Sandinistas At The NY Times: ‘A Mayoral Hopeful Now, de Blasio Was Once a Young Leftist’

September 23, 2013September 26, 2013 / chr1 / Leave a comment

Now de Blasio may just be an older Leftist, running for office.

I don’t have much to say about NYC politics, but this does go to the larger theory that we lost much of establishment liberalism, or at least nationalistic liberalism, back during the 60’s cultural revolution. Perhaps if it ever makes a comeback, it will be as a brand of neo-liberalism more like the kind we find in Britain, reaching out from a further Left base.

Why would I make such a prediction? Well, because of the wretched state of the humanities, overrun with postmodernism and continental philosophy, for starters. Or the soft, redistributive collectivism of much of current liberalism. Or the fact that green thinking and feminism have made such inroads in our culture. Or the increasing nihilism in NYC alternative and artistic cultures.

Let me know if I’m wrong. Perhaps I’m responding too reactively to current conditions.

Michael Bloomberg’s had to navigate a career in information and finance, gradually over to using the bully pulpit of Gracie Mansion to push a kind of ‘nudging’ authoritarianism to achieve the social outcomes he wants. He’s drifted independent.

Now NYC, often a cultural trendsetter for the rest of the nation, may be turning further Left:

‘Bill de Blasio, then 26, went to Nicaragua to help distribute food and medicine in the middle of a war between left and right. But he returned with something else entirely: a vision of the possibilities of an unfettered leftist government.

and:

‘His activism did not stop. In the cramped Lower Manhattan headquarters of the Nicaragua Solidarity Network of Greater New York, where he volunteered, Mr. de Blasio learned to cause a stir. He and a ragtag team of peace activists, Democrats, Marxists and anarchists attempted to bring attention to a Central American cause that, after the Sandinistas lost power in a 1990 election, was fading from public view. “The Nicaraguan struggle is our struggle,” said a poster designed by the group’

Solidarity!

Over at Ira Stoll’s Future of Capitalism:

‘Peter Beinart wrote an article for the Daily Beast heralding Bill de Blasio’s victory in the New York Democratic Mayoral Primary as the ‘rise of the new new left.” It describes Americans aged 18 to 30 as ‘Millennials” and claims, ‘unlike older Americans, who favor capitalism over socialism by roughly 25 points, Millenials, narrowly, favor socialism.”

If you were a beat, or a hippie, or now a hipster, you may not have to wear that Che shirt ironically any longer!

Addition: As a reader suggests, couldn’t you say the same of the Right? Well, the thesis here is that liberalism eventually runs aground into many of the problems of human nature, belief, ignorance etc. Some of its organizing principles take time to root, and now they have arguably deeper than before. One of this blog’s aims is to try and highlight some of the possible consequences of those principles.

Since it’s 1963 all over again: Clink on this link to explore the ideas of David Friedman, and his brand of libertarianism and anarcho-capitalism for yourself. Many of his positions are well-reasoned and should be considered on their merits. Few people make such a compelling and clear argument for private property and extend capitalism as far as it will go: Youtube Via Libertarianism.Org-David Friedman: ‘The Machinery Of Freedom’.

LIbertarianism at high tide against a particularly liberal administration?…Anarcho-capitalism: Pro-market, anti-state, anti-war…paleo-libertarian: Link To Lew Rockwell Via A Reader…Anarcho-syndicalist, libertarian socialist and sometime blind supporter of lefty causes: Via Youtube: (1 of 3) Kant, Chomsky and the Problem of Knowledge…Two Sunday Quotations By Albert Jay Nock in ‘Anarchist’s Progress’…new liberty away from Hobbes?: Repost-From Public Reason: A Discussion Of Gerald Gaus’s Book ‘The Order of Public Reason: A Theory of Freedom And Morality In A Diverse And Bounded World’

Monday Quotation From Charles Kesler And A Few Thoughts on Conservatism

The Hoover Institution Via Youtube: Charles Murray On ‘Coming Apart’

Charles Murray At The New Criterion: ‘Belmont & Fishtown’…Charles Murray Lecture At AEI: The Happiness Of People…Can you maintain the virtues of religion without the church…of England?: From The City Journal: Roger Scruton On “Forgiveness And Irony”…

Robert Nozick merged elements of Kant and Locke into a strong, libertarian defense of the individual, and also responded to Rawls distributive justice: A Few Thoughts On Robert Nozick’s “Anarchy, State and Utopia”…liberals attack: From Slate: ‘The Liberty Scam-Why Even Robert Nozick, The Philosophical Father Of Libertarianism, Gave Up On The Movement He Inspired.’

Michael Moynihan At The Daily Beast: ‘The Repentant Radical’

September 23, 2013September 23, 2013 / chr1 / Leave a comment

Full interview here.

Ahmed Akkari, one of the men behind the Danish cartoon protests, spends time on Greenland decompressing from the Islamist cocoon, and comes to renounce his former ways:

“He’s very brave. He’s taken a big step, and he’s ready to atone. He’s changed from being an Islamist to being a humanist.”

Believable?

Islamist ‘literature’ for Kierkegaard?

More details here on what he helped to inspire.

Cartoons here. (Westergaard’s is the 2nd down, I don’t have the rights to reprint).

Bonus:

Christopher Hitchens remained unmoved in a debate with Tariq Ramadan and maintained that the metaphysics of Islam will ultimately create and encourage violence through its moral absolutism and its total metaphysical prescription for all aspects of life, including politics and the public square. Muslims are the ones right now in Europe and the Middle-East, he points out, who are violent and threatening violence and it must be stood up to.

One of the products of Europe is the secular multiculturalism to which Ramadan often appeals, but which the adherents of secular multiculturalism are not always fully willing and able to defend (free speech as broadly interpreted as it often us under the 1st amendment here under the Constitution) against Muslim threats of violence. This secular tradition has also not been fully integrating Muslims successfully under its banner nor through public policy, the economy, or Europe’s political institutions, often creating fiefdoms and ghettoes.

Hopefully, we can still avoid getting into bed with both the neo-neo colonialists, the bien pensant Euro-Left on one hand and the Islamists on the other, without really addressing the underlying conflicts.

It should be pointed out that aside from cartoonists, filmmakers like Theo Van Gogh, and recent arrivals like Hirsi Ali, it is often the real materialists in Europe, former Marxists and socialists who speak up the loudest and possibly become marked for death:

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Here’s a further debate from Intelligence Squared with Ayan Hirsi Ali on one side, arguing that Islam is the problem (the same absolutism in Islam that will not tolerate questioning of its tenets, and its many violent passages). A member of the opposing side suggests that Muslim alienation in British life, combined with a European influenced fascist inspired-Islamism is the problem, not Islam itself (yes, it’s colonialist Europe’s fault). He proposes a more human-rights based Islam.

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It’s ironic that a strain of European secularism and socialism, quite fascistic, from Gadhafi to Saddam Hussein’s Baath party to Syria’s secularist Baath party still barely in power, was exported, and now we’re dealing with a fascistic Islamist response.

See Also: Why Lars Hedegaard Still Matters

From The Middle East Quarterly Via A & L Daily: Europe’s Shifting Immigration Dynamic

Kenan Malik In The Spiked Review Of Books: ‘Twenty Years On: Internalizing The Fatwa’-Salman Rushdie

Theodore Dalrymple argues that France has the potential to handle Muslim immigration better because of its ideological rigidity, which can better meet the ideological rigidity of its Muslim immigrants…Theodore Dalrymple Still Attacking Multi-Culturalism In Britain

How do you reasonably deal with relativism anyways?: From Virtual Philosophy: A Brief Interview With Simon Blackburn

Repost-Eugene Volokh At The National Review: ‘Multiculturalism: For or Against?’

If you thought the cartoons were bad, more on the Fitna movie here. Libertarians stand firm on this issue: Repost-A Canadian Libertarian Making Noise: Ezra Levant