Category Archives: History

History, Media Criticism, Political Commentary

“Why I Left The Left”

4 Comments

Nick Cohen has given up on Labour:

The half-educated fanatics are in control now. I do not see how in conscience I can stay with their movement or vote for their party. I am not going to pretend the next time I meet Owen Jones or those Labour politicians who serve in Corbyn’s shadow cabinet that we are still members of the same happy family. There are differences that cannot and should not be smoothed over.

I realise now what I should have known years ago. The causes I most care about — secularism, freedom of speech, universal human rights — are not their causes. Whatever they pretend, when the crunch comes, they will always put sectarian unity first, and find reasons to be elsewhere.

Pro tip, Nick: They never were their causes. They’re not in the U.S., either. Leftists are not, and never have been, liberals.

[Update a while later]

Who really won the Cold War?

It’s all enough to make the few traditional leftists among us want to pull their hair out. The broad alliance of cultural Left and corporate Right, which questions none of our economics, has triumphed in our politics—or at least had until Donald Trump came along to question “settled” issues such as mass, often illegal, immigration. The cultural Left favors this because it gradually dissolves the traditional culture, which they despise, while the corporate Right favors it for the cheap labor. Postmodern capitalism is a least as revolutionary a force as anything cooked up by any Marxist, as well as something any Social Justice Warrior can live with.
Postmodern capitalism is a least as revolutionary a force as anything cooked up by any Marxist.

For more than a generation we have sorely lacked mainstream contributions from social democrats who seek to make our society better, not destroy it. There ought to be no illusions about what the cultural Left seeks: a full revolution of our society and its history, which they see as benighted by irredeemable racism, sexism, and Old Think. Their opponents are objectively evil and on the “wrong side of history,” as Obama himself has assured us, and they must disappear. “Error has no rights,” the mid-nineteenth-century Vatican formulation, has oddly been adapted by our postmodern Left.

As communists once predicted the state itself would wither away, resulting in complete human freedom and progress, the New Left expects that all traditional societal arrangements will wither away, thereby allowing full human freedom and progress. One offered discipline and order and sometimes gulags; the other offers sexual liberty, anti-racism, and iPhones.

But no purpose.

Education, History, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Social Commentary

College Graduates

…don’t know much about the Constitution.

What a mess. This is shameful. They should be learning those sorts of things in high school. But instead, they’re propagandized about how we’re destroying the planet and how the US is the worst country in the history of humanity.

[Update a while later]

Related: Six questions you should ask about your children’s school:

If you want your child to grow up to be an independent thinker and a leader, take a look at the curriculum with this question in mind: Is your child being taught to learn in an objective fashion, or play political ball in a bureaucratic system?

If it’s a public school, it’s most likely the latter.

History, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, War Commentary

The Fences

2 Comments

“…are going up all over Europe, and they’re not coming down in our lifetime.”

Charles Martel weeps. Those who don’t know history…

[Update a few minutes later]

I’d laugh at this, if it weren’t so serious:

President Obama may be feeling double-crossed by his partners for peace. “Obama explained during a town hall event with members of the military that he warned Putin years ago not to support the tyrannical dictator.”

“I remember a conversation I had with Mr. Putin four or five years ago where I told him that was a mistake … he did not take my warnings and as a consequence things have gotten worse,” he said. …

“The strategy that they’re pursuing now by doubling down with Assad, I think is a big mistake,” he said. “You can’t continue to double down on a strategy that is doomed to failure.”

Obama said that the United States would continue talking with Russia to convince them that their actions were bad for Syria. He signaled that diplomacy was the primary vehicle for restoring order in Syria, encouraging the Russians to “get a little smarter.”

The depths of his delusions have no bottom.

[Update a few minutes later]

This wave of immigrants will give Europe an extreme makeover.

So did Attila.

History, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, War Commentary

Remembering 911

17 Comments

Yes, I wouldn’t have predicted this, either:

One thing I guess I didn’t believe 14 years ago is that America would elect such a feckless President in 2008, and stand idly by while he flushed our global position, and security, down a left-wing toilet. But we did, and we’ll be paying the price for a long time.

Yes. But I have to say, while it’s a cliche, for this I do at least partially blame George Bush. I expected more competence and strategic thinking in the wake of the removal of Saddam. In fact, the real disaster began with the Democrat take over of Congress in 2006.

I’ve mentioned that I was in Puerto Rico when it happened, getting ready to head to the airport to fly to CA. When I saw the second plane hit the second tower, I knew there was no point in going.

What I’ve never mentioned, I think, was that we had a going-away party a day or so later (we had a place on the beach in Isla Verde with a nice veranda) for one of Patricia’s co-workers. He was about to take a job in Saudi Arabia. He ended up changing his mind in light of recent events, but one of the topics of discussion was the reaction of many of the Puerto Ricans. Many attending had tales of glee. “The Americans had it coming.”

I saw this tweet from Xeni Jardin this morning:

This is delusional. There were cheers and ululations in Gaza and the West Bank, and handing out of candy.

We are not at war with Muslims (just as we weren’t at war with the Russian people during the Cold War), but Islam is at war with us (and has been pretty much since its founding). As I said on Twitter this morning, in the Cold War, our national leadership largely understood that we were at war with a totalitarian ideology that wanted to destroy our way of life. We still are, but the president wants to delude himself that we are not. And the most recent flare up of that war started not fourteen years ago, but thirty-six years ago, when Iran went to war with us, and we pretended that they had not. And they’ve been killing us ever since, every chance they get. With the president’s “victory” in ramming through this disastrous “deal” with them yesterday (a defeat for America, as most of Barack Obama’s “Victories” are) this has to be the major foreign-policy issue in the upcoming campaign.

[Early-afternoon update]

Fourteen years ago, Glenn Reynolds “made his bones and invented the blogosphere.”

I started this blog a few weeks later as a result.