PRESTOPUNDIT -- feeding memeorandum & econRT daily

Presby Church -- Blame U.S. Christians for Muslim Terror.

"The resolution warns against �falling into the quagmire of attempting to label individuals, groups, or governments as �terrorists.�� Instead it urges Christians �to ponder the message of attackers who are so desperate that they surrender their lives to kill others.� The resolution calls for Presbyterians to �acknowledge our complicity in contributing to the circumstances that prompt individuals to engage in acts of terrorism.� It asks church members to accept blame for: �our disproportionate consumption of the earth�s resources�; �the export of the artifacts of our popular culture such as movies, music, and television programming�; �military responses to terrorism [that have] too often been motivated by a desire for vengeance and not a desire for justice�; and �condemn[ing] the religious faith of those who are different without taking the time to understand that faith.� The resolution recommends �less reliance on the military response to terrorism� and �increased investment in programs that can transform and reduce the root causes of terrorism across the developing world.�" MORE "U.S. Presbyterians Asked to �Acknowledge Complicity� in Terrorism".

Enviro-Nazis in the land of John Kerry.

"It was one of three encounters during the week where someone from a vantage point of self-righteous indignation angrily berated someone for violating a rule or convention of the beach .. ".

MORE CAFE HAYEK -- "Erosion".

They love socialism -- they hate America.

Happy 4th of July everyone! Here's some Thomas Sowell:

"This is not a new phenomenon nor one confined to foreigners. More than 20 years ago, Eric Hoffer said: "Nowhere at present is there such a measureless loathing of their country by educated people as in America." Note that it is not the downtrodden masses but the pampered Ph.D.s who most vent their spleen at the country that protects and indulges them. When a friend who teaches at Harvard put an American flag sticker on his car, his astonished colleagues demanded to know: "What is that?!" An American flag on a car or a home would have brought a similar outcry of amazement and disgust at Berkeley -- and on elite campuses in between, all across the country. Nor is such a posture confined to academia. Movie-maker Michael Moore is going around the world saying that the United States is "a crappy country" and its people "stupid" -- while his movie "Fahrenheit 911" is being praised to the skies in the press and among the intelligentsia, as it puts its anti-American message on the screen. What is there about America that sets off such venom -- among Americans, of all people? One answer might be to look at the kinds of countries praised, defended, or "understood" by the intelligentsia. For many years, the Soviet Union was such a country. After too many bitter facts about the Soviet Union came to light over the years to permit its rosy image to continue, much of the intelligentsia simply shifted their allegiance or sympathies to other collectivist countries, such as China, Cuba, or Vietnam in the Communist bloc or India, Tanzania and other collectivist regimes outside it. It did not make a dent on intellectuals that people were fleeing the countries they praised, often at the risk of their lives, to try to reach the countries they were condemning -- especially the United States of America.

What is wrong with America, in the eyes of the intelligentsia? The same things that are right with America in the eyes of others.

If one word rings out, and echoes around the world, when America is mentioned, that word is Freedom. But what does freedom mean? It means that hundreds of millions of ordinary human beings live their lives as they see fit -- regardless of what their betters think. That is fine, unless you see yourself as one of their betters, as so many intellectuals do. The more the American vision of individual freedom prevails, the more the vision of the anointed fails. The more ordinary people spend the money they have earned for whatever they want, the less is available to the government as taxes to spend for "the common good" as Hillary Clinton recently put it. The more people who raise their own children by their own values, the less is there a place for the collectivist notion that "it takes a village to raise a child," as Hillary has said elsewhere. Too many of our schools are convinced that they are that village. Cars and guns are both instruments and symbols of personal independence -- and both are targets of hostility and even hatred by those who are convinced that they can run other people's lives better than those people can run their own lives. All sorts of claims are made against cars and guns, without the slightest interest in checking those claims against readily available facts.

When America frees ordinary people from the domination of their betters, and prevents them for being used as guinea pigs for the vision of the anointed, the more America insults the very presumptions that enable the anointed to think of themselves as special, as one-up on the rest of us. Countries that impose a collectivist vision from the top down will be forgiven many atrocities, while a country like the United States that lets individuals go their own way will not even be forgiven its successes, much less its shortcomings. As we celebrate both our country's independence and our individual independence on the Fourth of July, we should never forget that this independence is galling to those who want us to be dependent on them."

Leftywood.

"You've spent all day lying on the telephone and screwing your client out of his money and yelling at your assistant for bringing you the wrong kind of water and paying your Guatemalan maid sub-minimum wages ..". What to do to make yourself feel you're a good person? Why contribute some cash to a Democrat politician, of course.

Catherin Seipp does a profile of newly conservative Hollywood writer Rob Long.

Paul Krugman -- socialist assassin.

"Nor is Moore alone in spewing vitriol into the national debate. Many on the left seem incapable of carrying on a political discussion without descending into character assassination. One of their roadside bombs hit close to home this week. From his perch on the New York Times editorial page, Paul Krugman spins a bit of a conspiracy tale of his own. In a column titled "Who Lost Iraq?" Krugman attributes the "failure" of Iraq's reconstruction to "ideological obsession and cronyism." Now, let's see, we know that Saddam modeled Iraq on Stalin's Soviet Union, so what ideological obsession is Krugman referring to? It turns out that Krugman objects to capitalism. Yes, Krugman is appalled to learn that Paul Bremer was intent upon "privatizing government-run factories." Good heavens, these Bush administration people really are zealots! Later, Krugman calls them "right-wing economic theorists." Hello? Was Krugman asleep when we won the Cold War? Note: Free markets work; state-run economies flounder. But this news may not yet have filtered down to the New York Times. As for cronyism, Krugman smirks, "If the occupiers often seemed oblivious to reality, one reason was that many jobs at the C.P.A. went to people whose qualifications seemed to lie mainly in their personal and political connections -- people like Simone Ledeen, whose father, Michael Ledeen, is a prominent neoconservative ..."

This is rich. I happen to know Simone Ledeen. She is an MBA who speaks three languages .. ".

MORE Mona Charen, "Leftists hate fellow Americans more than Islamists".

The N-word & the Illiberal Left.

"For more than seven decades, the left has insisted that the more you disagree with them the more like a Nazi you are .. ". "The new n-word" by Jonah Goldberg, editor of NRO.

Chavez on Unions.

Friedrich Hayek would have loved this book. The big issue: unions operate largely beyond the rule of law. Linda Chavez describes the current system "Legal Apartheid" -- a set up where unions are beyond the bounds of law as it is written for everyone else.

Christian hating.

In Hollywood it's become the new anti-semitism. Don Feder reports.

Jean-Francois Revel.

"How to understand this war against globalization, which has grown in scope and virulence over the past five years? First, we must realize that it is a war in the real, not the figurative, sense of the word. It is a physical struggle being fought in the streets, not just theoretically. The demonstrators who are its shock troops are organized by activist organizations, many of them subsidized by governments, and they sack cities and lay siege to international meetings during their battles.

What motivates this extraordinary resistance? Globalization simply means freedom of movement for goods and people, and it is hard to be violently hostile to that. But behind this fight lies an older and more fundamental struggle�against economic liberalization, and against the chief representative thereof, which is the United States. Anti-globalism carnivals often feature an Uncle Sam in a Stars-and-Stripes costume as their supreme scapegoat. In this way, the new movement taps into an old socialist tradition, where opposition to economic freedom and opposition to America are impossible to separate .. ". MORE "Anti-Globalism = Anti-Americanism".

China Crushes Hayek Inspired Study Group.

Details can be found here.

Politics as Crime by Other Means.

The state has always been the most efficient institution for stealing the wealth of others. Consider Indonesia.

Ernesto Guevara.

The Osama Bin Laden of his time. So why are lefties walking around with a picture of this killer on their t-shirts?

"Social Justice" vs. Liberalism. "The signature of modern leftist rhetoric is the deployment of terminology that simply cannot fail to command assent. As Orwell himself recognized, even slavery could be sold if labeled "freedom." In this vein, who could ever conscientiously oppose the pursuit of "social justice," -- i.e., a just society? ..

To understand "social justice," we must contrast it with the earlier view of justice against which it was conceived -- one that arose as a revolt against political absolutism. With a government (e.g., a monarchy) that is granted absolute power, it is impossible to speak of any injustice on its part. If it can do anything, it can't do anything "wrong." Justice as a political/legal term can begin only when limitations are placed upon the sovereign, i.e., when men define what is unjust for government to do. The historical realization traces from the Roman senate to Magna Carta to the U.S. Constitution to the 19th century. It was now a matter of "justice" that government not arrest citizens arbitrarily, sanction their bondage by others, persecute them for their religion or speech, seize their property, or prevent their travel. This culmination of centuries of ideas and struggles became known as liberalism ..

the imperative of economic equality .. generates a striking opposition between "social justice" and its liberal rival. The equality of the latter .. is the equality of all individuals in the eyes of the law -- the protection of the political rights of each man, irrespective of "class" (or any assigned collective identity, hence the blindfold of Justice personified). However, this political equality .. spawns the difference in "class" between Smith and Jones. All this echoes Nobel laureate F.A. Hayek's observation that if "we treat them equally [politically], the result must be inequality in their actual [i.e., economic] position." The irresistable conclusion is that "the only way to place them in an equal [economic] position would be to treat them differently [politically]" -- precisely the conclusion that the advocates of "social justice" themselves have always reached .. more BARRY LOBERFELD.

Catallarchy fisks an anti-free market article by a BusinessWeek columnist. Don't you just love those anti-market folks in the business press? These have got to be some of the most unhappy J-school grads in journalism.

More reaction to George Will's "conservative" defense of a massive and expanding federal government -- Paul Mirengoff at Powerline argues that the correct conclusion is that George Bush simply isn't a conservative, a position Mirengoff has staked out before. See the posting for links. Mirengoff links to an article by Daniel Casse in Commentary (!) making the case for thinking that Bush is too a conservative. Well you don't say ..

"When I use a word," Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, "it means just what I choose it to mean�neither more or less."

"The question is," said Alice, "whether you can make words mean so many different things."

"The question is," said Humpty Dumpty, "which is to be master�that�s all."

So, the question for the day is, "Do the neoconservatives own the language?"

You can track blogosphere reactions to the George Will's "Freedom vs. Equality" piece right here.

Will is likely writing in response to Andrew Sullivan's "Bush vs. Freedom".

Prisoners lining up for roll call at Auschwitz -- part of the 5 million aerial photo collection of the WWII Aerial Reconnaissance Archives at Keele University which was supposed to go on line today here, but which has not been able to handle a tidalwave of hits. The BBC story is here.

A Nation mag lefty takes a looks at John Gray's latest rantings against liberal civilization -- in a book titled Al Qaeda and What It Means to Be Modern. Last we saw of him, Gray had embraced the eco-nuttiness of James Lovelock, author of the intellectually disreputable "Gaia hypothesis". Over the past few years Gray has produced increasingly suspect intellectual goods -- as he's moved into the pop market and out of the world of serious ideas. No one every said that Gray was the best or the brightest, but within his area of competence (political philosophy / history of idea) he made a quite useful contribution to the literature -- even if he often made overly strong and often simply incorrect pronouncements on technical matters outside of his area of competence (e.g. on the topic of functional explanation).

His latest book actually sounds interesting -- Gray thinks outside the conventional theoretical box, which allows him to see things (and say things) that the standard issue PC mind-prison doesn't allow for. This makes his work not only provocative, it also forces one to do some thinking of ones own. The problem is that much of Gray's popular work is slap-dash and poorly reasoned -- it's not only unbound by conventional thinking, it's unbound by careful thinking -- or common sense. Often it's maddenly .. how to put it .. dumb. And it sometimes falsely reports intellectual history, i.e. it sometimes gets the literature wrong. Which simply drives me crazy. So Gray's pop work suffers serious defects. And not merely trivial defects. Often the problems are serious enough that his work threatens to descend into laugh zone of howler claims and intellectual incoherence. Some examples from our Nation lefty:

Gray views the nature of global conflict today in terms of "population growth, shrinking energy supplies and irreversible climate change"; "ethnic and religious enmities and the collapse or corrosion of the state in many parts of the world"; the emergence of "political organizations, irregular militias and fundamentalist networks" made all the more ominous given the dissemination of highly lethal weapons. Taken together, Gray contends, these developments spell almost certain disaster.

Actually, you can drop the "almost." There is a strikingly deterministic and fatalistic streak in Gray. Scattered throughout the book are formulations like: "The population of European Russia will be more than decimated"; "geopolitical upheaval is unavoidable"; "there is nothing to be done about this"; "a consequence of the universal fact of entropy." Sound familiar? The tone of ironclad inevitability is one of the carry-overs from Straw Dogs. As Adair Turner recently pointed out in the English journal Prospect, Gray's rigid determinism is more than a bit ironic given his ruthless critique of positivism for its insistence that the growth of scientific knowledge would inevitably lead to a utopian future- - one of Gray's central themes in Al Qaeda.

But this tension pales in comparison with a much more fundamental problem in Gray's project. For all of his insights into our geopolitical situation and his monitions about the perilous path we're on, when one reads the two books in tandem, the effect is one of moral numbness. If one follows the argument of Straw Dogs (as we can only assume Gray does), what difference does it make whether the human species avoids its collision course with doom? If we should look forward to a time "when humans have ceased to matter," as Gray exhorts us to do in Straw Dogs, what's the point of even considering the proposals he offers in Al Qaeda for fashioning a less calamitous future? How can the apocalyptic antihumanism of Straw Dogs be squared with the claim, in the concluding chapter of Al Qaeda, that "we need to think afresh about how regimes and ways of life that will always be different can come to coexist in peace"?

UPDATE: And oh my does Gray get slammed for this book on Amazon. Yeow.