America's worst human being?

Robert Farley says so about Steve Sailer, who is using the Seattle Jewish Federation shooting as an excuse to make snide, crypto-racist attacks on immigration.

I'm not so sure, for a couple of reasons. To be truly vile, you can't have a purpose beyond being vile and making other people think vile things. But catching up on VDARE reading is actually damn useful for perspective. If nothing else, it's good to be reminded sometimes that (1) the internet is a very big place and (2) it's still possible to be truly, truly shocking, even in 2006, and (3) there are some things too vile even for National Review.

Secondly, there's the fact that once you get over into VDARE territory, separating out "the worst" from the routine pseudo-science drek (these are people who clasp every new report that blacks have higher incarceration rates or lower high school completion rates as confirmation of their "theories" as if nobody else has ever seen the same numbers... and Sailer is their "house moderate") becomes a mucky exercise. Here's a good example: Part I of a debate between Sailer, espousing a form of ethnic paleoconservatism he calls "citizenism" and some racist broadsheet writer named Jared Taylor, advocating full fledged "white nationalism" (at one point in the debate, Sailer notes that his friend's philosophy shouldn't be confused with white supremacism, though it's unclear to me why not).

The difference between citizenism and white nationalism hinges on the fact that proponents of the former (i.e. Sailer) believe that any successful ethno-political appeal has to be made on the basis of citizenship alone because blatantly racist appeals will crash on the rocks of white noblesse oblige. White nationalism is a political philosophy that urges whites (and, presumably, the politicians and public figures who speak to and for them) to acknowledge that it's ok to hate nonwhites. Er, sorry, that is, to acknowledge that "racial interests, like family interests, sometimes cannot be reconciled" and to resist being "pushed aside by groups that have never lost sight of their racial interests, and never will", etc. etc.

At face value, I have to say that Taylor is much worse. Though maybe not. As Farley points out, "Naveed Haq has lived almost all of his 31 year old life in the United States. He went to high school in Richland, Washington, and he's been diagnosed with bipolar disorder. His wealthy parents live in Pasco, Washington. By any meaningful definition of the word, Naveed Haq was an American... unless you're Steve Sailer, and believe that some races are just inferior to others, and thus presumably ought to be kept out." So maybe Sailer doesn't even believe his own "citizenist" talk or at least doesn't feel the need to keep up appearances for his blog readers. Maybe that kind of sophistry makes him worse than somebody who would openly whine about how "nothing entirely explains the savage joy of the liberal with a "racist" (or a "xenophobe" or "sexist") in his sights. People who think only moral inferiors could enjoy fox hunting or bullfighting take a different view when the quarry is human, as they bay for the blood of "bigots" like hounds on the scent. It is wearying, on the radio or off, to play the fox to liberal hounds."

Nothing like those martyrs for the majority!

One other interesting tidbit in the worst-people-in-America sweepstakes: one of Sailer's bravest, most outspoken enemies on the right is... John Podhoretz (I warn you: read that link and you'll immediately like him better). Yes, the same John Podhoretz recently found tugging his chin in the New York Post about a full-scale ethnic cleansing of fighting-age Sunni men as the most effective way to win the GWOT.

Rob has a point. But I'm just saying: the worst human being in America? What with all the myriad subtleties at work, that is one hell of a competition.

Good fucking God.

Via Dave, somebody gag me with a spoon!

Never been more proud to be a Canadian. Good lord.

Let them drive Yugos.

A brief hiatus from the hiatus to complain randomly about Margaret Wente's most recent Globe and Mail article about how the Ontario government's attempts to promote public transit is doomed to failure on general libertarian grounds. I love this graf:

As for lower-income people — supposedly the main beneficiaries of public transit — they have an alternative, too. It's called used cars.


It's also called gas prices and car insurance, which as the latter two (albeit American) links suggest, is significantly more expensive and hard to acquire for low-income people, all else equal.

If Wente wants to argue that it's impossible to improve public transport to the point where it would be attractive to working people in the lower end of the income scale not to keep a car, then fine. But she's not actually making that argument.


Update: Declan has a post up on a related topic, the new StatCan study on commute times. In brief, StatCan finds work commute times are going up for both drivers and public transit users all across Canada, and especially in the cities, due mainly to increasing concentration of cars on the roads during rush hours. Vancouver is the positive exception. Declan has some ideas about why that is.

On hiatus.

LWC is going on hiatus for a few weeks while I try to get over some lower back troubles. I've been informed that this requires more walking and less sitting in front of my monitor. Between the blog and the thesis, the blog has to go first.

Come back at the beginning of August. And happy summer.

Technical difficulties...

...of various sorts are responsible for sporadic blogging. But there's always time to gape in astonishment at the latest wisdom from the Bull Moose:

...In Mr. Meyerson's world, that makes Joe Lieberman out-of-sync with modern progressivism. Of course, in truth, he and his blogosphere and MoveOn.org buddies have only one issue, the war. They seek an American defeat. And then, for the next generation, the Democrats will have the same problem that they suffered from over the last thirty years - they are perceived as a weak party that will not be trusted to defend America.


Harold Meyerson's only issue -- his main issue -- is the Iraq War? Harold Meyerson?

This is amazing.

Go read Cheryl.

Boo!

I guess what with Zidane's freakout, they deserved to lose (although it was a cool way to get redcarded as these things go, and pretty poignant if this is true). Nevertheless, I was rooting for France. For much the same reasons expressed in this New Republic article by Andrew Curry about Germany:

In Germany, national feeling has always run either too hot or too cold, but never just right. But since the World Cup started on June 9, there's been a sudden outbreak of perfectly innocent flag-waving here....At first glance, this was a little unsettling. Under ordinary circumstances, flying the German flag anywhere but on top of federal buildings is looked down upon. Patriotic displays aren't quite taboo in Germany, but they are certainly politically incorrect. Perhaps for Germany, then, the best thing to come out of the 2006 World Cup may be something Americans take for granted: an understanding that it is possible to be proud of one's country without being a nationalist.

...Neither nationalism nor self-loathing, the feeling here is one of pride without hate. Reports of serious fights between German and foreign fans can be counted on one hand, and the police patrolling the capital's Fan Mile have been mostly bored. Despite over six million visitors since the beginning of the Cup, only one serious breach of security occurred when a driver broke through crowd-control barriers last Sunday and injured almost two dozen fans.

Of course Germany has celebrated during past World Cups, but never with the patriotic outpouring--and the sense of community--of the past few weeks. In fact, Berlin probably hasn't partied this hard since the fall of the wall in 1989. That party was more a celebration of freedom than of patriotism. But Germans today can be proud of being German without forgetting or denying the past. Though Germany's flurry of flags is unlikely to outlast the World Cup, hopefully the country's new-found patriotism will.


When we lived in Germany, I was in the first grade and my Dad was on sabbatical. Strangers actually approached my parents on the street to apologize for the Holocaust, for the past. And even though Germany has rebuilt itself and established a political system that protects against extremism while providing a lot of democracy, in recent years they've had to endure the indignity of being held up as a model of how not to run a macroeconomy and embarrassing gains by the far right.

Germany's need for innocent flag-waving (and that was one happy crowd Saturday) is second only to France's. It's been a rough few years for France... alternatively the punchline and the bete noire of the ascendant American right; ignominous loser of the 2012 Olympics (on the same day of the London tube bombings); main foilers of the EU Constitution (against poor Chirac's wishes); and the model example, even more than Germany, even among liberals, even among European liberals, not how not to run a macroeconomy. And of how not to run an assimilation policy. And then there was that humiliating-for-all-decent-people Jean Marie Le Pen thing a few years ago... And overtones of all of that in Zidane's end, in France's end on the field.

It all makes the Italian domestic football scandal pale in comparison as a need for redemption. Poor France.

Army dreamers.

I really don't know what to make of this and I'm scared to write anything flip. I wonder if you'd get similar sentiments from any other group in the Middle East outside Iran?

"This is the new fashion in the market," says Shorah. "It's a show of force, because the US army is powerful. It's a symbol of strength and of our refusal to put down arms."

The US army knock-offs are part of a broader trend here. After six years of an uprising against Israel and with Gaza heading once again for confrontation with the Israeli army, militancy has become a dominant theme in Palestinian culture.

Particularly now, as Gaza's 1.4 million inhabitants sit up each night waiting anxiously for an Israeli invasion aimed at rescuing a captured soldier, air strikes and tank shells are woven into the fabric of daily life.

The masked, fatigue-clad militants who roam Gaza's streets in the name of resistance to the Jewish state are lionized by Palestinian youth.

On their television sets these young people see images of US soldiers in Iraq, and they view them as the ultimate symbol of military might.

"People look in the streets and they see gunmen, they watch TV and see the US Army, and they say, 'I want to be a militant, too. I want that shirt,'" says Omar Bilbaysi, who owns three clothing shops in downtown Rafah.

...The trend is not limited to clothing. At barber shops across the West Bank and Gaza young Palestinians are demanding what's known as a "Marines," meaning a high and tight crew cut, the kind that is mandatory for US Marines.

Similarly, Abu Sim, a rank and file gunman in the Popular Resistance Committees' armed wing, has wrapped the barrel of his Kalashnikov with desert camouflage padding, another nod to US military fashion.

"I saw a US Marine sniper on TV doing the same thing," he says. "It's natural to copy the US military because they are powerful and so are we."


...While I'm thinking about Israel and Palestine, here's a long piece by Helena Cobban, proving, among other things, how impossible it is to write anything current about the situation there. This, though, is pretty striking:

Israel has largely ended the reliance on cheap Palestinian labor that for 30 years after 1967 helped to undergird its impressive economic growth. Israeli labor contractors have joined their counterparts in other rich economies of the Middle East in bringing large numbers of very cheap laborers from Asia or Africa into their country on a strictly “contract-only” basis. More than 100,000 Gaza Palestinians used to cross every day to work on farms and construction sites in Israel; now only 4,000 or 5,000 have the Israeli-issued permits required to do so.


I've not seen those figures before but surely throwing 100,000 Palestinians out of work (out of a total population of just under 1.5 million) over the course of a few years would be changing the dynamics in the region as much as anything else.

Plastic bullshit.

Brendan Nyhan eviscerates James Carville & Mark Penn's dumb WaPo op-ed on why Hillary Clinton is electable, using, like, numbers and stuff. Various bloggers have been complaining about the op-ed, but I haven't yet seen anybody reflect my initial negative reaction while browsing it this morning:

We don't know if Hillary is going to run for president, but as advisers who have worked on the only two successful Democratic presidential campaigns in the past couple of decades, we know that if she does run, she can win that race, too.


Ignoring the tired self-promotion -- you won 49% against Bob Dole, congrats -- of course Penn, HRC's pollster, knows whether she's running or not. If HRC's own staff didn't know her political plans then her operation wouldn't be worth supporting. Carville and Penn feed us this crap as part of the running HRC narrative about how focussed she is on winning her New York Senate seat again. It's a meaningless but perfectly obvious lie.

I don't know why. I'm a pragmatist with no special loathing of the political "establishment". But, somehow, being overtly bullshitted like this leaves me with a sour taste in my mouth. Plastic.

Do gas prices affect carbon emissions? Enough?

I have a feeling there are 20 things I ought to read before weighing in on this topic, but here's some interesting data from the American EIA via Andrew Sullivan:

U.S. carbon dioxide emissions from burning fossil fuels increased by 0.1 percent in 2005, from 5,903 million metric tons of carbon dioxide (MMTCO 2) in 2004 to 5,909 MMTCO 2 in 2005, according to preliminary estimates released today by the Energy Information Administration (EIA). The 2005 emissions increase was the third smallest during the 1990 to 2005 period, exceeding only the emissions declines recorded in [recessionary] 1991 and 2001.


Sullivan chalks the decreased consumption up to "gas prices, dummy", and advocates increasing the gasoline tax by $1. Is he right? From the EIA breakdown:

At the energy-sector level, preliminary data indicate that:

- Carbon dioxide emissions in the residential sector increased by 3.2 percent in 2005, mainly from increases in the residential demand for electricity.

- Emissions from the commercial sector increased by 1.9 percent in 2005, also due mainly to increased electricity demand.

- Industrial emissions fell by 3.3 percent in 2005 as the U.S. economy continued to move away from heavy manufacturing and as petroleum and natural gas prices rose.

- Transportation-related carbon dioxide emissions, which account for about a third of total carbon dioxide emissions, increased by 0.2 percent in 2005. Emissions related to gasoline demand decreased by 0.4 percent, emissions related to diesel fuel grew by 1.0 percent and jet fuel emissions decreased by 0.5 percent.


I don't meant to poo-poo the gas tax idea, particularly since the US has a deficiency of tax revenue and ridiculously low fuel taxes by international standards to begin with. (**Scroll down to see LWC simultaneously reinforce the point and enter the 21st Century with nifty StatCan graphics!!!**) But don't these data suggest that the real reason for the US's improvement in energy performance, not just recently but over the past couple of decades, is basically the continuing shift out of traditional carbon-intensive manufacturing industries toward electricity-intensive service industries? Presumably, I guess, an industrial carbon tax implemented 20 or 30 years ago might have induced traditional industries to adopt cleaner technology for evenutual export to the developing world. But as domestic manufacturing declines, such a tax must become decreasingly effective. At some point the tax will come too late to have much of a global effect as U.S. companies take more and more of their older, dirtier technologies to the cheap labour of the developing world.

A related, similarly unsubstantiated thought: we see the use of electricity in the home outstripping U.S. population growth (just under 1% annually) by a factor of almost three and a half while gasoline use falls relative to population growth by a factor of about -0.5. Possibly high gas prices encourage people to take their cars out less and to spend more time at home, and thereby use more energy at home. On the other hand, direct supply side contraints -- like increasing CAFE standards and using various tax incentives to substitute toward clean vehicles and beefing up the usability of public transport -- would have less of this energy use substitution effect. People would go out the same amount they used to but would do so in more energy efficient ways.

This is a lot of handwaving and a lot of policy to deduce from one U.S. government statistical release, particularly given how much thought other, more informed people have put into this. But even ignoring the welfare costs to rural and poorer citizens of a hefty gas tax, I'm not sure such a tax, or the natural equivalent of high oil prices, is really the best, or a sufficient, policy to combat emissions.

Coldplay

To get myself through the interminable trip home (sitting on the floor in JFK running my Fortran debugger at 4:10 a.m.) I bought the new Coldplay album. Yes, I know listening to Coldplay is lame. I don't care. I love this sort of empty-calories power pop. Or I would if not for the heinous quality of Chris Martin's lyrics, which on this effort seem to be some sort of passive-aggressive ode to failing grade-8 geometry. I try to ignore them and indulge in the falsetto and driving crunchy guitar and good production and endless hooks. But the procession of physics-for-poets lines like "You’re a part of the human race / All the stars in outer space / You’re a part of a system” just really subtracts from the Coldplay listening experience.

And how did x&y end up with the same metascore as the far-superior new Gomez album? There is no justice in the world.

Substance tomorrow, promise.