The more I read of Josh Trevino, the more I like him.

Over at Politics from Left to Right, which features left-leaning Chris Nolan as well, Trevino takes on the whole “Multiculturalism/Clash of Civilizations” conversation with gusto, and makes some very good, fundamental points in his dialogue with Nolan.

Here are just a couple:

Nolan’s objections to the clash of civilizations thesis are as follows:

* We cannot afford to set “one set of social or cultural mores….above another.”

This is self-refuting: the very act of the assertion sets the social and cultural mores of tolerance — or multiculturalism, as you prefer — above all else. This is an act wholly impossible to avoid. If you find that things have intrinsic moral characteristics by virtue of their being — for example, if you sense that a man blowing up a bus in the name of his faith is somehow in all contexts a moral wrong — then you are setting a particular social or cultural more above others (in this case, that holding that there are contexts wherein bus-bombing is quite acceptable). If culture and its trappings were no more than an accretion of aesthetic or pragmatic preferences (curry rather than barbecue, pagodas rather than Gothic, llamas rather than yaks), then we might safely consign it to some manner of rough equality, and hence fundamental irrelevance. Because culture carries with it the baggage of history, ideas and practices, we do so only as an act of willful ignorance.

* The modern phenomenon of Islamist terror is mostly a circumstantial reflection of technology and historical particulars.

Nolan overstates the effect of technology and the “connected, always-on digital age” of which she is a fan. It is indisputable that Islamist terror makes full use of the tools of the modern age, from aircraft to the internet. Many draw the lesson from this that the moral quality of the terror is therefore something new, and that the means of fighting it are new as well. Both assumptions are wrong. The folly of the “new” warfare finds its expression in the deathly maw of Iraq. What makes modern Islamist terror so unique is not its modern veneer but its barbarous ferocity: suicides, beheadings, the wanton slaughter of noncombatants, and public gloating over the same not commonly seen in the West since the Thirty Years’ War. Its cardinal quality is how profoundly primitive it is. Modernity abets its fury, but does not define its being. Having just closed out a century in which Rwandans massacred a million of their own in one hundred days with muscle power and machetes, we cannot afford to forget the overriding force that is the human will to annihilation.

Trevino is great. I discovered him during his commentaries on the whole “Live8″ benefit last month, and was really inspired and moved by his reports from a Scottish airport during the initial aftermath of the 7/7 London terror attacks.

So, go check out Josh Trevino right now. You’ll be glad you did.

July 27th, 2005 | Global War On Terror, Jihad Watch, Politics | 1 comment

California Conservative offers some thoughts on the SEIU and Teamsters Unions splitting off from the big AFL-CIO labor organization. This means that the the AFL-CIO has lost 3.2 million of its previous 13 million or so members.

From the Wall Street Journal:

…we are witnessing a fight over who gets to preside over a declining labor movement. Two of the largest and more successful unions, the Service Employees International and the Teamsters, are rebelling against the leadership of AFL-CIO President John Sweeney. The irony is that it wasn’t all that long ago, in 1995, that Mr. Sweeney won his job with his own coup against Lane Kirkland, the Cold War hero and more moderate labor voice.

In the wake of the GOP takeover of Congress the year before, Mr. Sweeney promised to pour hundreds of millions of dollars into electoral politics to stop the Gingrich revolution. He staffed AFL-CIO headquarters with activists from the political left–environmental groups, culturally liberal outfits–and made the union consortium a wholly owned subsidiary of the Democratic Party.

A decade later we can see how that turned out. Democrats remain in the House and Senate minority, and union membership continues to decline across the American economy. The unionized share of the total U.S. work force has been sliding steadily for years, and was down again last year to 12.5% from 12.9% in 2003. In the more dynamic private sector, only 7.9% of employees now carry the union label.

Yes, and if you take a close look at the curves on the chart above, you’ll see that a much greater percentage of all Government workers — approximately 35% — are Unionized than are workers in the “real world” private sector (8%). One might conclude that it’s the Government Unions that are keeping the labor “movement” alive, to the extent that it IS still alive.

And, of course, those Government Unions are supported with our tax dollars.

The Wall Street Journal piece says it clearly:

The tragedy is that neither [union] faction is offering an agenda that will make workers more prosperous in our increasingly competitive global economy.

Precisely. And as far as serving the taxpayers and businesses of our nation is concerned, it must be asked: are Government Unions helping or harming the cause of more efficient and effective Governenmental operations? Are we getting “bang for our bucks?” And, really, is this the best we can do for workers? Government Unions — extorting from the public they ostensibly “serve?”

The recent BART transit strike brinksmanship is an object lesson, and quite fresh in our collective memory.

I suggest that perhaps it’s time to move beyond the old adversarial class-warfare Union-versus-management model. Surely we can do better than what we’ve got, now. And I think it’s clear, we’re going to have to. The old style Union model is dying out.

July 26th, 2005 | Economics, Liberty, Unions | No comments