Month: February 2006

I thought that might grab your attention. I’m referring to one simple thing: a gas tax. Here’s an argument for why it makes sense. Money quote:

"Suppose a politician promised to reveal the details of a simple proposal that would, if adopted, produce hundreds of billions of dollars in savings for American consumers, significant reductions in traffic congestion, major improvements in urban air quality, large reductions in greenhouse gas emissions, and substantially reduced dependence on Middle East oil. The politician also promised that the plan would require no net cash outlays from American families, no additional regulations and no expansion of the bureaucracy."

Note that this proposal does not represent a net increase in taxation. It just shifts taxation around to encourage thrift and innovation. I fail to see why it’s so poisonous politically. But then I ride a bike and take public transportation. Yeah, I know: damn liberal.

"Bush has done real violence to the principle of limited government with all of his talk about how the government has to move when someone is hurting and his aim to leave no child behind. Some of his programs are, I think, easily defended on the merits. But that doesn’t change the fact that as general philosophical issue [sic], Bush has conceded that the government is there to help in a way Reagan never would have. Sure, Reagan made exceptions to his general anti-government position. Sometimes they were pragmatic, sometimes they were legitimate exceptions (conservatives aren’t uniformly opposed to all government interventions), and sometimes his deviations were hypocritical, at least in the eyes of some. But such hypocrisy was the tribute conservatives must sometimes pay to politics. Bush has conceded much of the fundamental ground to liberals when it comes to the role of government. Now the argument about governmental problem solving is technical — ‘will it work?’ — rather than principled, ‘is it the government’s job?’" – Jonah Goldberg, National Review.

Jonah said much of this before the last election. My own view is that this will soon become the conservative consensus, if it isn’t already. It will take a generation to undo the damage that Bush has done to conservatism, America’s fiscal health, and the whole idea of limited government. My prediction: we will see huge tax increases soon after Bush leaves the scene. He will insist they are a betrayal of his legacy. They will, in fact, be the logical consequence of everything he has said and done. Once they get past their loathing, big government liberals may well look back on the Bush years and wonder at the miracle of how he did what they spent two generations failing to do.

Now, Moscow’s chief rabbi warns against a gay pride parade:

"Rabbi Lazar on Thursday said that anything promoting what he called ‘sexual perversions’ does not have the right to exist. ‘I would like to assure you, that the parade of homosexuals it is not less offensive to the feelings of believers than any caricatures in newspapers,’ Lazar said, linking the pride parade with the current furor over the cartoons of the Islamic Profit Mohammed published in Denmark."

Isn’t it amazing that the one thing that can unite Muslims, Jews and Orthodox Christians is hatred of gay people? Still: he didn’t advocate violence. That’s left to the Muslims.

"The most glaring truth is that Islam’s mobsters fear the West has it right: that we have perfected the very system Islam’s holy scriptures urged them to learn and practice. And having failed in their mission to lead their masses, they seek any excuse to demonize those of us in the West and to try to bring us down. They know they are losing the ideological struggle for hearts and minds, for life in all its different dimensions, and so they prepare themselves, and us, for Armageddon by starting fires everywhere in a display of Islamic unity intended to galvanize the masses they cannot feed, clothe, educate or house.

This is not Islam. And the faster its truest believers stand up and demonstrate its values and principles by actions, not words, the sooner a great religion will return to its rightful role as guide for nearly a quarter of humanity." – Mansoor Ijaz, in the Los Angeles Times, today.

Here’s a summary of the key demand from a largely peaceful demonstration in London:

"Their freedom of speech should be restricted because it hurts our religion. At the end of the day everyone needs to respect others’ religions. And we should strive for peace."

This is the voice of moderate Islam, and it’s important to listen. The great problem we have is that an essentially fundamentalist faith, which resists the capacity for internal dialogue, which refuses to subject its holiest texts to dispassionate scholarship, which regulates all aspects of human life very aggressively, and which aims at the submission of other religions – this faith now has to reconcile itself with a Western world long since accustomed to complete intellectual freedom, brutal satire, free-wheeling debate and secular government. To make matters worse, at the same time, we have even more extreme versions of the same faith – the Islamists and their terrorist allies – who eagerly take advantage of the polarization and alienation that already affects many Western Muslims. If we defend our freedoms, we risk pushing the moderates into the hands of the extremists. If we sacrifice our freedoms a little, we legitimize the very arguments that make theocracy possible, and invite the terrorists to push for more.

Leave aside the issue of mob violence for a moment. No moderate Muslim or "sensitive" Westerner is defending that. What of the non-violent request: that one faith be granted its taboos, that Western culture must abide by them, that the law be reformed to protect religious faiths from blasphemy or offense? It seems to me that we should indeed avoid gratuitous insult of Islam, and Christianity, or any faith. But it is a complete delusion to believe that the major source of our problem today is something called "Islamophobia." No: the problem is terrorism and tyranny propagated under the banner of Islam. Without that, no Danish cartoon could have been conceived of, let alone published. That is the real and far more blatant blasphemy. If 10,000 angry Muslims had marched in London after the bombing of a major mosque in Iraq, I’d be impressed. But they didn’t. Until they do, the West has nothing to apologize for. The Muslim world needs to take the beam out of its own eye, before it removes the speck from the West’s.

"I never imagined I would live to see the day when the United States and its satellites would use precisely the same arguments that the apartheid government used for detention without trial. It is disgraceful … One cannot find strong enough words to condemn what Britain and the United States and some of their allies have accepted," – bishop Desmond Tutu. Me neither.

"One has to think a hundred times before publishing something, doing something or drawing something," – Vladimir Putin.
 

I’m not sure if he’s a neoconservative. But he’s definitely against al Qaeda.

"Shooting Victim Apologizes to Cheney" – CNN, yesterday, as noted by Josh. Just substitute Kim Jong Il for Cheney, and it doesn’t seem such a weird news story.

The blogosphere doom-mongers and critics are gaining traction. Dan Gross predicts meltdown here. I enjoyed this Financial Times essay a great deal, although I strongly disagree that Orwell’s prolixity was somehow detrimental to his work. (I love his essays on English cooking, the ideal pub, and the perfect cup of tea: all classic blog-fodder) The FT essay also fails to grasp how readers contribute to the process and act as a collective, corrective brain unavailable to the MSM. Still, the evanescence of bloggery is undeniable:

"And that, in the end, is the dismal fate of blogging: it renders the word even more evanescent than journalism; yoked, as bloggers are, to the unending cycle of news and the need to post four or five times a day, five days a week, 50 weeks of the year, blogging is the closest literary culture has come to instant obsolescence. No Modern Library edition of the great polemicists of the blogosphere to yellow on the shelf; nothing but a virtual tomb for a billion posts – a choric song of the word-weary bloggers, forlorn mariners forever posting on the slumberless seas of news."

Unlike, say, the Washington Post? The point of journalism of all kinds is its evanescence. I’m writing a book now; and it’s an utterly different exercize from bloggery. I cannot write it off the cuff; I think and re-think it every day. I revise and scrub and re-write and finesse and edit – before I publish. It would be great if the timing is perfect (October this year), but the point of a book is not necessarily to hit the perfect moment, but to make a longer-lasting statement. I.e. it’s not journalism. I had one memorable flash of revelation about journalism, over a decade ago. I’d written my latest column for the Sunday Times. Saturday night, I had a panic that I’d gotten something wrong, called the paper up and got the over-night sub-editors. The subs, as they are known in Fleet Street, are the real editors. They get to slice and dice your copy if an ad comes in too large. I huffed and puffed for a few minutes about my possible error, only to get the memorable reply (in broad Cockney):

"Aw, I wouldn’t worry about that, mate. It’s fish and chips soon, mate. Fish and chips."

For the uninitiated, the correct receptacle for fish and chips, Brit-style, is to have them wrapped in newspaper. Sooner rather than later, my imperfect prose would be warming a piece of battered cod. Google seems almost dignified in comparison.