Monthly Archives: May 2009

Beauty in Simplicity

The president’s Guantanamo policy is in trouble. Politico reports:

Sen. Sessions Releases Second Letter To AG Eric Holder

It is the job of the Attorney General to uphold and defend the rule of law and to defend this Nation against terrorist influences. You acknowledged as much during your confirmation hearing in January. Nonetheless you appear to be pressing for the release of trained militants who are inadmissible under our immigration laws and who have demonstrated hostility toward Western culture and even basic women’s rights. This danger and hostility was illustrated in an April 24, 2009 story in the Los Angeles Times:

“Not long after being granted access to TV, some of the Uighurs
were watching a soccer game. When a woman with bare arms was shown on the
screen, one of the group grabbed the television and threw it to the ground,
according to the officials.”

According to the Los Angeles Times article, military officials at Guantanamo thereafter censored television shows and displayed only pre-taped programs that would not offend the detainees. If these detainees cannot handle mere televised depictions of Western culture without violent outbursts, why is our government – including you as Attorney General – considering releasing them into our towns and cities?

This is a post from Megan McArdle
I don’t have the time or expertise to do this story justice.

05 May 2009 04:09 pm
Recently at Foreign Policy, Joshua Kurlantzick wrote that in many developing countries, the middle class was staging a backlash against Democracy:

“It wasn’t so long ago — just 17 years — that many of these same activists also fought battles in the streets of the Thai capital: middle-class Bangkokians, students, and businesspeople, and other elites. Today’s yellow-shirted protesters at first seem like the same crowd: shop owners and office workers, wielding expensive cellphones and the political power typically reserved for the most influential bloc of the electorate in any country.But the difference is that the protesters in the 1990s were fighting for democracy against a coup that had toppled an elected government. Despite its name, the People’s Alliance is explicitly antidemocratic. In its platform, the group seeks election reform measures that are basically meant to slash the power of the rural poor, who comprise the majority of Thais. In the minds of the Thai middle class, poor voters only vote for politicians like the populist Thaksin because they’re offered incentives such as a few baht on voting day. One former U.S. ambassador to Thailand puts it bluntly: The middle class “disdain[s] the rural masses and see[s] them as willing pawns to the corrupt vote buyers.” Instead of fighting for democratic rights, in other words, the People’s Alliance is protesting against them.”

I’m not sure why this is surprising. This is pretty much exactly the story of the Progressive movement in the United States, which was a backlash against the corrupt hoi polloi. Rent-seeking populists, backroom-dealing political machines–these were both inimical to classical liberalism, and also the voice of minority-majorities, who used favorable local demographics against members of the national elite. Think of some of the signal accomplisments of the Progressives: Planned Parenthood. Immigration restrictions. Civil service reform. Massive campaigns against the corruption of the urban machines. “Mental hygeine”. Spot a trend?I would tend to agree with the Progressives that the machinations of the urban machines that sustained my irish ancestors were bad for the cities they worked in. But the machines had undeniable popular support, which is why they were so hard to stamp out. Immigrants might not like an individual bosses. Nonetheless, the bosses were the only thing standing between them and a WASP elite that despised them.The poor benefit from the capitalist system, probably more than the rich–compare Pharoah to Bill Gates, then compare a standard Egyptian peasant around 2000 BC to, say, a minimum wage worker in America. But if you don’t have the social capital to make it to the top, at any given time, it may look like it pays off to undermine or overthrow the system. Naturally, the middle class, which preserves the system, will be averse to any system that gives them the power to do so.And if you’re sitting there, feeling all superior to those benighted bourgeois, consider all the things you want to take out of the hands of ordinary Americans because otherwise those amoral toads will do the wrong thing. Gay marriage. Or prayer in school. Immigration. Trade. I’ve no doubt that you have some very compelling reason that these things are entirely different from support for the rule of law or a standard liberal economic order. The point is, no one’s really comfortable with letting the majority set all the standards.

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I was conversing with a black commenter, who also happened to be gay, which the conversation was mainly about; and he calls me a racist. I looked back at that post and could not see what was racist about it. I did make a comment about some people in the black community but I couldn’t see how that could be construed as being racist. Then I thought he probably used that word, maybe subconsciously, to shut off the conversation or to put me in my place, so to speak. At that point Shelby Steele and his book White Guilt: How Blacks and Whites Together Destroyed the Promise of the Civil Rights Era. came to mind. I found this long essay, brilliantly written. More than half way through are these paragraphs which is his explanation of White Guilt.

What is white guilt? It is not a personal sense of remorse over past wrongs. White guilt is literally a vacuum of moral authority in matters of race, equality, and opportunity that comes from the association of mere white skin with America’s historical racism. It is the stigmatization of whites and, more importantly, American institutions with the sin of racism. Under this stigma white individuals and American institutions must perpetually prove a negative–that they are not racist–to gain enough authority to function in matters of race, equality, and opportunity. If they fail to prove the negative, they will be seen as racists. Political correctness, diversity policies, and multiculturalism are forms of deference that give whites and institutions a way to prove the negative and win reprieve from the racist stigma.

Institutions especially must be proactive in all this. They must engineer a demonstrable racial innocence to garner enough authority for simple legitimacy in the American democracy. No university today, private or public, could admit students by academic merit alone if that meant no black or brown faces on campus. Such a university would be seen as racist and shunned accordingly. White guilt has made social engineering for black and brown representation a condition of legitimacy.

People often deny white guilt by pointing to its irrationality–“I never owned a slave,” “My family got here eighty years after slavery was over.” But of course almost nothing having to do with race is rational. That whites are now stigmatized by their race is not poetic justice; it is simply another echo of racism’s power to contaminate by mere association. >>entire essay here

It is a long essay but well worth the time. It also might explain one of the reasons why Obama is president today.

Miss California: I’ll fight on despite racy photos

They just try to destroy, not disagree, but destroy anybody that dares to speak out if you are deemed to be a little right of center. When will enough be enough? Don’t they have any shame!

With partially nude photos of her popping up on Web sites questioning her
Christian credentials, Miss California USA Carrie Prejean has fired back,
claiming the racy pictures are just modeling shots and vowing to continue her
battle against same-sex marriage. “I am a Christian, and I am a model,” Prejean
said in a statement released overnight to the media. >>Read full article

Perez H:(His name redacted) “Vermont recently became the 4th state to legalize same-sex marriage. Do you think every state should follow suit. Why or why not?”

Prejean: “Well, I think it’s great that Americans are able to choose one or the other. We live in a land where you can choose same-sex marriage or opposite marriage. And you know what, in my country, in my family, I think that I believe that a marriage should be between a man and a woman. No offense to anybody out there, but that’s how I was raised and that’s how I think it should be between a man and a woman. Thank you very much.”

What was so wrong with that answer??

In the article was this: In 1984, Vanessa Williams had to resign her Miss America crown after revealing photos she had posed for in 1982 were leaked to reporters.

That was 1984, morals were different back then. They forgot to mention the picture was a sexual pose with another women. She was Miss America, that is for a more well rounded wholesome young women; where as Miss USA is more directed for beauty.

I believe these are the racy pictures

Black power, white supremacists, abortion foes make list

Whites and blacks, Christians and Jews, Cubans and
Mexicans, along with tax-hating Americans were among several political leanings
listed in the “Domestic Extremism Lexicon” that came out of the Office of
Intelligence and Analysis (I&A) in late March.

Black separatism was defined as a movement that they said
advocates the establishment of a separate nation within the U.S., and its
members “advocate or engage in criminal activity and plot acts of violence
directed toward local law enforcement” to advance their goals. Black power is a
“term used by black separatists to describe their pride in, and the perceived
superiority of the black race,” the report said.

Under the listing “antiabortion extremism,” the lexicon
cites a movement that “advocates violence against providers of abortion-related
services.” It notes that some people in the movement “cite various racist and
anti-Semitic beliefs to justify their criminal activities.”

“Although we have evidence that some of the groups described in
this and other DHS intelligence products are an active terror threat to our
nation, I would be interested in knowing why this lexicon mentioning left-wing
extremist groups was deemed inappropriate by DHS and recalled, yet a similar
report focusing on veterans, antiabortion activists and anti-illegal immigration
activists was fit for distribution and sent out by DHS to law enforcement
agencies across the country,” Mr. King said.

This reminds me of releasing the ‘harsh interrogation techniques’ memos but not the info they got from them. The question is not that they are not releasing them, it’s that they are trying to hide them. Why? We know why!

When are these people going to stop trying to divide us.

If you kids out there want to make up for all the trouble you caused your mother, here is a start.

Just a Hint

Parties were more fun when George W. Bush was president. You could debate, argue even, praise and condemn, throw darts and laurels and solve the world’s problems over a bottle of wine. No more. At least not in my circles. If you want to stop a conversation in its tracks, just question something President Barack Obama has said or done. It’s not open to debate — and I don’t think that’s healthy >>Read more

Wow, this was in the NY Times

Among African-Americans, support dropped to 36 percent from about half of those polled last year. Among whites, who constituted much of Mr. Nagin’s voting base in his first election, the approval rating was 5 percent. (The survey’s margin of sampling error for whites was plus or minus five percentage points.)
Edward F. Renwick, a retired professor of political science at Loyola University and a pollster himself, said he found that figure surprising. “I have hardly ever seen 5 percent,” Dr. Renwick said. On the other hand, he added, “I have never met a white person who doesn’t hate him.” >>Read the entire article