Criminal Law Reforms: African Style

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/07/books/michelle-alexanders-new-jim-crow-raises-drug-law-debates.html?ref=books Basically, she's saying that if arrest rates do not adhere to disparate impact standards, they're racist. She claims that the only major reason more blacks are arrested is racism and that drug laws must be repealed because blacks have disproportionate arrests under those laws. I will pass over her idiot imputations about the whole system being an anti-black conspiracy. This entire line of reasoning signally fails to break with the long tradition of blaming white America, and only white America, for black problems. Instead of constructive criticism of the black community, black leaders persist in destructive criticism of black-white relations. Blacks have chosen to adopt a parasitic role in America. It's unhealthy for them. It's unhealthy for their hosts.

The Conservative Climate

This climate change denial is just a case of anti-science populism, driven by the fact that conservatives believe reductions in emissions will rob them of their last freedoms. Aggressively opposing efforts to conserve the environment is not conservatism, it is selfish stupidity. Keep in mind this problem could largely be solved by going nuclear--especially by using either fast breeder reactors or liquid flouride thorium reactors, for both of which we have effectively unlimited fuel supplies. A massive system of nuclear reactors could also produce liquid fuels for transport and allow America to be energy independent and environmentally responsible. The military certainly believes in climate change and has policies in place to guard against the international security contingencies it will create.

As a general principle of thought and action, conservatives ought to think of ways to improve the world, rather than inflexibly hold to all that is just because it is. If conservatives continue their present braking strategy, the socialists will once again take the initiative on an inescapable issue and transform it into another step toward dystopia. Instead of choosing a conservative response to the threat, they will be run over again by the socialists. The current conservative "leadership" deserves to be run over.

Israel and Iran

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/01/opinion/israels-last-chance-to-strike-iran.html This is the take of a former Israeli fighter pilot, one who bombed Iraq's nuclear facility in 81'. I agree with everything he says, except his conclusion. In the end, Israel cannot rely upon the U.S. for protection. A sovereign nation must assume the necessity of self-reliance. As Machiavelli put it, with Israel's position corresponding to that of the prince: "since men love at their convenience and fear at the convenience of the prince, a wise prince should found himself on what is his, not on what is someone else's." And Israel has a decidedly (and I would add, necessarily) Machiavellian tradition in foreign relations.

A Review of Omeros

I've toyed with a Jamesian intonation in this review:

 

Mr.Walcott is essentially a poet of nature, magnificent in description. He has here, with, I believe, substantial success, attempted to write an epic of the Caribbean. As the title indicates, Homer forms a major source of inspiration for the author. The grand Greek epics echo in the background, linking Old World to New, Ancient to Modern, Pagan to Christian. But the narrator of Omeros is explicitly a part of the story he tells. Though his life intersects with those of his characters only tangentially in the narrative, his story as he tells it contrasts in the way of an autobiographic realism with the semi-mythic stature of many of the fictional characters he creates (who are, however primitive, nevertheless representationally convincing).

   The flashing brilliant originality and fresh beauty of his metaphors of the sensuous world constitute our author’s undeniable power. He gives us inimitable pictures of Caribbean life, invents and conveys unseen, unthought-of relations, paints his pictures with a luxuriant imagination, enlarges our perception of the world, offers up such insights, so many new connections, such profuse, ingenious metaphors as seem quite palpably to be actual additions to life. Thus, Mr. Walcott succeeds in what may be deemed the most vital function of a poet: his originality lights new vistas and suggests “another way to see.”

   Nor does this faculty, this extraordinary gift, the ability to create and recreate the external world fail to manifest a nearly proportionate strength in imagining the internal world, the soul of man. His fountain of metaphors flows unimpeded when he handles this other, more profound world—little of his magic is lost in the transition. I do not wish by any means to suggest that he is the greatest of moralists or psychologists, for he is neither; he does not reach the depth or scope of Shakespeare or Tolstoy. Yet his characters live, as do those of any good novelist. Whether we consider the simple, overtly fictional natives of St. Lucia who are depicted as living through the transition from the pre-industrial, pre-tourist, colonial world before the world war to the loud, mechanized, polluted, tourist-dependent modern world, or whether we turn our bemused attention to the pseudo-fictional mixed soul and complex consciousness, the sensitive social conscience and aesthetic appreciations of the narrator, life inheres in the human world found in his pages. I should suggest the former characters act in Mr. Walcott’s Iliad, set on the island, while the narrator figures in his own Odyssey, one which transports him through the European colonial powers, the United States, St. Lucia, and their intertwining histories. And there is more than this, including characters encountered during the narrator’s odyssey and an especially deep portrait of an elderly English couple resident in St. Lucia through their declining years. In passing, I may mention that this ambitious, encompassing historico-geographical epic contains such a range of historic allusions as will not be available in the memory of the educated reader. But this individual ought still to catch and comprehend most, at least, and sufficiency, of the intended meaning without reference.

   Much of the poem traces, through the consciousness of the narrator and two of his characters, an English immigrant to St. Lucia and a native black St. Lucian, the history of St. Lucia, with an hallucinatory view of the original slaves’ experience, and an history of the Western world since Homer. These journeys into history lend perspective to the elegiac tone which pervades the poem. Much has been lost by the African slaves and their descendants, and by the hemisphere’s indigenous peoples—their lives, their freedom, their culture. The characters represented as contemporary natives of St. Lucia also bear something of the burden of these past losses, while facing future threats to their culture and their environment from the tourist trade. Mr. Walcott’s poetic sensibility registers all these changes as losses, though the narrator, in a moment of introspection, recognizes his fellow islanders may see the alterations wrought by time less sentimentally, less nostalgically—being too poor to afford the spiritual luxury of a backward glance, and being, as well, quite unconscious of the scope of the changes. Each of these historical odysseys form a series of glimpses of imperialism’s ravages in the New World and Africa, and, indeed, in the nations and cultures which unleashed this exercise of power which, it is suggested, continues even today in a less barbaric, more clandestine and corrupting form under the guise of global, free-trade capitalism.

   There is in 'Omeros' a measure of moralizing (if rarely overt and unqualified) not found in Homer himself, though often enough found in the greatest writers, as, for example, Dante, Milton, Vergil. At all events, this mode of writing is perhaps never actually an inspiration to great poetry, but at best provides moral cover and the appearance of social benevolence. Mr. Walcott largely leaves the reader to draw his own moral lessons from the stories and histories presented. He knows no remedy for the sufferings of the past, though reverberations persist. Only these shadows sometimes beg new reckonings, salutary exfoliations of certain social and psychological layers. His suggestions in this path derive not from abstract principles, a priori presumptions, or categorical imperatives, but from that peculiarly human form of imagination, empathy. Empathy, enriched by our poet’s powerful imagination, sets upon past and present without malice or resentment, trusting the reader to see the moral landscape for himself, and then to feel it. Passing through all heavy challenges, the swift narrative current does not flag and does not concede its right to brilliance and beauty.

   To sustain a high level of poetic creation through the length of an epic and to overcome so many self-set difficulties--these mark Omeros as one of the preeminent literary achievements of our time. Of course, to invite comparison with Homer always makes for a reckless risk, one perhaps only Dante and Milton survived fully intact. Yet, Mr. Walcott possesses considerable strengths and wisely veers far away from Homer in his intricate narrative interweavings, his autobiographical version of an Odyssey mixed with an antiheroic Iliad, and his pursuit of such psychological interiorities as were still unthought of in Homer's time. One of these considerable strengths, and not the least impressive mark of greatness, is not only to accomplish the rare feat, but to do so with ease and panache, cheerfully to meet any figure or circumstance that may appear on the horizon, evading no aspect or element of the task--and thereby to manifest a complete soul, a spirit capable of matching the age and transmuting it into the finer material of art.

Slavoj Zizek and How Not to Recycle Other People's Ideas

  

My take on Slavoj Zizek's latest essay, The Revolt of the Salaried Bourgeoisie:

 

"It is the very success of capitalism (greater efficiency, raised productivity etc) which produces unemployment, rendering more and more workers useless: what should be a blessing – less hard labour needed – becomes a curse."

This makes no sense. Increased productivity has no necessary relation to the rate of unemployment. Capitalism redeploys workers rendered redundant for whatever reason to other jobs. Capitalism is even capable of inventing new types of work as technology, economy, society, and government evolve. The only kink in the machine, the reason why the percentage of the population that is employed has entered a period of decline in the rich world, is the socialist interference in the capitalist system in the form of welfare programs which induce an unwillingness to work in much of the population.  And the idea that labor is pricing itself out of the system, attributed to Fredric Jameson, only occurs, once again, due to socialist interference in the balance of demand and supply of labor. The socialists and their union base demand wages above the market rate and consequently find that the number who are employable declines. Effectively, the unions are a rentier class, who collect their rents primarily from non-union workers, but also from each other. Zizek wants holders of intellectual property rights to be considered rent collectors, but doesn’t bother to explain the trade-off between such rights and the incentive to create intellectual property in the first instance. This is once again rudimentary economics. I wonder what percent of the advanced economies now operate on the basis of IP income streams. Surely it increases, and the structure of this part of the economy, including the legal structure, becomes ever more important to abetting productivity and ensuring justice.

He is, at last, correct about the transition from the old capitalism of small businessmen and small farmers (owners) to the new capitalism of large businesses and big government employing the former class of owners as salaried employees. This process is far from complete and may turn in another direction, but the trend began with the industrial revolution and gathered pace in the early years of the 20th century.  He follows this with a generally accurate summary:

This new bourgeoisie still appropriates surplus value, but in the (mystified) form of what has been called ‘surplus wage’: they are paid rather more than the proletarian ‘minimum wage’ (an often mythic point of reference whose only real example in today’s global economy is the wage of a sweatshop worker in China or Indonesia), and it is this distinction from common proletarians which determines their status. The bourgeoisie in the classic sense thus tends to disappear: capitalists reappear as a subset of salaried workers, as managers who are qualified to earn more by virtue of their competence (which is why pseudo-scientific ‘evaluation’ is crucial: it legitimises disparities). Far from being limited to managers, the category of workers earning a surplus wage extends to all sorts of experts, administrators, public servants, doctors, lawyers, journalists, intellectuals and artists. The surplus takes two forms: more money (for managers etc), but also less work and more free time (for – some – intellectuals, but also for state administrators etc).

 

Directly after this Zizek presents the most interesting analysis offered in the essay (an analysis which doesn't happen to be his):

 

The evaluative procedure used to decide which workers receive a surplus wage is an arbitrary mechanism of power and ideology, with no serious link to actual competence; the surplus wage exists not for economic but for political reasons: to maintain a ‘middle class’ for the purpose of social stability. The arbitrariness of social hierarchy is not a mistake, but the whole point, with the arbitrariness of evaluation playing an analogous role to the arbitrariness of market success. Violence threatens to explode not when there is too much contingency in the social space, but when one tries to eliminate contingency. In La Marque du sacré, Jean-Pierre Dupuy conceives hierarchy as one of four procedures (‘dispositifs symboliques’) whose function is to make the relationship of superiority non-humiliating: hierarchy itself (an externally imposed order that allows me to experience my lower social status as independent of my inherent value); demystification (the ideological procedure which demonstrates that society is not a meritocracy but the product of objective social struggles, enabling me to avoid the painful conclusion that someone else’s superiority is the result of his merit and achievements); contingency (a similar mechanism, by which we come to understand that our position on the social scale depends on a natural and social lottery; the lucky ones are those born with the right genes in rich families); and complexity (uncontrollable forces have unpredictable consequences; for instance, the invisible hand of the market may lead to my failure and my neighbour’s success, even if I work much harder and am much more intelligent). Contrary to appearances, these mechanisms don’t contest or threaten hierarchy, but make it palatable, since ‘what triggers the turmoil of envy is the idea that the other deserves his good luck and not the opposite idea – which is the only one that can be openly expressed.’ Dupuy draws from this premise the conclusion that it is a great mistake to think that a reasonably just society which also perceives itself as just will be free of resentment: on the contrary, it is in such societies that those who occupy inferior positions will find an outlet for their hurt pride in violent outbursts of resentment.

The first sentence above overstates the case that jobs are awarded without reference to competence—though I concede competence is rarely the only factor and increasingly in our “no-accountability” world not even the first priority. The problem is mainly confined to the large non-capitalist and anti-capitalist sectors of the economy, especially government, non-profits, and unions. Dupuy adopts a counterintuitive line of psychological analysis, but I think it contains much of the story. However, to complicate this perspective with a further injection of reality, it seems to me that in addition to these four procedures of justification most thinking people also sense that some part of most instances of socioeconomic superiority is grounded in superior merit, a merit that they recognize as reality, not a social construct. But these defenses against social humiliation are no doubt effectual at virtually every level of the social and intellectual scales. How far a strenuously merit-based system of social organization would incite envy and instability has never been tested. Most men, though, consider their lives to be just as valuable as the lives of more accomplished men—and this fundamental fact sets a limit to how much less they would consent to receive in power and status, regardless of externally derived measures of merit. Certainly, humiliation may lead to instability and revolution—recall the nationalist pride that was one of the main passions driving the collapse of the Soviet Empire, or the 2011 revolts against contemptuous dictators throughout the Arab world.  

Zizek’s concluding paragraph is useless. He’s conflating multiple problems as one issue of capitalist instability. Instead, what we see is a typical example of capitalism’s boom and bust logic, involving an especially severe bust for the advanced economies (but decidedly not severe for most emerging economies). In addition, we see the strains imposed on capitalism by excessive socialist welfare policies and union protections—these parasitisms have grown so large in many places as to be unaffordable. Finally, adding to the strain, we have the quasi-capitalist (or state capitalist) competition of the emerging world’s businesses with the rich world’s businesses. These are the three main factors underlying our present economic malaise. The salary disparities Zizek mentioned in his inane attempt at a conclusion have little to do with the problem, howsoever unjustifiable they may be. On the whole, the only really useful part of the essay was lifted entirely from good Monsieur Dupuy, Zizek having spent most of his words playing the semi-clever malinterpreter of this incoherent ramble through the remnants of Marxist thought processes.

 

 

The Spirit of the Age

David Foster Wallace’s E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction is a long, detailed, complex essay from 1993, but still current in its fundamental arguments. Here I summarize it with some commentary. I remember being irritated with the pervasive culture of irony in America since College in the mid-nineties. This essay discusses the origins of this cultural pathology. It derives from the ironic, rebellious postmodern movement of the early sixties provoked into existence by the rampant hypocrisy in American popular culture—corporatism, bureaucratization, racism, domestic spying, and phony television shows too. This postmodernist countermove may even have impacted some of these issues, though the trendlines were already in place from other sources of power. But, postmodern sensibilities definitely impacted television. In fact, it largely dominated televisual culture by the eighties.

Now that postmodernism’s irony has infected popular culture and attained ubiquity, however, its purely negative nature becomes a problem. It is useful for “ground-clearing,” not for any positive or constructive mode. Any long exposure, such as we have been subjected to for decades and “one ends up feeling not only empty but somehow…oppressed.” All values are laid waste, except irony. But is irony even a value? It is a tool (of destruction), not a value, and its long tyrannical reign has made a wasteland. “And make no mistake: irony tyrannizes us. The reason why our pervasive cultural irony is at once so powerful and so unstaisfying is that an ironist is impossible to pin down. All irony is a variation on a sort of existential poker face.” If asked what he means, “most likely, I think, today’s irony ends up saying: ‘How very banal to ask what I mean.’…And herein lies the oppressiveness of institutionalized irony…: the ability to inderdict the question without attending to its content is tyranny. It is the new junta, using the very tool that exposed its enemy to insulate itself.”

“What do you do when postmodern rebellion becomes a pop-cultural institution? For this of course is the second clue to why avant-garde irony and rebellion have become dilute and malign. They have been absorbed, emptied, and redeployed by the very televisual establishment they had originally set themselves athwart.” This is television giving people what it thinks they want. “But, the harvest has been dark: the forms of our best rebellious art have become mere gestures, shticks, not only sterile but perversely enslaving…It’s almost a history lesson: I’m starting to see just why turn-of-the-century America’s biggest fear was of anarchists and anarchy. For if anarchy actually wins, if rulelessness becomes the rule, then protest and change become not just impossible but incoherent. It’d be like casting ballots for Stalin: how do you vote for no more voting?”

Though the essay discusses some intimations of the coming Internet Age, it’s neither quite accurate nor very detailed in analyzing this eventuality. The internet represents a massive interposition upon the long rule of televisual culture—though it is far from sufficient to end this reign. Thus far, the internet’s impact in this direction has manifested in the transformation of certain details of this culture, rather than undermining its commitment to its now traditional ironic stance. For example, TV shows are far more convenient by virtue of DVRs, Netflix, iTunes; ephemeral entertainments like those YouTube specializes in have grabbed market share; technical quality has improved, accelerating the talent and money shift from cinema to television. Notice that these changes have made the televisual-type of experience--image intensive fantasies--more appealing on multiple levels. The ability to tailor entertainments to individual tastes and the endless quantities available increase the sense of dependency on this televisual culture. Given that the ironic tone seems potent enough to hold fast through the upheaval, what we have is more entropy. “Jacking the number of choices and options up with better tech will remedy exactly nothing, so long as no sources of insight on comparative worth, no guides to why and how to choose among experiences, fantasies, beliefs, and predilections, are permitted serious consideration in U.S. culture.” Wallace wants cultural values, since without values there is no culture. But where do cultural values originate if not in moral and religious values and beliefs? An atheistic or agnostic society therefore can only have a dead or dying culture. And by a dying culture I mean the memory of a culture, of a time when culture was still possible.

This is the Way the World Ends

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/30/magazine/how-ready-are-we-for-bioterrorism.html?pagewanted=1&ref=magazine&adxnnlx=1320145648-K5idnXUdyKqBqlIIQsGvhw

The Bio-Defense establishment’s official position seems to be that a smallpox outbreak would be the worst case scenario bioattack. The article mentions a simulation of such an attack done a few years ago, which concluded that a million Americans would die. Calling this the “worst case” might be right if the simulation were modified to “a genetically engineered smallpox outbreak”—the toll would be higher. No one knows by how much!

Diseases can be “improved” for virulence or communicability or survivability or vaccine resistance or treatment resistance—or, theoretically, any other imaginable traits—by means of genetic manipulations. This has been possible since the 70s. And, today, it’s not even difficult to modify diseases. It is difficult, however, to achieve genetic modifications that will produce desired results. That is, transposing genes within an organism’s DNA, as a mechanical operation, is cheap and easy. Finding out which modifications will “improve” the beast remains difficult and expensive because so many non-linear variables come into play, and precise calculation of their interactions is impossible—the Soviets had to do extensive animal testing to determine what effects various modifications would have when exposed to animal immune systems and the natural environment. So, the worst case might involve a more virulent, more communicable disease not susceptible to conventional treatment, a disease that might kill far more than a million Americans. Even back in the 60s, per the article, before genetic engineering was possible, America had achieved weaponized tularemia (presumably by means of rapid, selective, experimentally-guided evolution) to the point that 50 pounds of it, properly disseminated, would wipe out 60% of a megacity.  

Protection against crude attacks with unmodified agents may well provide a high probability of effective defense for a couple more decades (though something more than a black swan risk is present already). The Muslim world is unlikely to muster anything but amateur-hour efforts within this time frame. Attacks from other quarters are improbable. But, back to the lingering black swans. The thing is, there are multiple black swan risks out there. A sample of contingencies: an accidental release of a bio-agent from a government lab (dozens of governments work on dangerous pathogens, offensively or defensively, and America alone has dozens of such labs), a pathogen developed in an “entrepreneur’s” garage and released, a deliberate release into the environment that escapes intended limits (eg, a controlled test of pathogen characteristics), a government employee deliberately steals, then sells or releases a bio-agent.   

The article discusses the dilemma of whether to focus resources on vaccine defenses or therapeutic defenses. Yet it fails to mention one of the prime determinants of the relative efficacy of these two approaches: the impact of the threat of genetically modified disease agents. Do vaccines against the variola major strain of small pox, for example, have a high probability of success against a genetically modified variant of the disease? And how difficult, in the context of a bio-arms race, would it be to develop small pox variants that would resist a known, stockpiled vaccine? I suspect the answers to these questions, if they’ve been considered and if they’re knowable, are classified.

The article concludes with a hint at the clash between political decision-making processes and cost-benefit processes. What translates into political capital tends to starve ugly, obscure issues until the piper comes round at last. “How to balance the unlikely but catastrophic potential of bioterror with the steady advance of natural disease is one of the most puzzling challenges for biodefense policy going forward.” This is an unavoidable question, except I would say the “steady retreat of natural disease.” The only significant inroads natural disease has made in the last 100 years are those related to poor nutrition—consequent upon mere stupidity (including the stupidity or conspiracy of doctors) and torpor. Natheless, sichlike common health issues, never out of sight and never out of mind, exert great gravitational pull on the common politician.  

Another part of the problem seems to be a matter of bureaucratic influence on policy decisions—like this Fauci genius spending 70% of biodefense funding on common diseases afflicting public health. Fauci is a public health bureaucrat, not a defense bureaucrat—so he spends what he can on public health. Bureaucrats generally fit the mold of defective wind-up toys—little action, no thought. Also, moving up a notch to the political sphere, it’s lovely to discover that Obama has ended centralized direction of biodefense. What we have is a few part-timers in the White House overseeing the program and trying to coordinate multiple mutually antagonistic bureaucracies. Well, I suppose it’s over-optimistic to expect Obama to take an interest in something other than handouts and labor unions.   

After such knowledge, what forgiveness? Think now
History has many cunning passages, contrived corridors
And issues, deceives with whispering ambitions,
Guides us by vanities. Think now
She gives when our attention is distracted
And what she gives, gives with such supple confusions
That the giving famishes the craving. Gives too late
What’s not believed in, or if still believed,
In memory only, reconsidered passion. Gives too soon
Into weak hands, what’s thought can be dispensed with
Till the refusal propagates a fear. Think
Neither fear nor courage saves us. Unnatural vices
Are fathered by our heroism. Virtues
Are forced upon us by our impudent crimes.
These tears are shaken from the wrath-bearing tree.

--Gerontion

The Muslim Revolts

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/30/sunday-review/the-arab-intellectuals-who-didnt-roar.html?pagewanted=1
The lack of ideology or even any plans strikes—but most revolutionaries past espoused notoriously unrealistic dogmas, and found a quick descent into self-protective pragmatics—that is, their “dogma” became “hold power at all costs.” More or less the same type of elites will retain power. They may approach management of the masses a bit differently.  

Confirmation of Global Warming

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204422404576594872796327348.html

The assessment done by this team looks thorough and convincing. They limited themselves to determining the degree and the certainty of warming over land. Given the complexities of the historical data, a careful methodology is necessary and was here applied. The results confirm the warming trend found by prior analyses. They did not look into the causes.

As I've said since at least 2005, we ought to get cracking on this. At a minimum, there is a significant probability that warming has primarily anthropogenic causes. The results of warming are potentially catastrophic. Therefore, as insurance against the possibility of catastrophe, we ought to make an effort to reduce likely causes of warming.

To do this requires, optimally, several steps for America:

First, persuade the public of the reality of climate risks and their probable causes.

Second, impose a tax regime on greenhouse gas emissions that provides for slowly increasing taxes over 20+ years--roughly to the point that the price of coal-based energy doubles and gasoline price rises $2-3/gal over market levels.

Third, greatly increase spending on basic scientific research that may be relevant to producing less polluting energy--$50+ billion a year. Probably the foci ought to be on nuclear power, solar power, electrification of transport, batteries for transport and the electric grid, building efficiency, offshore wind power, underground emissions sequestration, and perhaps methods of pulling CO2 from the atmosphere.

Fourth, take further measures to encourage the private development and deployment of clean energy systems, to include ensuring strategic clean energy industries remain onshore (without which presence innovation will diminish and public support decline).

Fifth, optimize and impose new regulations for houses and buildings to improve their energy efficiency--and incentivize retrofits of existing structures.

Sixth, pay nations to sustain their forests.

Seventh, come to an agreement with other climate change mitigating nations to phase in tariffs on imports from nations that do not attempt to control their emissions (exemptions possible for desperate nations).

Of these efforts, I consider the first, third and fourth the most important. They are the steps that can be leveraged to generate global impact--a sine qua non for success in climate change mitigation. Also, America has a comparative advantage over other nations in these areas--we are best in the world at basic science and, especially, innovation. The cheap solar, cheap-safe nuclear, cheap batteries that we invent and commercialize would benefit the rest of the world--whether we sell to them or they steal from us.

So far, through the eras of Clinton, Bush II, Obama--we have done about one tenth of what I recommend on steps 3 and 4. We have attempted no more. The major part of the political class, including the named Commanders, have evinced nought but cowardice before this challenge. This is a national security issue, as the Pentagon recognized formally years ago. Everyone agrees on the existence of at least one governmental obligation: the provision of security against internal and external threats. This is both types of threat, yet the government sits stupidly, watches it grow monstrous and risks letting it become unstoppable.

Islam and the West

http://www.tnr.com/book/review/citizen-islam-zeyno-baran

The link is to a review of a book, Citizen Islam: The Future of Muslim Integration in the West, by Zeyno Baran, on Muslim citizens in Western countries. It's a sharp, concise, excellent review, worth reading. The reviewer wrote a highly regarded book on this subject a couple of years past, Reflections on the Revolution in Europe: Immigration, Islam and the West. Both authors agree that the most essential question the rise of the Muslim population puts before us is what form of Islam these people will ascribe to. I agree with this assessment, though in those countries with relatively modest Muslim populations the issue of the magnitude of future Muslim immigration is almost as important. The politically correct view, of course, in America and Europe, is that mainstream Islam is distinct from "Islamism" (the interpretation that Islamic values and rules ought to prevail in the political sphere).

That the priests or imams should want mastery accords with the natural order of things. Why shouldn't the arbiters of the ultimate things requite their pious followers with the gift of effectual earthly guidance?

“Islamism shares the most fundamental aim of Islam and all religions,” Baran writes, “to bring the world closer to God.” In so saying, she removes us from the cocoon of cant that swaddles most public—and all governmental—discussion of Islam’s role in terrorism.

The motive force behind Islamic terrorism is thus conceived by its practitioners as transcending the civil laws of merely secular governments. And, since its inception, the Quran has seemed to certain numbers of its adherents interpretable in this direction. If confined to a few extremists or to marginal lands, this might be of minor consequence, and it has been little more than a nuisance through most of Islamic history. However, massive Muslim immigration into the West has changed things, and rendered this disease much more contagious, if not also more virulent.

Islamists are, by definition, politicized Muslims. They are better at politics than their apolitical coreligionists. European officials made a mistake in the 1980s and ’90s, when they “granted asylum to many immigrants who presented far more of a threat to democratic rule than the regimes they had fled.” The core of Baran’s book is her description of the tactics by which Islamists co-opted, infiltrated, bamboozled, and overwhelmed Muslim institutions of long standing. Islamists generally preferred subverting existing bodies to setting up their own, Baran writes, because it “required less effort and offered greater recruitment possibilities.” Her account of such subversion will remind readers of the history of Communists in the trade-union movement. As Baran shows, boards of directors staffed with doddering old-country patriarchs do not stand a chance against young, modern, Internet- and media-savvy “professional Muslims.”

One might also analogize Islamists to a special interest group in politics. Though constituting a small number, they care about their monomania more than the great mass of the polity, and often use their focus to achieve goals against the interest of the nation. This looks to be something of a vicious circle. Revolutions, though, tend to burn themselves out as the youthful vanguard becomes less youthful and settles heavily into power. But, by a similar process of energetic youth overcoming apathetic age, the nonpolitical version of Islam is losing power also in many Muslim nations. Turkey is cited as a clear case of this. It has proceeded in Pakistan, Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran--and the Arab Spring may yet prove another step in furtherance of this trend.

The threat of Islamism in the near and medium term arises from its manifest terrorist tendencies. Any irrational belief system, including any religion, may become dangerous. "The problem is that religion itself is a conveyor belt to radicalism in this way." The remedy for this, the action Western governments ought to undertake, according to Baran, is this:

  They should “shift their current focus from countering extremist violence to preventing extremism from taking hold in the first place.” The strategy she suggests might indeed be a better one. But there are two reasons it cannot be carried out. One is that Americans are too frightened of being disciplined and punished for breaches of political correctness to discuss honestly any aspect of any policy touching on Islam. Even this term—“political correctness”—does not do justice to the Zhdanovite lockdown that the government enforces when it comes to discussing Islam.

Apparently, even the Ft. Hood massacre of American soldiers by a radicalized Islamist soldier was dismissed by DOD as unrelated to Islamism.

Secondly, Americans don’t know Islam well enough. The distinction between “Islamists who renounce violence” (the people we are empowering now) and the “moderate Muslims who reject Islamism” (the people Baran would like us to empower)—these distinctions might be meaningful for a literary Turk with a good Koranic education. They will be lost on a galoot congressman from the mountain West who has never met a Muslim. And to draw such distinctions in the first place would reveal what a big, intransigent problem traditionalist Islam poses for Western societies. It is a problem that already has a long record of forcing those societies to weigh their commitment to diversity against their commitment to freedom.

We observe all this with a complacency born of the amateurism and incompetence of our domestic Islamic foes. In many Western nations, including America, their numbers are too small still to present a great danger. And the problem may well, by a variety of possible mechanisms, be self-correcting. The two most likely forms of this are the senescence of the revolutionaries or a change in attitude in Western nations should the threat become grave. That said, I see no benefit for the West from continued large scale Muslim immigration. Also, the radicals ought to be deported. We do not need the distraction and the drain on our powers political Islam involves--certes we do not benefit this way. Proliferation of WMDs, China's rise, and socialism-induced internal decay are quite a sufficient platefull of problems.