The advertising above is just a source of revenue. If the ads get offensive enough, I may drop them.
Clayton Cramer's BLOG |
|
|
Clayton's commentary on news and events of the day. Broadly speaking, I'm a conservative with libertarian sympathies (getting more conservative as my children get older).
 Never forget! I'm running for Idaho state senate I've written a number of history books, as well as scholarly and popular articles, (see my web page).
PayPal members: to make a contribution
Email me at blogmail at claytoncramer dot com. Sorry to be so indirect, but all spambots must die! But they haven't died yet! Include the word spamIamnot in your subject line to make sure that my spam blocker lets you through. |
Saturday, March 15, 2003
Oriana Fallaci: What A Long Strange Trip It's Been For those of us who grew up in the 1960s and 1970s, and remember Oriana Fallaci in the simple category of, "leftist anti-war, anti-American Italian journalist," this article by her that appeared in the March 13 Wall Street Journal is as startling as anything can be. Watch for falling pig droppings; they've got wings now. It's a long article, and has some significant criticisms of what Bush has done, when, and how. But she recognizes that we are engaged in a battle between the forces of savagery, and liberal democracy, and there should be no question on which side civilized people will stand. To avoid the dilemma of whether this war should take place or not, to overcome the reservations and the reluctance and the doubts that still lacerate me, I often say to myself: "How good if the Iraqis would get free of Saddam Hussein by themselves. How good if they would execute him and hang up his body by the feet as in 1945 we Italians did with Mussolini." But it does not help. Or it helps in one way only. The Italians, in fact, could get free of Mussolini because in 1945 the Allies had conquered almost four-fifths of Italy. In other words, because the Second World War had taken place. A war without which we would have kept Mussolini (and Hitler) forever. A war during which the allies had pitilessly bombed us and we had died like mosquitoes. The Allies, too.Fallaci is skeptical that Iraq can be "liberated" in the sense that Germany and Italy were liberated in 1945: As my father said when he asked the anti-fascists to join the Resistance, and as today I say to those who honestly rely on the Pax Americana, people must conquer freedom by themselves. Democracy must come from their will, and in both cases a country must know what they consist of. In Europe the Second World War was a liberation war not because it brought novelties called freedom and democracy but because it re-established them. Because Europeans knew what they consisted of. The Japanese did not: it is true. In Japan, those two treasures were somehow a gift, a refund for Hiroshima and Nagasaki. But Japan had already started its process of modernization, and did not belong to the Islamic world. As I write in my book when I call bin Laden the tip of the iceberg and I define the iceberg as a mountain that has not moved for 1,400 years, that for 1,400 years has not changed, that has not emerged from its blindness, freedom and democracy are totally unrelated to the ideological texture of Islam. To the tyranny of theocratic states. So their people refuse them, and even more they want to erase ours.Read the whole thing. It's worth it. Bowling for Columbine: It's Not A Documentary David Hardy, attorney, has put together a nice piece on why Bowling for Columbine should not win an Oscar for Best Documentary. Why? The film fails the first requirement of a documentary: some foundation in the truth. Bowling makes its points by deceiving and by misleading the viewer. Statements are made which are false. The viewer is invited to draw inferences which the producer must have known were wrong. Dates are transposed and video carefully edited to create whatever effect is desired.And he does. Some of the material won't surprise you, if you've read some of my previous criticisms here and here of Bowling for Columbine's accuracy, and Michael Moore's integrity. One point that Hardy does make that should embarrass a "progressive" like Moore is that racist view of blacks that Moore presents: In Moore's world, blacks are no more than cardboard cutouts. They are either victims of welfare reform, or gangstas who can handle themselves in a knife fight. Whites, in contrast, can be human and complex -- even Marilyn Manson, a strange duck at best, is entitled to sympathetic treatment. Whites can be good (protestors, violence victims, prosecutors) or bad (corporate presidents, the military, Charleton Heston). But there is no room in Moore's world for . . . oh, say, any black American worthy of mention during Black History Month. Or Colin Powell. Or Martin Luther King. Or that guy whose kids go to school with yours.If you are a member of the motion picture academy who reads my blog (yeah, fat chance!), please don't vote for Bowling for Columbine. If you do, you might as well vote for Reign of Fire as Best Documentary. Friday, March 14, 2003
No Peace for Oil! Another reminder that some of the "principled opposition" to the war against Saddam Hussein is really about money: French and Russian oil and gas contracts signed with the Saddam Hussein regime in Iraq "will not be honored," Barhim Salih, a leading Iraqi Kurdish official, said in Washington Friday, just before a series of high-level meetings with Bush administration officials.If Saddam Hussein were just your run of the mill thug, stealing from the masses and suppressing dissent, this would be a disappointing behavior by the French government. Hussein is a serious threat to his neighbors, probably to the U.S., and a brutal thug whose government gouges out the eyes of children to force confessions from their parents. Even by French standards of moral vacuity, this is abominable. Confronting Death; Seeking Eternal Life Interesting picture from U.S. forces in Kuwait. I don't want to spoil the surprise for you! You'll just have to go see it yourself! Merging? I have been invited to temporarily merge my blog into the Volokh Conspiracy blog in the interests of synergistic readership expansion, and it is a very tempting idea. (Blogging as a "mature industry": rather equivalent to when the thousands of American steel companies merged at the close of the 19th century into just a few.) One, I get to hang around with a bunch of well-educated law professors, and hope that some of that will rub off on me. Two, regular readers of Volokh Conspiracy will get a chance to see what I have to say on a regular basis. I get about 400 visits a day right now; the Volokh Conspiracy gets about 5000 visits a day. That's a dramatic increase in potential readership for me. Three, regular readers of my blog will have a chance to see how brilliant I am, even surrounded by a bunch of law professors. There are a couple of downsides. Some of my regular readers are friends and family, and may not particular care what a bunch of law professors think. (I may provide a link that lets you go straight to my blog entries, skipping over theirs.) There is also the small amount of money that comes in through the tip jars on my blog now. I suppose that I could leave the tip jars here, and hope that anyone that visits the Volokh Conspiracy blog will know to come back here occasionally and, to quote Billy Joel, "throw bread in my jar." In any case, I would like to hear from my regular readers: is this experiment in merging a good idea or not? Thursday, March 13, 2003
Amazon.com Responds Here's their email response. I think you can see why I will be removing all buttons associated with Amazon.com from my website this weekend: Dear Clayton,Of course, it doesn't have to be a "how-to" manual for molesting children. Most molesters don't need any instructions. They need justification and rationalization to let them get past their guilt feelings about what they do. That's why people like Father Shanley, a Catholic priest and child molester, played a part in founding the North American Man-Boy Love Association. We believe that people have the right to choose their own reading material. Our goal is to support freedom of expression and provide customers with the broadest selection possible so they can find, discover, and buy any title they might be seeking.My goal is not to do business with an organization that distributes child molester self-justification materials. There's a lot of material out there that I wouldn't buy, and wouldn't think very highly of someone who did buy it. But if someone wants to buy Hustler, or whatever passes for pretentious erotica, that's their bad taste. Distributing and selling stuff that encourages child molesters to think of themselves as the next identity group, in need of understanding, patience, and acceptance--that crosses the line. That selection includes some titles which most people, including employees of Amazon.com, may find distasteful or otherwise objectionable. However, Amazon.com believes it is censorship to make a book unavailable to our customers because we believe its message to be repugnant.Censorship is something that the government does. Private organizations are not censors when they choose not to associate themselves with depravity. While we do not censor items from our web site, I wanted to reassure you that Amazon.com does not promote these kinds of titles.How gratifying. If Amazon.com didn't offer it, there are molesters out there would have one less source of reassurance for their depraved indifference to the suffering of others. We value all feedback from our customers, and I thank you again for taking the time to send us your comments about this issue.It resolved the question for me. No more purchases from Amazon.com. My wife just ordered a book for a class she is gong to be teaching in the summer. She'll make sure that the textbooks ordered for her class come from someone else. If Conservatives Made Statements Like These... There would be understandable rage at the cynicism and savage indifference to human suffering. Prime Minister John Howard of Australia explained why he is taking Australia to war as part of the "coalition of the willing." Read what he had to say, then look at the Australian left's reaction: "The Iraqi people are oppressed by this current regime," he said. "There is no chance of normalcy in a nation where torture and rape and genocide and killing are standard practice.So what does the Australian left have to say? Not, "We share your revulsion at the evil of what Hussein has done to his people, but there must be a better way to achieve these praiseworthy goals." No--just the politics of anti-Americanism: Labor described the speech as sad and disgraceful, and said Howard had not told Australians the truth about his commitment to join a US-led strike.Thirty years ago, the American left made excuses for Pol Pot's extermination of three million Cambodians. Sixty years ago, Communists throughout the Western world followed the Party line, and excused the actions of Hitler. This generation of leftists is doing its darndest to keep the Murderer-and-Rapist-in-Chief in charge of Iraq. Have they no shame whatsoever? Why The French Suddenly Love Peace So Much William Safire has a bit of a bombshell about Chinese and French violations of the UN resolutions about shipping weapons to Iraq--and why both countries would prefer no one take a careful look at Iraqi government records. Thinking About Torture There has been a burst of discussions about the use of torture to extract information from terrorists. Over at The Volokh Conspiracy, and a few other blogs as well. The essential argument that has been advanced is this: Terrorists have planted a bomb somewhere in an American city. Thousands or more will die when that bomb goes off. The FBI has arrested at least one of the terrorists. Should they use torture to get him to reveal the location of the bomb? Should we change our laws to recognize this grim reality? I have several arguments against any change in our laws concerning use of torture: 1. A circumstance like this is very, very unlikely--rather like the "Lifeboat" scenario that moral relativists use to justify why murder isn't always a bad thing. For 99.99999% of Americans, we will never be in a situation that requires such a difficult choice--but the moral relativist argument, once accepted, will be used in all sorts of circumstances that do not justify killing, or torture, or molesting children, or whatever evil the moral relativists want us all to accept this week. Why corrupt our laws to handle a one in a million possibility? 2. One of the reasons that Western nations made torture as a method of obtaining information from suspects illegal was that someone who is being tortured will confess to any crime to make the pain stop. (Think of the movie In the Name of the Father.) "Stop the shocks! The bomb is in a white van in a parking structure downtown. I don't remember which one--it's a couple blocks from City Hall!" For the two to three hours it takes the police to check every parking structure for a white van with a bomb in it, the pain has stopped. How many delays in the torture before the bomb goes off? 3. About twenty years ago, I read a book about counterinsurgency warfare, focused on British colonies in the post-World War II period. One of the interesting claims that the book made was that British law did not provide for colonial governors to declare martial law. Consequently, if circumstances became bad enough, a governor that exceeded his legal authority could only beg for mercy from Parliament--that they would pass a law granting forgiveness. This book made the claim that this had the effect of discouraging colonial governors from going any further than absolutely necessary to deal with an insurgency, because they would have to justify their actions with no certainty of receiving absolution. I think the same is true with respect to torture. If we actually reach one of those 0.00001% situations where torture of a suspect to save the lives of thousands becomes necessary, I would like for whoever has to make this decision to say to himself: "My actions are illegal. I am going to have to go to the President, and make a strong and clear-cut case that using torture was justified by the extreme necessity of the situation, that there was no other solution to the problem, and that my actions were consistent with protecting the public good by using torture. I will make the minimum use of torture, and only after all other methods for obtaining this information have been exhausted." 4. Finally, I've read far too much about torture, in David Bergamini's Japan's Imperial Conspiracy, in William Shirer's The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, and John Carey's Eyewitness to History to ever regard torture with anything but the greatest horror. Wednesday, March 12, 2003
"One Nation, Under God" I've put some of this up on my blog before, but decided to add a few good quotes that I found, and put them somewhere that won't age away, like a blog. The next time the ACLU tries to argue that the phrase "under God" in the Pledge of Allegiance is unconstitutional, hand them this. Does Amazon.com Really Need Money This Badly? Here's a letter that I just sent to feedback@amazon.com: I'm a pretty open-minded sort, but there are limits beyond which decent merchants should not go--such as offering a book like Understanding Loved Boys and Boylovers. I appreciate that the Amazon.com review was pretty hostile, but do you really need the tiny profit that you make selling this book?Go click on the link, and tell me: why does Amazon.com need to offer this book? It's pretty clear from both Amazon.com's review, and those of the pedophiles that wrote customer reviews of it, that this is a straightforward apology for child molestation. UPDATE: Amazon.com responded. I'm not doing business with them anymore. I hope that you don't either. How Good Are Those Satellite Images? This news story denying that Osama bin Laden has been captured, mentions in passing that: In Afghanistan's southwestern Nimroz province, U.S. and Afghan forces carried out an operation near Rabat after picking up satellite images of men on horses. A firefight ensued and several people reportedly were killed or captured.I can't believe that pictures of men on horses in that part of Afghanistan would be all that unusual. Are these images good enough to pick out that one of the riders was extraordinarily tall? UPDATE: A reader pointed me to the National Reconnaisse Office's web page, where they have examples of their older technology satellite pictures on display. Another Rejection For My Book About the Bellesiles Scandal I've just about reached the end of the road on this. The message that I keep getting is that no book that refutes another book is publishable. In practice, this means that Bellesiles's lies will stand without refutation. It's okay to write another book that tells the truth, but it is not okay to directly confront his falsifications. I am now rewriting the book to make almost no mention of Bellesiles. Instead of pointing out that his claims are directly contradicted by his own sources, I will be writing the book as though Arming America doesn't exist. Even then, I'm told that there is no commercial potential for a book about gun ownership in early America. |
