The White Peril 白禍

Dean links to this post by political scientist R.J. Rummel. It's the first in a series, which--given that the topic is problems with the UN--promises to be lengthy. What he's arguing here is that the UN is no longer an agent for global justice, and this passage in particular caught my eye:

Out of the vast array of facts that make this case, I will select a few. But first, as one who made considerable use of UN reports, studies, and statistical services, such as the Demographic Yearbook and Statistical Yearbook, for my research, the story of the United Nations is not entirely negative. Indeed, some will make the argument that on balance the UN has contributed to the welfare of countries. But, then, one would have to downplay or ignore the political functions of the UN.

It's that last item that interests me. The "has contributed" part could simply indicate that if we take the UN's entire post-war history, the net influence of its non-political organs has been for the good. I can see arguing that, if you qualified it. But Rummel's main point is not about the UN's cumulative history but about where it is now, and if you downplay its political functions, that leaves.... Hmm. I'd be very interested to see it argued that the UN has not roamed off-course in its economic and humanitarian roles, too.

There's the World Health Organization, with its shift in focus from life-threatening diseases such as tuberculosis and malaria toward the sorts of voluntary behaviors that have become favorites of first-world busybodies: auto safety and smoking, for example. UNICEF's goals haven't diffused so alarmingly, but you have to wonder why WHO isn't attending to several of them already.

Look, even cursorily, for criticisms of the efficacy of World Bank lending policies, and prepare to drown. The tone of this Guardian piece is as snidely anti-capitalist as you'd expect, but the essential charges don't need to be. Giving countries money for vainglorious public works projects they may not be able to maintain, requiring privatization of a major industry in a country where only a tiny group of cronies have the means to own anything, and expecting to end corruption without changing the circumstances that make it attractive--you needn't be a socialist to see the folly there. (Note also that the World Bank has taken to joining forces with WHO on its global-nanny territory, issuing a finger-wagging report about the pitfalls of alcohol abuse.)

Anyway, Rummel's posts look to be interesting, given that he acknowledges he spent decades as a true believer. If he continues to tackle political functions specifically--and why not? he is a political scientist--I'll be eager to read what he thinks about the latest push to change the terms of membership on the Security Council.

Damn. Earthquake in Iran, reports the Nikkei. Magnitude 6.4 and at least 130 people killed. As was, I think, the case in Bam, mud-brick buildings have been collapsing. The current Reuters story, clearly more recent, says 400 dead already, in a region with a population of about 30,000. I feel guilty making this sort of downward comparison, but there's nothing like seeing a quake happen in another part of the world to make you fervently grateful for modern technology and infrastructure. The heart breaks at the thought of what the final numbers will be, but best to the Iranians in minimizing them.

You know this from fifty other people already: Senator Arlen Specter has Hodgkin's Disease. Best to him and his family. He's been one of our senators pretty much since we Pennsylvanians in our early thirties can remember; I can't pretend to be crazy about all his triangulations, but he's gotten my vote since I've been of age.

Uh, incidentally, this might be a nice time for the HRC (not Hillary--she'll do the politically advantageous thing intuitively; the Human Rights Campaign will not) to say that, despite their differences in the last election cycle, it's grateful for his record of gay-friendliness and robustly wishes him well. Of course, in order not to come off as (and be) cynically opportunistic, the HRC would have to have done some reflection. What chance is there of that?

Speaking of Jonathan Rauch, he's started a website, linked to by IGF. Cool (even if the design does give me distracting cravings for the Neapolitan ice cream of my childhood). The links to his articles appear to pull together what you'd get from looking him up on IGF and Reason, which is a good thing. His book on gay marriage is disappointing, but not much of his other writing is. I've been a fan since Kindly Inquisitors.

And he doesn't know what a trackback is, which gives me comfort. I thought I was just a moron, but maybe it's a fag thing. (Homos who always knew what trackbacks were because they helped invent them, or whatever, will kindly refrain from disillusioning me.)

Right Side of the Rainbow says everything I've ever wanted to say about defenses of traditional marriage against gays here. If I read his tone correctly, he's dead serious but also being arch. I particularly like this point:

Strip marriage of the rules that make it unappealing to gay men but keep all the nice perks that come with it — what, you think we don't want our partners to have health insurance? — and you get the inevitable. You get a political campaign driven by middle class gay men, possessed as all middle class Americans are of a suffocating sense of entitlement, that will not relent until it succeeds.

People talk about gay activists as if their sense of entitlement were some kind of evidence of special gay selfishness. But entitlements are the way modern civic life works--remember Jonathan Rauch's chapters on lobbyists in Demosclerosis? I'm happy to deplore this, and to join in any principled objection to the excesses of leftist gay advocacy. It's a target-rich environment, to be sure; however, I get very uneasy when it's treated as some sort of freakish aberration in American politics, rather than the wack-job end of a continuum that runs all the way through it.

Added on 17 February: Eric at Classical Values has mentioned common-law marriage in connection to gays, and I was sure that, somewhere, he'd pointed out that some gay-marriage advocates might not be so hot on the prospect of being considered a de facto married couple after cohabiting for seven years. Can't seem to find the post I'm thinking of, but the point was a good one.

Oh, and one more thing: childrearing is the single most important thing most people do in life, and the amount of sacrifice it requires is considerable. The view one hears nowadays that childrearing = selflessness and altruism, however, is coarse and misleading. Everywhere outside the developed world, people recognize very matter-of-factly that they're having children not just to let happy new life loose in the world but to provide work for the household, including elder care when the parents themselves are old and incapacitated.

The same mechanism operates here in the First World, of course; it's just that our money economy means that people are less likely to need their children's financial support and that the literal care they need can come from other people's children in the form of strong, young nurses and deliverymen. The investment of energy in child-rearing feels obvious and real. The payback from the pool of workers who keep the economy going feels diffuse and is easy to gloss over (in that one often hears people talk about parenting as an investment in the future, as if the effort went in a single altruistic direction only).

One must also consider that, in a world in which many of us don't do physical labor, and those who do are rarely involved in the farming of life's essentials, sex and the production of children is one of the few experiences left that serve primal, animal urges--which civilization teaches us to subsume but doesn't actually banish.

I am not arguing here that parenthood is on balance a selfish project. What I do think is that it paints a false picture to posit child-bearing straightness in an unqualified way as saintly and self-abnegating, which I think is the effect (however unintended) of quite a bit of the current discourse on marriage and parenting.

Joanne Jacobs gives us this wonderful little bon-bon:

Center for American Progress, a Washington think tank, is funding liberal newspapers on already liberal college campuses. "Isn't that a bit like pumping sand into the Mojave Desert?" the Washington Post asks.

"We're not winning the battle of ideas on campus," says David Halperin, who is running the project for the Center for American Progress. Conservatives "have this insurgency mentality, even though they run the world."

"We're being outhustled," says Halperin's colleague Ben Hubbard. "We want to cultivate the media stars, much like the right has done with Ann Coulter and Dinesh D'Souza."

Toward that end, the center will give $750,000 to nine liberal campus publications at such places as Princeton, Dartmouth and the University of Wisconsin, and help launch four at the universities of Michigan, Chicago, Kentucky and Ohio State. This is dwarfed by the more than $30 million a year that they estimate conservative campus organizations receive from such groups as the Young America's Foundation and Leadership Institute.

The web site, CampusProgress.org, has a cartoon showing a blonde female cheerleader, dressed in blue, kicking off the head of a red devil-monster, revealing the cowering male within.

I don't know about his colleague, but Halperin himself had a brush with media stardom of his own. In fact, I doubt that I'm the only person for whom he's been positively immortalized. Halperin, you see, was one of the subjects of Camille Paglia's climactic essay "Junk Bonds and Corporate Raiders," which fourteen years ago helped push her through to fame from buzz. Most people didn't see its original Arion printing but rather its climactic inclusion in her second book, Sex, Art, and American Culture. Here's a paragraph from near the beginning of the (very long) essay:

One Hundred Years of Homosexuality is a short collection of essays that seems to have only one coherent aim: the nomination and promotion of David Halperin as a major theorist of sex. But Halperin, like most of the American academics who have wandered into sex studies, lacks the most elementary understanding of the basic disciplines of history, anthropology, and psychology necessary for such work. The exposition of these essays is tortured, bloated, meandering, pretentious, confused. Halperin's first book, Before Pastoral: Theocritus and the Ancient History of Bucolic Poetry (1983), is quite different. Whether its precision and clarity of argument--not to mention skill in simple paragraphing--are due to the editors of Yale University Press or to a helpful dissertation director, it is evident that in One Hundred Years we are getting Halperin lui-même.

That's one of the more mild passages. It gets much sharper and funnier and basically doesn't let up until the end. At least the author of the other book under review was spared by death from seeing his idiocies ruthlessly enumerated and refuted. The whole essay is recommended most highly to anyone of generally kind-hearted disposition who nevertheless has an eensy mean streak that does not suffer fools gladly. It was a source of tremendous comfort to me when I was coming out, indicating as it did that the spoiled, upwardly-mobile LGBA types at college and the lugubriously noble AIDS sufferers of pop culture were not the only possible model for homosexual life.

This recent quotation from Halperin (in the article Joanne cites) is interesting because he appears not to understand its implications in the most meaningful sense. I mean, the "insurgency mentality" part. Conservatism includes a lot of people, and obviously there's a lot I find to disagree with when examining the ideas of some of them; but I do think that as a generalization, it's fair to say that conservatives have "hustle" because they see their ideas working and are thus energized and want to find new ways to implement them.

The left insists on retaining the why-aren't-they-flocking-to-us-when-we-know-what's-good-for-them? attitude that people REALLY DISLIKE in a free society. Tossing coins at a bunch of liberal campus newspapers seems to me unlikely to do much about that because it doesn't involve reexamining their own motivations and hold on reality.

I had gratefully forgotten his existence, but Living in Pink links (or was just displaying a link on one of its newsfeeds) to this Queer Day link to this Inquirer article about James McGreevey, who is settling into life as a Recovering Governor. Be sure to read the last sentence of Baker's statement--pricelessly dry. And though it's only February, I think Sabato has clinched the award for Drollest Use of a Participial Modifier, 2005:

Ross K. Baker, a Rutgers University political science professor, said the former governor did a masterly job of erasing memories of much of his scandal-riddled 2 1/2 years in office with his "I am a gay American" speech.

"I think he probably pulled off one of the most extraordinary acts of self-labeling in modern history by reducing the entire episode of Golan Cipel to 'I am a gay American,'" Baker said. "He defined the reason for his resignation as his sexual orientation and not other things that were less attractive about the McGreevey administration--like corruption."

Larry Sabato, the director of the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia, agreed that McGreevey's portrayal of himself has made him more marketable--"assuming he isn't indicted."