Jonah Goldberg on the Hollywood Vacuumheads

A spot-on column, noted by several other bloggers, in yesterday's NRO:

.... Okay, let's recap. "Intimidation" of free speech is a moral horror. Democracy means never being criticized. And, the refusal to sponsor speech you don't like amounts to having one's "right to work" repealed. This is childish. Oh, I don't mean childish as in silly, I mean literally this is childish. This is the way children talk and think, especially in our gitchy-goo self-esteem culture. Not understanding the difference between their desires and rights, they insist they are entitled to do whatever it is they are doing. No matter what they do with their crayons, children expect to be told "That's so good. Good for you." Any criticism elicits a tantrum about the unfairness of it all. Maybe it's because Hollywood types live as King Babies and are never told they're wrong about anything, or maybe their view of democracy is one in which they are the customers of expensive restaurants and the rest of the world are simply waiters. Waiters are supposed to receive criticism with intelligence and geniality but never, ever, talk back.

When Madonna says that democracy is undermined whenever critics of the president are criticized, it makes me wonder what kind of train wreck her interpretation of the Kabbalah must be. Sheen and his defenders want to be simultaneously saluted for their "courage" to speak out while at the same time believe they there should be no risks for those who do speak out. Well, if there are no risks, where's the courage? And why should movie stars have a right to risk-free political speech when no other profession has anything close? If I owned a hardware store and put a sign in the window reading, "Down with Bush" — I'd lose business. Or, if I put one in the window saying "Down with Saddam!" I'd also lose business. This is because other people have the right to associate themselves with ideas just as much as movie stars have the right to express their "ideas." Only by the logic of the bitchy little world we call Hollywood, where even men are divas, would we say it's outrageous that store owners are having their "right" to sell three-penny nails revoked....

Lane Core Jr. CIW P — Tue. 04/29/03 09:23:52 PM
Categorized as Political.

Norman Mailer: Senile? Psychotic? Or Just Plain Imbecilic?

Or the pitiable end-product of decades of self-loathing?

You tell me.

Lane Core Jr. CIW P — Tue. 04/29/03 08:41:55 PM
Categorized as Political.

"Is Federalism Conservative?"

An informative analysis by Robert Alt at NRO today:

.... But by casting stones at those who adhere to (or in Sutton's case, merely argue on behalf of) federalism, the Times and the liberal-advocacy groups simply demonstrate their misguided belief that the Constitution is an accumulation of policy preferences rather than a body of law. While the idea that law actually means something ordinarily sends shivers up a liberal's spine, it shouldn't in the case of federalism. Contrary to our liberal friends' assumption, federalism is not necessarily conservative. Rather, federalism is a series of constitutional rules, and as rules cut against both conservative and liberal positions alike. Yes, federalism will disappoint those who think that the only solution is a national one, but in terms of policy outcomes, federalism proves itself to be a neutral dealer....

(Thanks, John.)

Lane Core Jr. CIW P — Tue. 04/29/03 02:56:09 PM
Categorized as Political.

Re: Janet Daley

"Up from Liberalism"

From a reader:

She certainly grasped the essence of socialism. It is always embraced for its compassion and ends up as a form of control. The upper classes are both repelled by the lower classes and pitying of them simultaneously. They find a way to give them minimal succor while removing them from their lives, to self-destruct in obscurity. However, the same underclass manage to intrude themselves back into the lives of the upper classes in many unpleasant ways.

See From California to London.

Lane Core Jr. CIW P — Tue. 04/29/03 01:58:22 PM
Categorized as Social/Cultural.

"A New Iraq"

An excellent column by James Lindgren in Sunday's Chicago Tribune:

.... People are asking what we should be doing in Iraq and why aren't we doing it faster.

There are calls for a Marshall Plan for Iraq. Yet the historical analogy is more revealing than people realize. The war in Europe ended on May 8, 1945. In 1947, over two years after the war, Secretary of State George Marshall proposed a plan of economic recovery for Europe. By the time Congress passed Marshall's proposal and President Truman signed it into law, nearly three years had passed since VE Day.

Over the following four years, Washington poured a then-staggering $13.3 billion into Europe's recovery. Of course, the U.S. was very much involved in the reconstruction of both Europe and Japan long before the Marshall Plan was a gleam in the secretary of state's eye.

Nor was the U.S. concern in 1948 merely humanitarian; the U.S. was worried about containing communism and the Soviet bloc. Today, the U.S. is again animated by more than charity toward those in need--a successful recovery in Iraq increases stability and reduces terrorism and the threat of weapons of mass horror....

(Thanks, John.)

Lane Core Jr. CIW P — Tue. 04/29/03 01:22:48 PM
Categorized as Social/Cultural.

Is This Any Way to Run Anything?

Imagine you live in a community that has... unusual... rules for selecting the mayor, the police chief, and the officers of the town council. The rules can be summed up this way: any head of a household is eligible, and all of them take turns holding the different positions.

Now, each community is like every community in at least one respect: the population runs the gamut from saint to sinner, from angel to devil.

The system limned above could result in, occasionally, a convicted wife-batterer being the mayor; the town drunk, the police chief; a known pedophile, the president of the town council; a man thrice-bankrupted, the council's treasurer; and, a functionally-literate woman, the council's secretary.

How long would such a community last? For that matter, how long ought such a community be allowed to last?

And how, exactly, is the UN any different?

Vide.

(Thanks, Patrick.)

Lane Core Jr. CIW P — Tue. 04/29/03 11:58:36 AM
Categorized as International.

Carl Olson on Dispensationalism

A good "dialogue" at Envoy Encore, last Friday: "MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING...":

.... Dispensationalist should be exposed as a false belief system AND we should catechize Catholics. I was on an RCIA team for two years and then spent two years working as a full-time catechist in a parish. People do not ask questions such as, "Can you explain how the Eucharist is the eschatological sacrament and how this can be understood in light of modern physics?" No, they ask questions such as, "Should I read the Left Behind books?" and "What’s the ‘rapture’?" You have to meet people where they are at, and many Catholics are reading these books, or being fed this belief system by Fundamentalist friends, or even soaking up a "Catholic" version thereof....

Lane Core Jr. CIW P — Tue. 04/29/03 11:20:54 AM
Categorized as Religious.

Absolutely No Americans Were on Saddam's Payola List

How do we know that? Well... actually... we don't know that.

Saddam Hussein: "Compared to tanks, journalists are cheap — and you get more for your money."

See Saddam's Cash by Stephen F. Hayes in The Weekly Standard, dated May 5:

.... The Galloway affair was triggered when a reporter happened upon a slim, blue folder at one of the 23 Iraqi ministries — a snowflake in the avalanche of information loosed by the removal of Saddam Hussein from power. Some of the regime's records no longer exist. Iraqi officials destroyed some before the war began. Coalition bombs wiped out others. Looters made off with more. Still, Bush administration sources say they have recovered enough Iraqi government and Baath party documents to fill 100 semi-trailers. "We're overwhelmed with information," says one Pentagon official. "It's going to take a long time to go through it all."

That process is just now beginning — a fact that is surely rattling nerves around the world....

Here's to the first glimmer of sunshine penetrating the gloom! May the clouds part and let in the full panoply of warming, healing rays!

(Thanks, Charles.)

P.S. Has the "nation's newspaper of record" picked up this story yet?

Lane Core Jr. CIW P — Tue. 04/29/03 09:20:00 AM
Categorized as International.

From California to London

Janet Daley's journey out of Marxism.

A fine essay in the current City Journal:

.... The left-wing elite castigated teachers for attempting to correct the working-class accents and dialects that help trap children in the limitations of their own backgrounds. Correct grammar and properly pronounced English were, left-wing commentators argued, simply a middle-class dialect, with no claim to inherent superiority over the subliterate speech familiar to working-class children. Therefore, to inflict proper English on children who spoke the systematically ungrammatical dialects of the British proletariat was a form of cultural imperialism. Bourgeois values were the real enemy of working-class self-respect, because they made people who did not subscribe to them feel alienated and insecure. The socialist ideal was not to free people to fulfill their personal potential but to guarantee that no one would ever feel inferior to anyone else in any respect — intellectually, socially, or economically. Marxist veneration of the “working man” meant preserving, as a function of class cohesion, the behavior that I saw as symptomatic of self-loathing.

How had it come to this? Why did liberals who were supposedly advocates of egalitarianism collude in this blatantly repressive aspect of British social and political life? How did they reconcile their commitment to socialism, which I had always understood as being about the liberation of humanity, with a romanticizing of what anyone in his right mind should have seen as a cruelly inadequate and culturally degraded way of life? So much of what passed for left-wing thinking in Britain seemed to be steeped in middle-class guilt and self-hatred.

What decisively transformed my views was my growing understanding of the consequences of the welfare state that Britain had constructed out of a wartime command economy: it both reinforced the fatal passivity of the lower classes and provided a moral justification for the paternalism of the upper classes. The realization was slow but inexorable. It came through concrete example and abstract argument. By the end, it was so blindingly obvious that I wondered how anyone could ever not have seen that the socialist solution — the great, generous dream of perfect fairness — was inevitably destructive of the human spirit....

See also Why They Hate Us — the Europeans, That Is.

Lane Core Jr. CIW P — Tue. 04/29/03 09:12:56 AM
Categorized as Social/Cultural.

St. Catherine of Siena

Today in the Roman Church is the feastday of St. Catherine of Siena. Here is my favorite passage from her prayers.

O immeasurable love! O gentle love! Eternal fire!
You are that fire ever blazing,
O high eternal Trinity!
You are direct without any twisting,
genuine without any duplicity,
open without any pretense.
Turn the eye of your mercy on your creatures.
I know that mercy is your hallmark,
and no matter where I turn
I find nothing but your mercy.
This is why I run crying to your mercy
to have mercy on the world....

At Rome, Sexagesima Sunday, February 13, 1379.

(The Prayers of Catherine of Siena, ed. Suzanne Noffke, OP, Prayer 9, p. 69.)

Lane Core Jr. CIW P — Tue. 04/29/03 08:46:20 AM
Categorized as Religious.

Spam II

I have received 42 e-mail messages so far today. Every one of them spam.

Lane Core Jr. CIW P — Tue. 04/29/03 08:31:13 AM
Categorized as Other.