Category Archives: War Commentary

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, War Commentary

Correcting The Progressive Spin

6 Comments

…”on my defense of the Marines.”

They’re not anti-war, they just hate our military.

Oh, and if anyone is curious as to what I think, I think that it was almost criminally stupid (the same thing I thought about the morons at Abu Ghraib), but I didn’t think that George Bush was responsible for that, and I don’t think that Barack Obama is responsible for this. Sometimes, in war time, (and in peace time) people do stupid things. And like Dana, I’ll take the leftists’ outrage seriously when they show some concern about the real atrocities that the enemy (with whom we’re negotiating to surrender to) commits.

[Update a few minutes later]

An open letter to the armed forces, from Andrea Harris.

[Late morning update]

Allan West: “Shut your mouth. War is hell.”

Business, Economics, Political Commentary, Technology and Society, War Commentary

The Shale Revolution

1 Comment

Is going to have long-term geopolitical effects:

“So far this century, this is the biggest innovation in energy, in terms of scale and impact,” according to U.S. analyst Daniel Yergin, author of a classic history of the oil industry, “The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money and Power”, who emphasised that one-third of all the gas produced in the United States is already extracted from shale gas reserves.

…In Ramírez’s view, “the abundance and new distribution of reserves of shale gas and other non-conventional fossil fuels will affect predictions about the relationship between energy and the economy, and will have major geopolitical effects.

“An initial effect is that the largest and best discoveries are outside the Organisation of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC),” which will see its influence on the global energy market diminish in the long run, the expert said.

At the same time, Ramírez said, Russia will embark on the race to consolidate its position as a major global actor on the basis of its energy resources; Canada will emerge as a world oil power; and the United States, its supply secure, could feel freer from the vagaries of Middle East conflicts.

Can’t happen soon enough.

Political Commentary, Social Commentary, War Commentary

Mullah Ron Paul

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Thoughts on the congressman’s defense of Iran, from Spengler.

And thoughts on Ron Paul’s real racism from Roger Simon:

Paul’s racial bias is more complex and intense than what has already been alleged of his attitudes towards blacks and Jews. He thinks even less of Muslims. He treats the Islamic world as if they do not have views of their own, their own ideology. In essence, he does not take them seriously as people and claims their actions are largely a result of American (and presumably Western) imperialistic behavior.

In other words, Muslims are children who could not possibly have the beliefs they do of their own accord and choose to act on those beliefs. They only do what they do because of us.

Besides being ethnocentric in the extreme, this negates many centuries of history — the majority of which took place before the U.S. even existed — and an entire, highly evolved system of religious, philosophical, and social thought. Whether Paul does this out of ignorance or arrogance I am not sure, but his disregard of Islam as something to be taken seriously in and of itself is particularly stunning when that ideology is close to the most antithetical imaginable to Paul’s self-proclaimed libertarianism.

Yes, by denigrating the Muslims’ moral agency, he dehumanizes them.

[Update a few minutes later]

I should note that denying moral agency to Muslims is something that the left has been doing ever since 911.

Political Commentary, War Commentary

“Hamas Is Our Role Model”

5 Comments

So says the Muslim Brotherhood.

This isn’t going to end well.

[Update a few minutes later]

Reflections on the wishful thinking about Egypt:

There are wolves all too ready to profit from the gamboling of the sheep. Indeed, they are even quite willing to put on a wool disguise to lull them further into daydreams. The French aristocrat who converted to Catholicism to be king said that Paris was well worth a mass. The Islamists think that Cairo is well worth inviting dumb American journalists to dinner and being hospitable to them.

It’s the same generally with the West, dreaming of a moderate Palestinian state at peace with Israel; of moderate Islamists happily preserving their religion of peace; of Middle Easterners expressing gratitude to those wonderful Westerners who stopped backing dictators and evil Zionists to support instead the masses’ legitimate aspirations; and all the rest of that man-made global balminess.

Try to explain your good intentions to the firing squad. Blindness and wishful thinking are traits one cannot afford in the Middle East because the price for them is going to be very, very high.

The old joke about denial not being a river in Egypt seems particularly apropo here.