Month: May 2005

Vocabulary

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A Chicago Boyz exclusive – don’t look for these in a regular dictionary any time soon.

condestruction (n.) a. the act of assembling related things or ideas into a coherent whole; b. the process of interpreting a text without reference to the reader’s ideology. antonym: deconstruction. synonym: dedemolition.

fauxlex (n.) a watch sold by a sidewalk vendor.

fer (v.t.) to fail to grasp an implication or hint.

irrationalize (v.i.) a. to offer a nonsensical excuse; b. to justify by means of babble and non-sequiturs. cf. hummina hummina.

lumpentelligentsia (n. col.) an educated and intellectual elite, chiefly employed in the food service industry.

kabbala-la-la (n.) an esoteric theosophy of rabbinical origin as practiced in Los Angeles.

misleadership (n.) the process of directing the efforts of others by means of duplicity and treachery; the art of selling someone down the river under the pretext of a boat ride.

nere (adj.) neither here nor there.

penultimatum (n.) a. a semi-final demand backed by an insincere threat of force; specifically: b. the most severe type of resolution issued by United Nations.

thinwa (n.) an order or command to lose weight, usually issued by a physician or spouse.

Killing Free Speech in Illinois

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“Good Government” groups seem to have it in for free speech. On the federal level, this has led to the passage of the execrable BCRA nee McCain Feingold law limiting various forms of political expression and especially expending money to distribute your opinions.

Illinois seems to have local forces bent on the same evil ends. Of course it’s all dressed up in nice, nonpartisan language claiming to be a good government initiative. Most of these infringements on free speech sport the language of the little guy standing up to moneyed interests but the reality is that the big guys always do know how to get around any restrictions (see the emergence of once obscure 527 committees into 2004 election powerhouses for a real world example).

Who, in reality gets hit? The small guys who are scared to even open their mouths are the biggest losers. Their more courageous compatriots who can’t afford competent legal help are also unduly burdened in their free speech distribution rights. It’s just a mess for everybody but the guys who can buy exceptions in the law and can hire very good lawyers to work around any restrictions. 

We can already see the mess that is being made at the national level with BCRA/McCain Feingold. We don’t need to replicate it in Illinois. But people will try, yes they will try. For them BCRA’s free speech suppression isn’t a bug, it’s a feature.

Diversion for the map-challenged

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My oldest daughter introduced me to the Geography Olympics this week-end; she suggested, however, that a patriot would spend some time on this before bringing down America’s average (as she well knew I would).

It’s a nice break. This is my daughter (now seeking diversions from dissertation-writing) who in primary school fastened a world map to the front of her binder and asked her classmates to point our their native lands. She’d come home with questions about Qatar and Bulgaria and Botswama. Third-world nations building up their ag & engineering skills often send grad students to red-state schools. Something like 36 languages were spoken by those primary students, since that school also serves married student housing.

Quote of the Day

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I have meant for some time to post the following passage from Gerard Alexander’s review of two books about “neoconservatives” in the Winter 2004 Claremont Review of Books.

More important, treating neocons as an ideological community invites critics to treat their ideas as the product of an ideological heritage instead of as the product of hard-won, real-world experience. If they saw them as the latter, critics would set out instead to evaluate the validity of neocon ideas compared to other foreign policy proposals on offer. This should come naturally to Halper and Clarke. After all, they say neocons should be analyzed as a “political interest group,” and political science research on that subject usually highlights competition between interest groups. But Halper and Clarke focus only on neocons in isolation. This leaves them saying, with many others, that neocons took over after 9/11 because they “were ready with a detailed, plausible blueprint.” This suggests there wasn’t competition between points of view, and that neocons took over foreign policy without a fight because they were zealous and well-positioned.

This asks us to ignore the traditional realists and liberal institutionalists who were also full of advice and on the scene. As Norman Podhoretz says, it also asks us to believe “that strong-minded people like Bush, Rumsfeld, Cheney, and Rice could be fooled by a bunch of cunning subordinates.” Consequently, it precludes consideration of the crucial possibility that maybe those people adopted key neocon proposals because rival approaches did not provide credible alternatives. After the Cold War, and especially after 9/11, U.S. leaders faced two overarching national security questions: What should U.S. grand strategy be in a “unipolar” world? And how should America deal with violent Islamism and its global ambitions? “Neoconservatism” can be understood as an alternative, on these two matters, to traditional realism and liberal institutionalism. And a careful reading of the facts, as opposed to a reading of some texts, suggests that the common stereotype is a caricature of the neocons, not a useful guide to them.

(Emphasis added.)

Iraq as Potential Failed State

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Belmont Club’s latest post is worth reading. Wretchard argues that the Iraqi insurgents are best understood as gangsters rather than nationalists; they seek not so much national political power as chaos, which they would exploit by carving out regions of local control where their violent business enterprises may thrive. In this regard they closely resemble the Afghan warlords and the gangs that have gained considerable power in some of the weaker Latin American countries. This argument implies that we should systematically reshape our national-defense tactics to deal with gangster insurgencies (as we are already doing, to some extent, in response to events if not by plan), and that we should recognize that the strategic threat posed by ruthless and increasingly powerful anational gangs may transcend more-visible nationalist threats to our security.