verging_on_random

Common cause

Damian posted a week or so ago about the situation in Tibet, suggesting that things might not be quite so black and white as they were being painted in the media. I agreed; I had the same response as I do when I hear of any ’separatist movement’, namely when is it legitimate for a group of people to demand sovereignty and when should they be told to shut up and accept that they are part of a bigger nation state and they’d better get used to the idea?

I don’t pretend to have a pat answer to that question, by the way. I just wish other people wouldn’t leap so reflexively to the side of the perceived underdog without thinking through the implications. Are we supposed to support, for example, demands for independence in Aceh and West Papua? If not, how can we rationally distinguish those situations from that of East Timor? There might be a good case in support of different treatment but I never heard Alexander Downer make it. Why was it OK to support separatism in Northern Ireland but not in Mindanao? In both places the justification hinges fundamentally on alleged religious incompatibilities. Why are we expected to cheer for the Tibetans but condemn the Tamil Tigers as terrorists?

There are no glib answers to these questions and I just wish people would consider them with a bit of calm thought instead of getting all ‘Boycott the Olympics that’ll show the bastards!!’ about it.

A thought-provoking piece appeared in the Asia Times yesterday. It suggested that the CIA might have a hand in the Tibetan troubles. I hasten to say that I found the article unconvincing; it was completely speculative and the circumstantial evidence that it relied upon was thin. Nevertheless it remains true that many people in Washington, including the Bush Administration, would welcome the embarrassment that the Tibet situation will cause China. Moreover they must be delighted that for once, the despised lefties are just as vocal as the conservatives about the perceived Chinese oppression. It must be great to have the whole nation finally unite behind a bit of Commie bashing.

If the American Civil War broke out today, I wonder how many international voices would support the right of the North to use force to prevent secession … and how many would advocate the rights of the separatist South to go it alone if they wanted. The latter would be the majority view I suspect, but you don’t read many views these days that Lincoln was a great oppressor of human rights.

This is not an argument that all these issues should be decided on pragmatic grounds. They have a strong moral and ethical dimension. I just think many people are a bit too quick to adopt the dominant moral view presented by governments and the media, which tends inevitably to be a simplistic black and white one. Complex situations deserve calm considered analysis, not sloganeering.

Time to fight back against the Dasyatido-fascists

How much longer are we going to tolerate blatant terrorist attacks like this?

A 34-kilogram stingray killed a Michigan woman when it flew out of the water and struck her face as she rode a boat in the Florida Keys in the United States, officials said.

People might not want to admit it but we are obviously facing a well-organised campaign of terror to force us from the oceans. We should have hunted down the creature that killed Steve Irwin but oh no, as usual the bleeding heart do-gooders won the day. Now the stingrays - or the Dasyatido-fascists as scientists have begun to call them - think they can strike with impunity against weak liberal boaties anywhere.

Well I’ve had enough. Any time I go near the water from now on I’ll be carrying this, and any gutless hippie who tries to stop me better have fully paid health insurance.

Why do gun nuts hate America?

The response to my last-but-one post about gun nuts was remarkable. Within hours of it appearing, alert and alarmed gunlovers in the USA had been notified thanks to their trusty Google Alerts that presumably notify them whenever a bit of Wrong Thinking appears on one of the millions of blogs around the world. Somebody sounded whatever alarm they have and the pack came in yapping to attack the unrighteous heretic.

They’re still at it even as I write, a whole bunch of them milling around in moderation, like triffids pissed off when they found the fence had been electrified overnight. But I have some standards and there’s only so much manifest bullshit I’m prepared to allow on a thread before I pull the pin. Indulging them with 45 comments seemed more than generous. Let them go back to their own blogs where they can high five each other for their own rhetorical brilliance in winning the arguments they were having with themselves.

The funny thing was that these roosters illustrated what I wrote in my post so perfectly it was eerie, if a tad unsettling. They truly hate their own country; get rid of the cities, says one, cos there’s nothing there worth saving (including the inhabitants, one assumes he means) while another’s wife isn’t game to go to the movies unless hubby is packing a concealed handgun in case the cinema turns into Bad Day at Baghdad. Several openly state their guns are the only things that protect them from their fellow-Americans who would just love to harm them if they had the chance.

Even though my post said nothing whatever about the links between gun control and crime, most of the commenters pulled out their well-thumbed NRA talking points and proceeded to explain why everyone having guns was a great thing for keeping crime under control and if you took away people’s guns, crime would go through the roof. One lunatic even cited figures showing how this had been demonstrated in Australia (naturally when pressed to provide a link to his evidence he fell back on the well-worn blogger’s rejoinder that I should learn to use Google, despite my having posted a link to Australian Institute of Criminology statistics showing what a crock of shit his argument was). Others used the shop-worn tactic of cherry picking a change from 1996-98 and calling it a trend, ignoring the existence of contrary changes over a longer period.

In fact, they nearly all scrupulously declined to respond to facts that contradicted their opinions, such as the fact that virtually all developed countries have strict gun ownership laws like Australia’s and the exception, the USA, demonstrably has vastly higher rates of gun-related crime. Those who did respond did so with various versions of the line “Yeah well we’re Americans buddy, we’re not like anybody else and we’ll own guns because we have the right”, which rather lacked relevance I thought.

Apart from their need to protect themselves from their neighbours, many commenters hailed their possession of guns as evidence of their manly preparedness to stand up to government oppression. Quite how this would work in the USA where the government spends more money on the military than the rest of the world put together, they didn’t bother to explain. Maybe their shotguns and semi-automatic rifles would have more luck against cruise missiles than Saddam’s tanks and artillery but somehow I doubt it. When challenged to nominate examples in history where armed citizens had successfully resisted government oppression, many obediently named the War of Independence, as if the circumstances of the 1770s could meaningfully be compared to those of the 21st century. No mention of the innumerable other, more recent revolutions in which success was achieved by the people despite them not being armed to the teeth with legal weapons.

Nor did anybody see fit to mention the American Civil War, which one would hardly call a shining example of the virtues of universal gun ownership. Bizarrely, however, the 1944 Warsaw uprising got a mention by not one but two people, so presumably it’s on one of the standard NRA talking point sheets. Just how anyone can regard an incident in which virtually all those involved were slaughtered as an argument for gun ownership escapes me. I invited them to discuss whether post-invasion Iraq was a good example of the benefits bestowed on a society by the widespread private ownership of deadly weapons but none seemed disposed to tackle the question.

The most astonishing thing about the whole exercise was its pointlessness. Most of the comments had nothing to do with the content of my post. They were a Pavlovian, generic response to a perceived criticism of gun ownership. Even when I pointed out that nobody was arguing that increased gun controls reduced crime, they kept flooding the thread with meaningless statistics and illogical conclusions.

Another 20 or so comments are in moderation now and that’s where they’ll stay. This isn’t a site for use by paranoid Americans to tell us how big their dicks are and how much they hate and fear their fellow man. Coincidentally, I read something this morning in a Glenn Greenwald blog about Barack Obama that seems highly relevant:

From a 1989 front-page article in The New York Times written by R.W. Apple, on the very day when the first President Bush ordered the ludicrous (though deadly) Panamanian invasion (”Operation Just Cause”):

For George Bush, the United States invasion of Panama early this morning constituted a Presidential initiation rite as well as an attempt to achieve specific goals. . . . For better or for worse, most American leaders since World War II have felt a need to demonstrate their willingness to shed blood to protect or advance what they construe as the national interest. . . . - all of them acted in the belief that the American political culture required them to show the world promptly that they carried big sticks.

Barack Obama doesn’t appear to be all that eager to start a lot of wars and send people off to die. Therefore, unlike George Bush and Dick Cheney — whose hard-core manliness has never been in doubt despite lives completely devoid of any acts reflecting traditional masculine virtues — it seems that Obama (just like Kerry and Gore before him) probably isn’t man enough. He’s basically just a girl — weak and scared and afraid of fighting — and therefore not really fit to be Commander-in-Chief. So sayeth the people, like Glenn Reynolds and his war-cheerleading comrades, followed by like-minded media allies, who — quite revealingly — are the absolute last ones fit to arbitrate such matters.

I’m sure the flying monkeys would heartily disagree with Greenwald and Apple and endorse the warmongering opinions of Reynolds. Therein lies the danger which the USA poses to other nations … not only do many yanks hate and fear their fellow-Americans, they hate and fear the rest of the world.

(HT to Gummo Trotsky for the cool picture which I stole from one of his Larvatus Prodeo threads a long time ago.)

UPDATE:

And still they come. Long after any sane person would have retreated to his shed to polish his Smith & Wesson, the gunlovers surge around the comments box hitting the ‘Submit’ button, oblivious to the rather obvious fact that their carefully-compiled wisdom (no doubt written with tongue poking cutely out of the corner of the mouth while they consulted a dictionary) will simply disappear into cyberspace, never to appear online again. Maybe it’s a form of therapy.

Groupthink reigns supreme. Three scholars have now informed me that the Warsaw uprising occurred in 1943, no doubt because that’s what it (erroneously) says on their NRA ‘fact’ sheet. A more astonishing historical fact of which I was previously unaware is that the Japanese planned to invade the USA in WW2 but decided not to once they realised how impossible it would be to subdue the feisty shotgun-carrying population. If only the Chinese government had issued .303s to every adult male in 1933, history might have been very different my friends.

Of course half the comments are the usual juvenile crap that infests the blogosphere everywhere. You know the kind of thing: commenter raises several wholly irrelevant issues, demands that they be answered, and when they are ignored, commenter whoops and hollers about how they have ‘won’ the ‘debate’, which of course only ever existed in their own infantile minds. Such nonsense can be found on most blogs about topics from global warming to breeding tropical fish.

Much more serious is the drum beat that runs through virtually all the comments: they are Americans, they are way superior to other people, they don’t give a shit what anyone else thinks about anything and they’ll do whatever they fucking well want because they’re the men.

Truly scary people, just like the imbecile in the White House and the Republican maniac who wants to take his place.

News from the land of the dykes

The nanny state is running out of control in soft flabby liberal Europe. No wonder they won’t stand up and be counted in Afghanistan.

In the latest bit of lefty latté-sipping social engineering, the Dutch government has banned bestiality.

The Dutch parliament voted unanimously Thursday to ban sex with animals and pornography depicting bestiality. Anyone breaking the law now risks being sent to jail for up to six months. Until now, Dutch law had only forbidden bestiality in cases where animal suffering was involved.

In other words, the new law bans human/animal sex even when both parties consent and are in a loving monogamous relationship. It’s outrageous.

In other news, KLM reports having to double flights from New Zealand to Holland to accommodate a huge increase in numbers of migrating sheep .

Gun culture

Americans seem to be unique in their love of guns. Sure we have a few gun nuts in Australia but I have never read a serious suggestion that they influence the outcome of elections in the same way as the NRA influences politics in the USA. As a story yesterday accurately observed:

The American affinity for guns may puzzle foreigners who link high ownership rates and liberal gun ownership laws to the 84 gun deaths and 34 gun homicides that occur in the United States each day and wonder why gun control is not an issue in the U.S. presidential election.

Defenders of gun ownership usually make a media case based on some kind of public interest argument. Americans harp on about the constitutional right to bear arms as if that is sufficient reason to explain why anyone would want to bear arms, when plainly it is not. Others point to the need for an armed militia, as if a bunch of blokes with flano shirts and hunting rifles could turn back the invading hordes of South Americans or Indonesians or Muslims or whoever stars in your own apocalyptic vision of the future.

I’ve never placed much credence on these justifications. They’ve always sounded like rationalisations to me … far-fetched scenarios dreamed up to disguise the real reasons why all these blokes love their guns. Coincidentally, I’ve come across a couple of more personal explanations today which I think might give a truer answer. The first is in the story I linked to above:

Kartchner has meticulously prepared the defense of his home.

He keeps a semi-automatic shotgun loaded with buck shot and heavy lead slugs behind the bedroom door, and a high-powered AR-15 assault rifle loaded in the next room.

“Guns are for projecting force,” he says matter of factly, distinguishing firearms from other collectibles.

“Mao Zedong said ‘power grows from the barrel of a gun,’ and indeed it does.”

Quite why a guy living in Arizona, USA, is worried about ‘projecting force’ he doesn’t say.

The other extract is from an online forum which requires a subscription so you’ll just have to take my word for its authenticity. The author is writing to ask if he can take his gun collection with him if he goes from the USA to live in the Philippines:

From what I’ve heard and have been told by people involving guns is
that you cannot bring them with you if you move there. I believe
this to be 100% true. I’d have to sell off my whole accumulation of
them and I’m willing to do this before I move, classic Hobsons choice.

I’ve also found out that unless I become a Philippine citizen that I
can forget about owning a gun. My wife, who is a PI citizen, can
have one, but not me. This bothers me because I feel that I’d be a
natural target because I’m a “white man from somewhere” who the
locals will equate with wealth. The scenarios for having a gun for
protection are numerous. I want to have one legally over there when
I finally make the move. I am aware that I could always obtain one
by other than legal methods, but the risks aren’t worth getting
caught.

At our wifes wedding, my godfather was/is a retired Colonel in the
Philippine army. He’s not into the internet, so an instant answer is
not doable. But knowing people like that would come in handy. I have
prior service in the US Marines and guns are an integral part of my
life here in the States, I’d hate to surrender the piece of mind they
provide.

This seems to me to get to the heart of things. Guns are ‘an integral part of’ his life and if he didn’t have them he would have ‘no piece of mind’. No matter that several foreigners living in the Philippines have assured him that it’s a lot safer than California, he’s convinced he’d be a ‘natural target’.

It’s that unshakeable paranoia that convinces so many of these gun weirdos that they need to turn their homes into fortresses bristling with enough weaponry to equip a small third world army. Doesn’t matter what anyone says to them, they believe the world consists of people who want to attack them if only they get half a chance.

Actually, that might also explain a lot about US foreign policy.

The WTF?

It used to be standard practice to take the mickey out of the turgid prose of wine writers. Any media humourist who was short of an idea for Sunday’s column could always resort to a bit of satire about wine back labels or wine reviews. Indeed it was often hard to tell which was which. But I guess it all got too predictable after a while, and like political satire these days, it got harder and harder to distinguish the piss-take from the real thing.

There is, however, still a lot of mileage to be made from the feverish scribblings of the food critics, engaged in writing what somebody perceptively labelled ‘gastroporn‘. For someone like me who eats out at a proper restaurant about once every three months, and usually gets pissed off at paying ridiculous prices for crap that’s not as good as I cook for myself most nights, the restaurant reviews are hilarious. They have a language all their own and one shudders at the idea of sharing a meal with them as they bloviate about the quality of the jus and spend 10 minutes debating whether the scallops come from Coffin Bay or China.

The latest gem I’ve noticed occurs in reviews of Asian restaurants, when critics go into raptures about the unique character imparted to food by ‘the smoke of the wok’. I can’t quite pin down what they mean but I think they’re saying food tastes better if the wok has a crust of cooked on food that slowly builds up over years of not being washed properly.

Shit, young blokes living by themselves have known that since forever.

Why giving is wrong

Noblesse oblige is one of the virtues of the true conservative. Genuine conservatives accept that there will be great inequality within society and that nothing much can be done to change that without causing consequences (predictable or unanticipated) that make the overall situation even worse. However, along with this attitude goes a sense of duty, a belief that those who find themselves in a privileged position as a result of life’s great lottery are honour bound to give to the less fortunate.

That being the case, it’s always interesting to read people masquerading as conservatives trying to explain why noblesse doesn’t really oblige at all and in fact charity is actually deplorable. Thus we’ve seen some privileged souls arguing with straight faces for years that tax cuts help the poor but only if they are given to the rich, and welfare just makes the lives of recipients more miserable, and so on. Their arguments inevitably depend on a fantabulously imaginative model of human behaviour that owes its plausibility much more to its inventors’ idiosyncratic notions of human motivation than to any empirical data.

Even though I’m well accustomed to these kinds of arguments that rationalise why it’s not only excusable but positively moral for those with power and wealth to refrain from sharing even a tiny bit with the masses, I had to admire the latest example I read a few days ago. It mounts an argument against more foreign aid, an area where Australia’s performance has consistently fallen well below the levels expected of wealthy nations. Here’s the opening paragraph:

Sitting in a region that includes some of the world’s poorest, Australians understandably feel they should give more to the less fortunate. But we should not be blinded by superficial compassion. Simply giving more foreign aid is not going to solve, or build the foundations for, the solution to poverty alleviation.

Did you ever read two lines with such a dazzling array of rhetorical devices? If I had Noam Chomsky’s email address I’d send it to him as an exhibit for his next book.

First of all, our urge to give is ‘understandable’. Presumably this is meant to make us feel good about ourselves, even though I can’t say I’ve noticed that Australians en masse have this urge of which he writes. But it’s OK because if you were feeling uncomfortable that you hadn’t kicked in a few bucks for the Papuans lately you can relax: you have in fact avoided being ‘blinded’ by the compassion that afflicts your fellow-citizens. You needn’t feel at all guilty because their compassion is ’superficial’, the meaning of which is not clear but it ought to be enough to salve any qualms of conscience you were starting to have. Presumably anyone who feels deep compassion already understands that it is more blessed to receive than to give.

The real zinger in the paragraph is the final sentence though, in which the point suddenly switches from the urge to help the less fortunate to a ’solution to poverty alleviation’. This little sleight of hand fundamentally changes the topic which he’s discussing but he doesn’t mention this. The intention is clear: it’s to alter the way the reader frames the whole issue of foreign aid. What, did you think it was a way for wealthy countries to share a tiny part of their wealth with poor countries in accordance with charitable principles that have been preached for thousands of years by all religions and most secular philosophers? Huh, we have to get you away from that kind of superficial compassion. No, according to the article the aim of foreign aid is to find a solution to poverty.

It’s as if the writer has caught you about to give a starving child a sandwich. “Nooooo!” he’s cried. “Your urge to help does you credit but superficial compassion has blinded you! Keep the sandwich for yourself while we go figure out a solution to urban poverty.”

Now the obvious comeback, I would have thought, is “Why can’t we do both?” I mean the extreme poverty of many neighbouring countries is an objective fact, experienced in the daily lives of millions and millions of people. They need help now for little things like food and housing and education. Giving money or other practical forms of aid now is the only way to help those people. They don’t really have the luxury of waiting around while we find the solution to poverty.

Our writer gives us his take on that:

Too often profligate spending by foreign aid projects rarely reaches its intended target. Instead bumper aid budgets and loose approaches to project delivery simply creates the opportunities for corrupt foreign government officials to intercept money before it reaches its destination and use it to line their pockets.

No doubt that is true of some aid projects but why is it a reason to stop trying to help? To me it’s grounds to be careful in the ways in which one gives and for great suspicion of any projects which involve either government agencies or multinational corporations. That still leaves lots of other avenues to satisfy our superficial urge to be compassionate.

However it becomes increasingly clear that the author isn’t really concerned about the impact of poverty on individual human beings at all. His topic is the way to encourage economic development:

But Australians should not get bogged down in believing that more aid is the solution to development. Foreign aid is not the best way to promote development that will meet the social, environmental and economic needs of the world’s poor.

Our blogger is on a mission from god the owners of capital:

The best way to promote development is the spread of capitalism and the structures to support a free market economy.

And by the happiest of coincidences, the people who think this way just happen to be capitalists who might even make a buck out of the spread of the free market economy to all these poor countries.

By the way, I bet you were wondering when we’d get to read the shopworn line about teach a man to fish and you feed him for a day etc etc. Well don’t worry, it’s there:

If the structures of a free market economy are established the system necessary for the world’s poor to catch fish will become available. Such an option is a significant improvement from them being given a fish out of foreign aid dollars.

Damn right dude. I can’t wait to tell my Filipino friends squatting in the Manila slums “No more fish for you! I’m investing my money in a system that lets you catch fish.” Of course they’ll point out that all the fish were dynamited out of the oceans around the Philippines ages ago but I’m sure I can come up with a cute response if I think about it. Grow bamboo for ethanol then so people in rich countries can still drive their cars! That should shut them up.

In the meanwhile our learned author from the Institute of Public Affairs can hang on to his hard-earned cash secure in the knowledge that giving any of it to poor nations would be wrong because it’s the system that needs fixing. And I’ll keep wanting to help real live people who are hungry and sick and uneducated because they don’t have anywhere near as much money as I do, thanks to a system that neither they nor I had any hand in designing and no opportunity to change.

The IPA is of course free to argue that government aid should be devoted to reforming institutions in order to get rid of corruption and improve governance. With some qualifications I would even go along with them. But couching their argument as if helping the poor is an act of blindness is unforgivable. One is forced to conclude that they are not concerned with improving the lives of the poor so much as they are with rationalising their own selfishness.