TOTALITARIANISM TODAY
Wednesday, December 18, 2002
Winter wonderland.
I will be posting a lot less for the next five days because there is a hot tub right outside my room and a great deal to do besides hitting the slopes in Park City, Utah. My two goals for this trip? To ski and ski.
Last night, our waitress was a Romanian girl from Brasov (in Transylvania) who instructs ski classes by day and works tables by night. Four inches snowfall yesterday, so the slopes should be peaked. Off I go to tease the snow.
Monday, December 16, 2002
Drawing lines in the sand.
To each his own revolution.
Monday, December 16, 2002
A poem by Leonard Cohen
Love is a fire
It burns everyone
It disfigures everyone
It is the world's excuse
for being ugly.
Monday, December 16, 2002
Drugs, pedophilia, and Vlad.
Nothing like the confessions of a Russian heroin junkie named Vlad the Impaler to lighten the loaded gun of transition economies. As a matter of fact, illegal drugs have done quite nicely on the pret-a-porter black markets of Russia. Historians, like the eminent Kurt Treptow, might be the best advertisement for these black markets. Apparently, the Romanian courts sentenced Treptow to seven years in a Romanian prison for pedophilia and child abuse.
The tale puts his excellent studies of Dracula to shame. Treptow was caught with videos showing regular sexual intercourse and fellatio with minors as minor as the age of, well, seven. Coincidence makes the best defense.
Monday, December 16, 2002
12,000 pages might not be enough for the world's most ambitious cowboy.
According to RFE/RL news correspodent Katheleen Ridolfo:
The UN Monitoring,Verification, and Inspection Commission (UNMOVIC) announced receipt of the Iraqi declaration of weapons of mass destruction in a press
release on 7 December and Iraqi Lieutenant-General Amir al-Sadi confirmed on 8 December that Iraq has provided the United Nations with a complete and accurate declaration of its weapons programs, Al-Jazeera television reported. The 12,000 page-long declaration includes a list of "suppliers, be they countries or firms, and what was manufactured over the past years" according to Al-Jazeera. International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) Director-General Muhammad
El-Baradei confirmed receipt of the Iraqi declaration on 8 December,AFP reported.
El-Baradei said the IAEA would begin reviewing the declaration immediately, "including the painstaking and systematic cross-checking of the information provided by Iraq against information that the IAEA already has, information that it expects to
receive from other [UN] member states, as contemplated in
Resolution 1441, and results of past and present agency verification activities," El-Baradei said. He added that the IAEA expects to give a preliminary report on the Iraqi declaration to the UN Security Council within 10 days, and a more complete assessment by the end of January.
Major General Husam Muhammad Amin, director of the Iraqi
National Monitoring Directorate, told Baghdad's Iraq News Agency on 7 December that the Iraqi declaration covers three periods of time: from pre-1990 until 1991; from 1991-98; and from 1998 to the present. Amin noted that the nuclear declarations total some 2,400 pages, while the missile declarations total around 6,300 pages. Chemical declarations total around 1,800 pages and biological
declarations amount to some 1,330 pages.
"We turned over to the UN Monitoring, Verification, and Inspection Commission [UNMOVIC] and the International Atomic Energy Agency [IAEA] the semiannual declarations, which are submitted every six months in accordance with the monitoring plans annexed to Security Council Resolution 715 of 1991. These declarations were made on CD-ROMs and not paper," Amin said. He added that the Iraqi National Monitoring Directorate also
submitted a "complete" 350-page report on the monitoring regime and the whereabouts of cameras, sensors, and tags.
Sunday, December 15, 2002
Demystifying the catfight.
So scientists are now showing that women are just as jealous as men. According to evolutionary psychologists and many of my male friends, men fear sexual infidelity while women fear abandonment. Evolutionary psychologists explain this economically:
All these archetypes reflect some basic caveman economics: a man, it is said, must keep a careful watch on his woman lest he end up hunting and gathering for the offspring of some other man's gene pool, but a woman can forgive indiscretions as long as her mate cares enough to return to her and the little ones back at the cave.
Whenever a guy says this to me, I can't help reverting to the teenage practice of rolling my eyes. As a woman, this theory is not only counter-intuitive but also incredibly banal-- it overlooks the context provided by contemporary conventions. So it is with a sick smile and a little of the old rile-him-up-foreplay that I encourage you to feast your eyes upon this:
Some prominent psychologists have challenged those assumptions (and dozens of previous studies) about pining women and seething, controlling men with new evidence that suggests sexual jealousy is an equal-opportunity obsession. David DeSteno, a psychologist at Northeastern University, administered a questionnaire asking subjects which would be more upsetting: to learn that their partner had cheated on them or that their partner had fallen in love with someone else. And while the subjects were answering, he gave them a string of numbers to memorize and recall. With the addition of this so-called cognitive load -- a technique that aims to bypass complex pro-con reasoning and cut to the gut response -- the gender discrepancy that previous researchers had found disappeared altogether. Several other prominent studies being published this year produced similarly gender-neutral results: when deprived of the chance to weigh the long-term effects or to guess what response might be the more appropriately feminine, women proved just as brutishly possessive as men.
The findings are interesting in and of themselves, but they also have implications for some basics of evolutionary psychology. For one thing, it weakens the supposed link between sexual jealousy and parental uncertainty. (Women may have their own problems, but at least they know their children are their own.)
I agree with Susan Dominus' conclusion about this discovery--"Better to lay bare women's raw sexual jealousy than reinforce old stereotypes about needy women and their pursuit of emotional intimacy". Indeed, DeSteno's interpretation of the significance of sexual betrayal should bring men and women closer, as he believes that both sexes take it as warning that one might permanently lose someone held dear. In other words, the next time you see your significant other assisting a lady to smooth the back of her skirt, skip glaring at the lady and cut to the chase. He knows exactly why you are upset because he has been in the same position.
Threat perception is only irrational when duly unfounded. Since the evidence has revealed that both men and women evaluate threats in like manner, maybe now they can agree on why they get jealous and point each other to the nice, comfortable, peace-making, white-flagged contraption called a bed.
Sunday, December 15, 2002
Crytic post-communism.
Ceausescu's Romania represented the ultimate surveillance state-- the state which made privacy a public crime. Iulian Vlad created this website for Securitate (the Romanian version of the KGB) agents in exile. It is Romanian absurd humour at its best, but also an excellent resource for erosion of privacy updates from around the globe.
Sunday, December 15, 2002
At our own speeds.
If you haven't already, take advantage of the free time to see the movie "Personal Velocity", directed by Rebecca Miller. As the daughter of playwright Arthur Miller, Rebecca has alot of mainstream-lined expectation to live up to. The fact that she chooses not to do so, cutting independent waves in "Personal Velocity", reveals her strength of character. In an interview for Nerve.com, Miller talks about the double standards involved in modern moral condemnation of adultery. While an affair seems to be almost a mid-life rite of passage for males, adultery bears tremendous moral and social consequence for women. I'd be interested in views as to why the marital contract-- neutral on its face-- assumes unequal punishment for adultery based on sex.
Sunday, December 15, 2002
At our own speeds.
If you haven't already, take advantage of the free time to see the movie "Personal Velocity", directed by Rebecca Miller. As the daughter of playwright Arthur Miller, Rebecca has alot of mainstream-lined expectation to live up to. The fact that she chooses not to do so, cutting independent waves in "Personal Velocity", reveals her strength of character. In an interview for Nerve.com, Miller talks about the double standards involved in modern moral condemnation of adultery. While an affair seems to be almost a mid-life rite of passage for males, adultery bears tremendous moral and social consequence for women. I'd be interested in views as to why the marital contract-- neutral on its face-- assumes unequal punishment for adultery based on sex.
Sunday, December 15, 2002
It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas...
The Sunday newspaper is overflowing with annoucements of Christmas sales-- reminders to some parents that if you buy the coolest, most expensive toys for your kids, it might make up for that time you never spend with them. Fortunately for civilization, kids are not that stupid. Unfortunately, however, the very materialistic consumerism that parents complain about when their kids reach the teenage years might have been avoided if the parents hadn't enocuraged this materialism during adolescence. What makes Christmas so wonderful is extra time to spend with family, friends, and loved ones. To spend all this time shopping is a travesty.
Richard Blow reveals his inner grinchiness quite admirably by bemoaning the la-la-landness of magazine ads this year.
Sometimes their blindness is staggering. Take this week’s issue of New York. It features a short article on how New Yorkers are giving far less to charity this year than in the past. Right next to that is an "article" about a hot new trend: expensive sunglasses which supposedly use light to alter your brainwaves. Hmmm. Useless material goods. Income-deprived charities. I wonder if there’s a connection?
Another connection worth pondering is the one between the rising number of teenagers going to therapists and the empty materialism that magazine cultures espouses. Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn has an amazing piece on markets, commerical manipulation, and increasing conformism in the social sphere. Encouraging individualism involves reminding young people that the purpose of an ad is to make you want to buy something. And magazines make their money through ads, so it is in their commercial interest to reel you in, convince you that you could be as happy or cool as the lads and lassies in the magazine if you wore a certain kind of rebellious make-up, and then spit you out for commercial consumption.
Just because I favor markets does not mean that I should let myself be fooled by them. Believing that markets provide the best solution to Hayek's knowledge problem, as well as to economic problems of scarcity and distribution, doesn't force me to say, "Hey-- it's great that young people today are more concerned with their images than with who they truly might become (or might be)! Bless you Cosmo and Maxim for preparing me for the dating scene, for teaching me how to be exactly what everyone wants me to be, so I won't bother taking the time or savoring the solitude involved in finding out who I really am!"
It's disappointing that many of my friends won't apply that rational capacity which allows them to distinguish the best skirts at a sale to their own susceptibility to advertisements and what is "cool by rule". What ever happened to "sacred honor"? It's not something you can buy at a Hallmark shop. Character and integrity, the REAL makers of reputation, are not bought or sold as easily as an "image". Having liberty means cultivating the deliberative facets of our personalities which allow us to use and exercise this liberty wisely. What a pity that we don't want to bother.
Sunday, December 15, 2002
Australians fight for their "right" to moon.
According to CNN, the Australian courts are setting new trends in consitutional law by arguing for an implied "right" to moon. Police are worried that the law will lose its "bite" if mooning is discovered as a right. Senior Sergeant Michael Purcell, police prosecutor, with a keen eye towards precedent, said:
"If we allowed everyone who wanted to drop their pants and moon police officers, we are undermining the authority of the police."
According to CNN:
A lawyer for defendant James Albert Ernest Togo, 20, told a court in the eastern state of Queensland last month that his client was exercising his right to protest and was not guilty of indecency when he bared his buttocks at a police car last August.
Is mooning a form of political speech? Justice Scalia probably wouldn't think so. And the Aussies? Well, the case continues.
Saturday, December 14, 2002
How to spend the holidays.
If you haven't read Human Action by Ludwig von Mises, then you no longer have the excuse of cost to hold you back. The entire book can be downloaded here.
Saturday, December 14, 2002
Bitter little pill.
In an attempt to further develop George Packer's excuse for liberal bellicosity, I'm keeping up with his writing, seeking symbols or just a satisfactory allegory. Packer reviews the latest book by Dinesh D'Souza for The Nation. Calling it "an insignificant little book", Packer demolishes the new generation of political conservatives for living in the conservative-friendly post-Cold War years.
Saturday, December 14, 2002
Censored in the only Middle-Eastern democracy.
For the first time in 15 years, the Israeli government exercised its discretion to ban a movie. The main offender? Mohammed Bakri's documentary film, "Jenin, Jenin". Bakri, an Arab Israeli, shows footage of the destruction last April during Operation Defensive Shield. The film even goes so far as to actually quote residents describing Israeli soldiers committing war crimes. Yet Bakri's film is not as controversial as could be expected.
Most Jenin residents, unlike the Palestinian leadership, did not claim there had been a massacre but they did claim there had been war crimes, with Palestinian civilians buried alive by Israeli bulldozers. The film reflects these claims. It also shows the destruction of a large part of the Jenin refugee camp and interviews with residents claiming that there had been war crimes.
Sonya David-Elmalea, a spokeswoman for the Censorship Board, found the film disgusting. David-Elmalea said the film was banned because it falsely depicts fictional events as truth. The movie is "propaganda that represents a biased view of the group with whom Israel finds itself at war," she added. David-Elmalea also worried that the Israeli public would find the movie extremely offensive and "may mistakenly think Israeli soldiers are intentionally, systematically carrying out war crimes."
The last movie banned by the Israeli government was censored for extremely graphic pornography. Surely the Israeli government is looking out for the best interests of its people by keeping Bakri's film from the screens. After all, the last thing a country at war needs to be reminded of is the pornography of carnage. Unfortunately, however, Israelis need look no further than their windows for some of the same. If the Israeli government really wanted to be a good pater, it would stop the carnage-- not just the documentation of it.
Saturday, December 14, 2002
Affirming the consequent.
In the 1954 case of Brown v. Board of Education, Thurgood Marshall submitted the brief for the Legal Defense Fund of the NAACP, which he then directed. In that brief, Marshall wrote:
"Distinctions by race are so evil, so arbitrary and invidious that a state bound to defend the equal protection of the laws must not invoke them in any public sphere."
I take it that Marshall included public university education under "public sphere".
Saturday, December 14, 2002
Racial preferences and the Supreme Court's spring 2003 term: A legal thriller.
The Center for Individual Rights is helping Jennifer Gratz to contest the affirmative action policies of the University of Michigan. Grutter v. Bollinger and Gratz v. Bollinger challenge race-based admissions at the University of Michigan's Law School and College of Literature, Science, and the Arts respectively. Dubbed "Affirmative Action's Alamo" by Time Magazine, the two cases have come to stand for the national debate over racial preferences in university admissions. The oft-repeated prediction that the future of race-based admissions will rise or fall on the outcome of these cases has become reality now that the Supreme Court will decide Gratz and Grutter in the spring of 2003.
A recent national survey by the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation and Harvard University shows that a majority of Americans do not believe racial preferences in admissions should continue. Yet, at the mere suggestion of ending "affirmative action", young Left-leaning ladies of all academic disciplines begin to fidget and squirm. Even subject to my hawk-eyed scrutiny, the survey appears to be a fair and thorough one. Perhaps these distressed damsels feel crushed beneath the psychological weight of government program which makes them believe that they are not outstanding enough to compete with men on their own.
Meanwhile, the lines are being drawn through the sand. In support of these students, the National Association of Scholars submitted an amicus> brief. Amici briefs were submitted in support of the University's position by the Association of American Law Schools, the American Council on Education, and the State of Ohio. Bollinger continues to maintain that the lower court's decision conflicts with the Supreme Court's 1978 decision in University of California vs. Bakke.
Certainly, Bakke will play a role in the USC's decision. However, U.S. District Judge Bernard Friedman's dismissal of Michigan University's arguments that affirmative action is needed to "level the playing field" so minorities can compete in a society filled with either past or present discrimination will also certainly be in the forefront. Judge Friedman effectively ordered the University of Michigan's law school to quit using race as a factor in admissions, ruling that its affirmative action policies 1) violate the U.S. Constitution and 2) are not in the state's interest. The legal questions falls on this balance that Bakke maintains between constitutionality and state or community interest. In essence, the Court must decide if the goal of attaining and maintaining racial diversity in student enrollment rises to the level of a "compelling interest" under constitutional equal-protection analysis. Then the Court must decide if racial preferences are the only possible way to achieve this hypothetically-ideal diversity.
Saturday, December 14, 2002
Speech codes, affirmative action, and objectivism.
Steven Hicks dissects the rights-talk surrounding campus speech codes, noting that mere application of the First Amendment is not so simple.
"... The First Amendment is a political rule that applies to political society. It is not a social rule that applies between private individuals and it is not a philosophical principle that answers philosophical attacks on free speech.
As regards the distinction between the political and private spheres, for example, note that the First Amendment says that Congress shall make no law, with respect to religion, free speech, and assembly. This means that the First Amendment applies to governmental actions and only to governmental actions."
In trying to show the philosophical differences between those who support campus speech codes and those who do not, Hicks looks at the case of affirmative action. He notes that the argument for racial affirmative action usually starts with the observation that blacks as a group suffered severe oppression at the hands of whites as a group. Since this oppression was obviously unjust, and "since it is a principle of justice that whenever one party harms another, the harmed party is owed compensation by the harming party", Hicks argues that some might believe whites as a group owe compensation to blacks as a group. This compensation can take various forms, ranging from direct financial reparations to variegated levels of citizenship to social programs which create "level playing fields" etc.
For those who oppose affirmative action, the argument will take the form of a statement that the proposed "compensation" is unjust to the current generation. As Hicks explains, " Affirmative action would make an individual of the current generation, a white who never owned slaves, compensate a black who never was a slave". The "justice" of one group, under such zero-sum assumptions, will come at the expense of another. As a result, racial tensions will increase as individuals find they have more to gain financially through groupthink. Hicks draws a similar parallel, ending it with the old Randian dicta against collectivism-- a sign of Hicks' personal allegiance that undermines his attempts at objectivity in the objectivist fashion.
"Advocates of affirmative action argue that individual blacks and whites should be treated as members of the racial groups to which they belong, while opponents of affirmative action argue that we should treat individuals, whether black or white, as individuals regardless of the color of their skin. In short, we have the conflict between collectivism and individualism."
Hicks makes no secret of his antipathy towards post-modernism, yet this does little to damage his credibility. His distaste for post-modernist philosophy comes from intense study of post-modernist tomes and post-modernist influence. Hicks goes on to show how accepting affirmative action as a remedy for past wrongs presupposes deterministic views about human behavior and volition.
"Advocates of affirmative action rely upon a principle of social determinism that says, "This generation's status is a result of what occurred in the previous generation; its members are constructed by that previous generation's circumstances." The other side of the argument emphasizes individual volition: individuals have the power to choose which social influences they will accept. The second pair of competing principles follows: Do individuals most need to be made equal in assets and opportunities, or do they most need liberty to make of their lives what they will?"
It is precisely these deterministic assumptions, however, which undercut the logical consistency of present support for affirmative action. Can we really argue that it makes sense to make white people, as a group, pay now for what white people more than a century ago? If so, shouldn't we make every white person on the planet pay for slavery? Is the "social legacy" of slavery really containable in the globalized world to just North America?
It gets worse. If affirmative action is an attempt to make up for slavery to black Americans, but humans lack the assumption of free will to hold them accountable for moral disgraces like slavery, then why must it come as a cost to whites? In other words, if it isn't our fault because we lack the capacity for fault, then why do the results come at our expense?
Saturday, December 14, 2002
Words from the wise.
In Plato's Cratylus, Socrates says:
The worst of all deceptions is self-deception".
