the Guardian

Glenn Greenwald on the Hypocrisy of the Left

Brandon Christensen Current Events, Politics , , ,

Writing in the Guardian:

Meanwhile, a large bulk of the Democratic and liberal commentariat – led, as usual, by the highly-paid DNC spokesmen called “MSNBC hosts” and echoed, as usual, by various liberal blogs, which still amusingly fancy themselves as edgy and insurgent checks on political power rather than faithful servants to it – degraded all of the weighty issues raised by this episode by processing it through their stunted, trivial prism of partisan loyalty. They thus dutifully devoted themselves to reading from the only script they know: Democrats Good, GOP Bad.

Greenwald, a Leftist himself, is of course writing about the vitriolic attacks from the Left on Rand Paul’s filibuster the other day. There is more (it’s Greenwald after all):

That phrase – “engaged in combat” – does not only include people who are engaged in violence at the time you detain or kill them. It includes a huge array of people who we would not normally think of, using common language, as being “engaged in combat”.

Indeed, the whole point of the Paul filibuster was to ask whether the Obama administration believes that it has the power to target a US citizen for assassination on US soil the way it did to Anwar Awlaki in Yemen. The Awlaki assassination was justified on the ground that Awlaki was a “combatant”, that he was “engaged in combat”, even though he was killed not while making bombs or shooting at anyone but after he had left a cafe where he had breakfast. If the Obama administration believes that Awlaki was “engaged in combat” at the time he was killed – and it clearly does – then Holder’s letter is meaningless at best, and menacing at worst, because that standard is so broad as to vest the president with exactly the power his supporters now insist he disclaimed.

Read the whole thing.

States and Secession: Lamenting the Failure of the Euro Zone

Brandon Christensen Current Events, Politics , , , , , , , , ,

The Guardian has a so-so map on secessionist movements in Africa that’s worth checking out. I say it’s only so-so because it doesn’t really cover all the secessionist movements in the region, just the violent ones or the ones favored by Western diplomats.

I’m interested in secessionist movements because of the effects that they have on nationalism, one of the most dangerous ideologies to haunt mankind since the industrial revolution. Nationalism is probably worse than racism, or at least on par with it, when it comes to ideas gone horribly wrong.

That’s why I support free trade between states, and the deeper the better. The true tragedy of the EuroZone crisis is not the inevitable and predictable collapse of the euro but the fact that anti-liberal policies like the central bank and more political integration between states (and away from the people) are being misconstrued as liberal, in the classical sense.

The smaller the states the better, and the freer the trade the better. Mexicans should be able to travel and live in the US and Canada the same way that Nevadans are able to travel and live in California. The EuroZone could have been beautiful, but the pressure for a central bank and more control from a center, in Brussels, has probably ended it. It’s a good primer on how beautiful ideas often don’t pan out the way people would like them to.

Here’s how to fix the EuroZone crisis:

  1. Eliminate the monopoly of the central bank on creating money and credit.
  2. Open up the EuroZone market to more goods from the rest of the world (especially agricultural products from developing states).

I also think it’d be a good idea to keep Brussels as limited as it is. Doing so will not only allow more room for local policies to be experimented with and tested against other policies, but it will continue to erode the nation-state as well. What we were seeing prior to the crisis in the EuroZone is more calls for autonomy from state capitals throughout the EuroZone,  and a powerlessness on the part of states to do anything about it.

So instead of France and Spain, two states, the world may have seen up to five or six states in their stead, all interacting with each other economically while retaining nominal political independence from each other.

What a shame.