NYC Junta

Wed. Sept, 9, 2009, The Larry Lawrence Bar, 295 Grand St b/t Havemeyer and Roebling, Williamsburg, Brooklyn.

7:30 pm

What should humans be allowed to do, and what should they be prevented from doing? Besides the obvious rule against killing people who piss you off, how far should the law restrict our personal freedoms to drink, use drugs, prostitute ourselves, get married, vote, practice medicine or religion, or any number of things we might come up with?

Legalizing weed is a trending topic. Lots of people use it, despite its being illegal, and there is clearly a profit to be made by regulating and taxing it. But at what cost?

Should tobacco, whose use can be directly linked to over 5 million deaths per year (worldwide; in the US it’s 400,000), be outlawed?

If causing mass death is our gauge, maybe we shouldn’t let so many people drive. Forty thousand Americans die on the road each year.

Of course, we all know that Prohibition didn’t work out too well – but what about the prohibition of heroin? Hasn’t that done us well?

Then there’s religion. Americans used to pray in school, or so I’ve heard, until the Supreme Court said that wasn’t cool. More recently, a federal appeals court ruled that it was totally cool for a guy to sacrifice goats in his house as part of a “complex ritual for ordaining priests”.

What else can you think of – what should be made legal/illegal and why?

UPDATE: Forgot all about prostitution, the top example of an illegal activity that just won’t go away. NPR did a great debate, “Is It Wrong to Pay for Sex?”, which I heartily recommend everyone listen to (about 50min). On a related note, the Economist recently made a case for looser restrictions on how we treat pedophiles (Megan’s laws, sex offender registries).

And organ sales. People need kidneys; other people have kidneys to spare. Should we be selling our organs? The New Yorker did a story on people who felt motivated to donate their kidneys to total strangers, for nothing. There is also an audio interview with the author.

Announcements, Meetings booze, drugs, god, law, legalization, marijuana, religion

Good Junta last night, I’ll leave it to Rindy to post some of the highlights, but for me that was what the Junta was all about: a bunch of dudes sitting around drinking and having good, engaged conversation about real topics.

Relevant to last night, and other Junta topics, is the continued rioting in Xinjiang.  I’ve enjoyed reading about how the tone-deaf Chinese government tried to set up a PR tour through Urumqi. Apparently they didn’t learn anything from when they tried to usher journalists around Tibet when there was rioting there. Hahaha, I like the opening paragraph from the Gawker story below about this:

http://gawker.com/5309212/china-learns-the-yin-and-yang-of-pr

Anyway, I am following this story with mixed emotions. On the one hand, I love seeing the Chinese government, and generally the Han Chinese, getting their comeuppance. What they are doing in Xinjiang, just as in Tibet, is cultural genocide. The government provides incentives for Han Chinese to move to these frontier states, which have historically been independent as much as they have been a part of China, overtly favors the Han with jobs at the cost of the locals, and doesn’t provide anywhere near the proper safeguards to protect local culture. The clear goal is to change the fundamental character of these places. This is just a more patient, and very Chinese, form of ethnic cleansing and I really feel sympathy for the Uighurs and the Tibetans.

On the other hand, China is not Serbia or Kosovo. It is the only major economy that is growing and it’s stability and continued growth is absolutely essential to any sort of incipient recovery to the global economy.

So, I’m hoping that the rioters get their message out, possibly affect a change of policy, and that China loses huge face. But I also hope that it doesn’t get too bad. Maybe that can work out?

In the News china, discrimination, nationalism, politics, protest, religion, uighurs

Thursday night’s Junta was a great one. We continue to set the bar high for intellectual engagement and for attracting top-notch minds. And the Algonquin is becoming a favorite venue, at least in my opinion. The whiskeys are a bit tough on the wallet, but the atmosphere is par excellence.

Professor Andrzej Rapaczynski set out by stating the skewed numbers in political contributions of those working at universities. The liberal slant of academia is well set into the popular psyche but the lopsidedness is quite stark when viewed in pure dollar terms. We’re talking 80-90% of academics contributing to the Democratic Party. Rapaczynski said we, as a society, are “trained to be sensitive” to discrimination, to minorities; that after so many decades (centuries?) of innate racism and sexism, we have lately (relatively speaking) realized our error and so become very attuned to the fact that certain segmants of society have been trampled upon. We are constantly asking how many blacks are on the teaching staff, whether there are enough women, and so forth. But when it comes to Republicans, well, “this is not something we are interested in addressing.”

Now, these laws – Title VII, Title VIII, and others – are oriented towards eliminating discrimination using a fact-based method. If we look at the ratio of Asians teaching at Harvard, we can come up with a number, a percentage. We can easily determine the percentage of women faculty at Princeton. And we can say that if such numbers are found to be statistically out of whack – if women make up a mere 3% of the staff at Stanford – then we have evidence that something is not right: namely, that there is discrimination in hiring. These levels can be used as the basis for lawsuits, because such disparity, so the argument goes, cannot be an accident. Yet, not only can we not sue a university for having a faculty that is 94% Democratic, but this is not even a matter of serious discussion.

Andrzej said that often, among New York City society, at dinner functions and such, he feels “like a left-wing intellectual Jew at an Alabama fundamentalist dinner”. That when he puts forth his ideas, he can see his wife cringe. And that it is precisely that feeling which should not be occurring among the students of an institution of higher learning; that no student should be made to feel that his ideas are balderdash, that he is among the wrong.

Rise of the Right

Over the last 20-30 years, the American political right has been in the ascendence. The “Reagan Revolution” of promoting free markets, deregulation, privatization, etc, has been the strongest force in Washington. One may need to forget about the backlash of the last two years, or even (if one is an ardent Bush-hater) the last eight years, but as Professor Rapaczynski argued, since about the time of Reagan, the Republican party has been “the party of ideas.”

Now, one may claim that Bill Clinton brought the Democrats to power and reversed this trend. Yet Clinton’s primary achievements were welfare reform and balancing the budget, which are fairly conservative ideas. Clinton was a centrist, a member of the pro-business Democratic Leadership Council, and helped in his first election by Ross Perot splitting the Republican vote. So I would agree with Andrzej that the Clinton administration fit into the general trend of the rise of the right.

Yet this shift has not been reflected in the universities. And that void in the teaching staffs of our greatest institutions works to turn a good portion of the youth against the universities. Academia becomes a favorite flogging horse of the right, and this is not good for the health of the nation. It is not good for the state of education.

At this point in the discussion, Alex pointed out that if what Professor Rapaczynski said were true, that Republican academics were being denied jobs based on political leanings, then wouldn’t there be more class action suits against them? Wouldn’t those shut out be suing, in the great litigious tradition of this country? Andrzej’s answer was that Republicans (or Democrats, or Greens) are not covered under civil rights statutes. The laws cover “immutable” characteristics, which political beliefs are not.

So what can be done? As the Students for a Democratic Society used to say, “consciousness-raising.” When finding himself in a discussion over an open post at Columbia, and hearing arguments about how more blacks or women are needed, Professor Rapaczynski will say, “Yes, I agree, but the demographic we are most underrepresenting are Republicans.” This inevitably draws a laugh, but as he says, “I hope, on some level, that it sinks in.”

Anti-Semitism

We segued into part two of our discussion. Professor Rapaczynski led with his thesis that the anti-Zionist movement represents “a turn against Jews, disguised as a turn against Israel.” This provoked some rebuke, which was lessened when he defined anti-Zionism as the belief that Israel was “born in sin” and that the only solution was its elimination. While admitting that one can criticize Israel without being anti-Semitic, he claimed that if one scratched the surface of some of these views, claims that those holding them have nothing against Jews “seem inauthentic.”

He identified five pillars that “formed the basis of 19th-century anti-Semitism.” They are a rejection of:

• Cosmopolitanism
• Capitalism
• Jews
• America
• Exploitation

If one today added to this list “Israel,” Andrzej claims, he would have the 20th/21st-century definition of “anti-Zionism.”

Essentially, he says, anti-Zionists believe that Jews don’t have a right to a state in Palestine. In Professor Rapaczynski’s experience, this view is widely accepted in Europe, but not in America. He therefore limited his discussion to Europe, where he feels that this view is posing a danger to the world. So, for example, “when the French minister says that ‘I don’t think we should be dying for this shitty country,’ the only controversy is that a newspaper reported what a minister said in private.” (I looked unsuccessfully for a citation of this.) Or the boycott of Israeli scientists by some in European academia. (For more examples, see some of the professor’s citations in his introduction of the topic.)

One response to the professor was that many critics of Israeli foreign policy, for example, often find themselves unjustly labeled as anti-Semitic. Isn’t this an attempt to silence dissent by falsely accusing dissenters of discrimination? Andrzej conceded the point, but also posed a question. Which is the greater danger: oversensitive Jews who accuse others falsely of anti-Semitism, or the problem of real anti-Semites? Clearly he believed the latter was worse.

The conversation wandered a bit. There was mention of the Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem, and Daniel mentioned the irony of being able to see the occupied territories while exiting the memorial. We spoke of the similarities between Israel’s war against Hamas, and America’s war against al-Qaeda; that both, while trying to stamp out “terror,” inevitably exacerbate the conditions in which terrorists multiply. But things were falling apart, the whiskey was taking its toll. We decided to wrap it. One last memorable idea rose above the others, and it was Daniel who laid it out:

“Anti-discrimination laws are meant to protect the weak, not Republicans and Israelis.” I think that merited further discussion, but a meeting of the Junta can last only so long. I’d be interested in hearing elaboration on all these topics in the comments, if any are so inclined.

Wrap-Ups academia, anti-semitism, discrimination, israel, religion

The Junta will next convene on Thursday, February 5th, 7:00 pm at the Algonquin Hotel, 59 W 44th St, between 5th and 6th Avenues.

We are delighted that Professor Andrzej Rapaczynski has agreed to spend the evening with us. I worked with Andrzej for 9 years at Project Syndicate, an international association of newspapers based in Prague, and he remains a good friend. Project Syndicate distributes opinion commentaries, which it provides for free to newspapers in the world’s poorest countries, while receiving financial contributions from those able to pay. Growing from a tiny organization when I first moved to Prague in the late 1990s, it has blossomed into one of the most influential sources of commentary in the world, with over 400 member newspapers in nearly 150 countries, and many of the most recognizable names in global politics, economics, literature, human rights etc. Andrzej is one of the founders of Project Syndicate and one of its four editors/directors.

Andrzej is originally from Poland and was a part of a group of dissidents who agitated for reform under communism. The resulting crackdown led to his immigration to the US. He has had a distinguished academic career, holding advanced degrees in philosophy and law, and is currently a law professor at Columbia.

Andrzej will introduce a discussion of two topics related to neglected aspects of discrimination. The first will be the surprisingly disproportionate numbers of Democrats in American academia. Studies show the proportion of academics who identify as Democrats is over 90% in most major American Universities (higher than, for instance, among organized labor). Yet, despite repeated calls for diversity in academia, very few people object to this or even notice that our academic research and discussion are overwhelmingly biased toward one point of view. And yet, according to most prevailing academic and legal doctrines from other areas of discrimination, it is absolutely impossible to get a similar disparity without actual exclusion. The interesting fact is, then, that discrimination bothers people with respect to certain categories of minorities, but the same people have difficulties in even noticing its existence with respect to others.

The second topic will be the rise of global anti-Semitism. This phenomenon is much more pronounced outside of the US, but the implications for the US are also serious. Andrzej spends a lot of time in Europe and is exposed in a unique fashion to global trends of opinion because of his role with Project Syndicate. In was in this capacity that he came across the attached commentary, which recently ran in Business World, a financial newspaper in the Philippines. It is the more interesting for the fact that its blatant anti-Semitism comes from a country that isn’t exactly known for its large Jewish population.

But the most disturbing trends are in Europe. Although much contemporary anti-Semitism takes the overt form of “anti-Zionism,” a very traditional anti-Jewish animus is often only thinly veiled in such manifestations as an anti-Semitic cartoon in a mainstream European paper or the boycott of Israeli scientists in British universities, conferences, and professional publications. Indeed, the relentless association of Israel with globalization (previously known as “rootless cosmopolitanism”), world capitalism, US imperialism, the domination of the press, and the control of the immoral entertainment sector harkens to the most classical forms of anti-Semitism. Criticizing Israeli policies of course doesn’t make you anti-Semitic, but supporting policies that are likely to endanger the lives of several million people living in Israel cannot be easily classified as a harmless intellectual opposition to “Zionism.” Andrzej will also argue that, unlike the anti-Semitism of the second half of the 19^th and most of the 20^th centuries, which was the preserve of the Right, today’s anti-Jewish animus seems to be largely associated with the Left, thus curiously returning to its origins in Europe before 1848.

We have yet to settle on a location yet, but will be in touch in the coming days with details.

Below you will find some stories and cartoons that we will discuss on the 5th.

http://www.opensecrets.org/industries/contrib.php?ind=W04&cycle=2004

http://www.opensecrets.org/bigpicture/sectors.php?cycle=2006

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/05/opinion/05krugman.html?scp=1&sq=krugman%20and%20academia&st=cse

http://sciencenow.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/2007/531/4

http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/06/19/universities-condemn-professors-israel-boycott/

http://www.monabaker.com/BakerLondonConference.htm

http://online.wsj.com/public/article/SB111766420704048626-6z8PnnbJmw_a2TIyQttsLnChkZs_20050705.html?mod=blogs

http://www.adl.org/Anti_semitism/arab/cartoon_arab_press_080702.asp

www.project-syndicate.org

Additionally, the following text is from Lexis:

The Boston Globe

April 28, 2002, Sunday ,THIRD EDITION

A WAVE OF JEW-BASHING IN EUROPE

BYLINE: BY JEFF JACOBY

SECTION: OP-ED; Pg. E7

LENGTH: 860 words

THE ROCKS HAVE BEEN LIFTED ALL OVER EUROPE, AND THE SNAKES OF JEW-HATRED ARE SLITHERING FREE.

In Belgium, thugs beat up the chief rabbi, kicking him in the face and calling him “a dirty Jew.” Two synagogues in Brussels were firebombed; a third, in Charleroi, was sprayed with automatic weapons fire.

In Britain, the cover of the New Statesman, a left-wing magazine, depicted a large Star of David stabbing the Union Jack. Oxford professor Tom Paulin, a noted poet, told an Egyptian interviewer that American Jews who move to the West Bank and Gaza “should be shot dead.” A Jewish yeshiva student reading the Psalms was stabbed 27 times on a London bus. Anti-Semitism, wrote a columnist in The Spectator, “has become respectable . . . at London dinner tables.” She quoted one member of the House of Lords: “The Jews have been asking for it and now, thank God, we can say what we think at last.”

In Italy, the daily paper La Stampa published a Page 1 cartoon: A tank emblazoned with a Jewish star points its gun at the baby Jesus, who pleads, “Surely they don’t want to kill me again?” In Corriere Della Sera, another cartoon showed Jesus trapped in his tomb, unable to rise, because Ariel Sharon, with rifle in hand, is sitting on the sepulchre.

In Germany, a rabbinical student was beaten up in downtown Berlin and a grenade was thrown into a Jewish cemetery. Thousands of neo-Nazis held a rally, marching near a synagogue on the Jewish sabbath. Graffiti appeared on a synagogue in the western town of Herford: “Six million were not enough.”

In Ukraine, skinheads attacked Jewish worshippers and smashed the windows of Kiev’s main synagogue. Ukrainian police denied that the attack was anti-Jewish.

In Greece, Jewish graves were desecrated in Ioannina and vandals hurled paint at the Holocaust memorial in Salonica. In Holland, an anti-Israel demonstration featured swastikas, photos of Hitler, and chants of “Sieg Heil” and “Jews into the sea.” In Slovakia, the Jewish cemetery of Kosice was invaded and 135 tombstones destroyed.

But nowhere have the flames of anti-Semitism burned more furiously than in France.

In Lyon, a car was rammed into a synagogue and set on fire. In Montpellier, the Jewish religious center was firebombed; so were synagogues in Strasbourg and Marseille; so was a Jewish school in Creteil. A Jewish sports club in Toulouse was attacked with Molotov cocktails, and on the statue of Alfred Dreyfus in Paris, the words “Dirty Jew” were painted. In Bondy, 15 men beat up members of a Jewish football team with sticks and metal bars. The bus that takes Jewish children to school in Aubervilliers has been attacked three times in the last 14 months. According to the police, metropolitan Paris has seen 10 to 12 anti-Jewish incidents per day since Easter.

Walls in Jewish neighborhoods have been defaced with slogans proclaiming “Jews to the gas chambers” and “Death to the Jews.” The weekly journal Le Nouvel Observateur published an appalling libel: It said Israeli soldiers rape Palestinian women, so that their relatives will kill them to preserve “family honor.” The French ambassador to Great Britain was not sacked – and did not apologize – when it was learned that he had told guests at a London dinner that the world’s troubles were the fault of “that shitty little country, Israel.”

“At the start of the 21st century,” writes Pierre-Andre Taguieff, a well-known social scientist, in a new book, “we are discovering that Jews are once again select targets of violence. . . . Hatred of the Jews has returned to France.”

But of course, it never left. Not France; not Europe. Anti-Semitism, the oldest bigotry known to man, has been a part of European society since time immemorial. In the aftermath of the Holocaust, open Jew-hatred became unfashionable; but fashions change, and Europe is reverting to type.

To be sure, some Europeans are shocked by the re-emergence of Jew-hatred all over their continent. But the more common reaction has been complacency. “Stop saying that there is anti-Semitism in France,” President Jacques Chirac told a Jewish editor in January. “There is no anti-Semitism in France.” The European media have been vicious in condemning Israel’s self-defense against Palestinian terrorism in the West Bank; they have been far less agitated about anti-Jewish terror in their own backyard.

They are making a grievous mistake. For if today the violence and vitriol are aimed at the Jews, tomorrow they will be aimed at the Christians.

A timeless lesson of history is that it rarely ends with the Jews. Militant Islamist extremists were attacking and killing Jews long before they attacked and killed Americans on Sept. 11. The Nazis’ first set out to incinerate the Jews; in the end, all of Europe was burned in the fire.

Jews, it is often said, are the canary in the coal mine of civilization. When they become the objects of savagery and hate, it means the air has been poisoned and an explosion is soon to come. If Europeans don’t rise up and turn against the Jew-haters, the Jew-haters will rise up and turn against them.

Meetings academia, anti-semitism, discrimination, israel, politics, religion

Junta 2 met at the Algonquin Hotel in midtown to discuss the eternal problem of the ultimate unknown: God.

Leading the discussion was Pete, fresh off reading Richard Dawkins’s The God Delusion and Christopher Hitchens’s God is Not Great. Pete’s argument boiled down to atheism; literally, the opposite of theism, the belief in one god. A rejection of the belief that there is one thing determining the faith of your soul.

Pete talked mainly about Dawkins, who argues in his book that those who believe in science cannot possibly believe in God. Essentially, according to this theory, “God” has been the historic and traditional explanation for anything and everything that humans could not explain themselves: why the sun came up over here and went down over there, why the nights were longer in winter and the days in summer, why plants grew, etc. Having no understanding of these things, early humans created the idea of God: that which explains the unexplainable.

As time went on, of course, humans discovered the science behind all of these things, and God was no longer used as the catch-all explanation. It stands to reason, then, that after another thousand years, humans will understand many things that are unfathomable today – the nature of light, the origins of matter, black holes and so on. In time, the atheists say, science will explain all things to us.

Don brought up at interesting point here: science is its own faith. For example, we can read of the method of carbon dating, in which the age of ancient organic matter is determined by the amount of carbon-14 that is left in it. By this method scientists determine the age of artifacts and fossils. It is an accepted scientific method, and yet the majority of us have no idea how it works. We take it on faith that it is true. Isn’t science therefore just another religion, which most of us cannot verify, but instead put our blind trust in? It’s just another kind of faith.

Yet Pete came back with an effective (in my opinion) retort: science relies on the scientific method. Experiments must be repeated and verified by others before being accepted by the community. Everything they do is documented, recorded, repeated. In contrast, consider the miracles the Jesus performed. Though it was written in the New Testament that Jesus raised two people from the dead – from the dead! – no one ever thought to interview these people and hear about what an incredible experience that must have been. Brought back to life from death – yet it is simply recorded, never questioned, never followed up.

Further on the subject of Jesus, Don aired a point which I agree with completely: that Jesus definitely existed, that he was a guy who had a radical worldview, he was wildly charismatic, and his opinions reached a vast number of people because they were morally upright and essentially human. But he didn’t leave any of his own writings. He left that to his followers, who argued over it for years, who delayed, who made political compromises and ended up with the New Testament, a decidedly human work. Whether Jesus was the “Son of God” is beside the point, Don said. I would put forth that if there is a God, then we are all his sons and daughters.

Further to that, Don touched on the fundamentalist factor. That is, the chance that he, having been born a Catholic in Kansas, was “lucky” enough to fall into the “right” religion, unlike millions of others around the globe. How can fundamentalists be so exclusive, so narrow-minded, as to think that their God is the only god, that other people who believe just as fervently as they do in different gods are dead wrong, and not only that, they will be punished by burning in hell for all eternity? Don’s personal opinion was that anyone who thought that way, who truly believed that their way was the only way, and that others would be punished by their God in The End Times, were his intellectual inferiors.

Jeff chimed in on proving the existence or nonexistence of God, saying that both are impossible. That is the essence of faith: believing in that which cannot be proven. Just because science has learned the real reason the sun rises in the east and sets in the west does not rule out the possibility that there is an omnipotent God stroking his white beard in the heavens (though Jeff did not endorse this version of the Supreme Being). But his point was that no matter how much science figures out, it cannot prove that there is no God. Pete’s counterpoint came straight from Dawkins, who said the burden of proof is on those who claim that there is an invisible, omniscient being that created the universe and controls all things, but for whose existence there is exactly zero proof. You might as well claim that there is a giant green teacup hovering over all of us which controls the weather: hey, you can’t prove it’s not there, right?

Religion as Taste

All of this points to Dawkins’s conclusion that people’s religious opinions should be given no more preference or respect than their music opinions – because they are just that: opinions. I can’t prove that the Rolling Stones are a good band, and you can’t prove that Allah is the only true God. Some might believe in the creationist argument of “irreducible complexity,” as Jeff mentioned – the idea that some things about life are just too complicated to have come about by chance, by evolution. But others would argue that evolution is more than just blind chance; it’s the result of millions of years of trial and error. If the progress of life forms is a mountain, evolutionists believe that steps were made slowly up the mountain, one by one, over an impossibly long period of time. Intelligent designers picture a crane which lifted humans and their sophisticated organ systems right to the top of the mountain.

What about creativity, though? Where do ideas come from? Pete may argue that inspiration is just random sparks along our nerve endings, pulses jumping from neuron to neuron – but I can’t accept that, and my impression was that the others present are in my camp. Maybe it’s just a basic human impulse to believe in a higher order – maybe it’s an animal impulse and atheists are actually more developed life forms that us – but my own preference is that there are some mysteries that will never be solved by science, because they are divine. The field of quantum mechanics gives me hope, because my own limited following of the situation there indicates that the more our brilliant scientists discover about the nature of matter, of atoms and electrons and smaller particles, the more questions they raise. Pete would say that all will be revealed in time, but his argument is based on history, and history has not only shown us that we can figure things out, it has shown us that the more we learn, the more we realize how much we don’t know. But his riposte would be that “the world is amazing enough without a supernatural being.” Well, touche.

Or maybe Don put it best: “In the end, we’re all just a bunch of hairless monkeys, and when it’s over, the lights go out, and that’s it.”

Wrap-Ups atheism, dawkins, god, religion