Month: February 2007

A reader dissents:

You’re being a little naive if you think that AEI’s goal is truly to inspire a real debate about the veracity of claims about man-made climate change.  This is right out of the theocon playbook on evolution.  The goal is not to have a real debate, because a real debate is something you can (and in both cases, when talking about scientific evidence, will) lose.  The goal is simply to muddy the waters, try and get the media to portray climate change as a ‘he said, he said’ kind of issue.  The fact is, there are a lot of scientists. You will find contrarians to any position imaginable.  For an ideologically-inspired organization to cherry-pick a few who are willing to say what they want to hear (especially for a fee!!) and publish those reports, instead of those scientists having to go through the peer-review process, reduces the scientific rigor of the debate.

Many people don’t have the time or interest to sift through the actual evidence, so they’ll see one story that says yes, and another that says no, and throw up their hands and say ‘oh well, whatever, who can know?’ That has real-life consequences. So work like this really has a disproportionate effect, in the sense that 5 scientists who say ‘man doesn’t cause climate change’ and are funded by oil companies can counteract the effect of hundreds or thousands of scientists who say ‘man does cause climate change’, but operate through the usual, scientifically-accepted channels. That’s why shenanigans like this have to be see the light of day, so at least everyone knows who’s pushing the pieces around.

Here’s a quote worth reading:

"All the Shiites have to do is tell everyone to lay low, wait for the Americans to leave, then when they leave you have a target list and within a day they’ll kill every Sunni leader in the country. It’ll be called the ‘Day of Death’ or something like that," said 1st Lt. Alain Etienne, 34, of Brooklyn, N.Y. "They say, ‘Wait, and we will be victorious.’ That’s what they preach. And it will be their victory."

Now go read Victor Davis Hanson’s latest partisan screed against the Democrats. If the Republicans had spent half the effort they have devoted to domestic partisanship to winning the war in Iraq, we may not be in the morass we are today.

What on earth does this sentence mean:

The walls of ignorance and prejudice and cruelty, which she railed against valiantly all her public life, have not fallen, but their truculence to do so does not speak against her determination to make them collapse.

"Truculence" to do so? Does she mean reluctance? Or is there some other meaning to truculence that I’m unaware of?

Mike Allen reports:

"I introduced myself and said, ‘Good evening, Senator, may I walk with you?’ He replied, ‘You can walk with me. That doesn’t mean you can ask questions.’ I chuckled, thinking he was kidding. ‘But you can certainly walk with me,’ he added. The Senator then underscored, ‘I’m sorry. I’m not answering questions.’ The encounter pointed to some of the unusual dynamics of the ’08 …

More here.

He’s been reading Ben Franklin about the vital importance of doubt:

For having lived long, I have experienced many instances of being obliged by better information, or fuller consideration, to change opinions even on important subjects, which I once thought right, but found to be otherwise. It is therefore that the older I grow, the more apt I am to doubt my own judgment, and to pay more respect to the judgment of others.

Next up: try some Hume, Hugh. Or even Burke. At some point in the future, you might even become a conservative.

The American public is much more mature about this than the Congress or the president.

In honor of Sarah Silverman:

(Hat tip: Michael.)

Some of you have written to let me know the meaning of the word truculence. Thanks, but I am well aware of its meaning. I am also aware of basic grammar. Angelou’s sentence makes no grammatical sense. Walls cannot have a "truculence to do" anything. If someone sent this sentence in unsolicited, the editors at the Washington Post would have sent it back, asking for it to be re-written in English. But it’s Maya Angelou and so they printed it. Leave aside the self-righteous pretentiousness and the exhausted metaphor. The piece is laughably bad.

A reader writes:

Federer is a great player. But to put him up against the greatest of all time, or even our lifetimes (yours being somewhat longer than mine) means we have to put him above Sampras, Agassi, Lendl, Borg, Becker, McEnroe, Connors and Laver.  Why does this not sit well with me?  All of those men had real rivalries with other players.  As Borg brought the game to new heights, McEnroe came along to challenge him.  Agassi did the same for Sampras.  With no one to challenge Federer it’s irrelevant whether he’s just better than the field or he’s pushed the game too far too fast. In either case, with no one to challenge him, it’s less meaningful when he wins every tournament. We don’t even start on the abundance of hard court tournaments which have made his somewhat-less-impressive work on clay so much less of a liability.

The ones we should all be excited about are Gonzalez (whose played definitively better tennis than Federer before their Final match-up) and that scrawny, odd, brilliant young Scot, Andy Murray.

I’m all for scrawny, brilliant Scots. And I may be suffering from a syndrome known to straight guys as Kournikova-blinders. But Federer is mesmerizing.

Like a lot of serious thinkers – Sigmund Freud and Leo Strauss spring to mind – Michel Foucault has not been well-served by his acolytes in the American academy. I find him an alternately repellent and compelling writer, on those few occasions when I think I have properly understood him. But he is not, pace Stanley Kurtz, a simple pomo lefty. In the last years of his life, he began to appreciate the achievement of classical liberalism. In an email exchange yesterday, I asked a Foucault scholar if my impression was correct. He responded:

Absolutely. He was interested in a Classical Greek aesthetics of the self and a positive view of civil society and the market economy. "History of Sexuality" emphasizes the Hellenistic ethics in an account of sexuality which is both liberatory and questioning of myths of repression and liberation. "Society Must be Defended" establishes a distinction between an absolutist modern state and a state which is limited by laws and civil society. Foucault was always critical of power, early on there was a Marxist element to that, but in the texts I mention above and others, he came to see Classical Liberal themes as the antidote to power. For example he emphasised the role French Physiocrats had as an antidote to mercantilist absolutism, and similarly the role of Odo group free market economists in Germany as a centre of intellectual resistance to Nazism.

His politics kept evolving even as his theory came closer to Classical Liberalism. A turning point seems to have been the Iranian revolution when he initially supported the revolution because Shia clerics he met convinced him their goals were spiritual rather than concerned with state power. He couldn’t avoid noticing the extreme abuse of human rights though and from that point on did not seek an alternative to what we could call Classical Liberalism, though his understanding was a very specific mix of participation in and observation of resistance to power and discrimination (including gay rights), the study of Hellenistic individualism, and a detailed study of the different ways power has operated in the modern world.

And he spelled his first name Michel.