Reuters headline (in NYT): “Nordic Countries Top Gender Equality List.”
Great! Let’s see how much gender equality there is in a hundred years, when Muslims have replaced Swedes and other Scandinavians due to low birthrates.
One reason to have a bloated budget: it makes hiding pork easier, especially pork that might raise questions. (Scroll down after “War On Coal”).
Read all of this thoughtful post from the Belmont Club (commenting and expanding on a Chicago Boyz post by Shannon Love) on how the arrogance and contempt of the Left in Britain, and recent revelations about how cynical the Labor Party’s immigration policy really was, have driven a fifth of the British electorate into approval of the British National Party, which is not really a conservative party as the U.S. understands it, but truly fascist.
Among the shrewd observations here:
“What the Left and Fascism share is a belief in the transformative power of the state. Both regard government as the “high ground” of society and not, as some Americans still believe, simply a necessary evil. It is a prize to be seized by main force; the castle to be stormed.”
“Just as Global Warming can be understood at one level as an attempt to bring nature into the purview of politics, it is impossible to understand the Left’s fixation with abortion except as a sacramental affirmation of the state’s power over man. The strident insistence on abortion on demand goes way beyond any conceivable need to prevent backroom abortions, or even an affirmation of a woman’s right to choose. It is really an absolute display of the power of politics over life. Abortion’s principal utility is as a stake driven through the heart of the notion of human sacredness, which once performed, ought to prevent its revival entirely.”
The central point of this post is that once the individual has been desacralized and the state exalted as the supreme authority with no recourse to transcendent values, it’s a very short step from the kind of oppressive nanny-state Britons (and many European countries) now enjoy to a straight-up fascist state. Very little in the actual machinery of the government will have to change.
In today’s NYT, Roger Cohen urges Israel to becomes more like an “ordinary” country by abandoning “Israeli exceptionalism.”
“The Middle East has changed. So must Israel. ‘Never again’ is a necessary but altogether inadequate way of dealing with the modern world,” says Cohen. Even though he acknowledges that “some of Israel’s enemies contest its very existence,” he argues that most of Israel’s neighbors seek come kind of more or less rational accommodation of interests, and Israel can join them if only it stops thinking of itself as exceptional.
On a purely empirical level, one could point out that Israel (and Jewish) exceptionalism is at least understandable as the result of the exceptional nature of anti-Semitism itself, which stands out like a mountain among the foothills or ordinary group and tribal prejudices. Polls have revealed widespread anti-Semitism in Malaysia and Indonesia, which have almost no Jews, and even a degree of it in Japan, which also has a negligible number.
But to give up exceptionalism would be to give up the idea of Jewish chosenness, the identity that has kept this people together when other, more numerous peoples, some sharing some characteristics of the Jews, have dissolved or been absorbed by conquerors. Even when Jews tried to escape their identity and merge into the surrounding society, as Spain’s conversos tried to do, the surrounding society ultimately wouldn’t let them. Of course, some of the conversions were real; but they didn’t “erase” Jewish identity, even if in some cases it took generations for that identity to be rediscovered.
At a non-empirical level, Christians and Jews alike recognize that the Jews are not held together by their own efforts or identity alone. “Chosenness” makes no sense as a secular concept, and atheist Jews are capable of puzzling endlessly over what makes Jews so special if there is no God.
There is no answer to this question, of course: only the persistence of an exceptionalism that cannot be explained by any secular means.
The latest from Phyllis Chesler. Read to the bottom and you’ll see that even Canada is considering banning the niqab (a full-body-covering garment like the burka)–based on the statement of Sheik Tantawi, head of Al-Azhar University in Cairo, considered Sunni Islam’s leading theological center, that it is already forbidden in Mecca(!).
What a difference 9 months make? France not the US is the hard line democracy taking on Iran. Sarkozy is now the adult in the UN and in the world while US citizens become more and more frustrated with a government which is determined to dictate a far left agenda to a modern right population. It’s going to be a long 3 1/2 years. We all need to pray and work against such an agenda through constructive activism.
Burris is going and won’t be back, but he has begun the spin that will be picked up in the next week by the mainstream press. He maintains that George W. Bush is the reason Chicago didn’t get the Olympics. Bush has brought down our image in the world. According to Burris not even the new messiah could weave his rhetorical magic on the IOC. Burris doesn’t realize his magic is fizzling amongst Europeans who now know he’s just like they are–all show and no go.
I haven’t wanted to countenance David Letterman’s abominable behavior, but it illustrates the utter hubris of 99% of the television and film industry. In a word, he doesn’t know what propriety is. Does he think joking about extortion and his sordid affairs with staffers 1/3 of his age is funny? He’s a pathetic aging talk show host–a creepy dirty old man as Palin rightly observes.
The US Ambassador to the Vatican, Miguel H. Diaz, was not the best choice for the job and his recent comments, although not horrible, could have been improved with some basic moral substance. Benedict in his usual firm, and absolutely clear fashion communicated his concerns about the freedom of conscience and government mandated abortion on demand in the new health care bill. CNA reports:
Obama traveled to Copenhagen thinking his celebrity status would help Chicago get the Olympics. He couldn’t have been more wrong. America’s stature in the world is greatly diminished in large part because of him and his hubris; hence, his celebrity is just that–don’t mistake it for gravitas.