Month: June 2005

UN Groupies to US Congress: Don’t Review Their Performance!

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Fast on the heels of yet another Republican-led attempt to withhold membership dues partially, should the UN not address some reforms that are of keen interest to its biggest underwriter, a bunch of former US ambassadors to the UN are saying, essentially, that pay should not be based on performance:

Eight former U.S. ambassadors to the United Nations sent a letter on Tuesday urging congressional leaders to reject a bill that would link reform of the world body to payment of American dues, warning that the legislation could actually strengthen opponents of reform.

The UN groupies cite the following precedence:

The United States is the biggest financial contributor to the United Nations, paying about 22 percent of its annual $2 billion general budget. After the U.S. government fell millions of dollars behind in arrears in the late 1990s, the United States almost lost its voting rights in the General Assembly.

The letter said that withholding money again would “create resentment, build animosity and actually strengthen opponents of reform.”

“The fact is reforms cost money and withholding dues impair the U.N.’s ability to make the changes needed,” it letter said.

So, let me get this straight: If the US pays up, reform will be had? Really? We’ve been paying for about 60 years now. Where’s the reform? The UN fell from the vision of its founders pretty much as soon as Uncle Joe decided that Eastern Europeans didn’t need human rights. “Great Leader” Kim Il-sung had no use for the UN, and the UN participated in the little chaos he started only because the Soviets thought an absence meant a veto, and Uncle Sam led the countercharge. The UN did nothing while Fidel flirted with fortune. The UN stood by while Israel was invaded on more than one occasion, and at every turn denounced Israel for fighting back. The UN did nothing for Afghanistan. Nothing for Tibet. Nothing for Kashmir. Nothing for Northern Ireland. Nothing for anyone unless some plucky nation had the courage to lead, like the Americans in Korea, the Americans in Kuwait, and the Australians in East Timor.

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Blogging, Microsoft and China

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Glenn Reynolds has this. Please read the post he links to.

Here’ my two cents.

Lenin was right about a lot of things. And he was particularly right when he said that the Capitalist will always sell you the rope to hang him with.

Libertarians, perhaps dreaming of Dagney Taggart and Hank Reardon, often mistakenly think that the business community will care, at all, about freedom. Business people rarely do. They can’t. They are compelled by competitive pressure to care about profit, and to sell anything to anybody if they can get away with it. Because if they don’t their competitors will. People respond to incentives.

Microsoft is helping to build an Orwellian surveillance system for tyrants just because the tyrants will pay them to do so.

This should not surprise us. It would take moral courage to say no to the money, and answer to the shareholders for the lost money, and to suffer the ire of the communists in Beijing and all the lost business that would result from that ire. Courage is uncommon.

People who care about freedom need to be vigilant about the behavior of the government. But we also need to look with a hard and cynical eye at the behavior of private businesses. We should, to the extent possible, punish them when they behave as Microsoft is doing, by denying them business so they have an incentive not to become vendors to fascists, not to facilitate the crushing of freedom because it will be profitable, today, to do so

Suggestions on how to punish Microsoft for this contemptible behavior would be appreciated. Legislation punishing American companies from doing such work might be appropriate. Or setting up a fund to find ways to hack around the communist firewalls, then circulating it, in Chinese. But I have zero tech knowledge. Others will have better ideas than I do.

Long Live the King

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King of Pop dethroned in bloodless coup. — Headline from The Onion

While laid up and channel surfing recently I flipped past a lot of celebrity-news shows. It seemed that every third time I did so the story was about some legal trouble caused by the celebrity’s extreme behavior. Watching all this weirdness it suddenly struck me that we could have it much worse than having to hear about the celebrity trial du jour. In a previous age, we would have had these nut-jobs ruling over us.

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Why Do Some People Hate Clinton/Bush/Nixon?

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Ann Althouse has an interesting thread going on this topic, to which I posted the following comment:

There was a lot about Clinton to hate. He was routinely dishonest, personally corrupt and treated political opponents (e.g., gun owners, small-business people) as class enemies. He had a history of abusing individuals, both to advance his political goals and to avoid responsibility for his reckless personal behavior, and he showed indifference toward civil liberties. His intellectual MO was to avoid open discussion of issues and instead to make personal attacks on his critics. He appeared to value his personal interests over the good of the country. He got some things right (NAFTA, part of our intervention against Serbia), but squandered much of his early presidency trying to implement unpopular far-left schemes and his later presidency in dealing with the fallout from his personal behavior. And he was asleep at the wheel WRT the threat of Islamic fundamentalism. But for the Left and many Democrats, Clinton was and remains the great hope, because despite his flaws he was the national Democrat who could best compete with the Republicans.

Bush II is a mixed bag. IMO the people who liked Clinton hate W because W is effective in countering their political agenda. If W were a leftist Democrat and had the same political skills as he has now, they would love him. The accusations against W for having supposed personal flaws are therefore really coded political disagreements. That’s a different pattern of hatred from the one shown to Clinton, as many of Clinton’s haters would have accepted his policies if he weren’t such a scoundrel. The Bush haters and Clinton haters appear to be distinct populations with different values.

I think that Nixon haters share some of the values of both Clinton and Bush haters, since a lot of people disliked Nixon’s corruption as well as his policies. But other presidents, notably LBJ, were at least as corrupt as Nixon, so on balance I think it’s the policy disagreements that principally animate Nixon haters to this day. Nixon was a staunch anti-communist from the time of the Hiss prosecution, for which the Left will never forgive him. And the Right’s concerns about communist imperialism were vindicated by the SE Asian bloodbath after our withdrawal from Vietnam (mainly on Nixon’s watch, though he rarely receives credit), and the Left doesn’t like to be reminded about this outcome.

I was too young to be a Nixon hater, though I might have been one if I had been older. But in retrospect Nixon, though a lousy president in many ways (e.g., wage & price controls!), was better than most of the realistic alternatives. Certainly he had the country’s best interests at heart, and unlike some of his successors, particularly Clinton, he had a realistic idea about what we were up against in the world. I think that’s a large part of why the Left still hates Nixon with such vehemence.

Ann’s post and the other comments to it are worth reading.

It Isn’t a Cruise Ship

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There’s this old joke that the crews manning US Navy submarines keep repeating. It goes “There are only two types of ships in the modern Navy: those that are under the water and those that soon will be.”

I remember some of the criticism that was leveled against the Reagan administration over defense budgets. One big issue was the role of aircraft carriers. Critics said that they were too big, too expensive, too vulnerable. They were outmoded technology, sure to be sunk in an instant if hostilities ever flared up between the superpowers. Anecdotes about pictures taken through attack sub periscopes of oblivious carriers were presented as proof that a flattop’s time had come and gone. I even read a paper authored by a defense analyst that said the only reason more carriers were being built, the sole justification for spending all of that taxpayer money, was so retiring admirals could command a big ship before they trotted off to pasture.

There’s no way to sugarcoat it. The critics were wrong.

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