An accounting of the facts of the case and the current lawsuit against Columbia.
McArdle doesn’t think the suit will get too far:
But perhaps winning the suit is not the point. I wonder if many of the men in question aren’t simply rebelling against the system, determined to get their side of the story on the record somewhere — for much the same reason that Sulkowicz said she filed a complaint against Nungesser. He can’t silence her, and he shouldn’t have that power. But he can force the media to pay a little attention to his side of the story, something that didn’t happen during the many long months of Sulkowicz’s campaign to name and shame him.’
‘The failure of Wilsonianism, the collapse of the peace movement, and the weakness of the League of Nations in the interwar years are usually presented as evidence of the utter impracticability of a liberal world order. For Tooze, this misses the point. Such efforts were indeed deeply flawed, not least because of Wilson’s own uncertainty about America’s superpower status. But the outbreak of World War II proved not that liberal international order was impractical but that it was absolutely necessary, albeit in a more realistic form. As Tooze puts it, “The restless search for a new way of securing order and peace was the expression not of deluded idealism, but of a higher form of realism.”
‘Like all good historians, they start at the beginning. ISIS began its life as al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) after the United States demolished Saddam Hussein’s government in 2003. The Bush administration saw Arab democracy as the solution to the Middle East’s woes, and Syria’s tyrant Bashar al-Assad didn’t want to be the next Saddam. Assad waged a proxy war to convince Washington that participatory politics in the region would be perilous. Weiss and Hassan quote former Syrian diplomat Bassam Barabandi, who says candidly that “[Assad] started to work with the mujahideen.” He dispatched Syria’s homegrown jihadists to fight American occupation forces, and most of those jihadists would sign up with AQI. Assad pulled off a win-win scheme, purging Syria of potential enemies while teaching both the American government and citizenry a lesson they still haven’t forgotten: Occupying and democratizing an Arab land is a far messier and bloodier business than most in the West are willing to stomach.’
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Unfortunately, a girl with problems amplified those problems into becoming a ‘mattress artist’ (not a real artist), an arch victim (the ideology rewards it), a cause celebre, and a prime example of why ideologues and activists really shouldn’t be running their own kangaroo campus courts. Rape, of course, still remains a serious crime and moral horror despite the efforts of such activists and confused people to make it less so.
These are not people who act as though they want to live in a civilized society.
Such bad logic and bad incentives go not only to the top of Columbia, but much higher at the moment…
Here’s Briton Melanie Phillips speaking about Muslims in Britain, and also finding excessive fault with multiculturalism (~15:00 min):
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Phillips wrote a book called Londonistan, and perhaps she’s the British equivalent of a neo-conservative, having been ‘mugged by reality’ to some extent, for which she draws special ire from her former fellow travelers. As a columnist who started out for the British Left-Of-Center Guardian, and moved to the Daily Mail, Phillips targets that unholy marriage of Islamism and multiculturalism.
In the case of Britain, civil society has managed to create a space which shelters a number of Muslism immigrants operating outside of British law, sometimes bringing tribal customs and Sharia courts with them. Obviously, this is a problem.
Islamism and Islam, for Phillips, are two different creatures. There are Muslims who subscribe to the faith, and emigrate from their home countries. They come to the West for economic opportunity, political stability and all the other reasons people immigrate to the West. In the case of America, for example, they are particularly free to practice their religion, and perhaps have their religion insulted by South Park or the likes of Terry Jones.
Islamists, on the other hand, are a different matter. They range from the radicalizing Tsarnaevs, to Al Qaeda, to Anwar al-Awlaki and the Muslim Brotherhood. They subscribe to a form of Islamic ideology that sees itself in a global struggle against the encroachment of outside ideas, particularly the freedoms, culture, and influence of the West at the moment. Islamists are reactionary, ideological, and often advocate violence. They have serious issues with modernity, demanding and seeking solidarity and soldiers for the front lines against all enemies. Islamists seek to re-establish the kinds of laws and society that would enforce strict and impossibly ideal and narrow Islamic codes. This form of Islamic idealism has many wings and various sympathizers. It’s the kind of idealism we’re battling both abroad and on our soil, sometimes effectively, sometimes not very effectively at all. Some Islamists have even imported Western fascistic and socialist ideology and fused them with their own Islamism. A toxic brew.
Islamism is a major force throughout the Middle East and Muslim world right now, and at the very least, perhaps we can recognize that the Islamists mean harm to other Muslims as well.
So, how does Phillips think Britain should handle Muslim immigration? By highlighting terms which Britons should be quite clear about: There are laws to follow, forms of government to understand, a language to master and traditions which they might one day be expected to defend. This means locking horns with the multicultural Left.
The West is not merely a stop on the global benefits welfare chain. We’re not necessarily here to offer asylum or student visas to those who don’t particularly care to be here, nor those Islamists who travel from mosque to mosque, calling for jihad. Of course this is closer to the melting-pot approach that was once dominant in the U.S., which has since been on a slow decline due to the rise of multiculturalism here as well. I doubt this is a coincidence.
I’d add that America is obviously more than just a well-educated university faculty, or the talking heads on T.V. There are many other ideals, beliefs and virtues besides those like the new atheism, environmentalism, feminism and multiculturalism etc. Such secular ‘-isms’ tend to have universal aspirations, and many of their followers believe in these ideals with a kind of secular faith, rallying around these ideas and often presuming them to be universally true. As in Europe, universities and the media are natural draws for people who want to pursue such idealism, eventually influencing the culture and politics.
If Britain can show us anything, it’s that allowing the secular ‘-isms’ to be the highest things around, right alongside Muslim immigration and Islamism, is asking for serious trouble.
Now, I don’t think Phillips has everything right (nor obviously do I have everything right, for that matter) but her voice, like that of Christopher Hitchens, and Lars Hedegaard, are interesting voices of dissent tracing paths out of the Marxist, socialist and multiculturalist European Left. They have important truths to tell us.
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Sayyid Qutb isn’t a bad place to start to understand a little more, I’ve been told.
Michael Totten’s various interviews over the years with the Muslim Brotherhood are not inspiring. They’re Islamist lite, perhaps, and not likely the kinds of people we can do much business with.
Also, check out that sophisticated link between the Brotherhood, Muslim world and multiculturalist Europe, Tariq Ramadan. He sure knows how to speak the language:
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***Inevitably, criticism comes from the Left that highlights Phillips’ Jewishness. “She’s a shill for Israel” etc. Well, there you go. Anti-American, anti-semitic victimhood is all the rage in many quarters in Europe these days. Where’s that getting them?
Ever closer to the ideals which they hold aloft, and which move forever out of view.
People think I’m crazy, but NPR is the manifestation and mainstreaming of 60’s idealism. This idealism will always need money, and gravitates towards the public purse. Foundations which served other ideals naturally attract idealists. A Few Thoughts On NPR And Current Liberal Establishment Thinking Under Obama…
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
I’ve heard it described this way: America used to be like a bouncer at a club (thanks, Britain), and it seems now after signaling to everyone in the club we’re not showing up for work anymore, we’re trying to negotiate with a particular group of pretty powerful, pretty bad group of guys in the club. These guys do bad things, and operate much like a cartel, running guns, militias, terror squads and such in their part of the club. In fact, some of these guys are some of the worst guys in the club, and unsurprisingly they want to be in charge of the club (unsettling to catch sight of a ‘Death to America’ tattoo close-up amongst the 1979 crowd).
These guys (Shia, Iranian regime) fought a horrific turf war years ago against a guy (Saddam, Sunni, Ba’ath) in whose business many years later, for various reasons, the bouncer got involved. We went in and took Saddam out (admittedly one of the worst guys in the club..yet…this decision has failed on many basic premises and promises, and left behind a huge mess and a lot of suffering). The turf war is still going on in various forms, and on a larger scale now.
Our current representative keeps telling us we MUST do business with this group of guys (generally ignoring a lot of other people in the club…Kurds…various other Sunnis and a few semi-allies…and a strong ally and a decent fellow we know well whom everyone else would kill if they got the chance), because, yes, these are the people we can do business with. Other allies, semi-allies, frenemies, but mostly adversaries, are watching the drama unfold and making moves accordingly.We are being told this deal is a moral imperative because, well…peace or bust.
And that’s where a lot of people are looking.
Is it worth having sacrificed American treasure, wealth, time and opportunity costs on removing economic sanctions from the Iranian regime and bringing them a step or two in from the international wilds…for a deal that hasn’t even materialized yet?
***When you think about it, the analogy fails on a number of levels, but I thought I’d share it with the below links, because the ‘club’ is a real mess:
‘Yet, if the priority is to counter Iran while fighting ISIS, an American modus vivendi with Sadr may be necessary. Certainly the modus vivendi between Sadr and Tehran is not going well. The Iranians have built up numerous Sadrist splinter groups that put pressure on the leader. At the same time, Sadr’s criticism of the actions of Iranian-controlled militias and his more nationalistic tone—going so far as to suspend his group’s activities after the slaying of an Iraqi Sunni tribal leader—certainly demonstrates a shift.’
‘Iran’s ability to disrupt the Middle East is unmatched by any other state in the region, but it couldn’t conquer and rule the whole area even if it did have nuclear weapons. It can, however, foment fragmentation, chaos, terrorism, and war, and will continue to do so whether or not its government signs and adheres to an agreement with the US. A deal that allows Iran to grow stronger through sanctions relief without addressing any of that, alas, will almost certainly make the Middle East a worse place than it already is.’
Well, you probably know that people rarely make rational decisions, but did you realize how easy it is to be wrong?
…the additional information skews the odds, and with Cardano’s method you can make a rational, though counterintuitive, decision.
We have all probably “trusted our intuitions” in crucial moments but haven’t had rational explanations for why we did so, or for that matter, we probably don’t have a good definition of what intuition is either.
‘McAdams ended by observing that, “like the rest of academia, Marquette is less and less a real university. And, when gay marriage cannot be discussed, certainly not a Catholic university.’
Well, I don’t know about the whole campus, but with freedom comes responsibility.
Addition: Or as a friend puts it: Some ideologues on campus want to hermetically seal their place within it, and the campus itself, into a ‘zone’ under which they have influence, where reality and many parts of human nature can’t enter. This is not practicable long-term.
Some people are trying to erode common sense until it becomes less common:
‘The horrors and atrocities of history have been edited out of primary and secondary education except where they can be blamed on racism, sexism, and imperialism — toxins embedded in oppressive outside structures that must be smashed and remade. But the real problem resides in human nature, which religion as well as great art sees as eternally torn by a war between the forces of darkness and light.’
Well, that’s quite a worldview, but like me, you probably agree that there are bad, possibly evil, crazy, and dangerous people among us. The kinds of extreme badness and goodness one can find in war aren’t really ever that far away. Our knowledge and our civilization are often assumed to be less fragile than they are.
He should be given credit for noting and categorizing this trend:
‘This may seem like serious stuff to readers who recall Bobos in Paradise, Brooks’s acutely well-observed debut about the new class of “bourgeois bohemians”, the emerging elite who fused the social values of the hippies with the consumerism of the yuppies. Returning to America following a stint in Brussels for the Wall Street Journal, Brooks found that it was “now impossible to tell an espresso-sipping artist from a cappuccino-gulping banker.” (He counted himself a Bobo, as must at least some Guardian readers.) He zeroed in on a new form of conspicuous consumption: a Bobo would never spend thousands on a fancy TV – that would be crass – but would willingly blow cash on “necessities”, such as restaurant-quality kitchen appliances, or a bathroom lined with slate of precisely the right artisanal roughness.’
A sharp-enough guy. Being the ‘house’ conservative amongst Left and Left-Liberals has its benefits, including gigs at the NY Times and NPR.
‘His support for Obama helped establish him as the incoming president’s favourite conservative: the night before each column appeared, New York magazine reported, he’d get a call from a senior aide asking if the next day would be a good one, meaning: would Brooks praise or criticise the White House?’
Best to stay relevant and not evince a shudder of disgust amongst those movers and shakers in the right rings of public opinion when your career may depend upon it.
Expressing conservative views in the wrong setting can be met with bemused, quizzical stares and even mild shock. Many citizens are fearful to be seen loping around gun-shows, howling along to the pack-song in the wastes of AM radio, or steadily creeping along university quadrangles as though werewolves in mid-transformation.
All is not well, however. There is a disturbance in the force; lingering doubts and deeper sorrows:
‘Brooks builds a convincing case that this isn’t just his personal problem but a societal one: that our market-driven meritocracy, even when functioning at its fairest, rewards outer success while discouraging the development of the soul.’
Soul-development will be available in that new book, and at Yale, and at the NY Times, and on NPR.
***Clearly, this is a serious piece, and in no way presented tongue-in-cheek.
“The story of Harold and Erica does not really illustrate a new, coherent, science-based theory of human nature. It is a bowl hammered from Brooks’ philosophic predilections into which a jumbled stew of scientific anecdotes is poured.”
and:
“Brooks’ characters are constantly saying and thinking the sort of thing Brooks says and thinks in his opinion columns. They’re constantly made to express what are quite clearly elements of the author’s conception of human nature, sociality, and political life. But this stuff often has little or nothing to do with the “revolutionary” discoveries Brooks says he’s attempting to pull together into a coherent conception of human nature, sociality, and political life”
and:
“I suspect Brooks really does thinks thumos is an essential part of the best big-picture theory of human nature and the good society. But that’s an idea he took from the science-wary Allan Bloom and Harvey Mansfield, not Robert Trivers or David Buss or Geoffrey Miller.”
As before, perhaps it’s worth pointing out that the way in which Brooks goes about analyzing and understanding culture, our relationships to one another, our interior lives etc….is ostensibly through the lens of his understanding of the social sciences.
Metcalf is arguing, I think, that Nozick’s reasoning is unsound (philosophical father?). Here’s Metcalf:
‘When I study American history, I can see why America, thanks to a dense bundle of historical accidents, is a kind of Lockean paradise, uniquely suited to holding up liberty as its paramount value. This is not what Nozick is arguing. Nozick is arguing that liberty is the sole value, and to put forward any other value is to submit individuals to coercion.’
Well, it’s good to see a modern liberal appeal to Lockean life, liberty and property, even if for other ends (to position Nozick as extreme, and libertarians as outside the norm of a more reasonable definition of liberty). Here’s the Internet Encyclopedia Of Philosophy’s page on Nozick:
‘Nozick takes his position to follow from a basic moral principle associated with Immanuel Kant and enshrined in Kant’s second formulation of his famous Categorical Imperative: “Act so that you treat humanity, whether in your own person or in that of another, always as an end and never as a means only.” ‘
and:
‘But if individuals are inviolable ends-in-themselves (as Kant describes them) and self-owners, it follows, Nozick says, that they have certain rights, in particular (and here again following Locke) rights to their lives, liberty, and the fruits of their labor. To own something, after all, just is to have a right to it, or, more accurately, to possess the bundle of rights – rights to possess something, to dispose of it, to determine what may be done with it, etc. ‘
thus:
‘So far this all might seem fairly uncontroversial. But what follows from it, in Nozick’s view, is the surprising and radical conclusion that taxation, of the redistributive sort in which modern states engage in order to fund the various programs of the bureaucratic welfare state, is morally illegitimate. It amounts to a kind of forced labor’
Perhaps you find Nozick’s minimally intrusive, all-that’s-morally-justifiable “night watchman” state inadequate for how people actually behave (Nozick was well prepared, however, for many of your arguments). Let’s say you’re OK with paying taxes for roads and public education (as for me I know quite well that incentives can be distorted: state workers often getting lazy, bored, resentful at their bosses, aiming for retirement etc…teachers not often being the best minds, some quite mediocre, also aiming for retirement and benefits, bored, the creative ones ground down by the red tape and petty bureaucracy…and this is if both groups DON”T unionize). But no state services for roads and education?
So, what is Metcalf’s response to Nozick? After two readings, I’m still unclear:
‘The ploy is to take libertarianism as Orwell meant it and confuse it with libertarianism as Hayek meant it; to take a faith in the individual as an irreducible unit of moral worth, and turn it into a weapon in favor of predation.’
The ploy? Predation? Clarity please.
‘When Hayek insists welfare is the road is to serfdom, when Nozick insists that progressive taxation is coercion, they take liberty hostage in order to prevent a reasoned discussion about public goods from ever taking place.’
Not too impressive. I could see how liberals might want to keep Rand and F.A. Hayek and perhaps Nozick (thinkers grappling with communism and socialism on the ground in the former cases…and the results in both Russia and Austria…from defining the debate, but….well…make the arguments). Comments might be worth a read.
Addition: Libertarianism often rises during liberal administrations, and is particularly active in California. If liberalism has at its core some socialist and communist elements (and in my experience, it does), then I see a real need for a Nozickian defense of liberty as do many libertarians and Californians who’ve seen the rise of a union and special interest controlled democratic party, crony capitalism, and much corruption and waste. Those are serious threats to individual liberty as are the good intentions of many universalists and idealists, even if you find Nozick extreme.
As to Nozick perhaps unwittingly building a Kantian/Lockean extreme defense of liberty, built upon the largesse of a mix of state/private enterprise that modern liberalism has helped build, then where is a more clear path from modern liberalism to classical liberalism, and to Locke?