Critical Mass

This week's Critical Mass Award for the Most Original Way to End a Children's TV Series goes to Hamas' Al-Aqsa TV station. They have just aired the last episode of a show centered around a mickey mouse-type character named "Farfur" (known as "Mickey Hamouse" in Israel). The last episode, to provide happy inspiration for all the pre-schoolers watching the show, features Farfur being beaten to death by an Israeli agent ("terrorist Jew") for refusing to sell his land to the Israelis. Watch this video -- and be sure to catch the phone call they take from a three-year-old at the end of the episode.

- Dan Gelernter  

There is exciting news from the Elm City. In response to mounting crime and the incompetence of the police, members of the Yeshiva of New Haven will be commencing armed evening patrols, which operate in a large chunk of the suburbs from 6 to 10 pm. The patrols will consist of a pair of men, each carrying a licensed, concealed firearm and wearing a t-shirt that reads “Edgewood Park Defense Patrol.”

The leader of the group, Rabbi Greer, is a former city police commissioner. "We can fix all the houses up. We can plant trees. But if we cannot walk our streets securely, all our efforts are for naught," he said.

Of course he his plans have been attacked by the mayor and various alderman who, unlike the people who actually live in this neighborhood, express perfect confidence in the competence of the police force.

As a Yale student, the problem of crime in New Haven has been long on my mind. Yale students may be the least defended of all groups, since Yale forbids us from carrying any means of self-defense, and because most of us are under 21, which is the age requirement for obtaining a pistol permit in this state.

This is an important and unknown point: it is not the job of the police to protect you or anyone.

From a 1997 Cato Institute policy analysis by Jeffrey Snyder: “It is a settled principle of law throughout the United States that the police have no legal duty to protect any individual citizen from crime. That may come as a surprise to many people, but the principle holds even in cases where the police have been grossly negligent in failing to protect a crime victim.” There is a test case that confirms this point: in 1978 in Washington D.C., three women were beaten and raped and held captive for 14 hours. Though they called 911 twice, and even saw police cruisers pass by their house, the police never showed up. They later sued the police – and lost: the D.C. Superior Court ruled that “a government and its agents are under no general duty to provide public services, such as police protection, to any particular individual citizen.” The responsibility for personal protection rests with each private member of the community, not the government. The government has admitted it, so if you don’t protect yourself, you simply won’t be protected.

I wish I could help the community out by volunteering for these patrols myself; unfortunately I am only 20. Nevertheless, as they say in their press release, “Anyone interested in finding out more about the EPDP [Edgewood Park Defense Patrol] or participating in the patrols, should contact Eliezer Greer at (203) 606-3085.”

Read their press release here and a full news story here.

- Dan Gelernter 

Read David Gelernter's brilliant piece on abolishing the public school system on the Weekly Standard website.

A see the features section for my wrap-up of the third-annual Norman Podhoretz Lecture.

- Dan Gelernter 

Dear Readers,

I have just finished by far the busiest term of my life. I am back:

I was watching a DVD of a recent comedy called Music and Lyrics today, and things were going pretty well; it actually looked like one of the better modern movies I’d seen. But then we got to the closing credits, during which a series of little blurbs appeared on screen to let us know what happened to all of the movie’s characters “later in life.” We learn that the two main characters of the movie, Alex Fletcher (Hugh Grant) and Sophie Fisher (Drew Barrymore) go on to write many more hit songs together and that they are “now living together.” Not married – just “living together.”

“No!” I yell at the TV screen, “They’re not ‘living together!’ They’re married! They’d better be married.” (I find myself yelling at the TV set a lot these days, which is one of the reasons I try to avoid movies produced after 1967). I don’t mean to sound prudish, nor do I think that Hollywood’s liberal bent is anything new, but it just made me wonder: “Comedies,” by definition, are plays that end with marriages – at least this has been the way it has worked for about 2000 years. Remember, this happens past the end of the movie: the plot is over, we’re into the credits after all – it’s no skin off the playwright’s nose to suggest that these characters are simply married as opposed to living together (it even takes fewer letters). So why does this movie go extra lengths to make the “living together” statement? Just to express contempt: contempt for marriage, contempt for tradition, and contempt for America and the very idea of goodness.

But this is not as depressing as it sounds, provided we remember that Hollywood is an irrelevance. Asking a Hollywooder to explain morality is like asking a used-car salesman to fix your fuel injectors: there is no correlation between the ability to be loud and obnoxious and the ability to do something useful. And since Hollywood has been talking to us for a long time, I would now like to talk to them:

Dear Hollywood: Nobody takes you seriously. Hollywood’s pagan views do not interest America, except from the standpoint of a rather pathetic amusement. Hollywooders and academics and the media mercenaries can stand there all day long telling us that morality is a variable thing, that absolute goodness doesn’t exist, that out traditions are simple-minded and bigoted (in fact, this is what they do). But get this Hollywood: America refuses to believe you. A Hebrew proverb states that “silence is a fence around wisdom.” As a good neighbor, I will simply point out that there are few holes in your fence that could use fixing.

-- Dan Gelernter 

Read Guy Benson's article in our Features section.

Northwestern was not to be outdone by "sex week" at Yale. Our editor Guy Benson sent this in:

Northwestern University is enduring its first ever "sex week," featuring the distribution of free condoms and "safe sex supplies," various sex workshops, and the production of "Kama Sutra: The Musical." Amidst the depravity, Northwestern's pro-life student group has invited Feminists for Life president Serrin Foster to present the feminist case against abortion.  Ms. Foster will speak at Swift Hall room 107 on NU's Evanston campus at 7:30pm.  The lecture is free and open to the public.

Our Editor Guy Benson published this post on NRO today about an anti-free-love club at Harvard.

Via Power Line:
For those who are concerned about the brainwashing effects of many colleges, documentary filmmaker Evan Coyne Maloney has a film for you, called Indoctrinate U.  It's about "academics who use classrooms as political soapboxes, students who must parrot their professors' politics to get good grades, and administrators who censor diversity of thought and opinion," and "[giving] voice to those whose stories of harassment, intimidation, and censorship make our nation's universities, supposed bastions of impartiality and free inquiry, seem mere mainstays of groupthink and indoctrination."

You may have seen Maloney's work before with his piece Protesting the Protesters, in which he attended a New York City anti-war rally to ask the protesters some questions.  Maloney takes the same approach in Indoctrinate U, though from what I can tell in the trailer, professors are far less willing to talk than the run-of-the-mill anti-war protester.

Check out the trailer on the website to see if you are interested.  Sign a petition to get the film shown in your area if you are really interested.  If you're lucky, there may already be a showing somewhere nearby.

[Edit] For a little more about the film, check out Maloney's visit to Fox News recently.   

This from Guy Benson;

Northwestern's conservative newspaper, "The Chronicle," has an interesting piece in this week's edition.  It's incredible how rude and downright nasty some liberal professors can become when challenged---by a college sophomore, no less!

Phi Beta Cons pointed out a "scintillating" email from the Harvard dean of freshmen to students today. Follow the link to read the full text of the email which invites students to go and enjoy the "sexxxxxy suggestions." However, the most interesting part is the last line, which extends the invitation to "ALL students of every gender." Every gender? You mean all two of them? Wouldn't that just be both? Perhaps students at Harvard are in for some hot alien sex.

This morning I engaged in a discussion with my peers and a professor regarding the nature of law, among other things.  The specific context of the debate concerned toilet-papering a person's house, and whether such an action should be undertaken with a youth group if a parent protested the activity.  The discussion soon turned to whether or not it would be a legitimate complaint of a parent to say that a youth leader who headed up such an activity was knowingly encouraging youth to violate the law.  (This was operating on the assumption that TPing was illegal in the town because it is considered vandalism, but that the laws concerning TPing were never enforced.)  My professor argued that it was not; I argued that it was.

The rationale behind my prof's and many of my peers' argument was that context is everything; an unenforced law is no law at all.  For example, my prof noted that in many cities spitting on a sidewalk is illegal based on arcane law, but since the law is never enforced the law ceases to exist.  At the same time, this is not to say that any law which goes unenforced is no longer law; for example, though one of my classmates argued that a vandalism law concerning TPing would only be valid if the recipient of the action pressed charges, my prof countered by noting that a rape which went without charges being pressed would be rape nonetheless, and therefore illegal.  It all depends on context.

The rationale behind my argument is that law is law whether it is enforced or not; there are a few caveats, however.  I would assert that law is law not if it is enforced, but if it is enforceable.  For example, I would assume that if a case were brought before a judge concerning spitting on a sidewalk, the judge would throw the case out, saying that the law is no longer applicable.  If this were true, and the consequences of the law could no longer be enforced, then I would argue the law is no longer law at all.  If, however, laws simply go unenforced under general circumstances but can still be enforced if so desired, then I would argue the law still exists.  For example, if students are not regularly prosecuted for vandalizing by throwing toilet paper on people's houses, but an individual could still press charges if so desired, then the law is still law.

I would further argue that existing law falls into one of two categories: valid law and invalid law.  Valid law includes those laws which are known and enforced; speeding would be a classic example.  This is not to say that every violation of the law is prosecuted, but that under most circumstances an effort is made to enforce the law.  Invalid law includes those laws still on the books which are still enforceable, but which are not enforced.  These are laws which, due to their arcane and/or unenforced nature, should largely be removed from the books.  Until they are, however, they remain as existing law, whether followed or not.

To me, the point of recognizing even an unenforced but enforceable law as law is to maintain a consistent philosophical view of law.  I do not believe that one should argue that simply because a law is no longer culturally applicable that the law should therefore be ignored; rather, I would assert that said laws should be declared null and void and removed from the books.  The obvious argument against my view is that it would take too much time to search out all the "invalid" laws, as I so describe them, and that the search for and removal of said laws would be a waste of our legislators' time - an argument to which there is some merit.  One could argue that judges often do this work through our common law system, declaring some laws are simply no longer enforceable (like my spitting example above).  However, this does not resolve the issue of many laws which are simply not brought before the court, as is often the case with TPing.  There is also the question of whether it is socially acceptable and/or morally right to violate unenforced laws.

So what do you think?  Are laws law only if they are enforced?  Does it depend on the context of the law?  Should one attempt to maintain a consistent philosophy of law, holding that all laws are equal and should be considered law until they are repealed?  I would love to hear your thoughts. 

Yale’s Woolsey Hall sits on the corner of Wall and College Street and divides the campus (roughly speaking) into two chunks: science on one side and liberal arts on the other. The building itself is a huge ‘L’; one wing is Yale’s official auditorium and the other is Yale’s largest dining hall, known as “Commons.” Joining these two arms together is the rotunda, which provides students with a convenient shortcut from one side of campus to the other.

The thousands of Yale students who pass through this rotunda every day are apt to forget that it is a War Memorial, where the names of Yale graduates who gave their lives for their country are carved in stone on the curving walls. Yale has (appropriately) always forbidden students to use this space to sell tickets or promote events, though this edict is increasingly disregarded and the administration makes little apparent attempt to enforce it.

Yale memorializes its veterans on a grander scale than this alone: the entire space enclosed by the ‘L’ of Woolsey, called Hewitt Quadrangle, is a war memorial too, where the handsome World War One cenotaph stands with the inscription, “In Memory of THE MEN of Yale who, true to Her Traditions gave THEIR LIVES that FREEDOM might not perish from the Earth.”

Running along the front of Commons behind the cenotaph are the names of famous WWI battles carved into the architrave. Most Yale students, far from bothering about these names (which include Cambrai, Argonne, Somme, and Ypres) do not even know what they mean: you might hear an unusually curious Yalie ask you “who those people were.”

It’s easy for men to be ignorant of history – even if it stares them in the face every day of their lives. Every Yale student should know those names by heart.

- Dan Gelernter 

Mr. Benson of Northwestern, having technical difficulties, has asked me to post the following for him: 

Unless I'm missing something, this story in The Daily Northwestern is an outrage:

---
Law School Group Leader Resigns Amid Controversy
by Margaret Matray

The president of Northwestern's Student Bar Association resigned from his position Monday following
a controversy over invitations to a breakfast with Chief Justice John Roberts last week.

Third-year law student Peter Pattakos said he was asked to step down by law school administrators
and the association's executive board after a conversation he had with a student who was upset that
representatives from minority-centered organizations were not invited to the breakfast with Roberts.

"During what can only be described loosely as a conversation, I stated my belief that our community
would be better off if all student organizations were organized around ideas, and not ethnicity,"
Pattakos said Tuesday in an e-mail addressed to his classmates.

Roberts came to NU last week as the 2007 Howard J. Trienens Visiting Judicial Scholar. Pattakos
told The Daily that administrators asked him to recommend "academic and community leaders" to invite.

"I chose academic leaders," Pattakos said. "I was never given the impression that my list was going
to be the final list. I was asked for a recommendation."

Administrators said Monday in an e-mail to students that omitting some student leaders was partly
an administrative error, but that Pattakos' comments "dismissed the value of the organizations of
the uninvited leaders."

Pattakos said he sees why students would be upset with his comment, but that he did not speak with
malicious intent.

"We have the ability to work through the complicated issues this situation has raised and emerge a
stronger, safer haven for true diversity," he said.

---
It is a sad state of affairs when a"belief that [an intellectual] community would be better off if
all student organizations were organized around ideas, and not ethnicity" becomes grounds for dismissal.

 - Guy Benson

A reminder to all our readers that you can show your support for Critical Mass on facebook as well.  Join the group here.

The Yale Daily News announced today that Yale will take down a painting of the University's founder, Elihu Yale, that has hung in Woodbridge Hall for over a century.  It is to be removed because it shows a black servant standing next to Mr. Yale. The painting will be "replaced with a portrait of Elihu without servants." University Vice President and Secretary Linda Lorimer is worried about what the YDN called "perceived racist overtones" in the painting; she explained that the portrait is "confusing without the explanation" that Yale did not own slaves.
The Soviets used to air-brush politcally incorrect comrades out of photographs.

A repeated theme in the comments section of Critical Mass over the past few days has been the impassioned demand by several readers to know just who I (or we) think I (or we) am (or are) to judge their personal choices. My response to one of these questioners was initially, "Well, for one, I am a rational human being." However, I think the nature of their inquiry requires further elaboration.

The question about the right to judge personal choices implicitly raises two issues, in addition to the nature, origin, and legitimacy of 'rights'. This latter issue, however, we won't get into here. For the purposes of discussion, we'll (tenuously) assume that said right does exist.

Now, the first issue which comes up is what it means to judge. Based on the nature of the comments I've read and the sense of indignation which they express, I'm inclined to assume that many readers view 'judging' as containing some intrinsic ability to enforce the associated judgment. It seems absurd, though, to say that they actually think I could enforce my opinions. And were I to actually attempt to do so, they would indeed have a legitimate cause for concern. 

What it really means to judge, though, is not so much to 'tell someone what to do' as to give an argument pertaining to what they should do and why their current choice of action is incorrect. When we think of it this way, as we should, I fail to see why I am obligated to refrain from doing this. I don't want to go so far as to say I am entitled to do this, as I don't like making up rights out of thin air, but certainly there is no prohibition, moral, legal or otherwise, which keeps from judging in this sense.

And yet, maybe these accusers of mine share this definition nonetheless. Perhaps what they really want to say is that I should refrain from ever thinking one course of action (of theirs, presumably) is ever better than another. Ah, relativism, you sly guest, always showing up uninvited. Under this view, telling me I should not be 'judging you' seems rather foolish. Everyone judges others everyday. Can you honestly stand up and berate me, saying, "Don't you dare disapprove of my actions. They are my own and you have no right to say they are wrong!"

Are we afraid of being convinced? Is that the issue? This is the only other option I can imagine: that people are actually afraid that if someone tells them what they are doing is wrong, they will either have to stop because they are ashamed, and thus lose the enjoyment of the activity which they previously had, or they will be convinced too that it is wrong and suffer the same consequence. Otherwise, what danger need anyone fear at being told they are doing something wrong? If you disagree with my argument, respond or ignore. But does its mere existence really threaten you that much?

The second issue brought up involves the idea of a "personal choice." The undercurrent here is a decidely libertarian one. And I'm not favorably disposed to libertarian; they miss much of many arguments in my opinion.

The thought process behind the "personal choice" defense is that the matter at hand involves no one other than those making the choice and that it has no consequences, negative or otherwise, for anyone else. This would a very nice, tidy little idea were it not for the blatant fact that we live in a small thing called society. Even personal choices, reflected through the altered demeanor of the actor and his subsequent further actions, have the ability to affect others.

Now, hold on there. Put down the pitch fork, don't lynch me yet. Don't worry, I don't want to regulate your entire life and I don't want to let anyone else regulate it either. I may not be a libertarian, but privacy and minimal government are good things, the issue of our rights to them aside.

But one must admit that experience has already deemed it prudent for certain choices to be regulated, lest their consequences spread willy nilly. Drug use is a perfect example. As long as I don't have to pay your medicare bill, I could care less if you fry your brain on crack. Yet, I think few would disagree that minimizing the portion of our population which spends their days at home, totally baked, is in the interest of the nation as a whole. Without specifically addressing whether sex in a shower stall falls under this category, what I do want to express is that not all "personal choices" are as simply personal as we make them out to be. Debate on whether any given choice is personal or social is entirely welcome and expressly needed, but refusal to even admit that some choices may be as I have described them is sheer pigheadedness.

Who am I to judge? I am one who doesn't accept arguments or positions just because they sound good. I judge because I think, and you should too. 

Mr. Beckman reflected in his last post on the inadqueacy of the internet for political debate, as it appears to appeal to emotional over logical debate. I would say that the trouble isn't so much the internet itself -- ad hominem attacks and runaway emotions trouble political debate in general; I have noticed in the commentary on the website as well as in the emails I've received that the angry personal attacks are products of the Left. I realize that it is natural for conservatives to sympathize with my views, and for liberals to attack them. Nevertheless, in the stream of blog-comment conversation, the conservative responses (including those arguing directly against leftist comments) favor reason over the bitter ad hominem rhetoric that the Left employs so consistently. The liberals reading this may want to reflect on the now-permanent record of this fact in re the comments on my piece and on Mr. Hutchins' follow-up post.

I have been accused, as have many of my colleagues, of being a religious fanatic of some sort who refuses to part with antiquated moral conventions that cannot be reasonably justified (like the tradition of the uni-sex shower). But the utter bitterness with which I have been attacked (and seen friends in similar circumstances attacked) demonstrates what I will call the religious fanaticism of the Left. Their religion is politics; they put their absolute faith in progress, as if to say, "it doesn't matter where we're headed as long as we don't look back." 

- Dan Gelernter

I am becoming increasingly disenchanted with the Internet as a medium for discussion, particularly when it comes to touchy matters like religion and politics. This is troubling for me because I see the great potential of international communications forums allowing intelligent and diverse discussions of many-faceted issues that touch home with each of us – particularly when the statistics to back up arguments are so easily accessible. Unfortunately, it seems that whenever people enter a conversation about which they feel passionately, emotions overwhelm reason and people resort to ad hominem attacks of a type unknown to most personal debates.

Or perhaps I am wrong on this point as well. Media stories abound of political activists and speakers who are harangued and attacked by those who do not agree with them. The Columbia Minutemen debacle comes to mind, as do a number of other similar incidents from both sides of the political aisle. Civil discourse is no longer encouraged, but has been replaced with the concept of one side trying to shout down the other. Free speech has been killed in its own name, for rather than allowing a balanced and reasonable argument in which all sides are equally presented we resort instead to protests attempting to eliminate the voice of the opposition.

Though the American people often complain of the personal attacks in political advertisements, the blogosphere often seems little less than a mental wrestling match – and by this I do not mean great minds grappling with one another to try to emerge victorious, but more like something from WWE, where the insults and the flash replace any type of substance, or for that matter, real wrestling. Online discussion forums and comments sections of blogs turn into bickering messes of misunderstanding, name-calling, and abuse, in which the original intent of a post is often lost or obscured.

This is not to say that intelligent debate cannot or does not take place, because in certain limited cases it does. On the whole, however, our opinions fall into two categories: my view, or the wrong view. We develop mutual admiration societies for those with whom we agree, and mutual hate societies for those with whom we do not agree. Rather than carefully weighing arguments and considering the possibilities, we denounce and slander any dissenters, whether real or believed. (Often, it seems, the dissension is not so great as we may originally believe, for with further clarification of comments the real meaning of a poorly worded sentence or misinterpreted phrase is revealed.)

I find this shift – or perhaps only this realization of mine – towards ugly crassness so disconcerting that I find little inspiration to take part in the conversation – not because I might find my beliefs challenged, for I have no problem with that, but because I doubt the effectiveness of the conversation in the first place. Those who advocate some modicum of morality are denounced as “preaching” or “on their high horse;” those asking for restraint are considered repressed. Those holding Christian beliefs are sidelined as the ignorant “Religious Right,” while those supporting the country are deemed shortsighted “patriots” or “nationalists” – practically slurs in this “globalized” world. Meanwhile, anyone who argues against the traditional conservative ideas is designated a loony, Commie moonbat, or that worst of all invectives, a capital L Liberal.

I want civil discussion. I want well reasoned, statistic and theory backed arguments. I want logical debates, passionate debates, political and religious debates, personal debates that are not personal attacks. I want conversation rather than accusation. I think I may be left wanting for a while.

PS: Before the comments start flying, I want to note that this post is not really concerned with Mr. Gelernter 's or Mr. Hutchins' posts, but rather helps explain my own lack of posting of late. Disinclination to write and a wedding to plan tend to discourage much creative output.