Ralf Goergens

‘The blogging Mullah’

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Link via a blog at the website of the German business paper Handelsblatt:

Update: Tatyana informs me in the comments that one of Abtahi’s post I’m linking to, ‘Freedom of Holding Demonstrations against America’, alludes to an old Soviet joke about being perfectly free in the Soviet Union to protest against America.

The Ayatollah Ali Mohammad Abtahi, Vice President under former Iranian President Khatami has a blog of his own. According to Handelsblatt he is posting almost daily, his subjects mostly being ‘rumors heard in mosques, indiscretions [uttered] at official receptions and inside stories from the halls of power’. Abtahi still is a welcome guest all over the Arabic world, so he has a lot of such stories on offer. He mostly blogs in Farsi, but some stories are also translated into a quite idiosyncratic English here.

Abtahi and his former boss Khatami are quite moderate as Iranian Ayatollahs go, although the latter demonstrated this April the limits of his moderation by telling some Israeli journalists to ‘go to hell’. Furthermore, even people reporting for German public TV now and then feel compelled to point out that the Iranian government under Khatami was no less intransigent as far as their nuclear program was concerned as the present one under Ahmadenejad is right now.

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The Vietnam War (eventually) resulted in an American victory

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There is a pretty heated discussion about the war in Vietnam, among other things, in the comments of this post by Ginny, so these observations by Jerry Pournelle should contribute some useful context:

Viet Nam was a US success because a great part of Soviet transport production including trucks and such was built in the USSR, transported at great expense to Viet Nam and destroyed by USAF. When North Viet Nam invaded the South in 1975 they had more armor than the Wehrmacht had at Kursk, and more trucks than Patton ever had in the Red Ball Express. This was all replacements for similar amounts of materiel destroyed in 1973 when the US at a cost of 663 US casualties aided ARVN in repulsing a 150,000 troop invasion — fewer than 40,000 ever got back home — bringing with it more tanks than the Wehrmacht had at Kursk and more trucks than Patton ever had — none of which ever got home.
 
Viet Nam helped convert the USSR into Bulgaria with missiles. They neglected their own infrastructure to send materiel to Viet Nam for us to destroy.

As Pournelle also writes in his post, Afghanistan was yet another war of attrition that finished them off. One important reason why the Soviets didn’t realize all that in time was that they lied to each other. If displeasing your superiors with reports about problems is risky, you simply report successes all the time. The West in turn didn’t notice what happened because our spies didn’t get to hear anything but the misinformation Soviet officials were feeding each other. That’s also why the victory in Vietnam didn’t feel like one for decades. While Iraq isn’t Vietnam (it can’t be repeated frequently enough), the example of the long-term success that the Vietnam turned out to be should serve to demonstrate the virtue of patience. Iraq will only turn into a defeat (in the long as well as the short run) in case of a premature troop withdrawal (but that is an issue for another post).

Trucks, road damage and road tolls

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Recently I have become interested in the problem of increasing road congestion. This post is just meant to be a kind of general introduction to the issue, and also to demonstrate how damaging the increasing freight transport via trucks can become if the ensuing problems aren’t addressed properly soon. In follow-up posts the main focus will be on the situation in Europe, where complete gridlock will become inevitable if we don’t do something about current developments. I’ll also write about alternative means of transportation and new technological developments in this area. As a layman, I’d also be grateful for feedback from people who have first-hand knowledge of the industry and will incorporate it into my future posts; I’ll also be happy to correct any mistakes I have made with this one. Provided that any specialists are interested in this post post at all, I’ll very likely get quite an earful… :)
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The ‘Return of the Latin American Idiot’

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Alvaro Vargas Llosa writes at the website of The Independent Institute:

Ten years ago, Colombian writer Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza, Cuban writer Carlos Alberto Montaner, and I wrote Guide to the Perfect Latin American Idiot, a book criticizing opinion and political leaders who clung to ill-conceived political myths despite evidence to the contrary. The “Idiot” species, we suggested, bore responsibility for Latin America’s underdevelopment. Its beliefs—revolution, economic nationalism, hatred of the United States, faith in the government as an agent of social justice, a passion for strongman rule over the rule of law—derived, in our opinion, from an inferiority complex. In the late 1990s, it seemed as if the Idiot were finally retreating. But the retreat was short lived. Today, the species is back in force in the form of populist heads of state who are reenacting the failed policies of the past, opinion leaders from around the world who are lending new credence to them, and supporters who are giving new life to ideas that seemed extinct.

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The Idiot’s worldview, in turn, finds an echo among distinguished intellectuals in Europe and the United States. These pontificators assuage their troubled consciences by espousing exotic causes in developing nations. Their opinions attract fans among First-World youngsters for whom globalization phobia provides the perfect opportunity to find spiritual satisfaction in the populist jeremiad of the Latin American Idiot against the wicked West.

Read the whole thing, the article is well worth the time. Llosa describes the various species of predatory socialists who rule some key countries in South America and goes on to argue that there currently is a major conflict between pro-Western forces and those who would like to keep it on its present course. The negative influence of European and American intellectuals could well make it impossible to overcome the ‘Latin American Idiot’ and so finally get over economic stagnation and the subsequent, widespread lack of trust in democratic institutions.

The article also is very timely, the (mostly) European variety of economic and ideological idiot is currently preparing to protest the upcoming G8 Summit.

A collection of Jonathan Swift’s journalistic texts

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Attentive readers of Neal Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle will remember Daniel Waterhouse reading a a number of astonishingly vile newspapers. Some of the most acrimonious articles were from Jonathan Swift, writing for Tory papers. Stephenson didn’t make that part up, the articles can be found here.

I didn’t have time to do more than a bit of browsing, but some of the historical characters from the Baroque Cycle are mentioned, like Marlborough, Bolingbroke, Harley and of course Queen Anne. There also are extensive footnotes explaining the concrete circumstances under which the articles appeared.

Discuss this post at the Chicago Boyz Forum.