Canadian Cincinnatus

San Francisco circumcision ban

So let me ask this question: when this law goes into effect, when male circumcisions become illegal in San Fran, will female circumcisions (a much more debilitating procedure) remain legal? 

I have a feeling the answer to my question is yes.

Hmmm. I wonder why?

 

The Nature of Today’s Middle-East Revolutions

George Friedman of the intelligence firm StratFor wrote the most lucid and penetrating article I have yet read about the recent wave of protests and revolutions in the Middle East. Some of the more illuminating points he makes are:

“We do not see these revolutions as a vast conspiracy by radical Islamists to take control of the region. A conspiracy that vast is easily detected, and the security forces of the individual countries would have destroyed the conspiracies quickly.”

“In this case, whatever the cause of the risings, there is no question that radical Islamists will attempt to take advantage and control of them. Why wouldn't they? It is a rational and logical course for them. Whether they will be able to do so is a more complex and important question, but that they would want to and are trying to do so is obvious. They are a broad, transnational and disparate group brought up in conspiratorial methods. This is their opportunity to create a broad international coalition. Thus, as with traditional communists and the New Left in the 1960s, they did not create the rising but they would be fools not to try to take advantage of it.”

This is what conspiracy theorists don’t get. The world is just too complicated for anyone to control. Of course, this fact doesn’t prevent professional revolutionaries from trying.

“It is interesting here to note that the young frequently dominate revolutions like 1848, 1969 and 1989 at first. This is normal. Adults with families and maturity rarely go out on the streets to face guns and tanks. It takes young people to have the courage or lack of judgment to risk their lives in what might be a hopeless cause. However, to succeed, it is vital that at some point other classes of society join them. In Iran, one of the key moments of the 1979 revolution was when the shopkeepers joined young people in the street. A revolution only of the young, as we saw in 1968 for example, rarely succeeds. A revolution requires a broader base than that, and it must go beyond demonstrations. The moment it goes beyond the demonstration is when it confronts troops and police. If the demonstrators disperse, there is no revolution. If they confront the troops and police, and if they carry on even after they are fired on, then you are in a revolutionary phase. Thus, pictures of peaceful demonstrators are not nearly as significant as the media will have you believe, but pictures of demonstrators continuing to hold their ground after being fired on is very significant.”

“This leads to the key event in the revolution. The revolutionaries cannot defeat armed men. But if those armed men, in whole or part, come over to the revolutionary side, victory is possible. And this is the key event. In Bahrain, the troops fired on demonstrators and killed some. The demonstrators dispersed and then were allowed to demonstrate - with memories of the gunfire fresh. This was a revolution contained. In Egypt, the military and police opposed each other and the military sided with the demonstrators, for complex reasons obviously. Personnel change, if not regime change, was inevitable. In Libya, the military has split wide open.”

“It is this act, the military and police coming over to the side of the demonstrators, that makes or breaks a revolution. Therefore, to return to the earlier theme, the most important question on the role of radical Islamists is not their presence in the crowd, but their penetration of the military and police. If there were a conspiracy, it would focus on joining the military, waiting for demonstrations and then striking.”

This is a very illuminating point about the limits of power. The source of a strongman’s power is the military, so he needs a big army; but the only way to have a big army is though conscription; but with conscription, most of the army consists of civilians on loan. How many 18-year-old kids are willing to shoot their brothers and fathers? The Hungarian Revolution of 1956 started because the army - sent out to squash the protests - joined them. Now the protesters had tanks. This lesson was not lost on the Soviet Union. The Red Army took great pains to make sure conscripts served in a different part of the Soviet Union. In Tiananmen Square, the units sent to crush the pro-democracy protesters were trucked in from the furthest corner of China.

What a dictator really needs is a large professional army, but only a handful of liberal democracies like the US, Great Britain and France have been able to afford that – and only at great cost. In all of these countries, the threat of a dictatorship is very small, but still, it is one of the reasons I favour conscription for Canada.

“Those who argue that these risings have nothing to do with radical Islam may be correct in the sense that the demonstrators in the streets may well be students enamored with democracy. But they miss the point that the students, by themselves, can't win. They can only win if the regime wants them to, as in Egypt, or if other classes and at least some of the police or military - people armed with guns who know how to use them - join them. Therefore, looking at the students on TV tells you little. Watching the soldiers tells you much more.

The problem with revolutions is that the people who start them rarely finish them. The idealist democrats around Alexander Kerensky in Russia were not the ones who finished the revolution. The thuggish Bolsheviks did. In these Muslim countries, the focus on the young demonstrators misses the point just as it did in Tiananmen Square. It wasn't the demonstrators that mattered, but the soldiers. If they carried out orders, there would be no revolution.”

This is what the mainstream media doesn’t get but conservatives do. Radical Islam might not have started these uprisings but they might be the ones benefiting from them.

“If I were to guess at this point, I would guess that we are facing 1848. The Muslim world will not experience massive regime change as in 1989, but neither will the effects be as ephemeral as 1968. Like 1848, this revolution will fail to transform the Muslim world or even just the Arab world. But it will plant seeds that will germinate in the coming decades. I think those seeds will be democratic, but not necessarily liberal.”

I think this is a point many conservatives miss. The present situation in the Middle East is untenable. The stability there is entirely illusory. It is the stability of a pressure cooker - before it blows. Right now, the only alternative – radical Islam – is worse. Though this may surely be the most likely outcome of overthrown governments there, at least there is a chance for a liberal democracy, maybe not now, but in the future. 

But as Instapundit would say, read the whole thing.

 

Dr. Helen Smith: “Men Don’t Exist to Serve Women’s Desires”

By Dr. Helen Smith:

“I read Kay Hymowitz’s new book, Manning Up: How the Rise of Women Has Turned Men into Boys, recently. ... I do believe Hymowitz tried to be sensitive to the plight of today’s men, but the book presents as being more concerned about how men fit into the world of women rather than how men actually feel themselves.”

“According to Hymowitz, these child-men are all used to a freewheeling life of going from girl to girl and video game to video game. Hymowitz mistakenly believes that men are suffering from the limits of American individualism.

Though she reluctantly admits that the “materials available to young men are meager, and what is available contradicts itself,” she comes up with this ridiculous conclusion: “At bottom, they are too free, a fact epitomized by their undefined, open-ended, and profoundly autonomous pre-adulthood.” She ends the book suggesting that young women will have to get a better understanding of the limitations imposed by their bodies (Huh?) and young men need to man up.

My question to her: Why should they?

What do you have to offer these men you call child-men if they do man up? Are you going to ensure that they have fair access to their children should they divorce? Will you make sure that they aren’t hauled off to jail if the wife makes false accusations of domestic violence? Will you let them keep the earnings and property that they worked for over years rather than have them turned over to their wife, even if she cheated and was abusive? Will you shield the millions of men who live in fear of their significant other but have nowhere to turn for help? Will you make marriage, in other words, as valuable to men as you think it is for women?”

All too true. After reading Dr. Smith’s article, I am reminded of the fact that feminism is wrong not so much in what they say about the ‘patriarchy’ but in what they don’t say. What feminists neglect to mention is that in a traditional society, women have a huge normative role in male behaviour with the choices that they make: if you aren’t a stable, responsible, hard-working man (i.e. if you aren’t good-provider material), you don’t get to be married and therefore you don’t get sex.

But after trashing traditional marriage and/or making its cost exceed its benefit to men, is it any surprise that men aren’t interested in marriage any more? So men become slackers.

Feminists make things worse by telling women its OK to be a slut. They think they are doing women a favour by empowering them, but they are not. They are actually disempowering women by taking the power they used to have in controlling negative male behaviour away from them. Freeing men to be pump-and-dump, alpha male cads.

Who is all this good for?

Not men.

Not women.

Not society.

But this is what you get when you replace customs and traditions that have evolved over a long period of time with a theory concocted by ivory tower intellectuals.

Iraqi Shi’ite supporting Iranian Green Revolution?

According to Michael Ledeen, who has been predicting a revolution in Iran for a decade now, says:

The Iranian opposition has enormous internal support, and is also receiving encouragement from Shi’ite leaders in Iraq.  Ayatollah Jamal al-Din, a follower of the Grand Ayatollah Sistani of Najaf (arguably the most esteemed figure in the Shi’ite firmament), called upon the Iranian people to overthrow their leaders and restore freedom to their ancient land.  His words echoed some of Mousavi’s language and bear careful attention: 

Oh, Dear brothers! There is no difference between a dictator who wears a [crown], a dictator who wears a turban and a dictator who wears the traditional Arab gear. Dictators are the same regardless of their styles and languages. Freedom and dignity are the same for every people. And you, the Noble People of Iran, you were the first people in the Middle East to revolt against the dictatorship and corruption in 1979. Today is your day to reclaim your dignity, your freedom and the treasures of your rich country from the grasp of those thieves who stole religion and state. 

If this is true, then there is one man who has to be thanked when Iran eventually does overthrow the mullahs. That man is the much abused former President of the United States, George W Bush. His liberation of Iraq and his pro-democracy initiative, which has been much derided as hopelessly naïve, was a seed planted by him in Iraq that is now bearing fruit elsewhere.

 

Where is President Obama on the Libyan Revolution?

During the Egyptian Revolution, President Obama saw fit to lecture the Egyptian dictator Hosni Mubarak on what he should do, how he should do it, and when.

Now that America’s enemy, Colonel Gaddafi is machine-gunning his own citizens and even firing anti-aircraft missiles at them (!), the same loquacious President became strangely silent, even though what Gaddafi is now doing is 100 times worse than what Mubarak ever did.

One problem with weak Presidents like Barack Obama and Jimmy Carter is that their feebleness leads them to hector allies while sucking up to enemies.

In any event, here is an instructive video from Bill Whittle summing up the Obama foreign policy

Congressional Republicans should investigate the Obama administration on the closing of car dealerships

There are many things that Darrel Issa, the new head of the House Oversight Committee should investigate. Certainly the New Back Panther Party voter intimidation scandal ranks at the top, with the firing of the Americorp Inspector General not far behind. However there is one thing that I believe needs investigation that I have not heard anyone discuss and that is the mass closing of GM and Chrysler car dealerships across the US (and Canada) by the Obama administration.

This was done shortly after those car companies were nationalization early in President Obama’s term of office. At the time shutting dealerships was portrayed as a necessary cost cutting move, but since then disturbing reports have surfaced that have thrown new light on the administration’s motives. For instance, one report said that closure decisions were at least partially motivated by partisan politics. In other words, dealerships with Republican ties were closed much more often than those with Democrat ties. Another report suggested that there was no pressing economic need to close any dealerships at all; it was just that the Obama administration wanted to ‘spread the pain’ around. Spread the pain around? Wasn’t there enough economic pain going around in early 2009 without creating more of it?

These are serious charges because each car dealership closed is a business - potentially able to make money and employing hundreds of people at the time of closure. As a result of these actions, many people were laid off in an extremely challenging job market. In addition, the pattern of closures may hamper the recovery of the parent companies because a preponderance of the dealerships closed were rural. In many cases, they were the only GM or Chrysler dealership serving their particular community. How is GM and Chrysler better served if they have nobody left to sell their vehicles in a geographical area? But then again, most of the Republican dealerships were rural. You gotta keep your priorities straight!

And why did they close any dealerships at all? Car dealerships are not owned by the company they represent. They are independent businesses, separate and distinct from GM and Chrysler. If there was a surplus of dealerships, wouldn’t the rational thing be to let them duke it out amongst themselves in the marketplace in order to see which survives?

If any of this is true, then at best the Obama administration is guilty of amateurish incompetence in its handling of this issue. At worst, members of the administration have conflicts of interest that are criminal.

 

Three cheers for Charlottetown!

According to the National Post yesterday:

After years of caving in to the pleas of residents asking for stop signs to stem the flow of speeding cars, Charlottetown is preparing to tear up more than a dozen residential stop signs that the city has deemed unnecessary, and even harmful.

“Signs that are placed in areas where they’re not needed and they don’t work are dangerous,” councillor David MacDonald told a recent city council meeting. “Stop signs that people do not stop at and go through are dangerous.”

The review was part of Mayor Clifford Lee’s re-election promise to take the politics out of Charlottetown’s road safety decisions by leaving them up to traffic engineers rather than residents and councillors.

For my part, this change can’t come soon enough. Four-way stop signs are a millstone around the neck of civilization and a persistent annoyance to all motorists, so its heartening that other cities across Canada - like Winnipeg and Nelson B.C. - are also considering the same thing.

I also like the Charlottetown Mayor’s idea of leaving the final decision to traffic engineers. In this matter, they are by far and away the most levelheaded people; they only recommend what has been proven to work. In contrast, the neighbours who demand stop signs are hysterical NIMBY’s who don’t care what the effect on overall traffic patterns is when their selfish policy is replicated across the city; urban planners usually have a hidden agenda behind their Big Idea; and elected city officials are either placating the NIMBY’s to bring home the bacon (in the suburbs) or anti-car zealots (downtown). Meanwhile the commuter (i.e. the hard working taxpayer) suffers.

If you want to see what a world without four-way stop signs looks like, go drive around in Europe. We usually think of Europe as a mass transit society and North America as a car society but, in fact, their traffic laws are often much more sensible than ours. For instance, roundabouts are common across the pond where they have been proven to be much more efficient than stop lights at moving traffic through major intersections. In contrast, we don’t have them here, or if we do, we add stop signs to them - negating their biggest advantage (avoiding the complete stop as much as possible). Also, many European countries have almost completely eliminated stop signs. If a small street ends at a bigger street, there is a yield sign. And if two roughly equivalent small streets cross, motorists use the right hand rule: the car to right has the right of way and everybody else yields. Works great. On reason why it works so well is because they use the right hand rule the way we use four-way stops - except that everybody sings from the same hymn book thanks to the fact that the commonplace and safe practice of going 10 km/h through a vacant intersection is legal.

Now that David Miller is gone, maybe Toronto can get some of these common sense reforms too.

 

Is CBS News about to go conservative?

A year ago, in this post, I said:

Considering that Fox News generates more profit than CNN, MSNBC, ABC News, NBC News and CBS News combined, it can only be a matter of time before one of the broadcast news services (as opposed to cable) switches over to a conservative format. My guessing is that one of them would have done it by now except that they are afraid of US government retribution while Obama inhabits the White House. However if the Republicans take Congress in 2010 and it becomes clear that President Obama is a lame duck, look for a dramatic switch sometime in 2011.

The one to look for? My guess, CBS. They’ve go the lowest ratings, and they can save about $13.5 million on the newsreaders salary right off the top [i.e. Katie Couric’s salary].

Well, according to this article, the News Chief of CBS News, Sean McManus is leaving. The new President of CBS News will be David Rhodes, who “spent 12 years at Fox News Channel “starting as a PA and eventually leading the network’s newsgathering division”. Now I know Fox News Channel is not the same thing as Fox News’ cable channel, but still? CBS News is still in last place and those unrealized profits from conservative viewers are still there for the taking. And Marie Antoinette – er, I mean Katie Couric’s salary is still there to be chopped.

 

The Right to Self-Defense Under Attack Again in Canada

Once again, Ontario’s Crown prosecutors are assaulting the right of Canadian citizens to defend themselves. Last fall it was Toronto Chinatown grocer, David Chen, who made a citizens arrest against a shoplifter who had been robbing him blind for years, and whom the cops charged with assault for his troubles. 

Now it is an unemployed Port Colborne man in his 50’s, Ian Thomson, who was charged with using a firearm, “namely a handgun” “without lawful excuse”. His crime was to defend his property and his life when three masked men assaulted his house in the middle of the night with Molotov cocktails while yelling death threats. He came out of his house armed with a handgun while his house burned.

Thomson was also charged with unlawful storage of a restricted firearm. According to the prosecutors: what he did was “without lawful excuse, store a firearm, namely a revolver, in a careless manner.” His handgun was unloaded and stored in a locked safe prior to this incident. 

My God! What on earth has gotten into our prosecutors? What moral disease are they labouring under? When they behave this way, they are no longer public protectors, but public enemies.

Unfortunately, as a result of their efforts, Mr. Thomson has now been reduced to poverty by thugs – both legal and illegal. For this reason, Mr. Thomson’s lawyer, Ed Burlew is urgently soliciting donations for Mr. Thomson’s defense. Details of how you can help out can be found by calling Mr. Burlew’s office at 1-888-486-5677. I’ve made my donation. An interview of Ed Burlew explaining the case can be viewed under the “Right Interviews” section at the Daily Split web site.

Ed Burlew is also calling for people to come out and provide moral support to Ian Thomson at his next court appearance, on March 2, 2011. Please show up at 9 AM for a “peaceful day of protest.” The Welland Court House is located at 102 East Main St., Welland, ON.

Please remember that this is not just about the profound injustice done to Ian Thomson. As of this moment, Ian Thomson is not only defending himself but also the right of every Canadian citizen to defend himself against violent threat. 

 

Chinese motherhood and Western culture

A couple of weeks ago, Yale Law Professor Amy Chen created a huge stir with an article she penned in the Wall Street Journal about the superiority of Chinese mothers over Western mothers. In the article, Chen describes how Western moms are indulgent with their children, impose no discipline and ultimately serve their children badly by leaving them poorly trained for the rigors of adulthood because they are guided by bogus measures of parenting success such as their child’s self esteem. A lot of readers was hostile to the premise but felt uncomfortable saying so. Hostile, because the Spartan environment she imposed on her children and the harsh methods she used to get them to excel (including, but not limited to, verbal abuse and corporal punishment) is at odds with the Dr. Spock inspired notions of child rearing in today’s mainstream. At that same time, their hostility made them feel uncomfortable because multiculturalism has ingrained within these same people the commandment that thou shall not criticize a foreign culture and (especially) say that it is inferior to the West.

In contrast, my first reaction upon reading her was: Yeah! About time somebody stood up to the decadence of today’s permissive parents; too bad it can only be said in polite company by a member of a protected minority; Amy Chen is right, childhood should be a training ground for a successful life, not a hedonistic playground; the influence of immigrants from north Asia, unaffected by the sixties youth culture, is the much needed antidote to today’s laissez faire parenting.

While I certainly do still believe that Amy Chen’s Gen. Patton approach to motherhood is an overdue corrective, after reflecting on the matter some more, I am not sure that it is entirely a pure, unalloyed good. 

What got me doubting the wisdom of Amy Chen is this: consider China, Japan and South Korea. North Asia has about 1.5 billion people with the highest average IQ in the world: roughly 105. And yet with all this raw computational horsepower and all the emphasis placed on academics by parents there, remarkably little creativity takes place there. Take Japan: While it has perfected many things invented elsewhere (the car, the colour TV, the VCR), very few things are invented there. Off the top of my head, I can’t think of anything.

So I then asked myself, why has Western culture been so creative in the first place? I think one reason is the presence of a quintessentially Western phenomenon – the inventive outsider. Throughout the history of the West, a small set of alienated individualists - men (and they are almost always men) who avoided social norms, marched to their own drummer and synthesized existing concepts in a way that nobody ever did before them - was always present. At the very beginning of Western civilization, we find the founder of Western philosophy, Socrates and the architect of Christianity, St. Paul – two men of middle-class background who chose to live outside the mainstream. Going forward, we can add to this list polymath Leonardo Da Vinci, inventor Johannes Gutenberg, crackpot and monomaniac Sir Isaac Newton, amateur scientist Charles Darwin, inventor Thomas Edison, bicycle repairmen Orville and Wilbur Wright, amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos and Reed College dropout Steve Jobs. I could go on but it is at once obvious that no other civilization has produced such a long and stellar list of productive individualists. One reason why the West has so many is because it is about the only culture that celebrates this sort of people. Take one example from the film industry: the auteur who does it his own way from the very beginning and does everything himself is far more respected than the craftsman who dutifully worked his way up through the ranks of the studio system to be a director. 

The reason why eccentric outsiders have created so much is because it is usually only an outsider who can put disparate elements together in a completely unique way – like the way Walt Disney did when he merged cartoon drawing with the new technology of motion pictures. Insiders typically create much less because they are too immersed in conventional wisdom to see the forest through the trees. Thomas Kuhn, in Structure of Scientific Revolutions, points out the fact that scientific discoveries are usually made by people who are inside enough to understand the problem but outside enough to be alienated from the accepted answers.

The negative side of the West’s tolerance of aggressive individualists, is that for every Steve Jobs, there are thousands of iconoclastic dropouts who will amount to nothing. These people are, by any practical definition of the term, losers. Read the ‘early years’ section of Steve Job’s Wikipedia page and tell me that the most likely trajectory his life could have taken would be that of a burned out hippie dude, bumming around Venice Beach. But this didn’t happen because Jobs got spectacularly lucky. 

Needless to say, Amy Chen-style parents would not be very understanding if their child grew up to be like the Jeff Bridges’ character (The Dude) in The Big Lebowski. If she were Steve Job’s mother, Steve Jobs would not have become The Dude, but he wouldn’t have become the founder of Apple either. He would have likely been a moderately successful businessman. As a result, north Asia produces few Dudes. When comparing the West with the East, this is definitely a checkmark in the plus column for the East. 

On the other hand, it is the fortune of the West that this tradeoff is worth making - in fact, spectacularly so. The long-term benefit to society of a very small percentage of creators is a million times greater than the incremental amount of resources eaten up by a small (but not insignificant) number of eccentric but useless parasites. And as a result, perhaps a little bit of hippy-dippy permissiveness in childrearing is a good thing.