Pulling a Fas(cis)t One
Equality under the law: good. Essential. Forcing people of differing skills, motivation and capability to be “equal:” ruinous. Suicidal. And deeply, deeply unfair. But, for the Berkeley crowd, there’s no reason why a fatally flawed, disgusting, historically-demolished idea can’t be retried – and retried – and retried… So long as it will fit on a 2x4 foot piece of cardboard that you can hold on the end of a stick while dancing in a public fountain wearing a star-spangled diaper. Does Capitalism, and its equality of opportunity, produce cruel results? It does. Does Socialism, and it’s equality of outcome, produce a fair and happy society? Ask the Russian farmers under Stalin. Ask the Chinese under Mao during the Cultural Revolution. Ask the Cambodians under the Khmer Rouge. Oh, wait – you can’t. They’ve all been murdered. (i) to have committed, or to pose a significant risk of committing, an act or acts of violence that have the purpose or effect of: (A) threatening the peace or stability of Iraq or the Government of Iraq; or (B) undermining efforts to promote economic reconstruction and political reform in Iraq or to provide humanitarian assistance to the Iraqi people; (ii) to have materially assisted, sponsored, or provided financial, material, logistical, or technical support for, or goods or services in support of, such an act or acts of violence or any person whose property and interests in property are blocked pursuant to this order; or (iii) to be owned or controlled by, or to have acted or purported to act for or on behalf of, directly or indirectly, any person whose property and interests in property are blocked pursuant to this order. 
Another shot of BS from the BDS infectees - when will it end?
After perusing callimachus' post on snark, I decided to pay a visit to Snarky's blog and witness for myself the parody of intellectual thought that the Left is putting up just for entertainment's sake. Apparently, this mark gisleson believes that Michael Totten - yes, the same reporter who has risked life and limb to provide commentary in dangerous places as treacherous as Hezbollah-occupied Lebanon and less-reported locales like Kurdistan in order to put a visual picture of progress that the MSM and the Left are so afraid of showing to the American public (thereby constituting blatant censorship of information - doesn't that violate the principles of free press?) - is a "coward".
What deeply offends my sensibilities is that mark feels that he knows the situation better than Totten, when he is loath to even leave his little universe of half-truths and full-blown lies, instead subsisting on a lean diet of manufactured soundbites and the occasional buffet spread of garbage that poses for intellectual discourse in the MSM. Resorting to snarkiness of the most degenerate, he can't even make it past the first sentence without name-calling: "wingnut provocateur", "a**clown", "twisted f*ck", "sorry a**", "gasbag", "bloviating coward", "war whore" and the clincher: "fascist". Now that's the functional vernacular of the Left - throw a few concocted 'fake-but-accurate' anecdotes, equivocate some half-truths and assumptions with no basis whatsoever, build the argument up by appealing to the emotional rather than rational side - then deliver the low blow with a solid vulgarity or two to seal the deal.
Let us see what this mark has to offer in that post of his: firstly, he refers to Totten as an "effete Republican elite", which to me sounds like the typical progressivist grudge against the seemingly privileged in society, an attempt to appeal to the imaginary dichotomy between the have and have-nots. If you have not read fonte's essay on transnational progressivism, I would advise you to do so right away. One of the premises includes that of the hegemony/oppressed fallacy that progressives absolutely adore, and will promote just about any agenda, justify just about any argument and sanction just about any action despite its moral or logical contradictions to 'level the playing field'. Think about the oft-used "American imperial domination" or "hegemonic superiority" theories that have been foisted on the pages of editorials and blogs, trumpeted as though they were legitimate paradigms of thought that could be sustained simply by blind allegiance to the ideology of transnationalism.
The premise of the transnational progressivist argument that equality should be achieved even at the expense of degenerating standards goes against the entire principle of progress that every society, humanity itself should strive for. The fallacious meme that 'the rich get richer, the poor get poorer' is exposed for its deception by bill whittle:
I highly suggest you read the whole thing. whittle makes a compelling case that the bell curve of wealth can shift to the right, thereby creating rather than redistributing wealth and so every man and woman - rich or relatively poorer - benefits more so than if the rich were deprived of their hard-earned money while the poor subsist on welfare. That latter solution posited by the Left so vociferously sounds so much like Socialism, doesn't it? What is even more deliciously ironic is that mark points us towards another blogger, sara, that laments about the recent Executive Order about Blocking Property of Certain Persons Who Threaten Stabilisation Efforts in Iraq:This government has now asserted -- without so much as a by-your-leave from Congress -- its right to take away our houses, cars, savings accounts, the stuff of our lives, on the say-so of the President and his Treasury Secretary. They are not kidding. What we do here, what I am doing right now (unless I choose my words very carefully) is being done in defiance of the Law According to George Bush.
Ah yes, sara, I wonder what you would advocate should a Democrat with all these crazy Socialist ideas, who pores through volumes of Communist policies for inspiration, actually ascend the presidency - how would you and your Leftist comrades actually execute this Fairness Doctrine in terms of wealth redistribution? Would it not start with escalating taxes for the rich, then edging towards a fantastical re-enactment of Robin Hood as the wealthy find their property and assets being gradually redistributed to the poor? Why, if the Democratic establishment is so confident of seizing the throne once Bush steps down, this particular Executive Order should be right up their alley - it serves their interests in the future and fits right into the elitist mindset: why consult the people at all and risk giving them the power to oppose Congress? That sara should even dare to mention "a law no people's legislature ever approved" is blasphemous and an attempt at misrepresentation: when is it up to the legislature to approve anything when the citizens of the United States have not sounded out the approval or opposition? Congress has not taken their constituents into consideration when engaging in purely destructive demagoguery and frenetic, politically expedient partisanship - betraying the people who invested their hopes in them, desecrating the constitutional tenets of a republic.
[...] When the President can take away your life's savings without due process, under authority of a law no people's legislature ever approved, for simply disagreeing with his policies and publicly stating your intentions to do something about them, we are treading so close to that line that it's hard to tell whether we're actually over it.
Is sara actually fearful that the President might actually strip her and those of the Left of their property and riches simply because of political opposition? That she could become a victim of redistribution of wealth - that surely must scare the heck out of the Left. They could certainly sleep at night knowing that it's for the common good to rob the rich and give to the poor, but if it was ever done to them - why, that would be unacceptable! sara attempts to back up her theory of the rise of Fascism in the US by resorting to - ta-da! - a conspiracy theory:And there are people eager to accomplish this: according to Barna Research, there are about 50 million hardcore fundamentalists who have been eagerly awaiting the day, training and planning and praying for the chance to do just that -- to take out their frustrations on the liberal traitors whom they have been taught to believe are responsible for everything that's wrong with their lives.
That's what the Left considers as 'irrefutable evidence', but naturally I would liken this suggestion by sara to that of the Communist Party cadres in the post-war decades who labelled any anti-Communist organisations or activists as Fascist, thereby discrediting them almost irreversibly in the political spectrum. Just like Western European states evoked the spectre of Communism before the Second World War to isolate the Socialists and Communists; just like Hitler exploited the dependence of the Weimar Republic and the Socialists to weed out the far Left in Germany, then slowly but surely purged the Left from the alliance; here sara is evoking the spectre of Fascism in an attempt to discredit Bush and his administration, and thereby position the Left as saviours from a totalitarian reality. This blind binary characterisation with clear disregard for truth or fact is notoriously popular with the Left.
Let's be clear here: if there's any 'hardcore fundamentalists' in America, those are the Islamists and jihadists who lurk in CAIR and other such institutions. If there's any chance the US might actually revert to totalitarianism in the future, the Left is most possibly the one to send hordes of Americans to that eventuality under an Islamic empire, with the dhimmis of the Left being subservient to their 'hardcore fundamentalist' masters. I'm not evoking the spectre of Islamism for opportunism's sake - unlike sara who hasn't somehow figured out that Fascism has absolutely no credence within intellectual circles and is thoroughly discredited, Islamism is still a silent threat that is being perceived through rose-tinted glasses by a substantial proportion of the intelligentsia. Islamism is the true agent of corruption here, not Fascism - the Left is loath to admit it because it is unwilling to expose its main ally in the struggle for transnational progressivism.
Do I detect a tinge of bitterness? Perhaps the discreditation of Communism has left a legacy that has prevailed till today: the Left wants to reclaim intellectual and political power for itself, evoking the spectre of far-right extremism in the most notorious of strains: Fascism. They wail and rail against the right for embracing Fascist elements into government, trying to urge people to remember why the right is potentially dangerous, all the while conveniently keeping under its wings Socialist ideas that have already been discredited. Convenient amnesia of the Left in denying that the gulag, show trials and the lexicon of atrocities that Communism had perpetuated has channeled into the Left a virulent strain of hypocrisy and indifference to the lessons of history.
Let's return to mark and his rant again to dig up whatever gems he could eke out:If the gasbag right truly believed in this occupation they call a war, not only would they enlist, but they'd reach out to the left to build support here at home. Instead they resort to petty insults and cheap shots, trying to rub our noses in their superiority.
There is just so much crap one can take, and this stanza simply reeks of hypocrisy - the embodiment of their psyche in that last word there: 'superiority'. People like mark actually believe that they are without question more superior than us mere beings, thus granting them the insuperable right to contradict themselves word after word without allowing anyone to criticise them. Their superiority complex blinds them to the fact that they are the ones who are refusing to work with the right; that their own language is saturated with "petty insults and cheap shots"; that they are responsible for discouraging good citizens to enlist and help us in Iraq. Perhaps Americans should call their bluff and enlist - that will shut these defeatists up for a while. In fact, the Left finds itself on a pedestal it constructed in terms of moral superiority - they are more tolerant of cultures as degenerate as the Palestinian strain - and logical superiority.
Another contributor to sara's blog is dave, who churned out a seemingly rational response to his fellow blogger's post - that is, until he said this:That said, I think the bulk of Sara's post was reasonable conjecture, even if the concern over this particular executive order fails to pan out. We won't always agree, but I think she's right to stir the pot in this case anyway. Heaven knows the Bush administration has not given us anything but cause for concern when it comes to the limitations of their lust for power.
'Reasonable'? Don't get me started. Ah yes, the Left is forever intoxicated with the prospect of panic-mongering, so I can understand why each member of the Left can tolerate the next when he or she tries to 'stir the pot' for no apparent reason other than to exploit partisan divides - a naked display for the Left's own lust for power. dave then proceeds to defer to his fellow poster dan to dissect the Executive Order word for word and draw attention to the more questionably ambivalent parts:Excuse me? What the hell does 'significant risk of' mean? This is an anticipatory clause. No act of violence needs to be committed. No act of violence needs to be imminent. No act of violence needs to be planned or conceived.
A tactic that I've noticed during discussions when someone is presenting a particular argument, then somebody interrupts with a comment that seems to stump the presenter. That person who asked the question seems smug that he or she has effectively found holes in the argument and may actually have no proposed alternative in mind. That's when the tactic comes in: the presenter should ask him back, "What do you think?" That will put the smug person in the hot seat.
All that is required is an assessment that a person 'poses a significant risk of committing' an act of violence, and bob's your uncle.
Of course, if we all lived on the fantasy set of Minority Report and could foretell premeditated crimes, then perhaps this anticipatory clause need not have been included. Yet let me ask dan: what is the percentage of terrorist attacks so far that have been foiled and unraveled by us? Let me pose to him another question: what do you think is the percentage of terrorist attacks that will be successfully foiled by us in the future? If we can't catch the perpetrators in time - just like the recent plot to bomb London's airports that failed not because of intelligence being able to track them down but rather to equipment malfunction - and their plans remained undiscovered, to where does accountability lie when another terrorist act succeeds? If you assume that every plan is so clear cut and visible to our intelligence services, let me assure you that we are not that perfect in tracking these terrorist scum down, and they only need one chance to cause destruction.
And please don't start with queries about how the government will decide who is at significant risk of committing these crimes - one can foretell that the Left and dhimmi apologists will deny any blatant connection with terrorist groups like aQ, and will do everything in their power to insist on individual rights of terrorists and their sympathisers who are lurking within institutions of the nation. If part of the intelligentsia is infected with dhimmitude, how do you expect them to rat out their allies ? Why is the Left so incensed with this Executive Order to begin with? The obvious target is the select core of jihadists within our society who have every intention of sabotaging the war efforts and carrying out attacks on home soil; yet the Left fears that the hand of the law will descend upon them hard. They know that by undercutting support for the troops, leaving them in the battlefield with minimal funding and equipment, acting on their virulent anti-military prejudices - they are guilty of treason:
dan and those who agree with him may continue to argue that every word, sentence and phrase in the Order can potentially mean another unavoidable step towards Fascism, but of course this type of argument whereby the worst consequence is evoked in every part of his post is typical of - who else - the Fascists who had a penchant for apocalyptic urgency and the desire to implement violent, decisive 'solutions', as Tony Judt had remarked in Post-War. Once dan embarks on that path of discourse, there is no recourse as he plunges headway right to the final conclusion that seems inevitable - no compromise, no alternative scenarios that actually include the prevention of more terrorist attacks, less dead bodies, a more stable Iraq, the removal of internal enemies of the state such as CAIR.
But of course, all those scenarios would despoil the narrative of the Left.
The Executive Order represents a gold mine for post-modernists to interpret the heck out of it and fashion it as 'irrefutable evidence' of a presidential doctrine for a Fascist takeover; but we already saw the vultures circling ahead before it was issued, didn't we?
I said it before and I'll reiterate it here: the engineers of a totalitarian regime incorporating either Fascism, Socialism-Communism or both into its ideological superstructure will most probably be the transnational progressivist movement and its backers of the Left.
Of course, there's Islamism and the whole Caliphate scenario. But the Left didn't tell you about that, did they?
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Transnational Progressivism
3 spoke up:
The Big Lie of the 20th century and beyond, has of course been the idea that Fascism and Nazism were somehow rightist. I had even fallen for that lie until I came across this research, with all the links inside it proving otherwise:
http://ray-dox.blogspot.com/2006/05/american-roots-of-fascism-american.html
It's well worth a couple hours to read through.
The Left has a very strange idea of how the world works, and their criticism comes from an elitism in which everything is so extremely cut and dried and well defined that there are no rough edges to thought and, therefore, to reality. Thought, to them, must define reality... that is fantastical in the way al Qaeda has fantastical notions as an organization to what the actual effects of terrorism will be. To the Left, preparation for the future is based onlly on the 'known' and things blatantly and easily tied together. That is the world of children and the attitudes taken towards this world in the socio-political realm is likewise delimited.
The realm of INTEL work, however, is that of the possible and the probable. The possible is that large realm of all the things a set of actions or activities *could* mean. That puts forward highly speculative and tenuous outlooks because that allow for investigation in new directions. What may appear, at first, to be speculative can often have fruitful pathways to explore, even if they come to dead-ends, they then have increased the knowledge of what one is looking at.
The probably are those things that have definitive backing to them and have this thing known as a 'level of confidence' placed upon them. That level of confidence is based upon many things: multiple forms of self-supporting evidence, plausible speculation that has partial backing and some inferences between activities that appear unrelated. INTEL analysis, then, comes in highly couched terms that give leeway to interpretation because multiple ways to create existing evidence can exist, and, as humans do many different things that intermingle personal events, a series of unrelated events centering upon a few individuals may suddenly take on connections outwards to other information when viewed in a different light.
Much of this depends upon the organizational structure, the knowledge of individual analysts and the peering advisory that should go on as a normal part of analysis. When the Iraqi source 'Curveball' showed up in Europe, the Germans interviewed him and discounted much of what he said based on their understanding of what was going on. The CIA took that in hand, interviewed him separately and came to different conclusions as to his reliability and their level of confidence in him which was higher than the Germans had placed. Mind you, the CIA had benefit of an ally INTEL system and their analysis, plus their own, so which would be the more trustworthy? That is not cut and dried, and complaining about over-reliance upon one information source is one thing, but when placing it in a larger picture of multiple source, many not revealed, then the ability to say what was right and what was wrong given the then present circumstances is asinine. There was no 'golden path of reliability' only levels of confidence amongst probable viewpoints.
Mind you, coming from the larger IC, I do have some problems with *both* the CIA and German INTEL sources... and internal politics to *both* organizations to change what is and is not probable based on marginal evidence. Often marginal evidence is ALL you have, so much of the possible gets swept up in the probable, even at lower levels of confidence, because they cannot be rapidly discounted by any available information.
Leftists with didactic views of the world cannot abide by this messiness as they prefer the meat cleaver of past certainty rather than the messy lens of looking at the very near future. History is great because it doesn't change... but it only becomes history after actions are taken, not before. That is what my history is not inevitable post is all about: history is contingent upon current actions and outlooks, and the past only serves in formatic ways to give context to future events.
Here the Left is even worse off as the capability of understanding multiple format and systemic types is beyond them. By adhering to one ideology that is 'perfect' in its backwards looking outlook, they no longer explore the multiple ways that humans create our lives around us. One of the great pieces of wisdom that I had unknowingly been using, was put out by Stephen J. Gould in his work The Structure of Evolutionary Theory which was a compendium of how evolutionary theory had changed over the centuries to its modern form near his death. He had one great observation about evolutionary theory, and I paraphrase: What theory is proposed that is invalidated at one scale may be perfectly useful to examine another scale of evolution. With that he brought out the recurring themes of evolutionary theory and how they get applied again and again, and often discarded again and again, but some few finally do find homes as they are a good way to properly analyze different scales of activity. What may not serve at the species level may fit well with the differentiation process within populations or at the genetic level.
INTEL activity must now cross not only all the various INTs (HUMINT, IMINT, ELINT, SIGINT, etc.) but now cross-interpret across fields of narcotics trafficking, terrorism, standard grey/black market activity, money laundering, corruption of officials, and, of course, the actual movements of suspected indivduals that are deemed to have a high threat value due to their activities. There is no way to cut-and-dry that as the Left would love in their perfect world of childish perception. Simplistic outlooks to decry emergent complexity is not only something fit for children, but it will get you killed due to the way emergent effects from multiple events are associated with our daily life. As seen on Mythbusters it really ISN'T a good idea to take a shower during a thunderstorm as the risk of lightning strike via the electrical and plumbing system of your house can go right through *you* if a strike heads your way via *any* conduit. It is not a certainty, and a well-grounded residence should be highly safe. Still, not a smart thing to do and a risk that can be avoided.... stepping in front of a speeding bus, however, that can and should be avoided. Simple to explain, but now try to make a *law* around either to be enforced. You can't do it as there is too much in the way of personal assessment and sway to activities to highly define what any one individual sees as increased risk worth taking. But are there differences in that risk? Certainly! While being extreme examples, they do point out that trying to do everything with perfect future forethought is contingent upon current conditions and outlook.
And by not trying to confront that future with imperfect tools, we will succumb to it as those who seek to hide their activities would grow stronger under this concept of 'perfection'. While we would end up, by and large, perfectly dead.
Actually, Totten is a self-described liberal from Portland, Oregon who has voted the Dem ticket most of his life. mark gisleson can't let that interfere with his infantile rant though.
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