Canada: Progressive Paradise

The deep blue oceans, the golden fields of prairie wheat, the majestic snow-capped mountain ranges, the public parks and playgrounds littered with used needles. Ah, Canada.

Snark aside, this is an awful situation, just awful. Here's a great speech by a popular Vancouver radio host, a liberal who actually spent a great deal of time and effort helping drug addicts and knows that giving them free needles is not just counterproductive, it is actively, morally wrong. As he puts it, if you knew a downward-spiraling alcoholic, would you give him a helping hand, or a clean shot glass?

Though I personally dispute the statistical claims that HIV infections have only increased in those places where the free needle program has been implemented. Doesn't pass the smell test. I mean, next thing you know, they'll be claiming that rates of HIV infection increase with greater availability of condoms, or something crazy like that. Oh, oops.

Hat tip to Kate at SDA, who has a great idea about how to easily put an end to this program. For, as the gentleman giving the speech also explains, the whole reason these absurd initiatives exist is because government wants to appear to be fighting the problem, but refuses to actually take any sincere human interest in or accountability for the people it claims to want to help. Make the politicians actually accountable for the destruction they cause and, watch out, they'll shut the needle exchange down overnight. Reminds me of my stance on parole, which I swear is totally serious even though nobody believes me: if a parole court judge frees a serious criminal, and the criminal rapes or murders again, the judge should have to serve out the new sentence alongside the criminal. Now, of course, this would have absolutely no change on the system, because we all know that Canadian judges take the dangers posed by criminals very, very seriously, as seriously as if the dangers would be posed to their own family, and would never, ever dream of endangering even one more innocent life by letting a potentially dangerous man free. Nope, not ever. Oh, oops again. But, hey, come on, 12% isn't bad! So things really wouldn't be changed, because the judges certainly would be willing to take those 12% odds with their own lives, wouldn't they?

My brilliant campaign commercial idea

Yeah, okay, I don't know a thing about campaigning or commercials, this is just an ad I would enjoy. Start off with an old timey, Ken Burns style retelling of Davey Crockett's "Not Yours to Give" speech , then have an announcer or Bobby Jindal or someone say, "Giving your money to the needy is charity. Giving your neighbor's money to the needy is theft." Then close with the following words on the screen, read by the announcer, too: "Vote charity. Vote Republican."

I know, never gonna happen, but it would be great, and it would really drive liberals mad. And then if they made a big deal out of it you could run a follow-up ad with the stats about how you would never know it to hear Obama and friends talk, but Americans are by far the most charitable people in the world, and how Republicans are more charitable than Democrats. Maybe even throw something in showing a clip about Joe Biden talking how important and patriotic it is to pay high taxes to help the poor, and then flash on the screen while he's talking the numbers of how Biden gave a total of like five bucks and a smile to charity in his whole life.

Okay, now I'm mad

The economy is tanking, the media's already there, people who dare question Obama are being compared to George Wallace, and I have so much work it's insane, but I was fine. Really, I was; there's nothing like a Virginia fall to remind you of how beautiful life is and to put everything in perspective.

Then I found out about this. The liberals have gone too far. You can rewrite political and social history all you want, turn FDR into the man who saved America from the Great Depression, turn LBJ into the man who saved the black family from dissolution, heck, you can even pretend that the Democrats didn't invent the politically-correct lending to broke minorities that caused this whole meltdown, but you. do. not. mess. with. Bette. Davis.



They will have to take TCM from my cold, dead hands. Heck, I would even man the barricades over the occasional Seinfeld rerun.

The Lost Art of War

Via the indispensable Libertas, an absolute must-read. Some of the best lines:

"During World War II, Hollywood stars like James Stewart and directors like Frank Capra enlisted in the military to combat dictators as willingly as Sean Penn and Michael Moore now tootle down to Venezuela and Cuba to embrace them."

"the movie business merely provides the most glamorous example of a greater change throughout our creative and intellectual communities: a decades-long drift toward an idiot radicalism."

"Though European intellectuals and their left-wing American acolytes are loath to admit it, the U.S. had already provided an excellent new rationale for that emotion. Our Founding redefined nationhood along social-contract lines that Europeans can still only theorize about. Our love of nation at its best was ethical, not ethnic. Our patriotism was loyalty not to race, or even to tradition, but to ideals of individual liberty and republican self-governance."

"The English Patient is such a visually beautiful film that the mind has to overcome the eye in order to comprehend its moral emptiness."

Anyway, I liked it, please check it out.

Predictions

If my political predictions are at all like my football ones, then Fred Thompson is probably going to have a stroke tomorrow. But, because I still hope, and because I was right about the last two elections despite massive ridicule and disbelief (no, I have no proof for this, thus the need for this post), I'm going to jump on this bandwagon while it is still somewhat daring to do so.

Some of you know I started out supporting Giuliani, and I still have the cheesy cut-out membership card to prove it. It's not so much that Giuliani's changed as that I have, becoming more comfortable in my conservatism. And while I think Thompson has all of Giuliani's foreign policy toughness, he also has the cultural confidence that Giuliani lacks (or, as Giuliani would see it, that isn't all that important). Perhaps most importantly, unlike other social conservatives (genuine and phony) in the race, Thompson doesn't pander and he recognizes conservatism for what it is - a cultural movement - and not as a rhetorical tool, a political weapon, or a government program.

That Thompson isn't already a frontrunner is a mystery to me [UPDATE: see here], and extremely disappointing. If things will not soon change as I predict, and people like Huckabee, McCain, and Romney continue to stay ahead, then there is something seriously wrong going on here, people.

Incidentally, unlike some others, I don't think the presence of those three awful frontrunners highlights a major problem within the Republican Party - I think it highlights a major problem within the Democratic Party! No, bear with me for a sec, please. Huckabee is an absolutely perfect Democrat. Not that long ago, people like him - folksy, charismatic, populist, Christian, big-government types - were the leaders of the Democratic Party. The only reason he's a Republican is that the Democratic party has changed so much, become so morally bankrupt, that they don't care how big-government, how liberal, a person is - if he thinks that killing babies might be wrong, he must be mocked and excommunicated. McCain, too, would make a wonderful Democrat, were he not staunchly pro-military. Again, the Democratic party has become so twisted of late that this position, which until very recently came standard for Americans, is enough to disqualify him outright. As for Romney, well, he's just slimy, nothing to say there. To recap, in an only slightly different, slightly less crazy alternate universe, Huckabee, McCain, and Lieberman would be slugging it out for the Democratic leadership and the chance to face Thompson in the general. Instead, in this crazy mixed up world of ours, we have the best Democrats facing off againt the best Republican in the Republican primaries (and, as an inevitable result of the Democratic party's decline, three completely unqualified nobodies facing off in their primaries). So really, the only way to fix the Republican party is either to fix the Democratic party first or, the more likely scenario in my view, for the Democratic party to fade into America-hating irrelevance and the Republican party to split up into two or three new parties. Or, most likely of all, none of this happens and I'm exposed as clueless yet again.

UPDATE: As noted in the comments here, to get an idea of until just how recently it was that Democrats were actually, you know, not totally deranged, see Charlie Wilson's War.

Nobody puts Baby in a corner...

... unless Baby doesn't actually want to kill babies, that is.

Please take a couple minutes to digest this interview over at HotAir. So creepy.

This went on at Harvard to a much, much lighter extent. Never had one-on-one meetings with RAs, and I'm quite sure none of my conversations were typed up for the university files to keep track of my progress and "treatment." But I do remember the stand-in-the-corners game, good times! The facilitator (this was not the RA, just some random sensitivity trainer, as I recall) would ask about some controversial issue and then have us stand in different parts of the room depending on what our positions were. Always done in small groups of ten to fifteen, so you could see where everyone stood. The only point of the whole silly exercise was to immediately (this happened during the first week or so of school) point out and isolate the conservative minority (it's college, we're always the minority) - to quite literally put them in a corner. Liberals dream these hippie exercises up because they know it would work on them - that is, faced with isolation, they would cave and believe whatever it took to get them back with the crowd, maybe come up with some chants, paint a few signs, pass around a fat j, whatever, it's cool, dude, don't be a fascist. Unfortunately for them, with conservatives, this sort of stuff just backfires, since we enjoy pissing them off and like being troublemakers.

My point being, yes, please do get yourselves all up in arms over the Delaware sitch (yeah, I said sitch, deal with it), which is ridic, but don't forget that less blatant attempts at indoctrination are going on at just about every other campus, too.

And no, it doesn't really matter to most intelligent people (my dad's only concern as he underwent both nazi and communist indoctrination was to keep from giggling), but it certainly does do harm to the naive and unsuspecting. In any case, it's a total waste of time, perhaps even more so than actual college classes.

I refuse on principle to think of a dirty play on words on a children's classic with which to title this post

You know how we conservatives are always saying that liberals have absolutely no moral compass? Well, it may usually be a slight exaggeration, but not today, not in the crazy mixed up world of NYT reporter Alessandra Stanley.

Stanley today writes a review of the TV adaptation of the Gossip Girl series. The very series that, not long ago, was rightly eviscerated by Naomi Wolf in these same pages, revealed as the repulsive piece of trash that it is. So what does Stanley have to say about the soulless, materialistic, drug-fueled, sex-obsessed characters? Why, that they remind her oh so very much of the Little Mermaid! Or, no, wait, perhaps Sleeping Beauty. Well, in any case, definitely Willy Wonka. You see, folks, it's just another fairy tale!

"Like 'Peter Pan,' 'Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland' or the 'Harry Potter' series, these novels are fantasies and projections of an imaginary world where parents are dead or peripheral, and lost boys and girls struggle on their own with good and evil, or in this case, Bergdorf Goodman and evil.
Even the characters’ names — Blair Waldorf and Serena van der Woodsen — are as fancifully evocative as those found in children’s books ...."

You. Have. Got. To. Be. Kidding. Me. I know, I know, Judy Blume is still banned in some places for her sexual themes, Alice got high from her mushrooms, and some Harry Potter fanfic has just gotten way out of hand. But, and I will try to muster the deepest reserves of my eloquence here, come on!

The moral of this story: if you have kids, make sure to keep them away from Alessandra Stanley!

"The contemporary liberal is in large measure a conservative"

A line I came across, from 1971. "[H]is desire for social change is balanced by a mounting apprehension that the most essential traditional values are being undermined and ultimately will be abandoned."

Steyn on Camelot

Check it out. (Via RC)

Hilarious

Don't miss The Daily Gut sidebar, where I found this story (and the related Gregalogue) .

UPDATE: Different topic, but another great Gregalogue.

The Dark Knight Returns

First comic book I've read in over a decade. And it's less comic book than an excuse for merciless anti-liberal satire. In other words, I loved it. In brief: Batman goes around attacking vicious criminals, while liberal television commentators and famous therapists argue that the criminals are simply misunderstood, are nothing but innocent victims, can easily be rehabilitated, etc. It's mostly very broad satire, such as a scene when the mayor, rather than execute a monstrous criminal leader, decides to negotiate with him and is murdered within moments. There were some subtler moments, like the panel depicting the "Arkham Home for the Emotionally Troubled" (fans know the original name of the Asylum is the Home for the Criminally Insane). Even subtler is the panel right next to that one, my favorite image in the book: in the hallway of the Asylum, which houses all the most degenerate psychopaths in the world, there is only one forbidding sign, and I'll bet you can guess what it is.

All in all, though, a very depressing read. It was written more than twenty years ago, yet very little has changed. Things have probably gotten worse. I know that almost every time I go back home, there's a story about some child rapist or murderer who gets a five year sentence and is out after two on good behavior (good behavior in jail? well, duh - there aren't any nine-year-old girls to rape in prison). In one case last year, a man brutally raped a 14-year-old girl, bashed her head in with a rock, and left her for dead in the St. Lawrence River. Only by a miracle did she survive and manage to swim to safety. The prosecutors asked for ten years. The judge, displaying extreme coldheartedness, sentenced him to eleven. He only had to serve seven - not bad for rape and 'attempted' murder. There was an uproar in the aftermath of the sentence. It was reviewed, and the reviewer deemed the judge made the right decision, since the rapist had no prior history of sexual assault and was not a demonstrable risk to society (I swear I'm not making this up). Of course, it then turned out that, yes indeed, he did have a history and had sexually assaulted three other young girls. For these new charges, the prosecution asked for, and the judge granted, three years in jail - to be served concurrently with his other sentence. In other words, three more victims, not one extra day. And, as that article notes, if he behaves nicely in prison, he could be free after just two years. Anyway, sorry I'm getting carried away here, but I just wanted to show that The Dark Knight Returns is, these days, probably less satire than documentary.
Among the liberal elite, in his comic as in our lives, rapists and murderers receive sympathy and understanding; shunning is only for those who fight back. Oh, and of course, those who smoke.

p.s. no, i'm not demanding that the castrations begin immediately. baby steps, baby steps. a little deterrence might not be a bad place to start.

p.s. Jonah Goldberg promised some thoughts about this, I hope he comes through.

UPDATE: I forgot to add that Miller also makes a lot of fun of Reagan, which is why I wrote that the comic is anti-liberal, since it's not exactly conservative.

The Freedom Delusion

Relapsed Catholic links to an excellent David Warren article on freedom. According to Mr.Warren, "There is no price too high for human liberty, and those who dispute this are, and deserve to be, slaves." I agree with that statement wholeheartedly; the trouble is, people like Mr. Warren and myself, as well as others in the west, make the mistake of projecting our fundamental devotion to freedom onto people to whom freedom means very little at all. This is the fundamental flaw of the neocon project. Neoconservatism, or genuine interventionist liberalism, bases itself on the belief that the desire for freedom is innate to all of humanity. I am beginning to suspect, however, that freedom is a supreme value only in our western, judeo-christian tradition. In much of the rest of the world, it seems to me, people prefer hatred to freedom. Many would much rather kill a few Jews than live in a democracy.

I supported, and continue strongly to support, the war in Iraq. But, unlike many neocons, I do not do so through entirely idealistic motives. I do not believe freedom is innate in Muslim culture; I am, as of yet, rather skeptical. But if there is to be freedom, the best chance for it is in Iraq. The way I look at it, I guess, is that Iraq is the Muslim world's last and best chance to embrace and nurture freedom. If it fails there, I think, that's the end of that, and we will all know where we stand. In other words, I support the war because I think it's worth a shot, because we owe them everything in our power to help them get it right, before we wash our hands of the region.

I am not a big fan of the French (though my fellow Hungarian Jew Sarkozy is cause for great optimism), but, say what you will, they know how to revolt. Their history is one of almost constant revolutions, both minor and major; one barely has a chance to digest the filet mignon before the barricades are being manned yet again. Meanwhile, here in America, we started an incredibly bloody revolutionary war over stamps and tea. We later fought the bloodiest war in history, the Civil War, over some fairly abstract ideals. Yet, in the Muslim world, where problems are a little more acute than debates over the finer points of the Federalist papers, next to nothing. Their tyrants put French and British kings to shame, and their people do nothing. Live free or die? Not likely. You can take my life, but you can never take my freedom? As if. Sure, every few months some college kids might protest, but protesting is just what college kids do, nothing ever comes of it. It really seems to me that the overwhelming majority of the people in these countries do not love freedom, and are rather indifferent to it. Sure, they might claim to want it, and they may indeed prefer it in theory, but they are absolutely not willing to fight for it, not willing to die for it in the least. Mr. Warren and I might agree that freedom is invaluable, but we should not make the mistake of believing that applies to other cultures.

I want to be clear that I am not making the multiculturalist argument for respecting oppresion in other cultures. I firmly believe that Muslim treatment of women is monstrous and barbaric. But I am also beginning to believe that it can never be changed, that they can never be shown the light. We should do all we can to give safety and shelter to Muslim women, but we should not waste any more of our time in trying to change Muslim men. You and I might think that freedom is invaluable, but to all too many of them, freedom seems to be dirt cheap.

Bono Update

I made fun of how Bill Clinton played to his audience of college kids by equating Bono with Mother Teresa and Martin Luther King Jr. This news is a few days old, but I'm very glad to see that Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper doesn't buy the hype.

The man attacking Harper in that article is Bob Geldof. You may remember him from the spectacularly successful Live Aid concert, which revitalized the African continent. As Geldof so astutely realized, the only thing holding back Africa's tremendous potential was a few unbalanced checkbooks - a situation he and his followers corrected with a graceful ease. Who could have known that sending a few million dollars to Africa's rulers would lead to such a sudden and miraculous turnaround? Today, of course, the nations Geldof helped are infinitely better off, living in peace and prosperity, outpacing much of Europe in rates of productivity and growth. Proving the cynics and skeptics wrong, a few million phone calls and a great big rock concert really were enough to change the face of a continent - indeed, of the world. Oh, wait.

You know, I probably shouldn't criticize Geldof too harshly. Compared to the hundreds of millions of African deaths caused by other mindless liberal fashion trends, Live Aid's relatively minor death toll may in fact be cause for celebration.

p.s. there is one huge factual error in that article about Geldof I linked to, so glaring that I am amazed that nobody at the Guardian caught it before publication. As every Harvard student knows, the Ukrainian famine was not a direct result of Stalinist policy, but a bad break in a tough year. I mean, duh.

Men without chests, but with diplomas

In the past two days of graduation exercises, I have sat through not one, not two, but three whole speeches about the importance of keeping an open mind, embracing complexity, refusing to see the world in black and white, abjuring certainty, etc, etc, etc. In other words, speech after speech after speech putting forth the defining statement of the modern liberal mindset: "who are we to judge?" So now listen up, and listen up good, because I'm only going to say this once (well, not really, I pretty much say it all the time, but I'm on a roll, don't stop me now): if there is a problem with society today (and is there ever), it certainly is not rooted in an excess of judgment.

It's late, I'm tired, and I don't want to start a rant, so I will point you instead to the perfect antidote to commencement's cultural cowardice: C.S. Lewis' "Men Without Chests." An excerpt:

The operation of The Green Book and its kind is to produce what may be called Men without Chests. It is an outrage that they should be commonly spoken of as Intellectuals. This gives them the chance to say that he who attacks them attacks Intelligence. It is not so. They are not distinguished from other men by any unusual skill in finding truth nor any virginal ardour to pursue her. Indeed it would be strange if they were: a persevering devotion to truth, a nice sense of intellectual honour, cannot be long maintained without the aid of a sentiment which Gaius and Titius could debunk as easily as any other. It is not excess of thought but defect of fertile and generous emotion that marks them out. Their heads are no bigger than the ordinary: it is the atrophy of the chest beneath that makes them seem so.

And all the time—such is the tragi-comedy of our situation—we continue to clamour for those very qualities we are rendering impossible. You can hardly open a periodical without coming across the statement that what our civilization needs is more 'drive', or dynamism, or self-sacrifice, or 'creativity'. In a sort of ghastly simplicity we remove the organ and demand the function. We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honour and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful.

The difference between Lewis' time and ours? We no longer even pay lip-service to valor and honor. As demonstrated by so many of the graduation speeches this week, we castrate, and sing the virtues of impotence.

Hollywood's Hidden Conservatism

So obviously Hollywood would never consciously produce a film with anything but an ultra-liberal message, but a few current examples suggest that, when packaged with enough sex, obscenity, and violence, a hint of conservatism might sneak through and end up on the silver screen. I already wrote about Tarantino's Death Proof and its pro-gun, anti-victimhood message. Today, Hugh Hewitt's movie guy, talking about the extraordinarily vulgar Knocked Up, said that it would be very difficult to have an abortion after having seen the film and its full-screen sonograms (follow the Hewitt link for audio). Also today, a zombie-loving friend excitedly sent me a link to this movie, which, at least based on the trailer, could be seen as a parable about the dangers of abusing an illegal immigrant underclass to tend the lawns of the WSJ editorial board (although I am, as you may remember, greatly turned off by anti-Fifties themes in cinema).

Whit Stillman managed to film a first-class conservative body of work by writing scripts that went over liberals' heads, getting the critics, whose default setting is to praise that which they do not understand, to applaud works about their own shallow immorality. For those of us without Stillman's skills, however, it now seems that there is another way to sneak some sense past the p.c. focus groupthink. Call it the Apatow Approach: the most square, most old-fashioned values in the world can make it big in Hollywood as long as you couch them in enough swear words, penis jokes, and, in extreme cases, an occasional disembowelment.

UPDATE: A quick Google search on "Apatow's conservatism" reveals that Ross Douthat and the New York Times beat me to the punch.

ANOTHER UPDATE: My tip made it onto HotAir!

OKAY, LAST ONE: Prof Althouse mentions the surprising theme of Knocked Up, too!

Disobedience training tomorrow, 12 noon - don't be late!

Who says you don't learn anything at Harvard? I just received an email about a student-run training session tomorrow: "Civil Disobedience Training & Know Your Rights!" An excerpt:
"Before we leave for the summer, come learn about your rights to protest. Come practice non-violent street tactics!
- What is civil disobedience?
- Dealing with authorities and police officers
- Know your rights!
- Non-violent Civil Disobedience and Street tactics
- Escalation and de-escalation
Sponsored by: the Student Labor Action Movement"

The subject line of the email, you ask? "if you wanna be a rebel you gotta KNOW YOUR RIGHTS!" It is wrong for me to smirk. I must admit, I know of no better, more direct and straightforward way of becoming a rebel than attending a training session on how to be a rebel.

Shrinkage; or, modern liberalism is now officially beyond satire

So there was quite the kerfuffle on campus this past weekend. A bunch of people were out on the lawn on Saturday, having a barbecue and apparently blowing horns or something (I wasn't around, I can't vouch for any of this) and making a bunch of noise. Someone from my dorm actually called the police on them, which is ridiculous (why couldn't he just at least try first and go up to the people and ask them to quiet down? This is a post for another day, and I don't want Treacher on my back, but there are more and more signs every day of the frightening modern phenomenon of people being conditioned from birth to just curl up in a ball under the desk and wait for the authorities rather than help themselves).

Anyway, this is when things started to get out of hand. Because the people on the lawn were black (turns out it was the joint spring barbecue of the Harvard Black Men's Forum and the Association of Black Harvard Women, two groups who passionately oppose racism of any kind and who just happen to form groups based entirely on skin color because they love diversity), and they got really mad that the cops were called on them (indeed, they had been doing nothing wrong, and the cops went away and the bbq went on). I must be honest and and say that racism was probably a factor in the incident, since drunken white kids are really loud on that lawn on a regular basis and nobody ever calls the cops on them. But the whole thing has gotten dramatically blown out of proportion by all the usual people who have nothing better to do with their lives than exploit grievances and set up community meetings, so the past two days have been filled with discussion groups, open forums, student panels, and everything else that's in the liberal handbook under 'How To Savor That Delicious Righteous Outrage For As Long As Possible, And Bore Whitey Into Submission While You're At It!' Which brings me, at long last, to the point of this post.

Turns out that the discussions, heartfelt as they may have been, were, amazingly, not powerful enough to wipe out racism once and for all. So the campaign continues, and since hunger strikes are so last week, the offended people have come up with a brand new tactic: running around naked.

Primal Scream is this stupid Harvard tradition when, the night before finals start, people run around the yard naked, screaming, and acting like fools. Who knows, it might once have been a fun way for stressed-out students to let off steam (though I doubt it), but, these days, well, it's pretty much the same as every other night. Except now it's worse, because now it has become an occasion for the students to protest racism and celebrate diversity. Since, for liberals, a person is defined by their skin color, i.e. their body, it makes total sense to them that running around naked is the perfect way to assert your worth.

Here are actual excerpts from the email the community received today:

"Please join us as we take a stand for inclusion. For celebration of difference. And for acknowledgment that making Harvard a welcoming space for all is everyone's responsibility. Wednesday night, at 11:30pm, stand with us at University Hall as we celebrate the tradition of Primal Scream by declaring,

:: MY SKIN BELONGS AT HARVARD ::

Stand with us as we bare ourselves (as much as we each feel comfortable) and push for real change. We envision a Harvard where all students enjoy an equal sense of belonging. Where students of color are not only appreciated for their contribution to diversity, but are also respected as full-fledged members of the Harvard community, by the Harvard community. [...] This year at Primal Scream, bare yourself for a better Harvard."

Hilarious. "My Skin Belongs At Harvard." My mind, my soul? Screw 'em. But don't you dare question the crucial contribution to diversity made by my skin! Oh, and look at my dick. Stop it, stop averting your eyes. I demand that you show respect to the full fledge of my member of color!

The part I cut out is their list of demands. It's mostly the usual stuff (more support for ongoing initiatives, more ethnic diversity, better tools to proactively address racial inclusiveness, one white scalp, etc.). Except one cheerfully sinister line really did creep me out: "Consistent opportunities for more meaningful dialogue -- not just with the students who already attend discussions on race, but for everyone affected by race in the Harvard community. And that means all of us!" In other words, mandatory racial sensitivity training for the entire community. I just hope that, if it does come to that, we'll at least be allowed to keep our clothes on.

My reaction to this whole ridiculous mess? Well, it's time to add The Dawn Patrol to the blogroll!

Liberal Bias at Harvard? If only!

Over the years, I've applied repeatedly for an opinion column in The Crimson, the campus newspaper. I never made it. They don't tell you why they reject your column, it could be for bad writing, could be for your politics, I don't know. Though I have my suspicions. Since I have a lot of columns written and nowhere to put them, I will start publishing parts of them here. Here is the first installment, excerpts from an article about liberalism at Harvard:

Don’t worry, this isn’t a rant about liberal bias at Harvard. Just the opposite: Harvard isn’t liberal enough. Yes, teachers here give to the Democrats as if it were a tithe, and yes, students here pee in the bushes not from drink but from principled opposition to the injustice of gendered bathrooms. But liberalism at Harvard stops at America’s shores. Women’s rights, gay rights, free speech, and their relations are human rights, not American ones – they should be fought for the world over, not just in Cambridge. Unfortunately, as my years at Harvard go by, I fear myself more and more alone in that conviction.

The problem concerns Islam. Harvard’s liberals will trip over one another in their rush to defend the rights of anyone unlucky enough to have been detained simply for being a Muslim at the wrong place, at the wrong time, with the wrong World Trade Center blueprints. Yet when a Muslim is forced into an arranged marriage, or is murdered by her own brothers for going to nightclubs, or executed by the state for being a victim of rape, there is silence. Those whose grandiloquence knows no bounds when it comes to defending the right of a bespectacled young Saudi man to board a plane with as much contact solution as he damn well pleases, thank you very much, are all too quick to change the subject when it comes to a young Muslim woman’s right to live.

Others who bemoan the liberal double-standard over Muslim rights blame multiculturalism. A reluctance to judge other cultures by the standards of our own, they argue, leads to moral paralysis. I think the real reason is simpler: most liberals are scared. They know that despite the platitudes about Islam being a religion of peace, it’s the bloodiest religion of peace around these days. Yes, I hurry with the caveat that the overwhelming majority of the world’s Muslims are peace-loving pillars of their communities, with nice little dental practices in the suburbs and the firm conviction that jihad is a strictly internal struggle, maybe a good thumb-wrestling match at the most. It’s unfortunate that the tiny minority, the ones who bomb embassies and behead journalists, are rather motivated overachievers. The barbaric violence of their demonstrations, death threats, and public executions worked long ago to frighten Muslim reformists into silence, and they have of late managed to scare the dickens out of Europe, too. Most Europeans, when it comes to Islam, now act the role of henpecked husbands, tiptoeing around the house, apologizing profusely when confronted, all the while without the faintest idea of what they’re in the doghouse for this time. Now, if Harvard is any clue, it looks like the fundamentalists have made their mark in America, too.

Harvard’s renowned late political theorist Judith Shklar coined the term “the liberalism of fear” to describe how the fear of cruelty can serve as a powerful foundation for moral claims. She seems to have overestimated the resolve of her campus, for these days at Harvard, as in much of the West, the liberalism of fear best refers to a liberalism that wets itself and flees as soon as its enemies brandish a knife. Many Republican policies do merit condemnation, and do not lack for it. But no one has ever been in bodily danger for bashing Bush, unless you include the remote possibility that they may drop the Palme d’Or on their foot. Attack Islam, however, and chances are the only thing standing between you and a knife to the throat is a lifetime of police protection. If Europe is any indication, things will only get worse unless we change. We must stand up to our fear, exercise our freedom with no shame, no apologies, and fight just as hard for human rights abroad as we do at home.