If you missed these, you missed some interesting insights about our rapidly changing world.
- “Baby Trashed After Botched Abortion“, CBS News, 6 February 2009 — “23-Week-Old Delivered While Teen Waited For Late Doctor; Clinic Owner Tossed Infant In Garbage.” In my nightmares I often wonder if Hitler was not “wrong”, just “early.”
- “Warrior in Drug Fight Soon Becomes a Victim“, Washington Post, 9 February 2009 — “Mexican General Seized, Slain in Cancun”
- “The Meaning of Sarah Palin“, Yuval Levin, Commentary, February 2009 — Mostly conservative fantasizing, but the conclusion is insightful.
- “The Persistence of Ideology“, Theodore Dalrymple, City Journal, Winter 2009 — “Grand ideas still drive history.”
For those of you following the unusual activity of solar cycle 24, see “Code Blue: 10.7 centimeter solar radio flux is flatlining” by Anthony Watts, Watts Up with That, 14 February 2009. “Code Blue” is hospital jargon for patient requiring immediate resuscitation. For a more technical but accurate analysis see “When is Minimum?“, Leif Svalgaard, March 2007 and updated February 2009 — esp see the graph at the end.
Excerpts
(1) “Baby Trashed After Botched Abortion“, CBS News, 6 February 2009 — “23-Week-Old Delivered While Teen Waited For Late Doctor; Clinic Owner Tossed Infant In Garbage.” In my nightmares I often wonder if Hitler was not “wrong”, just “early.” What is wrong with Ms. Sterner’s reaction? Excerpt:
“It really disturbed me,” said Joanne Sterner, president of the Broward County chapter of the National Organization for Women, after reviewing the administrative complaint against Renelique. “I know that there are clinics out there like this. And I hope that we can keep (women) from going to these types of clinics.”
(2) “Warrior in Drug Fight Soon Becomes a Victim“, Washington Post, 9 February 2009 — “Mexican General Seized, Slain in Cancun”
The general didn’t get much time. After a long, controversial career, Brig. Gen. Mauro Enrique Tello Quiñones retired from active duty last month and moved to this Caribbean playground to work for the Cancun mayor and fight the drug cartels that have penetrated much of Mexican society. He lasted a week.
Tello, 63, along with his bodyguard and a driver, were kidnapped in downtown Cancun last Monday evening, taken to a hidden location, methodically tortured, then driven out to the jungle and shot in the head. Their bodies were found Tuesday in the cab of a pickup truck on the side of a highway leading out of town. An autopsy revealed that both the general’s arms and legs had been broken.
The audacious kidnapping and killing of one of the highest-ranking military officers in Mexico drew immediate expressions of outrage from the top echelons of the Mexican government, which pledged to continue the fight against organized crime that took the lives of more than 5,300 people last year.
(3) “The Meaning of Sarah Palin“, Yuval Levin, Commentary, February 2009 — Mostly fantasy, but the conclusion is interesting.
The sense of potential that accompanied Palin’s introduction, and the feeling that she might really reverse the momentum of the campaign, were not illusory. For two weeks or so, the polls moved markedly in McCain’s direction, as it seemed that his running mate was something genuinely new in American politics: a lower-middle-class woman who spoke the language of the country’s ordinary voters and had a profound personal understanding of the hopes and worries of a vast swath of the public. She really did seize the attention of swing voters, as McCain’s team had hoped she might. Her convention speech, her interviews, and her debate performance drew unprecedented audiences.
But having finally gotten voters to listen, neither Palin nor McCain could think of anything to say to them. Palin’s reformism, like McCain’s, was essentially an attitude devoid of substance. Both Republican candidates told us they hated corruption and would cut excess and waste. But separately and together, they offered no overarching vision of America, no consistent view of the role of government, no clear description of what a free society should look like, and no coherent policy ideas that might actually address the concerns of American families and offer solutions to the serious problems of the moment. Palin’s populism was not her weakness, but her strength. Her weakness was that she failed to tie her populism to anything deeper. A successful conservative reformism has to draw on cultural populism, but it has also to draw on a worldview, on ideas about society and government, and on a policy agenda. This would make it more intellectual, but not necessarily less populist.
McCain’s advisers were right about Palin: she was a mirror image of John McCain. She was not a visionary politician, or a programmatic politician, but an attitude politician with an appealing biography. In the end, she was no more able than McCain to offer a coherent rationale for his presidency.
That was not her job, though; it was his. The striking thing about the last two months of the 2008 presidential race was not Palin’s inability to turn things around decisively for McCain, but her success in giving McCain a lead for even a short while. She seized the imagination of the public in a way that scared the Left, and rightly so. It is not Palin’s fault that McCain was incapable of harnessing the phenomenal response to his running mate to his own advantage.
(4) “The Persistence of Ideology“, Theodore Dalrymple, City Journal, Winter 2009 — “Grand ideas still drive history.” Note that the phenomenon he describes exists in America as well as the Middle East, and was a major theme of Socrates. Excerpt:
In 1989, as the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe were reforming—indeed collapsing—so rapidly that it became clear that Communism could not long survive anywhere in Europe, Francis Fukuyama went one step beyond Bell and wrote an essay for The National Interest titled “The End of History?” {Summer 1989}
… At the end of his essay, however, Fukuyama—more concerned to understand the world than to change it, by contrast with Marx—implicitly raised the question of the role of ideology in the world’s moral economy. With no ideological struggles to occupy their minds, what will intellectuals have to do or think about?
… Who, then, are ideologists? They are people needy of purpose in life, not in a mundane sense (earning enough to eat or to pay the mortgage, for example) but in the sense of transcendence of the personal, of reassurance that there is something more to existence than existence itself. The desire for transcendence does not occur to many people struggling for a livelihood. Avoiding material failure gives quite sufficient meaning to their lives. By contrast, ideologists have few fears about finding their daily bread. Their difficulty with life is less concrete. Their security gives them the leisure, their education the need, and no doubt their temperament the inclination, to find something above and beyond the flux of daily life.
If this is true, then ideology should flourish where education is widespread, and especially where opportunities are limited for the educated to lose themselves in grand projects, or to take leadership roles to which they believe that their education entitles them. The attractions of ideology are not so much to be found in the state of the world—always lamentable, but sometimes improving, at least in certain respects—but in states of mind.
Afterword
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