We Should Live - Ben Bateman

Spengler considers a love of life to be an acquired taste:

The better one gets to know the Jews, the more peculiar they appear. “Remember us unto life, O King who delights in life,” they pray on the solemn occasion of their New Year, which this year fell on September 13. Unfeigned and spontaneous delight in life is uniquely Jewish; the standard Jewish toast states, “To life!” while the most characteristic Jewish gibe admonishes, “Get a life!” We are not dealing here with so-called lust for life that involves a pile of broken dishes and a hangover the next morning. Instead, the Jews evince a liking for life as such. That is not only unusual; it is almost unnatural.

Life as such is not that likable. As Mephistopheles taunted Faust in Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s tragedy, life in its totality was fit only for a god, too hard a cracker for ordinary humans to digest. That seems to be the prevalent opinion across epochs and cultures. Socrates told us to despise life and instead to view death as the highest good. Buddhism teaches us to regard it as an illusion to inure ourselves from its attendant pain. From the Spartans to the Vikings, the martial cultures of the pagan world showed contempt for life, for they often fought to the death. Pagans aspired to a glorious death; I can think of not a single instance in the history of the Jews, whose wars of antiquity were frequent and ferocious, of the mention of a “glorious death”. The very notion is repulsive to Jewish sensibilities. (more…)

Mark Steyn perfectly describes Europe’s Islam problem.  He quotes Massachusetts governor Deval Patrick as saying that 9/11 “was also a failure of human beings to understand each other, to learn to love each other,” and he points out that the suspects in the latest terrorist plot in Germany were named Daniel and Fritz.  And Fritz, at least, is ethnic German, converted to Islam in Germany at a multicultural center.

Then he gets to the heart of the problem:

Why do radical imams seek to convert young Canadian, British and even American men and women in their late teens and twenties? Because they understand that when you raise a generation in the great wobbling blancmange of Deval Patrick cultural relativism – nothing is any better or any worse than anything else; if people are “mean and nasty” to us, it’s only because we didn’t sing enough Barney the Dinosaur songs at them – in such a world a certain percentage of its youth will have a great gaping hole where their sense of identity should be. And into that hole you can pour something fierce and primal and implacable.

The good news is that the United States doesn’t have Europe’s demographic problems, so we have some time to close that hole and build a culture worth believing in.  The bad news is that this change of culture will probably take 20 years or so, until most of the fanatic baby boomers are packed away safely in nursing homes.  Then maybe we can get a more responsible generation in power, and they can push the culture toward something more sustainable.

Michelle Malkin reports on a new project by far-left group Iraq Veterans Against the War:

HELP END THE WAR!
BEFRIEND A RECRUITER!

Recruitment is essential for the military and politicians to carry out the war and occupation of Iraq. Recruitment levels are low thanks to “truth in recruiting” efforts, but now it is time to shut recruitment down. By flooding recruiters and recruitment centers with phone calls, appointments, questions, and smiling faces, recruiters will waste their time and resources on you. By calling and asking every question you can think off about all the false opportunities the military is offering, you are stealing away recruiters ability to do recruitment.

Like Michelle, I don’t see how this could fail to be sedition, though blogger Allah has done some research and claims that nobody could be convicted of a crime.  I’m not convinced.  Maybe you couldn’t prove a crime by the people who actually do this, but surely you could prove a crime by the people who put the web site together.  Those people are very open about their intent to disrupt the operations of the US military.  As I recall from law school, criminal conspiracy statutes are usually pretty darn broad.  The real problem is that prosecution wouldn’t politically feasible.

I sure hope that the left’s “Don’t you dare question my patriotism” line has worn itself out by now.

The good news is that their plan is pretty silly.  Rabid leftists are brave in groups, but I doubt that they could do much as individuals.  Besides, in essence they would be pitting their own resources against the US Treasury.  I would be surprised if more than a handful tried this preposterous stunt, and they would fail.  Only the fanatics would be bold enough to try it, and they would be the least capable of keeping their cool.

Warning: This one is kinda grisly, so you might want to skip it.

Today this phrase usually refers to insanity or extreme nervousness, with emphasis on an inability to function.  But its history is considerably uglier.  It’s British army slang from World War I, where advances in medicine meant that doctors could save the lives of wounded soldiers to a far greater extent than ever before.  This meant that the army had to transport significant numbers of the wounded back to Britain to recuperate.

There were many different types of wounded.  Some were purely psychological (called shell shock at the time), some were blinded or had respiratory problems from the poisonous gases used on the battlefield, and some were amputees.  Quadruple amputees—those who had lost the use of all four limbs—were particularly difficult to transport.  And so they were carried back to Britain in baskets.  Hence they were “basket cases”.

I think I’ll avoid this phrase from now on.

A Belgian political party wanted to stage a protest on 9/11 calling on the government to push back against Muslim influence in Belgium. The mayor of Brussels, Freddy Thielemans, decided that this protest would interfere with public order, and so forbade it. Some of the protestors showed up anyway:

Police arrested two leaders of a Belgian far-right party Tuesday for staging an illegal protest against the “Islamization of Europe,” six years to the day after the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington.

Police scuffled with some of the 200 people who converged on two squares in the EU district of Brussels to protest what they perceived as the rise of Islam as a significant political force across Europe. Officers handcuffed two leaders of the far-right Flemish Interest Party, which is very critical of Muslim immigrants, and took them away in police vans.

. . .

Only 200 or so protesters showed up Tuesday for a protest lasting only 30 minutes. The demonstrators faced more than 100 police, backed up by water cannons and helicopters, who closed off streets around the EU headquarters.

“We support the goals of the demonstration to protest against the lack of freedom of expression in this country,” said Frank Vanhecke, the head of the Flemish Interest Party, before he was bundled off to the police station. “And we also we fully agree that the rise of Islam in Europe poses a risk to our values.”

A hundred police, plus helicopters and water cannons, to handle 200 protestors? That’s nearly a compliment.

In what I’m sure is a completely unrelated story, Mark Steyn points to an interesting post at Gates of Vienna. The Brussels city council is currently ruled by the Socialist Party, the head of which is Freddy Thielemans—the guy who banned the anti-Islam protest. But he’s only one of 18 Socialist Party members. You might be interested to read the entire list:

1. Fatima Abid

2. Mustafa Amrani

3. Samira Attalbi

4. Mohammed Boukantar

5. Philippe Close

6. Jean Baptiste de Crée

7. Ahmed el Ktibi

8. Julie Fiszman

9. Faouzia Hariche

10. Karine Lalieux

11. Marie-Paule Mathias

12. Yvan Mayeur

13. Mounia Mejbar

14. Mohamed Ouria Ghli

15. Mahfoudh Romdhani

16. Sevket Temiz

17. Freddy Thielemans

18. Christian Van Der Linden

You wouldn’t want to draw any inferences from these names, of course. When Freddy sat down to discuss the proposed anti-Islam protest with Mahfoudh, Mohamed, Ahmed, Faouzia, Fatima, Mustafa, Samira, and the rest of the gang, I’m sure that they decided the matter based on a traditional understanding of Belgian law, as well as practical security considerations, and that their personal feelings about Islam played no role whatsoever in their decision to brutally silence dissent from the Right. Obviously, Europe has nothing to worry about with its massive and fast-growing Muslim population.

If you live in Brussels, then I’m sure that you will agree that shifting demographics will have no effect on your traditional rights and freedoms, and there’s nothing to fear from the rise of Islam. And you had better agree with that statement, or the Brussels police may visit you to demonstrate how easily a well-wielded baton can change your mind.

In case you’ve been worrying that a Guantanamo detainee’s free Koran might have been touched by an infidel’s bare hands, here’s a little history lesson for you, to put things into perspective.

An article by John Tamny of RealClearPolitics argues that falling birth rates are nothing to worry about:

What is forgotten amidst all the public and private handwringing is that birthrates have very little to do with the all-important factor when it comes to economic growth: gross domestic product per worker. . . .

People ultimately trade products for products, so if labor productivity is rising, the level of population growth (or decline) isn’t much of a factor.

As the ILO study shows, U.S. workers are the most productive in the world by a wide margin ($63,885 per worker), followed by Ireland, Luxembourg, Belgium, and France. Though the U.S. birthrate is still thought to be high enough to sustain population growth, it’s ultimately not very relevant. The more important factor here is that worker productivity and output continue to rise.

Mark Steyn responds here, but he doesn’t quite hit the heart of the issue. He can’t resist the technical point that economic output per worker is a poor metric, and that Tamny ignores the special costs that distinguish immigration from trade in commodities. And Steyn mocks what he calls “economic reductionism”, in which economists assume that people will always do what is in their economic self-interest.

I want to go a little deeper. The problem with economic reductionism isn’t just that it’s factually wrong, but that it carries dangerous moral premises. Mr. Tamny’s thinking is fundamentally hedonistic: If we’re all able to consume lots of economic goods, then that is what we ought to do. It’s simple utilitarianism: As long as everybody is happy, then everything is good.

The alternative is to value life more than happiness. Happiness usually promotes life, but not always and especially not in our era.  Life is often painful, and we must choose between accepting the pain and embracing life or avoiding pain and hoping that life will somehow manage of its own.

Raising children is tough.  It’s expensive.  It’s a hassle.  It’ll cost you all sorts of sleep and seriously cut into your sex life.  It’ll mean that you can’t go out in the evening whenever you want, nor can you conveniently rent and watch whatever movie you want.  But if you really want to live, if you really want some trace of your life to still exist a century hence, then making and raising children is the easiest, most effective way to do it.

That’s how I see the demographic crisis: Lots of people are choosing pleasure over life, and technology is making it easier for them to do so.  With population big turning point is probably birth control, which severed the link between reproduction and sexual pleasure.  Now westerners are freer than ever to enjoy themselves and then be forgotten.

I’ve been unplugged from news for nearly all of August. Life has been busy. But I did get sucked into this debate, which I think went pretty well. In course of digging up links for that, I came across two stories worth saving:

Brussels court upholds ban on anti-Islamization protest planned for Sept. 11. The headline pretty much says it all. A Brussels group wants to protest the Islamicization of Europe, and the mayor banned the protest, saying that the group is inflammatory and would disturb public order. Translation: The Belgian government already understands that it cannot maintain order if it too strenuously opposes Muslim demands. Europe is lost.

Mark Steyn reviews a book of poetry from prisoners at Guantanamo Bay:

The jacket of Poems From Guantánamo: The Detainees Speak shows a photograph by Paul J. Richards of Agence France-Presse: a close-up of the shackles that chain a man’s ankles to the floor while he’s being interrogated. But what rang a bell with me was the strip of carpet you can glimpse just above it. I visited Gitmo last fall — for Ramadan, as it happens — and, among other highlights, got to visit the interrogation room. The detainees are questioned while seated on a La-Z-Boy recliner or a sofa — blue plush with gold piping.

. . .

I mention the La-Z-Boy recliner not to make a political argument so much as an artistic one. Presumably when Paul J. Richards snapped his pic for Agence France-Presse, either the La-Z-Boy or the sofa was in the frame. But the Iowa University Press chose to crop the furniture out of the cover shot. Why? You can figure they’d have left it in if there’d been a rickety wooden chair under a bare lightbulb swinging on a frayed cord. But a book with a La-Z-Boy on the front doesn’t exactly shriek “Death camp!”

Steyn must not be a Monty Python fan, or he would surely have worked in a reference to the Spanish Inquisition’s Comfy Chair Torture. (Script here. Video here. And even if you’ve seen it before, watch the video. It’s funnier than I remembered.