We Should Live - Ben Bateman

The government of Zimbabwean despot Robert Mugabe paid over a million dollars to a woman who claimed that her magic staff could make diesel fuel spurt from the ground:

When Nomatter Tagarira, a spirit medium, claimed that she could conjure refined diesel out of a rock by striking it with her staff, ministers in Robert Mugabe’s Government believed that they might have found the solution to Zimbabwe’s perennial fuel shortage.

After witnessing her apparently miraculous gift they gave her five billion Zimbabwean dollars in cash (worth £1.7 million at the start of the year but now worth one seven-hundredth of that) in return for the fuel. Ms Tagarira was also given a farm, said to have been seized from its white owner during Mr Mugabe’s lawless land grab, as well as food and services that included a round-the-clock armed guard on the rock in the district of Chinhoyi 60 miles (100km) from Harare, the capital.

More than a year later officials realised they had been duped. Ms Tagarira is now in custody, awaiting trial on charges of fraud or, alternatively, of being “a criminal nuisance”. Details from court papers published this week said that over 15 months, until July this year, Ms Tagarira convinced Cabinet ministers, ruling party heavy-weights and top army and police officers that by striking the rock with her staff she could produce enough fuel to supply the country for 100 years.

These two paragraphs convinced me that the reporter really went to Zimbabwe:

“It’s an outlandish story but the people in government who believed this are the same ones who believe that Mugabe’s official policy of printing money will end inflation,” said an economist, who requested anonymity.

After 27 years of economic misrule, what was once one of Africa’s most prosperous countries is in a nightmare of hyperinflation, famine and infra-structural collapse.

American and European liberals have long fawned over third-world thugs like Mugabe, always hoping that this new round of smashing eggs will somehow make that mythical omelette.

It’s strange that a bunch of thugs being fooled by a simple con job would garner attention, while suffering and destruction on a massive scale in Zimbabwe does not.  I guess that’s human nature.

My six-year-old son’s entertainment habits have turned back to Veggietales recently.  In case you don’t have young children, Veggietales are a series of computer-animated Christian-themed videos for children in which all the characters are fruits or vegetables.  Some of the stories are straight from the Bible, a few are original, and several are re-workings of famous movies, such as The Wizard of Oz, Lord of the Rings, and Indiana Jones.

The trouble is that my son hadn’t seen any of those movies, so much of the humor was lost on him.  I tried to explain to him that the original movie was very different from the Veggietales, but the general story and characters were the same.  And this left me short for vocabulary: Are they satires, parodies, or farces?  So I did some research.
A satire makes fun of people, either specific individuals or groups, by revealing their vices and follies.

A parody is makes fun of an author or literary work.  This best fits the Veggietales.

A farce is something silly.  The historical root is from Old French “to stuff”, and the first use of ‘farce’ was as an ad-libbed humor skit inserted into religious plays.  Modern usage emphasizes a light, silly show that relies on situational comedy.

There’s still a word that I can’t find: The Veggietales Bible stories keep the original stories and characters intact, because the goal is that the children learn the stories and their morals.  But modern children aren’t likely to understand Old-Testament politics and wars, so the Veggietales re-casts the stories in terms that modern children can understand: Goliath is a big pickle with boxing gloves, the defenders of Jericho dump slushies on their attackers, and Joseph’s troubles with his brothers take place in the American West.

Is there a word in English to describe this sort of modernized-but-faithful retelling of a story?

Imagine a race-based government.  Imagine a governmental panel set up to decide which of its citizens belong to the special race and which do not.  Imagine public schools that only special-race children can attend, and elections in which only special-race citizens can vote.

It sounds like some nightmare from the past, perhaps something from the Jim Crow South, or from some third-world hellhole, or from the distant past.  But this isn’t just our past, it may well be our future, right here in the United States of America.

Sen. Daniel Akaka has long been pushing for just such a government for native Hawaiians.  As explained here and here, the Akaka bill is coming up for a vote yet again.

It’s difficult to overstate how disastrous this bill would be, both practically and symbolically.  Suffice to say that the bill’s supporters openly admit that the bill could permit the new Hawaiian government to secede from the Union.  Didn’t we resolve that question back in 1864?

I don’t yet believe that this bill has a serious chance of succeeding, but it astonishes me that the Democrats would spend any political capital on it so close to a presidential election.  The more attention they call to this bill, the more attention they will call to just how far left they really are.

Once upon a time, the socialist utopians could pretend not to know that their experiments and revolutions would become the bloody horrors that they eventually became.  In an age of industrialization and rapid change in how people lived their lives, I can understand how people could have believed that an all-powerful government, armed with this new scientific knowledge, might have discovered the secrets to peace and prosperity.

But the modern left doesn’t have any of that.  They don’t even bother claiming it any more.  It has all been tried before, on grander scales than anyone today is willing to contemplate.  Socialists used to be like snake-oil salesmen: They would coax power from the people with elaborate and compelling stories about the wonderful modern world of universal happiness that was always just around the corner.  Today they’re just thugs who hope to scare you into giving them what they want.

And like most groups of thugs, modern liberalism is essentially a death cult.  Liberals don’t know what the future will bring, nor do they care.  They have surrendered to the primal despair that weighs on us all, the belief that life isn’t worth living.  The mild version of this despair is hedonism: We might as well have a great time before we all die.  But deeper levels of despair go beyond the hedonism into an embrace of death itself.

One’s own death isn’t enough under this death-cult mentality.  This despair’s internal logic apparently requires that the followers share the pain and suffering before they take their own lives.  Self-hatred gives them meaning, and that meaning energizes them to spread the word.

I think that the psychology is the same for jihadis, Earth liberation types, and racial separatists like Akaka.  To the outsider the movement seems bizarre because it so obviously can’t survive.  But to the believers, the certainty of doom is precisely the point.  If you’ve given up on life, then you have nothing to look forward to but a glorious, meaningful death.  The psychic satisfaction is the same whether it’s self-detonation in a crowded restaurant, laws that ensure California wildfires, or sending an entire state back into racial strife and separatism.  (If the Akaka bill passes, maybe next the Hawaiians will try to legalize slavery.)

I blame it mostly on poor theology.  We all have an urge to die.  We all feel the despair to some extent.  And our societies work best when we recognize that despair and push back against it.  But socialism has taught us otherwise.  It told us that our minds were blank slates, blobs of Silly Putty waiting to be molded into whatever shape our political masters decreed.  In truth, it was all just wishful thinking from the socialists; their utopian project wouldn’t work unless our minds were blank and malleable.

Today the trend is away from that socialist nonsense: How many people today really believe that boys would cuddle dolls and girls would play with dump trucks—and that this would be a good thing—if only we tried a little harder to reshape society?  But the collapse of socialist thinking doesn’t automatically bring back the old Christian theology that really worked.  Instead we just have a void.  We have no particular understanding of good and evil, right and wrong.  And people have tried to fill that void with searches for meaning like tattoos and piercings or inventing their own nonsensical religion on the fly.

And then there’s tribalism.  When people don’t have a mature religion to turn to, they can give themselves over to that primal instinct of group unity and hatred: We’re the good people, and all others are the bad people.  Or as a major far-left group puts it: “Para la raza, todo.  Fuera de la raza, nada.” (For the race, everything.  For those outside the race, nothing.)

It shouldn’t surprise us that large numbers of people embrace death, destruction, and chaos for their own sake.  It was always thus, and it will always be thus.  The best we can do is to see this profound despair for what it is, take power away from its followers to minimize the harm that they can do, and urge those followers to turn back towards life.

A wildfire in southern California has destroyed over 700 homes and 384 square miles. The press is treating this as a natural disaster, but it was entirely avoidable. It’s a simple matter to clear out the dead brush that starts and fuels these fires, but litigious environmental fanatics have made it illegal. The Sierra Club and similar organizations demand policies that virtually ensure that fires like this will break out. I think that this destruction is precisely what they want. Their religion demands it.

Meanwhile, Hillary Clinton’s campaign has been accepting contributions of around $1000 apiece from about 150 dishwashers, street vendors, and others who either don’t exist or don’t have the means to make such a contribution. The media storyline is that Hillary’s campaign just got a little overzealous, and there’s nothing to get too excited about. Yes, she’s blatantly breaking the law on a grand scale, but this is Hillary, and she is much too special to be limited by mere laws.
This is the same stuff that the Clintons gave us back in the nineties, back when the liberals were all excited about getting a new (and blatantly unconstitutional) campaign finance law. Now campaign financing restrictions are like immigration law: tough statutes with lax enforcement. So people in power and the businesses who fund them have nothing to fear; they know that the law won’t be enforced against them. But people who don’t funnel enough protection money to the right politicians can always be accused of having violated some law or other.

It’s the same situation that we had with antitrust law in the late nineties, when Microsoft learned that even the mightiest businesses must pay tribute to the princelings who run Washington. This is why socialists love it when government makes new laws and regulations. With enough laws we all become criminals, and so the government can hammer any of us at any time. It puts us all down on our knees, begging the government for mercy, kinda like how this woman managed to avoid arrest on a drug charge.

Update 10/24/07:  As if on cue, we have this story about how comedian Steven Colbert’s joke campaign for president has generated threats of legal trouble.  See, it’s a big legal problem if a corporation endorses a comedian’s hopeless campaign as a publicity stunt.  But thousands of dollars illegally flowing to Hillary Clinton is just an insignificant error in judgment.

It started as a liberal fairy tale: At George Washington University, fliers were distributed around campus declaring “Islamo-Fascist Awareness Week” under the headline: “Hate Muslims? So do we!!!” The flier purported to come from the local chapter of the Young America’s Foundation.
The university’s response was swift and merciless. University president Steven Knapp said, “[W]e will not tolerate the dissemination of fliers or other documents that vilify any religious, racial, or ethnic group.” A student association vice president said that the fliers were heinous and supported expulsion. Campus liberals’ long-hoped-for manifestation of pure evil had finally appeared, and they savored the chance to demonstrate their moral purity.

But then the story began to fall apart. While it’s true that the Young America’s Foundation was sponsoring an Islamo-Fascist Awareness Week, they weren’t involved with the flier. A group calling itself Students for Conservito-Fascism Awareness confessed to the hoax, pretending that they expected the flier to be understood as satire. Their non-apology apology declared that “Campuses allied in their commitment to a hate-free environment and critical thinking should not allow Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week to take place.”

Then the strangest thing happened when the liberal fairy tale about hate on the right turned into a conservative cliche about fraud and slander from the left. Nobody seemed to care. The university’s spokesman has no comment.

Now the Young America’s Foundation has formally asked the university’s president to keep his word and punish hatred on campus—the hatred incited by the perpetrators of the fraud. So far, there are no news reports of the university punishing or even denouncing the hoax. It seems that all hatreds are equal, but some are more equal than others.

Update: Ann Coulter’s column today tells this story and other hate-crime hoaxes over the past few years. Her closing paragraph:

Liberals love nothing more than these constant self-righteous-athons — as if they would ever have the courage to stand up for any cause not universally supported by everyone around them.

Last August, Barack Obama said that he was so committed to the War on Terror that he would invade Pakistan without permission, if necessary. When even other Democrats questioned the wisdom of invading an ally—especially a nuclear-armed ally—Obama stood by what he had said.

Now the Democrat-controlled House Foreign Affairs Committee has passed a resolution condemning the Ottoman Empire for atrocities committed against the Turks. But the Ottoman Empire doesn’t exist. It hasn’t existed for 85 years. That same chunk of land is now called Turkey.

The atrocities against the Armenians are still a very sensitive topic in Turkey. It is a crime in Turkey to call them genocide, as the government insists that it intended only only to deport the Armenians, not to kill them. So the Turks were not amused with this bit of Democrat moral grandstanding. They have withdrawn their ambassador, and now there are worries that this will hamper our rights to fly over Turkey and use strategically important Incirlik air base.

We’re accustomed to the Democrats trying to demoralize the American public to defeat the US military, but this is far more serious. The Democrats are so determined to make us lose in Iraq that they’re snubbing our allies while appeasing our enemies.

Update 10-18-07: This NRO article gives more historical background to the Armenian deaths in 1915. In summary, the Ottoman Empire was under attack from many enemies, especially from Russia. It was ruled by a triumvirate of incompetent thugs. Some Armenians remained loyal to the empire, while others fought against it with hopes of an independent Armenian state.

Amid this chaos, the government decided to resettle Armenians in the rebellious regions away from the fighting, and was unable to provide them with adequate food, water, and shelter during the journey. So the closest analogy to the Armenian deaths is not the Holocaust, but the Bataan death march: Lots of people died horribly due to governmental incompetence and the natural chaos of war, but there was never a specific intention to kill so many of them.

Update to the Update: I should have pointed out that I’m not claiming the NRO article as absolute truth, just as one side of an insoluble argument.  No doubt there are many reputable voices on the other side, such as Spengler.

It’s often said in conservative circles that any organization that isn’t explicitly conservative will eventually become liberal. And internet businesses seem to follow that rule.

Young giant Google has already used its clout in advance liberalism by agreeing to censor its search engine according to the dictates of the Chinese government. Then Google subsidiary YouTube began deleting videos posted by conservative commentator Michelle Malkin.

And now Google has refused a political ad that criticizes MoveOn.org:

The banned advertisements said, “Susan Collins is MoveOn’s primary target. Learn how you can help” and “Help Susan Collins stand up to the MoveOn.org money machine.” The ads linked to Collins’ campaign Web site with a headline reading “MoveOn.org has made Susan Collins their #1 target.” The Collins Web site claims that MoveOn has contributed $250,000 to her likely Democratic opponent and has run nine ads against her costing nearly $1 million. The Web site also displays MoveOn.org’s controversial “General Betray Us” ad.

Google’s excuse for refusing the ad is feeble to the point of being pathetic: The ad contained “MoveOn.org”, which is a trademark, so Google concluded that the ad must violate its trademark policy. This will be news to the people at YouTube.

Here you can see the ads that were rejected, the page they led to, and a Kafkaesque web chat between a Google representative and Lance Dutson, the man who actually placed the ads on behalf of the Collins campaign:

Lance Dutson: So if anyone complains, you simlply pull the ad?
AnnaMarie: The term MoveOn is a trademarked term.
AnnaMarie: We proactively disapprove ads that have a trademarked term in them, unless the advertiser in question has permission to use the term.
Lance Dutson: Let me show you something:

[Lance shows some URLs of Google ads that use trademarks in a critical way. AnnaMarie insists that all trademarks in Google ads are used with the owners’ permission.]

Lance Dutson: So you’re telling me Blackwater sent you permission to run negative ads against them?

I doubt that the people at Google are bad; I think they’re just unprincipled. People are prone to moral error, so they need something a little more detailed than “Don’t be evil.” From the inside, I’m sure that the people making these decisions think that they’re acting very reasonably under the circumstances. But their mistake—the mistake of all relativists—is that they try to make major moral decisions on the fly. Those decisions, and the principles on which they should be based, are very difficult to get just right even in moments of calm reflection. But if you procrastinate and wait to do your moral thinking until the moment of crisis, then you’re almost guaranteed to get it wrong.

An article on NRO makes a trenchant point about the recent shooting at a Cleveland school, and the killings at Virginia Tech a few months ago.  I love the title: There’s a Reason They Choose Schools:

What is depressingly similar to the mass murders at Virginia Tech and Nickel Mines, Pennsylvania and too many others was the killer’s choice of venue — that steadfastly gun-free zone, the school campus. Although murderer Seung-Hui Cho at Virginia Tech and Asa Coon, the Cleveland shooter were both students reported to have school-related grudges, other school killers have proved to be simply taking advantage of the lack of effective security at schools. The Bailey, Colorado multiple rapes and murder of September 2006, the Nickel Mines massacre of October 2006, and Buford Furrow’s murderous August 1999 invasion of a Los Angeles Jewish day-care center were all committed by adults. They had no connection to the schools other than being drawn to the soft target a school offers such psychopaths.

. . .

In Cleveland this week and at Virginia Tech the shooters took time to walk the halls, searching out victims in several rooms, and then shooting them. Virginia Chief Medical Examiner Marcella Fierro describes the locations of the dead in Virginia Tech’s Norris Hall. Dead victims were found in groups ranging from 1 to 13, scattered throughout 4 rooms and a stairwell. If any one of the victims had, like the Appalachian School of Law student, used armed force to stop Cho, lives could have been saved.

The people of Virginia actually had a chance to implement such a plan last year. House Bill 1572 was introduced in the legislature to extend the state’s concealed-carry provisions to college campuses. But the bill died in committee, opposed by the usual naysayers, including the Virginia Association of Chiefs of Police and the university itself. Virginia Tech spokesman Larry Hincker was quoted in the Roanoke Times as saying, “I’m sure the university community is appreciative of the General Assembly’s actions because this will help parents, students, faculty, and visitors feel safe on our campus.”

It’s the classic dispute between conservatives: Would you rather feel safe, or be safe?  And you can’t have both, because being safe requires an awareness of ugly realities that many people would rather ignore.

Most voters don’t want the immigration situation of the past several decades, where we have reasonable laws on the books, but those laws go unenforced while huge numbers of illegals pour over the border. In a democratic republic you would assume that a majority of voters will eventually get what it wants, but not in this case. And that’s the puzzle: Why has democracy failed here?

The puzzle has two pieces. The left wants massive immigration for long-term political advantage, while the right’s natural allies in big business enjoy the benefits of cheap labor with the taxpayers bearing most of the costs.

Neither side of this unholy alliance has any reason to talk too freely about what they’re doing, because the whole scheme relies on them pretending that non-enforcement of our immigration laws some mysterious otherworldly phenomenon, rather than the specific intention of those in power. But Michelle Malkin reports on Senator Barbara Boxer slipping up and revealing a little too openly how the game works.

Boxer recently introduced an amendment (SA 3246) to a spending bill in which the Senate would openly instruct the immigration enforcement authorities not to enforce the law:

It is the sense of the Senate that as part of the effort to count all persons physically in the United States during the 2010 Census, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Bureau of the Department of Homeland Security should limit aggressive enforcement of federal immigration laws to promote full participation by non-citizens in the census.

And more illegals in the census means more House seats for California.

That’s where all the illegals come from, folks. Don’t fall for any silly stories about how the border is too big and the logistics of enforcement are too difficult. The immigration laws go unenforced because the politicians want them to go unenforced.

Michelle Malkin relays a story on a lawsuit accusing Target of violating the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA).  But there’s nothing wrong with the stores themselves.  They have plenty of ramps, wide doors, and whatnot.  Target stands accusing of insufficiently accommodating the disabled on their web site:

U.S. District Judge Marilyn Hall Patel in San Francisco rejected Target’s request to dismiss the case. She also certified the case as a class action, ruling that all legally blind people in the U.S. who have been denied access to services at Target stores because of deficiencies in the company’s website can join the suit.

Target has failed to use “technologically simple and not economically prohibitive” code embedded in websites allowing the blind to use software that vocalizes the content, according to court filings by the National Federation of the Blind.

The group filed the suit on behalf of Bruce Sexton, a UC Berkeley student who claimed that he couldn’t access some features of Target.com. “It was just gibberish for blind users trying to use the website,” said Larry Paradis, a lawyer for the group.

“Target has argued that no law — neither the Americans with Disabilities Act nor state law — could require it to make its website accessible to the blind,” Paradis said. “Today’s decision completely rejects Target’s argument.”

The problem with laws like the ADA is that they have no inherent limits.  As with any liberal sob-story group, the militant disabled can never be satisfied.  However much you give them, they’ll always want more.

If you doubt it, consider this story out of Baltimore:

Members of the National Federation of the Blind are picketing  today outside the South Baltimore offices of the Maryland Department of Environment.

They want environmental officials to order the makers of hybrid cars to make changes to the environmentally friendly car.

Chris Danielson says the cars are too quiet when running on their electric battery, and that can be dangerous for blind people trying to cross the street.

Danielson tells WBAL News that  he has no statistics on pedestrian accidents involving hybrid cars, but he does say there have been several near misses.

So the facts are irrelevant.  The picketers have no idea what benefits they’re claiming or what burdens they’re pushing on their fellow citizens, so I assume that they don’t care.  They know only the will to power, the desire to control what other people do.

Venom is a poisonous liquid secreted by snakes and other animals.

Venin is the protein in the venom that is actually toxic, especially with snake venom. Many sources ignore this distinction and call ‘venin’ a synonym for ‘venom’. ‘Venin’ by itself is exceedingly rare, and it’s difficult to research on the internet because it’s also the French word for ‘venom’.

Antivenin is a medicine for snakebite. It’s produced by injecting animals with non-lethal doses of one or more venins, waiting for the animal to produce antibodies against it, and then extracting those antibodies from the animal’s blood.

I would guess (based on this and this) that the medicine’s name refers specifically to ‘venin’ and not ‘venom’ because the people who actually make antivenin need the distinction. When you make antivenin, you don’t just inject raw venom into the animal. You process it and isolate the proteins for which you want antibodies. And the resulting medicine doesn’t just treat bites from a specific snake. The same venin can appear in the venom of various species of snakes, e.g. cottonmouths, copperheads, and rattlesnakes are all closely related. So it makes more sense to write and think in terms of the venins that the medicine will actually treat, rather than the animal’s venom that was distilled into those venins.

‘Antivenom’ is arguably not a word at all; it’s a common corruption of ‘antivenin’. Many writers consider it a synonym of ‘antivenin’, because most people don’t know what venin is and wouldn’t care about the distinction even if they did.

If you want to be a language snob with few friends, then use ‘antivenin’ and make fun of people who use ‘antivenom’. If you want to be understood and are willing to risk being mocked by language snobs, then use ‘antivenom’. As a compromise, you could write something like “antivenin (aka antivenom).”