Friday roundup

 Peggy Noonan's column in the Wall Street Journal this morning encapsulates exactly where we are as a civilization. She launches her reflection with a comparison of the unity America experienced in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001 attack and the utter lack of it on the occasion of the twentieth anniversary:

It had to do with a sense that we are losing the thread, that America is losing the thread. We compared—we couldn’t help it, it is in the nature of memory—the America of now with the America of 20 years ago, and we see a deterioration. We feel disturbance at this because we don’t know if we can get our way back. The losing of the thread feels bigger than ideology, bigger certainly than parties. It feels like some more fundamental confusion, an inability to play the role of who we are, and to be comfortable in who we are.

The money line of the whole essay is this:

Just about every large business in America is now run by its human resources department because everyone appears to be harassing and assaulting each other, or accusing each other. Is this the sign of a healthy country?

COVID has served to worsen our fracturing. Concern about our price various financial state has faded to the point of being negligible. That there isn't unanimous alarm about what happened at the Capitol this past January says much about where we are:

And of course it all plays out in a million political and cultural issues. The pandemic came, a once-in-a-lifetime occurrence (we hope) and somehow that shared experience became another opportunity for division. Government had to be deft and persuasive and honest about what it didn’t know and didn’t have, and often failed. But government can always regulate, spend and tax. We’re no deficit hawks in this corner but doesn’t U.S. public debt going toward $30 trillion feel a little . . . high? And dangerous? 

When a country has lost the thread it gets a mob breaking into the U.S. Capitol going for the ballots that will ensure and formalize a presidential election. When it’s lost the thread it can no longer maintain a rough consensus—it doesn’t even WANT a rough consensus—on how we vote.

Consider what the Met gala tells us about the flatlining of our culture:

The Met Gala the other night showed the elite of a major industry literally losing the thread. Google the pictures. It was a freak show. There was no feeling of a responsibility to present to the world a sense of coherence or elegance, to show a thing so beautiful it left the people who saw it aspiring to something they couldn’t even name. All this was presided over by a chic and cultivated woman who is cunning and practical. If freaky is in she’s going freaky deaky to the max. Follow the base, even if it’s sick. Do not lead. Leading is impossible now.

The argument is sometimes made that there's still a critical mass of Americans who are solid human beings, safeguarding the thread of which Noonan speaks. But their confidence in anything beyond their personal spheres has waned considerably:

What are regular people doing? My sense is they’re trying to hide from the national, figuring they’ll make strong what they can make strong—the family, the school, the local. They’re not trying to “maintain control” or “retreat,” they’re just trying to make things work. But what does it mean for a country when its most sober and thoughtful people are essentially trying to hide from it? To hide from the accusations and division and the growing air of freakishness, from the whole cultural revolution and the woke regime, trying to enforce boundaries between “that” and “us.” And knowing all the while that, as they say, you may be through with the culture but the culture isn’t through with you.

Strong stuff, but important to take in.

Danielle Pletka, writing at The Dispatch, says that the Taliban's re-ascension to rule in Afghanistan blows up the notion that Sunni and Shiite Muslims can't share goals and cooperate:

The era ushered in by 9/11 made theological terms like Sunni, Shiite, jihad, sharia, and Salafi household words, and birthed a nation of armchair experts on the intricacies of Islamic sectarianism and doctrine. Pretense to expertise is a privilege of living in a free country. Oddly, however, the U.S. government has adopted the same facile analysis of regional and religious dynamics in the Middle East and South Asia, viz. the trope that Shiite Iran is a natural enemy to the Sunni Taliban in Afghanistan. This is, in short, rubbish.

The Taliban victory in Afghanistan is a gift to Iran, nothing less.

How is this playing out?

At the end of the day, what underpins the Iranian relationship with the Taliban (as with al-Qaeda) is the central tenet of Iranian strategic policy overall: instability. While Tehran may have been pleased to aid the U.S. in ousting the Taliban in Afghanistan, it had no interest in seeing a stable, pro-American government to its east. And so, led by the IRGC, it returned to what Iranian strategists perceive as their sweet spot: playing both sides. The Taliban was licensed to open a political office in Iran. Senior Taliban leaders began occasional visits to Tehran to kiss the ring of the supreme leader. Meanwhile, the IRGC continued to support disgruntled Shiites inside Afghanistan. (Indeed, Iran’s support for those Shiites was such that by the time the Arab Spring erupted in 2011, Iran was well-placed enough in Afghanistan to reportedly recruit tens of thousands of Afghan Shiites to fight on behalf of their Syrian puppet Bashar al Assad.)

Nor was Iran’s support for the Taliban purely political. Tehran permitted Taliban training camps inside its borders and provided “light arms, rifled-propelled grenades (RPGs), and even military training for Taliban forces on Iranian soil.” Later stories made clear that the Iranian government was also paying Taliban salaries. And reporting last year revealed that Iran was paying the Taliban bounties to kill American troops in Afghanistan.

At the Washington Examiner, Quin Hillyer says we'd all damn well better get real about COVID:

The United States should revise its response to COVID-19. This is going to be a long explanation of both why and how. This first column will explain why a better response is crucial. A companion column will outline the better strategy. 

The tragedy of the U.S. pandemic response is that conservatives tend not to take it seriously enough while liberals overreact with counterproductive solutions. Both responses make matters worse, meaning either more culturally and economically devastating or more deadly. Or both. 

For more than six months, many conservatives have been saying the pandemic is effectively finished, especially for the vaccinated. Both the numbers and the nature of viruses show they are dangerously wrong. This contagion is a major ongoing threat . 

On Aug. 7, when the rolling seven-day average of U.S. coronavirus daily deaths again rose above 500, alarm bells should have gone off: At that rate, the annual deaths would have been three times worse than even a bad year of ordinary influenza. Since then, the bad numbers have nearly quadrupled yet again. As I write today, the seven-day average of deaths-per-day is at 1,827, the highest since March 2 and still rising. If this keeps up for a whole year, 666,855 more Americans would die in 12 months from COVID-19, on top of the 662,000 who already succumbed in the past 18 months.

The nation's supply-chain woes are due in large part to the pandemic. 

Russell Moore, writing at Plough, examines the loss of faith among the country's young. 

Generally speaking, The Atlantic's Adam Serwer is not my cup of tea, but he does make a compelling case that Robert E. Lee is not worthy of admiration. 

Here's a compare-and-contrast for you. Both Andrew Doran, writing at The National Interest, and Janan Ganesh, writing at the Financial Times, posit that there is a pointy-headed class of elites that has made a mess of US foreign policy, but Doran thinks the time may be ripe for putting that class out on its ear, while Ganesh thinks they are permanently ensconced. 

Ed Morrissey at Hot Air on how three Supreme Court Justices are pushing back on the notion that the federal judiciary is a political spoils system:

There’s no doubt, though, that the Supreme Court has become one of the main institutions caught in that crossfire. Furthermore, it can’t compete in that polarized-partisan atmosphere. The Supreme Court doesn’t have an electorate, let alone a base to fire up on its own. Decades of judicial activism that preceded recent courts has made it into a political spoil for elections, and the judiciary wars in the Senate over the last two decades are the result.

This year, however, the justices appear to have had enough. One could chalk up Breyer’s public tour as the need to promote his book, but he wrote his new book in large part to fight back against charges of polarization and politicization on the Supreme Court. Barrett and Thomas have now come out on the same theme, putting three of the court’s more controversial members on the campaign trail too, so to speak.

The period between terms has always offered justices the time to engage publicly, and often talk about the collegiality of the court, but this time it feels different. The political environment has changed, and perhaps the justices have decided that it requires a more robust defense of their own institution before it gets gutted by the nihilists, and with it the independence of the judiciary and the rule of law to boot. If so, then Thomas and his colleagues have accurately diagnosed the tenor of our times — and hopefully will continue to push back against it.

Heath Mayo laments a Republican Party that is more enamored of DeSantis and Abbott types than Massachusetts governor Charlie Baker and Maryland governor Larry Hogan. 

At Desiring God, Joe Rigney examines what a C.S. Lewis essay can teach us about how to cultivate moral reasoning and how it can elevate the tone of our debates and preserve our friendships. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

US foreign policy has been off the rails for some time

 Bob Woodward, collaborating with Robert Costa on this one, has a third book on the Trump presidency coming out. Woodward is a standard-setter for investigative journalism, but some question aspects of his pursuit of truth.  To my knowledge, though, there hasn't been any credible refutation of the material in the Trump books. If someone - besides the Very Stable Genius himself or any of the drool-besotted members of his cult - had attempted to discredit the gist of Woodward's reportage on that era, it would have made a significant splash.

The pre-release excerpt from Peril, the latest in the series, that is garnering buzz is about Joint Chiefs of Staff chair General Mark Milley's concern about Trump's deteriorating mental state in the last few months of Trump's presidency, and the measures Milley took to mitigate possible policy results. 

That Trump was coming unglued is something we were all able to verify with our own eyes and ears. His mega-boorish behavior at his October debate with Biden, his statement in the wee hours of November 4, the phone call to Brad Reffensperger begging him to "find" 11,000 votes, the tweet about how the rally scheduled for January 6 would be "wild," his inaction as the attack on the Capitol unfolded, and his big-baby refusal to attend Biden's inauguration all testify to it. Woodward's book adds some new details, but Trump's dangerousness was already established. 

Two wrongs don't make a right, however, and Milley cultivating a back-channel relationship with his Chinese counterpart and assuring him by phone that Milley would give him a heads-up if the US were going to attack China is a violation of the chain of command that warrants immediate investigation. There are procedures in place for countering bad moves being considered by a commander-in-chief; Milley's approach isn't one of them.

Milley isn't any great shakes generally speaking. His attempt to push back on charges of fostering woke-ness in the military at a House Armed Services Committee hearing in June was pretty lame.  And where was his concern for how a president under whom he was serving was handling a major foreign policy matter as Joe Biden allowed the Afghanistan withdrawal to be fatally botched? 

Milley's buddying up to General Li takes on a particularly disturbing cast in light of how US-China relations have gone so far in the Biden era. There was the dressing-down of Blinken and Sullivan by their Chinese counterparts at the Anchorage meeting in March. More recently, China has violated Taiwanese airspace in the conduct of "invasion war games."

So far in the twenty-first century, we have not been electing presidents with the foreign-policy chops this country has needed. 

Trump wasted a great deal of time and jet fuel holding summits with Kim Jong-Un. His sleazy phone call to the president of Ukraine got him impeached. He famously insulted leaders of allied nations in person and on the phone. 

Barack Obama's apology tour, his entering into a patty-cake agreement with Iran concerning its nuclear ambitions, and shameful little episodes such as letting Hugo Chavez present him with the gift of a Noam Chomsky book in front of the world's cameras all confirmed that he meant what he said about America needing fundamental transformation.

George Bush's naive notion that the Middle East and Central Asia, comprised of decidedly non-Western cultures, were ripe for Westernization did much to undo what he was right about - namely, that the Taliban in Afghanistan, and the Baathist regime in Iraq were rogue entities. He also pursued appeasement with North Korea, repeatedly sending Christopher Hill to East Asia for Six-Way Talks aimed at getting North Korea to change its stripes. 

The prospects for righting this state of affairs aren't encouraging. With both of the country's major political parties vying to out-ridiculous each other, it seems unlikely that either will nominate a presidential candidate for the 2024 race that will instill confidence in his or her seriousness about the stakes on the world stage. 

The world-stage reverberations begin - today's edition

 In a recent post with this title, I cited a Global Times editorial that posited as a given a mainland Chinese war with Taiwan.

The People's Republic's military is now backing that position up with incursions into Taiwanese airspace. The "invasion war games" involved ten J-16 and four Su-30 fighter jets, an anti-submarine aircraft, and four bombers capable of carrying nuclear payloads. 

The point of my title was that we now had evidence that America's enemies had been emboldened by the humiliating way US military involvement in Afghanistan came to an end.

There's now evidence of a link between the two situations. Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid has said that "China is our most important partner and represents . . . an extraordinary opportunity for us because it is ready to invest and rebuild our country." There's talk between the two nations about getting Afghanistan in on the Belt and Road Initiative and modernizing Afghanistan's cop[per mining industry. 

By the way, the Taliban has routed the resistance led by Ahmand Massoud in the Panjshir valley, the last holdout after the previous government's collapse. 

The horrifying consequences of an unserious nation still acting under the illusion that it's qualified to lead on the world stage

 The two blasts at Hamid Karzai International Airport - one at the Abbey Gate and one at the Baron Hotel - have killed at least 13 people, including 4 US Marines. The US military is now in the final stages of its "retrograde" - that's bureaucrat-speak for turning tail and getting the hell out - from the airport.

Approximately 1,500 Americans are still in Afghanistan, with rapidly dwindling chances of getting out. That's at least as true for the thousands of Afghans (at least 250,000 at a minimum who are eligible for US visas) who helped the US in various capacities and now face dismal prospects.  T.hose who are scrambling for the Pakistan border are encountering Taliban thuggery.

US Charge d'Affaires for Afghanistan Ross Wilson told CBS News's Norah O'Donnell this morning that his office had sent warnings starting in April, each one worded with more urgency, that they needed to get out, and that some seem to have chosen not to leave and that "that's their business."

Ambassador Wilson, how does that square with what Secretary of State Antony Blinken had to say on June 21, that "the embassy's staying, our partners are staying," and that he didn't think "significant deterioration in the security situation is something [that would] happen from a Friday to a Monday"?

Or with Joe Biden's assessment on July 8 that there would be "no circumstance where you see people lifted off the roof of an embassy"?

Speaking of Biden, what's up with the address the other day in which he didn't even mention Afghanistan, but rather exhorted the nation to get COVID vaccine booster shots, or the more recent presser in which he touted domestic-policy wins for his progressive agenda for seven-plus minutes before getting around to discussing Afghanistan?

Not that the previous administration was any better. As LITD mentioned the other day, Trump came damn close to hosting a Taliban delegation at Camp David in September 2019, until the plan was squelched by a Taliban-staged car bombing in Kabul. Still, he pressed ahead with his idiotic patty-cake agenda, having Mike Pompeo work out a "peace" deal that called for all US troops to be gone  by May 2020.

Western civilization has no reliable guardian now. The institutional and cultural rot that has been underway for decades is now matched by a foreign-policy rudderlessness to which both parties have signed on. 

Still, one side wants to talk about white-privilege indoctrination and forcing the populace to switch from cheap, dense and readily available forms of energy to play-like forms that would ultimately wind up depending on the continued existence of the normal-people forms, and the other side wants to indulge in rigged-election fantasies, flirtation with industrial policy, and paranoid notions that vaccines are some threat to personal liberty.

As I've said many times over the years, I keep hoping that someday the name of this blog could be rendered obsolete by a fundamental turn toward a rule bright future. Alas, the wait for that goes on.

UPDATE: The dead-Marines figure is now 12.

No precedent for this level of failure, humiliation and self-imperiling

 Biden telling George Stephanopoulos, "I think [the Taliban is] going through sort of an existential crisis about do they want to be recognized by the international community as being a legitimate government."

Secretary of Defense Austin's remark that the US military doesn't "have the capability to go out and collect up large numbers of people."

White House press secretary Jen Psaki announcing she's going on vacation as the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan is complete. 

German politician and probable successor to Angela Merkel as chancellor's characterization of Afghanistan's collapse as "the greatest debacle NATO has seen since its foundation."

European Union diplomatic corp leader Josep Borrell's assessment that "what has happened shows that Europe needs to develop this famous 'strategic autonomy' in order to be ready to face challenges that affect us eventually."

British Parliament member and Afghan conflict veteran Tom Tugendhat on Biden's characterization of the Afghan army: "To see their commander in chief call into question the courage of men I fought with is shameful."

Senate Foreign Relations Committee chair Bob Menendez: "I am disappointed that the Biden Administration clearly did not accurately assess the implications of a rapid U.S. withdrawal."

Taliban forces using whips, guns and chemical irritants to drive away people seeking entry to Hamid Karzai International Airport. Afghan women handing off their babies to soldiers. 50,000 locals gathered at the airport gates. 

CNN reporter Clarissa Ward, who is on the ground in Kabul: "A lot of people outside that airport would like to know, if this isn't failure, what does failure look like exactly?"

The scale of what is happening - to Afghanistan, to the United States, to global security - is unprecedented. Make no mistake. The world is entering a very dark new era. 

What Afghan women can expect a return to

 Do you for a second buy that s--- about the Taliban wanting to see women participate in government and keep going to school?

Consider the fate last month of Najia:

Najia was at home with her three young sons and daughter in a small village in northern Afghanistan when Taliban fighters knocked on their door. 

Najia's daughter Manizha, 25, knew they were coming -- her mother had told her they'd done the same thing the previous three days, demanding that she cook food for up to 15 fighters.

"My mother told them, 'I am poor, how can I cook for you?'" said Manizha. "(The Taliban) started beating her. My mother collapsed and they hit her with their guns -- AK47s." 

Manizha said she yelled at the fighters to stop. They paused for a moment before throwing a grenade into the next room and fleeing as the flames spread, she said. The mother-of-four died from the beating.

The US president who was predecessor to the current one appeased these monsters and the current US president has given them carte blanche. 

We shall see if God forgives this.  

The world-stage reverberations begin

 Chinese state-run media is basically saying that, in the wake of the Afghanistan debacle, the US will not prevent the fall of Taiwan, which is being characterized as a matter of when, not if:

An editorial by the Global Times, a Chinese state-run outlet, took aim at Taiwan’s ruling Democratic Progressive Party and President Tsai Ing-wen.

“From what happened in Afghanistan, [the DPP] should perceive that once a war breaks out in the Straits, the island’s defense will collapse in hours and the US military won’t come to help,” the editorial states. “As a result, the DPP authorities will quickly surrender, while some high-level officials may flee by plane.”

The editorial called on the DPP to “keep cross-Straits [of Taiwan] peace with political means, rather than acting as strategic pawns of the US and bear the bitter fruits of a war.”

Global Times editor-in-chief Hu Xijin also commented on the Afghanistan withdrawal on Twitter.

“After the fall of the Kabul regime, the Taiwan authorities must be trembling,” Hu wrote. “Don’t look forward to the US to protect them. Taipei officials need to quietly mail-order a Five-Star Red Flag from the Chinese mainland. It will be useful one day when they surrender to the PLA.”

It doesn't get much more explicit than that. 

 

 

Afghanistan

 Because this is 2021 in post-America, hard and fast takes on this are, like school-district mask mandates, whether global climate conditions necessitate urgent collective action, and whether there is anything systemic about whatever degree of racism still exists in our society, likely to outnumber more multifaceted conclusions. 

I don't say this as an excuse to equivocate. Anybody who doesn't assert that this is a foreign policy debacle of historic proportions has a woefully underbaked understanding of what is happening, in my book.

The US State Department begging the Taliban to spare our embassy in Kabul, the beheading of Afghan government troops who have surrendered, the drawing up of lists of girls and women between the ages of 15 and 45 in the conquered provinces for the purpose of forcing them to marry Taliban fighters, the influx of jihadis from the UK, Libya, Syria and Pakistan, China's indication that it is prepared to recognize a Taliban government, and the loss of intelligence capabilities add up to an absolute disaster. 

Using this to score points against the Biden administration is an exercise in sleaze, given Trump's plans to host a Taliban delegation, back when "peace" talks were underway, at Camp David on September 11 of last year, and his endless-war talk since entering the political arena in 2015. 

This is not to say that Americans haven't grown tired of US presence in Afghanistan. 20 years is a long time. But is there a widespread understanding that we've only had a relatively small military footprint there for many years?

A development like this doesn't happen in a vacuum. Following as this does on the heels of two other colossal Biden-administration foreign-policy blunders - allowing completion of the Nord Stream pipeline in Europe, and inviting a team from the UN Human Rights Council to come to the US to assess our societal health regarding race relations - it's apt to leave allies as bewildered as Trump's erratic approach did. 

This feels like the catalyst of ramifications to come. The way we were holding those ramifications at bay was far from perfect, but telling the Taliban "have at it" is going to prove grimly consequential. 

Saturday roundup

 I won't deny it, people. This has been an ordeal. 

A layman such as myself is not equipped to parse how many of my symptoms are due to the infection itself and how many due to the antibiotic. I just know my bursts of energy and clarity have to be acted on; they're brief and only come along about twice daily. Otherwise it's sleep, eat a little something (my appetite, customarily voracious, is about one-tenth its normal level) do my physical therapy, read, get sick. 

But the world has not ceased to be a place that merits our attention. 

Forthwith some nuggets on various aspects of that world, for your reading pleasure:

Climate scientist Judith Curry asks a question that merits examination:

How would you explain the complexity and uncertainty surrounding climate change plus how we should respond (particularly with regards to CO2 emissions) in five minutes?

You might go about it like this:

Let me start with a quick summary of what is referred to as the ‘climate crisis:’

Its warming.  The warming is caused by us.  Warming is dangerous.  We need to urgently transition to renewable energy to stop the warming.  Once we do that, sea level rise will stop and the weather won’t be so extreme.

So what’s wrong with this narrative?  In a nutshell, we’ve vastly oversimplified both the problem and its solutions.  The complexity, uncertainty, and ambiguity of the existing knowledge about climate change is being kept away from the policy and public debate. The solutions that have been proposed are technologically and politically infeasible on a global scale.

Specifically with regards to climate science. The sensitivity of the climate to a doubling of carbon dioxide has a factor of three uncertainty.  Climate model predictions of alarming impacts for the 21st century are driven by an emissions scenario, RCP8.5, that is highly implausible. Climate model predictions neglect scenarios of natural climate variability, which dominate regional climate variability on interannual to multidecadal time scales.  And finally, emissions reductions will do little to improve the climate of the 21st century; if you believe the climate models, most of the impacts of emissions reductions will be felt in the 22nd century and beyond.

Whether or not warming is ‘dangerous‘ is an issue of values, about which science has nothing to say.  According to the IPCC, there is not yet evidence of changes in the global frequency or intensity of hurricanes, droughts, floods or wildfires.  In the U.S., the states with by far the largest population growth are Florida and Texas, which are warm, southern states.  Property along the coast is skyrocketing in value.  Personal preference and market value do not yet regard global warming as ‘dangerous.’ 

AEI fellow Max Eden has a bracing piece at Newsweek on why the teaching of critical race theory in public schools should indeed be banned:

In January 2021, OCR determined that the Evanston/Skokie school district violated Title VI of the Civil Rights Act when it separated students and staff by race, publicly shamed students based on their race and told teachers to take student race into account in discipline.

But after President Biden issued his executive order on "racial equity," OCR took the nearly unprecedented step of suspending its own decision. No one should believe the decision would have been suspended if minority students were the ones being targeted. The simplest explanation: The federal government does not intend to enforce civil rights laws when white students or teachers are victimized.

This is what makes these "CRT bans" so necessary. In the 1960s, it became undeniable that some states wouldn't apply 14th Amendment protections to all citizens, so Congress passed the Civil Rights Act. Today, it has become apparent that the federal government is not equally and consistently enforcing the Civil Rights Act. It is, therefore, up to the states to step up to protect students from discrimination and racially hostile environments.

A stark assessment of the current state of affairs in Afghanistan:

"The important thing is how quickly [the U.S. withdrawal] has accelerated the disintegration of Afghanistan," D'Agata told CBS News chief Washington correspondent Major Garrett in this week's episode of "The Takeout" podcast. "There is a two-minute offense that the Taliban were starting to implement… it has stunned everybody — the Afghans, Americans, the White House — how quickly the Taliban advance in the offensive has gone on in the past six weeks or so." 

This one goes back a little, but I just ran across it. Sharon James, social policy analyst for the Christian Institute in the United Kingdom, writes at Tabletalk on how there is no basis for morality without God. 

Ted Campbell, a professor at Southern Methodist University's Perkins School of Theology, writing at Firebrand, on some context for the looming fissure of the United Methodist Church. 

Laura K. Field at The Bulwark on the sad descent of the Claremont Institute from highly esteemed think tank to Trumpist dumpster fire. 

 

Sunday roundup

 Sorry for the prolonged absence. Let's just say some health issues arose. Alas, it's a new day and there's much to avail ourselves of, so let's get started.

Greg Weiner has a piece at Law & Liberty entitled "Why We Cannot Just 'Follow the Science'" that makes clear that other actors besides those who collect and analyze data need to have a say in drawing public-policy conclusions. He begins by citing the opprobrium Jopn Stewart came in for as a result of a recent conversation with Stephen Colbert, in which Stewart made the following remark:

“Science is incredible,” Stewart told Stephen Colbert. “But they don’t know when to stop.” And then he went, apparently, too far:

Can I say this about scientists? I love them and they do such good work but they are going to kill us all. … Here’s how I believe the world ends. … The world ends, the last words man utters are somewhere in a lab. A guy goes, ‘Huhuh, it worked.’

But why should his view get dismissed out of hand? 

Paul Waldman of The Washington Post, reasonably arguing that celebrities should swim in their own lanes was particularly defensive of experts:

[Stewart’s] attack on expertise reminds us why expertise is so important. … That’s not to say that experts don’t often have biases or blind spots, because they do. Sometimes, they can be catastrophic. But it’s not because experts can’t be trusted, it’s because something kept them from seeing what they should have, or — perhaps more often — they just didn’t have enough information to arrive at the best judgment.

That view of experts is built atop a romantic idea of human nature. Substitute “politicians” for “experts,” and one can see why. Are we so far removed from the 20th century that scientific and technocratic abuse is unthinkable? Waldman may be correct that most experts mean well, but that does not address the reality that people with power need to be watched. Expertise can become tyrannical when it denies the authority of politics to question it. That is not to accuse any individual of doing so, but a theory of complete deference to experts—besides entangling itself in internal tensions—abdicates political responsibility.

There is a direct line between an ethic of deferring to experts and early 20th century Progressivism, a movement whose leaders—like Woodrow Wilson—would not all survive today’s scrutiny. Wilson himself is proof that expertise can be helpful or haughty. It can inform judgment or so ensconce itself in rigidity that accommodation to circumstances becomes impossible.

Early Progressives, like Lester Frank Ward, were so enamored of expertise that they thought the scientific method could be applied to politics. Their motive bears emphasis: In Dynamic Sociology, Ward argued that expertise was necessary because citizens were ignorant. The point was to empower “the few progressive individuals by whose dynamic actions social progress is secured.” The use of experts could “place [Americans] upon the highway to a condition of intelligence which, when attained, will in turn work out the problem of inaugurating a scientific legislature and a system of scientific legislation.”

Never mind the condescension. This is a road to abuse. Especially in today’s academic climate of hyper-specialty, scientists might well not see either the potential dangers of their work or, more important, sources of knowledge beyond it. Stewart’s prediction of scientists wreaking disaster—delivered, again, as a comedic rant—should not be dismissed out of hand.

While we're on the subject of the politicization of the word "science," Benjamin Zycher of the American Enterprise Institute says that righties - principled righties willing to engage in substantive discussion of particular issues, anyway - have the better argument where climate matters are concerned, but they need to formulate a way to participate in the conversation and stay away from dismissive bonehead-isms:

So long as Democrats can get away with presenting theirs as the “party of science,” they will continue to operate with a significant strategic advantage when it comes to public debates on climate policies that will have profound impacts on the country for generations to come. Instead of merely dismissing the faux science that lends support to climate alarmism as a “hoax,” conservatives must do more to engage with and reclaim the growing body of scientific evidence that supports their climate-change realism.

Stephanie Slade at Reason asks why fusionism wouldn't still be a viable way forward.  Fusionism was the basis for the rise of the 20th century conservative movement. It was basically the brainchild of Frank S. Meyer, one of the original editors of National Review. The problem for those 1950s-era thinkers seeking a way to unite libertarians - with their free-market purism and hands-off approach to individual behavior choices - with traditionalists, who brought a fealty to a transcendent order, and its implications for individual choice. There's been a lot of talk about how, since the lay of the world-stage land is so different in the post-Cold War era, the fusionist alliance is hopelessly fractured. Slade asks, is that necessarily so?

The central insight of fusionism is that the common good is best achieved when the state stays focused on protecting rights and liberties, leaving individuals and voluntary associations to do the rest. To be clear, there is nothing easy about that answer.

The post-liberal temptation is to believe that government power can be a substitute for the hard labor of institution building and cultural change. It isn't. The solution must begin at home—on the front porch, around the kitchen table, and in the mirror. The law is not a magic wand. There are no magic wands, and there is no shortcut to the good society. 

This one's a long read, but worth your while. Aaron Hanna, a black conservative writing at Quillette, is willing to concede that, overall, yes, the agency of individual human beings must be at the forefront of discussions about race, but that those of his classification need to fully consider all factors involved:

To the great frustration of black conservatives, progressive black thought has dominated the intellectual and cultural landscape over the last few years (decades, many would complain). As a result, conservatives have spent a great deal of energy criticizing progressive intellectuals such as Ta-Nehisi Coates, Nikole Hannah-Jones, Ibram X. Kendi, and Isabel Wilkerson, rather than engaging in the kind of self-criticism that would help them develop their own arguments. Like most black conservatives, I am not convinced that racism/anti-racism is the best framework for advancing racial equality, that “caste” is the best metaphor for describing race relations in our country, or that movements to “defund” the police will decrease crime in majority black neighborhoods. But what do black conservatives offer other than criticism of progressive ideas?

CNN national security analyst Peter Bergen says that, no matter what voices from what sides insist that the US has been in Afghanistan too long and that that's the long and the short of the matter, the pullout now underway is going to be a disaster, and not just for the Afghan people:

Habiba Sarabi, an Afghan government negotiator engaging in talks with the Taliban, told CNN, "With the imminent removal of all United States forces in just a few weeks, the Taliban are moving rapidly, resulting in a swift deterioration in the security environment. We were caught off guard by the scale and scope of setbacks in the north."

The United States has contributed to the deteriorating security situation by consistently saying for more than a decade that it is leaving Afghanistan, which has undermined the Afghan government and strengthened the resolve of the Taliban who have won at the negotiating table from the Americans what they failed to win on the battlefield.

Without swift action by the Biden administration we could see in Afghanistan a remix of the disastrous US pullout from Saigon in 1975 and the summer of 2014 in Iraq when ISIS took over much of the country following the US pullout from the country three years earlier. That withdrawal was negotiated by then-vice president Biden.

The Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, a Washington-based think tank, assesses that the Taliban now control 25 per cent of the Afghan population, while the government controls 40 per cent of the population, and just over a third of Afghans live in regions that are contested between the Taliban and the government

The Taliban have seized 50 of the country's 370 districts since May, according to the United Nations. 

The premise of the many years of US-Taliban negotiations has been that the United States will draw down militarily in exchange for the Taliban severing relations with al-Qaeda -- the terrorist organization it harbored at the time of the planning and execution of the terrorist attacks against the US on September 11, 2001.

This has been, to put it charitably, a charade, according to the United Nations, which reported just this month that the two groups remain "closely aligned and show no signs of breaking ties." The UN report notes that Taliban-al Qaeda ties have actually "grown deeper."

Rod Dreher, writing at The American Conservative, says that Joe Biden should be denied communion by the Catholic Church:

 The dilemma the Catholic bishops face comes down to this: is the Catholic Church meant to be a part of society, marching along with it, or is it meant to stand in the middle of the road, telling society to STOP? I think this question is at the heart of the division I observed among French Catholics when it came to my book The Benedict Option. Older Catholics there — Catholics my age (54) and older — tended to think the book was too radical. Younger Catholics, by contrast, understood it and accepted it. (This wasn’t universally true; I’m generalizing.) The difference, I think, has to do with how they see the Church’s relationship to the modern world. The older Catholics had not accepted that if the Catholic Church is true to itself, it will be hated by the modern world. The younger ones had, and had cast their lot with Catholicism, contra mundum. 

It comes down to this: in this moment, is the Church (not just the Catholic Church) called to be prophetic, or therapeutic? I think that only by being prophetic — calling the world out — can it be therapeutic, and heal the world of its brokenness.

Biden now says he's willing to sign the bipartisan infrastructure compromise Congress has crafted, one the scope of which is narrowed to stuff that most folks would consider to actually be infrastructure, and wait until later to work on the do-gooder statist stuff the Dems wanted to see included. As a result, Republicans are back on board with a favorable view of it. 

 

 

 

 

This is no way to leave Afghanistan

 It seems that Biden has a bit in common with the Trumpists who are enamored of the phrase "endless wars" and the Antiwar.com crowd who comes at it from a somewhat different angle - tying opposition to pretty much any use of force to a defense of the free market, something that still has me scratching my head after years of trying to see the connection.

He's set a date, and one fraught with symbolism at that, to bring every last troop home from Afghanistan. They'll be out by September 11.

He had to thumb his nose at top Pentagon leadership to do it:

As Biden weighed a full exit from the country this spring, top military leaders advocated for keeping a small U.S. presence on the ground made up primarily of special operations forces and paramilitary advisers, arguing that a force of a few thousand troops was needed to keep the Taliban in check and prevent Afghanistan from once again becoming a haven for terrorists, according to nine former and current U.S. officials familiar with the discussions.

 

Gen. Mark Milley, chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, as well as the four-star commanders of U.S. Forces-Afghanistan, Central Command and Special Operations Command, were emphatic proponents of this strategy, the current and former officials said, some of whom spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive planning.

But in the end, Biden and his top national security deputies did what no previous president has done successfully — they overrode the brass.

“President Biden has made a judgment that those are manageable concerns and not as important as drawing American participation to an end, and so everybody shut up and did it,” said Kori Schake, the director of foreign and defense policy at the American Enterprise Institute.

Adam Kinzinger makes plain that the small contingent still there is a crucial force for stability:

Unlike Genghis Khan and Alexander the Great, the Soviet Union and the British Empire, the United States finds itself in a unique position that no other nation has found themselves in before when it comes to having a presence in Afghanistan: America is welcome.

Through the stabilizing efforts of the United States military, the NATO mission, and the Afghan government, we have achieved so much. Over 9 million Afghan children are in school today, one-third of whom are young girls who were previously banned from accessing education by the Taliban.

Today, Afghan women are being empowered across society more than ever before, serving in high-level positions from government ministers to CEOs to generals. Preserving women’s rights was tied for the #1 policy priority in a peace deal among Afghans, signaling how important women’s empowerment has become to all of Afghan society.

David Petraeus has some deep concerns about the decision:

“I understand the frustrations very much that have led to the decision,” said Petraeus. “Nobody wants to see a war ended more than those who have actually fought it, and been privileged to command it and also write the letters of condolence home every night to America’s mothers and fathers. But I think we need to be really careful with our rhetoric, because ending U.S. involvement in an endless war doesn't end the endless war. It just ends our involvement. And I fear that this war is going to get worse.” 

Petraeus said he worries the Taliban will go on the offensive, ungoverned spaces will grow, and the terrorist organizations that use them will flourish. “I don’t see how you withdraw and maintain the capabilities that one would like to have there still.”  

Announcing a date months ahead of time, knowing that one of the grimmest groups in the world is licking its chops at the prospect of collapsing the Afghan government and reinstating the nightmare regime it had imposed circa 2000 is ill-advised in the extreme.

A major foreign-policy blunder on the Biden administration's part.

The Krebs firing

 One more conclusive example of how the Very Stable Genius prioritizes his fragile ego over national security:

President Trump took to Twitter late Tuesday to fire his top cybersecurity official via tweet for not toeing the line on his “rigged” election narrative.

“The recent statement by Chris Krebs on the security of the 2020 Election was highly inaccurate, in that there were massive improprieties and fraud - including dead people voting, Poll Watchers not allowed into polling locations, ‘glitches’ in the voting machines which changed votes from Trump to Biden, late voting, and many more. Therefore, effective immediately, Chris Krebs has been terminated as Director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency,” Trump declared.

Krebs, who had set up a web page to counter disinformation about the security of the election, had reportedly been expecting to be fired after becoming one of the few in Trump’s administration to dispute his claims.

He reacted to his termination with a brief statement on his personal Twitter account: “Honored to serve. We did it right. Defend Today, Secure Tomorrow.”

His firing comes as more and more of the president’s allegations of voting discrepancies fall apart in court. Just hours before Krebs’ ouster on Tuesday, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court ruled against the Trump campaign’s claims that observers were not able to properly monitor absentee vote-counting.

GOP Throws More Crap at the Wall as Trump Legal Losses Pile Up

While the president has repeatedly tried to sound the alarm over supposed voting discrepancies that he claims robbed him of victory in the Nov. 3 election, officials have said there is no evidence to back up his assertions. Even the Trump campaign’s own lawyers, in their legal blitz to prevent the certification of Joe Biden’s victory, have struggled to present evidence of a “rigged” election in court; many of their legal challenges alleging voter fraud have collapsed when judges grilled them on their claims. In some cases, the evidence was deemed to be hearsay gathered via a “voter fraud” website. In others, Trump campaign lawyers admitted under questioning that observers were not blocked from monitoring the vote count as the complaint alleged.

Lawmakers responded to news of Krebs’ termination with praise for his work in protecting the election.

“Chris Krebs is a dedicated public servant who has done a remarkable job during a challenging time,” Sen. Richard Burr (R-NC) said in a statement. He went on to say the work of Krebs and his CISA team “should serve as a model for other government agencies” and was “essential in protecting the 2020 U.S. presidential election against threats of foreign interference.”

Reps. Bennie G. Thompson (D-MS) and Lauren Underwood (D-IL) issued a joint statement calling Trump’s firing of Krebs “disturbing” and “antidemocratic.”

“The fact is that, since Election Day, President Trump has sought to delegitimize the election results by engaging in a disinformation campaign that could shatter public confidence in our elections for generations. Director Krebs put national security ahead of politics and refused to use his position to do the President’s bidding, so the President fired him,” they said.

“In firing Director Krebs for refusing to lend credibility to his baseless claims and conspiracy theories about voter fraud, the President is telling officials throughout the Administration to put his political interests ahead of their responsibilities to the American people.”

This, of course, comes on the heels of Trump's firing of Defense Secretary Mark Esper, a move during what should be a transition period, characteristically a time of relative wobbliness. This vulnerability does not go unnoticed in the world:

Even under the best of circumstances, a presidential transition "is a period when we aren't necessarily firing on all cylinders in terms of the people and processes that manage national security issues for the nation, which creates that sense of heightened vulnerability," Nick Rasmussen, a former head of the National Counterterrorism Center, told NBC News.

"This particular move today creates concern and uncertainty because there are already concerns about the president's decision-making style and what he might do in the remaining days of his presidency," he said.

We also must include as part of the context for the Krebs termination the abrupt drawdown of US troops in Afghanistan. The manner in which that is being proposed has raised concerns:

In a rare rebuke of Donald Trump, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has warned that the outgoing administration’s planned drawdown of troops in Afghanistan would “hand a weakened and scattered al-Qaeda a big, big propaganda victory and a renewed safe haven for plotting attacks against America.”

Mr McConnell couched his warnings about the hazards of an Afghanistan troop withdrawal in a speech on the Senate floor on Monday in more general praise for Mr Trump’s foreign policy achievements over the last four years. But the recently re-elected majority leader’s comments fit a larger pattern of pushing back — gently — against the president’s most anti-interventionist instincts in the Middle East.

“A disorganized retreat would jeopardize the track record of major successes this administration has worked hard to compile” in the region, Mr McConnell said on Monday.

Still, at this late date, this dangerously unfit buffoon has slavish devotees who are perpetuating his delusions and indulging his impulses. Townhall, American Greatness, The Federalist, OANN, Newsmax TV and the wilds of after-8 PM FNC are determined to ride the Trump Train all the way over the cliff.

It's time for actual conservatives to turn around and step back onto solid ground. There's not a moment to lose in beginning the process of rebuilding an understanding among thoughtful Americans as to what the immutable principles informing our positions are.

We'll just have to hope for the best during eight more weeks of winging it in place of coherent policy.