R-E-S-P-E-C-T

R-E-S-P-E-C-T

Find out what it means to me

Pat Condell is featured in a YouTube rant over at Small Dead Animals. In it, he waxes positively Steynsian in disrespecting radical Islam, then shakes himself out of it, and reverts to some banal A.C. Grayling bromides. Grayling, whose written an excellent history of philosophical logic, regularly waxes nostalgic in the UK’s Guardian for neo-classical 1940′s Oxbridge atheism, with a more up to date hairstyle. (I’m not sure about the glasses). Grayling is careful to observe the usual diplomatic atheist niceties, skipping over Pope Benedict’s vastly underrated Regensberg Lecture, and making sure to mention that: “there are nice and nasty Christians, nice and nasty Muslims, nice and nasty atheists.” No statistics are proferred on self-detonating religious protestors by monotheistic faith, but presumably he’ll get around to it.

Why the difference in tone? One writer appears, to me at least, to be safely esconced within the wrought iron gates of a tenured Oxford professorship, while the other is, well, I’ll let you read it, courtesy of his website:

I’ll also be poking fun at my own personal ball and chain, the Catholic Church, which over the years has consigned more infidels and heretics to the flames of hell on earth than all the Saudi-funded suicide bombers in Pakistan.More recently, the Church has been accused of anti-semitism because it collaborated with the nazis and ignored the Holocaust.

But we now know this was done primarily to stop the spread of communism. The fact that so many Jews were killed was purely a bonus.

Personally, I’m torn. Who do I believe about the involvement of the Catholic Church in one of the pivotal confrontations between Church and State of the 20th century? Sir Martin Gilbert in his American Spectator review of Rabbi David Dalin’s book The Myth of Hitler’s Pope or someone whose blog closes with:

“Alternatively, if you’re likely to be offended by jokes about religion, please seek psychiatric help.”?

If you have any insights, please drop a word into the comments.

A Positive Spin on Harper? Has Hell REALLY Frozen Over?

Thanks for the inspiration, Lord Kitchener.

Our friend cited an example (courtesy of Woman at Mile 0) of the Globe and Mail spinning a recent poll in the Conservatives’ favour. I decided to take a boo and see if this sign of the apocalypse might actually have come to pass.

At first glance, it does appear vaguely supportive of the Conservatives. However, on deeper perusal, it is packed with the usual junk assumptions and downright idiotic misrepresentations.

Some examples:

Even if he’s not setting Canadians’ hearts aflame, most have a neutral-to-positive impression of Mr. Harper.

Right up front, he’s not setting Canadians’ hearts aflame, and they are “neutral-to-positive”. I don’t call that a ringing endorsement.

With the most committed voter base of any party, he has the luxury of doing so without much risk of losing his current supporters.

This is a positive statement I’ll concede, but inaccurate. With the events of the spring, he is quickly eroding his conservative base. A lot of die-hard conservative supporters are thinking long and hard about this man they elected to be the Conservative PM. He hasn’t been representing the grass roots of conservatism well, but I don’t expect liberals to be aware of that – precious few keep a thumb on the pulse of the conservative blogosphere.

After all, in terms of party standings, the Conservatives are still tied with the Liberals in the low 30s. What’s holding them back? The reasons are evident in the data. A large majority of Canadians associate words such as “controlling” and “partisan” with Mr. Harper.

…thanks to whom?

They think he’s too right-wing. Most believe he’s too close to U.S. President George W. Bush.

Ayup, because the rest of the media won’t let up with the “HarperBusHitlerChimp” rhetoric. At all. Even in the face of Harper’s open opposition to America’s position on the Northwest Passage, intentions of exerting our own sovereignty and foreign policy as a separate and distinct nation from our past allies like the USA and England. What exactly has he done to get painted as a Bush wannabe or chattel of Dubya? Nothing. It was Martin that pushed Canada secretly into all kinds of North America infrastructure, immigration and such policies.

He’s not seen as particularly likeable. A majority don’t think he cares about people like them.

Funny how they think that, given he comes from the middle class, has worked for a living all his life, loves hockey and plays with his kids when he’s back at home on 24 Sussex. While our previous two Liberal PMs were upper crust elitists and the last one was a multimillionaire. So how did he get this “unapproachable” reputation? You guessed it? Our “unbiased” friends in the MSM!

Mr. Harper needs to work hard to find ways to connect to more ordinary Canadians. To help dispel his image as “controlling,” he would be well advised to share the limelight more.

Funny, since he did away with the daily “PM Scrum” personality cult that Paul Martin had going in Ottawa for years, he’s been a pariah in Ottawa. A guy tries not to be center of attention and he gets accused of it anyway. Makes sense.

But after more than 18 months in office, it’s clear what’s holding Mr. Harper back politically, both in terms of style and substance. So are some of the remedies at his disposal. He has tried some – witness his reversal on greenhouse gases. But so far they haven’t done the trick. The biggest question is whether he has the will or political agility to successfully pursue his opportunities for growth.

Sorry, the only foe he needs to outmanouvre is the media. If he hits on something that resonates with the people and is opposed by the media, and he can get the word on it past our intelligentsia to the people, watch out!

Political Fatigue over the State of the Media in Canada

Whew.

The summer’s almost over, and man am I getting fatigued politically.

I scan through National Newswatch, and all I see is “Harper no good, Harper mired in medicority, Harper in trouble, Afghanistan, Newfoundland, Opinion Polls”. What is it about the media that none of these things ever get turned around? I don’t expect the media to quit being negative, but why aren’t they asking the same questions of the Liberals, etc? Why isn’t the media asking, “If Harper is so mediocre, how come Dion has not made any headway whatsoever?” Why isn’t the media asking, “Why doesn’t the negative rantings of Dion and Layton over Afghanistan result in any gains in the opinion polls? Is this issue resonating with voters or not?”

It is just getting fatiguing, looking for a semblance of a conversation, and finding nothing. What happened to seriously discussing issues? Are we more polarized than ever before, or was political discourse always this way?

Opus on Radical Muslims: The Cartoon too Dangerous to Show

More silliness relating to Muslim fundamentalists and cartoons. This time newspapers are opting out even before anyone have a chance to get offended:

The Washington Post and several other newspapers around the country did not run Sunday’s installment of Berkeley Breathed’s “Opus,” in which the spiritual fad-seeking character Lola Granola appears in a headscarf and explains to her boyfriend, Steve, why she wants to become a radical Islamist.

See the cartoon here at Salon.com

Join the Writing Team at ThePolitic.com!

In an effort to expand ThePolitic’s scope and coverage of Canadian and world politics, we are looking for more writers to contribute to the following topics/areas:

* Canadian Politics (National and Provincial)
* US Politics
* Middle Eastern / Israeli Politics

We are particularly interested in attracting contributors with insight in provincial politics of Quebec, Atlantic Canada, and Ontario.

If you’re interested, please contact us. Prior experience writing for the Internet (or weblogs) isn’t required, but strongly encouraged. Please include your name, contact information and any relevant writing examples.

Also note, we will not be accepting any candidates who intend to cross-post between multiple weblogs – contributed material must be original. However, writers will retain copyright and ownership of contributed materials.

If you have any questions and or you want to apply, please contact Greg Farries.

Lee Harris on Radical Islam and Same-Sex Marriage

Fascinating interview on the Dennis Prager Radio Show with the author of “The Suicide of Reason,” Lee Harris.

Harris, a self-described “gay man” who dedicates his recent book to his “partner of twenty years,” tells how the orgins of Islam, be it the origins of an inner-worldly political community, were and are, out of necessity, violent. He argues that the very generosity of liberal values, when confronted by those who do not share such values, works to undermine the very security of Western liberal society.

Near the end of the interview, Harris shares why he is an opponent of same-sex marriage. He makes a point that I have argued here many times: traditional marriage is the very definition of marriage. Any partnership between two-persons of the same-sex is not, by definition, marriage; there’s no substantive equivalency.

In agreement with anyone of a conservative temperament, Harris argues that intellectuals should be highly wary of tinkering with basic traditional conventions, conventions that give Western society a basic ordering structure, from whence reason emerges.

This is an excellent point!

Once you start ignoring basic common sense differences between men and women, and basic differences between heterosexual and homosexual human relationships, you are no longer as in touch with the ordering structure of reality as you once were. And when common sense reason starts to flag in one area, such unreason is demonstratably contagious and liable to spread. Case in point: once “sexual orientation” was read into the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms and accepted as standard lingo in speaking of ALL persons, juridically and very narrowly, same-sex marriage became a more amenable, seemingly logical, permutation of Canadian jurisprudence.

Harris tells how he grew up a Southern Baptist and has a great deal of respect for many of “those people.” He says the very fact that he is tolerated as a gay man and allowed to live freely is a great accomplishment of civilization, especially when radical Islam would have him killed in the worst possible way. One can’t expect perfection from Western civilization, but rather be aware of how much better it is than the alternatives and WHY it is ABLE to be better than the alternatives.

Definitely an interview worth checking out!

Tony Blair: Delusions of Honesty

By the end of this masterpiece from Theodore Dalrymple, it’s hard to get the image of Tony Blair lying bruised and bloodied in a ditch somewhere out of your head.

Soon after Blair took office, however, a billionaire named Bernie Ecclestone offered the Labour Party a $2 million donation if the government exempted Formula 1 motor racing, which he controlled, from the ban on cigarette ads at sporting events. The government granted the exemption. After public exposure, Blair declared himself to be such a “straight kind of guy” that it was inconceivable that he had involved himself in such an unsavory arrangement—though clearly he had. It was his capacity to believe his own untruths that proved so persuasive to others; it was among his greatest political assets.

That was fast: Surete Quebec comes (halfway) clean

The Age of YouTube will not be a comfortable one for established authority:

* Quebec provincial police admitted Thursday that three of their officers disguised themselves as demonstrators during the protest at the North American leaders summit in Montebello, Que.

This next bit is not credible, however:

However, the police force denied allegations its undercover officers were there on Monday to provoke the crowd and instigate violence.

Right. Because nothing says “just keeping the peace” like wielding a rock.

Bush Puts War with Al Qaeda in Historical Context, invokes Vietnam

Speaking to the Veteran’s of Foreign Wars National Convention, George Bush ushered up some powerful examples from history to explain why America should not lose sight of victory in Iraq and Afghanistan. In a break with past avoidance of any comparison to Vietnam, President Bush takes it square on:

Three decades later, there is a legitimate debate about how we got into the Vietnam War and how we left. There’s no debate in my mind that the veterans from Vietnam deserve the high praise of the United States of America. (Applause.) Whatever your position is on that debate, one unmistakable legacy of Vietnam is that the price of America’s withdrawal was paid by millions of innocent citizens whose agonies would add to our vocabulary new terms like “boat people,” “re-education camps,” and “killing fields.”

There was another price to our withdrawal from Vietnam, and we can hear it in the words of the enemy we face in today’s struggle — those who came to our soil and killed thousands of citizens on September the 11th, 2001. In an interview with a Pakistani newspaper after the 9/11 attacks, Osama bin Laden declared that “the American people had risen against their government’s war in Vietnam. And they must do the same today.”

His number two man, Zawahiri, has also invoked Vietnam. In a letter to al Qaeda’s chief of operations in Iraq, Zawahiri pointed to “the aftermath of the collapse of the American power in Vietnam and how they ran and left their agents.”

Zawahiri later returned to this theme, declaring that the Americans “know better than others that there is no hope in victory. The Vietnam specter is closing every outlet.” Here at home, some can argue our withdrawal from Vietnam carried no price to American credibility — but the terrorists see it differently.

We must remember the words of the enemy. We must listen to what they say. Bin Laden has declared that “the war [in Iraq] is for you or us to win. If we win it, it means your disgrace and defeat forever.” Iraq is one of several fronts in the war on terror — but it’s the central front — it’s the central front for the enemy that attacked us and wants to attack us again. And it’s the central front for the United States and to withdraw without getting the job done would be devastating. (Applause.)

If we were to abandon the Iraqi people, the terrorists would be emboldened, and use their victory to gain new recruits. As we saw on September the 11th, a terrorist safe haven on the other side of the world can bring death and destruction to the streets of our own cities. Unlike in Vietnam, if we withdraw before the job is done, this enemy will follow us home. And that is why, for the security of the United States of America, we must defeat them overseas so we do not face them in the United States of America. (Applause.)

Recently, two men who were on the opposite sides of the debate over the Vietnam War came together to write an article. One was a member of President Nixon’s foreign policy team, and the other was a fierce critic of the Nixon administration’s policies. Together they wrote that the consequences of an American defeat in Iraq would be disastrous.

Here’s what they said: “Defeat would produce an explosion of euphoria among all the forces of Islamist extremism, throwing the entire Middle East into even greater upheaval. The likely human and strategic costs are appalling to contemplate. Perhaps that is why so much of the current debate seeks to ignore these consequences.” I believe these men are right.

In Iraq, our moral obligations and our strategic interests are one. So we pursue the extremists wherever we find them and we stand with the Iraqis at this difficult hour — because the shadow of terror will never be lifted from our world and the American people will never be safe until the people of the Middle East know the freedom that our Creator meant for all. (Applause.)

I recognize that history cannot predict the future with absolute certainty. I understand that. But history does remind us that there are lessons applicable to our time. And we can learn something from history. In Asia, we saw freedom triumph over violent ideologies after the sacrifice of tens of thousands of American lives — and that freedom has yielded peace for generations.

Peter Rodman explains why Bush’s history lesson correctly Assesses the consequences of defeat in Iraq for American global posturing.

So the president has his history right. The outcome in Indochina was not foreordained. Congress had the last word, however, between 1973 and 1975.

The strategic consequences of defeat in Indochina were also serious. Leonid Brezhnev crowed that the global “correlation of forces” had shifted in favor of “socialism,” and the Soviets went on a geopolitical offensive in the third world for a decade. Demoralized allied leaders in Europe as well as Asia feared the new Soviet aggressiveness and lamented the paralysis of American will. When Saddam invaded Kuwait in 1990, he and his colleagues invoked Vietnam as evidence that U.S. warnings did not need to be taken seriously. That’s what it means to lose credibility. Once lost, it has to be re-earned the hard way.

No analogies are ever complete, but — given our global leadership and the number of allies and friends that rely on us for their security — the consequences of an American defeat can be counted on to be terrible. How can anyone seriously think otherwise?

This Age of Ignorance

Victor Davis Hansen has written a succinct piece on what’s wrong with America’s education system; much the same criticism can be legitimately raised here in Canada.

the bleak statistics — whether a 70-percent high-school graduation rate as measured in a study a few years ago by the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, or poor math rankings in comparison with other industrial nations — come at a time when our schools inflate grades and often honor multiple valedictorians at high school graduation ceremonies. Aggregate state and federal education budgets are high. Too few A’s, too few top awards, and too little funding apparently don’t seem to be our real problems.

Of course, most critics agree that the root causes for our undereducated youth are not all the schools’ fault. Our present ambition to make every American youth college material — in a way our forefathers would have thought ludicrous — ensures that we will both fail in that utopian goal and lack enough literate Americans with critical vocational skills.

The disintegration of the American nuclear family is also at fault. Too many students don’t have two parents reminding them of the value of both abstract and practical learning.

What then can our elementary and secondary schools do, when many of their students’ problems begin at home or arise from our warped popular culture?

We should first scrap the popular therapeutic curriculum that in the scarce hours of the school day crams in sermons on race, class, gender, drugs, sex, self-esteem, or environmentalism. These are well-intentioned efforts to make a kinder and gentler generation more sensitive to our nation’s supposed past and present sins. But they only squeeze out far more important subjects.

The old approach to education saw things differently than we do. Education (“to lead out” or “to bring up”) was not defined as being “sensitive” to, or “correct” on, particular issues. It was instead the rational ability to make sense of the chaotic present through the abstract wisdom of the past.

So literature, history, math and science gave students plenty of facts, theorems, people, and dates to draw on. Then training in logic, language, and philosophy provided the tools to use and express that accumulated wisdom. Teachers usually did not care where all that training led their students politically — only that their pupils’ ideas and views were supported with facts and argued rationally.

But hope remains; order today your copy of The Encyclopedia of Stupidity.

Matthijs van Boxsel’s rollicking compendium of human follies and foibles is like no other encyclopedia. Cataloging acts of stupidity past and present, van Boxsel introduces us to a world in which peasants collect water with a sieve, men attempt to build towers without ladders, and “village idiots” and “dumb blondes” prove the veracity of the stereotypes-a world that we call home. Van Boxsel’s intent is not only to provide laughs on every page, which he does, but also to show readers how stupidity is the foundation of civilization. Through such anecdotes as “The Not Terribly Good Club of Great Britain” and “The Hell of Fools,” he dissects the idea of stupidity and finds that it is a crucial condition for intelligence, that blunders stimulate progress, and that failure is the basis for success.

Hailed as a “warming, enlightening, and invigorating read” (Manchester Evening News) and a “weirdly wonderful compilation” (Observer), The Encyclopaedia of Stupidity quietly instructs while it uproariously entertains, making the unassailable point that to err is indeed to be human.

« Previous Page — Next Page »