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"The stream of Time, irresistible, ever moving, carries off and bears away all things that come to birth and plunges them into utter darkness, both deeds of no account and deeds which are mighty and worthy of commemoration. . .Nevertheless, the science of History is a great bulwark against the stream of Time; in a way it checks this irresistible flood, it holds in a tight grasp whatever it can seize floating on the surface and will not allow it to slip away into the depths of Oblivion. "
- Anna Comnena (1083-1153), The Alexiad
"I have taken all knowledge to be my province."
- Francis Bacon, 1592
Frederick Turner on our historical moment, how and why people are chosing the sides they are, and what it says about their perspective. Check it out (via Glenn Reynolds). Related to the Turner article is this piece.
Meanwhile, in the category of "Fisking Christmas Carols", I really like Bing Crosby's rendition of "Do You Hear What I Hear, but lets take a quick look a the lyrics, shall we?
Said the shepherd boy to the mighty king,
Do you know what I know
In your palace warm, mighty king,
Do you know what I know
A Child, a Child shivers in the cold
Let us bring Him silver and gold
Let us bring Him silver and gold
What's wrong with a blanket? What's an infant going to do with silver and gold?
Said the king to the people everywhere,
Listen to what I say
Pray for peace, people everywhere!
Of course we know what Herod the Great meant by peace: the same thing Saddam meant by peace, and the same thing the French, Germans, Russians, and most American Democrats mean by peace & stability.
So maybe it's not such a good song after all. Anyhow, if going around Fisking Christmas Carols is a factor, I guess that makes me Palpatine after all. This explains why I'm not too broken up about it. My political-economy would be better than that fostered by the Jedi with their accident-of-birth hauteur. The Galactic Republic seems to resemble the EU to closely for my taste. Better off under my rule.
Read this page, Austin Bay's musings on the possible ripple effects of Saddam's capture. If we follow through in the right way, which we seem to be doing.
It also depends a bit on what other breaks we get.
I don't want to give away the episode, but if you didn't watch South Park's "It's Christmas In Canada" tonight, you missed out. I'll just say: damn, those guys are fast. (hint).
Here are serious (using that word loosely), mainstream Democrats, Fisked by Andrew Sullivan. It's more fun going after them than, say, McDermott, and makes more sense because they're actually given credibility by the wider culture.
I bring that up because we can make a further point on Hillary!'s speech, specifically this section:
Now, some of us spoke out about the excesses of the Taliban regime, especially its treatment of women, and the Clinton administration did attempt, through military action with missiles, to ferret out bin Laden and his training camps. In the years that followed, the government looked for efforts, covert and overt, to try to hit bin Laden, but he was, as he is today, an elusive enemy.
September 11th gave us the opportunity as well as the obligation to do what there had been no domestic or international consensus to do before we were attacked on our own shores: to go into Afghanistan and to try to root out both the Taliban and al Qaeda.
Important fact to remember: the World Trade Center was first attacked when? in 1993. On our own soil. We had the "opportunity", and the obligation, to do what ought to have been done then. We didn't seize that moment as we should have.
3,000 people - both American and from many other countries - paid the price.
Certain people pat themselves on their back for their great leadership. Their actions consisted of responding with a brief flurry of missiles, talking tough from time to time, but they did not show the leadership needed to create either domestic or international consensus to undertake more serious efforts, which Hillary! implies strongly that they knew needed to be done if the matter was really going to be dealt with. They did make a plan, but, unlike Brian Boitano, they didn't follow through - not even to the extent of preparing the public for such an undertaking. Instead, they preferred to say we were in an era of "peace and prosperity", thanks to their stewardship.
Thanks to their putting off problems rather than confronting them. Thanks to them defering to France, Germany, Russia et al then as they say Bush should be doing now (more here). Leadership consists of doing what you know needs to be done, regardless of whether other countries want you to. It also consists of more than waiting till an "opportunity" in the form of thousands of dead citizens create a consensus you refused to forge.
Bush is not guiltless here, either. Neither are many other people. But one needs to recognize this disparity in Hillary's attitude on display in this section contrasted with her effectively insisting that once again we lapse back into the same pattern, deferring to others and believing consensus should dictate whether we act when we need to or not. Well, as Howard Dean so eloquently put it back before he was driven solely by partisan spite, "the French will always do exactly the opposite on what the United States wants regardless of what happens, so we're never going to have a consistent policy" so waiting for them to join a consensus on taking decisive action to prevent another three thousand or so people from being incinerated is folly.
We tried that, Senator Clinton. You were there. It didn't work very well. I can forgive the policy of the time, what I can't forgive is a failure to learn from experience.
No, the Guardian isn't all fun and games, risible arguments from petulant eternal adolecents. Julie Burchill has a good piece, well worth checkin' out.
Briefly yesterday I considered having the Guardian become for this website what the Financial Times Opinion & Analysis section used to be (before they foiled all our fun). But it'd be like shooting fish in a barrel. The FT has a pretense of being less ideologically driven - it's an organ of the smug elite, Establishment Europe (and their admirers in America) on parade. Shooting their fish was somewhat sporting and had a point to it, because it was tacking Our Would-Be Masters. Going after the larks in the Guardian is like fishing with hang grenades - a nice change of pace for amusement, but not really an intellectual challenge. Plus, many of the people writing hack pieces for the Guardian represent a disgruntled but defeated movement, trying to be sure to attach themselves like Ramora fish to the EU/UN-ichs, but not really the intellectual/ideological force behind the New Class Mandarinate. So it just wouldn't be the same.
But, again, not everything in the Guardian consists of laughable Leftist tropes. The Burchill piece, for example, on anti-Zionism, ant-Semitism, and Judeophobia.
(Link via Joe Willingham. I've been too busy lately to make many finds of my own).
Pitfalls of Bad Philosophy: After Virtue and Protest Politics
Re-reading something can sometimes bring to mind connections to something else. In an article quoting Alasdair MacIntyre (read this and this), one finds this section:
It is easy also to understand why protest becomes a distinctive moral feature of the modern age and why indignation is a predominant modern emotion. . . . Protest is now almost entirely that negative phenomenon which characteristically occurs as a reaction to the alleged invasion of someone's rights in the name of someone else's utility. The self-assertive shrillness of protest arises because . . . protestors can never win an argument: the indignant self-righteousness of protest arises because . . . the protestors can never lose an argument either. Hence the utterance of protest is characteristically addressed to those who already share the protestors' premises. . . . Protestors rarely have anyone else to talk to but themselves. This is not to say that protest cannot be effective; it is to say that it cannot be rationally effective.
Something to ponder as you go find the book After Virtue to see the argument in full.
Responding to this post, B. Varenius sends a link to this post by Mark Shea and says "but also scroll down".
Varenius also writes:
And as for the possibility of schism as a solution, I daresay you are thinking like a Protestant and not a Catholic/Eastern Orthodox on that one!
Probably. But one should look at the state of the Catholic Church, especially in Europe, and the dwindling respect for the authority of the Church's hierarchy, and by that I mean among Catholics, lapsed and otherwise. A good, open schism, challenge to the Church that induces a wave of reforms, is probably better for it than the current situation of steady withdrawal from it.
Schisms have arguably been good for the Catholic Church over the years, prompting internal re-thinking, rooting out of corruption and religious complacency (such as these Cardinals who are careerists and EU politicians first, and prelates of Christ second; genuflecting to the UN, not Christ - re-defining "Just War" as "sanctioned by the UN". I don't remember that in the teachings of Christ). The Jesuits and the counter-Reformation came out of some of that in the past. One also can think of things that stopped short of open schism: Bernard of Clairvault's push for monastic reforms. Pope Sylvester II came in after a rather embarrassing series of Popes and revitalized the Papacy (John Paul II did in his earlier years, but in my opinion it would have been better to have a new Pope five years ago or so. Unfortunately, the last several years have diminished, rather than enhanced, his legacy). The Papacy of Machiavelli's Italy wasn't gleaming brightly. It took a prod for internal reforms for the Church to revitalize its spiritual authority.
In my opinion, they need something to shake them up a bit. Focusing on UN approval as equating to a Just War shows just how far they've strayed from theology and into political concerns. Jesus' teachings have little or nothing to do with focusing on following secular procedural institutions as the instrument of his Justice. I doubt either he, or St. Augustine or the other theologians who formulated Just War theory based on Biblical teachings would define a Just War on the grounds that the current rulers of Syria or China or Russia assented to it or not. The fact that the Vatican seems to shows that their minds have wandered, if not that they have strayed from the path.
It's been a long time since the Catholic Church has faced a good schism, and it shows.
So I haven't bothered to write a post on either the latest delusional rantings of one Jim McDermott (D-WA) or the odd sympathies of the Vatican hierarchy for the plight of despotic rulers rather than, as I think Jesus would have, identifying with the plight of those he ruled. I guess I'm still mostly in the mode of not paying much attention to this stuff at the moment.
With respect to the hierarchy of the Catholic Church, I expect no different anymore. With regards to McDermott, dittoes. McDermott also isn't representative of Democratic office-holders, and the mainstream of Democratic politicians, such as Howard Dean or John Kerry or Ted Kennedy (&tc &tc ad infinatum ad nausium) say enough stupid things it makes more sense to focus on them.
I will say that Catholics might start consider an old fashioned schism, and that if the Democratic Party had as much self respect as Britain's Labour Party does, they'd do with the likes of McDermott what Labour did with Galloway. But the Democratic Party doesn't, and they won't, and their isn't even the whiff of the possibility that it's even seen as an option. Which does say a lot about the state of mainstream Democratic Party politics today.
And is a reason to be, as I am, intransigently committed to their utter and complete electoral defeat next year.
Btw: posting here is dwindling a bit and coming in fits and starts more 'cause we're entering the busy period at work (shipping stuff before Christmas). Things should return to a more normal level in early January (after Inventory Hell Week), just in case you're wondering wazzup and why, for example, I didn't have more to say about the two below articles (the Orson Scott Card one in particular contains lots of stuff I've been focusing on myself, with respect to the war and the Democratic Party's overall unseriousness on same).
In the meantime, I have to assume from this that, of course, Monibot naturally never flies:
[C]ommercial flights, like military flights, are an instrument of domination. As tourists, we engage with the people of other nations on our own terms. The world's administrators can flit from place to place enforcing their mandate. The corporate jet-set shrinks the earth to fit its needs. Those with access to the aeroplane control the world.
The men who attacked New York and Washington on September 11 2001 drove one symbol of power into another. The aeroplane, more precisely than any other technology, represents the global ruling class. In the past we raised our eyes to the men on horseback. Today we raise our eyes to the heavens.
Those hijackers had turned the civilian product of a military technology back into a military technology, but even when used for strictly commercial purposes, the airliner remains a weapon of mass destruction. Last week the World Health Organisation calculated that climate change is causing 150,000 deaths a year. This figure excludes deaths caused by drought and famine, pests and plant diseases and conflicts over natural resources, all of which appear to be exacerbated by global warming. Flying is our most effective means of wrecking the planet: every passenger on a return journey from Britain to Florida produces more carbon dioxide than the average motorist does in a year. Every time we fly, we help to kill someone.
So, of course Monibot, being a man of high principle and a man of peace, never flies anywhere. My friend Last Toryboy, who ICQ'd me the link, says that:
I read the Guardian occasionally for a laugh, I always find something there to chuckle about.
So I have been pondering how Saddam should be tried. So far the best reason I could come up with for creating an international tribunal such as was created for the Balkan and Rwandan trials is that Rudi Giuliani could be appointed chief Prosecutor.
I suppose Dominique de Villepin could head up the defense team, using sophistry and supercilious as his chief weapons on behalf of his client. But now that Saddam is deplorably unfashionable, he would probably demure.
So on balance, it would seem an Iraqi court remains the best option. But it would have been quite the courtroom clash.
It's always amusing watching the pro-EU elite twist themselves into ideological knots to rationalize deference to the Authoritah of the EU's Frankenreich avant garde. Nelson Ascher highlighted this gem in the Guardian yesterday. The editorial staff of the Guardian channels Bob Novak, analogizing government to a bank:
The immediate crisis came because it was intolerable for Germany, a rich modern nation of more than 80 million people which contributes 25% of the total EU budget, to allow Poland, a poor undeveloped nation of around 40 million people which is about to become one of the largest beneficiaries of that budget, to have almost as many votes as one another in the EU decision-making process. A bank in which the borrowers have as much control over the money as the lenders is a bank that will go out of business. That was the predicament Europe faced this weekend.
Now, this is respectable right-wing opinion: that those who pay taxes should perhaps have greater say than those who are net recipients of government benefits. After all, people voting themselves largess out of the treasury can be a worrisome problem.
It will be interesting to watch the Guardian apply their newfound insight. Perhaps they'll come out for a further reform of the House of Lords, advocating that its membership be elected by the top 20% of British wage-earners and taxpayers, and that the poor who receive government welfare assistance should be excluded from voting on the grounds that it is ruinous to British welfare - after all A bank in which the borrowers have as much control over the money as the lenders is a bank that will go out of business, right?
Oh, you're saying they're only going to apply this reasoning selectively? Not even across the board when it comes to the EU but only on occasions when it can advance the power of the EU elites? This doesn't reflect the Guardian's principled position on these things, you say?
Such a pity. I'm so disillusioned. I thought the Left was infused with high principle, not just the pursuit of power over others by any rationale that comes to mind at any given time, changing said rationales at whim.
I mentioned that for some people, it's one thing to be a ruthless bloodthursty despot, but the real sin is to be unfashionable - for example, here when discussing in the update how titles like "Maximum Leader" or "President for Life" are a big turn-off, unacceptable in the socially aware salons of Paris. Well, so is being an unkempt President hiding in a filthy hole in some rural (rural!) backwater. Lileks writes:
Right now the TV is playing a hastily assembled documentary of Saddam’s rise to power – it’s mostly clips of the butcher in tailored suits, smiling, at ease, in power. The suits always seem to blind certain people. They see the suits, they assume the best. They want to sign treaties, make contracts, lend money. Yes, yes, he is a hard man, but it is a hard part of the world, no? One must deal with someone. Saddam was said to have studied Stalin, and in one respect he trumped his idol. Stalin’s smile never reached his eyes. He was always looking around to see who on his team was smiling more than he was, or wasn’t smiling enough. But sometimes Saddam actually had a genuine smile. And why not? He had his people under his heel, and a good portion of the West in his pocket. The American presidents, they came and went. Granted, so did their bombs. But no American president knew what it was like to grow up poor in Tikrit. No American president had ever shot a man – soft hands, they had. They had big sticks, but big sticks taxed the arms of weak men, and they always laid them down eventually.
Hence the grin; hence the big wide open toothy grin. Top of the world, ma. Top of the world.
Many have noted that the sight of Saddam looking like Nick Nolte’s mugshot will have a harsh effect on our old seething friend, the Arab Street. They will see him looking like a piss-soaked bum with matted hair and bags under his eyes that look like Kathy Bates’ bosom, and they’ll see the Proud Example brought low, the man who had stood up to America humbled and unmanned. (That always makes me wonder how many fellow Arabs a man can kill before that crime exceeds the virtue of Standing Up to America. Half a million? One? Two?) What struck me was his expression when the doctor poked around in his maw for a suicide pill – he had the standard reflex familiar to anyone who’s been in a dentist’s chair. The intimacy of the act makes you look away. You look up; you endure; you disengage until it’s over. Saddam humiliated himself. A big bald Yank stuck a stick in his mouth and he couldn’t even look him in the eye.
Well, that's just uncool. No wonder the French are now willing to wash their hands of debt incurred by such a man.
By the way, no link to Lileks' post. If your policy is going to be something along these lines:
Something new Monday through Friday all month long! The bleat returns in January.
(No archives - skip a day, and it's gone.)
Then there's no point linking to it, is there? This point was also good, though:
I’ve read all the nutball far-left sites worrying about the worrisome worries – does this help Dub? Was it all faked? Surely America will see that the man paraded before the cameras was a soy-based simulacrum cooked up in the Halliburton labs? It’s amusing to troll the fevered swamps, but nothing they say matters in the end.
For me, the most annoying reaction to the capture of Saddam hasn't been from those who waive it off, or cry tears of regret over it, worry about what it does for their political fortunes, gnash their teeth over it (btw, we're not supposed to question their patriotism, or, when coming from overseas, their friendship).
It's been the refrain I've seen several times now: "will he get a fair trial?" Always in a context where it's apparent that, for the person raising that question, fair trial equals acquittal. It's as if we had all decided in the aftermath of WWII that Herman Goering should get off on a technicality. I believe in the Rule of Law - far more, I suspect, than those people raising this question - but fair application of the law for a monster against whom a surfeit of evidence of his crimes against humanity have piled up over the years means punishment.
I also believe the tale of the Little Red Hen applies here. Sometimes the only rational response is "bugger off".
The more one reflects - and, more to the point, observes the reaction of Iraqis, which rival if not surpass the reaction on the liberation of Baghdad - the more significant the capture of Saddam seems.
The capture, the finding of him in a small and carefully hidden hiding hole, should not be minimized. Likewise, don't let the ignorant say he was out of the loop: the fact that he was found in a small hole does not mean he lived there There was, apparently, no way to eat or even take a piss in the hole. This wasn't where he lived, it was where he hid when American troops were near (actually, one of many such places). He was found with weapons that he didn't use, and also with the minutes of a meeting of guerilla leaders (see here). So those who for their own insidious political reasons are trying to diminish the capture by downplaying his role are, as usual, full of fecal matter.
What they say reveals more about their attitudes towards successes rather than the campaign itself. They should be listened to - but only so their views can be noted, for they reveal the kind of people they are.
Likewise, this was not an easy capture, as I noted above. The supercilious can Monday Morning Quarterback blithely. But it should be noted, especially for the European among them, that Radovan Karadzic and Ratko Mladic haven't been found yet. It wasn't easy. But it's a blessing that it's been done. Yesterday was a great day and anyone who downplays that simply shows their lack of connection to reality, or that other motives drive their behavior. Today is a great day.
It's all the better that he was revealed not only as the murderous thug he was, but, in the end, a craven coward. The spell is lifted, his grip on peoples minds is over. It is natural to note here that there will still be difficulties ahead. But that should not cause us to cease being happy over what has happened.
Lee Harris on why the capture of Saddam is so important, and much to be prefered over the visceral shadenfreude that would have come from killing the Tyrant of the Tigris.
People often say, when the subject of bringing democracy and freedom to Iraq is mentioned, that their is a lot of work that needs to be done before that can happen, before they'll be able to meet our standards.
They clearly have yet to learn that the role of the press in a free society is to be neutral-indifferent to hostile and suspicious of everything done by your country and its friends, and to point out all the flaws, drawbacks, and focus on the negative in even the best of news.
I'm reminded of the SP: BLU Saddam song. In honor of the news that Atta trained in Iraq, I'm taking the lyrics from a Czech site:
I Can Change Saddam Hussein
Saddam: Some people say that I'm a bad guy,
They may be right, they may be right
But it's not as if I don't try,
I just fuck up! Try as I might!
But I can change, I can change!
I can learn to keep my promises, I swear it!
I'll open up my heart and I will share it!
Any minute now I will be born again!
Yes, I can change! I can change!
I know I've been a dirty little bastard!
I like to kill, I like to maim, yes I'm insane,
but it' OK, 'cause I can change!
It's not my fault that I'm so evil;
It's society, society!
You see, my parents were sometimes abusive,
And it made a prick of me!
But I can change! I can change!
I can learn to keep my promises, I know it!
I'll open up my heart and show it,
Any minute I will be born again!
Satan: But what if you never change?
What if you remain a sandy little butthole?
Saddam: Hey, Satan!
Don't be such a twit,
Mother Teresa won't have shit on me!
Just watch, just watch me change
Here I go! I'm changing!
Others are highlighting the "Coalition of the Pissy", a worthy task that needs to be done. I find myself without the interest to do that today. I'd rather focus on the good news rather than those people to whom good news for the country is bad news for them and their politics, ideology, whatever.
Let them stew. There will be time and occasion to focus on and highlight them in future weeks and months. Today, for me, is a day of happiness for the people of Iraq, off of whom finally the shadow of Saddam will lift. Here's Blair's reaction and the Telegraph report on the capture:
"We are celebrating like it's a wedding," said Mustapha Sheriff, a resident of Kirkuk. "We are finally rid of that criminal."
For today, I'm giving myself a Day-Pass, Leave, and not visiting the BBC or FT or the like.
Update: Mark at Kaedrin Weblog has a roundup of reactions.
Extraordinarily, the summit did not fail over an issue of principle: no one was objecting to the supremacy of EU law, or the creation of a European criminal justice system, or the huge increases in power for the European Commission and Parliament or, indeed, the very fact of having a European constitution.
Rather, the process foundered on the most tangential of questions: voting weights. It is as though the Philadelphia Convention of 1787 had failed because no one could agree on where the signing ceremony should take place.
Actually, it's as though the Philadelphia Convention failed because they couldn't agree on representation - a House of Representatives apportioned by population and a Senate with all States having equal representation. But I quibble (and on a morning like this).
This process had seen an astonishing - indeed, almost sinister - agreement on the broad picture. Everyone agreed that the EU should cease to be an alliance of states bound by international treaty, and become instead a single polity with its own constitution. So what on Earth happened?
To answer this question, it is necessary to recall a little of the EU's history. In the early days, there was near unanimity about Europe's unitary destination, the so-called finalite politique. The arguments only began in earnest when the six founder members were joined, in 1973, by Britain, Ireland and Denmark.
While the political elites of these new members were broadly happy with ever-closer union, they were constrained by the scepticism of their electorates. Indeed, it was at around this time that the word "Euro-sceptic" was coined.
Read the whole thing, when you get time. It includes this:
Whenever a new initiative was announced, the old Carolingian members would push for maximum harmonisation.
"Restored Carolingian Empire" indeed.
Update: Meanwhile, still lost in a haze of fantasy and delusion, Chirac is blaming Blair for the Constitution Summit's failure.
