Shot in the Dark

Hollow Democracy

As the Sanders candidacy – the 25% of the left that is the analog of the Trump audience in the GOP – continues to slurp up the attentions of our lazy media, it’s always instructive to be aware of the inevitable failure of democratically-elected socialism in our hemisphere.  Kevin Williamson runs down the dismal record and present of the Maduro regime in Venezuela, which has continued and extended the misery and repression of the Chavez years.

That’s all bad enough.

Worse?

Maduro, like Chavez and all socialists before him, has been moving aggressively to control public opinion, banning opposition media and driving all dissent underground.

And while the dog is in Venezuela, the tail is here in America:

There is more to democratic legitimacy than open ballots truly counted. As the Founders of our own republic keenly appreciated, genuine democratic engagement requires an informed populace and open debate, thus the First Amendment’s protections, which extend not only to newspapers and political parties but also to ordinary citizens, despite the best efforts of Harry Reid and congressional Democrats to trample those rights. (They call this “campaign-finance reform,” on the theory that political communications more sophisticated than standing on a soapbox outside the Mall of America requires some sort of financial outlay.) But Venezuela has been for years cracking down on newspapers, radio stations, and television stations, even as the Maduro regime’s inspirations in Havana have been locking up outlaw . . . librarians.

Is it an accident that suddenly, the First Amendment is out of style on the left, with a whole generation of college students being raised to see speech as a controlled professional entitlement, the Obama Federal Communications and Elections Commissions constantly moving to control alternative media, using Homeland Security to demonize and the IRS to stifle dissent, and our nation’s chattering elite finding the First Amendment just too complicated for commoners?

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Mitch Berg

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19 responses to “Hollow Democracy”

  1. Chuck Avatar
    Chuck

    Betty McCallum wants to hump Casto’s leg.
    Yesterday Betty McCallum called for an end to aid to Israel.
    How f’ing stupid can you get? She supports a totalitarian dictator whose subjects live in poverty and have no rights. She attacks a liberal democracy that is surrounded by rightwing terrorist countries.

  2. AlexG'sWankingMitten Avatar
    AlexG’sWankingMitten

    The First Amendment is out of style on leftist electronic media. Every leftist biodigester censors comments. I have yet to find 1 conservative site that does so.

    Cases in point: DG & her award winning, 100K views per day bleeg (Tumbleweeds) vs SITD (Wide open free speech for all)

    Mother Jones (Dissenting comments disappear faster than a speeding bullet) vs Brietbart (Say your piece; stand your ground)

    Betty! McCollum holds “public town hall” appearances at Unionthug HQ, where the audience is screened at the gate.

    Leftist slobs know that speech is power, and if they cannot control it to suit their needs, they will destroy it altogether.

  3. Emery Incognito Avatar
    Emery Incognito

    “She [McCollum] supports a totalitarian dictator whose subjects live in poverty and have no rights. She attacks a liberal democracy that is surrounded by [right-wing] terrorist countries.”
    Israel is a country where people have separate rights depending on whether they are Jews or Arabs. As long as that is the case, there will be no peace in or around Israel. Call it racism, zionism, or apartheid, but as long as an Arab living in an area under Israeli control does not have all the rights of a Jew, Arab and Jew will fight. Forming Bantustans for Palestinians will never solve the problem. Israel must change, and become a normal nation with equal rights for all.

  4. Chuck Avatar
    Chuck

    Arabs who have Israeli citizenship have full rights. Something Jews living in the Arab countries don’t.

    Arabs living in the territories around Israel have fewer rights due to the fact that they keep trying to murder jews. But they still live pretty good.

  5. Yossarian Avatar
    Yossarian

    Re: Emery InDogNeato:

    I write for the technology sector, so I receive A LOT of press releases in my e-mail. I have NEVER, in over 15 years, seen any press release from Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Libya, et al. However, I have received a continuous stream of tech e-mails out of Tel Aviv, Israel. It’s almost like they have a productive and innovative streak that doesn’t involve maintaining an AK-47.

  6. Emery Incognito Avatar
    Emery Incognito

    Palestinians need to prove that they can govern themselves peacefully and effectively. they haven’t yet. Israel exists and always will. Palestinians need to recognize this. Claims to land in Israel within the pre-1948 borders need to be dropped immediately. Israel needs to accept that an eventual Palestinian state will have East Jerusalem as its capital.

  7. justplainangry Avatar
    justplainangry

    EmerytheAntisemiticSoci@list filth, please address your latest antisemitic talking point of “Israel is a country where people have separate rights depending on whether they are Jews or Arabs.” and subsequent fisking by Chuck. Gonna move the goalposts to Cleveland?

  8. Chuck Avatar
    Chuck

    Emery, I think we agree on some things. Such as the need for Palestinian-Arabs to be able to create a civilized state. Something they don’t seem able to do right now.
    For those who say that pre-1948 borders are needed…..that is just a way to say they want to Final Solution the Jewish state.
    No one is calling for pre-1946 borders in Poland/Germany. Or right of return for ethnic Germans in the Czech Republic or elsewhere in that area.

  9. Prussian Blue Avatar
    Prussian Blue

    FYI, when socialist states implement socialist policies, and the fruits of these policies are censorship, political prisoners, inflation, and rationing of common goods, Leftists blame this on “cronyism” and “corruption”, not on socialist policies.

  10. Emery Incognito Avatar
    Emery Incognito

    Chuck:
    At the heart of liberal democracy is the belief in universal human rights and dignity. You have to abandon that if you abandon people because of the potential for a few of them to engage in terrorism at some point in the future or the certainty that they will enter the job market.

    Individually, it is never easy to draw lines between good people and bad people. It is trivially easy to divide any large collection of people between those in our tribe and outsiders. But we have progressed from tribalism to nationalism to some degree of universal respect for humanity as our civilization has advanced. To concede that it is OK to slide back towards nationalism and tribalism because of the pressures of the moment is no small concession, and no small step backwards. Don’t assume that such a civilization will still have the same respect for the half of humanity deemed acceptable. Once you accept the goodness of drawing lines and manning borders with machine guns, there will always be those calling for more lines and more borders. It is a short distance from populist policies to excluding Muslims at the border to segregating black people in the South, or restricting where Jews can work and live in Europe.

  11. justplainangry Avatar
    justplainangry

    or restricting where Jews can work and live in Europe.

    It’s already happening, you ignorant, blind, open borders, appeasing, kumbaya-singing, soci@list utopian, Marxist, slavery loving, suicidal waste of bandwidth!

  12. Prussian Blue Avatar
    Prussian Blue

    The idea that civilization has advanced is subjective, Emery. Until about 1600 AD, most intellectuals believed the opposite. Mankind was perfect in Eden, and the further we were from Eden, the further we were from God, and God was, by definition, perfect. The idea that the passage of time fundamentally changed mankind was unknown prior to about 1600, at least in the West. Moreover, the advanced of industry and technology in the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries brought great wealth, which was promptly converted to more efficient means of waging war. Prior to the 20th century, most wars were wars of conquest. In the 20th century, wars became wars of extinction. At the height of the cold war the US had something like 15,000 nuclear weapons, and we spent a fraction of our GDP to build and maintain them (a few percent). A century from now, the world may look like Europe in 1910, Europe in 1945, or like Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four.

  13. Prussian Blue Avatar
    Prussian Blue

    Even without man’s doleful history of progress to consider, it’s possible that we may experience another Carrington Event: http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2008/06may_carringtonflare/
    They seem to happen every few centuries . . . or every few thousand years. The science isn’t good on their rate of occurrence, at least not yet.
    If we had a few days warning, we would ground all planes, get the ships into ports, and tell EVERYONE to prepare for at least a few weeks w/o electrical power from the grid. Virtually all of our satellites would be destroyed. Say sayonara to the astronauts on the ISS. That’s best case scenario.
    Worst case, we get hit by one with a few hours warning, all the above plus planes fall from the sky and ships are lost at sea.
    It’s best not to think about, really.

  14. justplainangry Avatar
    justplainangry

    Oh sure, Blue! Yet another natural disaster to be blamed on AGW!

  15. Prussian Blue Avatar
    Prussian Blue

    JPA, the AGW doomsday theory depends on the idea that the mid and long term future can be very different from today. The geologic record tells us that it was, though human recorded history tells us that today’s climate is very similar to what it has been for at least 5k years (once you average out the weak cycles). The namesake of the Carrington event happened a little more than a century and a half ago. It was closely examined as much as the science of the day allowed. We know how bad it would be if it happened today. To find the frequency of Carrington-type events they have some historical records of extreme aurora, but the main record lies in isotypes found in layers of polar ice, and the science is not well developed. If you accept that the past and future are like the present, a century-and-half distance from a Carrington event is kind of scary.
    A Carrington event now would cost trillions of dollars and perhaps billions of lives. It could set human population and development back a century or more. There are relatively inexpensive things that could be done to mitigate the effect of a Carrington event (or near Carrington event) on the power grid and on satellites, but no one seems interested in doing them.
    If the ruling class had more to gain by isolating power grids and radiation hardening satellites maybe more would be done.

  16. Emery Incognito Avatar
    Emery Incognito

    I’m not a climate change denier, but I’m unimpressed by ambiguous warnings of the coming cataclysm. I see nothing which convinces me that climate change is a bigger risk to humanity than cold war nukes, a big asteroid strike, a huge solar flare or a global epidemic. There’s lots of existential risks if you go looking for them.

  17. Prussian Blue Avatar
    Prussian Blue

    Virtually all of the big, continent-killer NEO’s and short period comets have been mapped and are not a threat for a century or more.
    The real Big Scary is an Oort cloud comet on a collision course. Oort cloud comets can come from any part of the sky and they come fast — tens of km/sec, so they can be world-killers with a relatively short discovery time, < a year. What's more, since it is their first time in the inner solar system, they shed material and their trajectory is hard to calculate with precision. We wouldn't have a way to deflect an Oort cloud comet. A nuclear bomb (if we could get it there) might just make the eventual impact inevitable or worse. Fortunately the chance of an Oort cloud comet hitting us is extremely low (maybe multiples of ten megayears between impacts).
    Some years ago — in the 80s — the US congress ordered NASA to study the issue (I think RAND did the actual work). Congress got nervous because the spy satellites we'd been putting up since the 60's detected a lot of impacts that never made it into the lower atmosphere. Something like several megaton equivalent impacts each year. The near-Earth space environment is much more dynamic than it was thought to be, pre space age.
    For the purpose of threat assessment, they divide potential impacts into city-killers (like Chelyabinsk in 2013, or the Tunguska Event), continent (or region) killers, and civilization enders. The last impact that would have been a civilization ender was the impact that created a the K-T boundary about sixty million years ago. It started forest fires even on the opposite side of the globe from the impact site because the released energy made the upper atmosphere of the entire Earth glow yellow hot for a few seconds. Yow!
    The K-T event object was supposed to have been a stony asteroid 10 or 15 km. across moving at a relative velocity of 10 km/sec or so.

  18. justplainangry Avatar
    justplainangry

    Geez, Blue! You are full of good news today! Anything else we should watch out for? Locusts? Boils? Frogs? Plagues? Or wait, Plague IS back.

  19. Prussian Blue Avatar
    Prussian Blue

    I think that we are probably safe from an apocalyptic plague, JPA. Most plagues are associated with groups that have weakened immune systems or systemic poor hygeine (no clean water, for example). There has never been a first world plague (the swine flu epidemic notwithstanding). The variety of the bubonic plague that struck Europe in the 14th and 15th centuries was incredibly nasty. It was very contagious, very deadly, and had several infection vectors. If it was released into the human population today it wouldn’t make much headway, other than with populations with weakened immune systems and little access to antibiotics.
    So cheer up!

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