FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

Foreign Policy as Moral Preening Why we must take the world as it is, not as we dream it to be. Bruce Thornton

Posted By on October 26th, 2018

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/271711/foreign-policy-moral-preening-bruce-thornton

The murder of Jamal Khashoggi, a Saudi regime insider and columnist, in Istanbul continues to dominate the news cycle as the president and Congress consider their response. Despite the dog-bites-man nature of the story–– autocrats and tyrants across the globe regularly eliminate political enemies without such intense outrage from the West–– our media and politicians have conducted an orgy of moral preening, thunderous denunciations, and various proposed punishments of Saudi heir to the throne Mohammed bin Salman.

Once again, the cheap idealism and hypocrisy of the self-righteous West illustrates the dangers that come from a foreign policy based on illusion rather than on the tragic reality of human nature and action.

Much of this outrage results from the fact that Khashoggi worked as a columnist for the Washington Post and possessed a green card. Ignoring the distinction between journalists who supposedly report facts, and an editorial page columnist who gives opinions, both progressive and conservative media have turned Khashoggi into a martyr of the Fourth Estate, an intrepid seeker of facts and watchdog of the public weal.

Only a few commentators have reported on the real nature of Khashoggi’s “analyses.” Khashoggi was an Islamist press agent for Osama bin Laden and the Muslim Brotherhood, the mother-ship of modern jihadism, and a critic of the Saudi regime not for its human rights offenses, but for bin Salman’s war against the Iranian supported jihadists in Yemen, his hostility to the Muslim Brotherhood, his break with Qatar for supporting Hamas and Hezbollah, and his desire for closer ties with the U.S. Khashoggi was a “dissident” alright, but one who opposed the reformist policies of the regime that align with the interests of the U.S., and who wooed gullible Westerners with sweet-talk of Islamists “reform.”

The media’s elevation of Khashoggi, of course, also serves their anti-Trump agenda, ever on the watch for anything that can be turned against the president. Having created the caricature of Trump as an “autocrat” in the making who has a soft spot for fellow autocrats, the media have elevated the killing of Khashoggi, and the ongoing investigation of its circumstances, into 24/7 flogging the president and parsing his every word for signs of indulgence of bin Salman’s actions, or asserting dark conspiracies about “hit lists” coming from the White House.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Europe’s Crisis of Survival by Giulio Meotti

Posted By on October 26th, 2018

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/13186/europe-crisis-survival

In facing this existential challenge, a downward spiral in which Europeans seem to be slowly dying out by failing to reproduce, it seems that Europe has also lost all confidence in its hard-won Enlightenment values, such as personal freedoms, reason and science replacing superstition, and the separation of church and state. These are critical if Europe truly wishes to survive.

In Western Germany, 42% of children under the age of six now come from a migrant background, according to Germany’s Federal Statistical Office, as reported by Die Welt.

“[I]f you look through history, where the Church slept, got diverted away from the Gospel, Islam took the advantage and came in. This is what we are seeing in Europe, that the Church is sleeping, and Islam is creeping in… Europe is being Islamized, and it will affect Africa.” — Catholic Bishop Andrew Nkea Fuanya of Cameroon.

“The possibility that Europe will become a museum or a cultural amusement park for the nouveau riche of globalization is not completely out of the question.” This thought of Europe as a vast cultural theme park was presented by the late historian Walter Laqueur, who, for his far-sighted prognosis about Europe’s crisis, has been called “the indispensable pessimist.” Laqueur was one of the first to understand that the current deadlock in which the continent finds itself goes far beyond economics. The point is that the days of European strength are over. Because of low birth rates, Europe is dramatically shrinking. If current trends continue, Laqueur said, a hundred years from now Europe’s population “will be only a fraction of what it is today, and in two hundred, some countries may have disappeared.”

Sadly, the “death of Europe” is drawing nearer, is becoming more visible and is more frequently discussed by popular writers.

“At a time when literature is increasingly marginalized in public life, Michel Houellebecq offers a striking reminder that novelists can provide insights about society that pundits and experts miss,” the New York Times wrote about arguably the most important French author. Houellebecq “speaks” through his best-selling novels, such as Submission, as well as his public lectures. The last conference that Houellebecq attended in Brussels — on the occasion of the Oswald Spengler Prize, commemorating the author of The Decline of the West — was dedicated to that topic. “To sum up,” Houellebecq said, “the Western world as a whole is committing suicide.”

POLITICS Comments turned off

ELECTIONS ARE COMING: CONNECTICUT GOVERNOR RACE: NED LAMONT (D) VS. BOB STEFANOWSKI (R)

Posted By on October 25th, 2018

https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-connecticut-rescue-plan-1540509346
A Connecticut Rescue Plan The state’s economy has shrunk 9.3% since 2007. Time for a change?

For Connecticut taxpayers, the eight years of Democratic Gov. Dannel Malloy may feel like Groundhog Day. High taxes have repressed economic growth, swelling budget deficits that Democrats have “solved” by raising taxes again and again. This year voters face a choice of whether they want to relive this misery for four more years or take a risk on a growth remedy.

Once upon a time Connecticut had no income tax and attracted high earners from all over the Northeast. From 1976 to 1991, Connecticut led the country in GDP growth. But its fairy tale economy began to end in 1991 with its enactment of a flat 4.5% income tax. That soon became a “progressive” tax, and rates have since climbed while taxpayers have fled.

After the financial crisis, former GOP Gov. Jodi Rell raised the top rate on individuals earning more than $500,000 to 6.5% from 5%. Mr. Malloy pushed the top rate to 6.7% in 2011 and 6.99% in 2015, notwithstanding his re-election promise not to raise taxes. He also imposed a 10% surtax on corporate income over $100 million. Connecticut’s 8.25% top corporate rate exceeds that of all of its neighbors.

The result has been a lost decade of growth. Connecticut’s GDP has shrunk an incredible 9.3% since 2007 and declined by 0.5% on average annually during Mr. Malloy’s governorship. Revenue growth for the government has been sluggish as businesses and high-earners have decamped to lower-tax states. Over the last five years $8.8 billion in income has left the state, mostly to Florida.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Boko Haram Put a Bounty on My Head Nigeria’s president plays down the jihad against Christians as an ethnic ‘clash.’ By Hassan John

Posted By on October 25th, 2018

https://www.wsj.com/articles/boko-haram-put-a-bounty-on-my-head-1540507593

I received a phone call several years ago saying that someone had found my wallet, and I could pick it up at an abandoned racetrack. I don’t carry a wallet. Shortly thereafter, while investigating a story about a massacre of Christians in the Middle Belt of Nigeria, I saw a charcoal message emblazoned on a wall: “Hassan, we know about you and will meet you one day.” A Muslim friend confirmed that Boko Haram had put a bounty of $700 on my head. Such is life for a pastor in modern Nigeria.

Nigerian Christianity is under siege from radical Islam. The country’s importance to Africa, and to Christianity as a whole, makes this siege particularly noteworthy. With a population of nearly 200 million—about 50% Christian, 40% Muslim and 10% animist—by 2050 Nigeria will become the third most populous country in the world, the United Nations estimates. No wonder Nigeria has been a strategic target for radical Islamists for several decades.

Boko Haram, a radical Islamic movement whose name roughly translates to “Western education is forbidden,” has ramped up attacks on Christians this year. Since 2009 when Boko Haram began its rampage, about 20,000 Nigerians have been hacked with machetes or shot. Two million have been displaced. Pastors and their families have been specifically targeted for death.

The government’s response has deepened Christian frustrations. President Muhammadu Buhari, a Muslim, describes the violence as “clashes” between Fulani tribesmen and farmers, who are mostly Christian. But many Christians, who often become refugees, believe the government is telling the world what it wants to hear, that this has nothing to do with religion. Yet why are all the attackers Boko Haram? And why do they target Christians? We sense that Muslims generally are killed as collateral damage, not as primary targets.

MEDIA, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

The Comment Awards Fiasco written by Claire Fox

Posted By on October 25th, 2018

https://quillette.com/2018/10/25/the-comment

The issue of press freedom has been making headlines in recent days—for all the wrong reasons. Murdered journalists are a visceral reminder of the risks that many around the world take to tell the truth. It is one of the reasons that whenever I am asked to judge media awards, I say yes. Over the years, I have judged the Foreign Press Association Awards, the Society of Editors’ National Press Awards and, most recently, Editorial Intelligence’s Comment Awards, now in its 10th year. I am happy to read dozens of articles, to spend time really thinking about who should be shortlisted, get the accolades and so on because it seems important to honor great journalism, to give credit to those scribblers who make a difference through their writing.

Mainstream media (MSM) and, indeed, many new media outlets are a crucial part of our public square. It is true that, in recent years, the much derided MSM regularly stands accused of self-congratulatory smugness. All the more reason to shake up any complacency by congratulating those whose writing cuts through, that enlightens, entertains, drags us screaming out of our comfort zones. At a time when screeching tweets can replace well-argued analysis, and trolling is given as much credence as thoughtful commentary, finding ways of encouraging stand-out commentators on all sides of the political spectrum who share their thoughts in trying to make sense of a world riven by change and challenge is a worthy cause. With the brutal tragedy of Jamal Khashoggi’s murder as a backdrop, publicly acknowledging the achievements of journalists is one modest way of pressing home why a free press matters. Which is why the tawdry tale of how identity politics has turned the 2018 Comment Awards into a vehicle to attack nominated journalists is rather tragic and self-defeating.

Firstly, two of the shortlisted nominees for the Society and Diversity award, Guardian journalists Gary Younge and Nesrine Malik, demanded that they were removed from the shortlist, because Times columnist Melanie Phillips appeared on the same list. We have become accustomed to people refusing to share platforms with others. But refusing to be on the same shortlist? They argued that shortlisting Phillips “legitimizes her offensive attacks on immigrants…and Muslims” and that her “body of work…amounts to bigotry and divisiveness.” I don’t agree, but I accept that it’s fair comment if that is what those journalists believe. But to conclude that they don’t even want their name next to hers on a list compiled in good faith by the awards’ judges? That seems itself to be an example of divisiveness and a snub to one form of diversity: that of diverse opinion.

ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

The Psychology of Progressive Hostility written by Matthew Blackwell *****

Posted By on October 25th, 2018

https://quillette.com/2018/03/10/psychology-progressive-hostility/

Recently, I arrived at a moment of introspection about a curious aspect of my own behavior. When I disagree with a conservative friend or colleague on some political issue, I have no fear of speaking my mind. I talk, they listen, they respond, I talk some more, and at the end of it we get along just as we always have. But I’ve discovered that when a progressive friend says something with which I disagree or that I know to be incorrect, I’m hesitant to point it out. This hesitancy is a consequence of the different treatment one tends to receive from those on the Right and Left when expressing a difference of opinion. I am not, as it turns out, the only one who has noticed this.

“That’s a stupid fucking question,” answered a Socialist Alliance activist when I asked sincerely where they were getting what sounded like inflated poverty statistics. “If you don’t believe in gay marriage or gun control, unfriend me,” demand multiple Facebook statuses from those I know. “That’s gross and racist!” spluttered a red-faced Ben Affleck when the atheist and neuroscientist Sam Harris criticized Islamic doctrines on Bill Maher’s Real Time. Nobody blinks an eye when Harris criticizes Christianity, least of all Affleck, who starred in Kevin Smith’s irreverent religious satire Dogma. But Christians are not held to be a sacrosanct and protected minority on the political Left. As Skeptic Magazine’s Michael Shermer tweeted recently:
Michael Shermer ✔ @michaelshermer

“When I debate Christians, Jews, Creationists, climate deniers etc. they are unfailingly polite, respectful, thoughtful, discerning, & listen to my arguments. Far Left SJWs do not. They simply look for fault & pounce. ”

Outbursts of emotional hostility from progressive activists – now described as Social Justice Warriors or SJWs – have come to be known as getting ‘triggered.’ This term originally applied to sufferers of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, but activists have adopted it to describe the anxiety and discomfort they experience when they are exposed to views with which they disagree. “Fuck free speech!” one group of social justice advocates recently told Vice Media, as if this justified the growing belief among university students that conservatives should be prevented from speaking on college campuses. It’s no secret that, with the rise of the triggered progressive, university professors are increasingly intimidated by their own students. An illustrative example of this alarming trend was provided by the hoards of screaming students who surrounded the distinguished Yale sociologist Nicholas Christakis and demanded his head (which they duly received). Christakis had made the mistake of defending an email his wife had written gently criticizing Yale’s attempts to regulate students’ Halloween costumes. “Who the fuck hired you?!” screamed one irate student in response. “You should step down!”

ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

David F. Smith The Charade of “Carbon Pollution”

Posted By on October 25th, 2018

https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2010/03/the-charade-of-carbon-pollution/

We see too much bad science, lack of scientific accuracy, and imprecision. The most appalling and consistently bad example is reference to “carbon” when carbon dioxide is intended, but there are plenty more. Known falsehoods are blithely repeated. Why are scientists and scientific societies not protesting?

There is no need to open the newspaper: there are examples on the front page. On the front page of the Australian of January 28: “Wong presses on with 5pc carbon reduction target”. There was a (slightly) more comforting main headline, “Be truthful on climate change: science boss”, but no reference to carbon or carbon dioxide. Inside the paper Bjorn Lomborg wrote that “spending on R&D would produce … breakthroughs … needed to fuel a carbon-free economy for the entire planet”. Carbon-free? Carbon underpins the life of the planet!

Under the main headline, the British government’s chief scientific adviser, Dr John Beddington, urged more honest disclosure of uncertainty about the speed of climate change and less hostility to sceptics. Australia’s chief scientist, Dr Penny Sackett, said she shared his concerns. I would urge both of them to go further and encourage a culture of precision. We also have a right to expect protests about such things from our august scientific bodies—the royal societies, the Academy of Science, the science teachers’ associations. Our Prime Minister has a desire to lead the world in the whole matter—perhaps we could lead the world in differentiating between carbon and carbon dioxide!

Forgive me, I am a polluter! Well, that is what many, including the United States Environment Protection Agency, are claiming, simply because we produce carbon dioxide. The Agency has proclaimed carbon dioxide a pollutant, which it is not, by any stretch of the imagination or sophistry. The explanation was that the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is so important that President Obama had to have power over decisions regardless of Congress. Thus he was able to give some commitment at Copenhagen.

ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

Judy Stove: Why Jordan Peterson Matters

Posted By on October 25th, 2018

https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2018/10/jordan-peterson-matters/

The Canadian professor’s entire moral enterprise arose from his horror at the ease with which murderous ideologies came to possess ordinary people. Most of us look only briefly at that matter and others, unsettling as they are, but Peterson explores the very bases of such thought and being.

The cultural world changed after the UK Channel 4 interview which took place on January 16 this year, in which Cathy Newman “interviewed” the Canadian psychology professor Jordan B. Peterson.

The interview, or rather attempted harangue by Newman, became an instant phenomenon, mainly because Peterson’s demeanour, intelligence and patience with Newman’s rudeness, and real or assumed stupidity, were so impressive. The interview, contrary no doubt to the plan of Newman and Channel 4, greatly raised Peterson’s already high public profile, ensured best-seller status for his second book (12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos), and consigned Newman and Channel 4 to the ridicule of millions of viewers around the world. Whether either will recover is yet to be seen. (online editor: that video is embedded below)

While numerous profiles and interviews of Peterson have, over the last year, appeared in news and opinion outlets, most have been along the lines of: “Look at this wacky Canadian professor who seems to have millions of fans for some reason.” Few have attempted to come to grips with what are arguably his most important and original contributions to the ideas of the day. (A notable exception is the excellent hour-long interview by Dutch commentator Timon Dias, on the Geenstijl website and YouTube.) For me, writing as I have done for ten years about the importance of personal morality, in particular a return to a virtue framework, the most exciting thing about Peterson is that he is bringing talk about virtue and morality back to thousands of people in a West which has shunned and indeed ridiculed those ideas for fifty years.

ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

A Stark Raving Mad Conspiracy So Vast By Michael Walsh

Posted By on October 25th, 2018

https://amgreatness.com/2018/10/24/a-stark-raving

It’s bad enough that our politics have now become so polarized that there seems to be no way to escape either a split or an apocalypse. Left and Right no longer huddle near a squishy but relatively amicable middle, the nation’s rudder tilted slightly to the left and the ship of state steadily drifting to port. The postwar consensus, which by and large accepted the Roosevelt-Truman domestic agenda in the interest of winning the war, is now breaking up as a result of the conservative reaction (1980-present) against it. Even the brief interregnum of Jimmy Carter/Bill Clinton/Barack Obama only served to heighten the distinctions between the two sides, while the Trump counterrevolution has effectively ended all thoughts of a reversion to the mean.

For his part, President Trump took the high road Wednesday. “Those engaged in the political arena must stop treating political opponents as being morally defective,” he said. “The language of moral condemnation . . . these are arguments and disagreements that have to stop. No one should carelessly compare political opponents to historical villains. It’s got to stop. We should not mob people in public spaces or destroy public property.”

“There is one way to settle our disagreements: It’s called peacefully, at the ballot box,” he said.

That’s quite right. Conflicts need be neither violent nor bloody. The Cold War was fought between the Soviets and the Americans without a clash of armies or an exchange of nuclear weapons. Similarly, the Cold Civil War (as I termed the current struggle back in 2010) has been largely nonviolent, however heated. But with the reports Wednesday of explosive devices and suspicious packages mailed to prominent figures on the Left—coming on top of some startling attacks against the Right (Steve Scalise and Rand Paul), we find ourselves moving into terra incognita, politically speaking.

It’s true that America has seen domestic violence before—the wave of anarchism and labor unrest around the turn of the century, the Mad Bomber in New York, the “Days of Rage” in the late 1960s—some of it politically motivated. But not since the Civil War—which was essentially a conflict between the Southern Democrats and the Northern Republicans (if you don’t believe me, read Grant’s Memoirs)—have the two main parties edged this close to direct action against each other.

FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

Transacting with Riyadh By Andrew C. McCarthy

Posted By on October 25th, 2018

https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2018/11/12/transacting-with-riyadh/

We do not share values with the Saudi regime

‘We’ve defeated ISIS.” So said President Trump in a recent Associated Press interview. Not for the first time was the president’s exuberance overstated. Military officials quickly added the qualification that the Islamic State’s end appears to be near but it is not yet vanquished.

Welcome news all the same. News that would naturally lead one to ask: Does the dismantling of the jihadist network mean, finally, an end to the brutal enforcement of sharia? Can we close the book on savage beheadings intended to terrorize and to inculcate compliance with a literalist, scripturally based construction of Muslim law, set in stone — or is it stoning? — a millennium ago?

Not a chance. If you are, say, a homosexual, an unmarried woman innocently commingling with non-related men, a Christian who has apostatized from Islam, or even a believing Muslim who questions the ancient consensus on some aspect of Islamic doctrine, you know the peril of decapitation has never been limited to precincts of Syria and Iraq where the Islamic State imposed its caliphate. Beheadings are still routinely conducted in Saudi Arabia, by the governing regime. In fact, for particularly heinous offenses, the regime directs that decapitation be followed by display of the corpse, hung from a horizontal pole along with the severed head in a plastic bag, a practice publicly referred to as “crucifixion.”

And yes, the regime we are speaking of is the same Kingdom of Saudi Arabia that the United States government has long deemed a valuable ally.

The Trump administration so values the Saudis, as both a strategic partner and a lucrative client for military arms, that it has made the alliance the plinth of U.S. policy in the Middle East. Not only was Riyadh the site chosen for President Trump’s first foreign visit; in a major speech there in May 2017, the president maintained that “principled realism” — his coinage for the administration’s professed America-first approach to international affairs — is rooted in the “common values” said to be held by the U.S. and the House of Saud.

Close monitors of radical Islam worry that principled realism is not very realistic. Not for nothing did 15 of the 19 mass-murdering 9/11 hijackers hail from Saudi Arabia. There are reasons al-Qaeda so readily drew on the kingdom for moral and financial sustenance.

What is variously called “radical Islam,” Islamism, “political Islam,” or “Islamic extremism” (and don’t you dare ask what it is that they’re so extreme about) is better diagnosed as sharia supremacism. It is an ideology aimed at imposing the tenets of Islamic civilization and law, the necessary precondition for establishing Islamic societies.

Sharia is not merely a legal code. It is a comprehensive political and social framework that systematically discriminates against women and non-Muslims. Notice, for example, that President Trump gave his ballyhooed speech in Riyadh rather than Mecca or Medina. That is because, as a non-Muslim, the president of the United States is deemed unfit, under sharia strictures derived from Koranic verse, to step foot in Islam’s two sacralized cities.