Tag: politics

That was easy enough

Last week, Chelm Wiseman insisted that I and others were wrong about Israel’s support for American intervention in Syria and repeatedly insinuated that our doubts about the supposed Israeli non-interest in American military action in Syria was somehow anti-semitic.

Here are some selections from his comments. The response to the third is mine:

  1. You have only supposition to support they accusation that Israel is in
    favor of a Syria war. If Israel is not behind it then it follows that
    the “elite Jews” are pursuing their own interest (like all elites
    everywhere) not Israel’s. 
  2. You are seeing what you want to see here. This supports my point. The
    fact that they even have to phrase it like this indicates that there is
    not clear support from the Israel. They are not putting obstacles in the way of a US strike? Not exactly an ringing endorsement.
  3. Yes, but there is no source for that either and it comes after a
    statement about Israel deliberately trying to stay on the sidelines of
    the debate. NYT is not a friendly source for Netanyahu, so they can not
    be relied upon to portray him accurately. Stop pretending that they are.

    “I caught you out blatantly misrepresenting the NYT article,
    Chelm. And I can, and will, easily find reports of the Netanyahu
    government’s support for American military action in Syria from other
    sources, so banking on the NYT misrepresenting the Israeli government’s
    position was an unwise move on your part.”

And here is a report from Reuters on Tuesday:

Israel wants to
see Syrian President Bashar al-Assad toppled, its ambassador to the
United States said on Tuesday, in a shift from its non-committal public
stance on its neighbor’s civil war.

Even Assad’s defeat by al
Qaeda-aligned rebels would be preferable to Damascus’s current alliance
with Israel’s arch-foe Iran, Ambassador Michael Oren said in an
interview with the Jerusalem Post.

His comments marked a move in Israel’s public position on Syria’s two-and-1/2-year-old war….

“We
always wanted Bashar Assad to go, we always preferred the bad guys who
weren’t backed by Iran to the bad guys who were backed by Iran,” Oren
said in the interview, excerpted on Tuesday before its full publication
on Friday.

Note that this is a move in Israel’s public position.  Its private position remains unchanged from before: it wants Bashar Assad to go and it wants America to make that happen. Now, there is nothing wrong with the Israeli position. It may well be in the Israeli national interest; I’m certainly not in any position to judge that. The problem is with those American Jews and their Christian Zionist allies who seek to elevate the Israeli national interest above the American one.

And if it is intrinsically anti-semitic to be pro-American, well, there are an awful lot more anti-semites out there than I had previously imagined.

Publishing bias and the new vertical markets

In which I take exception to Standout Author Larry Correia’s take on Cedar Fort’s decision to cancel a publishing contract given to a gay writer:

So Cedar Fort really likes a book submitted to them and says that they
think it will sell well. Cedar Fort gives a contract to these two
authors. They write their author bios. One mentions his “partner”
instead of his wife. Cedar Fort flips out and drops them.

There are two schools of thought with dealing with the Left.  Larry’s is presently the dominant one among conservatives, which is that one should play by idealistic rules of ideological fair play that are observably no longer in effect. He notes, correctly, that this decision by Cedar Fort to blackball homosexuals is no different than the decision by major Manhattan publishers to blackball writers of the political Right.  He writes:

I keep seeing authors get black listed for their political opinions, and
since the publishing industry is mostly in Manhattan, it is usually
writers who lean right (righters?) that get blackballed. Of course, when
I talk about this on the internet, proper goodthinking people tell me
that’s crazy talk.

As one of the few writers who has been blackballed by both left-wing Manhattan publishers AND right-wing regional publishers, (Thomas Nelson canceled the contract for Media Whores when it discovered that I was going to address various Fox News figures in addition to the mainstream media figures they expected to be targeted), I actually think it is a positive development that these publishing biases of left and right are exposed and made more visible to the reading public.

The observable fact is that all publishing houses are ideologically biased and none of them are solely motivated by business concerns due to the fact that the editors are human, and their financial interests in the publishing houses for which they work is generally negligible.  Their bias is further compounded by the fact that none of them has any real ability to know what will, and what will not, sell well, which means that they will always be free to indulge their ideological biases with regards to every writer who does not already have an established track record of considerable success.

My opinion is that it is a serious mistake for the Right to attempt to remain above the fray and refuse to play by the rules established by the Left.  As the example of Fox News shows, as the example of Larry’s own exceptional literary success shows, the Right has considerable economic power.  However, the Right has long played into the hands of the Left by being more than willing to financially sustain the Left while the Left is doing its level best to financially starve the Right. Many conservatives fall all over themselves to proclaim how eager they are to read books by gay black handicapped communist Che Guevara enthusiasts in a futile attempt to establish their cultural impartiality.

Which means that in the cultural civil war, the Left is playing the role of the ruthless Union while the Right is playing the role of a Confederacy that is too gentlemanly and refined to take the opposition seriously.  You may recall who won that war, and how.

I fully accept that no matter how many books I write, no matter how many games I sell, Tor and its filthy editors will never publish my books.  That is absolutely and entirely fine with me.  I never wanted to have anything to do with such despicable creatures, which is why I never submitted anything to them even prior to the changes in the publishing industry that are rendering the mainstream publishers less necessary than before.  I have no problem with the fact that the 4,000 daily readers of Whatever will never buy my books or with the fact that many left-wing fans of epic fantasy will prefer to wait another five years to slog through George R.R. Martin’s next interminable self-parody than read A Throne of Bones.  I realize, as I expect Larry does as well, that there are thousands of SF/F readers who will never even look at The Grimnoire Chronicles because they are written by an avid gun enthusiast and published by Baen Books.

And, in like manner, left-wing writers should learn to accept that right-leaning publishers will not work with them and an increasing number of right-leaning consumers will not read their works.  The age of the uniform mass market and its ideological impartiality is over and the age of ideologically-based vertical markets is upon us. The sooner everyone on the right side of the ideological aisle embraces that fact and begins to act accordingly, the sooner we will be able to stop swimming in the moral filth, breathing in the philosophical effluvia, and wandering aimlessly throughout the creative wasteland of the Left.

Larry, I have no doubt, will disagree with my opinion.  So will a number of other writers on the Right. And that’s fine, as we can disagree about this and debate this without feeling any need to excommunicate each other or rigidly enforce a dogmatic consensus because we are not rabbits of the Left.

Obama family tied to Muslim Brotherhood

WND cites Egyptian reports that Malik Obama, Barack Obama’s half-brother, is connected with the Muslim Brotherhood:

Malik Obama’s oversight of the Muslim Brotherhood’s international investments is one reason for the Obama administration’s support of the Muslim Brotherhood, according to an Egyptian report citing the vice president of the Supreme Constitutional Court of Egypt, Tehani al-Gebali

In a news report on Egyptian television of a Gebali speech, translated by researcher Walid Shoebat, a former Palestinian Liberation Organization operative, Gebali said she would like “to inform the American people that their president’s brother Obama is one of the architects of the major investments of the Muslim Brotherhood.”

This is interesting, but the one thing that makes me unsure about Obama still practicing what he once, supposedly by accident, referred to as “my Muslim faith”, is that he hasn’t cut off American aid to the Egyptian military regime, as he is required to do by law.  If Obama was still a Muslim – and make no mistake about it, he was a Muslim even if he is not now – one would assume that he would have been quick to undercut the government that replaced the Brotherhood’s Morsi regime.

Less than inconceivable

While liberals are staggered with the probability that the Lightbringer would be more accurately described as the Liebringer, I think the defense has a fairly credible case. Not a very flattering one, to be sure, but credible:

But just as it is utterly absurd to claim Director of National Intelligence James Clapper didn’t lie before Congress (and some reporters thankfully admitted that truth in the open), it has now become almost silly to insinuate or assume that the president hasn’t also been lying. Why? Because if that’s true — if indeed he hasn’t
been deliberately lying — then it means he has been dangerously,
irresponsibly and negligently ignorant of not only the government he
runs, but also of the news breaking around him.

Think about three recent presidential declarations. A few weeks back, the president appeared on CBS to claim that the secret FISA court is “transparent.” He then appeared on NBC
to claim that “We don’t have a domestic spying program.” Then, as
mentioned above, he held a press conference on Friday to suggest there
was no evidence the NSA was “actually abusing” its power.

For
these statements to just be inaccurate and not be deliberate, calculated
lies it would mean that the president 1) made his declarative statement
to CBS even though he didn’t know the FISA court was secret (despite knowing all about the FISA court six years ago); 2) made his declarative statement to NBC but somehow didn’t see any of the news coverage of the Snowden disclosures proving the existence of domestic spying and 3) made his sweeping “actually abusing” statement somehow not knowing that his own administration previously admitted the NSA had abused its power, and worse, made his statement without bothering to look at the NSA audit report that Gellman revealed today.

So
sure, I guess it’s possible Obama has merely been “wrong” but has not
been lying. But the implications of that would be just as bad — albeit
in a different way — as if he were deliberately lying. It would mean
that he is making sweeping and wildly inaccurate statements without
bothering to find out if they are actually true. Worse, for him merely
to be wrong but not deliberately lying, it would mean that he didn’t
know the most basic facts about how his own administration runs. It
would, in other words, mean he is so totally out of the loop on
absolutely everything — even the public news cycle — that he has no idea
what’s going on.

The reason the Left has such a hard time understanding Obama’s behavior is because they are inextricably wedded to a false assumption, which is that he is highly intelligent.  I have been pointing out for years that the guy not only isn’t particularly bright, but he isn’t even particularly interested in his presidential responsibilities.  It’s hard for the media, particularly the political media, to understand that latter point because nearly everyone in the political game is in it for the power.

The reason the Right has such a hard time understanding Obama’s behavior is because they are inextricably wedded to a different false assumption, which is that Obama has an agenda. He doesn’t. He’s never been in politics for the power. He doesn’t give a damn about what he can do and he doesn’t have a particular agenda. Forget the Republican paranoia; I don’t think there has ever been a post-FDR president who was less likely to even think about seeking four more years.

Obama got into politics for the same reason rock stars get into music. He can’t wait to get on the Clinton lecture circuit, have no responsibilities, get away from Michelle, and travel around the world with his very close male friends being applauded for walking on stage and reading his teleprompter. I still contend that if the decision had been left up solely to Obama, he would not have run for re-election. He not only made the second term Reagan look like a paragon of presidential engagement in his first term, but has rendered himself the lamest of ducks without even being crippled by a major internal scandal or losing the Senate.

Obviously, what Obama has been saying about the NSA is not true. But when one considers both his intelligence and his observable level of interest in his presidency, I think Occam’s Razor strongly suggests that it is the alternative explanation that is the correct one and he has no idea what is going on in his administration.

It’s not that Obama lied to you, my progressive friends, it’s that you lied to yourself about him.

Mailvox: the futility of cancer

Nate explains both why left-wing parasites are driven to take over organizations and why their takeovers always end in the eventual demise of the organization:

They never learn. They don’t understand civilization, and they don’t
understand power. That’s why they are never able to successfully build
organizations in the first place. So they have to take over the
organizations others have already built and try to use them for their
own goals. They think that the organization itself… the name… is
what makes it relevant. So they imagine if they can just get control of
it… all that power will be theirs.

So they break the very tools they are planning to use to fix the world.

Then
they stand there with a dumb look on their face… trying to drive a
nail with a broken hammer… and cannot understand why it isn’t working.

This process is as true of the Episcopalian Church and the Boy Scouts of America as it is of the SFWA.  Some believe that destruction was always the aim, but I don’t think that is true of the average parasite who joins an organization. I think in most cases they genuinely wish to “improve” the organization and do not understand that their desired improvements will kill it.

I’ll write more on this in the next day or two, in my response to NK Jemisin’s call for further “reconciliation”. What is interesting is the way in which Nate’s description here perfectly describes her approach to “improving” SF/F.

Their analytical abilities don’t appear to exceed that of the average cancer cell. The current SFWA is rather like a collection of cancer cells congratulating themselves on how much they have improved the body they are inhabiting and celebrating the way in which they have driven most of those disgusting, unprofessional white blood cells out.  And it is not hard to imagine their alarm when suddenly the body that sustains them begins to cease functioning, for no particular reason at all.

This is something that the Society for the Advancement of Speculative Storytelling may wish to keep in mind, lest it one day find itself going the same route as SFWA.  And speaking of SASS, the organization released a statement entitled: “Statement on the expulsion of a member by another writers’ organization“

In response to requests for comments regarding the decision of another writers’ group to formally expel a lifetime member, SASS Secretary and spokesman Lou Antonelli makes the following statement:

“Although the subject in question was exercising his free speech rights under the First Amendment to the US Constitution, that has nothing to do with the standards of conduct and behavior within a private organization

“Like any private club, the organization in question is allowed to police its membership according to its regulations and bylaws. This is an internal discipline issue and not a matter of concern to the Society for the Advancement of Speculative Storytelling.

“The by-laws of the Society for the Advancement of Speculative Storytelling clearly state that members should not discuss religion or politics within its auspices, and its members are expected to treat each other with respect. Those are our bylaws, and each group operates according to its own bylaws and policies.

I note that not only does SFWA have no standard of conduct and behavior, but it previously had one that was, if I recall correctly, junked during the Russell Davis administration.  As the SFWA’s statement demonstrated, the current Board believes it can throw anyone out of the organization at any time for no particular reason at all.  If I hadn’t made it clear to everyone that I was the member to whom the statement referred, no one would outside the SFWA Board and its confidants would even know with certainty who the expelled member was.

Of course, it would certainly be amusing if the Board’s assumptions turned out to be incorrect, would it not?  Because in that case, I would not even be expelled at all. And it occurs to me that someone inclined towards conspiracy theory might even conjecture that the reason the SFWA Board refused to publicly identify the expelled member is because they know very well that the expulsion was not legitimate, that it was a sham expulsion, and they are attempting to avoid being sued for damages once the illegitimacy of their action is established.

Tiananmen Spring

You may recall I was more than a little dubious about the “Arab Spring” being trumpeted by Middle East experts such as Thomas Friedman:

A security operation to clear protesters camped out on the streets of
Cairo since President Mohamed Morsi was deposed by the military last
month has left at least 40 people died. The Egyptian Interior Ministry says 200 people have been arrested,
including 50 in the Rabaa al-Adawiya sit-in in Nasr City and 150 at the
Nahda Square sit-in in Giza.

By mid-morning, state television reported that security forces had finished breaking up the sit-in there. Bulldozers were said to have been used to uproot the camps. The Interior Ministry said security forces had “total control” over
Nahda Square, and that “police forces had managed to remove most of the
tents” in the area. Security forces had blocked all access to the
protest camp.


Sources on the ground told Al Jazeera of at least 40 fatalities,
while the Muslim Brotherhood said at least 300 people had been killed,
with more than 5,000 others injured.

Democracy is not a viable alternative for any society that is not both fully civilized and homogenous.  It used to work for the USA and the UK.  It still works in Japan. It has never really worked on the continent of Europe. It is not a societal panacea and it should never come as a surprise when the imposition of a democratic system leads directly to violence and political turmoil.

Remember, civil war is nothing more than extreme politics.

Spot the false assumption

CNN’s Chief Medical Correspondent changes his mind about the evils of marijuana and its medical inutility

I apologize because I didn’t look hard enough, until now. I didn’t look far enough. I didn’t review papers from smaller labs in other countries doing some remarkable research, and I was too dismissive of the loud chorus of legitimate patients whose symptoms improved on cannabis.

Instead, I lumped them with the high-visibility malingerers, just looking to get high. I mistakenly believed the Drug Enforcement Agency listed marijuana as a schedule 1 substance because of sound scientific proof. Surely, they must have quality reasoning as to why marijuana is in the category of the most dangerous drugs that have “no accepted medicinal use and a high potential for abuse.”

They didn’t have the science to support that claim, and I now know that when it comes to marijuana neither of those things are true. It doesn’t have a high potential for abuse, and there are very legitimate medical applications. In fact, sometimes marijuana is the only thing that works. Take the case of Charlotte Figi, who I met in Colorado. She started having seizures soon after birth. By age 3, she was having 300 a week, despite being on seven different medications. Medical marijuana has calmed her brain, limiting her seizures to 2 or 3 per month.

Assuming that the government does anything for scientific reasons, common sense reasons, or simply in the national interest is almost always going to turn out to be wrong.  Don’t do it.

Marijuana should be legalized. So should every other illegal recreational drug. The cost of banning them is simply far too high.  It is time to end Prohibition 2.0.

The dismay of the white liberal

As Brown America waxes in influence, its longtime white liberal allies are dismayed to discover that the minorities they championed never actually gave a damn about the liberal principles they espoused:

Here’s the Daily Kos founder on the Snowden revelations:

I
don’t give a shit. Seriously, I just don’t care. NSA spying is bad! So
is stop and frisk. So is splitting up families by deporting children to
countries they’ve never been to and don’t speak the language. So is
harassing American muslims.

Government overreach
is bad. But to act like having the government track who you call is the
height of government abuse is a very white privileged view of the
privacy issue.

But as for Greenwald and Snowden? Seriously, I don’t give two shits.

Please,
Mr. Moulitsas, tell us, what is the proper, non-privileged,
multi-cultural view of the “privacy issue”? Is it one that stays within
the confines of what’s allowed by the Democratic Party? Is it one that
is relevant to the war on women, or voting rights, or immigration, but
ignores the collapse of the rule of law and the justice system (which is
far from a “white privileged” issue)?

Of course a
Mr. Moulitsas doesn’t give a damn about privileged whites such as
Greenwald and Snowden.  They are not of his clan or a minority in a
similar position. Imagine how shocked the white liberals are going to be
when they find out their erstwhile allies don’t give a damn about the
equality, the environment, abortion, women’s rights, or any of the
Left’s other sacred causes.  They never did, they merely went through
the motions and mouthed all the right words in order to ensure
themselves a place at the table.

The two-party system
based on ideology is totally foreign to most non-Americans, who are
accustomed to interest-based politics.  Now that minorities, real ethnic
minorities, make up a significant part of the Democratic party, it
should come as no surprise that they are beginning to reveal the true
nature of their politics.  Because of this, don’t be surprised when La
Raza becomes an effective third party in California and begins to
compete directly with the Democrats.

It’s not treason, it’s just free trade

So, the threat from al-Qaeda is so great that Americans have to give up all their civil liberties, while at the same time, al-Qaeda is being subsidized by the U.S. government:

Supporters of the Taliban and al-Qaeda in Afghanistan have been getting U.S. military contracts, and American officials are citing “due process rights” as a reason not to cancel the agreements, according to an independent agency monitoring spending.

The U.S. Army Suspension and Debarment Office has declined to act in 43 such cases, John Sopko, the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, said today in a letter accompanying a quarterly report to Congress.

“I am deeply troubled that the U.S. military can pursue, attack, and even kill terrorists and their supporters, but that some in the U.S. government believe we cannot prevent these same people from receiving a government contract,” Sopko said.

But even that is less apparently treasonous than the US government directly supplying al-Qaeda, with whom it is supposedly at war, with heavy weaponry.  At this point, it looks as if Obama’s chief legacy will be having been the greatest gun salesman, both foreign and domestic, of all time.

It’s enough to almost make me wish I’d voted for him.

Congress exempt from Obamacare

Just in case it wasn’t sufficiently clear that Obamacare is going to wreck American health care, the executive branch has given the congressional branch an exemption from the law:

The White House has approved a deal that will exempt members of Congress and their staff from some of the provisions of the Affordable Care Act, Politico reported late Thursday. Under the law, popularly referred to as Obamacare, lawmakers and their aides were required to source health insurance “created” by the law or offered through one of its exchanges, and without the subsidies they currently enjoy, the members of Congress would have faced thousands of dollars in additional premium payments each year, the report said. However, the Office of Personnel Management now plans to rule that the government can continue to make a contribution to the health-care premiums of the lawmakers and their staff, it said, citing unnamed congressional sources and a White House official.

Their shamelessness simply knows no bounds.  None.  Cicero was right; democracy does lead inevitably to aristocracy. The fact that we presently have an aristocracy of connections and influence rather than an aristocracy of blood only means that it will be another generation or three before the latter is made institutional.