are out-to-lunch. We are sorely bereft of leaders, and of ideas... with an implacable enemy looking down our throats, cocked and ready. Anyone inclined to rejoice had better think again. And there's really no reason to believe we're at the bottom of the curve, either. While the Chinese are scaling up their human potential, we're scaling down. While they're investing we're divesting.

I, for one, am unsure. It's hard for me to even imagine a place for myself, let alone a bright future. I have some ideas, but haven't sold any, let alone myself. Like many in my generation I'm grievously underemployed, and my impression of the thirty-something generation that's currently ready to assume power is that they're impressed by superficial appearance but have not a clue what "substance" means. They're even more vain and distracted than my own generation, if that's possible. They amount to the equivalent of what R.B. Fuller once described as "Industrial Designers" who, if they were tasked with building a ship, would produce a sinking raft of toilet plumbing and wallpaper designs floating down the Hudson to the sea. For the most part they're rather mean-spirited and ignorant brats who will be compelled to learn 40 years of life in 10 just to survive, and who have been handicapped with an unserious attitude about serious things. They'll end up killing most of us before our time.

But you know, I don't really mean that... I'm just saying it for dramatic effect.

Sure I am.

(Cross-posted to The Jawa Report)

Under Tallmansville

Time passes. Listen. Time passes.

Come closer now.

Only you can hear the houses sleeping in the streets in the slow deep salt and silent black, bandaged night. Only you can see, in the blinded bedrooms, the coms and petticoats over the chairs, the jugs and basins, the glasses of teeth, Thou Shalt Not on the wall, and the yellowing dickybird-watching pictures of the dead. Only you can hear and see, behind the eyes of the sleepers, the movements and countries and mazes and colours and dismays and rainbows and tunes and wishes and flight and fall and despairs and big seas of their dreams.

From where you are, you can hear their dreams.

--Dylan Thomas, Under Milk Wood

I don't know..., but I feel akin. I wonder if I'm alone in thinking that living with the impropriety of media-distracted America is sometimes like being buried alive?

Yet Another "Pro-Torture" Post

Bluto has a provocative post below, about the actions of a British diplomat who compromised national security for the sake of his personal convictions about the use of intelligence obtain through torture. This fellow starts off by framing the position of his opponents as "pro-torture," so he's already dealt himself out of the debate by virtue of the fact that he doesn't frame it honestly. (Boy, was that a shock!)

I've always been a bit suspicious of the argument that "torture doesn't work," mainly because it's the kind of thing we'd like to believe so it'd be understandable if we applied an empirical filter that gives us that result. It's the sort of thing that happens all the time with methodoligally flawed scholarship. I'm guessing it does work, as does the occasional credible threat of torture. The question is whether there are alternatives that always work as well. If it genuinely didn't work then we wouldn't need a ban on it, we could just apply principles of professionalism to keep sadists out of the ranks of interrogators, and that'd be that.

Moreover, to some people practicing their piano lessons or studying calculus constitutes "torture." Yes, that's not what we're talking about here... but who can doubt that we would be talking about that eventually given the sort of wishful thinking one-sided "virtue" that dominates left-talk nowadays.

There's an argument for regime change in Uzbekistan, of course. Unfortunately most of those on the left can't bring themselves to use it, because it's the same one that justifies intervention in Iraq. But ultimately the paradigm is pretty simple, and it lies behind both the arguments against state torture and the arguments favoring the displacement of tyrants: respressive regimes breed group social pathologies, including terrorism. And there's also no doubt that the credible threat of a military intervention might serve to soften or replace a tyrannical regime once in awhile.

Actually the resolution I've proposed at various times would probably result in fewer instances of torture, or even near-torture, than would bans like those McCain supports. If the situation is sufficiently grave that you can obtain an uncoerced volunteer from your own service to undergo exactly the same treatment then "torture" is justified by the circumstances and odds of success. If you can't, then the situation isn't grave enough to justify it. That leaves the option open in extreme circumstances, reduces the overall instance of torture and cruel and unusual treatment, and gives us the moral high ground. But it would also evoke a lot of complaints from the morally bankrupt left who are less interested in results than in the appearance of superficial virtue.

For what it's worth it was none other than Cleveland Amory, animal rights activist and darling of the left, who first proposed something like the above. He suggested that the triggering codes that allowed a global thermonuclear launch be implanted next to the heart of an innocent person who would accompany the President at all times. Then, if the President were compelled by circumntances to order the use of our nuclear arsenal the only way he could do so would be by using a very sharp knife to "surgically remove the codes" himself, from the chest of a living victim (with no "help" from other service personnel). It's completely "barbaric" of course, but it reflects the barbarism of the choice and it therefore seemed entirely ethical. Score one for Cleveland. Today's "left" is just not made of the same stuff.

(Cross-posted to The Jawa Report)

Nose Drama: Part of God's Plan?

I snore pretty loudly, or so others tell me. I've never heard it, myself. However sometimes, just as I'm falling asleep my nasal passages emit sounds like a poorly tuned reed instrument leaving me the impression, in my half-dream stupor, that there's a crowd cheering close by, or that some poor soul next door is screaming his bloody head off in agony. I usually awake with a start. I think the muscles that generally hold those passages open, relax just enough to turn the whole nasal chamber into a sound synthesizer that hits my half-conscious mind with windy reverberations it interprets as shrieks, howls and shouts. Once I even heard elephants charging and several times Mary Baker Eddy yelled at me to turn off the damn TV, which I often leave on because the sound is off anyway.

How do I know it's Mrs. Eddy? Well, she has a voice a like Louis Farrakhan's. It's the result of being dead for nearly a century coupled with the self imposed moral burden of having stolen many of her spiritual notions from the Freemasons, without attribution. So, she thinks it's her job to keep me on the narrow regarding my exploitation of major electrical appliances. Or it could just be my deep-seated religious guilt, a legacy of childhood.

Come to think of it I don't recall ever hearing this nasal racket before I turned 50, so it could be something God designed into us for its entertainment value, just to break up the monotony as things get really tedious in the autumn of life. Well, that's my theory. It could also be adenoids, I guess.

(Cross-posted to The Jawa Report)

The Pedagogical Role of Peers.

In the comment section of a recent post about an impending "Intra-Generational Conflict" one reader (IM) observes:

I call these trustfund babies the "rage against your allowance" generation.

VDH sees something similar, but afflicting the entire culture in "The Plague of Success:"

What explains this paradox of public disappointment over things that turn out better than anticipated? Why are we like children who damn their parents for not providing yet another new toy when the present one is neither paid for nor yet out of the wrapper?