Category Archives: Neoconservatism

Al-Sisi Is No Sissy

History, Islam, Media, Middle East, Neoconservatism

Being neoconservatives for the most, American pundits are without a concept of history. This was manifestly obvious during the democracy spreading mission to Iraq, a mission the British had tried a century ago and failed.

In this context, I am unsure whether Jonah Goldberg’s likening of Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi to “Atatürk — the Turkish strongman who modernized and secularized Turkey a century ago,” is warranted.

Addressing the assemblage of imams in the room, al-Sisi called for a “religious revolution” in which Muslim clerics take the lead in rethinking the direction Islam has taken recently. An excerpt (as translated by Raymon Ibrahim’s website):

Goldberg quotes al-Sisi as saying this, at Al-Azhar University:

“I am referring here to the religious clerics. … It’s inconceivable that the thinking that we hold most sacred should cause the entire umma (Islamic world) to be a source of anxiety, danger, killing and destruction for the rest of the world. Impossible!
“That thinking — I am not saying ‘religion’ but ‘thinking’ — that corpus of texts and ideas that we have sacralized over the centuries, to the point that departing from them has become almost impossible, is antagonizing the entire world. It’s antagonizing the entire world! … All this that I am telling you, you cannot feel it if you remain trapped within this mindset. You need to step outside of yourselves to be able to observe it and reflect on it from a more enlightened perspective.
“I say and repeat again that we are in need of a religious revolution. You, imams, are responsible before Allah. The entire world, I say it again, the entire world is waiting for your next move … because this umma is being torn, it is being destroyed, it is being lost — and it is being lost by our own hands.”

The Egyptian leaders that came before President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi—the unseating of the last, Husni Mubarak, was cheered by the West—governed in a secular manner. Their influences ranged from Egyptian nationalism and Pan-Arabism to socialism and anticolonialism, but not Islamism. They all fought ruthlessly against the Muslim Brotherhood and its offshoots. Anwar Sadat was assassinated by this faction for making peace with Israel. But repeated attempts were made by the Islamists on the lives of the other two, Gamal Abdel Nasser and Hosni Mubarak. Perhaps Al-Sisi is simply an Egyptian in the mold of Nasser, Sadat and Mubarak.

One thing is true: Al-Sisi is no sissy

The Fourth Estate (Media) Moving Country Into Third Dimension

Hollywood, Journalism, Media, Neoconservatism, Objectivism, Technology

Being part of major US media—the Fourth Estate—means moving into a Third Dimension of your own making and taking the country with you. What was it that the Bush neoconservative Karl Rove once asserted at the heights of that regime’s manipulation of reality?

“We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors … and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”

As was suggested over these pixelated pages, the “Hollywood hack hysteria” was a media event, not a journalistic investigation, as all news reporting should be. Accordingly, “the moron media shared speculations but not much credible evidence as to the source of the hack.”

It was left to an unconventional citizen-journalist-cum-blogger using conventional journalistic methods to uncover Jonathan Gruber’s utterances. Ditto the Sony hack attack. A blog called North Korea Tech by Martyn Williams did the digging. It

details inconsistencies in the Sony attack and past attacks by North Korea.
“Computers at Sony displayed a message threatening the release of internal documents if undisclosed demands were not met. North Korean hackers have never made such public demands,” Williams writes.
He also notes that little is known about Guardians of Peace, the group that claimed responsibility for the attack. No group has claimed credit in past North Korean hacks.
Williams said that the hackers stole sensitive information about movie stars, staff, and Sony management. In an apparently personal attack, the hackers posted a message on the Twitter accounts of Sony employees. This gives credence to the growing theory that the attack was an inside job.
Tommy Stiansen, the chief technology officer for Norse, a hacker-tracking company, told Bloomberg that he plans to approach the FBI and Mandiant, the private company researching the attack, with information that implicates a disgruntled Sony employee in Japan in the attack.

MORE.

NASA And The Neocon National Greatness Agenda

Business, Free Markets, Neoconservatism, Republicans, Technology, The State

Hungry to sustain the National Greatness agenda, Republicans, who pose as the party of free-market capitalism, were furious when Barack Obama and his posse privatized aspects in the operation of NASA, the National Aeronautic Space Administration. Duly, neoconservative statist Chucky Krauthammer recently linked the so-called erosion of NASA under Obama to the Virgin Galactic SpaceShipTwo crash. That’s what happens when you trust this kind of national greatness enterprise to the private sector is what Krauthammer seemed to be saying.

How many disasters has NASA (which, incidentally, has always been a private-public collaboration) weathered? Many. Which NASA official has been as devastated as Virgin founder Richard Branson, as quick to take responsibility for the failures, or as resolute about rectifying these?

Branson’s career in business has been spectacular. The test pilots, astronauts and scientists who work for him know the risks. They’ll get it done. The incentives to succeed are tremendous. Angelina Jolie and her brood will get to levitate above the earth more so than they already do, soon and safely.

UPDATED: Levin Claims Liberty’s Language (Levin/Mainstream Media & Object Permanence)

English, Neoconservatism, The State

It’s not saying much, but Mark Levin is better than most radio talkers in that he crafts thoughtful commentary daily, rather than resort to taking calls, or to frivolous banter with bimbo producers. It’s, however, truly bizarre for “The Great One,” as Sean Hannity has dubbed Levin, to claim to have originated the term “statism,” coined by, I believe, Ludwig von Mises. Via Ludwig von Mises Institute:

Statism is a political ideology where the central state, rather than the people, are the ultimate source of authority and power.[1] Statism tends towards increased central planning in the economic sphere and a curtailing of civil liberties, which may be deemed necessary by those in power to achieve social or militaristic goals. The term statism is derived from the French word etatism, a term which was preferred by Ludwig von Mises as he believed it expressed the fact that the ideology did not originally emerge in Anglo-Saxon countries but rather was later adopted by them.

It would be comical were it not true, but, in similar vain, Levin could be heard the other day, laying claim to popularizing the use of the term “civil society.”

Plain dumb.

Here is just one use of liberty’s language, in 2003: “… paleolibertarians care first about the effects of the state on civil society.”

Another: “To liberals, the U.N. is the embodiment of civil society.” Here.

Google “civil society” at the ilanamercer.com Articles Archive, and the search will spit up over two pages.

UPDATE (9/26):: Levin/Mainstream Media & Object Permanence.

Most good libertarians use “civil society” and “statism” without second thought. Perhaps Levin has figured that good libertarians are marginalized enough to ignore … Mainstream media generally believe that unless they personally have arrived at certain eternal truths—these truths and their champions do not exist. In psychology we’d say that they lack object permanence, a facility a baby acquires in his first year. What is out of sight doesn’t exist.