Barrel Strength

A crypto-doctrinaire socialist explores new weird realms of semantic yoga to defend the Taliban:

In a nutshell, there is no Afghan working class or progressive petit bourgeoisie to speak of, and the major social classes (aside from the puppet regime and it’s assortment of bandits and thugs) are the poor peasantry and the Islamic clergy.

So, in the absence of typical Marxist benchmarks, the author goes DIY in a most unwholesome manner:

The Taliban are increasingly espousing a strong nationalist message and, in some cases, have substantially moderated their social conservatism in order to build a more broad-based and effective resistance movement.

Alas, Google offers no help for the total lack of citation of evidence for these “cases”. Did the author mean this?

Next comes the “Archbishop Romero=Mullah Omar” moment:

There is no fundamental difference between the liberation theology movements in South America and the popular Islamist resistance movements in the Middle East and Asia, movements such as Hezbollah, Hamas and the Taliban. To be sure, the former were less socially conservative, but as religiously colored grassroots resistance movements they are essentially the same kind of manifestation of class resistance.

I’ll venture one: South American liberation theology demands a reading of Marx, while the Taliban will demand a limb for reading Marx.

The left needs to ask itself why it is much more critical of Muslims expressing class anger in a religious form than of South American Christians; to my mind, unexamined Islamophobia explains much of this discrepancy

Well, if you put it that way…

Oy.

Jaw-dropping evidence of the incredulousness of Obama, the Democrats and their MSM familiars when it comes to ferreting out their own “crazies” and undesirables:

Some people have been distorting my argument by pointing out that some people who were violent leftists in the 1960s and 1970s were friendly with politicians long, long, long after they re-entered the mainstream. I can’t stand Bill Ayers because I think he lies about his past (he claims all he cared about was ending the Vietnam War when actually the Weathermen were quite explicitly that they were working to foment a violent overthrow of the American government–read their manifestos). But he was a legitimate and law-abiding and non-violent member of the Chicago progressive community by the time Barack Obama met him. It was quite possible–as Obama claims is the case– not to know about his past [emphasis added].

So, unlike some scribbler with a non-Ivy League BA in history, a former editor of the Harvard Law Review and a politically ambitious community organizer was somehow incapable of the due diligence of conducting some basic research to discover that his putative mentor used to be a notorious urban terrorist?!

And they wonder why we just can’t take anything they say at face value.

Summer is an exceptional condition in Canada. Most of the world, most of the time, is sweating in what we would call sweltering heat. Here a milder version of that heat lasts six weeks, if we are lucky. I stepped outdoors this morning in shorts, shirt, and barefoot. I stepped on green grass. The grass was moist, the air humid. The trees were langorously breathing, sending cooler air upwards as they evaporated groundwater through their leaves. The air was a pleasant 78Fahrenheit. A gentle breeze was coming in from the south. It was not even hot by Virginian standards. It felt warm to me. The climate was not trying to kill me, for a change.

How exceptional it is to live in a place where it is above freezing for only six months of the year! I assure you, fellow Canadians, there are parts of the world that have never known glaciation. Where I stand on my lawn, 10,000 years ago it had the same temperature as the Greenland ice sheet, and two thousand years from now it will be that cold again. I look at those swaying green trees with the long appraising gaze of a geologist, where ten thousand years is the shortest meaningful stretch of time. I will be gone in another 40 years, but the landscape I look at will be northern taiga in another thousand, Baffin Island in another two thousand, and high Arctic in another five thousand.

Enjoy the heat while you can, Canadians and fellow northmen. We are nearing the end of the curent warm phase of the Milankovitch cycle.

I encourage you to read up on it. Then you will know we are living in a warm interlude in an ice age.

“To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle.”
George Orwell
1903-1950

I have come across a copy of Foreign Affairs,vol 68, no 1. 1989. Soviet Communism was in the process of collapsing. The satellites were flying off in their own directions. Within a year the Russian state would sign the Treaty of Paris, [Treaty on Conventional Armed Forces in Europe, November 1990] signifying the end of its pretensions to overthrow the international order, and its return to the comity of nations, after having rejected the same in the Bolshevik Revolution.

So what are all the learned international relations and political science profs writing in Foreign Affairs in the winter of 1989?

Professor David Holloway of  Stanford University was writing a chapter on “Gorbachev’s New Thinking”, mentioning the end of revolutionary faith in the Soviet Union.

Professor Robert Legvold was writing about the “Revolution in Soviet Foreign Policy”. They no longer thought about conquering the world.

Professor Charles Gati was writing about “Eastern Europe on its Own”.  The dictators were having as much trouble assimilating Gorbachev as the learned professors.

The normally highly sagacious Richard Nixon was  describing Gorbachev in that issue and changes in Soviet policy as “changes in style and rhetoric” not to be confused with “shifts in substance and policy.” (at p.200)

But one article you will not have seen in Foreign Affairs or anywhere else for that matter, was a confident statement beginning with “1989 will see the demise of Communism as a serious political idea, and the end of the Soviet Union as an effective regime.”

No article in 1989 began “It’s over”.

Yet it was happening before our noses. In 1989 I was 39. I had been for years firmly anti-communist. I had no illusions about the nature of communism: the essential rubbish of Marxism, the tens upon tens of millions killed to sustain the lie and make the way for the new soviet man; the thuggish brutality, the deliberate destruction of Russia’s productive farmers, the endless slaughters in the prisons of the KGB.

Yet none of us got up and said: communism is over. It is finished. The house of cards will collapse within 18 months. Not one person on this side of the Iron Curtain. My friend the Dark Lord recalls listening to  a Hungarian taxi driver in 1986 or thereabouts telling him “it is finished” in such definitive terms, but even the Dark Lord failed to grasp the dimensions of the taxi driver’s remark.

Which brings is to the present day. What do we fail to see that is before our noses?

Islamic demographic take-over of Europe?

Mark Steyn in “America Alone” and Christopher Caldwell in “Reflections on the Revolution in Europe” are slowly creating awareness among the well read on this issue.

The world getting colder instead of warmer?

Failure of regulatory oversight of markets? Too late for that barn door!

You get my drift. Orwell reminds us that a constant effort must be made to see the obvious. It is not enough to speak of economic cycles. You have to be ready to sell out of the market before the crash, even as you endure the opprobrium of many for being a bad sport. You have to be ready to state the obvious in public places, even as the faithful are scandalized. And if I am slightly more apt to scandalize the faithful (global warming alrmists) I am no better at predicting the future than Joe Average.

I have been reading high-minded rebuttals of the latest trendy atheists. In particular, Michael Novak’s “No One Sees God” is a fine engagement with the squadron of atheists who currently occupy mindshare.

But, tiring of my non-fiction diet of history, science, and religion, I found Evelyn Waugh’s “Brideshead Revisited” in an attracive edition, and have been devouring it to the exclusion of the weightier tomes.

You may be of an age to recall the wonderful Brideshead Revisited television series of 1981 with Jeremy Irons, with the gorgeous settings and the great music by Geoffrey Burgon. There is also a new movie covering the same, which I have not yet seen. Like Dune, Brideshead will engender a fresh edition each generation. It is one of the great stories.

In the chapter, “Brideshead Deserted”, the hero Charles Ryder encounters Cordelia Flyte, younger sister of his alcoholic former friend Sebastian, while on his first commission as an architectural painter, painting the Brideshead London palace before it is torn down to make way for a block of flats. This is several years after Charles had his falling out with Lady Teresa Flyte over Sebastian’s hopeless drinking. Cordelia asks Charles to take her out to dinner. She is fifteen, quite ugly and very perceptive.

They are at the restaurant talking of the late Lady Flyte, who was disliked by members of her family in varying degrees. Who can fail to recall Lady Flyte’s [Clare Bloom's] cool and withering denunciation of Charles Ryder for having assisted Sebastian’s drunkenness be lending him a couple of pounds? “Callous wickedness”, she called it, in her cool, quiet voice.

So here they are years later as Cordelia scarfs down her first meal in a public restaurant, speaking of her late mother.

Read the rest…

I am. When Obama lies straight out about his stance on single payer insurance – knowing that it is a lie and that he will be caught out in the lie – and goes ahead and lies anyway, something bad is happening.  I think he is confident – maybe not serenely confident but confident enough – that the mainstream media will protect him and he will get his way. That frightens me. The truth is that there is no health care crisis in the US. Most people are insured for most problems.  Most Americans have more to lose than to gain from collectivizing medicine – and they know it. I think Steyn has this weasel Obama pegged – all he needs to do is jam through something – anything – and an irreversible trend will be started.

Hardcover non-fiction

Number one – “Culture of Corruption: Obama and His Team of Tax Cheats, Crooks, and Cronies” – Michelle Malkin

Number two – “Liberty and Tyranny: A Conservative Manifesto” – Mark R. Levin

I thank a merciful providence for the Internet, without which I do not think this could have happened.

Proving that Google is the kryptonite of Canadian journalism. John Ibbitson serves up one confusing mess to the chattering classes in today’s Globe and Mail when comparing American and Canadian political discourse:

U.S. society is far more polarized. Most Republican senators will vote against confirming Judge Sotomayor, in part because the National Rifle Association fears she may support gun-control laws.

Canada doesn’t have an NRA, and there was little conservative opposition when Paul Martin chose to appoint Rosalie Abella to the Supreme Court, despite her long record of liberal and judicially active rulings. It would have been poor form.

For a start, Canada has no advise-and-consent mechanism like the United States: MPs at the time of those appointments could not even call the nominees to appear before a parliamentary committee. And the critics of Abella went beyond conservatives to include Douglas Fisher, journalist and former CCF MP.

This can lead to scenes like the one in South Carolina, where an angry voter warned Congressman Bob Inglis at a town hall to “keep your government hands off my Medicare.” Mr. Inglis, according to The New York Times, tried to explain that Medicare actually is run by the government, but the voter “was having none of it.”

In contrast to such Yankee ignorance, our sumo pundits had nothing to say about the typical Canadian voter’s understanding of our constitution during the prorogation flap of last winter.

Facts, dear boy, facts.