BatFlattery

What happens when you deliberately destroy your country’s once-strong, food-exporting farming infrastructure, condemning millions of your people to years of starvation? Why, you become the front runner to lead the World Food Programme.

But I suppose that’s what happens when “democracy” means letting a bunch of kleptocratic thugs run Africa as though it were their own personal fief, all in the name of emancipation. And unfortunately South Africa is heading down the same path. All the democrats and anti-racists cried foul when cynics branded the first non-racial elections in Zimbabwe as “one man, one vote, once.” But unfortunately the cynics were right. And for South Africa, I fear it’s just a question of time. If they really cared about the welfare of Zimbabweans they would force Mugabe out. By pretending all is well, they are making clear what their priorities are: solidarity with a dictator, because he is black. But then again, racism’s only bad if you’re white, I suppose.

Bill Woodcock at the U.N. Internet Governance Forum, responding to the
Cuban delegate’s evasion of the question:

“Let me answer the question about what percentage of Cubans are
connected to the Internet. … Zero percent of Cubans are connected to
the Internet. The Cuban government operates an incumbent phone
company, which maintains a Web cache. Cubans who wish to use the
Internet browse the government Web cache. They do not have
unrestricted access to the Internet.”

An interesting article by Daniel Pipes argues that just because
America invaded Iraq to protect its interests doesn’t mean it is
obliged to rehabilitate it. He suggests redeploying the coalition
forces to the uninhabited areas, where they can protect the borders,
ensure no new dictators take over, etc, but leave the policing and the
ground-level security to the Iraqis. It’s certainly time the Iraqis
took some responsibility for their own fate. Saddam is gone: there’s
no excuse now for not taking action. Let’s see some.

In Iraq, Stay the Course – but Change It

So you’ve got Tony Blair: a man to be greatly admired for his
principled stand on spreading democracy in the Middle East and getting
rid of loathsome tyrants, yet a man (the moaning of the hardcore
Labourites notwithstanding) overly enamoured of the idea of the State
as a positive force in the lives of its citizens, and a force which
should consequently be made larger over time: the latter is of course
a Bad Idea and the person holding it is not to be admired on that
account.

And then you’ve got George W Bush, a man to be greatly admired for his
principled support of Tony Blair’s stand on spreading democracy etc,
such support notable for going well beyond mere moral encouragement,
yet a man given to pork binges that would make a Democrat blush, were
they capable of blushing, and again not a particularly admirable
trait.

What to make of the parallels? Is there in fact no contradiction, that
the actions in the external and internal sphere are both of a piece?
Could it be that the principled stand is nothing more than the
overweening desire to interfere in the lives of other people, and that
we who find it admirable, do so chiefly because it is happening to
other people and not to us?

I ask this particularly in view of the fact that the situation in Iraq
seems to be rapidly moving towards a resemblance with the situation of
the Palestinian Arabs, where leaders promise to crack down on
militants who carry out atrocities, yet these same militants form a
significant part of the leader’s support, and everyone knows the
promise is as much action as will ever be forthcoming. So as things
degenerate into Business As Usual in Arabland, it’s hard to escape the
conclusion that the outside interference of the Iraq war was as
pointless and counterproductive as any other state intervention. The
fact that all the usual suspects who have in the past urged more state
intervention in the domestic sphere, were in this case against this
particular state intervention, should not have blinded us to the
truth: that, whatever the moral reasons for doing so, interfering in
the lives of ordinary Iraqis was a profoundly Big Government thing to
do.

Now there certainly was a moral case for the removal of Saddam: of
that there is no doubt. And there is a moral case for staying the
course and finishing what has been started. But I just find it
interesting to think about whether there really is a contradiction at
the heart of Bush and Blair, or whether they are actually the True
Prophets of universal interference in peoples’ lives, at home and
abroad.

Just thinking about Mugabe’s promise to continue to meet protest with violence:

Addressing a rented crowd bussed to Harare Airport, on his recent return from addressing the United Nations General Assembly in New York, Mugabe said he would continue to sanction the beating of labour leaders who disregard police orders.

Here we have the perfect example of why the UN is a failure. You can have thuggish dictators like Mugabe and Chavez stand up in New York and hand out the most outrageous abuse of their hosts, while no-one in their own countries is permitted a whisper of free speech. Refusing to look into the way in which the representatives of states achieve their status makes a mockery of the democratic procedures of the UN. What is the point of allowing a gangster free speech and a vote at the UN, when the people he supposedly represents did not vote for him and do not trust him to advance their aims? No representative of a government should be allowed to speak at the UN unless his government allows free speech at home. No representative should be allowed to take his seat at the UN unless his appointment is made by a government duly elected in free and fair elections.

From that bastion of free expression and human rights, Cuba, comes news of the latest act of tolerance and openness:

Bulldozers dug up a street in front of the U.S. diplomatic mission in Havana on Wednesday apparently preparing to block the view of an electronic billboard carrying human rights messages that has angered President Fidel Castro.

U.S. diplomats said Cuba’s communist authorities were building a concrete wall or screen to obstruct view of the ticker, which displays messages to the Cuban people, news headlines and quotes from Abraham Lincoln, Mahatma Gandhi and Lech Walesa.

But the important thing is that Cubans have free healthcare, right?

Jeff Goldstein at Normblog:

Nuke it from orbit. It’s the only way to be sure.

For those of you who missed one of the greatest movies of all time, it’s one of the best quotes in Aliens.

Oliver Kamm on the latest antics of the Honourable Member for Bethnal Green:

After George travelled to Damascus last July to tell the Syrian people, who had had no say in the matter, how fortunate they were to have Bashar al-Assad as their leader, there were few ways open to him to lose his dignity further, and he at least showed imagination in finding one of them.

Of course, there’s the amazing success of the Iraqi elections. It says something about the negativity of the media coverage of Iraq that the success does amaze us: no-one was amazed that black South Africans went out and voted in the first democratic elections fifteen years ago. Mark Steyn looks at some of the reasons why, as only he can. (Unfortunately not everyone is sufficiently mentally healthy to enjoy this good news: this is now only on the Free Republic site because it has for some reason disappeared from both the Democratic Underground website and the Google cache.)

And then there is this. If you’re as tired as I am with all the nonsense about global warming (sorry, it’s climate change now, isn’t it – sounds silly to blame the snow storms in North America on warming now, doesn’t it) you may enjoy this speech by Michael Crichton (he of Jurassic Park fame) on the dangers of the “scientific consensus” that proponents of global warming theory are fond of saying is in favour of their theory:

Historically, the claim of consensus has been the first refuge of scoundrels; it is a way to avoid debate by claiming that the matter is already settled. Whenever you hear the consensus of scientists agrees on something or other, reach for your wallet, because you’re being had.Let’s be clear: the work of science has nothing whatever to do with consensus. Consensus is the business of politics. Science, on the contrary, requires only one investigator who happens to be right, which means that he or she has results that are verifiable by reference to the real world. In science consensus is irrelevant. What is relevant is reproducible results. The greatest scientists in history are great precisely because they broke with the consensus.

He goes on to provide plenty of examples of a consensus that was upheld by the scientific community for years, even decades, despite being completely wrong. This includes puerperal fever, the mythical “pellagra germ”, continental drift, and the cause of stomach ulcers.

Regarding global warming, Crichton makes some very valid criticism of the over-reliance on computer models:

This fascination with computer models is something I understand very well. Richard Feynmann called it a disease. I fear he is right. Because only if you spend a lot of time looking at a computer screen can you arrive at the complex point where the global warming debate now stands.

Nobody believes a weather prediction twelve hours ahead. Now we’re asked to believe a prediction that goes out 100 years into the future? And make financial investments based on that prediction? Has everybody lost their minds?

That would certainly seem to be the case. Read the full speech here.

One of the more amusing results of the Bush re-election has to be the sight of Democrats trying once again to come to terms with the continuing refusal of the American electorate to see things their way. Last time the narrowness of the result allowed them to fume that they “wuz robbed”, with some even denying that Dubya was in fact elected President.

This time, unfortunately for them, there is no such easy way out. With George W Bush the decisive winner of both the collegiate and the popular vote, it would seem that even the most hardened Democrat would have to accept reality. However, despite adopting the modest mantle of the “reality-based elite” it looks like adjusting to reality is as hard as ever. I feel that a Web metaphor might help.