perfidy

Mike Hendrix at Cold Fury has a great post up about Eric Rudolph, Domestic Terrorist. It's a response to an Andrew Sullivan piece dicussing the role of fundamentalism in fostering terrorism. Hendrix sez: 

"He's right on that as far as it goes, but he's missed something here, I think. He's assuming that most people around here share Rudolph's fundamentalist hatred of abortion, gays, blacks, etc. And while some most certainly do, Sullivan fails to consider the visceral mistrust and even outright hatred these country people feel for the Feds and especially the FBI, ATF, and IRS - institutions that they may not even know the names or acronyms for but can recognize employees of from a mile away. Anybody from those agencies would have a hard time getting the correct time of day if they had to rely on asking the locals to find out. You can double down on the veiled animosity and politely cooperative non-cooperation if the person asking does so with a Yankee accent. And most of those folks think I talk like a Yankee. If you've ever heard me speak, you know quite well that I do not."

On the same subject, the New York Times discussed yesterday how the people in Rudolph's home town helped him hide out for the last few years. Although done in that inimitable "awww, ain't they quaint" style the Times is so good at, the article deals fairly well with this deep-rooted distrust of outsiders. It mentions signs on restaurants, "Pray for Eric Rudolph," and quotes an old timer as saying "I didn't see him bomb nobody. You can't always trust the feds." Another man is quoted as saying, "He was a man who stood for what he believed in," said Bo Newton, a short-order cook in Andrews. "If he came to my door, I would've given him food and never said a word." A reasonable person might well ask, "What the hell? The guy's a terrorist!" 

This is exactly what I was talking about a few weeks ago (archives are probably hosed...again) when I said that "homeland" is not not not an intrinsically American concept, not like the Feds use it anyway. Like I said-- my homeland is Northeastern Ohio, not the USA. That's probably where I would end up if I were in bad trouble and needed help of the duffel bag and automatic rifle kind. In the same way, Eric Rudolph's homeland is Western North Carolina. In many areas, these ties are far tighter and more compelling than merely political or civil bonds. Family, clan, church, neighborhood, all of these take precedence over what the Federal Gubmint so laughably calls our "Homeland," and they would do well to remember that when they move to prosecute Rudolph. So why would North Carolinans harbor a known terrorist? Three reasons:

1. Because he's family. Sometimes blood is what matters most, for better or worse.
2. Because he bombed a gay bar, an abortion clinic, and the Olympics. I'd imagine a lot of people in the hills of NC, even if they aren't gonna go bomb a clinic themselves, can't find much to get worked up about if someone else holds back the tide of moral disorder and one-worldism.
3. Because f*** the damn Feds.

Final note: I'm with Hendrix-- good moonshine is hard to beat. I've had it exactly once, but daaaaamn. I need to find someone who goes to Tennessee on business from time to time. 

Another final note. Historian David Hackett Fisher devotes a few hundred pages to the origins of the culture Eric Rudolph comes from, in his book "Albion's Seed." Although overlong and overambitious, there's a lot to like and a lot to learn from it.

I don't follow. What's the connection between class and voting?

Investors 

So I guess you're an equality of opportunity guy, I'm more an equality of outcome guy. I'm willing to leave it at that on an agree to disagree. 

India 

I'm of the opinion that imperialism is never benign. It always involves subjugating another people and reducing them to a sub-human status. That one form of imperialism appears more benign than another, to draw an analogy, is like saying "Well I shot this guy in the face, but I only knee-capped this other guy." But beyond that, the Amritsar Massacre alone indicates that British conduct on the Indian subcontinent, despite attempts by the Viceroy's office to distance themselves from the event, carried negative consequences for the indigenous population. 

Americanism 

I'm not responding to Judson because he can sit and spin. I'm responding to Steve. I don't believe in the freedom to bear arms. Yet I do believe in the freedom to arm bears. What happens to my citizenship? 

Teacher's Unions 

Well we're kind of on different pages on this one, since I'm in post-secondary education. Things are probably a bit different there, as are the unions. My first concern is always my students. I will gladly continue to teach at sub-minimum wage levels without a raise. When I worked at a certain Jesuit University that shall remain nameless, I personally opposed a TA walkout to protest budget cuts because I didn't want to leave students hanging, even a little bit. I honestly don't know what's going on with secondary education teacher's unions. But here in the city colleges, they're just trying to get a few more dollars for adjuncts, if possible. If not, I won't strike, I won't quit, I'll continue to give my best possible effort as a professor. It's all I know how to do (aside from playing the fiddle, I'm nearly competent with it these days) and it's all I've ever wanted to do.

Well, that is a tough one. America is an ideal. Americans are those who hold those ideals. They include, but are not limited to, the these beliefs: that we each have a right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; that we all should have freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, freedom of the press, freedom of religion, freedom to bear arms; in the idea that government exists to benefit the people, not the other way around; independence and self-reliance; in rule of law and that we are all equal before the law; and a generalized hatred of the French. Well maybe not the last one.

But that is the core of it. People who do not agree with the things on that list are, at least in some sense, un-American. I freely cribbed these concepts from a couple of pages I found on the IN-TER-NET. Check 'em out.

Well, the problem with the FCC is that it is deregulating the top of the market without deregulating the bottom. It is impossible (and I know people who have tried) to get a broadcast license for radio or TV in this country, unless you are already part of a large network. Cable TV provided a loophole, which is now being closed. While I am not against allowing large companies to merge in principle, the flip side is that you must allow new entrants into the field. As older dinosaurs calcify and grow stagnant, new dinosaurs move in. However, if you lock out the bottom of the market, you assure that the current players will stay there forever. 

We never truly deregulated broadcast media. That is the problem.
 

That the weaknesses of the Soviet Bloc did not appear until the seventies is ridiculous. The only thing that changed in the seventies is that the Soviet Bloc was now trying to do two things with an inefficient economy, instead of one. In the sixties, the Soviets were spending 10-15% of GNP on defense, and even higher if you count nominally civilian projects with military uses. They were spending a larger fraction of a smaller economy on defense. But the nightmares of the Soviet economy go back to forced collectivization, the rural electrification projects, and the like in the twenties and thirties. To say that economic problems suddenly developed in the seventies ignores the inefficiencies that were always present in the Soviet system.

Mike, they're good for you. If they get you a raise, I will be happy for you. But are teacher's unions helping or hurting education for our children? Probably not, because it is the job of union to improve the situation of its members. Every union, and every special interest group is a conspiracy against the interests of every other segment of society. We have to look at the balance between benefitting the members of that group, and the larger society. Children's education in this country is in the shitter. I will not send my child into that cesspool. Mrs. Buckethead was forced to be a member of the NEA despite her total disagreement with their agenda. She was a teacher in Ohio and Virginia, and can vouch for the sad state of affairs that has been to some extent engineered by the NEA, even in the best school districts.

Yeah, but over half of the households in the United States are now part of the "Investor Class." This is not exactly all the wealth piled up at the top of the pyramid. And before anyone points out the richest 5% blah blah blah, the fact that there is inequity in incomes and wealth is not the issue. Do we want everyone to make 37,000 a year, or whatever the median income is? It is more important that everyone have the equal opportunity to pursue happiness (or wealth) in their own way, to whatever limits their talents allow. Equality of outcome is incompatible with liberty. If we allow everyone liberty, some will do better than others.

The peoples of the Indian Subcontinent were no doubt happy to see the back of the British Imperial administration. But it was the British trained Indian Civil Service that made that country function beyond the typical third world dog's breakfast that is the normal state of affairs. The British were certainly the most benign of the Imperial powers, and while the subject peoples chafed under imperial rule, the British introduced rule of law, railroads, medicine, education - rather like the scene in Monty Python's Life of Brian:

REG: All right, but apart from the sanitation, the medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, a fresh water system, and public health, what have the Romans ever done for us? XERXES: Brought peace. REG: Oh. Peace? Shut up!

The United States, only two years later, experienced a periodic downturn in the economy, which caused a national leader to get the boot. Deficits in the United States also happened, but were soon corrected when the economy had expanded sufficiently. Nevertheless, the economic boom of the nineties in both the US and the UK is the result of the structural reforms instituted by Reagan and Thatcher in the early eighties.