Christopher Hitchens

Saturday, October 8th, 2005

Jamie Glazov of FrontPage asks former Trotsky-ist, now quasi-neo-conservative, Christopher Hitchens, “Are you hopeful that we will win the War on Terror against militant Islam and rogue regimes?”

Since I do still find that I use the method of historical materialism (not yet surpassed by any rival) I think it’s worth stating some unarguable propositions. First — all jihads have always failed. The last serious one, which was the declaration of a holy war by the Ottoman Empire in 1914, ended by the loss of that empire as well as the loss of the war, and was a defeat and erasure so complete that many people who hear Osama bin Laden’s call for the restoration of the Caliphate don’t even know what he’s screeching about. Lesser jihads tend to consume themselves in quarrels over spoils or doctrines: an irrational view of the world will tell against you in the end, as is shown by the crazy and self-destructive tactics now being pursued by Islamists in Saudi Arabia, Indonesia, Turkey and elsewhere. They wish to be martyrs — we should be willing to help.

Second — dictatorship is a very unstable and uncertain (and highly vulnerable) method of rule. Third, no combination of dictatorship and clericalism can possibly stand against the determined power of the United States. In other words, the eventual result is certain victory, military and political, however long the task may take. It can be useful to bear this in mind. The job of citizens is to make sure that this American power really is self-determined, and not left either to professionals or to amateurs. We are not watching for the outcome of this war: we are participants in it and had better comport ourselves as such.”

(Hat tip to, of all places, CrossFit.)

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Isegoria: Bryan Caplan is definitely allergic to shared culture. On the other hand, I don’t think our public schools have been working hard to assimilate everyone into our shared culture in a long, long time. I was just reading Charles Murray’s Coming Apart, and that is one of his main points: The main vehicle for nineteenth-century socialization was the reading textbook used in elementary school, the variants of which were modeled on the overwhelmingly most popular series, the McGuffey Readers. They...
Phileas Frogg: Caplan is one of the most hit/miss popular academics today. He goes from cogently and insightfully detailing the flaws and issues with a complex system or behavior, to proposing the most obviously asinine and unworkable solutions imaginable to anyone with practical experience in that field, to slipping a totally original and unlooked for consideration into the mix that gives you pause, all within the span of a small handful of pages, only to do it again a few pages later. Reading Caplan...
Bob Sykes: One argument in favor of Emily et al is social cohesion and group self-identification, national-building. Caplan seems to think humans are identical, interchangeable atoms, without history or culture. Or is he just furthering the usual sabotage of the surrounding, somewhat alien, culture in which he is embeddded
David Foster: “The great 20th-century composer Igor Stravinsky wrote, in The Poetics of Music, “You cannot create against a yielding medium.” Stravinsky’s innovations were nothing if not revolutionary, but he knew that he could not have produced them if he had not been constrained by the traditions of music and the mathematical strictures of tone. “Let me have something finite, definite,” he wrote. “My freedom will be so much the greater and more meaningful the...
Jim: “They were free to imagine and play and invent and write,” he said. “They were inventing one thing after another, after another, after another and for an engineer, what more can you ask for?” That’s the worst imaginable environment for engineers, who invariably need to be held down and whipped with soapful socks like Private Pyle at boot camp.
Jim: Yet maintaining the universalist, human-rights based legal infrastructure constructed after the Second World War takes priority over addressing these issues. The fact that this infrastructure was created for an entirely different world, where there was much less international migration, and where “asylum seeker” meant a political dissident from the Eastern Bloc, does not matter. If the post-WWII occupational court infrastructure were universalist, it would be possible for Englishmen to immigrate to...
Isegoria: That’s exactly the kind of thing he’s talking about, Phileas. I don’t want to share too many lengthy excerpts from a brand new book, but I’m happy to pique everyone’s interest.
Phileas Frogg: Looking forward to reading more excerpts, I thoroughly enjoyed, “The Sports Gene,” so much so that I went and bought a copy a few years ago. I expect some similarly provocative and interesting fodder from this one. On the topic of the book, whenever I was struggling to write a drum part for the band I played for in college, I would begin systematically taking pieces of my kit away until I developed something that worked, and then slowly add pieces back in. Limiting myself...
Jim: Phileas Frogg: Then we are substantially in agreement, our only meaningful divergence being that I reflexively view utility from the perspective of the world-controllers, as opposed to from the citizen-subjects. The major difference, then, is not moral righteousness or justice or other such thing, but the habitual understanding that the perpetuation of a system, any system, is owing, ultimately, to the perspective of its managers, formal or informal, that the purpose of a system is what it does…and...
Jim: Free men do not live subject to video surveillance or electronically locked buildings.
Bob Sykes: If you want a career in education, engineering, medicine, law, business, or the sciences, an accredited degree is mandatory. The days when you could just sit in the back of the room and listen ended long ago, even for state schools. At most schools, private and public, key cards of some sort are needed to get into most buildings, and surveillance cameras are everywhere.
Isegoria: Wow, times have changed! The recent Brown University shooting footage revealed that security cameras are common now, but the idea of locking a college down is really foreign to me.
Gaikokumaniakku: Historical perspective: Although the doctrine that the sea by its nature must be free to all was eventually upheld, most commentators did recognize that, as a practical matter, a coastal state needed to exercise some jurisdiction in the waters adjacent to its shores. Two different concepts developed—that the area of jurisdiction should be limited to cannon-shot range, and that the area should be a much greater belt of uniform width adjacent to the coast—and in the late 18th century these...
Gaikokumaniakku: Middle-aged people can wonder whether they will live long enough to see the collapse of the AIPAC-USA-Epstein coalition. Meanwhile, even if the coalition is ultimately doomed, it is still effective enough to drag out the war in Iran and Lebanon.
Gaikokumaniakku: “We can’t just wish or manifest our way to crazy performance, despite what some in the self-help world may say.” Magness has a tendency to generalize too far from very limited evidence. If wishing/manifestation always worked like Aladdin’s Lamp, of course we would see everyone re-making the world into their own versions of the Arabian Nights. Conversely, if mainstream scholars were honest about paranormal topics, Steve Magness would not have a “performance coaching”...
Dan Kurt: Fellow classmate from Ivy during 1960s contacted me to say he was shocked, shocked to discover on visiting the campus EVERYTHING was locked down, security was obvious, and cameras watched over all. As to the schooling, he told me that the number of lectures given to students had decreased substantially per course since our time there.
Handle: Colleges do card now. The last five campuses I’ve been to all had many buildings with secure entry that require tapping student or staff identity cards on some RFID sensor panel to disengage the automatic lock on the doors. Even state schools that explicitly provide free “audit” access to classes for certain groups like the elderly still require more than the professor’s mere permission and one must apply for to get one of those IDs and, as I understand it, there is some...
Bruce: Ringers are a cheat code for democracy. Once one party controls the courts, you get ringers.
Phileas Frogg: Jim, Absolutely. I was just noting one way to look at it based on the posts main thrust. The, “education,” system exists to: - Continue existing - Provide jobs for people - Provide childcare for parents - Gatekeep and reward compliant behaviors - Signal who is compliant and, “acceptable,” ; for positions of power Education is a distant 7th-8th item on the list, and only incidentally due to the efforts of some individual teachers (often harangued and punished).
Jim: Phileas Frogg: “School has, as a general rule, primarily been about social signaling and only ever rarely has it been about education…” That may be true from the bottom looking up, but it isn’t true from the top looking down. From the top looking down, schools are a mechanism of homogenization and control. And it isn’t like they hide it: school buildings and prisons look similar because they’re based on the same underlying logic—compliance—if in different...

Isegoria

Christopher Hitchens

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