Why Not Just Ban The Burqa?-Some Links

January 14, 2015January 15, 2015 / chr1 / Leave a comment

A while ago, Dalrymple wrote concernedly about massive immigration to London, and even more about the British response. He went so far as to compare Britain unfavorably with France.

Britain:

“…is not an ideological state; it has no foundation myths that are easy to identify with…”

According to Dalrymple, French ideological rigidity through the laws may be quite useful in handling the ideological rigidity of the terrorists, and perhaps other not fully assimilated Muslim immigrants. The French have their own brand of integration, after all (making new Frenchman), particularly since the revolution. Eventually too, the enforcement of laws and the ideals of liberte, egalite, fraternite, have the force of the State behind them.

Evidently, some Muslims in France are being raised to believe Islamic laws of blasphemy trump those of the French Republic. Add large ghettos and relatively less social mobility, economic opportunity, and integration, and you’ve got potentially serious problems. Among them, the anti-semitism that Muslims often treat as their birthright, compacted under such pressure, simmering in neighborhoods large enough where a lot of customs from the home countries linger, mutual suspicions and conspiracy theories abound, and where Islam itself can be at odds with post-Enlightenment, post-revolutionary France.

Dalrymple:

“Multiculturalism, that is, is not compatible with the founding Enlightenment mythology of France; assimilation, not integration, is the goal “

And hey, listen, I don’t want to get between the British and the French, but there’s this:

Why do Frenchman piss on the sides of highways?

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Through American eyes, the French revolutionary esprit seems to manifest itself in different ways, bubbling up into eddies of libertinism, the-intellectual-as-rock-star, that particular brand of French colonialism, deep mistrust of authority, the monarchy, the aristocracy, the Catholic church etc. which the Charlie Hebdo folks kept alive.

On that note, here’s a drunk Serge Gainsbourg letting his intentions be known to Whitney Houston.

Smooth, Serge:

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Well, the French did simply ban the burqa by law, so maybe Dalrymple had a point.

And what about the Anglo-American view?:

Another take: Walter Russell Mead discussed his then new book entitled God and Gold: Britain, America and the Making of the Modern World.

Maybe there are other options besides Fukuyama’s Hegelian end point of history, and Huntington’s Clash Of Civilizations with regard to our current dealings with the Islamic resurgence and its anti-modern, anti-Western, theocratic impulses (liberal internationalism and Obama’s foreign policy have certainly created problems, but there are underlying issues the West will face):

Mead argues that religion, government, free-trade, capitalism, sport, and especially naval power have shaped our two cultures which have thus shaped the world (an [economic] model he suggests originally came from the Dutch).

Likely worth your time.

Related On This Site: It seems like one point of discussion is what kind of Western ideas lead the debate: Some Quotations From Leo Strauss On Edmund Burke In ‘Natural Right And History’…Paul Berman At The New Republic: ‘From September 11 to the Arab Spring: Do Ideas Matter?’…french Liberte?: Charlie Rose Episode On Libya Featuring Bernhard Henri-Levy, Les Gelb And Others…

Yes, Edmund Burke opposed the French Revolution: Sunday Quotation: Edmund Burke On The French Revolution..

Charles Murray is trying to get virtue back with the social sciences: Charles Murray At The New Criterion: ‘Belmont & Fishtown’…Ross Douthat At First Principles: ‘The Quest for Community in the Age of Obama: Nisbet’s Prescience’

Repost-From Guernica: Bernard Henri Levy Interview On Anti-Semitism And Fascism

Medieval Times-Roaming The Gloom With Theory: Interview With Michel Hollebecq

January 11, 2015 / chr1 / 2 Comments

Interview sent in by a reader with French novelist Michel Hollebecq on his new novel, ‘Soumission,’ which, in his fictional world, imagines a soon-to-be Muslim candidate defeating a French nationalist candidate, followed by an ultimate submission of French society to Islamic law and political leadership.

Interesting discussion at the link (including a deflation of (R)acism as critical theory).

‘But now you’re asking words to mean something they don’t. Racism is simply when you don’t like somebody because he belongs to another race, because he hasn’t got the same color skin that you do, or the same features, et cetera. You can’t stretch the word to give it some higher meaning.’

On some of Hollebecq’s thinking behind the creative work:

‘Yes. It has to happen sometime and it might as well be now. In this sense, too, I am a Comtean. We are in what he calls the metaphysical stage, which began in the Middle Ages and whose whole point was to destroy the phase that preceded it. In itself, it can produce nothing, just emptiness and unhappiness. So yes, I am hostile to Enlightenment philosophy, I need to make that perfectly clear. ‘

Whoa, at least he’s relatively up front about that.

Isn’t it possible to reject Hollebecq’s modernity-is-dead worldview AND also put the universal claims of progressive, collectivist, ideological, postmodern, multicultural feminist discontents into their proper perspective…without suggesting the end of the modern world and some presumed next stage to be reached?

And as for discussions of art: Is the book worth a read?

*******I’ve never been to Medieval Times, but I am told there will be flagons of mead and tournaments of strength:

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From the comments:

‘Those of you regarding e.g. feminism as somehow an antidote to the patriarchal impulses in enlightenment thinking or Islam, or in broader terms postmodern political and social movements as offering a ‘third way’, something totally new and immune from this dynamic of competitive decay and decline, forget the fact that these movements are themselves the most recent outgrowths of the emancipative instinct, one of the core features deeply rooted in Western thought ever since the renaissance, as Barzun described. As an Asian living in the West myself, I have to tell you that this instinct is simply not present as a core element in other civilisations, and is indeed distinctive about the West. That Japan and Korea, and for that matter every non-western nation, modernised without a countercultural ‘values’ rebellion is indicative in this regard. The west is going to be without allies as it goes with a whimper.

Under such a depressing worldview, hope is provided for by religion and mysticism, a return to medievalism. It is sad, because the West will truly die as it numbs its own most deeply embedded instincts in the process of conversion, but the mysticism is a form of hope for the masses, who never particularly cared for high ideals anyway.

Houellebecq seems to channel Spengler, who hardly anybody reads nowadays. But that such an interesting thinker is hardly glanced at today is an indictment of us, not of him.’

Also, from the comments. Hubristic, but there’s something to the grandiosity and deflated nihilism:

‘This is why I love French writers and thinkers. Fascinating to read even if they are always wrong.’

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Robert Merry took a look at Oswald Spengler:

‘So it is with America and Europe. Hence, an analysis of American decline must lead to questions about Western decline. And an analysis of Western decline must lead to Oswald Spengler, the German intellectual who in 1918 produced the first volume of his bombshell work Der Untergang des Abendlandes (The Decline of the West), followed by the second volume in 1922. Spengler’s thesis forced his readers to look at history through an entirely new prism. They did, and he enjoyed a surge of influence. But the man and his work are in eclipse today, and there’s little evidence that scholars pondering American decline have consulted the dark musings of this German romantic or his overarching theory of history.’

As much as I’m hoping for a break-up of Islamist ideology, I suppose I’m hoping for some light into these dark, post-Enlightenment corners as well. Something other than the existential void and the ideas and ideologies which so often rush in.

I have to give Hollebecq some credit, too, for as he points out, the major religions have been dealing with questions of purpose, suffering, telos, why, what, when, and the stuff human nature for a lot longer time…

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Denis Dutton suggested art could head towards Darwin (and may offer new direction from the troubles of the modern art aimlessness and shallow depth…the money and the fame) Review of Denis Dutton’s ‘The Art Instinct’…

Roger Sandall, Australian critic of romantic primitivism and the Western’s Left’s penchant for the Noble Savage: His home page where his essays can be found. Here’s “The Rise Of The Anthropologues“ and…

Robert Hughes, Australian and often fierce critic of modernism and post-modernism.

***I should add that Herzog’s ‘Into The Abyss‘ was worth my time. Herzog is probably not a proponent of the death penalty, but I thought he left me to decide what I thought, and he didn’t flinch from the crime, the tragedy and the loss.

From Edward Feser: ‘Nagel And His Critics Part IV’…A Few Thoughts On Isaiah Berlin’s “Two Concepts Of Liberty”…

John Gray Reviews Jonathan Haidt’s New Book At The New Republic: ‘The Knowns And The Unknowns’

Update And Repost- From YouTube: Leo Strauss On The Meno-More On The Fact/Value Distinction?’

Sunday Quotation: Edmund Burke On The French Revolution

Repost-Sarah Chayes At The L.A. Times: ‘Innocence Of Muslims’ Doesn’t Meet Free-Speech Test’

January 10, 2015 / chr1 / Leave a comment

Full piece here. (Also published over two years ago, to recap the Islamist threat and gaps between the Western and Islamic worlds, and figure out how to analyze the problems involved, and the reactions to them).

How exactly did we get to the point where this kind of argument is prominently featured in a mainstream publication?:

‘The point here is not to excuse the terrible acts perpetrated by committed extremists and others around the world in reaction to the video, or to condone physical violence as a response to words — any kind of words. The point is to emphasize that U.S. law makes a distinction between speech that is simply offensive and speech that is deliberately tailored to put lives and property at immediate risk. Especially in the heightened volatility of today’s Middle East, such provocation is certainly irresponsible — and reveals an ironic alliance of convenience between Christian extremists and the Islamist extremists they claim to hate.’

While Chayes does not currently represent the Obama administration (that’s a little far even for them), I suspect if you look a couple of ticks center-ward, you might find some on the current foreign policy team, and some sentiment from the President toward the Muslim world.

I don’t think the administration’s response after Ambassador Stevens’ death (addition: In Benghazi) was just designed to protect an increasingly ineffective foreign policy platform given events, or worse, just a cynical political calculation for his foreign policy to be seen as effective. He may actually see his job as some sort of bridge-builder between two cultures, and peace-maker between civilizations under ideas he presumes to be universal. How such an approach working out in practice is another matter.

Here’s a quote from Anne-Marie Slaughter, on liberal internationalism (addition: which is probably a few ticks centerward of further Leftward progressive, semi-radical peace and democracy advocates)

‘The central liberal internationalist premise is the value of a rules-based international order that restrains powerful states and thereby reassures their enemies and allies alike and allows weaker states to have sufficient voice in the system that they will not choose to exit’

What if you can’t even appease extreme and radical groups of violent Muslims as they murder your diplomats and citizens under the pretext of the video…let alone get them on-board some sort of ‘rules-based international order’?

What if there is such a chasm between Western and Muslim civilizations that even less violent Muslims on the street have no clue as to the concepts we’re defending, and why?

What if you go so far down this path that you are, or least appear to be, willing to bend on a key issue and core freedom for our country (admittedly maybe not as far as Chayes is willing to bend it)?

Addition: From Walter Russell Mead:

‘Hassan Nasrallah, the Hezbollah chief who usually stays hidden from public view because he fears being assassinated by Israel, made a rare appearance at a massive rally in Beirut yesterday, calling on hundreds of thousands of supporters to prolong protests against the U.S. because of the now notorious anti-Islam video.’

Another Addition: Ronald Bailey has more here at Reason. Don’t reward violence. Don’t shovel off the responsibility of standing up for Americans’ right to express themselves to Google, or Americans themselves. Obama is potentially on a fast track to the European solution, which is to say, a problematic cauldron.

Related On This Site: Chayes is a former NPR reporter (Is NPR essentially the mainstreaming of the New Left of the 60’s into mass and popular culture?) that went off the map in Afghanistan and has started a cooperative there, also advising the military and the joint chiefs: In understanding Afghanistan better, you could do worse, but I didn’t realize…..: Sarah Chayes On Afghanistan In The Boston Review: Days Of Lies And Roses

Free speech (used both well and unwell) meets offended Muslims: ‘Mohammad Cartoonist Lars Vilks Headbutted‘During Lecture’……From The OC Jewish Experience: ‘UC Irvine Muslim Student Union Suspended’…From Volokh: ‘”South Park” Creators Warned (Threatened) Over Mohammed’…From Volokh: ‘”South Park” Creators Warned (Threatened) Over Mohammed’

Repost-From Beautiful Horizons: ‘Christopher Hitchens and Tariq Ramadan at the 92nd Street Y’

Is Bernhard Henri-Levy actually influencing U.S. policy decisions..the old French liberte? From New York Magazine: ‘European Superhero Quashes

Repost-From Slate: ‘MFA vs. NYC’

January 9, 2015 / chr1 / Leave a comment

Full post here.

Of the MFA (Master Of Fine Arts):

‘Staffed by writer-professors preoccupied with their own work or their failure to produce any; freed from pedagogical urgency by the tenuousness of the link between fiction writing and employment; and populated by ever younger, often immediately postcollegiate students, MFA programs today serve less as hotbeds of fierce stylistic inculcation, or finishing schools for almost-ready writers (in the way of, say, Iowa in the ’70s), and more as an ingenious partial solution to an eminent American problem: how to extend our already protracted adolescence past 22 and toward 30, in order to cope with an oversupplied labor market.’

There are of course still storytellers, geniuses honing their craft that will hold up a mirror and lens for humanity within their creative imaginations. Maybe they can be found at MFA programs, but I’m guessing they’re more likely doing other things: getting crippled on a naval campaign, spending their days in an attic, learning to navigate the Mississippi by steamboat, or acting and writing for a theater troupe.

Addition: And as a reader points out: learning how to communicate during the current technological revolution.

How much good are all these museums, foundations, and institutions actually doing for the arts and humanities?

Related On This Site: From Poemshape Via Andrew Sullivan: ‘Let Poetry Die’…Here’s a suggestion to keep aesthetic and political judgements apart-Roger Scruton In The American Spectator Via A & L Daily: Farewell To Judgment…English departments can’t just copy “(S)cience”…From Bloggingheads: Shakespeare and The Second Law Of Thermodynamics…Repost-How To Study Literature: M.H. Abrams In The Chronicle Of Higher Ed

Wednesday Poem: Wallace Stevens-Anecdote of The Jar…Wednesday Poem: A Postcard From The Volcano..-Review of Denis Dutton’s ‘The Art Instinct’

From The Arnoldian Project: ‘Architecture, Campus, And Learning To Become’

From NPR: Grants To The NEA To Stimulate The Economy?…From 2 Blowhards-We Need The Arts: A Sob Story

Arts and Foundations and Institutions-MOMA is private, so perhaps it’s not as decadent if they display Tilda Swinton in a box:

Tilda Swinton At MOMA-From Arma Virumque: ‘Nightmare In A Box’

…From The City Journal Via Arts And Letters Daily: Andre Glucksman On “The Postmodern Financial Crisis”

Roger Scruton says keep politics out of the arts, and political judgment apart from aesthetic judgment…this includes race studies/feminist departments/gay studies etc.: Roger Scruton In The American Spectator Via A & L Daily: Farewell To Judgment

Savagery And Speech-A Few Thoughts On The Charlie Hebdo Attack

January 7, 2015 / chr1 / 5 Comments

One wonders if the often self-selecting guardians of cartoons in America would show the same courage to publish freely and provoke, day-in and day-out, as did those at Charlie Hebdo.

From The Independent, a little backstory:

‘Reappearing months later under the name Charlie Hebdo, its left-libertarian team of writers and illustrators, whose crude caricatures provided the magazine’s signature style, gleefully mocked all sources of political and religious authority. It folded in 1981 but was resurrected in 1992.’

One suspect in the attack has turned himself in.

Ross Douthat:

‘But if publishing something might get you slaughtered and you publish it anyway, by definition you are striking a blow for freedom, and that’s precisely the context when you need your fellow citizens to set aside their squeamishness and rise to your defense.’

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More broadly, the West is at war with many Islamist ideologues and holy warriors motivated to be in a state of constant war/conflict with the West, especially through terrorist and guerilla-style attacks such as this one. Simmering away in caves and enclaves, real-world havens created by leadership like the Taliban, as well as virtual havens and floating cells, online screeds and video feeds, some people are quite busy.

Some would go so far as to the draw the West into battle and face the full force of organized Western violence (they can’t seem to imagine anything else), in hopes of ultimately driving the infidel from the Arabian peninsula, achieving glorious purity, domination and ideological conquest. This part of the conflict will likely be going on for some time, hot and cold.

I should point out that I don’t think the West is in a war with Islam, per se (nor its universal claims forbidding such cartoons), which is a vital distinction to make. I encourage others, as always, to think for themselves, gain new experiences, to get to know parts of the Islamic world, faith and people and make their own judgments.

That said, many in the West often take for granted the freedoms, opportunities and obligations of living in post-Enlightenment societies (their own roots). In the case of Charlie Hebdo, these conflicts were sought out in the pursuit of truth and principle, often to provoke, but only one side made it bloody, savage, and terminally personal.

At certain points, the claims made by those living in the West are universal of course, including religious and faith claims as well as knowledge claims, but also (especially in Europe) the potentially violent and revolutionary claims of socialist solidarity, the softer claims of secular humanism and multi-cultural tolerance which seem to have congealed into majority opinion in many places, exported around the globe, glossing over a past, bloody century and many debt-ridden, aging, more culturally homogenous populations.

It seems to me that on the part of the citizen, a response to such violent attacks doesn’t necessarily require the bravery and valor of soldiers, but simply the quiet courage and the strength to look such barbarism in the eye for what it is.

To call it what it is.

As many people as possible must not tolerate such a violent response to the expression of ideas; a struggle in which we all have a part to play.

Any thoughts and comments are welcome.

From The Middle East Quarterly Via A & L Daily: Europe’s Shifting Immigration Dynamic

Kenan Malik In The Spiked Review Of Books: ‘Twenty Years On: Internalizing The Fatwa’-Salman Rushdie

Theodore Dalrymple argues that France has the potential to handle Muslim immigration better because of its ideological rigidity, which can better meet the ideological rigidity of its Muslim immigrants…Theodore Dalrymple Still Attacking Multi-Culturalism In Britain

How do you reasonably deal with relativism anyways?: From Virtual Philosophy: A Brief Interview With Simon Blackburn

Repost-Eugene Volokh At The National Review: ‘Multiculturalism: For or Against?’

If you thought the cartoons were bad, more on the Fitna movie here. Libertarians stand firm on this issue: Repost-A Canadian Libertarian Making Noise: Ezra Levant

Via The A & L Daily-Interview With Christopher Caldwell At Spiegel Online

Christopher Hitchens At Slate: Yale Surrenders

A British Muslim tells his story, suggesting that classical liberalism wouldn’t be a bad idea…as a more entrenched radical British Left and Muslim immigration don’t mix too well: From Kenanmalik.com: ‘Introduction: How Salman Rushdie Changed My Life’… Via YouTube: ‘Christopher Hitchens Vs. Ahmed Younis On CNN (2005)’…

Wednesday Poem: Pearl By Pearl Of Light

January 6, 2015 / chr1 / 5 Comments

Flying Over The Nebraska Of My Life

So much of our lives dissolves.
What did I do the day before
I met you? You remember
what I was wearing that holiday.
What did I wear the next morning?
What did I write the day my mother died?

I fly at night over the plains.
There is a cluster of lights,
a starfish shape glittering. Then
darkness and darkness.
Then another clump bearing
long daisy petals of roadway.

Then nothing again. How much
of my living has fled like water
into sand. The sand is not
even damp to the hand.
Tears and wine and sparkling
water all vanish the same.

I know looking out the plane’s
dirty window that there are houses,
barns, roads, trees, stores
distinct in that darkness I once
drove through. I knew them and will
never know them again.

The plane is flying from lighted
place to lighted place, but
our arc is from the dark into
brightness then back into darkness.
I want to possess my own life like a
necklace, pearl by pearl of light.

–Marge Piercy

For a special friend, you know who you are.

From The de Blasio Files: The Unions Are Supposed To Work Together In Supporting The People’s Future

January 4, 2015 / chr1 / Leave a comment

Just a brief re-cap on some of ‘The People’ whom NYC Mayor Bill de Blasio’s been siding with:

First, a man changes over time, but this quote is from the NY Times:

‘Bill de Blasio, then 26, went to Nicaragua to help distribute food and medicine in the middle of a war between left and right. But he returned with something else entirely: a vision of the possibilities of an unfettered leftist government.

and:

‘His activism did not stop. In the cramped Lower Manhattan headquarters of the Nicaragua Solidarity Network of Greater New York, where he volunteered, Mr. de Blasio learned to cause a stir. He and a ragtag team of peace activists, Democrats, Marxists and anarchists attempted to bring attention to a Central American cause that, after the Sandinistas lost power in a 1990 election, was fading from public view. “The Nicaraguan struggle is our struggle,” said a poster designed by the group’

Solidarity!

Here’s Liam Neeson on the horse-drawn carriage fiasco, which has been blown into quite the cause.

As of December 8th, de Blasio’s still pushing, and here’s a gem of a quote:

‘In New York, “animal politics always trumps any other issue except racial politics,” says Mitchell Moss, urban policy professor at New York University.’

Witness the spirit of one lone Irishman willing to stand-up for the dignity of honest work, the sacred bond between man and beast, and the nameless, faceless Joes (and the Teamsters) crushed under the bootheel of Big Red Bill DeBlasio, Big Parking and Big Animal Activism.

Earth-shaking stuff (yes, there’s a little sarcasm here):

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DeBlasio’s managed to get money set aside for universal Pre-K, so he’s siding with the teacher’s unions first, over many other interests.

Walter Russell Mead had an interesting analysis a while back, on some of what’s going on in New York City, and I think the conflict between police unions and their interests on one hand, and De Blasio and his interests on the other (activist, race-based protest movements and quite far Left coalitions of ‘the People’) can help to clarify some of what’s been going on lately.

‘The good government upper middle class, the entrenched groups with a solid stake in the status quo and the marginalized working or non-working poor with no prospects for advancement apart from the patronage of the state: this is the mass base of the blue electoral coalition — and the groups in the coalition don’t seem to like each other very much.

Ties That Bind

What all three groups share is a burning desire for more: a hunger and demand for ever larger amounts of government revenue and power. Money and power for the government enable the upper middle class good government types to dream up new schemes to help us all live better lives and give government the resources for the various social, ecological and cultural transformations on the ever-expandable goo-goo to-do list that range from a global carbon tax to fair trade coffee cooperatives and the war on saturated fat. All these programs (some useful in the Via Meadia view, others much less so) require a transfer of funds and authority from society at large to well-socialized, well-credentialed and well-intentioned upper middle class types who get six figure salaries to make sure the rest of us behave in accordance with their rapidly evolving notions of correct behavior.

The Times reporters represented the goo-goos at the Bronx courthouse. Sixty years ago the reporters would have had more in common with the cops, but the professionalization of journalism has made these jobs the preserve of the college educated and the upwardly mobile in status if not so much in money.

The angry and determined unionized cops represent what used to be the heart of the blue coalition: the stable urban middle middle class. In the old days, this group included a much bigger private sector component than it does now. The disappearance of manufacturing and the decline of skilled labor in most of New York means that the middle middle class, so far as it survives, depends largely on revenue from the state. The cops, the teachers, the firefighters, the sanitation and transit workers: these are most of what remains of the backbone of what used to be the organized working class.

‘An interesting Heather MacDonald piece here:’

Police tactics have perhaps peaked as hot-button issue across the country, touching on issues of overreach and abuse of State power against individuals for many libertarians, and often abuse of power against individuals as members of minorities and victim-classes for many progressives. Regardless of the sad facts of the Eric Garner case, which has been ruled a homicide, some of the pressure is going to come against current NYPD Commisioner William Bratton’s Broken Windows policing strategy which MacDonald has already written about.

From her current piece:

‘The anti-cop forces have shifted the focus of attention from the tactics used to subdue Garner after he resisted arrest—which is where attention should stay—to the very enforcement of misdemeanor laws themselves, such as the one against illegal cigarette sales. The New York Times’s lead editorial on Saturday, “Broken Windows, Broken Lives,” exemplifies this opportunistic turn against quality-of-life enforcement: “How terrible it would be if Eric Garner died for a theory, for the idea that aggressive police enforcement against minor offenders . . . is the way to a safer, more orderly city.”

Progressive sentiment and the need to keep the crime-rate low may pull de Blasio in competing directions, MacDonald reasons. I’m guessing that De Blasio can’t be seen as too far ahead of his activist coalitions, nor the kinds of sentiment expressed at the Times.

Some were speculating that the Big Apple is headed back to 70′s-style crime rates, fear and seediness. Myron Magnet, at the City Journal, recalls what it was like for him during those days, and hopes De Blasio stays strong on crime so that NYC can keep heading in the right direction.

From this NY Times previous piece on James Q Wilson’s theory:

‘But he was best known for his research on the behavior of police officers and lawbreakers. Probably his most influential theory holds that when the police emphasize the maintenance of order rather than the piecemeal pursuit of rapists, murderers and carjackers, concentrating on less threatening though often illegal disturbances in the fabric of urban life like street-corner drug-dealing, graffiti and subway turnstile-jumping, the rate of more serious crime goes down.’

MacDonald is still focusing on the victims of crime.

***Bonus-If you like hearing two local Daily News reporters discuss NYC politics with bemused and fairly cynical eyes, regardless of your political leanings, this one’s for you.

.Heather MacDonald At The City Journal: ‘The Sidewalks Of San Francisco’ Heather MacDonald At The City Journal: ‘Radical Graffiti Chic’

Some Links On 5Pointz, Graffiti, & The Arts–Property Rights & The Rule-Of-Law So, You’re Telling Me What’s Cool?-Theodore Dalrymple At The City Journal: ‘Banksy In Neverland’

Michael Totten At World Affairs: ‘Cuba: To Embargo Or Not’

January 2, 2015 / chr1 / 8 Comments

Full piece here.

‘In a non-communist country where such a basic product is in short supply, somebody would mass-produce it and sell it. Soap-making doesn’t require nuclear physics. You can make it at home. Google “soap recipe” and you’ll see how easy it is. But Cuba is a communist country where private commerce is banned. If you make stuff and sell stuff, you might become “rich” and “bourgeois,” and the authorities will send you to prison.

That’s why Cuba is poor. Lifting the embargo would have little or no effect on such tyrannical imbecility.’

Michael Totten At World Affairs: ‘The Once Great Havana’

Repost-From Michael Totten At World Affairs: “Noam Chomsky: The Last Totalitarian”