Dawg took the obvious and correct shot at Margaret Wente on drug policy and Dan Gardner posted a comment to correct a minor error. I went to his website and found this dead smart article:
Seen from this perspective, needle exchanges and safe injection sites are relatively minor attempts to reduce a harm created by prohibition.
But people don’t see it from that perspective because all they hear about is harm reduction. The news stories. The research. The politics. The debates. The noise about harm reduction is deafening. It dominates public discussion of drug policy.
As a result, perception is totally out of line with reality. Most Canadians, I suspect, would assume Margaret Wente is right in calling harm reduction “the philosophy that has come to dominate drug policy.” But to say that harm reduction dominates drug policy is to focus on the housefly while ignoring the elephant on whose rump it sits. Dan Gardner, Ottawa Citizen
The headline on the Wente piece is “Legalization in disguise”. Some chance. As Gardner points out the safe injection sites are the fly on the elephant of drug prohibition. Do they work? Do they reduce harm? Perhaps. But compared to the harm inflicted needlessly by the current drug laws in Canada the entire concept of safe injection sites is trivial.
I had business in downtown Victoria today and it took me down Pandora Street. There are handy receptacles for “used sharps” which is a good thing as I sure as Hell don’t want one sticking in my foot or my children’s. There were a lot of people who were clearly “on something”. And there were street workers out checking to see how the people they know were doing.
Gardner advocates an end to the drug prohibition, so do I; but that end has to be managed very carefully lest it turn out like the influx of Residential Schools settlements or resource money on Indian Reserves.
Part of that management may well be the creation of a quasi-criminal space where, for their own benefit, substance addicts can be taken off the street for a period of time. And, yes, this is exactly opposite to my libertarian views and to my skepticism about the State’s ability to do good; but the tragic fact is that there are concentrations of two or three thousand people in various cities in Canada for whom full legalization of drugs with the attendant 95% (or 70% or whatever) drop in price would be fatal.
Drug prohibition must end and end soon; but we will have to deal with the consequences of 50 years of this misguided policy. They are people and they are citizens - and they might just be your brother or your child.
Pour yourself the late Sunday night coffee or glass of wine, get comfortable, and go and read Jonathan Chait’s brilliant deconstruction of one of the left’s saddest cases: Canada’s own Naomi Klein.
But Klein was intellectually unfazed. Rather than re-think the economicist premises of her recent radicalism, she set out to synthesize her old worldview with the post-9/11 world. “I felt it emotionally,” she told The New York Times, “before I understood it factually.” Doggedly connecting the dots, she discovered that the Iraq war was–guess what?–part of the same economic tissue that connected Nike and the World Trade Organization. Klein is nothing if not a totalistic thinker. Everything always adds up, and darkly. the new republic
What has always struck me about Ms. Klein is that her world view admits no possibility of doubt, much less error. She knows the truth and sets out to find the facts that back her up. Chait, a rather more nuanced thinker, finds more than a few facts which shoot her down. Not that it matters: to the sort of people who read Klein, “truthiness” is more important than actual fact. And much more interesting.
Benedict XVI: My essential contribution can only be prayer, and in my prayer I will be very close to the Anglican bishops who are meeting in the Lambeth Conference. We can’t, and we shouldn’t directly intervene in their discussions. We respect their own responsibility. Our hope is that schisms or new fractures can be avoided, and that a solution can be found that responds both to the needs of our time and also to fidelity to the Gospel. These two things must go together. Christianity is always contemporary and lives in this world, in a given time, but it makes present in this time the message of Jesus Christ, and therefore, it offers a true contribution for this time only by being faithful in a mature way, in a creative way that’s faithful to the message of Christ. We hope, and I personally pray, that they find together the path of the Gospel in our time. This is my wish for the Archbishop of Canterbury: that the Anglican Communion, in the communion of the Gospel of Christ and the Word of the Lord, finds responses to the current challenges. deborah gyapong
It appears that Benedict XVI is willing to play the long game and willing to understand the essential nature and the essential tensions within my Church.
Dr. Dawg is more than a little exercised at the rise of what he sees as a resurgent fascism in Italy. And he means old skool fascism as opposed to the simple trope much enjoyed by the left of calling anyone who disagrees with them “fascist”. He has a point and one which he and his lefty pals (not to mention Liberals) should be taking to heart.
Italians had decades of Center-Right and Center-Left governments. None were very effectual but, then again, there were no existential issues facing Italy. Business got along just fine in a culture of officially winked at corruption and tax evasion. Politics, to a large degree, consisted of doling out public jobs and funds. That began to change in the 1990s when illegal immigrants and rather phony “refugees” began to arrive in Italy to supplement growing communities of other, documented, immigrants. Dawg cites the issues surrounding the Roma in a number of Italian cities, but Muslim migrants have also piled in.
Like most European countries Italy took a relatively liberal line with these new migrants extending welfare, social services, education and medical services. So long as the immigrant communities were relatively small Italians seemed able to adjust. However, as the immigration continued and as Italian birthrates declined, the non-elite mass of Italians began to seriously question the value of that immigration.
What Dawg sees as fascism - and there are certainly more than a few reasons to describe it that way - is also what I would describe as a cultural nationalism. And it is a cultural nationalism which I suspect will become increasingly prevalent in European countries with relatively large Muslim communities.
One of the great conceits of the left and center-left post-war politicians is that culture does not matter and that we are moving towards a multi-cultural, post national, world. The implication of this belief is that the very idea of “Italianness” is little more than a historical relic which will, with in the embrace of the EU, gradually become a quaint folk custom. Which might well have happened had the EU kept its borders shut to non-European immigration. But, of course, the EU positively encouraged Muslim immigration and the bien-pensant are now reaping the whirlwind.
Now, for the political elites, the essential differences between Western/Christian culture and Eastern/Islamic culture were matters to be ignored or studied or accommodated. Those elites rarely had much to do with the day to day reality of the cultural conflicts which arose. However those conflicts were and are real despite the arm waving and denial of the political elites.
Democratic politics has a generally conservative tendency - most politics takes place without there being much chance for actual change because the elite practitioners of such politics generally agree on all but the most trivial points. To a degree, this elite agreement is one of the main reasons why voter turnout has precipitously declined throughout the West in the last few decades.
However, at a certain point, the politics of elite accommodation effectively collapse in the face of focussed public anger. This can happen very quickly - as it has in Italy - and reflects a sea change in an electorate. Elite politicians ride along happy in the belief that their position, secured by effective media collusion, is secure. After all, when was the last time the voters in a democratic nation voted for real change?
The answer to that question is another question: When was the last time that voters in a democratic nation were confronted with an existential challenge to their culture? Mass, non-assimilated, immigration is just such a challenge and the voters of Italy met it by tossing the old coalition politicians out of office and replacing them with politicians who promised to address the real concerns of ordinary Italians.
I would not be at all surprised to see more of this happen in Europe. And in Canada too if dimwits like Dion really think they can do Green Rape with impunity.
France has denied citizenship to a veiled Moroccan woman on the grounds that her “radical” practice of Islam is incompatible with basic French values such as equality of the sexes, a legal ruling showed on Friday.
The case will reignite debate about how to reconcile freedom of religion, which is guaranteed by the French constitution, and other fundamental rights, which many in France feel are being challenged by the way of life of some Muslims.
Le Monde newspaper said it was the first time a Muslim applicant had been rejected for reasons to do with personal religious practice.
“She has adopted a radical practice of her religion, incompatible with essential values of the French community, particularly the principle of equality of the sexes,” said a ruling by the Council of State handed down last month and sent to Reuters on Friday to confirm a report in Le Monde. reuters via Kathy
While there is much to be said for tolerance and reasonable accomodation, there is also a great deal to be said for essential principles. Basically the woman in question was kept in close confinement and had nothing to do with France and knew nothing of France. Not unreasonably she was denied French citizenship.
Now the language of the decision suggests that the woman “adopted a radical practice of her religion”. Did she? Or was this forced upon her by her husband and male relatives force this practice upon her with the full approval of their particular segment of the Muslim community?
The poor woman was ignorant of the essential principles upon which France is governed; but that is unlikely to have been her fault. Rather it is more likely to have been the fault of the males in her life who, to a degree, would have been aware of those principles and chose to directly reject them.
If anyone is at fault it is the anti-assimilationist males who kept this woman isolated. If anyone should get the boot it is the people who created the environment where this poor woman was denied the basic human dignity - or even the knowledge of such dignity.
It might well be a good idea to kick the husband and male relatives as well as the other husbands and male relatives and any religious leaders involved right back to Morocco where they would not have to deal with the interfering French state.
The poor women might be better off being allowed to stay in France in a shelter where she can be deprogrammed from the beliefs of this nasty cult.
A goodly number of pixels have been spilt on the allegedly political removal of two children from their white supremacist mother after the elder was sent to school with a swasika drawn on her arm. Dawg went to the wall in his comments:
“Teaching kids to hate is harmful per se. It seems to me, based upon the precautionary principle, that it’s up to you to prove otherwise.” dr dawg
I think this is an exceptionally dangerous view of the nature of the role of parents, the state and the culture. First off it opens parents to losing their children as the result of thought crime. While these poor kids’ mother is hardly a brilliant parent, if, as Dawg conjectures, the rule is “teach hate, lose kids” then her capacity as a parent is not in issue one way or another. So on that basis the Khadr’s would have lost their kids the instant the authorities became aware of the jihadi views of the parents. I certainly hope Mohamed Elmasry doesn’t have kids because his political/religious views might count as hatred. Anti-Zionist? Lose your kids. Black mother in the Jane Finch corridor blaming whitey for black peoples’ problems - better watch her step. Catholics and fundamentalist who teach their children that abortion is murder and abortionists murderers…no kids for you! Environmentalists who tell their children that the people who run big corporations are killing the Earth and should go to jail…kidless.
But, and one cannot help but notice what this lame brained mum did, maybe we should set the standard higher. Perhaps the test should be that you have to actually do something like draw on your kids. (Frankly I’d start with the parents of the cringing little moppets who are stuck having their faces painted for National holidays.) For example telling your female children that they have to wear a head scarf (or a sack) or Uncle Ali will be over to behead them? Perhaps it would make sense for teachers, as soon as they see a little Muslim girl wearing the hajib to ask if Fatima really wants to wear it and to keep pushing until they are absolutely certain Fatima is not being coerced at home.
Hang on: he got a grave? The UK actually shipped his body back to Pakistan for a “proper burial” and didn’t wrap it in bacon first? kathy
Garlic for vampires, dogs and pigs for Islamists: works like the wonderfully ancient charm it is. If you are fighting the 7th century you need to use 7th century tactics.
Dr. Dawg is making fun of the IDers. Intellectually this is rather like little boys pulling the wings off flies: cruel, but inconsequential. Only the fundamentalist “no chancers” want to try and run the ID argument and when they do the billions of years and trillions of chemical interactions per year get in their way. However, the Dawg says something which I think suggests that, despite his trade union background and grad student foreground, he might finally be getting a picture of the sheer messiness of the real world.
“The social is simply too complex to attribute it entirely or even significantly to evolution.” Well Dawg I am delighted that you are willing to throw the fundamental premise of Marxism, namely that economics can be understood and even made to obey laws, into the ashcan of history. (Where it belongs.)
Once you have acknowledged that “the social” is too complex to be attributed to evolution you have begun a happy accent to a purely humanist understanding of the world. Science, per se, can only explain so much. (And I entirely agree with you on the looniness of the IDers and anyone else who thinks their particular Sky-God sat down and “created” in any but the most abstract, “lit the fuse for the Big Bang” sense.}
What is fun about your stand against socio-biology is that in taking that position you render absurd the claims of assorted socialists and utopians - not to mention St. Algore - who claim to have the economic, social and scientific answers to the world’s issues. The social, the economic and even the scientific are, indeed, complex. So complex that it would take the same sort of reductionism as the socio-biologists employed to come up with even an approximation of the true state of affairs.
We watched that reductionism play out in the failed states of Russia, fully Communist China, Cuba, the unlamented Warsaw Pact and, currently the delights of Zimbabwe. Poor buggers didn’t have a clue and, on your argument, couldn’t.
Part of the attraction of the libertarian right for me is its humility in the face of what we do not, and likely cannot, know. It is grand to see your gradual progression towards a deeper understanding of our ignorance.
Animals are complicated, humans are complex, populations are entirely unknowable. The fun of social science is to suspend one’s disbelief long enough to take a really close look at a particular belief or behaviour or trend. The danger of social science and economics - which is a social science dressed up in calculus - is that the practitioner is apt to think that he or she “understands” and therefore can “predict” the observed behaviour. This can go very well for quite sometime until, eventually, it doesn’t.
So long as it is an academic parlor game it is both interesting and valuable; but when it begins to encroach upon actual policy decisions it is a dangerous, anti-human, conceit. Which, happily, the Dawg has finally realized.
I finally have the comments back to working....sort of. Basically I have to wade through the spam to find the nuggets. I do this a couple of times a day. Sometimes comments are lost. I am working on this. What I need is a Capcha like the coolkids have.