Pasi J. Matilainen was kind enough to translate my To Save the World How Many Would You Kill? post into shiny new Finnish version!
That’s two languages down, 240+ to go.
Shannon Love
Copter Box
Here is a neat concept for air dropping supplies cheaply. The system uses cheap prefabbed boxes that have a tiny stabilizing parachute and then cardboard rotors that pop out and autorotate to slow the package’s descent. Check out the videos at the bottom of the linked page to see it in operation.
The advantage of this system is that you don’t need a big expensive parachute and you don’t have to have someone who can properly pack a chute. Just grab the boxes, load them up to weight and toss them out of the aircraft.
It will be a big boon for relief and aid workers and yet another innovation created by small-scale capitalists.
It’s funny what you find while researching pre-WWII autogyros.
Vietnam, Israel and the Left’s Delusional Narratives
The Western left’s criticism of Israel’s role in Middle East conflict has long since become so bizarrely lopsided and vicious that many non-leftists have concluded that only antisemitism can explain it.
The left makes sure that every real and imagined military misstep on Israel’s part becomes international news, while ignoring the intentionally brutal attacks of Israel’s enemies against both Israel and their own people. The left contends that democratic, relatively multicultural Israel ultimately makes the evil decisions that drive the conflict and not the autocratic regimes attacking Israel. The left claims that the conflict can end only when Israel reforms, gives up or even disappears. The left requires almost no concrete action towards peace on the part of Israel’s enemies while demanding that Israel take concrete actions merely to get the enemies to even begin to think about negotiating.
Such extreme and thoughtless imbalance in the face of objective facts is one of the hallmarks of bigotry but I don’t think antisemitism drives the left’s stance on Israel. Instead, I think the mindless criticism a kind of intellectual mass hysteria that creates a delusional narrative so encompassing and so immersive that leftists begin to see it as unquestionable truth.
In short, the left is trapped in an immersive story in which Israel is the villain. Any fact that disrupts the “plot” gets edited out of the narrative.
That might sound overwrought but we have seen a mass delusional narrative before…
… the Vietnam era “peace” movement.
Vietnam Delusion: The “Peace” Movement Brought Peace
[Note: This is a subpost linked to by Vietnam, Israel and the Left’s Delusional Narratives. Feel free to comment but the post might not make much sense without the parent post’s context.]
Delusion:The “peace” movement brought about peace in Indochina.
Reality: This is the most tragic delusion of all. It is the reason I have been putting “peace” in quotation marks. Despite its delusions, the “peace” movement might have been justifiable had it actually produced peace for the people of either Indochina or America. Sadly, it did neither.
The people of Indochina suffered horribly during the final communist invasions and their horrific aftermath. We know at least 165,000 Vietnamese were executed outright in the two years following the fall of Saigon. Another estimated 250,000 died from neglect in the “reeducation” camps. Another two million were made refugees with an unknown loss of life as they fled across seas in tiny boats.
Worse, 1.5 million out of a population of 7 million, 1 in every 5 living Cambodians, would die under Pol Pot’s insanity. The Khmer Rouge murdered 300,000 people outright, and we know this because they took before and after photographs of each and every one of them. You can see them in a museum in Phnom Penh today. The rest they starved to death in an insane attempt to empty the cities and create an agrarian utopia.
It wasn’t just the democides. Soon after we abandoned the people of Indochina and let the communist superpowers take over, the victors fell out among themselves. Border skirmishes broke out immediately, culminating in an invasion of Cambodia by Vietnam followed by an invasion of Vietnam by China. The area would remain mired in unceasing, brutal warfare until the early ’90s.
The aftereffects for America reverberate to this day. The mythology of plucky 3rd worlders armed with nothing but AK-47s and RPGs defeating America’s power has been used by every enemy since to convince their followers that small groups or nations like theirs could take on America and win. Most grimly, it appeared repeatedly in Al Qaeda’s indoctrination materials prior to and after 9/11.
A “peace” that brings totalitarian oppression, impoverishment, mass murder and incessant, bloody military conflict is not a “peace” any humane person would seek. If that is “peace”, most would choose “war”.
Vietnam Delusion: The Words Not Spoken
[Note: This is a subpost linked to by Vietnam, Israel and the Left’s Delusional Narratives. Feel free to comment but the post might not make much sense without the parent post’s context.]
Delusion: The deafening silence about the nature of the communist regimes that were on the other side of the conflict.
Reality: This delusion is not something the “peace” movement said but something it didn’t say. Throughout the conflict and even in the leftists’ histories today, one thing is glaringly absent: There was never any serious examination, nor even serious mention, of the brutal nature of the superpower communist regimes, of North Vietnam or of the ideology and intentions of the Khmer Rouge.
You can read entire leftwing books about the conflict, such as Neil Sheehan’s “A Bright and Shining Lie“, without ever reading more than a couple of paragraphs about the nature of the regimes we were fighting. Instead, the left’s histories focus conclusively on the corruption of our non-communist allies and America’s failings. This creates a distorted and unbalanced appreciation of the actions of the non-communists. Of course their actions look irrational and unreasonable when removed from the context of being counteractions to communist aggression.
As I said before:
The Left’s description of the War in Vietnam is like watching a Kung Fu movie where the bad guys have all been digitally edited out. The hero thrashes about punching air, breaking things and hurling through walls for no apparent reason.
Imagine if every book you ever read on WWII made no mention of the internal nature or actions of the Third Reich. Imagine that you only knew of morally questionable actions by the allies but not those carried out by the Axis. Imagine that the histories spent dozens of pages each detailing the crimes of Stalin and damning America and Britain for allying with him. Suppose mostly what you knew about WWII combat was the results of the city bombing campaigns. Imagine that, while WWII was actually being fought, academics, the media and activists had hammered that lopsided view of the conflict into the public awareness.
Needless to say, your attitudes about the morality and necessity of WWII would be much different than the one you hold now. That is exactly the kind of lopsided, delusional view of the Vietnam conflict, and of the Cold War in general, held by the “peace” movement both then and now.