Armed Liberal

OK, I give up.

I’ve been a media consumer all my life, and now have the opportunity to add something to what I call the “mediaverse” that we are all living within. So here it goes:

WHO THE %%^&!! ARE YOU, ANYWAY?

Just a guy. I live in Southern California, although I’ve lived on the East Coast and in Europe. Middle-aged, straight, mostly white. Divorced dad with a crop of awesome sons. I can be emailed at eablair@excite.com, although I’m not the Eric Blair who is trolling the blogoverse so thoroughly.

I’m choosing not to identify myself – right now – for a variety of reasons. I’ll start by standing on the time-honored tradition of anonymous pamphleteering, which I believe blogging fits neatly into. My significant other has a fairly political job (although she doesn’t believe so). And finally, I’m trying to disassociate the value of what is set out here from any judgment you might make about me.

WHY “ARMED LIBERAL”

Because that’s what I am. I’m a Liberal – one who believes in the potential value of government action. And I’m armed – I own guns, and believe that the American political landscape is profoundly different because of the kinds of individual rights (I’ve never bought the collectivist 2nd amendment arguments) represented by gun ownership.

That tension – between a belief that government can, through its authority and power, move societies in good directions, and the need for strong individual rights – defines my politics pretty well, actually. And by extension, I believe it defines American politics in the 20th and 21st century awfully damn well.

WHAT’S THE “MEDIAVERSE”, ANYWAY?

Think about it. In the course of your daily life, how much of what you know and believe you know comes from your direct experience or the direct experience of anyone you know?

We’re blessed to live in a “global village” (thanks, Marshall). But the price we pay is that increasingly, our experiences are mediated – they are not experiences we directly sense or participate in, or even that we know people who sense or participate in. Instead, we have created professional classes who sense, review, and act on our behalf. We watch the results on paper or on computer, television, or movie screens. And we try and build out internal lives around what we are shown and told.

There are good things that come from this, without question. But there are problems as well. We’ll talk about this later on.

SO HOW’S THIS GOING TO WORK, ANYWAY?

I tend to do things vertically – I buy all the recordings of musicians I like, read all the books by authors, etc. I also have not much time in my life, so here’s what I’m planning.

I’ll spend 30 minutes a day, and try and do two things: respond to the meme of the moment, and also try and extend a few arguments in some depth over several posts.

Let’s see how it goes.

The Middle East, what else?

Like so many others, I had been a dove in Middle Eastern (read: Arab/Israel) affairs for a long time. My belief was that the Palestinian people had been displaced, in a modern example of the zero-sum nature of history, and that they deserved a state and the assistance and respect of their neighbors, the Jews of Israel. Part of this was tactical; you can’t win every time, and the reality is that Israel only gets to lose once. Better to work for a stable peace, I felt.

Like so many others, I’ve changed my mind. Not about Israel getting to lose once – that’s still the sad and frightening truth – but about the ability of the Palestinian population, as presently organized, to support a state. And, bluntly, about the question of whether they have earned one.

On the second question, the harsh reality is that had Arafat led 100,000 Arab people on a peaceful march to the sea…imagine a modern version of the “Salt March” of Gandhi…he’d have won already. Picketing, boycotts, and marches…the vocabulary of the American Civil Rights movement…would have granted him an unassailable moral high ground, and Israel would within months have been negotiating on his terms.

But for a variety of historical, social, and I would imagine psychological reasons, Arafat is incapable of that kind of moral leadership. Actually, that’s unfair. He’s not alone. Where in the modern Arab are the contemporary Ataturks?

On the first question, I am still confused as to why it is that people widely believe that social and political institutions which took close to two hundred years to mature and grow in Western societies can simply be transplanted like rose cuttings into societies, cultures, and political environments that simply cannot support them.

We assume that we can create Western democracies by fiat, and I just don’t understand why the absurdity of that position isn’t more apparent. The only case I am aware of in which anything close to this has been accomplished was in post WWII Japan, where the incredibly strong sense of nation, and the clear support of those who held whatever legitimacy remained made a form of democratic government possible.

So the Palestinians don’t deserve a state, and probably couldn’t maintain one. So just what the hell is to be done?? Personally, I'm not sure, but I think it highly likely that a number of people will have to die before any positive result becomes possible. The political task, as I see it, is to keep them from being my sons.

One begins to see common themes between "Jihadism" and Fascism.

From Fascism to Jihadism by Yehudah Misksy

In today’s LA Times:

Boroughs Pitched as Middle Ground

Searching for a middle ground that acknowledges separatist sentiments but that would keep Los Angeles whole, City Councilwoman Wendy Greuel said Sunday that her proposal for a borough system would likely give local areas meaningful control over zoning, development and delivery of services.

Such a structure would go far beyond the city's existing neighborhood council system in spinning power away from City Hall and to communities across Los Angeles.

The cure-all for bad governance is seen as smaller government…smaller in span, smaller in footprint, smaller in authority.

You gotta wonder, though. Yes, Los Angeles is in the grip of an essentially corrupt “iron triangle” on development…there the rules are murky, the process uncertain, and the homeowners and developers are locked in a battle to see who can seduce the local council member, who essentially has absolute control over what will and will not be built.

But as I look around at the smaller cities in the area, they break generally into three categories:

Uber-prosperous enclaves: Santa Monica, Beverly Hills, San Marino, etc.

Relatively well-run middle-class communities: Glendale, Torrance, etc.

Problem children: Carson, Hawaiian Gardens, etc.

Obviously, the immediate reaction is that these are stratified by class, race and income (and they are). But each has it’s own unique problems, and if the city is going to become a collection of local fiefdoms…the region will have problems as well. I'm not just talking about corruption.

The problem, of course is that by giving the immediate neighbors total control over zoning and land use, for starters, little things like airports, transit hubs, jails, sewer plants, trash staging or disposal, low-income housing, and services for the homeless are Right Out.

Everyone wants a world-class medical center in the region. But no one wants to live with the traffic, noise, congestion, etc. that one brings. And to the extent that local voters will control what is built, they won’t have to.

The problem, of course, is that for the region to function, we have to have regional services; some are optional – music centers, universities, etc.; some are nice to have – world class hospitals, international airports, etc.; some are important but arguable and often argued about: affordable housing, services for the homeless, mentally ill, or addicted; and, finally, some are necessary: trash, sewers, generating plants.

Someone please explain to me how we allocate these in a region where every neighborhood gets to say “no”??

Does anybody actually place related items alongside each other and just relish the irony?

Independent.co.uk May 14

There was always, in the past, a limit to this hatred. Letters would be signed with the writer's address. Or if not, they would be so-ill-written as to be illegible. Not any more. In 26 years in the Middle East, I have never read so many vile and intimidating messages addressed to me. Many now demand my death. And last week, the Hollywood actor John Malkovich did just that, telling the Cambridge Union that he would like to shoot me
…
Thus a disgusting remark by an actor in the Cambridge Union led to a website suggesting that others were even more eager to kill me. Malkovich was not questioned by the police. He might, I suppose, be refused any further visas to Britain until he explains or apologises for his vile remarks. But the damage has been done. As journalists, our lives are now forfeit to the internet haters. If we want a quiet life, we will just have to toe the line, stop criticising Israel or America. Or just stop writing altogether.
--Robert Fisk, in the Telegraph today

Independent.co.uk April 13

THE Board of Deputies of British Jews is considering making a complaint to the police over a newspaper interview with the poet Tom Paulin in which he is reported as saying that American-born settlers in Israel should be shot dead. Paulin, who appears regularly on the panel of the BBC2 arts programme Newsnight Review (formerly Late Review), allegedly made the comment in an interview with the Egyptian newspaper Al-Ahram. The interviewer wrote that Paulin, a consistent critic of Israeli conduct towards the Palestinians, clearly abhorred "Brooklyn-born" Jewish settlers. Paulin, a lecturer at Hertford College, Oxford, was then quoted as saying: "They should be shot dead. "I think they are Nazis, racists, I feel nothing but hatred for them." Earlier in the interview, he was quoted as saying: "I never believed that Israel had the right to exist at all."

Context is everything. If Fisk was willing to put his turmoil into context—to acknowledge that there were other, competing points of view, and that people on both sides were acting badly—it might be possible for him to put his arguments into a form where they were arguments, not dogma. And we need arguments and dialog right now.

I’ll never excuse terrorism, not against Israelis, New Yorkers, Sri Lankans, anyone. But the fact remains that it’s not enough to kill terrorists (although I’m all for that); we have to stop growing terrorists. And while I don’t begin to agree with the Fisks of the world, I wish like hell that there was a constructive dialog to be had about how to stop growing terrorists, if such a thing is possible. I am sure that, like Japan and Germany, it will be a combination of destruction and rebuilding. Some people are good at one, some at the other.

But Fisk shares the romantic (note Berlin, below) intellectual’s fascination with nihilistic violence aimed at the oppressive forces of order and conformity; and he wants both to be defended by those forces of order and conformity (how dare that Hollwood star threaten him!!) and to be free to stand in opposition to them.

Dylan said “to live outside the law, you must be honest.” If Fisk had an honest bone in his body, he’d condemn Tom Paulin the same breath with which he condemns Malcovitch.

But he doesn’t, and really, did anyone expect him to?

Sunday was a gorgeous day here in Los Angeles, clear, windy, just a hint of smoke from the fire up above Santa Clarita.

The SO – who is the “perfect pillion” as well as a pretty good rider herself – and I took the motorcycle out and spent the day with some friends riding through the canyons up there, and on the way I was strongly reminded of why I am a liberal.

First, the clean air.

The population of Southern California has gone up by about 60% since 1970, according to the Southern California Association of Governments. Auto ownership and use has grown faster, probably about 25% more, I’ll estimate, so we’re looking at a 75% increase in vehicle-miles. We’ve probably lost a bunch of manufacturing and refining, but employment is still a whole bunch higher than it was back then.

And I remember summer days in high school when you couldn’t see the end of my West LA block for the smog. Two-a-days in the pool at school when you spent the day with “aqualung”—a chest so sore you couldn’t raise your voice.

My sons haven’t had those problems (I am aware of the higher incidence of asthma, but there’s a bunch of interesting epidemiology on that). I don’t think their children will, either. Why?

The damn bureaucrats, and their command-and-control bureaucracy. Personally, I think there are more refined tools available to us in the Information Age … Precision Guided Munitions of regulation, rather than the crude daisy-cutters. But if we don’t regulate, we’ll choke.

Next, the infrastructure.

Our normal ride, up Bouquet Canyon, was closed due to the fire, so we rode up San Francisquito Canyon instead (past “A Place to Shoot”, a pretty decent firing range).

In the canyon you can see the remnants of William Mulholland’s last great project, the St. Francis Dam, which failed catastrophically in 1928, killing at least 500.

But Southern Californians live on the desert because of the infrastructure that gives us water, protects us from floods, lets us move around, etc. etc. etc.

I know that each of these is the heavy boot of man’s dominion over nature…but unless we are all willing to live like Gabrielinos, we need it.

And the infrastructure isn’t just physical, but social as well. I have a bachelor’s and a master’s from the University of California, and it is a truism the public university has changed people’s lives.

Finally, charity and hope.

We spent Saturday night at the annual fundraiser for the St. Joseph’s Center in Venice. This hasn’t been a brilliant year for us financially, but we managed to give some away anyway, and enjoyed the company of a bunch of people who were doing pretty much the same thing.

I’ve always felt that I was an economic liberal because I enjoyed my nice things less when I had to either worry about someone trying to hit me on the head and take them away, or eat my meal in the window of a restaurant while a starving family stood outside.

Look, I know that the biggest beneficiaries of the welfare programs in the last fifty years have been the people who work for the welfare departments.

I know that we’ve grown dysfunctional cultures like mold on bad French cheese.

But does it tell you we’ve accomplished something when the biggest nutritional problem among the very poor is obesity?

A lot of news coverage on potential Islamicist threats to US targets on July 4 (see this CNN article); something jogged my memory, and it occurred to me:

July 4 is also the date of the famous Battle of Hattin/Tiberias, at which Saladin defeated Guy, King of Jerusalem and his army of Crusaders and effectively ended the Frankish occupation of Palestine.

Since we know Al Queida knows their history, I’d be definitely be in Condition Yellow that day.

Slate's article on game theory in the Middle East is pretty good, but I believe Wright underestimates the power of his option #1 (irrational hatred). War is not an auction, and when it has been run as one -- most famously in Vietnam by Johnson, Nixon and their hardy band of "incrementalists" -- its managers manage to kill more while accomplishing less.

This is a 19th century, Viennese-opera conception of war. I'd suggest going back to Thucydides to see what tribal warfare is all about.

Jill Stewart has a great column on Jackie Goldberg, the former LAUSD school principal/board member/LA City Council Member/CA Assembly member who has a unique talent for talking about the downtrodden and helping out the Skybox Crowd.

While on the LAUSD Board, she helped start the avalanche that would become the $200 million Belmont debacle (important mitigating point: her role was in proposing a much smaller middle school on the most contaminated 11 acres of the 25 acre site – but the key staff and players who led the march for the absurd effort of the school bureaucracy to become for-profit developers came on board during her watch).

While in the City Council she carried water for the $600 million Trizec/Haan Hollywood/Highland project:

On another local front, Goldberg's idiotic deal with the Canadian developers TrizecHahn to create the new Egyptian-themed mall and Academy Awards hall at Hollywood Boulevard and Highland Avenue stands as the worst expenditure of city tax dollars in recent years.

Two weeks ago, the L.A. City Council spent an hour commiserating over the money-hemorrhaging project, into which Goldberg, using her strong-arming, backroom style, persuaded the city council to pour $90 million into the parking structure. The money should have gone to more cops for Hollywood, or true redevelopment of its heavily barred storefronts and litter-strewn, filthy sidewalks and streets.

This is exactly the kind of Skybox Crowd project – doing well by purporting to do good – that represents the failure of modern liberalism.

I don’t know if it is just the seductive power of the lobbyists, or the desire of the low-level elected officials and bureaucrats to be “playahs” that leads to the kind of insane belief that the lives of the bulk of the population or the character of their communities will be improved by building these ill-thought-out megaprojects.

And what we see in real estate carries on to social programs as well, as we try and solve problems that are a collection of a number of small factors with one massive, sweeping program or project.

Things are more complex than that, and to effect people’s lives – which is what liberals in government purportedly want to do – we have to come up with solutions that reflect and embrace that complexity.

I’ll suggest that there is a kind of new paradigm emerging – with the open-source “Cathedral and the Bazaar”, with "Emergence : From Chaos to Order", with Wolfram's new book, "A New Kind of Science" – that suggests that a collection of smaller decisions, programs, or projects all built around a basic set of rules or goals, may in fact be a more powerful agent of change than a single massive project.

It requires a new kind of humility on the part of the change agents though, and as long as the space is occupied by blowhards like Goldberg, that will be hard to do.

And how could I forget her current project, AB2115, which will ban school names which a state board of Political Correctness (sorry, State Board of Education) finds offensive. Last time I checked, California has an education crisis in funding and student performance. Am I remiss in suggesting that the State Board of Education would be better served doing something about crappy schools in Indian communities (as well as all the other communities in the state) before wasting one second in dealing with this?

I once proposed a state board to approve vanity license plates; it would employ all the poor poets and writers, and every applicant would have to justify their plate before the board. At least my proposal was meant as satire.

The Blogosphere(tm) is correctly going starkers about this poster. I'll quote from the target site:

This poster, funded by the Associated Students of San Francisco State University, was posted on campus in April2002. This is perhaps the most grotesque and explicit incarnation of the "blood libel" observed in the free world since the Nazi Holocaust. It was generated on the campus of a public university by students, using public money. The poster included the names of the following organizations: Associated Students, GUPS (General Union of Palestinian Students), MSA (Muslim Student Association) and WIA (unidentified).

From Forbes.com: If you give a machine tool away, it will collect dust. If you sell it, it can cure poverty.

The ramshackle facade of Christopher Wilson's two-room home in the gritty Southside neighborhood of Kingston, Jamaica, doesn't raise great expectations. But through the rickety wooden gate and beyond the drainage ditch lies a new, freshly plastered extension to his house and woodworking shop.

Wilson, 36, who has a wife and two young children, brings in $800 a month making cabinets, tables and chairs for a furniture store and for neighbors. His business got a big kick six months ago when he bought a used drill press and lathe for $650. It doubled his productivity, which in turn allowed him to purchase the materials for the extension and hire a mason.

Wilson bought the tools, at a 20% discount from their secondhand value, from a nonprofit called Tools for Development. Started 15 years ago by Roy Megarry, 65, the former publisher of Canada's prestigious Globe & Mail newspaper, Tools for Development has a simple but powerful premise: Make secondhand equipment available to poor entrepreneurs at an affordable price. There are no handouts. The entrepreneur pays for the tools either up front or on credit, with interest rates slightly lower than banks charge.

Slow Down Stadium Deal(requires registration)

Where are the Wachs-style questions, or even a little of his righteous indignation? Where, in fact, is the public debate on this issue? Instead, our city leaders seem hellbent to do the deal. On Tuesday, the council introduced a motion to allow the use of public money to help build a stadium so long as the funds were repaid. That motion will be heard next month. Nothing should go forward until every bit of fine print is examined, in public.

I’ve been thinking about “Liberalism” (as opposed to Lockean “liberalism”) for a while – after all, I need to justify the title of this blog. I am trying to unify the examples of what mostly goes for Liberalism in this day and age, which I’m calling “SkyBox Liberalism” – which is v. different from what I’m promoting.

While the theory percolates, let me explain by example.

In the late 1970’s, I was a graduate student at UC Berkeley. It was good for me, got me almost exactly the job I wanted when I got out, and convinced me that none of my sons will go to mega-public universities as underclassmen.

While I was there, there was a small controversy that I followed. It involved the effort of the student government to evict from the student union one tenant, and to replace it with another. This is to me, the perfect example of SkyBoxing, and I hope that telling the story will help define what I mean.

In the 60’s in Berkeley, there was a movement to create a series of co-ops that would allow student-radicals to both generate jobs outside the hated-but-paying-their-rent capitalist system, and provide a living example that (for all I know) Trotskyite anarcho-syndicalism could triumph in the Belly of the Beast.

Most of these communal businesses failed mercifully quickly, as far as I know (this is all ancient history to me, so if I’m getting part of it wrong, drop a note). By the time I got there, there were two survivors – Leopold’s Records (“Boycott Tower Records, keep Berkeley Free”) and the Missing Link bicycle shop.

Leopold’s was off-campus somewhere near Telegraph, but the bicycle store was a part of the mini-shopping area that was in the ASUC building.

The student government decided that they were going to evict it to make room for a small-electronics (Walkmen, stereo, calculators, etc.) annex to the Student Store. Why??

The small-electronics store could pay as much as $50,000 more in rent every year.

Now this is an appropriately cold-hearted landlord kind of decision to make. But the people making the decision weren’t sweater wearing conservative Young Republicans, driven by their vision of the purity of the market.

They were a bunch of New Left, ethnic-identity, progressive communitarian kind of kids.

Why did they want to make this decision? Because it would mean $50K a year more for their organizing budgets; $50K more in pork they could carve up in the hopes of building their perfect communitarian future.

Now I don’t know about you, but I have a hard time imagining anything more keyed to a progressive communitarian future than a cooperatively owned bicycle store. I mean, how much better does it get? Nonprofit. Cooperatively employee owned. Bicycles, for chrissakes. If you really wanted to educate people in alternatives to the “mass consumerist repressive capitalist paradigm” (I think I got the buzzwords right), wouldn’t that be a good way to do it?

But reality couldn’t stand a chance against the cold need for this elected group to make sure that they and their friends were rewarded.

See it’s not about what you really believe in, in the SkyBox world…it’s about making sure you and your friends can be very comfortable while you think and write and feel very very seriously about it.

I’m not touting bicycles or co-ops right now (although there are things to say for both); it’s the fact that one group put their beliefs into practice in the world, while another made it a point to live comfortably while thinking really hard about making the world a better place.

One of those is a Liberal – the other is doing something else, but is definitely doing it from a SkyBox.

As awkward as it makes me feel to disagree with my betters, InstaPundit and Perry de Havilland are flat wrong about this.

Both make the “innocent bystander” case, amplified by the letter from Leo LeBrun. To quote LeBrun:

Sure there has been pro-Palestinian street demonstrations with hateful messages, but did you notice that the next day, 300.000 French people took to the same streets to express their disapointment with the Government and their support for Israel? These protestors outnumbered the pro-Palestinians 3to1! I happen to work in a field that depends on American tourists coming here and nothing would sadden me more that seeing Americans stop visiting my country. Would you boycott any product that comes from the Bay Area because lots of students at Berkeley and SFSU legitimize Palestinian terror? Would you give up Rice A Roni? I don't think so. Please acknowledge that many Frenchmen are good people who sympathize with Israel even if they are not Jewish (you will not find somebody who is more Breton than me!);and love the US for what it stands for, even more so in these trying times. Please don't make all Americans see France in this way, even though we have a lot of things to improve!

Our not supporting Israel, our criticizing of US for being 'simplistic', our unwillingness to join the US in attacking Sadamm and root out terror are positions that disturb me.

And so does the nonchalance of my government when it comes to horrible acts of anti-semitic hatred.

Boycotting France to 'punish' the French people for the views of some would be rather like boycotting the USA because of the existence of the KKK, the Aryan nation and Susan Sontag.

But we need to have at least the expectation of civilized behavior on the part of Western governments…and the implicit or explicit toleration of racist violence falls on the wrong side of that line.

When I lived in France, it was clear to the French people that any foreign policy issues they might have were really not with the American people, they were with the politicians running things, who they were convinced were simply hoodwinking the American people…because after all, that’s what the government in Paris does to the people in Brittany.

And a loud, public opprobrium, if not a boycott—from the American people, not from some Jewish organization – is the best way to get the message across that this isn’t interdepartmental infighting, but an overwhelming repulsion toward specific, intolerable behavior.

Reynolds correctly highlighted the “shittly little country” story, just a week ago:

READER PHILIPPE RAMOFF writes from France, and he's very offended by my post (below) about the BoycottFrance.Com website. He also sends a link to this story in which Woody Allen compares the filmmakers' boycott of Cannes to Nazi methods, which he apparently feels bolsters his case. I'm unimpressed. Allen isn't boycotting Cannes because, frankly, his career is not at a point where he can afford to boycott Cannes. He's hoping for a comeback. Allen's odious comparison does him no credit, to put it mildly, nor is Allen generally regarded as a source of moral leadership.
Ramoff also asks: "And, maybe you may explain some day, which collective sin made us, french, mourning for your forgiveness?" Well, there's a topic the Blogosphere could work on all day. But it's the consistent practice of siding with terrorists (at least so long as they don't strike French citizens), the denunciations of American policy, and Americans, as "simplistic," the tolerance of Islamic extremism, synagogue burning, and antisemitism, the description of Israel as a "shitty little country," etc., at least for a start, that have people interested in boycotting France. The BoycottFrance.Com site has more information.
As I mentioned in my post, France may actually be coming around. I'm hopeful, but then I'm a well-known optimist.
Posted 5/17/2002 07:34:18 AM

There is nothing quite like annoying but ineffective pressure from outsiders to confirm prejudices, which is why 'American Jewish Congress' actions are so idiotic. All it does is play into the hands of the racists who can point to a few empty hotel rooms (not enough to actually scare anyone into line, of course) and then point an accusatory finger at 'The International Jew'. It is not within the power of American tourists to change the actions of the French state or to significantly alter French public opinion about Jews for the better, even if 100% of potential US visitors to France complied with the AJC's wishes (and I very much doubt even 5% will).

The ability of such organisations to do harm to the interests of Jewish people (particularly in France) is far greater than their ability to do good if they are going to dismiss the entire French people with a phrase like 'The French are anti-Semitic' and then make pronouncements that can only encourage precisely that sentiment.

But ya know what? It worked.

[Feb '03 Update: Go check out the discussion about France over at Winds of Change.net]

[March 18 Update: Guys, let's give this a rest, not much new or interesting is being said here, and I mostly have to come delete the comments from trolls. My oldest sons have French passports; I love the French people (I'm even fond of my ex-wife); but there are some issues between us politically ... as nationals are legitimately allowed to have ... and when I have to choose, I'll choose the U.S.'s side, for a variety of reasons.]

[March 30 Update:I've deleted the comments here, and will continute ot delete them as they come in. Sadly, the tenor of the comments, as I've noted above, has become kinda simplistic France- or America-bashing, and this isn't the site for that. My apologies to the very reasonable posters whose work had to be painted over in order to cover the digital graffiti.]

Well, gosh, golly, gee. Here’s an example of why I don’t understand what the Bush administration is doing at all.

Get a clue guys: Every time I get on a commercial airplane, my life and the lives of everyone aboard are in the hands of the flight crew. I think we’ve all had a pretty clear demonstration of what a pilot can do with a loaded and fuelled airplane, haven’t we?

And you won’t trust them with a handgun?

To quote from the Undersecretary’s testimony (from CNN):

"Utilizing the experience of my 40 years of law enforcement and consulting with all the interested parties and having our staff with a lot of experience look at this issue, and obviously consulting all along the way with Secretary Mineta ... I will not authorize firearms in the cockpit," Magaw told the committee.

Until someone produces a working Star Trek Phaser, the only way we have for someone who isn’t one of the Gracie brothers (world Ultimate Fighting champions) to immediately stop someone from doing something we really, really don’t want them to do is to use a gun.

As noted in a few places below, I think that we are seeing the delineation of two clear –philosophies – in politics, business and elsewhere. The great metaphor there is “Cathedral and the Bazaar”; in one, people perform specialized functions as a part of an orchestrated grand vision. Leave defending yourself to the professionals, they would say in this case.

In the other, we have large numbers of individuals who associate within a loose set of rules, and where the overall organizing principles arise “organically” from these interactions. They evaluate the situation, quickly decide what to do, and act. Kind of like the folks on Flight 93.

I think that it ought to be obvious that no centrally controlled and managed, highly specialized “cathedral” can be built that will secure us from the kind of violence the Islamofascists have used. The only real safeguard, as evidenced by the actions of the heroes below (and on Flight 93), is the concerted and intelligent actions of the population as a whole. The bus passenger in this story (scroll down) who:

Two alert passers-by succeeded yesterday morning in foiling a terrorist attack, apparently aimed for the town of Afula. The suicide bomber blew himself up a short while later while being questioned by Border Policemen. No one else was hurt in the blast.

At around 7 A.M. yesterday, Natan Yadan, 54, of Moshav Nir Yafeh, was waiting at the Ta'anachim junction in the north for the bus that takes him to work at a Defense Ministry facility in the Haifa Bay area. He noticed "a well-shaven
and well-dressed young man in sports clothes" who looked suspicious.

Yadan later said: "I kept a distance from him and put my hand on my revolver."

When the bus arrived, Yadan climbed on and saw that the youth was trying to enter the bus as well. "I pushed him back and told him it was a special bus. He indicated to me that he was a mute, but I repeated that even so, he was not allowed to ascend."

Yadan then called Afula police from the bus. He described the youth as being "very nervous and very well dressed, and no more than 17 or 19 years old."

At around the same time, Shimshon Arbel, a civilian worker in the Israel Defense Forces who was driving a military vehicle, noticed a suspicious-looking youth crossing the junction in the direction of Afula. He called the police and asked that they dispatch a patrol car to the area immediately.

The Border Policemen, who were nearby, arrived at the scene within minutes and began asking the youth questions. When they told him to show his ID card, he put his hand in his pocket, stepped back a few meters and blew himself up.

The two alert citizens heard the news of the suicide bomber on their way to work.

From the Downtown News Online Archives

Much like the Bush Administration's response to the Enron fiasco, Davis supporters insist that the governor's appetite for campaign contributions only affects politics, not policy. Yet, in 2001, a $115,000 donation from a development company led to approval of a hotly contested reservoir project in the Sacramento Delta. The governor's office successfully killed a bill that would have protected bank depositor privacy after top-drawer financial firms poured over a half million into the Davis campaign. Late last year, Davis refused to support a key teachers union bill after the group rebuffed his repeated demands for a $1 million campaign contribution.

I'm saddened that no one on the Democratic side of the aisle has the nerve to stand up to this. I'm even more saddened that the statewide media have laid down their Good Government ideals enough to give Davis a free ride on this.

Out of this kind of insane corruption, one hopes, comes reform.

You have to read this (by Ramachandra Guha from Granta, courtesy of Will Warren)

Unremitting Verse

Chris Bertram, who writes better than I do and appears to have a whole lot more time (hey, out in Blogland, how do you guys do it?), discusses Sullivan’s comments on social stratification and the consequences of the kind of insane inequality (which I am trying to label as SkyBox-ing) prevalent in America and Europe.

Part of his comments:

Andrew Sullivan is busy writing about the ‘overclass’, the super-rich. Of course, Sullivan being Sullivan he’s moved to assert that the vast inequalities that obtain in the world are inevitable, good and deserved. Of course, not all of his fellow conservatives are as sure as he is, Kevin Phillips is worried that you can’t sustain a genuine republic with the sort of inequality that obtains in America (and even in Britain today). And that’s an old worry, one that Montesquieu and Rousseau both articulated. If the public power, that should belong to everyone, is in fact at the behest of those whose wealth allows them to escape the problems of their compatriots, then alienation and cynicism will increasingly erode commitment to the political order. In the absence of a sense that citizens share one another’s fate then a republican or liberal polity will increasingly given way to a Hobbesian system where social peace is only maintained by changing the payoffs facing wrongdoers. (And my saying, yesterday, that retribution for crime in the UK should be swifter and more certain is a recognition that alienation here has become quite advanced.)

If you look at the “must-read” section below, you’ll see two books on legitimacy; you might guess that it’s an important topic to me.

It ought to be one to all of us. On a basic level, it implies that the allegiance and obedience the citizen offers to the state is earned and freely given from a core belief that the demands made are “legitimate”; that they serve some common interest in which the individual participates.

Look, you can’t have enough traffic police to enforce the laws everywhere. So obedience to traffic rules comes from two sources: First, a sense of “correctness”; a belief that the rules make sense, that we all benefit from the rule being followed, and that others will also follow the rule; Second, fear of punishment, either through direct consequences (an accident) or through the actions of other citizens or agents of the state (being threatened by someone you cut off, or being cited and fined by a police officer).

It ought to be obvious that the first source works better than the second. It works all the time, regardless of the state of enforcement; it is internalized so that each driver can freely respond to current situations. I’ll argue that it is morally better, as well, because it treats each driver as a responsible actor, rather than just a subject for enforcement.

But the first source depends on something which is in ever-shorter supply; a sense of the legitimacy of the rules, and a sense that one is connected to the others who are also bound by those rules. So why not run red lights?

Habermas and Schaar each have a different vision of why legitimacy is in short supply; they are rich and difficult to summarize, so I won’t right now. To those, I will add the simple fact of inequality as it exists today (and here I’ll poach from Montesquieu as noted by Bertram, above).

I’m talking about a level of ‘Gilded Age’ inequality that gives us Lizzie Grubman and all she represents, a sense of separation, entitlement, and inheritance which is mirrored by the people who read about her and are convinced that modern American society is structured for people like her, and not people like them.

The kind of separation between people in the SkyBoxes and the rest in the cheap seats.

And the consequence isn’t just bad views or a mild sense of disengagement between classes. It is a profound corrosion of the relations that tie society together, as those in the SkyBox decide that they are above the law, and those in the nosebleed section see no reason to obey, as the law does nothing for them.

So as the light turns yellow, they just gun it, and the rest of us just have to be very, very careful because we are the ones they hit.

Bush Fled 'Harm's Way' With 9/11 Flights

Excuse me?? I don't recall that Ike hit Omaha Beach with the first wave either. In modern warfare, preventing "decapitation" -- the loss of senior commanders -- is considered a basic truism of warfighting. Our leaders aren't tribal warriors, deciding matters in personal combat.

(Although I will admit that is sometimes a favorite fantasy).

The article isn't as bad as the headline, but geez, people, could we show any more bias?

"COWARDLY PREZ FLEES, LEAVES WIFE TO FACE TERRORISTS ALONE!!"

CNN.com - Fire at Israeli Embassy in Paris - May 23, 2002

I'll repeat myself:

BOYCOTT FRANCE?? MAIS OUAIS!!

Winds of Change leads with a cogent argument on why there will not be a nuclear exchange in South Asia in the immediate future.

Even Global News Network, the leading cause of sleeplessness in the Blogverse, is suggesting that the actors involved are getting some sense scared into them.

What an interesting year we are living in...

Well, we’re off to the Sierra to terrorize the locals on the motorcycle for Memorial Day. I had realized that I’ve been writing a lot about being a liberal, and not much about being armed, so here’s the beginning of something (have to go adjust the preload on the rear suspension...) about guns. Back Tuesday with more.

SHOOTING AND MINDFULNESS

I just realized that there have been a bunch of posts about politics and liberalness, and hardly anything gun-related at all. And I have to uphold the blog title, or it’s just posturing, after all.

So I’m trying to teach the SO (Significant Other) how to shoot; in part because it’s something I do and she wants to be able to participate (and doubtless, to quote Uncle Duke, my personal role model, to be able to “return fire”), and also because I’m trying to get my idea of mindfulness across to her.

In her case, it is in part because she is working to become a good motorcyclist, and riding successfully – which to say surviving – riding motorcycles calls for a number of skills, but first of all calm awareness, or what the Eastern meditative religions call mindfulness.

Mindfulness is nonconceptual awareness. Another English term for Sati is 'bare attention'. It is not thinking. It does not get involved with thought or concepts. It does not get hung up on ideas or opinions or memories. It just looks. Mindfulness registers experiences, but it does not compare them. It does not label them or categorize them. It just observes everything as if it was occurring for the first time. It is not analysis which is based on reflection and memory. It is, rather, the direct and immediate experiencing of whatever is happening, without the medium of thought. It comes before thought in the perceptual process.

from Mindfulness in Plain English

I call it simply “the art of doing what you’re doing”. Most of us spend all our time thinking about all the stuff our minds consume…what I’ll put into the blog tomorrow, my Visa bill, what I’ll say at the meeting tomorrow, what was said at the meeting yesterday…and while our minds run with all this activity, they are only loosely tethered to what we are doing. While we’re talking on the cell phone, we aren’t doing a very good job of driving. In “The Empty Mirror”, a great book about Zen studies, the abbot accuses the Western student of being loosely tethered, of “brushing his teeth while pissing, which means you do a bad job of brushing your teeth and a bad job of pissing”.

For me at least, I find that shooting – particularly the kind of dynamic shooting involved in tactical or combat shooting – requires that kind of mindfulness.

Guns are heavy in the hand. They should be. Part of this is mechanical, the physical weight of the mechanism needed to contain the explosive power of the cartridges. And a part of it is the psychic weight of knowing this is a real weapon, and that you are suddenly both at risk and responsible.

Chris Bertram just paid off my ad. Wow, that felt good.

978 motorcycle miles this weekend, only about 85 of them on freeways. The edges of the tires are nicely worn, and everyone came home in one piece. Stopped at a small-town cemetary, all decorated in flags, and discovered that we had just missed the chili-cookoff conducted by local veterans, benefiting the local school.

Small-town America may have its own problems, but it produces a bunch of really really good people.

Well, Instapundit referred me to this - Victor Davis Hanson on Memorial Day in National Review Online, in which he poignantly reflects on his namesake and relative who died in the Battle for Okinawa.

And it turns out that he was raised in Kingsburg, CA, about 62 miles as the crow flies from Ponderosa, CA, on Route 190, where (I'm pretty sure that was the town...I'm looking at a crumpled map and it's late) we saw the cemetary. And somehow reading his column, I felt an even stronger sense of connection to the old man selling paper poppies who told me about the chili cookoff and suggested we ride past the town cemetary. I'm glad we did, and sorry we missed the cookoff. I make pretty good chili - I've won a few cookoffs myself - but I'd bet I could have learned something.

By now, most people sophisticated enough in the Blogosphere to have found this site will know the base facts about the SFSU flap.

It’s not all that different than the situation on many campuses: on one side, a core population of actively identified Jewish students, and other supporters of Israel’s existence (and, to a greater or lesser extent, defense policies); on the other a population of active Islamicists, as well as those who oppose Israel either in its existence as a Jewish state, or in its defense and foreign policies. But events at SFSU not only effect real people, but provide a good case study for what is going on at the other campuses.

Now, I’m not on the ground in San Francisco, and I’ll defer a little bit to some folks who have first-hand experience of the events there. But there are a few things that are incontrovertible and clear:

The pro-Israel/pro-Jewish side seems to be taking all or a vast majority of the physical damage;

The acknowledged racist comments are all coming from the pro-Palestinian side;

The powers that be are taking a “children, children, you shouldn’t both be fighting” moral equivalence stance. They have turned three students over to the District Attorney’s office for possible prosecution – two pro-Palestinian and one pro-Israel.

And that’s just wrong.

Look, there are real arguments to make about what to do about the parts of Palestine that weren’t made part of Israel; there are arguments to make about what to do about the Palestinian Arabs who left Israel and who live with their descendants in the well-financed squalor of refugee camps.

And when pro-Palestinian students actively condemn violence and intimidation, instead of seeing them as “the legitimate political tools of the oppressed”, we can have those discussions.

When the windows of pro-Arab student groups are broken, and when libels against all Arabs are an official part of Jewish student’s political oratory, there will be moral equivalence.

I can’t for a minute imagine African-American or Latino students tolerating this kind of racist nonsense for a minute. They wouldn’t be begging the school administration to enforce the laws, the school administration would be calling out the riot squads to protect themselves and the window-breaking libelers, not to protect those libeled.

(This is a thought experiment meant to show how absurd the current situation is, I’m not suggesting that Jewish thugs are the solution.)

But there is an measurable difference between heated political expression and the politics of violence and intimidation. And it is in the nature of politics in our relatively free nation that it must be free from intimidation and violence; the other side…and there is an other side…sees intimidation and violence as everyday political tools. And, frighteningly, they are extending the kind of politics that we see on the ground in Arafat-controlled Palestine and bringing a lind of “lite” version of it here.

The President of SFSU, Robert Corrigan, has convened a task force. As much as I hate to make Star Wars references…you’ll recall that’s what the Chancellor did when he couldn’t take action on the invasion of Naboo. And you’ll remember where that got him.

At the very least, people who are concerned should make sure he knows the whole world is watching, as we used to say.

More later today, including a discussion of why the “Days of Rage” back in the late 60’s/70’s were different than what we are seeing here (hint: they didn’t identify and actively condemn a minority group).

Winds of Change has an index of other bloggers' comments on this issue.

CharlesMurtaugh has a great column on his reaction to the New York Time's great story on the last minutes of the WTC victims.

The story isn't his tears on reading the article (you'll cry too); it is his fury at the nonreaction and paralysis that grips both parties in Washington.

He thinks, and I agree, that if they don't get off their asses there will be a lot of ex-politicians looking for work as lobbyists in the next election cycle.

CraigSchamp.org covers yet another pay-for-play on the part of our illustrious Governor.

If only there was another candidate running...

No time to blog today, but here's what I'm working on in the background:

More Gray (SkyBox) Davis;

Finish "Shooting and Mindfulness";

"Why Being Armed Matters";

Comments on Winds of Change's comments on 4th Generation Warfare (which he interprets as information-enahnced warfare, and can also be interpreted as low-intensity, pervasive, urban warfare);

Directions for Effective Liberalism (I almost called this blog "The Effective Liberal", but in this climate that sounded too much like an oxymoron).

Drop me a note at armedliberal-at-yahoo.com and let me know which I should do first...

One of the movies we’re watching a lot at our house is 'Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back' (can you tell that we have a teenager, and that my own maturity is probably questionable?). There’s a scene in the movie where our heroes (?) are hitching cross-country and get a ride from a van full of attractive young women (and one unattractive guy) on their way to liberate a bunch of animals.

Stick with me for a moment, there’s actually a point.

The scene in the van is incredibly funny as we watch the explicitly mindless “save the bunnies” discussion (and neato song, as well). Ultimately, we discover an ulterior motive as well as cool latex outfits, and it all makes plot sense. But the satirical take on the thoughtless “hey, Mr. Science Guy, don’t spray that aerosol in my eye” politics was pretty damn funny.

Sadly, that mindless attitude is a lot less funny when you se it on the Op-Ed page of the New York Times. Thomas Friedman’s ‘A Failure to Imagine’ is a column that can really only hit the right tone when it is read by attractive actresses playing at being truly inane. Now, I thought 'From Beirut to Jerusalem' was really good, and some of his NYT columns have been sensible, but this one is just absurd.

I know I’m a little late on this, and it’s not one of the things I’ve talked about writing about, but my reaction has been sitting in the back of my mind and it’s just won’t shut up until I write this.

No, I don't blame President Bush at all for his failure to imagine evil. I blame him for something much worse: his failure to imagine good.

I blame him for squandering all the positive feeling in America after 9/11, particularly among young Americans who wanted to be drafted for a great project that would strengthen America in some lasting way — a Manhattan project for energy independence. Such a project could have enlisted young people in a national movement for greater conservation and enlisted science and industry in a crash effort to produce enough renewable energy, efficiencies and domestic production to wean us gradually off oil imports.

Such a project would not only have made us safer by making us independent of countries who share none of our values. It would also have made us safer by giving the world a much stronger reason to support our war on terrorism. There is no way we can be successful in this war without partners, and there is no way America will have lasting partners, especially in Europe, unless it is perceived as being the best global citizen it can be. And the best way to start conveying that would be by reducing our energy gluttony and ratifying the Kyoto treaty to reduce global warming.

Look, if we buy another car soon, we will probably buy a hybrid. I think that Jerry Brown was prescient in his emphasis on conservation (of energy and water, among other things) as an economically and environmentally smart set of policies.

But I don’t support Kyoto, because I believe the issue there really isn’t restraining fossil fuel consumption or greenhouse gasses, but in ultimately transferring wealth from the First World to the Third.

But to suggest that by ending our dependence on Middle Eastern oil, we would somehow defang Islamicism or reduce our exposure to terrorism is too stupid to even be believed by Missy, Sissy, or Chrissy (in vapid Students Against Animal Cruelty mode, not in kick-ass bad-girl mode).

We need to both defeat terrorism militarily, and having done so, defeat it politically. We need to be completely focused on this, and secondarily on the various other things we need to do (energy and water conservation are high on that list).

There is a well-known political and bureaucratic impulse, in times of crisis, to pull out one’s pet issue and explain why it is that your policy is critical to solving the crisis. Terrorist attack? This flood control program we’ve been touting for ten years is the answer, of course. By hitching your program to the meme of the moment, you hope to gain some political traction.

I do believe that resource misallocation and mismanagement, combined with insane population pressures are going to create more political instability in the Third World. I think that substituting brainpower for fossil fuel is almost always a good thing.

But, as noted by the Zen master quoted below, when you brush your teeth and piss at the same time, you usually do a bad job of both.