Leftism

A Short Rant……

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“In the wake of the latest failed terrorist incident, the TSA announced a new round of security procedures designed to greatly inconvenience millions of air passengers without doing anything to increase their security…”

Here’s an idea. Let’s start using basic counterintelligence principles to screen prospective travelers to the United States and bar those young, unmarried, Muslim men having affiliations with radical mosques, madrassas, imams, extremist Islamist political groups or a history of mental illness and erratic behavior from receiving visas to enter the United States. This clown should never have been able to get a visa. His own father, a senior government official of a foreign nation, was trying to red-flag him as a potential al Qaida terrorist for us(!).

Would such a policy catch every prospective terrorist? No. Nothing will.

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The Identity of the Enemy

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Chris Matthews of MSNBC, commenting on Obama’s choice of a West Point venue for his Afghanistan speech:

“He went to–maybe–the enemy camp tonight)”

(video clip here)

Does Matthews himself consider the U.S. Military Academy to be “the enemy camp?” If a commentator with a strong reputation for neutrality had said something like the above, then we might believe he was stating a conclusion about the beliefs of others, rather than an opinion he himself necessarily agreed with. But it would be hard for anyone to argue that Matthews is “a commentator with a strong reputation for neutrality.”

Whatever Matthews’ personal beliefs may be, I think his comment reflects the belief of a substantial part of the “progressive” movement which represents Obama’s core support. These people are very reluctant to use words like “enemy” in talking about America’s terrorist adversaries. They are primarily concerned with instigating conflict within American society itself, and in achieving victory in such conflict–and the American military, along with many other important parts of American society, does indeed in their view constitute an enemy.

Here are some relevant thoughts from Neptunus Lex, which I’ve previously quoted because they are so insightful:

The innate character flaw of the political right, with its thrumming appeals to the logic of blood and soil, is its lamentable tendency to go in search of enemies abroad. The left, on the other hand, with its own appeals to the politics of envy and class warfare, is content to find mortal enemies closer to hand.

“The People 48%, The Reactionaries 52%”

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I don’t remember the exact words but this was the essence of a headline in a Chilean leftist newspaper after an Allende referendum was defeated by the voters (as reported, IIRC, by Robert Moss in Chile’s Marxist Experiment).

The aroma of similar attitudes wafts from an AP report that has the headline, “Honduras vote to sideline president, enshrine coup”. Hey, nobody’s calling anybody reactionary here, but if you talk about a “coup” it’s usually an indication that you’re unsympathetic to the people who did it. Never mind that the president was kicked out by his own legislature and courts, following their country’s written constitution, after he flagrantly broke the law. Like global-warming hysterics, and lawyers for obviously guilty defendants, Zelaya’s supporters don’t have the facts on their side and so keep repeating unsupported assertions that are meant to shift the frame of debate in the direction of their narrative.

Meanwhile, the Brazilian government, sensing weakness, is trying to push Obama around. This is the same Brazilian government that just received the great democrat Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in a widely publicized state visit. But Honduras, one of the poorest countries in Latin America, a democracy and a steadfast US ally, is a threat to world peace.

SEIU Crime Alert

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Breitbart’s Biggovernment.com scores again, interviewing homecare workers threatened by the SEIU in a union election in Fresno. Obviously there are labor law issues but SEIU’s former counsel and now NLRB member Craig Becker can probably keep the SEIU out of hot water on the labor front. But what about the postal front?

Multiple times on the linked video, the workers said that SEIU representatives took their mail, opened it, and intimidated them into voting SEIU, and then took their ballots. This stinks, but is it a crime? According to postal inspector Hillary Smith, who covers the Fresno area, it certainly sounds like one. Specifically, the crime would be mail theft, which carries a financial penalty of up to $250,000 and up to 5 years in prison.

Filing a complaint for mail theft can be done electronically here. Without complaints, mail theft cannot be investigated. The inspectors have seen the video. They just cannot proceed without a complainant. To date, they do not seem to have received one.

The “Complex” Left vs. the “Simple” Right

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Over at Hit&Run, there is a thread about how simplistic and empty Sarah Palin is compared to Obama or previous conservatives. Leaving out the fact that both Reagan and Goldwater suffered the same contempt in their time that Palin does now, it does raise the issue of whether it is important that leftists do in general produce much more complex and “sophisticated” explanations of political ideas than do conservatives.

The major reason that non-leftists’ ideas look “simplistic” compared to leftists’ ideas is that non-leftists’ ideas are usually nothing but statements about the limits of human knowledge.

For example, all arguments for the free market can be distilled to something like:

No human or group of humans has a predictive model of the economy. As such we cannot predict the consequences of economic actions we take. This is especially true of large-scale actions. Therefore, the best policy in the overwhelming majority of case is to not attempt to use the coercive power of the state to try and steer the economy, because the we cannot predict the results and we are more likely to do harm than good.

By contrast, leftist arguments are statements about the possession of knowledge by some elite group of human beings. The “complex” leftists arguments are detailed elaborations of what they think they know in each particular case.

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