I have been getting more aggressive memo’s from my blue state governor whom I am technically employed by. That appears to be ramping up to a Covid Mandate.
Guess ill be getting a vacation soon
Entrance to a Secret Garden, with peace and tranquility for all those the enter.
Neo,
I don’t know whether you saw Roger Kimball’s column on Merrick Garland at American Greatness this weekend, but he has a very big quote from you. I put myself in the lower class of your readers, but it’s still good company.
Just another open-thread comment.
Dominic Cummings is a British political strategist, who briefly served as Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s chief adviser. He writes at substack. About a month ago he published an essay entitled “Regime Change #2: A plea to Silicon Valley – start a project NOW to write the plan for the next GOP candidate.” The first line: “The goal is not ‘reform’ but a government that actually controls the government.”
This post is a wide-ranging attack on the federal government bureaucracy (aka the administrative state, the swamp, the deep state, etc.). I’m sympathetic to Cummings’s analysis, and his proposed solutions are imaginative and thought-provoking. But there’s not a chance in hell that anybody will take up his proposals. Even so, it has the potential to provoke some interesting arguments. For better or worse, I read it as a thought experiment.
Open thread, ok.
The more they push mandates on the vaccines, the more I have come to question these vaccines.
A 70 year old grandmother voluntarily taking mRNA vaccines for a disease that kills the elderly is one thing.
Forcing 7 or 17 or 27 year old women of child bearing age to take relatively new types of vaccines for a disease that primarily kills the middle and old aged is another thing entirely.
When you have a former Pfizer VP saying this needs to be studied more before pregnant women take it, that makes me sit up and take notice.
Mythx, good luck!
expat:
Yes, I did see that and would like to email and thank him, but I have no idea what his email address is. If anyone knows, please let me know.
Good luck, Mythx.
It’s plain old intolerance and mean spiritedness.
The news about airline flight cancellations is swirling with confusion. Air Traffic controllers at JAX? SW Air pilots? Vaxx-related walkouts reported and denied. I’m not sure what to think.
Tuvea: “Happy Indigenous Peoples Day! Who were not only the First Americans; they were the First Americans to practice slavery.”
Although, they might not be the first Americans?
Perhaps 10 years ago I read a post at Instapundit which linked to an article that discussed the evidence that humans were in North America when our “indigenous” “Native Americans” came across the Bering Straits land bridge. It was suggested that the American Indians wiped out the existing population. As I recall there was some evidence that would help advance the research (human bones?) but the evidence was being withheld from investigators by tribal authorities or government stewards.
I don’t recall hearing more on the story so maybe it was a dead end.
Minor note. The performance of the Communist Party of Bohemia and Moravia was poor enough in elections this week to get them knocked out of the Czech parliament. There aren’t any in the Slovak parliament either (though there is a bloc from a political party which has the Communist Party in its pedigree). The Czech and Slovak legislatures are free from Communists for the 1st time since 1925.
Strait is the gate and narrow is the path that leads to life, and few there be that find it.
Neo,
I did find this on Kimball at Encounter Books.
Thanks. I had not seen that news item. That is good news. Although his name may not be respected here, about two decades ago Donald Rumsfeld prophesied this trend speaking of “old” and “new” Europe. Poland, Chech and Slovakia, Hungary even Austria(?) do not seem to be fans of many EU policies. I haven’t kept up with elections, but at one time the leaders of all the western, EU nations were childless (this was pre-Boris Johnson, obviously). I read some opinion pieces commenting on how that perspective was driving policy.
expat:
Thanks, but the email address there seems to go to their publicity department.
Art Deco:
That’s interesting news about Eastern Europe in particular because there must be tons of voters there now who did not grow up under Communism and therefore have no negative direct personal experience of it, and yet they seem to still be resisting the siren call of the left. I wonder why that is. Are they actually listening to their parents? And has the educational system there made it clear to students how pernicious the left is, teaching the history of what it was like when the left held sway?
I don’t want to re-litigate the McConnell thread, but I went off on a few rants and I want to make sure no one took offense. I think sometimes when I attempt to clarify my writing I end up muddying things further.
My sole point was McConnell is a politician who sees his job as promoting the Republican Party. Also, McConnell did not see Donald Trump’s movement as good for the Republican Party.
I am a Kurt Schlichter fan and he has argued very cogently on why Conservatives should back McConnell. I understand his point, and don’t disagree that McConnell is good for Conservatives more often than not, but I personally have no respect for someone who is employed by his Countrymen and women to uhpold and oath, but subrogates it to other principles.
Politicians who enact legislation to inhibit my natural rights are not my friend. They are my enemy. That doesn’t mean they are bad, or ineffectual politicians.
Great photo. Where/when was it taken?
As for Roger Kimball: a ferocious advocate for reason and liberty. His New Criterion is required reading and a rare bargain. Floreat Roger.
Mythx, jon baker, and JimNorCal:
If you think COVID mandates are bad here, it’s worse on the other side of the pond. There’s a long article in City Journal by Lionel Shriver [a birthing person, BTW], an American living in the UK, about the nearly unbelievable willingness of the British public to accept the so-called new normal. Sample from “The Most Frightened Nation”: “While 64 percent want Britain’s mask mandate in shops and on public transport to remain a legal requirement for the duration of the global pandemic, an astounding 51 percent want to be masked by law, forever. There’s more: some 35 percent want to confine any Briton who returns from a foreign country, vaccinated or not, to a ten-day home quarantine—permanently, Covid or no Covid. A full 46 percent would require a vaccine passport in order to travel abroad—permanently, Covid or no Covid.”
According to this, the SW Air flight cancellations may be due to
1) pilots notified their jobs are gone as of Nov unless vaxxed
2) pilots using their banked vacation time before it’s lost
I think growing up with direct evidence of what Communism wrought compared to Capitalism (a lot of the architecture still exists, and parents’ and grandparents’ tales) does drive political philosophies, but immigration is also a huge issue in many of those countries. Political leaders have seen the unrest that results from welcoming huge numbers of immigrants while making little attempt to integrate them into society and culture; as in France, England and Germany, and they don’t want the same in their nations.
PA+Cat,
I can’t help but notice how many COVID policies align with what Leftists had been promoting under the guise of climate change and green initiatives. It’s an astounding coincidence. 😉
RTF:
Just for you, a little musical interlude: “Rule, Britannia!”
“Rule, Britannia! Britannia, rule the waves!
Britons never, never, never shall be slaves.”
That whirring sound you hear is Churchill and Thatcher spinning in their graves.
Owen:
Portland, Maine. Many picturesque spots there.
Neo: thanks. Remarkable colors on that stonework. And very nice stonework it is, too. We live in CT and there is God’s own plenty of stone walls (a book whose title escapes me now, said there are about a quarter-million miles of stone walls in New England) but most are tumbledown; less intentional structures than a hasty way to clear a field for plowing. Also the rocks around us tend to be rounded; glacial debris with corners milled off; hard to stack well. A well-built wall like that in your pic is not common.
Regarding Art Deco’s comment about the Czech Republic, hopefully we’ll hear from commenter Tom Gray (I hope I’m remembering his name correctly {Tom Grey?}). A former Californian who is married to a physician and lives in the Czech Republic. He’s always interesting and would have an inside perspective.
“there are about a quarter-million miles of stone walls in New England”
I imagine the stones being pulled out of the soil, one by one, by weary farmers … and then repurposed for walls.
JimNorCal: I think it was something of an art, with stone-boats pulled by oxen and digging under the big rocks and using chains to drag them up onto the stone-boat. Slow and exhausting work. In the book whose name I don’t remember, the author said that the size of the fields (where the stones from the interior were moved to form the walls) reflected a mathematical optimum of effort versus area cleared to be plowed. A tiny field was easier to clear but you couldn’t grow much of a crop in it. A big field was the opposite. The settlers’ homegrown methods converged on that optimum.
Finally some slight acknowledgment about what the data is showing. He doesn’t go far enough in my view. It will be interesting to see if the trend continues tomorrow morning after the state’s weekend data comes in. There’s always a 3 day lag that I have to catch up on Tuesday due to none of the states doing any data reporting over the weekend, so I get Saturday, Sunday, and Monday data on Tuesday morning.
Neo – Here’s a link to Glenn Loury’s latest meditations on “The Black Family”.
Of course he’s describing a disaster foretold 56 years ago by Pat Moynihan. Loury can’t quite bring himself to state the degree of degradation – he doesn’t want to rub the wokester Brownies too much the wrong way. But in his halting, diffident way he’s trying to sound the alarm.
I assume this is at least somewhat exaggerated, there must be some fine print … but in the state of Louisiana you can a felony conviction expunged if you vaxx? https://youtu.be/2uWwrnpYNzU
Rufus T. Firefly, as you could tell from my comments, no offense here. I respect differing opinions. I lean with Schlichter on this, and also on his repeated comment that he doesn’t owe any politician anything, including loyalty. As applied to Trump, he’s calling for acknowledgment that personnel problems and failure to clean house were major problems. What will Trump, or any other candidate, propose to do about that?
@JimNorCal
“… As I recall there was some evidence that would help advance the research (human bones?) but the evidence was being withheld from investigators by tribal authorities or government stewards.”
Asking Silicon Valley to help make Government Govern… and for Republicans, no less, is like begging the faculty of Al Azhar to design a marketing strategy for the processed pork industry.
Cummings has been reading Yarvin, obviously… although Yarvin is certainly not in the business of helping Republicans win anything. The big difference is that Cummings is pimping for electoral grift trade. In any case, Ask not for whom the Cornhole Bell Tolls…
The issue of stone walls is of interest to me. In the town of Rensselaerville, southwest of here, there are areas on state land of considerable size which are checkered with quite a few of those old stone walls. Some of them make handy landmarks, of course. But all of those old farms from two hundred years or so ago are generally abandoned now and forested over. Often when I’m hiking those lands, I’m moved to ponder such things.
A lot of them must go back to the time of the Patroons.
OK, myriad closet Z Man Fans. Here’s a new one to digest and enjoy:
“A basic rule of strategy, one of the first things you are taught when learning strategy, is that you must conceal your plans from the opponent. If you are deposing a witness, for example, you do not tell opposing counsel how you hope to trick the witness into saying something that helps your case. An essential part of your strategy is to conceal from the other side how you hope to win the case.
One obvious reason for this is to prevent the other side from coming up with a strategy to counter your strategy. In sports, coaches spend a lot of time trying to trick the other coaches into thinking they know what is coming. Deception is a big part of sports, even one-on-one combat sports. Boxers use deception to lure the opponent into a position the opponent thinks is advantageous, but is actually a trap.
The overly quoted Sun Tzu said that “All warfare is based on deception.” The equally over-quoted Clausewitz said that “War is the continuation of politics by other means,” so taken together we can conclude that politics is about deception. This is especially true in liberal democratic politics where the game is to trick the majority into handing over their privileges to a minority, who never have their best interests in mind.
This is what makes the sudden lack of deception in the war on white people a strange and possibly dangerous development. The war on whiteness, as the beautiful people like to put it, is supposed to be about the bad whites. These are the people who use taboo language and maintain anachronistic opinions about the human condition. They are the problem, not everyday white people.
This is not true, of course, but it has been an important part of the program, as it allows most whites to think they are the good guys, even as their neighbors are being picked off one by one. There is usually some way to justify the bad fortune of a white person hurled into the void for heresy. “It is a shame Bob got fired, but he really should not have used the N-word in third grade.”
Recently, we have seen a sudden break from this deception and a tacit admission that we now live in the age of Jim Snow. There are rules and standards for the white population, who are treated like a hated minority despite being the majority. Then we have a set of rules for the nonwhite population, who are often treated as sacred objects by the ruling class. Whites are sinners in the hands of angry nonwhite gods
.
.
It used to be that whenever someone noticed the war on white people, Conservative Inc. would swing into action labeling those people as racist. Maybe they would have one of their South Asian houseboys dig through the garbage of the accused, looking for proof of his apostasy. [Zaphod Sayeth: If you can’t read this without cringing, you’re lacking some essential survival gene. That’s what they do.] Even they are finding it impossible to explain away what has become overt and official. America is a Jim Snow country.
.
.
Pat Buchanan famously said that America was the first country to have a ruling class that hated the people over whom it ruled. It turns out that they only hate some of the people, the white majority. The question that naturally follows is can such a country last when the ruling elite despises the majority with such passion? More important, can such a country last when the majority begins to hate their rulers back?”
On the generational thing, it actually takes 2 generations to “forget” the lessons of their ancestors. We baby-boomers were taught by parents and grandparents who experienced the Great Depression and the World Wars; our kids are further removed but some of them listened to us (obviously, not all); their kids have no direct contact with those who were “there.”*
However, the positive side is that we also now have a generation whose natural tendency to rebel against The Man means they are directing their ire to the Left and the Democrats!
Let’s Go, Brandon!
*Family story about that: my mother went back to college for her MA as part of her teaching career (probably required for retention or salary raise; she taught 7th grade), and one class was Modern History. She recalls one of the college-age students asking her how she managed to make such high grades on the tests, because she never seemed to be reading the book or listening to the teacher (she was probably napping in the middle of the day). Mother explained, “Honey, I don’t have to study that stuff. I was there.”
Peter Heck at Not the Bee had a pair of posts explaining how conservatives can move some of the younger voters over to the right. Made sense to me.
I don’t know about New England but here in Michigan the glaciers left rounded stones when they retreated and the action of freeze/thaw throws them up to the surface every Spring. Farmers in the past had to remove them from the fields and then used them to build with.
@ PA Cat > “If you think COVID mandates are bad here, it’s worse on the other side of the pond. There’s a long article in City Journal by Lionel Shriver [a birthing person, BTW], an American living in the UK, about the nearly unbelievable willingness of the British public to accept the so-called new normal”
“That whirring sound you hear is Churchill and Thatcher spinning in their graves.”
I read Shriver’s essay yesterday, and was impressed by her vehemence. She is not happy.
And Wikipedia tells me that Shriver is a metalsmith.
Maybe we ought to require that all politicians learn a construction trade before they can be elected to anything.
@ Cornflour > “The first line: “The goal is not ‘reform’ but a government that actually controls the government.” ..”
I read Cummings’ essay and it is indeed very interesting, probably good advice, and I have no idea how it could be implemented and by whom.
He throws around the idea of shutting down the dysfunctional bureaucracies (yea!) and replacing them with “new start-ups” (yea?) but gives no clue as to how those start-up replacements are to be created, staffed, and emplaced in the legal structure that the bureaucracies now occupy.
Also, he praises FDR for doing exactly that, with or without the acquiescence of the legislature — effectively bullying Congress (and the Supreme Court) because of his huge electoral mandate — but we’ve all seen how lower courts can impede and stymie executive orders.
Also, there is some serious consideration now that Roosevelt delayed the recovery from the Depression by his tinkering and use of his “start ups” rather than improving the economy, and we all know the deleterious consequences of his socialization of the country, “soft” though it may have been compared to Stalin’s communism. So, how can we be sure the cure won’t be worse than the disease today? (Although, with the political diseases now inflicting us, it would be very hard indeed for his system to be worse.)
As you said, “there’s not a chance in hell that anybody will take up his proposals.”
However, leaving the government running the government aside as an outside bet, there might be some hope of setting up the parallel non-government structures advocated by other people along the same lines as Cummings’ start-ups, with the same kind of focus and mission, just not inside the halls of DC. The Left is already doing that, with their “woke parallel government,” which operates even when they are officially “in charge” of the government, so we might as well have one on the Right as well. Then the Official Government will be the third rail.
One of the things Cummings pointed out in his essay:
Mid-terms almost always lead to losses for incumbents. Many structural factors make it hard for the Democrats to keep control. And many structural factors have pulled and will pull Biden towards positions that will alienate millions. For example, those who work in Democrat campaigns are much younger, much more educated and much more left than the median voter. They routinely push Democrat candidates to do things that are objectively irrational from the perspective of winning, such as running ads against Trump that actually help Trump (cf. @davidshor for details, e.g HERE which will tell you much more about campaigns than every NYT/Guardian oped combined for the next four years). As Andrew Sullivan has pointed out, if Obama gave some of his 2007-8 speeches now he’d be cancelled by his own activists.
I think it gives some clues to forming a parallel government, and generating public support for the Cummings Start-Ups.
Also, read through the addenda to Cummings’ post where he answers some of the questions from commenters, which I think adds some substance to his generalities in the main post.
His reading list is interesting, to say the least.
“I haven’t paid much attention to US politics for a long time and have just started looking at it again. A few people I’ve found interesting are:” (linked in his post)
Scott Alexander
Richard Hanania
Marginal Revolution
David Shor
Andrew Sullivan
Curtis Yarvin
Hmm. Didn’t get those blockquotes closed properly.
Something there is that doesn’t love a blockquote wall.
Zaphod,
Pat Buchanan must’ve skipped class the day they discussed the French Revolution.
It’s becoming increasingly obvious that the bureaucratic/administrative state – whatever you want to call it – has a dictatorial tendency of it’s own. Maybe we should go back to the days before civil service protections when a new admin fired all the old staff and hired their own. I know that era was riddled with corruption and cronyism but, really, could it be any worse than what we’ve got now?
Corruption – check
Cronyism – check
Party power shifts – not so much
“Maybe we should go back to the days before civil service protections when a new admin fired all the old staff and hired their own.”
Sure looks like “Biden”‘s yer man!
– – – – – – – – –
And in other incredible, improbable, and otherwise unbelievable news, it looks like SOMEONE in China actually tells the truth: there’s a real-estate development firm (something like Evergrande, in fact) called…wait for it…”FANTASIA”!! https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/its-disastrous-day-all-hell-breaks-loose-chinas-bond-markets
(Not that “Evergrande” isn’t a gem of a name, itself. Still, “Fantasia”—on a par with those George Soros-founded/funded “Democracy” and “Transparency” Orgs—deserves a Nobel Prize of some sort.)
Not really. French Revolution mainly ate its own revolutionaries and a chunk of the old aristocracy. Couldn’t have happened to nicer people in the main (*).
Give you partial credit for the Vendée — lots of commoners got killed… but if you revolt and don’t succeed, being put down with maximum brutality is par for the course. Something to keep in mind in the current year.
* Anything which decimates the IgNobility of the Robe from time to time isn’t entirely a bad thing.
“…a chunk…”
Er, kindly define “a chunk”…
(Sort of like, “a smidgeon”? As in, “Sure, I’ll have another piece of that incredible Valrhona ‘death-by-chocolate’ cake concoction, but, um…just a smidgeon…”?)
“Also in 1988, Wang—having risen with unprecedented speed to become Fudan’s youngest full professor at age 30—won a coveted scholarship (facilitated by the American Political Science Association) to spend six months in the United States as a visiting scholar. Profoundly curious about America, Wang took full advantage, wandering about the country like a sort of latter-day Chinese Alexis de Tocqueville, visiting more than 30 cities and nearly 20 universities.
What he found deeply disturbed him, permanently shifting his view of the West and the consequences of its ideas.
Wang recorded his observations in a memoir that would become his most famous work: the 1991 book America Against America. In it, he marvels at homeless encampments in the streets of Washington DC, out-of-control drug crime in poor black neighborhoods in New York and San Francisco, and corporations that seemed to have fused themselves to and taken over responsibilities of government. Eventually, he concludes that America faces an “unstoppable undercurrent of crisis” produced by its societal contradictions, including between rich and poor, white and black, democratic and oligarchic power, egalitarianism and class privilege, individual rights and collective responsibilities, cultural traditions and the solvent of liquid modernity.
But while Americans can, he says, perceive that they are faced with “intricate social and cultural problems,” they “tend to think of them as scientific and technological problems” to be solved separately. This gets them nowhere, he argues, because their problems are in fact all inextricably interlinked and have the same root cause: a radical, nihilistic individualism at the heart of modern American liberalism.
“The real cell of society in the United States is the individual,” he finds. This is so because the cell most foundational (per Aristotle) to society, “the family, has disintegrated.” Meanwhile, in the American system, “everything has a dual nature, and the glamour of high commodification abounds. Human flesh, sex, knowledge, politics, power, and law can all become the target of commodification.” This “commodification, in many ways, corrupts society and leads to a number of serious social problems.” In the end, “the American economic system has created human loneliness” as its foremost product, along with spectacular inequality. As a result, “nihilism has become the American way, which is a fatal shock to cultural development and the American spirit.”
Moreover, he says that the “American spirit is facing serious challenges” from new ideational competitors. Reflecting on the universities he visited and quoting approvingly from Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind, he notes a growing tension between Enlightenment liberal rationalism and a “younger generation [that] is ignorant of traditional Western values” and actively rejects its cultural inheritance. “If the value system collapses,” he wonders, “how can the social system be sustained?”
Ultimately, he argues, when faced with critical social issues like drug addiction, America’s atomized, deracinated, and dispirited society has found itself with “an insurmountable problem” because it no longer has any coherent conceptual grounds from which to mount any resistance.
Once idealistic about America, at the start of 1989 the young Wang returned to China and, promoted to Dean of Fudan’s International Politics Department, became a leading opponent of liberalization.”
May I respectfully suggest reading the whole article and digesting. Best read first and get a grip on just how well educated and thoughtful this guy is before slinging about the trite Hassan al-Banna stuff.
Not the early Seventies anymore. You can’t send the Court Jew off to Beijing to spout off about Metternich in 2021. Chinky has read all our books and done his homework. How many of us can read his books?
Note too, that stupido retarded One-dimensional Nuance-lacking Winnie the Pooh went out of his way to hire this guy. Cogdis anyone?
The West really needs to up its game. I’d start by looking at ourselves through educated Chinese eyes.
@Rufus:
“Ozzy Man would likely sink from the level of chunk to chunder.”
One could do worse than explore and examine it thoroughly and carefully. There is much there to digest and learn (though might one also wonder why the ill effects he vividly describes are so much more prevalent when the Democrats are in control of “the hen-house”?…)
OTOH you may have noticed that this modern-day de Tocquevillian rambler has come to “all the right conclusions” and is saying “all the right things” (at least as far as “…Nuance-lacking…” is concerned).
Especially, one might say, with his note on “drug addiction”. In fact, so wise is the peripatetic full professor that he’s even been elevated—by “…Nuance-lacking…”—from “acute observer” all the way up to “counseling sage”. Is there any wonder, then, why “…Nuance-lacking…” is sending so much Fentanyl into the country (and why “Biden” is allowing so much of it in)?
Just one example, of course; nonetheless, Wang’s world of commentary is invaluable…and for many reasons.
Let’s do a thought experiment, though. Let’s “send” the acute observer cum counseling sage on a de Tocquevillian trek around the Middle Kingdom for several years and “allow” him to go wherever he wants—to every corner, every nook and cranny, every dim sum restaurant and noodle bar, university and cooperative farm, every fab and hi-tech park, etc.—and, moreover, to record all his acute observations on paper/parchment/pixels.
And publish it all.
And then wonder how “…Nuance-lacking…” might reward him for his loyal candor….
BTW, if “court Jew” is “spout[ing] off about Metternich” in Beijing, it’s for external (i.e., US/Western) consumption ONLY.
(Such “firm, determined opposition” plays to the indignant peanut gallery of Deplorablecs(TM) a whole lot better than ‘Xi and “me” see eye to eye…and hope to work together in a spirit of sublime cooperation between our two great countries, yadda, yadda, yadda…’)
If you read the article again you’ll note that the Chinese government is actually trying to do something about rectifying social ills. As opposed, you know to pouring gasoline on fires. Radical. This kind of implies that they’re at least a bit capable of self-reflection and backing up and trying new approaches.
I’m uncertain what any of article has to do with waging undeclared war on the USA and other countries. Why would that refute sense and logic if their domestic actions? make Only a fool would not make undeclared war on West. Best defense is offense. Never occurred that Western Poz is itself an Offense?
Needless to say one doesn’t go about it J’Accuse-wise in the Middle Kingdom. Never been their way. But then how’s all that Truth to Power working out for you?
PS: Kissinger notoriously did spend a metric &$@!ton of time bloviating about inside kabbalistic historiographic baseball with Mao and Zhao — much to their combined bemusement. But Inscrutable Duo knew to let the Foreign Devil talk. And talk. Just smile a lot and nod politely and make some gnomic utterances. Guaranteed to work.
“This kind of implies that they’re at least a bit capable of self-reflection and backing up and trying new approaches.”
This is encouraging.
However, might one wonder about the “built-in” limitations?
Of course, every “system” has its pluses and minuses, etc., i.e., has its “built-in limitations” (but which system is more adept at minimizing those “limitations”…). And of course the “we’re all sinners” paradigm can help to cover quite a lot….
And all too often, we’re all captives—maybe I should, fashionably, say VICTIMS—of our own rhetoric!…which raises the question: “Which system, if any, has more of an ability to ‘break free'”? (Or is it a question less of “system” than of “leadership”…though formulating it in this way raises even more questions…along the lines of how that leadership is chosen, i.e., if it IS chosen…)
E.g.,
One is quite aware of the methodology of the CCP, but… https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/washington-secrets/biden-2020-win-tainted-56-say-it-was-a-cheaters-paradise
Alas, in spite of everything, we seem to be living in the “Age of Opacity”…
So close and yet so far away. Which is how powerful lies always work, by incorporating a hint of truth as a varnish coat.
“This gets them nowhere, he argues, because their problems are in fact all inextricably interlinked and have the same root cause: a radical, nihilism at the heart of the modern American Left.”
FIFY
“This is encouraging”….
…until one reads about “Evergrande” and “Fantasia”, etc.
Might this be the “big test”?
(And no, boom-bust cycles are most certainly NOT limited to Communist China… but this one seems about to go nuclear….)
OTOH, nor do they seem to be passing—let’s call it “the Taiwan test” with flying colors…
Well, nobody’s perfect, I guess.
“Court Jew”…
Woops, it seems you were referring to Henry K.
(And here I thought you were talking about Antony Blinken…. Oh well…sorry about that.)
Not to worry. The Biden-inflation will soon bailout all the issuers of dollar denominated real estate bonds.
I have been getting more aggressive memo’s from my blue state governor whom I am technically employed by. That appears to be ramping up to a Covid Mandate.
Guess ill be getting a vacation soon
Entrance to a Secret Garden, with peace and tranquility for all those the enter.
Neo,
I don’t know whether you saw Roger Kimball’s column on Merrick Garland at American Greatness this weekend, but he has a very big quote from you. I put myself in the lower class of your readers, but it’s still good company.
Just another open-thread comment.
Dominic Cummings is a British political strategist, who briefly served as Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s chief adviser. He writes at substack. About a month ago he published an essay entitled “Regime Change #2: A plea to Silicon Valley – start a project NOW to write the plan for the next GOP candidate.” The first line: “The goal is not ‘reform’ but a government that actually controls the government.”
This post is a wide-ranging attack on the federal government bureaucracy (aka the administrative state, the swamp, the deep state, etc.). I’m sympathetic to Cummings’s analysis, and his proposed solutions are imaginative and thought-provoking. But there’s not a chance in hell that anybody will take up his proposals. Even so, it has the potential to provoke some interesting arguments. For better or worse, I read it as a thought experiment.
Here’s a link:
https://dominiccummings.substack.com/p/regime-change-2-a-plea-to-silicon
Happy Columbus Day!
Happy Indigenous Peoples Day! Who were not only the First Americans; they were the First Americans to practice slavery.
The photo brought to mind some paintings by the Canadian Group of Seven, for instance: http://www.reidbetweenthelines.ca/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/AutumnAlgoma.jpg
Open thread, ok.
The more they push mandates on the vaccines, the more I have come to question these vaccines.
A 70 year old grandmother voluntarily taking mRNA vaccines for a disease that kills the elderly is one thing.
Forcing 7 or 17 or 27 year old women of child bearing age to take relatively new types of vaccines for a disease that primarily kills the middle and old aged is another thing entirely.
When you have a former Pfizer VP saying this needs to be studied more before pregnant women take it, that makes me sit up and take notice.
Mythx, good luck!
expat:
Yes, I did see that and would like to email and thank him, but I have no idea what his email address is. If anyone knows, please let me know.
Good luck, Mythx.
It’s plain old intolerance and mean spiritedness.
The news about airline flight cancellations is swirling with confusion. Air Traffic controllers at JAX? SW Air pilots? Vaxx-related walkouts reported and denied. I’m not sure what to think.
Tuvea: “Happy Indigenous Peoples Day! Who were not only the First Americans; they were the First Americans to practice slavery.”
Although, they might not be the first Americans?
Perhaps 10 years ago I read a post at Instapundit which linked to an article that discussed the evidence that humans were in North America when our “indigenous” “Native Americans” came across the Bering Straits land bridge. It was suggested that the American Indians wiped out the existing population. As I recall there was some evidence that would help advance the research (human bones?) but the evidence was being withheld from investigators by tribal authorities or government stewards.
I don’t recall hearing more on the story so maybe it was a dead end.
Minor note. The performance of the Communist Party of Bohemia and Moravia was poor enough in elections this week to get them knocked out of the Czech parliament. There aren’t any in the Slovak parliament either (though there is a bloc from a political party which has the Communist Party in its pedigree). The Czech and Slovak legislatures are free from Communists for the 1st time since 1925.
Strait is the gate and narrow is the path that leads to life, and few there be that find it.
Neo,
I did find this on Kimball at Encounter Books.
https://www.encounterbooks.com/authors/roger-kimball/
Art Deco,
Thanks. I had not seen that news item. That is good news. Although his name may not be respected here, about two decades ago Donald Rumsfeld prophesied this trend speaking of “old” and “new” Europe. Poland, Chech and Slovakia, Hungary even Austria(?) do not seem to be fans of many EU policies. I haven’t kept up with elections, but at one time the leaders of all the western, EU nations were childless (this was pre-Boris Johnson, obviously). I read some opinion pieces commenting on how that perspective was driving policy.
expat:
Thanks, but the email address there seems to go to their publicity department.
Art Deco:
That’s interesting news about Eastern Europe in particular because there must be tons of voters there now who did not grow up under Communism and therefore have no negative direct personal experience of it, and yet they seem to still be resisting the siren call of the left. I wonder why that is. Are they actually listening to their parents? And has the educational system there made it clear to students how pernicious the left is, teaching the history of what it was like when the left held sway?
I don’t want to re-litigate the McConnell thread, but I went off on a few rants and I want to make sure no one took offense. I think sometimes when I attempt to clarify my writing I end up muddying things further.
My sole point was McConnell is a politician who sees his job as promoting the Republican Party. Also, McConnell did not see Donald Trump’s movement as good for the Republican Party.
I am a Kurt Schlichter fan and he has argued very cogently on why Conservatives should back McConnell. I understand his point, and don’t disagree that McConnell is good for Conservatives more often than not, but I personally have no respect for someone who is employed by his Countrymen and women to uhpold and oath, but subrogates it to other principles.
Politicians who enact legislation to inhibit my natural rights are not my friend. They are my enemy. That doesn’t mean they are bad, or ineffectual politicians.
Great photo. Where/when was it taken?
As for Roger Kimball: a ferocious advocate for reason and liberty. His New Criterion is required reading and a rare bargain. Floreat Roger.
Mythx, jon baker, and JimNorCal:
If you think COVID mandates are bad here, it’s worse on the other side of the pond. There’s a long article in City Journal by Lionel Shriver [a birthing person, BTW], an American living in the UK, about the nearly unbelievable willingness of the British public to accept the so-called new normal. Sample from “The Most Frightened Nation”: “While 64 percent want Britain’s mask mandate in shops and on public transport to remain a legal requirement for the duration of the global pandemic, an astounding 51 percent want to be masked by law, forever. There’s more: some 35 percent want to confine any Briton who returns from a foreign country, vaccinated or not, to a ten-day home quarantine—permanently, Covid or no Covid. A full 46 percent would require a vaccine passport in order to travel abroad—permanently, Covid or no Covid.”
https://www.city-journal.org/united-kingdom-servile-response-to-covid-19-pandemic
God Save the Queen.
Chicago weekend update from another blog. Pray for our Black American fellow citizens.
At least 44 shot, 3 fatally in ChiTown this weekend:
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/crime/3-killed-41-wounded-in-weekend-shootings-across-chicago/ar-AAPjWhk
As Biden would say, “Come on, man. You can do better.”
According to this, the SW Air flight cancellations may be due to
1) pilots notified their jobs are gone as of Nov unless vaxxed
2) pilots using their banked vacation time before it’s lost
https://twitter.com/bennyjohnson/status/1447533987770023941
neo,
I think growing up with direct evidence of what Communism wrought compared to Capitalism (a lot of the architecture still exists, and parents’ and grandparents’ tales) does drive political philosophies, but immigration is also a huge issue in many of those countries. Political leaders have seen the unrest that results from welcoming huge numbers of immigrants while making little attempt to integrate them into society and culture; as in France, England and Germany, and they don’t want the same in their nations.
PA+Cat,
I can’t help but notice how many COVID policies align with what Leftists had been promoting under the guise of climate change and green initiatives. It’s an astounding coincidence. 😉
RTF:
Just for you, a little musical interlude: “Rule, Britannia!”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y2iLA3h_u60&ab_channel=%E2%99%9ARomanosTheMelodist%E2%99%9A
Well-known chorus:
“Rule, Britannia! Britannia, rule the waves!
Britons never, never, never shall be slaves.”
That whirring sound you hear is Churchill and Thatcher spinning in their graves.
Owen:
Portland, Maine. Many picturesque spots there.
Neo: thanks. Remarkable colors on that stonework. And very nice stonework it is, too. We live in CT and there is God’s own plenty of stone walls (a book whose title escapes me now, said there are about a quarter-million miles of stone walls in New England) but most are tumbledown; less intentional structures than a hasty way to clear a field for plowing. Also the rocks around us tend to be rounded; glacial debris with corners milled off; hard to stack well. A well-built wall like that in your pic is not common.
Regarding Art Deco’s comment about the Czech Republic, hopefully we’ll hear from commenter Tom Gray (I hope I’m remembering his name correctly {Tom Grey?}). A former Californian who is married to a physician and lives in the Czech Republic. He’s always interesting and would have an inside perspective.
“there are about a quarter-million miles of stone walls in New England”
I imagine the stones being pulled out of the soil, one by one, by weary farmers … and then repurposed for walls.
JimNorCal: I think it was something of an art, with stone-boats pulled by oxen and digging under the big rocks and using chains to drag them up onto the stone-boat. Slow and exhausting work. In the book whose name I don’t remember, the author said that the size of the fields (where the stones from the interior were moved to form the walls) reflected a mathematical optimum of effort versus area cleared to be plowed. A tiny field was easier to clear but you couldn’t grow much of a crop in it. A big field was the opposite. The settlers’ homegrown methods converged on that optimum.
Finally some slight acknowledgment about what the data is showing. He doesn’t go far enough in my view. It will be interesting to see if the trend continues tomorrow morning after the state’s weekend data comes in. There’s always a 3 day lag that I have to catch up on Tuesday due to none of the states doing any data reporting over the weekend, so I get Saturday, Sunday, and Monday data on Tuesday morning.
https://www.newsmax.com/newsmax-tv/jha-delta-covid-coronavirus/2021/10/11/id/1039969/
Neo – Here’s a link to Glenn Loury’s latest meditations on “The Black Family”.
Of course he’s describing a disaster foretold 56 years ago by Pat Moynihan. Loury can’t quite bring himself to state the degree of degradation – he doesn’t want to rub the wokester Brownies too much the wrong way. But in his halting, diffident way he’s trying to sound the alarm.
https://glennloury.substack.com/p/a-family-affair
I assume this is at least somewhat exaggerated, there must be some fine print … but in the state of Louisiana you can a felony conviction expunged if you vaxx?
https://youtu.be/2uWwrnpYNzU
Rufus T. Firefly, as you could tell from my comments, no offense here. I respect differing opinions. I lean with Schlichter on this, and also on his repeated comment that he doesn’t owe any politician anything, including loyalty. As applied to Trump, he’s calling for acknowledgment that personnel problems and failure to clean house were major problems. What will Trump, or any other candidate, propose to do about that?
@JimNorCal
“… As I recall there was some evidence that would help advance the research (human bones?) but the evidence was being withheld from investigators by tribal authorities or government stewards.”
Sounds like Kennewick Man:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kennewick_Man
@Cornflour:
Asking Silicon Valley to help make Government Govern… and for Republicans, no less, is like begging the faculty of Al Azhar to design a marketing strategy for the processed pork industry.
Cummings has been reading Yarvin, obviously… although Yarvin is certainly not in the business of helping Republicans win anything. The big difference is that Cummings is pimping for electoral grift trade. In any case, Ask not for whom the Cornhole Bell Tolls…
The issue of stone walls is of interest to me. In the town of Rensselaerville, southwest of here, there are areas on state land of considerable size which are checkered with quite a few of those old stone walls. Some of them make handy landmarks, of course. But all of those old farms from two hundred years or so ago are generally abandoned now and forested over. Often when I’m hiking those lands, I’m moved to ponder such things.
A lot of them must go back to the time of the Patroons.
OK, myriad closet Z Man Fans. Here’s a new one to digest and enjoy:
https://www.takimag.com/article/living-in-the-age-of-jim-snow/
“A basic rule of strategy, one of the first things you are taught when learning strategy, is that you must conceal your plans from the opponent. If you are deposing a witness, for example, you do not tell opposing counsel how you hope to trick the witness into saying something that helps your case. An essential part of your strategy is to conceal from the other side how you hope to win the case.
One obvious reason for this is to prevent the other side from coming up with a strategy to counter your strategy. In sports, coaches spend a lot of time trying to trick the other coaches into thinking they know what is coming. Deception is a big part of sports, even one-on-one combat sports. Boxers use deception to lure the opponent into a position the opponent thinks is advantageous, but is actually a trap.
The overly quoted Sun Tzu said that “All warfare is based on deception.” The equally over-quoted Clausewitz said that “War is the continuation of politics by other means,” so taken together we can conclude that politics is about deception. This is especially true in liberal democratic politics where the game is to trick the majority into handing over their privileges to a minority, who never have their best interests in mind.
This is what makes the sudden lack of deception in the war on white people a strange and possibly dangerous development. The war on whiteness, as the beautiful people like to put it, is supposed to be about the bad whites. These are the people who use taboo language and maintain anachronistic opinions about the human condition. They are the problem, not everyday white people.
This is not true, of course, but it has been an important part of the program, as it allows most whites to think they are the good guys, even as their neighbors are being picked off one by one. There is usually some way to justify the bad fortune of a white person hurled into the void for heresy. “It is a shame Bob got fired, but he really should not have used the N-word in third grade.”
Recently, we have seen a sudden break from this deception and a tacit admission that we now live in the age of Jim Snow. There are rules and standards for the white population, who are treated like a hated minority despite being the majority. Then we have a set of rules for the nonwhite population, who are often treated as sacred objects by the ruling class. Whites are sinners in the hands of angry nonwhite gods
.
.
It used to be that whenever someone noticed the war on white people, Conservative Inc. would swing into action labeling those people as racist. Maybe they would have one of their South Asian houseboys dig through the garbage of the accused, looking for proof of his apostasy. [Zaphod Sayeth: If you can’t read this without cringing, you’re lacking some essential survival gene. That’s what they do.] Even they are finding it impossible to explain away what has become overt and official. America is a Jim Snow country.
.
.
Pat Buchanan famously said that America was the first country to have a ruling class that hated the people over whom it ruled. It turns out that they only hate some of the people, the white majority. The question that naturally follows is can such a country last when the ruling elite despises the majority with such passion? More important, can such a country last when the majority begins to hate their rulers back?”
Poland is not at all happy with the EU, and vice versa (h/t Powerline today).
https://www.spiked-online.com/2021/10/11/why-we-must-stand-with-poland/
On the generational thing, it actually takes 2 generations to “forget” the lessons of their ancestors. We baby-boomers were taught by parents and grandparents who experienced the Great Depression and the World Wars; our kids are further removed but some of them listened to us (obviously, not all); their kids have no direct contact with those who were “there.”*
However, the positive side is that we also now have a generation whose natural tendency to rebel against The Man means they are directing their ire to the Left and the Democrats!
Let’s Go, Brandon!
*Family story about that: my mother went back to college for her MA as part of her teaching career (probably required for retention or salary raise; she taught 7th grade), and one class was Modern History. She recalls one of the college-age students asking her how she managed to make such high grades on the tests, because she never seemed to be reading the book or listening to the teacher (she was probably napping in the middle of the day). Mother explained, “Honey, I don’t have to study that stuff. I was there.”
Peter Heck at Not the Bee had a pair of posts explaining how conservatives can move some of the younger voters over to the right. Made sense to me.
https://notthebee.com/article/lets-pump-the-brakes-on-that-young-people-embrace-socialism-conclusion
https://notthebee.com/article/reversing-young-americans-slouch-towards-socialism
I don’t know about New England but here in Michigan the glaciers left rounded stones when they retreated and the action of freeze/thaw throws them up to the surface every Spring. Farmers in the past had to remove them from the fields and then used them to build with.
@ PA Cat > “If you think COVID mandates are bad here, it’s worse on the other side of the pond. There’s a long article in City Journal by Lionel Shriver [a birthing person, BTW], an American living in the UK, about the nearly unbelievable willingness of the British public to accept the so-called new normal”
“That whirring sound you hear is Churchill and Thatcher spinning in their graves.”
I read Shriver’s essay yesterday, and was impressed by her vehemence. She is not happy.
How many here know that Churchill was a hobbyist stone mason aka bricklayer, generally to “relax” from the rigours of saving Western Civilization, not that anyone is thanking him for his trouble these days*.
https://winstonchurchill.org/publications/finest-hour/finest-hour-157/churchill-as-bricklayer/
*Except for this guy – there is some hope for at least some of the younger generations.
http://quixoteconsulting.com/Blog/2010/02/08/winston-churchill-was-a-bricklayer/
This looked interesting; haven’t listened to it yet.
https://churchillonchurchill.com/
And Wikipedia tells me that Shriver is a metalsmith.
Maybe we ought to require that all politicians learn a construction trade before they can be elected to anything.
@ Cornflour > “The first line: “The goal is not ‘reform’ but a government that actually controls the government.” ..”
I read Cummings’ essay and it is indeed very interesting, probably good advice, and I have no idea how it could be implemented and by whom.
He throws around the idea of shutting down the dysfunctional bureaucracies (yea!) and replacing them with “new start-ups” (yea?) but gives no clue as to how those start-up replacements are to be created, staffed, and emplaced in the legal structure that the bureaucracies now occupy.
Also, he praises FDR for doing exactly that, with or without the acquiescence of the legislature — effectively bullying Congress (and the Supreme Court) because of his huge electoral mandate — but we’ve all seen how lower courts can impede and stymie executive orders.
Also, there is some serious consideration now that Roosevelt delayed the recovery from the Depression by his tinkering and use of his “start ups” rather than improving the economy, and we all know the deleterious consequences of his socialization of the country, “soft” though it may have been compared to Stalin’s communism. So, how can we be sure the cure won’t be worse than the disease today? (Although, with the political diseases now inflicting us, it would be very hard indeed for his system to be worse.)
As you said, “there’s not a chance in hell that anybody will take up his proposals.”
However, leaving the government running the government aside as an outside bet, there might be some hope of setting up the parallel non-government structures advocated by other people along the same lines as Cummings’ start-ups, with the same kind of focus and mission, just not inside the halls of DC. The Left is already doing that, with their “woke parallel government,” which operates even when they are officially “in charge” of the government, so we might as well have one on the Right as well. Then the Official Government will be the third rail.
https://www.nationalreview.com/news/mcconnell-corporate-america-acting-as-woke-parallel-government/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=article&utm_campaign=river&utm_content=top-bar-latest&utm_term=first
I hope this has been a somewhat interesting argument. 😉
@ Rufus in re Tom Grey – he’s been commenting only sporadically lately.
For those interested, he does have a blog, but it’s also sporadic.
https://tomgrey.wordpress.com/
One of the things Cummings pointed out in his essay:
Hmm. Didn’t get those blockquotes closed properly.
Something there is that doesn’t love a blockquote wall.
Zaphod,
Pat Buchanan must’ve skipped class the day they discussed the French Revolution.
It’s becoming increasingly obvious that the bureaucratic/administrative state – whatever you want to call it – has a dictatorial tendency of it’s own. Maybe we should go back to the days before civil service protections when a new admin fired all the old staff and hired their own. I know that era was riddled with corruption and cronyism but, really, could it be any worse than what we’ve got now?
Corruption – check
Cronyism – check
Party power shifts – not so much
“Maybe we should go back to the days before civil service protections when a new admin fired all the old staff and hired their own.”
Sure looks like “Biden”‘s yer man!
– – – – – – – – –
And in other incredible, improbable, and otherwise unbelievable news, it looks like SOMEONE in China actually tells the truth: there’s a real-estate development firm (something like Evergrande, in fact) called…wait for it…”FANTASIA”!!
https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/its-disastrous-day-all-hell-breaks-loose-chinas-bond-markets
(Not that “Evergrande” isn’t a gem of a name, itself. Still, “Fantasia”—on a par with those George Soros-founded/funded “Democracy” and “Transparency” Orgs—deserves a Nobel Prize of some sort.)
https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/its-disastrous-day-all-hell-breaks-loose-chinas-bond-markets
Molly+Brown:
Not really. French Revolution mainly ate its own revolutionaries and a chunk of the old aristocracy. Couldn’t have happened to nicer people in the main (*).
Give you partial credit for the Vendée — lots of commoners got killed… but if you revolt and don’t succeed, being put down with maximum brutality is par for the course. Something to keep in mind in the current year.
* Anything which decimates the IgNobility of the Robe from time to time isn’t entirely a bad thing.
“…a chunk…”
Er, kindly define “a chunk”…
(Sort of like, “a smidgeon”? As in, “Sure, I’ll have another piece of that incredible Valrhona ‘death-by-chocolate’ cake concoction, but, um…just a smidgeon…”?)
And in other news, it looks like “Transparency”(TM) is once again about to be unleashed by the Democrats! (Can “Unity” be far behind?)
https://justthenews.com/politics-policy/elections/unlike-others-wisconsins-election-probe-zeroes-democrat-machine-tactics
Speaking of “revolutions”, might this be a “Lexington/Concord” moment?
“Texas Governor Bars All COVID-19 Vaccine Mandates in State”
https://www.newsmax.com/newsfront/abbott/2021/10/11/id/1040068/
(Or more of a Fort Sumter…)
@BarryMeislin:
Admittedly Carlyle managed to pen a perfectly good book about the Revolution without ever sinking to the level of Chunk.
The inimitable Ozzy Man would probably locate Chunk on the spectrum thusly:
SFA < Smidgen < Chunk < Slab < !@#$load < A Metric @#$%Tonne
You probably don't want to know what he'd use to describe a thickness measurement < 1mm.
Zaphod,
Ozzy Man would likely sink from the level of chunk to chunder.
Fascinating. He’s not wrong. Trigger warning for Copeium Addicts:
https://palladiummag.com/2021/10/11/the-triumph-and-terror-of-wang-huning/
“Also in 1988, Wang—having risen with unprecedented speed to become Fudan’s youngest full professor at age 30—won a coveted scholarship (facilitated by the American Political Science Association) to spend six months in the United States as a visiting scholar. Profoundly curious about America, Wang took full advantage, wandering about the country like a sort of latter-day Chinese Alexis de Tocqueville, visiting more than 30 cities and nearly 20 universities.
What he found deeply disturbed him, permanently shifting his view of the West and the consequences of its ideas.
Wang recorded his observations in a memoir that would become his most famous work: the 1991 book America Against America. In it, he marvels at homeless encampments in the streets of Washington DC, out-of-control drug crime in poor black neighborhoods in New York and San Francisco, and corporations that seemed to have fused themselves to and taken over responsibilities of government. Eventually, he concludes that America faces an “unstoppable undercurrent of crisis” produced by its societal contradictions, including between rich and poor, white and black, democratic and oligarchic power, egalitarianism and class privilege, individual rights and collective responsibilities, cultural traditions and the solvent of liquid modernity.
But while Americans can, he says, perceive that they are faced with “intricate social and cultural problems,” they “tend to think of them as scientific and technological problems” to be solved separately. This gets them nowhere, he argues, because their problems are in fact all inextricably interlinked and have the same root cause: a radical, nihilistic individualism at the heart of modern American liberalism.
“The real cell of society in the United States is the individual,” he finds. This is so because the cell most foundational (per Aristotle) to society, “the family, has disintegrated.” Meanwhile, in the American system, “everything has a dual nature, and the glamour of high commodification abounds. Human flesh, sex, knowledge, politics, power, and law can all become the target of commodification.” This “commodification, in many ways, corrupts society and leads to a number of serious social problems.” In the end, “the American economic system has created human loneliness” as its foremost product, along with spectacular inequality. As a result, “nihilism has become the American way, which is a fatal shock to cultural development and the American spirit.”
Moreover, he says that the “American spirit is facing serious challenges” from new ideational competitors. Reflecting on the universities he visited and quoting approvingly from Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind, he notes a growing tension between Enlightenment liberal rationalism and a “younger generation [that] is ignorant of traditional Western values” and actively rejects its cultural inheritance. “If the value system collapses,” he wonders, “how can the social system be sustained?”
Ultimately, he argues, when faced with critical social issues like drug addiction, America’s atomized, deracinated, and dispirited society has found itself with “an insurmountable problem” because it no longer has any coherent conceptual grounds from which to mount any resistance.
Once idealistic about America, at the start of 1989 the young Wang returned to China and, promoted to Dean of Fudan’s International Politics Department, became a leading opponent of liberalization.”
May I respectfully suggest reading the whole article and digesting. Best read first and get a grip on just how well educated and thoughtful this guy is before slinging about the trite Hassan al-Banna stuff.
Not the early Seventies anymore. You can’t send the Court Jew off to Beijing to spout off about Metternich in 2021. Chinky has read all our books and done his homework. How many of us can read his books?
Note too, that stupido retarded One-dimensional Nuance-lacking Winnie the Pooh went out of his way to hire this guy. Cogdis anyone?
The West really needs to up its game. I’d start by looking at ourselves through educated Chinese eyes.
@Rufus:
“Ozzy Man would likely sink from the level of chunk to chunder.”
You’ve jogged some neurons:
Chuck Chunder #1 “Monster in the Dunny”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ZKhZUTQ0GI
Based Intro Music, too.
“…Nuance-lacking…”
Remarkable post, for which thanks.
One could do worse than explore and examine it thoroughly and carefully. There is much there to digest and learn (though might one also wonder why the ill effects he vividly describes are so much more prevalent when the Democrats are in control of “the hen-house”?…)
OTOH you may have noticed that this modern-day de Tocquevillian rambler has come to “all the right conclusions” and is saying “all the right things” (at least as far as “…Nuance-lacking…” is concerned).
Especially, one might say, with his note on “drug addiction”. In fact, so wise is the peripatetic full professor that he’s even been elevated—by “…Nuance-lacking…”—from “acute observer” all the way up to “counseling sage”. Is there any wonder, then, why “…Nuance-lacking…” is sending so much Fentanyl into the country (and why “Biden” is allowing so much of it in)?
Just one example, of course; nonetheless, Wang’s world of commentary is invaluable…and for many reasons.
Let’s do a thought experiment, though. Let’s “send” the acute observer cum counseling sage on a de Tocquevillian trek around the Middle Kingdom for several years and “allow” him to go wherever he wants—to every corner, every nook and cranny, every dim sum restaurant and noodle bar, university and cooperative farm, every fab and hi-tech park, etc.—and, moreover, to record all his acute observations on paper/parchment/pixels.
And publish it all.
And then wonder how “…Nuance-lacking…” might reward him for his loyal candor….
BTW, if “court Jew” is “spout[ing] off about Metternich” in Beijing, it’s for external (i.e., US/Western) consumption ONLY.
(Such “firm, determined opposition” plays to the indignant peanut gallery of Deplorablecs(TM) a whole lot better than ‘Xi and “me” see eye to eye…and hope to work together in a spirit of sublime cooperation between our two great countries, yadda, yadda, yadda…’)
If you read the article again you’ll note that the Chinese government is actually trying to do something about rectifying social ills. As opposed, you know to pouring gasoline on fires. Radical. This kind of implies that they’re at least a bit capable of self-reflection and backing up and trying new approaches.
I’m uncertain what any of article has to do with waging undeclared war on the USA and other countries. Why would that refute sense and logic if their domestic actions? make Only a fool would not make undeclared war on West. Best defense is offense. Never occurred that Western Poz is itself an Offense?
Needless to say one doesn’t go about it J’Accuse-wise in the Middle Kingdom. Never been their way. But then how’s all that Truth to Power working out for you?
PS: Kissinger notoriously did spend a metric &$@!ton of time bloviating about inside kabbalistic historiographic baseball with Mao and Zhao — much to their combined bemusement. But Inscrutable Duo knew to let the Foreign Devil talk. And talk. Just smile a lot and nod politely and make some gnomic utterances. Guaranteed to work.
“This kind of implies that they’re at least a bit capable of self-reflection and backing up and trying new approaches.”
This is encouraging.
However, might one wonder about the “built-in” limitations?
Of course, every “system” has its pluses and minuses, etc., i.e., has its “built-in limitations” (but which system is more adept at minimizing those “limitations”…). And of course the “we’re all sinners” paradigm can help to cover quite a lot….
And all too often, we’re all captives—maybe I should, fashionably, say VICTIMS—of our own rhetoric!…which raises the question: “Which system, if any, has more of an ability to ‘break free'”? (Or is it a question less of “system” than of “leadership”…though formulating it in this way raises even more questions…along the lines of how that leadership is chosen, i.e., if it IS chosen…)
E.g.,
One is quite aware of the methodology of the CCP, but…
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/washington-secrets/biden-2020-win-tainted-56-say-it-was-a-cheaters-paradise
Alas, in spite of everything, we seem to be living in the “Age of Opacity”…
So close and yet so far away. Which is how powerful lies always work, by incorporating a hint of truth as a varnish coat.
“This gets them nowhere, he argues, because their problems are in fact all inextricably interlinked and have the same root cause: a radical, nihilism at the heart of the modern American Left.”
FIFY
“This is encouraging”….
…until one reads about “Evergrande” and “Fantasia”, etc.
Might this be the “big test”?
(And no, boom-bust cycles are most certainly NOT limited to Communist China… but this one seems about to go nuclear….)
OTOH, nor do they seem to be passing—let’s call it “the Taiwan test” with flying colors…
Well, nobody’s perfect, I guess.
“Court Jew”…
Woops, it seems you were referring to Henry K.
(And here I thought you were talking about Antony Blinken…. Oh well…sorry about that.)
Not to worry. The Biden-inflation will soon bailout all the issuers of dollar denominated real estate bonds.
The Stasi are now going after Clapton.
https://twitter.com/walterkirn/status/1447627141672169474
And Texas says, “Come in, I’ll give ya shelter from the [Biden-mandates] storm.”
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/texas-governor-greg-abbott-bans-vaccine-mandates-by-any-entity/ar-AAPowqR
Musical reference:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-gsDBuHwqbM