Category Archives: Political Commentary

Economics, Political Commentary, Science And Society

Making A Difference

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I’m going to turn on extra lights tomorrow night at 8:30. I hope that many of my readers will join me. Hell, I might even turn on the air, though we won’t need it. I’ll just run it with the windows open.

I wonder what these people think when they look at a picture of the Korean peninsula at night? Who do they consider more virtuous, those in the light, or those in the dark?

Call it a vote for sanity and freedom.

[Later afternoon update]

Here are some more suggestions:

Our press release described ways people might celebrate the achievements of humanity such as eating diner, seeing a film, driving around, keeping the heat on in your home — all things that Earth Hour celebrators, presumably, should be refraining from. In the cheekiest manner, we claimed that anyone not foregoing the use of electricity in that hour is, by default, celebrating the achievements of human beings. Needless to say, the enviros in the blogosphere didn’t take to kindly to our announcement.

Needless to say.

If our Human Achievement Hour is at all a dig against Earth Hour, it is so only by the fact that we are pointing out what Earth Hour truly is about: It isn’t pro-Earth, it is anti-man and anti-innovation.

Got it in one.

[Update a couple minutes later]

Here’s the web site for Human Achievement Hour.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary

The Meaninglessness Of Political Labels

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At the thread about the world’s most attractive female politicians, Alan K. Henderson notes that Alessandra Mussolini didn’t make the cut, though she’s got Hillary beat by a country mile. I’d never heard of her before, but she’s very interesting. She’s Il Duce’s granddaughter, and Sophia Loren’s niece, if Wikipedia is to be believed.

But what’s strange about the article (well, not so strange, actually, it’s typical) is the way the word “fascist” and the phrase “right wing” are thrown around freely, with very few references to actual policies that would justify such labels. It seems to contain many of the misconceptions described in Jonah Goldberg’s book. For instance:

Her relations with Gianfranco Fini, leader of the Alleanza Nazionale, never were very good, she announced; she then withdrew later, her resignation due to differences with him at least once.[9] This antagonism was exacerbated when Fini criticized some aspects of fascism, such as its antisemitism. She unsuccessfully challenged him for leadership of the party when he withdrew support for Benito Mussolini in a television interview in January 2002.

Note that there is an implicit assumption that there is something intrinsically anti-semitic about fascism. But one can understand why she might be upset about this slander against her grandfather because, for all of his other sins, there is zero evidence that he was anti-semitic. That was in fact one of the tensions between his regime and Hitler’s. It wasn’t just a coincidence that eighty percent of Italian Jews survived the Holocaust.

And of course, there was very little that was actually “right wing” about him, except that he appropriated the label late to differentiate himself, a man of the left all his life, and a national socialist, from the international ones in the Soviet Union.

And let’s puzzle out the next graf:

Mussolini suddenly left National Alliance on 28 November 2003, following the visit of party leader and the Deputy Prime Minister Gianfranco Fini to Israel, where he described fascism as “the absolute evil” as he apologised for Italy’s role as an Axis Power during the Second World War. Mussolini however defended the right of Israel to exist and declared that the world “should beg forgiveness of Israel.”

That hardly sounds like either a “right winger,” or anti-semite to me. Again, while it wouldn’t be inappropriate to apologize for being part of the Axis, Italy had nothing to apologize for when it came to its own treatment of the Jews, at least relative to the rest of Europe, or even with respect to the US, which refused to admit them in the thirties. So again it would be understandable that she would be upset about an apparent slander of her grandfather’s memory. The use of the word “however” in the last sentence implies that she would be expected to be opposed to Israel, when in fact there’s no reason to think that even her grandfather would have been.

This next one is hilarious, if you accept Jonah’s thesis:

Following her resignation, Mussolini formed her Social Action party, originally named “Freedom of Action”, and organized a far right coalition named Social Alternative. That was a surprising move, as Mussolini, during her political career, had always taken progressive stances on many issues, including abortion, artificial insemination, gay rights and civil unions. She has been an outspoken “feminist” and has been described by conservative commentators as a “socialist” and a “left-winger”.

So, what exactly is it that is “far right” about the coalition? They don’t say. We must simply take their word for it that it is. Is it possible that the move is not as “surprising” as it might be to people who don’t view the world through the conventional looking glass of fascism as “right wing”?

I loved this one:

In 2006 she responded to claims by effeminate Italian M.P. candidate Vladimir Luxuriathat she was a ‘fascist’ with the line “Meglio fascista che frocio” (“It is better to be a fascist than a fruit”).

Of course, she’s not necessarily admitting to be a fascist with that line, but she actually seems fine with the label, given that her grandfather invented it. Perhaps as a leftist, she understands fascism much better than most of her cohorts?

[Update late afternoon]

I missed this one. The very first sentence of the article:

Alessandra Mussolini (born 30 December 1962) is an Italian conservative politician…

So what is it that makes her a “conservative”? Her “progressive” views on abortion, artificial insemination, gays, civil unions? Her “feminism”? Or is it just that she’s an admitted fascist, and we all know that fascism is “conservative,” and “right wing”?

[Update a few minutes later]

Now that I think about it, she’s her grandfather’s granddaughter — a leftist who calls herself a fascist. Except unlike most European leftists, she’s not anti-Israel (and anti-semitic).

Business, Economics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary

Time To Bust The Biggest Trust

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Thoughts on the unsavory and oppressive relationship between big government and big business:

…one needs to remember that the New Deal was not the assault on big business that its fans claim. FDR may have talked a good game about going after “economic royalists,” and he did love confiscatory personal income taxes. But he and his Brain Trust also loved cartels, big businesses, and other “big units” of society. The notion that big business and big government are at war with one another is one of the great enduring myths of the 20th century. The truth is that ever since Teddy Roosevelt abandoned his love of trust-busting, progressives have liked big businesses big, really big. The bigger the business, the more reliable the partner for big government.

Contra popular myth/lies, It’s not libertarians who favor big business and corporations.

[Update late morning]

Not Japan — Argentina:

In visits to Asian capitals during the region’s financial crisis in the late 1990s, I often heard Asian reformers such as Singapore’s Lee Kuan Yew or Japan’s Eisuke Sakakibara complain about how the incestuous relationship between governments and large Asian corporate conglomerates stymied real economic change. How fortunate, I thought then, that the United States was not similarly plagued by crony capitalism! However, watching Goldman Sachs’s seeming lock on high-level U.S. Treasury jobs as well as the way that Republicans and Democrats alike tiptoed around reforming Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae — among the largest campaign contributors to Congress — made me wonder if the differences between the United States and the Asian economies were only a matter of degree.

On Wall Street there is an old joke that the longest river in the emerging-market economies is “de Nile.” Yet how often do U.S. leaders respond to growing signs of economic dysfunctionality by spouting nationalistic rhetoric that echoes the speeches of Latin American demagogues like Peru’s Alan Garcia in the 1980s and Argentina’s Carlos Menem in the 1990s? (Even Garcia, currently in his second go-around as Peru’s president, seems to have grown up somewhat.) But instead of facing our problems we extol the resilience of the U.S. economy, praise the most productive workers in the world, and go on and on about America’s inherent ability to extricate itself from any crisis. And we ignore our proclivity as a nation to spend, year in year out, more than we produce, to put off dealing with long-term problems, and to engage in grandiose long-term programs that as a nation we can ill afford.

Read the whole depressing thing.

Business, Economics, Political Commentary

Banning Guns By Zip Code

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You know, if we were to follow the logic that people use against the high penalties for crack cocaine, this law would be racist. Of course, as Glenn points out, that would be nothing new in gun-control laws. It has a long-established history of being employed to keep the “negras” from being too uppity.

And of course, it’s also, historically, the basis for things like the minimum wage and Davis-Bacon — to keep people of darker hue from competing for white folks’ jobs. Amusingly, it is another demonstration of Jonah Goldberg’s thesis that so-called progressives are unfamiliar with their own intellectual history.

One other point. Ironically, Barack Obama no doubt supports such laws, since he has talked about how laws for places like Iowa aren’t applicable in Chicago. But I doubt that he sees the irony.