Category: Uncategorized

A call for permawar

David Brooks openly calls for “constant garden-tending”, or in other words, an ongoing state of aggressively militaristic global policing by the United States:

As Robert Kagan shows in a brilliant essay in The New Republic, for the past 70 years, American policy makers have understood that underreach can lead to catastrophe, too. Presidents assertively tended the international garden so that small problems didn’t turn into big ones, even when core national interests were not at stake. In the 1990s, for example, President George H.W. Bush and President Clinton took military action roughly every 17 months to restrain dictators, spread democracy and preserve international norms.

This sort of forward-leaning interventionist garden-tending will be even more necessary in an age of assertive autocracies. If the U.S. restricts intervention to “core interests,” as Obama suggests, if it neglects constant garden-tending, the thugs will grab and grab and eventually there will be horrendous conflagrations. America’s assertive responses will not need to be military; they rarely will be. But they’ll need to be simple, strong acts of deterrence to preserve order.

This is insane and this is wrong. The reason that “the number of countries that moved in an autocratic direction has outnumbered those that moved in a democratic one” has been because the supposedly democratic countries have demonstrated to all and sundry that they are not democratic at all. The United States, Italy, Greece, Ukraine, Ireland, France, the UK, and above all, the European Union, have proven, beyond any shadow of a doubt, that their “democracy” is a sham.

Switzerland is the only genuinely democratic country in Europe. It is the only country where the will of the people can actually, at times, override the will of the government elite. The government there has voted twice to join the EU. The people voted it down twice and that is why Switzerland is not in the EU. Contrast that with, for example, the UK, where the people have never voted to join the EU and the government has repeatedly lied to them and denied them the opportunity to decide for themselves if they wish to belong to it. Or Ireland, where they voted down the Lisbon Treaty, then were forced to vote again until the will of the Irish elite had been accomplished. Or the USA, where one of the largest invasions in human history – 50 million strong – was aided and abetted by the three branches of government.

The concept of representative democracy has failed abysmally. It is no wonder that people are now trying other options. It’s hard to believe that Brooks is crazy enough to demand the US engage in national sovereignty-violating military action twice every three years. This is the madness of the neocons reaching terminal velocity.

Mailvox: the sterile wasteland

A foreign author observes the pinkshirts running amok in other literary genres than SF/F:

I found your blog yesterday and I just wanted to thank you for what you have done there. I’m a published author in an Anglosphere country, who has really been struggling with the prevailing SJW culture in my local literary community. What is going on here is actually horrifying, to the point where I have indulged in self-exile and given up ever publishing in this market again.

The entire literary community here has been transformed into a horde of politically correct zombies hellbent on sniffing out and crushing the merest hint of intellectual insurgency.

The types of writers arising from this mess are increasingly foisting upon the local and international public derivative works of insipid speculative fiction which amount to remixes of ideas from other better authors.

However, they all seem to be geniuses at networking amongst our small, left leaning liberal elites, and a small, well-networked coterie of these people occupies positions in the mainstream reviewing press, publishing journals and publishers. The result is that unanimous praise is heaped upon everything that is published by anyone attached to this network, and prepared to turn their novels into conduits for speaking power to truth.

One of these authors recently won a major international literary prize for a second novel which was so bad that I actually blushed when I read the first chapter. I have been completely unable to make sense of this, or the way that some big names in fiction have put their weight behind this person, while crowd-sourced reviewing sites have largely given the work the stick it deserves.

Reading through some of your blogs I now have a sense of the behind-the-scenes political maneuvering that must accompany literary awards, and it has helped to develop a sense of what really goes on. I have always suspected that some rather dark Machiavellian maneuvering happens in the backrooms of Big Lit.

At any rate, this whole process is gradually turning our locally literary landscape into a sterile wasteland. Literary forums where writers used to interact have turned into barren wastelands because of the vigour with which any dissent is persecuted.

The people in the community seem oblivious to this fact, and now seem to interact mainly on Twitter where they retweet each others’ blind observations and compete to come up with interpretations of the world that are as thoroughly inverse to observable reality as possible.

I stopped engaging with these people over two years ago and now just observe them, as they make for an interesting study of the decay of Western civilization and values. I find myself coming up with theories in an attempt to make sense of and accept what I see.

One thing I have considered is that many not terribly bright people hold the art of novel writing in incredibly high esteem and consider it the ultimate status position in society.

This gives these people a very strong motivation to write books, and if these books are bereft of quality, those who possess suitable social skills have a strong motivation to use these skills to bring their work to prominence by hook or by crook. The result is that we’re seeing the survival of the cynical, while actual writing ability is coming uncoupled from literary success and renown.

It was a huge relief to find your blog, and to see that not every writer fits this mold. I’ve subscribed to your blog and look forward to participating in discussions on it. Thanks, you’re doing God’s work and beaming a light into the darkness.

It increasingly appears that we are the monks of the Grimdark Age. It is vital that we continue to read, continue to write, and continue to support those who are keeping the traditional literary forms alive, despite the mainstream’s descent into the literary equivalent of Ow! My Balls! and Ass.

Let’s face it, Redshirts, “If You Were A Dinosaur, My Love” and “All That Fairy Tale Crap” are considerably closer to Ow! My Balls! than to Dune, Foundation, or The Lord of the Rings.

I’m clearly not the only one who has picked up a book that has won awards or been given a quantity of rave reviews, then wondered what on Earth the readers were dropping to reach such obviously absurd conclusions. It only takes a few times experiencing this to realize that most reviewers these days are actually worse than useless. Which is why precisely we are in the process of turning the CH blog into the leading site for the review of independently published books.

The unreason of atheism

John C. Wright points to an aspect of atheism I observed myself when I was writing the book that was published as The Irrational Atheist:

There are many brands of atheism, but they all have some points in common. First, one common point is that none have a rational explanation of the objectivity of moral rules.

Not all cultures agree on what priority to place on various moral rules, but one thing that is so obvious about moral rules is that they are objective. When guilt pricks us, it does not say we betray a matter of taste or opinion; the feeling of guilt is the feeling of having offended a law. When injustice rankles, we do not accuse those who trespass against us of having breached a matter of taste or opinion; we refer to a standard we expect the other to know and acknowledge. We cannot help it.

In all human experience, everything is open to doubt but this. No man with a working conscience can escape the knowledge. It is the one thing we cannot not know. And yet atheists are at a loss to explain it.

I do not call atheists immoral, but I note they cannot give a rational reason to account for morality.

In any atheist worldview, moral laws are an invention of man and serve his contingent purposes, or an imposition of Darwinian survival mechanisms that serve the contingent purposes of the Selfish Gene. Such purposes as the preservation of life or the pursuit of happiness are subjective, hence not laws at all. Whether selected by nature or by man, if moral maxims are selected merely as a means to an arbitrary end, they are merely expedient conveniences.

In the end, nihilism is the only rational atheism. And since most atheists rightly shy away from nihilism and its concomitant despair, they tend to trap themselves into philosophical unreason. Which is, of course, is often more than a little ironic due to the oft-heard atheist claim to be a true devotee of reason.

They call conscience an illusion and morality an artificial construct. But if they are not correct (and there is considerable logic and evidence to conclude that they are not) then even the most staunch atheist must admit that he is the delusional one.

The division cycle

It’s interesting to note that the pattern of growing nationalism and ethnic homogenization, reversing the trend of the last 45 years, is global:

Welcome to Myanmar, where tremendous democratic progress is being swamped by crimes against humanity toward the Rohingya, a much-resented Muslim minority in this Buddhist country. Budding democracy seems to aggravate the persecution, for ethnic cleansing of an unpopular minority appears to be a popular vote-getting strategy….

This narrative is absurd, as well as racist. A document as far back as 1799 refers to the Rohingya population here, and an 1826 report estimates that 30 percent of the population of this region was Muslim.

Since clashes in 2012 claimed more than 200 lives — including children hacked with machetes — the authorities have confined Rohingya to internment camps or their own villages. They are stripped of citizenship and cannot freely go to the market, to schools, to university, to hospitals. Tens of thousands have made desperate attempts to flee by boat, with many drowning along the way.

This year, the Myanmar authorities have cracked down even harder, making the situation worse. First, the government expelled Doctors Without Borders, which had been providing health care for the Rohingya. Then orchestrated mobs attacked the offices of humanitarian organizations, forcing them out.

As usual, Kristof fails to grasp the implications of “tremendous democratic progress” occurring simultaneously with ethnic cleansing. And it also demonstrates how the diversity dogma that has permitted more than 10 million Asian immigrants to enter the USA is very unlikely to lead to improved inter-tribal relations.

It’s hardly a mystery why the Burmese do not wish to permit any Muslim minority in their midst; one could ask Lee Rigby’s widow about the potential downside there. No one wants the jihad on their doorstep and the people of Myanmar are obviously exercising their rights of national self-determination and freedom of association.

Because Man is a social creature, mass immigration is the crime against humanity. Those who have advocated and permitted it are the parties who should be held primarily responsible for the eventual bloodshed.

Saladin and diversity

The great Islamic sultan Saladin succeeded his uncle as vizier to the Fatimid caliph before he engineered a largely bloodless coup that allowed him to supplant the Fatimids and establish the Kurdish Ayyubid dynasty in Egypt. However, two years before the coup, he was faced with the challenge of dealing with a large foreign army who had been imported by the caliph in order to better control the oft-restive Egyptian and Syrian emirs. From Thomas Asbridge’s The Crusades: The Authoritative History of the War for the Holy Land:

In the early summer of 1169, Mutamin, the leading eunuch within the caliph’s palace, sought to engineer a coup against Saladin, opening channels of negotiation with the kingdom of Jerusalem in the hope of prompting yet another Frankish invasion of Egypt to topple the Ayyubids. A secret envoy was dispatched from Cairo, disguised as a beggar, but passing near Bilbais a Syrian Turk spotted that he was wearing new sandals whose fine quality jarred with his otherwise ragged appearance. With suspicions aroused, the agent was arrested and letters to the Franks discovered, sewn into the lining of his shoes, revealing the plot. Saladin curtailed the independence of the Fatimid court, executing the eunuch Mutamin in August and replacing him with Qaragush, who from this point forward presided over all palace affairs.

Saladin’s severe intervention elicited an outbreak of unrest among Cairo’s military garrison.The city was packed with some 50,000 black Sudanese troops, whose loyalty to the caliph made them a dangerous counter to Ayyubid authority. For two days they rioted through the streets, marching on Saladin’s position in the vizier’s palace. Abu’l Haija the Fat was sent to stem their advance, but Saladin knew that he lacked the manpower to prevail in open combat and soon adopted less direct tactics. Most of the Sudanese lived with their families in the al-Mansura quarter of Cairo. Saladin ordered that the entire area be set alight, according to one Muslim contemporary leaving it ‘to burn down around [the rebelling troops’] possessions, children and women’. With their morale shattered by this callous atrocity, the Sudanese agreed a truce, the terms of which were supposed to provide for safe passage up the Nile. But once out of the city and travelling south in smaller, disorganised groups, they fell victim to treacherous counter-attacks from Turan-Shah and were virtually annihilated.

It should be noted that Turan-Shah was Saladin’s brother and lieutenant. Now consider: Cairo was founded in 973 and by 1340 it had a population of “nearly half a million”. If we generously assume the population of Cairo was 400,000 in 1169, this means that Saladin managed to eliminate or forcibly deport an armed foreign population that made up between 12 and 20 percent of the entire populace in a matter of days.

Keep that in mind when you assume that because there are a large number of foreign immigrants in a previously homogenous society, there always will be. Being one of the greatest and most decisive generals in human history, Saladin’s ruthless actions were more efficient and effective than most of their kind, but these periodic ethnic cleansings are the historical norm throughout the world and have reliably followed periods of relative peace and mass immigration.

The point is not to argue that these actions are good, only that they appear to be a predictable consequence of importing large numbers of foreigners. Of course, there is another known historical alternative, such as when the Ayyubid sultan was overthrown by his imported Mamluk slave soldiers 81 years later.

Sometimes the native populations win, sometimes the immigrants do. Saladin himself was a Kurd, after all, not an Egyptian or an Arab, although he was fully accepted by the Egyptians and Arabs over whom he ruled and he remains one of the greatest heroes of both Islam and Arabia. But the one thing that never seems to happen is for everyone to live together in one peaceful, multi-ethnic society. Not for long, anyhow.

Mr. Tokowitz refuses to cave

Unlike all the IT nancy boys who can’t resign fast enough when someone looks at them the wrong way, Donald Tokowitz has rightly told the NBA where it can stuff its fine and its attempt to steal his property. It’s interesting to see Michael McCann, SI’s sports lawyer, suddenly sounding considerably less confident concerning the NBA’s legal position, which he’d previously made sound almost unassailable:

The answer begins with perhaps Sterling’s best argument: the recording of his infamous, albeit private, remarks to V. Stiviano was likely unlawful under California law, and the NBA is attempting to throw him out based on the recording. If the NBA was suing Sterling in a court of law, the recording would likely be deemed inadmissible under rules of evidence. But, as Sterling wisely acknowledges, the NBA’s internal system of justice doesn’t follow courtroom rules of evidence. The NBA constitution makes this clear, and Sterling has agreed to follow that the league’s rules.

Sterling attempts to counter this argument by claiming that the NBA cannot contract around substantive due process protections under California law. One of those protections, Sterling argues, is the right to privacy, and Sterling cites several cases where the right is treated as paramount. Sterling therefore contends that even if the NBA can, as a matter of procedure, rely on evidence that would be inadmissible in court, the league can’t, as a matter of due process, violate his right to privacy.

Expect the NBA to counter with several arguments. First, Sterling’s answer does not cite a case where a privacy right was used to reverse the decision of a private association. While the absence of a clear precedent does not nullify Sterling’s claim, the NBA would argue it weakens Sterling’s contention. Second, the NBA would likely insist that California law does not apply. The NBA’s constitution repeatedly references New York law as the state law governing league matters. And unlike California, a two-party starte where both parties must consent to a recording, New York is a one-party state whereby it is lawful to record another person so long as one party consents. From that lens, the NBA can maintain the privacy right under California law does not apply.

It’s also fascinating to hear everyone claiming that the NBA’s internal system of justice somehow trumps state and federal law just because the owners agreed to it. I mean, we all know that no judge has ever overturned a prenuptial agreement or a business contract, right?

I suspect the league will have a very hard time claiming it had to act for fear of damage that never actually happened. Silver would have been smarter to let the players boycott first, then step in, as there would be actual damage to which he could point. But, since it’s entirely theoretical now, Tokowitz can point to the full stadiums and TV ratings and very credibly argue that no harm has been done by his continued ownership of the team.

And once the lawyers start citing every racist and sexist statement ever made by anyone connected to the NBA, many of which will be much worse than what Tokowitz said, the league is going to have a tough time arguing its actions were not prejudiced and arbitrary. Especially if the lawyers can dig up any evidence of a preexisting discussions concerning how to get rid of the Clippers owner.

Of course, all of this could just be a bargaining chip meant to drive the purchase price up. If the price is $2 billion+, we’ll know it worked. But I hope the old bastard means it and does fight to the bloody end. The thieves in the NBA head office deserve it.

The chaos flowers grow

A Statistical Portrait of the Foreign-Born Population in the United States 2012

There are now 40.7 million foreign-born residents living in the USA. This makes foreigners the most populous “state” in the country; the total population of California is only 38.3 million. The top ten source countries:

  1. Mexico: 11,489,387
  2. India: 1,974,305
  3. Philippines: 1,861,996
  4. China: 1,719,819
  5. Vietnam: 1,264,188
  6. El Salvador: 1,254,501
  7. Cuba: 1,114,864
  8. Korea: 1,105,653
  9. Dominican Republic: 960,211
  10. Guatamala: 880,869

Of course, this doesn’t even begin to account for the “American” citizens who are foreigners born in the United States. The actual number of full or partial Mexicans legally resident in the USA, for example, is 34 million. A few observations:

  • The idea of “integration” and a “melting pot” at this scale is laughable. None of the people from the top 10 countries have any political tradition that is even remotely compatible with the Common Law and the concept of limited government. Integration no longer exists as there is no longer a WASP-standard to which the foreigners can be integrated.
  • The tribal battles for the levers of resource distribution are going to heat up once the Chinese and Indian populations exceed 3 million. Both populations tend to be more intelligent than the average, they are just as self-confidently tribal as the Jews, and they are totally unsusceptible to the Holocaust card.
  • African-Americans are rapidly becoming irrelevant. The black-white lens through which all American politics has been viewed for the last 50 years is very nearly outdated. The Obama administration likely represents the high water mark for African-America.
  • The observed decline of the USA as the premier global economic and military power will speed up as the nation becomes increasingly fragmented and its average IQ declines.
  • Since deportation is no longer physical practical, the political entity will necessarily break apart. Some level of ethnic cleansing will likely take place. Civil war is unlikely, as the central government will be hard-pressed to maintain order in the Northeast corridor.

I understand it is impossible for most people to imagine change. Most people are linear thinkers who can only extrapolate the present into the future for infinity. But history is cyclical, and it should be obvious that we are already 25 years into a negative cycle in which political entities all over the world are either breaking up or are coming under intense tribal pressure to break apart. Forget the doomed EU, the old alliances of England and Scotland, and Aragon and Castile, both of which predate the existence of the USA, are in jeopardy.

The seeds of chaos were sown in 1965 with the Immigration Act of that year, the plants have sprouted and grown, and soon they will begin to bloom.

Reproductive equality

An Ohio bill addresses one long-ignored injustice intrinsic to current abortion law, reproductive inequality.

Legislation in the Ohio House of Representatives (House Bill 252)
requires written consent from the father of an unborn child in order to
perform an abortion.  The bill will put to test the “it’s my body, it’s
my right” notion of pro-choice activists by adding the rights of the
father of the unborn child into the equation.  Ideally, the decision of
abortion should be a consensus between both parents, with both parties
being involved in any decisions regarding the child.

This is a significant legal and social issue where parental rights
are heavily unbalanced due to the fact that a father plays no role in a
matter as critical as his unborn child’s life.  If a woman decides to
keep her child, the father is required to pay child support regardless
of whether he wanted to keep the child or not, or face future jail time.
 A father currently has no say.  Alternatively he cannot opt-out of
parenthood, but a woman can: She can do so by abortion.

Under the Ohio Bill, a woman must have written consent from the
father; if a woman is claiming rape, she must file a police report,
provide other court documents or an official complaint of the incident.
 If the woman chooses to undergo an abortion in this case, the physician
must have “reasonable cause” to believe the woman’s claim of rape and
thus, perform an abortion.  In cases where the father may be unknown, a
list of all potential fathers must be submitted to a physician.  They
will all be contacted and summoned to a paternity test.  If the father
is not found, no abortion can be performed.  The bill would turn
abortion without a father’s permission or naming a “false biological
father” into a first-degree misdemeanor with a maximum $1,000 fine.  A
second occasion of providing false information would be considered a
fifth degree felony.

I’d vastly prefer to see abortion banned and prosecuted as manslaughter, but this is a realistic and not-unreasonable step in the right direction. After all, his DNA, his choice. A woman should no more be permitted to unilaterally choose abortion than a man should be permitted to force a woman to get one.

The Sack of Jerusalem, revised

The more history I read, the more I learn that the pop version of it isn’t merely incomplete, it is often downright misleading. I was always dubious of the stories of the terrible massacre of Jews and Muslims by Christian crusaders during the Sack of Jerusalem; the detail about the blood reaching to the bridles of the horses ridden by the knights in particular never passed the smell test for four reasons:

  1. The crusaders didn’t have many horses left. They’d eaten most of them at the siege of Antioch and they weren’t able to replace many of them.
  2. You’d have to kill a tremendous amount of people very, very quickly and intentionally drain their bodies for the blood to get that deep before it ran off through the city’s drainage systems.
  3. There were only about 15,000 crusaders attacking the city.
  4. Who rides horses when storming city walls?

Despite my skepticism about the body count, I was startled by the incredible shrinking number of people killed after the walls were breached when reading Thomas Asbridge’s The Crusades: The Authoritative History of the War for the Holy Land.

Neither Latin nor Arabic sources shy away from recording the dreadful horror of this sack, the one side glorying in victory, the other appalled by its raw savagery. In the decades that followed Near Eastern Islam came to regard the Latin atrocities at Jerusalem as an act of crusader barbarity and defilement, demanding of urgent vengeance. By the thirteenth century, the Iraqi Muslim Ibn al-Athir estimated the number of Muslim dead at 70,000. Modern historians long regarded this figure to be an exaggeration, but generally accepted that Latin estimates in excess of 10,000 might be accurate. However, recent research has uncovered close contemporary Hebrew testimony which indicates that casualties may not have exceeded 3,000, and that large numbers of prisoners were taken when Jerusalem fell. This suggests that, even in the Middle Ages, the image of the crusaders’ brutality in 1099 was subject to hyperbole and manipulation on both sides of the divide.

Casualties may not have exceeded 3,000? For what is still cited as one of the most brutal massacres of all time? It’s the Spanish Inquisition all over again. Here, for example, is the previous authority on The Crusades, Steven Runciman, describing the sack:

Iftikhar and his men were safely escorted out of the city and permitted to join the Moslem garrison of Ascalon. They were the only Moslems in Jerusalem to save their lives. The Crusaders, maddened by so great a victory after such suffering, rushed through the streets and into the houses and mosques killing all that they met, men, women, and children alike. All that afternoon and all through the night the massacre continued. Tancred’s banner was no protection to the refugees in the mosque of al-Aqsa. Early next morning a band of Crusaders forced an entry into the mosque and slew everyone. When Raymond of Aguilers later that morning went to visit the Temple area he had to pick his way through corpses and blood that reached up to his knees.

The Jews of Jerusalem fled in a body to their chief synagogue. But they were held to have aided the Moslems and no mercy was shown to them. The building was set on fire and they were all burnt within. The massacre at Jerusalem profoundly impressed all the world. No one can say how many victims were involved, but it emptied Jerusalem of its Moslem and Jewish inhabitants.
– The First Crusade, Steven Runciman, p. 286-287

What may not be apparent here is that Jerusalem had already been emptied of its Christian inhabitants, who were expelled by Iftikhar ad-Dawla, the Fatimid governor of the city, in preparation for a potential siege, and who, by Runciman’s own account, “outnumbered the Moslems in Jerusalem”. And it should be obvious that the 15,000 attackers couldn’t have killed all that many people, considering that they spent the evening of the day they took the city gathering in order to give thanks to God.

The other unassailable truth of Jerusalem’s conquest is that the crusaders were not simply driven by a desire for blood or plunder; they were also empowered by heartfelt piety and the authentic belief that they were doing God’s work. Thus that first, ghastly day of sack and slaughter concluded with an act of worship. In a moment which perfectly encapsulated the crusade’s extraordinary fusion of violence and faith, dusk on 15 July 1099 saw the Latins gather to give tearful thanks to their God. A Latin contemporary rejoiced in recounting that, ‘going to the Sepulchre of the Lord and his glorious Temple, the clerics and also the laity, singing a new song unto the Lord in a high-sounding voice of exultation, and making offerings and most humble supplications, joyously visited the Holy Place as they had so long desired to do’.

Now, a sack certainly did take place and many of the city’s inhabitants were killed. But the scale appears to have been at least one order of magnitude less than has been conventionally claimed and certainly the entire population was not wiped out. So where did the legend come from? From a chronicler who wasn’t there liberally borrowing imagery from the Revelation of St. John.

The Gesta Francorum noted that the crusaders were left wading up to their ankles in blood by the work of butchery. However, another ‘eyewitness’, Raymond of Aguilers, expanded on this image. Lifting a scriptural quote from the New Testament Book of Revelation, he declared that the Franks ‘rode in [enemy] blood to the knees and bridles of their horses’. This more extreme image gained wide acceptance and was repeated by numerous western European histories and chronicles in the course of the twelfth century.

Mailvox: employment advice

DH, who has more than a little expertise in the area of employment and human resources,  offers some excellent advice in this age of purges:

Make them fire you. If you resign under pressure you have basically no legal standing. Make. Them. Fire. You. If they pressure you to resign, you should write a letter, declining to resign, declining to take any responsibility for your private, off-duty, speech and/or actions. Specifically point out that you are exercising your personal discretion to engage in political and social commentary regarding current events, that you are not willing to be subjected to a hostile work environment for your unorthodox political views, and that you are not willing to explain or defend or justify those personal political views.

Always make them do their own dirty work.

Most of the time, employment purges are not legal. If you are being pressured to resign, that is in itself a de facto admission that they know they can’t fire you. Of course, none of this will prevent you from getting blackballed when applying for a new job, which is why it is wise to always use an untraceable pseudonym on the Internet and to avoid social media.

It will be used against you, somehow, by someone. Whether or not that is fair and desirable is irrelevant. Those are the new rules of the game. Master them and play by them. Play by them ruthlessly and remember that the Left tends to be far more careless about these things than the Right because they assume their positions are beyond criticism.