What a Mind
When this guy writes, it's always incredibly interesting.
It's sometimes easy to forget how powerful words can be, but there are some people who have such a distinct way of thinking, it's pretty amazing. This guy Nelson Ascher, for my money, is one of them. His blog is Europundits, but he never updates it.
Update: Maybe I'm fooling myself. Maybe I'm conservative after all. But this guy has so many things right in this article, methinks it scary.
Another Update: Again, he sums up what I've been thinking really well.
7 comments:
He has some very interesting things to say. But in the second article I'm a little wary of his view that "global leftists" have joined with militant muslims in an attempt to defeat western ideologies, capitalism in particular. Maybe I'm not understanding what is meant by a global leftist; I've met plenty of people on the far left, but none of them come even close to wanting to overthrow capitalism (especially by force).
Greg: You're man says the following about the mainstream/liberal press:
"1) Ever since the beginnings of the Afghan campaign and of the wider War on Terror, they have been talking about asymmetric warfare and telling us that warriors equipped with the cheapest hardware, though misunderestimated, could be able to defeat huge war machines.
2) Many pundits have also assured us that any monopoly of power couldn’t survive for long because the hubristic arrogance and unilateralism of the imperialistic powerful would breed discontent and incite the weak to unite against them.
3) Finally, they also foresaw that those who lied to the public would pay the price for it sooner rather than later."
Show me a link or anything that proves these things to be true, because from my vantage point these are biggest strawman arguments around. I second what Ben f says, and wonder whether this guy actually knows real liberals.
When did the NY Times and BBC predict military defeat? Who are the pundits who predicted other countries would mount a serious effort to unite against the US? C'mon, man.
the guy is brazilian and his family is from hungary. he was a european leftist prior to 9/11. when he refers to the left, he means talking about people who literally supported the soviet union over western imperialism, so i think that is a lot of where the discrepancies are.
you guys are viewing it as though he were talking about american democrats, which he is only marginally talking about.
anyhow, the dude is a poet, not a policy wonk. and that's why i like him.
The thing is, at least in the link read, the third one, he doesn't criticize hard left-wing Europeans. He explicitly singles out "mainstream and the liberal media", and gloats about people at the NY Times and BBC being fired. These media outlets did none of the things he implied that they did, like saying the US would lose the war or that other countries would unite against us.
"anyhow, the dude is a poet, not a policy wonk. and that's why i like him."
Perhaps you are a conservative. Most of the jobs in this administration went to conservative poets instead of those with a firm grasp of policy. Hence, Katrina and Iraq.
Being from Brazil, I imagine he does have a very different view of the terms 'liberal' and 'left-wing' than we do. But while we are somewhat short-sighted if we assume our meaning of the word liberal is the same for the rest of the world, he falls into the same category when he essentially substitutes leftists for communists. This may be true in Brazil (and Venezuela and Cuba), but for most of the rest of his audience (I don't imagine many Chinese are reading) leftist and communist (may have some traits in common but) are far from synonyms.
i don't mean to point out the obvious, but ascher isn't a member of the bush cabinet....and neither am i.
http://www.radioiowa.com/gestalt/go.cfm?objectid=020BFC5A-FA7D-42CC-9BA6A4ED9DA063B8
But you could be. What are your interests- film and sports? You could have been put in charge of the Iraqi version of the National Endowment of the Arts, or the head of the Olympic commitee. Your lack of experience wouldn't matter, just your hawkish credentials and willingness to see the big picture.
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