Gateway Pundit (hat tip Larwyn) reports yet another anti-Semitic campaign in Venezuela:
>On December 1, 2007, Venezuelan police raided a Jewish community center in Caracas. The raid by drug and terrorism police occurred just hours before Venezuelans went to the polls to vote on constitutional changes proposed by President Hugo Chavez. The Jewish community is routinely the target of verbal intimidation in the Chavez government-sponsored media- ADL.org.
>Today Hugo Chavez, the "brother" of Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, opened a new media campaign against the Jews...
The stridency of Chavez's anti-Semitism is not, as the ADL claims, "inexplicable". Chavez is a national socialist in the same tradition as Hitler and Stalin. His storm troopers have attacked Jews before and will so again.
Tuesday, June 3, 2008
Media Silence on Iraqi War Success
The Belmont Club (hat tip Larwyn) notes that:
"The sudden and precipitous drop-off in the media coverage of Iraq is largely due to the reluctance among pundits to advertise the fact that they were wrong. Iraq is unmentionable because things are going well. Well for Iraq means not so well for pundits who staked their reputations on failure. Abe Greenwald at Commentary Magazine writes: "After years of telling us the war on terror was creating more terrorists, the mainstream media has mysteriously woken up to the fact that Islamic extremism is on the wane. Newsweek is the latest publication to run a support-for-jihad-is-fading piece.". The Washington Post has quietly and recently done so as well. Better to concede past mistakes in judgment quietly the better to deliver more judgements of the same quality in the future. But it comes at the price of clinging to the same false premises and ignoring the most glaring lessons. Greenwald writes:
"'there is an important omission in the sudden coverage of moderate Muslims: No one talks about the effect of the Iraq War. The MSM can dodge the issue all they like, but the fact remains that the Coalition’s toppling of Saddam facilitated the first organized rejection of fanatical Islam in the Middle East. Back in November 2005, while everyone stateside was crying fiasco, a group of Sunnis in Anbar province joined forces with a clutch of U.S. Marines and began to wrest their country back from al-Qaeda and its sympathizers.'"
In 1921 Walter Lippmann enumerated the reasons why the press could not be expected to provide reliable information needed for public deliberation. One is the need to sell newspapers. However, he was mildly sanguine about the technical ability of the media at that time to execute its news-providing mission competently. Things have turned out worse than Lippmann expected. Groupthink and political correctness dominate the media. The progressives of Lippmann's time had varying philosophies. Some were more or less socialist or conservative. The post-Depression New Deal liberalism resulted in two philosophies: (1) a moderately conservative progressivism that has mirrored social democracy and (2) social democracy. However, the media are almost all in the latter camp. One of the characteristics of social democrats is the inability to tolerate dissent and deliberation. Even in areas where their qualifications are weak, such as military strategy and foreign policy, the left looks to leadership from a few elite newspaper analysts. The result is a policy debate that is emotionally driven but poorly conceived.
Let us celebrate that things are going well in Iraq. General David Petraeus's fourth generation warfare strategy has worked. Rather than discuss why and begin to think about ways to improve it, the media react stupidly and public policy debate continues to be inarticulate and foolish.
"The sudden and precipitous drop-off in the media coverage of Iraq is largely due to the reluctance among pundits to advertise the fact that they were wrong. Iraq is unmentionable because things are going well. Well for Iraq means not so well for pundits who staked their reputations on failure. Abe Greenwald at Commentary Magazine writes: "After years of telling us the war on terror was creating more terrorists, the mainstream media has mysteriously woken up to the fact that Islamic extremism is on the wane. Newsweek is the latest publication to run a support-for-jihad-is-fading piece.". The Washington Post has quietly and recently done so as well. Better to concede past mistakes in judgment quietly the better to deliver more judgements of the same quality in the future. But it comes at the price of clinging to the same false premises and ignoring the most glaring lessons. Greenwald writes:
"'there is an important omission in the sudden coverage of moderate Muslims: No one talks about the effect of the Iraq War. The MSM can dodge the issue all they like, but the fact remains that the Coalition’s toppling of Saddam facilitated the first organized rejection of fanatical Islam in the Middle East. Back in November 2005, while everyone stateside was crying fiasco, a group of Sunnis in Anbar province joined forces with a clutch of U.S. Marines and began to wrest their country back from al-Qaeda and its sympathizers.'"
In 1921 Walter Lippmann enumerated the reasons why the press could not be expected to provide reliable information needed for public deliberation. One is the need to sell newspapers. However, he was mildly sanguine about the technical ability of the media at that time to execute its news-providing mission competently. Things have turned out worse than Lippmann expected. Groupthink and political correctness dominate the media. The progressives of Lippmann's time had varying philosophies. Some were more or less socialist or conservative. The post-Depression New Deal liberalism resulted in two philosophies: (1) a moderately conservative progressivism that has mirrored social democracy and (2) social democracy. However, the media are almost all in the latter camp. One of the characteristics of social democrats is the inability to tolerate dissent and deliberation. Even in areas where their qualifications are weak, such as military strategy and foreign policy, the left looks to leadership from a few elite newspaper analysts. The result is a policy debate that is emotionally driven but poorly conceived.
Let us celebrate that things are going well in Iraq. General David Petraeus's fourth generation warfare strategy has worked. Rather than discuss why and begin to think about ways to improve it, the media react stupidly and public policy debate continues to be inarticulate and foolish.
Monday, June 2, 2008
Social Justice Dispositions and Charles E. Lindblom's Concept of Preceptoral Authority System
In his book Politics and Markets: The World's Political-Economic Systems* political scientist Charles E. Lindblom describes three kinds of authority: market, state and preceptoral. Market and state reflect the usual definitions but preceptoral is a concept that seems to have been Lindblom's own. In William Ouchi's Theory Z**, published about four years after Lindblom's book, the idea that clan or organizational culture can supplement market and bureaucratic control methods seems to parallel this idea. The idea of preceptoral control is that educational indoctrination can substitute for state coercion or economic incentives as a method of control. This idea very closely fits the concept of "social justice disposition" that the National Council for the Accreditation of Teacher Education (NCATE) has advocated:
"Persuasion or "education" is aimed first--but perhaps only transitionally--at a transformation of personality, at the creation of the 'new man' as he is often referred to in communist discourse. Mao speaks of the need to 'remold people to their very souls.' 'We must fight 'self.' The 'fundamental task,' Castro declares, is the formation of the new man, a man with a profound consciousness of his role in society and of his duties and social responsibilities.
"For the USSR, Cuba and China alike, the template for the new man has been fashioned from socialist thought, George Orwell's 1984, and Victorian England. Selflessness, cooperation, egalitarianism and service to society mix as themes with duty, hard work, self discipline, patriotism and moral conservatism in dress, the arts and sexual behavior. Two features of the new personality are indispensable. 'Education' tries to create men who will autonomously serve collective interests, that is, who will do on their own initiative what in other societies they must be commanded or induced to do. It must also create men who will voluntarily respond to state and party when either asks for specific performance.
"To explain, justify and win agreement on all tasks takes too much time; such persuasive efforts have to be reserved for inducing personality transformation and for motivating major tasks. Hence, citizens must be persuaded simply to accept the authority of their leaders on the assignment of most tasks. How then does such a system differ on this point from a conventional authority system? It differs in that the new man will ordinarily need no external direction. When he does, authority is a residual tool to be used only in cases in which persuasion is not feasible because too costly in time and effort. In addition, such authority as is needed rests on its prior establishment by persuasion alone. If these requirements seem difficult to satisfy, they help explain why a preceptoral system remains largely aspiration rather than fact."
Not if the educational establishment can help it.
*Charles E. Lindblom, Politics and Markets: The World's Political-Economic Systems. New York: Basic Books, 1977, p. 56.
**William Ouchi, Theory Z, 1981
"Persuasion or "education" is aimed first--but perhaps only transitionally--at a transformation of personality, at the creation of the 'new man' as he is often referred to in communist discourse. Mao speaks of the need to 'remold people to their very souls.' 'We must fight 'self.' The 'fundamental task,' Castro declares, is the formation of the new man, a man with a profound consciousness of his role in society and of his duties and social responsibilities.
"For the USSR, Cuba and China alike, the template for the new man has been fashioned from socialist thought, George Orwell's 1984, and Victorian England. Selflessness, cooperation, egalitarianism and service to society mix as themes with duty, hard work, self discipline, patriotism and moral conservatism in dress, the arts and sexual behavior. Two features of the new personality are indispensable. 'Education' tries to create men who will autonomously serve collective interests, that is, who will do on their own initiative what in other societies they must be commanded or induced to do. It must also create men who will voluntarily respond to state and party when either asks for specific performance.
"To explain, justify and win agreement on all tasks takes too much time; such persuasive efforts have to be reserved for inducing personality transformation and for motivating major tasks. Hence, citizens must be persuaded simply to accept the authority of their leaders on the assignment of most tasks. How then does such a system differ on this point from a conventional authority system? It differs in that the new man will ordinarily need no external direction. When he does, authority is a residual tool to be used only in cases in which persuasion is not feasible because too costly in time and effort. In addition, such authority as is needed rests on its prior establishment by persuasion alone. If these requirements seem difficult to satisfy, they help explain why a preceptoral system remains largely aspiration rather than fact."
Not if the educational establishment can help it.
*Charles E. Lindblom, Politics and Markets: The World's Political-Economic Systems. New York: Basic Books, 1977, p. 56.
**William Ouchi, Theory Z, 1981
The Greatest Sin Against God
Gateway Pundit blogs that Barack Obama's associate, Father Michael Pfleger, has said that:
America is the greatest sin against God.
Rather than appoint Pfleger Secretary of the Interior Obama, rapidly becoming known as the Teapot Dome candidate, now seems likely to appoint Pfleger to the Supreme Court bench.
America is the greatest sin against God.
Rather than appoint Pfleger Secretary of the Interior Obama, rapidly becoming known as the Teapot Dome candidate, now seems likely to appoint Pfleger to the Supreme Court bench.
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