Talking about Sullivan, is quite distasteful, it does beg the question how low does one have to go before the Times of London, and the
Atlantic dismiss him, for generalized gynaphobia, onset anti Semitism,
aggregious anti Catholic sentiment. The Iowahawk parody of a late
Noir take on his 'journalism,' is revenge enough
It's not really that hard at least from a European perspective, as Ferguson points out in "Pity of WAr" a purported victor like the UK
lost an entire generation in the battlefield, for what the media ended up representing as a confused cause, the French had mutinies toward
the end of the war, then again with the likes of Nivelle and Foch, maybe they were do that, The Russian experience toppled the regime in charge, Of course Iraq in the popular imagination has been painted
as worse than Vietnam, the Civil War, et al; hence the skiddishness
of the major players against Iran
The back to back oil shocks of the 1970s, along with the removal of wage and price controls, made the 70s, an interesting era for music
but a strange one to live through
A progressive academic with little executive experience, with an ahistorical mindset, pushes through a piece of legislation that the
populace is not in favor of; this is what Glenn Reynolds would call
a bug not a feature
One wonders how accidental the absence was, FDR was one of the last remaining major figures of the Wilson administration, yet he helped
demolish it's status, by cooperating with the Nye Committee, before then, isolationism was not so great a force (one of the junior staffers
on that panel, who was soon to rise in the Government bureaucracy
was Alger Hiss, first in the AAA and later at State. Later actions like
the 'court packing scheme' did little to engender comity, the Hatch Act arose out of the blatant electioneering that he was engaging it
against who he considered his foe, who weren't abroad for the most part
Why is that, those who try to determine the taxonomy of 'this rough
beast that slouches" toward mine and your town, are to be dismissed as cranks.
The fact is the progressive solution really hasn't worked,
the Fed is as accurate as a passel of blind dart throwers in gauging
our economic condition, social security and other programs are unsustainable in Keynes 'long run' yet they have a growing constituency. I do disagree with Beck on at least one point, both
Russia and China, didn't 'transform' in the last generation, they reverted, the first to the modified Czarist state, with the siloviki as the new Boyars, China back to the Chiang regime, with the PLA.
That conversation I had with that Argentine historian, who I was surprised when he referred positively to Jonah Goldberg, no one else
in my neighborhood, knows who he is, and needless to say, a big
admirer of Sarah, remarked on that seemingly long ago election day.
He had seen the chiliastic left and the right, tear out the center of his nation,over a forty year period, he left after the Proceso junta, he agreed with Churchill's aphorism about democracy "worst form of of government, except for all the others" and fit classical liberalism in that same place
Russia is like the proverbial 'Norwegian blue parrot' it's a dying nation
it just doesn't know it yet. If it's very lucky it can return to it's borders back in the 16th Century, before the Tatars but I don't think
so. China is a formidable contestant for the prize of hegemon, but
it's economic system, makes AIG seem transparent. The post AGW
dystopia "Mirrored Heavens", has it falling prey to a sixty year civil
war, which seems more than a bit unlikely, but without a kernel of consent, warlordism with a PLA flavor sounds likely
So where do good intentions, in part defined by anecdote, stop being the source for public policy. That was the contrast at the health care
summit, on the debates on SCHIP, for illegal immigration, campaign finance, gun control, if there is no underlying principle, rights can be swept away, like so much shattered glass.
He was probably dead by then, but I'm sure he would have approved, it's the pattern with all these figures like Wallace supporters like
Mailer and Vidal and McGovern (who wrote his dissertation on the great
Ludlow massacre of 1916)
You've read Paul Hollander, the late Jean Jacques Revel I take it, most of these people have made excuses for the GULAGs, the Cultural Revolution, UMAP, Year Zero, the Sandinista turbas yet they seem to have seem our country as Amerika, long before Gitmo became 'the
21st Century analog for Devil's Island.
Ah yes, Upton Sinclair who along with Lincoln Steffens saw the brave new world in the Soviet Union, along with George Bernard Shaw, as
well as H.G. Wells (the originator of Liberal Fascism)WEB Dubois, saw good things in the likes of Mussolini for a time.
Well there was the Washington Treaty, but there was no wide spread
pacifist movement in the 20s. it was only after the Depression, and in part the efforts of the Comintern, that chestnut got underway. The USretreated to normalcy under Harding, but that didn't stop the Nicaraguan expedition, under Coolidge
Honestly, you perplex me, Rex, what world do you think you are striving for, Ayn Rand in Atlas Shrugged, writing from the perspective
of 1957, didn't want this to come about, yet we have come dangerously close to the world of Wesley Mouch and the Dog Eat Dog Laws, and the Peoples States
Well the first part is the left's narrative of conservatism, and this is kind of the way, of the portrayal in history books. Now Iran Contra and
Lebanon are linked but not in the usual way. Since we were mostly
focused on the Soviet threat, we gave scant attention to the proxy
fight waged by Iran with Hezbollah, Since we did not go after Mugniyeh
in that way, we were limited in how we could maneuver in that landscape
Well Galbraith is Canadian, as blinkered as the Douglas clan, whose last relative in Kiefer Sutherland. The more famous of the former, was
a roommate of Benazir Bhutto, supporter of the Kurds, who parlayed
that into a very profitable sideline, while damning the rest of the Iraq
initiative
If you think about, Progresssivism was been offered as the salvation for all the sins (slavery, poverty, a sense of mindless conformism)
that they see the Constitution facilitating. Now take TR please ( rimshot) he broke up Standard OIl, yet they were able to regroup under
the Achincarry Agreement and ultimately ARAMCO. In that sense the solution was ultimately worse than the malady
Now CK, Olbermann rarely had those numbers, yet he was taken seriously, when he did those rants on the MCA, on the 'civil war'
in Iraq, on the general's mutiny (Baptiste, Eaton, et al) as did his
colleagues transitioning from Air America/Radio to TV (MSNBC)
No, they were not willing, and Jim Crow, "Southern fried apartheid, pursued a generation later. proves the point. As does the accession
of Woodrow Wilson to the Presidency, in the following one. Ironically
this was an outcome that Dubois, made possible by protesting so vehemently about what he thought were TR and Taft's too methodical
responses to the crisis that sparked the formation of the NAACP
That is deeply ridiculous, Jefferson believed in the common people, Obama thinks them 'bitter clingers'. Yes, he was opposed to the Alien & Sedition Act, which was what the left pretends the Patriot Act to be. He was slandered by the media, Callender & co, in a way hat probably hasn't been equaled since I don't know, Aug. 2008.
Obama as far as it goes, is a Hamiltonian, he believes in the unlimited exercise of state power. Jackson, did set the stage by moving his crony Taney from Treasury to the Court, where he failed spectacularly to grasp the main point.
There was no argument for Plessy, frog, in some ways it is worse than Dred Scott, because it came after the 600,000 dead that cleared the debt. The Court surrendered to the insurgency of the Klan's monopoly
of violence
That raises an interesting point, the philosophers of the Modern Era, Marx, Freud, Darwin, and add Nietsche to the mix, did have a way of diminishing man's essential nature, in Marx's to economics, Freud to impulses, Darwin to genetics. But the spiritual side was jettisoned along the way. The thing that allows for phrases like 'what a wondrous creature is man, infinite in his faculties. . ." I guess that's a bit of what Avatar offers, but it paints man as the intruder. The virus on the body of the organism known as Gaia or Pandora, or well Caprica. Nature is an infinitely more powerful adversary, than we are, we only need to check the latest news for proof of that, yet we are presumedly powerful enough to alter it's patterns, as the AGW promoters would suggest
Well that's why I made the Three Days of the Condor reference, the assassination of the Agency analyst shop, which happens right near
if not in the WTC (bad) is to stop the discovery of a plot to take over
the Middle East, much like Luttvak's 1975 "Miles Ignotus" essay, in Harper's, a necessary evil some might say. Well this thread is officially
the longest in record, over a film that really isn't worth all that
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.
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Many on therightthink President Obama's Oval Office address last night should have credited "the Surge," and they would have preferred thanks to his predecessor for taking and implementing a decision that Senator Obama and others fiercely criticized. Theleft would have preferred a more ringing indictment of the Bush Administration, and a "never again" promise. The war's strongest supporters will, with notable exceptions, remain convinced that going to war was the right decision, that its positive effects are under-appreciated, and that the unknowable alternative history would likely have been at least as violent, and more difficult to influence. The war's strongest critics will remain convinced that going to war was undeniably the wrong decision, that any positive effects could have been achieved or even outbid by other means, and that the unknowable alternative history might have been much less violent and expensive, and have allowed America to retain much greater influence and freedom of action. No one knows for sure where actual history is leading, but everyone is prepared to blame someone else if things go poorly, and all will feel fully justified in their own eyes.
The President chose to let left and right cancel each other out:
As I have said, there were patriots who supported this war, and patriots who opposed it. And all of us are united in appreciation for our servicemen and women, and our hope for Iraq’s future.
It was his demeanor, called "half-hearted and detached" by one as-ever implacable critic, that expressed and may have resonated with a broader public sense of exhaustion regarding the whole subject. He seemed to be saying, "We're working hard to make the whole thing as boring and forgettable as possible." He did not promise "never again," possibly because he is not in a position to keep such a promise, otherwise because for the foreseeable future an Iraq Syndrome ought to handle the matter anyway. With 50,000 troops still in Iraq and in a re-negotiable position, with 100,000 troops in Afghanistan - and still an angry, self-righteous, globally committed, and incredibly well-armed nation - the U.S. will remain involved in wars and warfare, but we are, for now, exceedingly unlikely to undertake a new major military expedition except as a true last resort, and we are even less likely, next time, to assume an ability to change regimes and contain aftermaths. The experience of the '00s has erased the imperial hubris inherited from the '90s on both economic and military fronts. Call it our intellectual war dividend: Revolutions, we now recall, are not always, or even usually, velvet ones. Wars, we now recall, do not always, or even usually, end more quickly and at less cost than predicted. And, incidentally, incomes, revenues, and stock and property prices, we now recall, do not always, or even usually, rise continuously. In this sense Iraq was just one self-chastening among others.
My personal view remains that we were destined to become deeply, bloodily, and expensively engaged in and around Iraq: Too much unfinished business, too much political, economic, and moral involvement. Following 9/11,with both our fear and our blood still high, our confidence boosted by a seemingly easy victory in Afghanistan, we chose to act rather than react, to pre-empt rather than retaliate, to take the dice in our own hands rather than bet on someone else's throw. To indulge for a moment in a-what-might-have-been, if we had not acted when we did, then, sooner or later, by whatever concatenation of collapses or aggressions, we would have found ourselves on propinquitous ground, sea, and air taking and giving heavy fire anyway. The world economic and political system or "order" that we uphold and depend upon is itself too dependent on what flows out of the geographical Gulf for us to abide indefinitely all of those other gulfs: the gulf in our knowledge, troubling gaps in our sense of control and predictability, the increasingly intolerable moral chasm in our then existent policy. Nature abhors a gulf of gulfs, and "if we knew then what we know now" is a vain exercise, since we never would have learned what we now know except by having acted, suffered, and desperately fought to rescue ourselves. Compare what our armed forces, the political class, and the interested public now have learned about Iraq and environs, and all related issues, as compared to what we generally knew in the year 2000. Operation Iraqi Freedom was as much an exploratory expedition as a "real war" - for the country - if too real for our carefully counted soldiers and much less carefully counted budget.
As for the Iraqis, it is an index of our former naivete, insuperable except by experience, that we hoped to "give" them freedom, and, through their happy example, to spread it to the rest of the Arab and eventually the Islamic world. We simply allowed ourselves to forget what our own history would have taught us, if only anyone ever learned from history. Maybe deep down we remembered, but put it out of our minds -choosing to believe (not all of us, but easily enough of us) what we needed to believe. You can say we chose to trick ourselves into acting, and, even though we saw the bucket of water placed strategically above the partly open door, we decided to blunder forward anyway. Except the bucket was full of blood, and most of it Iraqi, the critics will say - and they are right. Yet can anyone with much knowledge of the history of the region pretend that the violence and destruction would likely have been avoided for very long? That they weren't bleeding out month by month already - with an ever-present option on the next catastrophe, against a background of misery and despair? That goes for the violence and destruction of the first liberation, the liberation from Saddam - it had to come someday; it goes for the violence and destruction of the second liberation - from foreign masters and would-be masters, including but not limited to us; it goes for the violence and destruction of the third liberation, from the "thousand Saddams" that now compete in Iraq for position.
By intervening as we did and how we did, we helped set the timetable of revolutionary violence and put ourselves in place to absorb and channel it, but it may be another form of hubris to assume anything more. Here is the simple summary that the President supplied, using terms that his predecessor might just as well have used, putting a hopeful emphasis on how Americans enabled Iraqis to take their fate into their own hands:
The Americans who have served in Iraq completed every mission they were given. They defeated a regime that had terrorized its people. Together with Iraqis and coalition partners who made huge sacrifices of their own, our troops fought block by block to help Iraq seize the chance for a better future. They shifted tactics to protect the Iraqi people; trained Iraqi Security Forces; and took out terrorist leaders. Because of our troops and civilians – and because of the resilience of the Iraqi people – Iraq has the opportunity to embrace a new destiny, even though many challenges remain.
The difficulty for Americans, especially for onetime proponents of the war like myself who hoped for a simpler, smoother, and much less costly transition - though who had been willing to contemplate a much costlier initial battle - was coming to understand why the Iraqis themselves were so resistant to seizing that historical opportunity and acting in their own collective interests.
So here is what I think we have re-learned, and had to re-learn: Prior to "Operation Iraqi Freedom," as the name emphasizes, the Iraqis were un-free. They were unprepared and perhaps unwilling to enter history as free human beings, and, though we removed one seemingly insuperable obstacle, the terror regime, we could not relieve them of the struggle that alone gives meaning and, potentially, durability to freedom. Without us, the Iraqis might have put off a new effort of self-liberation for many years. They might never have gone the final distance as a people (or set of captured peoples), but such a description ignores the extent to which they were held back and hemmed in, trapped by history at the cradle of civilization, at the crossroads of the world, on an ocean of oil, and at the same time pushed forward by larger forces - the same ones that gave Saddam his weapons and his dreams, the same ones that enslaved the Iraqis together in a "republic of fear," the same ones that made the world so interested.
"Operation Iraqi Freedom" could therefore only have ever meant a willed confrontation with catastrophe. We can take this knowledge with us on the next "operation," and there will very likely be a next one, different because of our additional knowledge and our new cautions, but sooner or later on the same terms.
Any attempt to expose the crucifixion as mere fiction repeats what is supposed to be erased. To proclaim the falseness or the mere historicity, merely human reality of the crucifixion is to seek the death of Jesus Christ all over again, to re-crucify [h]im in stripping [h]im of divinity. Yet the same must be true of any attempt to take possession of His sacrifice, as a mere precious object to be defended against the comfort, however distorted by agony, the dying might take in it. …and so the tableau repeats itself again, and again, forever…
"Counterfactual certitude fallacy" would be a corollary of historical fallacy, as in any claim of certainty that a simple alteration of a particular fatal decision would have necessarily led to an on-balance better course of subsequent events.
On “Paul Ryan on Real Progressivism”
http://iowahawk.typepad.com/iowahawk/2009/10/dial-m-for-maternity.html
"
Talking about Sullivan, is quite distasteful, it does beg the question how low does one have to go before the Times of London, and the
Atlantic dismiss him, for generalized gynaphobia, onset anti Semitism,
aggregious anti Catholic sentiment. The Iowahawk parody of a late
Noir take on his 'journalism,' is revenge enough
"
Well they did in most of the East Bloc, and Nicaragua
On “It wasn’t a very good year: 1938 – Hitler’s Gamble by Giles Macdonogh”
It's not really that hard at least from a European perspective, as Ferguson points out in "Pity of WAr" a purported victor like the UK
lost an entire generation in the battlefield, for what the media ended up representing as a confused cause, the French had mutinies toward
the end of the war, then again with the likes of Nivelle and Foch, maybe they were do that, The Russian experience toppled the regime in charge, Of course Iraq in the popular imagination has been painted
as worse than Vietnam, the Civil War, et al; hence the skiddishness
of the major players against Iran
"
The back to back oil shocks of the 1970s, along with the removal of wage and price controls, made the 70s, an interesting era for music
but a strange one to live through
"
A progressive academic with little executive experience, with an ahistorical mindset, pushes through a piece of legislation that the
populace is not in favor of; this is what Glenn Reynolds would call
a bug not a feature
"
One wonders how accidental the absence was, FDR was one of the last remaining major figures of the Wilson administration, yet he helped
demolish it's status, by cooperating with the Nye Committee, before then, isolationism was not so great a force (one of the junior staffers
on that panel, who was soon to rise in the Government bureaucracy
was Alger Hiss, first in the AAA and later at State. Later actions like
the 'court packing scheme' did little to engender comity, the Hatch Act arose out of the blatant electioneering that he was engaging it
against who he considered his foe, who weren't abroad for the most part
"
Why is that, those who try to determine the taxonomy of 'this rough
beast that slouches" toward mine and your town, are to be dismissed as cranks.
The fact is the progressive solution really hasn't worked,
the Fed is as accurate as a passel of blind dart throwers in gauging
our economic condition, social security and other programs are unsustainable in Keynes 'long run' yet they have a growing constituency. I do disagree with Beck on at least one point, both
Russia and China, didn't 'transform' in the last generation, they reverted, the first to the modified Czarist state, with the siloviki as the new Boyars, China back to the Chiang regime, with the PLA.
"
That conversation I had with that Argentine historian, who I was surprised when he referred positively to Jonah Goldberg, no one else
in my neighborhood, knows who he is, and needless to say, a big
admirer of Sarah, remarked on that seemingly long ago election day.
He had seen the chiliastic left and the right, tear out the center of his nation,over a forty year period, he left after the Proceso junta, he agreed with Churchill's aphorism about democracy "worst form of of government, except for all the others" and fit classical liberalism in that same place
Russia is like the proverbial 'Norwegian blue parrot' it's a dying nation
it just doesn't know it yet. If it's very lucky it can return to it's borders back in the 16th Century, before the Tatars but I don't think
so. China is a formidable contestant for the prize of hegemon, but
it's economic system, makes AIG seem transparent. The post AGW
dystopia "Mirrored Heavens", has it falling prey to a sixty year civil
war, which seems more than a bit unlikely, but without a kernel of consent, warlordism with a PLA flavor sounds likely
On “The Real Progressives”
So where do good intentions, in part defined by anecdote, stop being the source for public policy. That was the contrast at the health care
summit, on the debates on SCHIP, for illegal immigration, campaign finance, gun control, if there is no underlying principle, rights can be swept away, like so much shattered glass.
"
He was probably dead by then, but I'm sure he would have approved, it's the pattern with all these figures like Wallace supporters like
Mailer and Vidal and McGovern (who wrote his dissertation on the great
Ludlow massacre of 1916)
"
You've read Paul Hollander, the late Jean Jacques Revel I take it, most of these people have made excuses for the GULAGs, the Cultural Revolution, UMAP, Year Zero, the Sandinista turbas yet they seem to have seem our country as Amerika, long before Gitmo became 'the
21st Century analog for Devil's Island.
"
Ah yes, Upton Sinclair who along with Lincoln Steffens saw the brave new world in the Soviet Union, along with George Bernard Shaw, as
well as H.G. Wells (the originator of Liberal Fascism)WEB Dubois, saw good things in the likes of Mussolini for a time.
"
Well there was the Washington Treaty, but there was no wide spread
pacifist movement in the 20s. it was only after the Depression, and in part the efforts of the Comintern, that chestnut got underway. The USretreated to normalcy under Harding, but that didn't stop the Nicaraguan expedition, under Coolidge
"
Honestly, you perplex me, Rex, what world do you think you are striving for, Ayn Rand in Atlas Shrugged, writing from the perspective
of 1957, didn't want this to come about, yet we have come dangerously close to the world of Wesley Mouch and the Dog Eat Dog Laws, and the Peoples States
On “I'm a cancer, he's a cancer, she's a cancer, we're a cancer…”
Well the first part is the left's narrative of conservatism, and this is kind of the way, of the portrayal in history books. Now Iran Contra and
Lebanon are linked but not in the usual way. Since we were mostly
focused on the Soviet threat, we gave scant attention to the proxy
fight waged by Iran with Hezbollah, Since we did not go after Mugniyeh
in that way, we were limited in how we could maneuver in that landscape
"
Well Galbraith is Canadian, as blinkered as the Douglas clan, whose last relative in Kiefer Sutherland. The more famous of the former, was
a roommate of Benazir Bhutto, supporter of the Kurds, who parlayed
that into a very profitable sideline, while damning the rest of the Iraq
initiative
"
If you think about, Progresssivism was been offered as the salvation for all the sins (slavery, poverty, a sense of mindless conformism)
that they see the Constitution facilitating. Now take TR please ( rimshot) he broke up Standard OIl, yet they were able to regroup under
the Achincarry Agreement and ultimately ARAMCO. In that sense the solution was ultimately worse than the malady
"
Now CK, Olbermann rarely had those numbers, yet he was taken seriously, when he did those rants on the MCA, on the 'civil war'
in Iraq, on the general's mutiny (Baptiste, Eaton, et al) as did his
colleagues transitioning from Air America/Radio to TV (MSNBC)
On “The Point of Being Annoyed with Glenn Beck”
No, they were not willing, and Jim Crow, "Southern fried apartheid, pursued a generation later. proves the point. As does the accession
of Woodrow Wilson to the Presidency, in the following one. Ironically
this was an outcome that Dubois, made possible by protesting so vehemently about what he thought were TR and Taft's too methodical
responses to the crisis that sparked the formation of the NAACP
"
That is deeply ridiculous, Jefferson believed in the common people, Obama thinks them 'bitter clingers'. Yes, he was opposed to the Alien & Sedition Act, which was what the left pretends the Patriot Act to be. He was slandered by the media, Callender & co, in a way hat probably hasn't been equaled since I don't know, Aug. 2008.
Obama as far as it goes, is a Hamiltonian, he believes in the unlimited exercise of state power. Jackson, did set the stage by moving his crony Taney from Treasury to the Court, where he failed spectacularly to grasp the main point.
"
There was no argument for Plessy, frog, in some ways it is worse than Dred Scott, because it came after the 600,000 dead that cleared the debt. The Court surrendered to the insurgency of the Klan's monopoly
of violence
On “In a world of their own: Conservatives and Avatar”
This thread is never going to end "it will get out of control, and we'll be lucky if we live through it"
"
That raises an interesting point, the philosophers of the Modern Era, Marx, Freud, Darwin, and add Nietsche to the mix, did have a way of diminishing man's essential nature, in Marx's to economics, Freud to impulses, Darwin to genetics. But the spiritual side was jettisoned along the way. The thing that allows for phrases like 'what a wondrous creature is man, infinite in his faculties. . ." I guess that's a bit of what Avatar offers, but it paints man as the intruder. The virus on the body of the organism known as Gaia or Pandora, or well Caprica. Nature is an infinitely more powerful adversary, than we are, we only need to check the latest news for proof of that, yet we are presumedly powerful enough to alter it's patterns, as the AGW promoters would suggest
"
Well that's why I made the Three Days of the Condor reference, the assassination of the Agency analyst shop, which happens right near
if not in the WTC (bad) is to stop the discovery of a plot to take over
the Middle East, much like Luttvak's 1975 "Miles Ignotus" essay, in Harper's, a necessary evil some might say. Well this thread is officially
the longest in record, over a film that really isn't worth all that
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.