Ronald Reagan and Murray Rothbard agree on just wars
17 Oct 2014 Leave a comment
in laws of war, Murray Rothbard, war and peace Tags: jus bellum, just wars, Murray Rothbard, Ronald Reagan
Principled Anti-War Celebrities We Fear May Have Been Kidnapped
15 Oct 2014 Leave a comment
in liberalism, war and peace Tags: temporary doves
The only explanation for their continued silence since January 20, 2009 must be a large, organized kidnapping.
HT: Buzzfeed
The politics of anti-war movements or your real mates vote for you when you’re wrong
14 Oct 2014 Leave a comment
in politics - USA, war and peace Tags: anti-war movements, temporary doves
Why mass electronic surveillance is so important in the war on terror
10 Oct 2014 1 Comment
in defence economics, war and peace Tags: David Hicks, economics of oppositional identities, electronic surveillance, Jihadists, security and intelligence, war on terror
Islamic Jihadists seem to be a bunch of windbags. First thing they do is tell their friends, acquaintances and everyone down at the local mosque what they plan to do. Out of a spirit of public duty or hope of reward, someone informs the police or their chatter is picked up through electronic eavesdropping.
A surprising number of Jihadists, including Bin Laden’s courier, have been located by listening in on their mum. Jihadists tend to be mummies boys.
One of the strengths of the Jihadists terrorist networks, their decentralised and spontaneous nature, is also one of their weaknesses. There appears to be no recruitment standards or admission criteria or any other mechanism for screening out the indiscreet and those prone to big talk.
The fact that idiot David Hicks got into Al Qaeda and the Taleban in Afghanistan indicates that they seem to be not in any way suspicious of infiltration.
Ron Radosh » The American Left: Friends of Our Country’s Enemies
27 Sep 2014 Leave a comment
in liberalism, war and peace Tags: Can there be a decent Left, Leftover Left, The superiority of Western civilisation
The American Left used to be patriotic. In its heyday, Eugene V. Debs never attacked America, and the socialist vision he advocated was in his eyes a way to realize the promise of America.
As for the American Communist Party, in reality the tool of Stalin’s USSR, it pretended in the 1940s to be pro-American, and its chairman, Earl Browder, coined the slogan “Communism is 20th century Americanism.” This pretence came to an end during the Cold War, when the Left supported the Soviet bloc and all of its policies, and argued that America was in the process of becoming a nascent fascist state.
The remnants of the ’60s New Left identified with America’s new enemies, especially North Vietnam, Communist Cuba, the PLO, and, in the ’80s, Sandinista Nicaragua. After 9/11, many of its adherents took the position that the United States had the terror attack coming to it, since the perpetrators had taken 3000 lives in protest against America’s imperial ambitions and control.
This led Michael Walzer, the social-democratic intellectual, to pen an article called “Can There Be a Decent Left?” Walzer courageously took on many of those on his side of the spectrum, hitting them for accepting the “blame America first” doctrine to explain foreign policy defeats; for not criticizing any peoples or nations in the Third World; for believing in what he called “rag-tag Marxism”; for failing to oppose dangerous jihadists and Islamist states; and for refusing to blame anyone else for the world’s wrong except the United States.
I wonder what Walzer would write today if he examined his article anew. If one looks around at the Left’s response to Hamas’ actions in Gaza and its attacks on Israel, and its view of Islamist fascism in countries like Iran, Syria and among the ISIS forces seeking to take over Iraq, it is clearer than ever that the Left has one function — to support the enemies of democracy.
Operating in the United States, Britain and France, the Western Left takes the opportunity to speak freely in the democracies in which they live, to openly support and express their solidarity with democracy’s most fervent enemies.
via Ron Radosh » The American Left: Friends of Our Country’s Enemies.
Timeless Tips for ‘Simple Sabotage’ — Central Intelligence Agency
21 Sep 2014 Leave a comment
in applied price theory, entrepreneurship, industrial organisation, organisational economics, personnel economics, war and peace Tags: sabotage
Edward Snowden Is No Hero – The New Yorker
16 Sep 2014 Leave a comment
in liberalism, war and peace Tags: Edward Snowden, leaking versus dumping, narcissism, national security, oppositional identities, treason
Any marginally attentive citizen, much less N.S.A. employee or contractor, knows that the entire mission of the agency is to intercept electronic communications…
What makes leak cases difficult is that some leaking—some interaction between reporters and sources who have access to classified information—is normal, even indispensable, in a society with a free press.
It’s not easy to draw the line between those kinds of healthy encounters and the wholesale, reckless dumping of classified information by the likes of Snowden or Bradley Manning.
Indeed, Snowden was so irresponsible in what he gave the Guardian and the Post that even these institutions thought some of it should not be disseminated to the public. The Post decided to publish only four of the forty-one slides that Snowden provided. Its exercise of judgment suggests the absence of Snowden’s…
The American government, and its democracy, are flawed institutions. But our system offers legal options to disgruntled government employees and contractors. They can take advantage of federal whistle-blower laws; they can bring their complaints to Congress; they can try to protest within the institutions where they work.
But Snowden did none of this. Instead, in an act that speaks more to his ego than his conscience, he threw the secrets he knew up in the air—and trusted, somehow, that good would come of it. We all now have to hope that he’s right.
Richard Cohen: NSA is doing what Google does
16 Sep 2014 Leave a comment
in economics of media and culture, liberalism, war and peace Tags: conspiracy theories, Edward Snowden, Left wing paranoia
Greenwald likens Snowden to Daniel Ellsberg, who revealed the Pentagon Papers to The Post and the New York Times more than four decades ago.
Not quite. The Pentagon Papers proved that a succession of U.S. presidents had lied about their intentions regarding Vietnam — Lyndon Johnson above all. In 1964, he had campaigned against Barry Goldwater for the presidency as virtually the peace candidate while actually planning to widen the war.
As the Times put it in a 1996 story, the Pentagon Papers “demonstrated, among other things, that the Johnson administration had systematically lied, not only to the public but also to Congress, about a subject of transcendent national interest and significance.”
In contrast, no one lied about the various programs disclosed last week. They were secret, yes, but members of Congress were informed — and they approved.
Safeguards were built in. If, for instance, the omniscient computers picked up a pattern of phone calls from Mr. X to Suspected Terrorist Y, the government had to go to court to find out what was said. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act established a court consisting of 11 rotating federal judges. These judges are the same ones who rule on warrants the government seeks in domestic criminal cases. If we trust them for that, why would we not trust them for other things as well?
via Richard Cohen: NSA is doing what Google does – The Washington Post.
Some people are still shocked when they learn that governments spy on people. What next? Will people be shocked to learn that the police investigate innocent people in the course of routine enquiries.
The Story of the Only American Not on Earth on September 11th – The Atlantic
12 Sep 2014 Leave a comment
in politics - USA, war and peace Tags: 9/11
Foreign policy in an uncontrollable world alert: Who was Obama arming today?
03 Sep 2014 Leave a comment
in politics, politics - USA, war and peace Tags: interventionist foreign policies, Obama foreign policy, The fatal conceit, unintended consequences
HT: Helen Dale
Utopia, you are standing in it! 
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