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December 2018

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The Growing Poverty of Political Debate by Amir Taheri

By on December 30th, 2018

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/13489/political-debate

The European Union, too, is clearly on the decline. Despite Pollyannish talk of creating a European army and closer ties among member states, the EU has lost much of its original appeal and faces fissiparous challenges of which the so-called Brexit is one early example. I believe that the only way for the EU to survive, let alone prosper, is to recast itself as a club of nation-states rather than a substitute for them.

Another significant trend concerns the virtual collapse of almost all political parties across the globe. Within the year now ending, a number of mostly new parties forced their ways into the center of power in several European countries notably Hungary, Poland, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Holland and Sweden. Interestingly, the more ideological a party is, the more vulnerable it is to the current trend of decline in party politics. This is why virtually all Communist and nationalist parties have either disappeared or been reduced to a shadow of their past glory.

The massive development of cyberspace has given single-issue politics an unexpected boost. Today, almost anyone anywhere in the word could create his or her own echo-chamber around a pet subject. Here, the aim is to fight for one’s difference with as much passion as possible.That trend is in contrast with another trend, promoted by the traditional, or mainstream media, offering a uniform narrative of events. Turn on any TV or radio channel and go through almost any newspaper and you will be surprised by how they all say the same thing about what is going on.

As the year 2018 draws to a close, what are the trends that it highlighted in political life?

The first trend represents a growing global disaffection with international organizations to the benefit of the traditional nation-state. Supporters of the status quo regard that trend as an upsurge of populism and judge it as a setback for human progress whatever that means.

Today it is not the United Nations alone that is reduced to a backseat driver on key issues of international life. Its many tentacles, including the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank, too, have been reduced to a shadow of their past glory. In the 1990s, the two outfits held sway on the economies of more than 80 countries across the globe with a mixture of ideology and credit injection. Today, however, they are reduced to cheer-leading or name-calling from the ringside.

The European Union, too, is clearly on the decline. Despite Pollyannish talk of creating a European army and closer ties among member states, the EU has lost much of its original appeal and faces fissiparous challenges of which the so-called Brexit is one early example. I believe that the only way for the EU to survive, let alone prosper, is to recast itself as a club of nation-states rather than a substitute for them.

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Isaac Asimov, you were no Nostradamus By Joseph Hall

By on December 30th, 2018

https://www.thestar.com/news/world/2018/12/27/isaac-

In many ways, the world may seem more like 1984 today than it did in 1984.Electronic surveillance of our every keystroke. Shifting international alliances. Authoritarian risings. Fake News!

The dystopian world that George Orwell imagined 35 years before the year 1984 seems closer to today’s reality than it did in his 1949 book’s namesake year.

But on Dec. 31, 1983 — as the world was about to ring in that Orwellian year — another noted author took a crack at predicting what the world would look like a further 35 years hence, in 2019. And how well science fiction writer Isaac Asimov did in that Toronto Star special can now be examined as that year dawns.

Asimov — who died in 1992 — predicated all his New Year’s Eve forecasts on the assumption that the world could avert a nuclear war in the coming decades. And even as the intervening Cold War thaw appears to be refreezing — with a new nuclear arms race in the offing — our species did manage to avoid annihilation.

Thus we survive to gauge the accuracy of Asimov’s predictions in his other two essay themes: computerization and space utilization.

And it appears he was no Nostradamus.

For example, while he did predict there would be a space station up and running by 2019, planning for that international effort had been underway for years by the time of his writing.

Outside of some unmanned probes, however, the station was as far afield as humans would venture into the heavens over the next three and a half decades. And his fanciful visions of large mining projects on the moon — let alone the massive, orbiting structures they’d provide materials for — seem loony in hindsight.

On computers, he was equally hit-and-miss, says York University computer scientist Zbigniew Statchniak.

To be fair, Statchniak says, computing was advancing at such a speed as 1984 dawned that predicting where it might go would have been next to impossible.

“Having said that,” he adds, “I think he got easy things right and difficult things wrong.”

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Good Riddance, Syrian Civil War! By Nicholas L. Waddy

By on December 30th, 2018

https://amgreatness.com/2018/12/29/good-riddance-

The media and the political establishment’s excoriation of President Donald Trump for his decision to withdraw U.S. forces from the battlefield of eastern Syria has been blistering, as usual. Our exit from the Syrian Civil War is, in fact, well-timed and sensible. President Trump deserves praise for bucking the conventional Beltway wisdom to save the American people and, more importantly, American servicemen from this bloody quagmire.

It pays to recall how we became involved in Syria in the first place. In 2011, in the midst of the chaotic but hopeful “Arab Spring,” a number of global and regional powers, including the United States, decided that now was the perfect time to destabilize the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. Accordingly, the Obama Administration encouraged a popular rebellion, while denying the rebels the means to succeed in their revolt.

The result was a strategic and human nightmare. A civil conflict raged that wrecked the Syrian economy, obliterated cities, killed hundreds of thousands of civilians, and turned millions into desperate refugees. True, Assad is no angel, but the sufferings of the Syrian people since a host of outsiders, including the sage experts in the Obama White House, decided to “rescue” them have far outstripped any indignities that the Assad family could devise.

What was worse was the fact that the Syrian Civil War quickly devolved into senseless and disorganized violence, as the forces “rebelling” against the Assad regime became a multi-headed hydra of terrorists, fundamentalists, and thieves. True, some Syrians fought for democracy and freedom, but the conflict also became saturated with a wide assortment of villains, and with foreign actors—including Russians, Iranians, and Turks—who wished to exploit the opportunity to expand their influence.

Worst of all, Sunni extremists in eastern Syria coalesced into a new movement that became known as the Islamic State. ISIS imposed ironfisted repression, including slavery and torture, on a vast scale, while gruesome executions became the group’s calling card.

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Jonah Goldberg and Cardinal Newman By Roger Kimball

By on December 30th, 2018

https://amgreatness.com/2018/12/29/jonah-goldberg-and

My friend Jonah Goldberg has prompted me to think a bit about the issue of character as it relates to public service. Jonah thinks that Donald Trump is a man of bad character. He’s written this several times, most recently, I believe, at National Review where he puts it negatively: it is an “obvious truth,” he says, that “President Trump is not a man of good character.”

In August, on Twitter, Jonah issued a challenge that, he noted, he had been pressing for three years: “Please come up with a definition of good character that Donald Trump can clear.”

I’ll take a crack at that in a moment. First, I want to agree, at least provisionally, with Jonah’s observation in his column that “Character is one of those topics, like culture or morality, that everyone strongly supports yet also argues about.” I say “provisionally” because although I agree that character, culture, and morality are typically matters that interest us deeply and, hence, are things that we endlessly discuss and often argue about, I am not quite sure what he means when he says that “everyone strongly supports” them. Thinking it over, I am not sure I have ever heard anyone say “I support character.” Have you?

Jonah is fond of quoting Heraclitus’s aphorism ἦθος ἀνθρώπῳ δαίμων against the president. He says that it is “most often” translated as “man’s character is his fate.” It has indeed been translated thus, but it is perhaps more accurately translated as “Man’s character is his daimon.” The usual Greek word for fate is μοῖρα. “Daimon,” which was that inner admonitory voice that Socrates said guided him, is something else.

While I am at it, I should perhaps also say I am not sure that ēthos means quite what Jonah’s weaponization of the aphorism implies. As I understand it, ēthos means one’s settled disposition; the Liddell and Scott lexicon mentions the Latin word ingenium among its definitions. Someone in the early modern era might have described it as a man’s “humor.” Jonah begins his most recent column by noting

For a very long time now, I have been predicting that the Trump presidency will end poorly because character is destiny.

The logic is: Trump’s character is bad. Character is destiny. Ergo Trump’s administration will come a cropper. The aphorism by Heraclitus is offered as confirmation of this syllogism.

It is, I’ll admit, amusing to speculate about what Heraclitus would have made of Donald Trump. But for my money, a more pertinent saying of the old Ephesian is φύσις κρύπτεσθαι φιλεῖ: the true nature of things likes to conceal itself.

In any event, Jonah goes on to say, notwithstanding the “obvious truth” that Donald Trump is “not a man of good character,” some people disagree and, mirabile dictu, “seem to have convinced themselves that Trump is a man of good character.” Some of these people, moreover, “take personal offense at the insult, even though I usually offer it as little more than an observation.” The contention that Trump is “not a man of good character,” you see, although it is “an insult,” is also an “obvious truth.” Which is to say, like the proposition “All men are mortal,” one is not free to disagree with it. You might dislike it. You might wish it were not true. But there is something coercive about “an obvious truth.” It is simply beyond debate.

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George Washington’s Prescient Words By Eileen F. Toplansky

By on December 30th, 2018

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2018/12/george_washingtons_prescient_words.html

As the man who was “first in the hearts of his countrymen,” George Washington wrote guiding principles for the newly established country in his Farewell Address of 1796. He stressed:

… that the ‘national Union’ formed the bedrock of ‘collective and individual happiness’ for U.S. citizens. As he explained, ‘The name of AMERICAN, which belongs to you, in your national capacity, must always exalt the just pride of Patriotism, more than any appellation derived from local distinctions.’

We see the degradation of this idea of patriotism as the left continually hammers away that America is the nexus of evil. One need only read the 1994 book titled Unsettling America: An Anthology of Contemporary Multicultural Poetry, which states in its introduction that the “nostalgic vision of a simple, harmonious past … obscures the long history of oppression within the United States.” The editors choose “not to be all inclusive [or] create a pluralistic play of voices.” Instead, they choose “poems that directly address the instability of American identity and confront the prevalence of cultural conflict and exchange within the United States … [in order] to highlight the constant erecting, blurring, breaking, clarifying, and crossing of boundaries that are a consequence of the complex intersections among people’s cultures, and languages within national borders.”

Hail to the fact that the country is not afraid to deal with its past, but woe to the students who receive such a skewed and narrow interpretation of what the country has accomplished.

Dinesh D’Souza writes in his Death of a Nation that “in other countries, a flag is just a flag, but in America … the flag is the symbol of a founding event, emerging out of the Revolutionary War that articulated principles that could only be fully expressed almost ninety years later in the aftermath of one of the bloodiest civil wars in history.” America is “a product of design that gave rise to an American dream[.] … There is no such thing as a French dream, an Indian dream, a Chinese dream. Identity in other countries is based on birth and blood; but in America it is based on embracing American ideals and the American way of life. That’s why the American tribe is so multiracial and includes white people, black people and brown people.”

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Bre Payton, Beloved Staff Writer At The Federalist R.I.P. (1992-2018)

By on December 29th, 2018

http://thefederalist.com/2018/12/28/bre-payton-beloved-staff-writer-passed-away/

Bre Payton, our beloved staff writer for The Federalist, passed away on Friday in San Diego, California following a sudden illness.

Bre was born in California on June 8, 1992, to George and Cindy Payton.

She received her high school diploma from the Western Christian High School Private Satellite Program. She graduated from Patrick Henry College in 2015 with a degree in journalism.

Bre joined The Federalist in April of 2015. In the space of just a few years, she became a rising star on cable news, regularly featured as political commentator on Fox News Channel, Fox Business Channel, and OANN.

Bre brightened the lives of everyone around her. She was joyful, hard-working, and compassionate, and she leaves behind friends and colleagues for whom she brought nothing but sweetness and light.

Though we are heartbroken and devastated by Bre’s death, we are comforted in the knowledge that she was a woman who lived a life marked by deep Christian faith, trusting in her Savior, Jesus Christ – in the God who promises the way our story ends is that “He will wipe every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more.”

Bre is survived by her parents, George and Cindy; siblings James, Jack, Christina, and Cheekie; and boyfriend Ryan Colby. Her family would appreciate privacy and your prayers as they grieve this loss.

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Kavanaugh’s Trial by Ordeal: Burning Truth in Effigy Peter Murphy

By on December 29th, 2018

https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2018/12/kavanaughs-trial-by-ordeal-burning-truth-in-effigy/

The news from Washington is that 85-year-old Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the lionised liberal so often depicted as the Supreme Court’s heroic bulwark against Trumpism, has lung cancer. When the time comes, will it be possible to find a replacement prepared to face the Jacobin accusations and evidence-free slanders heaped on a blameless man?

The smearing of US Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh was hardball politics at its most disingenuous. The stakes were unambiguous. The Democrats and their supporters wanted to delay and derail his nomination. The tactic was to wait till the end of the regular nomination hearing and then leak an accusation that the judge was guilty of sexual misconduct. Base politics for sure, but Democrats had tried twice before to derail a Supreme Court nomination with confected allegations. So the ploy was not surprising. Republicans kept their nerve. They patiently navigated three weeks of brutal character assassination of a major public figure with a spotless track record.[1] In the course of those days the Democrats attempted to turn the supplementary Senate Judiciary Committee hearing into a show trial. As that unfolded, the very nature of “Brett Kavanaugh” changed. He was transformed from a nominee for America’s highest court into a symbol of America’s political division.

A part of Kavanaugh’s trial by ordeal was simple political payback. Kavanaugh had worked under Ken Starr at the Office of Independent Counsel investigating legal matters related to Bill Clinton’s sexual conduct. Kavanaugh’s appointment as a Circuit Judge to the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia was blocked by Democrats for three years during the George W. Bush presidency.[2] The Kavanaugh imbroglio, though, turned out to be much more than just opportunistic payback. The two weeks of attempted trashing of Kavanaugh’s life and reputation tapped a much deeper vein in American life. A tsunami of protest, pressure, intimidation, bluster, stunts, grandstanding, demagoguery, defamation and table-thumping erupted across much of left-leaning America, leaving moderates and conservatives shocked.

At a certain point the Kavanaugh hearing stopped being about him. Instead it become a reckoning of the broader America society with itself, in particular a reckoning about the nature of truth. The Democrats put truth on trial. The result was disturbing. The Kavanaugh ordeal revealed that long-observed and once keenly-held notions of evidentiary truth have been rejected by a substantial minority of Americans, many of them in the vocal professional-managerial elite.[3] Evidentiary truth means that an allegation or claim that we make about serious matters needs to be backed up with compelling facts and independent observations before it can be accepted.

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UK Welcomes Extremists, Bans Critics of Extremists by Douglas Murray

By on December 29th, 2018

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/13455/britain-extremists

In November, it was reported that the Pakistani Christian mother of five, Asia Bibi, was unlikely to be offered asylum by the British government due to concerns about “community” relations in the UK. What this means is that the UK government was worried that Muslims of Pakistani origin in Britain may object to the presence in the UK of a Christian woman who has spent most of the last decade on death row in Pakistan, before being officially declared innocent of a trumped-up charge of “blasphemy”.

One person who has had no trouble being in London is Dr Ataollah Mohajerani, Iran’s former Minister of Culture and Islamic Guidance. Mohajerani is best known for his book-length defence of the Ayatollah Khomeini’s fatwa against the British novelist Salman Rushdie.

This week we learned that the UK government has allowed in a man called Brahim Belkaid, a 41-year old of German origin, believed to have inspired up to 140 people to join al-Qaeda and ISIS. His Facebook messages have included messages with bullets and a sword on them saying, “Jihad: the Only Solution”.

It is almost as though the UK government has decided that while extremist clerics can only rarely be banned, critics of such clerics can be banned with ease. The problem is that the trend for taking a laxer view of extremists than of their critics keeps on happening.

The British government’s idea of who is — and who is not — a legitimate asylum seeker becomes stranger by the month.

In November it was reported that the Pakistani Christian mother of five, Asia Bibi, was unlikely to be offered asylum by the British government due to concerns about “community” relations in the UK. What this means is that the UK government was worried that Muslims of Pakistani origin in Britain may object to the presence in the UK of a Christian woman who has spent most of the last decade on death row in Pakistan, before being officially declared innocent of a trumped-up charge of “blasphemy”.

Yet, as Asia Bibi – surely one of the people in the world most needful of asylum in a safe country – continues to fear for her life in her country of origin, Britain’s idea of who should be allowed to travel to the country (and stay) looks ever more perverse.

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POLITICS Comments turned off

It’s Not That Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Knows Nothing . . . By Chris Buskirk

By on December 29th, 2018

https://amgreatness.com/2018/12/28/its-not-that-alexandria

Many on the right say she is a millennial know nothing. That’s not true. It’s just that everything she thinks she really knows is wrong.

As tragedy struck an acquaintance this week, I was reminded today of the fleeting nature of life. The Psalmist begged God, “O Lord, make me know my end and what is the measure of my days; let me know how fleeting I am!” What can one say to that but, Amen! As important and precious as our lives are, they are fleeting, delicate, ephemeral.

But Christmas is a season when we pause to remember and to honor the advent of the Creator who took on human vesture, as the Liturgy of St. James so memorably puts it, and in doing so we catch a glimpse of the eternal. Politics, though important, gets put into perspective.

Yet Christmas was also the day I was reminded of how quickly and perversely even the highest things are misused for low purposes. I realized almost immediately that I had made a mistake when, out of sheer habit, I looked at Twitter on Christmas morning. Within moments I happened upon a tweet from the Bronx’s newest congresswoman, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

It began cheerfully enough: “Joy to the world.” Wonderful. “Merry Christmas everyone.” And a Merry Christmas to you, too! I thought. Look, per Rodney King, we can all just get along if only for a morning. The congresswoman-elect continued: “. . . here’s to a holiday filled with happiness, family, and love . . .” Lovely. Sounds like just the way to spend Christmas.

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They Shall Not Grow Old a box office blowout – for good reason By Monica Showalter

By on December 29th, 2018

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2018/12/they_shall_not_grow_old_a_box_office_blowout__and_for_good_reason.html

Was there ever a more consequential war than World War I? As a result of the bickering petty politics of Europe’s inbred monarchs, we got communism and the Soviet empire from it, for one. We got 37 million deaths, millions and millions of bright people, a death toll so high that it skewed the demographics of nations such as France. We got grotesque forms of warfare – trench warfare, chemical warfare, and Howitzers, shell shock, tanks, and huge civilian death tolls. We also got the breakup of the Austro-Hungarian empire – Europe’s first truly internationalist empire of tolerance and melting pots – to be replaced by the crummy and oppressive European Union. We got the creation of the morally relativistic cultural Eurotrashiness of Europe in that war’s wake, too – dada art, stupid other kinds of modern art, and a Europe that refuses to fight or stand up for itself, no matter what may come down the pike. The death toll allows us to recognize the rationale with sympathy. And as an awful coda, the war was so badly resolved that it led to a second and even bigger world war. So this is a war that’s still very much with us in effects, one hundred years after the armistice was signed.

This is why Peter Jackson’s brilliant documentary is so compelling, just on topic alone. It’s the 100th anniversary of that war’s end, and the Imperial War Museum wanted someone to come in and look at its archives of grainy, jerky, faded, black and white footage to bring back to everyone today just what happened, show how that war looked. Jackson, the Academy Award-winning director of The Lord of the Rings, who has an artist’s eye for color, visuals, and framing a story, did a brilliant job framing this one through the eyes of the British ordinary soldiers in the war, having them tell their stories in the documentary, using oral histories from the BBC taken in the 1960s and 1970s, and pairing it with on-the-ground war footage of the soldiers themselves – signing up, uniforming up, acting like the World War II soldiers with “a job to do” – and dealing with trench warfare, privations, mustard gas attacks, Howitzer attacks, land mines, barbed wire, rats, lice, and bloody dead bodies, with considerable courage and aplomb. Not all of them were victims, as literary classics such as All Quiet on the Western Front or A Farewell to Arms suggested, worthy as those writings are (and what a pity the Millennials don’t read them). The soldiers cracked jokes, got used to deaths all around them, and dealt with the ordeal.

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