In Spring 2002, _Dissent_ published Michael Walzer’s essay, “Can There Be A Decent Left?,” which played as big a part as any piece of writing in generating the fractures among lefty intellectuals over the Iraq war. Although Walzer was later to come out in (mildly expressed) opposition to the Iraq war, he calumniated the left for its persistent failure to wake up to the reality of global terrorism.
The radical failure of the left’s response to the events of last fall raises a disturbing question: can there be a decent left in a superpower? Or more accurately, in the only superpower? Maybe the guilt produced by living in such a country and enjoying its privileges makes it impossible to sustain a decent (intelligent, responsible, morally nuanced) politics. Maybe festering resentment, ingrown anger, and self-hate are the inevitable result of the long years spent in fruitless opposition to the global reach of American power. Certainly, all those emotions were plain to see in the left’s reaction to September 11, in the failure to register the horror of the attack or to acknowledge the human pain it caused, in the schadenfreude of so many of the first responses, the barely concealed glee that the imperial state had finally gotten what it deserved. Many people on the left recovered their moral balance in the weeks that followed; there is at least the beginning of what should be a long process of self-examination. But many more have still not brought themselves to think about what really happened.
When a man gets to be around 40 – maybe a bit older – he starts to look back on life and wonder: what thing have I done for which I will be remembered? The next thing he does is start a webcomic. Maybe sell a few t-shirts, other Cafe Press-type stuff. Which brings us to:
No, really. I honestly don’t know whether it’s a comic or not. It’s an illustrated childrens book for adults, maybe. I’m planning to serialize it on Flickr. Here’s the set. Subscribe to the RSS feed! I decided to start things out by posting the first 21 pages. I’ll be adding a page a day, weekdays. (Not like there’s a story or anything, but it rhymes.)
Then it will become wildly popular. (Step 3: Profit!) Maybe I’ll be able to find a publisher, eh?
The only other really good idea I’ve had lately is … Bob, can we just show them the picture? [click to continue…]
From the “Chronicle”:http://chronicle.com/news/index.php?id=6263&utm_source=pm&utm_medium=en
The student-newspaper staff at Brigham Young University removed some 18,500 copies of the paper from the campus yesterday, and reprinted nearly the entire press run, because an embarrassing typo in a front-page photo caption appeared to offend key leaders in the Mormon hierarchy…. The caption described a photograph illustrating the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints’ General Conference, and it referred to the group’s “Quorum of Twelve Apostates” rather than “Apostles.” … A student had misspelled the word “apostle,” and the article’s editor chose the wrong word from among the options offered by spell-checking software.
It seems that Ryanair’s Michael O’Leary “may have been put in charge of international space collaboration”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/7973747.stm .
My fellow Americans, the thing about the Geithner plan is this. Experts disagree about the nature of the crisis. Either it is a liquidity problem or an insolvency problem. That means: either the market values of these so-called toxic assets are depressed because of a kind of market failure; or the market has priced these assets more or less correctly and many institutions holding these assets are, as a result, insolvent. If we are indeed in a liquidity crisis, the Geithner plan should solve it as well as any alternative plan could. If it is an insolvency crisis, however, as many experts believe, the Geithner plan will do nothing – or not nearly enough.
If the Geithner plan fails, we will confront another either/or: either nationalize these too-big-to-fail institutions, at great cost, or allow them to fail, collapsing the global financial system and, very likely, the world economy. This is no true choice, however. Hard as nationalization will be, if it comes to that, the alternative would be far, far worse.
We do not need to take this daunting step of nationalization yet because, first, we’re trying the Geithner plan. What you should know about the Geithner plan is that, if it fails, it will still have been worth trying. We will have determined that the problem is indeed insolvency. We will have clarified the path to be taken, laid to rest any reasonable skepticism about the strict need for nationalization. And we will have paid no more for this knowledge than we would have had to pay in any case. If the government effectively transfers money to distressed financial institutions, under the Geithner plan, and later those institutions have to be nationalized for a time, there is no need to ‘pay twice’. [click to continue…]
Brad DeLong links to Matthew Yglesias linking to Damon Linker linking to my old Dead Right post. How gratifying! I was thinking of writing it all out again, in response to Charles Murray’s rather odd AEI dinner talk. But they’ve saved me the trouble. (I would like to say, however, that I prefer the term ‘Dark Satanic Millian Liberalism’ for what Linker calls ‘Donner Party Conservatism’.)
Let me make a few somewhat fresh points about stuff in the general vicinity of the Murray speech (which was well received by conservatives. Goldberg loved it, and Douthat thought it was pretty good.)
As you’ve probably noticed, conservatives tend to argue against liberalism/progressivism by asserting (plausibly) that Robespierre, or Stalin, or Hitler did bad things; then asserting (considerably less plausibly) that liberalism/progressivism somehow equals, or naturally tends to slide into, bad authoritarianism of a distinctively modern sort. Ever since Burke wrote his book about the French Revolution, some such slippery slope argument is the Ur-argument of conservatism as political philosophy.
Suppose we sketch out that thing that it is feared liberalism/progressivism will slipperily slide into. See if you don’t agree that the one thing every conservative swears up and down that he hates in all its many works and deeds, is anything resembling the following: [click to continue…]
When the Bush administration advocated abstinence and the like on the international stage, it was seen as an example of Bush pushing a parochial agenda. But when Western cosmopolitanism is championed on the world stage, it’s progress. What am I missing? (link)
Goldberg is missing the possibility that liberals might believe that Bush was pushing a parochial agenda while at the same time believing that their own proposals would constitute progress. In short, liberals believe Bush was heading in the wrong direction, whereas a liberal proposal would head us in a better direction. In shorter: liberals think Bush was wrong, they are right. In shortest: liberals believe their beliefs. This is what Goldberg is missing.
To put it another way, when he says “it just seems to me that there’s no real standard here,” he’s missing the possibility of classical liberalism, broadly speaking. (Given that Goldberg claims to believe in classical liberalism, his failure to consider that any standard could possibly occupy the intellectual space occupied by the standards of classical liberalism is … an impressive feat of doxastic auto-evacuation. It doesn’t occur to him to believe what he believes, apparently.)
Goldberg is missing that it is possible to believe things without necessarily wanting to impose those beliefs on others (for reasons of prudence, or principle, or a bit of both). He also misses that one can take tolerance (non-coercion) to be a virtue (in principle, and as pragmatically warranted by circumstances) without believing that, in fact, no beliefs are better, more warranted than others. Finally, he seems to be missing the possibility that one might believe that coercion is warranted in some cases, but impermissible (or imprudent) in other sorts of cases.
If Goldberg is not missing absolutely all of this, then I fail to see what other thing he could be missing, leading to his sincere puzzlement. I am at a total and complete loss. Really. I’m drawing a blank.
With the day that’s in it, I have a few random complaints to lash together into a not-too-coherent post. First off, it sucks to be Irish in the US on St. Patrick’s Day. Sorry, I know it’s churlish, and on my better days I agree that all the enthusiasm and interest and desire to party is actually quite sweet, but there it is. If I have to smile politely at one more person telling me they’re Irish (really? whip out your passport, then.), giggle appreciatively at one more crap – invariably Scottish – accent, or spend one more penny listening to Loreena McKinnit or some similarly bogus disneyfied version of Oirish music in the ladies’ loo of the Culver City Radisson where I am already suffering through a full-day operations planning session, I may stab someone. I know the day is not about celebrating Ireland, but about Irish Americans, who are a fine bunch of people now that their Noraid-supporting and parade-homophobia days are behind them. Another thing, no one I have ever known in Ireland has ever eaten corned beef. Ever. It’s the most Enid Blyton food there is, and not remotely Irish. Just saying.
Secondly, I groaned out loud when I heard on the radio that our current Taoiseach, Brian Cowen, was in the White House to meet President Obama. Again, I’m not saying I’m proud of it, but my immediate response was ‘Oh no, once he meets Biffo, Barack won’t think we’re cool any more!’. But I’ve got to hand it to Reuters. They’ve put out a picture of the ceremonial handing over of the green muppet skin where President Obama looks an even bigger nob than Brian Cowen.
We may not have mutated beavers (jokes on this topic to the beaver thread, please!), but life in Australia is still interesting. I’ve never had a roo in the house, but I once had to remove a green tree snake which had come in through the window. And that reminds me of my favourite Australian tourist promotion.
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I realize that beaver management jokes are so a fortnight ago. Nevertheless, my wife – because she loves me – bought me a book on the subject. [click to continue…]
I held out for the new iMac and now it’s here! (Unfortunately, Belle’s cute little white Macbook just up and died. Poor thing was only 16 months old. Motherboard dead. Battery toast, too. Repair cost: roughly the same as replacement cost. Sigh.)
Washington, DC — Responding to Republican charges that President Obama’s proposed budget includes $8 billion for a high-speed, magnetic-levitation train that “<a href=”http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2009_03/017129.php”>will deliver customers straight from Disney . . . to the doorstep of the moonlight bunny ranch brothel in Nevada</a>,” Democratic leaders today unveiled plans for a “<a href=”http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JOV6siQOwYc&feature=related”>Love Train</a>” that will join “people all over the world.”
I have acquired a copy of R. Wilmott’s English Sacred Poetry of The Seventeenth, Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries (1861) for the Dalziel brothers engravings. Which I am moderately pleased with. The book itself is fantastic looking. Comically heavy-bound and smoky-dark object. Zoë (age 7) got to see the thing before I did and her reaction shows she understands me well: ‘Daddy is going to love this. It even has water damage.’
And now I would like to report that the book contains the single worst argument against atheism yet devised. I present “The Atheist and the Acorn”, by Anne, the Duchess of Winchelsea. Complete with an engraving of the young PZ Myers by H.S. Marks: [click to continue…]
