The only thing we have to fear

The greatest and most tragic irony of homo sapiens, by my lights, is that, outside of disease, generally in the form of bacteria and viruses, this most intelligent of species has fended off almost all of other natural predators. Except for itself.

And in the effort by this natural predator to fend off fear of itself, it has made every effort to prove to the rest of its species just how unfraid it is. And to that end, it has made every effort to instill the fear of God into the rest of the species. And the response to that stroke of diplomatic and criminological genius has been for everyone involved to go to great lengths to instill the fear of God into those doing the scaring. To prove just how unfraid they are. And around and around they go. Leaving death and destruction in their wake for as long as they have inhabited the earth.

And the most profound irony of this long and fruitless exercise in overpowering all those sources of fear, of which human beings are, collectively, the sole responsible source, is that, at the bottom of all of this mindless posturing is, in fact, a deep and profound fear. Of one another. Of themselves. And of everything that might challenge their ability to overpower that fear and all its sources. All while multiplying all of the fear meant to be overpowered. Meaning, the efforts to overpower their fear and the sources of their fear have made them less safe and more afraid, not more safe and less afraid. And the added fear thus becomes justification for renewed efforts to start down the same road all over again.

Fear that none of us actually have, mind you. That was the whole point, remember. To prove how unfraid we are. In fact, that is the point of every player in the endless manipulations of power. To master the sources of our fear. To prove that we are not afraid.

So unfraid, that we obsess endlessly about how to build up the caches of power, leverage, and weaponry we can manage to prove just how unfraid we are.

This has been the long, tragic, murderous, and oppressive length of human history.

And now, they claim, the source of our progress. Or so says the they who claim progress as their political mantle. As it has always been. No matter who carried that mantle.

It is not a new logic. This logic of intimidation and aggression to get one's way. It's as old as hominid species have walked the earth. It's as old as predation itself. It is, in fact, the logic of predation.

And the question homo sapiens need to ask themselves, today, is, "Is this what the future holds?"

Powerful and powerless. Master and slave. Predator and prey.

Is that it how humanity improves itself?

By overpowering one another.

Because if that is what we believe, it has been tried.

With much death and destruction left in its wake.

Perhaps our capacity for overpowering will be for good cause, this time.

Because that could not possibly be what every other group who ever aspired for power believed. They all must have thought they were using it for the purposes of evil. We, alone, will use it for the purposes of good. And finally right will be wedded to might.

This logic of predation and intimidation has been with us since the beginning of human existence and the existence of our hominid brethren.

Perhaps, this time, finally, it will yield the progress that we so desperately seek from it. Perhaps, this time, our overpowering will finally yield the hope of a better tomorrow. And not the tragedy that it has yielded since our earliest existence.

And when it does not, we can lament amongst ourselves about how there is no better tomorrow. And how there is nothing that can be done anyway.

For it could not be our failure. It could only be the failure of our enemies. Or our foolish neighbors. Or our children. Or anyone who is not us.

For we are a brave species. We do not fail. And we most certainly do not admit our failure. Because to do so would be to show our weakness. And show disloyalty to our courage. The courage to continue down a path even when it leads to nowhere.

To continue despite disappointment is a sign of courage. To admit failure is to betray cowardice.

And thus begins the long series of lies that animates power and its obsession. And always has.

All because we are unfraid. And bound and determined to prove just how unfraid we are.

A species that has, otherwise, outside of disease, fended off every other natural predator it has faced.

This most intelligent of all species, or so it says, is finally only preyed upon by the most deadly of all its sins. It's own pride. It's own incapacity to recognize when it's instincts for predation and aggression have failed it many times over.

All because doing so would be to admit the very fear that it claims to not harbor.

The only thing we have to fear. Or so they say.

Or maybe what they should say is that progress only comes with just enough of the only thing we have to fear.

Perhaps that's what that revered American President meant.

Perhaps, this time, instilling the only thing we have to fear will prove once and for all just how unfraid we are.

Make love (even when you gotta make war)

The most important mistake humanity makes, I think, in addition to the killing, and aggression, and general meanspiritedness, is waiting for someone else to love them.

If you are waiting for someone to love you, you are wasting your time.

Love comes to those who have it to offer. Love, as Clint Black wisely croons, is something that we do. And love, like everything else, comes most to those who have the most to offer. What comes around goes around. And that includes all the good stuff like love.

If you are waiting for love, you are going to be waiting a long time. Because love comes to those who work on having it to offer.

If you want love, or you're unhappy because you feel like you don't have enough love in your life, the path to happiness is making it available to others, not waiting for it to come your way.

If you want to be loved, then your task is to work on loving. Lots of it. As much as possible.

And, if you listen to haters, expect to get as much love as they get. Meaning, very little. The scraps from the table of those rich in this most valuable commodity.

If you build it, it will come. For reals, homey.

Take that from a lover. And a fighter. But, mostly, a lover. Or at least I'll love the fuck out of you while I'm beatin' your ass, if that's what you need.

But most people don't need more ass-beating. Most people need more love. And they won't find it until they get off their lazy asses and start sharing it with others. Slackers.

Make love. Even when you need to make war.

And work on making a world where we make love and not war, as much as is humanly possible.

And that happens when you pitch in. And offer up all the love you have to contribute.

The problem with the world is not too little Hitler and too much King. That couldn't get more obvious, really, when we aren't bullshitting, all the time.

More love + less ass-beating = real progress. Where people get treated better.

And that's frankly what everyone wants, when we get really honest.

Back to your regularly scheduled bullshit.

Bullshit is bullshit

A reality check for those convinced that a controlled economy is better than a free one.

Cubans Debate Future of Socialism

"'The vendors there are criminals,' said one woman, to nods of agreement.

It didn't seem like the kind of deep-searching probe of the nation's problems that President Raul Castro solicited when he called for a national dialogue on the future of the country's socialist system in an August speech.

Since then, authorities have set up discussions at universities, government workplaces and under the glow of street lamps. Community organizations called Committees for the Defense of the Revolution - created in part to root out anti-government activity - are now tasked with collecting criticism of the socialist system, along with suggestions for how to reform it.

Declining revenues and mounting debts have stretched the Cuban government to the point that it must trim some of its longstanding entitlement programs, Castro told the National Assembly during the August speech.

'Nobody, no individual nor country, can indefinitely spend more than she or he earns. Two plus two always adds up to four, never five,' he said. 'Within the conditions of our imperfect socialism, due to our own shortcomings, two plus two often adds up to three.'

That losing formula has the Cuban government increasingly exhorting its citizens to work harder, expect less and come up with solutions to their own problems.

The input is funneled upward to Cuba's leaders and will ostensibly be used to guide the reform process. Similar discussions soliciting criticism and ideas were gathered during a round of open-air discussions called by Castro in 2007. The government collected 1.3 million opinions from residents during that period, Castro said, nearly half of which were criticisms of one problem or another.

While Cuban authorities have made it clear that major political and economic reforms to the country's one-party system are not on the discussion agenda, participants at the meetings are being encouraged to speak freely and openly about problems in their daily lives.

Many Cubans simmer with frustration brought by chronic transportation and housing shortages, a gargantuan state bureaucracy and salaries that average roughly $20 a month, even though most consumer goods in state-run stores are priced above what they would cost in the United States.

Subsidies for food, utilities and other basics offset those meager earnings, but as the government's fortunes decline, authorities are increasingly telling Cubans to tackle their own problems. One high-ranking party official recently said Cubans can't expect for the 'daddy state' to fix everything, waiting with open mouths 'like baby birds.'

Such a statement is 'offensive' to the Cuban people, said dissident economist Oscar Espinosa Chepe, who has spent time in prison for his opposition to the government.

'This system was designed to control everyone, so it's absurd that the official propaganda talks about the ‘daddy state,'' he said, referring to Cuba's government-run media. 'It's as if the Cuban people were to blame for this economic debacle, and not the government. The government is to blame for the way Cubans behave, because this is the system it created.'"

Free peoples are free for a reason. It's not an evil conspiracy. Or a failed utopia.

It's the best that we have to offer. And the best means we will ever have to make it infinitely better.

What we need is more freedom. And more honest and decent treatment of one another. And more of everything that really is our best.

When we're not bullshitting, that is.

And bullshit will always be bullshit, no matter how much we try to manipulate around it.

For all little girls and boys in the world

After a long meeting and an all-too-long career with teachers and parents and various adults who have given up on kids.

This is dedicated to all the little girls and boys out there who have adults in their lives who don't believe, anymore, in them and everything they can be. Yeah, you. You know who I'm talking about. I'm talking to you, kid.



A little advice, kids. Pardon my french. But, fuck 'em. Every last one of them. They're wrong. You can be whatever you want to be. Don't listen to adults or anyone who's given up on themselves and, thus, on you and everyone else.

And for the adults who have done so. You probably need to take a moment, to think, for just a second, about that little boy or little girl inside of you. That cute, pudgy one who was always afraid about what everyone else thought about them. And you might take a moment to remember at what point that little boy or little girl started to give up on themselves.

I just want you to remember, if even for a moment, what it was like to still believe in yourself before all those fears about what you couldn't possibly be started to overwhelm your dreams about what you could be, given enough heart and effort to make it so. And you want to do so to help you get honest about the fact that you talking kids and people and yourself up or talking them down is the likely the single most important thing that you could do to either support or sabotage a child. Or yourself. Or anyone for that matter.

So talk your kids up. Talk all kids up. As high as they can go. As high as their dreams will take them.

Play pretend trumpets with them. And pirates. And princesses. And Indie pop stars.

And, more to the point, stop talking kids down. Stop talking yourself down. Stop talking everyone down. And stop taking those foolish fears you live inside of so seriously.

Get busy finding a life you love. And stop talking down kids and everyone else around you.

And, in the meantime, kids. Listen to Aunty Ingrid. She knows what she's talkin' about.

And when adults tell you different, tell them to go fuck themselves. Not out loud, of course. Because you'll probably get smacked. They're still bigger, after all.

But in your heart. Tell them to go fuck themselves. Nicely. You know. As nicely as you can tell someone to go fuck themselves.

And go be whatever you want to be. For real. Find a life you love. I mean it.

And, while you're working and patiently waiting for that life to come through, love the one you have now. Because I said so, that's why. And go give your mom and dad a kiss, why don't ya. And go clean your room, for Christs' sakes.

For your own sake. And for the sake of your own children.

Oh, and by the way. Thanks mom. You were right. I love you.

Is love alive?

A reminder, today, of why I've always liked nice people and the bighearted more than anyone else.

Reading the national political coverage, today, it occured to me that most of politics, frankly, is shitty people doing shitty things to other shitty people. And doing shitty things to not-so-shitty people along the way.

As the National Review put it very well, today, "The love of power can prove at least as corrupting as the love of money, and the American political class does not seem likely to resist either temptation, much less both at once."

It's kinda stupid, really. Most of it. It's remarkably stupid, actually. Since so little of it does any real good.

And, lately, even though an enormous commitment of my life is to clean up the mess and to have something more honest in the way of governance and life, I've just found myself wanting to avoid it all, frankly. I understand my friends, now, who feel overwhelmed and powerless to do anything about it all. It's understandable. But if noone does anything to think bigger than our problems and work on more honestly viable solutions, we'll be stuck with the same mess a hundred years from now as much as we are today. So our children get stuck with the same shit.

And everyone pretending that being shitty really does more good than it really does.

That's the part that I can't handle. I can't handle the idea of my kid growing up to be a nice kid, a good kid, I hope, only to have assholes come at him or her from every direction telling him or telling her how they're the cause of all the bullshit in the world. Because they're so nice. All so those very same assholes never have to face up to the fact that the problem is assholes not wanting to face up. And so it'll be easier to blame the nice kids, like my kids, I can only hope, so dicks can go on being dicks. Sociologists call it scapegoating. I just call it bullshit.

It's fucked up to the nth degree, is what it is. It's shitty people doing shitty things to other shitty people. And along the way, doing shitty things to the not-so-shitty people in the world, while they're at it.

After awhile, I understand the cynics and the apathetic. Who gives a shit if people keep fucking up in the same direction just so they never have to consider that they might be wrong. About anything. Nevertheless anything important.

All of it makes me want to just avoid it all, is the truth. And hang out with folks like Ingrid.



I just want to find someone to spoon with like noone else. And leave to its own devices a world bound and determined to fuck itself into oblivion because it is too stubborn to face it's own bullshit. And it's own failure.

But I'll have to leave my teaching position to do that. Because it is sadly, and so unnecessarily, bound up in all this bullshit.

I keep thinking maybe that will be for the best. So I can get out of the way of all this progress. And let the shitheads have their way and make everything anew.

I may end up doing just that. I'm tired of the heartache of it all, is the truth. And something with a little less of it would be just fine by me.

In the meantime, I'll try to keep Ingrid and Sara and their Wintersong close to my heart.



I'm tired of shitty people justifying their shittiness on my back of my decency. And the decency of people who really do give a shit.

But there's not a damn thing I can do about it.

And I just want to hide away from it all, is the truth. With a woman who will love me honestly and unconditionally. I don't give a shit how unpopular that notion is. And never will. And I want to have kids that I can count on that woman to love unconditionally with me. No matter what shape the world or their lives are in.

Because the truth is there's not a goddamn thing anyone could ever do to convice me not to love my children and my wife and my family unconditionally. There is no amount of force anyone could offer up that would ever change that. Ever.

And if my experiences during this period have taught me anything, it is that I will be kinder, more understanding, more decent, more compassionate with them than before we took this tragic turn, not less. Because I'm much more aware of just how stubbornly fucked up the world is, today, than I was when we started down this ugly path.

And fuck every last asshole who defends things otherwise. What comes around goes around. And so it goes.

Though the truth is that we will, none of us, be out of this mess until we finally figure out that treating each other like shit is not the path of progress or anything else for that matter except for the same path to oblivion that has ever futily consumed our energies and never taken us anywhere resembling forward.

The damned human race. Until it learns its lessons. And that only happens with an open mind and an open heart and a little honesty with ourselves.

I'll take the company of someone who brings both to the conversation over just about anything else in the world, is the truth. Be nice for one of those someones to be a woman, at some point. And to raise a couple kids with the same. So maybe somebody can do something to unravel this godforesaken mess that is the human race, at some point.

Is love alive? I don't know. All I know is that if it isn't, we're all in much more trouble than anything any law or party or belief could ever offer us. That's just a fact. And no amount of stubbornness on our part will twist our way around it. I sure hope love is alive. Because we're in deep shit, if it's not.

Because it's about the only thing that can possibly get this foolish species through the rough spots of its own making, as much as any of the rest.

I want to take Twain's outlook and laugh at what a stupid, stubborn species we are. But, the truth is, like Twain, I think, as one of his admirers, H.L. Mencken, wisely observed, though he could be shy about sharing it, I just want to experience the tragedy, sometimes, that I feel on my heart, of just how lost and awful we are.

That's where Sara and Ingrid come in. I appreciate it, girls. Gives a heart or two to connect with when mine feels heavy with the world on it.

I wish I didn't care, most days, is the truth. And I wish it was funnier to me than it is, at this moment, most of the time.

But there's just a part of my heart that really does give a shit that we get it figured out. And that part weighs heavily with me, tonight.

I know. I need to get laid. Drink some beer. Watch a comedy.

Thanks for the advice, bro. It's just that sometimes, I just need to feel what's really there. And not pretend that I feel better for someone else's sake or to pretend that I feel better than I do.

Because if I don't, I never get to feel the good stuff, either. And there's too much good stuff out there in the world to forgo just so I don't have to feel the bad stuff.

And if I want to fall madly in love, to love my wife fully on our wedding day and every day after that. If I want to love my kids with as much depth as I can muster after a long day of work. If I want to love my family and my friends and my colleagues and everyone I care about in my life with as much as they deserve, then I gotta feel the bad stuff when it comes, too. It's just part of the deal.

And that's why I love these girls and their beautiful songs. Because they open up that part of my heart that feels all of it. The good. The bad. All of it. Whatever is there. So that I can keep love and hope and all the rest alive.

This is how we keep it alive. And this is how we find real strength. The kind that loves fully and thoroughly. The kind that Christ and the Buddha, Ghandi and King, Mother Theresa and Mohammed Yunus, Desmond Tutu and and all of the strongest among us bring to life. And remind us what real strength looks like.

I don't know why we take all of their efforts for granted. Why we take all of it for granted. I don't know why.

I just know that a world that operates like that without something more honest to help people correct it will consume itself. As North Korea, Iran, Cuba, Zimbabwe, as much as Nazi Germany and Soviet Communism are testament to.

And I don't want that for my children. Or anyone else in my life, frankly. And I'll do everything in my power to make sure that they live in a world that is as free and safe, decent and good, loving and kind, abundant and hopeful, and all the rest that makes for the kind of life that makes life worth living.

Is love alive?

That is the question to ask if we're wondering if we've made a world worth living in for our children.

It's the central question, really. All the rest, after a certain point, for which Maslow has more details, is just window-dressing, really.

Perhaps some folks are satisfied with window dressing. I'm just not. And never will be. No matter how much bullshit we engage in.

Is love alive? That is the question that my children will ask me for whether we have made real progress in the world.

At least I hope they will. I'll be damned disappointed if they don't. And I'll be goddamned proud, if they do.

Is love alive?

Good goddamned question.

We get to decide.

Let's hope the answer is yes. For all our sakes.

In the meantime, it's nice to have someone ask the question.

Progress and other matters of the heart

After watching a long period of people in all walks of life, futily and foolishly, try to scare the world and one another into some bizarre and dangerously distorted notion of progress in the world, this is what I have to share as a bottom line.

It is clearly a failed path. It's not just a failed path for us, as is so clearly is to anyone not trying to defend the failure.

What has been bizarre about this path, from the beginning, is that it was the most clearly failed path of the 20th century, and really the failed path of the long length of any honest history of humanity. It was the failed path of Adolph Hitler's Nazi regime and Joseph Stalin's and the Soviet Politburo's Communist government. It was those failures that vindicated the efforts of liberal democracies, like our own, that took freedom and democracy seriously in a world that, at the beginning of that century, oppressed the majority of its people under the auspices of the very same logic that has animated this bizarre and failed period of repression as some proxy for a more honest path to progress.

The world got substantially freer over the course of the 20th century. And it's inhabitants had lives that were substantially better by almost any measure one could take of quality or quantity of life offered by this freedom.

And like every period of regression and repression in human history, the world looked at all of that real progress and said, "But it has not kept us from making the mistakes that frighten us." And they started turning the clock backward.

Apparently oblivious to the fact that no philosophy, or religion, or form of governance, or any institution or rule or law or belief or system of belief whatsoever will ever keep people from making mistakes in the world, even the mistakes that fighten us.

Quite to the contrary, most of the most serious mistakes in the world that frighten us are a function of the very kind of cynicism and fear about the world that animates that belief. Nazism and Communism being but only two of the many plethora versions of that tragic and foolish and clearly ineffective means of making all of our mistakes and our fears about all of our mistakes go away.

Here's the bottom line for our personal lives.

If we do not take responsibility for our failures, including our failures trying to force one another to stop failing and stop making choices we don't want them to make, it does not make our failure go away.

Pretending that you haven't failed doesn't mean you haven't. It just means you're pretending.

And the most important failure we are experiencing, right now, outside of failing to keep ourselves safer or more financially secure or have more honest safety around our health or to address our environmental or other common problems effectively, is raising our children and believing that trying to force them to be better people really is some kind of compensation for our own failures to be better people and the examples they need.

In all our fear-mongering, we have desperately lost sight of being the kind of honest, decent people that our children need to look up to.

And trying to pretend that we are being those people when we very clearly have decided to take the route of dishonesty, manipulation, fear, and base impulse, is really the saddest fate of all.

Failing and honestly facing your failure so you can move forward and avoid making the same mistakes is by far a better path than screwing up again and again, pretending like you are not, and then refusing to face your failure.

And failure as a parent, on this mark, is the saddest failure I can imagine.

Which is why it becomes all the more incumbent for us to get honest. And to face that failure, rather than stubbornly refusing out of an ego that betrays us because it fails to allow us to move forward and learn from the failure and our mistakes. And, ironically, the reason why threats and force and power are so counterproductive is because they undermine this very kind of open acknowledgement of mistakes and failure that allow us to move forward.

So here's the bottom line.

We want to keep failing as parents and teachers and political leaders and citizens because we stubbornly do not want to face the much more stubborn fact that our efforts to force others to be who we want them to be is counterproductive and demonstrates a lack of respect for their own ideas of what kind of people they want to be, so be it.

Don't face it.

And live with it.

And at the end of the day. When you're making excuses for how it's the pop culture or the schools or capitalism or the government or Western decadence or whatever dumbass excuse people have come up with, this time, for why they're not responsible for their failures as parents to treat their children with kindness and respect or why they're not responsible for the failures as citizens, neighbors and political representatives to treat their fellow citizens, neighbors, and colleagues with respect for their conscience and understanding and choices.

Just know that pretending that we are not failiing does not make the failure go away.

If you doubt that, ask the Soviet Union. They did it for 70 years. And only stopped because people just wouldn't put up with it anymore when it became crystal clear what a failure the whole dumbass idea of Communism was.

If you don't want to face your failures - as a parent, in your career, as a leader, as a human being - noone can make you. That's just a fact. And there is no talking or leveraging or manipulating our way around that fact.

You want to keep failing. So be it. Keep it up.

But no amount of pretending makes the failure go away.

Facts of life are stubborn like that. Much more stubborn than anything denial of them could ever muster.

That's why it's been so important to me to keep this one straight, no matter how much people try to bullshit they're way through it.

Because that failure, the failing as a parent, is the one that would break my heart more than any other. And I would count myself as a failure not if my child made mistakes or failed, themselves. That is an inescapable fact of life. There is no learning that happens without it.

I would count myself as a failure as a parent if my children either held back their own dreams to please some distorted notion of my own ego desperately trying not to face my own failures or if they decided just not to talk to or deal with me anymore, at all, as a parent, because I just persistently refused to face the fact that they are their own people with their own chosen courses in life and that I am there to help facilitate their growth, not to determine it's direction.

And if we don't want to face our failure to force people to be the kinds of people we want them to be, either as parents or teachers, or through politics or any other forum, then we will live with those much more serious failures.

Failures of the heart. The most serious failures of all.

Sara Bareilles and Ingrid Michaelson offer a more honest way forward.



It is in opening our hearts that we will more honestly move forward.

Without it, we are lost. As long as we take the path that avoids it.

And that really is the most tragic fate of all.

Perhaps it is time to reconsider what our hearts have to offer.

Freedom and virtue

If you make me choose between freedom and virtue, I'll choose freedom.

So don't make me choose.

Dumb, dum-dum dumb

When did foreign policy get so unfathomably dumb that it became a contest between nice and tough? How stupid do we have to get before we recognize that we can be tough and nice as situations honestly call for them?

The danger of Obama's dithering

Who do you know who is only nice all the time? Or tough all the time? Noone. Not even King and Ghandi were nice all the time. And not even Hitler and Stalin for tough all the time.

But that doesn't mean we're going to sit around and pretend like the problem with the world is that there are too many Kings and Ghandis and not enough Hitlers and Stalins. And it doesn't mean that we sit around and act like we somehow forfeit understanding for tough as our liberal values and our self-defense are honestly advanced by either.

Least possible necessary aggression. Meaning, we use force as little as possible. And we only use it when it is honestly consistent with our liberal values.

Note to John Bolton: this is why you lost your job, dumbass. You want to sit around and pout that the world just doesn't understand what guys like you who want to whack everything they don't like do for the world. So be it.

And don't expect to get your job back, you dipshit.

And don't expect the rest of us to listen to a guy who can't get figured out that he and his boss were booted from office for exactly this reason. It certainly wasn't for the socialism, that's for sure.

If you can't reason beyond this stupid false choice, John, you need to join professional wrestling where that level of reasoning is more appreciated.

Because we need something smarter than that in foreign policy, John.

And every time you write you remind me why I put up with the socialist bullshit to make sure I get someone in that office who knows to stop pretending to be a terrorist to defend ourselves against them.

Faith amidst tragedy

Makes me yearn to hear from one of my more important heroes. C.S. Lewis.

This is one of the more resonant religious discussions I have heard in a long time, from Reverend Tom Honey.

As a Christian youth leader, earlier in my life, and an atheist with a deep and profound Christian and moral grounding, a believer in universal morality and spiritual connection, and who finds much more in common with people of various faiths than I could ever possibly find different, I found this discussion of God in the contemporary world very moving and thoughtful.



I think the bottom line is do we live lives where we honestly prevent such tragedy, or do we live lives where we are indifferent or make worse such tragedy or make it possible, at all?

We make choices, is what we do. And our choices either hasten tragedy. Or they prevent it.

The trick of life is that we all work with terribly incomplete understandings of what will and what will not hasten or prevent tragedy. And we have stronger opinions, on the matter, typically, than we have reason to believe so strongly. We talk more than we listen. We assume more than we know. We try to overpower more than engage and understand.

Real progress in tackling our problems necessitates that we are humble more than we are more certain than we can ever possibly be about how we can work together to tackle them together.

A discussion well worth a listen.

The way forward in Afghanistan

Steve Coll has a remarkably well-reasoned and thoroughly knowledgeable essay about Afghanistan and our future course in the current issue of Foreign Policy.

The Case for Humility in Afghanistan

"To improve its chances for success, the United States and the international community must bring all of their leverage to bear to ensure the formation of a coalition government in Kabul that incorporates all of the meaningful sources of non-Taliban opposition and sets Afghan political and tribal leaders on a sustained, Afghan-led program of political, constitutional, and electoral reform.

Some analysts have suggested invoking the Afghan institution of a loya jirga to host some or all of this continuous reform process. Whether that specific institution is selected or not, the spirit of this suggestion is critical -- Afghans have many difficult but important political and constitutional issues to negotiate, and political business-as-usual will not carry these negotiations forward adequately at a time when the United States is risking blood and treasure in support of Afghan stability. Issues that require discussion and negotiation among Afghan leaders, both formal and informal, include the future of the electoral system, to ensure fraud on the scale alleged in the most recent election cannot recur; political party formation and activity; constitutional issues such as the election of governors and the role of parliament; and issues of national integrity such as the access of different ethnic, tribal and identity groups to government employment and opportunity in the expanding security services.

Political reform and Afghan-led negotiations of this type must be seen as fundamental to American policy in Afghanistan no matter what choices are made about troop levels and deployments. Such a process would be part and parcel, too, of national program of reconciliation and reintegration designed to provide ways for Taliban foot soldiers to find jobs and for their leaders to forswear violence and enter politics.

This emphasis on political stability through continuous Afghan-led negotiation and national reintegration, as opposed to grandiose state-building or policies premised on the pursuit of military victory by external forces, should not be seen as an adjunct wing of U.S. policy in Afghanistan, but as fundamental. It is clear that no realistic level of American and Afghan forces deployable in the foreseeable future can provide security to the population in every village of Afghanistan. Accepting this reality and developing a political-military strategy that best accounts for it will lead, inevitably, to support for Afghan-led political approaches at the national, provincial, district and sub-district level. This is how the late Gorbachev-backed government in Kabul achieved a modicum of stability in far less favorable circumstances.

America's record of policy failure in Afghanistan and Pakistan during the last 30 years should humble all of us. It should bring humility to the way we define our goals and realism about the means required to achieve them. It should lead us to choose political approaches over kinetic military ones, urban population security over provocative rural patrolling, and Afghan and Pakistani solutions over American blueprints. But it should not lead us to defeatism or to acquiescence in a violent or forcible Taliban takeover of either country. We have the means to prevent that, and it is in our interest to do so."

The only argument I have with Steve's reasoning is that if you read the entirety of this article - which I highly encourage if you care about the fate of Afghanistan and American troops rooting out our Al Queda enemies and their allies in the Taliban there - the only consistent conclusion you can come to from the entirety of that argument - which I largely agree with; the thrust of which being that all of our efforts must make central the political task of a self-determining Afghani effort to reconcile their ethnic and political differences to create a pluralistic, strong Afghani government capable of offering security to its population and developing a process by which its serious divisions can be healed, over time - such an effort cannnot be secured, as Steve suggests in that first line I quoted, with external Western pressure.

To the contrary, the entirety of Steve's article illustrates the successive folly of various outside forces from imposing or pressuring their will externally and how this has bred the mistrust in foreign armies that is now the central problem America is contending with.

Meaning, we are very unlikely to get ourselves out of that mess if we make the same mistakes that caused this mess in the first place.

Americans and the West need to get on the up and up and be cooperating honestly with competing Afghani political parties to work on building a self-determining Afghani government rather than expecting the Afghanis to be patrons of our largesse and subjects to our leverage. As Steve argues well in this article, I believe, both are bad courses, of the long haul.

Instead of Americans focussing on what they can do to stabilize Afghanistan, what Steve is saying well in this article that deserves our attention, I think, is America should focus on what it can do to support Afghanis to address the political divisions and the military strategies, with American help, when necessary, to secure their country and create a pluralistic Afghani future of their own choosing that looks after the interests of all Afghanis, and seeks to destroy, arrest, and, when possible, coopt or moderate the Taliban and their supporters as a necessary prerequisite to looking after those Afghanis' interests.

The way through in Afghanistan and Iraq is to get more honest with ourselves about the extent to which we have engaged these wars more self-centeredly and to get less self-centered in our engagement.

If we want Afghanis to trust us, we need to be trustworthy. And that is the only honest way to success.

Just how far backwards we've fallen

Peter Berkowitz, at Stanford University's Hoover Institution, offers up the most serious case of censorship in the halls of liberal education that I have seen in a very long time. And a testament to just how illiberal we have become.

Academia Goes Silent on Free Speech

"Consider Yale. On Oct. 1, the university hosted Danish cartoonist Kurt Westergaard. His drawing of Muhammad with a bomb in his turban became the best known of 12 cartoons published by the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten in September 2005. That led to deadly protests throughout the Muslim world. On the same day, at an unrelated event, Yale hosted Brandeis Prof. Jytte Klausen. Her new book, "The Cartoons that Shook the World," was subject in August to a last minute prepublication decision by Yale President Richard Levin and Yale University Press to remove not only the 12 cartoons but also all representations of Muhammad, including respected works of art.

The Westergaard appearance inspired protests. Muslim students condemned Yale's invitation to the cartoonist as religiously and racially insensitive, compared him to Holocaust deniers and white supremacists, and declared his art and utterances hate speech rather than free speech.

Students will be students. It is to be hoped that those who opposed Mr. Westergaard's invitation will learn at Yale that the aim of liberal education is not to guard their sensitivities but to teach them to listen to diverse opinions and fortify them to respond with better arguments to those with whom they disagree.

Mr. Westergaard's appearance did prompt a small faculty-led panel discussion on Oct. 7. It dealt mainly with Muslim reaction to the cartoons, though Prof. Seyla Benhabib said that in Ms. Klausen's position she would have withdrawn the book. But generally the faculty has been unmoved by Yale's censorship of Ms. Klausen's book, which suggests that lessons in the fundamentals of liberty of thought and discussion may be lacking on campus.

To be sure, Yale's censorship—the right word because Yale suppressed content on moral and political grounds—raised difficult questions. Can't rights, including freedom of speech and press, be limited to accommodate other rights and goods? What if reprinting the cartoons and other depictions gave thugs and extremists a new opportunity to inflame passions and unleash violence? Can't the consequences of the cartoons' original publication be understood without reproducing them? Weren't the cartoons really akin, as Yale Senior Lecturer Charles Hill pointed out in a letter to the Yale Alumni magazine, to the depictions of Jews as grotesque monsters that successive American administrations have sought to persuade Arab newspapers to cease publishing? And isn't it true, as Mr. Hill also observed, that Yale's obligation to defend free speech does not oblige it to subsidize gratuitously offensive or intellectually worthless speech?

These are good questions—to which there are good answers.

Rights are subject to limits, but a right as fundamental to the university and the nation as freedom of speech and press should only be limited in cases of imminent danger and not in deference to speculation about possible violence at an indeterminate future date. One can't properly evaluate Ms. Klausen's contention that the cartoons were cynically manipulated without assessing with one's own eyes whether the images passed beyond mockery and ridicule to the direct incitement of violence.

Even if the cartoons exhibited a kinship to anti-Semitic caricatures, it would cut in favor of publication: a scholar would be derelict in his duties if he published a work on anti-Semitic images without including examples. And finally, if Yale chooses to publish a rigorous analysis of the Danish cartoon controversy, which affected the national interest and roiled world affairs, then the university does incur a scholarly obligation to include all the relevant information and evidence including the cartoons at the center, regardless of whether they are in themselves gratuitously offensive and intellectually worthless.

The wonder is that Yale's censorship has excited so little debate at Yale. The American Association of University Professors condemned Yale for caving in to terrorists' "anticipated demands." And a group of distinguished alumni formed the Yale Committee for a Free Press and published a letter protesting Yale's "surrender to potential unknown billigerents" and calling on the university to correct its error by reprinting Ms. Klausen's book with the cartoons and other images intact. But the Yale faculty has mostly yawned. Even the famously activist Yale Law School has, according to its director of public affairs, sponsored no programs on censorship and the university.

Alas, there is good reason to suppose that in its complacency about threats to freedom on campus the Yale faculty is typical of faculties at our leading universities. In 2006, even as the police had barely begun their investigation, Duke University President Richard Brodhead lent the prestige of his office to faculty members' prosecution and conviction in the court of public opinion of three members of the Duke lacrosse team falsely accused of gang raping an African-American exotic dancer. It turned out they were being pursued by a rogue prosecutor. To be sure, it was only a vocal minority at Duke who led the public rush to judgment. But the vast majority of the faculty stood idly by, never rising to defend the presumption of innocence and the requirements of fair process. Perhaps Duke faculty members did not realize or perhaps they did not care that these formal and fundamental protections against the abuse of power belong among the conditions essential to the lively exchange of ideas at the heart of liberal education.

Similarly, in 2005, Harvard President Lawrence Summers sparked a faculty revolt that ultimately led to his ouster by floating at a closed-door, off-the-record meeting the hypothesis—which he gave reasons for rejecting only a few breaths after posing it—that women were poorly represented among natural science faculties because significantly fewer women than men are born with the extraordinary theoretical intelligence necessary to succeed at the highest scientific levels. Before he was forced to resign, Mr. Summers did his part to set back the cause of unfettered intellectual inquiry by taking the side of his accusers and apologizing repeatedly for having dared to expose an unpopular idea to rational analysis. Apart from a few honorable exceptions, the Harvard faculty could not find a principle worth defending in the controversy over Mr. Summer's remarks.

As the controversies at Yale, Duke and Harvard captured national attention, professors from other universities haven't had much to say in defense of liberty of thought and discussion either. This silence represents a collective failure of America's professors of colossal proportions. What could be a clearer sign of our professors' loss of understanding of the requirements of liberal education than their failure to defend liberty of thought and discussion where it touches them most directly?"

If we cannot count on a commitment to liberal education, thought, discussion, and debate on university campuses, where in the hell can we count on them?

We have taken a very dark and seriously wrong turn in the last decade. Our fears about being too liberal, which more than 200 years of experience should have taught Americans, by now, is not possible, have led us down a terribly ugly and small-minded illiberal path, following the lead of our repressive and illiberal brethren in the Middle East and Communist Cuba, China, and North Korea and all of the places in the world where force really is the governing philosophy.

It is bizarre, in the extreme, to watch the liberal world simulataneously take a more illiberal turn all in the name of battle with these illiberal regimes and actors and out of a seriously unhealthy fixation and obsession with making the world finally right with enough capacity to force it to be so.

That is the central obsession of the terrorists and illiberal regimes we are fighting

Why in God's name would we be adopting it as our own as we defend ourselves from the destruction wreaked by these cultures and their terrorist spawn?

Because we are scared. That's why. And it is our fear of our own shadows, not love for liberty that makes us weak.

Our liberty makes us strong. Because it reflects our courage and confidence. In ourselves and in humanity.

And it is the cruel and bitter face of power as a means to finally rid us of our weakness among Al Queda and the likes of Kim Jong Il and Robert Mugabe that are the truest reflections of weakness and obsession with power and with the dark impulses it is meant to suppress.

Weakness is our failure to face this obsession with our basest impulses.

Strength is our ability to face it and ourselves honestly. And to openly discuss all that fear that debilitates us and makes us believe that we are unfailingly weaker than we might otherwise be.

One thing is for sure. Our lurch into illiberalism, whether it come from the left or the right, is not a movement forward, no matter how much we might like to pretend to the contrary. It has neither made things better nor will it ever, in Iran or North Korea nor in the liberal democracies that should know better.

Because our progress is predicated on our liberty. It always has been and it always will be. No matter how much we bullshit otherwise.

Our biggest waste

I think the capacity to reason is wasted on homo sapiens. I have never, in my life, encountered a species with such infinite capacity for thought so stubbornly committed to weaseling out of using it. Except insofar as it can help them avoid doing so.

It is not that people are incapable of reasoning. It is that they willfully refuse to do so. For fear of overspending their severely limited capacity to ever admit they are wrong about any goddamned thing.

Perhaps the high road

After so much failure in manipulating the thuggish regime of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Shirin Ebadi suggests taking the high road.

How to Engage with Iran: A fellow Nobel Peace laureate offers some friendly advice, and a rebuke, to President Obama.

"SHIRIN EBADI, a 62-year-old Iranian lawyer who won the Nobel Peace Prize six years ago, is generally cautious and measured in her speech. She is a human rights lawyer who says that she does not involve herself in politics. She says that it's not her job to favor one party over another, as long as the government respects people's right to express themselves.

So it was startling this week to hear Ms. Ebadi say bluntly that the Obama administration has gotten some things backward when it comes to Iran. It's not that engaging with the government is a mistake, she said during a visit to The Post. But paying so much more attention to Iran's nuclear ambitions than to its trampling of democracy and freedom is a mistake both tactical and moral.

Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad 'is at the lowest level of popularity one can imagine,' Ms. Ebadi said. 'If the West focuses exclusively on the nuclear issue, Ahmadinejad can tell his people that the West is against Iran's national interest and rally people to his cause. But if the West presses also on its human rights record, he will find himself in a position where his popular base is getting weaker and weaker by the day.'

Administration officials point out that they have not focused exclusively on the nuclear issue. President Obama has spoken out in support of democracy forces, and Undersecretary of State William J. Burns put human rights on the agenda during his meeting with an Iranian official in Geneva this month. Ms. Ebadi acknowledged that Mr. Obama has said 'that the voice of the people needs to be heard. But he needs to repeat the statement again and again, so that people in Iran hear him.'

Ms. Ebadi suggested that the nature of Iran's regime is more crucial to U.S. security than any specific deals on nuclear energy. Iran's people are not as wedded to the nuclear program as the regime wants outsiders to believe. A democratic government would be unlikely to build a nuclear bomb, she said, and even if it did, the weapon would not be a threat in the hands of a government that would not view America or Israel as enemies. By contrast, she argued, even a seemingly ironclad nuclear agreement with Mr. Ahmadinejad might be of little value: 'Imagine if the government actually promised to stop its nuclear program tomorrow. Would you trust this government not to start another secret nuclear program somewhere else?'

The courage it takes to say such things may be difficult for Americans to comprehend. Ms. Ebadi's husband, 67, and her brother and sister are called in for questioning every week, she said, and pressured to pressure her. Many of her clients are in prison, some now facing the death penalty. She herself intends to return to her homeland. But the events of the summer -- the prematurely announced election results, the shootings of peaceful protesters in the street and on university campuses, the rapes of imprisoned protesters, the ghoulish show trials of alleged traitors to the regime -- seem to have convinced her that she must speak out."

Perhaps honest discussion might do more good than we realize.

Perhaps our weakness has been being too scared to just live up to our highest liberal values.

This is what force looks like

Those who have been arguing for it's use as a governing philosophy should be proud.

How else better to get your way?

What democracy is for

Why the Democrats' Health Care Overhaul May Die

All I know is that I will avoid voting for as many Democrats as possible, out of this, in the next election and in as many elections to come as is necessary.

And if progressive ideologues doubt that this is a prevailing sentiment, in the face of polls that demonstrate stronger voter disapproval, I suggest they watch how those midterm elections go down.

Anyone wanna bet Democrats lose seats? How much?

And, more importantly, anyone wanna bet how much they deserve it, right now?

This is what we have democracy for. To get rid of assholes who could give two shits about how Americans want to run their our own lives.

I don't intend on taking that freedom for granted.

Our progress springs from our hatred

"Shout. Shout out his name."

George Bush.

Barack Obama.

John McCain.

Hillary Clinton.

Ronald Reagan.

Bill Clinton.

Republican.

Democrat.

Our progress springs from our hatred.

Love is weakness. Power is strength. Freedom betrays us. Force improves us.

Reason is for the weak, and patient, and naive.

Power is the only reason that counts.

Many people have reasoned this way. Much tragedy has been made down this road.

Most human tragedy has been made down this road.

But, somehow, more enlightened people have convinced us that this is the way of the future. Rather than a tragic vestige of our past.

When it serves their cause, that is.

And when hatred is confused with progress.

Which it has been many times. Always ending in tragedy. Always.

Perhaps this is the time that it restrains freedom for good.

Or perhaps it will fail as it has every time.

You tell me.

Is history a march of freedom?

Or a march of power?

You choose.

Why Madonna can bite me

Because Natalie Portman is my true love. The Love Doctor said it was so.

The Love Calculator

These are the results of the calculations by Dr. Love:

Ben Sutherland Natalie Portman - 92 %

Dr. Love thinks that a relationship between Ben Sutherland and Natalie Portman has a very good chance of being successful, but this doesn't mean that you don't have to work on the relationship. Remember that every relationship needs spending time together, talking with each other etc.

I've always had a thing for girls who support microfinance. Makes me all tingly inside.

And then there's this.



Thank you, Love Doctor.

If that ain't love, I don't know what is.

So how's all that stone-throwing workin' out?

Barbara Boxer finally says something, for the first time in a long time, that I agree with.

Barbara Boxer asks why we all have to be throwing stones



I'm just as baffled at President Obama winning the Nobel Peace Prize, without a peace deal to his name, as the next person. Seems kinda bizarre to award a peace prize to a guy who snubs the Dalai Lama so he isn't a bother to his buddies in China who are just a little too extreme for his tastes. Having said that, I don't have a problem, in the least, with the Nobel committee encouraging someone who is more genuinely committed to peace in a world full of sometimes foolish, sometimes hateful folks promoting warfare, aggression, manipulation, and, generally, an obsession with power and our worst instincts to rid the world of those very impulses. Including our President, ironically, too often.

But I do think America and the world might take a step back and answer Barbara's question.

How's all that stone-throwin workin' out? We got any progress up in here yet? Things gettin' better? Isn't all this progress a little overwhelming? Isn't it awesome how much better everything has gotten the bigger of pricks we've become?

In fact, isn't the most incredible sign of progress exactly what colossal pricks we've all become in the name of progress?

Isn't that what progress looks like, actually?

How shitty we treat one another?

We treat people shittier. Things get better for everyone.

At least that's what the Taliban and our pals in the Chinese Communist party say.

And since we are weak and they are strong, it only makes sense to follow their lead.

Because, really, when everything is going off in such flying colors, how can anyone doubt all this progress?

Victor Davis Hanson, or why power, and its obsession, corrupts

This is why Lord Acton said that power corrupts.

Victor Davis Hanson says Obama's too nice

Because it, and the obsession with it, makes people unbearable pricks. Because when they exercise it, or obsess over it, they often become so invested in defending their uses of it and advocacy for its uses, that they can so rarely ever admit when they might be wrong. Like Victor Davis Hanson.

Victor Davis Hanson is the right-wing version of Paul Krugman. He is clever. Too clever by half. And obsessed with power. And always right. Always. No matter how wrong he might be.

And that is why Lord Acton is one of the more honest founders of our liberal democratic heritage.

And why Victor Davis Hanson, like Paul Krugman, is a columnist who can't get respect. Except from the people who think he's always right.

Right...

"Capitalism: A Love Story": Michael's Moore's Grapes of Wrath

And Zombie Stripper is Jenna Jameson's Scarlet Letter.

Headline: Millionaire film director and grotesquely obese fat-ass puts the final nail in the coffin of capitalism and proves once and for all that everyone should care desperately about their health.

How could anyone doubt this guy?

I smell a Pulitzer!

Some peace of my own

I think I've decided that I really just want to find a woman, someone I can really trust and love, and hide away from the world, is the truth.

People are so shitty to one another, is the truth. Stubbornly so. And as long as they are, I just want to be away from them and it all. If people aren't going to stop being shitty, I just don't want anything to do with them, is the truth.

I just want one woman with a loving heart to talk about anything and everything that might be on my heart. And not have to worry about her being petty, or snarky, or shitty about people in the world. Because I'm beyond exhausted with all that shit.

I want a wife. And maybe some kids. And some peace in life.

And let everyone tear up this world and one another as much as they like, if they're not gonna stop. Don't stop, I say. And live in the shitty world you make. And no matter what excuses people make, the only force responsible for fucking things up was the force of everyone's own egos. And I just don't want anything to do with any of it, anymore.

Humanity can enjoy the shitty world of their own making.

I just want some peace away from it all.

Her feelings don't support our cause? Fuck her.

At last. The most honest and even-handed account of the Roman Polanski affair I have read to date. And what is at stake for those all-too-uninterested in the feelings or wishes of the person who actually experienced this horrible crime.

The War over Polanski

Brendan O'Neill's particularly keen insights, from The Australian, are shared here, under an unbearably dark cloud of shame, in toto:

"Should Roman Polanski be extradited to the US over his statutory rape of a 13-year-old girl in Los Angeles in March 1977? It's an interesting legal question. But it's not the question that is driving the trans-Atlantic furore that followed the film director's arrest in Switzerland last weekend.

Instead, various prejudices and unresolved battles are being projected on to l'affaire Polanski, robbing it of its legal complexities and turning it into a proxy culture war in which clapped-out conservatives and disoriented liberals are hurling intellectual (and not-so-intellectual) grenades at one another.

Polanski, the Polish-French maker of some decent films (Chinatown, Rosemary's Baby, The Pianist) and some awful ones too (Frantic, The Dance of the Vampires), pleaded guilty in a Los Angeles court in 1977 to having sexual intercourse with a minor.

On March 10, 1977, then 44, he had taken Samantha Gailey, a 13-year-old child model, to the home of Jack Nicholson in Mulholland, California, where he said he was going to take photographs of her for the French edition of Vogue. After taking the photos, he gave Gailey champagne and a sedative and performed oral sex, intercourse and sodomy on her while she said: 'No, I don't want to do this.' The original charges against Polanski were 'rape by use of drugs, sodomy, and a lewd and lascivious act with a child under the age of 14'. As part of a plea bargain Polanski got it reduced to 'sexual intercourse with a minor'.

When he realised that even this charge could land him in jail, he fled the US.

But the newspaper commentary and feverish diplomatic activity that greeted his arrest in Switzerland have not been concerned with the facts of the case, the question of legal precedents or the issue of justice.

Instead, Polanski has been turned into a symbol. For conservatives, still convinced that the 1960s are the root of all evil, he is symbolic of the perversions allegedly unleashed by the naked, hippie, free-love liberations of the countercultural period, with his rape of a 13-year-old girl seen virtually as the logical end product of legalising drug use and encouraging people to be sexually experimental.

For liberals he is a symbol of tortured European artistry who is being victimised by an ugly and prudish America. For US officials, Polanski symbolises European degeneracy and they fantasise that returning him to an American jail will be a victory for Reaganite decency over French moral turpitude.

For French officials, meanwhile, Polanski is a symbol of Europe's gallant recovery from its dark past (Polanski and his family, Polish Jews, were persecuted during the Holocaust), who is being tortured anew by 'the darker side of America, the side that scares us all'.

Just as Mia Farrow's Rosemary was a vessel for the devil in Rosemary's Baby, so Polanski has been turned into a vessel for all sorts of political jibber-jabber today.

It is striking how quickly the discussion of what Polanski, one man, did to Gailey, one girl, twists and turns into a discussion about competing moral values and even clashing national standards. For 60s-baiting conservatives, Polanski has long been a rotting symbol of everything that is wrong with that decade.

Both Polanski's experience of a terrible crime in 1969 and his execution of a crime in 1977 are held up as evidence of the darker side of the 60s and why a diet of sexual looseness, rock'n'roll and drugs is a Bad Thing.

In 1969, Polanski's wife Sharon Tate, a beautiful actress, was brutally murdered by Charles Manson's cult, the Family. Family members stabbed to death Tate and four others at Polanski's home in California while he was away; Tate was 8 1/2 months pregnant.

That crime, carried out by a tiny cult of weird hippies, has been cited by US conservatives as the neat conclusion to a decade in which traditional values had collapsed under the weight of a new generation that was less respectful than its 50s forebears; it was the 'dark side of the California dream', as one writer argued, a product of the 'political, social and cultural turbulence of the 1960s'.

The Manson crimes have been analysed more than any other serial-killing episodes in US history because they have been elevated from the realm of crime to the world of politics and morality, used by conservatives to absolve themselves of any responsibility for the collapse of traditional values in the 60s (instead it was all the fault of the Beatles, the Beach Boys, drugs and other things loved by Manson) and to depict sexual liberation and social experimentation as having necessarily brutal consequences.

Yet just as Polanski was a victim of alleged 60s excesses, so he was a rapacious product of those excesses, too. Any sympathy for Polanski dried up following his conviction for unlawful intercourse in 1977. This, too, conservatives argued, was part of the degeneracy of the American west coast in the mid to late-20th century; it sprang from a determination to 'push back the boundaries of sexual liberation', as one report said this week.

Some American law enforcers and right-wing commentators seem to imagine that having Polanski returned to the US will finally end the odious influence of the 60s on society. Under the headline 'Why we dislike the French' one conservative columnist asks how liberal Europe can 'support a child rapist'.

Yet if this attempt to write off 60s sexual liberation (some of which was progressive, some of which was solipsistic) on the back of Polanski's past is bad, then the defence of Polanski by European government officials and commentators is even worse.

They are motivated not by anything remotely related to legal norms or questions of justice but by a snobbish anti-Americanism in which Polanski (who is probably a bit of a creep) becomes recast as a paragon of European decency against hung-up America.

So determined are some liberal observers to use l'affaire Polanski to get one over on the US that they have even forgotten about their normal role of stoking up hysterical panics about pedophiles and have re-depicted Polanski's encounter with Gailey as just an over-exuberant heavy-petting session. European liberals rallied to Polanski's defence against what Frederic Mitterrand, nephew of the former French president and a friend of Polanski, described as a senseless and outrageous arrest that springs from 'the darker side of America, the one that scares us all'.

In short, Polanski is not merely being pursued under an old legalistic arrest warrant, the kind that exists for many fugitives, but is the European victim of evil America.

One French commentator says the US is 'acting out some kind of prudish revenge' against a 'great talent who never abided by American rules'. Here, Polanski's actions in 1977 are presented as a bit of rule-breaking and anyone who thinks he should be punished for them is clearly an un-arty prude.

But whatever you think of the arrest warrant against Polanski and the motivations of US law enforcers, it is not prudish to think that performing oral sex and sodomy on a drunk 13-year-old is unacceptable behaviour.

The difference between the liberal media reaction to Polanski and to Gary Glitter - the big-haired glam-rock star who in 1997 was discovered to have child porn on his computer - is striking. Where Glitter has been turned by the British media into a symbol of the pedophilic evil that is allegedly stalking our land, Polanski is presented as the misunderstood artist who is the real victim here, of a 'money-grabbing American mother and a publicity-hungry Californian judge'.

So keen are some liberals to mark themselves out as Not American that they are effectively saying: 'Polanski might be a pedophile, but he's our pedophile.'

But perhaps the worst aspect of the Polanski affair is the competition of victimhoods. It is testimony to the domination of the victim culture in society that Polanski haters and Polanski defenders have used the language of victimology to make their case.

For many American and British commentators this is all about Gailey, whom they have transformed into the archetypal victim of the alleged great evil of our time, child abuse. 'Remember: Polanski raped a child', says a headline in Salon online.

For European observers, by contrast, Polanski's actions can be explained by his victimised past, especially during the Holocaust. We have to understand his 'life tragedies' and how they moulded him, says one filmmaker.

Anne Applebaum, a US commentator who spends much of her time in Europe, says Polanski fled the US in 1978 because of his 'understandable fear of irrational punishment. Polanski's mother died in Auschwitz. His father survived in Mauthausen. He himself survived the Krakow ghetto.' (Applebaum fails to disclose that she is married to Polish Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski, who is campaigning against Polanski's extradition.)

This spat in victimology confirms that the politics of victimhood dominates debate on both sides of the Atlantic, but in the Anglo-American sphere it is the victim of child abuse that is most sacrosanct, while in Europe it is the victims of the Holocaust who enjoy the most unquestioned moral authority, to the extent that Polanski's fleeing of the US can be excused as a latent reaction by a tortured man to the horrors of Auschwitz.

L'affaire Polanski has become a culture war that dare not speak its name, a pale imitation of the debates about values that have emerged at various times during the past 50 years.

As a result we are none the wiser about the legal usefulness of 30-year-old arrest warrants or contemporary extradition laws, as observers have instead turned Polanski into a ventriloquist's dummy or a voodoo doll for the purposes of letting off cheap moral steam."

It is tragically and tellingly ironic that in the obsession that has grown out of the legitimate concern for victims of childhood sexual abuse, that noone seems particularly interested with the feelings and wishes of the victim in this case, don't you think?

Tells you something about what such people really think about victims of sexual abuse. That they are an useless afterthought to, as Brenda brilliantly puts it, their "cheap moralizing" and self-righteous grandstanding, especially if their feelings get in the way.

The only reason to care about the emotional experience of the victim, in this case, for such folks, is if her feelings happen to support their cause.

And if they don't, fuck her, they reason.

She doesn't care about the feelings of the real victims, anyway.

Let that be a warning to all selfish rape victims

Samantha Geimer thinks it's all about her.

She "got over it long ago," she whines endlessly. "He did something really gross to me, but it was the media that ruined my life," she says, callously disregarding Roman Polanski's real victims. Everyone else.

Does Samantha not realize that it is was everyone else who got raped that night by Roman Polanski? Does she not recognize just how selfish she is trying to deny justice to the rest of us for what Roman Polanski did to her, that night? Some people can just never get over themselves.

What Samantha Geimer does not realize is that it was not her that was raped that night at Roman Polanski's hands. What happened to Samantha Geimer is really quite beside the point, frankly.

It is what happened to everyone else that night that really is what is important, in this case.

And if Samantha Geimer wants Roman Polanski to be forgiven for that terrible crime. Well, that is just tough titty.

Because it's not all about Samantha Geimer, now is it?

What it's really about is the real victims. Everyone else.

When will selfish rape victims ever learn to think about someone other than themselves?

What it means to be more genuinely liberal (when everyone takes liberty for granted)

The worst consequence for any know-it-all - and this is most certainly a case of "it takes one to know one," in this as in the case of almost every damn fool thing that comes to my attention in the world - is being seriously wrong on anything of import. Try an enormous hunk of your central professional and personal commitments in life. Then you'd know what it's like to be Paul Krugman.

Paul Krugman: We're Still Not Spending Enough

His dumbassery has become so obvious, I almost feel sorry for the guy. Almost.

Here's the skinny for the politically naive.

Paul is a professional economist and paid columnist and open manipulator. Paul Krugman's outlook is that if he can get you and me and everyone to constantly support more government spending, then we will support the needs of the poor and disadvantaged and all of the folks that both Paul and I care about, but which Paul can just not find it in his brain-so-chalk-full-of-himself-that-it-just-can't-ever-go-wrong to even consider that such a route might not be the best way to help such folks.

In the universe of Paul Krugman and his radical ilk, criticisms of public welfare, public education, public health care and other government sponsored programs of generosity-from-the-pockets-of-others are all one grand conspiracy against the poor, disadvantaged, and everyone in the world that Paul and his as-extreme-as-they-can-get kind pity in the world. Only the stupid or selfish or evil could possibly disagree with Mr. Krugman. Insert Nobel Prize-winning self-aggrandizing left-wing condescension here.

The ends justify the means for Paul Krugman and his likeminded friends on the left who believe that bullying and manipulating people into helping others really is not only the same as but, in fact, far superior to, helping others out of the goodness of one's heart. It is superior as much as Paul and company are superior to you and me, as well. And both are just as self-evident to Mr. Krugman and tow. He did win the Nobel Prize, after all. What else do you need to know about how much better he is than you?

It has never occurred to such folks that the problems cited in such programs just might be true. That welfare might encourage dependency and gaming of the system. That public education might be a mess very difficult to unravel exactly because it is run by the government as a matter of law rather than as a matter of autonomous responsibility by students, parents, teachers, and administrators. That public health care might suffer from serious problems, like rationing and lack of speciality care, as well as discouraging the kind of robust market that makes so much technology, prescription drugs, medical specialists, choices of insurance and medical providers and all sorts of advantages available that we enjoy and take for granted in a private health care market.

None of such criticisms could possibly be true, they reason. Because they come from nasty, selfish, mean-spirited conservatives. And everyone knows, or at least everyone on the left knows, that conservatives are only out for themselves and cannot be trusted. Ever. With anything. Certainly not with government. But really not with anything that might need a sound mind and body. Namely, anything.

I say this as someone who spent the bulk of my life as a man of the left, only to finally come to terms, in my young adulthood, that not a damn soul on the face of this earth has any or all of the final answers in the world. Including conservatives. And especially, right now, in America, since they are in power, progressives and those on the left. And, here in a few years when the right surges and retakes the reigns of government, especially conservatives and those on the right. And, really, especially anyone who breathes and has a pulse and might be tempted to seek out power based on the pretension to know everything and thus be able to make decisions for the rest of us who don't and prove once and for all what knuckleheads I and my ilk are and forever will be on this matter and all matters.

So. That's the way the game works on the left, and the right, among those who believe that manipulation, intimidation, and dishonesty is a better path than sincere engagement and understanding. Bully, guilt, and manipulate the public until they support your policies as long as you can get away with it. And when things go to shit, blame the other guy.

Fun game, isn't it? Kind of like Go Fish. Without all that honesty and decency.

And, for all kinds of bitter, mean-spirited, cynical reasons - and mostly because of all the lying - that position has been confused with what it means to be more genuinely and honestly liberal, here, as of late.

Liberal, meaning to love liberty, and to take seriously our highest and most noble values - generosity, compassion, selflessness, lovingness, decency, forgiveness, honesty, integrity, openness, and all the rest - is a value that is found in the best that conservative and progressive ideologies have to offer. And it is absent in all of the worst of both. In the stingy, mean-spirited, self-centered, hateful, spiteful, retributive, dishonest, corrupt, narrow-minded and small-hearted impulses among progressives, conservatives, and all people in the world. No ideology, nor any religion or any other grouping of any kind, has a monopoly on either wisdom in the world, nor its folly or ugliest impulses.

People of the left and right, like Christians, Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, atheists, and people of every religious and areligious persuasion, like Europeans, Africans, Asians, Middle Easterners, and Native Americans, and every variety of person on the earth, are all guilty of all of the worst impulses that the world has to offer. And they each also have much to offer of the best values, ideas, and contributions to the world.

And liberal values are the accumulation of the best that each of these traditions, ideas, values, contributions, and other offerings that each individual and each of these groups of individuals has to offer and the liberty that makes it possible for us to choose among these traditions, ideas, values, and contributions.

Without the freedom to choose which of these contributions is good or bad for us and our future, there is no way to know, honestly, which of each idea, value, contribution, and the rest is our best. That freedom is critical to our ability to know, better, what represents our best. Hence its centrality in our society and our value system.

Hence our liberal values. Our liberal education. Our liberal democracy. And our liberty, broadly.

So an economist of the left, even one with a Nobel Prize, who, at every step, demeans, eschews, bullies, manipulates, and otherwise weasels his way around and in limitation of our liberty is hardly liberal, by any honest standard. And neither is any group or individual who does the same.

A more honest liberal is someone who writes something along these lines.

The Wizard of Beck

David Brooks, a conservative in modern parlance, is without question a more committed liberal of this more honest, higher calling. In his values, in his person, and in this well-written criticism of conservatives who often profit from while taking for granted the best that free markets, freedom of speech, freedom of thought, and liberal values, and, namely, liberal education, has to offer.

David does not take them for granted. Not to the same degree, at least. He's smarter. He clearly did take his liberal education more seriously. And hence his stronger commitment to our strongest liberal values. I don't always agree with David on every matter. But he is more thoughtful and honest than either Glen Beck, whom he rightly criticizes in this piece, and Paul Krugman, who has clearly demonstrated himself, at this point, to be a less honest and more manipulative participant in our liberal democratic discussion.

The truth is our more honest and more genuinely liberty-loving people in America and the world tend to be our more decent-hearted, good-natured, thoughtful, and generally good folks in the world. If you're one of those folks who takes those values seriously, you can tell, generally, who else is and who else isn't. It doesn't take a brain surgeon. You can get a sense if they have a good heart or not. And you can listen for a moment to get a sense if they have a good head on their shoulders, as well. Noone knows it all. And the best folks not only know this about themselves, they cut plenty of slack to everyone else as well.

Such folks come from all sorts of backgrounds. Conservative. Liberal. Independent. Apolitical. Black. White. Hispanic. Native American. Middle Eastern. Protestant. Catholic. Jewish. Muslim. Buddhist. Atheist. American. North Korean. British. Chinese. French. Cuban. German. Iranian. All sorts of people are the more genuine and decent folks who embody our highest values.

And they tend to be recognized and rewarded in their fields.

Bill Gates. Warren Buffet. Steven Spielberg. U2. George Will. David McCullough. Steven Ambrose. Gordon Wood. James McPherson. Milton Friedman. Amartya Sen. E.O. Wilson. Stephen Jay Gould. Shirin Ebadi. Pope John Paul II. Mohatma Ghandi. Martin Luther King. Voltaire. Baron de Montesquieu. John Locke. Mary Wolstonecraft. Lord Acton. John Stuart Mill. Mark Twain. Etc., etc., etc.

And folks like Paul Krugman are not such folks. For whatever reasons, the Paul Krugmans of the world are convinced that such folks will never be able to persuade people to be more decent honestly. For folks like Paul Krugman, honest discussion and debate is for fools. Kind of ironic for an economist, someone who makes a living engaged in such debate and discussion, huh? But that's how he plays nonetheless. Paul, like many more dishonest participants in democratic discussions, will try to scare the bejeesus out of you and me, as long as it means getting his way. Because he is so convinced of how much smarter he is than you and me that he just feels like he doesn't have the patience to persuade us because we were never going to ever get as smart as him anyway.

It's a nifty way to think about people, don't you think?

Too brilliant for you and I to understand apparently. That's what they give those prizes for, Paul reasons. It's a Nobel thing. We just wouldn't understand.

Either that or Paul is just perpetually full of shit. And distorts much of his outlook around a manipulative worldview where average citizens just couldn't understand what it means to be as smart as Know-It-All Paul.

In other words. Paul is illiberal. He's not someone who trusts open and free and honest discussions where people are persuaded and their consciences are respected. Paul believes, as so many illiberal regimes and leaders and actors, including terrorists, around the world, that engaging you and me honestly is a waste of his time that will only leave his brilliance unrealized in the political world and all of us screwing up what he is better off taking care of himself, anyway.

It's just too brilliant, isn't it?

Too clever by half, obviously.

Honest liberals persuade honestly. That's the whole point, frankly, of a liberal society. The whole purpose of a liberal democracy is for people to be able to engage one another honestly and not try to intimidate one another to abandon their consciences because we have enough firepower to make it so. That was the entire length of our illiberal history. So to repeat it and call it liberal is really just kind of bizarre, at best, and dishonest, at worst.

Many, many, many people - left and right - take the explicitly dishonest route. Paul Krugman is one of those people, I believe.

And that kind of dishonesty should not now or ever be confused with something more honestly and genuinely liberal.

In fact, our failure to make that distinction is exactly what is responsible for much of our illiberal history. It is the reason that Lord Acton wisely observed that power corrupts. And it is the reason why all real progress in the world has led us on a path toward greater liberalism. Meaning more liberty. Not less.

So when folks like Paul Krugman manipulate us in a direction of less liberty, our bullshit detectors should go off with vigor.

Because it's a big fat lie to call a direction of manipulation and less freedom a path to progress. Because every point in history in every society in the world where that has happened, we have been taken down a path of much misery and unnecessary tragedy. And no progress whatsoever. Just more lies. To cover up the failure to make any real progress. If that sounds like the long history of the Soviet Union and the short history of Nazi Germany, you're beginning to get the point.

Real liberals value liberty. It's the meaning of the word. Anything else is dishonest.

Lots of that going around, these days.

And seeing through it, as Orwell warned, relies on our capacity for bullshit detection. Even when it is people on our "team" who are engaging in the bullshit.

My team is humanity, at this point. I'm an American. And a liberal, in that broadest sense. I'm a conservative and a liberal. A Christian, a Jew, a Buddhist, an atheist, and most things in between. I'm a white man in pigment, and a black man in my soul. And plenty of Asian, Native American, Middle Eastern, and everything I can get my hands on.

I care about people. And the freedom that allows them to look after themselves and one another most reliably. And I care about them honestly caring for one another. And not this dishonest, illiberal bullshit we've been engaging in.

It's time to get honest about what it means to be liberal. To care about liberal democracy, liberal values, liberal education, and liberty, broadly. And the courage involved with being that sort of person and society. And to see, more honestly, the cowardice involved with illiberal values, illiberal societies and illiberal political players.

Players like Paul Krugman. And, more to the point, players like Osama Bin Laden, Kim Jong Il, Hu Jintao, Fidel Castro, Robert Mugabe, Saddam Hussein, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Joseph Stalin, Adolph Hitler, and all the rest. All of the people in the world who will use, rationalize, and infinitely manipulate for power in an endless race with more honest, decent people - more honest liberals - and their efforts to embrace and expand freedom as the means of good people living good and decent lives.

To be a liberal has nothing to do with ideology, at all, actually. To be a liberal means to love liberty. That is the etymology of the term. That's where the word liberal comes from. From the commitment to liberty as the basis for progress in a society.

And people who believe that freedom matters need to have the courage to live those values without fear of intimidation from these assorted thugs in the world.

To do so means to learn to stop acting like them. And to act more like ourselves. To embrace freedom and respect for the thoughts and consciences of others and to engage one another honestly, without intimidation and without thuggery. Thuggery is for thugs. And thuggery is neither honest nor liberal in any recognizable way.

We need to let thugs be thugs. And we need to embrace our more decent, compassionate, honest, liberal, freedom-loving ways.

And tell the weak-ass thugs of the world that we are not scared of their illiberalism or their bullshit. Nor do we have any interest in emulating it.

Because, though we may not always make the right or best choices, we do our best to use our freedom to make better choices, over time, and with a bit of patience, compassion, and understanding for ourselves and one another.

And we have every reason to be proud of that legacy. And to tell the various thugs of the world who lack that kind of compassion and patience and concern for their friends and neighbors that they can go can fuck themselves, thank you very much.

Because we like our freedom. And all the good things, as much as any of the bad things, that is does now and always will afford us, from here until the end of our short little existence on this lovable little planet.

And if they don't like that and they keep trying to push us around. We will push back. And we'll do it as nicely as possible. But no nicer. And if they don't like that, they can kindly eat shit.

We need to learn to be confident in our liberal values and our liberal democracy. And we will never learn to do so trying to behave like our more illiberal, more thuggish fellow-travelers in the world.

We need to lead. Because that is what liberal peoples do. And when they do so, with a genuine commitment to liberal values and all of the good that they produce, people follow. Liberal and illiberal. Because that freedom offers so much more than thuggery does or ever will.

And the proof is in the pudding, on that one.

Just take a look around you and all of the brilliant opportunities that that freedom makes available to you. And take about two seconds looking into illiberal societies like North Korea, Cuba, China, Iran, Syria, Myanmar, Zimbabwe, and any and all societies that do not take freedom seriously, except for the freedom of their rulers to oppress their people.

So be proud of being a liberal. It doesn't have a lick to do with being left or right or Christian or Muslim or American or Iraqi or any of the rest.

It has to do with loving liberty. And all of the amazing opportunities that freedom has made possible in this remarkable little world.

Enjoy it. There's a lot to love.