A Second Hand Conjecture

After the John Brennan experience, Obama is having trouble finding qualified intelligence experts who are ideologically acceptable to liberal bloggers. Pleased to see we have our security priorities in the right place.

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(image: Planetsave)

Apparently PETA’s taste for misanthropy has motivated them to enter a new promotional market: the manufacture of human coffins. As you can see above, the result is a kind of bumpersticker for a corpse.

A note of caution. Were you tempted to purchase one of these for your own burial, spare a second thought of sympathy for the poor eulogist. The chances are probably good that your tendency to shout bitter ideological slogans about animal rights at completely inappropriate times like funerals, would be the aspect of your personality he’d be trying to politely avoid (eg, “she was a woman of…bold convictions.”).

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Synova wrote a little post that gets halfway to where I would come down on this perennial parlor game of  the John Galt general strike. Sy recognized that to be successful, such a revolt would realistically be a miserable experience for a society, resulting in bloodshed and economic ruin. But she does not depart from Rand in assuming that the eventual outcome would be desirable. I’d advise the ancient wisdom that if the means are clearly evil in a political project, one should become immediately skeptical of the alleged justice of the ends.

We should also be skeptical of the social assumption for Galt, that there is a definable and rigid division among men into a minority of Platonic creative guardians, and an empowered majority of proletarian oppressors and their craven political servants — and that these factions could have accurate self-recognition of their social roles. I would contend that anyone who thinks of the majority of the people as disposable abstracted parasites, under a constitutional order that explicitly derives its governing powers from the majority consent of the governed, is never selling you anything that’s going to arrive in a happy place.

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Like so many others, Elizabeth Johnson is out for that Palin look.
Sarah always has such choice footwear…and eyewear retailers are getting explicit in their advertising.
In case you were curious, this is where you end up when your anti-Palin hysteria finally hits rock bottom.
Finally, the sad sight of an ideologically indoctrinated childhood, at an anti-Palin protest in Alaska.

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The British National Party has started a cryptofascist youth camp. The Mirror seems a little overly concerned about the presence of rifles and pocket knives, when it’s the ideological education ought to be most objectionable.

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Extremely interesting post from Seth Weinberger on the opportunity for pulling China in the pro-Georgia camp, after the SCO failed to endorse Russian actions in Abkhazia and South Ossetia.

Seth is as mystified as I am that the Russian foreign ministry could possibly have believed it would persuade China to endorse ethnic separatism and provincial secession. If there is such a thing as an enduring Chinese ideology from ancient times, it is the idea of struggle against separatist disorder and provincial independence. A fear that is only amplified to extraordinary degrees by the prospect of other great powers assisting in the dismemberment of traditional territorial unity.

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I’d heard that Hitch addressed the situation in Zimbabwe in his introductory remarks at the Freedom Fest 2008 debate with Dinesh D’Souza, but I hadn’t seen the video of it until today. It’s worth a watch.

The subject of the debate itself wasn’t Zimbabwe, but the general subject of conflict and religion. If you’ve seen one D’Souza/Hitchens debate on God and man, you’ve seen everything that follows this clip, so I’ll only post the first part.

Hitch takes the opportunity to examine his marginal complicity in fostering the Western mythology of Robert Mugabe as a heroic anticolonial guerrilla leader resisting Rhodesian tyranny. A Western moral investment that Mugabe has been trading on ever since, to the unbelievable misfortune of his people.
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The explosion of enthusiasm for Palin on just about every conservative blog and media outlet has apparently gone unnoticed at the DailyKos, which is predicting that Sarah represents a divisive force, who will soon fracture and ultimately destroy the Republican party. Hmm.

Now, there has always been a tendency among ideological people to retreat to fantasy in moments of peak political crisis, when the ideological narrative they’ve been following suddenly runs aground of some protruding reef of reality, but this is almost too much. I’m not sure it’s even possible to be more comprehensively mistaken in a single political assessment.

In truth, Palin is of course the ultimate force for unification and it’s why she or someone like her was so desperately needed by McCain and the Republicans. How much of a unifier is she? When the neoconservatives and Ronpaulists like the selection, if you are familiar with the party beyond name, you need say no more.

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Here’s a fascinating little article on Walter Veltroni, the mayor of Rome and the new leading light of the Italian Left. Vetroni has worked to create a more moderate and flexible social democratic political culture in Italy. Modeling his new party in name and substance expressly on the US Democratic Party, he’s sought to create a very American kind of Left in a country so often fractured by the rancor of political extremism. His fierce criticism of Iran and his rejection of ossified socialist economic theory represent substantial breaks from the ideological status quo. While many of his positions and views aren’t entirely welcome, perhaps a Blairite “third way” is finally coming to the Italian Republic.

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