This morning, I talked to Littlest Guy (my 10 year old) about the shootings at Virginia Tech. He’d seen the paper, and knew the basic facts.

I explained first that while it got a lot of attention, it wasn’t something I worried about a lot, and that he was more at risk from bees than he is from mad killers like this. I told him that nonetheless it was a good idea for him to imagine what he’d do if something like this happened, so that he could know that he isn’t ever helpless.

Later, I talked to a friend who is a University police officer about it, and got this response (the author is a law enforcement officer at a major urban university who will have more to say about the response at VPI tomorrow):

What do you tell your college bound child about crime, danger and self-preservation?

Recognize that a University is just a city within a city, filled with people. Some are good, some are bad, some are there to take advantage of the environment for profit and others, to prey upon a particularly vulnerable population.

By vulnerable, I include students, staff and faculty, all of whom tend to believe the hype about the University Community being somehow insulated from the crime that exists outside the borders. By design, Universities are filled with idealists wishing to take the higher road of understanding and compassion when it comes to dealing with the dangers people often pose toward their own species.

Tell your son or daughter that in order to decrease the risks hidden behind the school’s marketing facade, they must listen to their instincts when confronted with danger, rather than letting their intellect and ideals overcome them. A student needs to be willing to see danger when it presents itself. They need to understand that bad things happen to good people every day, even in places that are supposed to be safe. That all of nature survives and thrives upon decisions of fight or flight, but fails or dies if they succumb to the immobility of fear.

Unfortunately, we live in a would-be virtual world, where we protect our children from fear and leave them to practice their survival skills in games that allow them to respawn when they make the wrong choice. This leaves them believing that they cannot come to harm and although I don’t think walking around riddled with anxiety over every potential encounter is healthy; skepticism, caution and adaptability to swiftly changing circumstances are excellent tools for long term survival.

To be more specific, if something doesn’t look right, it probably isn’t and you should report your concerns to the authorities. If someone seems irrational, delusional or just plain weird, let someone know. If someone seems to believe you have a romantic relationship and you don’t – be alert and report stalking or obsessive behavior as soon as you encounter it. Sometimes, if these situations are caught early, the subject can be helped with medical intervention. Do not put embarrassment above safety.

Most importantly, if you find yourself in an active shooter situation and you can access real shelter or cover, waste no time running full speed in that direction. If you are trapped, in a room with an assailant who is picking off victims as he/she finds them, FIGHT. Throw things, big things if you can grab them. Use that as a distraction to assault the shooter. Go down fighting if you must, but do not let yourself be immobilized by fear. Unless you can hide among the bodies and successfully play dead (a risky tactic if the assailant decides on a ‘coup de grace’ shot), you may as well go down fighting. If you cower in a corner or under a desk, as soon as he sees you he will kill you. Take the initiative away. You have nothing to lose in this situation. Remember the lesson of 9/11, submission to an adversary bent on killing plays into his expectations and will likely result in your death.

Update: changed formatting to distinguish the author’s words from mine.

	– MyDD –	– Kos –	– Gallup Apr 13-15 –
Edwards	43%	42%	16%
Obama	34%	25%	26%
Richardson	8%	13%	3%
Clinton	4%	3%	31%

Why?

My oldest son goes to college at the University of Virginia (Glenn appears to have misread this, my apologies for using the abbreviation earlier), and so I’ve gotten a slug of phone calls from colleagues and friends who knew he was in Virginia telling me about the mass murder at Virginia Tech today.

This isn’t the time for dispassionate – or even passionate – policy discussion, although that will surely follow.

It’s time to think about the other parents – parents like me – whose daughters and sons go to school at VPI (instead of UVA where my son goes) and are waiting for news or are getting the worst news imaginable.

Here’s this week’s video. Please share it with some friends once you’ve watched it:

We’re very slightly under $14,000 today, with very little publicity after the initial 3 or 4 blog posts.

Here’s what’s going on:

1) I’m working to get the legal and accounting set up for the PAC, so that we’ll be legal and I can contact each of the pledged donors to fulfill their pledge.
2) I’m reaching out to a number of people to put together a 5-person Board of Directors so this isn’t just me doing things and/or making decisions.
3) I’m designing a site that will allow you to register, pledge, donate, post your thoughts, and contact others to help us raise money and awareness.

My guess is that all of this will happen between 4/21 and 5/10, with a goal of being fully operational by 5/15.

Feel free to go to the VictoryPAC site and add your pledge.

Littlest Guy (finishing 5th grade) just took their test and did very well. We’re debating putting him into one of the summer or distance learning programs, and I’d love to find someone who’s had a child go through one (or a child who went through one themselves) who’d be willing to comment on it.

Leave a comment or drop a me a note.

And no, he doesn’t look like the milkman.

Media Matters has a post up today explaining that

Internet gossip Matt Drudge has claimed that Media Matters for America is a “Soros operation.”

In fact, Media Matters has never received funding from progressive philanthropist George Soros.

Looking at the non-authoritative but informative Sourcewatch entry on Media Matters we get:

Funded with “more than $2 million in donations from wealthy liberals.” “Among Mr. Brock’s donors is Leo Hindery, Jr., the former cable magnate; Susie Tompkins Buell, who is co-founder of the fashion company Esprit and is close to Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York, and Ms. Buell’s husband Mark; and James C. Hormel, a San Francisco philanthropist whose appointment as ambassador to Luxembourg was delayed for a year and a half in the late 1990’s by conservative lawmakers protesting what they called his promotion of a ‘gay lifestyle.’ [5]

Media Matters for America is funded in part by the Democracy Alliance.

And following the Sourcewatch link to ‘Democracy Alliance’ we get:

“Members of the Democracy Alliance include billionaires like George Soros and his son Jonathan Soros, former Rockefeller Family Fund president Anne Bartley, San Francisco Bay Area donors Susie Tompkins Buell and Mark Buell, Hollywood director Rob Reiner, Taco Bell heir Rob McKay … as well as New York financiers like Steven Gluckstern.” [3]

Conservative site ‘Discover the Networks‘ says:

Media Matters has not always been forthcoming about its high-profile backers. In particular, the group has long labored to obscure any financial ties to George Soros. But in March 2003, the Cybercast News Service (CNS) detailed the copious links between Media Matters and several Soros “affiliates” – among them MoveOn.org, the Center for American Progress, and Peter Lewis. Confronted with this story, a spokesman for the organization explained that “Media Matters for America has never received funding directly from George Soros” (emphasis added), a transparent evasion.

Here’s why this matters – if the issue is to replace one group of powerhungry liars with another, it’s really hard for me to motivate any energy to become involved. And I assume that I’m not alone.

Transparency and honesty matter, or they don’t. You can’t bust GWB for failing to be completely transparent and then cloak yourself in bullshit without the room starting to stink.

Honesty is more important to me than social justice because I don’t believe that people who are profoundly dishonest are capable of advancing the cause of social justice.

Steve renamed his blog Smythe’s World ‘The Concerned Troll‘ – and given the amusing nature of that would-be dismissal by the netroots tools, it’s a great blog title. I wish I’d thought of it…

But Steve’s not only clever, he’s moral.

Racist Quote of the Day:

Oh oh….looks like a pouty Brown Sugar is going to ask Daddy to buy her another pair of Ferragamos. Or invade another country.

—T.Bogg (referencing a photo of the Secretary of State).

There’s an amusing debate going on in the blogosphere over whether Imus is a liberal or a conservative, as if that makes any difference. If “nappy-headed ho” comes out of your mouth when you describe a female college basketball player, you’re a racist. If making a lewd reference to a black prostitute is what comes to mind when you need to dis Condaleeza Rice, you’re a racist. And it doesn’t matter if the nazis over at LGF are pretending to take offense.

I have never understood the notion that liberals like Tom (of TBogg) – who would spasm into rageful unconsciousness listening to a white redneck talk smack about a black man or a woman somehow feel free to bring out their inner Tom Mezgers if the target isn’t on their side of the angels.

An old post from armedliberal.com back in 2002 which seems highly appropriate in light of yesterday’s Duke acquittals, and this post at Maggie’s Farm:

The War on Bad Philosophy continues.

I’m still working today, so I can’t give this the depth it deserves, but I want to point folks to an article on Free Speech and Postmodernism, by Stephen Hicks, a Randian liberal arts professor, and commentary on the article by Arthur Silber on his blog Voice of Reason. (link originally via Instapundit)

First, I’m not a big fan of Rand and Randians. As a group, they tend to exhibit the confusion between logic and reason that many bright teenagers display (I should know, I’ve got two…). But while there is a framework in both articles I’d take some exception to (and will when I get a moment), there are a couple of 18kt gems worth pulling out and handing around. From Hicks:

What we have then are two positions about the nature of speech. The postmodernists say: Speech is a weapon in the conflict between groups that are unequal. And that is diametrically opposed to the liberal view of speech, which says: Speech is a tool of cognition and communication for individuals who are free.

If we adopt the first statement, then the solution is going to be some form of enforced altruism, under which we redistribute speech in order to protect the harmed, weaker groups. If the stronger, white males have speech tools they can use to the detriment of the other groups, then don’t let them use those speech tools. Generate a list of denigrating words that harm members of the other groups and prohibit members of the powerful groups from using them. Don’t let them use the words that reinforce their own racism and sexism, and don’t let them use words that make members of other groups feel threatened. Eliminating those speech advantages will reconstruct our social reality – which is the same goal as affirmative action.

A striking consequence of this analysis is that the toleration of “anything goes” in speech becomes censorship. The postmodern argument implies that if anything goes, then that gives permission to the dominant groups to keep on saying the things that keep the subordinate groups in their place. Liberalism thus means helping to silence the subordinate groups and letting only the dominant groups have effective speech. Postmodern speech codes, therefore, are not censorship but a form of liberation – they liberate the subordinated groups from the punishing and silencing effects of the powerful groups’ speech, and they provide an atmosphere in which the previously subordinated groups can express themselves. Speech codes equalize the playing field.

I haven’t read a better description of the postmodernist take on speech and power.

I believe Hicks to be off base in his explanation of the root of this construction; he explains it as a political tactic adopted as the previous tactic – affirmative action – began to fail. He’s wrong; this is a manifestation of the underlying philosophy behind affirmative action – the primacy of group identification, and the construction of politics as conflicts between identified groups.

I’d suggest going back to Marcuse’s ‘Repressive Tolerance’ for a historic touchstone.

A bit more bloggage then back to work…

…2002 was an interesting year, wasn’t it?

(Sorry, I just love the Glenn Gould movie)

So I broke down and subscribed to Foreign Affairs. I want to learn what the smart folks (like Dan Drezner, who has an article in the Marc/April issue) are thinking and writing about. I acknowledge my lack of expert knowledge and think it’d be good to hear what expert have to say.

So this month, along with Drezner’s article, there’s a lead article by Ray Takeyh on Iran, in which he argues strongly for detente. He argues, in fact, for the inevitability of detente, because of the strength of Iran.

In order to develop a smarter Iran policy, U.S. leaders must first accept certain distasteful facts – such as Iran’s ascendance as a regional power and the endurance of its regime – and then ask how those can be accommodated.

OK, there’s some things to think about in that.

But – no where in the article is there anything about the demographic issues or the potential collapse of Iranian oil revenues – and the political implications that presents for the “endurance of its regime”. Now it may be that those issues are overblown; there are certainly arguments to be made.

But I’d say that it’s pretty difficult to talk about Iran and our long-term strategy with them without dealing with these issues – or at least raising and dismissing them with some arguments that hold some weight.

And it’s difficult for me to sit down and accept the authoritay of someone who is a Senior Fellow at the Council of Foreign relations and author of ‘Hidden Iran: Paradox and Power in the Islamic Republic’ when he tells me that Iran is an unstoppable force in the Middle East and doesn’t deal with the reasons why Iran may either be a hollow power – or why it may be motivated to be aggressive within a specific window of time. If this is what the leading experts are doing – heaven help us all.

Then Noah Pollak sent me a note announcing the new issue of Azure, the magazine he’s involved with.

In it, David Hazony (editor in chief of the magazine) has an article on ‘The New Cold War’ in which he details the issues in containing Iran.

By most measures, Iran is an easier mark than the Soviet Union. It does not yet have nuclear weapons or icbms; its Islamist ideology has less of a universal appeal; its tools of thought control are vastly inferior to the gulag and the KGB; and its revolution is not old enough to have obliterated the memory of better days for much of its population. In theory at least, it should be much easier for the West to mount a similar campaign of relentless pressure on the regime – from fomenting dissent online, to destabilizing the regime through insurgent groups inside Iran, to destroying the Iranian nuclear project, to ever-deeper economic sanctions, to fighting and winning the proxy wars that Iran has continued to wage – in order to effect the kind of change of momentum needed to enable the Iranian people to bring their own regime down the way the peoples under communism did in the 1980s and 1990s.

This article cuts closer to my presuppositions and beliefs than Takeyh’s; it stands as a counter to his arguments about the inevitability of Iranian power with an argument about the necessity of countering it.

But it’s more in the nature of a polemic than an analysis.

And the question, of course, is whether it’s the right polemic. And some analysis would help make that case. Or Takeyh’s.

My dad was a very good gambler. The best bets he made were ones where the suckers other bettors saw the odds differently than they were really.

I’ve argued for a long time that the progressive netroots weighs more in the consciousness of the political class than it does in political reality. I was meaning to do a post on the Political Arithmetik post showing netroots-fave Edwards 4th and stalled when Jeff Jarvis did a much better post for me.

“Boy, those results don’t look like those from Gallup – from the real voters. At the Politics Online conference in Washington a few weeks ago, I remember one of the many pundits there arguing that Hillary has no grass roots support and momentum because you can’t find it in the blogosphere. Well, maybe in one blog.”

The political blogs are all about Edwards and Richardson, and the polls are all about Hillary.

It’s a fundamental mistake to presume that because one narrow slice of the chattering classes (us) happens to be all excited about a candidate – like, say Ned Lamont – that the enthusiasm is shared by the larger electorate.

I think there’s a lesson there for the netroots – especially the wannabe political consultant class netroots – and I’ll cite my perennial source John Schaar:

“Finally, if political education is to effective it must grow from a spirit of humility on the part of the teachers, and they must overcome the tendencies toward self-righteousness and self-pity which set the tone of youth and student politics in the 1960’s. The teachers must acknowledge common origins and common burdens with the taught, stressing connection and membership, rather than distance and superiority. Only from these roots can trust and hopeful common action grow.”