Richard D. Wolff and the ice cream cones

The New Neo Posted on by

[NOTE: This is a slightly-edited version of a previous post.]

Here’s an interview that includes some remarks by a leftist academic named Richard D. Wolff. Wolff’s credentials are impressive, if you’re impressed by this sort of thing:

Richard D. Wolff is Professor of Economics Emeritus, University of Massachusetts, Amherst where he taught economics from 1973 to 2008. He is currently a Visiting Professor in the Graduate Program in International Affairs of the New School University, New York City.

Earlier he taught economics at Yale University (1967-1969) and at the City College of the City University of New York (1969-1973). In 1994, he was a Visiting Professor of Economics at the University of Paris (France), I (Sorbonne)…

BA in History from Harvard College (1963);
MA in Economics from Stanford University (1964);
MA in History from Yale University (1967); and a
PhD in Economics from Yale University (1969)
Published work

Now that we’ve established that, here is a paragraph from that Wolff interview that especially caught my eye:

We don’t need and we don’t want — because it’s socially destructive and socially divisive — to have one group of people who work and another group of people who don’t. Give everyone reasonable work, and give everyone reasonable pay.

Work and money—doled out by a bunch of overseers who “give” people these things—perhaps from each according to his abilities and to each according to his needs.

More:

Our societies are being torn apart by struggles over redistribution. Do we take [there’s that “we” again], and from whom, to give to those less fortunate — as if it was a matter of fortune, rather than an economic system that doesn’t work.

To translate—taxation and the social welfare benefits that come from the proceeds are a form of “redistribution” that is just a bandaid on a suppurating sore. The wound is the entire economic system that “doesn’t work.” I wonder who decides what’s working? Obviously it would be Richard Wolff, for starters.

But here’s my very favorite part:

Redistribution tears societies apart, it’s— here’s the parallel: you’re going into the park on a Sunday afternoon, you’re a married couple, you have two children. One is six and one is seven, and you stop because there’s [a] man selling ice cream cones. And you give one of your children an ice cream cone, it’s got four scoops. And the other one, an ice cream cone with one scoop. And you continue walking. Those children are going to murder each other. They’re gonna struggle. What are you doing? And don’t then come up — ‘okay, you’ve had — you’ve eaten this part of your scoop, so give the other part of your scoop to your sister, or your brother,’ — stop. The resentment of the one who hose [???] his ice cream or her ice cream — you see where I’m going? Every parent that isn’t a ghoul understands, give each child the same damn ice cream cone—two scoops each. You don’t need redistribution if you don’t distribute it unequally in the first place. Capitalism is congenitally incapable of distributing equally

I find that passage quite fascinating. First of all, because it uses an example we all can understand: being a parent and getting your kids ice cream cones. And secondly, because it is such a piss poor analogy it shouldn’t be acceptable even from a freshman in an econ course. And yet this is a professor whose credentials seem impeccable. And I bet a lot of people nod in agreement when they read it, thinking yes, I understand that; that’s just the way it works.

Perhaps Wolff is aware of the absurdity of his analogy and hopes his readers and listeners aren’t, and assumes that they will nevertheless find it a convincing argument. We are generally trained in school to take down what teacher says without thinking about it overly, just accepting it and learning it for the test. Perhaps he’s used to being listened to with great respect and acceptance.

Or perhaps he himself thinks he’s made a very good analogy between parents, two kids, and two ice cream cones; and a country’s economy. I don’t see into his mind, so I don’t know.

But if you think for just a moment about what Wolff said there, you can’t help but notice the following problems, which are not difficult to spot:

(1) Manipulating an entire society by any means, including that of a guaranteed Universal Basic Income, is completely and utterly different in scale, scope, intent, and almost every single other way possible from buying your young kids ice cream cones.

(2) Among other things, the parent is an adult and children are children, and the parent or parents control the entire economy of the children (in this example, two children). The parent is in charge and—unless a child is remarkably entrepreneurial—all the child’s income and possessions ordinarily come completely and directly from the parent[s] and a fairly small number of relatives and friends of the parents.

(3) An ice cream cone is an extra, a gift, a treat. Sometimes it’s even a reward (I’ll return to that thought in a minute).

(4) No one would be able to take a society and ensure equality without an amount of control that is unconscionable. It’s been tried, too, and that’s the way it ends up: a horror show. It cannot be achieved even with the best of intentions (which are not often present, and certainly are never present in more than a percentage of the people in charge). Some people will always manage to get more than others, a la Orwell’s great parable Animal Farm. The history of every supposedly or actually Utopian-inspired leftist society, from the small ones such as communes and kibbutzim, to the large ones such as the the USSR, is one of breakdown and/or inequality at best and terrible brutality at worst. Human nature will out, and no amount of social engineering from the likes of the Wolffs of this world will change that—as history has amply and continually demonstrated.

Ah, but this time it will be different.

(5) An ice cream cone is a treat bestowed on a child by a parent, and completely at the parent’s discretion. Some parents might choose to give a child a cone as a reward, however, for something—chores done, grades achieved, something of the sort. If there’s a sibling who didn’t do his or her chores—didn’t fulfill his or her end of the bargain—should that child also get the cone? The same size cone? Not just a smaller or lesser cone than the other one, but exactly and precisely the same cone?

What sort of resentment would ensue then, I wonder? I bet it would be formidable, and rightly so. And next time the parent asks the children to do a chore or improve their grades with a cone for reward, what will be the result?

Now it’s probably best not to use bribes such as cones for efforts like that. But we’re talking cones here. And a salary is not a bribe or a gift from a benevolent parent, it is a payment for services rendered. If it doesn’t reflect the quality of the work done—well, then you get the old Soviet system, where “so long as the bosses pretend to pay us, we will pretend to work.”

And we all know how productive the Soviet Union became. Why, the Five Year Plans said so!

Perhaps my favorite part of that quote from Wolff is this part:

You don’t need redistribution if you don’t distribute it unequally in the first place. Capitalism is congenitally incapable of distributing equally.

And socialism is capable of doing it? It would be funny if it weren’t so tragically horrific—that a supposedly intelligent person can still believe this, and is treated as some sort of sage.

One last thing—did anyone notice the number of scoops in Wolff’s little example? I think it’s telling. The parent who is fostering inequality and resentment gives one kid four scoops and one kid gets one. The total is five scoops. But when he makes it equal, they each get two scoops. The total is four. What happened to the other scoop? Couldn’t they each have gotten two and a half? Or maybe even three? It reminds me of Margaret Thatcher’s famous moment:

Zelensky’s message: Surrender, Conscripts

The New Neo Posted on by

Given the unhappiness of many of the Russian conscripts, this appears to be a clever approach:

This is also an interesting observation, if true:

…[T]he Putin regime could stop the mass exodus if it wanted to do so. This flight to avoid mobilization is allowed, I believe, because the men running away are those with education, means, and social standing. Just as our draft riots in the mid-1960s started at elite universities and spread outward, the men absconding to Georgia and Armenia have the potential to form an effective resistance to conscription and endanger the regime. Unfortunately for Russia, most of the men who flee mobilization will be lost forever. The men conscripted are generally poor, poorly educated, powerless, and ethnic minorities. No matter how mad they get, it will never be a threat to Putin’s regime.

Also there’s this:

Russians are calling Ukraine to surrender before even being drafted into the military as moral within Putin’s ranks collapses, Kyiv has claimed.

Andrii Yusov, spokesman for the Ministry of Defence, said men who are fearful of the draft have been getting in touch with a surrender hotline to check how to give up safely before they are called to the frontlines.

Meanwhile videos have emerged showing a newly-recruited tank commander who has been told he will deploy to the Kherson frontline in just two days without so much as firing a shot on a training range.

Ukraine is certainly not above giving out “disinformation” – otherwise known as propaganda – on this. But it makes a certain amount of sense. The morale of a fighting force – as well as its training and experience – is a very important element of warfare. Russian forces appear to have a significant morale problem.

Dershowitz, Barr, Durham, and lawfare against political opponents

The New Neo Posted on by

In line with Allen Dershowitz’s history as a defender of civil liberties, he’s going to represent the “My Pillow” guy Mike Lindell in his lawsuit:

I disagree with My Pillow founder Mike Lindell about a lot of things, including his belief that the 2020 election was stolen from Donald Trump. I’m a liberal Democrat; he is a conservative Republican. Yet I am enthusiastically representing him in his lawsuit against the Justice Department and Federal Bureau of Investigation over the recent search and seizure of his telephone.

…it’s essential to keep politics out of the justice system—for principled Democrats and Republicans alike to advocate strict compliance with constitutional norms, regardless of whose ox is being gored…

In my view as a lifelong civil libertarian, the Justice Department went too far in seeking a search warrant against Mr. Trump’s property at Mar-a-Largo…

I also believe the department exceeded its constitutional authority by seeking and executing a search warrant against Mr. Lindell’s telephone, which gives investigators access to his computer files and other private and business data…

If the Trump administration had done to a prominent Democratic supporter precisely what the Biden administration has done to Mr. Lindell, many Democrats would be outraged and support judicial relief. But today few Democratic lawyers will represent Trump Republicans whose constitutional rights have been violated. This is a tragedy that endangers the neutrality of our Constitution and the legal profession.

Not all that many years ago such sentiments were widely and even proudly shared by many Democrats or even most Democrats. Dershowitz is 84 years old and belongs to that era, but he’s one of very few remaining in the party with such a point of view. He’s been railing at the ACLU for years for similar reasons, saying that they’ve betrayed their original principles.

The puzzlement is why Dershowitz is still a Democrat, when he obviously knows how dangerous their excesses are.

I think it’s partly that “birthmark” phenomenon I wrote about in a post way back in 2005, discussing Zell Miller:

Many people wondered aloud why Zell Miller had not switched parties in light of his strong alignment with the Republicans and his staunch opposition to the Democrats. A “conservative Democrat” seemed to be a sort of oxymoron.

Miller’s answer? That he was born into the Democratic Party and considers his party label to be “like a birthmark”–innate, and difficult to eradicate.

But I think that Dershowitz is also clinging to the idealistic liberalism he used to know. He can’t accept that he is nearly alone now. Even more importantly, I believe that he thinks he can use the power of his own example to guide the party back.

He cannot succeed; the Democratic Party is too far gone and the rewards for acting otherwise have been too great. But Dershowitz is probably correct that if he changed affiliations and became a Republican or even an Independent he would lose whatever infinitesimal amount of influence over moderate Democrats that he might still retain, and would be demonized further by the rest as an apostate who left the circle of the anointed.

The theme of this post ties into a viewpoint expressed in an essay by Margot Cleveland at The Federalist in which she discusses lawfare against opponents as practiced by Democrats these days, including the DOJ and the FBI, and contrasts it to the way the GOP proceeds:

While some critics on the right frame Barr and Durham’s failure to prosecute more broadly as proof that their goal has always been to protect the establishment and cover up wrongdoing, an honest assessment of the former attorney general’s words and conduct suggests a different answer — one that was reasonable and prudent at the time but can no longer be justified.

“I love the Department of Justice, I love the FBI, I think it’s important that we not, in this period of intense partisan feeling, destroy our institutions,” Barr said in explaining why he did not regret serving as Trump’s AG. “From my perspective,” Barr added, “the idea of resisting a democratically elected president and basically throwing everything at him and, you know, really changing the norms on the grounds that we have to stop this president, that is where the shredding of our norms and our institutions is occurring.” So, seeing that our “country was headed toward a constitutional crisis,” and that the Russiagate narrative was “being used to cripple his administration and drive him from office,” Barr accepted the position, believing the president “needed an attorney general who could stabilize the situation.”

Barr rightly noted in explaining his decision to probe the Crossfire Hurricane and Mueller investigations that foreign interference in our elections is bad, but stressed that “it’s just as dangerous to the continuation of self-government and our republican system … that we not allow government power, law enforcement, or intelligence power to … intrude into politics, and affect elections.”

It’s very much in line with Dershowitz and reflects a traditional view of our legal system. It’s the way most people in both Republican and Democratic parties used to think, although no more. It’s also in line with one of my favorite quotes from “A Man From All Seasons,” in which More speaks out against those who would “cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil.” The idea is that all of us are protected by the process of law and must uphold its even-handedness, lest we be the victims the next time.

The left isn’t playing that game. Neither were More’s enemies, and you know what happened to him.

More from Cleveland’s article:

As AG, Barr also made clear that he would not take creative license with the federal criminal code “to gin up allegations of criminality by one’s political opponents based on the flimsiest of legal theories.” Using the criminal justice system for partisan political ends “is not a good development” and “is not good for our political life. And “the only way to stop this vicious cycle, the only way to break away from a dual system of justice, is to make sure that we scrupulously apply the single and proper standard of justice for everybody,” Barr stressed, promising justice “will not be a tit-for-tat exercise.”

This perspective explains the dearth of criminal cases resulting from the Russia collusion hoax before Barr resigned. And given that Barr personally tapped Durham to oversee the investigation into the Crossfire Hurricane and Mueller probes, Durham presumably shares his former boss’s views.

In the rest of the article (which I recommend reading), Cleveland explains that the tepid and high-minded approach of Barr and Durham only “emboldened the DOJ, FBI, and intelligence community’s intrusion into politics and its interference in elections.” Cleveland also describes a Barr I consider hopelessly naive (I would say stupid except I know he’s not stupid, and I don’t believe he’s corrupt, so I’m left with dangerously naive):

…[E]ven after personally seeing the DOJ and FBI’s deceit, Barr believes the narrative peddled to justify the search and only hopes his successor, Attorney General Merrick Garland, will act prudentially, keeping in mind that “this is a former president.”

Cleveland ends with this paragraph:

While it may be too late now to reverse course, with the statute of limitations likely expired on several of the crimes, if Durham is debating a broader conspiracy charge, prudence now compels a course change with every plausible charge filed against everyone complicit in the hoax and investigation. Nothing less will save the DOJ and FBI — and our country.

It’s not just that it’s too late (although I believe it is). It’s that Barr and Durham are temperamentally unable to do such a thing. And I don’t even think it would work if they were willing to do it. It would require, among other things, fair and objective judges and juries in Washington DC. It would require an MSM willing to report fairly and objectively as well.

These things do not exist.

There is also the question of whether legal remedies exist for what was done during Russiagate. Many of the perpetrators, perhaps most of them, were lawyers and were careful to prepare their defenses and cover their tracks. The FBI isn’t going to cooperate with prosecuting those people for lying to the FBI when the FBI itself generated and promoted those lies and accepted them with vigor. When the whole system is corrupt, how can justice prevail?

The Nordstream pipeline has been damaged, and it looks like sabotage

The New Neo Posted on by

As if things weren’t bad enough, now this:

Natural-gas is erupting like geysers on the surface of the Baltic Sea above the damaged Nord Stream pipelines, images from the Danish military show.

Danish Defence on Tuesday released a video taken from a helicopter showing the extent of the disturbances caused by the leaking pipelines, which European officials believe have been sabotaged…

The pipelines were intended to be the main artery of natural-gas flow from Russia to Europe, but supply has been all but shut off since Russia invaded Ukraine. The damage to Nord Stream is a further blow to Europe as it grapples with an energy crisis.

Who did it? How? And why?

I obviously don’t have the answers. My first thought was that we still are arguing about who set the Reichstag Fire, so I doubt we’ll ever know for sure. Another thought is that it can’t be easy to accomplish the sabotage – underwater diving of some sort, with explosives – but it’s certainly more than possible for private groups or for government entities. Another question is whether such a thing can ever be prevented.

If this had happened prior to the Ukraine war, I would have said the culprit was some environmental group. They aren’t high on my suspect list now, which is topped by Russia. You might say that’s silly, because Russia’s revenue is based on selling its gas via such a pipeline; why would it sabotage itself? My answer is that, as you can see from the quote above, “supply had been all but shut off since Russia invaded Ukraine.” Obviously Russia is not depending on this right now. It’s Europe that’s hurting, and Russia would like Europe to hurt much much more and much much longer, and to be afraid of future sabotage as well. Stupid Europe, says Russia:

What is Russia doing for revenue right now? Remember this?:

Although exports to the European Union (EU) have fallen since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the bloc is still buying a significant amount – over one million barrels of oil per day.

However, EU members states have said they’ll ban all seaborne imports from December (most Russian oil comes by sea rather than by pipeline).

India and China have recently become big buyers and now account for over half of all Russia’s seaborne oil exports.

“India accounts for the bulk of Russian crude flows redirected to Asia,” says Sean Cronin, head of oil analysis at Argus Media.

Here’s another article that mentions that neither branch of the Nordstream pipeline was operational when the explosions occurred:

The Nord Stream 1 pipeline – which consists of two parallel branches – has not transported any gas since August when Russia closed it down for maintenance.

It stretches 745 miles (1,200km) under the Baltic Sea from the Russian coast near St Petersburg to north-eastern Germany. Its twin pipeline, Nord Stream 2, was halted after the Russian invasion of Ukraine began.

Although neither pipeline is in operation, they both still contain gas.

As for arguments that it’s not Russia who did it, because they wouldn’t act against their future self-interest, I disagree. First of all, as I pointed out, they don’t need Europe as a customer for their gas; Europe needs them much more than vice versa. Secondly, the damage can be repaired if necessary. If Putin was concerned about his future self-interest in European markets, he’d have withdrawn from Ukraine some time ago. But he is not the least bit concerned about it.

How corrupt is the FBI?

The New Neo Posted on by

This corrupt. And judges/magistrates seem to have little trouble rubber-stamping the FBI’s excesses.

Neither of the stories of FBI malfeasance described in the linked post at Ace’s have anything to do with searching Donald Trump, by the way. The first one involves the confiscation of the property of 1400 safety deposit boxes in Beverly Hills, based on a misrepresentation by the FBI. But even without the misrepresentation, this sort of mass search and seizure of the property of people not suspected of a specific crime – just a general possibility that some of them might be drug dealers – should never have been approved.

Some facts:

The privacy invasion was vast when FBI agents drilled and pried their way into 1,400 safe-deposit boxes at the U.S. Private Vaults store in Beverly Hills…

Eighteen months later, newly unsealed court documents show that the FBI and U.S. attorney’s office in Los Angeles got their warrant for that raid by misleading the judge who approved it.

They omitted from their warrant request a central part of the FBI’s plan: Permanent confiscation of everything inside every box containing at least $5,000 in cash or goods, a senior FBI agent recently testified.

The FBI’s justification for the dragnet forfeiture was its presumption that hundreds of unknown box holders were all storing assets somehow tied to unknown crimes, court records show.

It took five days for scores of agents to fill their evidence bags with the bounty: More than $86 million in cash and a bonanza of gold, silver, rare coins, gem-studded jewelry and enough Rolex and Cartier watches to stock a boutique.

The U.S. attorney’s office has tried to block public disclosure of court papers that laid bare the government’s deception, but a judge rejected its request to keep them under seal.

The box holders have mounted a class action lawsuit against the government, and that’s the only reason the deception has come out.

The FBI had reason to suspect that there was some criminal activity going on with certain unknown safe deposit box holders as well as the business itself, due to the fact that they observed drug suspects walking in and out.

So get a warrant to search the boxes of the actual suspects, if you must. That’s not all that happened, though. What happened was described above – an FBI out of control.

This is a good analogy:

Box holders would liken the raid to police barging into a building’s 700 apartments and taking every tenant’s possessions when they have evidence of wrongdoing by nobody but the landlord.

Please read the whole thing. It’s long but fascinating and horrifying. And it actually doesn’t matter if a lot of these boxholders were drug dealers. It doesn’t even matter if all of them were, although of course that’s not the case. I especially like this bit:

When the FBI vacated U.S. Private Vaults, it posted a notice in the store window inviting customers to claim their property. The FBI went on to investigate anyone who stepped forward, checking their bank records, state tax returns, DMV files and criminal histories, agents testified.

Sounds like a mass sting operation to me.

Do a Google search or a DuckDuckGo search for “fbi misled judge in beverly hills safe deposit box search” or something of the sort. Usually when you search Google for a big story, the entire first page of results consists of MSM sources such as the NY Times, the WaPo, and the like. Ordinarily, sources on the right are way down on the list. The exceptions are when the story is something the MSM would like to bury and the right is covering. In the case of this story, it’s mostly on the right except for the local angle of the LA Times covering it quite heavily. Also, as you could see from my Yahoo link above, Yahoo picked up the story from the LA Times; the text in Yahoo and the Times appear to be the same. Other coverage is from the right, such as the NY Post and Reason. Even doing a search like “New York Times Beverly Hills safety deposit box FBI search” yields nothing in the Times. Same with the WaPo.

This may seem tangential, but it’s not. It’s the way stories are buried and at least half the population doesn’t even know about them.

The second part of the story at the link to Ace that began this post is about the FBI SWAT-type raid on Catholic pro-life activist Mark Houck. A link to the story can be found here. Once again, when I do a Google search I can only find coverage from the right, plus a Rolling Stone piece that follows the “Republicans pounce” angle.

Here’s an excerpt from the latter:

The Catholic father of seven is Mark Houck, and the Department of Justice on Friday charged him with two counts of violating the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances (FACE) Act. The DOJ has accused Houck of twice assaulting a 72-year-old volunteer patient escort at the Planned Parenthood Elizabeth Blackwell Health Center in Philadelphia. According to the DOJ indictment obtained by The Daily Beast, the 47-year-old Houck “forcefully shoved B.L. to the ground” and then, in a second altercation the same day, “verbally confronted B.L. and forcefully shoved B.L. to the ground.” Houck did this “because B.L. was a volunteer escort at the reproductive health care clinic,” the indictment said. The second assault caused “injuries to B.L. that required medical attention.”

Houck’s wife, Ryan-Marie Houck, said in an interview with Catholic anti-abortion website LifeSiteNews that police and federal agents surrounded their family home to arrest her husband. After she opened the door to the authorities, she said, “they had big, huge rifles pointed at Mark and pointed at me and kind of pointed throughout the house” while their seven children were home. Houck’s wife also claimed that the clinic escort was saying “crude” things to her then 12-year-old son before the alleged incidents and “kind of came into [the son’s] personal space.” She said her husband drives to Philadelphia one day each week to spend 6-8 hours protesting reproductive health clinics…

The alleged assault [by Houck] has not stopped MAGA media from attempting to make the case an exhibit of conservative persecution.

The article conveniently leaves out the following:

The altercation was captured on a video the Houcks are in the process of locating, Middleton added. As of Sunday the family had not yet hired a lawyer but they expect to do so on Monday, he said.

When both the city police and the district attorney declined to file charges against Houck, the escort filed a private criminal complaint in Philadelphia municipal court, Middleton said. The case was dismissed in July when the man repeatedly didn’t show up in court, Middleton said.

Just days later, Houck received a “target letter” from the U.S. Attorney’s Office informing him that he was the focus of a federal criminal probe into the same incident, Middleton said.

Through his attorney at the time, Houck tried to contact the U.S. Attorney’s Office to discuss the case but never received a response, Middleton said.

“The next time they heard anything was Friday morning,” he said.

That’s when the raid occurred.

More:

“[The agents during the raid] said they were going to break in if he didn’t open it. And then they had about five guns pointed at my husband, myself, and basically at my kids,” [Houck’s wife] added.

“They were pointing their weapons,” Middleton said. “They came in as if they were expecting some kind of confrontation.”

The FBI told CNA that Houck was arrested outside his residence Friday morning “without incident.” In a press release, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania said that Houck is being charged with a violation of the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act, more commonly referred to as the FACE Act.

The federal indictment says that Houck twice assaulted a 72-year-old man who was a patient escort at a Planned Parenthood clinic at 1144 Locust St. in Philadelphia on Oct. 13, 2021. Houck first shoved the escort, identified by the initials B.L., to the ground as B.L was attempting to escort two patients, the indictment says. Houck also “verbally confronted” and “forcefully shoved” B.L. to the ground in front of the clinic on the same day, the indictment says.

The indictment says that B.L. was injured and needed medical attention. Middleton, the Houck family spokesman, maintains the injury was minor, only requiring “a Band-Aid on his finger.”

If convicted, Houck could face up to 11 years in prison, three years of supervised release, and a fine of up to $350,000, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office.

The local charges didn’t stick, so the feds got involved. Now, where have we heard that before?

The election of Italy’s “far-right” Giorgia Meloni: the EU “has tools”

The New Neo Posted on by

The EU was none too pleased at the prospect of the election of Giorgia Meloni of Italy:

As Italians prepare[d] to vote in [Sunday’s] general election, the European Union has issued a warning – making clear that it stands ready to act.

Giorgia Meloni, leader of the Brothers of Italy party, is widely expected to become prime minister at the head of a right-wing coalition. At an event in Princeton University, Ursula Von der Leyen, the EU president, said she is watching. ‘If things go in a difficult direction, I’ve spoken about Hungary and Poland, we have tools,’ she said.

So the unelected Ms Von der Leyen is talking about what she might do if confronted by Meloni being elected and getting ‘difficult’. The ‘tools’ she refers to are those used to withhold funds from Hungary and Poland for alleged violations of what the European Court of Justice has termed the EU’s ‘common values such as the rule of law and solidarity’, mainly in respect of the judiciary and media. That an unelected EU Commission should punish democratically elected governments in Hungary and Poland for failing to uphold common values is extraordinary – that it should threaten to do so in Italy if Meloni is elected and does not behave is outrageous.

Such [behavior] by the EU is hardly surprising. It reflects the default view of the Euro Establishment on Meloni – the ‘heir to Mussolini’ – which lazily brands her ‘far-right’ or ‘post-fascist’. She is neither, for reasons I explain at length…Her victory would be a triumph not for dictatorship but democracy. That is to say, if she wins, she will be Italy’s first elected prime minister for 14 years after six unelected prime ministers in a row. And she will be the first-ever woman to hold the post. That, surely, is something to be welcomed in a country often called the ‘beating heart of Europe’?

It’s that third paragraph where I believe the author goes wrong. There is absolutely nothing “lazy” about the EU branding Meloni as “far-right” or “post-fascist.” It is a familiar line of attack for anyone to the right of Macron, anyone who opposes the EU, anyone who isn’t for unlimited immigration (illegal or legal), anyone who appeals to what one might think of as nationalism, which is a dirty dirty word to the EU. After all, the EU exists to transcend nationalism and its supposedly pernicious effects.

The American left is similarly unlazy or perhaps even the opposite of lazy – relentless and Ahab-like – in its pursuit of someone like Trump, who is Hitler or worse than Hitler and not just proto- or post-fascist.

And of course the election to high office of a woman who is not on the left – just like a black person or woman in this country who is not on the left – is not to be applauded by the left. A black person or woman on the right is by definition a traitor to that person’s race or sex, according to the left, and deserves the loss of the favored status and praise that such a person would otherwise enjoy at the hands of the left.

This is elementary and basic stuff.

More:

Meloni identifies as a conservative and takes inspiration, not from Benito Mussolini, but from old-fashioned English conservatives such as Sir Roger Scruton and JRR Tolkien, as I discussed at length in my interview with her.

As, but remember what happened to Scuton not too long before he died?

The Spectator essay goes on to add that Von der Leyen has pulled back from her earlier comment about tools and said that the EU would “work with any government.” But I would bet that she is still looking for a way to undermine Meloni as best she and the EU can, if anything Meloni does threatens the EU and Italy’s membership in it.

As for coverage of the Italian election, Googling Meloni’s name yielded a series of articles, the titles of which I reproduce here, along with short excerpts:

From CNN, “Giorgia Meloni claims victory to become Italy’s most far-right prime minister since Mussolini.”

Brothers of Italy leader Giorgia Meloni has claimed victory in a general election that seems set to install her as Italy’s first female prime minister, leading the most far-right government since the fascist era of Benito Mussolini…

Preliminary results put an alliance of far-right parties, led by Meloni’s ultraconservative Brothers of Italy party, on track to win at least 44% of the vote, according to the Italian Interior Ministry.

From Politico, “Italy on track to elect most right-wing government since Mussolini”:

Italians voted on Sunday in an election that analysts predicted would usher in the far-right firebrand Meloni — leader of the Brothers of Italy party — as the country’s first female prime minister.

From the Financial Times, “Giorgia Meloni’s rightwing bloc storms to Italian election victory”:

A coalition led by Giorgia Meloni’s arch-conservative Brothers of Italy has won a decisive victory in Italy’s snap election, putting it in position to form the country’s first government led by the far-right since the second world war.

From The New York Times, “Giorgia Meloni Wins Voting in Italy, in Breakthrough for Europe’s Hard Right.”

From the BBC, “Giorgia Meloni: Italy’s far right on course to win election.”

And CBS News says that Meloni’s party is “far-right” and “neo-fascist” as well as “reminiscent” of Mussolini’s party.

I don’t see a lot of “center-right” descriptions there. And although it may indeed be factually true that Meloni’s government will be the most right-wing since Mussolini (I’m not sure, since I’m not especially conversant with Italian politics of the last 100 years), it’s a misleading statement with the purpose of linking Meloni with a man widely perceived as a villain. As with Hitler, there are valid arguments that Mussolini was only on the right as regards nationalism and was on the left otherwise (in fact, he began as a socialist, and aimed for big government rather than small). It is her nationalism that Meloni shares with Mussolini, which is hardly enough to make her any sort of fascist at all.

I blame it on the Neanderthals

The New Neo Posted on by

Hey Jean!
You have more Neanderthal DNA than 34% of other customers. You inherited a small amount of DNA from your Neanderthal ancestors. Out of the 7,462 variants we tested, we found 229 variants in your DNA that trace back to the Neanderthals.

All together, your Neanderthal ancestry accounts for less than ~2 percent of your DNA.

Now for the specifics:

You have one variant associated with experiencing more itchy mosquito bites.

I can well believe it.

You have one variant associated with generally not feeling angry when hungry (hangry).

I am the soul of patience even when hungry. But many of the men in my life (plus my mother) have been subject to hangriness.

You have one variant associated with having a worse sense of direction.

I wouldn’t doubt it.

You have two variants associated with being a better sprinter than distance runner.

I’m not great at either, but it’s probably true that I’m better at sprinting.

You have one variant associated with being less likely to prefer salty foods over sweet.

I plead guilty to having a sweet tooth.

But absolutely no on this:

You have one variant associated with being more likely to prefer dark chocolate over milk chocolate.

I can’t eat chocolate at all. Ever since my forties it’s given me migraines, even a small bit of it, and about twenty years ago I finally acknowledged I can’t have any without fairly nasty repercussions. But back when I loved chocolate and could eat it, I preferred milk chocolate over dark.

Teaching Zinn: Part I

The New Neo Posted on by

This post and a planned Part II are mostly based on a draft I wrote in March of 2013. That’s nearly ten years ago – how time does fly! I’ve mentioned before that I have a lot of old drafts hanging around. I can’t remember why I never polished the Zinn one up and published it, but I guess seemingly more pressing things always intervened. There are a lot of pressing things at the moment, too, but this topic is perennially relevant. So here it is.

I thought of it again when commenter “huxley” wrote this comment the other day:

However, it seemed to me I was taught [in school] to idolize America above all else without question and it kinda went into the BS hopper of stuff I was supposed to nod along to, like the perfection of the Catholic Church or the indisputable evil of marijuana.

I felt like adults, near and far, were constantly lying to me, and I couldn’t figure it out beyond I would have to figure it out for myself.

In a later comment, huxley added this:

I take Campbell’s point that myths of some sort, including Santa Claus, are part of the human experience because whatever the Truth may be, it’s probably bigger than us poor humans can handle, especially as children. We need some way to grow big enough to assimilate more truth.

I complain that I felt lied to when I was young, including all that Yankee-Doodle-Dandy stuff, that it seemed adults told me more for their benefit than mine.

Yet I agree with neo, that it’s important to have some reverence for one’s country, especially a country as great as America.

I’m not sure how to handle reverence and warts at the same time. The solution today is to forget reverence and get into the warts.

But emphasizing the warts is another set of lies told to benefit a different set of adults.

Which brings us to one of the ways they’re being lied to: by reading the works of Howard Zinn without much challenge, and/or by having teachers who were schooled in the words of Zinn and accepted his basic assertions as truth.

There have been books written about Zinn’s propaganda and the errors it contains, but I doubt those books reach more than a small fraction of those who have swallowed Zinn’s work hook line and sinker. Even a periodical like The New Republic has offered criticism (relatively mild, I might add) of Zinn’s history revisionism, probably to little avail:

Yet when it comes to Zinn’s demand for history to be judged for its political utility, Duberman is finally too indulgent. He can never bring himself to say that the fatal flaw of Zinn’s historical work is the shallowness, indeed the fallaciousness, of his critique of scholarly detachment. Zinn rests satisfied with what strikes him as the scandalous revelation that claims of objectivity often mask ideological predilections. Imagine! And on the basis of this sophomoric insight, he renounces the ideals of objectivity and empirical responsibility, and makes the dubious leap to the notion that a historian need only lay his ideological cards on the table and tell whatever history he chooses. He aligns himself with the famous line from the British historian James Anthony Froude, who asked rhetorically if history “was like a child’s box of letters, with which we can spell any word we please. We have only to pick out such letters as we want, arrange them as we like, and say nothing about those which do not suit our purpose.” Froude made this observation in the middle of the nineteenth century.

Note also how the author of that TNY piece, David Greenberg, mentions his own initial attraction to Zinn’s work in terms much like huxley’s. It’s probably a very common reaction and accounts for much of Zinn’s popularity:

As a faculty brat in those years [the 1980s], I was doubly enamored of Zinn after a classmate gave me A People’s History of the United States, his now-famous victims’-eye panorama of the American experience. In my adolescent rebelliousness, I thrilled to Zinn’s deflation of what he presented as the myths of standard-issue history. Do you know that the Declaration of Independence charged King George with fomenting slave rebellions and attacks from “merciless Indian Savages”? That James Polk started a war with Mexico as a pretext for annexing California? That Eugene Debs was jailed for calling World War I a war of conquest and plunder? Perhaps you do, if you are moderately well-read in American history. And if you are very well-read, you also know that these statements themselves are problematic simplifications. But like most sixteen-year-olds, I didn’t know any of this. Mischievously—subversively—A People’s History whispered that everything I had learned in school was a sugar-coated fairy tale, if not a deliberate lie. Now I knew.

The idea of being in on a subversive and secret truth is part of the huge draw Zinn’s work has for teenagers – and for many adults his work retains that attraction. What’s more, the activist left has been promoting Zinn’s work for many many decades. They are organized and dedicated; here’s a website devoted to the endeavor. Zinn was probably a Communist and certainly a far-leftist, and his lifework, in David Horowitz’s summary, was this: “All Zinn’s writing was directed to one end: to indict his own country as an evil state and soften his countrymen up for the kill.”

I think we can safely say that Zinn has been wildly successful in achieving that goal. Probably even more important than teaching children the work of Zinn himself is teaching it without a critique of his points, and especially teaching it to the teachers who will teach those younger people, teachers who are themselves converts to the Zinn cause.

[NOTE: My intention in Part II is to go into some of the details of many teachers’ dedication to teaching the work of Zinn as the truth of American history.]

Putin orders fuller mobilization; many Russian men flee if they can

The New Neo Posted on by

Putin is planning the tried-and-true Russian tactic of throwing a lot of its male citizens into the fray and overwhelming the enemy by numbers. One problem, though, is that – unlike, for example, the Nazi invasion of WWII, when Russia was fighting a defensive war that was obviously a struggle for its own existence against an aggressive and implacable foe – this time it’s Russia that is the aggressor, although Putin’s rhetoric says otherwise.

Putin has tried to minimize his action in Ukraine by never calling it a war. But now he wants Russia on an obvious war footing, and it’s not going over so well:

Putin declared on Wednesday that 300,000 reservists would be drafted, as Moscow seeks to replenish depleted forces after a successful counter-offensive from Kyiv this month. The move is set to change the scope of Russia’s invasion from an offensive fought largely by volunteers to one that embroils a larger swath of its population.

The announcement unleashed a scramble for some Russians, with social media chatter on platforms like Telegram exploding with people frantically trying to figure out how to get seats in vehicles headed to the borders, with some even discussing going on bicycle.

Long lines of traffic formed at land border crossings into several countries, according to video footage. Images on Kazakh media websites appeared to show vehicles backed up near the Russia-Kazakhstan border. In one, posted by Kazakh media outlet Tengri News, a person can be heard saying their vehicle has been “at a standstill for 10 hours” in Russia’s Saratov region, as they try to make their way to Kazakhstan.

“Endless cars. Everyone is running. Everyone is on the run from Russia,” the person in the video can be heard saying. CNN cannot independently verify the videos.

Well, not everyone. But plenty of people. And not every nearby country is willing to take them:

The Czech Republic will not issue humanitarian visas to Russian citizens fleeing mobilisation orders, Foreign Minister Jan Lipavsky said on Thursday…

His stance was in line with that of fellow European Union members Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia, which border Russia, who said on Wednesday that they would not offer refuge to any Russians fleeing Moscow’s mobilisation of troops…

Finland said on Thursday it was considering barring most Russians from entering the country as traffic across the border from its eastern neighbour “intensified” following Putin’s mobilisation order.

And in Russia itself, over 700 protesters have been “detained.”

Men from the provinces are being mobilized first:

In Buryatia, a mostly rural region wrapped around the southern shore of Lake Baikal, the mobilisation has seen some men drafted regardless of their age, military record or medical history, according to interviews with local residents, rights activists and even statements by local officials.

Buryat rights activists suspect that the burden of the mobilisation – and the war itself – is falling on poor, ethnic minority regions to avoid triggering popular anger in the capital Moscow, which is 6,000 km (3,700 miles) away.

I have long avoided prognostications on the Ukraine war except to say that it will almost certainly go on for a long time and that it has potentially dangerous and wide-reaching consequences, some of which are already coming to pass (Europe’s energy and economic crisis, for example). I will add that this move of Putin’s certainly doesn’t reduce those dangerous possibilities, and it is most likely to increase the human cost. There is no dearth of people willing to say what it all means, but they disagree with each other and I think they are mostly just blowing smoke.

However, here’s an example that seems to be describing some rather obvious truths of the situation at the moment:

Even if the Kremlin manages to add several hundred thousand people to the roster of the armed forces, the Army would have to house and train them, a mammoth effort. In the best-case scenario, that will take months, by which time it may be too late to affect the trajectory of the war—not least because these new draftees will not be particularly motivated or trained in advanced modern weaponry. “If they had announced mobilization in March, by now they could have had, let’s say, fifty thousand new troops prepared—but they didn’t do that,” the person told me.

When describing varying levels of support for the war in Russia, the political philosopher Greg Yudin splits the country into three groups: “dissenters,” “radicals,” and “laymen.” That is to say, those who openly oppose the war, those who cheer it on, and those who do their best not to pay attention, respectively. As Yudin argues, the laymen represent the majority of Russians, who have tried to maintain their private lives while avoiding the entire topic of Ukraine and the war. “It is obviously deplorable but the upside of it is that these people are completely unwilling to participate in war actively in any way,” Yudin tweeted, in mid-September. Putin’s strategy had been to muddle through the war, offering the laymen life as usual in Russia’s big cities, and the radicals a historic battle against Nazis and a Western machine hellbent on destroying Russia.

Mobilization, though, will put the illusions of the laymen under pressure, if it doesn’t blow them apart entirely. But, as Yudin told me, that will be a process that happens over time, and it is likely to take place on a personal rather than collective level. In other words, expect individual discontent, perhaps even sabotage, but not yet a revolution.

That’s the price of minimizing the war. It had the advantage of keeping the Russian population quiescent and mostly acquiescent. A large mobilization means that it will be very very difficult, if not impossible, to sustain that reassuring narrative.

I don’t know what it would take to make Putin give up this campaign, and I don’t think he will unless there’s a way to save face. I can’t even imagine what that way would be. He is in too deep and his rhetoric has described this war as a fight for Russia’s existence. Does he actually believe that? I certainly don’t know; perhaps. But one thing of which I’m pretty sure is that Putin sees it as a fight for his own political existence, and that’s a fight he’s determined to win.