Missing the Point

I left a comment on the blog of Bob Smietana, who writes for Christianity Today, and has written at least one column for the Revealer, which is a religion news blog run by Jeff Sharlet, a hugely talented and smart young writer who is at times very insightful on religion, but often also very mistaken, because he is trying to write mostly about Christianity as if he is a dispassionate observer, when actually he believes in his secular humanism/materialism as strongly as any Christian does in Christ.

Smietana was angry over an Al Mohler column, and I wrote a few words in Mohler's defense, but also in protest of Smietana's apparent willingness to miss the main point. Click here to read his post and my comment below.

Cindy Sheehan: The Musical.

Hilarious.

Intelligent Design in College

The Wall Street Journal reports, albeit somewhat reluctantly it seems, that intelligent design is making inroads in the universities.

Thank God. Maybe it will return a measure of sanity and reason to those places.

Reading in New York

While in New York, I scrounged around a few area publications, and found some interesting stuff.

The Village Voice looks at all the ways that abortion is already being limited and restricted by laws and court rulings put in place since Roe v. Wade.

The L Magazine, a little glossy that as far as I can tell has nothing to do with lesbianism, bemoans the "civil rights" record of SCOTUS nominee Sam Alito, which they call "so narrow it would make John Ashcroft blush."

Two other interesting points from this fairly well-written and interesting piece:

1. Author Noam Biale (nbiale@thelmagazine.com) says that overturning Roe is "the central aim of the radical Christian movement that now controls the bulk of our government, save the courts." Riiiiggghhht. Sheesh, it sure is interesting to see the histrionics in the big L when they realize that Christians aren't just staying in church praying for Jesus to come back soon. The way they react, you'd think a bunch of pedophiles had been let out.

2. Biale screeds for 1,209 words and ends by saying,

"If the Democrats can stay on message and not allow the indictments, the cronyism, the scores of casualties at home and abroad caused by this administration to be forgotten, then they stand a good chance at winning back some ground in Congress, maybe even the White House."

This is the only hint of a point in Biale's piece. It is typical, I think, of Gen X communication. Increasingly, along with Gen Y and Z, we are more focused on cleverness and being "interesting" than on making a substantive point.

Biale basically complains, cleverly, about Alito for over 1,000 words, and then ends with the above statement. But what is the Democratic "message" he refers to, the proactive thrust of the big L's ideology? He mentions none. He only advises that the Democrats continue to harp on things they don't like about Bush, which are shaky, shaky criticisms at best.

End of News(papers)

The New York Review of Books looks at the present state of a media that is being revolutionized. I am wondering myself what the future of newspapers is--I think that in their present form they are doomed but will undergo some sort of reinvention. What that will be and whether there are many desirable jobs in that new form I do not know.

Who is lying about Iraq?

Norman Podhoretz wrote yesterday in Commentary magazine, which I think is part of the Wall Street Journal, that it is the left liberals among the Democrats who are lying, not Bush. Avoid the "no, he did" syndrome by actually reading through the piece before you talk about this topic with your friends.

European Jihad?

Newsweek wonders if the riots in France are the beginning of what Mark Steyn is calling a new intifada, or Muslim holy war in Europe.

I am an Elve

I took a quiz to find out. Click on the link below to find out what you are.


Elvish


To which race of Middle Earth do you belong?
brought to you by Quizilla

French riots spread; riots also in Denmark

"Rioting Spreads to 20 Towns Around Paris: Rioters Shoot at Police, Torch Car Dealerships, Buses in Eighth Day of Violence in Paris Suburbs," reports the Associated Press.

Also, in a story that has not been reported in the MSM (mainstream media), there have been riots by immigrant, Muslim youth in Denmark as well. Click here and hereto read about that.

Click here to read quotes on what has created this situation. Or click here to read the entire essay, called "Barbarians at the Gates of Paris," by Theodore Dalrymple.

From that essay, here is a description of what these ghettos--created for North Africans, many Muslim, brought in to fill labor needs from the 1950's to the 1970's--are like:

The cites are thus social marginalization made concrete: bureaucratically planned from their windows to their roofs, with no history of their own or organic connection to anything that previously existed on their sites, they convey the impression that, in the event of serious trouble, they could be cut off from the rest of the world by switching off the trains and by blockading with a tank or two the highways that pass through them, (usually with a concrete wall on either side), from the rest of France to the better parts of Paris. I recalled the words of an Afrikaner in South Africa, who explained to me the principle according to which only a single road connected black townships to the white cities: once it was sealed off by an armored car, “the blacks can foul only their own nest.”

The average visitor gives not a moment’s thought to these Cités of Darkness as he speeds from the airport to the City of Light. But they are huge and important—and what the visitor would find there, if he bothered to go, would terrify him.

A kind of anti-society has grown up in them—a population that derives the meaning of its life from the hatred it bears for the other, “official,” society in France. This alienation, this gulf of mistrust—greater than any I have encountered anywhere else in the world, including in the black townships of South Africa during the apartheid years—is written on the faces of the young men, most of them permanently unemployed, who hang out in the pocked and potholed open spaces between their logements. When you approach to speak to them, their immobile faces betray not a flicker of recognition of your shared humanity; they make no gesture to smooth social intercourse. If you are not one of them, you are against them.

Their hatred of official France manifests itself in many ways that scar everything around them. Young men risk life and limb to adorn the most inaccessible surfaces of concrete with graffiti—BAISE LA POLICE, fuck the police, being the favorite theme. The iconography of the cités is that of uncompromising hatred and aggression: a burned-out and destroyed community-meeting place in the Les Tarterets project, for example, has a picture of a science-fiction humanoid, his fist clenched as if to spring at the person who looks at him, while to his right is an admiring portrait of a huge slavering pit bull, a dog by temperament and training capable of tearing out a man’s throat—the only breed of dog I saw in the cités, paraded with menacing swagger by their owners.

There are burned-out and eviscerated carcasses of cars everywhere. Fire is now fashionable in the cités: in Les Tarterets, residents had torched and looted every store—with the exceptions of one government-subsidized supermarket and a pharmacy. The underground parking lot, charred and blackened by smoke like a vault in an urban hell, is permanently closed.

When agents of official France come to the cités, the residents attack them. The police are hated: one young Malian, who comfortingly believed that he was unemployable in France because of the color of his skin, described how the police invariably arrived like a raiding party, with batons swinging—ready to beat whoever came within reach, irrespective of who he was or of his innocence of any crime, before retreating to safety to their commissariat. The conduct of the police, he said, explained why residents threw Molotov cocktails at them from their windows. Who could tolerate such treatment at the hands of une police fasciste?

Molotov cocktails also greeted the president of the republic, Jacques Chirac, and his interior minister when they recently campaigned at two cités, Les Tarterets and Les Musiciens. The two dignitaries had to beat a swift and ignominious retreat, like foreign overlords visiting a barely held and hostile suzerainty: they came, they saw, they scuttled off.

Antagonism toward the police might appear understandable, but the conduct of the young inhabitants of the cités toward the firemen who come to rescue them from the fires that they have themselves started gives a dismaying glimpse into the depth of their hatred for mainstream society. They greet the admirable firemen (whose motto is Sauver ou périr, save or perish) with Molotov cocktails and hails of stones when they arrive on their mission of mercy, so that armored vehicles frequently have to protect the fire engines.

Benevolence inflames the anger of the young men of the cités as much as repression, because their rage is inseparable from their being. Ambulance men who take away a young man injured in an incident routinely find themselves surrounded by the man’s “friends,” and jostled, jeered at, and threatened: behavior that, according to one doctor I met, continues right into the hospital, even as the friends demand that their associate should be treated at once, before others.

Of course, they also expect him to be treated as well as anyone else, and in this expectation they reveal the bad faith, or at least ambivalence, of their stance toward the society around them. They are certainly not poor, at least by the standards of all previously existing societies: they are not hungry; they have cell phones, cars, and many other appurtenances of modernity; they are dressed fashionably—according to their own fashion—with a uniform disdain of bourgeois propriety and with gold chains round their necks. They believe they have rights, and they know they will receive medical treatment, however they behave. They enjoy a far higher standard of living (or consumption) than they would in the countries of their parents’ or grandparents’ origin, even if they labored there 14 hours a day to the maximum of their capacity.

But this is not a cause of gratitude—on the contrary: they feel it as an insult or a wound, even as they take it for granted as their due. But like all human beings, they want the respect and approval of others, even—or rather especially—of the people who carelessly toss them the crumbs of Western prosperity. Emasculating dependence is never a happy state, and no dependence is more absolute, more total, than that of most of the inhabitants of the cités. They therefore come to believe in the malevolence of those who maintain them in their limbo: and they want to keep alive the belief in this perfect malevolence, for it gives meaning—the only possible meaning—to their stunted lives. It is better to be opposed by an enemy than to be adrift in meaninglessness, for the simulacrum of an enemy lends purpose to actions whose nihilism would otherwise be self-evident.

Thank you.....50 Cent?

I never thought I'd say this, but I am proud of 50 Cent:

50 CENT SLAMS KANYE'S 'BUSH IS RACIST' COMMENT

Rapper 50 CENT has lashed out at fellow hip-hop star KANYE WEST for accusing US President GEORGE W BUSH of racism in the wake of Hurricane Katrina.

The IN DA CLUB star believes human intervention could not have prevented the effects of the hurricane, which killed over a thousand people in the US gulf states in August (05), and sees no point in reprimanding the President for something which was beyond his control.



He says, "The New Orleans disaster was meant to happen. It was an act of God.

"I think people responded to it the best way they can.

"What KANYE WEST was saying, I don't know where that came from."

French riots are muslim riots

None of the news outlets are reporting the riots as such, but when you read three to four paragraphs into each story, there it is:

Fifth night of unrest in Paris suburb following deaths of two youths

Police fired tear gas canisters and rioters hurled Molotov cocktails as violence hit a poor Paris suburb for the fifth straight night in unrest that officials said had also spread to neighbouring towns.

The local prefecture said that the levels of violence in the troubled suburb of Clichy-sous-Bois were lower than on previous nights.

However 12 people were arrested in the town, which has a large Muslim community, during a night in which a Molotov cocktail was thrown at a police station and 11 cars and trash cans were torched.

Ironically, a book I picked up recently and wrote about a week or so ago, "Our Culture and What's Left of It," has a chapter on the ghettos in which the French have stuck the majority of their immigrant Muslim population.

The essay is called, "The Barbarians at the Gates of Paris." Here are some highlights:

"Reported crime in France has risen from 600,000 annually in 1959 to 4 million today, while the population has grown by less than 20 percent (and many think today's crime number is an underestimate by at least half). In 2000 one crime was reported for every sixth inhabitant of Paris, and the rate has increased by at least 10 percent a year for the last five years...Where does the increase in crime come from? The geographical answer: from the public housing projects that encircle and increasingly besiege every French city or town of any size, Paris especially. In these housing projects lives an immigrant population numbering several million, from North and West Africa mostly" (299). "A kind of anti-society has grown up in them" (301).

"There are now an estimated 8 or 9 million people of North and West African origin in France, twice the number in 1975--and at least 5 million of them are Muslims" (307).

Theodore Dalrymple, the author, explains that the French have tried to appease their own national conscience, inflamed by their segration of the immigrants in these ghettos, by creating a giant welfare state for those who live in the ghettos. Dalrymple explains that, especially for the young men in the ghettos, this only makes things worse:

Emasculating dependence is never a happy state, and no dependence is more absolute, more total, than that of most of the inhabitants of the cites...It is better to be opposed by an enemy than to be adrift in meaninglessness, for the simulacrum of an enemy lends purpose to actions whose nihilism would otherwise be self-evident" (303).

"French youth unemployment is among the highest in Europe--and higher the further you descend the social scale, largely because high minimum wages, payroll taxes, and labor protection laws make employers loath to hire those whom they cannot easily fire, and whom they must pay beyond what their skills are worth.

Dalrymple explains how the French government will not allow religious expressions such as the wearing of the hijab, or headscarve for women, "but at the same time, official France also pays a cowering lip service to multi-culturalism--for example, to the 'culture' of the cites.

"Thus French rap music is the subject of admiring articles in Liberation and Le Monde...One rap group, the Ministere amer (Bitter Ministry), won special official praise. Its best known lyric: 'Another woman takes her beating / This time she's called Brigitte / She's the wife of a cop / The novices of vice piss on the police / It's not just a firework, scratch the clitoris / Brigitte the cop's wife likes niggers / She's hot, hot in her pants.'

"This vile rubbish receives accolades for its supposed authenticity: for in the multi-culturalist's mental world, in which the savages are forever noble, there is no criterion by which to distinguish high art from low trash. And if intellectuals, highly trained in the Western tradition, are prepared to praise such degraded and brutal pornography, it is hardly surprising that those who are not so trained come to the conclusion that there cannot be anything of value in that tradition. Cowardly multi-culturalism thus makes itself the handmaiden of anti-Western extremism" (305).

Dalrymple ends with this point:

Imagine yourself a youth in Les Tarterets or Les Musiciens, intellectually alert but not well educated, believing yourself to be despised because of your origins by the larger society that you were born into, permanently condemned to unemployment by the system that contemptuously feeds and clothes you, and surrounded by a contemptible nihilistic culture of despair, violence and crime. Is it not possible that you would seek a doctrine that would simultaneously explain your predicament, justify your wrath, point the way toward your revenge, and guarantee your salvation, especially if you were imprisoned? Would you not seek a 'worthwhile' direction for the engergy, hatred, and violence seething within you, a direction that would enable you to do evil in the name of ultimate good?" (309)

Before we Americans get too self-righteous towards the French on this point, we should also consider how much this last statement could be applied to our treatment of the Hispanic immigrant community.

The Press as Antagonists

Nick Lemann is one of the few somewhat objective staff writers at The New Yorker (he's also professor of journalism at NYU), and he has written a piece this week on the confusing Valerie Plame case that doesn't do much to clear up the confusion.

But there is one illuminating passage, where he talks about the way the press, or news media, has been transformed since Watergate and Richard Nixon:

In the late nineteen-seventies, around the time that the current generation of foreign-policy conservatives was coalescing in Washington, a ne idea about the press corps was forming, too. Vietnam and Watergate had discredited the old ideal of the Washington-establishment reporter, wh dined with top officials, and who was proud to be a part of the governmental process. Instead, reporters would be muckraking outsiders, who pu before the public the truth about their government, which they would have got from courageous, obscure sources. In this new scenario, peopl who anonymously gave information to reporters were good guys; high Administration officials, who were likely to be bad guys, were merel press-conference purveyors of the party line. It was on this theory that many state legislatures in the nineteen-seventies passed laws protecting th reporter-source relationship—laws that gave journalists an officially enhanced legal and professional status, premised on their implicit oppositio to officialdom

But Congress never passed such a law; and in 1972, in a 5–4 decision, the Supreme Court had ruled that the First Amendment does not protect a reporter from having to testify before a grand jury. During the past few years, prosecutors and judges have shown themselves to be increasingly impatient with the idea that journalists have special privileges. Meanwhile, in Washington, the old journalistic way of doing business had not, it turned out, actually vanished from the scene along with the Alsop brothers and Walter Lippmann. Government officials still attempt to use the press to gain advantage, and they still use anonymous leaks as well as scripted scenes. Even the press-resistant Bush White House leaks. Editors still want their reporters to get access to top officials, in the hope of finding information that their competition doesn’t have. Especially in the small world of foreign policy and national security, the reporters and columnists for the leading news organizations tend to be assigned to their beats semipermanently, and to have close, confidential relationships with officials. This is no less the case today than it was in the Clinton Administration; it’s just that a different set of journalists (Charles Krauthammer, for example) have the better access. In the end, the chummy imperatives of Washington trumped the press’s independent self-conception.