no taxation without representation

Copenhagen:  The imposition of the largest tax grab on the western economies by unelected, unaccountable and undemocratic forces:

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By Václav Klaus

Many thanks for the invitation and for the courage to organize such an important gathering in the moment when political correctness tells you not to do it.

We are meeting one month before the Climate Change Copenhagen Summit and several weeks before the U.S. Senate hearing regarding the cap-and-trade scheme. For these reasons, today’s meeting can’t be an academic conference, even though the topic still needs academic discussion. There is no consensus — neither in science, nor in economic analysis or politics.

I have already been at a UN Summit in Copenhagen before. It was in 1995 at the so-called Social Summit. At that time, the Summit was attended by then U.S. Vice President Al Gore who — so it seems — will be there again this year. I did also attend, as Prime Minister of the Czech Republic, but I don’t plan to go there now. I don’t see any chance to influence the results or to be listened to.

afghan elections

UPDATED: Aug 21 2009.

Well, that was hardly unexpected;  the Red Star can barely offer up a grudging acknowledgement that things weren’t all that bad in Afghanistan.   Featuring a column entitled  “millions of afghans vote,  but is it enough“, one rather gets the impression that Ms Dimanno was hoping for a disaster.   

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Well, the Afghan elections seem to have gone quite a bit better than predicted hoped by the prophets of doom.   26 Afghans were killed exercising their right for freedom from oppression by the agents of the mad mullahs – that’s it, that’s all. 

Terry Glavin has it summarised nicely here.  Speaking of which, he notes and debunks some weirdness appearing on the socialist worker site.  These loons are right off the rails:

Bush and his coterie of crooks and warmongers told us that only a military invasion could liberate the people, and especially the women, of Afghanistan from the brutal, misogynistic and “medieval” Taliban movement.  

There was no mention, of course, of the substantial support offered to the Taliban regime in the late 1990s when Clinton was president and in the early days of the Bush presidency, nor of the long and ugly history of U.S. intervention in Central and South Asia, which was an important precondition for the rise of Islamism. (WTF? Vietnam, Cambodia = Islamism?)

Ordinarily I wouldn’t give more than about two seconds to contemplate this kind of drivel, but our writer at SW was convinced that even slick willy was in on the whole thing, so I got to thinking.   I understand that Hillary’s long suffering husband wasn’t above execising the Leeden doctrine*, especially when special prosecutors were poking around his habit of poking around -  but  just how much ’support’ did the Clinton administration supposedly offer to the Taliban, as claimed by ‘Nick’ at SW?  According to the SIPRI database, none, zero, nada.  As in not one dollar of evil imperialistic military industrial complex support delivered to the Taliban / Afghanistan between 1993 and 2000.    Records produced by Defense Department also show nothing in the way of miltary contracts or assistance for period of the Clinton administration.

And as for Dubbya – the entire deliveries of major military equipment to Afghanistan between 2001 – 2008 consisted of 188 M113 Armoured Personnel Carriers (I’m thinking ’hangar’ queens) and in the neighbourhood of about 4000 up-armoured HUMMVs. 

Myth – busted.

*“Every ten years or so, the United States needs to pick up some small crappy little country and throw it against the wall, just to show the world we mean business.”

savage compassion – or what’s wrong with progressives

Quite a few self identified leftists are distancing themselves from the recent and disgusting habit of many of their more ‘progressive’ brethren of aligning themselves alongside the islamosfacists.   Most notably Bernard-Henri Levy  (identifying reflexive anti-Americanism as only one of the hatreds at the heart of the new left) and Nick Cohen (describing his disappointment with the apologists of islamic terror);  and now Yacov Ben Moshe has produced a short essay which summarises most eloquently the reasons why, while I often feel that I hold classically liberal values, I cannot under any circumstances find common cause with the progressives amongst us:  

Savage Compassion:

The progressive demands that we believe his claim that he serves a higher truth and a loftier goal.  He tries to force us to accept the idea that his ideas are unassailably good. And, even if they fail to be good, his virtuous pretentions are supposed to indemnify him from guilt or shame.  Even if he make mistakes, behaves badly or cause harm, virtue will save him from blame.  His “caring and good intentions” are supposed to trump the fact that he cares about the wrong things in the wrong way and his intentions are a humbug. Virtue is more than a sham- it is the prim, ruthless face of coercion. It is aimed outward, at others, as a self-justification; an accusation and, above all, a yearning for Utopia.

 

Utopia is an attack on the individual.  There has never been a Utopia that could survive for long without crushing the individual.  That is why “selflessness” is considered a key element of virtue.  Hannah Arendt foresaw the destructiveness of progressive virtue many years ago.  In her work On Revolution she wrote:

“Virtue has indeed been equated with selflessness ever since Robespierre preached a virtue that was borrowed from Rousseau, and it is the equation which has put, as it were, its indelible stamp on the revolutionary man and his innermost conviction that the value of a policy may be gauged by the extent to which it will contradict all particular interests, and that the value of a man may be judged by the extent to which he acts against his own interest and against his own will.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

  

 

RTWT