Blog Credo

The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.

H.L. Mencken

Wednesday, August 30, 2017

Marc Thiessen Is An Idiot

I know Marc.  We went to school together.  His lack of moral compass and intellectual bankruptcy have been a topic before in these digs.  His torture apologies were repugnant.

Today he has another moral atrocity that again demonstrates that this is someone with real rot in his soul.

Marc argues that antifas is not just problematic, which I would agree with, but the "moral equivalent of Nazis."

His "argument" follows two nonsensical tracks.  First, antifas are Marxists, and Marxism is as bad as Nazism.  His argument rests on the fact that Marxism - or at least Stalinism and Maoism - killed millions just like the Nazis.  What this rests on is the outcome rather than the result.  The point of Marxism, especially as opposed to Stalinism, was NOT to kill people.  In Nazism, killing people was precisely the point.  Marxism wanted true equality, but its method of getting there was bloody and bankrupted it of any moral legitimacy.  With Nazism, violence was precisely the point.

Secondly, he conflates the Black Bloc with all of antifas.  This is a typical move done on both sides of the rhetorical divide.  Not everyone in Boston or Berkeley were white supremacists, some were truly free speech advocates.  And most antifas see their role as protective. The Black Bloc are anarchists who believe in violent revolution.

What's again intellectually vacuous is that he equates anarchists with totalitarianism.  Marc has sometimes fashioned himself as a principled voice against SOME aspects of Trumpism.  Here he embraces the Trumpist tactic of having words make no sense.

Anarchists are fools.  It's never worked. It's the political equivalent of masturbation.

But they simply are the opposite of totalitarian.

The thing about totalitarianism is that - like Nazism - it is very, very rare.  Anarchism seeks to destory the state - again, because they are fools.  Saying that Black Bloc is totalitarian is like saying that liberals want concentration camps.  It's just....

There are plenty of problems with the use of violence on the Left, but even Marc notes that Nancy Pelosi condemned the violence in Berkeley in terms that escaped Trump.  The problems with antifas is that their tactics are counterproductive to their desired ends.  The problem with anarchists is that they are self-absorbed idiots.  The problem with Marc Thiessen is that he's an immoral idiot.

1 comment:

Michael Strassberg said...

Today, November 27, 2018, Thiessen wrote in The Washington Post that Trump wants to work with the congressional Democrats to make deals and pass legislation. Thiessen says that Trump is a deal maker, not an ideologue. Doesn't he realize that good governance is irrelevant to Trump, and that the only two things trump cares about are his ego and his money? Trump has demonstrated this over and over. He knows next to nothing about our Constitution or values, and doesn't care that he is ignorant of them. Only his money and ego count.