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July 14, 2005

And Speaking Of The Decent Left...

Paul Berman was mentioned in that article linked below. He's mentioned much more prominently in a book review quoted, it seems, in full, by NormBlog.

Apparently Berman's book Terror and Liberalism has changed at least one mind. The reviewer confesses complete error in his thinking -- not in detail, he remarks, but in fundamentals.

The reviewer quotes Berman's analysis of the French left's response to the rise of Hitlerism-- to excuse it, to suggest that perhaps it wasn't all that bad (Weren't Jews guilty of at least something? Obviously the Germans must be angry with them for a reason), and then finally to actually support the collaborationist government imposed by the Nazis after the invasion:

To see the old process at work, one only has to look at how a large chunk of the world's liberal opinion has got itself into the position where it can't support Iraqi and Afghan liberals, socialists and feminists. You think the worst thing in the world is the developed countries because they brought the First World War, which to be fair is a charge worth making, or globalisation and McDonalds, which to be fair is a charge that is infantile. You are confronted with totalitarian movements, which are worse, and your first thought is to blame them on the West. Your second is to make excuses for them. Your third is to betray your comrades. Your fourth is to go up to the totalitarian movements and shake them by the hand.

As the Arabs say, "The enemy of my enemy is my friend." The left seems to believe that on some level, perhaps unconscious, and can't quite bring itself to condemn lunatic barbarity simply because it seems opposed to the sorts of things they're opposed to as well -- American military power, globalization, capitalism, etc.

Would that more on the left realize that aphorism is a guideline, not a rule. Sometimes the enemy of your enemy is your enemy, too. This is probably the case when the enemy in question annouces, with little equivocation, that he hates you with a black passion and would like to murder you, no matter how progressive and tolerant your politics might be.

And, not to put too fine a point on it, when he announces that he hates you especially, because you are, after all, the ones most aggressively pushing the vile ideas of secularism, equality for women, more latitudinarian attitudes towards sex, and of course the crazy idea that homosexuals and victims of rape shouldn't be stoned to death.

Thanks to "someone."

More From Nick Cohen: Writing in the Guardian, of all places:

The instinctive response of a significant portion of the rich world's intelligentsia to the murder of innocents on 11 September was anything but robust. A few, such as Karlheinz Stockhausen, were delighted. The destruction of the World Trade Centre was 'the greatest work of art imaginable for the whole cosmos,' declared the composer whose tin ear failed to catch the screams.
Others saw it as a blow for justice rather than art. They persuaded themselves that al-Qaeda was made up of anti-imperialist insurgents who were avenging the wrongs of the poor. 'The great speculators wallow in an economy that every year kills tens of millions of people with poverty, so what is 20,000 dead in New York?' asked Dario Fo. Rosie Boycott seemed to agree. 'The West should take the blame for pushing people in Third World countries to the end of their tether,' she wrote.

In these bleak days, it's worth remembering what was said after September 2001. A backward glance shows that before the war against the Taliban and long before the war against Saddam Hussein, there were many who had determined that 'we had it coming'. They had to convince themselves that Islamism was a Western creation: a comprehensible reaction to the International Monetary Fund or hanging chads in Florida or whatever else was agitating them, rather than an autonomous psychopathic force with reasons of its own. In the years since, this manic masochism has spread like bindweed and strangled leftish and much conservative thought.

All kinds of hypocrisy remained unchallenged. In my world of liberal London, social success at the dinner table belonged to the man who could simultaneously maintain that we've got it coming but that nothing was going to come; that indiscriminate murder would be Tony Blair's fault but there wouldn't be indiscriminate murder because 'the threat' was a phantom menace invented by Blair to scare the cowed electorate into supporting him.

Worth reading in full.

Thanks to Si.

posted by Ace at 01:40 PM

Comments

As the Arabs say, "The enemy of my enemy is my friend."
That's the abridged version. The rest goes:

Until I kill my enemy, then I cut off the head of my enemies enemy and we are all the best of friends.

Posted by: 72 VRIGINS on July 14, 2005 01:44 PM

Actually, the review is at Normblog, part of an interesting series (that started with Buddenbrooks!).

Dunno how he gets 'em, but he does.

Posted by: someone on July 14, 2005 01:55 PM

The other thing is that the author -- Nick Cohen -- is the sole non-nut left at al-Guardian now that Aaronovitch went to the Times.

Posted by: someone on July 14, 2005 01:57 PM

The reviewer, Nick Cohen, writes in the Guardian's more grown-up Sunday version, The Observer, and has been a kick-arse war-lefty for years. I'm only surprised to find there was a time when he wasn't. He supported the Iraq war since the beginning and I thought he was up for Afghanistan too.

He had an excellent piece on Sunday on the loony-liberal response to the London bombings:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/Columnists/Column/0,5673,1525260,00.html

Posted by: Si on July 14, 2005 02:08 PM

As I posted before below and it bears repeating:

Liberals are scared shitless of Moslems!

Though Liberals are somewhat in sympathy with Islam, or more correctly, they hate some of the same people that Islam hates, it isn’t the primary motivating factor when it comes to Islam. Liberals are by definition cowards and being Liberals, they are capable of finding an infinite amount of bullshit excuses and reasons for their cowardice. While we can analyze their motives till doomsday, the important truth is this: Liberals are scared shitless of Moslems.

And not without reason either. Moslems have shown the entire planet that they are eager to kill anyone who opposes their Jihad against the world. But Liberals, already scared of their own shadows, are trying to compensate for it by working themselves up into a lather and putting on this fake tough-guy act like Kennedy, Dean, and Gore, against their own country! It makes them feel brave and powerful (when they are really cowardly and impotent) to yell and shout about how terrible this country is, this administration is, blah, blah, blah. This compensates for the deep fear they have of the rest of the world. And they know that there’ll be no real consequences for their actions, no shadowy-middle-eastern-man lurking in the garage when they come home at night.

No doubt some conservatives have the same justified fear. But the difference between Liberal writers at, say the NYT and conservative writers at the NRO is that the conservatives refuse to be intimidated by Islam and are eager to tell the truth about it, and they do so all the time, for being Conservatives, they have the courage of their convictions. Men like Robert Spencer and Rusty Shackleford and many others refuse to be intimidated in the face of the Islamic Threat. And deserve as much appreciation for their courage as Liberals deserve condemnation for their cowardice.

Posted by: 72 VIRGINS on July 14, 2005 03:07 PM

Best quote from that piece:

'In his intervention before last year's American presidential election, bin Laden praised Robert Fisk of the Independent whose journalism he admired. 'I consider him to be neutral,' he said, so I suppose we could all resolve not to take the tube unless we can sit next to Mr Fisk. But as the killings are indiscriminate, I can't see how that would help and, in any case, who wants to be stuck on a train with an Independent reporter?'

Posted by: Si on July 14, 2005 03:07 PM

You are confronted with totalitarian movements, which are worse, and your first thought is to blame them on the West. Your second is to make excuses for them.

Your third is to betray your comrades ...

Your fourth is to go up to the totalitarian movements and shake them by the hand.

Why would anyone act this way?

1) they have the mental disorder called Liberalism which allows them to justify anything.

2) But far more importantly:
Because Liberals are Cowards!

Posted by: 72 Cowards on July 14, 2005 03:22 PM

$10,000 bet: You will large numbers of leftists (progressvies, anarnchists, commies, etc) start to convert to Islam by 2010.

Posted by: on July 14, 2005 03:40 PM

My analysis of the reasons for the lefts 'alignment' with the terrorists has more to due with the fact that if the right is for it, then they must be against it. That is, if I as an evil neocon fascist warmonger come out as pro puppies than they are required to take the opposite stance and will easily be able to come up with justifications for it.

But then again, since as Mr. Dean pointed out, I am evil and lazy, then what can I possibly know that would serve any purpose other than to spread more evil laziness?

Posted by: Defense Guy on July 14, 2005 03:41 PM

$10,000 bet: You will large numbers of leftists (progressvies, anarnchists, commies, etc) start to convert to Islam by 2010.

I agree, unless of course Islam starts losing, and being Liberal Cowards, then they won't.

Posted by: 72 Liberal Cowards on July 14, 2005 03:57 PM

"Terror and Liberalism" didn't start my wake-up act, but it hammered it home, as the bishop said ...

"Radical Son," David Horowitz's biography, was the real catalyst. Anyone else? I was vaguely aware of him as a "movement" guy, not so much his current "radical right-wing extremism" (actually for once fairly accurate, it's hard for some dudes to get anywhere near the middle) ...

... expecting Hoffmanian boosterism - nay, EAGER for it, I am now ashamed to admit - I met a devastating autobiographical/psychological/existential explanation of politics, "the sixties" and the twentieth century.

Before I read that book, I was DOWN with the DU agenda. Almost three years go by, and here I am at ... this fine establishment.

Oh, and in case Cedarford is around: Haven't got a chance to taunt you in a while, sicko, so here goes:

AFTER YOU DIE OF IMPACTED BILE YOUR CORPSE WILL BE PAWED BY JEWISH MED RESIDENTS, JEWISH LAWYERS WILL DEVOUR YOUR ESTATE, AND YOUR OFFSPRING, IF ANY, WILL CONVERT AND BECOME TRANNY-BOYS DOWN THE OLD JAFFA WAY.

Because you *know* that's what happens in his nightmares. And sketchbooks.

Asshole.

/that should tide me over for a few days

Posted by: Knemon on July 15, 2005 02:10 AM

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In more marketing for Project Hail Mary, scientists say they've found the biosigns indicating life growing on an alien planet. It's not proof, just signatures of chemicals that are produced by biological metabolism, and it could be nothing, but scientists think it's a strong sign that this planet is inhabited by something.

In a paper published in the Astrophysical Journal Letters, a team of scientists announced the detection of dimethyl sulfide (along with a similar detection of dimethyl disulfide) in the atmosphere of an exoplanet called K2-18b. This is actually the second detection of dimethyl sulfide made on this planet, following a tentative detection in 2023.
Tons of chemicals are detected in the atmospheres of celestial objects every day. But dimethyl sulfide is different, because on Earth, it's only produced by living organisms.
"It is a shock to the system," Nikku Madhusudhan, first author on the paper, told the New York Times. "We spent an enormous amount of time just trying to get rid of the signal."

He means they tried to prove the signal was caused by things other than dimethyl sulfide but they could not.

Artemis moon shot a go, scheduled for 6:24 Eastern time tonight
Great marketing arranged by Amazon to promote Project Hail Mary. Okay not really but it does work out that way.

TJM talks John Boorman, director of Excalibur

Good rickroll

What? Skeleton of the most famous Musketeer, D'Artagnan, possibly discovered in Dutch church closet.
Dumas picked four names of real musketeers out of a history book, D'Artagnan, Athos, Aramis, and Porthos. So there was an actual D'Artagnan, though he made most of the story up. (Or, you know, all of it.)*

Charles de Batz de Castelmore, known as d'Artagnan, the famous musketeer of Kings Louis XIII and Louis XIV, spent his life in the service of the French crown.
The Gascon nobleman inspired Alexandre Dumas's hero in "The Three Musketeers" in the 19th century, a character now known worldwide thanks to the novel and numerous film adaptations.
D'Artagnan was killed during the siege of Maastricht in 1673, and there is a statue honoring the musketeer in the city. His final resting place has remained a mystery ever since.

A lot of Dumas's stories are based on bits of real history. The plot of the >Three Musketeers, about trying to recover lost diamonds from the queen's necklace, was cribbed from the then-almost-contemporaneous Affair of the Queen's Necklace. And the Man in the Iron Mask is based on real accounts of a prisoner forced to wear a mask (though I think it was a velvet mask).
* Oh, I should mention, Dumas says all this, about finding the names in an old book, in the prologue to his novel. But authors lie a lot. They frequently present fictions as based on historic fact. The twist is, he was actually telling the truth here. At least about these four musketeers having actually existed and served under Louis XIV.
Fun fact: You know the beginning of A Fistful of Dollars where the local gunslingers make fun of Clint Eastwood's donkey and Eastwood demands they apologize to the donkey? That's lifted from The Three Musketeers. Rochefort mocks D'Artagnan's old, brokedown farm horse and D'Artagnan is incensed.

A commenter asked which should be read first, The Hobbit of LOTR?
Easy, no question -- read The Hobbit first. It's actually the start of the story and comes first chronologically. It sets up some major characters and major pieces in play in LOTR.
Also, the Hobbit is Beginner-Friendly, which LOTR isn't. The Hobbit really is a delightful book, and a fast read. It's chatty, it's casual, it's exciting, and it's funny. In that dry cheeky British humor way. I love that the narrator is constantly making little asides and commentary, like he's just sitting next to you telling you this story as it occurs to him.
LOTR is a very long story. Fifteen hundred pages or so. The Hobbit is relatively short and very punchy and easy to read. If you don't like The Hobbit, you can skip out on LOTR. If you do like it, you'll be primed to read LOTR.
Oh, I should say: The Hobbit is written as if it's for children, but one of those smart children's stories that are also for adults. Don't worry, there's also real fighting and violence and horror in it, too.
LOTR is written for adults. (It's said that Tolkien wrote both for his children, but LOTR was written 17 years later, when his children were adults.) Some might not like The Hobbit due to its sometimes frivolous tone. Me, I love it. I find it constantly amusing. Both are really good but there is a starkly different tone to both. LOTR is epic, grand, and serious, about a world war, The Hobbit is light and breezy, and about a heist. Though a heist that culminates in a war for the spoils.

The Hobbit Challenge: Read two more chapters. I didn't have much time. Bilbo got the ring.
I noticed a continuity problem. Maybe. Now, as of the time of The Hobbit, it was unknown that this magic ring was in fact a Ring of Power, and it was doubly unknown that it was the Ring of Power, the Master Ring that controlled the others.
But the narrator -- who we will learn in LOTR was none of than Bilbo himself, who wrote the book as "There and Back Again" -- says this about Gollum's ring:
"But who knows how Gollum had come by that present [the Ring], ages ago in the old days when such rings were still at large in the world? Perhaps even the Master who ruled them could not have said."
In another passage, the ring is identified as a "ring of power."
I don't know, I always thought there was a distinction between mere magic rings and the Rings of Power created by Sauron. But this suggests that Bilbo knew this was a ring of power created by Sauron.
Now I don't remember when Bilbo wrote the Hobbit. In the movie, he shows Frodo the book in Rivendell, and I guess he wrote it after he left the Shire. I guess he might have added in the part about the ring being a ring of power created by "the Master" after Gandalf appraised him of his research into the ring.
I never noticed this before. I know Tolkien re-wrote this chapter while he was writing LOTR to make the ring important from the start. And also to make Gollum more sinister and evil, and also to remove the part where Gollum actually offers Bilbo the ring as a "present" -- Bilbo had already found it on his own, but Gollum was wiling to give it away, which obviously is not something the rewritten Gollum would ever do.
But I had no memory of the ring being suggested to be The Ring so early in the tale.

Finish the job, Mr. President!
Melanie Phillips lays out the case for the total destruction of the Iranian government and armed forces. [CBD]

TJM acts like he knows anything about John Wick and screenwriting. It's embarrassing, really.

Podcast: Sefton and CBD talk about how would a peace treaty with Iran work, Democrats defending murderers and rapists, The GOP vs. Dem bench for 2028, composting bodies? And more!

Oh, I forgot to mention this quote from Pete Hegseth, reported by Roger Kimball: "We are sharing the ocean with the Iranian Navy. We're giving them the bottom half."

Batman fires The Batman
Batman is disgusted by the Joachim Phoenix version of Joker
Batman tries to fire Superman
Batman is still workshopping his Bat-Voice

Forgotten 80s Mystery Click: Red Leather Suit and Sweatband Edition
And I was here to please
I'm even on knees
Makin' love to whoever I please
I gotta do it my way
Or no way at all

Tomorrow is March 25th, "Tolkien Reading Day," because March 25th is the day when the Ring is destroyed in the book. I think I'm going to start the Hobbit tomorrow and read all four books this time.
The only bad part of the trilogy are the Frodo/Sam chapters in The Two Towers. They're repetitive, slow, and mostly about the weather and terrain. But most everything else is good. Weirdly, the Frodo-Sam chapters in Return of the King are exciting and action-packed and among the best in the trilogy. (Though the chapters with everyone else in Return of the King get pretty slow again. Mostly people talking about marching towards war, and then marching towards war.)

Sec. Army recognizes ODU Army ROTC cadets for their bravery and sacrifice in private ceremony
[Hat Tip: Diogenes] [CBD]

TJM gives you a brief tour of his movie collection.

Forgotten 80s Mystery Click
One day I'm gonna write a poem in a letter
One day I'm gonna get that faculty together
Remember that everybody has to wait in line
Oh, [Song Title], look out world, oh, you know I've got mine

US decimation of Iran's ICBM forces is due to Space Force's instant detection of launches -- and the launchers' hiding places -- and rapid counter-attack via missiles
AI is doing a lot of the work in analyzing images to find the exact hiding place of the launchers. Counter-strikes are now coming in four hours after a launch, whereas previously it might have taken days for humans to go over the imagery and data.

Robert Mueller, Former Special Counsel Who Probed Trump, Dies

“robert mueller just died,” trump wrote in a truth social post on march 21. “good, i’m glad he’s dead. he can no longer hurt innocent people! president donald j. trump.”

TJM has thoughts on Superheros and Iconography