Over at BlackFive, Grim posted a piece which has become … kinda controversial.

It’s called “On The Virtues Of Killing Children” and you ought to read it.

It reminded me, strongly, of an old post of mine which I’m reproducing here.

LES MAINS SALES

So I was stuck in traffic riding my motorcycle to the client site today, which meant that the ride was more contemplative than usual (if I’m riding through traffic, I can’t think about anything but riding…).

And I was thinking about Avdeon Carol’s post, and what it is that I find so grating about many people (not including her at this point, since I don’t know her well enough) who share the general ‘attitude space’ I’m trying to talk about.

And I had an idea I just had to try out on you guys.

A long time ago, I talked about the moral importance of hunting…that I felt it somehow wrong for people to both eat meat that they buy in the store and yet somehow they deny their responsibility for the life that was taken for their consumption. For me, having hunted somehow solves this problem…I have taken the responsibility, I have had my hands up to the elbows in the bloody mess, and changed something from an animal to meat for my table.

But when I read much of what comes from the left, I’m left with the feeling that they want to consume the benefits that come from living in the U.S. and more generally the West without either doing the messy work involved or, more seriously, taking on the moral responsibility for the life they enjoy.

We enjoy this life because a number of things happened in the world’s (our) history. Many of them involved one group dominating (or brutalizing or exterminating) another, or specific actions (Dresden, Hiroshima) whose moral foundation is sketchy at best.

“Do you think one can govern innocently? Purity is a matter for monks, clerics, not for politicians. My hands are dirty to the elbows. I have shoved them in filth and blood,” Hoederer says in Sartre’s ‘Dirty Hands’.

Part of political adulthood is the maturity to realize that we are none of us innocents. The clothes we wear, money we have, jobs we go to are a result of a long, bloody and messy history.

I see my job as a liberal as making the future less bloody than the past.

But I accept the blood on my hands. I can’t enjoy the freedom and wealth of this society and somehow claim to be innocent. I don’t get to lecture people from a position of moral purity. No one spending U.S. dollars, or speaking with the freedom protected by U.S. laws gets to.

Posted by Armed Liberal at December 11, 2002 11:19 AM

My local paper, the Daily Breeze, which I love because high school sports dominate the Saturday sports page, runs a front-page article on what a 10kt nuke in Long Beach harbor would do … my nightmare scenario.

It’s a long, great article, and you ought to go read it.

Titled “Considering the Effects of a Catastrophic Terrorist Attack” the report warns that in the weeks and months after an attack, costs would exceed $1 trillion in medical care, insurance claims, workers’ compensation, evacuation and construction.

“The $50 billion to $100 billion for (the 9-11 terrorist attacks) put this figure into perspective,” the report states. “In general, consequences would far outstrip the resources available to cope with them.”

I’ll beg you to go read it, because it gives a sense of the stakes involved.

And when you’re done, ask yourself this…absent a calling card from the scientists at Natanz…who do we respond to when it happens?

And yes, the Times covered it as well – in the California section.

Shrinkwrapped blog has a pretty insightful riff on my rambling post on “Some Thoughts On Violence, Suicide, And Bad Philosophy“

Such people have no dependable core of their own and their chronic frustration and rage at a world which refuses to satiate their desperate inner hunger cannot be contained but must be externalized.

When the rage is externalized, all it needs is a coherent idea to give it meaning and shape. Islam, par excellence, is an ideology of Meaning. After all, by submitting to one’s God, there are no further questions; all questions have been answered.

Perhaps at one time vulnerable children could have found Meaning in their religion, but our Western elites have managed to destroy religion as a source of inner strength for too many. Without meaning, they have nothing, which is the core of nihilism. Modern Multiculturalism and the deconstruction of Western reality has left too many of our elites with no fixed beliefs; nothing they believe has any meaning beyond their belief that nothing has any meaning. There is one exception for the Left:

All cultures are equal except for Western Civilization , which is evil and the source of all that is wrong with the world.

And if that’s the case…well, no action is unjustifiable.

I’ve had a variety of reactions to author Gunter Grass’ admission that he was a member of Hitler’s (the real one, not the metaphorical one) SS during World War II.

Then it hit me. And I went to the bookshelf, and pulled down my copy of ShrinkLits, by Maurice Sagoff.

Dafoe’s “Moll Flanders”

The Fortunes and Misfortunes of the famous
Moll Flanders, who was born in Newgate, and
during a life of continued variety, for
threescore years, besides her childhood,
was twelve years a Whore, five times
a Wife (thereof once to her own
brother), twelve years a
thief, eight years a
transported Felon in Virginia,
at last grew rich, lived honest,
and died a penitent.
Written from her
own memorandums.

– original title page

That’s the story,
…Briefly told.

At age 70,
…Weak and old,

Pricked by conscience,
…Moll retires,

Banks her savings
…And her fires;

She repents her
…Sins and all…

Love your sense of timing
…Moll.

Over at one of my favorite local blogs – it’s iconoclastic to the max – “Mayor Sam’s Sister City” (for Sam Yorty, a dead former mayor of Los Angeles) I tripped over this image:

Do you find this picture as offensive as I do? Can you imagine an image more insulting to the people who serve in our military than this one?

Let me tell you where it comes from: the website of the Southern Poverty Law Center.

The post is about SPLC’s position – as reported by one reporter – that various anti-illegal immigration groups are “hate groups”.
The image is the head on a SPLC expose on white radicals in the military – it’s cropped, and the full image is here:

The Mayor Sam’s blog posts’ author, Walter Moore, needs to use Google more.

Back in 2000, SPLC was the subject of an article in Harper’s. You’d assume an anti-hate group would get plaudits from a progressive magazine. Assume again.

Here’s the article (reprinted at Freep, but the substance is exactly as I recall reading it).

Ah, tolerance. Who could be against something so virtuous? And who could object to the Southern Poverty Law Center, the Montgomery, Alabama-based group that recently sent out this heartwarming yet mildly terrifying appeal to raise money for its “Teaching Tolerance” program, which prepares educational kits for schoolteachers? Cofounded in 1971 by civil rights lawyer cum direct-marketing millionaire Morris Dees, a leading critic of “hate groups” and a man so beatific that he was the subject of a made-for-TV movie, the SPLC spent much of its early years defending prisoners who faced the death penalty and suing to desegregate all-white institutions like Alabama’s highway patrol. That was then. Today, the SPLC spends most of its time–and money–on a relentless fund-raising campaign, peddling memberships in the church of tolerance with all the zeal of a circuit rider passing the collection plate. “He’s the Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker of the civil rights movement,” renowned anti- death-penalty lawyer Millard Farmer says of Dees, his former associate, “though I don’t mean to malign Jim and Tammy Faye.” The Center earned $44 million last year alone–$27 million from fund-raising and $17 million from stocks and other investments–but spent only $13 million on civil rights program , making it one of the most profitable charities in the country.

It’s profitable because they work at it.

Morris Dees doesn’t need your financial support. The SPLC is already the wealthiest civil rights group in America, though this letter quite naturally omits that fact. Other solicitations have been more flagrantly misleading. One pitch, sent out in 1995-when the Center had more than $60 million in reserves-informed would-be donors that the “strain on our current operating budget is the greatest in our 25-year history.” Back in 1978, when the Center had less than $10 million, Dees promised that his organization would quit fund-raising and live off interest as soon as its endowment hit $55 million. But as it approached that figure, the SPLC upped the bar to $100 million, a sum that, one 1989 newsletter promised, would allow the Center “to cease the costly and often unreliable task of fund raising. ” Today, the SPLC’s treasury bulges with $120 million, and it spends twice as much on fund-raising-$5.76 million last year-as it does on legal services for victims of civil rights abuses. The American Institute of Philanthropy gives the Center one of the worst ratings of any group it monitors, estimating that the SPLC could operate for 4.6 years without making another tax-exempt nickel from its investments or raising another tax-deductible cent from well-meaning “people like you.”

Now I like a good hate-group bashing as much as the next guy. But when I wrote my posts on “Skybox Liberals”, this article was a part of what I was thinking about. Doing well by doing – kinda – good.

Raising tempests in teapots appears to be their stock in trade. Slandering the troops is just the latest marketing communications from their ad shop.

So yesterday we took delivery of our new Civic Hybrid (in an attractive shade of Magnetic Pearl, with the dealer-$-packed options including a custom leather interior). We’ll be selling the Odyssey in the next few weeks (anyone want a nice 2000 Odyssey?), and this will be our only car (well, we do have four motorcycles…).

The tipping point toward decision was a spill TG took on her motorcycle while commuting; minor, little damage except to the cosmetics of her new bike and to my lifespan as the anxiety hit my adrenals…The program in California that lets hybrids use the HOV lanes is about to close, and by buying a hybrid now, we could get stickers allowing her to drive to work and still use the carpool lane – a saving of about 15 minutes on her otherwise 50 minute drive.

Hopefully, she’ll use it…

But there were other reasons as she & I discussed it last week.

The biggest one is simple; we’re down to one kid in the house, I’m not racing motorcycles (requiring a trailer), and so we haul around a bigger vehicle than we need. Objectively, the environmentally soundest thing we could do would be to put another 60 or 70,000 miles on it, and not buy a new vehicle.

But I do think it’s worth something to make tradeoffs between long-term and short-term impacts, and right now the thing we need to do is buy less oil. And while the difference between a 25mpg Odyssey and a 35mpg Civic Hybrid isn’t great, there’s some difference – back to my minor steps that add up theory.

And like it or not, it’s a public statement. In my case it’s not a public statement about global warming or saving the ice cap. It’s a public statement about lowering the price of oil and starving the funding for Finbury Mosque and all the other places around the world where people are being taught to hate me and my children.

So yes, I know we’ll likely never see a ROI on the price we paid unless gas is $4.00 per gallon. The value to me is the security of TG commuting more miles on 4 wheels instead of 2, and of my putting our money – literally – where my mouth is on what we ought to do about energy policy.

Once we get a few miles on it, I’ll talk about it some more.

Actually, a bunch of us who have been severely critical of Tim Rutten are probably kind of awestruck by his column today in the L.A. Times.

Lebanon photos: Take a closer look

THE controversy this week over Reuters’ distribution of digitally manipulated, falsely labeled and — probably — staged photos of the fighting in Lebanon hasn’t been nearly as large as it should have been.

Holy cow.

Rutten is the man who I criticized for thinking of the journalistic profession as a priesthood.

He said:

There is a certain kind of bright but brittle mind that loves this sort of either/or thinking. What such minds cannot accept is the common-sensical notion that real life — including that of the press — is lived mostly in the pragmatic middle. There, experience has demonstrated that intellectual rigor and emotional self-discipline enable journalists to gather and report facts with an impartiality that — though sometimes imperfect — is good enough to serve the public’s interest in the generality of cases.

I said:

Rutten seems to have missed that whole Reformation thing; the notion that truth might not have to be derived from a priesthood – and make no mistake, when he starts talking about ‘intellectual rigor and emotional self-discipline ,’ he’s talking about a priesthood – is something that went by the wayside in Western society a number of years ago. Frighteningly, it appears to be coming back.

Today, I tip my hat to him. Not because he said something that supports position I’ve taken (although that’s nice), but because he’s willing to publicly complain about this:

There are, however, two problems here, and they’re the reason this controversy shouldn’t be allowed to sputter to its inglorious conclusion just yet: One of these has to do with the scope of what strongly appears to be wider fabrication in the photojournalism Reuters and other news agencies are obtaining from their freelancers in Lebanon. The other is the U.S. news media’s grudging response to the revelation of Hajj’s misconduct and its utter lack of interest in exploring whether his is a unique or representative case.

Thus far, only a handful of relatively brief stories on this affair have appeared in major American papers. The Times picked up one from the Washington Post, which focused mainly on the politics of Johnson’s website. The New York Times, which ran one of Hajj’s photos on its front page Saturday, reported that it has published eight of his pictures since 2003, but none were altered. It then went on to quote other papers about steps they take to detect fraudulent images. No paper has taken up the challenge of determining whether there’s anything dodgy about the flow of freelance photos Reuters and other news agencies — including the Associated Press, which also transmitted images made by Hajj — are sending out of tormented Lebanon.

Well said. Rutten may feel there is a priesthood of journalists, but he sees that it needs to police it’s own, or else the laity will do it for them. I’m thrilled to hear him say that, and I’ll go put on a hat so I can tip it.

Meanwhile I’ll go see if Mrs. Patterico can throw some ice water on Patrick and bring him out of his dead faint.

You were in L.A. got to go to Coop’s and Gale Banks’, had my phone number and didn’t invite me!!

Great. Now I know where I rate. You’ll pay, he said darkly, you’ll pay.

I’m so ronrey…

…and gets some career advice himself. The interview will run on 60 Minutes Sunday.

Mike Wallace in 2006:

Of Ahmadinejad, Wallace said, “He’s an impressive fellow, this guy. He really is. He’s obviously smart as hell.”

Wallace said he was surprised to find that the Iranian president was still a college professor who taught a graduate-level course.

“You’ll find him an interesting man,” he said. “I expected more of a firebrand. I don’t think he has the slightest doubt about how he feels … about the American administration and the Zionist state. He comes across as more rational than I had expected.”

[emphasis added]

You know I’m going to bring this back up, don’t you?

Mike Wallace in 1987:

Didn’t Jennings have some higher duty, either patriotic or human, to do something other than just roll film as soldiers from his own country were being shot? “No,” Wallace said flatly and immediately. “You don’t have a higher duty. No. No. You’re a reporter!”

Some things speak for themselves, don’t they?

I wrote this a little while ago, had some dialog with neo-neocon about it (it touches on her domain pretty closely, and I believe she will have a parallel piece soon), and then two things combined to get me to pull it out, add a few things, and put it out here for discussion.

Obviously, one of the things was the murder in Seattle, in which a – troubled – young Muslim man shot up a Jewish Federation office in Seattle; an office much like the one where my mom used to work here in Los Angeles.

Another was an interview by Andrew Cochran at the Counterterrorism Blog with filmmaker Pierre Rehov, who just finished a documentary on shahids (suicide bombers).

…I became fascinated with the personalities of those who had committed those crimes, as they were described again and again by their victims. Especially the fact that suicide bombers are all smiling one second before they blow themselves up.

In my original post on Seattle, I asked if the assailant had been a “mucker” – someone who simply went amok from the strains of modern life (the word comes from John Brunner’s great ripoff of Dos Passos – “Stand on Zanzibar”). In Brunner’s 2010, muckers are common enough that they are discussed like the weather.I continue to focus on this issue because I believe that while we have to continue to degrade the military forces arrayed against us, the core battle is against an ideological movement, and that when we can defang the movement, defeating the military will be No Big Thing.

I think we need to understand this phenomenon better, and while there are obviously political understandings that are critical to that, there are also psychological ones as well. I’ve argued for along time that the mindset we see in Islamist rage isn’t only present there, but is present in a wider – if less intense – form here in the West as well. I’ve called it ‘Bad Philosophy’, and suggested that building a ‘Good Philosophy’ is as important as building weapons and armies. Maybe more so.

I’m going to ask for all of your help on this, because I’m going to wind up walking closer to an edge of appropriateness than I’m necessarily comfortable, and if we take a wrong step in the comments, I’ll wind up stepping over the edge and have to pull back.

I’m going to talk about Bad Philosophy, violence and the threats of violence and suicide. I’m trying to make an abstract philosophical point, not to comment on the specifics of threats, violent acts, or specific suicides. If you comment, and it’s specific to a person, ask yourself a simple question: Would you email your comment to the mother of the person you’re commenting about? Would you do it if you liked the mother? If the answer is no, don’t post it. If I think the answer is no, I’ll reserve the right to yank the comment. If I can’t control the comments, I’ll close comments entirely. It’s my party, and in this case you’ll drink what I pour; BYOB isn’t going to apply here.

Bear with me while I explain.

I assume you’ve been following the recent and ongoing hoo-hah over at Jeff Goldstein’s place, in which a – deranged – commenter goes off the deep end, and winds up quitting her job and moving to Eugene. No, really.

So I started putting clips together about blog-threats, and went back to the one time I’ve been threatened – as Rob Lyman pointed out, being the Armed Liberal may cut down on that kind of chatter – back in 2002.

PLEASANT SURPRISES

I’ve harshed Hesiod and Sullywatch over language and tone, and while I’ve been impressed at the work Charles at LGF does in bringing Middle Eastern news to light, I’ve got issues with his comments section; the omnipresent tone of Arab-bashing and chest-beating, at a time when we need to proceed with determination, care, and seriousness is part of what led to my ‘thought experiment’ below (and which I’ll follow up on as time allows today).

Then this charming set of comments over at Aaron’s ‘Uppity Negro’ blog was pointed out to me:

[sorry, crabby] I feel a collecting-spree coming on, & I’m afraid Armed Liberal’s blinky, doe-eyes are looking mighty fine. Can I have’em, Aaron? Can I?
Posted by: Neogrammarian on September 16, 2002 05:21 PM

As long as I can have the ears.
Those necklaces of them look quite fetching.
Posted by: Aaron on September 16, 2002 05:41 PM

So, trying to figure out how to comment on them, I can only think of one response…molon labe, kids, molon labe.

[a few folks wanted to know what ‘molon labe’ meant…I added a link]

So I wander over to Aaron’s blog to see what he’s up to lately, and discover to my shock that he’s dead. And I Google a bit, and discover that he’s likely a suicide.

And, sadly, I go “huh”. And I wonder about the role of this kind of undifferentiated social rage in suicide, and further the connection between the kind of philosophical anger I talk about when I discuss Bad Philosophy and real anger you see here expressed in the world – and that ultimately may be expressed toward oneself.

I’ve talked about “Bad Philosophy” in the past. Let me recap:

ROMANTICISM AND TERRORISM – AND A QUOTE FROM ISAIAH BERLIN:

You would have found that they believed that minorities were more holy than majorities, that failure was nobler than success, which had something shoddy and vulgar about it. The very notion of idealism, not in its philosophical sense, but in the ordinary sense in which we use it, that is to say the state of mind of a man who is willing to sacrifice a great deal for principles or some conviction, who is not prepared to sell out, who is prepared to go to the stake for something which he believes, because he believes in it – this attitude was relatively new. What people admired was wholeheartedness, sincerity, purity of soul, the ability and readiness to dedicate yourself to your ideal, no matter what it was.

No matter what it was: that is the important thing.

IS THE WAR ON TERROR THE WAR ON BAD PHILOSOPHY? with a quote from Baudrillard:

Continuing an analysis developed over many years, Baudrillard sees the power of the terrorists as lying in the is symbolism of this slaughter. Not merely the reality of death, but a sacrificial death that challenges the whole system. Where the past revolutionary sought to conduct a struggle of real forces in the context of ideology and politics, the new terrorist mounts a powerful symbolic challenge, which, when combined with high-tech resources, constitutes an unprecedented assault on an over-sophisticated, vulnerable West.

WHAT BAD PHILOSOPHY LOOKS LIKE with quotes from a Salon reader:

When the towers started collapsing and all chaos broke loose, I felt actual excitement. Here was an event that broke banality. Finally, here was something meaningful. I had grown so tired of the meaningless fluff our continent had become so enamored with. Here was an issue of raw emotions. I was glad that this was happening to snap people back into reality, to snap them back to mortality. My last sinful thought was that of genocide — lets just send nuclear missiles to all of the Middle East and let it be done once and for all.

– Name withheld

These are all positions that come from a kind of spiritual hole, and seek to fill it with strong – even violent – action, as the purest expression of a self that is somehow battened down by the world.

I’ve believed for a while that the violent strains in Islamism come more from an infection with this Western disease than from intrinsic issues within Islam – although those issues may provide a fertile ground for the infection.

I don’t think – and have never thought – that it is limited to Islam, though. I think there is a strong strain of it in the West as well. And recent events have brought that to mind.

Because in reading the fascinating train wreck of a public life – the one being done by Deborah Frisch, lately of the University of Arizona, and headed for the Twilight Zone…I came on this (linked from the comments here):

I am about as unanonymous as they get, aardvark.

My name is Deborah Frisch. I live in Tucson, Arizona. I teach in the psychology department at the YOUkneeversity of AIRYzona.

You want to come find me, see that I’m real, hold a .357 magnum in my face, i say:

BRING IT ON.

Posted by: Deborah Frisch | Jan 3, 2005 8:02:40 PM

Posted by: DF

One day, some cheeky blogger is going to be offed by a psychopathic blogger. Will it be a scuffle@left2right? idunno.

i hope to hell it ain’t me, i gotta tell ya.

but i feel kind of guilty for not blowing myself up on the steps of the lincoln memorial when i lived in d.c. while i was doing out pork for sam..so in a way, i WANT some futhermucker A-hole to off me because i pissed him off in the blogosphere.

BRING IT ON, FUTHERMUCKERS!!!!!!!!

Posted by: DF | Jan 3, 2005 8:06:43 PM

And I start puzzling a few things together…

I do think there is a connection – between a bright, well-schooled but socially inept person like Dr. Frisch (whose name, as Goldstein has promised, will now become an Internet verb) and her fantasies of self- annihilation, and the forces that would lead a well-educated, middle class man like Mohammed Atta to commit suicide in the loudest, most attention-getting way he could envision.

Does this mean I think Dr. Frisch is a terrorist, or even remotely likely to actually be one? No. Let’s be clear and absolute about this; I’m using her public meltdown as an example of something I think is more common – if less extremely visible – than we expect, and that is a part of the social movement – a part ofthe intellectual fashion – that I think presents serious problems.

So there’s a process visible here that’s worth looking at with some interest, and she’s a handy example. In my view, it starts here:

The USA is a sick, diseased, cancer, blight on the earth. This is a fact. You guys are in denial about it and hate the fact that I’ve got the chutzpah to hang here and tell it like it is.

OK, I’ll disagree about the U.S. – but the interesting thing to me is this. If this how you feel about where you live – if your life is dependent on this blight, and you’re inextricably a part of it – what’s the logical reaction?

I’ve got to believe that it’s rage, and a rage that really, really wants to pierce the banality of things with violent, orgasmic action. And it’s a rage of the privileged, because it is the more bitter rage of the child against the parent; rage against that which made you, which comforted you, and which you know you owe a debt to, but somehow can’t seem to agree to pay.

This is entirely consistent with studies that have shown that terrorists preponderantly come from more advantaged, rather than less advantaged, backgrounds. In The New Republic, Kreuger and Maleckova write:

The evidence that we have assembled and reviewed suggests that there is little direct connection between poverty, education, and participation in or support for terrorism. Indeed, the available evidence indicates that compared with the relevant population, participants in Hizbollah’s militant wing in the late 1980s and early 1990s in Lebanon were at least as likely to come from economically advantaged families and to have a relatively high level of education as they were to come from impoverished families without educational opportunities. We should caution, however, that the evidence we have considered is tentative due to data limitations. In addition, our focus has been primarily on the Middle East, so our conclusions may not generalize to other regions or circumstances.

Still, less quantitative studies of participants in a variety of forms of terrorism in several different settings have reached a conclusion similar to ours. We are particularly struck by Charles Russell and Bowman Miller’s work in this regard. In 1983, to derive a profile of terrorists, they assembled demographic information on more than three hundred fifty individuals engaged in terrorist activities in Latin America, Europe, Asia, and the Middle East from 1966 to 1976 based on newspaper reports. Their sample consisted of individuals from eighteen revolutionary groups known to engage in urban terrorism, including the Red Army in Japan, the Baader-Meinhof Gang in Germany, the Irish Republican Army in Northern Ireland, the Red Brigades in Italy, and the People’s Liberation Army in Turkey. Russell and Miller found that “the vast majority of those individuals involved in terrorist activities as cadres or leaders is quite well educated. In fact, approximately two-thirds of those identified terrorists are persons with some university training ,university graduates or postgraduate students.” They also report that more than two-thirds of arrested terrorists “came from the middle or upper classes in their respective nations or areas.”

And this process, this rage against the unsatisfying world, is the process we have to break – and we’ll only break it by providing a better process for these privileged sons and daughters to be a part of.

Our armies may buy us space to do this, but until we do, we’ll live in a false peace.