 |
PM |  | |
Quote | | |
Reply | | |
Full Topic | |
| Joined: | Mon Nov 21st, 2005 |
| Location: | California USA |
| Posts: | 6399 |
| Status: |
Offline
|
| Mana: |    |
It goes without saying that these effeminate men-children flock to play war, even as they avoid real debate, real disagreement, and real combat. Intimidated by a complex and uncontrollable world, they create in their own minds an ordered controllable fantasy. Hence the tidy attraction of socialism – but this ideological flirtation with super-centralized control of human activity is normally overcome by education and maturity – and for most moral people, ownership of perfection is granted to a higher, immortal power. It is eerie to witness the arrested intellectual and moral development on public display at AEI. But more frightening is AEI’s institutional avoidance of reality and justice, and its enthusiastic cultivation of what Hayek called the pretense of knowledge.
The strangest aspect of the AEI panel was the fluidity of AEI’s pronouncements on the wrongness of the Russian military action against the Georgian state, its cities and population, AEI’s pointed criticism of Russia’s economic motivations, and AEI’s repeated claims for the rights of small states to be left alone, to rule themselves, to evolve. With each high-minded criticism of Russia’s actions over the past few weeks, I wondered why no one in the audience was physically wincing at how accurately AEI’s criticism applied to our own cavalier destruction of states, governments and cities, our own insistence on loyal puppet governors (like Saakashvili himself, supported by American taxpayer dollars, and Washington back-room dealings) as we occupy Iraq, and manipulate the governments of Afghanistan and Pakistan, and other countries around the world.