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Left-Wing
Hates America, Says Author (11/07/02) new
By Michael L. Betsch at Cybercast News Service
“‘The left talks a great deal about diversity, but the diversity
that exists on college campuses is a diversity where you have a faculty
that looks like the United Nations, but thinks like a San Francisco coffee
house,’ Flynn said. For example, he said the Left hates Christianity’s
influence in American society because it is an ‘intolerant’
religion. ‘But if you look at America, people of all faiths can practice
their religion here,’ Flynn said. ‘You’re not going to
be able to practice your faith in a lot of places outside of western civilization.’”
Failures
of Nerve (November 2002) new
By Roger Kimball in The New Criterion
“Orwell noted that pacifism was ‘objectively pro-Nazi’
because it inculcated an attitude that aided Englands enemies. Just so,
anti-Americanism is objectively pro-terrorist. It was not surprising that
the Nazis did all they could to encourage pacifism among the English (just
as the Soviets actively aided the anti-War movement in America in the
1960s and 1970s). Similarly, anti-Americanism helps to create a climate
where terrorism is excused, rationalized, explained explained away.
We deserved it; we had it coming; arrogance; poverty; the environment;
root causes.... Pacifism was built around phrases that sounded pleasant
(peace, love, non-violence) but that were essentially deceptive because
they were unrealistic that is, untrue to the nature of reality, to the
way the world actually works (as distinct from the way we might wish that
it did). ‘To abjure violence,’ Orwell noted, ‘it is necessary
to have no experience of it.’”
Retreats
into fantasy (November 2002) new
By David Pryce-Jones in The New Criterion
“In the superficial sense that they seized power and initiated regimes,
the nationalist leaders of the 1950s and 1960s succeeded. In some countries,
for example in Indonesia, Malaysia, and sub-Saharan Africa, they seemed
to have restored the rightful sense of dignity to their people. In the
Arab countries, however, independence has brought neither freedom nor
dignity but one-man rule secured by a single party and the military and
secret police apparatus. The archetypal Arab leader remains Gamal Abdul
Nasser, the undisputed leader of Egypt from 1953 till his death in 1970.
What he claimed to be building was Arab socialism. What in fact he built
was a second-hand totalitarian state with neither human rights, nor respect
for life and property. Other Arab countries, even those that were nominally
monarchies, imitated the model or deferred to it, also relying on the
military and secret police apparatus.”
Yearning
to be liked (November 2002) new
By John Derbyshire in The New Criterion
“Try to imagine that your own notion of life in the United States
was constructed entirely from American movies and TV programs. You would
perceive my country as being inhabited by a mix of gigantic, steroid-enhanced
basketball stars, exquisitely beautiful young people with perfect teeth
and musculature, gangsters, detectives, lawyers, and freakish pop singers.
We live in palatial apartments, do very little work, sleep around a lot,
and get our way mainly by murdering each other. It is not much of a secret,
I think, that a large proportion of American movies are made for export.
The people of the Third World watch them with fascination. Unfortunately,
fascination is not the same as admiration or fondness. It can coexist
very happily with, for example, disgust.”
Behind
the Veil: A Muslim Woman Speaks Out (11/09/02) new
In The New York Times by Marlise Simons
“The theme of injustice toward women in Islamic countries has become
common in the West, but it has gained fresh currency through Ms. Hirsi
Ali’s European perspective, her study of Dutch immigrants and her
own life. Born in Mogadishu, she grew up a typical Muslim girl in Somalia.
When she was 5, she underwent the ‘cruel ritual,’ as she called
it, of genital cutting. When her father, a Somali opposition politician,
had to flee the country’s political troubles, the family went to
Saudi Arabia, where, she said, she was kept veiled and, much of the time,
indoors. At 22, her father forced her to marry a distant cousin, a man
she had never seen. But a friend helped her to escape and she finally
obtained political asylum in the Netherlands. She was shocked when, as
a university student, she held a job as an interpreter for Dutch immigration
and social workers and discovered hidden ‘suffering on a terrible
scale’ among Muslim women even in the Netherlands. She entered safe
houses for women and girls, most of them Turkish and Moroccan immigrants,
who had run away from domestic violence or forced marriages. Many had
secret abortions.”
The
Reform Islam Needs (Autumn 2002) new
By James Q. Wilson in City Journal
“Freedom of conscience has made the difference. In an old world where
knowledge came from libraries, and scientific experiments were rare, freedom
would not be so important. But in the new world, knowledge and all that
it can produce come from the sharp challenge of competing ideas tested
by standards of objective evidence. In Istanbul, Muslims printed no book
until 1729, and thereafter only occasionally. By contrast, the West became
a world in which books were published starting three centuries earlier
and where doubt and self-criticism were important. Of course, doubt and
self-criticism can become, as William Bennett has observed, a self-destructive
fetish, but short of that calamity, they are the source of human progress.
The central question is not why freedom of conscience failed to come to
much of Islam but why it came at all to the West. Though Westerners will
conventionally assign great weight to the arguments made by the defenders
of freedom, I do not think that the ideas of Milton, Locke, Erasmus, and
Spinoza though important were decisive. What made religious toleration
and later freedom of conscience possible in England was not theoretical
argument but political necessity. It was necessary, first in England and
later in America and much of Europe, because rulers trying to govern nations
could not do so without granting freedom to people of different faiths.”
This
Is Serious: Dominance for Republicans. Vindication for the president.
And a good showing from the American people. (11/06/02) new
By David Brooks in The Weekly Standard
“The Republicans should not read a radical ideological mandate into
the results tonight. But there is a trend here. The American people are
fundamentally serious. They know that the most important problem facing
the country right now is terrorism and security. They know that George
W. Bush is basically right on how to approach this problem. They know
it is important to send people to Washington to support the president.
In key states, they are doing that.... Don’t underestimate the importance
of the Wellstone memorial service/rally. The polls shifted in the last
few days. One big event was that rally. People saw liberal self-righteousness
and they remembered that they don't like it. People saw the future of
the Democratic party and its name was Walter Mondale.”
Fallout
from a Memorial: Did the memorial service for Paul Wellstone cost Democrats
the election? (11/18/02) new
In Time by Matthew Cooper
“A backlash against the politically charged service almost certainly
helped Norm Coleman beat Walter Mondale for Wellstone’s Minnesota
Senate seat. And a private poll by Bill Clinton’s former pollster,
Mark Penn, suggests the service backfired on Democrats nationally as well.
Penn found that 68% of voters knew about the service a high awareness
of an event broadcast live nationally only on C-SPAN. What’s more,
49% of voters said the service made them less likely to vote for a Democrat
and 67% of independents said they felt that way.”
The
Gerrymander Scandal: Why bother voting for Congress? Redistricting has
already determined the outcome. (11/10/01) new
By the Editors of The Wall Street Journal
Americans will go to the polls a year from now in the quaint belief that
they will be electing a new Congress. But the real story is that nearly
all of those races have already been decided — by politicians in
backrooms and long before anyone even votes. The reason is the bipartisan
scandal known as redistricting, or more colorfully as the "gerrymander."
That is the process by which state politicians sit down every 10 years
to carve up Congressional districts. This time they’re doing it with
an even more blatant mix than usual of partisanship and incumbent protection.
The result is that perhaps only 30 of 435 seats in the U.S. House of Representatives
will even be competitive next year.“”
The
Gerrymandered Democrats: Incumbency protection isn’t good for the
minority party or democracy. (11/05/02) new
By the Editors of The Wall Street Journal
“Gerrymanders are hardly new, but it used to be that politicians
had to guess how to draw district lines every 10 years. Nowadays they
use computer databases that can account for voter tendencies down to the
city block. Nowadays, too, politicians tend to be careerists who prize
incumbency above even partisanship. So rather than go for broke every
decade by creating many competitive seats, their first priority is to
protect themselves. This is the box canyon Democrats have walked into
this year. In California, Texas, New York and Illinois, accounting for
nearly one-third of all House seats, they conspired with GOP incumbents
to freeze the status quo. The result is that in America’s largest
state of California, which is increasingly Democratic, only one of 53
House races is even competitive, and that one only because Gary Condit
became famous. Republicans in the state still can’t believe their
good luck.”
Based
on Koranic Verses, Interpretations, and Traditions, Muslim Clerics State:
The Jews Are the Descendants of Apes, Pigs, And Other Animals
(11/01/02)
By Aluma Solnick at The Middle East Media Research Institute
“Depicting Jews and sometimes also Zionists as ‘the descendants
of apes and pigs’ is extremely widespread today in public discourse
in the Arab and Islamic worlds. For example, in a weekly sermon in April
2002, Al-Azhar Sheikh Muhammad Sayyid Tantawi, the highest-ranking cleric
in the Sunni Muslim world, called the Jews ‘the enemies of Allah,
descendants of apes and pigs.’ In one of his sermons, Saudi sheikh
Abd Al-Rahman Al-Sudayyis, imam and preacher at the Al-Haraam mosque
the most important mosque in Mecca beseeched Allah to annihilate the
Jews. He also urged the Arabs to give up peace initiatives with them because
they are ‘the scum of the human race, the rats of the world, the
violators of pacts and agreements, the murderers of the prophets, and
the offspring of apes and pigs.’”
Pigs,
Jews & War: Fronts in the clash of civilizations. (11/01/02)
By Jonah Goldberg at The National Review Online
“Jean Francois Revel wrote, ‘Clearly, a civilization that feels
guilty for everything it is and does will lack the energy and conviction
to defend itself.’ Well, increasingly I can’t help but think
that the liberals of Europe and the leftists of America (there’s
still hope for our liberals) have lost the energy and the conviction to
defend themselves. They cannot grasp that our enemies especially those
hailing from the Third World cannot be reasoned with. It doesn’t
matter if we wronged them in the past. It doesn’t matter if their
historical grievances have weight. What matters, as a matter of pure survival
and morality, is what they believe today and what they do because of those
beliefs. Germany had any number of legitimate grievances about the Treaty
of Versailles and its treatment at the hands of the victors in World War
I. That doesn’t justify Nazism.”
The
Faith-Based Left: Getting behind the debate. (02/05/01)
By Stanley Kurtz at National Review Online
“Conservatives and liberals alike have bought into the notion that
we face a choice between value-free programs that ignore the individual
and simply dole out material goods, and faith-based programs that look
to transform character by instilling morality. Certainly there are food
banks and soup kitchens that fit the model of a strictly secular giveaway
that makes neither moral nor behavioral demands on its beneficiaries.
(Ironically, many of these effectively secular programs are run by churches.)
But the government already gives legal and financial support to a raft
of coercive and morally fraught leftist social programs that are religious
in all but name. These programs are designed to turn their beneficiaries
into gender warriors and militant multi-culturalists whether they like
it or not.”
The
Church of the Left: Finding meaning in liberalism. (05/31/01)
By Stanley Kurtz at National Review Online
“Liberalism arose as a solution to the destructive religious wars
of Europe’s past, and succeeded because it allowed people of differing
religious perspectives to live peacefully and productively in the same
society. Designed to make the world safe for adherents of differing faiths,
liberalism itself was never supposed to be a faith. But that is exactly
what liberalism has become. And this transformation of liberalism into
a de facto religion explains a lot about what we call ‘political
correctness.’”
Our
Secularist Democratic Party (Fall 2002)
By Louis Bolce and Gerald De Maio in The Public
Interest
“Anyone who has followed American politics over the past decade cannot
help but feel some concern about the supposed fundamentalist Christian
threat to democratic civility, pluralism, and tolerance. At the very least,
the attentive citizen would find it hard not to regard the cultural and
political positions of fundamentalists as outside the mainstream, given
the volume of media stories that have conveyed this point. At the same
time, the media’s obsession with politicized fundamentalism distracts
public attention from the changing role of religion in political life
today. In particular, the media overlooks the remarkable erosion of denominational
boundaries that until a quarter century ago defined the religious dimension
of partisan conflict, with Catholics, Jews, and southern evangelicals
aligned with the Democratic party and nonsouthern white, mostly mainline
Protestants forming the religious base of the Republicans. Also, the media
mistakenly frames cultural conflict since the 1970s as entirely the result
of fundamentalist revanchism. In so doing, the media ignores the growing
influence of secularists in the Democratic party and obfuscates how their
worldview is just as powerful a determinant of social attitudes and voting
behavior as is a religiously traditionalist outlook.”
UW-Waukesha
astir over column: Student writer links black fashion, community, parents
to Young’s death (10/25/02)
By Scott Williams in The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
“The fatal mob beating of Charlie Young Jr. is stirring racial tensions
on a college campus here after a student newspaper column linked the Milwaukee
incident to lifestyles and struggles in the African-American community.
‘Stop the welfare payments and you’ll end the madness,’
wrote assistant editor Dan Hubert in the latest issue of the Observer,
University of Wisconsin-Waukesha’s student newspaper. Since the column
rolled off the presses earlier this week, angry students have demanded
Hubert’s expulsion from school and called for the university to cut
off funding for the Observer.”
Student
columnist apologizes but defends stance at forum: UW-Waukesha crowd sounds
off about bigotry, rights (10/30/02)
By Scott Williams in The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
“Attracting more than 200 students and others to the University of
Wisconsin-Waukesha, the nearly two-hour forum was organized in response
to a student newspaper column that linked African-American culture to
a deadly mob attack in Milwaukee. The uproar that followed has turned
an uneasy spotlight on the Waukesha college, as students and administrators
struggle to balance freedom of the press with racially charged commentary
that some view as hate speech.”
Zigging
and zagging on the sniper’s trail (10/21/02)
By Mark Steyn in The National Post
“When the expert commentators get so much of the easily verifiable
stuff wrong, it’s hard to see why their airier fancies should command
respect. Is the sniper linked to al-Qaeda? ‘Most unlikely,’
said Elliott Leyton, a St. John’s professor of anthropology, in The
Globe And Mail. ‘Such groups (religious or political) generally find
their murderous pleasures in bombs, airplanes and gas, not rifles.’
In fairness to the Islamofascists, when it comes to their ‘murderous
pleasures’ variety is the spice of death. They disdain a consistent
M.O. Much of what they do is unprecedented: September 11th, the shoe bomber,
the Afghan resistance leader they assassinated by posing as interviewers
and killing him with a disguised camera. Before I rule out the Islamists,
I’d want a better reason than Professor Leyton’s.”
We
angry white males were right about the sniper (10/27/02)
By Mark Steyn in The London Telegraph
“You get the picture: sure, Muslim fundamentalists can be pretty
extreme, but what about all our Christian fundamentalists? Unfortunately,
for the old moral equivalence to hold up, the Christians really need to
get off their fundamentalist butts and start killing more people. At the
moment, the brilliantly versatile Muslim fundamentalists are gunning down
Maryland schoolkids and bus drivers, hijacking Moscow theatres, self-detonating
in Israeli pizza parlours, blowing up French oil tankers in Yemen, and
slaughtering nightclubbers in Bali, while Christian fundamentalists are,
er, sounding extremely strident in their calls for the return of prayer
in school.”
Coloring
the sniper news (10/11/02)
By Michelle Malkin in Jewish World Review
“The media immediately embraced the Angry White Male theory by sensationalizing
the cops’ questioning over the weekend of one Robert Gene Baker.
Newspaper reports described him as ‘heavily tattooed’ and ‘linked’
to ‘militia and white supremacist’ groups. The headlines screamed:
‘Supremacist Sought in Sniping Spree’ and ‘Neo Nazi Named
as Sniper Murders Suspect.’ But in fact, Baker was never a suspect
and had no weapons on him at the time he was taken into custody for an
outstanding auto-theft warrant. The AWM theory remains a plausible one,
of course. But it isn’t the only one. You won’t hear Katie Couric
or Peter Jennings talking about it with their conventional-thinking experts,
but there is a significant possibility that the sniper and the sniper’s
support system could be non-white Muslim extremists with ties to Osama
bin Laden’s al Qaeda network.”
Who
let Lee Malvo loose? (10/25/02)
By Michelle Malkin at TownHall
“The mainstream media informed us this week that Lee Malvo, the reportedly
‘17-year-old’ youth charged as a material witness in the sniper
investigation along with John Mohammed, is a ‘Jamaican national.’
As of this writing (Oct. 24), the Immigration and Naturalization Service
refused to comment publicly on the exact nature of Malvo’s immigration
status. Here are the facts the INS doesn’t want you to know: Lee
Malvo is an illegal alien from Jamaica who jumped ship in Miami in June
2001. He was apprehended by the Border Patrol in Bellingham, Wash., in
December 2001, but was then let go by the INS district in Seattle in clear
violation of federal law and contrary to what the arresting Border Patrol
officers intended, according to my law enforcement sources. ”
With
the Sniper, TV Profilers Missed Their Mark (10/25/02)
By Paul Farhi and Linton Weeks in The Washington Post
“Almost everything the sniper ‘profilers’ and pundits told
the media over the past three weeks turns out to have been off the mark,
considering the very real profiles of the two people arrested early yesterday.
The men and women who had been described on the air and in print as ‘forensic
psychologists’ and ‘former FBI investigators’ took many
swings at the who and why of the sniper case — and mostly missed....
The important question is, was the orgy of speculation harmless —
or was there a very dangerous undercurrent to it? By saturating the public’s
consciousness with phantom images of thirtyish white men, did the media
profilers distract attention from a more general and possibly open-minded
search for the perpetrators?”
Arm-Twisting:
A historian’s book makes the case for gun control. Other scholars
hotly dispute his claims. (04/05/01)
By Kimberley A. Strassel at OpinionJournal
“Released by highbrow publisher Knopf last year, Arming America
was a historical and political bombshell, a rare piece of work that purported
not only to overturn long-held historical beliefs, but to alter modern
politics profoundly in the process. Few colonial Americans owned guns,
Mr. Bellesiles argues. He bases this on his study of probate and military
records, travel narratives and other primary sources.... Unsurprisingly,
left-leaning journalists, academics and politicians went weak at the knees....
But there’s a problem. A growing number of respected scholars, from
across the political spectrum, are saying that Mr. Bellesiles’s research
and conclusions are wrong.”
Guns
and Poses: Michael Bellesiles’s work is charming and disarming —
but sloppy and maybe fraudulent. (02/22/02)
By Kimberley A. Strassel at OpinionJournal
“Arming America came out in September 2000. About that time,
James Lindgren, a professor of law at Northwestern, wanted to reanalyze
Mr. Bellesiles’s probate information for his own research. He sent
Mr. Bellesiles a routine e-mail in August 2000 asking the Emory historian
for details about which records he had used and where to find them. Mr.
Bellesiles wrote back that he’d read them on microfilm in the federal
archives in East Point, Ga. But when Mr. Lindgren and others made calls,
they were told the facility had no such records. Mr. Bellesiles then sent
an e-mail saying he’d read them in some 30 different places across
the country. He also told Mr. Lindgren he couldn’t immediately send
detailed information on which records he’d used because his counts
made on legal pads had been damaged by a flood.”
Academic
Accountability: An antigun scholar defends his shoddy work by calling
critics names. (06/06/02)
By Kimberley A. Strassel at OpinionJournal
“Several weeks ago, in a bold and impressive move, the NEH became
the first institution to treat the accusations against Mr. Bellesiles
with the gravity they deserve. It came in response to a $30,000 NEH-funded
fellowship that the Newberry Library, a Chicago research institution,
awarded Mr. Bellesiles in February 2001. Last month NEH deputy chairman
Lynne Munson wrote to the library that in light of the ‘serious question
concerning academic integrity,’ that have been raised about Mr. Bellesiles,
the NEH wanted its name removed from the fellowship. The Newberry Library’s
defense is that the criticism of Mr. Bellesiles’s book didn’t
take on a ‘scholarly character’ until after it had granted the
fellowship. But whatever the timing, the fact remains that Newberry never
did anything about revoking or suspending the fellowship — even when
serious questions about Mr. Bellesiles’s academic integrity came
to the fore.”
Michael
Bellesiles Resigns from Emory Faculty (10/25/02)
By Robert A. Paul in a Press Release from Emory
University
“I have accepted the resignation of Michael Bellesiles from his position
as Professor of History at Emory University, effective December 31, 2002.
Although we would not normally release any of the materials connected
with a case involving the investigation of faculty misconduct in research,
in light of the intense scholarly interest in the matter I have decided,
with the assent of Professor Bellesiles as well as of the members of the
Investigative Committee, to make public the report of the Investigative
Committee appointed by me to evaluate the allegations made against Professor
Bellesiles (none of the supporting documents, however, are being made
public).”
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The
Role of Government in Education (1955)
By Milton Friedman in Economics and the Public Interest
“This re-examination of the role of government in education suggests
that the growth of governmental responsibility in this area has been unbalanced.
Government has appropriately financed general education for citizenship,
but in the process it has been led also to administer most of the schools
that provide such education. Yet, as we have seen, the administration
of schools is neither required by the financing of education, nor justifiable
in its own right in a predominantly free enterprise society. Government
has appropriately been concerned with widening the opportunity of young
men and women to get professional and technical training, but it has sought
to further this objective by the inappropriate means of subsidizing such
education, largely in the form of making it available free or at a low
price at governmentally operated schools. The lack of balance in governmental
activity reflects primarily the failure to separate sharply the question
what activities it is appropriate for government to finance from
the question what activities it is appropriate for government to administer
— a distinction that is important in other areas of government activity
as well. Because the financing of general education by government is widely
accepted, the provision of general education directly by govern mental
bodies has also been accepted. But institutions that provide general education
are especially well suited also to provide some kinds of vocational and
professional education, so the acceptance of direct government provision
of general education has led to the direct provision of vocational education.
To complete the circle, the provision of vocational education has, in
turn, meant that it too was financed by government, since financing has
been predominantly of educational institutions not of particular kinds
of educational services.”
Advice
to Graduates About Advice (06/06/1971)
By Edward C. Banfield at Claremont McKenna College
“Figures of speech, especially metaphors, are peculiarly serviceable
to people who give advice about social problems. The use of them tends
to create an emotional response in the listener that enhances the urgency
of the ‘problem’ thus raising the value of the putative ‘solution’
that the advice-giver offers. I sometimes wonder if we could have an ‘urban
crisis’ without a good supply of metaphors. Suppose that a writer
could not speak of ‘decaying neighborhoods’ but instead had
to say what he meant straight out — say that the well-off have moved
away from aging unfashionable neighborhoods, that this has given the less
well-off opportunities to move into housing better than they formerly
had, and that they, for obvious reasons, are in most instances disposed
to spend less on the repair and maintenance of houses than the former
occupiers were. Or suppose that a United States Senator instead of saying,
as one recently did, that ‘the cities are mortally sick and getting
sicker’ and that the ‘states are in a state of chronic crisis’
had to speak plainly — in this instance, perhaps, to say that although
in the last decade the cities and states have increased their revenues
by a factor of three, there are nevertheless many voters who would like
to have more spent, provided of course that the taxes are paid mainly
by others.”
The
End of History? (Summer 1989)
By Francis Fukuyama in The National Interest
“The triumph of the West, of the Western idea, is evident first of
all in the total exhaustion of viable systematic alternatives to Western
liberalism. In the past decade, there have been unmistakable changes in
the intellectual climate of the world’s two largest communist countries,
and the beginnings of significant reform movements in both. But this phenomenon
extends beyond high politics and it can be seen also in the ineluctable
spread of consumerist Western culture in such diverse contexts as the
peasants’ markets and color television sets now omnipresent throughout
China, the cooperative restaurants and clothing stores opened in the past
year in Moscow, the Beethoven piped into Japanese department stores, and
the rock music enjoyed alike in Prague, Rangoon, and Tehran. What we may
be witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War, or the passing of a
particular period of post-war history, but the end of history as such:
that is, the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the
universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human
government. This is not to say that there will no longer be events to
fill the pages of Foreign Affairs’s yearly summaries
of international relations, for the victory of liberalism has occurred
primarily in the realm of ideas or consciousness and is as yet incomplete
in the real or material world. But there are powerful reasons for believing
that it is the ideal that will govern the material world in the long run.”
An
Explosion of Green (Apr. 1995)
By Bill McKibben in The Atlantic
“In the early nineteenth century the cleric Timothy Dwight reported
that the 240-mile journey from Boston to New York City passed through
no more than twenty miles of forest. Surveying the changes wrought by
farmers and loggers in New Hampshire, he wrote, ‘The forests are
not only cut down, but there appears little reason to hope that they will
ever grow again.’ Less than two centuries later, despite great increases
in the state’s population, 90 percent of New Hampshire is covered
by forest. Vermont was 35 percent woods in 1850 and is 80 percent today,
and even Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Rhode Island have seen woodlands
rebound to the point where they cover nearly three fifths of southern
New England. This process, which began as farmers abandoned the cold and
rocky pastures of the East for the fertile fields of the Midwest, has
not yet run its course.... This unintentional and mostly unnoticed renewal
of the rural and mountainous East — not the spotted owl, not the
salvation of Alaska’s pristine ranges — represents the great
environmental story of the United States, and in some ways of the whole
world. Here, where ‘suburb’ and ‘megalopolis’ were
added to the world’s vocabulary, an explosion of green is under way,
one that could offer hope to much of the rest of the planet.”
The
Doomslayer (Feb. 1997)
By Ed Regis in Wired
“The world is getting progressively poorer, and it’s all because
of population, or more precisely, overpopulation. There’s
a finite store of resources on our pale blue dot, spaceship Earth, our
small and fragile tiny planet, and we’re fast approaching its ultimate
carrying capacity. The limits to growth are finally upon us, and we’re
living on borrowed time. The laws of population growth are inexorable.
Unless we act decisively, the final result is written in stone: mass poverty,
famine, starvation, and death. Time is short, and we have to act now.
That’s the standard and canonical litany.... There’s just one
problem with The Litany, just one slight little wee imperfection: every
item in that dim and dreary recitation, each and every last claim, is
false.... Thus saith The Doomslayer, one Julian
L. Simon, a neither shy nor retiring nor particularly mild-mannered
professor of business administration at a middling eastern-seaboard state
university. Simon paints a somewhat different picture of the human condition
circa 1997. ‘Our species is better off in just about every measurable
material way,’ he says. ‘Just about every important long-run
measure of human material welfare shows improvement over the decades and
centuries, in the United States and the rest of the world. Raw materials
— all of them — have become less scarce rather than more. The
air in the US and in other rich countries is irrefutably safer to breathe.
Water cleanliness has improved. The environment is increasingly healthy,
with every prospect that this trend will continue.’”
A brilliant parody:
Transgressing
the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity
(Spring/Summer 1996)
By Alan Sokal in Social Text
“There are many natural scientists, and especially physicists, who
continue to reject the notion that the disciplines concerned with social
and cultural criticism can have anything to contribute, except perhaps
peripherally, to their research. Still less are they receptive to the
idea that the very foundations of their worldview must be revised or rebuilt
in the light of such criticism. Rather, they cling to the dogma imposed
by the long post-Enlightenment hegemony over the Western intellectual
outlook, which can be summarized briefly as follows: that there exists
an external world, whose properties are independent of any individual
human being and indeed of humanity as a whole; that these properties are
encoded in ‘eternal’ physical laws; and that human beings can
obtain reliable, albeit imperfect and tentative, knowledge of these laws
by hewing to the ‘objective’ procedures and epistemological
strictures prescribed by the (so-called) scientific method.”
... and, in explanation, ...
A
Physicist Experiments with Cultural Studies (May/June 1996)
By Alan Sokal in Lingua Franca
“For some years I’ve been troubled by an apparent decline in
the standards of rigor in certain precincts of the academic humanities.
But I’m a mere physicist: If I find myself unable to make heads or
tails of jouissance and differance, perhaps that just reflects
my own inadequacy. So, to test the prevailing intellectual standards,
I decided to try a modest (though admittedly uncontrolled) experiment:
Would a leading North American journal of cultural studies — whose
editorial collective includes such luminaries as Fredric Jameson and Andrew
Ross — publish an article liberally salted with nonsense if (a) it
sounded good and (b) it flattered the editors’ ideological preconceptions?
The answer, unfortunately, is yes.... What’s going on here? Could
the editors really not have realized that my article was written as a
parody?”
Networks
Need a Reality Check: A firsthand account of liberal bias at CBS News.
(02/13/1996)
By Bernard Goldbert in The Wall Street Journal
“There are lots of reasons fewer people are watching network news,
and one of them, I’m more convinced than ever, is that our viewers
simply don’t trust us. And for good reason. The old argument that
the networks and other ‘media elites’ have a liberal bias is
so blatantly true that it’s hardly worth discussing anymore. No,
we don’t sit around in dark corners and plan strategies on how we’re
going to slant the news. We don’t have to. It comes naturally to
most reporters.”
There
is No Time, There Will Be Time (11/18/1998)
By Peggy Noonan in Forbes ASAP
“When you consider who is gifted and crazed with rage... when you
think of the terrorist places and the terrorist countries... who do they
hate most? The Great Satan, the United States. What is its most important
place? Some would say Washington. I would say the great city of the United
States is the great city of the world, the dense 10-mile-long island called
Manhattan, where the economic and media power of the nation resides, the
city that is the psychological center of our modernity, our hedonism,
our creativity, our hard-shouldered hipness, our unthinking arrogance.”
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