jordan179
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Below are the 10 most recent journal entries recorded in the "jordan179" journal:[<< Previous 10 entries]
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01:19 pm
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Can This Be? A Horrifying Report from Saudi Arabia of Fathers Selling Their Sons as Suicide Bombers
I'm generally very willing to believe the worst of Muslims, and Saudi Arabia is basically a wretched hive and scum and villainy with the addition of oil money. But this beggars belief: would human beings actually do something like this, when they probably aren't poor?
http://www.theblaze.com/stories/terrifying-video-shows-young-saudi-arabian-man-auctioned-off-as-sacred-sacrifice/
Admittedly, this is a culture where the fathers and sons may both believe that the sons are getting a one-way ticket to Paradise. But still -- selling your sons? To be sent off to die? Again, it doesn't even sound human.
Any opinions on whether or not this was faked -- or real?
Current Mood:  curious
Tags: islam, jihad, terrorist war
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12:39 pm
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Jane Austen and the Real Regency Society
Inspired by a comment I made to the blog of Sherwood Smith (![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif?v=92.1) sartorius).
He had written:
There is an entire subgenre, called Regency romance, that is largely built on Georgette Heyer's own alternate London.
and I replied:
Which is in turn largely built on Jane Austen's impression of Regency England. Here we have a different problem: Austen, who wrote fiction set in her own time, understood perfectly well how things worked and people thought, but
(1) did not always explain it in a way which someone from two centuries later -- why should she? She was a contemporary writer writing for a contemporary audience; and
(2) wrote from a particular point of view: that of a highly intelligent, in some ways idealistic and in some ways cynical unmarried gentlewoman, which is of course who she was; and
(3) advocated specific ideas, which were sometimes the ideals of her own particular class and generation, and sometimes her own personal obsessions, whether we tend to agree with them or not.
For instance, how many modern readers of Pride and Prejudice understand that the entail of an estate could only be set aside by the agreement of the entailed heir and at least in the case of some estates by Act of Parliament (which is the spur driving the plot: any Bennett sisters who don't marry well are going to be in trouble when Mr. Bennett dies)?
For that matter, how many modern readers grasp that the Regency economy was far smaller and less fluid than the modern one, which is why everyone's so obsessed with inheritences and wealthy marriages in the first place? Anyone not inheriting well or marrying into a good inheritance is facing a grim and possibly sterile future of very hard work which might only lead to a young grave. Jane Austen doesn't need to explain this to her readers (she avoided this herself only because her brothers loved her, and even then she had to suffer some of the humiliations of being a "poor relation."
Jane Austen's characters are obsessed by the simultaneous importance and difficulty of marrying for love, which Jane herself saw as essential because she had seen so many women marry purely for money and suffer miserable marriages in consequence. They did this because they (rightly) feared poverty: Jane herself had loved a man whom she could not marry because he lacked the means to support her well.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Langlois_Lefroy
What must have made matters even more personally painful for Jane, he did become successful, and mainly through his own intelligence and skills -- meaning that she may have chosen wrongly, moved by her belief that he could not provide for her. But that's exactly the sort of thing that happened in an economy where the benefits of industrial capitalism had not yet spread widely through the population -- though Jane would never have seen it in those particular socioeconomic terms.
What modern readers most especially don't get about Jane Austen is that she was advocating a (mildly) radical position regarding love in marriage. At the time, the assumption was that one should marry for money, with "love" entering into it only in that one should at least avoid marrying someone one was likely to hate. Either love would blossom after marriage, or the couple would produce an heir or two and then settle into a routine of amicable cohabitation, perhaps seasoned by discreet adultery.
It was precisely the hypocrisy of the latter arrangement which Jane found reprehensible, which is why she insisted on marrying for love. Things could be worse: a wife with a truly hateful husband might find herself essentially beaten and raped at regular intervals, with little or no legal recourse (this is precisely the behavior that the modern concept of divorce for "crulety" was invented to address). As long as he didn't literally kill or at least noticably maim her, no outsider was likely to intervene.
Even a genial but irresponsible husband might be bad for the woman. There was no fortune so vast that enough gambling might not run through it, and almost all of the wife's property save for that specifically defined as "dowry" became the husband's upon marriage. A woman might make a "good" marriage in ordinary social and financial terms and have it ruined by a fool of a husband.
A word on reputation and hypocrisy. The importance of reputation is frequently overlooked or belittled by modern writers who don't understand how it worked and why it was so important in the world of two centuries ago.
This is a world in which the economy as a whole is poor by modern standards, both criminal and civil law enforcement is minimal and extremely expensive to those attempting to make use of it, and consequently people are much more thrown onto their own resources, both personal and social, than is common today outside of the Third World. In fact, if you think of Regency England as being a lot like a more cheerful, dynamic and reasonable version of, say, Guatemala, you wouldn't be going so far wrong: economically, what you have is a tiny wealthy elite -- not so rich by modern American standards; a small middle class, and a huge mass of grindingly poor and uneducated people at the bottom.
The last thing you want in a world like that is to do something that causes people to think poorly of yourself or your family. Men do not want to be seen as cowards, because a lot of the protection they and their family enjoy from criminal and other violence comes from the knowledge that they are willing and able to fight at need. Women do not want to be seen as promiscious, because a lot of the social respect they and their family enjoy from other men and women comes from the supposition of virtue in both wives and daughters: this is why their heirs are assumed legitimate and their heiresses virginal and thus suitable for respectable marriages. And neither sex wants to be seen as bankrupt, because this will cut off their credit and possibly lead to incarceration for unpaid debts.
This is more than just melodrama. Gentlemen fought duels -- confrontations with lethal weapons -- over what seem to us extraordinarily-trivial points of honor. Yes, these usually proved non-fatal (deliberately shooting wide was not uncommon unless one actually hated the opponent), but sometimes someone shot straight instead of deliberately missing, smoothbore pistols were not exactly modern match firearms, and any wound to the torso was usually fatal. One of these points of honor was the reputations of their wives, sisters, daughters and even mistresses.
Imprisonment for debt was not only legal but quite common. If anyone with money cared sufficiently for the debtor, his debt might be paid by a friend or relative; if not, hey, it wasn't the creditor who was spending the rest of his life in prison. Did I mention that criminal and civil prosecutions were both largely personal during this era? The creditor was not necessarily doing this to be evil either: if enough of his debtors defaulted, he might be unable to pay his debts too. People lived much closer to the edge of ruin then than is common today. Yes, even than is common right now in the middle of a Depression.
If you were deemed a coward, you might be exposed to all sort of insult by bullies, and bullying was then not uncommon among adults. If you were deemed a slut, likewise, and to rape as well (good luck proving it if you were a woman of bad reputation!) Your children were likewise so exposed.
If you were thought of poorly, for any reason, good luck getting financial credit. There were no credit reporting agencies at the time, and being "creditable" meant that bankers personally thought that you both had the means and the morals to be a good lending risk. And they could and did take into account all sorts of personal sins or even eccentricities with which no modern banker would bother.
Thus hypocrisy. If you were a cowardly man, you swaggerd and boasted and lied about your bravery, so that no one would suspect your cowardice. If you were a light woman, you held your nose high and sniffed and fainted with the best of them, so that no one would suspect your lechery. And man or woman, you dressed and ate and lived as well as you could afford, or better than you could really afford, and delayed and juggled and sometimes resorted to the most absurd ploys to hold off your creditors, so that no one would suspect your bankruptcy.
Hypocrisy was then not so much a character trait as a survival strategy. The only alternative to it was to be really BE brave (like Jane Austen's brothers) or virtuous (like Jane Austen herself) -- and even then, if you didn't act the part, people might suspect that you weren't. Hypocrisy bred conformity, because honest non-conformists tended to have short and miserable lives in a world constantly on the edge of ruin.
This doesn't come naturally to us, because we aren't. No, really: compared to them, we're all rich and secure in our lives.
Current Location: Oakland
Current Mood:  contemplative
Tags: england, history, jane austen, literature, morals, regency, sociology
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02:54 pm
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Oberonian Oort Sloop (c. 2300)
Nationality: Republic of Oberon
Type: Oort Sloop
Launched: 2300
Mass: 3000 tonnes.
Configuration: Close Structure.
Construction: Polyphase osmium-iridium steel reinforced by monomolecular carbosilanes.
Powerplant: Deuterium-trihelium vortex nuclear fusion reactor, also capable of running on deuterium-tritium mix in emergencies, at the cost of neutron-flux damage. Power storage carbon-based nano-bloc chemical batteries.
Propulsion: Advanced plasma rocket drive, cruising speed 0.6 G, full fusion afterburner thrust 2.0 G.
Computers: Main computer VH-AINT (Very High Artificial Intelligence); also at least one low-level AINT per crew member.
Sensors: OmniDAR (Omni-spectral Detection And Ranging) electromagnetic: 200 thousand kilometers range detection versus concealed or stealthed objects.
ECM: Basic cloaking device, adequate to defeat long-range detection.
Controls: Standard Immersive neurolinkage at all main sations; advanced ordinary neurolinkage at all terminals.
Shields: Dynamic electromagnetic screens, optimized against space dust.
Armor: Light multiphase steel forward; very light polyphase steel over control and engineering modules.
Weapons: Varies from ship to ship; generally includes multiple batteries of X-Ray Lasers designed to destroy chunks of space debris, but also effective against small craft and other small ships.
Auxiliary Craft: One 10-person passenger longboat, capable of short interplanetary flights; and one 6-person gig, capable of shuttle operations.
Crew: Generally around 10 incarnates for long voyages, plus 1 main and around 10 subordinate Aints. Can theoretically operate with 1 or 0 incarnates, but this is not optimum for prolonged missions.
Cargo: Bracing for around 1000 tonnes internal, fitting for up to 2000 tons external cargo stowage. At maximum capacity, performance is limited to 0.3 G cruise and up to 1.0 G afterburner. Use of afterburners may be hazardous with full external load.
Comments: Small private merchantmen like this made many of the great pioneering voyages of the early 24th century that first opened the Oort Cloud: more mundanely, they also plied the trade routes to Triton, Pluto, Quaoar and the other worlds of the Kuiper Belt. The ship described here is clearly configured for Oort Cloud operations due to her powerful engines and relatively modest cargo capacity; she would be inefficient on a Kuiper Belt cargo run. The museum piece here is the Sally Fernandez, owned by Jacob Morningstar III and kept in service until 2402: her retirement to a distant parking orbit saved her from destruction during the Second Solar War.
Oort sloops were far from luxurious, but they could carry up to 10 incarnate organics and support their lives for as long as the power held out, and repair most damage they were likely to suffer from long and hard running. Though their technology was hardly cutting-edge, the crews were highly professional, as only skilled hands were normally selected for what were for their day very long voyages. Some of the best spacefarers of the Republic of Oberon -- which is to say of the whole late 23rd and early 24th century -- served long years in the Oort trade. This included many who fought in the Second Solar War and the many wars of its aftermath.
Current Mood: creative
Tags: essays, mandate, spaceships, technology
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09:00 am
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The Second Time as Farce - The Terrorist Wars
So, here we are again.
Global financial crisis, check. Rising obviously hostile foreign force spewing threats of world destruction. Our own elites doing everything they can to feed the global financial crisis under the guise of fighting it, while simultaneously deriding the foreign threat as unreal, fighting pinprick actions against it, and trembling before its might.
Any survivors from the Greatest Generation, or the leading edge of the Silent Generation, or those who study history, will recognize this situation immediately. We're in the 1930's, drifting towards a world war. In the late 1930's this caught the West by surprise: now there's no excuse, but it's still likely to happen anyway because we refuse to remember what happened before, lest it upset us too much right now.
When I was young, in the 1980's and 1990's, I used to wonder how World War II could have happened. The threats of Hitler and Mussolini; the actions of Germany and Italy and Japan, were so clear and obvious, the costs of stopping the dictatorships when they were still weak and small so low compared to the terrible costs of the actual fighting between 1939 and 1945. Looking at the 1930's with hindsight, of course.
Surely, I thought, this could never happen again. I saw President Reagan, acting with full knowledge of the possibilities, lead our military buildup that stopped the Soviet Union from launching World War III, and beyond all expectation led to their collapse without our having to directly fire a shot. Our diplomatic and military position in the 1990's seemed unassailable: any even remotely competent US President could at least prevent disaster.
I had not yet heard of generational dynamics
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strauss-Howe_generational_theory
http://www.generationaldynamics.com/ww2010.htm
or grasped the extent to which one's view can be time-bound even if one has ample access to history, because the generation that personally-remembers a part of the ~ 88-year cycle dies out and later generations find it both in their political and psychological interest not merely to forget the unpleasant lessons of history, but to actively suppress their implications.
So it is, now, that in 2012, a man born in the year of the Crash of 1929 would be 83 years old, and his memories of the Great Depression would be those of a small child, mostly ignorant of politics and affairs of state. Even the youngest veterans of World War II -- those who fought as Hitler Youth in the hopeless defense of Germany in 1945 -- would be approaching their eighties.
In America -- the Power whose will most moves the world -- World War II was an affair of young male adults who fought the war half a world away, or at worst offshore against skulking U-Boats. American children knew nothing worse than the deaths of relatives in far-off wars (sad, but not as bad as seeing the Luftwaffe bomb your block or the Wehrmacht or Red Army march into your city), and the mild pinch of wartime rationing (which was more than offset by the greater availability of jobs when FDR was forced by wartime production needs to abandon the insane self-flagellation of the production restrictions of the New Deal). With a few exceptions, the youngest soldiers who fought were 17 in 1945, meaning that they are now in their mid-eighties. Even with lengthening life expectancies, those 84 and older do not yet constitute either a significant voting bloc or major social group.
Those younger than that have only known the Cold War -- a war in which direct participation was almost entirely optional for the vast majority of Americans, a war whose campaigns seemed like "wars of choice" to the inobservant or hopelessly optimistic, and a war of which a major social movement (backed in part by Moscow) tried to convince us was merely a dangerous illusion woven by our own political masters. The combination of natural generational forgetfulness and deliberate memetic venom has done deadly work upon our ability to grasp diplomatic and military realities.
We have been fighting the First Terrorist War for over ten years now, starting on 9-11-2001, and I have been increasingly horrified by the degree to which public opinion has wandered away from the historical context. A significant portion of the American public -- perhaps a majority -- now believes that losses of about 10 thousand killed in a decade of fighting constitutes "heavy" casualties in war; that failing to provide trials for prisoners taken in war is a falling-away from previous practice: most dangerously, that a war which began with attacks on America at home can somehow be avoided by simply calling our own troops home.
What is more, we have lost all sense of how bad things could get. We imagine that the worst that the enemy could do to us is to make us overly suspicious of each other -- a proliferation of TSA checkpoints and ill-founded arrests for terrorism based on overreactions to jests -- and it is obvious that we have forgotten not merely Bastogne and Iwo Jima, but also the immolation of whole cities in the last two years of the Second World War.
We sit mesmerized, arguing about tight versus loose sanctions on Iran, fearing the reaction at home of the "Arab street" -- and meanwhile our foes are building atomic bombs and long-range rockets, and openly boasting about how they will rain destruction upon us come The Day.
Almost everyone in 1946 would have recognized this pattern; almost no one would have been naive enough to imagine that the worst that could happen would be abuses by overzealous security agents. They remembered the bombings of London and Coventry; many of them had smelt the nauseous burning-pork odor as they rode Flying Fortresses over enemy cities in flames. They would realize that it could happen here, because they had seen it happen to the great cities of Europe and Asia.
How will it all turn out? We don't yet know.
I do see the players putting on their masks and getting ready for their turns on stage. Iran and North Korea are auditioning for the roles of Germany and Japan. They're a lot weaker than the World War II Axis giants, but then the Communist poison we drank during the Cold War has weakened us in the moral sense enough that the Terrorist States hope that they can grab or destroy enough quickly enough to force us to surrender. They're wrong, of course -- I would say laughably wrong, if it weren't for the fact that a lot of people, many completely innocent, will get killed in the process of Cultural Evolution in Action demonstrating this on the battlefield. The same thing happened last time round, after all, but it didn't prevent World War II from killing at least 100 million people.
With the turn of France toward a new round of Socialist delusions, it looks as if France is auditioning for the same role she had in 1939-1945. Europeans seem happy about the turn of French politics, so it's possible that the whole European Union will get to play "France" in this reprisal of the most successful military theater of human history.
The really interersting question is who gets to play "Britain," and who "America."
We tend to think of Britain as a victor of World War II, but for Britain it was a Pyrrhic victory. The British role was to hold the line of Civilization, feeding her own blood and treasure into the meatgrinder until the Axis, frustrated by its inability to win a quick victory, turned to what it imagined to be the "easier" targets of Russia and America. In doing so the Axis met its doom.
Britain paid the price for her heroic action. By 1945 Britain was so exhausted, both materially and morally, that over the next two decades she lost her whole empire. Britain never rose again, becoming at best merely America's main ally.
We do not want to be "Britain."
The best way to avoid being Britain is to take both missile defense and internal security very seriously, so that the foe is unable to deliver nuclear attacks against our own cities. Absent such attacks, there is nothing the Muslim world can do to seriously weaken us, and so we get to be the "America" of this war, coming out of it all the stronger because we will have been the Arsenal of Democracy and one of the few places surviving with economy and society intact. If we suffer such attacks, we will come out of the war weakened; possibly weakened enough to lose our status as the dominant world Power.
Our lack of seriousness regarding national defense right now endangers us greatly. The nuclear threat is most serious at the outbreak of war, because that's when the enemy gets to strike with surprise. After the bombs go off, any enemy facility that looks like it could be a nuclear weapons site or rocket launch facility or major terrorist HQ is going to be plastered, with the Western media too upset about its own dead to shed many tears for foreigners. Right now, though, our delusions of "humane" warfare mean that we are probably going to have to defend against a first strike, so it is vital that our defenses be strong.
Russia and China are of course auditioning for the parts of "Russia" -- the country that starts by sucking up to the foe and then takes but survives a treacherous attack from them to emerge as one of the few Powers still standing tall at war's end. They fear being "China" -- the country that gets hit and hit again and only comes out of it with the extensive aid of the other Allies.
Right now it looks as if Russia, under Putin the Poisoner's deluded leadership, is going to wind up being "China" -- she's ignored the obvious provocations from Central Asian Islam and is actually arming her own foes. With huge land frontiers with the enemy and a military and security establishment still in free-fall, coupled with a ruinously-low birthrate, Russia will probably emerge from the Terrorist Wars as a badly-weakened ally of either America or China. She might even suffer a Second Russian Civil War to determine into which camp she falls.
China, which is still strong and socially-cohesive but is arming North Korea as an "ally" -- is more likely to be the "Russia" of this war, and may even avoid a surprise attack from North Korea if she plays her cards right. China will probably emerge from the Terrorist Wars as America's major rival in the postwar era, perhaps having gobbled-up Korea, Eastern Siberia and Southeast Asia.
The really sad thing about the cycle of wars about to start is that they are even more avoidable than was World War II. The Terrorist States, all put together, are far weaker compared to America than was any one of the Axis Powers compared to any of the major Western Powers around 1936. The only reasons why war is likely is that the enemy is far more fanatically-aggressive in the strategic sense than was true of the Third Reich or Imperial Japan, and that the West has become even more deeply lost in a pacifist dream than was true even of France in the mid-1930's.
The wars to come will be a farce. But, thanks to the development of nuclear weapons, they will be a deadly farce, and one that may wind up claiming the lives of a quarter-billion or so people before the final curtain falls.
We must really want to see this farce. We've stood long enough in line buying the tickets :(
Current Location: Oakland
Current Mood:  sad
Tags: diplomatic, future, generational, history, military, strategic, terrorist war
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11:23 am
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Russia Threatens Unprovoked First Strike on NATO ABM Bases in Europe
Courtesy of in http://kelloggs2066.livejournal.com/607492.html#t3689732 referencing Shaun Waterman, "Russia threatens to strike NATO missile defense sites," The Washington Times http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2012/may/3/russia-threatens-strike-nato-missile-defense-sites/
The reason why my title says "Unprovoked" is that such a strike would, of course, be without provocation. We have the right under bpth international law and common sense to build as many ABM sites as we want, where-ever we want, with whatever range desired, including ones which have the effect of neutralizing the Russian missile threat. If the Russians do not like this, then they have the option of building more missiles until they have saturated our defenses. If they cannot afford to do this -- tough on them. If they respond with an attack, then this attack will have been unprovoked no matter what Russia says; and the proper response to such an attack would be unlimited warfare against Russia, as Putin should realize.
Putin is a fool who is trying to bring back the glory days of the Cold War, despite the fact that Russia is much weaker and the West much stronger now, and Russia is far more endangered by radical Islam than it is by the West. He is a dangerous fool, however, because he commands a powerful nuclear arsenal. He was bound to complain about any missile defense in Western Europe, and this complaint -- and the insanity of the specific threat he has made -- only makes it more urgent that we deploy such a defense, and deploy it quickly. If Russia is willing to threaten attacks on us for such non-provocations and we yield, what will they demand next?
We need to make it clear that any strike on our European bases, even if limited, would mean immediate and total war with Russia, so that he is not impelled to believe that he could launch a limited strike against the ABM bases and expect Russia to continue on as if nothing had happened. That is the job of the President of the United States of America. Also, we should immediately end all arms limitation talks with the Russians: we should not engage in arms limitation talks with a Power which threatens to destroy us if we don't adopt the position they like: failing to do so will give any concession we make to them the color of yielding to threats. We may resume such talks once Putin is no longer in power.
Obama has helped cause this situation, both with his absurd "reset button" statement and his betrayals of the Czech Republic and Poland
http://jordan179.livejournal.com/144024.html#cutid1
(and showing weakness in the defense of those two countries demonstrates Obama's pathetic tone-deaftness to the musics of history!). Putin has reason to believe that America is weakly led, hence he is willing to make a threat which -- if defied -- will force him to choose between annihilation and humiliation. By helping to cause Putin to believe that America is weak enough for this threat to pay off, Obama has put the West in a very dangerous situation and a real risk of strategic nuclear war. Which is the most important reason why we must defeat Obama in the 2012 elections -- four more years of this idiot, and there will be many more situations, and eventually an enemy of the West will strike and strike hard.
Current Location: Oakland
Current Mood:  angry
Tags: america, diplomacy, europe, missile defense, obama, putin, russia, strategic
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12:37 pm
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Review of "Guyal the Curator" (John C. Wright, 2009) up on Fantastic Worlds
Introduction
"Guyal the Curator" is a short novella (about 12 thousand words) which John C. Wright set in Jack Vance's "Dying Earth" storyverse, and available in the Songs of the Dying Earth anthology.
The `verse is probably familiar to a lot of my readers, but basically the "Dying Earth" stories are science fantasy, set in Earth's far future (1) -- many millennia, or even millions to billions of years from our time -- when the Sun is guttering out, whether from natural senesence or from having its energy drained by generation after generation of human engineers. The humanity of Earth, which at one time attained a very high level of technology including interstellar and transdimensional travel, lives among the ruins of of its past scientific and psionic achievements, many of which they no longer understand and treat as magical. A few humans, called "magicians," have made a study of these lost arts and have learned to channel transdimensional energies through their own minds, through memorized spells (2), or by studying and collecting artifacts of the lost technologies, using them without fully grasping the sciences behind their operation (3).
To learn more details of John C. Wright's tale, and also find out to what my cyptic numbered notes refer, read the full post at
http://fantasticworlds-jordan179.blogspot.com/2012/04/review-of-guyal-curator-2009-by-john-c.html
Current Location: Oakland
Current Mood: contemplative
Tags: 2000's science fiction, fantastic worlds, jack vance, john c. wright, review, science fantasy, science fiction
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01:58 am
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Confessions of a Neckbeard
Looking at this post by inverarity at http://inverarity.livejournal.com/136523.html?view=comments I think the real point of their argument is Looking at the other blog, I think the whole point of their argument is to say
"Institutional racism silences Women and People of Color but we Privileged White Males, by acknowledging and apologizing for our Privilege, make ourselves the agents of the Women and People of Color, with power to speak for them so if you disagree with us you're a racist. Also, we get to pick which Women and People of Color are being "authentic" as opposed to traitors. We have to do this because we are the ones with the Privilege. Isn't it good that we wish we could renounce our Privilege?"
Note the part where a commentator argues that Thomas Sowell is a "racist" for daring to argue that culture affects performance. As Sowell himself points out, if culture doesn't affect performance, then of what use is it?
I'm sick of arguing with these idiots.
Current Location: Oakland
Current Mood: numb
Tags: "white male privilege", meta, racism, sexism
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05:34 pm
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Europeans Express their Ignorant Parochialism Over the Supreme Court Review of Obamacare
From "Europe is Baffled by the U.S. Supreme Court," in which John Hudson of the Atlantic Wire makes a deeply-futile attempt to make America feel guilty for having an independent judiciary in http://news.yahoo.com/europe-baffled-u-supreme-court-220944850.html
Europe is scratching its head over possibility that the U.S. Supreme Court will strike down President Obama's signature legislative achievement. As the judiciary and the Obama administration trade legal barbs over the high court's authority, the idea that health care coverage, largely considered a universal right in Europe, could be deemed an affront to liberty is baffling.
Of course, as John Hudson surely knows (unless he really is as ignorant as he pretends to be), what the Court is considering is not the "universal right" to "health care coverage," but rather the provision in Obamacare which forces people to purchase health insurance.
"The Supreme Court can legitimately return Obamacare?" asks a headline on the French news site 9 POK . The article slowly walks through the legal rationale behind the court's right to wipe away Congress's legislation. "Sans précédent, extraordinaires" reads the article.
Actually, it would be quite in line with precedent: the Supreme Court has been recognized to have the authority to declare acts by the other two branches of government unconstitutional for around 209 years. The French are thus revealing their ignorance, or pretended ignorance, of the American Constitutional system. Not that one would expect the French to understand the details of our system, which has kept us free of the frequent revolutions and coups which France has "enjoyed" since 1789, but one would hope that they would bother to study a history before they claim an act "unprecedented" and "extraordinary."
In the German edition of The Financial Times, Sabine Muscat is astonished at Justice Antonin Scalia's argument that if the government can mandate insurance, it can also require people to eat broccoli. "Absurder Vergleich" reads the article's kicker, which in English translates to, "Absurd Comparison." In trying to defeat the bill, Muscat writes, Scalia is making a "strange analogy [to] vegetables."
Thus revealing that Sabine Muscat's own mental capacity is roughly at the level of a vegetable, since she can apparently not grasp that if the State can force a citizen to buy "Thing-1," it can also force a citizen to buy "Thing-2." But I guess that Sabine Muscat hasn't progressed to conceptual thinking -- and perhaps her audience hasn't, either. They are of course German, citizens of a country with a history of forcing its people to do a lot worse than buy broccoli.
"Wasn't the point to make sure the richest and most powerful nation on the planet could protect its own people, as other nations do?" he wrote. "If Americans are promised not just liberty but life and happiness, is there not a constitutional right to affordable healthcare?"
See, now that was actual reasoning, showing that the British at least understand our system a bit better than do the French or Germans. But it's still wrong -- Americans are promised only a lack of State interference in life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness -- obviously no State composed of mortal human beings can guarantee its people eternal life, complete liberty and ultimate happiness. The demand in Obamacare that citizens purchase healthcare, whether they want to or not, violates the right to be secure in the possession of one's own property, which in turn derives from the right to the pursuit of happiness.
What can we say? Welcome to America, Europe.
Indeed. Though not the way John Hudson means it!
Current Location: Oakland
Current Mood:  amused
Tags: america, barack hussein obama, britain, constitutional, europe, france, germany, legal, obamacare, political
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08:00 am
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The Special Lightworker Fails High School Civics
Courtesy of smokeboater in http://smokeboater.livejournal.com/152874.html#comments referring to "Former Obama Student: Obama's Ignorance of Constitution Embarrassing," in the Breitbart News at http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2012/04/04/Former-Obama-Student-Obamas-Ignorance-of-Constitution-Embarrassing?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+BigGovernment+%28Big+Government%29
The really hilarious aspect of this whole story is the way in which Obama's ignorance of the very subject in which he claims to have SPECIALIZED is robbing him of the victories he otherwise might have expected, coming into office in 2009 with a popular majority and both Houses of Congress of his own party.
He (and Pelosi, who has been in Congress for years and has absolutely no excuse) could have crafted a health care bill that -- while still socialistic in concept -- would have actually passed Constitutional muster. They could have organized the Congressional campaign for that bill better, so that it would have passed clearly and cleanly in both Houses.
Now, Obama is trying to INTIMIDATE the SUPREME COURT OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. And he's trying this, not when he has a majority in both Houses and a surety of years in office, but after his party lost the House and when he is not sure of staying in office for even one more year.
A bright high school student who paid attention in Civics classes could point out why this is a very bad strategy. Obama can't really back up his threats, because he can't pack the Supreme Court without unified support from Congress. And he's obviously outraged the Federal judiciary -- indeed, his clumsy bluff may wind up swinging the moderates on the Supreme Court against him, because he's posturing as if he imagines himself to be a Hugo Chavez-like dictator.
No doubt when the history of these days is written, Left historians will try to claim that Obama failed because he was some sort of noble Lightworker who meanies hated because he was a black -- er, light coffee-colored -- man. But the fact is that Obama is failing because he is a fool -- and the worst kind of fool, an arrogant one who imagines that his most egregious errors are brilliant strategy.
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PS - And yes, Obama is dead wrong in his claim that the Supreme Court can't set aside Congressional legislation if they find it unconstitutional. This is called the power of "judicial review," and it is the essence of the function of the Supreme Court. As anyone knows who has ever taken a high school Civics course.
But then what would I know. I'm not Mr. Special Lightworker, now am I?
Current Mood: amused
Tags: american, barack obama, constiutional, legal, politics
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07:26 am
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The new Thundercats series
Last night I saw the first three episodes of the new Thundercats series and was blown away by how good it was. I'd always liked the original series, but was disappointed by the way in which the writers -- in part because of the constraints of Western TV animation in the 1980's -- had thrown away the many good science-fantasy concepts implicit in the world of Third Earth, a world of ancient science, even more ancient sorcery, and numerous obviously genetically-engineered successor species, derived from various animal stocks.
The new series is great. The characters are well-drawn -- both in the sense of art and writing -- with strongly-established relationships and goals, instead of just sort of being there as they were in the old series. There are secondary characters and extras, unlike the old series in which after the pilot they just kind of forgot that both heroes and villains were supposed to be the elites of whole races (this was almost certainly due to limited animation budgets and technologies). And the new series actually hints at resolving some of the mysteries that the old series brought up and then dropped.
This bids to be the best Western animated series since Gargoyles and Avatar: The Last Airbender. I hope it lives up to its promise.
Current Mood: happy
Tags: 2010's science fantasy, review, science fantasy, tv, western animation
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