I have only briefly glanced at what the Mudville Gazette has arranged for us to read here. The point that I just want to briefly make is that our adherence to Congress of Vienna era defintions of nation-states is severly limiting our ability to conduct the war against Islamofascism as it could be. For all intents and purposes, we have been fighting a significant "hot" phase of the war since we decided to repel Saddam from Kuwait, with multiple flare-ups, showdowns, bombing campaigns, invasion, occupation, and reconstruction. And now we're engaged in a national debate with the Seriously Stuck on Stupid Party that seems intent on doing everything they can to succeed in bringing back enforcement of the Sedition Acts while the Republicans cower behind the corner asking frightfully, "Are you sure we're the majority?"
As to the limitations imposed on us by essentially pre-World War I rules concerning the behavior of nation-states, keep this in mind: the people of the Muslim world generally view themselves as Muslim first, nationality second. But for Muslims this identity is deeper than the identity that Christians create concerning their relationship with their savior--for Muslims, Islam is the only institution that hasn't failed them (though it has), hasn't abandoned them, hasn't left them shuddering in the face of centuries of collective might from what they consider to be primitive and barbaric civilizations. Thus, think of the Muslim people living in Europe, they are united by an extranationality that goes beyond whether or not they are Moroccans or Afghans or Algerians--they are Muslim.
The nation-states that are all involved (for the most part) are constructs of the post-colonial world. They are not nation-states in the tradition of the West, geographic areas of common language, culture, traditions, heritage, but are instead, just drawn lines. Even Iran, a country that can trace its' roots back to Persia, is not a Persian country. For one thing, Persians were not Muslims. But that's beside the point. One could argue that Iran is perhaps the most complete nation within the umma that has roots that could be argued are more Western in nature than any other umma state, even Turkey, though that may be a toss-up. We should stop treating these separate "states" as separate entities when they are in fact only separate in administration, they are not separate in drive, motivation, and their ultimate desire, to establish a global umma.
Had we felt this way in the getgo, we would never have stopped at Kuwait in 1991, we would have liberated Iraq in 1991 and done the hard task that we are now engaged in.
And finally, think about all those countries that the United States never stopped "occupying" and think of how much we poured into making sure that Europe remained safe from the the threat of communism, how up until ten years ago there were still 200,000+ troops in Europe and more than 100,000+ in Asia. Are we supposed to simply call those troops home to, because they are been engaged in nation-building for the better part of sixty years now?
Great nations must do great things, otherwise they become great history. And I have no interest in seeing our nation-state, a nation-state forged on the backs of countless free men and women, becoming a great nation-state historically. Again, I implore the President to seek a declaration of war against all state-sponsors of terrorism and the terrorists themselves. Action is what gave the President his significant domestic legislative victories. Inaction is what has caused the President to become mired in the mediocrity that is the US Congress.
Sunday, November 20, 2005
Monday, November 14, 2005
...and the tragedy is always comic
What do we laugh at the most? Think about it. Really think about it. What do you really find funny? Watching some guy swinging from a rope swing, letting go and falling headsmack right into a tree and then falling through multiple limbs on his inevitable descent to the ground? Yeah, that's what I thought. Think slapstick, toilet humor, the Three Freaking Stooges for crying out loud! Physical suffering, unintentional or intentional is almost always funny. Why?
I think it's our way of dealing with the tragedy of the situation. We see some guy walking down the street listening to his iPod and he doesn't notice the telephone pole and WHACK, he runs right into it and all I can do to keep from laughing is turn around and pretend to be on my cell phone. I watch people all the time doing completely stupid and inane shit and have a hard time believing that I too do exactly the same kind of shit.
For instance, the other day I woke up moderatly late, late enough that I didn't hurry my ass up I would be late for work. So I jumped up, unaware that my legs had become entangled in the sheets, I lost my balance, and in an ill-advised attempt by my reflexes to correct the impending collapse onto the floor in some random heap, one foot struck out for the closest object upon which I could stand: the bed frame. Unknown to me, I had developed a rather large callous on my toe from wearing large boots at three shows all weekend at Walter Sobchak from The Big Lebowski and as my foot descended toward the bed frame, a rather sharp and obtrusive piece of metal when you really think about it, it managed to catch this callous at exactly the right location to split it open from the base up. Needless to say, I did not go to work that afternoon.
But stupid, inane and completely accidental. It hurt so much all I could was laugh, and laugh I did. Which is really, honestly, all that I can do at this point.
Put it to you this way: if the country that created such giants as Voltaire, Bastiat, Diderot, Rousseau, Joan of Arc, Charles the Hammer, Pascal, Balzac, not to mention Monet, Manet, fine food and a knack for being unable to win any military conflict at any point since before the Battle of Waterloo, which was in 1812, well, if that country becomes as Mark Steyn puts it, "the third Muslim nuclear power", then we're in for a long hard slog. A lot longer and a lot harder than anything we've ever had to do, and something that will shape the future in a way that is hard to now imagine. A future that had we accepted the role destiny put in our laps much earlier would not have been so difficult, and of course, I am talking about the undeniable fact that we should have used the provisions under the Constitution which enable us to turn territories into states as much as possible. Cuba, should have a been state. Think about how much headache that would have kept us from, not to mention being unable to smoke Cuban cigars, legally, for all these long decades. In fact, the Caribbean as a whole, all states, situation fixed. The Phillipines, should have spent some time as a territory and then, boom, another state. All the countries we liberated in world war II, states. Japan, South Korea, hell, Taiwan. All states. Germany, Britain and of course Ireland, and any of the members of British Empire, really, and of course France. If France had become a state, none of this would have ever been a problem.
Our problem as a society, is that there is too much of Athens running in our blood and not enough of Sparta. We have become overcivilized. Overcivilized and it's despicable. Everything that's any fun, whether it be the occassional rumble or isolated fistfight, smoking, smoking in your car in some places, people being charged with public drunkenness after leaving bars, everything that really, on the underbelly, marks the health of the class which lives only for the moment, which unfortunately, makes up a substantial if not majority portion of the population, everythign has been criminalized. You can't even light up a cigarette in public in most places anymore in the West and this from a culture that spawned the Industrial Revolution, which, if you had been alive in 1850 or so you wouldn't have made it three steps down the sidewalk in London such would have been the smell, to say nothing of even the smell in 1900.
The time for such thoughts is not now. We can't fault the past until we develop time travel and screw it up royally. Just think Doc Brown. Great Scott!
None of that is going to change unfortunately. Only makes me more convinced that every law should have an expiration date, that way we don't build up laws on the books and the number of laws and regulations remain more or less permanent, and it takes away time from the executive branch bureaucracy from enforcing--because they have to write new regs all the time silly!
Which again, the tragic is comic. We must face facts:
1) France will not long survive this most current front in the war against Islamofascism.
2) What's the saying, once France falls the rest of Europe will know its curtains? Oh, I just made that up. Not that some of Europe might not fight back, or that they might even ask for our help. I'm telling we ought to invoke the NATO charter and send in SOFOR to handle this. That way you'd make the French citizens know who is protecting them, and who have always been protecting them, Americans.
3) The longer the riots go on, the sooner the appeasement begins.
4) At this point, it's fairly obvious that the intensity of the riots don't matter. They could be setting fire to garbage bins and as long as they set fire to enough garbage bins the effect would be the same.
5) Has anybody thought about the thousands of French motorists who no longer have cars? Maybe the EU should give them each a brand new one! But seriously, these people are NOT innocents. They have allowed this perverse biculturalism to fester too long in the country that created eclairs. Shame, shame, shame!
The question is, when the riots become goal oriented? In other words, when will a Lenin appear on the scene and unite the disparate, almost autonomous factions scattered throughout Europe but together a potent force for action. What could twenty millions Muslims entrenched in Europe accomplish tomorrow if they really wanted to? Would the Europeans be able to defend themselves? Can they defend themselves? Should we help them? Does it matter one iota what one poll in America says about anything? That was completely random.
But important. The President seems stuck in neutral. The GOP, beholden to a Soros funded shadow group (somewhere at MichelleMalkin...you go and find it!) of so-called "moderates" (read: useless pragmatists who balk at the first sign of trouble) is unable to cut $50 billion out of the budget over the NEXT TEN YEARS and the Senate can't even hold a commitee vote on maintaining the current tax rates on capital gains and dividends.
Fiddling while Rome burns indeed.
And what is the most important issue to the Left, Bush lied. Dr. Sanity does a far better job than I can to explain the pyschology of Bush hatred (doesn't sound natural does it...). Suffice it to say I can understand where the Bush haters are coming from. I despised Clinton throughout my adolescence and young adulthood. I grew up, proud and defiant in the era of Reagan and came of age, cynical and disappointed, in the era of Clinton. No man has done more to temper my idealism or belief in the perfectability of our form of government than the man from Hope, and I daresay that he continues to offend me in ways that don't even approach the ways than Carter and that's only because Carter offends me in ways that are tangible. Being almost entirely at fault for letting the Islamofascists gain such a strong foothold so early on. But with Clinton it was entirely intangible. Everything about the man made me want to scream. The way people admired him, the way he smiled, fakely, at everthing, the way he would hold press conferences just to bask in the glow of the White House press corps. The way every few months seemd to hold some new investigation into some part of his administration. History will be glowing in their praise of Clinton if they refer to his administration as the most corrupt in history; a more apt description would be engaged in activites that border on having severely curtailed the national security of this nation. Even to this day I cannot believe the list of scandals the Clinton administration went through, and I'm not going to name all of them, just the ones that stick out: Whitewater, Vince Foster, Ron Brown, the WH possession of FBI files on thousands of political opponents, illegal campaign contributions, the selling of White House bedrooms for campaign contributors, the various investigations into Mike Espy the HUD secretary, the number of Clinton administration officials indicted and convicted, not to mention perjury and obstruction of justice and the wholesale acceptance of his philandering by the feminist left and the mainstream media, which had he been a Republican, would have landed him in the slammer as a rapist, in which case, Slick Willy would have taken on an entirely new connotation.
So, suffice it tos ay, I know something about hating a President so much that every day you wake up determined to convince everyone else that the President ought to be impeached, so much so that you spend the better part of ten months with signs in the back of your car that read "IMPEACHMENT NOW". That you go to the Senate trial. That you watch the vote count and remember wanting to pound Arlen Specter for being such a sissy. That you remember telling some kind named Dan that there wouldn't be a NASA for him to work for in the future because the Republic had effectively ended.
And then the malaise lifted. I suddenly understood what crippled so many of Bubba's critics. You couldn't attack him personally. People saw too much of themselves in Bill. People saw the flaws that they themselves have experienced. In many ways, Clinton is not just the consummate politician, but the greatest political figure the country may have ever produced. And I don't mean that as a compliment: Bill Clinton is the last remnant of industrial politics. He was tailor made for TV. A Nazi geneticist could not have created a better posterchild for progressive politics. Bill Clinton is to everyone what they want him to be. Simultaneously denying and accepting every position because he has none himself. The only way to oppose Clinton was to forget about him. To look past his modest successes and see instead how his presence unified the conversative and libertarian elements and how had he not been elected in 1992, the dramatic conservative takeover in 1994 would probably not have happened. And that, was really the last straw that made me love Bill Clinton. He gave me five glorious years with of Mr. Prime Minister, Newt Gingrich. Thanking him saved me, and it let me put the hate aside.
The Left cannot ever thank Dubya. And that is their weakness. To never give your opponent even the slightest bit of wiggling room, to never say, hey, maybe you're right, that's a good point, yes, let's take that under advisement, is not a strategy for winning more votes, it's the actions of a reactionary who is seeking to hold on to what they with every last bit of strength and nothing seems to be working. And Republicans still hold a 2-1 fund raising advantage despite all of their tactical missteps in the past ten months or so. So, yes, things are rather tragic looking right now, but you've go to laugh then haven't you?
I think it's our way of dealing with the tragedy of the situation. We see some guy walking down the street listening to his iPod and he doesn't notice the telephone pole and WHACK, he runs right into it and all I can do to keep from laughing is turn around and pretend to be on my cell phone. I watch people all the time doing completely stupid and inane shit and have a hard time believing that I too do exactly the same kind of shit.
For instance, the other day I woke up moderatly late, late enough that I didn't hurry my ass up I would be late for work. So I jumped up, unaware that my legs had become entangled in the sheets, I lost my balance, and in an ill-advised attempt by my reflexes to correct the impending collapse onto the floor in some random heap, one foot struck out for the closest object upon which I could stand: the bed frame. Unknown to me, I had developed a rather large callous on my toe from wearing large boots at three shows all weekend at Walter Sobchak from The Big Lebowski and as my foot descended toward the bed frame, a rather sharp and obtrusive piece of metal when you really think about it, it managed to catch this callous at exactly the right location to split it open from the base up. Needless to say, I did not go to work that afternoon.
But stupid, inane and completely accidental. It hurt so much all I could was laugh, and laugh I did. Which is really, honestly, all that I can do at this point.
Put it to you this way: if the country that created such giants as Voltaire, Bastiat, Diderot, Rousseau, Joan of Arc, Charles the Hammer, Pascal, Balzac, not to mention Monet, Manet, fine food and a knack for being unable to win any military conflict at any point since before the Battle of Waterloo, which was in 1812, well, if that country becomes as Mark Steyn puts it, "the third Muslim nuclear power", then we're in for a long hard slog. A lot longer and a lot harder than anything we've ever had to do, and something that will shape the future in a way that is hard to now imagine. A future that had we accepted the role destiny put in our laps much earlier would not have been so difficult, and of course, I am talking about the undeniable fact that we should have used the provisions under the Constitution which enable us to turn territories into states as much as possible. Cuba, should have a been state. Think about how much headache that would have kept us from, not to mention being unable to smoke Cuban cigars, legally, for all these long decades. In fact, the Caribbean as a whole, all states, situation fixed. The Phillipines, should have spent some time as a territory and then, boom, another state. All the countries we liberated in world war II, states. Japan, South Korea, hell, Taiwan. All states. Germany, Britain and of course Ireland, and any of the members of British Empire, really, and of course France. If France had become a state, none of this would have ever been a problem.
Our problem as a society, is that there is too much of Athens running in our blood and not enough of Sparta. We have become overcivilized. Overcivilized and it's despicable. Everything that's any fun, whether it be the occassional rumble or isolated fistfight, smoking, smoking in your car in some places, people being charged with public drunkenness after leaving bars, everything that really, on the underbelly, marks the health of the class which lives only for the moment, which unfortunately, makes up a substantial if not majority portion of the population, everythign has been criminalized. You can't even light up a cigarette in public in most places anymore in the West and this from a culture that spawned the Industrial Revolution, which, if you had been alive in 1850 or so you wouldn't have made it three steps down the sidewalk in London such would have been the smell, to say nothing of even the smell in 1900.
The time for such thoughts is not now. We can't fault the past until we develop time travel and screw it up royally. Just think Doc Brown. Great Scott!
None of that is going to change unfortunately. Only makes me more convinced that every law should have an expiration date, that way we don't build up laws on the books and the number of laws and regulations remain more or less permanent, and it takes away time from the executive branch bureaucracy from enforcing--because they have to write new regs all the time silly!
Which again, the tragic is comic. We must face facts:
1) France will not long survive this most current front in the war against Islamofascism.
2) What's the saying, once France falls the rest of Europe will know its curtains? Oh, I just made that up. Not that some of Europe might not fight back, or that they might even ask for our help. I'm telling we ought to invoke the NATO charter and send in SOFOR to handle this. That way you'd make the French citizens know who is protecting them, and who have always been protecting them, Americans.
3) The longer the riots go on, the sooner the appeasement begins.
4) At this point, it's fairly obvious that the intensity of the riots don't matter. They could be setting fire to garbage bins and as long as they set fire to enough garbage bins the effect would be the same.
5) Has anybody thought about the thousands of French motorists who no longer have cars? Maybe the EU should give them each a brand new one! But seriously, these people are NOT innocents. They have allowed this perverse biculturalism to fester too long in the country that created eclairs. Shame, shame, shame!
The question is, when the riots become goal oriented? In other words, when will a Lenin appear on the scene and unite the disparate, almost autonomous factions scattered throughout Europe but together a potent force for action. What could twenty millions Muslims entrenched in Europe accomplish tomorrow if they really wanted to? Would the Europeans be able to defend themselves? Can they defend themselves? Should we help them? Does it matter one iota what one poll in America says about anything? That was completely random.
But important. The President seems stuck in neutral. The GOP, beholden to a Soros funded shadow group (somewhere at MichelleMalkin...you go and find it!) of so-called "moderates" (read: useless pragmatists who balk at the first sign of trouble) is unable to cut $50 billion out of the budget over the NEXT TEN YEARS and the Senate can't even hold a commitee vote on maintaining the current tax rates on capital gains and dividends.
Fiddling while Rome burns indeed.
And what is the most important issue to the Left, Bush lied. Dr. Sanity does a far better job than I can to explain the pyschology of Bush hatred (doesn't sound natural does it...). Suffice it to say I can understand where the Bush haters are coming from. I despised Clinton throughout my adolescence and young adulthood. I grew up, proud and defiant in the era of Reagan and came of age, cynical and disappointed, in the era of Clinton. No man has done more to temper my idealism or belief in the perfectability of our form of government than the man from Hope, and I daresay that he continues to offend me in ways that don't even approach the ways than Carter and that's only because Carter offends me in ways that are tangible. Being almost entirely at fault for letting the Islamofascists gain such a strong foothold so early on. But with Clinton it was entirely intangible. Everything about the man made me want to scream. The way people admired him, the way he smiled, fakely, at everthing, the way he would hold press conferences just to bask in the glow of the White House press corps. The way every few months seemd to hold some new investigation into some part of his administration. History will be glowing in their praise of Clinton if they refer to his administration as the most corrupt in history; a more apt description would be engaged in activites that border on having severely curtailed the national security of this nation. Even to this day I cannot believe the list of scandals the Clinton administration went through, and I'm not going to name all of them, just the ones that stick out: Whitewater, Vince Foster, Ron Brown, the WH possession of FBI files on thousands of political opponents, illegal campaign contributions, the selling of White House bedrooms for campaign contributors, the various investigations into Mike Espy the HUD secretary, the number of Clinton administration officials indicted and convicted, not to mention perjury and obstruction of justice and the wholesale acceptance of his philandering by the feminist left and the mainstream media, which had he been a Republican, would have landed him in the slammer as a rapist, in which case, Slick Willy would have taken on an entirely new connotation.
So, suffice it tos ay, I know something about hating a President so much that every day you wake up determined to convince everyone else that the President ought to be impeached, so much so that you spend the better part of ten months with signs in the back of your car that read "IMPEACHMENT NOW". That you go to the Senate trial. That you watch the vote count and remember wanting to pound Arlen Specter for being such a sissy. That you remember telling some kind named Dan that there wouldn't be a NASA for him to work for in the future because the Republic had effectively ended.
And then the malaise lifted. I suddenly understood what crippled so many of Bubba's critics. You couldn't attack him personally. People saw too much of themselves in Bill. People saw the flaws that they themselves have experienced. In many ways, Clinton is not just the consummate politician, but the greatest political figure the country may have ever produced. And I don't mean that as a compliment: Bill Clinton is the last remnant of industrial politics. He was tailor made for TV. A Nazi geneticist could not have created a better posterchild for progressive politics. Bill Clinton is to everyone what they want him to be. Simultaneously denying and accepting every position because he has none himself. The only way to oppose Clinton was to forget about him. To look past his modest successes and see instead how his presence unified the conversative and libertarian elements and how had he not been elected in 1992, the dramatic conservative takeover in 1994 would probably not have happened. And that, was really the last straw that made me love Bill Clinton. He gave me five glorious years with of Mr. Prime Minister, Newt Gingrich. Thanking him saved me, and it let me put the hate aside.
The Left cannot ever thank Dubya. And that is their weakness. To never give your opponent even the slightest bit of wiggling room, to never say, hey, maybe you're right, that's a good point, yes, let's take that under advisement, is not a strategy for winning more votes, it's the actions of a reactionary who is seeking to hold on to what they with every last bit of strength and nothing seems to be working. And Republicans still hold a 2-1 fund raising advantage despite all of their tactical missteps in the past ten months or so. So, yes, things are rather tragic looking right now, but you've go to laugh then haven't you?
Tuesday, November 08, 2005
the comedy is always tragic...
The Earth these last few months has held to the same course that it has kept, relatively unchanged, for much of the past four billion years. There were no orbital deviations of consequences to report, although the entire planet did move a few millimeters off axis when the Sumatra earthquake hit early this year. The planet's magnetic field continued to wane, as we approach the period of the poles reversing, a process we can't even begin to understand. For an outside observer who wasn't paying any attention to the surface nuisance, things would have seemed just as they had the last time they visited, say a billion years before.
For the surface nuisance, things have changed greatly.
Our anthropic tendencies (tendencies because we are what we are and cannot deny it) cannot be explained away--we are products of an evolutionary system that has been at least three billion years in the works--three billion years of code errors and transcription problems and mutations from radiation, three billion or more years of the program we call life running non-stop, perpetuating itself until we came along to realize what was happening--an evolutionary system that spawned highly clustered neural nets that house our consciousness, our ability to turn these random elements on this screen into what constitutes language in our minds. We are not so separate from the world that we alienate ourselves from at every turn. Technology has made us masters of the moment--we can control our moment to moment existences in almost excruciating detail. There is, for those of in what constitutes the West, no elements of surprise. There are no challenges, save for those that we create ourselves, and to really be tested, you must be tested by situations that you have absolutely have no control over. When we do faces crises, we flip out. We become conspicuosly aware that technology has not allowed us to become masters of the whole--that no matter how many helicopters we have, no matter how many cameras we have placed throughout cities, no matter how many UAV's you have flying, you cannot control the random element that is the human being.
And of course, the prompt: the opening of the Eurabian civil war, which has for years engaged in an even lower level of activity against mostly Jewish targets throughout Europe, and has now of course become the potential fuse to the powderkeg.
There were plenty of signs, such as this one, long, long ago, and more recently some have been saying stuff like this, but the one thing that I want to point out is this: in roughly seven days, the affected areas went from one suburb of 40,000 some odd thousand, to three suburbs three days later, to three hundred cities eleven days after the initial electrocution, ostensibly as good as "lighting" of the fuse as any other (think assasination of Archduke Ferdinand, that type of thing) and then to a few random isolated events in Brussels and Germany.
A few weeks ago, Peggy Noonan had an article in the Wall Street Journal in which she wrote that "the wheels have come off the trolley and the trolley is off its tracks." And I read that with the specific intent of letting it sit. Of letting it settle. Too much is decided today without the necessary reflection that decisions of weight require--I'm not talking about the time required, I'm talking about the quality of the reflection. I'm talking about realizing that for the Islamists, the Battle of Tours was but a momentary blip on their eventual desire to extend the umma globally, just as the Ottoman Turks defeat at the gates of Vienna was only a roadbump--it has obviously not derailed their attempts to create Eurabia. That kind of reflection. It's important to put into perspective when we consider how unusual our period of history has been in that for the most part the wheels of the trolley were on and the trolley was in its tracks. That is an abberation in the great continuity of the human comedy, and it is also our tragedy. We find any time that things don't work exactly as they should that something must be done about it. We are astonished when the cable internet goes out, or our cellphone inexplicably cuts out, or any of the conveniences that we not only take for granted, but assume that our mastery of the moment extends to a mastery of the whole. We don't need to know how the cellphone works, only that it should. We don't need to understand how the internet works, only that it does. We have completely decoupled knowledge from experience and instead have made propietary knowledge, speciality knowledge the key component of our life experiences. One form of information, one form of thinking, one form of employment, and yet what we do in that time, what do we achieve, what do we personally build? I don't mean to diminish a person's hobbies, those things spent in "free time" (another modern concept), interests that may include the "amateur" tag, such as, "oh he's an amateur horticulturalist" or "she's an amatuer birdwatcher." What distinguishes one person as a professional and the other as an amateur? And who gets to make that determination?
We have for decades churned graduates out in the most proto-industrial manner: speciality of focus equals mastery of the moment. Specialists of every ilk and manner have been conceived and people who attain such speciality, i.e. those at the master and Ph.d level, dedicate their "careers" to usually that one specific area of study. What are the statistics on those who achieve one master's degree or Ph.d, how many of those choose to pursue another? And how many of those use their degrees in truly interdisciplinary research?
No one said that the division of labor would always indefinitely remain indispensable--indeed we have reached the point where soon all of our "labors" will be completely automated, where Westerners will not have to engage in any physical activity to maintain their survival at all. We are already nearly at that point. The division of labor has produced a cornucopia, but at the same time it has stolen something essential from us--the instinctive need to survive. We have blunted, meddled, contracpted, aborted, liberated the instinct to survive. Lest us never forget, we are as much a primate as any other primate alive today, domesticated or not, because that is what we have become. Domesticated, overcivilized, and unwilling to do the things necessary to preserve our common civilization. Much as it pains me to do so, France is a member of Western civilization. What better way to expose French hypocrisy than to offer a Marine division to help win back each of those "little Fallujahs" that pockmark the French landscape? What better way to make them see the unreality that they have been living? These acts of vandalism which constitute nothing more than abject abhorrence of the law and the concept of civil society should be met with exactly the kind of force that only a full Marine division can bring to bear against such reprobates. How would the French public respond to a public offer from the President of the United States to the President of France to give whatever military support necessary to thwart this beginning that could end quickly or build to something much, much worse. The worst would be France ceding control of those areas that are Muslim to Muslim authorities and setting the stage for the end of France as a Western nation-state. The best, Chirac mobilizes the Army and begins shooting on sight anyone doing anything that violates the provisions of curfew and the normal law and order expectations of a civil society.
Can we expect any other European country to stand up to this latest threat to Western civilization when none of them value the civilization that we have built? Can we expect the EU to bring it's Common Defense Force or whatever its called into action to preserve law and order? Can we expect anything but more of Noonan's feeling that the wheels have come off the trolley, or perhaps we should get used to the idea that things are indeed broken, that we cannot just put the trolley back on the tracks and keep going, that we might have to sacrifice something of the comfort that our ancestors earned for us, how blissfully unaware they were that it was the very fact that they had to work for whatever they had in order to appreciate it that made them great and that makes us merely dwarfs standing on the backs of giants. It makes all of our vaunted technological prowess seem as vaccuous as the vaunted singularity that approaches will lead us to be, for what is it to possess life if one no longer hears its music? If the sublime fails to touch you in some small way, seeing first light at dawn, feeling the vast abundance that the division of labor within nature produced long before humanity ever conceived of language or humanity itself and knowing that there is something there, there is some greater meaning than just being masters of the moment. That if we truly do believe in a culture of life that it is our responsibility to build nobler goals than sales pitches and Sunday brunch with your Sunday best and Wednesday night bible study--to believe something is not enough anymore, we must do it. We must understand that the only logical conclusion of a culture of life is the recognition that spreading humanity and life, life in our image, culture and belief systems, must be our penultimate goal. That again, we can do little to change a culture's mind whose penultimate goal is the destruction of all other religions and the incorporation of all people of planet Earth into the umma and a permanent static existence that they would gladly force upon everyone, just as they trying to force it upon the people of France this very day.
It becomes my belief more and more each day that we cannot defeat an enemy that we will not call out in name, that we cannot win a war in which we continue to trade with known enemies, that we cannot ever hope to proclaim victory if we do not first declare war. And that unfortunately, we may not be able to pacify an enemy who believes they are the only truly spiritual people on the planet, that they and they alone possess the truth, and that that truth is laid down in one book. Remember how dangerous Western civilization was when people believed that the only truth that existed was contained in the Bible? Truth flows not from an authority, but from experience, in the cumulative experiences of the billions of people who lived on this planet that tonight continues its present course and speed. Ahead at roughly one half impulse Mr. Sulu.
For the surface nuisance, things have changed greatly.
Our anthropic tendencies (tendencies because we are what we are and cannot deny it) cannot be explained away--we are products of an evolutionary system that has been at least three billion years in the works--three billion years of code errors and transcription problems and mutations from radiation, three billion or more years of the program we call life running non-stop, perpetuating itself until we came along to realize what was happening--an evolutionary system that spawned highly clustered neural nets that house our consciousness, our ability to turn these random elements on this screen into what constitutes language in our minds. We are not so separate from the world that we alienate ourselves from at every turn. Technology has made us masters of the moment--we can control our moment to moment existences in almost excruciating detail. There is, for those of in what constitutes the West, no elements of surprise. There are no challenges, save for those that we create ourselves, and to really be tested, you must be tested by situations that you have absolutely have no control over. When we do faces crises, we flip out. We become conspicuosly aware that technology has not allowed us to become masters of the whole--that no matter how many helicopters we have, no matter how many cameras we have placed throughout cities, no matter how many UAV's you have flying, you cannot control the random element that is the human being.
And of course, the prompt: the opening of the Eurabian civil war, which has for years engaged in an even lower level of activity against mostly Jewish targets throughout Europe, and has now of course become the potential fuse to the powderkeg.
There were plenty of signs, such as this one, long, long ago, and more recently some have been saying stuff like this, but the one thing that I want to point out is this: in roughly seven days, the affected areas went from one suburb of 40,000 some odd thousand, to three suburbs three days later, to three hundred cities eleven days after the initial electrocution, ostensibly as good as "lighting" of the fuse as any other (think assasination of Archduke Ferdinand, that type of thing) and then to a few random isolated events in Brussels and Germany.
A few weeks ago, Peggy Noonan had an article in the Wall Street Journal in which she wrote that "the wheels have come off the trolley and the trolley is off its tracks." And I read that with the specific intent of letting it sit. Of letting it settle. Too much is decided today without the necessary reflection that decisions of weight require--I'm not talking about the time required, I'm talking about the quality of the reflection. I'm talking about realizing that for the Islamists, the Battle of Tours was but a momentary blip on their eventual desire to extend the umma globally, just as the Ottoman Turks defeat at the gates of Vienna was only a roadbump--it has obviously not derailed their attempts to create Eurabia. That kind of reflection. It's important to put into perspective when we consider how unusual our period of history has been in that for the most part the wheels of the trolley were on and the trolley was in its tracks. That is an abberation in the great continuity of the human comedy, and it is also our tragedy. We find any time that things don't work exactly as they should that something must be done about it. We are astonished when the cable internet goes out, or our cellphone inexplicably cuts out, or any of the conveniences that we not only take for granted, but assume that our mastery of the moment extends to a mastery of the whole. We don't need to know how the cellphone works, only that it should. We don't need to understand how the internet works, only that it does. We have completely decoupled knowledge from experience and instead have made propietary knowledge, speciality knowledge the key component of our life experiences. One form of information, one form of thinking, one form of employment, and yet what we do in that time, what do we achieve, what do we personally build? I don't mean to diminish a person's hobbies, those things spent in "free time" (another modern concept), interests that may include the "amateur" tag, such as, "oh he's an amateur horticulturalist" or "she's an amatuer birdwatcher." What distinguishes one person as a professional and the other as an amateur? And who gets to make that determination?
We have for decades churned graduates out in the most proto-industrial manner: speciality of focus equals mastery of the moment. Specialists of every ilk and manner have been conceived and people who attain such speciality, i.e. those at the master and Ph.d level, dedicate their "careers" to usually that one specific area of study. What are the statistics on those who achieve one master's degree or Ph.d, how many of those choose to pursue another? And how many of those use their degrees in truly interdisciplinary research?
No one said that the division of labor would always indefinitely remain indispensable--indeed we have reached the point where soon all of our "labors" will be completely automated, where Westerners will not have to engage in any physical activity to maintain their survival at all. We are already nearly at that point. The division of labor has produced a cornucopia, but at the same time it has stolen something essential from us--the instinctive need to survive. We have blunted, meddled, contracpted, aborted, liberated the instinct to survive. Lest us never forget, we are as much a primate as any other primate alive today, domesticated or not, because that is what we have become. Domesticated, overcivilized, and unwilling to do the things necessary to preserve our common civilization. Much as it pains me to do so, France is a member of Western civilization. What better way to expose French hypocrisy than to offer a Marine division to help win back each of those "little Fallujahs" that pockmark the French landscape? What better way to make them see the unreality that they have been living? These acts of vandalism which constitute nothing more than abject abhorrence of the law and the concept of civil society should be met with exactly the kind of force that only a full Marine division can bring to bear against such reprobates. How would the French public respond to a public offer from the President of the United States to the President of France to give whatever military support necessary to thwart this beginning that could end quickly or build to something much, much worse. The worst would be France ceding control of those areas that are Muslim to Muslim authorities and setting the stage for the end of France as a Western nation-state. The best, Chirac mobilizes the Army and begins shooting on sight anyone doing anything that violates the provisions of curfew and the normal law and order expectations of a civil society.
Can we expect any other European country to stand up to this latest threat to Western civilization when none of them value the civilization that we have built? Can we expect the EU to bring it's Common Defense Force or whatever its called into action to preserve law and order? Can we expect anything but more of Noonan's feeling that the wheels have come off the trolley, or perhaps we should get used to the idea that things are indeed broken, that we cannot just put the trolley back on the tracks and keep going, that we might have to sacrifice something of the comfort that our ancestors earned for us, how blissfully unaware they were that it was the very fact that they had to work for whatever they had in order to appreciate it that made them great and that makes us merely dwarfs standing on the backs of giants. It makes all of our vaunted technological prowess seem as vaccuous as the vaunted singularity that approaches will lead us to be, for what is it to possess life if one no longer hears its music? If the sublime fails to touch you in some small way, seeing first light at dawn, feeling the vast abundance that the division of labor within nature produced long before humanity ever conceived of language or humanity itself and knowing that there is something there, there is some greater meaning than just being masters of the moment. That if we truly do believe in a culture of life that it is our responsibility to build nobler goals than sales pitches and Sunday brunch with your Sunday best and Wednesday night bible study--to believe something is not enough anymore, we must do it. We must understand that the only logical conclusion of a culture of life is the recognition that spreading humanity and life, life in our image, culture and belief systems, must be our penultimate goal. That again, we can do little to change a culture's mind whose penultimate goal is the destruction of all other religions and the incorporation of all people of planet Earth into the umma and a permanent static existence that they would gladly force upon everyone, just as they trying to force it upon the people of France this very day.
It becomes my belief more and more each day that we cannot defeat an enemy that we will not call out in name, that we cannot win a war in which we continue to trade with known enemies, that we cannot ever hope to proclaim victory if we do not first declare war. And that unfortunately, we may not be able to pacify an enemy who believes they are the only truly spiritual people on the planet, that they and they alone possess the truth, and that that truth is laid down in one book. Remember how dangerous Western civilization was when people believed that the only truth that existed was contained in the Bible? Truth flows not from an authority, but from experience, in the cumulative experiences of the billions of people who lived on this planet that tonight continues its present course and speed. Ahead at roughly one half impulse Mr. Sulu.
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