Category Archives: Argument

UPDATED (3/23/022): Tucker Carlson’s Producers Rewarding Retread Reformed Neocon Tools Like Sohrab Ahmari

Argument, Foreign Policy, Iran, Iraq, Media, Neoconservatism, Old Right, Paleoconservatism, Paleolibertarianism, Political Philosophy, War

Leave a reply

On the one hand, Tucker Carlson and his oft-worthy guests make the case that America’s catastrophic institutional rot (MY EXTENSIVELY DEVELOPED TERM, no theirs) is a consequence of there being no adverse consequences attached to being dead-wrong all the time.

On the other hand, the show has a tendency to reward reformed neocons such as newcomer Sohrab Ahmari, who peddles retread banalities (or stuff the Old Right—myself included—had espoused decades ago, and from the get-go, in the case of the Globe and Mail commentary below: September 19, 2002).

Rewarding conveniently reformed, politically pleasing mediocrities makes the practitioner part of the institutional rot.

“PUNDITS, HEAL THYSELVES!” (Ilana Mercer, May 29, 2004) spoke to this repulsive specter:

… So why are insightful commentators whose observations have predictive power generally barred from the national discourse, while false neoconservative prophets are called back for encores?

I got to thinking about the neoconservative talking twits. They’ve been wrong all along about the invasion of Iraq. They’ve consistently dished out dollops of ahistoric, unintuitive, and reckless verbiage. Yet they’ve retained their status as philosopher-kings.
Thomas Friedman, Christopher Hitchens (undeniably a writer of considerable flair and originality), George Will and Tucker Carlson (both of whom seem to have conveniently recanted at the eleventh hour), Charles Krauthammer, William Kristol, Mark Steyn, Max Boot, John Podhoretz, Andrew Sullivan – they all grabbed the administration’s bluff and ran with it. Like the good Trotskyites many of them were, once they tasted blood, they writhed like sharks. Compounding their scent-impaired bloodhound act was their utter ignorance of geopolitical realities – they insisted our soldiers would be greeted with blooms and bonbons and that an Iraqi democracy would rise from the torrid sands of Mesopotamia.
Their innumerable errors and flagrant hubris did not prevent the neoconservatives from managing to marginalize their competitors on the Right: the intrepid Pat Buchanan and his American Conservative; the quixotic Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr. of LewRockwell.com, and Antiwar.com. (Plus this column, of course). Unfortunately for America, there hasn’t been a horror in Iraq that these prescients did not foretell well in advance.

….the opportunity costs associated with consumption of toxic punditry are low or non-existent.

If you didn’t have the cerebral wherewithal to be against the war on Iraq in 2002, you don’t have anything original to contribute on foreign policy and anti-war or Just War thinking now.

Younger offenders can be found agitating against Iran, or scribbling inanities for the War Street Journal and other neoconservative outlets such as Commentary, the Weekly Standard, and Foreign Policy, where Sohrab Ahmari would put out irredeemable and unforgivable content such as “The Costs of Containment.”

It’s one thing to have made a mistake as Tucker Carlson had done regarding the Iraq war of aggression. Carlson apologized profusely and humbly about his Iraq error. Moreover, Carlson had never been the consummate philosophical neocon; which Sohrab Ahmari is. According to the Militarist Monitor,

“the neocons’ favorite Iranian,” Sohrab Ahmari has been a vocal advocate of U.S.-imposed regime change in his native Iran, which he left as a teenager. Rosenberg likened Ahmari to Ahmed Chalabi, the formerly exiled Iraqi politician who curried favor with U.S. neoconservatives ahead of the Iraq War and lent an Iraqi name to the list of those supporting the U.S. invasion.[3]

I’ve watched the likes of Sohrab Ahmari work their magic in the malfunctioning media for decades. I also understand fully that Tucker Carlson has a producer, for he himself cannot research each such well-promoted phony who is resurrecting a career on the solid anti-war arguments of the dissident Old, paleolibertarian and paleoconservative Right.

* Image: Truth-teller on Twitter.

And in defense of The Tuck against mediocrity Claire Lehmann, who generated the non sequitur below: Tucker Carlson doesn’t support the Russian invasion! From the fact he argues unpopular truths–it doesn’t follow that Tucker is not a populist. Most immutable truth is unpopular. Popularity does not equal populism. This woman can’t even define the terms of debate.

UPDATED (2/7/022): GoFundMe Threatens To Defraud Canadian TruckersForFreedom And Steal From Them

Argument, Business, Canada, COVID-19, Republicans

1 Reply

F-ck your promise of an inquiry (“we have questions“), Rep. Jim Jordan. When an alleged perpetrator–-GoFundMe-–operating across stateliness, is caught red-handed with private property stolen, you don’t plan on convening a congressional committee—always mere theatrics—to “question” him; you dispatch or coordinate the appropriate authorities to stop a crime in progress, liberate the funds stolen, apprehend the perps and bring them in for questioning.

THEFT IN PROGRESS
The infraction under discussion is, as mentioned, courtesy of GoFundMe, which had originally promised to “withhold millions of dollars raised for Canadian truckers protesting against vaccine mandates, citing police reports of violence. The Freedom Convoy has been rallying since last weekend, and more protests are expected in Toronto and Ottawa.”

Why the use of the terms theft and fraud? Why, it ought to be obvious: The GoFundMe fucks were 1. threatening theft of private property. 2. Perpetrating fraud by initially promising donors to act as a trust-worthy fiduciary and then violating that promise.

Fraud can be a federal crime. And there’s something audaciously both criminal and lawless about an organization operating across state lines, entrusted with donations—that’s GoFundMe’s mission statement—appropriating these funds publicly.

RIP, GOP
Most Republicans see their main occupation as waiting in Fox News’ Green Room. I have to finally concede, though, that unique among them is Governor Ron De Santis. He truly gets it. De Santis is a man who’s seriously attempting to govern in accordance with first principles, and is acutely aware of the systemic rights violations against the kind of Deplorables who support him.

He tweets:

It is a fraud for Go-Fund Me to commandeer $9M in donations sent to support truckers and give it to causes of their own choosing. I will work with AG Ashley Moody to investigate these deceptive practices — these donors should be given a refund.

Go-Fund Me Thieves won’t be fucking with De Santis.

Oh, and Maybe multi-billionaire Elon Musk will do more than tweet? He got rich off an industry wholly subsidized by taxpayers, the Commie Car racket. Would that he’d  show some noblesse obligé to his working-class benefactors.

RELATED:

“NEW From Ottawa: Canada’s Truckers Are Sheer Unmasked Goodness”

“Will Justine Ape Pappy Trudeau, And Use The Military Against Canadian Truckers?”

“Tucker And The Trucker: Condescending About Canada; Wrong About American South”

“Dispatch From Ottawa, Canada: ‘FUCK YOU, TRUDEAU’”

UPDATED (2/7/022):   THEFT’S THE THEME: Ottawa Mayor Jim Watson orders his goons to STEAL the private property of Truckers For Freedom. Shameful armed police officers and firefighters have STOLEN so far 3,200 litres of fuel from peaceful heroes struggling to keep from freezing in arctic temps. READ.

TRUTH: Ukrainian Lobbying Is To Blame For Overheated Atmosphere; Not Biden

America, Argument, Conservatism, Democrats, Economy, Foreign Policy, Globalism, Military, Republicans, Russia

Leave a reply

Breitbart: “After Destroying America’s Economy Biden Now Destroying Foreign Economies.”

That bit of Breitbart reporting attests to the fact that conservatives would rather score political points against the opposition, Joe Biden, in the tit-for-tat manner that typifies our impoverished political discourse, than TELL THE TRUTH.

THE TRUTH: Ukrainians are tireless and wily lobbyists in Washington and way more cunning than their American counterparts. Like lobbyists for wars in the Middle East; they play Americans for the fools they are. Biden is not responsible for the overheated atmosphere in Ukraine, the one Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky now wishes he could dial back; Ukrainian activists and politicians have brought us this far. Ukrainians energetically lobby the EU, too.

ONE-SIDED NONSENSE via Breitbart: “After Destroying America’s Economy Biden Now Destroying Foreign Economies.” This idiotic advocacy from Breitbart is as sub-intelligent as anything that CNN emits. Ukraine agitated for foreign intervention. It almost got it. Now the corrupt enterprise that is Ukraine is regretting the exercise. Biden has actually said, “There is not going to be any American forces moving into Ukraine.”

MORE. AND HERE & “Ukraine’s Relentless Lobbyists Take to Congress: How a few Washington firms are seeking to put the U.S. on collision course with Russia.”

Except the Ukrainian lobbyists beat the Russian lobbyists, since America has settled into propagandized hatred of Russia.

Don’t Be A Pollyanna: The COVID Booster Racket Is Here To Stay, For Now

Argument, Constitution, COVID-19, Healthcare, The State

2 Replies

It doesn’t work: The COVID booster doesn’t stop the boosted from catching and transmitting Covid-19.  The booster may stop serious disease and hospitalization for some months, but then, an already overburdened immune system must be boosted again, if alleged protection against death and hospitalization is to last. And maybe not. There are no guarantees even of this promise. The European Medicines Agency’s (EMA) head of vaccines strategy has sounded something as close to a warning as one can hope: “repeated vaccinations within short intervals will not represent a sustainable long term strategy.”

Logically, these frequent vaccine boosts could damage the immune system. Circuitously, and by hedging their words—the medicrats admit as much:

The World Health Organization cautions that, while “protection against severe disease is more likely to be preserved, more data on vaccine effectiveness, particularly against hospitalization, severe disease, and death are needed.”

In other words, they just don’t know.

On the basis of the above consensus, veteran Covid-19 commentators on the Right have heralded a victory against the futile coercive vaccine and booster mandates that are largely ineffective and unnecessary for the broad, relatively healthy population.

“It’s over, people. Aside from a few unlucky Israelis, no one is going to receive a fourth dose of the original vaccine; everyone with eyes can see it doesn’t work against Omicron.”

So says Alex Berenson:

Now the World Health Organization has waved the white flag on Covid vaccine boosters too.

WHO released a statement about Covid vaccines yesterday. It’s filled with the usual public health jargon and ass-covering, but one line stands out:

a vaccination strategy based on repeated booster doses of the original vaccine composition is unlikely to be appropriate or sustainable.

It’s over, people. …

Instead the WHO is now promising/demanding vaccines based on whatever the dominant Sars-Cov-2 strain is at the moment.

That promise is as empty as all the others the health bureaucrats and vaccine companies have made.

At least five major variants (“variants of concern”) have developed in the last year, and two have become globally dominant. Even the mRNA vaccines cannot be cooked up and delivered fast enough to match whatever strain of virus becomes dominant. Covid is faster than the scientists.

This is all true. Virus variants crop-up faster than vaccines can be cooked-up. Vaccines will afford at most, “weeks of marginally improved protection for potentially severe side effects.”

The Omicron is currently the dominant variant (and in my opinion, weaker variants like it will evolve optimally to perpetuate themselves by skipping from host to host without killing them).

Vaccine makers know that “the virus is evolving new mutations faster than vaccine makers can keep up.” Despite that, “In public statements, Pfizer claimed it could deliver an Omicron-based vaccine by March 2022 if needed.” So why are they proceeding to develop and manufacture an Omicron-specific vaccine planned for when Omicron will have peaked or morphed or both?

Behind them, vaccine manufacturers have the power of the state. They know full-well that even if their newly manufactured potions miss the medical mark—they have behind them the state’s unconstitutional, coercive measures as a guarantee to help flog their (practically compulsory) products. So long as rights-violations to bodily integrity endure and are allowed—Big Pharma has made a safe investment in manufacturing more mismatched or useless drugs.