isaiah

Why Frum Is Wrong and Rush is Right

David Frum's Newsweek article, "Why Rush is Wrong", instead serves to highlight why Rush is right. The Republican Party and the conservative movement is not in a state of flux or transition, it is defunct. Frum states that there ought to be debate, discussion, and a transformation of the Party so that it can do what it has always done: respond to the problems of the times. Frum neglects to admit that the crisis developed under conservative watch; he neglects to look back at what went wrong and instead simply looks forward in very sweeping and ambiguous terms, nodding to environmental concerns and civil rights, but with no specificity.

By ignoring its recent past, he goes on to invoke the same faux-ideology that they have been eroniously applying to their existence all these years, namely they are the party of fiscal conservatism.



Yes, it takes cartoonist Steve Greenberg to highlight the sheer hypocrisy of that label – and the inverse "tax-and-spend liberal" – to see why Rush is right and that their only hope to recover from such self-deceptive self-perception is to cling to the realities of their party that are not self-deceptive and are truly what they believe.

The reason why no one is stepping up to the conservative plate and leading the Republican Party is because they have nowhere to go. Frum says that they ought to be debating Obama's policies and that the stimulus plan passed without said debate. Again, he neglects that the debate already occurred: it was Obama vs. McCain and the American people were the deciders as to who won that debate, as evinced by the trouncing in November. That is why the only hope in the end is obstruction and sabotage, because deep-down, conservatives know that their ideology has objectively failed and their only hope back is by forcing liberalism/centrism to fail as well. This is a point, yet again, Rush understands and Frum does not.

As odd as it may sound, Frum represents deception and Rush represents honesty, as reprehensible as that may be.

Amazon.com & Thoughtless, Automated Recommendations

Never purchase pregnancy books from Amazon: you'll be inundated with pregnancy recommendations long after the baby has been born and the pregnancy is but a memory. I bought a couple more than two years ago and the recommendations are still ubiquitous.

China: Land of Paradoxes

As the Chinese New Year passes once more, I am struck by the traditions and how prescribed everything seems to be. As I looked out into the surrounding apartment blocks last night, I couldn't help but notice that all the televisions were tuned to the same channel: CCTV1's New Year's Gala. It's as prescribed as they come and every year is pretty much the same shtick. The odd thing is that everyone I know who watched it thought it was boring, and yet, they will all watch it again next year, because that's what you do. Almost all parties are equally prescribed and ordered. If you are invited to a party, chances are, there will be a microphone, a stage, and coerced performances.

At the same time, so many other aspects of society are without order at all: lines and traffic are two prominent examples. If you go to a bank, for instance, there isn't normally an orderly single-file line, rather a half circle crowd around the wicket. Traffic is equally oblivious to rules as cars often drive on both sides of the road or drive through red lights.

It's odd, whereas in the West, we work in order and relax in chaos the opposite is true in China.

Israel's vow to defend its soldiers: what is tells us about Israel

Israel's statement that it will defend its soldiers tells us two things about Israel: the higher levels of the administration may be implicated in the war crimes and/or they are complicit in the potential war crimes and not a just or humane nation.

The first is quite easy to deduce. Often people at the top of the command chain fear the bottom speaking out about those above in return for leniency. Whether you are a drug lord or a government war criminal, it is always the upper echelon giving the orders that is the golden prize, not the drudge soldiers who carry out said orders.

Even if the above point is untrue, and the soldiers acted individually and committed war crimes of their own volition, what does it say about a society that wishes to obscure justice? In civilian law, even manslaughter – an unintentional destruction of life – is punishable; why is there a different standard in a time of war? A hallmark of Western values is that that which is large must protect that which is small, or those with the most power carry the greatest responsibility. This is still further proof of the secularism entrenched in the modern state of Israel and how removed it is from Judaism, which maintains those values.

Bill O'Reilly recently said how sometimes one must compromise your values to ensure security, to which Jon Stewart pointed out that in that case they are no longer values. It's a sad state of affairs when Israel and its defenders agree more with Bill O'Reilly than Jon Stewart.

Cold, Hard Great Firewall of China

I was surprised to find Wikipedia blocked until I proxied it: Jan. 23 marks an important anniversary in China as seen on their home page, and so it was blocked. Other Wikipedia pages, if I type in the URL directly, are accessible, so hopefully by tomorrow, the block will be lifted.

Sometimes the cold, hard reality of living under communist rule hits you like walking into a glass door: you feel stupid for not foreseeing what seems so obvious in hindsight.

Below is what it looks like to try to trick the computer into loading an elicit page; it simple stops loading.

China's PR Woes Continue

Obama's reference to defeating communism, as you may well know, has been censored in China. This shows the continued myopia of the government's PR battle with the world and more importantly its own citizens. Had they not censored the portions, there would be no story afterwards of how they censored the speech, and this blog would not exist, nor the plethora of news stories across the world about the incident. Reuters carried a story in which the government defended its right to edit whatever they want, but that argument gives the sense of a petulant child. Yes, it's also my right to never shower again, but I will have to live wit the ramifications of my decision. Likewise, they have every right to manipulate the media, but they must understand that such actions will have a greater impact than whatever it was they were censoring in the first place. In 2008, China learned the value of PR, even going so far as to hire a PR company, but it's clear that they still have a long way to go to understand that blatant, objectively provable control of information is in an of itself a story, and a PR black eye both abroad and at home.