A world where Angela Merkel feels compelled to accept millions of migrants for Europe even to the detriment of Germany and where president Obama feels he can sign major international treaties with Iran without reference to Congress is an unstable world locked in a game that is no longer transparent. Who do politicians work for? It creates a world of dubious loyalties and unpredictable coalitions.
If the obvious conflict of interest has been ignored by the politicians, it has not been lost on the voters. Many plainly sense what economists call an principal-agent problem, which may be the source of the current voter revolt.
Drill Rex, Drill
Light Holiday Reading
Recommended by EBD, which is good enough for me: The Great Republican Revolt and ‘These left thinkers have destroyed the intellectual life’;
So, what is all this Nothing-ness about? ‘My view’, says Scruton, ‘is that what’s underlying all of this is a kind of nihilistic vision that masks itself as a moving toward the enlightened future, but never pauses to describe what that society will be like. It simply loses itself in negatives about the existing things – institutional relations like marriage, for instance – but never asks itself if those existing things are actually part of what human beings are. Always in Zizek there’s an assumption of the right to dismiss them as standing in the way of something else, but that something else turns out to be Nothing.’
That ought to keep you busy for a while.
WATCH: As For The Second Time In History, Fire Melts Steel
Checking His Privilege
Here, Tell These People Something They Don’t Know About Me
What’s happening is that Gessler’s Hat has been knocked off the pole. For those who don’t know the story, the rebellion against the Habsburgs by what became Switzerland started when a certain William Tell refused to bow to Gessler’s headgear, which was placed on a pole in the market square of Altdorf. It was only a seemingly little incident but it turned into a big deal.
No one could know it, certainly not Gessler and perhaps not even William Tell, but that act of symbolic defiance touched off a series of unpredictable events whose consequences echo to this day, 800 years later. A very similar thing is unfolding today. Trump has forced politics to squarely face the taboo. That act has caused a cascade which is releasing a lot of pent-up energy.
A Thing Of Beauty
It’s Probably Nothing
Kissinger: “If nuclear weapons become established (in the Middle East), a catastrophic outcome is nearly inevitable.”
It’s The Steel
Related: How the Feminists’ “War against Boys” Paved the Way for Islam
Frankly, My Dear
Via TimR in comments: “Someone reverse-engineered Ahmed’s clock. Stupid media got suckered again.”
So I turned to eBay, searching for vintage alarm clocks. It only took a minute to locate Ahmed’s clock. See this eBay listing, up at the time of this writing. Amhed’s clock was invented, and built, by Micronta, a Radio Shack subsidary. Catalog number 63 756. […]
So there you have it folks, Ahmed Mohamad did not invent, nor build a clock. He took apart an existing clock, and transplanted the guts into a pencil box, and claimed it was his own creation. It all seems really fishy to me.
Understanding Hitler’s Anti-Semitism
So those were intuitions, but then I went back and reread [Hitler’s manifesto] Mein Kampf, and reread the second book, and read all the major Hitler primary sources, and I was really astonished at how clearly these ideas came out–that, in fact, Hitler’s quite explicitly an ecological thinker, that the planetary level is the most important level. This is something that he says right from the beginning of Mein Kampf, all the way through. And likewise, I was struck that Hitler explicitly said that states are temporary, state borders will be washed away in the struggle for nature. In other words, the anarchy that he creates was actually there in the theory from the beginning. He says from the very beginning, what we have to do is destroy the Jews; strip away the artificial political creations that the Jews are responsible for; and let nature just take its course. And what he means by nature’s course is [that] the stronger races destroy the weaker races. …
Isis Happens
“…how strange it was that I met many people who fell in with the wrong crowd but never any members of the wrong crowd itself.”
Para Panamania
August 6th
The day we commemorate the nuclear takedown of comedian Jon Stewart.
Showing Up To Riot
h/t Wayne
I, Napoleon
All I want is the pretty white horse.
Featured Comment
SDA commentor, “nick”.
Bravo, Mr. Glavin. “So what lessons have we learned?” Well, this shameful episode upon which you report—the “Knowing what we know now…?” gambit—has shown us that the political and chattering classes, left, right and otherwise, pose a greater danger to us than do the savages. The threats, of course, are different. To the savages we might lose our heads, and that would be rather inconvenient. To the professional talkers, we lose our minds. How are we—those of us busy living the lives of ordinary people—supposed to understand how the world works when the commentariat upon which we depend for information is so ineffectual and/or corrupt? Where oh where (present company excepted) are those who remember that the WMD threat was one of twenty-some reasons for invading Iraq, and far down the list in importance? Where are those who noticed that caches of WMD were found in Iraq. Where are those who ask where Assad got his WMD, and remember in the asking the stories of Russian Spetsnaz troops carting WMD out of Iraq into Syria and Lebanon?
In the place where facts and understanding should be, we have instead this idiotic question and its presumption that the Iraq adventure had to fail. It did not. That failure took considerable effort from the ruling classes. Let’s remember to give them the credit.
What have we learned? We should have learned, again, that these a$$holes will say anything to promote their cause, and that their cause is always themselves. (Case in point: The idiot Rand Paul now says that ISIS was caused by GOP hawks. What purpose do you think this idiocy is intended to promote? Truth? Knowledge?)
In this regard, it may be worth remembering that the rights of free speech and of the press exist to protect and promote knowledge. When the press and the politician’s purpose is instead to make you stupid, why should their speech be protected?
“Knowing what we know now”
Or – forgetting what they knew then.
In the Taliban slave-state where Afghanistan used to be, thousands of jihadists from Chechnya, Libya, Jordan, Palestine, Lebanon, Kashmir and elsewhere were attending to their exercises in training camps strewn across the landscape in the days before 9-11. Do we really need to run a fan-fiction contest to imagine how that situation would have played out had we all listened to Noam Chomsky and stayed out of it?
As for Iraq, there is a kind of wilful amnesia demanded by the revisionist orthodoxy that “what we know now” is that the world would be a better place if Saddam Hussein had been left unmolested in Baghdad. We know no such thing because we can’t know. But there is something more enfeebling than mere memory loss at work in the pernicious and widely-held misapprehension that the entire Iraqi regime-change escapade was trumped up on a Bush administration “lie” that Saddam possessed WMDs.
It wasn’t even the Bush administration that committed the United States to shifting the Baathist nightmare out of Baghdad. It was the Clinton administration and the Iraq Liberation Act of 1998.
An excellent piece by Terry Glavin.
Free Pam Geller!
This is the best thing you’ll read all week.
Oh? We’re criticizing Ms. Gellar, a woman who was just the subject of a jihadi assassination attempt and who may well be a marked woman for the rest of her life, on niggling matters of tone and style?
And we need to do this now? We need to trot out the smug and absolutely unexamined, absolutely thoughtless vanities of Upper Middle Class Respectability and attack Ms. Gellar for not doing it in quite the way we would have, even as, in all likelihood, she scrambles to find long-term security to protect her life?
For drawing a cartoon?
[…]
This is about class. This is all about class.
This is about, specifically, the careerist, cowardly, go-along-to-get-along mores of the Upper Middle Class, the class of people whose parents were all college educated, and of course are college educated themselves; the class that dominates our thought-transmitting institutions (because non-college educated people are more of less shut out of this industry).
It is a class which is deathly afraid of social stigma, and lives in class-based fear being grouped with the wrong people, and which is more interested in Career, quite frankly, than in the actual tradecraft of that Career, which is clarity of thought and clarity of expression.
This is something I’ve talked about before. Ace spells it out.
QOTD
“But more importantly, it comes out of the fact that, during this century, intellectualism failed, and everyone knows it. In places like Russia and Germany, the common people agreed to loosen their grip on traditional folkways, mores, and religion, and let the intellectuals run with the ball, and they screwed everything up and turned the century into an abbatoir. Those wordy intellectuals used to be merely tedious; now they seem kind of dangerous as well.”
Via Instapundit.