Disasters and blame in Iran

The New Neo Posted on by

I thought of adding this as an addendum to my previous post today. But then I decided it deserved the emphasis of a post of its own.

Some Iranian history:

…[I]t was another tragedy, one of the biggest terrorist attacks ever, with a lot of lies behind it that helped bring the Ayatollah Khomeini and his minions to power. Many Americans are not even aware of it…

From Bloomberg:

“On the night of Aug. 18, 1978, a fire broke out at a cinema in Abadan, close to the border with Iraq. The conflagration claimed anywhere from 420-470 lives, and it was quickly clear that the fire was no accident. The government of the Shah, already feeling the effects of widespread popular discontent, blamed Marxist terrorists.

“The opposition, led by the exiled Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, blamed the Shah’s much-feared intelligence agency. The movie being screened, “The Deer,” was a thinly-veiled critique of the economic distress felt by most Iranians, and the widespread corruption of the Shah’s government. Years would pass before the truth of the burning of Cinema Rex came to light: The arsonists had been Khomeini loyalists, inspired by the cleric’s contempt for cinema as an instrument of Western decadence. It is now acknowledged as one of the deadliest acts of terrorism ever.

But in the immediate aftermath of the fire, Iranians widely blamed the Shah’s regime, and Cinema Rex became a rallying cry for nationwide protests. In the months that followed, these grew in size and frequency, leading eventually to the unrest that forced the Shah to flee — and ushered in the Islamic Republic.”

The Khomeini terrorists barred the exits so people couldn’t get out and set the building ablaze, so many burned alive or suffocated. Many were women and children, infuriating the public…

Western mainstream media “instantly and foolishly” fell for it all and blamed the Shah for the fire, according to the Times of Israel. Carter administration officials were completely taken in. The U.S. ambassador to Iran, William Sullivan, referred to Khomeini as a “Gandhi-like figure” and the U.S. Ambassador to the UN at the time, Andrew Young, said, “Khomeini will eventually be hailed as a saint”!

I wrote this post nine years ago about the incident.

More clouds on Iran’s horizon?

The New Neo Posted on by

Iran’s not been having a great week.

This could end up being a big deal, re the Iranian Deal:

Germany, France and the United Kingdom have launched a formal dispute mechanism against Iran which could end up putting international sanctions on the regime. The measure was announced on Tuesday following recent Iranian violations of the 2015 nuclear deal. The dispute will now be brought before a Joint Commission made up of Iran, Russia, China, the three European signatories, and the European Union. If the panel fails to resolve the dispute, the matter will then come before the United Nations Security Council.

Even if the process gets stalled at the UN, Iran could end up facing comprehensive international sanctions — in addition to the current U.S. sanctions, media reports suggest. “If the Security Council does not vote within 30 days to continue sanctions relief, sanctions in place under previous UN resolutions would be reimposed – known as a “snapback”…

It’s not time to get too excited about this. But still, it’s noteworthy that the nations in question – Germany, France, and the UK – might be willing to go along with new sanctions. Even if Iran’s buddy Russia blocks a Security Council vote, the snapbacks might come into play. None of these nations have a history of being tough on Iran – au contraire – so that’s why I put “might” in italics.

Internally, there’s also a seeming split brewing [hat tip: commenter “Sergey”] among the forces in Iran, specifically between the mullahs and the military. This has the potential of becoming big, as well, because history tells us that if the military and/or security forces such as police start refusing to defend a regime, the end may be nigh for the dictators. Whether or not we are anywhere near that point in Iran remains to be seen, but the report is that Iran’s leadership is claiming that not only was the military responsible for the shootdown (on its own?), but they didn’t tell those innocent leaders about the shootdown until Friday, although it happened early Wednesday morning in Iran. So all those denials by the government, and all those lies those leaders told, weren’t lies at all – they were just in the dark.

Riiiight. If so, then why didn’t they just say in their initial statements that they didn’t know why it crashed, and that they were investigating? That would actually be the normal thing for a government to say under the circumstances. Why did they immediately say it was technical difficulties, and anyone who said otherwise was a liar?

I doubt there are many people on the face of the earth who believe the regime at this point, but Iran’s leaders must go through the motions of blaming someone else (including the US, of course), because they know that the Iranian people are intensely furious with the leaders themselves. But the danger of blaming the military is obvious, if the military comes to see itself as endangered in general.

From the article [emphasis mine; also comments in brackets are mine]:

Several people have been detained in Iran over the accidental shooting down of a Ukrainian passenger plane with a missile, the country’s judiciary says…

Mr Esmaili told a news conference in Tehran that the judiciary would “investigate the causes and direct impact of the incident”.

He added: “We will investigate the extent to which US warmongering caused this event. Several people have been detained and the investigation continues.”…

In a televised speech, President Rouhani said the judiciary would assemble a special court with a high-ranking judge and tens of experts to oversee the probe.

“This will not be a regular and usual case. The whole world will be watching this court,” he added.

Mr Rouhani also stressed that Wednesday’s “tragic event” should not be blamed on one individual.

“It’s not only the person who pulled the trigger, but also others who are responsible,” he said.

“Iranian armed forces admitting their mistake is a good first step [indication there will be a show trial plus public mea culpas, as well as military officers going along with the party line that they didn’t tell the leaders right away. And if they really didn’t tell them right away – which I doubt – it probably would be because they were terrified that exactly this would happen, as well as their execution and various punishments for their families],” he added. “We should assure people that it will not happen again.”

The president also said he wanted relevant officials to explain publicly why it took days for the authorities to disclose [see comment in brackets in paragraph above] that missiles were fired at flight PS752.

The Iranian government’s spokesman has denied that it was involved a cover-up, saying Mr Rouhani was not told what had happened until Friday evening.

The commander of the Revolutionary Guards’ Aerospace Force said on Saturday that he had informed “officials” about the strike hours after the incident.

So there’s a bit of a contradiction there, although my guess is that the commander of the Aerospace Force will have his memory “refreshed” about that, until the discrepancy between the two stories disappears and he supports Rouhani’s version.

The Revolutionary Guards are the notorious IRGC:

The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC)…is a branch of the Iranian Armed Forces, founded after the Iranian Revolution on 22 April 1979 by order of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini…intended to protect the country’s Islamic republic political system. The Revolutionary Guards state that their role in protecting the Islamic system is preventing foreign interference as well as coups by the military or “deviant movements”.

Angering this group could cause them to become a lot more lax about such “deviant movements.”

More:

The Revolutionary Guards have roughly 125,000 military personnel including ground, aerospace and naval forces. Its naval forces are now the primary forces tasked with operational control of the Persian Gulf. It also controls the paramilitary Basij militia which has about 90,000 active personnel.

The Basij militia is the IRGC arm tasked with controlling the Iranian people:

Today the force consists of young Iranians who volunteer, often in exchange for official benefits. Basij serve as an auxiliary force engaged in activities such as internal security, enforcing state control over society,[9] law enforcement auxiliary, providing social services, organizing public religious ceremonies, policing morals, and suppression of dissident gatherings.

I’m not making any predictions. But it seems as though the leaders of Iran are treading on delicate ground if they make the IRGC the fall guys in order to protect themselves. Maybe the whole “trial” will develop mostly as a way to blame The Great Satan for all of it. But I don’t know that such an effort will be successful – except, of course, with the left of the US and western Europe.

Who’s “electable”?

The New Neo Posted on by

I confess that I don’t really understand what makes a candidate “electable.”

I remember, however, that it used to be considered a big deal in the GOP. Over and over, a more moderate candidate was touted as more “electable,” and that seemed at least somewhat correct. After all, to be elected, a person had to appeal to swing voters in the middle.

At least, it seemed that way. That was one of the arguments for McCain and Romney, but both lost. However, the memory of the huge loss of someone like Goldwater was a cautionary tale. The only Republicans who had won the presidency in many decades were indeed moderates such as the two Bushes. Not since Reagan had a conservative won, and he was a special case that included intense charisma. Prior to that, I’d say the last conservative president had been Coolidge.

And then Donald Trump won. I can’t even characterize where he seemed to stand politically prior to the 2016 election, but I don’t think there’s anything especially “moderate” about him as a personality, and his presidency has played out in a way that’s further to the right than most people expected.

Now it’s the Democrats who seem obsessed with finding a candidate who is “electable.” They are handicapped in this endeavor by a seeming contradiction: they want someone electable, but if “electability” is defined as “not being too radically leftist,” then they’re in quite a bit of trouble because Democrat voters seem enamored of leftism these days.

The most passionate candidates among the Democrats are leftists, and even their so-called (or pretend) “moderate” candidates are tacking way to the left in order to appeal to the base. Their “moderate” candidates – if there are any – are just not popular or charismatic and have failed to garner much support within the party (Bloomberg can barely summon a minyan at his appearances). Biden is supposedly moderate, but sounds like a leftist most of the time and also sounds wacky much of the time.

And yet “electability” is what they seek, because defeating Trump – as Pelosi says, “one way or another” – is their tip-top priority.

“There can not be another massacre of peaceful protesters…The world is watching”

The New Neo Posted on by

There are now reports that Iranian demonstrators have been fired on, tear gassed, and beaten by the those in charge of riot control. It’s hard to know the extent of this, and the Tehran chief of police has denied it, but it certainly has been the case in the past.

The title of this post features some tweets from President Trump to the leaders of Iran. Here’s a fuller version:

US President Donald Trump told Iranian protesters that he supported them and warned the regime against cracking down on demonstrations that broke out after Tehran admitted shooting down an airliner by mistake, killing all 176 people aboard.

“The government of Iran must allow human rights groups to monitor and report facts from the ground on the ongoing protests by the Iranian people,” Trump tweeted Saturday in English and Farsi.

“There can not be another massacre of peaceful protesters, nor an internet shutdown. The world is watching,” Trump added, referring to an internet blackout that blanketed the country during widespread protests in November.

For those of us of a certain age, the phrase “the world is watching” rings an over-50-year-old bell. It was the chant the antiwar leftist protestors near the 1968 Democratic Convention shouted as some of them were being beaten by police in Chicago. Some history can be found here, but the gist of it is that the protestors tried to provoke police into violence and the police obliged.

Although there is really no parallel between that milder violence in 1968 and the recent massacres of protestors in Iran, the events in Chicago in 1968 were nevertheless shocking at the time to those of us who didn’t expect such things to happen in 1968 to antiwar demonstrators at a convention in the US. It was easy for college students (many of whom were against the war) to identify with the demonstrators who were being beaten.

That chant “The whole world is watching!” had a different scope in the pre-internet age. But it referred to the fact that there was massive television coverage, and that the demonstrators knew full well that the coverage would reflect poorly on the police.

Trump is old enough to remember. But when he uses the phrase now, he is addressing a murderous regime in Iran. And that regime in Iran has killed many of the student demonstrators in the past rather than just slightly injured them. This time, the whole world really is watching, because of the internet. This time, the mullahs are on the economic ropes. And this time, Trump is also purposely rubbing the left’s face in all of this by using that phrase, because the left is on the other side this time (although they would deny it, they have been empowering the present leaders of Iran).

Who will blink? Will the Iranian regime continue the violence, and how will they calibrate it? The mullahs know that, at least until January of 2021 and perhaps beyond, they are dealing with Trump and his resolve to stop them. They know that Trump has served notice through the killing of Suleimani (who among other things was the person in charge of previously cracking down so hard on the Iranian protestors) that he means business, as opposed to previous US presidents who mouthed words but whose actions spoke of passivity. Not only that, but Trump’s sanctions have hurt them economically and they fear that he’s willing to extend sanctions even further. And perhaps they think that if they start massacring the protestors, even their buddies in Europe may start turning on them (unlikely, but possible).

But they may consider it worth the risk. They know that if they don’t crack down on the protestors with lethal force, the size of the demonstrations may swell to unwieldy or even uncontrollable levels. And if the regime’s security forces ever turn on the regime as well, that would be an even greater turning point, the biggest turning point of all. I doubt it will happen, because those tasked with keeping the people in line tend to be highly dedicated to the cause of the theocracy, but it’s not unprecedented that they might have a breaking point.

One of the most poignant of all the recent chants by the demonstrators – who are mostly students – is ““You killed our geniuses!”. This is of course a reference to Flight 352 and the passengers on it, who leaned heavily to students traveling to Canada to commence or resume studies there. They were among Iran’s best and brightest, and the demonstrating students take it very personally that they were killed, and then that the people of Iran were lied to about it in such a blatant manner.

North Korea has maintained its iron grip by completely cutting its people off from the rest of the world. Iran has not done that for the most part, and it would be difficult (although not impossible) to start doing it now for more than a short while. The whole world is indeed watching, and the Iranian people are watching the whole world.

RIP Sir Roger Scruton

The New Neo Posted on by

A great loss.

Among the tributes listed there I think the one I like best is by Boris Johnson: “We have lost the greatest modern conservative thinker – who not only had the guts to say what he thought but said it beautifully.”

And here are some of Scruton’s best quotes:

A writer who says that there are no truths, or that all truth is ‘merely relative,’ is asking you not to believe him. So don’t. Deconstruction deconstructs itself, and disappears up its own behind, leaving only a disembodied smile and a faint smell of sulphur.

Intellectuals are naturally attracted by the idea of a planned society, in the belief that they will be in charge of it.

It is not the truth of Marxism that explains the willingness of intellectuals to believe it, but the power that it confers on intellectuals, in their attempts to control the world. And since…it is futile to reason someone out of a thing that he was not reasoned into, we can conclude that Marxism owes its remarkable power to survive every criticism to the fact that it is not a truth-directed but a power-directed system of thought.

The disposition, in any conflict, to side with ‘them’ against ‘us’, and the felt need to denigrate the customs, culture and institutions that are identifiably ‘ours’. Being the opposite of xenophobia I propose to call this state of mind oikophobia, by which I mean (stretching the Greek a little) the repudiation of inheritance and home.

Leftwing people find it very hard to get on with rightwing people, because they believe that they are evil. Whereas I have no problem getting on with leftwing people, because I simply believe that they are mistaken.

The contradictory nature of the socialist utopias is one explanation of the violence involved in the attempt to impose them: it takes infinite force to make people do what is impossible.

The fictions were far more persuasive than the facts, and more persuasive than both was the longing to be caught up in a mass movement of solidarity, with the promise of emancipation at the end. My father’s grievances were real and well founded. But his solutions were dreams.

And the proximate cause of Iran’s admission…

The New Neo Posted on by

…about its takedown of Ukrainian Airlines Flight 752 was this:

[Ukainian security official] Danilov said Iran had no choice but to admit to shooting down the plane because the facts had become apparent to Ukrainian experts on the ground and to the international community.

The “cherry on top” in Ukraine’s probe, he said, came on Friday evening Iran time, when Ukrainian investigators found fragments of the top part of the airplane cabin that had been pierced by what appeared to be the shrapnel of a missile warhead.

“As we saw it, Iran had to face the reality that there’s no way they’ll get out of this,” Danilov said.

In addition, reports that the plane had made some sort of sharp or unusual turn are erroneous:

Contradictions and miscues complicated Iran’s message even as it took responsibility for the disaster. Iran’s military, in its initial admission early Saturday, said the flight’s crew had taken a sharp, unexpected turn that brought it near a sensitive military base — an assertion that was immediately disputed by the Ukrainians.

Hours later, an Iranian commander who accepted full responsibility for the disaster agreed that the Ukrainians were right.

“The plane was flying in its normal direction without any error and everybody was doing their job correctly,” said the commander, Gen. Amir Ali Hajizadeh, who leads the airspace unit of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard — a powerful, hard-line military force. “If there was a mistake, it was made by one of our members.”

But this sentence from the same article immediately stuck out:

Iranians who only a few days earlier were united in outraged grief over the U.S. killing of a storied Revolutionary Guard leader, Maj. Gen. Qassem Soleimani, were now once again out en masse protesting their government.

Are the writers of the article that easily fooled? Do they really think that grief at Suleimani’s death gripped the whole country? Do they have no idea how these things work in Iran? Or are they just churning out the usual leftist propaganda?

Or all of the above.

“Dance to Your Daddy” – and the loss of “thou”

The New Neo Posted on by

When I was very young, we had a record that had a rendition of the folk song “Dance to Your Daddy.” I loved it and can remember it well. I’ve looked and looked online for the particular version from my childhood – unfortunately, I can’t remember who sang it but maybe the Clancy Brothers. But I haven’t been able to find it although I found plenty of others. Most are nice, but not quite right.

The original song used the word “thou” instead of “you” in addressing the child to whom the singer is singing. “Thou shalt have…” was repeated throughout, not “you will have” or “you shall have” as in so many versions appearing on YouTube. The words “thou” and “thou shalt” are phrases many people think of as religious and archaic because they’re familiar with them from the King James Bible. But “thou” was a way people who were close to each other used to address each other in the second person instead of “you,” as in “tu” for example in Spanish. It’s the familiar, and it was the way you spoke to loved ones.

The following version has the right tune and many of the words. But they sing “you” instead of “thou,” as well as a few other changes. She’s a fine fiddler, though, and seems to perform with such ease! I love the little catch in her voice, too. These two musicians are married, by the way. At the end, they segue into another version of essentially the same song:

And here’s another rendition of the first version. It’s fairly close to the one I know but this time starting slow and getting fast. Note how the type of fish the child will get keeps changing. This one has the “thou shalt” construction that I consider important:

Another thing that may seem minor to you but is major to me is when they say something like “she will be your girl (or lass) and you will be her man“. No, no, NO! My version said lass and laddie. “Laddie” rhymes with Daddy, first of all. And it just goes better with the famliar “thou,” as far as I’m concerned. The version I knew went this way: She shall be your lass and thou shalt be her laddie/Dance to your Daddy, my little man.

Here’s a different version, basically the one they finished up with at the very end of that first video. This version uses “thou shalt,” which I consider obligatory, but otherwise it’s rather different:

But I wish wish wish I could find the version I knew. Can anyone help? The way they sang “boiled” was great, too; it had two syllables.

The changing politics of New England

The New Neo Posted on by

[NOTE: This post was sparked by a back-and-forth yesterday in this thread.]

Most of now-liberal/left New England was for many years the center of rock-ribbed Republicanism, with native Vermonter Calvin Coolidge a typical product.

In 1932 there were only six states that didn’t vote for FDR, but the ones that didn’t were mostly in New England, four of the six: Connecticut, New Hampshire, Vermont, and Maine. In 1936, only two states voted against FDR: Maine and Vermont (I believe that may have been the origin of the old saying “As Maine goes, so goes Vermont”). In 1940 eight states in the midwest and west joined Maine and Vermont in voting against him, and in 1944 ten midwest and western states again voted against FDR, plus Maine and Vermont. In 1948 every New England state except Massachusetts voted against Truman. In 1952 (Eisenhower landslide) even more-liberal Massachusetts joint the other states in New England – all of them – to vote Republican, and 1956 was the same. In 1960, even Massachusetts son JFK didn’t appeal to Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine, who all voted for Nixon. 1964 was a turning point of sorts; as part of LBJ’s landslide, New England voted for Democrats for the very first time. But in 1968 New Hampshire and Vermont were back in the Republican fold again. 1972 was the enormous Nixon landslide that saw only liberal Massachusetts voting against him. In 1976 only Massachusetts and Rhode Island went for Carter; the rest of New England voted for Ford. In 1980 New England went solidly for Reagan except for tiny Rhode Island; even Massachusetts voted for him in 1980. By 1984 even Rhode Island had jumped aboard the Reagan train. In 1988 only Massachusetts and Rhode Island went for Massachusetts favorite son Dukakis; the rest of New England voted for Bush.

It really wasn’t till 1992 that New England suddenly went solidly Democrat for Bill Clinton, and that held true in 1996 as well. This marked a real turning point, but it was not till then that it occurred, and then in 2000 holdout New Hampshire (“live free or die”) went for Bush, alone of the New England states. In 2004 all of New England voted for Kerry, and in 2008 as well as in 2012 solidly for Obama. Then in 2016, Trump lost in New Hampshire by a hair, and in Maine (which splits its electoral votes into districts) Trump won in the 2rd district there. If you follow that link I just gave, and look at the map of Maine, you will see a sharp division between the urban south and the rural north.

What happened in New England was a combination of two factors: the rural areas lost population while urban centers gained, and the gain was mostly from out-of-state people moving in. Like what’s happened in certain other states, particularly Texas and some western states.

For example, here’s an article from 2016 that describes the history of what happened in Vermont. Vermont is probably the most extreme example of the phenomenon of New England leftism, but it didn’t start out that way. Here’s a summary of what happened:

It all started in the 1950s. From the mid-19th century to the mid-20th century, the Republican Party had an unbreakable majority in Vermont. But by the mid-1950s, this majority began to show signs of weakening…the 1950s were a pivotal point for transitioning away from Republican control of the state.

Unfortunately for the Republicans, it was in part due to their own infighting that led to their downfall. Starting in the 1940s, the Republican stalwart regime broke into two factions: one led by the traditional, conservative Republicans of the “Proctor” family, and another led by a new progressive wing of Republicans, which included Governor Ernest Gibson. The once unified GOP was broken…The disorganization of the Vermont Republican party in the 1950s left the door open for the increasingly well-organized Democrats to step in.

However, the change was not only the product of the Republicans self-inflicted wounds. Several other crucial factors were at play. For example, during the 1950s, Vermont’s urban population centers increased by 6.2 percent, while its rural population actually fell. Similarly, during the same period, Chittenden County’s population grew by 20.9 percent. The growing urbanization of Vermont did not help Republicans who traditionally relied on rural communities for their support. Furthermore, much of this population growth was driven by the “importation” of Vermont residents from outside the state. By 1970, one in four Vermont residents had been born elsewhere, according to Doyle, and many came from more liberal northeastern states, bringing their ideologies with them. The building of the interstate highway, I-89, likely contributed to this outcome. Additionally, in the early 1960s, legislative apportionment was determined by “one-man, one-vote” rather than the traditional “one-town, one-vote” method. Overnight, legislative Republicans representing rural areas had their seats taken away.

Those changes have occurred to a lesser or greater extent in all of New England, although Massachusetts has always been more liberal than the other states, and New Hampshire and to a lesser extent Maine remain somewhat purplish – for now.

What sort of mistake was the shootdown of Ukrainian Airlines Flight 752?

The New Neo Posted on by

Iran finally admits what everyone already knew: that it shot down Flight 752. Iran says it was due to “human error.” And predictably, Iran also takes some talking points from the western left and accuses Trump of being the real cause.

Clearly, the Iranians meant to shoot down something. So they were not altogether incompetent; they were aiming at something, and the something was this plane, and their aim was true. They claim they didn’t know it was a passenger plane that had just taken off from their own major airport loaded with Iranians and Canadian-Iranians. That was their mistake.

But some people find this “we didn’t know it was a passenger plane” to be an explanation impossible to believe, or at least highly unlikely to be true.

The Iranian leaders are certainly capable of such a cold-blooded murder. They also are fully capable of lying about it.

The lies we know they did tell initially were brazen and ridiculous – and stupid, because they were not believable. First they loudly claimed the cause was technical malfunction, when it was too early to have known that and when they should have realized other nations would have access to data that would easily disprove it. The real cause could not be hidden for long, but lying was the first (and utterly familiar) refuge of these scoundrels.

Then they told the lie that anyone who said they were to blame was lying. Then they claimed they wouldn’t give up the black boxes or cooperate with Boeing examiners in any investigation. That would be a violation of the usual protocol followed in such studies and also would make it much harder to figure out what had happened if it had been a real crash. So those denials were also “tells” that indicated extreme duplicity. And then the Iranians doubled down on those lies even when pretty much the whole world was saying “We know otherwise.”

They’re incompetent liars, in addition to everything else.

So it makes a certain amount of sense that there are people who think they’re still lying now and that they very much intended to shoot this plane down (or a different passenger plane; this one had left somewhat later than originally scheduled), and that it would be payback for the Vincennes incident of 1988, in which Iran’s Flight 655 was erroneously felled by a missile fired from a US ship. After all, there was this earlier tweet from Rouhani: “Those who refer to the number 52 should also remember the number 290. #IR655 Never threaten the Iranian nation.”

It certainly sounds as though it might be a threat connected with shooting down a passenger plane. But why shoot down a Ukrainian plane with Iranians and Canadian-Iranians on it? Why not perpetrate something like Lockerbie, where at least the Iranians would be getting revenge on Americans? Surely these experts in terrorism and bombing could figure out how to do that? As for a case of mistaken identity with some other passenger plane, there were no American flights to Iran; American commercial planes don’t go there and they weren’t flying over air space there. So this action makes no sense in terms of revenge.

Other people have theorized that there was someone on the plane the Iranians wanted to kill. But if so, this was a terribly inefficient and downright embarrassing way to do it. The Iranians don’t lack for more pointed ways to kill people and shooting down a plane with 176 people (mostly Iranian or Canadians of Iranian ethnicity) on it just doesn’t make sense if the goal is to kill one person or even a couple of people. And who was this person or these people Iran was trying to kill? Internet speculation about their possible identity has been unconvincing so far.

And then there’s the problem Iran has been having with its protestors. An action like this – shooting down a plane loaded with Iranian civilians – would be likely to inflame the crowds and increase their numbers. Is that really what the mullahs were eager to do? Somehow I doubt it. It makes it unlikely that the leaders of Iran would intentionally choose to do this. And in fact, more and larger protests have indeed occurred.

My sense at this point is that the Iranian authorities are now – like that proverbial stopped clock – caught in a brief and rare moment of telling the truth. Not the whole truth and nothing but the truth, but the truth that they were incompetent and didn’t mean to shoot down a passenger plane loaded with 176 people.

However, I would never be surprised if more evidence emerges later that shows it was purposeful and the plane was targeted for some reason, because the Iranian leaders are certainly capable of an action such as that if it suits their goals. I just don’t think it was the case this time.

Breaking: Iran admits it shot down the Ukrainian plane by mistake

The New Neo Posted on by

I guess their lies had gotten too preposterous, and Iran authorities figured it would be worse to keep denying it than to finally admit it:

Iranian military officials have admitted that the country “unintentionally” shot down a Ukrainian airliner, killing all 176 people on board.

State TV, reading out a military statement, blamed “human error” for shooting down the plane.

How did they think they could maintain the lie, with intelligence-gathering being as good as it generally is this days? Their willingness to lie and lie and lie, and accuse their accusers of being the liars, reveals how duplicitous they are (although we didn’t need any reminders).

I guess they were also relieved that the US left has already blamed Trump for whatever errors Iran made, and that may have made it easier for Iran to admit it committed the deed.

This entire event has been tragic and terrible. Although it’s not unprecedented that a passenger plane is mistakenly shot down, this was a plane shot down by Iranians with mostly Iranian and Canadian-Iranian passengers on board. I cannot even imagine what the families and friends of the victims must feel, as well as so many Iranian people who have suffered for so long under this terrible regime.

I’ve heard of people who claim to never wash their faces with soap

The New Neo Posted on by

But I don’t think I’ve ever heard someone claim to never wash her face at all. And yet, here’s Elizabeth Warren:

But one of the most standout revelations stemmed from a signature Cosmo question: “What’s your skincare routine?”

“Pond’s Moisturizer,” Warren concisely responded. “Every morning, every night. And I never wash my face.”

Then again, she has very good skin for someone her age.

But wouldn’t there be some sort of buildup of Pond’s over time, like the many layers of Troy?

[NOTE: Regarding the title of this post, I was unsure whether it’s more correct to write “people…faces” or “people…face.” But I went with “faces.”]

Susan Hennessey: caught in the crossfire crossfire

The New Neo Posted on by

I’d never heard of Susan Hennessey before last night. Then I saw, via a link on Instapundit, that she’d tweeted this about this about the tragic shoot-down by Iran of a Ukrainian plane taking off from Tehran airport:

When I saw it I thought Susan Hennessey must be some celebrity, perhaps an actress of some sort. But no. Here’s her bio: “Lawfare Executive Editor, Brookings Senior Fellow, CNN National Security and Legal Analyst, Former IC attorney.”

If you go to the replies to that tweet, you can see an almost unending stream of ridicule, richly deserved, about her misuse of the word “crossfire.” But I want to look beyond that, because what Hennessey did is quite revealing of the mind of a seemingly intelligent and supposedly well-educated leftist Trump-hater.

This is obviously not a case of a person who made a mistake because she literally doesn’t know what “crossfire” means. But just for the record, of course there was no actual crossfire here. Only Iran had been firing on American positions in Iraq, although not all that successfully. Only Iran fired at the plane. Iran, Iran, Iran doing the firing.

But when the left wants to blame someone, they trot out “the cycle of violence” (the better to make both sides seem equivalent) or “tit-for-tat” (likewise), and they arbitrarily choose a starting point that makes the side they want to call the bad guys seem like the instigators and then attribute all the bad things that happen subsequently to that side’s agency. No matter who actually does the deed.

And since the starting point is chosen not because it’s the actual starting point but because it’s the way to blame that side, it’s an almost infinitely flexible way to mount an argument. Or it might seem that way, as long as you don’t stretch it so far that it breaks, as Susan Hennessey did here.

It’s a sequence like this, and any point can be chosen along the way to highlight, depending on who needs targeting:

For want of a nail the shoe was lost.
For want of a shoe the horse was lost.
For want of a horse the rider was lost.
For want of a rider the message was lost.
For want of a message the battle was lost.
For want of a battle the kingdom was lost.
And all for the want of a horseshoe nail.

As long as Trump is an actor somewhere in the mix, they can blame him for the whole sequence and everything that follows after whatever his role was in it. And if you’re writing propaganda, as so many tweeters are (and as Susan Hennessey certainly was here), you use words like “crossfire” quite loosely for effect rather than for truth or accuracy. After all, we did something violent to some Iranian at some point, right? So yeah, “crossfire” will do, Hennessey must have thought.

And later she tries to define “crossfire” in a way she thinks makes her look less knavish and/or foolish:

Yeah, Susan, sure thing. But when you use “crossfire” to refer to the actual, literal shooting down of an airplane you’re not using the word that way. You’re just not, and the fact that you’re trying to make it seem as though you were only makes it even more clear how disingenuous you are being. This situation involved no firing from two points in which the line of fire crossed, nor one in which the forces of the sides met or clashed, and it most certainly was not the rapid or heated exchange of words.

But “crossfire” seemed to Hennessey such a useful way to look at it that it’s been hard for her to give it up.