Michael Moore Banned in Cuba

If this story does not bring a smile to your face-- or, at least, a grin-- I don't know what will.


We all remember Michael Moore's movie, Sicko... even if we never saw it, even if we wish we hadn't.


In case you missed it, the film indicted the American health care system and promoted the virtues of other health care systems in other parts of the world. It gushed praise about the health care system in Communist Cuba.


This should not have come as too much of a surprise. Moore is a left wing propagandist; he works tirelessly to destroy American capitalism. 


Now, we learn, through the same Wikileaks whose founder, Julian Assange, is being defended by Michael Moore against rape charges, that Moore's film was banned in Cuba. Link here.
As Roger Kimball reports, the reasons were twofold. When Cuban physicians saw the film they walked out on it, because they could not bear to see their health care system so grossly misrepresented. The film was simply promoting a big lie.

The government also banned the film because it feared the reactions of everyday Cuban citizens. If these citizens had been allowed to learn that the best of Cuban health care was only available to high party officials and those willing to pay the right bribes, they would have been outraged.

And yet, even Cuba's best is not really very good. The Guardian reports that: "The Cuban ruling elite leave Cuba when they need medical care.... Fidel Castro, for example, brought in a Spanish doctor during his health crisis in 2006. The vice-minister of health, Abelardo Ramirez, went to France for gastric cancer surgery. The neurosurgeon who heads CIMEQ ... hospital-- widely regarded as one of the best in Cuba-- came to England for eye surgery, returning periodically for checkups."

As Roger Kimball points out, Hollywood's elite loved Michael Moore's film. They nominated it for an Oscar. Perhaps they are just not smart enough to understand the difference between fact and propaganda.

Mark Madoff, R. I. P.

I do not know and will not speculate on whether Mark Madoff participated directly in his father’s infamous Ponzi scheme.

Regardless of whether Mark Madoff had worked on the scheme, he profited from it, and thus his wealth was subject to confiscation.

We know that Mark Madoff’s name was so thoroughly tarnished that he despaired of ever returning to good repute. Link here.

Mark Madoff‘s suicide shows a good name going bad. From having been proud of the name Madoff, Mark suffered the unbearable anguish of having his name become a stigma.

Mark Madoff killed himself because he could not live with the shame. He must also have calculated that with him gone, his wife and children could change their names and escape the family curse.

French sociologist Emile Durkheim speculated that there were four different kinds of suicide: egotistic, altruistic, anomic and fatalistic. Mark Madoff‘s seems to have been altruistic: he killed himself to save his family.

Even if Mark Madoff was not directly responsibility for his father’s massive fraud, still, for having worked in his father’s company and for bearing his name he was shunned from society.

Mark Madoff seems to have suffered because his father failed to understand the difference between shame and guilt.

I speculate that Bernard Madoff imagined that he was fulfilling his role as protector and provider. He was providing richly for his family and would protect them by refusing to implicate anyone else in his crimes. It must have felt like a moral act. It was his largest miscalculation.

He would take the fall and live out his days in prison. With him out of the way his family would be able to move on with their lives.

The guilt would be his and his alone. As it happens, guilt is not transferable. If you steal a goose you and you alone are punished. Your family does not bear any criminal culpability for your misdeed.

This is why guilt is a weak social sanction. A man like Bernard Madoff can imagine that he can pay for his crimes while still protecting his family.

Shame is the stronger sanction because it does not just affect the person; it affects the name. Shame is shared because reputation is held in common.

In some ways it feels unjust to punish, by shaming, people who were not even accomplices. Yet, for being affiliated with Madoff, and for having enjoyed the benefits that accrued to him from that affiliation, his family has also been subject to the most severe social opprobrium.

Shame is the more effective sanction. If you fear guilt, you also know that you can pay off your debt to society, with time, or even with your life. Guilt can become part of the cost of doing business.

If you fear shame, you know that your own punishment will pale in comparison to the pain experienced by your family. Your pride in protecting your family will end up being a delusion.

Thus, shame is the ultimate deterrent.

Reports from his prison suggest that Bernard Madoff was so anguished at his son’s death that he withdrew from all interactions with others. Could his son’s suicide have been the moment where he fully grasped what he had done, not just to himself, but to those he loved?

Did he see at that point that his plan had failed, not just because he had been caught-- surely, he knew that he would be caught at some time or other-- but because his ignominy has also been visited on his family, to the point where his eldest son no longer wanted to live with the Madoff name?

Mark Madoff found one way to save his own wife and children. He hung himself with a dog leash.

Feminists Against Women's Rights

Sometimes the pull of ideology is so strong that well-intentioned zealots end up supporting regimes whose actions violate everything they pretend to hold sacred.

If love is blind, so is ideology. With love, your actions only effect yourself. With ideology, your behavior can influence policy that hurts millions.

Great thinkers supported Communism, even after they had learned of Stalin’s predations. Great philosophers supported Naziism, and their followers have defended them.

Today, serious intellectuals, many of whom label themselves feminists, have been supporting regimes that commit terrorist acts and oppress women.

It’s all about reality. And reality is not about how intoxicated you are with the latest trendy idea. Reality is who you support. Reality is taking sides.

This week, Caroline Glick called out the human rights advocates and feminists who have taken up the Palestinian cause. Parroting the party line, they condemn Israel as a racist, apartheid, fascist state while defending and condoning Islamic regimes that systematically violate everyone’s human rights and that submit women to the worst forms of oppression. Link here. Via Instapundit.

In Glick’s words: “But if being a human rights activist means attacking the only country in the Middle East that defends human rights, then that means that at the very basic level, the term ‘human rights activist‘ is at best an empty term. And if being a feminist means attacking the only country in the Middle East where women enjoy freedom and equal rights, then feminism too, has become at best, a meaningless term. Indeed, if these anti-Israel female protesters are feminists, then feminism is dead.”

It’s not about what you believe, or which goddess you worship. It’s about whose side you’re on.

If you oppose a democratic country that guarantees women’s rights and defend countries that practice honor killings you are nothing more than a “useful idiot.”

If you fail to support the only nation in the Middle East that practices liberal democratic principles, then you should not become indignant when someone accuses you of not supporting liberal democracy. And when, after denouncing a democratic country, you stand up for groups that practice honor killings and that imprison rape victims, you are simply showing your true colors.

We’re not just talking about radical feminists here. We are also talking about the Obama/Clinton foreign policy.

The staunch feminist who is leading American diplomacy spent most of her first two years in office trying to smear Israel as the obstacle to Middle East peace. Not once did she place the onus on a Palestinian leadership whose deathly embrace of terrorism and tyranny has been the only real obstacle to peace.

As it happens, she has now acknowledged that this policy “reset” has failed. We can only hold our collective breath to see what is going to come next.

And then, as Glick notes, our pro-women and pro-human rights president went to the world’s largest Islamic nation and said nothing about the way women were being brutalized under Shariah law in the nation’s Aceh province. Instead, in a grand gesture of weakness, Obama took the opportunity to criticize Israel as the obstacle to peace in the Middle East.

Was he speaking truth to power? Not at all. Caving in the pressure? Perhaps. Wanting to ingratiate himself by telling people what they want to hear? Surely.

This will not come as news to readers of this blog, but Caroline Glick explains well what feminism has become: “But at its most basic level, the feminist label has never been solely or even predominantly about preventing and ending oppression or discrimination of women. It has been about advancing the Left’s social and political agenda against Western societies. It has been about castigating societies where women enjoy legal rights and protections as ‘structurally‘ discriminatory against women in order to weaken the legal, moral and social foundations of those societies. That is, rather than being about advancing the cause of women, to a large extent, the feminist movement has used the language of women’s rights to advance a social and political agenda that has nothing to do with women.

“So to a large degree, the feminist movement itself is a deception.”

Behind its airy rhetoric and gauzy proclamations, feminism has promoted leftist ideology whose proximate enemy is the Republican party, but whose true enemy is Western capitalism and democracy.

If they are not, then we are all waiting for them to stand tall and proud with the only capitalistic democracy in the Middle East.

To remain true to their principles, feminists should systematically denounce the oppression of women in Islamic states.

Perhaps they think that they are standing up to Islamophobia, and thus that they are establishing themselves as vigorously anti-racist. In truth, they have been cowed into submission and into silence by a religion whose name means submission.

As Glick points out, international protest movements often have a salutary effect. As the old saying goes, sunlight is the best disinfectant.

The more people draw attention to the way women are oppressed in Islamic countries, the more those countries will be shamed into mitigating their oppressive tactics.

As Glick writes: “Tyranny unchallenged is tyranny abetted.”

As of now the feminist movement is far too preoccupied with its war against Republicans and the Tea Party to worry too much about what happens to women in the rest of the world.

Of else, the movement is being directed by strong women who are afraid to offend Muslim sensibilities.

"The Man Repeller"

I'm not sure why high school student Leandra Medine had to call her blog: "The Man Repeller," but apparently the title appeals to today's feminist sensibility. Who knew?


Beyond all of the pseudo-deep reflections about what certain fashion statements do or do not do to the male gaze-- read some of them here and here-- let's imagine that women can be attractive without baring nearly all of their intimate assets. I hope that that's not too radical a notion. 


Better yet, why not see the trend, assuming that it's real, as signifying a wish by some women to return to modesty.


Clearly, there's nothing wrong with modesty. There is something wrong when a normal tendency for women to be more modest has to be larded over with empty feminist musings.

The Right Kind of Anger

There is nothing intrinsically wrong with feeling angry. Often considered a negative emotion, anger has its uses and purposes. I would say the same of another negative emotion: fear.

I would not want to wager on the long term survival of people who know neither anger nor fear.

You mobilize anger to defend yourself. Your fear tells you when you are in danger.

If you refuse to defend yourself and do not know when you are in danger, then you are not likely to have a very long and happy life.

Confusing these emotions, as in, misreading their messages, is a bad thing. If you are afraid when you should be angry, you will be consigning yourself to second-rate status. And if you are angry when you should be afraid, you will not survive for very long.

Feeling an emotion is one thing. Expressing it is quite another. And there are many ways to express an emotion. You can express it appropriately and temperately or you can go to one of the extremes: not expressing it at all or overdoing the expression.

There is nothing intrinsically wrong with anger, but throwing a tantrum against a waiter is the wrong way to express your anger, at the wrong time, in the wrong place, to the wrong person, under the wrong circumstances.

If your unbridled rage mostly draws attention to your weak character, then you have accomplished nothing. You might feel that you have purged a negative emotion, but later, when sanity prevails and you reflect on what you have done, you will discover that you have embarrassed yourself in public. You will not feel very good about it.

There are right and wrong ways to express anger. Or better,  there are effective and ineffective ways to express it.

Recently, American citizens who were angry about government policy demonstrated in public, attended town hall meetings, and eventually expressed their anger by voting in a democratic election.

Theirs was not a temper tantrum or an expression of uncontrollable rage.

Expressing anger the right way will draw attention to the problem, not to yourself.

Thanks to Tea Party anger, the nation is now more clearly focused on fiscal responsibility. Those who accused the Tea Party of emotional intemperance failed to persuade, so the issues that provoked the Tea Party have taken center stage.

Most often, we feel anger when people offend us, insult us, or disregard our feelings. Of course, we do not always know that we have been “dissed” so we rely on anger to alert us to social realities that we might have ignored.

Feeling anger and expressing anger are two fundamentally different things. When you are angry with someone who insults you, you have a number of different ways to express it.

If the person is inconsequential you can ignore the slight. If the person is consequential, you can confront the person, parry the insult with wit, counterattack, or make an angry facial expression.

If you are trying to avoid a duel-- and not share the fate of Alexander Hamilton-- you want to effect a conciliation. If someone has wronged you, you want them to apologize and to take it back.

The right expression of anger will afford the other person a chance to repent and change his ways. The wrong one will make you look weak, as though you cannot control your emotions, and thus, deserve the insult.

But what about fear. In a way, fear is to physical danger what anger is to moral danger.

It’s normal to be afraid of an elephant on a rampage. There is little most of us can do to stop it, and it does represent a danger to our physical being.

It is not normal, when faced with such an occurrence, to have no fear at all. Failing to recognize danger is not an adaptive response. In some circumstances, it is good to hide your fear, to pretend to be dead or hurt.

But it is not normal to be so afraid that you fail to take whatever actions are needed to protect yourself.

How, then, should you express fear? If you look like you are afraid of your shadow, even when you are not facing physical danger, then you will be admitting to physical or psychological weakness. Overly fearful signifies powerless.

The best expressions of fear involve taking action; not expressing your feelings for the sake of expressing your feelings.

When the therapy culture talks about the need to express emotion-- to which I have taken severe exception-- it does not seem to be talking about fear. We certainly do not want people running around making a point of expressing how afraid they are.

To complicate these issues, I want to introduce some new research about how we are influenced by other people’s emotions. How do we respond to people when we see anger on their faces or when we see fear on their faces?

Time Magazine has just reported on research performed by psychologists in Utrecht, The Netherlands. Link here.

In the study subjects saw images of a series of objects on a computer screen. In one corner of the screen there was also a picture of either an angry face or a fearful face.

As each object was flashed, the subjects were asked whether or not they wanted it, and how badly they wanted it.

The study associated object with emotion, but with someone else’s emotion. And it explicitly addressed one’s wish to acquire objects.

The researchers seem to believe that their results also apply to leadership, but that is not entirely explicit in the study.

If the terms involved being motivated to follow someone’s lead, then we would understand that you are more likely to follow the lead of a person who appears to be angry than to follow the lead of someone who is afraid.

At the same time, we differentiate between a manager who is angry at you and a manager who is angry at circumstances and determined to do better next time.

As for the study itself, Time Magazine reports: “The results showed that respondents tended not to want the objects associated with fearful faces, an expected outcome given the negative nature of this emotion. As for the people subjected to flashes of angry faces, however, they not only tended to want the objects more, but they also squeezed the handgrips harder, suggesting that they were willing to exert effort to acquire the objects.”

If you see an angry face you are more likely to believe that the object associated with that person has value. If you see a fearful face you are more likely not to want the object associated with it.

Why should this be so? The researchers believe that anger looks a lot like determination, and that we respond more positively to leaders who look like they are determined to get things done. It might also mean that we prefer to associate with people who project strength, not weakness.

One might also imagine that an angry face feels threatening, and that a fearful face does not. A person who feels threatened might be more likely to do what this face seems to want it to do.

Or else, an angry face might make you feel as though you had someone offended the person, and therefore, that you owed him an apology. Might that not also provoke a wish to purchase an object from him?

Then again, if you were to go into a store and the salesperson at the shirt counter looked at you angrily, I would imagine that you would not want to stay very long in that person’s presence.

If the salesperson was fully focused on you, your purchase, your questions, in the sense of being more determined to make the sale, then you would probably be more likely to buy something.

But, if the person looked afraid, would you feel less impelled to purchase something, would you feel that you had certainly not done anything to provoke the fear, or would you feel sorry for the person and think that you should purchase something?

Barack Obama: Writer in Chief?

Maybe it’s gotten to Sam Jacobs. It’s certainly gotten to me.

I’m talking about the currently trendy habit of analyzing everything in terms of narrative. Link here.

Is Obama flailing and failing because he lost control of the narrative? Is he allowing other people to tell his story, and thus, to cast him in a role for which he seems ill-suited?

And how can this happen to a man who has recently been described, by Harvard Prof. Kloppenberg no less, as the greatest presidential writer since Woodrow Wilson.

Before plunging headlong into the narrative issue, I wish to point out that Woodrow Wilson was hardly a great writer. He is nowhere near as good as Theodore  Roosevelt.

As Jacobs illustrates, the intelligentsia has by now made a fetish out of the notion of storytelling. It seems to have bought the idea that a president must be a teller of tales, like a modern day Aesop or La Fontaine.

The notion was given to the culture by psychoanalysis. A while back, seeing your life as a story was all the rage in psychoanalytic circles. Therapy consisted in discovering the narrative you were living out, and then, with any luck, rewriting the story.

This sounds like a self-evident truth. It is not. Nor is it simply an innocent, charming misrepresentation.

If life is a narrative, your job is to follow the script, to play your role well. And this must circumscribe your freedom to speak and to act.

But who is the author of your life story? And who else is going to have a role in it? It’s cute to imagine that everyone has his own life story, but stories must involve more than one character. If your story is going to make sense, other people will have to follow your script.

Or else, if their stories are going to make sense, you will have to follow their scripts.

The Obama administration does not have a problem crafting narratives. Since the moment Barack Obama came into political focus, he has been doing nothing but. He is himself nothing but a self-created narrative.

Obama has also been trying to recast American politics in narrative terms. At times, the oppression of the poor by the rich; at times, the need to atone for American racism; at times, his own struggle against the big, bad Republican party.

But why have these fictions not worked? Why have the American people refused to buy them?

Perhaps they know that life is not a story. Perhaps they understand that it is better to see life as a game or as a marketplace.

At the least, there is a great deal more freedom in playing a game than there is in acting a role in someone else’s, or even your own, script.

Obama’s problem is that he is too much involved in storytelling, and that he does not know how to play the game of politics or leadership.

And yet, many intellectuals are puzzled, Jacobs tells us, by the simple fact that Obama is a great writer; he has written two great books. Wasn’t that one of his qualifications for the presidency, one of the unimpeachable signs of his all-encompassing brilliance?

And weren’t his books even more important given that we have never seen a grade transcript, a board score, or any other piece of evidence that would suggest that Obama is anything but an intellectual poseur?

Those who are married to the notion that life is a story cannot understand why the great writer Barack Obama does not know how to tell a good story.

They could easily extricate themselves from this dilemma, which really has nothing to do with governance, by acknowledging the obvious point that Barack Obama probably did not write the two books for which he has claimed authorship.

Obama the writer seems like a fiction that large numbers of people mistook for a fact.

That is the subtext of this entire debate. The current occupant of the White House does not resemble the author of Obama’s two books.

Jack Cashill provided the most serious debunking of the notion of Obama the writer in The American Thinker. He even offered it in time for people to weigh it in their deliberations over their vote in the last presidential election. Link here.

To little avail.

Cashill’s analysis strikes me as valid, and not just because the images, metaphors, and sentence structure of Obama’s books resemble the writing of William Ayers. The more important fact is that no one who is not a writer just sits down and writes a well-written book.

I hate to sound simple-minded, but writers write. If they are serious writers, if they spend an enormous amount of time mastering their craft. Didn’t Malcolm Gladwell posit that it takes 10,000 hours of hard work to become really good at anything?

When you are dealing with a writer who does not write, who has never published anything of consequence, and who then produces two polished, well-written, well-constructed books, the odds are astronomically high that he did not write them himself.

If Obama had been a newspaper columnist or a frequent op-ed contributor, if he had published law review articles… if he had every shown any inclination to write… then we might give him the benefit of the doubt. He has not, so we will not.

Those who are torturing their minds over the fact that our writer in chief does not seem to have succeeded in controlling the narrative should only be surprised at their own gullibility.

If you voted for Obama because you thought he was a great writer, or because you thought he was a writer at all, then you have been conned. If it can happen to Harvard professors, it can happen to anyone. It does prove that if you really, really want to believe in a fiction you can easily mistake it for a fact.

Mao's Great Famine

The story does not fall within the scope of this blog. It has nothing to do with therapy or culture or coaching issues. Not even remotely.

But I am linking Frank Dikotter’s article: “Mao’s Great Leap to Famine” for its historical significance.

Mao’s Great Famine is perhaps the most important underreported stories of the past century. The famine continued from 1958 to 1962.

According to Dikotter, it was caused by Mao’s economic policies, and the means he used to impose them and his Communist ideology on the Chinese people.

The result, in Dikotter’s words: “In all, the records I studied suggest that the Great Leap Forward was responsible for at least 45 million deaths.

“Between 2 and 3 million of these victims were tortured to death or summarily executed, often for the slightest infraction. People accused of not working hard enough were hung and beaten; sometimes they were bound and thrown into ponds. Punishments for the least violations included mutilation and forcing people to eat excrement.”

He continues: “As the catastrophe unfolded, people were forced to resort to previously unthinkable acts to survive. As the moral fabric of society unraveled, they abused one another, stole from one another and poisoned one another. Sometimes they resorted to cannibalism.”

Perhaps the most important point, for our understanding of history, is the fact, as Dikotter points out, that the Great Famine was the “turning point” in the making of modern China. It led to the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution which led to Deng Xiaoping’s takeover, and the subsequent rise of a new and revitalized China.

In Dikotter’s words: “Mao’s Great Famine was not merely an isolated episode in the making of modern China. It was its turning point. The subsequent Cultural Revolution was the leader’s attempt to take revenge on the colleagues who had dared to oppose him during the Great Leap Forward.”

Mao’s Communism mixed an obscene ideology with deranged economic policies and tried to enforce them with terror. However much certain people still try to romanticize Communist revolution, Mao’s Communism was surely one of the greatest crimes against humanity that the world has ever seen.

Certainly, it one of the least recognized.

While reading this article, I could not help recalling that many of my politically savvy French friends in the 1970s were singing the praises of Mao and proclaiming themselves to be diehard Maoists.

Perhaps they didn’t know what was going on? Perhaps they didn’t know what had gone on? Some of them had in fact visited China during the Cultural Revolution, another time of extraordinary political terror, and had come away impressed.

Let’s not forget that when Nixon opened up relations with China in 1974, the American press was falling over itself trying to exclaim China's greatness.

The next time you hear someone try to romanticize Communism, recall the victims of Mao's Great Famine.