Auspundits

America's Culture War

* By Lounge Lizard

Who can forget Sarah Palin's speech to the Republican Convention in which she accepted the nomination as John McCain's running mate?

Joe McCain, John McCain's brother, gave an insider's account of the speech in an article in The Australian of September 16 entitled The real barracuda.

In this article, Joe McCain revealed that the joke Palin told about hockey moms who, unlike pit bulls, wear lipstick, wasn't in the script. Indeed, she went so off-base during her speech that eventually the teleprompter operator decided to turn the thing off.

For the speech of her life, that demonstrated enormous self-confidence.

Lounge Lizard watched her as she spoke. He noted that she was a very fit and healthy looking person and that she was totally at ease with herself, her family and with being an American. She betrayed not the slightest hint of nerves.

She's tough.

She not only preaches conservative values but the choices she and her family have taken in life's journey demonstrate to ordinary Americans that she lives by those values.

And that drives the left totally nuts.

Re: Drums In The Deep

* Lounge Lizard responds to Moose, revealing the inspiration of his nom de plume.

Moose,

As usual, you make some good points.

I agree with you that there seems to be a decline in rationality, which can perhaps be put down to the rise in importance of the semi-educated, such as the so called 'doctors' wives'. Perhaps 40% of young people now go to university and therefore think they must be clever, but the truth is that only about 10% of the population are really capable of university-level thought, or what was once considered university-level thought - and that eliminates many current academics!

Re: Drums In The Deep

* Moose responds to Lounge Lizard.

Lounge Lizard, some very good arguments. My responses below, inline.

Lounge Lizard wrote:

I think that Western leaders have to take into account the fact that their own people are also not always rational, and this impacts on what is considered to be in the national interest. In short, and especially when you have a democracy, you cannot divorce the perceived national interest from a people's culture and as [has been] remarked, culture will out.

I think that we are in a strange transitional phase where what you say holds. I do not however consider this phase to be stable or sustainable. The ability of the West to act as a rational society is deteriorating. On the other hand, the West is the one society, or family of societies where rationality was a bedrock of culture, and informed national interest. One thing we may agree on is that the West ain't what it used to be, and that this view holds with increasing velocity. The culture of the West is changing rapidly, and the Westerner of today has precious little in common with their grandparents.

This change is not guaranteed to lead to a sustainable, secure society. Further, I am of the opinion that the state space of possible societies contains precious few stable, free, secure, prosperous societies. So any runaway trajectory is not likely to take you to a good place. Kind of like sailing in a random direction and hoping to find Moby Dick. So, either we will develop radically new instituations, tools and legislation, or the West will go the way of the dinosaurs.

Re: Re: Re: Drums In The Deep

* Lounge Lizard enters the fray. Comments on part 1, part 2 and part 3. This was all in response to Richard's "Drums In The Deep" post.

I think that Western leaders have to take into account the fact that their own people are also not always rational, and this impacts on what is considered to be in the national interest.

In short, and especially when you have a democracy, you cannot divorce the perceived national interest from a people's culture and as the author of part 2 has remarked, culture will out.

Here are just a few examples where it could be argued that sheer cold brutal expediency didn't, in the final result, determine policy:

• "Poor Little Belgium is being raped by the Huns" - one of the reasons the British Empire entered the First World War so enthusiastically.
• Retaining the Falkland Islands. The costs of recovering and retaining these islands far exceed any economic benefits. The few people who live on them are of no importance in the great scheme of things.
• Support for Israel. If this was obviously in the national interest, both Israel and domestic Jewish lobbies wouldn't have to worry constantly about Western support.
• Support for East Timor. The East Timorese display little capability and this failed micro state will be a constant drain on Australian resources for the foreseeable future. Objectively, it would have been far preferable for it to have remained a province of Indonesia. Indonesia would have borne all the costs and Australia would have been able to negotiate a better deal over the Timor Gap. However, a religious faith shared with many in Australia together with memories of support for our soldiers during WW2 helped generate a less expedient approach.

Given our culture, nothing will stop what might be called Western Interfering Missionary Programs (or WIMPS for short). They are a product of a free society and an economic prosperity that gives people time and resources to display their moral superiority, carefully sugared with a coating of pseudo-humanitarian blather. Some WIMPS we may not dislike, others we may deplore, but whatever kind, the world will have to put up with them. I particularly dislike certain NGOs such as Greenpeace and I deplore ego-driven bureaucratic arrogant do-gooder world government monstrosities such as the International Criminal Court. But these things are here to stay. They are like the Left, of which Richard Fernandez once remarked:

The Left is the Mr. Hyde of Western civilization, and as such probably ineradicable for as long as the civilization itself exists. As a practical matter, it has to be treated as a golf handicap. There’s no use railing against it. All that anyone can do is make allowances for their inevitable input.

Moose may deplore the Orange Revolution, but you have as much chance of stopping the promotion of this kind of thing as you have of stopping the spread of the common cold. The key is that it's more a matter of culture rather than of calculation. Sometimes there will be successes, perhaps temporary, as with the Ukraine; other times, hopeless and perpetual failure, as with Tibet. Bad experiences may slow and defeats reverse the changes sought, but like war itself, which they will help promote, WIMPS will continue to the end of time, or at least to the end of Western Civilisation as we currently know it.

Re: Re: Drums In The Deep

Moose enters the "Drums In The Deep" fray. See part 1 and part 2.

Russian leaders are seldom guided by much more than sheer cold brutal expediency. They do however have to work with political support from a less than rational people.

The same is true of the Pakis.

And far less true of the Norks.

As for the Russians not making sense:

• In geopolitics pride and anger are justifications, almost never core reasons for action.
• Russia's core strategic assets are being threatened and key agreements made in the early Yeltsin years are trampled on. Russia's sovereignty, security, ethnic groups abroad and key economic assets are all under threat as of the Orange Mistake of 2005.
• The significance of Georgia, and particularly the Ukraine to key Russian interests should not be underestimated. To take Russia to task for having these interests is to take the Euroweenie pacifist "end of history" perspective, which is paradoxically what the West has been doing these past few weeks. It is also to ignore that the US has the Monroe Doctrine, and Australia has its own "near abroad" in the Pacific Islands, where we play Big Daddy, and rightly so. And not always with the poor little fuzzy wuzzy's interests at heart, as in the case of Timor Sea oil negotiations. And rightly so again.

Now one may still say that there is reason to pressure or cripple Russia, either for a better deal on other geopolitical matters, or for the endgame of depriving them of their nukes. But even then it serves us little to pretend that Russia does not have serious interests driving its actions.

Re: Drums In The Deep

In response to my email, posted here, on Richard's "Drums in The Deep post", one of my friends sent this response.

Comrades,

Steady on. The North Koreans are behaving like North Koreans, the Russians are behaving like Russians and the Pakis, unfortunately for them, are behaving like Pakis.

Culture will out. Perhaps the next US president, whoever he is, will behave like an American.

If there is a worry, it is that the Russians are acting out of anger and wounded pride. They do not make much sense.

Georgia Down

I mean an FAA air-traffic control system located in the United States' state of Georgia. Major disruptions to air traffic. I'll given even odds of Russian hacker activity.

Meanwhile, the USAF is considering the plight of its Cyber Command.

Book Quote Of The Day

From Philip Bobbitt's The Shield of Achilles:

Not every application of the RMA [Revolution in Military Affairs] is suitable to a market-state strategy for the United States...Because the United States is so well placed to exploit a high-tech RMA, conflict with a power such as Russia (over a dispute in Eastern Europe or one of the states of the former Soviet Union) or China (over Taiwan) - that is, with a great power whose vital interests are at stake in a territorial conflict - invites resort to nuclear weapons on the part of the American adversary, because almost no other option would be effective against a United States armed with advanced twenty-first century technology. Considerations such as these prompted Eliot Cohen to observe, "the RMA may bring a kind of tactical clarity to the battlefield, but at the price of strategic obscurity."

A few points:

• This of course is predicated on the United States' willingness to flout its military might in such near competitor conflicts. Some American stick is being shown, as discussed at in some lucid commentary at The Belmont Club and described by Simon at Classical Values. A few U.S. warships float into the Black Sea and Russia's Black Sea dwarfs in comparison. Although the U.S. navy ships did try to anchor at Poti but were moved along by Russia forces stationed there. So the assumption on which Bobbitt's argument is predicated is not necessarily true.
• Bobbitt didn't precisely specify against whom the American adversary would wield its nuclear weapon. Presumably the U.S.. However Russia threatened to point it's targeting system at Warsaw. Perhaps this demonstrates Russia's tacit acknowledgement of the United States' strategic and tactical preponderance?
• Cohen's point on tactical clarity requires tactical resolve. And so far the U.S. has demonstrated nothing short of ambivalence in this regard.

Meanwhile, Russia recognises the sovereignty of South Ossetia and Abkhazia. French President Nicholas Sarkozy, angered by Russian recalcitrance in withdrawing as per his peace agreement, has called for an emergency summit of the E.U. to discuss "future of relations between the EU and Russia and on aid to Georgia."

Re: Re: Re: The Doomsday Clock Resurrected

* By Moose

Here's further discussion of the "Russian nuclear arsenal first" argument I made in my first post.

Re: Re: The Doomsday Clock Resurrected

* By Moose who is responding to Polar Bear's last post

Spengler's article focused on the misalignment between the West's perception of Russia's existential threats, and Russia's own assessment.

It would pay to consider another misalignment of Western perceptions: those of its own existential threats. The US is fixated solidly on the Russian nuclear arsenal (if they are being at all rational, that is).

But there is Islam. There is Pakistan and Iran. There is Syria. There is China. There is a resurgent Latin American "Bolivarian" socialism. They could all use a friend.

This is not all, however. We also need to consider another asymmetry. Russia is solidly behind their government's aggressive policies, and would support far more aggression in the future. The first observation to make here is that Russians would be equally supportive of any decisive action against Islamism in their neighbourhood. What a waste..

The more important observation, is that effectively there is no "West" in any meaningful, strategic sense. There is no alignment of interests, common threat assessment or unity of action. Indeed, Russia is right now negotiating a separate security arrangement with Germany. What does this do to NATO ? Italy and France are trying to put the brakes on an NATO membership for Georgia and Ukraine, and the NATO reaction to the Estonian cyber-war was an interesting foretaste of likely "touch one, touch all" bluster from a NATO that in the end cannot be bothered.

So no Rubicon has been crossed. Caesar is going to win again, at least in the short term. Indeed, his sticky end is pre-ordained this time around too, the Senate's daggers replaced with Spengler's demographics.

The best part of all is that there is a best part. Much good is going to come of a Europe bordering on the insane in its pacifism, left wing nuttery and anti-americanism realising that the wolf is at the door, that European solidarity is as bogus as the notion of soft power, and that that the wolf (Bear ?) has his paws on the gas taps during a winter that says more about failing sunspots than it does about global warming. Time they learned.