Nothing Else Fit

by hilzoy

A few notes about my last post (the one on Maureen Dowd): I didn’t mean to suggest that there were any character traits, let alone major virtues, that are the exclusive province of men. I just read the comments Dowd quoted, about men not having any occasion to display their manliness etc., and thought: they seem to have something in mind, and it would be churlish to reply: so I take it you’ve stopped being an exhibitionist? or something like that. What is this something? Apparently, it seems to have to do with things like strength and courage. But why would anyone think that there is no occasion for strength and courage, rightly construed? I was assuming that any decent version of manliness would not actually be defined as “what women are not”, but would involve some positive ideal worth pursuing in itss own right, whether or not women were doing something similar. Debitage suggests that I am wrong:

“The macho impulse is a drive not just to do things that are intrinsically good for men, but to do things that distinguish men from women. This is why so much of machismo is wrapped up in policing border-blurring behavior, such as homosexuality and uppity women. Therefore it’s only manly to have strength if women are typically weak. If women can be strong too, men will have to find a different reason to be strong (and plenty of such reasons exist).”

If so, then I agree that men should give up on this whole set of motivations. No one’s psyche should actually require the weakness of others. I was hoping that there was a better way to respond to the guys Dowd quoted; but if I’m wrong, well then, I’m wrong.

(I also did not mean to suggest that my being single was the result of my not being pert, winsome, etc. (Wouldn’t it be convenient to think so!) I tend to put it down to a combination of My Many Faults and the vagaries of my personal history. I’m just not in a good position to be a counterexample to Dowd’s thesis, is all.) (Also: I should know better than to write posts while I’m rushing around getting ready to catch a train.)

All that said: the comments on that thread have now turned to a discussion of these comments:

(a): “Those of us who aren’t bastards typically find that most women take no romantic interest in us”

(b) “As a lesbian, of course, I have no direct interest in this matter. But I can tell you that the straight women of my acquaintance say the worst turn-off is a man who makes a big point of how much of a nice, non-sexist guy he is, and then expects women to be grateful and appreciative of this. A remarkable number of men don’t seem to have grasped the point that women don’t like to be told, either explicitly or implicitly, that they should be grateful to men for treating them like mature adult human beings.”

My take on this question below the fold.

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This is the quintessential iceberg post, since virtually all of it is submerged below the fold.  It’s long, rambling, self-analyzing and probably not considered a "feel-good" piece.  You’ve been warned.

(Update at the end)

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by hilzoy

While thinking about Sebastian’s thread, it occurred to me that my thinking about foreign policy crystallized around some very specific episodes, and that it would be interesting to know what everyone else’s were. (It might also help us know where everyone else is coming from. On reflection, I found I could barely imagine what it would be like to have the reference points of someone, say, 15 years younger than me.) Here are mine. (Just foreign policy; adding domestic policy would take too long.)

When I was growing up, both the war in Vietnam and the Cold War were the backdrop to everything. My parents were, basically, liberal internationalists. They had met in Paris, in 1954 and therefore they had followed the French Indochina war, and therefore they knew a fair amount about Vietnam way before the US got seriously involved, and thought our getting involved was a bad idea from the outset. And this meant that they did not go through any sort of wrenching change of heart in 1965 or ’66, and thus were at no risk of lurching from too far on one side to too far on the other. They just thought that we did not have significant national interests there, and that there was no real case for going to war to support one bad regime against another. I tended to agree. (And I read a lot about it later, not wanting to be stuck with a kid’s understanding of it, and have never seen any reason to change my mind.)

The major lesson I took from the Vietnam war, as a kid, was this: it seemed to me that we had gotten into it without having fully thought it through. What if advisors weren’t enough? Were we prepared to send troops? What if the troops we sent weren’t enough? Etc. By the time I started being really aware of the war, around ’67 or ’68, it seemed to me to be a kind of situation I (as a kid) completely recognized from my own experience: the kind where you say something dumb without thinking, and then are made to follow up on it in some way, and then can’t figure out how to backtrack, and end up having completely painted yourself into a corner with no way out. The obvious way to deal with these situations, thought 8 year old me, was not to get into them in the first place, and if you do, just apologize immediately and extricate yourself. (I did not, then or now, consistently act on this knowledge, more’s the pity.) Likewise here: I thought you should never get into a war without being very clear about how you can get out again without damage to your credibility. Never, never, never. And never for some vague reasons like: this is communism, we should oppose communism, therefore we should intervene. Never, ever get into a war without knowing exactly what you’re doing.

About the Cold War: it was just omnipresent, though in its later, 60s form. It’s relevant, though, that my mother is Swedish (she moved to the US after marrying my Dad), and so half my relatives were (a) not from the US (which meant that I always knew what it was like to see the US from the outside), and (b) living disproof of the idea that all leftists were communists. (It’s hard to disbelieve in the existence of people who are, in fact, your grandparents: proud and committed socialists (and democrats) who took it to be obvious that the US was a fundamentally admirable country and the USSR was not.)

It was also part of the backdrop of my childhood that the US government sometimes did the right thing and sometimes did not. The major political events of my parents and their friends were World War II and McCarthyism, which made either reflexive dislike of or reflexive cheering for the US and all its works just impossible. Our basic assumption, when I was growing up, was that the US was founded on admirable principles to which it sometimes lived up and sometimes did not, and that it was our job as citizens to help it to do the right thing more often.

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by hilzoy

I was so hoping not to write anything about Brad DeLong’s post on explanation v. justification — it is, after all, my day job. But since we have started talking about it in comments, I decided that perhaps I should. It’s below the fold, since it’s long.

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by hilzoy

It struck me today that I have read a lot of good non-fiction this summer, and that some of it might be worth sharing. What I’m posting here are books that meet the following criteria:

* They have some relevance to policy.

* They are not, however, primarily “policy books” (e.g., books about what sort of environmental policy we should adopt.) Instead, they either tell stories or present relevant facts.

* They are fun to read. (Crucial.)

* The author’s politics are either undetectable or don’t get in the way of his or her accuracy. (I’ll indicate when the author’s politics are detectable. No mention of them means: I have no idea.)

I’m always looking for books like this: books that allow me to actually learn something while having fun at the same time. Feel free to add your own suggestions, or talk about cookware. (Me: cast iron, definitely. Just cook with it every day for two weeks or so, and the surface will take care of itself. I also use enameled saucepans.)

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by Charles

[For a little background, check out Part I and Part II]

It’s been a while since I wrote the first two parts, mainly because I lost interest, both in writing this series and in listening to talk radio in general.  I still listen frequently but the blogosphere is so much more informative, interactive, stimulating and enlightening, that I’d rather blog.  Also, the commercials on talk radio are killing me.  Like accruing mercury or lead poisoning, they’ve built up in my system to toxic levels.  They play the same ones, over and over, all day long, day after day, week after week.  Ugh.  What’s more, I’m not interested in what they’re selling.  At all.  I don’t want to try hutia and gingko biloba or some other crackpot concoction, or listen to Larry King tout health products and grape juice (Larry King?!  Health?!  He’s had more heart attacks than wives!), or buy gold, or incorporate in Nevada, or consolidate my debt, or get a credit report, or try exercises to improve my eyesight.  [To all station managers, are you getting this?  You’re not attracting new listeners with this awful pablum.]  So anyway, I’m a little down on talk radio for now.

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My Japanese grandmother died on July 5th, but my Grandpa Yosh left notifications to some people in the church who didn’t realize my part of the family didn’t know, so I was not notified until yesterday.  As a result I missed the memorial, which is sad for me though of course memorials are for the living so I can find my own way.  In any case I’m going to repost (below the fold for those who don’t need the non-political stuff) a Thanksgiving post about her which I wrote a while ago.

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by hilzoy

Chris Bowers at MyDD has a story on the audiences of liberal and conservative blogs. Here’s what he finds:

“I spent much of the morning looking at the Blogads traffic rankings. Adding up the 200 blogs that are concerned with politics and either identify or have been identified with Democrats / liberals or Republicans / conservatives, I found 87 blogs that general fit into the “liberal” category and 113 blogs that fit into the conservative category. However, despite the greater number of conservative blogs, the liberal blogs totaled nearly ten million page views per week, while the conservative blogs managed just over six million. I have been tracking the comparative audiences of the two blogosphere off and on for the past nine months, and this is the largest lead for the liberal blogosphere that I have ever found. In September, the margin in favor of Democrats was 25%. In winter, it was 33%. In the spring, it was 50%. Now, it has risen to 65%. This is particularly amazing, since less than two years ago the conservative blogosphere was at least twice the size of the liberal blogosphere.”

Bowers has a theory about why this is. Since MyDD is a liberal site, you might expect that it would be something along the lines of: because we’re right, or perhaps some slightly subtler version, like: because intelligent, insightful people such as ourselves both see the truth and write better blogs. But his theory is entirely different (luckily; had it been one of the above, I would not have bothered with it.) It doesn’t mention the comparative merits either of liberalism and conservatism, or of liberal or conservative blogs, at all.

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by Charles

Joe Katzman wrote a lengthy and good piece on Zimbabwe a few days ago.  The dire situation in this once free country was the final tumbler for him, cementing his view that the right to keep and bear arms is a universal human right "on par with freedom of speech and religion".  Welcome to the club, Joe, glad you finally came around.  But what grabbed me more is the fact that, over the past twenty five years, President Robert Mugabe has run this formerly prosperous country down to dust, from Africa’s bread basket to basket case.  The Telegraph:

President Robert Mugabe’s onslaught against Zimbabwe’s cities has escalated to claim new targets, with white-owned factories and family homes being demolished in a campaign that has left 200,000 people homeless.

Across the country, Mr Mugabe is destroying large areas of heaving townships and prosperous industrial areas alike.

The aim of this brutal campaign is, says the official media, to depopulate urban areas and force people back to the "rural home".

Shades of Pol Pot and his killing fields.  All that’s lacking are "reeducation" camps.  Today’s New York Times has a similar report.  Mugabe isn’t just sentencing 200,000 of his political opposition to slow death by starvation, he is purposefully gutting his own economy in the process.

Chris Viljoen and his wife, Elsie, were still inside their five-bedroom house when a bulldozer began reducing it to rubble. The white couple live in the industrial zone of the capital, Harare.

Next door was a 70-acre site filled with 24 factories and workshops. Bulldozers spent last week razing this area, destroying all but nine businesses that employed about 1,000 people in a country suffering mass unemployment and economic crisis.

…

Across Zimbabwe, the United Nations estimates that 200,000 people have lost their homes, with the poorest townships bearing the brunt of Mr Mugabe’s onslaught. "The vast majority are homeless in the streets," said Miloon Kothari, the UN’s housing representative. He added that "mass evictions" were creating a "new kind of apartheid where the rich and the poor are being segregated".

Virtually all the areas singled out for demolition voted for the opposition Movement for Democratic Change in the last elections. The MDC says that Mr Mugabe ordered the destruction as a deliberate reprisal. But the regime is also seeking to depopulate the cities, driving people into the countryside where the MDC is virtually non-existent and the ruling Zanu-PF Party dominates.

The Herald, the official daily newspaper, urged "urbanites" to go "back to the rural home, to reconnect with one’s roots and earn an honest living from the soil our government repossessed under the land reform programme".

Betsy Newmark:

What Mugabe is doing now in Zimbabwe is reminiscent of Stalin’s actions to induce famine in the Ukraine. Zimbabwe was once one of the more prosperous African countries and now it is in an economic shambles solely due to Mugabe’s treatment of his own people. Now, he is driving people out of the cities and destroying their lone source of earning a living. They are being pushed towards the countryside which is experiencing a drought now. Sadly, we will probably learn in the coming months how these people have starved to death. That is one way for Mugabe to get rid of his opposition.

In effect, Mugabe is sending political opponents to government-owned farms, presumably to be paid at government-set rates, assuming they are employed once they get there in first place.  Southern share croppers had it better.  In addition to driving its citizens off the land they legally own, Mugabe is systematically starving those who don’t toe his line.  Another from the Telegraph:

People are being starved in Zimbabwe by President Robert Mugabe’s deliberate and systematic ploy of using food shortages to cling to power.

Millions of people are going hungry not, as Mr Mugabe’s government claims, because of poor rains but as a direct result of its policy of denying food to opposition supporters and enriching its loyalists.

Last night, the deadline passed for the mass eviction of 2,900 of Zimbabwe’s white commercial farmers, for decades the mainstay of the agricultural sector. Mr Mugabe ordered them to abandon their homes, land and livelihoods by midnight.

An investigation by The Telegraph found that control of the Grain Marketing Board (GMB), Zimbabwe’s state-owned monopoly supplier of commercial maize, was passed this year to one of Mr Mugabe’s most loyal henchmen, Air Marshal Perence Shiri, an alleged war criminal.

With Zimbabwe’s economy in chaos, Shiri’s mission was to spend a £17 million loan provided by Libya buying just enough maize to stave off food riots, which would then be supplied through the GMB.

The organisation, which is meant to supply maize at subsidised prices to all Zimbabweans, has instead been selling maize only to supporters of the ruling Zanu-PF party. Backers of the opposition Movement for Democratic Change went hungry.

Worse still was the country’s Food For Work programme. Thousands of opposition supporters would provide 15 days’ labour only to be told at the end there was no GMB food for them.

The GMB is so corrupt and politicised that aid groups shipping food into Zimbabwe are being forced to set up their own expensive parallel storage and distribution facilities, rather than using those of the GMB – the traditional way of bringing food aid into Zimbabwe.

There is also evidence that the Zimbabwean government is deliberately blocking the work of these international aid groups and keeping the flow of aid down to a trickle.

That trickle is enough to stave off threats of public unrest, but not enough to provide food for all of the country.

"What we are seeing is nothing but humanitarian torture," an aid worker said. "It takes three months to die of starvation and this is a torture every bit as bad as beating someone with barbed wire or hanging them from handcuffs.

Emphasis mine.  Joe Katzman:

Um, ever studied what dying of starvation actually involves, dude? It’s just a little bit worse than hanging from handcuffs – and there’s nothing humanitarian about it.

What do the various humanitarian groups have to say?

• Freedom House:  Zimbabwe garners sixes (with seven being least free) in civil liberties and political rights.  Their report confirms that democracy there is a joke, on par with Iran’s "democracy".
• Index of Economic Freedom:  Ranked 151st in economic freedom.  Only Libya, Burma and North Korea have economies that are less free.  Even communist Cuba ranks better than Mugabeland.
• Reporters Without Borders:  Ranked 155th in press freedom, tied with Syria.  Its 2005 annual report on the nation once known as Rhodesia quite simply states:  "Freedom of the press simply does not exist in Zimbabwe. Everything is under government control, from the licensing of the media and journalists down to the content of articles. Television and radio are a state monopoly. Police and the judiciary ensure that dissenters live in terror or endure the constant battering of a relentless harassment."
• Amnesty International:  "The government continued its campaign of repression aimed at eliminating political opposition and silencing dissent."  There is not one category that Zimbabwe is not egregiously violating.  How does AI rank Zimbabwe relative to the 148 other countries it covers?  Oh yeah, it doesn’t.
• Human Rights Watch:  "The human rights situation in Zimbabwe continues to be of grave concern."  Four articles written on Zimbabwe this year, with more interest focused on their sham March election than the democide that Mugabe is currently overseeing.
• Transparency International:  Ranked 114th in corruption out of 146 countries, tied with Venezuela, Uzbekistan, Congo and Ethiopia.

Austin Bay has a piece here, and he hearkens back to an observation he made in 2002 that rings just as true today:

Here’s the lede:

He’s an ethnic cleanser, a “former Marxist” and a cynical thief whose greed and mismanagement has destroyed a once productive economy.

His scheme to retain power involves the dictator’s usual routines: stoking ethnic strife, inciting economic envy, silencing the press, physically intimidating his domestic opposition.

Serbia’s Slobodan Milosevic? No, Slobo’s been nabbed and is on trial in the Hague. This time the scoundrel is Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe. The local context is a March 2002 national election in Zimbabwe, where once again Mugabe’s election platform includes the murder of his democratic opponents in the black-led Movement for Democratic Change (MDC).

Mugabe is never held accountable for his oppression and destruction.

The difference between Mugabe and Miloslevic is that Mugabe is engaging in political cleansing, not ethnic cleansing.  What exactly is the food situation under Mugabe’s fascist regime?  Horrible.  The Washington Post:

Zimbabwe, facing fears of widespread famine, has welcomed the resumption of international food donations that could feed up to 4 million people, U.N. officials reported Wednesday. President Robert Mugabe had curtailed such aid last year, saying the country could feed itself.

The problem is that Mugabe will use these food donations as a weapon, strengthening his political allies and starving his opposition.  Chester asks the relevant question:  Is Zimbabwe the Kitty Genovese of the international community?  Unless we do not spotlight what’s going on there, the answer is yes.

So what are we to do?  When South African president Thabo Mbeki met with President Bush, Mbeki offered nothing but platitudes and Bush was little better.  Mbeki couldn’t even admit that a genocide was occurring in Sudan.  Tony Blair is pushing for more aid to Africa from the US, but whatever portion gets to Zimbabwe, Mugabe’s opponents will still starve and unless there are important strings attached, it will be a counterproductive effort [Ed. sentence revised].  Here are my thoughts:

• Provide moral support for an "African solution" as Mbeki suggested but expect that there will no beneficial results.  Mbeki hasn’t lifted a finger against Mugabe, and the South African’s "African Renaissance" has the heft of those puffy rice crackers.
• Give food, money and arms to the opposition party, the MDC, as Perry de Havilland suggests.  They deserve the right to defend themselves and seek freedom, and they could take comfort in these words:

When in the Course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. –That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, –That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

• I don’t know if the UN has sanctioned Zimbabwe, but it they haven’t, they should.  If they have, then sanction them more.  By the way, Zimbabwe is a current member of the UN Human Rights Commission.  When will Kofi Annan kick this country off?  [See Update below]
• Provide aid directly to those that Mugabe is purposely starving, using military forces if necessary to secure distribution.
• Start a blogging storm.  Nothing will get done and nothing will change until we clamor for it.  Let’s get going.

Update:  I stand corrected on the portion struck out above.  To amend the sentence:  When will Kofi Annan take steps toward kicking this country off?  Does Annan have the direct authority to remove Zimbabwe?  No.  Members are voted in by other continent-sharing countries.  Getting a spot on the HR commission has proven an effective way to shield the offending countries from official UN criticism.  Saudi Arabia and Cuba have done well at that.  A leader would call a country on such cynical ploys and make proposals, not wait for a commission’s word.  Has Annan proposed scrapping the existing HR commission in favor of a new, reformulated one?  Yes, and to his credit if it happens.  Has Annan lobbied the existing HR commission to remove those countries engaging in genocide and democide?  To my knowledge, no.  The primary issue with Kofi Annan is his abysmal failure of leadership, which will likely be the topic of a separate post.  Finally, taking the UN and its top leader to task does not mean that individual nations bear no responsibility.  The United States should lead the way on sanctioning Zimbabwe.

(cross posted at Redstate.org)

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by hilzoy

Today, Josh Marshall opened his new site, TPM Cafe. It is really, really interesting. Thus far, I particularly like America Abroad, the foreign policy section, and John Edwards’ guest blog, as well as the main “Coffee House” section. (Note: in this section, a lot of the posters are commenting on one another’s posts, so it helps to start at the beginning. To do this, go down to the bottom of the page and click what it confusingly called “Next n”, where n is the number of posts you choose to display when you sign up. Likewise, ‘previous n’ gets you back to the later posts.) Good stuff which should finally lay to rest the right-wing claim that Democrats have no ideas.

I think TPM cafe is interesting in a way that goes beyond the interest of its various posts, though; and to explain why, I’m going to have to back up and say a few things about what I think of blogs in general. I am normally skeptical of claims that blogs are revolutionizing this or that. I love them, of course; and I particularly love the fact that they let anyone at all write commentary on whatever they like, and acquire an audience through the simple fact of having something interesting to say. Blogs let me know about all sorts of interesting things I would otherwise have missed, and they provide interesting commentary and insight that otherwise wouldn’t exist at all. But this, while wonderful, is not (to my mind) enough to warrant all the breathless rhetoric about blogs that I periodically read.

But there is one thing that blogs can do that I think is as important as allowing everyone who has a computer to join a huge ongoing conversation, but that is not generally remarked on, and it has to do with rectifying what I see as huge informational gaps in the world of most citizens.

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by hilzoy

Eleven years ago today, the Rwandan genocide started. (Actually, the plane carrying the presidents of Rwanda and Burundi crashed on April 6, 1994, and there was some killing that night; but April 7 was the first day of organized genocide.) About three months later, eight hundred thousand people were dead, mostly hacked to death with machetes. The best account of the genocide and the Clinton administration’s shameful non-response is Samantha Powers’ article Bystanders To Genocide.

Instead of writing about the genocide, I want to focus on Mbaye Diagne, a Senegalese military observer who was profiled in the excellent Frontline program Ghosts of Rwanda. His background was unremarkable: according to the profile on the Frontline site, “Capt. Mbaye, a devout Muslim, was one of nine children from a poor family on the outskirts of Dakar, Senegal’s capital. He was the first in his family to go to college. After graduating from the University of Dakar, he joined the army and worked his way up through the ranks.”

But what he did during the Rwandan genocide was extraordinary. Again, from Frontline:

“”A real-life Cool Hand Luke…”

“The bravest of the brave…”

“…the greatest man I have ever known…”

These are the words of those who knew Capt. Mbaye Diagne, a young Senegalese army officer who served in Rwanda as an unarmed U.N. military observer. I have never heard another human being described in the way that those who knew Mbaye describe him: he was, as one of his colleagues told me, “the kind of guy you meet once in a lifetime.”

He was a hero.

From literally the first hours of the genocide, Capt. Mbaye simply ignored the U.N.’s standing orders not to intervene, and single-handedly began saving lives. He rescued the children of the moderate Prime Minster Agathe Uwilingiyimana, after 25 well-armed Belgian and Ghanaian U.N. peacekeepers surrendered their weapons to Rwandan troops. The Rwandan troops killed Madame Agathe (and, later, ten Belgian peacekeepers), while the unarmed Capt. Mbaye — acting on his own initiative — hid the Prime Minister’s children in a closet.

In the days and weeks that followed, Capt. Mbaye became a legend among U.N. forces in Kigali. He continued his solo rescue missions, and had an uncanny ability to charm his way past checkpoints full of killers. On one occasion he found a group of 25 Tutsis hiding in a house in Nyamirambo, a Kigali neighborhood that was particularly dangerous. Capt. Mbaye ferried the Tutsis to the U.N. headquarters in groups of five — on each trip passing through 23 militia checkpoints with a Jeep-load of Tutsis. Somehow, he convinced the killers to let these Tutsis live.”

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