Monthly Archives: January 2020

The consistency of the left

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No one can be more consistent than the leaders of a modern left-side party. Policies are irrelevant – they just do or say whatever will lead them to power. Take this for an example: Oppose Iran sanctions, but support BDS against Israel?

Contrary to the claims of some of its apologists, the purpose of BDS is not to pressure Israel’s government to change its policies. As the founders of the movement and its leading advocates in the United States have repeatedly made clear, its goal is to eliminate Israel.

So if you support BDS against Israel but oppose sanctions against Iran—a brutal theocracy that oppresses its own people, seeks to impose its brand of Islamist tyranny on others via terrorism, and is dedicated to the goal of destroying Israel—then you are not merely being hypocritical. Singling out Jews for treatment that you think not even one of the worst governments on earth deserves is a form of bias that is indistinguishable from anti-Semitism.

Then there’s this:

Donald Trump and the mythmakers from Caroline Glick.

For the past 40-odd years, two narratives have guided American Middle East policy. Both were invented by the Carter administration. One relates to Iran. One relates to Israel.

Both narratives reject reality as the basis for foreign policy decision-making in favor of delusion. Over the past two months, President Donald Trump has rejected and disavowed them both. His opponents are apoplectic.

As far as Iran is concerned, as journalist Lee Smith explained in Tablet online magazine this week, when Iranian “students” seized the US Embassy in Tehran in November 1979 and held 52 Americans hostage for 444 days, they placed the Carter administration in a dilemma: If President Jimmy Carter acknowledged that the “students” weren’t students, but soldiers of Iran’s dictator Ayatollah Khomeini, the US would be compelled to fight back. And Carter and his advisers didn’t want to do that.

So rather than admit the truth, Carter accepted the absurd fiction spun by the regime that Khomeini was an innocent bystander who, try as he might, couldn’t get a bunch of “students” in central Tehran to free the hostages.

 At the base of their decision to prefer fantasy to reality in regards to Iran was the hope that Khomeini and his “students” would be satisfied with a pound or two of American flesh and wouldn’t cause Washington too many other problems.

So too, as Smith noted, the Carter administration was propelled by guilt. The worldviews of many members of the administration had been shaped on radical university campuses in the 1960s. They agreed with the Iranian revolutionaries who cursed Americans as imperialists. They perceived Khomeini and his followers as “authentic” Third World actors who were giving the Americans their comeuppance.

Khomeini and his “Death to America” shouting followers got the message. They understood that Washington had given them a green light to attack Americans in moderate and, as Smith put it, “plausibly deniable” doses. it. For the next 40 years, Iran maintained its aggression against America. And from Ronald Reagan to Barack Obama, every president since Carter accepted and kept faith with Carter’s decision not to hold the Iranian regime responsible for the acts of aggression and war it carried out against America through proxies.

Which continues:

This then brings us to President Trump. Trump’s decision to kill Qassem Soleimani – who as commander of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps’ Quds Force was the head of all of Iran’s regional and global terror apparatuses – destroyed the Carter administration’s Iran narrative.

Soleimani was killed in Baghdad along with Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, the commander of one of the Soleimani-controlled Shiite militias in Iraq. Iraqi protesters, who have been demonstrating against Iran’s control over their government since last October claim that Soleimani was the one who ordered al-Muhandis to kill the demonstrators. More than 500 demonstrators have been killed by those forces in Iraq over the past three months.

By killing the two together, the Americans exposed the big lie at the root of 40 years of American deliberate blindness to the reality of Iranian culpability and responsibility for the acts of terror and aggression its surrogates have carried out against America and its allies.

By killing Soleimani, Trump made clear that the blank check for aggression the previous six presidents gave Tehran is now canceled. From now on, the regime will be held responsible for its actions. From now on US policy towards Iran will be based on reality and not on escapism.

At least from now on until the next post-modernist clown, looking to preserve every possible constituency, takes over, which must happen eventually.

Hayek was a John Stuart Mill classical liberal

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This is an exceptionally interesting article, that needs to be considered among us on the right side of the political ledger: F.A. Hayek & Social Justice: A Missed Opportunity and a Challenge. They argue that Hayek’s views were left incomplete, but what’s worth, because they do not conform to some commonly accepted modern version of conservative thought, Hayek is being abandoned by those who ought to turn to him for sound advice. Start here which is where the authors start with a critique of Hayek by Professor Edward Feser:

Dr. Feser argues, of “economism”:

This subjectivism about value has great utility when our focus is merely on satisfying the material needs and wants people actually happen to have. Hayek’s purely procedural conception of just action, however, effectively treats value subjectivism as a completely general principle of social organization. The rules that govern capitalist societies must not treat any of the diverse ends people happen to have as objectively better or worse than any other. To acknowledge that there is some objective fact of the matter about what people ought to want, or some standard of value independent of the market, would open the door to justifying interference with the choices of economic actors, and thereby destroy the price mechanism.

This is the point that Professor Feser makes which I happen to agree with:

This subjectivism, Dr. Feser contends, is an acid that will eat away at capitalism itself: “If there is no standard of good apart from what people happen to want, how can Hayek complain if what they happen to want is an egalitarian redistribution of wealth, or freedom from religion and traditional family arrangements?”

But this was no more Hayek’s position than it was John Stuart Mill’s. It is the modern libertarian position as best I understand it, but it is not the view of we classical liberals. I think this is an absolutely valid criticism.

This is what they conclude from the book they are discussing:

Hayek does not have an “objective notion of the good as such” when it comes to the substance of a society (or at least a large and complex society). But it is not clear he was entirely subjective about justice or even that he would necessarily limit it to the personal sphere. Even with regard to the distribution of goods, he is not averse to the idea that there are “smaller scale orders in which it is possible to distribute goods on the basis of various interpretations of justice, taking into account effort and need.” They argue that Hayek did have a conception of an objective nature to justice in the personal and even business realm, explaining, for instance, how “an employer should determine employees’ wages according to known and intelligible rules and that it should be seen that all employees receive what is due to them.”

That could just as easily have been said by Mill. There are no absolute criteria available from any source that will lay down what the answers to these issues is, but must emerge through a process of trial and error as events are examined over time and in different circumstances. Freedom sits at one pole and justice at the other, but these are only words until attempts are made to transform such ideas into practice. What the authors see as “the Great Forgetting” which they blame on Hayek’s “incompleteness” is their own failing because they see the answers in some libertarian set of principles which Hayek did not accept.

Others like Craig Kelly needed even more than ever

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Yesterday I put up a post on Craig Kelly standing up for sense in the face of the climate change idiocies we are forced to endure. I titled the post, More like Craig Kelly needed. I am coming back to it only because it has been brought up again somewhere else.

I hadn’t seen Craig Kelly’s original interview on ITV but Gerard Henderson had: Interview more about ‘look-at-me’ Piers Morgan than Craig Kelly. First the bad news, which I had not known:

Early on, Morgan put this question: “Do you accept the planet is heating up at a dangerous level — yes or no?” To which Kelly replied “yes”.

It’s almost certainly untrue, but during the times in which we live, that is the only answer a politician, other than Donald Trump, is permitted to give. There was then more. The gullible self-harming fools who watch Morning Television on ITV in the UK are not part of Craig’s constituency. So what followed next only matters here in Oz:

Within minutes, [the pommy weather girl] Tobin entered the discussion by accusing Kelly of burying his “head in the sand”. She added: “You’re not a climate sceptic, you’re a climate denier.” This, despite the fact that Kelly had accepted Morgan’s proposition that the planet is heating at a dangerous level.

This would suggest that Tobin was more interested in stating her case than listening to what Kelly had to say.

Of course they’re not interested in listening – we’re talking about the ABC and their like-minded cohorts. They are just part of the liars-squad who for reasons already well-known, are the actual deniers, the ones who deny there is no problem.

Although Henderson thinks there is nothing to be gained by putting the case that global warming “science” is almost entirely fraud, there is, in fact, a great deal to be gained. Someone in a position to actually be interviewed needs to say these things in public or they will never be said where others can hear. Good for Craig Kelly and tough luck for Britain if that is the level of their understanding about climate change.

Of course Uri Geller can bend spoons with the power of his mind, you bloody morons.

More like Craig Kelly needed

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There is then the Turnbull wing of the Coalition which seems to cover around half the party. Which brings us to this in the Oz today: Bushfires: Scott Morrison courts states for fire inquiry. What exactly was the “trainwreck”here?

Amid international media criticism of Australia’s emissions policies, Mr Morrison also warned his MPs off interviews with overseas media outlets — a reference to Liberal back­bencher Craig Kelly’s trainwreck British TV interview in which he was attacked as a climate change denier.

This is the trainwreck:

Mr Kelly traded barbs with Laura Tobin and co-host Piers Morgan on the Good Morning Britain television program on Monday where he was accused of being a “climate denier” by the hosts over his views on the effect of global warming on Australia’s bushfire crisis.

Mr Kelly accused Tobin of being an “ignorant Pommy weather girl” in the now-deleted post and said that he “might have to send her some of the published peer-reviewed scientific papers on Australia’s weather.”

She sounds like just another standard-issue cookie-cutter climate alarmist. They are everywhere with nothing to show for it other than a failure to deal with actual environmental problems that have made the bushfires this year so devastating. She would be absolutely impervious to any peer-reviewed scientific papers or indeed, any evidence at all. Happily blighting the lives of billions across the planet because of some conjectures about the future trends in the weather. We need more Craig Kellys around to put the acid on to see if we can prevent a collapse of our economies while the cost of energy goes through the roof.

There are many fronts in the wars to defend Western Civilisation from its enemies

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The political leaders in China, North Korea and Iran can oppress their people to their heart’s content. It is a tragedy, and one wishes it were otherwise, but no one’s going to go to war to save them. But if the leaders of these regimes want to impose their way of life on us by force, then that’s different.

I do not wish to live in a theocracy, whether religious or socialist. What I do hope and wish for is that American power will continue to protect the rest of us – along with our own active support and participation – from the kinds of tyranny that runs rampant across the world. Donald Trump gets it.

As discussed here: DONALD TRUMP POLITICS ROGER KIMBALL US POLITICS Eliminating Qasem Soleimani was Donald Trump’s Middle East farewell letter. I will just quote the opening.

In July 55 BC, in the midst of his campaigns to civilize Gaul, Julius Caesar was troubled by the Germans. They would cross the Rhine, wreak havoc, and then disappear back across the mighty river, whose depth and swift currents made the Germans regard it as an impregnable barrier.

To teach them that it wasn’t, Caesar had his engineers construct a bridge across the Rhine. As Caesar recounts in Book IV of his commentaries on the Gallic War, they did this in an astonishing 10 days. Caesar and his troops crossed over, stayed for a few days in German territory, ‘burned all their villages and other buildings, and cut down the grain in their fields’. They then crossed back over and destroyed the bridge.

The point, which was not lost on the Germans, was that the Romans could go anywhere they wanted, whenever they wanted, and there was nothing the Germans could do about it.

Western Civilisation has enemies, some within and some without. Thankfully it also has its defenders. There are many political fools around but at the moment, our side is ahead, even if it’s only slightly.

NOW ADDING THIS FROM INSTAPUNDIT: FOUND HERE

Susan Hennessey is Executive Editor of the Lawfare Blog, a Brookings Senior Fellow, and a CNN National Security Legal Analyst and former Intelligence Community lawyer. She’s also, as you can see, a dishonest idiot. These are the “experts” Trump is supposed to have deferred to. Disgraceful, and a pretty good explanation of why our foreign policy has been a dumpster fire for the last three decades.

Related: The Suicide of Expertise.

Plus:

Yet the more we learn — about the deliberations preceding the strike, about the chain of events leading to it, about the prior and subsequent moves by CENTCOM to harden the American position in the region — the more it seems that the President acted with deliberate aforethought, that he does in fact have a plan, and therefore likely is capable of envisioning and handling what happens next. That much is only fair, whether or not one agrees with the decision as such.

What nearly the entire DC / academia / journo natsec/forpol commentariat actually means by its critique, though, is that they weren’t included in any of this. Ben Rhodes took the time to rally them together, get their talking points aligned, illuminate a pathway to social and professional advancement: that’s their preferred template for Iran-related policymaking.

Donald Trump’s template for Iran-related policymaking is the smoking wreckage of a terror mastermind’s vehicle. The courtiers see it, and want to know what’s in it for them.

Americans see it, and they know.

What the foreign policy apparatchiks fear isn’t that Trump might fail — they pray for that. What they fear is that he is likely to succeed.

UPDATE:

Well, I’m doing my part on the mockery front. Feel free to join me.

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The level of traitorous stupidity is breathtaking.

The Battle of Warsaw 1920

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From The war that saved Europe from Communism, from a hundred years ago. Here’s the conclusion from a book written by the English ambassador to Poland at the time the battle took place.

Had the Poles “failed to arrest the triumphant advance of the Soviet Army at the Battle of Warsaw, not only would Christianity have experienced a dangerous reverse, but the very existence of western civilisation would have been imperilled.”

Just as the Battle of Tours “saved our ancestors from the Yoke of the Koran”, he concluded, had the Poles “failed to arrest the triumphant advance of the Soviet Army at the Battle of Warsaw, not only would Christianity have experienced a dangerous reverse, but the very existence of western civilisation would have been imperilled.”

Just as the Battle of Tours “saved our ancestors from the Yoke of the Koran”, he concluded, so the Battle of Warsaw saved Western Euro
had the Poles “failed to arrest the triumphant advance of the Soviet Army at the Battle of Warsaw, not only would Christianity have experienced a dangerous reverse, but the very existence of western civilisation would have been imperilled.”

Just as the Battle of Tours “saved our ancestors from the Yoke of the Koran”, he concluded, so the Battle of Warsaw saved Western Europe from “a far more subversive danger – the fanatical tyranny of the Soviet.”

Here’s the movie with subtitles:

https://youtu.be/aN73N9EjoM4

Not to mention the Battle of Vienna, 1683.

Noble and self-sacrificing for the common good of humanity

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An update on We are the most virtuous country in the world. I have now been informed of the following:

Multiple Facebook posts shared thousands of times contain a list of purported active and under construction coal-fired power plants in several countries around the world. The figures in the list are out of date; the numbers in the misleading Facebook posts were taken from a 2015 report; the current figure for active and under construction coal-fired power plants in the selected countries is less than half the total count listed in the misleading posts.

I never trusted Facebook anyway. The revised figures nevertheless don’t change the point, that it would be insane for Australia to do anything to ruin its standard of living in some kind of noble sacrificial decision to rid itself of coal-fired power stations as part of some non-existent global effort. It’s good to have more accurate data, but the conclusion remains. And even on the new list Australia is the only country not building any others at the present time, although we are apparently considering adding two others.

The Global Coal Plant Tracker provides summary statistics for the number of coal-fired power plants per country here, as well as by region here.

As of July 2019, the Global Coal Plant Tracker shows:

  • Within the 28 European Union countries, there are 268 coal-fired power plants in operation, with 7 in construction and 8 in pre-construction.
  • Turkey has 29 plants in operation, with 2 in construction and 31 in preconstruction.
  • South Africa has 19 plants in operation, with 2 in construction and 5 in preconstruction.
  • India has 291 plants in operation, with 33 in construction and 41 in preconstruction.
  • Philippines has 21 plants in operation, with 8 in construction and 19 in preconstruction.
  • South Korea has 24 plants in operation, with 3 in construction and 1 in preconstruction.
  • Japan has 83 plants in operation, with 15 in construction and 5 in preconstruction.
  • China has 1032 plants in operation, with 126 in construction and 76 in preconstruction.
  • Australia has 20 plants in operation, with 0 in construction and 2 in preconstruction.

Excluding Australia, the countries listed have 1767 operational coal-fired power plants and a further 196 under construction, for a total of 1963.

A list of the 20 coal-fired power plants in operation in Australia can also be found on the Australian Clean Energy Regulator’s website here, which was published on March 25.

Australia houses 1.1% of the world’s coal-driven power stations. It’s insane anyway, but let’s not lead the pack over the edge of the cliff.

International confidence in the American president

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Confidence in Trump remains low internationally

I would take a sceptical attitude as reasonable except these parts of the Anglosphere and the former members of the nation states that once comprised Western Civilisation are filled with people who are saturated in ignorance and lacking in common sense. They are impervious to the dangers they were led into by Obama and the left in general, and are fearful of the actions taken by Donald Trump. This  in fact goes beyond mere ignorance into a kind of cultish stupidity that makes no sense on any level.

The ABC, and the media overall, are filled with people whose only stock in trade are their opinions. They support mass murderers who would snuff out their lives without hesitation, and snuff out their culture as well if they could.

If not Donald Trump, who do they think would do better? Hillary? Bernie? Calling them clueless is too good for them.

Here by the way is the source of the chart. And here is the president’s address this morning on Iran.