Q. How do you confuse Jonah Goldberg?No wait, I told it wrong.
A. This country sucks.
UPDATE. Q.E.D.
While alicubi.com undergoes extensive elective surgery, its editors pen somber, Shackletonian missives from their lonely arctic outpost.
Q. How do you confuse Jonah Goldberg?No wait, I told it wrong.
A. This country sucks.
Libertarianism did not have to take this unfortunate turn. Ludwig von Mises himself warned that the attempt (of socialists) to undermine the family was a ploy to strengthen the state. Hayek, too, grasped the family's role in upholding the free market. Coming of age in Europe around the time of World War I, he stressed the state's inefficiency but also warned, more generally, of the limits of human reason. "Hayek's economics was rooted in man's ignorance," Mr. [Brian] Doherty writes; so were his political views, which included both an enthusiasm for freedom and a Burkean respect for customs and institutions.Maybe because outside the social studies classroom, Hymowitz' "Burkean respect for customs" means enforcement of moral codes better suited to a 17th century Pilgrim encampment than to the society we actually inhabit. And the Libertarian Party has no need to appease Religious Right yahoos to gain votes, because they rarely have any hope of being elected. In fact most libertarians vote for parties other than the LP, which probably best explains the existence of Hymowitz' essay. She knows libertarians like free markets, and hopes to weaken their attachment to the free minds part of the equation sufficiently to shore up that old Reagan coalition for one more election.
It is difficult to say why this aspect of libertarianism has faded away...
In 1983 [Subhumans founding member] Gerry Hannah was in the news, but not as a musician. Always involved in political issues, including environmentalism - one of his nicknames was “Nature Punk” - he linked up with a group of political activists called Direct Action, whose frustration lead them toward armed struggle. Among other actions, the group blew up an environmentally unfriendly hydroelectric substation on Vancouver Island and bombed the Litton plant near Toronto, which manufactured parts for the American cruise missile, a “first strike” nuclear weapon. Canadian authorities eventually arrested the group, known in the press as the Squamish Five, and Gerry was sentenced to ten years in jail. He was released after serving five years.Blew up a power station and bombed an aircraft plant? Five years in prison? Reformed the band for a western Candian tour? I can't even approve of that. (The violence, I mean.) Sigh. I am officially a poser.
In 1995, Gerry and Brian reformed the dormant band for a western Canadian tour...
It seemed right away like it would be a big war, three to four years – Afghanistan first, of course, then Iraq, then Iran.Instead, it's been a short five-year occupation and no boom-boom in Iran. Sigh. It's amazing what power tortured English Lit grad students exercised over President Bush and a mostly Republican Congress.
The liberal West, which worships at the shrine of reason, does not understand that ideas can kill. As a result Britain, Europe, America, and Israel have all left the battleground of ideas undefended, allowing the advance of falsehood and hatred. Worse still, our intelligentsia and media often act as an Islamists’ fifth column.If "undefended" means "defended by such as Melanie Phillips," I can sort of see her point.
...many conservatives, when pressed, will say that their conservatism is really just a mild classical liberalism, their declared religiosity is balanced by a strong enthusiasm for religious pluralism and their idea of valuable cultural production is the film adaptation of The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe. While busily exporting the "now much-talked-of system of liberty," to borrow a phrase from Patriarch Anthimus' Paternal Instructions, we create no enduring cultural life worth mentioning. There is some kind of culture out there, of course, but most of it will not be of any lasting significance because one of our main values is utility and our impulse is for building things for the present, not for posterity or eternity.Larison's link is to a Chronicles rant by Clyde N. Wilson about how the 20th Century "strangled" American culture with "war, industrialism, Yankee pragmatism, and polyglot immigration," leading to "young white men, the heirs of two thousand years of Western civilization, [who] adopt baggy pants, earrings, backwards baseball caps, and primitive music because that is the nearest thing to a cultural expression that their American environment has ever exposed them to."
Everything that America has produced in literature and music of enduring cultural value since the mid-20th century has come from Southerners who were raised in an environment that was still incompletely conquered by Yankee pragmatism. Whether our Southern bit of cultural residue will survive for much longer, and whether it can possibly do so without political separation from the American Empire, are questions that will probably be decided in the present rising generation..Political separation from the American Empire... it seems to me the South tried that one before.
Ned Beatty could absolutely be a Montana Senator running his own private army of CIA goons and oil-pipeline engineers all around the world! And when asked about it, he'll deliver a stemwinder of a lecture that could have been written by Trotsky! It could happen! Really!Jonah Goldberg in 2004:
Network is still an astoundingly relevant and good movie.It may be that Goldberg's tastes have changed. But when did he ever have taste?
The thing about China is, no one ever tells China “no.” Not in language China understands. I don’t mean the losers in Cambridge with “Free Tibet” bumper stickers who also do not care to see U.S. power exerted anywhere in the world. I’m talking about parties China might pay attention to. The United States government, the market forces the United States. China would respond well to “no.” Just look at the hoops China is jumping through over a little bad publicity. Money is important to China...According to the US-China Business Council, China's total FDI [Foreign Direct Investment] inflows for 2006 were $69.5 billion. China's not the only party to whom money is important.
A few liberal readers have taken offense to my suggestion that the "left" doesn't object to anonymous cruising for gay sex in public places...It seems fitting to say goodbye to summer '07 with Jonah Goldberg feverishly wrestling a rubber doll to keep it from fucking him in the ass.
First, I deliberately used "left" instead of "liberal" in the relevant sentence. But then I did revert back to liberal for most of the rest of the column. I probably could have been more exacting in the distinction...
Maybe I'm a product of my times, having grown up in New York City in the 1980s, but gay cruising in random places, specifically bathrooms, most certainly was part of the gay rights agenda...
I haven't paid that much attention to the issue in recent years, but I still don't seem to recall a lot of liberals expressing their disgust with bathroom hook-ups when Jim McGreevey's tale was revealed...
So, the mental health check is mandatory too? Why does he not even realize how bad that sounds? He's so warmed up about the generous benefits he's promising that he doesn't even hear the repressiveness in his own statements. I'm sure he won't be able to deliver on these promises. I'm just wondering about a person with so little sensitivity toward personal freedom.Mandatory enrollment in a cradle-to-grave government scheme -- why, that's the stuff of totalitarian dystopias.
Based on my experience, women raising boys without fathers and urbanization are ending the hunting tradition. Disney and Warner Brothers certainly did not help the cause by depicting hunters over the years as shoot-em-up yahoos.Even Bambi and Bugs Bunny aren't safe! I suggest Greengrass take a look at the long-awaited screenplay by Roger L. Simon and Michael Ledeen if he values his citizenship.
Scrawny Iraqi police recruits chattering like excited birds as they marveled at the tattoos on a Marine weightlifter's torso: A flesh-and-blood metaphor for muscular, over-the-top America and our relationship with malnourished, bewildered Iraq.Here's what our stateside poets miss: the opportunity to make metaphors of scrawny occupied peoples. Kipling might have appreciated the chance, but I expect he would have made more of it.
We were standing in Iraq's Atlanta, discussing Sherman. For one of those lightning instants when you grasp something beyond words, we both felt the timelessness of war and soldiering.The glory that was total war, the grandeur that was Reconstruction. Well, five years after it was taken, Atlanta didn't have reliable electric service either.
Sitting in a plywood-partition office in a combat outpost with an American captain and an Iraqi Provincial Security Forces general as the Iraqi "complied" with the captain's request for three bids from local firms to deliver gravel to a dirt motor pool before the rains began.Who says they don't know how democracy works? Wait'll they get internet access. They'll be selling our own weapons back to us.
Eager to close a deal that wouldn't do his own retirement savings any harm, the general laid down three pieces of paper. They were identical, except that one specified $800 per truckload, a second $750 and a third $700.
It was obvious that the bids were all from the same source and that the drill was simply to do things in the peculiar way Americans expected.
An old sheik, who had done nicely under Saddam, reminiscing about the days of no-nonsense law and order when he could drive safely on the spur of the moment from Fallujah to Basra. As the polite old man continued telling stories, it became heartbreakingly obvious that much of the post-liberation fighting between Iraqis and Americans had been the result of confounded expectations on both sides.This piqued my interest, till I read on and found Peters was speaking of Americans and Iraqis in general, and not of himself and the polite old man.
Living so long under Saddam - and previous stern regimes - men such as the sheik simply couldn't comprehend our rules or assumptions or philosophy, nor did we grasp the accommodations Iraqis had made with the concept of "laws."
We began by shouting past each other, and ended by shooting at each other.
Pound vaunted his ability to form explanatory relationships, but it was the very thing he could never truly do, even though, like any other paranoid psychotic, he tried to all the time. Nevertheless he had the talent to demonstrate that to go mad for detail might yield something, whereas to go mad for generalization leads nowhere... he thought that he could judge an empire by the metallic composition of its small change, just as he thought he could extract the meaning of a Chinese ideogram by the way it looked. In both cases he was too far from the mark for sanity. But if he didn't get the picture, he could at least see it...When he likes his subjects James is even better: "Montesquieu can delay his judgement on Tiberius: a forebearance that not even Tacitus can show... Tacitus, as much fascinated as repelled, had his sense of irony exhausted by a satanically gifted individual. Montesquieu, less emotionally involved, saw a point about Tiberius that extended to all mankind." If you can't get with this sort of material, he also writes elegantly about Dick Cavett and Tony Curtis.
Akhmatova encapsulated the anguish of millions of devastated women when she wrote: "Husband dead, son in jail: pray for me." But a romantic she remained, still believing in the imaginative validity of a love affair beyond time. In Hope Abandoned, Nadezhda was able to say firmly that her friend was mistaken. Love affairs beyond time were impossible to take seriously when violent separations are the stuff of reality. With real life so disturbed, the nature of romanticism had been changed. In the new reality, all love affairs were beyond time.James is so good at finding such aesthetic kernels in the tragedies that came with totalitarianism that I was prepared and even eager to hear a lot more of them. Alas, I did, and the kernels lost their savor soon enough. Part of it perhaps could not be helped; the horrors of the century may have been unprecedented, but they certainly begin to resemble one another over long stretches of description, and after the thirtieth or fortieth outrage I wished an editor had gently told James that we get it already. When Dante went to Hell he took Virgil, and you need a guide at that level to keep the infernal circles from closing into a blind spiral on you.
When Democracy finally arrived in 1974, Saramago didn't trust it. Saramago had good reason to suspect that justice would never come by reasonable means. But when it showed signs of doing so, he did nothing in his discursive writings to justify his position the only way it could have been justified... but it was wholly untrue to go on claiming that the far left offered an alternative in itself. The price of sticking to such a proposition was to restrict his own frame of reference to the size of his study. There was a world elsewhere in which the common people, all over the planet, had been massacred by the millions...You soon see there is no Third Way with James. Authors who don't get the message are failures on that basis, despite the merit of their prose. James does not quite descend to the sort of Konservetkult nonsense we regularly lampoon here because he is a true critic with a rigorous standard: as with Pound, the ability to see the object is some recompense, but to get the picture is what art should be doing, particularly when the picture is of an oncoming holocaust. This is an arguable point, and certainly not the same thing as the blind weighing and sorting of the propagandist, but weighing and sorting is done and sometimes to an absurd degree:
In the long view of history, Brecht's fame as a creep will prevail, as it ought to. An unblushing apologist for organized frightfulness against the common people whose welfare he claimed to prize above his own, he was really no better than Oswald Mosley and a lot more dangerous. Brecht's fame as a poet will depend upon a wide appreciation of what he could do with language, and there lies the drawback: because the more you appreciate what he could do with language, the more you realize how clearly he could see, and so the more you are faced with how he left things out. You are faced, that is, with what he did not do with language.What Brecht did do with language James never addresses, but you can pick up his plays and poems and enjoy them, I would say, even if you are not an apologist for Stalin.