Some of President Barack Obama’s unfulfilled promises await him. The promises will go unfulfilled, but there must be some publicity stunt that imitates tackling and fixing these promises. Faux gun control via executive orders may have inspired the president to cry on national television, but it did not change much, if anything, in the world of guns. No one cares that zero bankers have gone to jail or that the TBTF banks have actually grown, but progressives cannot be concerned with that, just “economic inequality.” One little promise remains: closing the enemy combatant prison at Guantanamo Bay.
This is still a jewel for the left to grasp at, and they still support it. They support even releasing these men despite many of them returning to a life of jihad. An updated report put the recidivism at roughly 1-in-5 released prisoners. This is part of the true split of left and right. The left is for chaos and disorder, while the right is about order. The left cannot grasp the need for special institutions to face this threat because the threat is part of their chaos game. The left cannot back off of their calls for closing it a decade ago because it has become a part of their holiness game.
While President Bush was a progressive in Republican attire, the creation of the Gitmo prison infrastructure was an attempt to manufacture order out of the chaos of fighting terrorists. It was a response to new warfare. The Geneva Conventions did allow for armies to execute non-uniformed combatants immediately. This was a leftover from when the Germans were taking potshots from random snipers in wars of old. How does a military handle non-uniformed fighters of value?
The problem with fighting a terror network and handling captured terrorist fighters was that they could provide valuable human intelligence about a threat that the US had very little information but was suddenly fighting. They could be interrogated for immediate intelligence, in order to thwart any potential follow-up attacks after 9/11, as well as filling out the network that, to the US, looked rather empty. Guantanamo was a simple concentration of the terrorists picked up around the globe.
The amazing thing about the left was that for always wanting to see the Constitution as a living document, which allows their trained judges to make things up as they go, the left clung to the Geneva Conventions. The media dutifully showed video images of terrorists kneeling in red suits. This was a moral outrage. Once the outrage bit was out there, the left and their foot soldiers had a talking point to rally around. They could claim moral superiority while never considering the threat that releasing these enemy combatants and terrorists posed. Once there was a possibility for virtue signaling their holiness by being kind or good to men who shot at American soldiers, the left charged forward, national security be damned. Good nations do not do this!
This also reveals the left’s love of chaos or willful ignorance to security threats. This was also reflected a decade ago with their approach towards terror as if it were crime. John Kerry even mentioned this conceptual grasp of terrorism in the 2004 election. There are similarities between, say, the Mob and a terror network, but the fat tail risk of large attacks makes it different. To give the left the benefit of the doubt momentarily, there is an argument with regards to terror in importance and to treat it procedurally. This reveals the weaker left problem of seeing it purely on the crime basis. This will eventually get to sociological excuses. This is the underlying basis for Marie Harf saying that the US could defeat ISIS with jobs. This is their ideology.
The darker interpretation is that the released prisoners can create more terror, and the chaos feeds the system’s need. Chaos creates a need for a police state to control a population. There is chaos for broken people as collateral damage for social work, and of course, more programs and aid to prevent little terrorists from growing up. The left will not pause to consider the idea of releasing Islamic ideological warriors into the American federal prison population, which already has enough black Muslim converts. Import the chaos for more leftist designed solutions. How much is terribly idiotic worldview and how much is nefarious desires for control? We will never know but it gets clearer and clearer that the two parts need each other.
The left’s obsession with closing Gitmo has no reasoning besides being good. There is no attempt to understand why it is used, just that it is bad and needs closing. It is the right thing to do. It is the moral thing to do. There is no logic, as it has become a religious tenet to the progressive faith. It is only moral because the priests of their faith, academia and the media told them so.
The defenders of Obama continue to claim that he would have closed Gitmo if not for Republican obstructionism. Odd, then, that Obama managed to get the Affordable Care Act passed with not a single Republican vote, and with the GOP and its various unofficial satellite organizations trying everything they could think of to try to stop it.
It seems that when it wants to be, the Democratic establishment is as capable of utterly ignoring the demands of its base as the Republican establishment is.
@ Ryan Landry
Per the recent podcast, you are Hestia Society’s resident “smart-guy” on economics/finance.
Any chance you will offer your perspectives on Hamilton, the Fed, Nick B. Steve stopping just short of calling Trump the “economic Jesus for whitey,” etc?
Funny, I don’t remember getting anywhere near that conclusion. I seem to remember making a (perhaps too nuanced for you) point that Trump might be able to improve the short term prospects, but leave the long term prospects as dismal as ever.
Note to Self: Do more to alienate listeners!!
Have you listened to what you said? It starts at 2:30:45. Main quote:
“(Trump) rebuilds American industry. We see enormous job growth and enormous economic growth, and America wins. And that’s going to be really good for people between the ages of maybe 12 and 22. Right now, in the short term and maybe for the rest of their adult lives.”
Since your time here would seem to be short, I won’t bother responding in much detail. I did listen to it at least twice. (Not including the recording.) And I guess I’m not seeing where I said “economic Jesus” stuff. I seem to recall a context where it delays the inevitable collapse. Maybe we just don’t agree on the definition of “long term”.
You don’t consider what you said (to say nothing of the actual probabilities of any them happening) as being ridiculously “messianic?”
You think a democratically elected president has the ability to do those things? Or even that a “king” of America could do those things? You completely divorce the human capital and psychology of the people from your analysis. I do not even understand how you can defend what you said and it will be telling if any other NRx types try to defend you.
To be clear, your sentiments are exactly why supporting Trump is far from risk-free. You are utterly primed for cognitive dissonance and smell similar to the liberals electing Obama.
Forget having “nice” things, it’s becoming increasingly likely we cannot even have the “less bad” things without the risks rising unacceptably high.
For further clarification on the last point, see Steve Sailer’s UNZ article titled “Why the Histrionic Left Is Helping Trump Win” and replace “the Left” with “the Reactionaries;” specifically:
“It’s just not the same with Obama or leftists in charge, which ultimately only leads to cognitive dissonance and disillusionment.”
You likely have a far better immune system than most on “the right” and yet you still fall prey to the same dynamic. Which makes the prospective risks that much greater.
This is from Artxell Knaphni responding to a post by Land (yes; I know you do not agree with Land or Tech-Comm, but the dynamic still applies):
“Any quasi-Darwinian system — i.e. any machinery that actually works — is nourished by chaos, exactly insofar as it is able to rid itself of failed experiments. The techno-commercial critique of democratized modernity is not that too much chaos is tolerated, but that not enough is able to be shed. The problem with bad government, which is to say with defective mechanisms of selection, is an inability to follow Cthulhu far enough. It is from turbulence that all things come.”
“Darwinian systems” are an ongoing race of elements adapting to conditions which they themselves constitute. Thus, any particular reading of ‘conditions’, done in a sectarian way, merely becomes a new ‘element’, reflexively producing new ‘conditions’, instantly outmoding itself.
1) “The techno-commercial critique of democratized modernity is not that too much chaos is tolerated, but that not enough is able to be shed.”
2) “The problem with bad government, which is to say with defective mechanisms of selection, is an inability to follow Cthulhu far enough.”
3) “It is from turbulence that all things come.”
Thus, according to your logic, if an ideal ‘Neoreactionary’ government was able to shed all ‘chaos’, there would be no ‘turbulence’ left, from which anything could come?
If you wish to reject that possibility, then you face the ineluctable conclusion that Neoreaction wholly depends on the very countervailing social forces animating its ethos of alleged dissatisfactions, that you call ‘chaos’, in order to produce anything at all. So why complain about chaos in the first instance, if you’re only going to praise & promote it as an engine of productivity, in the second instance?
Hmmm… It would seem an empirical question about just how much a “democratcially elected politician” could “improve things” (if he were given 100 days of whatever he wanted) and utterly a matter of faith to deem it un-possible. There are, I think, marginal, politically feasible actions that could temporarily improve material conditions. Building a goddamn wall is one of them. Mercantilist trade policies are another. I could of course be wrong. Not that I think these, or any democratically possible reforms, are long-term solutions to any fundamental and long-term social problems.
Good God, man, can’t a guy muse about lesser of evils every once in a while?
“Hmmm… It would seem an empirical question about just how much a “democratcially elected politician” could “improve things” (if he were given 100 days of whatever he wanted) and utterly a matter of faith to deem it un-possible.”
It does not appear to me as an “empirical question” or “a matter of faith.” At least not any more than alchemy’s un-possibility. And at that point; we are no longer discussing human beings, so what is the point.
“Building a goddamn wall is one of them. Mercantilist trade policies are another.”
The only debate I watched was about the first hour of Miami. In discussing his trade platform, Trump mentioned threatening China with tariffs if they don’t “behave.” He went on to say he knows manufacturers who want to “get into China” but they would be forced to pay a huge tax. It isn’t clear if he means he wants American owned businesses manufacturing in China (in a simple formulae, regulatory arbitrage) or if he meant opening markets for their exports. And we are unlikely to ever know what he actually means by it. That is democratic politics in its essence.
“Good God, man, can’t a guy muse about lesser of evils every once in a while?”
You consider what you said on the podcast to simply be the “lesser of evils?” If those sorts of expectations are considered the “lesser of evils,” what do you want from political rule?
Again, the issue isn’t stating that you consider Trump as “lesser of evils.” Rather, it is the type of sentiment that sets up Reactionaries for massive cognitive dissonance and dissolution. You could literally rewrite the Sailer article flipping Left for Reaction and the candidates and it holds (even more so due to the higher intelligence of Reaction). The Leftists have a tendency to moderate on their own as they age (though to be more accurate it usually appears that they still have full blown AIDS, they just get better at suppressing the symptoms with age and their compromised immune systems continually compromise at the worst possible moments).
The Alt-Right doesn’t need to oppose everything that the Left supports, but, sadly, it appears that mindlessly opposing all things “Left” is as deep as it gets for most Neoreactionaries.
If you’ve got something interesting to add, do so. Else, I’m deleting this by the end of the day.
Is saying that NRx too often looks like a bunch of disrespectful helots interesting?
Or if you find art more interesting, you can listen to Modest Mouse – “Dashboard”
I don’t mind critiques at all. Their posts were not critiques. I’m not interested in emotivism on this site.
Appreciated.
Or how about asking the “patchworkers” to offer a counter-factual interpretation of how such a “patchwork” survives the Cold War?
Attracting this sort of faggotry means we must be doing something right.
Or most importantly, that Hestia’s claims to want “a king” often appear to mean they want an intellectual who is impotent and retarded in the same way the authors are impotent and ignorant. Is that interesting?
If you’re applying for the job of NRx Critical Jester, be advised that the role is filled by Peppermint, who is, at least, sometimes funny.
Who’s Hadley in the organization? Just a mod?
Nah. It’s pretty simple. Prisoners of War were usually treated pretty well on the principle of reciprocity. Spies, saboteurs, and partisans hanged. Maybe you could trade a spy or two under the table with his affiliate state, but the unaffiliated were out of luck. Clemency might be granted if mitigating factors were demonstrated; this was often the case with those impressed into service by pirates who didn’t participate too actively in further ventures.
As a result of its operations against fanatical Mohammedan partisans, USG finds itself in possession of a few live specimens. Caesar would have known what to do with them; in fact, so would FDR. But in the Current Year, that would violate their Human Rights. But they obviously can’t just be let go, and a trial would be a total farce, and even if found guilty would amount only to an eventual release. So they sit and rot in Gitmo in full public view. There is evidence that USG has learned from its mistake and no longer advertises the facilities in which it stores the drippings from its Overseas Contingency Operations. I’m not sure this is preferable to a gallows on the National Mall.
Nah, As the writer, I would have supported holding them, interrogating them for whateverintel we could find and then the firing squad.
Torture. I don’t really care.