From: Technotranscendence (neptune@mars.superlink.net)
Date: Sat Apr 13 2002 - 14:56:22 MDT
On Saturday, April 13, 2002 3:55 PM Spudboy100@aol.com wrote:
> You may have the last word on this Dan, because I will not waste a lot
of
> time on old PB.
Understood.
> I don't take him as a serious analyst, but merely as a racial
> polemicist.
I don't think of him as a racial polemicist, BUT I agree he's not
"serious analyst." In fact, he's an extremely sloppy thinker and the
only reason he gets so much press is that he takes stands which many
people find controversial. (Earlier in his career, I've heard, he was a
much less sloppy thinker. I'm only going by my exposure to him.)
For example, I heard him talking about his book on, I believe, NPR
several weeks ago. He mentioned how if Mexican immigration keeps up at
the present rate, Cincho de Mayo will replace the Fourth of July as the
big holiday and he doesn't want to live in an America where that
happens. (Well, no one is really stopping him from leaving.:) He
mentioned several other things along these lines, so I didn't take his
Fourth of July thing as if he was just sloganeering. I thought,
instead, to Buchanan, what American culture means is all the
surface/superficial stuff, such as the Fourth of July as a holiday (we
all know for almost everyone it's just a day off work and a day to see
some fireworks, which are illegal in most of the US throughout most of
the year), the English language (something which doesn't distinguish the
US from Britain, Jamaica, India, or Zimbabwe), and other silly crap like
this. I.e., NOT individual liberty, NOT the ability to question and
change traditions, NOT the fact that most Americans don't feel locked
into, say, eating or dressing a certain way -- all the stuff I like
about America and which is actually spreading around the globe.
But all that said, one reason to not ignore him is that he has some
influence and he's easy to pounce on.:)
> He was the same fellow I remember seeing who stated on the McGlaughlin
Group
> (I no longer ever watch them) that Saddam Hussein's Iraq was like
taking on
> North Korea, and the US had better watch out! This was December 1990.
To be fair here, many other pundits didn't think Iraq would be so easily
pushed out of Kuwait in 1990-1. (We see the same pattern repeated in
regards to the Soviet Union, Serbia, etc.) In fact, even some US
commanders were surprised at how easily Iraqi resistence crumbled. Part
of this, no doubt, was due to the fact that the Iraqi war machine really
wasn't all that great. Remember, this same army pretty much had a
stalemate with Iran for a decade during the Iran-Iraq War. Another part
was that the US government, no doubt, built up Iraq to be an even bigger
threat than it was. Recall, the whole Iraqi domino theory at the time?
That if the US allowed Iraqi occupation to go unpunished, the next step
might be for Iraq to take the rest of the Gulf States?
This does bring up a wider issue of these kinds of evaluations and
predictions. I wonder if anyone here thinks there are any good
predictors of outcomes in war and what these are. I see a few.
Generally, naval powers tend to be victorious against non-naval powers.
More industrialized nations tend to beat less industrialized ones.
Richer ones tend to beat poorer ones. There are exceptions to all these
of course.
Later!
Dan
http://uweb.superlink.net/neptune/
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