No enemies to the left, no friends to the right
Left wing journalist Nir Rosen ridicules Lara Logan’s rape. Seems that because Nir Rosen is even further left than she is, the stupid slut deserved to get raped.
“Lara Logan had to outdo Anderson. Where was her buddy McCrystal.â€
That she is supposedly a buddy of the insufficiently left wing McCrystal is a suggestion that she is insufficiently left wing.
Also observe his “sincere apology”:
‘“As someone who’s devoted his career to defending victims and supporting justice, I’m very ashamed for my insensitive and offensive comments.â€
Self congratulation: 12 words.
Apology: 9 words.
This kind of coerced statement is not an apology – it is a conspicuous display of submission: a Stalin show trial in miniature.
Oh, quite so, but I am never very troubled by Stalinists repressing each other.
Stalin, and Stalin’s purges, where a force for moderation in the Bolshevik party. Without Stalin, they would have gone Khmer Rouge. He repeatedly reigned in, and frequently eradicated, the more extreme elements.
Whenever a leftist uses the word “Stalinism” we should keep in mind that the big objection to Stalin on the left was that he was too soft on the
peasantskulaks, and he restrained all the good progressives from treating thepeasantskulaks as they deserved.Perhaps you don’t know enough about the Stalin regime? I didn’t until the past year or so – although I thought I did.
I consider myself an expert on the Soviet regimes, with deep insight into events, and into the psychology underlying the events. Stalin was a semi sane man in a lunatic asylum, a rational and reasonable psychopath in a party full of frothing at the mouth psychopathic sadists. Stalin won over Trotsky because Trotsky (like Che) spent so much time personally torturing and killing people with his own hands that he neglected management and bureaucratic politics, while Stalin delegated such unimportant tasks as torture to menials. Stalin was always spending late hours in his spartan office struggling with piles of paperwork, (such as death warrants) while Trotsky was busy in the dungeons.
Of course, this may well have in practice meant that Stalin killed more people than Trotsky, it being lot faster to sign off on a list of people to be killed than to personally poke them with a hot pitchfork, but it is also an indicator of comparative sanity. Pol Pot used to personally beat chained up high party officers to death with a club, which reflected a party than murdered more maniacally than the Soviet party. That Pol Pot never saw any death warrants meant that murders were carried out capriciously in Cambodia, while in Stalin’s Russia, if you were tortured and murdered, at least the ordinary menial torturer and murderer had to fill out several forms in triplicate.
If someone merely died of hunger, cold, and overwork in a slave labor camp, records were seldom kept, so it was pretty easy in Stalin’s Russia to kill people by neglect, but it was a lot harder to kill them by torture and murder than in Pol Pot’s Cambodia, and lot harder to kill people by torture and murder than most of the Soviet party, and most of the western left, would have preferred.
Bruce,
You make a good point. But on the other hand, are apologies ever unforced? Can you think of an example?
As they say: “I’ve never met a man who has struggled with conscience and lost.â€
Oh yes! I apologize sincerely nearly every day – usually for losing my temper and regretting it.
Humans cannot live up to the standards of behaviour that they ought to strive-for – therefore apologies are necessary.
However, they ought to be private and personal.
Really? That’s a saying?
I wish it applied to me. My conscience is a right bitch and causes me no end of grief.
Indeed, I often get stuck between my desire to apologize and the fact I’m aware the recipient won’t take it well – thus making something else I might have to apologize for, which they also won’t take well, thus…