ShrinkWrapped

On The Collapse of Complex Societies

Millennialism has a very long pedigree; it seems that almost from the time Man first became aware of his own mortality, concerns about the end of the world have been a recurrent theme during stressful times.  Our current times are no different.  Millions of people are convinced the world will end because of our sins against Mother Earth (AGW) while other millions are convinced we have begun an inexorable decline in the West; Mark Steyn is one of the foremost proponents of the view that the West has lost its traditional strength as it has surrendered its traditional values: 

Dependence Day

If I am pessimistic about the future of liberty, it is because I am pessimistic about the strength of the English-speaking nations, which have, in profound ways, surrendered to forces at odds with their inheritance. “Declinism” is in the air, but some of us apocalyptic types are way beyond that. The United States is facing nothing so amiable and genteel as Continental-style “decline,” but something more like sliding off a cliff.

In the days when I used to write for Fleet Street, a lot of readers and several of my editors accused me of being anti-British. I’m not. I’m extremely pro-British and, for that very reason, the present state of the United Kingdom is bound to cause distress. So, before I get to the bad stuff, let me just lay out the good. Insofar as the world functions at all, it’s due to the Britannic inheritance. Three-sevenths of the G7 economies are nations of British descent. Two-fifths of the permanent members of the U.N. Security Council are—and, by the way, it should be three-fifths: The rap against the Security Council is that it’s the Second World War victory parade preserved in aspic, but, if it were, Canada would have a greater claim to be there than either France or China. The reason Canada isn’t is because a third Anglosphere nation and a second realm of King George VI would have made too obvious a truth usually left unstated—that the Anglosphere was the all but lone defender of civilization and of liberty. In broader geopolitical terms, the key regional powers in almost every corner of the globe are British-derived—from Australia to South Africa to India—and, even among the lesser players, as a general rule you’re better off for having been exposed to British rule than not: Why is Haiti Haiti and Barbados Barbados?

I tend to agree with part of Mark Steyn's thesis.  I do believe that the Anglosphere has done more to create and enlarge Western Civilization, including the emphasis on the Rights and value of the individual, than any other "tribal" grouping on the planet.  Further, if America, "the shining city on  the hill", falters, it is likely we will enter an extended period of barbarity; amid material wealth, th individual we be devalued, entrenched elites will become more and more authoritarian, and behavior between nations and between ethnic and religious groups will devolve. 

One of my favorite lines from the Declaration of Independence never made it into the final text. They were Thomas Jefferson’s parting words to his fellow British subjects across the ocean: “We might have been a free and great people together.” But in the end, when it mattered, they were a free and great people together. Britain was eclipsed by its transatlantic offspring, by a nation with the same language, the same legal inheritance, and the same commitment to liberty.

It’s not likely to go that way next time round. And “next time round” is already under way. We are coming to the end of a two-century Anglosphere dominance, and of a world whose order and prosperity many people think of as part of a broad, general trend but which, in fact, derive from a very particular cultural inheritance and may well not survive it. To point out how English the world is is, of course, a frightfully un-English thing to do. No true Englishman would ever do such a ghastly and vulgar thing. You need some sinister rootless colonial oik like me to do it. But there’s a difference between genial self-effacement and contempt for one’s own inheritance.

Steyn's essay includes many of the well known tropes; we are losing our initiative, agency, and resolve as we increase our dependency on government; we are too easily ceding our hard won freedoms in favor of a stultifying conformity and PC; we are financing our own demise; our elites have completely inverted our principles and values.  His conclusion is sobering:

In our time, to be born a citizen of the United States is to win first prize in the lottery of life, and, as Britons did, too many Americans assume it will always be so. Do you think the laws of God will be suspended in favor of America because you were born in it? Great convulsions lie ahead, and at the end of it we may be in a post-Anglosphere world.

His essay is a wonderful read, high level Apocalypse porn if you will, and everyday we see new evidence of the failure of our governments, our academics, our business leaders, and our opinion makers to stand up for those core values that have created and bequeathed to us this great nation an great Civilization.  Yet, I think Mark Steyn, to paraphrase Wolfgang Pauli's famous comment, "may not even  be wrong." 

The Steyn article is merely prologue. 

Zenpundit, Mark Safraski, answer the question, "What was the best book you read in 2010" as follows:

Best Book of 2010 ( that I read)

As my criteria for “best” will be the book with ”most profound idea” then….the winner is…..The Collapse of Complex Societies by Joseph Tainter. As I wrote recently:

A superb academic book, previously featured and reviewed in the blogosphere by John Robb and Joseph Fouche, The Collapse of Complex Societies embarks upon a critical examination and partial de-bunking of theories that purport to explain the “sudden” fall of great empires, such as Rome or the vanishing of the Mayans. With caveats, Tainter settles on declining marginal returns from increasing societal investment in complexity as a rough proximate cause capable of subsuming a ” significant range of human behavior, and a number of social theories” under it’s rubric. Highly recommended.

His first commenter, Joseph Fouche, who blogs at The Committee of Public Safety (someone should do a study of blog names; it would be fascinating) and reviewed  the book here, added:

Tainter’s was the most important book I read this year.

In his review, John Robb noted:

THE SIMPLIFICATION OF COMPLEX SOCIETIES

If your interested in a very smart perspective on system collapse, please go read the anthropologist Joseph Tainter's book, "The Collapse of Complex Societies" (I've been a big fan of his work for ages).  In the book, he makes the compelling case that complex societies are, at root, very successful problem solving systems.  If they weren't, they would never have become complex in the first place.  Why?  Societies solve challenges by creating new rules and processes (new complexity) that are then added on to the existing system ad infinitum.  More successful outcomes = more complexity.

John Robb is quite pessimistic for our current system but has some thoughts about a possible resolution.  Joseph Fouche points out some of the drawbacks in Tainter's approach.   I do not have the strategic depth of understanding or the background of these excellent bloggers, however there is much in the Tainter book that is worth discussing.  The book is information dense and fascinating; reading it is some work but rewarding.

In the next few weeks I will discuss some of my impressions of this important work and hopefully will be able to add some Psychological insight to the discussion. 

 

The Collapse of the Institutional Left

The pillars supporting the ideology of the Left have been eroding for years.  The failure of Socialism to improve the lives of their subjects everywhere it has been tried, has led to a new Left "Rearguard" (née Vanguard) fighting a holding action in order to maintain their class privileges and slipping power.  New York City, for so long the liberal Nirvana, complete with cradle to grave care and maximum diversity, has long been able to avoid reality (with the exception of that little bankruptcy problem back in the 1970's) because of the out-sized success of its financial industry.  Mammoth Wall Street bonuses trickled down to the people on Medicaid, Disability, and Welfare, while the Middle Class was marginalized.  Paradoxically (at least to any liberal who might give it any thought) the quasi-socialism of New York has not led to a rising tide lifting all boats but to massive increases in inequality:

City's extreme rich-poor income divide

Income gaps in New York are greater than those of any other big American city, and have been trending higher for decades, says a study by the Fiscal Policy Institute.

One percent of New York City residents earned nearly 45 percent of the city's income in 2007. Nationally, the top 1 percent of earners took about 23.5 percent of all income, the study says.

New York's top 1 percent -- about 90,000 households -- had average incomes of $3.7 million in 2007, said James Parrot, a Fiscal Policy Institute economist.

That works out to an income of about $10,000 a day -- about what the city's poorest 1 million households earn in a year, Parrot said.

"New York City has always had extremes of rich and poor," said Parrot. "But we haven't had the extremes we have today.

"It's been getting more extreme all the time. It's more extreme now than what it was 10 years ago, or 15 years ago."

Unhappily for the Left, this is difficult to blame on the Bush tax cuts since the wealthy have always managed to minimize their tax exposure.  Wall Street bonuses are usually treated very kindly by the IRS, taxed at lower rates than earned income.  Attempts to change this have always failed because, in reality, the very wealthy only have to pay what they want to pay and can always find ways to hide the rest.  People smart enough to earn millions in finance can hire lawyers smart enough to charge $750 an hour and they then run rings around the regulators (when those regulators are not themselves products of the Wall Street-Washington axis.)

One of the most under-reported stories of the early third millennium concerns a second pillar of Leftist ideology, the healing power of "diversity."  Diversity is placed in quotes because for the Left diversity refers to shades of skin color rather than diversity in thinking.  Multi-culturalism is dying; it is yet another failed ideology.  Recent sociological research showing that increased diversity is accompanied by decreased trust is  a fatal blow against the dominant liberal ideology that diversity is an unalloyed good in all circumstances.  The diversity meme and the immense industry that has grown up around it has always been counter-intuitive but the chickens are coming home to roost (as the perfect epitome of Multi-culturalism, a faux Native American, née Indian, might say.) 

[Quick, name one country other than America and Canada (which came close to falling apart over the issue) that has been stable and contains more than one similar sized dominant language and/or ethnic/tribal group.  Note that America and Canada are countries explicitly based on ideas rather than ethnicity; Multi-culturalism overtly seeks to subvert this by enabling a salad bowl rather than a melting pot.] 

Robin Shepherd warns that, once again, Israel and the Jews are the canaries in the West's coal mines:

Israel leads the way as collapse of Labor Party illustrates end of multi-culturalism. Europe will be next.

At first sight, it may not appear as the sexiest story in the world. But Gideon Levy’s deeply flawed analysis today of the effective collapse of the Israeli Labor Party following HUD Barak’s departure to create the Atzmaut party, is symptomatic of wider misunderstandings of key political dynamics in both Israel and western Europe. Writing in Haretz, where he is a regular columnist and something of a superstar figure for the old Israeli left, Levy laments Barak’s alleged treachery in the following terms:

“[Barak] officially turned Israel into the only state in the West, not counting the United States, that lacks a Labor party, a Socio-Democrat party or a left wing. All European countries have such parties… we are now more like the third world ¬ we are a state that has about one and a half parties. Almost all there is in Israel is an ultra-nationalist right, comprised of parties that have various names: Likud, Kadima, Shas, Yisrael Beiteinu, National Union; yesterday, Atzmaut (Independence) joined them”.

But Levy spectacularly misses the point. The reason for the collapse of the Israeli left is that the multi-culturalist, third-worldist assumptions that sustained it have taken a 10 year beating from which they were never going to recover. [Emphasis mine-SW]  Ever since Barak’s peace offers, brokered by Bill Clinton in 2000 and 2001, were flatly rejected by the “moderate” Palestinian leadership in favour of violence and rejectionsim the core argument of the Israeli left that the Palestinian cause was based on legitimate grievances that could be addressed via the “land for peace” formula simply lacked credibility inside the Israeli electorate. And given that social populism — another facet of left-wing parties — is now almost as much a feature of several other parties in Israel, the Labor Party simply found itself with nothing to offer. Its implosion was thus inevitable.

Melanie Phillips summarizes:

The left's sleep of reason

Israel’s politics are not ‘moving to the right’ – they are merely moving towards Planet Reality, where most ordinary people are living. The Israeli Left collapsed because its fantasy that Arabs committed to the extermination of Israel actually wanted to live in peace alongside Israel turned out to be a murderous mistake that cost thousands of lives.

Unfortunately, the political and intellectual elites of Britain, Europe and America have still not understood this blindingly obvious point. They have been colonised by a world-view which has succeeded in hijacking language to shift the centre of political gravity to the left -- from where all opposition is demonised as 'the right' and thus beyond the moral pale altogether. So anyone who upholds realism and reason is turned into a pariah: a world turned upside down.

The vision of the left is based on ideology which denies reality, truth and reason. It still has Europe firmly in its lethal, civilisation-busting grip.

The failures of the Left to provide for their subjects whenever they have had the opportunity means that they have lost the battle of ideas.  All they  have left is the struggle to hold onto their power.  They now must resort to controlling what people are allowed to say in an effort to control what people are allowed to think; this is a sure sign of desperation.  Richard Fernandez has the last word:

Free the Dictionary

CNN is now apologizing for the use of the word “crosshairs” in general political speech, as shown in the video after the “Read More” jump. The implication is that word itself has been used to facilitate a hate crime.  That is untrue as former New York City Mayor Ed Koch observes.  But maybe the belief is that if a lie is repeated for long enough then it eventually becomes true. Then power follows. “Real power is the ability to define what the fight is about.” The entire discussion moves into a rigged casino. Control words and you control truth. George Orwell understood this so well that he believed one of the first things every totalitarian ideology does is redefine the words in a language, purposefully, forcefully and relentlessly. In his novel 1984, he called this artificial language of totalitarianism Newspeak.

Orwell knew that,as someone once said, “you will not prevail just because you are right. If you know something but cannot communicate it, it’s as though you don’t know it”. Take away the words and you take away the power to express a contrary thought. And the best way to do this is to torture words until they meant what the narrative said they should say; by changing meanings until only the allowable meanings were left.

...Perhaps the reason why the Left is almost incandescently furious at Sarah Palin is because she refuses to play their little game. Since she doesn’t use their dictionary she is pilloried as illiterate.  By using Oldspeak words  she ipso facto gives offense.  It is this stiff-necked refusal to get with the word program that may paradoxically give her the political strength. Those who’ve accepted the vocabulary of politesse, aka Newspeak, have unwittingly surrendered. Pre-surrendered, in fact, for the dubious honor of acceptance into quality society. Maybe being from Alaska, Palin never knew enough politesse to forget a very important principle. “You don’t know what is possible before you try. And if you negotiate with yourself before you negotiate with others, you will never know what was possible.”

Perhaps the real long-term significance of the Loughner affair is that people are finally beginning to realize how insidious these word-games are.  I think CNN would do well to outlaw one word in the dictionary per day.  When they finally get to zero they may find there are still words they want to get rid of.

Read the whole thing.

In His Own Words

One of the under-reported stories from the 1960's is a fundamental change that took place at that time in the male rite of passage.  Ever since the first humans began the arduous trek from primitive tribal societies to civilized society, the male adolescent's progression to adulthood included some rite which demarcated childhood from manhood.  Most of the time this rite of passage was explicitly designed to evince the young prospective man's physical prowess and courage.  There is a clear line of communication from the young tribesman who was expected to kill a lion or bring down a buffalo by himself and the British aristocrat training at Sandhurst.  There were always those who did not take part in such rites, but for the culture's elites, evidence of courage were considered a sine qua non to entry into adulthood.

The mass mobilizations of the last centuries allowed everyman to take part in this rite of passage.  The Bands of Brothers of WWII, in the retrospective popular imagination, were the apotheosis of courage under fire, solidarity, and steadfastness.

During the Vietnam War the children of the elites, to a much greater extent than in previous wars, avoided serving.  This was especially prominent in the children of the liberal elites.  As with any complicated and conflictual behavior, all sorts of psychological reactions ensured.  Via the beauty of the reaction formation, the covert anxiety felt by many was transmuted into its opposite.  The moral of the Vietnam War struggle, for the counter-culture,l was that the truly brave fought against the unjust, imperialistic war.  However, beneath the defensive bravado, the anxiety persisted.  Mark Rudd documents this in his Washington Post op-ed over the weekend:  [HT: Trevor Loudon]

An ex-Weather Underground radical on the Tucson shootings and political violence

In 1970, when I was 22 years old - the same age as Jared Loughner - I was a founder of the Weather Underground, an offshoot of the antiwar group Students for a Democratic Society. That spring, a small contingent of the Weathermen, as we were known, planned to plant three pipe bombs at a noncommissioned officers' dance at Fort Dix, N.J. Our intention was to remind our fellow Americans that our country was dropping napalm and other explosives on Vietnam, killing hundreds of thousands of civilians. I wasn't among the bombmakers, but I knew what was in the offing, and to my eternal shame, I didn't try to stop it.

I considered myself an agent of necessity in a political revolution. I'm not sure if Loughner, who seems to suffer from mental illness, can be considered an agent of anything. But I'm sure that if, as alleged, he pulled the trigger, he had convinced himself that he was doing what needed to be done.

At his age, I had thought myself into a similar corner. My willingness to endorse and engage in violence had something to do with an exaggerated sense of my own importance. I wanted to prove myself as a man - a motive exploited by all armies and terrorist groups. [Emphasis mine-SW] I wanted to be a true revolutionary like my guerrilla hero, Ernesto "Che" Guevara. I wanted the chant we used at demonstrations defending the Black Panthers to be more than just words: "The revolution has come/Time to pick up the gun!"

Mark Rudd's use of his own experience to somehow illuminate any aspect of the Tuscon shootings is curious at best.  What is more interesting is that he cannot yet question his own politics:

On March 6, 1970, the Weather Underground's bombs, assembled in a New York townhouse, exploded prematurely. Ted Gold, Diana Oughton and Terry Robbins - three brilliant and passionate young people who had decided that they must become terrorists - were killed. Only by their deaths was the greater tragedy we were plotting avoided. Emotionally shattered, I dropped out of the Weather Underground but remained a fugitive until 1977.

After I turned myself in, I spent the next 25 years trying to figure out why I had made so many disastrous decisions as a young man. One of my conclusions was to pursue only nonviolent action - righteous action still, but without anger or brutality.

It was never Mark Rudd's goals that were problematic, only his means, yet once the Left determines that its goals no longer justifies its means, it is no longer a revolutionary force, but an emasculated one.  If you are fighting oppressors who are tormenting the innocent and helpless, every means must be used; after all, true heroes will risk all to protect the innocent.  The young Leftist must either question his assumptions or condemn himself as a coward. 

Some in the modern Left believe they can attain their goals by stealth; the election of 2010 has made that problematic.  At this point the Left is being repudiated throughout the Civilized world.  As Walter Russell Meade has pointed out, the Social Welfare model of the last half of the 20th century has failed and we have not yet found a  new model.  The great problem for the Left is that they have failed spectacularly.  The Soviet Union is now a kleptocracy surviving off oil; China is a State run Corporation; Cuba can barely feed itself and its much vaunted healthcare system is a shambles for all  but the well connected who can obtain western (Capitalist) medical care; Venezuela is going off a cliff despite its oil; everywhere Socialism has been tried it has failed to do anything but terrorize and consign its people to perdition.

For the new generation of Mark Rudds, who have not yet surrendered their Utopian ideology, there are few options for exhibiting their courage.  They can engage in mindless violence with the anarchists; they can support the oppressed by joining the murderers fashioned in the image of those most lovely of sociopathic killers, "Che" or Yasser; or they can attempt through subterfuge to achieve an impossible dream which has already been repudiated.

The true heroes, men and women of courage, are those few willing to stand up against barbarism in defense of our way of life.  This is an intolerable state of affairs. 

Mark Rudd has the self awareness to recognize that he desperately needed to prove he was not a coward even as his ideology precluded the possibility of doing so; a generation of 60's radicals are still trying to prove their courage and importance; it would be sad if they weren't still dangerous.

Stories You May Have Missed If You Only Read the New York Times: Updated

Barry Rubin notes some additional major stories that have not been covered in the MSM.  The Fatwa he mentions may represent a significant inflexion point in the conflict between the West and "Those-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named."

Revolutions, walk-outs and fatwas

IN EGYPT, an extraordinarily important fatwa has been issued by Dr. Imad Mustafa, of al-Azhar University, the world’s most important Islamic university.

He began by stating the well-known doctrine of “defensive jihad,” that is Muslims must go to war against infidels who attack them. Of course, the word “attack” is often spread rather thinly to justify aggression.

But now Mustafa has publicly and explicitly come up with a new concept, one that up until now was supposedly restricted to groups like al-Qaida: “Then there is another type of fighting against the non- Muslims known as offensive jihad... which is to pursue the infidels into their own land without any aggression [on their part]...

“Two schools [of Islamic jurisprudence] have ruled that offensive jihad is permissible in order to secure Islam’s border, to extend God’s religion to people in cases where the governments do not allow it, such as the Pharaoh did with the children of Israel, and to remove every religion but Islam from the Arabian peninsula.”

I could find no mention of Dr. Imad Mustafa in a search at the New York Times web site today.  The implications are important:

What does it mean about extending “God’s religion,” i.e., Islam? On the surface, “where the governments do not allow it” and the reference to Pharaoh seem to imply the complete prohibition of Islam.

But in the current context, this means that it is permissible to wage jihad against a country if anything “necessary” to Islam according to (hard-line) clerics’ interpretations is blocked (polygamy, child marriage, special privileges at work places, building mosques anywhere, permitting the wearing of head scarves or burkas).

In practice, according to this doctrine, then, any non-Muslim can be attacked anywhere. Thus, mainstream, powerful clerics are now calling for a seventh century- style jihad against non-Muslim lands even if the victims cannot be accused of attacking Muslim ruled lands. Merely to “extend God’s religion” to others is a sufficient motive. Mustafa says that two of Islam’s main schools have always endorsed offensive jihad, but I doubt if he would have made that argument ten or 20 years ago.

Of course, that doesn’t mean most Muslims will accept this new stance. But it does mean that radical groups now have mainstream support for their most extreme, aggressive behavior. Even if nobody repeats Mustafa’s statement publicly – if for no other reasons than it is bad public relations in the West – this idea will be more and more taken for granted. Presumably, Mustafa won’t be forced to retract this fatwa by his colleagues or Egypt’s government.

Moreover, we probably won’t see senior clerics denouncing and rejecting the doctrine of offensive jihad.

This is a development of stupendous proportions that will probably not be covered in the Western mass media. If this viewpoint continues to spread, along with the growing al-Qaida type doctrine of the Muslim Brotherhood, it could be a historical turning point that will greatly intensify revolutionary Islamist terrorism and attacks on the West.

It has always been in the interest of the radical Islamists to enlarge their war against us to become a true conflict of civilizations.  Their power, indeed their survival, depends upon enlarging the conflict.  That is why I was always supportive of the Bush administration's attempts to retain a clear distinction between fighting against the radicals as opposed to the entire Islamic world.  Bush went too far in insisting that Islam was the "Religion of Peace" but at least there could be a reasonable rationale for such an approach.  However, the Obama administration has taken this approach to an absurd level; they refuse to criticize tyrants and continually attempt to engage those who use Islam as a weapon against us.  By effacing the distinction between truly moderate Muslims and the radical Islam which is gaining legitimacy (if it ever lost it) in much of the Muslim world, acquiescence in the name of Peace (and appeasement) if you will, the Obama administration is enabling the exact opposite of what they profess to desire.

Events in Tunisia suggest a nascent democracy is possible, albeit unlikely.  Instability in the Middle East usually leads to unhappy outcomes.  The Obama administration's current stance, American recusal in the struggle for democracy, can only lead to poorer outcomes.

Stories You May Have Missed If You Only Read the New York Times

To be fair, the Times has an occasional story about the difficulties facing Christian communities in the Muslim world, but they typically underplay the extent of the ethnic cleansing.  The victims are not only Egyptian Copts and Iraqi Chaldeans:

Over 70 Christians arrested in Iran during Christmas

In the early morning hours after Christmas day, the Iranian government arrested 25 Christians in Tehran and other locations. They also planned to detain sixteen others, but were unable to locate them. There are also unconfirmed reports that the authorities have arrested over 50 other Christians. According to BBC Persian, the Governor of Tehran has vowed to arrest more evangelical Christians.

One of those detained was able to make a call to friends from an unknown location on the morning of the arrests, leaving this message -

"Unfortunately early this morning the authorities came to our homes. They arrested us and many other believers. I want to ask you to pray for us.We are sure God will never leave us or forsake us. God bless you. Sorry for giving you bad news over Christmas, but I believe God will do something for us."

...

None of them have been granted any legal representation. No charges have been made, though it is clear that they were arrested for their active Christian faith.There has been a gross lack of due process. The government authorities have not provided any written documents as to the reason for the arrests, any record of the items confiscated, and family members are not allowed to visit the detained.

Islam has a long history of attempting, often successfully, to re-write history.  The Palestinians do all in their power to deny the Jewish connection to Jerusalem (and for those with short or absent memories, Jewish Synagogues and Christian Churches are usually destroyed or turned into Mosques whenever they come under the control of Muslims; Jews were not allowed to worship or visit their religious sites when the "moderate" Jordanians controlled the West Bank and parts of Jerusalem.)   The Persian Muslims are just doing what their co-religionists have done so many times before:

Esther's tomb downgraded as pilgrimage site 

The Jewish Telegraph Agency reports that the Iranian authorities have officially downgraded the tombs of Esther and Mordechai in Hamadan as official pilgrimage sites. According to Jonathan Tobin (below), their revisionist inversion of the Purim story means that Iran has declared war on Biblical Jews:

(JTA) -- Iranian authorities have downgraded the status of the tomb of Esther and Mordechai, while an official state news agency has publicized the Purim story as a Jewish massacre of Iranians.

Officials recently removed the sign that identified the mausoleum of the biblical figures in the central Iranian city of Hamadan as an official pilgrimage site. The removal of the sign signifies that its status has been downgraded, according to reports.\

The actions come about two weeks after a group of about 250 militant students surrounded the tomb and threatened to tear it down. Their threats were in response to alleged Israeli excavations under the Al-Aksa Mosque in Jerusalem.

Yaakov Kirschen summarizes:

The MSM also ignores stories that highlight the barbarity of "modern" Islam:

Fatwa: "It Is Permissible to Have Sexual Intercourse with a Prepubescent Girl"

This is another fatwa from IslamOnline.net, which again is the sixth most popular Islamic website on the internet, according to Wikipedia. As the author of this fatwa points out, this ruling is entirely based on the Qur'an and the example of the prophet, who is considered the perfect example for Muslims in all ages. How many young girls have been and continue to be abused due to Muhammad's perverse actions in having sex with a nine-year-old, which now must be made permissible for all Muslims? (See the original Arabic here.)

One of the pillars of Western anti-colonialist Leftism is an increasingly overt anti-Semitism; the Huffington Post is one of the largest political sites on the web and it is an increasingly inviting home for anti-Semites; here are two review/summary articles for your perusal.  As the old adage (or my updated version of it) has it, twice may be a coincidence but a hundred stories starts to look like a pattern:

The Huffington Post's Jewish Problem

Articles about anti-Israel, anti-Semitic hate at HuffPost - and its response

Another pillar of current Leftism which especially appeals to the Liberal-by-Temperament cohort, is Anthropogenic Global Warming.  Again, in the interest of fairness, the Times has not completely ignored all of these stories.  For example, there have been many stories, with pictures, documenting the Australian floods and the UK's snows, yet little explanation of how the bureaucracy's embrace of AGW has contributed to the misery.

Richard North, et al, at EU Referendum, have done a wonderful job documenting the "global warming" in England and around the world; they have also been building a case that concern over global warming has led to a mis-allocation of resources that have led to avoidable death and disaster for millions. 

Finally, for a fascinating story that would be front page news everywhere if the people involved were a different nationality and the story line did not contradict the current AGW narrative, consider the extraordinary events that have been taking place in the Okhotsk Sea:

Off and on it goes

The rescue operation in the Okhotsk Sea has now been resumed, but it was set back more than was at first admitted yesterday when the towing cables broke. As we now learn, the towing equipment was damaged as well. But, with little more detail, almost like the old days when the TV shut down every night and all you got was the station card, all the Russian media is offering are stock photographs of the Okhotsk Sea.

The blogosphere is not only disintermediating the political process, but more importantly, it is changing the way news is gathered and reported.  We no longer must depend on the MSM for their pre-filtered "news".

Certainly, the stories I have linked today are in areas of particular interest to me.  Yet, prior to the internet, I would have been blind to the developments and would have had little choice but to accept what my perceptual apparatus (the MSM, especially the New York Times) revealed to me about the world beyond my front door.  As the song says: I was blind but now I see.

An Interesting Question

Next Big Future posts on a new report discussing the failure of Malaysia to maintain or resume their growth trajectory since the beginning of this century:

Malaysia stuck in Middle Income Trap

Here is a 12 page paper that discusses how Malaysia is stuck in a middle income trap

Malaysia has moved from being a raw commodity exporter to an industrial product exporter, from a banana chip exporter to a computer chip exporter. Malaysia has become a middle-income country, and knowledge-led growth is the next development stage for Malaysia.

The expectation in 2001 was that things would return quite rapidly back to normal, back to the pre-Crisis period of impressive material growth and structural transformation. For example, projected private investment in 2010 (21.4 percent of GDP) would be at almost the same level as in 1990 (21.9 percent of GDP).

However, this optimism has proved to be ill-founded even before the arrival of the global financial crisis in the last quarter of 2008. Instead of surging to a 7.5 percent growth rate, the average annual real GDP growth rate turned out to be only 4.5 in the first five years of the Second Millennium, and 6.1 percent in the 2006-2007 period. The fact that, in the same 2001-2007 period, economic growth accelerated in the neighboring countries of China, India and Indonesia certainly makes credible the possibility that Malaysia has descended to a much slower growth path, and would not transition fully to a knowledge-based economy by 2020.

What happened? How could the Malaysian economy get its groove back?

NBF offers an explanation:

Malaysian Demographics

Ethnicity
Malay 50.4%, Chinese 23.7%, indigenous 11%, Indian 7.1%, others 7.8% (2004 est.)
Religions

Religion
Muslim 60.4%, Buddhist 19.2%, Christian 9.1%, Hindu 6.3%, Confucianism, Taoism, other traditional Chinese religions 2.6%, other or unknown 1.5%, none 0.8% (2000 census)

Malaysia tried to give a free ride to the majority Malaysian population. Although the bias is uneven and favors some groups of Malays over others. Malays would get a free ride and the ethnic chinese would do the work. Eventually too many of the successful ethnic chinese left Malaysia.

I wonder if there is a lesson here for California?  Or America?

Sometimes I Feel So Weak I Just Want to Explode

No matter what culture you come from, it is a terrible thing to be a failure.  Glenn Reynolds links to a perfect encapsulation of the problem from someone named Chateau:

Color me shocked that another mass murdering male shooter has a history of sexual rejection. Obviously, being mentally deranged can hurt your chances with women, but constant sexual failure tends to reinforce the mental instability. It’s a vicious celibacy feedback loop.

For Chateau, et al, it is always and only about sex and the mating game (or Game.) 

[The purveyors of "Game" sites may be the only true Freudians left!]

[ That last line was a bit of Psychoanalytic humor, not meant as a serious comment.] 

It is true that men who fail at sex and love are over-represented among mass murderers but it is more true that most losers do not commit mass murder and a great many of the worst mass murderers have been quite successful.  Ted Bundy was a charmer who was a great success by every metric we value.  However, being a failure at love and sex does increase one's sense of inadequacy and when one feels weak and helpless, attendant rage fueled revenge fantasies ensue. 

Our culture has done a fairly good job of enabling all but the most damaged to have success in finding a mate (albeit it often seems that we do our best to make forming and keeping families together problematic.)  It is likely that one of the subconscious reasons polygamy has been outlawed in modern cultures has been to minimize the pool of disaffected young men who will fail under a system that so drastically limits the availability of women.

Unfortunately there are cultures where most of the men born into the system are facing a stacked deck; status and the opportunity to "win" a woman are extremely limited.  In such a culture the majority of young men are going to be chronically traumatized by tension between the availability of fantasy sex (pornography) and the reality of their limited possibilities.  Temptation and frustration combine to create helplessness.  The result has been beautifully described by The Great American Bard:

Sometimes I feel so weak i just want to explode.

In yesterday's post I linked to Barry Rubin's article positing the question: If One Extremist Gunmen Can Do So Much Damage in America, How About Ten Million Such People In The Middle East?  The cultures of the Middle East are designed to create mass murderers and do that far better than they create people who can contribute anything measurable to the modern world.  Their ability to self- reflect is non-existent, criticism is experienced as an assault, and they have been successful in convincing the civilized world that they are filled with psychotic lunatics ready, willing, and able to respond with violence to perceived and real slights.

The dysfunction of too much of the Muslim World is an ongoing threat, only manageable because the availability of WMD has been limited by their own inability to create or procure such weapons.  This state of affairs cannot last and the question that the Civilized World will need to face, once the "can" can no longer be kicked any further down the road, is whether or not we can tolerate nations filled with glorified mass murderers to gain control of weapons that would allow them to indulge in their sick fantasies with far greater destructiveness than 9/11.

We have only an extremely limited ability to effect the future course of the Muslim/Arab world.  What little influence we do have has been dissipated by our current administration's efforts to use the "therapeutic self esteem" model of pedagogy (a dismal failure at home) in the international arena.  There is some modest evidence that the President has begun to treat the dysfunction of Iran more seriously (see Jeffrey Goldberg for the optimist's pov); time will tell. 

Right now we should all be thanking the creators of the Stuxnet virus for giving us some additional breathing space.

The Promised Land

On a rattlesnake speedway in the Utah desert
I pick up my money and head back into town
Driving cross the Waynesboro county line
I got the radio on and I'm just killing time
Working all day in my daddy's garage
Driving all night, chasing some mirage
Pretty soon little girl I'm gonna take charge.

The dogs on main street howl,
'cause they understand,
If I could take one moment into my hands
Mister, I ain't a boy, no, I'm a man,
And I believe in a promised land.

I've done my best to live the right way
I get up every morning and go to work each day
But your eyes go blind and your blood runs cold
Sometimes I feel so weak I just want to explode
Explode and tear this town apart
Take a knife and cut this pain from my heart
Find somebody itching for something to start

The dogs on main street howl,
'cause they understand,
If I could take one moment into my hands
Mister, I ain't a boy, no, I'm a man,
And I believe in a promised land.

There's a dark cloud rising from the desert floor
I packed my bags and I'm heading straight into the storm
Gonna be a twister to blow everything down
That ain't got the faith to stand its ground
Blow away the dreams that tear you apart
Blow away the dreams that break your heart
Blow away the lies that leave you nothing but lost and brokenhearted

The dogs on main street howl,
'cause they understand,
If I could take one moment into my hands
Mister, I ain't a boy, no, I'm a man,
And I believe in a promised land
I believe in a promised land...

Our Post-Modern Left

The story of the week is the response of the Left-Liberal intelligentsia to the Arizona shootings.  By now, all but the most partisan recognize that the shooter was a seriously disturbed psychotic man who was responding to his own internal delusions and had no relationship with the Tea Parties, Sarah Palin, or any Conservative ideology.  The attempt to hijack this incident for political gain is noxious in the extreme; sadly, it is further evidence of the Left's need to demonize its opponents rather than engage their arguments.  There is a relatively simple reason why they need to follow this well marked path:  Leftism, as an ideology, has failed, is incoherent, and is truly post-modern; in other words, there is no core belief system for Leftism, there is merely emotional resonance disguised as rational argument.

For the Left, the use of martial metaphor and terminology by the Right creates a climate in which violence, even when non-political or coming from the Left, is caused or increased.  At the same time, political violence from the Left and their allies is never considered to be symptomatic of Left wing excess.  At one time this formulation worked to control the speech and thinking of most people; the Media was the gate keeper, not only of information, but of narratives, and when you hear the same story line repeated over and over again, most people do not spend the requisite time and energy to question the narrative.  As I have noted on many occasions, our brains and our minds (which may overlap in the space they inhabit but are not equivalent conceptually) are conservative, that is, they aim to limit the expenditure of energy.  In other words, biology is lazy.  There is nothing wrong with recognizing that truism, but it does mean that when the narrative imposed on reality is limited, it is, for most people, too much work to question.  That has changed with the advent of new media.  The great problem for the Left is that the new media narratives are easier to understand and better reflections of most people's quotidian reality than the more complex narratives constructed by the post-modern Left.

A brief example should suffice:

For the Left, Anthropogenic Global Warming was an excellent narrative when it was first proposed.  It explained warming trends, justified a massive expropriation of money and power from the wealthy world to the power brokers of the international elites (under the rubric of helping the poor who rarely ever saw a fraction of the appropriated money and none of the power), and it served as a useful weapon against the hated capitalist system.  The problem was that as time went on the dire consequences of the world failing to end on time meant that the narrative had to be amended time after time.  Now we are told that human derived CO2 is causing Climate Disruption or Anthropogenic Climate Change, née Anthropogenic Climate Warming.  Granting there is a non-zero risk that through so far unexplained and undiscovered feedbacks, tiny increases in trace gases in the atmosphere are throwing the entire system into chaos, the current Conservative narrative is simply easier to understand and fits the visible facts better than the Ptolemaic epicycles built by the AGW proponents.  That is, climate varies naturally, probably in relation to the sun's output and other long term variables over which man has no control; technology will increasingly allow us to reduce our dependence on carbon emitting energy sources; and the single greatest protection we have against Climate Change, human derived or otherwise, is increasing wealth, also enabled by our burgeoning technology.  Game, Set, and Match to the AGW skeptics!

Because the post-modern Left has no core beliefs, they are capable of the most overt contradictions.  For example, if they truly believe that martial verbal productions create a climate of fear and violence, then they should be appalled at what occurs on a daily basis in the Muslim World.  Professor Barry Rubin explains:

If One Extremist Gunmen Can Do So Much Damage in America, How About Ten Million Such People In The Middle East?

When one crazed or ideologically obsessed gunman named Jared Loughner  starts shooting in Arizona, people condemn him and start bemoaning the state of their society. How about a place with ten million people like that who are treated as heroes?

America this week is awash in a huge and passionate debate over whether angry political disagreements and harsh criticisms of certain views or groups inspired the attack on an American congresswoman (Jewish and a strong supporter of Israel, by the way). I’m not going to enter into that argument right now but I want to point out the Middle Eastern ramifications of what's going on here.

Every day for more than a half century, Arabs and Muslims have been inundated every day with hatred for Israel, America, the West, Jews, and often Christians. You can read transcripts of Syrian broadcasts or Palestinian speeches from 50 years ago that sound just like what is being said by their successors  now.

Let’s say that the proportion of lies, slanders, extremism, and incitement in the American discourse is one-tenth of one percent of all the words spoken on controversial issues. The equivalent figure for the Middle East is well over 95 percent.

In addition to that tone, there is not only a total lack of balance but an absence of the other side altogether. It's all one-sided.

And in addition to those two points, the level of factual accuracy is farther away from reality than anywhere else in the world. (Though, admittedly, that gap has been narrowing in recent years as Western academic and journalistic standards decline).

And in addition to those three points, while extremists tend to be marginal in the United States, they are in control--either politically or at least setting the terms of discussion--throughout the Arabic-speaking and Muslim-majority worlds.

Thus, the level of incitement, imbalance, lies, and the hegemony of hatred in that region towers above that in the West like the World Trade Center towers over an anthill.

Oh, the World Trade Center doesn't exist any more. Well, that has something to do with this situation, too, doesn't it?

Or to put it another way, in the Middle East, the crackpot is often (usually?) given more credit than the rational or factual.

I won’t take your time with lots of examples but one might start with the widespread belief that the U.S. government or Israel carried out the September 11 attacks, coupled with the contradictory belief—held often by the same people—that it was something to be proud about. Or all the ridiculous conspiracy theories about Israel, as in the cases mentioned here and here. Or the editorial in al-Ahram, the most important Egyptian newspaper, that claimed all terrorism in Iraq was a U.S. plot to divide Muslims.

Read his whole post; it is replete with smart insights and includes a wonderful image that should be seen and savored.

Once again, the lack of core beliefs dictates that the Left must create its post-modern ideology on an ad hoc basis.  There are general guidelines, such as "Capitalism bad, Socialism good" and "America and Israel bad, Arabs and Europeans good" but there is no coherence to the structure.  As a result, those who follow such a belief system are forced to censor their own perceptions and attempt to limit the perceptions of others; too much reality threatens the narrative. 

Please watch Melanie Phillips explain to an Israeli interviewer how abysmally Israel has failed in their hasbara, ie public relations; especially pay attention to her explanation of the difficulty Israel's positions have in gaining any oxygen among the British intelligentsia:

My fondest wish is that Melanie Phillips appear more often and in more venues.  Americans still tend to hear better when a speaker has a refined and delightful British accent, perhaps a remnant of the respect one has for one's parents even after having declared independence from them.

The committed Leftist cannot help but force all data to fit his narratives; when the narratives change, the data is reinterpreted to fit.  They have created a protean ideology that has no core and is impossible to combat in the realm of ideas (in part because they can not and will not argue ideas but can only argue power and money.)  The Left and the parts of the economy that they dominate are losing power and influence as the need to become more efficient in producing the tangible assets requisite for life becomes ever more overt.  Their livelihoods are threatened since they are fundamentally parasitic; (when was the last time a Left wing Professor of Literature produced anything of tangible value?) and as with any life form that feels its life is threatened, their defensive struggles are only going to become more and more vicious until they are marginalized and defeated. 

If we are lucky, 2008 will one day be seen as having been the high water mark of Leftism, the moment when its inevitable decline into irrelevance began.  More likely it will persist and return to threaten the freedoms of succeeding generations; in the future, however, the growth of uncontrolled information sources means that they will never again be able to control the narratives as they once did.

On Madmen and Freedom

In the aftermath of the terrible events of last weekend, many illogical and non-sensical recommendations have been made. 

A Republican Congressman has suggested that we pass new laws to control the presence of guns near government officials (since everyone knows that murderous madmen will abide by all such laws.)

A Democratic Congressman would like to outlaw incendiary speech (and would presumably appoint himself as the arbiter of such speech.)

These ideas are non-starters and would do nothing to decrease the likelihood of future shootings.  However, some smart people, among them William Galston, have suggested that we re-examine our legal standards for the involuntary commitment of dangerous mentally disturbed persons: [HT: Jennifer Rubin]

The Tucson Shooter and the Case for Involuntary Commitment

The story repeats itself, over and over. A single narrative connects the Unabomber, George Wallace shooter Arthur Bremmer, Reagan shooter John Hinckley, the Virginia Tech shooter—all mentally disturbed loners who needed to be committed and treated against their will. But the law would not permit it.

Starting in the 1970s, civil libertarians worked to eliminate involuntary commitment or, that failing, to raise the standards and burden of proof so high that few individuals would meet it. Important decisions by the Supreme Court and subordinate courts gave individuals new protections, including a constitutional right to refuse psychotropic medication. A few states have tried to push back in constitutionally acceptable ways, but efforts such as California’s Laura’s Law, designed to make it easier to force patients to take medication, have been stymied by civil rights concerns and lack of funding.

We need legal reform to shift the balance in favor of protecting the community, especially against those who are armed and deranged. This means two changes in particular. First, those who acquire credible evidence of an individual’s mental disturbance should be required to report it to both law enforcement authorities and the courts, and the legal jeopardy for failing to do so should be tough enough to ensure compliance. Parents, school authorities, and other involved parties should be made to understand that they have responsibilities to the community as a whole, not just to family members or to their own student body. While embarrassment and reluctance to get involved are understandable sentiments, they should not be allowed to drive conduct when the public safety is at stake. We’re not necessarily cramming these measures down anyone’s throat: I’ve known many families who were desperate for laws that would help them do what they knew needed to be done for their adult children, and many college administrators who felt that their hands were tied.

Finding an appropriate balance between the rights of the individual and the protection of the community is not a simple matter.  It is clear that our current system is biased against being able to treat people against their will, even when Mental Health Professionals have reasonable concerns about safety.  However, this must be accompanied by a number of large caveats:  The vast majority of paranoid and delusional patients, even those who make threatening statements, will never act on their delusions.  The patient who descends into paranoid madness and is visibly agitated is easy to identify; the more common situation, of a paranoid who quietly descends into madness, is a more difficult problem.  The Arizona shooter apparently announced in tones clear enough for anyone to see that he was potentially, and eventually in reality, dangerous, yet his confinement and treatment would never have been an easy determination.  For example, most Paranoid Schizophrenics, when not in the throes of an acute exacerbation, know that they must control their ravings in order to be seen as well enough to leave confinement in a Psychiatric hospital.  Especially when the patient is young, Psychiatrists work hard to avoid diagnostic closure; a diagnosis of Schizophrenia is a devastating conclusion for a patient (and for the patient's Psychiatrist) with a cloudy prognosis and a lifetime of disability ahead for most.  The treatments will be lifelong and carry serious long term risks, and the knowledge of the diagnosis is often crushing for the patient and his family.  If that same patient can be understood as suffering from Bipolar Disorder (even when the treatment is exactly the same), his prognosis is better and his paranoia is more clearly associated with disturbed episodes.  As a result, even had the shooter come for treatment, every effort would have been made to focus on episode-specific treatment; once the patient had become symptom free he would have been expected to follow up on his own for any long term treatment; after all, once symptom free there would be no grounds for ongoing involuntary treatment.  This should not be understood as a nihilistic approach to such violence but a recognition of the limits of our ability to predict and control such occurrences.  At the same time, the difficulty in determining future dangerousness (in the absence of the only accurate predictor, ie a past history of violence) is not a reason for avoiding the effort; it does suggest great caution in making large changes in the law.

Galston's conclusion is worth questioning as well:

Second, the law should no longer require, as a condition of involuntary incarceration, that seriously disturbed individuals constitute a danger to themselves or others, let alone a “substantial” or “imminent” danger, as many states do. A delusional loss of contact with reality should be enough to trigger a process that starts with multiple offers of voluntary assistance and ends with involuntary treatment, including commitment if necessary. [Emphasis mine-SW]  How many more mass murders and assassinations do we need before we understand that the rights-based hyper-individualism of our laws governing mental illness is endangering the security of our community and the functioning of our democracy?

Here is where the greatest problems in using the law to define mental disturbance lie.  At any one time, society considers various beliefs to be out of touch with reality.  At one time, were you to believe that sex with a member of your own gender was appealing, you would be considered to have a mental illness.  In the Soviet Union, to believe that Communism was failing was a priori evidence of delusion.  Making beliefs, even the most obviously delusional, the basis for involuntary confinement and/or treatment is highly problematic and potentially quite dangerous.  It should be readily apparent to all that Psychiatrists never let their personal beliefs color their diagnostic acumen (that is meant as sarcasm, so please refrain from making comments until you have finished the post) but even the best of intentions can not guarantee that "false imprisonment", ie the involuntary commitment of harmless people, will not take place.  In fact, the rate of false positive involuntary commitments (and treatments) will dwarf the rate of incarceration of truly dangerous people, simply because the number of paranoids who are harmless to all but themselves is 3 or 4  or more orders of magnitude higher than the number who will actually harm a stranger.

Steve Sailer gets it exactly right:

How dangerous is the lunatic fringe?

Not hugely, it would appear to me. There doesn't seem to be much justification for rounding up all the eccentrics, as is so often proposed after mass shootings.

The numerator of psycho killers like Jared Loughner doesn't appear to be large, and it may be shrinking due to better medications and the like. This story is big news for a bunch of reasons (e.g., the press wants to use it to launch Obama's re-election campaign the way Timothy McVeigh launched Clinton's re-election in 1995), one of which is that it's a man-bites-dog story: Members of Congress and judges don't get shot very often at all.

On the other hand, the denominator of people who suffer major mental problems at some point in their lives is very large.

It is interesting to me that the very same people who have counseled us, with increasing frequency since 9/11, that Islamic terrorism is a relatively minor realistic risk and can be handled adequately by the criminal Justice system, are so ready to infringe upon basic rights in order to minimize the chances of a lone madman committing mayhem.  Another interesting paradox is that there is far more that we can do as a society to diminish the risk of Islamic terrorism that there is that we can do to minimize the risk of lone madman.  Its almost as if they have an ideological purpose behind their suggestions.

The Computer Ate My Post

Due to computer problems, there will be no post today.  Beyond that, there is little to say except that the behavior of our "responsible and respectable" media in the wake of the terrible events of the weekend are simply beyond the pale; abominable is too tame a word to describe their partisan behavior.