Published on 8 Dec 2016
Field Marshal August von Mackensen gets a very special present for his birthday this week: Bucharest, the Romanian capital falls to the Central Powers. The Romanians reluctantly agree to destroying their grain and oil supplies on their retreat which are the two things Germany and Austria-Hungary desperately need to continue the war. Romania’s direct ally Russia has its own problems at the moment as the political game of thrones continues in Petrograd.
December 9, 2016
The Fall of Bucharest – Political Turmoil in Russia I THE GREAT WAR Week 124
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Global anti-libertarianism
Tom G. Palmer on the rising tide of anti-libertarian parties, organizations, and groups around the world:
A spectre is haunting the world: the spectre of radical anti-libertarian movements, each grappling with the others like scorpions in a bottle and all competing to see which can dismantle the institutions of liberty the fastest. Some are ensconced in the universities and other elite centers, and some draw their strength from populist anger. The leftist and the rightist versions of the common anti-libertarian cause are, moreover, interconnected, with each fueling the other. All explicitly reject individual liberty, the rule of law, limited government, and freedom of exchange, and they promote instead radical, albeit aggressively opposed, forms of identity politics and authoritarianism. They are dangerous and should not be underestimated.
In various guises, such movements are challenging libertarian values and principles across the globe, especially in Europe, in America, and in parts of Asia, but their influence is felt everywhere. They share a radical rejection of the ideas of reason, liberty, and the rule of law that animated the American Founding and are, indeed, the foundations of modernity. Those who prefer constitutionalism to dictatorship, free markets to cronyist or socialist statism, free trade to autarchy, toleration to oppression, and social harmony to irreconcilable antagonism need to wake up, because our cause and the prosperity and peace it engenders are in grave danger.
THREE THREATS
At least three symbiotic threats to liberty can be seen on the horizon: a) identity politics and the zero-sum political economy of conflict and aggression they engender; b) populism and the yearning for strongman rule that invariably accompanies it; and c) radical political Islamism. They share certain common intellectual fountainheads and form an interlocking network, energizing each other at the expense of the classical liberal consensus.
Although all those movements are shot through with fallacies, especially economic fallacies, they are not driven merely by lack of understanding of economic principles, as so many statist interventions are. While most support for the minimum wage, trade restrictions, or prohibition of narcotics rests on factual misapprehensions of their consequences, the intellectual leaders of these illiberal movements are generally not thoughtless people. They often understand libertarian ideas fairly well, and they reject them root and branch. They believe that the ideas of equality before the law, of rule-based legal and political systems, of toleration and freedom of thought and speech, of voluntary trade — especially among strangers — for mutual benefit, and of imprescriptible and equal individual rights are phony, self-interested camouflage for exploitation promoted by evil elites, and that those who uphold them are either evil themselves or hopelessly naïve.
H/T to Johnathan Pearce for the link.
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The Trudeau government’s bad times
Chris Selley on the (largely self-inflicted) hard times of Justin Trudeau’s government recently:
It has been one hell of a couple of weeks for the Liberal Party of Canada: first Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s bizarre encomium to dearly departed Fidel; then the approval of two pipelines projects, dashing the oil-free dreams of people who hadn’t been paying attention and producing thousands of barrels of fake outrage; and then, the inevitable collapse of the government’s electoral reform agenda.
It was always going to look bad. The Liberals were always going to break their promise to make 2015 the last first-past-the-post election. Perhaps they had even contemplated their members on the electoral reform committee recommending they break it, by adopting a go-slower approach. But no one, surely, anticipated Democratic Institutions Minister Maryam Monsef accusing the committee as a whole of not doing the job she had set out for them, which they had; mocking the Gallagher Index, an easily explicable formula for measuring proportionality in election results; and justifying herself with shameless bafflegab that would make Paul Calandra blush.
[…]
Monsef later apologized for accusing committee members of slacking, Manon Cornellier notes in Le Devoir, but not for misrepresenting their mandate, mocking mathematics — as an emissary of the party of “evidence-based policy,” no less — and generally behaving like a buffoon.
“(Monsef’s) beef with the Gallagher Index isn’t that it only measures proportionality. Her beef with the Gallagher Index is that it’s math, with its sums of squares and square roots and symbols that are literally Greek,” Fine fumes. It’s a worrying outburst of idiocy, she argues. Monsef and her ilk talk constantly of “engagement,” but that’s a very difficult thing to measure. “At the intersection of ‘affinity for engagement’ and ‘contempt for metrics’ is fertile breeding ground for leaders who wish to make up their own rules,” Fine trenchantly observes.
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QotD: Protest-theatre in Alberta
Protest-theatre is a creation of the political left, which uses it in an attempt to endow quotidian political fights with the dignity and importance of genuine popular struggles for fundamental rights. It is designed to endow debates over teacher pensions or hydraulic fracturing with the hysterical romance of revolution. In some cases, it is meant only to show that a movement is numerous enough to make trouble for own its sake.
It is, in other words, a form of cheap stakes-raising, with just a whisper of possible mob violence thrown in. The right, organized in this instance by Ezra Levant’s Rebel Media web-channel, is now borrowing the tactic. This was one of the Copernican political discoveries of the late Trump presidential campaign: a right-wing populist, if Trump is that, can use protest-theatre too.
The “lock her up” chant in Alberta’s capital was a sort of mangled, improvised collective allusion to Trump, whose crowds had chanted this about Hillary Clinton. They did that because Hillary Clinton has done a certain amount of stuff in her long political career that she probably could have been locked up for. I am not aware that this can be said of Premier Notley. She may have done unwise things, and has definitely made some inexplicable political errors, and may even have pursued unethical policies. But she has done it in legally legitimate ways, and her ministry has yet to face a major scandal in the traditional sense — an event that would have a reasonable person asking if the cops should be called.
Colby Cosh, “After the ‘lock her up’ fiasco, it seems Canada is fresh out of grown ups”, National Post, 2016-12-07.
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