Category Archives: culture

Despotic Regime Staying Power

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Such polities have a staying power that the West has long been unable to understand. For instance,

Iran’s ability to resist despite large civilian casualties, the decapitation of much of the regime’s leadership, and severe economic damage shows the staying power of authoritarian governments. For decades, Tehran developed a toolbox that includes widespread political repression, relentless propaganda, an ideology of martyrdom and a powerful security apparatus—all aimed at protecting the state from enemies abroad and within.

But who (emphatically not what) is this state that’s being preserved?

The men and women populating the government and its levers of power are that “state.” These men and women don’t think like we do; in particular, they don’t put the same value on life that we do. What these personages value is their own power and their own lives; they don’t care a single minim about the value of the subjects over whom they reign, nor do they care a whit about the economic damage done to their nation as a whole or to those unvalued subjects. None of those tools of power are designed to protect their “authoritarian government,” they’re designed to protect the lives, personal power, and economic condition those men and women who manifest that government.

Nikolay Kozhanov, of Qatar University:

The state’s first priority was to ensure the survival of the regime. There are reasons why the government, elite, and to some extent the people, end up uniting around the regime.

Kozhanov needs to take that one step further: the state and the regime are those persons, not an impersonal, generalized institution to which we too often refer, in misleading shorthand, as “government” or “state” or “regime.” Those institutions don’t exist without the men and women who occupy the various positions in them.

The leadership…shares an ability to endure casualties and economic hardship, pain that is often borne by their populations. And when their people do rise up in protest, the regime’s foot soldiers have proven ready to use lethal violence to put down dissent.
“There is a much higher tolerance for pain among authoritarian regimes,” said Edward Howell, an international-relations lecturer at the University of Oxford. “That’s because we see very little evidence of them prioritizing the needs of their people.”

None of that should be a surprise. That leadership doesn’t care about the casualties of the people over whom they reign; those unfortunates are merely tools for maintaining/enhancing their own wealth, ego, power. Even a despotic regime’s “tolerance for pain” is a misnomer. They don’t feel the pain their subjects are experiencing, they feel only the pain they personally feel. Nor do they prioritize the needs of their subjects; their subjects are only tools.

In the end, there are only two ways to collapse a “state.” In many cases, those state men and women are pecuniary and can be bought off—Idi Amin, for example—especially if cut off from the money and material wealth sources of their physical comfort. A state comprised of ideologues, though, won’t collapse until the ideologues do: they’re cut off from life itself—they’re killed.

Progressive-Democratic Party and Religious Freedom

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Consider the Dominican Sisters of Hawthorne, who operate a 42-bed nursing facility in New York that gives free palliative care to poor people with cancer. The State of New York is trying to force this Catholic institution to deliberately violate their religious beliefs. The New York State Department of Health requires the Sisters to begin

  • assigning patients to rooms by self-identified sex
  • [stop] segregating restrooms by biological sex
  • use…patients’ preferred pronouns even when the patient is not present
  • allow patients to cross-dress

The Department is threatening the Sisters with fines, injunctions, potential loss of licensing, and imprisonment if they do not repudiate their religious beliefs and commit these egregious to them acts.

The Sisters have applied for a religious exemption, and the State has ignored their application.

The Sisters are just the tip of a monstrous iceberg. This is Party’s attitude toward the 1st Amendment’s Establishment and Free Exercise clauses. Party already badly wants to disarm us and deny us our right to speak as we see fit. Now we’re to have no conscience, as well.

The Strait and Victory

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There is a two week cease fire more or less in progress in the US-Iran portion of the US/Israeli war against Iran, one that is subject to the Islamic Republic of Iran agreeing to the COMPLETE, IMMEDIATE, and SAFE OPENING of the Strait of Hormuz. Iran has not done so.

On Wednesday [after the cease fire nominally went into effect], Iran told mediators that it would limit the number of ships crossing the Strait of Hormuz to around a dozen a day and charge tolls. The Iranian navy also told ships anchored nearby that they still needed Iran’s permission to cross the strait. “If any vessel tries to transit without permission, [it] will be destroyed,” according to a recording reviewed by The Wall Street Journal.

The White House is insisting that what the Iranian personnel say in public is radically different from what they’re saying in private. Either way, though, those are just words. Actions matter, and so far those actions include a lack of tanker and cargo ship movement through the strait beyond a few that have paid as much as $2 million in protection money to the Iranians. That’s not a COMPLETE, IMMEDIATE, and SAFE OPENING.

Meanwhile, Iran is attempting after the fact to alter the terms of the cease fire to include Lebanon and Israel’s campaign against the Iranian terrorist surrogate Hezbollah. That that’s a separate matter is unimportant to Iran as its personnel, once again, welch on an agreement, tap things along, and stall, stall, stall.

That Iran’s military capacity has been devastated is true enough.

…strikes destroyed roughly 80% of Iran’s air defenses, more than 1,500 targets, as well as more than 450 ballistic missile storage facilities and 800 one-way attack drone storage facilities. The operation has also decimated Iran’s defense industrial base, Caine said, including shattering more than 80% of its missile factories.

But those numbers are just the modern body count, and they’re just as meaningless without context. How do those losses compare with what Iran started with? How many of those missiles, rockets, drones, and launch systems does it have left? How many of those small boats? How much of its industrial base is left?

The current situation seems similar to that of the Rome-Carthage wars, particularly the second one. From Adrian Goldsworthy’s The Fall of Carthage:

Despite their appalling losses, the string of humiliating defeats, the defections of some Italian allies, and the continuing malevolent presence of Hannibal’s army in Italy, the Romans simply refused to come to terms with the Carthaginians…. They were then able to beat the enemy on every other front and force the undefeated Hannibal to evacuate Italy…. The Carthaginians expected a war to end in a negotiated peace. The Romans expected a war to end in total victory or their own annihilation, something which no contemporary state had the resources to achieve.

We’re not dead yet, say the Iranian negotiators, so we haven’t lost.

It’s time for them to die.

ACLU Exposes Its Intrinsic Racism

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Janai Nelson, ACLU President, made the organization’s, and her own, racism plain in her Sunday letter to The Wall Street Journal‘s Letters section, a letter in which she accused DoJ’s Assistant AG of its Civil Rights Division, Harmeet Dhillon of

undermin[ing] the rights she was appointed to protect. In a case before the Supreme Court, the department under her leadership filed an amicus brief arguing that Louisiana’s intentional creation of a second majority-minority congressional district violates the Constitution. Her position on this issue would limit voting rights for black Americans by making it incredibly difficult for black voters to elect their candidates of choice.

Nelson is ignoring her BFF’s and favorite Progressive-Democrat ex-President. then-Illinois State Senator, Barack Obama’s statement at Party’s 2004 Convention:

[T]here’s not a liberal America and a conservative America; there’s the United States of America. There’s not a black America and white America and Latino America and Asian America; there’s the United States of America.

Especially that last: There’s not a black America and white America and Latino America and Asian America; there’s the United States of America. Race doesn’t matter in this nation, for all that bigotry (hold up a mirror facing you, Ms Nelson) still exists here. There are only citizens of the United States.

I repeat the relevant clause of the 14th Amendment to our Constitution, even though that’s lost on an entity and its chief for whom our Constitution has no meaning:

No State shall…deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

There’s not a black voter and white voter and Latino voter and Asian voter; there’s the United States of America voters. Gerrymandering by race is racist at its core.

Nelson would have a stronger case were she to argue that that same 14th Amendment clause makes gerrymandering on the basis of political party unconstitutional. It’s instructive, though, that she chose race as the core of her special-treatment-by-gerrymandering argument.

It’s Not Up To Them

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Or it shouldn’t be. Harvard may be moving to control grade inflation for its students—everyone gets an A—by capping the number of A’s a professor can hand out in his classes.

The whining and bellyaching from the students are loud and hysterical—”crude and absurd” they caterwaul. That shouldn’t matter to school management, though; the kiddies are there to learn in what should be a challenging environment, not to get stars on their calendars and Blue Ribbons for showing up.

A frenzied debate has gripped campus, with students protesting that the changes would increase stress, fuel competition, and discourage academic exploration.

Bunch of crybabies. Stress, as much as happiness and ease, are a part of life and is much more productive than celebrating unearned plaudits and partying. It’s cowardly of them to fear competition; aside from strengthening them for life in the world, competition is how progress is made—good ideas, mechanisms, techniques, et al., survive, even flourish, while bad ideas fall by the wayside. Without competition, the latter simply clutter to the point of pollution everything else. Finally, only the timid would be discouraged from exploration, and the stress and competition would only strengthen the timid, or move them out of the school altogether. Those pupils don’t belong in school, anyway; they’re only wasting their parents’ money and whatever school financial aid they’ve been getting.

“The fact that this policy even MIGHT go into effect with 94% student disapproval is absurd and goes to show how much this administration cares about us,” said one commenter on a Harvard discussion forum.

Crybabies, indeed. The school’s caring would be coming—if management has the backbone to proceed—in the form of badly needed tough love.

If the students put as much energy into their studies as they are in protesting having to work at those studies, they’d be doing better and be stronger graduates for that.

There’s another aspect to this, though:

Harvard’s faculty is set to vote next week on a proposal to cap the number of A’s per course, which now comprise more than half of undergraduate grades after years of inflation. The plan also suggests getting rid of GPA as an internal metric, instead using percentile rank to calculate honors like cum laude recognition.

It shouldn’t be up to the faculty, either. Their input would be useful on something like this, but they work, at least nominally, for the school management team, not the other way around, and this sort of thing more properly belongs as a management decision.

In the end, three things need to happen. The first is to implement the system without hesitation while recognizing, and acting on the recognition, that this is only a first step (capping A’s but not A-‘s is just silly). Second is to recognize that the decision is management’s not faculty’s and proceed with or without faculty “approval.” Third is handling the pupils and faculty members who can’t handle this academic culture change: expel the students who don’t adapt, and send the faculty members who don’t adapt (including by slow-walking implementation or finding ways to weasel-word around the change) on their way to another enterprise’s payroll.