I very much doubt that Friere and Fanon are responsible here. That’s not to say that the thinking is any different. It’s just to say that in point of fact it’s more likely that the thinking you describe came about independently in Islamic countries rather than as a result of two little-known Western authors. (Likewise, the fact that the Cherokee had a religious/spiritual concept of balance between opposites doesn’t mean they must have been influenced by the Taoists.)
— alkali

Uh, Fanon was an Algerian, and his writings were central to the modern understanding of colonial rebellion; the PLO and successor organizations uses rhetoric pretty much out of his playbook. I’m not suggesting that he is somehow personally culpable, or that without his book that the world would be radically different; just that there is a philosophical strain of thought which runs through him and appears to be showing up today.
New ideas are genuinely rare; we live in a world of shared ideas and some grow and others don’t. These ideas have grown.

I also think the whole, “they hate our freedoms” angle is 100% wrong. From what I have gathered from my father who was raised there and others that I know, is that most Egyptians (and my guess this is a common opinion) LOVE our democratic system. The problem they have with us is our foreign policy and the hypocrisy that it entails. When Bush goes out and says “Democracy is important to the Palestinian and Iraqi people,” while at the same time supporting the corrupt and thuggis regimes of Mubarak and the House of Saud. They don’t hate the U.S. because we vote or have women’s rights, they hate us because we use them for oil or strategic reasons.
Some of it is jealousy, I admit, but what kind of message do we send when we call Arafat a danger to his people, but the Saud family and Mubarak are dandy? We say, “We only want you to be democratic when it helps US. If disrupting the despotisms raise our oil prices during the revolution, then we want your despotisms to stand.” When you do that, you give psychopaths like OBL a chance to exploit people.
When people have no political power they turn to two things, the church and violence. And because of the poverty and low literacy and education rates the church becomes an easy place to control people.
I have an semi-unrelated question A.L. (this is my first time on you blog). Why no mention of the IRA as a terrorist orginization. Which group would they be in? I would lump them into a group similar to the Arab orgs.
— Mostafa Sabet

As noted elsewhere, I talked about the IRA in Part I, but limited to Ulster, instead of remembering (doooh!!) the long history from the early 1900’s in Eire. I don’t doubt the resentment talked about here is real (part of another discussion I’m thinking about on us and the Arab world), but my issue is “why is it manifesting itself in this way?”

You seem to discuss terrorism solely as a tactic of insurgents — those on the outside looking in. But states practice terrorism and then write histories that absolve themselves of guilt. For instance, if you believe Israeli historian Benny Morris, everything that Hamas is doing the Zionists used to do (though in keeping with the Jewish adage, only crazy people commit suicide). To some extent, insurgents learn terrorism from their oppressors. I’m not saying this justifies terrorism, but it is at least part of the explanation.
You also neglect the dimension of feasible alternatives, which goes back to the JFK cliche “If we make peaceful revolution impossible, we make violent revolution inevitable.” This is at least part of the explanation (again, aside from moral judgements) for the selection of tactics.
The other missing element in your posts gets to the substance a bit more. Terrorists sometimes lack a plausible notion of what sometimes is called “agency.” Namely, an idea of what is the motive force in history. You need a motive force if you expect to change history. The Weatherpeople, for instance, envisioned their deeds would spark a revolt of minorities and radical hippies. Sometimes terrorists are just loopy (i.e., the SLA), but their acts get sufficient notice as to invite analyses that make them part of something larger, when they are simply nuts.
On the whole I enjoyed the posts.
Cheers,
Max

Hmmm. A couple of things. First, the issue isn’t violence, it’s terrorism. I don’t doubt that (effectively every) modern state has some roots that were watered in blood. And I don’t doubt that much, if not most, of that blood was essentially innocent. But there is a unique quality to terrorism … particularly modern terrorism … that bears discussing.
Again, part of my issue is the relative ineffectiveness of the terror tactics on any practical basis. The acts seek image and drama more than impact, and that’s part of what I’m puzzling over.
More in a bit.

Go away from the computer for a while, and whammo!! Lots of link love, as Dawn would say.
My only request to the folks visiting is that they think about the posts and comment or email; as you can doubtless tell from the tone, I’m working this out in public, and your feedback is critical (in more ways than one…).
Thanks to Instapundit, Redwood Dragon, Cooped Up, Lean Left, Ranting Screeds, Sketch, and all the other folks who blogged this work-in-progress.
I’m just back home, and about to go have dinner with my fiancee and my ex-wife. [Begin Irony]Blogging somehow can’t get to center stage in my awareness just right now…[End Irony]…so I’ll promote some comments and see if I can put up some quick responses.
Part 4 is on the stove right now, will be up tomorrow.

Here’s the nub of the question: Are we fighting the Muslim Arab world in a replay of the Siege of Vienna? Or are we struggling with issues endemic to both the developing and developed world, which are, for specific reasons, more apparent right now in the Arab world?
This is a really important question to me.
First, please note that it really doesn’t significantly change the politics between us and the Arab/Palestinian world. From my point of view, it strips away some of my emotional reaction to their tactics, but the underlying conflicts remain what they are…which is something I haven’t yet seen clearly articulated (but will try and talk about more in the next few days)
It is important because if this theory holds water…and I’ll try in this post to succinctly articulate it so that folks can work with me to try and come up with some tests…we are in for some seriously challenging times as terrorism becomes more and more endemic not only through the Third World, where it is common, but in our own front yards.
Let’s present two alternate interpretations of recent events:
First, that we are in an undeclared war with the Muslim Arab world, who have used terrorist tactics against the Israelis for almost thirty years with some success, and who are now extending their tactics to the supporters of Israel (i.e. us).
This suggests that the overall cultural moment of the Muslim Arabs is aimed at both the destruction of Israel and the weakening of influence (if not overall weakening) of the United States.
The second possibility is that there is a rising tide of dissent, often led by the educated classes throughout the world; in the Arab world, the only survivable outlet is in protest against Israel and America, which fits neatly into the philosophical underpinnings of that educated dissent, which is the rejection of modernity and the Western concept of ‘progress’. But while the incoming wave is most visible where there are reefs…and so the fact that this viewpoint finds official support in the Arab world, for a variety of reasons…the wave is moving in along a very broad front.
Here are some individual (and sweepingly overgeneralized) facts to consider:
Africa is essentially becoming ungovernable, and subnational violence is rising everywhere the governments become too weak to repress it.
Parts of Asia look to follow Africa, with particular attention to India, where Hindu violence against Muslims, and Muslim violence against Hindus seems to be increasingly unsurpressible.
Latin America has similar problems with lost of national government legitimacy and increasing violence from subnational groups on the right and the left.
Now some of this looks like overt acts of directed terrorism; some like simple tribal or religious mob violence; some like high-intensity crime.
In Europe, we have a substantial rise in street crime, with the peaks…attacks on banks, jewelry stores, and armored cars by organized gangs armed with assault rifles and RPG’s…looking different from terrorist attacks only because there is loot to be taken away. We also have increasingly factionalized politics, and national politics explictly driven in some part by fear of further factionalization.
And here in the U.S. we are mirroring the level of European high-intensity crime (I just watched the LAPD tape of the North Hollywood bank robberies…) and in crime by subnational groups (the white-supremacist group that was robbing armored cars and banks). Add to this the increasing level of ‘mucker’ crimes, such as Columbine and the recent LAX shootings, and all that is missing is a philosophical framework in which to place this level of alienation and rage.
That framework exists, as above.
It supports and rationalizes attacks on ‘oppressive institutions’, and suggests that personal gratification and liberation can only be found in such violent attacks.
Andrew comments:

A personal note. I remember thinking on September 11th back to reading Fanon when I was an undergraduate bolsheveik. I remember feeling terrible, absolutely terrible, that I’d ever entertained the notion (from Fanon)that violence against civilians was an acceptable response to oppression. Hmmm…

These attacks will typically be symbolic, rather than practical.
In my younger days, as I learned about the mechanical underpinnings of cities…the commerce in energy, water, food and the dance of transportation on which life in any big city depends. I used to marvel at how easy it would be for ten or fifteen determined people to move Los Angeles toward the edge of habitability. If Al Quieda had meant to physically attack the US, instead of symbolically attack it, they would have attacked along one of those paths, or attacked the NSA or CIA headquarters. They had an opportunity to do something that would have genuinely weakened the U.S., as well as demoralized us.
Instead they attacked the symbols of American economic and military might.
Lee Harris’ article has received a lot of play in the Blogosphere. In the event that you’re one of the three people who haven’t read it, go now. Here’s something to whet your appetite:

…this does not change the fact that the final criterion of military success is always pragmatic: Does it work? Does it in fact bring us closer to realizing our political objectives?
But is this the right model for understanding 9-11? Or have we, like Montezuma, imposed our own inadequate categories on an event that simply does not fit them? Yet, if 9-11 was not an act of war, then what was it? In what follows, I would like to pursue a line suggested by a remark by the composer Karlheinz Stockhausen in reference to 9-11: his much-quoted comment that it was “the greatest work of art of all time.”
Despite the repellent nihilism that is at the base of Stockhausen’s ghoulish aesthetic judgment, it contains an important insight and comes closer to a genuine assessment of 9-11 than the competing interpretation of it in terms of Clausewitzian war. For Stockhausen did grasp one big truth: 9-11 was the enactment of a fantasy — not an artistic fantasy, to be sure, but a fantasy nonetheless.

Bill Quick and N.Z. Bear have posted “I’m available for work” to their blogs, and I’ve been looking (without result so far), so why not add myself to the list, I thought…
I’m looking for a short-to medium term consulting project (preferred) or, God Forbid, a job (actually have been thinking about hanging up the consulting hat, since I’m tired of making recommendations that get ignored). Here’s what I do in a nutshell:
1) Evaluate and manage troubled (and other) projects. My recent experience is in technology projects, including large Ariba/Tradex and Oracle projects. Spent 60% of the budget and have nothing to show for it? I’ll typically evaluate what you’ve got and suggest the least painful path out. And help hang the guilty, where appropriate. I’ve also got significant experience in large real estate workouts both of financially troubled existing projects and politically troubled development projects.
2) Devise technology strategy to fit business objectives, and design systems (down to the architecture level) to implement this strategy.
I have a bunch of happy ex-clients (or at least ex-clients who wished they had done what I suggested), and up until this round haven’t spent much time looking for projects or work. I didn’t even have a finished resume until six weeks ago…hadn’t needed one.
But times are different now…
Please email me if you have a lead or an “opportunity” as they are called, somewhere in the greater Los Angeles area.
…back to terrorists on motorcycles later today.

First, let me try and set some expectations. I am not a military historian or expert; I have no ‘inside’ knowledge of our plans, responses or of the plans or responses of those opposed to us. I do not intend to talk about the tactical issues involved in practicing terrorism, nor about the tactics of suppressing it. Lots of folks in the Blogosphere seem to feel that they are terrorism and counterterrorism experts; maybe they are graduates of Ft. Benning, or maybe they read a Tom Clancy book once. I can’t opine, because I am not an expert.
What I am is a citizen, and what I am qualified to speak about is our goals and the acceptable costs and range of paths toward those goals. The rest is up to the professionals.
First, unlike conventional wars, which are typically at root fought for objective interests, I’ll argue that terrorist wars are fought as much for emotional and psychological reasons…in short, out of hate and frustration.
Where does the hate and frustration come from? That’s the $64 million question…
Here, I’ll step over to the faar left side of the room and introduce ‘liberation theory’. This is a catch-all critical theory that explains all of Western society in the context of the various relationships created by the market and between classes of people, which are defined in this model by power and ultimately oppression. For some reading, I’ll suggest first, and foremost, Franz Fanon. His work (including the referenced ‘Wretched of the Earth’ is probably the cornerstone of what Paolo Freire called the Pedagogy of the Oppressed.
Essentially, (and I’m running on old memory here) these works translate essentially all relationships into relationships of power. Since the market, and particularly the extractive colonial markets, in which colonies were essentially sources of raw materials and inexpensive labor, uses power – the power of the colonial military, the superior technology and economy of the colonizer, they define the relationships between colonizer and colonized…which to them is both a national and a racial relationship…as oppressive. The colonizer oppresses the colonized.
Now I don’t agree with much, if any, of liberation theory. I believe that they started out with their conclusion and ideology and constructed theories to support it. But first, it is a useful and coherent analysis, and second and far more important, it is impossible to understand the roots of modern terrorism without understanding this body of work.
Read these quotes from Freire

Dehumanization, which marks not only those whose humanity has been stolen, but also (though in a different way) those who have stolen it, is a distortion of the vocation of becoming more human. This distortion occurs within history; but it is not a historical vocation. Indeed to admit of dehumanization as an historical vocation would lead either to cynicism or total despair. The struggle for humanization, for the emancipation of labor, for the overcoming of alienation, for the affirmation of men and women as persons would be meaningless. This struggle is possible only because dehumanization, although a concrete historical fact, is not a given destiny, but the result of an unjust order that engenders violence in the oppressors, which in turn dehumanizes the oppressed.
Because it is a distortion of being more fully human, sooner or later being less human leads the oppressed to struggle against those who made them so. In order for this struggle to have meaning, the oppressed must not, in seeking to regain their humanity (which is a way to create it), become in turn oppressors of the oppressors, but rather restorers of the humanity of both.
This, then is the great humanistic and historical task of the oppressed: to liberate themselves and their oppressors as well. The oppressors, who oppress, exploit, and rape by virtue of their power, cannot find in this power the strength to liberate either the oppressed or themselves. Only power that springs from the weakness of the oppressed will be sufficiently strong to free both. Any attempt to “soften” the power of the oppressor in deference to the weakness of the oppressed almost always manifests itself in the form of false generosity; indeed, the attempt never goes beyond this. In order to have the continued opportunity to express their “generosity”, the oppressors must perpetuate injustice as well. An unjust social order is the permanent fount of this “generosity”, which is nourished by death, despair, and poverty. That is why the dispensers of false generosity become desperate at the slightest threat to its source.

And another one:

Any situation in which “A” objectively exploits “B” or hinders his self-affirmation as a responsible person is one of oppression. Such a situation in itself constitutes violence, even when sweetened by false generosity, because it interferes with the individual’s ontological and historical vocation to be more fully human. With the establishment of a relationship of oppression, violence has already begun. Never in history has violence been initiated by the oppressed. How could they be the initiators, if they themselves are the result of violence? How could they be the sponsors of something objective whose objective inauguration called forth their existence as oppressed? There would be no oppressed had there been no prior of violence to establish their subjugation.
Violence is initiated by those who oppress, who exploit, who fail others as persons — not by those who are oppressed, exploited, and unrecognized. It is not the unloved who initiate disaffection, but those who cannot love because they love only themselves. It is not the helpless, subject to terror, who initiate terror, but the violent, who with their power create the concrete situation which begets the “rejects of life.” It is not the tyrannized who initiate despotism, but the tyrants. It is not the despised who initiate hatred, but those who despise. It is not those whose humanity is denied them who negate humankind, but those who denied that humanity (thus negating their own as well). Force is used not by those who have become weak under the preponderance of the strong, but by the strong who have emasculated them. For the oppressors, however, it is always the oppressed (whom they obviously never call “the oppressed” but — depending on whether they are fellow countrymen or not –“those people” or “the blind and envious masses” or “savages” or “natives” or “subversives”) who are disaffected, who are “violent,” “barbaric,” “wicked,” or “ferocious” when they react to the violence of the oppressors.
Yet it is — paradoxical though it may seem — precisely in the response of the oppressed to the violence of their oppressors that a gesture of love may be found. Consciously or unconsciously, the act of rebellion by the oppressed (an act which is always, or nearly always, as violent as the initial violence of the oppressors) can initiate love. Whereas the violence of the oppressors prevents the oppressed from being fully human, the response of the latter to this violence is grounded in the desire to pursue the right to be human. As the oppressors dehumanize others and violate their rights, they themselves also become dehumanized. As the oppressed, fighting to be human, take away the oppressors’ power to dominate and suppress, they restore to the oppressors the humanity they had lost in the exercise of oppression.

You have to realize that all three of the waves of terror in our time come from the philosophical roots set out here. First, the terrorist wars against colonial powers; then the terrorist attacks against manifestations of the capitalist state by the academic terrorists; and now the Arab terrorist war against Israel, and by proxy, the West.
I had leant to the assumption that because the latest round of terrorists used the language and rhetoric of Islam, that what we were seeing was a war of religious fanatics against the West. And to be sure, the mullah’s rhetoric on Friday nights sounds like that. But go back and reread (either in my blog or the original articles from the Times and Ha’aretz) the interviews with the ‘failed’ terrorists.
Does this sound like religious fanaticism? For myself, I have an easier time placing it in the context of alienation and a striving for national liberation. I think they have more in common with the kids who were pulled into the Weather Underground, and in support, I’ll point out that almost all of the leadership of the Palestinian/Arab terror movement has been from the highly Westernized upper-middle class.
I’m wondering if we are trying to fight the wrong war.

So I spent most of a week with my 18 year old son, and other than worrying about the usual parental concerns (Does he have enough condoms? Does he understand his school’s sexual harassment policy? WTF is he doing with a tobacco pipe?), being with him makes we think about our immediate future and so about terrorism.
If you have read this blog at all, you know that I’m no friend of Hamas or any of the other alphabet-soup of Islamists up and to Bin Laden the Asimov-reading nutjob who destroyed the World Trade Center. I don’t believe that a Palestinian state is the answer at this point, nor have I excused terror as the inevitable consequence of oppression.
But being with my son made me worry, both about the impacts on my sons’ futures of not doing anything about terrorism, and about the cost in young lives (like my son’s) of doing something. And when I worry, I think.
First, let me set the stage.
I think that we’re headed into some dark times. While many in the world are better off than they have ever been, they are also plugged in enough to know how much more others have than they do. And the key to resentment isn’t absolute deprivation, but relative. Add to that the global mobility…of money, people, goods…and we in the U.S. are tied closer than ever to a world population that not only resents us for our wrongdoings (such as they may be) but for simply living the lives we lead every day.
I think, as does Kevin Phillips, that we are a late-stage empire, and that the habits that brought us our power and wealth are becoming weakened. There’s good and bad in that; I don’t mean to judge them normatively, but rather to use them in a way that offers a theory of what the medium-term future – my sons’ future – may look like.
Now, let me talk about terrorism.
I’ve been reading a lot about terrorism, and a lot of the rhetoric about it has finally begun to gel in my head.
Most broadly, terrorism is the use of violence against civilian targets in a manner designed to create fear and so to drive a political action home.
It has been the subject of much debate and many competing definitions. A few include:

“Terrorism is an anxiety-inspiring method of repeated violent action, employed by (semi-) clandestine individual, group or state actors, for idiosyncratic, criminal or political reasons, whereby – in contrast to assassination – the direct targets of violence are not the main targets. The immediate human victims of violence are generally chosen randomly (targets of opportunity) or selectively (representative or symbolic targets) from a target population, and serve as message generators. Threat- and violence-based communication processes between terrorist (organization), (imperilled) victims, and main targets are used to manipulate the main target (audience(s)), turning it into a target of terror, a target of demands, or a target of attention, depending on whether intimidation, coercion, or propaganda is primarily sought” (Schmid, 1988).
From U.N Office for Drug Control and Crime Prevention
…the definition of terrorism contained in Title 22 of the United States Code, Section 2656f(d). That statute contains the following definitions:
The term “terrorism” means premeditated, politically motivated violence perpetrated against noncombatant (1) targets by subnational groups or clandestine agents, usually intended to influence an audience.
From U.S. Navy Department Library

So what we have are three core features:
1) Violence against civilians
2) Violence for nonmilitary purposes
3) Violence by a subnational or clandestine group
Let’s go through these. Violence against civilians ought to be obvious…soldiers wear uniforms, drive marked behicles, etc. etc. But there are gradations. There is a profound difference between attacking the Speaker of the House and attacking his grocer in order to frighten him. [Inserted: Both are civilians, but one occupies a role that is both functional and ceremonial in the leadership of the country and by extension, our military capacity.] If you hate the United States, or Republicans, you might believe that killing Hastert, even though he is nominally a ‘civilian’ would somehow strike at the effectiveness or strength of the U.S. or the Republican party (note: I don’t advocate this, Ann, please don’t get any ideas…). You’d be deranged in these cases, because one of the strength of our system is its relative independence from who wields the levers of power. But you’d be ‘understandably’ evil. Comprehensibly evil. But to kill the guy who runs the Quick Mart where Dennis stops and gets his Slim-Jims, in order to frighten or intimidate Hastert moves the evil to a whole new category. The grocer’s life becomes meaningless, you make him into a pawn, devalue him as a moral agent, and in so doing, devalue yourself morally.
This fits into 2), the concept of violence for nonmilitary purposes. Let’s look back at WWII and strategic bombing. There was a huge difference between bombing factories in the Ruhr, or bombing railroads…the destruction of which would have degraded the ability of Germany to fight…and bombing Dresden, which was designed to frighten German citizens. Attacking the armed forces of an enemy, or the resources on which the armed forced depend to fight has a legitimacy which simply killing the civilians of the enemy lacks.
And finally, 3) the question of identifiable combatants. There are two justifications for the clear identification of soldiers; first because we morally believe in ‘fighting fair’, and the notion that we have to take the reactions from our actions is important; but more importantly, because if enemy combatants are hiding among the civilian population and killing my soldiers, one very likely outcome involves the wholesale slaughter of the enemy civilian population in order to kill the hidden combatants.
In my life, there have been three waves of terrorism:
1) Undeclared and declared wars of national liberation. Algeria, the Congo, Vietnam, Ulster, Sri Lanka. In each of these, the tactics of terror were used to combat a colonial power, in the interest of founding an independent nation.
2) Western middle-class terrorists; what I’ll call “academic” terrorism. Baader-Meinhof, Red Army Faction, the Weather Underground (how pathetic is it that the Germans and Japanese grew better middle-class terrorists than we did?), on to groups and individuals I’ll suggest stand in the same continuum but without the overt politics…Charles Manson, Charles Whitman, the SLA, and Columbine.
3) Palestinian and other Arab terrorism. From Munich to Lockerbie, the secular Arab nationalist movements (note that the Islamist movements have been relatively free from terrorism…the capture of the American Embassy arguably was an action against ‘combatants’) have attacked Israel and secondarily Western countries that have supported Israel.
In the next part, I want to try and make some connections between these three waves, and to try and outline a theory of the connection and progress of terrorism, with some disturbing suggestions about its future.

Every day my local, small-town, Republican newspaper has a historic quote on the front page. Today’s got my attention…

I pity the man who wants a coat so cheap that the man or woman who produces the cloth will starve in the process.
-Benjamin Harrison

We were lucky enough to have dinner Sunday with Dave Trowbridge, his lovely and incredibly talented partner Deborah Ross, her daughter and friend, Ann Salisbury and friend, and briefly, Steve Den Beste. It was great to talk with all of them, and I walked away again impressed at the luck that I’ve had since starting this through the people I’ve met physically and electronically.
We rode a motorcycle down, since anyone who knows Southern California can tell you how awful the traffic is on the 405 on a Sunday afternoon and evening. Remarking on this, Dave commented that he’d recently seen a motorcyclist die on Highway 9 near his home, and that he’d written about it.
Here’s what he wrote:

Tuesday night, as I drove home from work along Highway 9 in the Santa Cruz mountains, I passed a dying man lying at the side of the road. I couldn’t know at the time that he was dying, although I thought it likely, for his kind die weekly on our roads during the summer. He was surrounded by his friends, and there was nothing I could do, so I drove on.
But the next day, on my way to work, I knew his fate, for where he had lain were the spidery orange lines of spray paint left by the Highway Patrol investigator, and some hyacinths planted in the embankment, surrounded by cut flowers still in the florist’s plastic sheaths, there in the deep shade of a redwood forest where such flowers never grow, much less bloom, except on the occasion of violent death.
He was a young man, I suppose, for his hobby is not for the old. Or, rather, those that persist in it usually do not reach a great age. He was a café racer, or so we call them here in the mountains, naming them for the low-slung motorcycles they ride. If you drive the mountains, you will have seen them, blurred harlequins in their riding leathers flashing by, hugging the center line or even crossing it, impatient with the slower pace of four-wheeled traffic. Theirs is a dance of the physics of untreaded rubber and asphalt, the fragile vector between the inertial ghost of centrifugal acceleration and the pull of gravity, first one knee and then the other almost brushing the rushing road beneath them as they follow the highway’s weaving path in an ecstasy of speed that has no teleology but the moment…

And both his comments and his writing cut close to home, in a way that’s more impressive because usually when outsiders write about something you know you may admire the writing or the ideas, but they get it fundamentally wrong. Dave didn’t (well, the tires have treads…but that’s a nit).
In the last six years, three people (one of whom was a very close friend) I know have died sportriding (riding motorcycles quickly on mountain roads). Dozens of others have been injured, usually mildly, thank Someone. And my partner, my significant other, my fiancee has had two trips to the hospital engendered by her own over-enthusiastic riding.
And yesterday, I was riding hard through the hills above Ojai helping test and review some motorcycles for a friend.
Hang on, there’s a point. Actually, two.
First and foremost, there’s this: People have some right to be stupid. I said earlier:

There’s more, which can be put simply that people will sometimes do stupid or evil things with their freedom. But without their freedom, they will seldom do great things. So by protecting society against one, you also deprive it of the other.

The more we take freedom and responsibility away from people, the less responsible and more dependent people we will help create. People want to be free, they want responsibility for themselves and others. And so in doing so…in banning fast motorcycles, or fast food…you begin to create the rust that will eventually corrode away our society and government. That rust exists. It is deep and powerful. But the metal underneath it…the structural steel that holds our society and the government of our contry together…is still strong.
For now.
The second is that while it’s great to advocate the freedom to be stupid, there is also an obligation to minimize the risks to yourself and others, to act responsibly, in other words. This is a gospel I preach most of the places I go, whether in the shooting community, motorcycling community, or, for that matter in politics and other public spheres. Your actions have consequences on you and on the people around you. And to the extent that you decide to simply ignore those consequences…to ride beyond your capabilities or beyond what is remotely safe for the conditions you are in, or in a way that infuriates the other legitimate users of a road or a community…then you are abusing your freedom, not building it, and someone is likely to take it away from you.
Rights and responsibilities are inseparable. It is meaningless to talk about one without the other: to have rights, implies that you are an actor, not an object.
Actors have responsibility. Period.

…and boy, am I behind. Haven’t had a chance to catch up on blogs or news yet; will try and do some in the next day or so. Have been thinking hard about terrorism through history, and came to some surprising conclusions. As soon as they get set (sort of) articulately down in pixels, I’ll post them.
Lots of reading to do.

9/10/02: Visitors from InstaPundit: I’m not Steve Skubinna. He was a frequent commenter here, and someone I thought highly of even before this.