A Couple of Must Reads

First, the ever readable Victor Davis Hanson on Broken Icons of the Left. He argues the left will never be taken seriously in foreigh affairs unless it couples values with policy. One quote:

What is preached in the madrassas on the West Bank, in Pakistan, and throughout the Gulf is no different from the Nazi doctrine of racial hatred. What has changed, of course, is that unlike our grandfathers, we have lost the courage to speak out against it. In one of the strangest political transformations of our age, the fascist Islamic Right has grafted its cause onto that of the Left’s boutique “multiculturalism,” hoping to earn a pass for its hate by posing as the “other” and reaping the benefits of liberal guilt due to purported victimization. By any empirical standard, what various Palestinian cliques have done on the West Bank — suicide murdering, lynching without trial of their own people, teaching small children to hate and kill Jews — should have earned them all Hitlerian sobriquets rather than U.N. praise.

Read the whole thing. Conservative should thank God we have writers like VDH.

Second, Jonah Goldberg writes that FDR is indeed dead. He comments on the left's obsession with the status quo when it comes to Social Security. A quote:

I have some advice for the real small-c conservatives and reactionaries in the debate over Social Security reform: Franklin Roosevelt is dead. Get over it. It seems every time I turn on the TV or the radio, I hear some opponent of reform whining that we're tinkering with FDR's "legacy." Who gives a rat's patoot?

Let's start with what should be obvious: If the current social-security system is a good deal, then it's a good deal. Period. If it's a bad deal for 300 million Americans, then it's a bad deal. Only a moron of ground-shaking proportions would argue that we should screw millions of low- and middle-income (or even, yes, rich) Americans out of a better retirement — and their own money! — out of respect to Franklin Delano Roosevelt's memory. What politician in his right mind would say, "Sure there's a better way, but we owe it to FDR to stick with this junk." I'm no fan of Henry Ford, but even if I thought he was the bomb, I can't imagine saying we owe it to Henry to keep driving Model Ts.

Third, Daniel Henninger in the Opinion Journal argues that American "hegemony" is not achieved through military means, but rather through cultural and technological ones. Describing the confluence of politics and technology: cell phones, SMS for the Orange Revolution in the Ukraine, and blogs in China and Iraq. Quote:

Anyone want to guess the third-most used language on the Web, behind English and Chinese? Farsi. Iran now has about 75,000 individual Web logs. That's because a young, Toronto-based Iranian journalist who publishes as Hoder created tools in Farsi to make it possible. Only 10% of the Iranian blogs could be called political; most discuss music, movies, poetry and Iranian or Western culture. "Iran's most interesting political conversations take place in taxis," said Hoder.

There's more coming. Developers from California at the conference introduced the first Arabic-language blogging tool. Created with support from Spirit of America, it will be used now in Iraq. The Fadhil brothers of Iraqthemodel.com plan to assemble 25 Internet journalists to report the Jan. 30 election. This effort will be patterned after Ohmynews.com, the influential South Korean Web newspaper.

China uses up to 40,000 bureaucrats to police its explosion of blogs. We'll no doubt find out how many anti-Web divisions Syria's President Bashar al-Assad has. (One provocateur at the conference plausibly suggested the greatest opportunities for these technologies lie with one of the world's most monopolized precincts--local U.S. politics.) In Africa, by contrast, the best political communication occurs outside cyberspace, on talk-radio. The most interesting is Ghana's JoyFM (it maintains a lively Web site of Ghanaian news at myjoyonline.com).

There is no need to oversell the power of these technologies. What happened in Ukraine won't happen in Cairo next month. But unless Hosni Mubarak and Vladimir Putin can come up with a way to shut down every engineer and programmer in America who is inventing new ways to output/input ideas and tweaking the ones we already have, they've got a problem.

Their problem--and the promise here--is that this stuff is moving the world's people, and fast, toward the one American product that governing elites really need to fear: free speech. Some at the Berkman conference worried this still isn't enough to "change things." Jeff Jarvis, one of this movement's most intelligent thinkers set them straight: "This is not about causes or organizing people. It's about us creating these tools and then simply having faith in people who use them elsewhere to do good."

Again, well worth a Sunday afternoon read. See you at the games!
- posted by Base10 @ 10:26 AM