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Power Line introduces us to French philosopher André Glucksmann whose City Journal essay is a major part of Pickings tonight.
Dutch blogger Michael van der Galiën says Holland has received the ultimate insult – accused of cowardice by French philosophers. Beside the amusement, this is a back door way to tout André Glucksmann and to give an update on Ayaan Hirsi Ali. Pickerhead does understand French jokes may not be in good taste now, but he can’t help himself.
Things have gotten so bad in the Netherlands that even French intellectuals are now accusing us of “unacceptable cowardice†because of the way Ayaan Hirsi Ali was treated recently. Several intellectuals wrote an open letter, which was published in the French newspaper Libération. In it, Pascal Bruckner, Luc Ferry, Alain Finkielkraut, André Glucksmann and Bernard-Henri Levy don’t just accuse the Dutch of cowardly behavior, they also call on their own government to offer Ayaan Hirsi Ali the French nationality.
Here is Monsieur Glucksmann as he tries to explain his thoughts about why “Modern terrorism seeks to combine the annihilating power of Hiroshima with the nihilistic gospel of Auschwitz.”
With what measureless naivety has the twenty-first-century democratic citizen managed to be surprised when hate breaks down his door? He has—along with his father and his father’s father—witnessed, directly or indirectly, wars, murderous revolutions, and the genocides that were the last century’s specialty. How could he believe himself immune? “Not here, not me,†he told himself. But then, on September 11, 2001, Americans saw several thousand of their own assassinated, for no reason. There they were, unsuspecting, in their usual places, at work or at a café, white, black, and yellow, housewife and banker, when they suddenly realized that they were targets of an indiscriminate, merciless will to kill. …
… What threatens Iraqi society is not Vietnamization but Somalization. Recall Operation Restore Hope, in which an international force, led by Americans, disembarked in Mogadishu in 1993, seeking to ensure the survival of a population that was starving and being massacred by rival clans. After losing 19 in a horrific trap, the GIs left. The rest is well known. An angry President Clinton swore “never again,†and a year later refused to intervene in Rwanda, where 5,000 blue helmets would have been enough to interrupt the genocide that wiped out as many as 1 million Tutsi in three months.
The Somalian model has spread across the planet, from the Congo to chaotic East Timor to Afghanistan, where the Taliban have violently resurfaced, to Iraq. Populations are taken hostage, terrorized, and sacrificed, the spoils of wars by local gangsters. Under various pretexts—religion, ethnicity, makeshift racist or nationalist ideology—commandos contend for power at the point of AK-47s. They fight against unarmed populations; most of their victims are women and children. Terrorism is not the prerogative of Islamists alone: the targeting of civilians has been used by a regular army and by militias under the command of the Kremlin in Chechnya, where the capital city of Grozny was razed to the ground. Where the killers appeal to the Koran, it is still primarily Muslim passersby who suffer. Algeria, Somalia, and Darfur (at least 200,000 dead and millions of refugees in just a few years, with the Sudanese government, protected by China and Russia, acting with impunity) are live laboratories of the abomination of abominations: war against civilians. …
… Astrophysicists have found, wandering in the starry expanse, certain black holes. When faraway stars come into contact with them, the stars disappear, along with their planets, swallowed by bottomless darkness. From the beginning, human civilizations have existed alongside analogous moral abysses, which foreshadow an end of all things. According to tradition, such annihilation suggests a jealous and vengeful divinity, or malevolent demons.
In their endeavor to understand the black holes that threaten societies, the inventors of Western philosophy, comparing them to natural cataclysms, earthquakes, volcanoes, and epidemics, refused to see in them a supernatural sanction or to deny the responsibility of mortals. If God is not a cause, the darkness that threatens to overtake humanity is human, irreducible to an impersonal fate. The destructive principle inheres in us, whether we know it or not—this is the persistent message of the tragedians. Hate moves like Thucydides’s plague, not a purely physiological condition but an essentially mental disorder, which takes over bodies, minds, and society. The idea of a contagion of hatred must be taken literally: hatred spreads hatred, an outbreak that inoculates itself against all who oppose it.
Maybe one day, we will view the last century with nostalgia, even if it was dealt Auschwitz and Hiroshima. For today’s terrorism strives to mix these two ingredients into new cocktails of horror. During the cold war, the threat to man was dual: one, between two blocs, involved reciprocal annihilation; the other, terrorist, confined the savage extermination of civilian populations to the interior of each camp. Today, global terrorism eliminates geostrategic borders and traditional taboos. The last seconds of the condemned of Manhattan, of Atocha, and of the London Underground sent us two messages: “Here abandon all hope,†the Dantesque injunction carried by a bomb that wipes the slate clean; and “Here there is no reason why,†the nihilist gospel of SS officers. Hiroshima signified the technical possibility of a desert that approaches closer and closer to the absolute; Auschwitz represented the deliberate and lucid pursuit of total annihilation. The conjunction of these two forms of the will to nothingness looms in the black holes of modern hatred. …
John Stossel says the global warming debate is not over.
First he won the Oscar — then the Nobel Peace Prize. He’s being called a “prophet.”
Impressive, considering that one of former Vice President Al Gore’s chief contributions has been to call the debate over global warming “over” and to marginalize anyone who disagrees. Although he favors major government intervention to stop global warming, he says, “the climate crisis is not a political issue. It is a moral and spiritual challenge to all of humanity”.
Give me a break.
If you must declare a debate over, then maybe it’s not. And if you have to gussy up your agenda as “our greatest opportunity to lift global consciousness to a higher level,” then it deserves some skeptical examination. …
The Captain has the end game in Jena, LA. Would you be surprised to learn the MSM story is mostly BS?
Over the past month, the press and a good deal of the blogosphere has thundered over the racial motivations of the town of Jena, Louisiana, after a series of incidents supposedly showed the bigotry of its people and its government. Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton called Jena the new Selma of the civil-rights movement. Activists pressured presidential candidates into making appearances in Jena and statements regarding the allegedly harsher punishments given to black students for assault and battery. The nation assumed that the South still couldn’t give justice equally regardless of race.
Craig Franklin of the Christian Science Monitor says that assumption comes from a national media too lazy to do any reporting on its own. He should know; he lives in Jena and his wife teaches at the high school at the center of the controversy. The media failed to learn anything from the Duke non-rape case and swallowed myths whole rather than investigate and report facts: …
Don Boudreaux has the ultimate “dirty job” – running for office.
… You confidently insist that no issue is beyond your comprehension and no problem beyond your ability to solve. You pretend to be simultaneously a master of foreign policy, military strategy, economics, law, political horse-trading and even environmental science. If elected, you will publicly swear to uphold the Constitution and then immediately proceed to violate it in ways too numerous to count.
In short, in this job you must soil your honor and sell your soul by behaving foolishly and by saying things that you know to be false. Without question it is the dirtiest and most repellent job that anyone with a conscience can possibly try his or her hand at.
H.L. Mencken saw clearly the nature of this dirty job. About the politician, Baltimore’s Bard wrote:
He is willing to embrace any issue, however idiotic, that will get him votes, and he is willing to sacrifice any principle, however sound, that will lose them for him. I do not describe the democratic politician at his inordinate worst; I describe him as he is encountered in the full sunshine of normalcy.
To Mike Rowe I say: If you want really to get dirty, to soil yourself so deeply that soap will never wash away the grime, run successfully for political office.
That’s the ultimate dirty job.
Cafe Hayek has more of ethanol’s bad news.
The public panic caused by climate change alarmists is actually worsening our supply of natural resources, as predicted by some skeptics. This is certainly the case with bio-fuels, which have dramatically increased food prices, causing severe problems for import dependant developing countries. Now it is even threatening our water supply, as demonstrated by Cornell University professor David Pimentel.
The production of corn-based ethanol, a heavily subsidized source of bio-fuel, consumes roughly four gallons of water per gallon of fuel. However this does not include all the water needed for growing the corn in the first place. That amount adds up to the incredible figure of 1,700 gallons of water per gallon ethanol. …
Christian Science Monitor says dittos.
… the problems of mass- producing this type of ethanol are beginning to crop up. …