Quotations

Quote of the Day

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Michael Ledeen on the Iranian elections:

But things are different now. The Iranians do not expect any help from the outside world. Bush did not help them, to his shame, and nobody thinks Obama would lift a finger for Iranian dissidents. They’re on their own, just as the Lebanese voters were a few days ago. I think many Lebanese decided that they’d better take a stand against Hezbollah before all hope for freedom was lost. Many Iranians may well reason the same way.
 
If violence breaks out, what will the West do? Probably nothing, except express concern, and call for sweet reasonableness. Good luck with that! What should the West do? Support freedom in Iran. Nothing would so transform the region as a free government, dedicated to good relations with the West. Such a government would end the profligate spending on terrorism and devote the country’s resources to domestic concerns. Hezbollah, Hamas, Islamic Jihad, the Taliban, and the other jihadis, would be dramatically weakened. Syria’s Bashar Assad would suddenly find himself without his big brother in Tehran. If you want to dream of peace in the Middle East, a free Iran is at the heart of your Utopia.
 
Finally, for those who unaccountably continue to believe that the most important thing in the Middle East is the Arab-Israeli conflict, the best chance is once again a free Iran that worries about Iranians instead of Palestinians. There is no chance of peace so long as Tehran runs the terror movements. But if the terrorists have to raise their own money, find their own weapons, and train their own killers, things might get a lot easier.

I think that Ledeen’s comment about Lebanese voters is probably right. Anyone who isn’t blind must see that US allies threatened by aggressive dictatorships, as well as oppressed populations in those dictatorships, are now on their own with no chance of receiving US help. Certainly most Israelis understand this, though it’s not clear whether their corrupt political class does. Nor are Japanese, Taiwanese, South Koreans, Australians, Georgians, Venezuelans and others likely to have any illusions. Interesting times ahead.

Coming out as a conservative …

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I tried to suppress my conservative tendencies at first. I convinced myself that they would eventually pass, like adolescent hot flashes. … I behaved like a 40-year-old married father who suddenly realizes that he’s gay, and doesn’t know what to do.
 
There were early signs of my tendency, and in retrospect they were clearly recognizable. [A] friend of mine from school, even claims that she has always known about it. When we talked about our younger days at a class reunion three years ago and I mentioned switching sides politically, she looked at me with pity in her eyes and said: “[Y]ou were never truly liberal. It was always just a pose for you.” I felt as if I’d been caught in the act, and yet she didn’t mean it in a bad way.
 
The hardest part about being a late conservative is coming out. It’s a moment you postpone for as long as possible. You worry about the way colleagues will react, and you don’t want to humiliate your parents. My mother will be 73 this year, an age at which she is increasingly unlikely to ever shed her prejudices against conservatives. She tries to be polite in conversation and not let anyone see how she really feels, but sometimes her prejudices emerge with a clarity that even I find shocking.

Jan Fleischhauer

Quoted Without Comment

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“A recollection touched him, booklegged stuff from the forties and fifties of the last century which he had read: French, German, British, Italian. The intellectuals had been fretful about the Americanization of Europe, the crumbling of old culture before the mechanized barbarism of soft drinks, hard sells, enormous chrome-plated automobiles (dollar grins, the Danes had called them), chewing gum, plastics … None of them had protested the simultaneous Europeanization of America: bloated government, unlimited armament, official nosiness, censors, secret police, chauvinism … Well, for a while there had been objectors, but first their own excesses and sillinesses discredited them, then later …”

Poul Anderson, Sam Hall

Quote of the Day

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This financial and political system is the operating system on which the world runs; the Dutch introduced version 1.0 in about 1620; the British introduced 2.0 in about 1700; the Americans upgraded to version 3.0 in 1945, and as an operating system, it works pretty well—most of the time. The 300 years of liberal, global capitalism have seen an extraordinary explosion in knowledge and human affluence. Not everybody shares in these benefits, and there are environmental and social costs to the rapid progress. Still, not many of us would like to turn the clock back to 1610.
 
But the system has bugs—among them, a tendency to crash. Ever since the great Dutch tulip bubble of 1637, the economic system has been prey to roller-coaster-style booms and busts. From the South Sea bubble of 1720 to the subprime loan bubble of our own time, the financial system leads people into irrational behavior and fever dreams of wealth and of eternally rising prices for stocks, houses—and tulips. These episodes never end well, and as time passes and the financial system grows more complex, more global and more interdependent, the cost of these periodic crashes gets worse.

Walter Russell Mead

RTWT.