Two types of people desire to impose politically correct locutions on the rest of us: those who possess unlimited power and fear to lose it and those who aspire to unlimited power and need a means to attain it.’
‘The Belt and Road is really the expansion of a specific part of China’s domestic political economy to the rest of the world. That is the nexus between state-owned contractors and state-owned banks, which formed in the domestic infrastructure building spree construction that began after the 2008 global financial crisis (and has not yet ended).’
From AEI, on the regime in Cuba and regime in Venezuela’s connections. They’re certainly not helping most people who want food and electricity, aside from political and economic liberty:
‘When Chavez succumbed to cancer under Cuban care, they micromanaged Maduro’s rise to power. Cuban advisors engineered his unlawful presidential campaign and unlikely victory in 2013.’
‘Lest anybody feel creeped out by running political errands for a brutal and repressive caudillo, Joseph Kennedy — son of Senator Robert Kennedy — proclaimed that refusing the strongman’s patronage would be “a crime against humanity.” Kennedy was at the time the director of Citizens Energy, which had a contract to help distribute that Venezuelan heating oil — Boss Hugo was a brute, but he understood American politics.‘
Sometimes radical chic is just radical chic, sometimes a Che shirt is just a Che shirt, and sometimes people are truly finding fascist, totalitarian political ideology worth extolling.
‘Venezuela, Brazil and Argentina are languishing in differing shades of turmoil, steadily losing ground to regional underdogs. The Pacific Alliance, an historic trade agreement between Mexico, Peru, Chile, and Colombia (and coming soon: Costa Rica), has the potential to recolor Latin America’s economic map and introduce some new regional powerhouses to the world stage. As The Atlantic points out, not all the credit goes to the underdogs’
It’s way too early to make those kinds of predictions, mind you, but more trade, market liberalization and neo-liberal strains willing to stand up against further Left strains are good signs. The Economist had a piece on Argentina’s troubles.
Some light humor:
Michael Moynihan reviewed Michael Moore’s ‘Sicko’ which praised the Cuban Health Care System.
Christopher Hitchens took a helicopter ride with Sean Penn, and that tracksuit-wearing strongman of the people, Hugo Chavez-Hugo Boss:
It’s a long way out of socialist and revolutionary solidarity, which continually occupies the South American mind. One more revolution: Adam Kirsch takes a look at Mario Vargas Llosa. The Dream Of The Peruvian.
How’s that Russian reset going?:
——————
What about value pluralism…positive and negative liberty?: The classical liberal tradition…looking for classical liberals in the postmodern wilderness: Isaiah Berlin’s negative liberty: A Few Thoughts On Isaiah Berlin’s “Two Concepts Of Liberty”
At first, a friend pointed-out the return of the old Moscow-Tehran-Damascus alliance: Russia may be only a shade of its former Soviet self, but Putin is still running the old Cold-War playbook for leverage to recover his empire. The Syria redline debacle simply allowed him to dust-off some old plays.
‘That Russia is building ties with the least democratic and most anti-American governments in the hemisphere should help us as we gaze into his eyes and try to see his soul. He doesn’t actually like us very much, and doesn’t wish us well. This kind of stuff is particularly problematic for the two flexibility experts in DC—Kerry and Obama—who have consistently reached out to Russia in hopes of a better or at least more pragmatic understanding.
It’s hard to think of many goals that the Obama administration has pursued so consistently as the reset with Russia. News like this reminds us that it may have all been in vain.’
As of now, we’re putting human rights ideals and peace-dealing before many of our other interests, using this dragnet to try and include even bad-actors into an international framework.
The actual consequences of this approach are not reassuring, with Syria and Russia currently standing-out. We’re creating something of a power vacuum and conducting an experiment to see which kind of people fill the void.
If I’m not mistaken, Mead is calling for a more Huntingtonian approach, or rounding-up our interests and allies first and proceeding from there (less Western far-Left, human-rights focused and liberal internationalist).
‘What requires more thought is Mead’s conclusion. He sees a major zero-sum geopolitical contestunfolding, pitting Russia against the United States. Washington, he argues, should abandon its policy of seeking better relations and push back against Russia. Most urgently, in his view, the administration needs to rethink its policies on Ukraine and Syria to take into account Russia’s unrelenting opposition—and Mead would surely argue that the dramatic events in Kiev and the collapse of the Syrian negotiations only reinforce the urgency. But he has not yet suggested what the pushback would entail in detail and what it should aim to achieve. What, in other words, should the United States do, to what ends, at what cost, and with what chances of success?’
We may be getting to that point shortly under the current leadership.
‘A few days after Venezuelan caudillo Hugo Chavez expired, his body saturated with cancer he believed was implanted in him by the CIA, I sat on an MSNBC panel encircled by academics sympathetic to the dead autocrat. Vastly outnumbered by halfwits and fellow travellers, I reached for the most conciliatory point available. “Chavez was no democrat,” I muttered, after viewing clips of various silly pundits denouncing him as a dictator, “but words mean things.”‘
His successor and thuggish hanger-on, Nicolas Maduro, is no Chavez. Can Leopoldo Lopez oversee a peaceful uprising from prison?
‘Chavez is actually not an orthodox Marxist in the sense that Marx would have recognized (which was why I linked to the sort of Marxist ‘prophecy’ of people like Chavez from the ‘Eighteenth Brumaire’). Chavez is more along the lines of what traditional Marxists referred to as ‘Bonapartist’ (borrowing from the figure of Napoleon Bonaparte). The whole theory on which Chavez based his political life was that the working class (or what passed for it, in a country like Venezuela) *could not* make a revolution on its own, and that someone else (the military and the Socialist Party, led by him) needed to make the revolution for them. ‘
‘The boss loves to talk and has clocked up speeches of Castro-like length. Bolívar is the theme of which he never tires. His early uniformed movement of mutineers—which failed to bring off a military coup in 1992—was named for Bolívar.’
If we’re going to have a chattering class of middlebrow know-nothings, can we at least ask they know the right somethings?:
—————–
It’s a long way out of socialist and revolutionary solidarity, which continually occupies the South American mind. One more revolution: Adam Kirsch takes a look at Mario Vargas Llosa. The Dream Of The Peruvian.
It’d be so boring to talk about the popularization of the sciences and also keep politics and ideology out of the title of your piece: Dahlia Lithwick at Slate: ‘How Can You Explain ‘Color’ To An 11 Yr Old?:’
Alan Alda, boomer establishment voice of reason and secular humanitarian of M.A.S.H. fame, is involved in an interesting project:
‘I ask whether he has to translate himself when he talks to a roomful of scientists. He replies: “I love science. But I am very aware that I am not a scientist. So I make it clear that my contribution is to ask questions rather than translate. One of the things I am working on in the center is to help scientists communicate in their own voice and not have to be translated at all. I know something about communicating; I spent my life communicating. So this is what we do.”
This blog appreciates the time and effort put-in to helping inspire young minds and possibly changing the the course of lives for the better. That could be good work. As for Slate, however, more political pissing-matches ensue in the comment section, hardly surprising when the ‘personal is political‘ is likely a starting point for discussion.
It’s almost like some people have formed a Cargo Cult, still looking for their ‘Big Man.’ As has been my experience, it doesn’t seem very ‘scientific’ to signal the feelings one has or ought to have, in order to reinforce the beliefs one has or ought to have, in order to show loyalty to the ideology and worldview one is hoping to share and push upon everyone else.
‘Venezuela, Brazil and Argentina are languishing in differing shades of turmoil, steadily losing ground to regional underdogs. The Pacific Alliance, an historic trade agreement between Mexico, Peru, Chile, and Colombia (and coming soon: Costa Rica), has the potential to recolor Latin America’s economic map and introduce some new regional powerhouses to the world stage. As The Atlantic points out, not all the credit goes to the underdogs’
It’s way too early to make those kinds of predictions, mind you, but more trade, market liberalization and neo-liberal strains willing to stand up against further Left strains are good signs. The Economist had a piece on Argentina’s troubles.
Some light humor:
Michael Moynihan reviewed Michael Moore’s ‘Sicko’ which praised the Cuban Health Care System.
Christopher Hitchens took a helicopter ride with Sean Penn, and that tracksuit-wearing strongman of the people, Hugo Chavez-Hugo Boss:
It’s a long way out of socialist and revolutionary solidarity, which continually occupies the South American mind. One more revolution: Adam Kirsch takes a look at Mario Vargas Llosa. The Dream Of The Peruvian.
How’s that Russian reset going?:
——————
What about value pluralism…positive and negative liberty?: The classical liberal tradition…looking for classical liberals in the postmodern wilderness: Isaiah Berlin’s negative liberty: A Few Thoughts On Isaiah Berlin’s “Two Concepts Of Liberty”
The post-Chavez Maduro government is trying to control whatever in order to keep power and presumably still claim the high moral ground of its unrealizable socialist-populist ideals, having taken over a series of electronics stores:
‘As the economic situation rapidly worsens in Venezuela, the government is growing increasingly authoritarian and is now actively undermining the foundations of the country’s already deteriorated social fabric’
‘Chavez is actually not an orthodox Marxist in the sense that Marx would have recognized (which was why I linked to the sort of Marxist ‘prophecy’ of people like Chavez from the ‘Eighteenth Brumaire’). Chavez is more along the lines of what traditional Marxists referred to as ‘Bonapartist’ (borrowing from the figure of Napoleon Bonaparte). The whole theory on which Chavez based his political life was that the working class (or what passed for it, in a country like Venezuela) *could not* make a revolution on its own, and that someone else (the military and the Socialist Party, led by him) needed to make the revolution for them. ‘
‘The boss loves to talk and has clocked up speeches of Castro-like length. Bolívar is the theme of which he never tires. His early uniformed movement of mutineers—which failed to bring off a military coup in 1992—was named for Bolívar.’
Maybe people shouldn’t be getting their political advice from Sean Penn:
‘What does it stand for? Populism, socialism, militarism, xenophobia, nationalism, Marxism, anti-Americanism, class warfare, Bolivarian revolution, lawlessness, corruption, financial collapse—it depends on where you stand.’
‘The boss loves to talk and has clocked up speeches of Castro-like length. Bolívar is the theme of which he never tires. His early uniformed movement of mutineers—which failed to bring off a military coup in 1992—was named for Bolívar.’
There are a loyal group of followers crying in the autocratic populist’s wake, as he directed the spigot of oil wealth somewhat in their direction. There are also some other anti-American, anti-capitalist types who hold him up as a model.
‘I like to think of Hugo Chavez as the result of what would happen if a politician of the limited intellect, naiveté and fiery populism of a Jesse Jackson on the left or Sarah Palin on the right were to win the presidency in our country, or better yet, if a reality TV star became president.’