Free Tibet ... And China

Walter's ghost lives:

Instapundit - Blog Archive - REMEMBER, THEY’RE STILL COMMIES: Chinese Police Force Nobel Peace Prize Winner’s Wife To Leave Home…: "Last year Thomas Friedman was writing that America needed to be more like China and adopt one-party democracy.

Two weeks ago he told us that America needs to be more like China and adopt green technologies.

Yes, this Thomas Friedman.

So now can we expect a Thomas Friedman column telling America to adopt the policy of harrassing the families of Nobel Prize winning dissidents? I guess not, we don’t have Nobel Prize winning dissidents here; political opposition is legal here. Still do you think that we might see a Friedman column soon condemning China? Or is China’s enlightened leadership above criticism in Tom’s benighted opinion?

They’re above criticism so long as he holds the Walter Duranty Chair at the NYT."

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O Longing For Fidel's Gulag

Instapundit � Blog Archive � DAVE KOPEL: Obama Is Too A Christian. “Coulter is accurate in calling Jeremiah Wright ‘a racist nu…: "DAVE KOPEL: Obama Is Too A Christian. “Coulter is accurate in calling Jeremiah Wright ‘a racist nut.’ However, that does not prove that Wright (and by extension Obama, to whatever extent Obama believes in Wright’s theology) is not a Christian. Some practitioners of ‘liberation theology’ (including the black liberation theology variant) may simply be Marxists looking for some broadly-appealing rhetoric to add to their political program. Other practitioners, however, may be sincerely and otherwise-orthodox Christians who truly believe in both Christianity and Marxism, and in the liberation theology fusion of the two. . . . Similarly, I would suggest that many of the pastors in slave states in antebellum America who taught that slavery was legitimate because of the slaves’ inherent racial inferiority were also sincere Christians, albeit grossly mistaken in their teachings on this matter.”"

This is too kind to O Duce. Of course I can't know what is in Obama's heart -- unlike he is likely certain he knows what is in mine(!) -- but there is plenty of evidence that he spent his life as a a pure Marxist Socialist and certainly none to contradict it from his actions in office.

But then the next paragraph just sings with truth:

And — to take things beyond the Obama question — on a similar moral plane. In fact, if you look at a Marxist Utopia — say, Cuba — what you’ll see is basically a plantation. At the top, you’ve got the Massa and his family — Fidel, Raul, et al. — followed by various layers of overseers — the Communist Party apparat, the secret police — and House Negroes — e.g., the state-controlled media — all living off the surplus labor of the Field Negroes, whose produce is disposed of not according to their own desires (that would be capitalism!) but according to their betters’. This, we’re told, is for the best, since they aren’t smart enough to make their own decisions anyway, and the Massa looks after them with food, housing, and health care. Slaveholders even defended their system as more humane and less exploitative than atomistic capitalism, conveniently ignoring the role of the lash, just as apologists for Marxism conveniently ignore the role of the gulag.

Perfectly executed analysis as Andrew Wilkow would say...

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Obama's Plan

From an email my wife received:

An economics professor at a local college made a statement that he had never failed a single student before, but had once failed an entire class.

That class had insisted that Obama's socialism worked and that no one would be poor and no one would be rich, a great equalizer.

The professor then said, "OK, we will have an experiment in this class on Obama's plan".

All grades would be averaged and everyone would receive the same grade so no one would fail and no one would receive an A.

After the first test, the grades were averaged and everyone got a B. The students who studied hard were upset and the students who studied little were happy.

As the second test rolled around, the students who studied little had studied even less and the ones who studied hard decided they wanted a free ride too so they studied little. The second test average was a D! No one was happy.

When the 3rd test rolled around, the average was an F.

The scores never increased as bickering, blame and name-calling all resulted in hard feelings and no one would study for the benefit of anyone else.

All failed, to their great surprise, and the professor told them that socialism would also ultimately fail because when the reward is great, the effort to succeed is great but when government takes all the reward away, no one will try or want to succeed.

Could not be any simpler than that.

Pretty much the story of the USSR in a nutshell. Any questions?

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Dialectical Disaster: Inside Blowback

Mark Steyn is one of my favorite authors and I haven't been featuring his work nearly enough. In fact, it's inexcusable that I haven't quoted him at all on this blog.

So let me overcompensate by stealing in its entirety a concise home run on Van Jones he just posted:

Powerline notices the evolution of Van the Truther's views. On September 13th 2001, as the towers still burned and the lampposts of lower Manhattan were plastered with flyers for missing loved ones, Van Jones spoke at a rally "against racism and war":

A recurring theme of the speakers was the brutal violence committed by or supported by the United States government on a daily basis. "The bombs the government drops in Iraq are the bombs that blew up in New York City," said Van Jones, director of the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights, who also warned against forthcoming violence by the Bush Administration. "The US cannot bomb its way out of this one. Safety at home requires justice abroad."

Gotcha. Blowback. America had it coming.

That was Van Jones in the fall of 2001. A couple of years later and suddenly it's the 9/11-was-an-inside-job routine.

Traveling through the Middle East about six months after 9/11, I was struck by the number of Arabs, from Egypt to the Gulf, who simultaneously believed (a) the Mossad were behind the attacks and (b) it was a great victory for the Muslim world. Van Jones would seem to be an American variant of the same phenomenon: a man who believes 9/11 was (a) blowback for the actions of the US government's war machine and (b) an inside job by the US government's war machine.

No wonder the left derides those boorish enough to bring this stuff up: Why, surely all sophisticated persons know these positions are little more than lifestyle accessories or fashion hemlines. One season, everyone on the catwalk is agreed 9/11 was blowback by Jihadists for Social Justice. The next, everyone is equally agreed that Bush called up the White House Steel Melting Czar and buried the whole thing under "miscellaneous" in the budget.

This is just a beautiful portrait of why lefty loons and Islamic nutjobs are soulmates, no? Their logical faculties are so deficient that they routinely believe entirely irreconcilable things simultaneously.

Good Marxists are the very embodiment of dialectical disaster.

And in general they are nuttier than A.D.D. riddled Cuckoo Clocks.

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