I would like to write a piece in which I stretch as far as I can for every possible source of optimism to put me in agreement with Martin. Beck's view, however, carries a ton weight of history with it. Save this task for later... I have radio work to do for my boss tomorrow and things to prepare for the trip to Kenting on Saturday.
Later:
They could surrender to us, but I wouldn't bet on it.
"I'm tired of hearing how the US really won the war in Vietnam. There's more to war than shiny aluminum and bigger guns - General Giap knew that, the US has still not learned this lesson. The former USSR did not learn it well, either.
War is politics prosecuted by other means. America (and many other Western nations) has somehow decided that war consists only of performance at arms, and all we hear is about how well our men and our arms did in this-or-that engagement. This is why we keep hearing how we flattened those NVA tanks in the spring of '72, or we kicked their asses at Ia Drang, or we smoked 'em out at ToraBora, or whatever the latest successful feat of arms may happen to be. All true, and every honour to those that fought there - and yet, the wars always seem to be lost, even as the battles are won.
Wars are fought and won by nations, not by armies. If social and political forces in the US caused the Vietnam war to be lost - you don't get to put a star in the scorebook and say 'well, we would have won if only X, Y and Z.' The end result is, what it is. Your enemy outfought you on the battlefield of nations - the fact that you might have sometimes beaten him in combat doesn't change that.
The same will be true in any military conflict in Korea. If you concentrate on the relatively-trivial issues of how the combat might play out - always the US approach, lately - you are almost-certain to lose in the conflict of nations. There's far more to this conflict than whether or not you can suppress artillery fire on day 1 or day 2."
- Commenter Llamas on this Samizdata thread on recent events in Korea. I - mostly - agree and feel the point deserves all the emphasis it can get.
So me and my girlfriend are off this weekend to Sail Boat Rock - hotel has been booked for a month; weather forecast is for lots of rain, thunder and lightning....
Bring it on - I'll drive the bike right through every second of that and consider myself lucky to be alive to do such things.
Beethoven's 7th symphony - 2nd movement....
I recall a trip from two years ago. I tried to make the drive from Kenting up to Hualien on the blue bike. Storm. Flat tire. Stuck in the mountains pouring with rain and shivering in the cold. After getting the tire fixed it was a horrible, shivering drive in constant downpour along the tortuous mountain road until re-emerging upon the east coast. That was only a brief respite before re-engaging the edge of the precipice with articulated lorries and cocky gangsters in shiny new Mercs up my backside for the best part of an hour. No mistakes. The second return to the coast out of and down from the mountains brings you onto a half-mile long, steep downward stretch of highway with magnificent views of the ocean to your right, mountains to your left and the city of Taitung out in the distance. Before getting to this part of the journey I had pulled into a lay-by to remove my helmet during a brief lull in the rain, and had still not put it on again by the time I hit that half-mile slope. Torrential downpour and vicious wind in my face. Lorries up my backside. No separate lane for bikes. No safety margin. No food or drink for about five or six hours. No mistakes: total determination.
"For believe me: the secret for harvesting from existence the greatest fruitfulness and the greatest enjoyment is - to live dangerously."
It was a good game and Inter again showed why they deserved to be European Champions; fast, precise, simple, direct and assured going forward; resolute, organized and calm in defence. Mourinho's Inter are a superb team - and what a superb show of support from the fans too; look at that massive Inter banner!
Diego Milito's goals were both excellent poacher's goals - superb finishes both - worthy of winning any match. And what a way for Mourinho to say goodbye to Italian football - by winning the Scudetto, the Coppa Italia and now the Champions League in the same season. Absolutely superb. Massimo Morratti couldn't possibly have asked for more. Oh - and white socks too!
Watch the highlights (apologies for the appalling commentary by that Scottish tattie-head Andy Gray):
Roderick T.Long digs out some old letters to the editor from about fifteen years ago, including this one with an historical take on firearms ownership and policing. An excerpt:
"The current debate over gun control is the latest, and perhaps the last, skirmish in a centuries-old conflict between two radically different visions of social order: the Celtic-Germanic system and the Imperial Roman system."
Ha! What a perfectly risible half-time comedy. She dishes out sympathy like make-up in a soup ladle and is offended that an equally sloppy sympathy is not splattered all over her in return. Enough.
As a young child I wasn't interested in the game at all - I can still recall being faintly bemused and even slightly annoyed at some of my friends for wanting to waste time kicking a ball around at school. I was climbing trees and looking at pictures of cars...
Anyone who equates "soccer" with socialism and chickens running around on the streets is immediately disqualified from any discussion of sport or art in even the most general of terms. I won't indulge that sort of multi-level stupidity. No apologies whatsoever.
To say that football is the world's most popular sport - being followed or played by an estimated two thirds of the world's population - is at once neither an exaggeration nor a fair estimation of the nature of its' popularity.
Quite aside from the usual litany of reasons given for football's popularity (the sparsity of necessary equipment to play, making it cheap and thus widely available to the world's poor; the relative simplicity of its' rules; the interdependence between individual and team competence, its' appeal to tribal instincts and so on) there is so much more to "the beautiful game".
The key to understanding the famously "religious" appeal of football across the world lies with Francis Bacon's dictum that "nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed". With every bounce of the ball, the possibility of bringing it under control rests upon unbroken attention to the split-second unfolding of reality. Every attempt to achieve something with the ball - a pass to a team mate for instance - again requires an absolute, yet effortless concentration of the mind in reading the natural bounce of the ball and the relative positions of team mates and opponents in space and time, making the optimum selection and executing the pass with the optimum technique - chosen "automatically" from a time-honed mental inventory of countless possible variations on basic categories of technical skill. And this all while equally committed and skilled opponents are reading your every split-second movement and are trying to stop you.
The team nature of the game however, demands much more than the mere physical and psychological integration of mastered techniques. The strategic and tactical dimensions of the game require extensive knowledge and constant concentration - particularly when the player himself does not have possession of the ball and especially when his team does not possess the ball either. Defenders are often the unsung heroes of football. The art of putting in a tackle to prevent an opponent advancing into a dangerous position always has a very salient dimension of applying physical force against another player which is often lacking in a forward's strike on goal or in a midfielder's innocuous sideways pass to his right back. The defender's attention and movement without the ball leading up to the challenge is typically a less celebrated aspect of his play. They are the obvious warriors in a team, with their reading of their opponent's attempts to create and exploit space or their exquisite timing of sliding tackles and restraint from over-committing just as vital, if not more so, to a team's success than the beautiful flourish of a striker's finish.
There is another, perhaps in some ways larger dimension to the game residing in the psychology of the players, coach and even, to some extent, the fans themselves. It is the psychology of status - of winners and losers and must-try-harders. There is intellectual conflict over strategy, tactics and positioning of certain players. There is the psychological demand for undiluted enthusiasm and concentration. Players and teams can be broken by these demands. I have seen teams psychologically defeated after conceding just a single goal with plenty of time left on the clock, and I have even seen teams defeated as soon as the match kicks off - passing the ball backwards in a hurry, always afraid of receiving it and the responsibility to create that goes with it. For to play football demands courage and enthusiasm and honour. It brings out, in rarefied microcosm, all of the greatest human virtues - and some of the worst. I have seen players of both great talent and modest embrace the responsibility of winning against the odds. I have seen them shrink from it. I have seen fans enraptured at the exceptional commitment and enthusiasm of their players. I have also seen the opposite.
The sheer complexity with which the various mental, physical and moral requirements of the game are blended to varying extents in each player and across each team astounds me when I reflect on it. All of these requisite qualities must be applied to the most demandingly fluid reality of the football match with the utmost concentration if there is to be a chance of success.
Football is one of the highest artistic celebrations of what man is and of what he can and ought to become. Football gives us a highly rarefied glimpse of Nietzsche's concept of the "superman". Want to see an example? Look no further...
There is a thread over at RTG about greatest football teams, with a lot of voices raised for the Milan side of the late 80s - Ruud Gullit, Marco Van Basten, Frank Rijkaard, Franco Baresi and of course Paulo Maldini. I was eight or nine years old at the time of this team, and it would be a few years yet before I discovered what all the fuss was about kicking a ball around.
But I can vividly remember watching Match of the Day with my Dad in around 1993 and being impressed - having no knowledge of the game - with the young Ryan Giggs and the United side which had just won the first Premier League title and which all the papers were raving about, with Giggs being frequently compared to George Best and so on. I remember my Dad saying that it was all nonsense and that that United side weren't anything special at all. I thought it was just because he was getting old, but he really was right. Later that season, I remember that United team going to the Nou Camp to take on that Barca team with Romario and Stoichkov and United got slaughtered 4-0. Suddenly the wonder team everyone in England had been hyping up seemed absolutely hopeless. I was shocked.
But what I remember next will stay with me forever I think: when the European Cup final came around in 1994, that terrifying Barca team led by Stoichkov - scoring free kicks from 40 yards away - were favourites against a Milan side which was to play without three or four key players due to injuries or suspensions as well as the fact that some players were ineligible due to stupid UEFA rules about player nationality. That Milan side included Zvonimir Boban, Marcel Dessailly, Demetrio Albertini, Christian Panucci, Dejan Savicevic, Danniele Massaro and Paulo Maldini...
Well... I was stunned. That Milan side ran out 4-0 winners, but their superiority to Barca was unquestionable throughout the whole 90 minutes. I can remember asking myself at one point, watching the game on the kitchen TV with my Dad, whether I had seen Milan put a single pass astray the entire time - they were that good it was like watching gods in white socks - every pass was just about inch perfect and they seemingly didn't even need to look up to accomplish them.
After that I always wanted to play football in white socks...
Claire Berlinski, writing in City Journal, casts shadows of shame everywhere with this title "A Hidden History Of Evil" and the accompanying accusative question: "Why doesn't anyone care about the unread Soviet archives?"
I'm quite looking forward to this Saturday's Champions League Final between Inter and Bayern. I watched Inter beat Chelsea, CSKA Moscow and then of course Barca. Mourinho's Inter are interesting to me in two ways. The first is that Zona Mista-like formation with Sneijder as the playmaker, Zanetti as left wing-back, Eto'o as second striker and Thiago Motta as sweeper. The Italian national side played like this at the 1982 world cup after Rinus Michels had supposedly made Catenaccio obsolete. So there's that historical parallel. But the second reason why I like this Inter side is that, unlike Barca, they carry an attitude of honour and courage in everything they do; sure they look for the pass when receiving under pressure but they are never dependent on it and will take their markers on even when they've got little chance of getting through and they don't go looking for favours from the referee either. They deserve to win it.
It was too late; I had already hit the left indicator button when I saw them: cops - two - on scooter patrol. It's nearly midnight, there's no traffic and I'm on my way home on little side-streets after taking the dog to the park to do her business. Naturally I hadn't bothered with my helmet. They order me to pull over and one of them asks me in English if I can speak Chinese. So I say yes and go on - before he can let out another word - to tell them in Mandarin that no, I'm not wearing my helmet and yes it's against the law, but that it's 沒關係辣! (i.e. of no importance to anyone, least of all me). He says OK, no fine this time, but.... etc....
I usually talk to the cops in Chinese when I get stopped (which, to be fair, is a rare occurrence) largely because I want them to see that I don't take them seriously either. But I can't be bothered arguing with them - if there had been any chance they'd have taken me seriously then they wouldn't have pulled me over in the first place.
"It's almost a sort of "reverse-tautology": the close repetition of a pair of simple words ("the good") can often blind their enormous import. And, it presents a concept so opposite the everyday experience of American history that most find it incredible on its face: nothing could possibly be that completely evil. Many people can understand "envy", but very few are psychologically equipped to understand it raised to the level of ideology in action in global affairs, across decades."
"Natural rights, unlike the variability of human culture on whose general recognition their enforcement depends, just are what they are and are not subject to any man's opinion at any time. They may be ignored or their implications left unattended and unenforced, but that doesn't alter what they are."
Part of my comment in response to IanB at Samizdata.
"Personal honor is an archaic, fossilized concept....But suddenly, amid public malaise, dozens of nontraditional soldier-citizens have stepped forward out of the shadows to argue that right now in America, neither money nor incumbency matters as much as civic duty and the old idea of public service. And unlike most of us, they once put their lives on the line to prove just that."
Victor Davis Hanson on veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan campaigns deciding to campaign for Congress this November. If that strategy is going to have a cat in hell's chance of success, then the brave souls daring to take it on are going to have to be put in the shade by indomitable souls right across the entire continental U.S. who will not be governed by evil men any longer.
The anarchy-minarchy scrap kicked off again last night over at Samizdata, and again, I don't have time to get in there right now as I have work to do. I'll jump in later but it'll probably all be over by then if it isn't already...
Later: I was at work all day today and missed most of the thread which I see evolved into Alisa making mini-comments and Ian deciding to act like a right berk - which is a shame.
"I don't actually think there's going to be a catastrophe... I think the Enemy have spent the past century learning how to run the world in their image and that system is now bedding in. They'll save the Euro and continue building the global society thing they want to build, and it'll go through occasional crises and they'll learn from each one and get better at it."
Ian B over at Samizdata prompted by a discussion of the EU and IMF's decision to bail out the heavily indebted Greek province of Europe.
I found Ian's little predictive tangent far more interesting than the actual news item itself.
So is Ian right or wrong? Let's consider...
The predicted catastrophe he refers to is a worldwide currency collapse - starting with either the Euro or the Dollar, and spreading around the world in domino effect. Although there may be room for speculation as to what the precipitating event(s) would actually be, the key components of a currency collapse would be (a) the inability of whichever governments are initially involved to obtain further borrowing to secure their debts and (b) therefore the move toward a hyperinflationary monetary policy from which most or all of the debt could be paid off at the expense of ruining the formal economy in that country (with of course large ripple effects around the world).
Warnings of such a collapse are often given by people like Paul Marks partly because what is happening in both Europe, in the case of the PIIGS particularly, and in the United States is an apparently relentless accumulation of government debt (a significant share of which is NOT actually Federal). The pressure on the global banking system to continually obtain further borrowing to prevent monetization of toxic debts (and thus hyperinflation and the possibility of currency collapse) is now immense. So if Ian is right, then fairly soon we'll have to see some drastic combination of spending cuts and tax increases all across the EU and the US if currency collapse is to be avoided. But wouldn't this in itself be a catastrophe in the form of a very very long-lasting global economic depression? And while that would be eating its way through the adult lives of today's children (what comparatively few there are of them) the mere choice of which party to vote for is going to keep a lid on all the political pressure?
In the meantime of course, the sloppy laboratory of the European Union is as weird as it has ever been and there is the - I think rationally incontestable - view that the current President of the U.S. is an ideological Marxist and enemy to the essential epistemological and ethical underpinnings of Western culture and the institutions it has produced over the last several centuries. At a time like this, doubt has great importance and can bestow very peculiar values; care and clarity are the only clothes that will fit this hideous angel...
"Anna Quangel, grief-stricken but still in terror’s web, is hesitant at first. “Isn’t this thing that you’re wanting to do, isn’t it a bit small, Otto?” she asks. To which her husband responds, “Whether it’s big or small, Anna, if they get wind of it, it’ll cost us our lives.” That does it: “He might be right: whether this act was big or small, no one could risk more than his life. Each according to his strength and abilities, but the main thing was, you fought back.”
Roger Cohen in the New York Times reviews Hans Fallada’s "Every Man Dies Alone". Via John Venlet at Improved Clinch - "The Immensity Of Defiance In Small Acts."
"...if you mean what you say..." - As the person to whom those words are addressed, each one of them carries one hell of a weight. I have barely eaten all through work today until I got back a few hours ago.
I have a life; I have a girlfriend of two years, I have friendships I treasure, I have a dog that I love, I have contracts to honor and financial commitments. There are people who need my help, I have plans for the future and I live on an astonishing island out in the Eastern Pacific and I love all of this.
I don't know what a period of time in jail would do to me and what my life would be like if/when I ever got out again.
But I do know this: there can be no ultimate hiding place from the unchecked consequences of political avarice. At the risk of sounding like something I am not, there are monstrosities out there, they are coming for me and my life sooner or later whether I like it or not and I cannot stop them on my own by either speech or violence whether separately or in tandem.
The only possible escape lies with confrontation - in fusing words and action into principled, outright and unequivocal defiance of the arrogant presumption that my life and the people and things I love can be claimed by a government for "the greater good".
No.
"When you're down is where you find yourself When you drown there's nothing else If you're lost you'll need to turn yourself Then you'll find out that there's no-one else To make the moves that you can do When you fall from grace your eyes in blue Your every breath becomes another world And the far horizon's living hell..."
"...the world, beholden to a few unelected, unaccountable, rich financial speculators, needs to regulate the very markets they operate in before many more economies are wrecked and peoples’ lives are ruined."
Go and see for yourself here in the Timid Times. I think I may have met him once, but my memory of name and face can be slippery sometimes.
Absolutely superb! You can go and listen to Scott Ott's interview with him here. Unlike Scott, I agree with Beck and, although I'd have to sort out a lot of personal commitments first, I'd be ready to go to jail with him in defiance of any government and to stand up for the idea of freedom.
Update: Your welcome, yes and I hope so too, but it'll take a lot more than just me.
