The Fight For France

Last week’s podcast concluded just before the attacks in Paris began, so this week, we’ve assembled a couple of guests who can help us make sense of it all and divine what response the U.S. should make both the terrorists and the refugees soon to be arriving en masse.

Herb Meyer served during the Reagan Administration as Special Assistant to the Director of Central Intelligence and Vice Chairman of the CIA’s National Intelligence Council. He’s also the dad of Ricochet editor Tom Meyer. Walter Russell Mead is the Distinguished Scholar in American Strategy and Statesmanship at the Hudson Institute, the James Clarke Chace Professor of Foreign Affairs and Humanities at Bard College, and Editor-at-Large of The American Interest. He’s also someone’s dad. Finally, should tipping be discontinued? Tune in to find out.

Music from this week’s episode:

Save A Prayer by Eagles of Death Metal

The opening sequence for the Ricochet Podcast was composed and produced by James Lileks.

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There are 20 comments.

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  1. BuckeyeSam Inactive
    BuckeyeSam
    @BuckeyeSam

    The segment with Meyer was fascinating, and he certainly knows far more than I. But I’m not buying that Islam’s problems are growing pains. If it is, I say it’s all the more reason to turn Muslims back to the Middle East with the instruction to kill themselves and let us know when they’re finished. In the meantime, Western countries and others (China and Russia) should go to extraordinary lengths to root out Islamic terrorists intent on exporting their terror. Single it out and exterminate it. Period.

    • #1
  2. Kevin Creighton Contributor
    Kevin Creighton
    @KevinCreighton

    Is it me, or does Rob look like Steve Martin in that photo?

    • #2
  3. Aaron Miller Inactive
    Aaron Miller
    @AaronMiller

    Your connection of refugee considerations to our government’s disinterest in the normal immigration process was perfect, Peter.

    Still listening.

    • #3
  4. Aaron Miller Inactive
    Aaron Miller
    @AaronMiller

    I like Meyer’s general point about allowing for the possibility that enemies will make pivotal errors and regret their strategic decisions.

    But is it likely that ISIS leaders were not impressed by President Bush’s response to 9/11 and yet fear the repercussions of the Paris attacks?

    If they regret anything right now, it is inviting Russia into the mix. Western nations have more potential power, but Russia has the will to scorch the earth and fight dirty.

    Also, that’s a great point about the unlikely conflux of Reagan, Thatcher, and Pope John Paul II.

    Still listening.

    • #4
  5. OmegaPaladin Moderator
    OmegaPaladin
    @OmegaPaladin

    Rob, I use the phrase Islamic Supremacism for the scumbags that like to kill us or make us submit to Allah.

    • #5
  6. Aaron Miller Inactive
    Aaron Miller
    @AaronMiller

    I wish Herb had answered your question directly, Peter. Perhaps he will do so here sometime.

    Certainly, communication and transportation technologies have incalculable effects on civilizational development. Most of the progress secular academics these days attribute to “the Enlightenment” and the rise of empiricism, I attribute the technologies that empowered collaboration and production while also increasing common education.

    But, as Meyer agrees, a neighboring family’s “growing pains” become your own when a shot comes through your window. I would add that your neighbor loses the freedom to manage his own affairs when he clearly and brutally abuses the fellow members of his house. And if you had abused your family before “maturing” to regret your misdeeds and live better, would that excuse you of the duty to intervene? Might the immature West have been better off if a mature civilization had intervened for us? The maturation theory has little use even if it is true.

    We must question the essential nature of Islam itself. If it is rooted in harmful role models and precedents, then modern interpretations cannot salvage it. If Geert Wilders, Mark Steyn, Allen West, and other sharp minds have estimated its history and teachings correctly, then Islam might be more akin to communist ideology than to Christianity or Judaism. We don’t welcome moderate communism or pretend that non-violent progressives should never have to hear opposition.

    • #6
  7. EJHill Podcaster
    EJHill
    @EJHill

    It took about 1800 hundred years for Christendom to reach the Enlightenment. Let’s see, Islam was founded in the early 600’s…

    Man, the year 2415 is going to be solid…

    • #7
  8. Richard Fulmer Inactive
    Richard Fulmer
    @RichardFulmer

    European welfare states, in the name of protecting workers, have made it expensive to employ workers. Minimum wage laws, payroll taxes, and laws that make firing and layoffs difficult all combine to make employers reluctant to hire. The result is that the least experienced, least educated, and most discriminated against people are the least likely to get hired. In many European countries, this translates into young Muslim men.

    Lacking any sort of future other than living on the dole, such men are likely to feel resentment for being shut out of the system. They become easy prey for Imams selling visions of power. Whatever their understanding of Islamic theology, they quickly learn that Islam intimidates Europeans – the people they likely blame for their second class status.

    • #8
  9. Joseph Kulisics Inactive
    Joseph Kulisics
    @JosephKulisics

    I wish that the hosts had talked more extensively about tipping. I lived abroad for four years, and now, I can’t stand tipping. I almost never go out because I resent the atmosphere tipping creates, and since taking a trip generally requires eating out, when I travel, I try to look up the states with no tip credit so that I can skip it entirely.

    I hate tipping for several reasons.

    1. Though tipping advocates make much of the ability to withhold a tip, I find that no one seems to withhold tips. People feel too guilty and wish to avoid incurring the wrath of waitstaff in restaurants to which they might return.
    2. Tipping puts the onus for disciplining the employer’s employees on the customer instead of the manager.
    3. The tip rate seems to steadily rise with time. When I was a child, 12% was considered normal, and 15% a form of praise. As a young adult, 15% became normal, and 18% became a form of praise. Now, people say that 18% is normal, and %20 is a form of praise. Why does the normal percentage for a tip ever change? Prices change, so a constant percentage causes a gradual increase in tip income corresponding to the gradual increase in meal prices.
    4. I think that a competent waiter or waitress who works no harder than a stock boy in a store can make $40,000 a year with tips. It’s unfair to other non-tipped workers.
    • #9
  10. PsychLynne Inactive
    PsychLynne
    @PsychLynne

    I haven’t finished listening to the podcast, but yesterday at lunch my husband said “Is one of the problems with Islam that they never had a Reformation?”

    Then to hear Herb Meyer talk about the fight for modernity….

    I married a smart man : )

    • #10
  11. ParisParamus Inactive
    ParisParamus
    @ParisParamus

    There will be no Reformation in Islam because its primary text rules such out. Muslims will either opt out or be radicalized. Or be murdered attempting to opt out.

    • #11
  12. PJS Coolidge
    PJS
    @PJS

    Kevin Creighton:Is it me, or does Rob look like Steve Martin in that photo?

    It’s you.

    • #12
  13. Freesmith Member
    Freesmith
    @

    “Isn’t there anybody who, like in the old days, can go into the Oval office and tell this president that his strategy isn’t working?”

    “Why aren’t there any generals, or cabinet secretaries like Bill Casey, who will resign loudly in order to show disagreement with this president’s policy?”

    Poor podcast hosts. They still don’t understand.

    Can’t criticize the black guy.

    • #13
  14. Judge Mental Member
    Judge Mental
    @JudgeMental

    On the Journal Editorial Report, I just saw Bill McGurn mention Walter Russell Mead’s reference to Obama’s least favorite question, “why are there Syrian refugees?”.  The way he phrased it made it sound as if he listened to the podcast.

    • #14
  15. Peter Fumo Inactive
    Peter Fumo
    @Wolverine

    Agree with Buckeye Sam. Found Meyer unconvincing on Islam. There was a struggle in Christianity between different factions and denominations, and between Christianity and secularism, science etc. I don’t see a great struggle within Islam itself, just between Islam and the West. .

    I certainly might have misunderstood what he said, but it sounded unconvincing.

    • #15
  16. Aaron Miller Inactive
    Aaron Miller
    @AaronMiller

    I hope Peter, Rob, and James will join the discussions in Claire’s threads. Y’all spoke sensibly on the podcast.

    • #16
  17. Robert Dammers Thatcher
    Robert Dammers
    @RobertDammers

    We do have an aircraft carrier (HMS Queen Elizabeth), which was launched on 4th July (!) 2014.  Unfortunately, she won’t be ready to be formally commissioned until May 2017, and even then, we won’t have taken delivery of her complement 36 F-35s (she will carry only helicopters initially).  She’s planned to be fully up to scratch in 2020.  Oops.

    Her sister-ship, HMS Prince of Wales will follow 3 years later – though perhaps under the ancient name “Ark Royal” (there have been 5 Ark Royals since 1587), which apparently Prince Charles supports (like his father and his elder son, he’s a Navy man).

    • #17
  18. Casey Inactive
    Casey
    @Casey

    First, Tom’s dad was a great guest.  Interesting, conversational, clear, and different.  That is, he sounded like a normal person that follows things and not like a person who follows things and tries to explain to normal people.

    As for his comments on growing pains, true but a small tweak.  It isn’t that they are going through growth and we want them to hurry up.  It’s that we’re stuffing modernity into them like Peter’s wife is stuffing that goose.  They are rebeling against the stuffing.

    Now the left feels like this stuffing is an act of foie gras aggression and wants us to stop it.  The right thinks of it more like forcing yucky medicine into its mouth.

    Probably it’s like an addict who wants it but doesn’t want it and we’re supplying it and so it hates us.

    So there you go, it’s like a sick, druggy, Muslim goose.

    • #18
  19. GingerMa Inactive
    GingerMa
    @GingerMa

    Nice to hear EODM’s cover of Save a Prayer. Love that band, BTW The singer was a speech writer for Sonny Bonno.

    • #19
  20. Liz Member
    Liz
    @Liz

    Great listening to Tom’s dad.

    • #20
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