Pro Commerce

The environment

The reprint at the end of this blog suggests that environmental organizations are worried because visitorship to national parks is falling precipitously.  They fear a loss of future envrionmentalists.

The reprint raises, for me, the question "Why do people take an interest in the natural world, in the first place?" The environmental world won't like my social thought answer.

Nature in America is conceived as beautiful because it is chaotic, random and untouched by humans.  The basis for respecting nature is the awesome power it has to easily and without apparent moral qualms, destroy humans. 

Other societies don't have the same view of nature. A natural Japanese garden is well organized and even the appearance of random leaves is a human creation.  This  well organized idea of natural is the source of Japanese love of nature.  The fear of tsunomis and typhoons is not associated with love or beauty.

What evokes the "beauty of nature" in Americans is not parks or mountains with climbers on them...it is roadless uninhabited areas with dangerous man eating animals.

If the enviro's want more Americans to love nature and presumably appreciate the environment, they need to support more outdoor adventures, more survival training and particularly more dangerous outdoor adventures.  Parks schmarks; love of nature in America has nothing to do with parks.

Click to see reprint.

Al Qaida goodbye

This piece stands on its own.  I have recently been a champion of encouraging the Sunni and Shiia to fight.  This is a good reason that I didn't know about.

Foreign Affairs

Why U.S. Should Steer Clear As Shiite, Sunni Rift Evolves

• Newsweek, Feb. 19

Rising tension and outright violence between Islam's Shiite and Sunni sects have weakened al Qaeda's appeal and ended one of its founding missions -- to unite the Islamic world against the West -- writes Newsweek columnist Fareed Zakaria. With this in mind, the U.S. should avoid taking sides as the rupture grows.

Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri founded al Qaeda in the 1980s as a pan-Islamic organization. To that effect Mr. bin Laden initially resisted sanctioning violence against the Shiite minority in Afghanistan during the war against the Russians. Similarly, after the invasion of Iraq, Mr. Zawahiri reproached al Qaeda's head there, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, for attacking Iraq's Shiites.

Nevertheless, Mr. Zarqawi's approach has won out. Al-Qaeda's anti-Shiite message has boosted its appeal among a Sunni minority disenfranchised by the fall of Saddam Hussein. However, while the anti-Shiite stance might boost al Qaeda's appeal in "Iraq, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and some parts of the gulf," Mr. Zakaria says it means that everywhere else al Qaeda has lost its original appeal as a uniter of Muslims against a common, powerful enemy.

While al Qaeda finds itself dragged into an internal battle between Muslims, the U.S. should stay out of it, Mr. Zakaria says. This way it can ensure that what is a war between sects evolves into a war of ideas. "Islam must make space for differing views about what makes a good Muslim," says Mr. Zakaria. "Then it will be able to take the next step and accept the diversity among religions, each true in its own way."

Contentions

Contentions is the most exciting blog yet.  It is full of interesting writing by some of our leading public intellectuals, ... you will never feel you have enough time to read it. Here is a short list of the current writers of this offspring of Commentary.

• Max Boot
• David Gelernter
• Hillel Halkin
• Victor Davis Hanson
• Joshua Muravchik
• David Pryce-Jones
• Terry Teachout
• Ruth R. Wisse

Contentions is a follow-on to a newsletter created by Midge Decter as pointed out in The Weekly Standard:

"THE SCRAPBOOK is old enough to remember with fondness and more than a little nostalgia the original Contentions, a monthly publication of Midge Decter's Committee for the Free World, which like that fine organization closed its doors with its mission accomplished--the collapse of the Soviet Union.

In the valedictory December 1990 issue of Contentions, Midge noted that among the important work carried out by her committee was to oppose "the anti-Americanism of the fashionable liberal and leftist intelligentsia," which "represented a very real danger to the country, for inevitably over time it was bound to produce a terrible demoralization. Even the citizens of a sturdy democracy cannot resist forever the erosions of a culture that continually disconfirms their beliefs, their principles, their very daily lives. A demoralized society cannot mount a defense of itself, in the end not even in that bedrock definition of defense as the military means necessary to hold off an enemy bent on your destruction.

 Alas, there is an all-too-contemporary sound to those words, without the good cheer that accompanied them in 1990. Happily, there is a new Contentions to pick up where the original left off."