Dzhokhar Tsarnaev guilty on all counts

The New Neo Posted on by

Guilty on all thirty counts, seventeen of which carry a possible death penalty.

This is no surprise whatsoever. The penalty phase, in which the defense will try to make the case that he was under the influence of his evil older brother (now conveniently dead), will be interesting. Even though it’s Boston and Massachusetts, a very liberal place, I think the heinous nature of his crime might just get him a death penalty, although whether it would actually be carried out is anybody’s guess.

I don’t buy this “under the influence” business. I think Dhzokhar Tsarnaev was acting nder the influence of the fact that Dzhokhar Tsarnaev is a murderous and cold-blooded psychopath (or sociopath, take your pick). I wrote about that here:

Reading Cleckley [on psychopaths], and then reading the Rolling Stone piece [on Dzhokhar], one can’t help but be struck by the similarity between his friends’ descriptions of Dzhokhar and Cleckley’s descriptions of psychopaths. Many of Dzhokhar’s friends were deeply puzzled by the cool, chill, laid-back Jahar’s [Dzhokhar’s nickname] participation in the bombing, and theorized that his more conventionally depressed, angry, and jihadi brother Tamerlan must have “turned” him or controlled or brainwashed him in some way to have accounted for Dzhokhar’s going along with such a violent and cold-blooded act.

Most people would find it hard to believe that Tamerlan, the more ideologically motivated of the pair, could really just say to his brother, “Hey, want to help me bomb people at the marathon?” and that Dzhokhar would say, “Sure, why not?” But if one studies psychopaths, it is much easier to see how that could really be the case. There is no need to postulate some sort of terrible psychological trauma for Dzhokhar, nor any particularly deep influence or mysterious control Tamerlan had over him, if Dzhokhar is a psychopath. It may have just seemed like a good idea to Dzhokhar at the time, and he had no inner core of morality to stop him…]

Our Lost Constitution

The New Neo Posted on by

Here’s a book that sounds tremendously interesting. Disclaimer: I haven’t read it. But I was in the car last night and happened to catch an interview with its author, Sen. Mike Lee of Utah, and was impressed.

From a review at Amazon from Georgetown law professor Randy Barnett:

Senator Mike Lee knows how to tell a story. Combining historical fact and his own legal expertise with imagined dialogues and settings, Lee brings the sometimes dry and archaic debates of the constitutional convention in Philadelphia and other episodes to life, and with them the Constitution itself. This is truly an inspired, fascinating, and important book.

Another sign of the continuing decline of the American university

The New Neo Posted on by

This headline caught my eye: “Univ. of Michigan Cancels ‘American Sniper’ Screening, Made Students ‘Feel Unsafe’.”

At first I thought it was some sort of objection to a film about a sniper and war, although I’m pretty sure other films with bloody themes have been shown on campus, and that “American Sniper” is hardly the most violent. What sort of fragile flowers have American students become, if they couldn’t even view a war film?

But I was wrong; that’s not what the controversy was about. It’s about a Muslim protest:

The signers were mostly students, but also some staff, as well as the Muslim Students’ Association and the president of Students Allied for Freedom and Equality, a Palestinian solidarity group at UMich.

The online memo, titled a “collective letter from Middle Eastern and North African (MENA) and Muslim students on campus,” accused the public university of “tolerating dangerous anti-Muslim and anti-MENA propaganda” by showing the movie, the highest grossing film of 2014…

“Chris Kyle was a racist who took a disturbing stance on murdering Iraqi civilians,” the collective letter stated. “Middle Eastern characters in the film are not lent an ounce of humanity and watching this movie is provocative and unsafe to MENA and Muslim CollectiveLetter students who are too often reminded of how little the media and world values their lives. ”¦ The University of Michigan should not participate in further perpetuating these negative and misleading stereotypes.”

Among other things, that’s not a correct description of the movie and its attitude towards its Iraqi characters and the deaths of civilians. But hey, who cares about correctness when you can have political correctness, by far the most important kind?

I will leave without comment the fact that the film was replaced by the movie “Paddington Bear.”

Here’s more on the decision to cancel, which seems to have been made by something called the Center for Campus Involvement, which apparently was the organizer of the event:

“American Sniper” was set to be shown as part of the center’s “UMix Late Night” program, which brings movies, games, dances and other social events to the student body. The center is responsible for more than 300 co-curricular programs each year, including cultural and educational programs, films, art exhibits, UMix Late Night, athletic/spirit activities and various performance groups and concerts, its website states.

“We in the Center for Campus Involvement and the UMix Late Night program did not intend to exclude any students or communities on campus through showing this film,” the center’s announcement stated.

“”¦ UMix should always be a safe space for students to engage, unwind, and create community with others, and we commit to listening to and learning from our community in the interest of fostering that environment. ”¦ We will take time to deeper understand and screen for content that can negatively stereotype a group.”

I said I wouldn’t comment on the choice to run “Paddington,” but curiosity got the better of me and I watched the trailer. It made me feel very unsafe, not to mention revolted. The first scene here? Disgusting! And if the trailer is any evidence, I do believe it portrays bears as very stupid:

Shot in the back

The New Neo Posted on by

A white North Charleston police officer was arrested on a murder charge after a video surfaced Tuesday of the lawman shooting eight times at a 50-year-old black man as the man ran away.

Walter L. Scott, a Coast Guard veteran and father of four, died Saturday after Patrolman 1st Class Michael T. Slager, 33, shot him in the back.

Five of the eight bullets hit Scott, his family’s attorney said. Four of those struck his back. One hit an ear.

The footage filmed by a bystander, which The Post and Courier obtained Tuesday from a source who asked to remain anonymous, shows the end of the confrontation between the two on Saturday after Scott ran from a traffic stop. It was the first piece of evidence contradicting an account Slager gave earlier this week through his attorney.

The video is both disturbing and unequivocal. Whatever transpired beforehand, it seems clear that the victim was running away, and that there was no reason for the officer to imagine he had a gun or that he was threatening the officer. Did the officer think, as he had alleged earlier, that Scott had taken his taser? Perhaps:

The three-minute clip of Saturday morning’s shooting starts shaky, but it steadies as Slager and Scott appear to be grabbing at each other’s hands.

Slager has said through his attorney that Scott had wrested his Taser from him during a struggle.

The video appears to show Scott slapping at the officer’s hands as several objects fall to the ground. It’s not clear what the objects are.

Scott starts running away. Wires from Slager’s Taser stretch from Scott’s clothing to the officer’s hands.

With Scott more than 10 feet from Slager, the officer draws his pistol and fires seven times in rapid succession. After a brief pause, the officer fires one last time. Scott’s back bows, and he falls face first to the ground near a tree.

If a person grapples with a police officer without any sort of physical attack and perhaps gets a taser from him (perhaps not) and then starts running away, with his back to the officer, I don’t see how there can be any justification for the officer to shoot that person in the back, unless perhaps if the person is some sort of extremely dangerous felon (is a convicted murderer in the act of escaping from prison, to take an example). Nothing of the sort was happening here; Scott’s rap sheet (which Officer Slager may or may not have looked up during the traffic stop, depending on how far into it he was when the incident occurred) was relatively mild:

He had a history of arrests related to contempt of court charges for failing to pay child support. The only accusation of violence against Scott during his lifetime came through an assault and battery charge in 1987.

Charged but not convicted, over 24 years ago.

Slager says he “felt threatened.” Whether or not that’s true is unknowable at this point; it goes to Slager’s state of mind, which will be an issue when he faces murder charges. But the more important question now is whether he had objective reasons for feeling threatened, and it seems clear that the situation provided no justification for those feelings except to the very easily threatened.
And if someone feels that easily threatened, he or she has absolutely no business being a police officer.

A couple more observations:

I continue to believe it would be best if all officers wore body cameras. Even though in general I’m uneasy with the increasing documentation of every aspect of our lives, police camers would help all around to discourage bad behavior on all sides, and to get a better idea of the truth when something goes terribly wrong.

What if there had been no video at all?

Chris Stewart, an attorney for Scott’s relatives, also questioned during the family’s news conference whether Slager would have been charged.

“What happened today doesn’t happen all the time,” Stewart said. “What if there was no video? What if there was no witness? … This wouldn’t have happened.”

We’ll never known, of course. But I think he would have been charged. In this case the ballistic and autopsy evidence would dictate it. The man was shot in the back many times. I am not conversant with all the cases of police killing someone where there have been accusations of wrongdoing on the part of the officer, but as far as I know, if the person is shot in the back, forensics would reveal it rather easily and the officer is likely to be charged. That is exactly the sort of evidence that was lacking in the Brown/Wilson case, and in fact evidence of the opposite helped to exonerate Wilson (as did the eyewitness testimony).

I tried to find cases in which police officers had shot someone in the back while that person was fleeing and yet were exonerated. I haven’t been able to locate one, but I did find a very recent case in which the officer was indicted and is awaiting trial. In the James Ashby case, the suspect wasn’t fleeing; in fact, it appears the cop had pursued him to his home, and the policeman was off-duty.

Here’s a description of what had happened in the Ashby case. As far as I can tell, the victim was Hispanic:

…[W]hen a police officer on the job for five months stopped a 27-year-old resident skateboarding along the main drag, followed him to his home and shot him dead last fall, Rocky Ford’s residents were shocked and angry…

Officer James Ashby was charged with second-degree, non-premeditated murder after an investigation led by law enforcement from surrounding communities and the Colorado Bureau of Investigation…

Ashby told investigators that Jacquez mouthed off to him when he stopped him skateboarding on U.S. Highway 50. Ashby said he thought Jacquez was trying to burglarize what turned out to be his own home because he walked erratically before heading toward the home’s back entrance. Gallegos said break-ins have been on the rise in the town of about 4,000 due to a rise in heroin addiction…

However, the brother of a police officer who was on a ride-along with Ashby that night, Kyle Moore, contradicted Ashby’s account. He said Jacquez did not talk back to Ashby and walked straight from the street to a side entrance to his house, where his mother opened the door for him.

Ashby said Jacquez grabbed a baseball bat and was about to swing it at him when he fired. The coroner found that Jacquez was shot in the back, not a position he would be in if he was winding up for a swing.

An autopsy found that the shot passed through Jacquez’s spine, instantly paralyzing him. Ashby said Jacquez took another step or two before collapsing as his mother watched, leading Dr. Daniel Lingamfelter of the El Paso County coroner’s office to conclude that Jacquez was already moving away from Ashby when he was shot.

The contradictions and forensic evidence led state investigators to conclude that there was enough evidence to arrest Ashby.

No video in that case. But the autopsy had made it clear that Ashby’s story was very fishy, and he was charged with murder as a result.

Note that most of use have never heard of the Ashby case. I think it failed to become a cause célé¨bre, despite its outrageousness and the fairly clear evidence of wrongdoing by the officer, because the victim was not black.

There is no way to tell whether Slager’s actions had anything to do with the race of the victim, Scott. But it is an indisputable fact that Slager is white and Scott was black. Rest assured that many people will draw the conclusion that the killing was racially motivated.

[ADDENDUM: I see that the mayor has called for all police to wear body cameras. Good. I’m astounded that it hadn’t been the policy earlier in a city as big as Charleston.]

My latest PJ article: Too good to fact check

The New Neo Posted on by

Here’s my new article for PJ. It deals with the report by the Columbia Journalism School on the infamous and bogus UVA gang rape story written by Sabrina Erdely and published in Rolling Stone. Here’s an excerpt from my piece:

Erdeley and the editors appear to have jettisoned those time-honored procedures for reasons that were most likely both ideological and self-serving: the story was a perfect fit for their pre-existing biases about campus rape and its perpetrators, and the tale was so sensational that it could practically guarantee them a record number of readers.

In other words, it was far too good to fact check. The author and editors lost sight not only of the need to do so, but of how obvious the story’s deficiencies would be.

[ADDENDUM: Erdely’s and Rolling Stone’s problems shouldn’t end with the UVA story, either. I’ve confined my own posts to that particular article of Erdely’s, because opening up the wider topic of her other stories and my suspicions about them would make for too long a tome.

But anyone who’s done much research on Erdely has probably come up thinking that she may be a serial offender. As a warm-up for background on just how deep Erdely’s deceptions went on the UVA story, please see Richard Bradley, who has been excellent on the topic of Erdely and the UVA article from the very start. Pay special attention to point #10, but just read the whole thing.

Now go to Leon H. Wolf at RedState for a description of another time when Erdely may have used the very same m.o. in writing a story, and for the very same purpose. Wolf’s piece begins with this reflection:

One of the painful things the New Republic was forced to undertake whn [sic] it first came to light that reporter Stephen Glass had fabricated certain details of his stories was to go over all his stories with a fine toothed comb to determine exactly how systemic the problem had been with Glass’s reporting. After all, a reporter who faked details in one or two stories might well have done so in others. To TNR’s credit, they promptly performed an exhaustive, line-by-line review of each of Glass’s stories over the years and laid bare the gruesome results for the world to see, exposing that the infractions for which Glass was eventually caught were only the tip of the iceberg, and that fabulist reporting by Glass was the rule, not the exception.

But that was so Twentieth Century. This is the 21st, dude, so there’s no need:

Rolling Stone has shown absolutely no inclination to engage in a similar soul searching over whether Ms. Erdely might have engaged in similarly shoddy reporting in the past, and whether such shoddy reporting (if it exists) might have slipped through their fact checking and editorial system. Ms. Erdely by all appearances has not been professionally disciplined at all for her blunders and the Rolling Stone brass is acting as though this is an isolated incident in which they were blameless victims of an exceptionally clever con artist.

Wolf goes on to describe the similarities between the UVA article and a previous piece Erdely wrote that appeared in—you guessed it—Rolling Stone, called “The Rape of Petty Officer Blumer.” I had read that article of Erdely’s, as well as several other pieces questioning its veracity in the wake of the UVA article, back in December when the UVA story first broke and unraveled. The two Erdely stories were very similar in terms not only of the tale told, but of Erdely’s agenda and her journalistic techniques. There were hundreds of vulnerabilities in the Blumer case that Erdely never really confronted, and I had expected that a larger investigation would have been launched by now into Erdely’s entire journalistic output, because the Blumer tale is not the only other fishy part of it (see this, for example).

That hasn’t happened. Columbia has kept to its assignment, which was limited to the UVA story and its wretched excesses.

I had also expected Erdely to be fired by now, and to never be able to work as a journalist again. Once more, I was wrong. Someone has to expose this further, because it is getting more clear every day that both Erdely and Rolling Stone have almost certainly been doing this for some time, and that they probably won’t stop now. The Columbia report gives the impression it was an isolated incident, and that is unlikely to have been the case.

And I don’t think the practice is limited to Erdely and Rolling Stone. They just got caught because their offenses were so glaringly obvious, and the story so sensational that it got an enormous amount of attention. If they’d just been a bit more subtle they would have gotten away with it.]

You learn something new every day

The New Neo Posted on by

Sometimes several things, actually.

For instance, I’ve learned quite a bit already today from this article.

Let’s see if I can summarize:

(1) The Hill has taken to calling unaccompanied children who have arrived in this country illegally “unaccompanied immigrant children.”

(2) There are groups who have government contracts to take care of such children.

(3) Quite a few of these children have been raped.

(4) The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops is one of the groups that has such a government contract.

(5) The administration has proposed that such contractors be required by the government “to provide access to contraception and abortion for unaccompanied immigrant children who have been raped.”

(6) The Catholic bishops are objecting to fulfilling the contraception/abortion requirement.

(7) The ACLU is suing, not the bishops, but the Obama administration, in order to gain access to “documents it says will show religious organizations are restricting access to abortions for unaccompanied immigrant children.”

(8) The bishops believe their right to refuse comes under the recently-in-the-limelight federal Religious Freedom Restoration Act.

There’s something absolutely revolting about every single aspect of this case. It’s horrible that the administration encouraged these kids to come and then refused to deport them. It’s dreadful that taxpayers are being made to pay for their indefinite upkeep, against taxpayer will. It’s horrific that the kids (the article says teenagers in this case) are being raped and might be pregnant. It’s awful that they might have to take abortificants. It’s bad that taxpayers would have to pay for them (I wonder under what law that falls, or is it just something Obama or one of his agencies dreamed up one fine day?). It’s lousy that we are not being told how many children/teenagers are involved. It would be a travesty if the ACLU appears is planning to attempt to force or otherwise coerce an explicitly Catholic group into cooperating with this. On the other hand, these kids having their rapists’ babies (anchor babies, at that) also seems a nightmare. And yet deportation (which I generally advocate, even though the administration has no intention at all of doing it) seems especially inhumane under these circumstances.

Again with the fouettes

The New Neo Posted on by

“Caedmon” asks me to comment on this clip of Natalia Osipova’s fouettes. Let’s take a look and compare them to the ones shown in my previous post about those whiplike turns:

I have to say I lke Osipova’s fouettes the least of all the dancers in the clip I’ve posted. She obviously can do fouettes, of course; that almost goes without saying. Not all of hers are regular fouettes—she tosses off a lot of varations on the theme, but I’ll just talk about the ones that are the classic stuff.

Osipova performs them at a fast tempo. What makes her look somewhat hectic and sloppy at times is that she’s what I call a leg flinger, which is always a temptation with fouettes—just shoot that leg out there in a big hurry to start the turn so you don’t fall behind the music.

In her haste, Osipova doesn’t even usually straighten that leg all the way, nor does she sweep it out completely to the side before beginning her turn. Sometimes she only gets it about halfway there. Compare that to what the others do, and you’ll see that although they sometimes rush, with them there’s still more of a sense of the leg unfolding. With them you can actually see the sweep from front to the side, and you can almost feel in your own body the impetus of the leg’s trajectory beginning to lead the dancer into the turn rather than the dancer flinging the leg out in such a way that its momentum doesn’t seem to naturally start the turn.

It’s as though Osipova wants to get that leg-to-the-side part over and done with, as though it’s just a meaningless prelude to the main attraction—the turn—rather than an integral and necessary part of it. But it should all be one seamless flow.

Let me just add that I know about this problem because I was a habitual leg-flinger myself.

Obama’s negotiating style

The New Neo Posted on by

Is it possible that Obama thinks that agreements have some worth in and of themselves, irrespective of what’s in them? I think so.

Obama has spent nearly his entire life as a Potemkin (cargo cult) achiever and leader. Even when he was a young man, people unaccountably told themselves on meeting him: “This man could be president—and this man should be president.” On first meeting him, many Americans seemed to have felt much the same thing, although he had no record of political achievement except winning elections and making speeches in a sonorous baritone.

Obama is accustomed to casting a spell—a spell to which I’m oblivious, but which I’ve seen demonstrated convincingly. He is used to being lauded for producing absolutely nothing of value.

So why should he not think he can get away with presenting America and the world with some sort of non-binding, not-yet-agreed-on “deal” with Iran as a great accomplishment and have people believe him? It may even be that by June nothing more definite will have been decided but that he’ll declare an even more wonderful interim agreement and then kick the can further down the road.

What’s more, by the time Iran actually gets a nuclear weapon and demonstrates that this is the case, a Republican administration could be in power and can be blamed for it. Obama has never had to face any consequences from his lies and missteps and outright betrayals so far, except for the loss of Congress in 2014, a setback he seems to have weathered quite creatively by going around them.

So what’s the downside for him in the Iran deal? I really don’t see one. The only downside would be if Congress decided to impeach and convict him as a result, and let’s have a show of hands on how many people believe that will happen.

[ADDENDUM: Richard Fernandez has some thoughts which are somewhat related:

While the president may vaunt America’s strength it is equally apparent that by almost any measure, that strength has been declining ever since he set foot in office.

He is like an aristocrat who inherited a great fortune and done nothing but lose money at cards since he assumed the title, spending his hours presenting the high presence when not busy at golf. Now, even as he boasts of his still considerable wealth, Obama appears to remain carelessly indifferent to the foes who have driven him out of Libya, Syria, Iraq and Yemen. He is going to play against the same people who beat him in the past, yet without taking any special precautions, is confident of victory this time.

Why? Perhaps Friedman should have asked the president, “besides America strength, which you did not create, from where else do you derive your confidence? Is there some success you’re not telling us about?” We will be assured that these successes exist in abundance in some secret archive, though under seal together with his school records. We’ll have to take it on faith, What Jaffe called “the limits of the administration’s approach” are after all the limits of Obama’s mind. And the limits of that mind are a closely guarded secret…

If Yemen, Somalia, Libya and Syria are any guide, Obama’s “model” nuclear agreement may be a similar bust. Even the fact that he never ceases to talk about the glittering possibilities of that “once in a lifetime deal” with Iran is vaguely disturbing, reminiscent of those people who are almost stock characters who prattle on about some “sure thing” ”” a gold mine, undervalued stock, perpetual motion machine or some Nigerian bank transfer ”” they learned about down at the corner, eagerly pawning their property and borrowing all the money they can to make the Big Bet. These are people who in reality about to be taken to the cleaners, cheated, or rolled in the ditch when they leave the building. It is, as I have written elsewhere, almost too painful to watch.

At the moment, Fernandez seems to be leaning heavily on the “fool” argument.]

About those fouettes

The New Neo Posted on by

I’ve written about the ballet step known as the fouette before, and so I’ll quote myself:

The turn…is known as the fouette—a word that means “whip.”…The trajectory of the leg as it quickly unfolds leads the body into the turn with a whipping force that isn’t easy to control, to say the least.

But you know what? I don’t care much for any of it. And this isn’t only because I was never all that good at fouettes, especially when on pointe.

Like most steps in ballet, the technique required of dancers performing the fouette has become more extreme. It used to be enough just to do them; the step itself elicited oohs and ahs. Now, multiple turns embedded within the fouettes (as you see in this video at the beginning and end) have become required in order to satisfy the jaded palates of the dance consumers, used to gymnastics rather than finesse, athleticism rather than art, tricks rather than sublimity.

I have searched You Tube for an example of fouettes that would partake of artistry. I couldn’t find any, even in older clips featuring dancers I admire greatly. It seems it doesn’t matter who does them, or how well or how poorly; they’re a trick that doesn’t interest me at all, although I admire the strength and balance required because I know how exceptionally difficult it is.

Here is an illustration of the genre, by a German dancer named Adeline Pastor. A phenomenal turner, she begins the sequence with something I guess would be called an octuple turn (as opposed to a double or triple or quadruple). It’s something I’ve never seen before from a woman en pointe, although occasionally it’s done by a man in soft ballet slippers, which although not easy is certainly a lot easier (fouettes are never done by men). Pastor then proceeds to do something else that’s exceptionally difficult; she changes her focus with succeeding fouettes, eventually coming back to face the audience:

It’s an astounding trick. But again, it’s in the nature of a circus or gymnast’s feat. Interesting and extraordinarily difficult, but not what I think is unique to ballet.

Here’s a set of fouettes I found that’s also good, but quite different. What’s so hard about this one is that the dancer manages a double revolution every third fouette, even as the series goes on and as one would expect she begins to tire. She doesn’t falter, though. What’s more, she adds something subtle that the casual watcher wouldn’t know is fiendishly difficult: she puts her arms up as she does the doubles.

Why is that so difficult? A dancer usually pulls his/her arms closer to the body order to reduce what I think would be called air resistance while turning, as well as to make the turner smaller and more compact and more like a ball and less likely to be thrown off-center. Our teachers used to sometimes make us turn with arms up, and believe me it doesn’t take but one experience to illustrate the principle:

The dancer in the following clip throws in doubles every other fouette, but notice two things that make her achievement, impressive thought it is, less impressive than the one above it: her arms are on her hips rather than in the air, and as she tires she eliminates the doubles and the fancy arms:

Hey, I couldn’t do anything of the sort even when I was in my prime. And my prime (at least where fouettes are concerned), unlike that of Miss Jean Brodie, seems to have passed.

Obama and disarmament: one of his longest-held dreams

The New Neo Posted on by

Remember this? It’s one of the few papers that Obama wrote while in college or law school that is available; the rest seem to have disappeared. It is a 1983 article in the Columbia campus paper, and it constitutes pretty much Obama’s only paper trail—except for some poetry he wrote while at Occidental—until Dreams From My Father.

The article is mostly straight reportage and quotes about the Nuclear Freeze Movement and organizations called “Arms Race Alternatives” (ARA) and “Students Against Militarism (SAM). But sometimes Obama reveals his own attitude in a few comments such as, “Generally, the narrow focus of the Freeze movement as well as academic discussions of first versus second strike capabilities, suit the military-industrial interests, as they continue adding to their billion-dollar erector sets.” Note the superior tone, the boilerplate Sixties leftist-activist lingo, and the contempt for the military, already present in Obama at a relatively young age. To him, the military are boys playing with expensive toys.

He quotes one activist as saying “everyone’s asking for peace, but no one’s asking for justice,” which (in Obama’s words), causes “one…to wonder whether disarmament or arms control issues, severed from economic and political issues, might be another instance of focusing on the symptoms of a problem rather than the disease itself.” To Obama, the real problems appear to be economic and political issues involving a lack of justice, and the arms race is a mere symptom of that deeper concern (shades of this far more recent policy statement).

Later in the article, Obama writes in his own voice again:

Perhaps the essential goodness of humanity is an arguable proposition, but by observing the SAM meeting last Thursday night, with its solid turnout and enthusiasm, one might be persuaded that the manifestations of our better instincts can at least match the bad ones…

The most pervasive malady of the collegiate system specifically, and the American system generally, is that elaborate patterns of knowledge and theory have been disembodied from individual choices and government policy. What [the students in these groups] try to do is infuse what they have learned about the current situation, bring the words of that formidable roster on the face of Butler Library, manes like Thoreau, Jefferson, and Whitman, to bear on the twisted logic of which we are today a part.

This is a young man who certainly doesn’t seem to like America. He also doesn’t appear able to express himself all that well, but there is no question he thinks he knows better, and has purer and more noble instincts, than those stupidheads in charge. That’s not an unusual point of view for a young man, I suppose. But Obama seems to have managed to carry that sort of attitude right up to the present (excepting the non-stupidhead-in-chief, of course).

Even the NY Times wrote of Obama’s article:

What clearly excited him was the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, which would end the testing and development of new weapons, and thus, in the minds of arms controllers, end the nuclear arms race. The Reagan administration vehemently opposed the treaty. Paraphrasing Mr. Bigelow’s views, Mr. Obama said the United States should initiate the ban “as a powerful first step towards a nuclear free world.” That phrase would reemerge decades later…

Barack Obama’s journalistic voice was edgy with disdain for what he called ‘the relentless, often silent spread of militarism in the country’ amid ‘the growing threat of war.’ The two groups, he wrote, “visualizing the possibilities of destruction and grasping the tendencies of distorted national priorities, are throwing their weight into shifting America off the dead-end track.”

And Obama biographer David Remnick called Obama’s article “muddled.”

The USSR fell not that many years after Obama wrote that 1983 piece, and many people believe this happened in part because of the arms race. See this on Reagan and Star Wars:

In the arms control negotiations with the Soviets, SDI proved to be a very powerful bargaining chip, primarily because the President did not believe it was up for discussion. Secondly, as many of us who met with USSR officials came to realize, the Soviets were the most fervent believers that the U.S. could actually develop and field the complex systems needed for SDI to work! Moscow had apparently concluded that this system would tip the strategic balance toward the United States.

This came at a time that the USSR itself was falling further behind economically””much more so than many in the U.S. Intelligence Community believed.

We did not fully appreciate then that Gorbachev, unlike his predecessors, was aware of the depths that the Soviet economy had fallen. It also appears that Gorbachev was deeply concerned about the President’s SDI program, feeling that what was at stake was more than just a space defense program. He believed that if the United States combined its technological superiority with its economic potential, America would make an enormous “skachok” (leap) ahead. In doing so, we would, to use the Marxian phrase, “consign the Soviet Union to the ash- heap of history”!

I am virtually certain that Obama hated Star Wars. Almost every liberal did at the time (although I remember thinking it didn’t sound so stupid for us to start working on something like that; this probably was an early sign of what was later to become my political conversion). Star Wars didn’t single-handedly cause the USSR to topple, of course, but it seems to have helped.

You might also remember this:

…President Obama erred in 2013 with his decision to scrap — in response to Russian objections — a planned system in Europe to defend against missile threats from the Middle East. Obama won no good will from the Russians, even as he forfeited an important opportunity to strengthen U.S. allies against future threats. Missile defense allows strong nations to defend themselves against weaker enemies without resorting to terrorist tactics or fighting bloody wars. This is a win-win, except for terrorists like Hamas and national rulers bent on aggression against neighbors.

But the dream dies hard, doesn’t it?

[NOTE: Let me add a personal note about the nuclear disarmament movement of yesteryear. Some of its activists were idealists. But a certain percentage (I don’t know how large) were pro-Soviet Communists. I say that from personal experience; I’m talking about a relative of mine who combined his pro-Soviet, pro-Communist proclivities with prominence in the nuclear disarmament cause.]

Waging the PsyWar

The New Neo Posted on by

Here’s an interesting call to PsyWar arms:

The Islamists have enjoyed a long run in which they have directed the most hateful imaginable propaganda and violence against Jews, Christians, Hindus, and the wrong kinds of Muslims…It is this article’s purpose to unleash a whirlwind that will make Islamists the world’s pariahs, and probably to the extent that the world’s civilized nations will deport their adherents and fellow travelers as undesirables.

To author William A. Levinson I say “good luck with that deportation stuff.” Right after 9/11 I had thought the West would go that route, but I couldn’t have been more wrong.

Levinson advocates less propaganda defense and more propaganda offense, but although it’s a necessary part of activism to become more effective in the counter-propaganda game, I’m not at all sure that PC thought hasn’t largely eliminated our ability to do so. If it isn’t already obvious that the Islamist terrorists, and particularly ISIS, are savage barbarians (to use some very un-PC words), I don’t know what more could be done to make it clear.

But we do need to become more able to tell the truth about the enemy—with, for example, words like “enemy”—and not to shy away from it because of some mistaken and slavish devotion to an ideal of tolerance. There is evil, and they are on its side.

[Hat tip: commenter “g6loq.”]