‘American Sniper’ in Indian country

My review of the movie is up at TAC:

The New York Times review of “Lawrence of Arabia” from 1962 complains that we don’t really get to know the titular character, a fault Bosley Crowther blames on “the concept of telling the story of this self-tortured man against a background of action that has the characteristic of a mammoth Western film.”

“American Sniper” feels the same way, both in character and background. For most people, consideration of the similarities between Western expansion and America’s permanent presence in the Middle East starts and ends with how one feels about “cowboy president” jokes. But in less self-conscious times, no less than the venerable Robert Kaplan once referred to Little Bighorn as “the 9/11 of its day.”

Did Jeff Flake think Robert Mugabe was a T.S. Eliot fan too?

Charles Johnson uncovers the masters thesis of Sen. Jeff Flake, the main GOP supporter of rapprochement with Cuba. It, uh, doesn’t speak well of his judgment:

The entire premise of Flake’s thesis, “Zimbabwe: Rhetoric vs. Reality,” (below) is that Mugabe really isn’t a Socialist and is “on the side of the West.”

“After a visit to the country with exposure to the amount of private enterprise and limited government interference in the economy, as well as recognizing the viable existence of a second party, one would clearly see that Zimbabwe is more on the side of the West,” Flake wrote.

Flake doubted that Mugabe really was a socialist. “What is the reason for Mugabe’s continuing lip service to socialism? Perhaps Mugabe never believed in following the socialist path at all,” he wrote. “Mugabe may have come to the conclusion that the socialist model of development is bankrupt in the African context.”
Flake continued arguing that “despite the Marxist-Leninist rhetoric, Zimbabwe has not moved towards a high degree of socialism under Mugabe.”

Now, let’s give Sen. Flake the benefit of the doubt; his thesis was exceptionally ill-timed. It was turned in in 1987, the year Zimbabwe’s decline began to accelerate as Mugabe assumed new powers, and major collectivization schemes had yet to take place. But still, we would rightly take a dim view of a masters thesis from 1935 just before the Nuremberg Laws saying Hitler displayed a “gulf between rhetoric and reality” (Flake’s words).

Really wanting socialist revolutionaries to be on your side is different from really wanting national socialists to be on your side. Wyndham Lewis is pretty much forgotten, but in 2008, we see columns in the New York Times about how, despite the lack of evidence, Mugabe was a secret T.S. Eliot fan (h/t Moldbug).

Those parts of the West that didn’t quite support left-wing anti-colonial movements were deeply invested in the notion that the transition to majority rule in Africa would be painless and orderly. The United Church of Christ was firmly in the former camp, however, and had a long history with Mugabe’s regime. That was fine when he was a revolutionary socialist, but less fine when he started oppressing gays. One of the presidents of ZANU, Ndabaningi Sithole, was a UCC minister. He gave an interview in 1995 saying the revolution was kindled by, of all people, Swedes:

Tor Sellström: There was an early involvement by the Nordic countries in the liberation struggle in Zimbabwe. How can you explain that? Did it start with the missions?

Ndabaningi Sithole: Well, to begin with it was an involvement by the missions. Sweden had a very big mission in this country at Mnene. Incidentally, my first child was born at that mission. When the struggle started, somehow the good-hearted people at Mnene sympathized with the African nationalist cause and we were able to send some of our fellows to Sweden. My own son, for instance, got into a family there. They looked after him. My daughter also got there through a Swedish family. But it is not only my family that benefited from being kept by Swedish families during the struggle, but other families as well. They benefited a great deal.

Flake is a Mormon, though, and we usually expect more sober assessments from them.

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America needs to get back to religion, no matter what libertarians say

Here’s a quick lesson for young, self-styled libertarians: Nick Gillespie’s punk-rock stylings and irreverent attitude are not a formula for success.

Admittedly, few in the budding millennial libertarian “generation” will believe me. They are busy celebrating pot freedom and the right to marry whoever they want. Clearly, somewhere along the line between Leonard Read and the New York Times-dubbed “libertarian moment,” freedom turned into blissful sodomy and getting stoned. Should the trend continue, libertarianism will wither, and rightly so.

Gillespie, who is a thought leader in the trendy libertine-leaning freedom movement, is championing the decline. From his soapbox at Reason magazine, he preaches the principles of free association and non-aggression. Much of his work is laudable; his wittiness is a great tool showing how foolish the warmongers in Congress are. But even the wisest jokester is not immune to stupidity. Gillespie’s attitude, anti-authoritarian as it is, is a road map of the perilous direction that libertarianism is trending.

In a recent diatribe, the black jacketed sermonizer attempts to correct Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal on a topic of high importance: God and America. The governor, who is a convert to Catholicism, recently told a group of Christians and Jewish leaders the country has drifted away from God. This path is dangerous for America, he averred. As a possible 2016 presidential candidate looking to court social conservatives, Jindal was unambiguous about his warning, telling the crowd, “We have tried everything and now it is time to turn back to God.”

This is all wrong according to Gillespie. Issues of public policy, spending and debt, entitlement programs, civil liberties, and militarization are not matters of spiritual conviction. When it comes to politics, he maintains, “God has nothing to do with any of that.”

(more…)

The feds suck at everything: cybersecurity edition

I’ve got two new posts at Medium today detailing just how bad the G men fail at information security. They both analyze the President’s recent “cybersecurity modernization proposal” that he revealed last week and is expected to expand upon during tonight’s State of the Union address. (More like State of the Disunion address, amirite guys?)

The proposal is as bad as you’ve no doubt come to expect.

One large part of the initiative would enact the spirit of the wildly-unpopular CISPA legislation through a watered-down executive proposal. Our worldly planners in Washington propose to strengthen the nation’s cybersecurity by coercing private organizations to fork over even more private data about our online activities to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).

There’s just one big problem, apart from the normal civil liberties concerns–the federal government’s IT systems have suffered from a staggering increase in data breaches and cybersecurity failures despite years of internal information-sharing and billions in cybersecurity investments.

Here’s a chart, based on new research by me and Eli Dourado at the Mercatus Center.

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From the article:

While cybersecurity vulnerabilities and data breaches remain a considerable problem in the private sector as well as the public sector, policies that failed to protect the federal government’s own information security are unlikely to magically work when applied to private industry. The federal government’s own poor track record of increasing data breaches and exposures of personally identifiable information render its systems a dubious safehouse for the huge amounts of sensitive data affected by the proposed legislation.

The second piece looks at the portion of the proposal that would criminalize a broad expanse of innocuous online activities under the guise of “fighting cybercrime.”

President Obama proposes to expand federal law enforcement authority to reclassify cybercrime under federal “racketeering” laws, which drastically reduce the burden of proof needed to charge an individual with a crime, while expanding the already-controversial and aggressively-applied Computer Fraud Abuse Act (CFAA) to include the mere sharing of unauthorized information–like emailing a password or retweeting a link.

I write:

If the new White House proposal is applied as haphazardly and aggressively as the CFAA has been in the past, there is a real fear that whitehat hackers’ normal activities—like emailing each other information about password leaks and security vulnerabilities—could be trumped up into criminal convictions for no reason but the zeal of a new foolhardy War on Whatever.

The gradual development of this Cyber Police State would have chilling effects on online collaboration and innovation—and the rest of us would get left in the digital dust.

And that’s bad, mm’kay.

Check them both out.

Sacred Harp 178: ‘Africa’

Now shall my inward joys arise,
And burst into a song;
Almighty love inspires my heart,
And pleasure tunes my tongue.

God, on His thirsty Zion’s hill,
Some mercy drops has thrown;
And solemn oaths have bound His love
To show’r salvation down.

Why do we then indulge our fears,
Suspicions and complaints?
Is He a God, and shall His grace
Grow weary of His saints?

Introducing The Sensorium of B.H. Obama

I suppose it’s a rarity for someone to get two posts in a row on here, but this is a fine reason to break rules. Cross-posted from FPR:

Pete Davis made his debut on this blog [ed — that blog] this week, with an essay on the poisonous politics of The West Wing. But he’s not just a writer or community reformer. Today he has released The Sensorium of B.H. Obama, written by Davis and Paul VanKoughnett. I had the pleasure of seeing it at a private screening last weekend, and even my right-wing companions enjoyed the heck out of it. For a short description, we’ll let the creators speak for themselves:

In the early months of 2015, a young United States President named Barack Obama made a fateful decision. Frustrated by the endless pressures of his thankless, dead-end, white-collar job, Obama delivered his State of the Union speech and disappeared– to America’s heartland – Lawrence, Kansas – where he began the great work of which he’d always dreamed. But with the lamestream media and the forces of Washington politics-as-usual hot on his tail, could this plucky POTUS deliver the change he believed in?

It’s a wonderfully original, creative movie with a heart of gold and a Joe Biden impersonator. Without further ado:

(Check out their production company here and here)