Iraq just rejected unconditional inspection demands. The ambassador did try to hedge a little about whether they'd accept them as a last ditch effort to avoid war, but I don't think they're going to get that opportunity.
DUBAI - Iraq's Deputy Prime Minister Tariq Aziz on Friday rejected the unconditional return of U.N. arms inspectors called for by Washington.
"We do not accept President Bush's conditions," Aziz told the Dubai-based Arab satellite television station MBC in an interview being shown at 1500 GMT, footage of which was seen in advance by Reuters.
"The return of inspectors without conditions will not solve the problem...we have had a bad experience with them. Is it clever to repeat an experience that failed and did not prevent aggression?"
It turns out that even we did not suspect the depths of Al-Qaeda's inhuman pursuit of terror. Their access to WMD is much worse than we previously thought. While some have speculated that they might have gotten their hands on biological, chemical, or even nuclear weapons, not even the most pessimistic commentators suspected the awful truth: Al-Qaeda has bypassed these conventional threats and gone straight to the most inhuman, terrifying destructive weapons man has yet produced -- the business blather book.
And from there it gets still worse. They have mastered the Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. They have Crossed the Chasm. They have transformed themselves into Guerilla Marketers. And now, we find that our worst fears have been realized:
I'm beginning to think that someone in the White House is very, very smart.
One hopes it's the president of course, though I've heard strong minority voices for Condi Rice, Rumsfeld, and Cheney. Whoever it is, I think they've confirmed my belief that the Administration has managed this crisis like a virtuoso.
I never took very seriously the complaints that Bush was flailing, because my years of watching politics have convinced me that there is some sort of natural law decreeing that every administration policy will provoke an equal number of equally vehement voices for, and against it. Especially in a war, when the demands of national security mean that the people running the war have a lot more information than the people trying to tell them how to run it. That's not to say that their decisions are necessarily right. But it means that I am unmoved by complaints that "I don't understand where he's going with all this". Thank God. A military strategy where everyone and their brother in law can chart the moves in advance is not one that I find reassuring.
The first time I suspected Bush was smarter than he looks (well, actually, it was the second time. But I can't remember what the first one was) was when he announced the formation of the Department of Homeland Security. It seemed to me that rather than displaying panic, it was a master stroke, politically speaking. He didn't say anything until the Democrats had enough rope to hang themselves -- and then he pulled the trigger. They were left without anything to say.
This looks similar to me. The Clinton team would have been out there, aggressively putting over the spin. The Bush administration was silent until everyone had decided that the complaint they were going to hang their hopes on was the abominable unilateral bent of the US. They let everyone talk themselves out and then they delivered this.
The UN performance was brilliant in so many ways. First of all, even before the speech, the obvious push for invasion forced Europe to stop pushing to ease the sanctions and let Saddaam build whatever weapons he wants as long as he buys French equipment and pays the Russians what he owes them. It brought us to a position of strength in negotiation. Whether or not you want the US to invade, it's pretty clear that the credible threat of invasion is the only thing making Saddaam offer to submit to inspections, or making Europe actually argue for uncompromising inspections. Second of all, now that it is clear that the US is going, it is fairly clear to me that Europe is indeed going to jump on the bandwagon so that their governments don't end up looking totally irrelevant. And third of all, most brilliantly, it was a "Put up or shut up" to the multilateralists.
Saddaam is in violation of about a hundred UN resolutions. And not fluffy resolutions either. Resolutions about things like stockpiling ABC weapons.
The UN can endorse the US invasion, and lose an opportunity to aggrandize its power and appease the small countries who would like to see the US brought low.
Or it can fail to endorse the invasion, and admit that its resolutions have no force. Should this occur, I don't think it's alarmist to say that we could look for the US to pull out of the UN in the not so distant future, the UN having proved itself not only anti-American, but irrelevent to boot.
I think they're going to endorse the invasion. I think they will make Saddaam an offer he can't accept -- really, truly, disarm (in which case I think Saddaam knows he would be dead in six months) or the US gets the green light. And then I think they will -- reluctantly, painfully, resentfully -- give lip service to the American cause.
Flailing? I think the Bush administration has more discipline than we've seen in the White House for a long time.
I had an interesting discussion with Norah Vincent the other day about the future of libel law in the blogosphere; now she's blogged about it.
She took a lot of heat for her angry response to some people who accused her of plagiarism because she used four words from a song. My initial response was "These people need to get a hobby". For anyone who has been planning to level similar charges, yes, I cribbed large parts of a post below from the Gettysburg Address, the Declaration of Independance, and other sources. I assume that my readers are educated enough to pick up the references. For anyone who may have been confused, let me clear it up: I did not write either the Declaration of Independence or the Gettysburg Address, though of course I wish I had.
But anyway, as Norah pointed out to me, for a professional journalist, this is a very serious charge. That accusation could easily end up with editors who will demand explanation and hurt her livelihood, especially owing to the magic of google. The people who made the accusation may not have realized this. If they did, they deserve our full censure.
We aren't always as careful as we should be. I know that I am not, although I am more careful than I was six months ago. Certainly, I don't want to shut down other peoples' freedom of expression. But when we are leveling serious charges we should have serious evidence. For some of us, it may not matter. But for the people here who make their living in the public sphere, I think that it is right that they should be able to ask that others not deliberately spread silly or false charges because of ideological disagreements. I think it is right for us to support that by not linking those charges, and thus furthering the damage, unless we think that they are fair. Norah's blast about non-professionals was taking as a smear against bloggers who are not professional journalists, when it was rather a -- justified! -- smear against people who use the unique powers of a blog to make unfounded charges that can severely harm someone's career. I do not know that the bloggers in question were malicious; I certainly hope not. But I think it behooves us all to think hard about what we say, and whether there is a fair basis for it, before we put it in out there.
But I'm interested in what others think, about the ethics and also about the future of litigation in the blogosphere. If I put up a lie that gets wide coverage, am I liable?
So I was reading Joseph Stiglitz's article in the Atlantic Monthly, which is not yet online, and meditating on the difference between liberal and conservative economists.
One of the interesting phenomenon I experience with this blog is when liberals who take offense to my generally free-market slant present me with some evidence that the market -- usually the financial market, but any market will do -- has produced an imperfect result. So there! they say, triumphantly, and presumably sit back with a satisfied smile to await the inevitable crisis when I, all my dreams of market purity having been swept away like so much chaff, crumble and admit that after all, the free market's not so hot.
They are generally shocked and hurt when instead I respond "Of course it doesn't always work perfectly. And your point is. . . ? "
The caricature of the free-market side is that, because we are mean and wish to keep all of our money to ourselves, and/or because we are stupid and probably racist and classist to boot, we are blinding ourselves to the down sides of markets in order to cling to the belief, which we know in our heart of hearts to be erroneous, that markets are perfect. I believe this is a fairly succinct statement of a belief that I have encountered from roseate interlocutors on a fairly regular basis.
Unfortunately for my erstwhile opponents, this is not the case. If you want to hear a great rundown of all the ways in which markets fail, there's no better place to get it than the University of Chicago Economics Department. All of the market failures my left-leaning adversaries describe have well known economic names, from the Principal-Agent problem to the Free Rider problem, to the eternal curse of negative externalities. The economic illiterate does not, in my experience, discover anything new under the sun.
At their base level, markets are merely systems. Sometimes the rules are sub-optimal, in which case Chicago economists and many others devote precious intellectual effort to figuring out what rules would be more optimal, and often charge private parties a pretty penny to help them implement these improved systems. And sometimes the results are bound to be imperfect within the limits of human interaction, and all we can do is mitigate the damage.
The difference between a free market economist and a more pro-regulation one is not that the former is a venal poltroon who is unaware that markets fail, much as the Nation and the American Prospect might wish that this were the case. The difference is that they impute to government different levels of ability to remedy these failures without introducing new, worse failures into the system. Liberal economists have a higher degree of confidence in the workings of regulation.
Now, just as National Review authors generally pretend that there ain't no such thing as a market failure, Paul Krugman generally pretends that there is no such thing as a government regulation that makes things worse. In neither case do I believe that the authors are actually under the delusion that the systems they are touting are perfect. But they feel that they have to pretend that they are perfect, so that the proles will not experience doubt and thus be led to make an incorrect choice come next election. But this is not that kind of web site. For example: lowering tax rates does not increase tax revenue, at least not at the current levels of taxation in the US. It would be very nice if that were true, but it isn't, and that's that. I am not going to pretend that it is true, or argue that it might be true, or what have you, in order to support my idealogical predisposition for lower taxes. It isn't. It is true that Democratic analyses of such matters always overstate the amount by which revenues will fall, because they make ludicrous assumptions about individual behavior, but no one is in serious doubt that the net effect will be to lower overall revenues somewhat. You may see this site arguing for tax cuts for other reasons, but the Laffer curve will not be among them.
My, that felt better. Back to liberal economists.
The reason that I was thinking about this is that Joseph Stiglitz, writing for a popular audience, is making ludicrous assumptions about the behavior of government. Partly this is because he worked for the NEA, which sets macro policy from the olympian heights of monetary policy and broad fiscal guidelines, not down in the trenches making particular regulations. Partly, I assume, it is ideological predisposition to wish that government regulations were very, very effective. And partly, I assume again, it is that Joseph Stiglitz doesn't want to worry his readers with the possibility that a government regulation, particularly one proposed by smart, well meaning Democrats, might not, y'know, work.
The topic of the rest of this post will be fractional reserve banking. Those of you who are operating heavy machinery, or who would otherwise find it unsafe to health or career to suddenly drop into a deep sleep, should stop reading now.
Joseph Stiglitz was excoriating the Bush administration for lowering the reserve requirements and therefore making the banking system less safe. But this is dumb. Lowering the reserve requirements doesn't make the banking system any safer, even though journalists think it does. But Joseph Stiglitz is not a journalist, and ought to know better.
First, let's talk about what fractional reserve banking is. Probably the best explanation of it is given by Jimmy Stewart in It's A Wonderful Life, but I don't have time to watch the movie right now, so I'll have to wing it.
Basically the concept is this: when your bank takes your money in, it doesn't, contrary to popular belief, stick it in a vault where your bankers can periodically go and rub their hands, thinking of how they screwed the workers out of all this dough. They lend it out to other people, in mortgages and car loans and such. That's how they get the money to pay you the .005% annual interest they dole out.
But they can't loan out every penny you give them. If they did that, and you decided you needed to get some money out to buy your nephew a set of ginsu knives for his 18th birthday, it would be a little awkward. They'd have to go get the cash from the guy they loaned it to. But the guy they loaned it to is probably a 16 year old kid with his first car. His liquid assets consists of two bucks lunch money and the remains of the six pack he and his buddies bought last night when his parents thought he was at the library. In order to get the money, he'll have to sell the car. And no one wants to buy a 1981 Honda Civic that's been driven around by a sixteen year old. Plus all this takes time, which means you're going to miss out on the special Elvis cutting board, which is only available if you call in the next ten minutes.
So they only loan out a fraction of what you give them. The aim of bankers is to balance things exactly so that the amount of cash they have on hand at any given time is enough to meet all the demands of people who want cash around that time, without any extra left over. They want every penny possible to be out there working hard and earning interest. Of course, it's not possible to be that exact. It is therefore better to be somewhat conservative, to ensure that you have enough cash to meet unexpected demand. This is because the consequences of not having sufficient cash are horrendous: a bank run. Bank runs mean the bank goes out of business and the depositors lose everything.
This is how banking has worked since the system was invented. However, there are problems with this system. The main problem is that in good times, banks get too optimistic. They figure nothing bad has happened for years, so why worry? They start holding fewer reserves, lending more. This results in a dramatic increase in the money supply, fueling more growth. Unfortunately, if anything does go wrong, like too many loans default or a lot of depositors lose their jobs and start taking money out instead of putting it in, the bank goes bust. The result is a dramatic decrease in the money supply, dramatically curtailing growth. This phenomenon was one of the major drivers of the boom-bust cycle of the 19th century, which was much more volatile on both the upside (long periods of high growth) and the downside (6-10 year recessions).
So along comes a progressive johnnie and says, "How about the government requires banks to hold a certain amount of their capital as reserves?" The states had been doing this previously, but they weren't very aggressive about it; there are amusing stories (for non-depositors, I mean) of consortiums of banks that would ship the same vault, containing a lot of sand covered by a thin layer of gold coins, around between them just ahead of the bank examiners. The federal government, on the other hand, made it stick. Banks now have a percentage of their deposits that they must have in their vaults at all time. The government sets what that percentage is on a national basis; the percentage is called the reserve requirement.
The conventional wisdom is that this acts to simply force the banks to behave responsibly; carry the reserves they should in order to safely operate. This is how journalists treat the question, if they treat it. But this is not true.
Why? Because banks cannot dip below their reserve requirement. If they do, the government descends and starts asking nasty questions, and forces them to raise their reserves back to the requirement. So that money is, for all intents and purposes, off limits.
Think of it as if it were your budget. Say there's a federal mandate that you have to carry around 25% of your income in cash to deal with emergencies. If you drop below that number, they arrest you. Can you walk around with just that 25% in your pocket? No, because you're not allowed to drop below that 25%. You'll need to carry more than 25% in order to deal with your day-to-day expenses. Banks have to do the same thing.
Now, theoretically, of course, if everything goes to hell, the government can step in and lower the reserve requirements, freeing up cash for the banks to use. But this is where Joseph Stiglitz is imputing to a political system the kind of perfect efficiency that liberals accuse me of attributing to markets. To wit: if the economy is shaky, can the government lower the reserve requirement?
Hell, no. If the banking system is in trouble, lowering the reserve requirements is going to panic depositors, and more importantly, voters. The last thing that is going to happen is for the reserve requirements to be lowered.
(Note: I'm talking about a banking crisis, not a recession. Reserve requirements have in the past been lowered in the face of recession, though they've also been raised.)
Reserve requirements protect the Fed, by making sure that at least some assets will be available in case the bank melts down and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation has to bail out the depositors. But it doesn't make the bank any less likely to melt down in the first place, which is what Stiglitz says it does. And it doesn't because while during the Clinton boom years, the public may have ignored the actions of the Treasury and the Fed, in times of crisis they pay close attention, and if you make the wrong move they can panic and make things worse, or panic and unelect your boss. Both severely constrain the ability for the government technocrats to manipulate the system.
In sum, when the liberal economist demands, "How can you say that free markets are best?". the conservative economist replies "Because we've looked at the alternative."
Asparagirl wants to know what happened with the radioactive cargo ship. I want to know what happened with a couple of stories I heard yesterday. . . the building in Ohio that was evacuated, the plane (planes?) that was diverted because of the unruly passengers who locked themselves in a bathroom, the arrests in various cities. Each of them appeared briefly on the news, and then disappeared as quickly. Anyone know what happened? Or have any other stories like this? What am I not being told, and is it because they're afraid of sparking panic, or because the law or the media are afraid of looking like idiots for making a mountain out of a molehill?
Well, I could link the Salon troll, Forbidden Thougts on 9/11, which the editor describes as "puncturing orthodoxies", a task it accomplishes in much the same way the commuter in the next train seat "punctures outmoded conventions" by picking his nose and belching. Or I could link Tim Blair's "Forbidden Thoughts" piece, which doesn't puncture anything except inflated senses of self-importance.
All right, blogosphere, I have no idea if this story is true. Frankly, the idea that it could be makes me so sick that I can't bear thinking about it. But how about putting a full court press on the mainstream media to find out whether it is or not?
Thanks for the kind words about the memorial page. I'm not generally very sentimental, but. . . well, I make no excuses for my maudlin moments. Anyone still looking for the memorial page will find it here. It's also over there on the left under the new black button.
Meanwhile, in my last poetic gesture for a while, I'm going to share a poem that I particularly liked:
Optimism
At last there'll dawn the last of the long year, Of the long year that seemed to dream no end, Whose every dawn but turned the world more drear, And slew some hope, or led away some friend. Or be you dark, or buffeting, or blind, We care not, day, but leave not death behind.
The hours that feed on war go heavy-hearted, Death is no fare wherewith to make hearts fain. Oh, we are sick to find that they who started With glamour in their eyes came not again. O day, be long and heavy if you will, But on our hopes set not a bitter heel.
For tiny hopes like tiny flowers of Spring Will come, though death and ruin hold the land, Though storms may roar they may not break the wing Of the earthed lark whose song is ever bland. Fell year unpitiful, slow days of scorn, Your kind shall die, and sweeter days be born.
I cried yesterday. I'm not a weeper, generally speaking, but yesterday I wept freely.
I cried when they sang the Battle Hymn of the Republic at Shanksville. I was so glad it was the Battle Hymn, and not Amazing Grace. It's not yet time for us to focus on the next world; there's still much to be done in this one.
I cried when I saw a wounded eagle who had been nursed back to health by the parks service soar back into the wild.
I cried when I saw the towers hit again, and fall again, and saw the hole in New York's skyline still gaping.
I cried when I heard the victims talk about the helplessness and hopelessness of lives rudely interrupted, and when I saw the photographs of the men with eyes as blank and pitiless as the sun who thought nothing of this terrible thing they did.
I cried for the people I knew who died that day. They weren't particularly remarkable, except to those of us who knew them; not especially brilliant or good; just ordinary, decent people who were as surprised by their death as we were. I don't think I grasped the finality of their deaths until I heard their names read out loud. When people we know die we tend to think of their death in only the most personal way: their absence from our lives, and the lives of the people we know. Their death is a sad moment, something we'd like to tell them, something we wish they could see. But when a stranger read out loud the name of a boy I dated my freshman year of college, I realized: he is not just dead to me. He is dead to the world. He is gone forever. And I cried.
I wept for an America that vanished without warning at 8:46 AM on an otherwise unremarkable summer morning. It was a shallow and frivolous place, perhaps, but it was nonetheless sweet, and it will never be regained.
And now our year's mourning is over, and it's time to wipe away the tears.
Most of the people who died that day weren't heroes, any more than the thousands of people who die each day in this country in accidents not of their making are heroes; they were victims of a terrible injustice. But the dead at Shanksville have showed us that they could have been heroes, if only they'd had the chance. Given the knowlege of what they face, Americans will make the hard choices and the sacrifices required to defend themselves and their country from the barbarians at the gates. That knowlege, and opportunity, were denied the victims. So now the work of defeating the evil that did this falls to the rest of us.
We can never do enough for the families. We can't give them their loved ones back. We can't give them solace, save for the solace of knowing that we grieve for them. We can't give them vengeance. We cannot give them one million billionth of a tiny part of all that they lost a year ago. All we can give them is honor for their sacrifice, and freedom and peace for their families. And wish as hard as we do that we could restore their loved ones to them, we can give that gift to other people: to the victims of terror who have not yet been created. Even though we don't know their names, and God willing, never will, we can give them everything we wish we could give the families of the 9/11 victims.
Because they deserve our best efforts. There are those who dismiss our grief, arguing that 9/11 is nothing compared to car wrecks or cancer or typhoons. This is the sort of cold calculus that made the death camps possible. Human beings are not counted like cordwood. Whether you believe the answer is a stronger military or more foreign aid, they died in your place. To the attackers, you would have done just as well. To the enemy, it would be a blessing to see you follow them into the grave. You have an obligation to honor the memory of that sacrifice, even though -- especially because -- it was not freely chosen. We have an obligation, the same obligation we accept to get murderers off the streets so children can play there, and old ladies can get their groceries safe from harm.
That means being prepared to make the sacrifices required to deny terror a safe harbor anywhere in the world, and to secure, as the document says, the blessings of liberty to ourselves and to our descendants. No one else is going to do it for us. Whether you believe in UN style multilateralism or not, US power is the only instrument capable of ensuring peace. If you believe, as I do, that we must invade Iraq, that means preparing for the financial sacrifices that will be required. It means not complaining if the price of oil goes up. It means being prepared, if it becomes necessary, to offer your services in pursuit of this war. And if you are against the war, well, you know what you think the solution is. Do it. Don't sit around talking about how much foreign aid would help; offer some. Don't sit around ranting about how horrible Ashcroft is; go to work for an organization dedicated to protecting our civil liberties. If what happened a year ago showed us anything, it is that it is not sufficient to talk about how much better things would be if only we ran the world. We have to do as much as we can in our own small way to make that happen.
I've been reading a lot of poetry over the last few days, particularly poetry from the World Wars. It is filled with an agony that I could not have comprehended one year and two days ago. I was struck particularly by one line, written by Perry McKaye on Christmas, 1915: Now is the midnight of the nations.
I think that two years ago was the golden hour of twilight when everything looks perfect, and everyone is content. A year ago the sun set. And while I don't yet think that we are at the midnight of the nations, I think that it is coming, and that it will be dark, as midnights are apt to be. But the other thing I was struck by is how well they met their darkest hours. That's why I cried at the Battle Hymn of the Republic -- because our ancestors, who stood at Lexington and Valley Forge, at Gettysburg and Antietam, at the Ardennes and Normandy and Hamburger Hill, knew, and they gave us, not a funeral dirge, but a call to arms:
I have read a fiery gospel writ in burnished rows of steel: "As ye deal with my contemners, so with you my grace shall deal; Let the Hero, born of woman, crush the serpent with his heel, Since God is marching on."
He has sounded forth the trumpet that shall never call retreat; He is sifting out the hearts of men before His judgment-seat: Oh, be swift, my soul, to answer Him! be jubilant, my feet! Our God is marching on.
In the beauty of the lilies Christ was born across the sea, With a glory in his bosom that transfigures you and me: As he died to make men holy, let us die to make men free, While God is marching on.
Yesterday it made me cry. Today it makes me want to meet this in the best tradition of my country. For us, the living, to be dedicated to the great task remaining before us.
That, from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion.
That we here highly resolve these dead shall not have died in vain; that the nation shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.
I've gotten some interesting mail on the subject of my Ayn Rand post.
On the one hand, there were people espousing what we might term a classical Objectivist, Randian argument, such as John Venlet:
While I am not a practicing Objectivist, I do find much in Rand's writings that I admire and believe should be practiced by us falleable humans. With that in mind, I must heartily object to Jane's hypothetical above. While she, in theory, respects an individual's right to bodily integrity, she states that this integrity should be forcibly denied an individual for the good of another individual, at least in this hypothetical. Taking such a stance negates Rand's philosophy. Additionally, where then would one draw the line in regards to determining where one's inviolable rights end or begin? Wouldn't a better approach to the needle challenged, unwilling donor be a business transaction? What is the value of the man's blood? It is definitely valuable to him as it sustains him daily, it is also valuable to the child in need of this specific type of blood, or he will die. So what price must be paid? If the needle challenged owner of the blood cannot be induced monetarily or by reasoned discussion to donate, the price must be death for the child. Though this may sound harsh, it is in actuality a much lesser evil than forcibly taking something to which you have no right if the owner cannot be induced to part with it.
I sympathize with these people; they come from what I might term the "Slippery Slope" school of individualism, where even the smallest compromise in principle results in the inevitable destruction of liberty. Nonetheless, I can't endorse it; ultimately I think it would both be impractical, and result in too many dead bodies, to run a society this way, for reasons I outlined in my earlier post.
Meanwhile, Chris Sciabarra, who has written books on Rand, and whose introduction to the argument confirms my belief that I am fighting far out of my weight class, offers a nuanced view of Objectivism as separate from the life and times of Ayn Rand. It's an extremely valid point, although in my defense, I would argue that Objectivism as a philosophic movement does not seem to me to have grown fully beyond the veneration of the founder; there is still a heavy preponderance of references to her work in discussions by and about Objectivists, at least the ones I've seen. Of course, as a philisophic movement, it's quite young yet, so this isn't particularly unusual.
An interesting discussion has emerged about the extent of Rand's contempt for the common man. I'm not sure I thought of her as particularly contemptuous of the common man, although there is certainly a Nietzschean aspect to much of her literature; it's just that her philosophy didn't seem to have much place for the poor schmuck who just can't quite cut it. My impression of Rand is that she was a very, very, very smart person, and very, very intense. And like most such people, she had great difficulty tolerating those of lesser intellect who didn't agree with her. I think the fact that the great minds of her day pretty much refused to engage with her left her in a position where all the smart people she knew admired her, and agreed with her. It is not hard to see how, out of this, one develops the conviction that people who do not get on the band wagon are either idiots or evil. But that's an impression; I am nowhere near as well versed in the Annals of Ayn as my fellow conversationalists.
We all seem to agree that Ayn has an Aristotelian view of happiness and goodness as being mutually dependant. Sciabarra has a fancy greek word for it, but us plain folks don't need to learn all that gussied-up foreign palaver.
Let me be among the too-few columnists in this self-absorbed, egocentric, materialistic, pleasure-obsessed, jingoistic country of ours to cry out into the great mindless void that no, in fact, we have not changed in the year since September 11.
Moreover, since I feel so much better getting that off my chest, let me add that I am achingly weary of seeing Americans treat the tragedy as if it outstrips every other contemporary tragedy in our world, and I am irked beyond belief that the victims of September 11 and their survivors are treated with a holy sanctity not afforded to other victims and other survivors of man's horrific actions against mankind.
Indeed, I say without shame to America's ever-growing, increasingly troubling and loudly throbbing Cult of Nine Eleven, "For God sakes, get a grip!"
. . .
Can you imagine how we'd hate the Brits if we were still deeply pissed off about the Revolution? Or how awful it would be if grade-schoolers sang morbid songs about the rotting Civil War dead at Richmond?
We reject the mournful, noir world of self-pitying, self-aggrandizing, excess-testosterone tribalism. We say, let other countries wallow in that if they must. But more and more, I sniff a hint of wallowing. I hear a bit of tribal whining.
So, on September 11, I suggest that you not light a candle for the victims of the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Plenty of others will do so for you."
I just walked off the site today for the last time before the anniversary. They are making preparations for the widows and orphans that Stewart finds so risible to mourn their dead, who they can never lay to rest. And I would like to sugest that on Wednesday, instead of one of those mawkish lowbrow vigils, you commemorate those dead by looking for a woman named Jill with a sullen, self-righteous expression and no candle, and pound the snot out of her.
But that would be wrong.
Besides, I've no doubt that if she opens her mouth again, plenty of others will do so for you.
Is the blogosphere sexist?, ask Susanna Cornett and a bunch of other bloggers. I don't think so, but then, I'm doing all right. Hey, I'm not Instapundit, but that's because. . . well, I'm not Instapundit, I'm me. I haven't noticed any sex differences in what posts get picked up; when I write something I think is really good, usually a fair number of people link it.
It's interesting that Dawn Olsen, who stirred up the controversy, is proposing a very old feminist idea: flatten the hierarchy in the blogosphere by refusing to link the big guys. I don't think it will work, for the same reason it doesn't work for Gloria Steinem, et al; they didn't grasp the basic social science phenomenon of the distribution. Human groups do not work themselves out into nice even groups; they cluster. Someone in a network has to be in the center; someone has to be at the tail ends of every distribution. We can't all be chiefs and no Indians.
Besides, I think (my personal opinion) that viewing traffic dearth through the lens of sex is not necessarily useful for determining causation. Most bloggers have low traffic. Most bloggers don't get linked by Instapundit. Most bloggers are also (to judge from what I've seen) male. There are clearly other factors, besides sex, causing the lack of linkage.
To the extent that there is a dearth, I think it's largely because female bloggers are disproportionately represented in the life diary blog style. [Note: this is an anecdotal impression, not an Actual Fact]. It's a free choice; no one's forcing them to write that type of blog. I think they should write whatever kind of blog they want, but I'm also not surprised that the market for my news commentary is larger than the market for my commentary on what I had for breakfast. Observe comedy writers. If you want to base your schtick on the funny thing your three year old did in the bath last night, you have to be really, really good. It is a sad fact of life that most of us, including me, are not that good. Also, there are more people who have an opinion on, say, the war in Iraq that they are looking to hear someone confirmed, than have an opinion as to whether or not I should use ashes-of-roses shantung for my livingroom drapes.
I will allow that I have noticed that Instapundit does tend to link the salacious items from female bloggers. But I just can't get worked up about it. I spent four years working with an all-male engineering group, went to a business school that was only 19% female, and have spent the last year of my life on a construction site. As offenses go, dirty jokes just don't register with me any more.
Anyway, I'm just a lone blogger, not The Voice of Female Blogdom. Go read the exhaustive compilation of posts on the subject that Susanna has put together and decide for yourself.
Update I've read more posts by and about women bloggers, including a second reading of Dawn's; there seems to be some consensus behind the argument that women blog differently from men, and that it's not fair that the woman-type blogging is less popular than the male-type blogging. I think it's probably true, but I'm not sure it's useful.
For one thing, it's a constant. It's an odd truth known among grammar school teachers that you can't get little boys to read books about little girls, not even well-brought up little boys with feminist moms. They'll sit still while the teacher reads A Little Princess out loud, but they aren't interested in childhood classics like "Little House on the Prairie" or "Anne of Green Gables", even though those books surpass the inferior, boy-centered ones they choose by almost any measure. And this dichotomy holds throughout life: women read books, watch movies, etc. that are aimed at women, but not the other way around. And it is easily possible to segment one's audience to be comprised of either all women, or mostly men, by the subject matter you choose.
The school of thought that has grown up around variations on this banal observation is called "Difference Feminism". Its icon is Carol Gilligan, and it strongly resembles Victorian social norms, with day care. Women are different, more caring and thoughtful and connected than rigid, hierarchical men. Women's ways of doing things aren't properly valued. In fact, many difference feminists will tell you, women's ways are better; we should make men do things the right way.
Personal experience tells me that women are different, though I have no official opinion on the breakdown between genetics/culture in that difference. Nor do I think that one way is better than the other. I like being a woman. I like the connection I feel with my close female friends and relatives, which is different from the connection I feel with my male friends, or the one that my male friends feel with their close male friends and relatives. (I say close because I don't think there's much important difference between the way I relate to my male or female acquaintances; close friends are another matter.) Men often do things that I think are typically male, which make me very angry or irritated. But women also often do typically female things that irritate me. I can't say I think one way is metaphysically better than the other.
I also don't think that, to the extent that this is true, "women's ways of knowing" translate well into a large audience. The whole point of the difference feminists is that women base their interactions on small, intimate, consensus-based interactions. That's the very opposite of blogging, which for all its bilateral linkage, is still in most important ways a broadcast medium.
So I don't think that you can right this by simply demanding more linkage of "female" blogging. It doesn't work; did your boyfriend start enjoying watching Lifetime movies because you told him he ought to, and made him sit through 20 or so to get the taste? (All right, I like Lifetime movies. On a rainy Sunday afternoon, there's nothing like a good wife-beating story or uplifting terminal disease or triumph-of-the-human-spirit prison tale to pass the time.) Over the long run, any significant effort by Glenn to distribute his links evenly between male-type and female-type posts won't help increase the traffic of the diary-bloggers; it will decrease his traffic, as his readers lose interest.
I think that current male/female norms are broken in some major ways. And I think that, by and large, even with all the ridiculous "don't say anything or I'll sue" discrimination laws, women generally end up with the short end of the stick, though I also think that this is changing. But I also think that we've passed the time where pointing to a numerical disparity and demanding redress is the answer. What is the answer? I dunno; dialogue, I guess. Dialogue always seems to be the answer to questions like that. And I guess that's what this is. So there's my 2 cents, for what it's worth.
Arthur Silber has responded to my post on Rand with some worthwhile thoughts of his own. He fleshes out his ideas about those with compatible values with some personal examples, bringing it back to what Rand calls a "sense of life" and others might term "taste" or "aesthetic impulse"; the fundamental response you have to other people, works of art, or ideas, based upon the feeling that they are congruent with your most deeply held values. (I'm paraphrasing; I hope that Mr. Silber will forgive and correct if I am misstating). But while he does an admiral job of amplifying his beliefs about personal interaction, he glosses over what I think is the fundamental error in Rand's premises: the attempt to reduce human interaction and behavior to a rational framework. I don't think it can be done, and I think that if it could, we would be horrified by the results.
Take one of the defining values Arthur proposes:
Let's take what is perhaps a less controversial example of a difference in fundamental approach: do you consider individual rights inviolable, or do you think that sometimes it's okay to for you or some group, via the government, to make me do something that I don't want to do, even when I'm just minding my own business and not bothering anyone else?
Okay, well, let me give you a hypothetical. Say a child is dying, bleeding to death. No time to get them to a hospital; they need a transfusion now. But the child is type O Negative. A transfusion of the wrong type of blood could kill them. The equipment to perform the transfusion is available, but here's the problem: there's only one person in the immediate area with O Negative blood, and he's afraid of needles. He refuses to donate.
In theory, I respect his right to bodily integrity. In practice, I would join with all the other adults in the area and hold him down so we could take his blood.
Not that this is a particularly likely hypothetical. I submit it as an example of the ways in which it becomes difficult for human beings to build a completely consistent philosophy based on total individual integrity. Yet on the other end of the spectrum, there are the "dead babies trump common sense" arguments which are all too prevalent in our news media, particularly on the op-ed pages and news magazines. I don't endorse those either. To some extent, all ethics is situational.
Or flip the argument, and look at just how rigorously we really want others to be able to enforce their right to indivdual integrity on us. The classic libertarian phrase "Your rights end at the tip of my nose" has unsustainable applications in an industrial society. Eminent domain, for example, grows out of the fact that in a deal with a large number of sellers and a small number of buyers, such as the deals required to build, say, a courthouse or a road or a military base, the power of the remaining sellers grows with each person who sells. This positive externality is captured by the last few sellers, who can extort huge amounts from their fellow taxpayers, because of the expense of starting over, and the knowlege that wherever they start, the same thing will happen all over again. This phenomenon produces decidedly suboptimal outcomes, both economically and politically.
Or look at the environment. Of course, environmental cleanliness could be easily secured by rigorously enforcing property rights -- the right of the owner of every piece of property not to have their air or water polluted by someone else's emissions. But it's not possible to control where every drop of air and water goes after it leaves your land. Enforcement of this individualist credo would require the cessation of commerce; a single individual could shut down the entire industrial complex of the United States.
We make compromises with individual integrity in order to allow society to function. As a broad principle, I agree that we shouldn't ask others to sustain us; that need is not, as Rand says, a blank check on the universe. As a rigid heuristic I disagree that children, the disabled, or the old and infirm should be allowed to starve because they can't cut it in the market economy. And yes, I'm willing to take your money, as well as mine, to support them. I think there are certain obligations incumbent upon being an adequately wealthy member of the human race. And if it weren't for the rest of us, most of the Objectivists I know wouldn't get very far trying to carve their living out of the raw earth. Scratch that "Most Objectivists"; make that "Most people".
Silber is presenting, I think, a much more nuanced view of human relations than Rand herself did. I think it's hard to deny that Rand's work is fairly intolerant of individual choices of those choices do not involve accepting Rand's individualist ethics. Silber's post illustrates that he doesn't make such rigid distinctions. Which I think essentially agrees with what I was trying to say: Objectivism works best when it is aspirational, rather than normative, at least as regards interpersonal connections.
This is the kind of liberal that makes me so mad I could spit. My contempt is a bottomless well that springs forth ever renewed when I hear the kind of self-centered, yet thoroughly self-righteous, hypocrisy that is passing for values among a certain brand of soulless rich [expletive deleted]. There is not sufficient invective in the English language to express the depths of my revulsion for the morally bankrupt woman who wrote this letter. I think it's time to get a posse, head out to suburbia, and beat the snot out of the first Democratic Party chair we find. (Via Best of the Web)
Radley Balko has a good post about George Fisher's incredibly silly editorial on military recruitment in the New York Times. Fisher is in a snit because under the Republican president, the government is finally enforcing the federal funding rules: you don't let the military recruit on campus, you don't get any Federal aid:
The change is not a result of the nation's reborn patriotism in the wake of Sept. 11. It is a victory for the military, but it is not a victory we should applaud. It represents a triumph of power over principle — educational principles that are especially meaningful to law schools.
For more than a decade, Harvard Law School had resisted demands by military recruiters to interview students through the school's career placement office. Almost all American law schools — including Stanford, where I teach — took the same stance. They did so not because law professors or law students are unpatriotic, but because the military rejects qualified students who wish to serve if they are openly lesbian, gay or bisexual. For the last several years, however, the military has increased pressure on law schools to allow them to recruit on campus. Now that Harvard has succumbed, other schools are likely to follow.
. . .
So why have Harvard and other American law schools changed their policy? The reason, almost everywhere, is money.
In 2000 the Department of Defense issued regulations reinterpreting federal law. The regulations say that if any part of a university denies access to military recruiters, the entire university will lose an array of federal funds. In May, the Air Force informed Harvard it was no longer content to be invited to campus by students. It demanded that the school allow military recruiters to use the school's career placement office.
Today any law school that chooses to hold firm against discrimination threatens the financial stability of the entire university. At Harvard the dean of the law school said the university was in danger of losing over $300 million in federal funds if the law school did not cooperate. The dean of the University of Southern California's law school said the school's policy, now revoked, could have cost the university between $300 million and $500 million. Across the country, those law schools that have not yet abandoned their policies face similar consequences.
Boo-hoo. The Harvard students aren't going to get hundreds of millions of dollars of my tax money? How come Fisher isn't upset about the naked excercise of power involved in taking hundreds of millions of other people's money and handing it to a university devoted to the service of the most privileged elite on the planet?
Sorry. . . sometimes the libertarian side just takes over and I can't control it. You all saw The Shining, right? Same thing, without the axe.
I think my father had the best solution to this whole brouhaha. The money benefits society, you say, by providing research etc? Fine. Don't withhold the money. Withhold the jobs.
If your school does not allow one branch of the government to recruit on campus, no branch of the government will be allowed to recruit on campus.
Let the Physics department keep their money. Let's see how long Stanford Law maintains its anti-discrimination policy when its students become ineligible for Federal clerkships.
Patrick Sullivan sends along a fascinating interview with Barbara Branden, the wife of the man with whom Ayn Rand commenced an affair that was sanctioned by both spouses. I think it illuminates what I was saying about the unrealistically, and simplistically, rigid framework into which Rand attempted to fit messy human relations:
Q: Why did you agree to the affair?
Barbara: For a host of very complex reasons which involved my psychology and life-experiences and convictions. But I can say that there were two fundamental reasons why I agreed. I felt considerable guilt toward Nathaniel, because I did not feel the sexual-romantic love for him that I believed I ought to.
