Thursday, October 06, 2005

So, if it spits out the chunks, play dead, but if it swallows yer leg...

...back away.

New news on what to do when a bear is chewing on you. Apparently grizzlies tend to attack defensively, but when black bears attack, they're hungry.

Talk about a voice in the Wilderness

Leftie Sasha Abramsky writes in openDemocracy:
My core politics haven’t changed, but it seems to me that the world has changed so dramatically – traditional alliances and reference points have become unreliable, the ground rules of the power game have so shifted – I’d be a fool not to incorporate these changes into my analytical framework...

...I’d argue that a strong defence of pluralistic, democratic societies needs to be an essential, perhaps a defining, component of any genuinely progressive politics in today’s world.

...It is because bin Ladenism is waging war against the liberal ideal that much of the activist left’s response to 11 September 2001 and the London attacks is woefully, catastrophically inadequate. For we, as progressives, need to uphold the values of pluralism, rationalism, scepticism, women’s rights, and individual liberty and oppose ideologies and movements whose foundations rest on theocracy, obscurantism, misogyny, anti-Semitism, and nostalgia for a lost empire.
Abramsky makes a good point about the foolishness of arguing first causes when the enemy is already thru the gate:
The head-in-the-sand response (epitomised by Ward Churchill) that argues, in essence, that because America funded bin Laden in the 1980s we should sit back and take whatever his organisation throws at the country, or the world, today, is as flawed as arguments pre-second world war that because Hitler was a product of the Versailles treaty and the devastation wrought on Germany during and after the first world war, Britain and France should suck up the Nazis’ increasingly brazen outrages and simply hope for better times ahead....

Not to put too fine a point on it, it was a dumb argument then,...and it’s a dumb argument now....Once a monster has been created, once its ambitions have been unleashed, the most important question ceases to be, “How and why did this situation develop?” and becomes, “How can we quench these mad fires that threaten to consume all before them?”
She is sure to be excoriated for that- how dare she compare the noble bin Laden with Hitler? Or has the Left now so philosophicly perverted itself that it is willing to embrace Hitler as well as Stalin and Mao, Saddam Hussein and even bin Laden, so long as they are opposed to everything which the Left has tradionally honored?

The Left followed its fairy tale of liberation thru oppression thru all the 20th century, supporting Stalin, Mao, and even Pol Pot and Kim Jong Il. How have they so perverted their beliefs that they find defenders of western liberalism to be the real criminals in the struggle with secular and Islamist fascism? It reminds me of the old Socialists who fissioned repeatedly because they were so obsessed with tiny ideological differences that they saw each other as the real antagonists toward their common goals. These lefties see the bin Ladens and Husseins as allies, while the conservative advocates of western liberalism are the real enemy to them.

The first couple of responders in the Comments section seem unphased by anything she wrote.

Thanks to Arts & Letters Daily for the lead.

Tuesday, October 04, 2005

a hot young star strips

Check it out. Definitly a hot pic, and worth using for wallpaper.

Ivy League college admissions

They don't want the best students. They want the best graduates. The two require quite different admissions policies.
Being a smart child isn’t a terribly good predictor of success in later life, they conclude. “Non-intellective” factors—like motivation and social skills—probably matter more...It is a wonderful thing, of course, for a school to turn out lots of relatively happy and successful graduates. But Harvard didn’t want lots of relatively happy and successful graduates. It wanted superstars...
It's a lot like branding a product. Malcolm Gladwell wrote about it in The New Yorker.

Thanks to ArtsJournal for the lead.