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May 30, 2005
stay upwind - 1
Instead of working back from a goal, work forward from promising situations. This is what most successful people actually do anyway.In the graduation-speech approach, you decide where you want to be in twenty years, and then ask: what should I do now to get there? I propose instead that you don't commit to anything in the future, but just look at the options available now, and choose those that will give you the most promising range of options afterward.
It's not so important what you work on, so long as you're not wasting your time. Work on things that interest you and increase your options, and worry later about which you'll take.
Suppose you're a college freshman deciding whether to major in math or economics. Well, math will give you more options: you can go into almost any field from math. If you major in math it will be easy to get into grad school in economics, but if you major in economics it will be hard to get into grad school in math.
Flying a glider is a good metaphor here. Because a glider doesn't have an engine, you can't fly into the wind without losing a lot of altitude. If you let yourself get far downwind of good places to land, your options narrow uncomfortably. As a rule you want to stay upwind. So I propose that as a replacement for "don't give up on your dreams." Stay upwind.
How do you do that, though? Even if math is upwind of economics, how are you supposed to know that as a high school student?
Well, you don't, and that's what you need to find out. I can give you some tips on how to recognize upwind. Look for smart people and hard problems. Smart people tend to clump together, and if you can find such a clump, it's probably worthwhile to join it. But it's not straightforward to find these, because there is a lot of faking going on.
"What you'll wish you'd known," by Paul Graham, January, 2005 (excellent advice for young people)
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May 25, 2005
If Michael Moore had had his way ...
If Michael Moore had had his way, Slobodan Milosevic would still be the big man in a starved and tyrannical Serbia. Bosnia and Kosovo would have been cleansed and annexed. If Michael Moore had been listened to, Afghanistan would still be under Taliban rule, and Kuwait would have remained part of Iraq. And Iraq itself would still be the personal property of a psychopathic crime family, bargaining covertly with the slave state of North Korea for WMD. You might hope that a retrospective awareness of this kind would induce a little modesty. To the contrary, it is employed to pump air into one of the great sagging blimps of our sorry, mediocre, celeb-rotten culture. Rock the vote, indeed.
"Unfairenheit 9/11: The lies of Michael Moore," by Christopher Hitchens, Slate, June 21, 2004
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May 18, 2005
"honor" killings - 1
The suicide rate among Asian women in Britain is four times that of the indigenous population and other immigrant groups. Being so tightly controlled and abused, suicide is often perceived as the only escape. Rosie Cowan, The Guardian's crime correspondent, writes, "While killings [are] more often carried out by men, women were sometimes involved. In some cases mothers and grandmothers handed a daughter over to her murderers." She quotes Commander Andy Baker, head of Scotland Yard's homicide squad, as saying, "Those who come to police are, without question, the tip of the iceberg." London police have been advised by a behavioral psychologist to listen carefully to any young girl or woman who gets up the nerve to walk into a police station, and not to inform the families and not to try to mediate.The fingers of "honor" killings snake through the EU, with its great masses of unassimilated Muslims living in self-imposed ghettoes and seething with contempt for their host societies. In Holland, 60 percent of women in women's shelters are Muslim. In Berlin, there is a safehouse for young Turkish women to hide to escape family violence. In the vast social housing estates of Paris and other northern cities in France, violence, including rape, is perpetrated for such minor infractions as running out to the grocery store without wearing a headscarf. In Sweden, a female Muslim campaigner against "honor" killings was herself shot dead by her father for having a relationship with a Swedish man.
Kathleen Knox, for Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, writes that in Prague, a 14-year-old Turkish girl was on her way to the supermarket when she was kidnapped and raped. When she was rescued, her father allegedly murdered her and buried her in a forest. The 14-year-old had "stained the family honor" by being overpowered by an adult male and raped.
The United Nations estimates that at least 5,000 women and girls worldwide are murdered every year by way of cleansing some primitive sense of family honor, many of them, like the girl above, having "dishonored" the family by having the temerity to be rape victims.
"Honor Thy Father -- Or Else," by Val MacQueen, Tech Central Station, February 2, 2005
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May 15, 2005
"The great Continental fatalistic shrug...."
Just over a year ago, in one of those wretched Security Council performances before the Gulf War, the French Foreign Minister, Dominique de Villepin, turned to Colin Powell and offered the umpteenth variation of the familiar argument that, if we Europeans are resistant to ze idea of war, it is because we have seen so much of ze horrors of ze war. The reality is the other way round: the reason they’ve seen so much of the horrors of war is because they’re so resistant to the idea of it - until it’s too late and conflagration is all that’s left.If one had to cast the great Continental fatalistic shrug in a less jaded light, one would do it this way: the Second Republics and Third Empires, Fascists and Communists and European Unions come and go; they’re mere political forces. The ancient buildings, the old vineyards, the big stinky unpasteurised cheese your village has made for centuries and which the wimps at that Yankee Federal agency responsible for regulating all the taste out of American food won’t even let into the country: this is the essence of a man’s identity; the political fashions of the day come and go, but underneath you endure. By contrast, an American’s sense of himself as an American is much more explicitly political – it’s about First and Second Amendments, or, according to taste, a “woman’s right to choose”. The United States is a political project in a way that Spain – imperial, Fascist, monarchist, republican, pacifist, Euro-federalist, your-ideology-here-ist – isn’t.
They’re right in a way. For most Communist or Nazi foot-soldiers, the label was a flag of convenience. But that’s not true of the jihadi. And the tragedy for the Continent is that this time it’s their core identity that’s at stake. If you think that Spanish election result is a disgrace, look down the road two or three years, to the next election cycle, in France, Belgium, the Netherlands. In the US, psephologists speculate on the impact of Ralph Nader’s two or three per cent. Think about an election where 20% of the voters are a culturally unassimilated Muslim bloc. If Washington has a hard time getting any useful contribution to the war from Europe now, you do the math five years hence. The incompatible buddy-cop routine works in Starsky & Hutch, but America and Europe have stretched the formula way beyond breaking point. It can’t be put back together.
"Starsky and Putsch," by Mark Steyn, National Review, March 29, 2004
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May 09, 2005
"A rational sensible kindly peaceable world where evil can be regulated by pieces of paper and General Assembly votes."
Again, to repeat the point I’ve made in the last 3 years again and again: it’s not the dissent. It’s the thin, meretricious, self-satisfied quality of the dissent. This is like Tom Selleck giving an interview and saying, “Well, Americans are too stupid to see Clinton for what he is, and they can’t find Bosnia on a map, and the ones who can are all gay atheists, you know.” He'd be held up as a parochial idiot, but Maher's drivel resonates, because he is vibrating on the moonbat frequency. He's one step removed from the people who would see a mushroom cloud over Manhattan and blame it on Abu Ghraib. Ah well. These people will either have to prosper and live unmolested in a world they hate, or get the world they keenly seek. A rational sensible kindly peaceable world where evil can be regulated by pieces of paper and General Assembly votes. A world where "hope is on the way!" means that Kofi Annan has entered his private elevator.
The Bleat, by James Lileks, October 25, 2004
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