Read this interview with Marek Edelman, who is the last surviving military leader of the uprising in the Warsaw Ghetto. Read it now. (If you get weird gobbledygook, reload or shift-reload the page; Blogspot now has some freaky glitch that causes this to happen to its sites.)
Via Tim Blair.
I can’t come up with anything that would top this. This post will stay at the top until Tuesday.
(Via Ken Summers.)
Update: this is also good. (Via John Dunshee.)
The notion that the liberal mind is attracted to authoritarian regimes is not a new one. This kind of puts the asserions of the current crop of anti-war commentators that, among other things, Saddam was “not a threat,” and “Iraq was really much better off under Saddam than under US” – never Coalition – “occupation” into perspective. Of course, it isn’t one that makes them look very good…
Notable quote:
I think that those people believe in power. It was put to me very succinctly when we were taken down to Kharkiv for the opening of the Dnieper dam. There was an American colonel who was running it, building the dam in effect. “How do you like it here?” I asked him, thinking that I’d get a wonderful blast of him saying how he absolutely hated it. “I think it’s wonderful,” he said. “You never get any labor trouble.”
(Via a commenter to this post of Roger Simon’s.)
I usually don’t bother linking to things on Little Green Footballs because I figured 1) everyone knows where the site is by now so it needs no promotion by me, and 2) I didn’t think my outrage meter had a higher peg. But it does: read Muslim Cop Kills “Blasphemer”. Never mind the beating to death – the man was in charge for doing his job. But see, being a Christian, he didn’t know every anal detail of the freakish laws modern-day Muslims apparently (at least in Pakistan) follow:
Masih had been in jail since Aug. 23, 2003, awaiting trial on charges of blasphemy under Pakistan’s strict “Law 295″ – which forbids desecrating the Quran and “defiling” the name of Islam’s prophet, Muhammad. On the day of his arrest, Masih was collecting garden rubbish, which he heaped temporarily against the wall of a mosque in Lahore’s Lawrence Gardens section while collecting more that he planned to burn later. This action brought the blasphemy charge, which carries a maximum two-year prison sentence.
Though really, he probably just had forgotten to bribe someone or other, or maybe he looked funny at some Muslim, or maybe they just felt like arresting an infidel that day:
According to human rights groups, Pakistan’s blasphemy law is much abused and frequently used to settle personal grudges.
Good grief. And we wonder why “Muslims hate us.” They (or at least – gotta put in the disclaimers for the .0000031564% of Muslims who aren’t like this! – some of them) hate just about everything and everybody on earth. What a miserable group of people.
Another disclaimer: it occurred to me that “never mind the beating to death” is a bad phrase to use, when I actually meant “the beating to death aside,” or “in addition to the appalling fact of the beating to death.” I just see in my mind a helpless sick man being bludgeoned in his bed by some human monster – who was assigned to guard his victim! – and I wonder at the degeneracy of a culture that produces such folk. At least the killer is in prison, but I wonder if a miscarriage of what that land calls “justice” will get him a light sentence, and if so, what form will it take – bribes, intimidation by the killer’s family/tribe members, or who knows what?
And uses big words like “obfuscation.” I don’t agree with every single one of Bush’s ideas here, but I’m not going to get into that now; I just put this up as a kind of gift for people who keep using the “Bush can’t talk” line and also for CurrencyLad, who alerted me to this interview.
It seems to me that much of the pacifistic movement is based on a mistaken reading of human nature. This is demonstrated in the remarks of Hugo Schwyzer, in the comments to his own post on feminism and Abu Ghraib:
I don’t want women in the military because I am troubled by the military
And here, from another commenter on the same post,
With all due respect, doesn’t being trained to kill other human beings with weapons and your hands lead to coarsening or perhaps a better word is desensitizing (even if it isn’t on the “training schedule")? I know that the military does more than kill, but killing the enemy before he/she kills you seems to be a fundamental nature of the occupation.
This isn’t the first time I’ve encountered the notion of pacifists that human beings are by nature gentle beings who must be “coarsened” or otherwise have their natural instincts (as they see it) to be kind and cooperative subverted or stifled, if not outright destroyed, before they can become soldiers. In fact, it seems a central tenet of most pacifism, even that based on Christianity (most pacifist Christians I have encountered seem to focus on the gentle “rabbi” Christ while passing over the Christ who knocked over the money-changers’ tables at the Temple and stated he had come “not to bring peace but a sword” as temporary aberrations if not outright false portrayals shoehorned in by Gospel-writers with an anti-Roman agenda).
The thing is, the pacifists are wrong about human nature, and the briefest observation of a group of two-year-olds could make their mistake known to them, were they not blinded by their own misconceptions and pride. I say “pride” because (again, as the Christians are always pointing out, and this is one of their least popular lessons) human beings like to think well of themselves, and tend to think they are better than they really are. Instead of being natural paragons of sweetness and light that bad old Life, or Society, or Experience, darkens and twists, human beings are only too apt to be quarrelsome, combative, and violent from the get-go, and killing is all too easy for us. If the humans-are-naturally-good crowd were right, neighborhoods full of highschool dropouts would be paradises of comity and kindness instead of places you don’t dare drive through with the windows rolled down and the doors unlocked. Far from turning a man or woman more beast-like in order to “turn them into killers” the military serves the purpose of disciplining and controlling the human killer instinct so that men and women will be less apt to kill or commit other violence indiscriminantly, and any deviation from this course can be laid to the failure of either the recruit to learn or the instructor to teach the lessons of military education.
(Via Sarah.)
What do I like most about Wordpress and other blogging programs like it? Besides the price – free – comment moderation is built in. (That is, you don’t have to add it as a hack.) Sure, I’ve gotten a couple of whiny “you don’t have the courage to let me shit on your blog and then smell it and tell me how good it stinks” emails when I rejected someone’s trollfart, but so what? Like I care what a troll feels.
David Wong wants The Ultimate War Sim. It sounds… well here, read a sample:
Forget about the abandoned building wallpaper in Red Alert 2. I want to have to choose between sending marines door-to-door to be killed in the streets or leveling the block from afar, Nuns and all, with 30 carriers. I want to have to choose between 40 dead troops or 400 dead children, and be damned to Hell by chubby pundits from the safety of their studios regardless of which way I go.
Then read the whole thing.
(Also via Brian Tiemann.)
It’s Berkeley, where else? If I were a parent of a college-age kid today, I’d encourage that kid to go to trade school. You can read books on your own.
(Via Brian Tiemann.)
I know I said at some point that this would be an election-matters-free blog but I can’t resist pointing out yet another good reason to not vote for Ravingloon Democrat Party candidate (and former minor cartoon character) John “I was in Vietnam but never My Lai!” Kerry: torture was a-ok as a terrorist-nabbing device the last time the Dems were in power. And we have it on the good authority of Our Betters™ in the media that torture is bad, nasty, and awful. Right?
Here’s the url to the video of monsters sawing off the head of a tied-up, helpless American, as he screamed:
http://isntapundit.com/images/iraq2vediow.wmv
For all our lives we’ve let the television, newspaper, and radio media control the flow of information. I’m willing to bet the majority of us have even taken for granted that we are getting the truth, or at least some form thereof, even as we wax cynical about the “lying, biased” media.
I haven’t watched tv news in months.
I open the paper, skim the editorials, spit, and go right to the recipes (on Wednesday), the car stuff (Thursday) and the ads.
I don’t listen to talk radio and the only radio news I listen to is the weather and the traffic; the rest I ignore as background noise.
I get most of my news from blogs, where other people with stronger stomachs and better skills at sifting the wheat from the chaff sort through the news for me.
In other words, I do my best to ignore the bullshit, ever more blatant and open and in our face, that passes itself off as the “news of the world.” But still, I do see news reports every now and then, and of course there are the internet versions of the tv/deadtree/wireless giants. And I don’t go into a huge skeptic-fest; I generally accept what I read is what the so-called reporter saw, heard, and felt. Of course, some things are more report-worthy than others, aren’t they?
First we had the images of the people jumping from the World Trade Center, which were a no-no, because people might get all upset and sad (or worse, upset and mad). Now there is the butchering of Nick Berg by orcs disguised as humans. Wouldn’t we, Precioussss, prefer instead to watch the Abu Ghraib video nasties over and over again? Watching a fellow citizen have his head sawed (not chopped or cut – sawed) off by some man-shaped piece of sewage might get us all angry at other people, which is a no-no. (Unless those Other People are George Bush and crew. It’s okay to get mad at them. Just don’t get mad at any foreigners. Foreigners, especially ones who hate us, are Our Betters™. They know we don’t deserve to live.) Watching some grinning female diddling a prisoner in a hood is good, because it makes us feel all crawly and disgusting, and people who are paralysed by self-disgust can’t do anything to defend themselves.
This is all to lead up to tell you to read everything from here down, and to download, and upload to your own site if possible, the video* that Nanny News Media doesn’t want you to see. Because it might make us angry, and we might damage all of her cute little preconceptions.
(Note: give dipnut’s site a chance to rest. I tried to get the video and the download cacked out on me. I’ll try again later.)
*Update: hotlink removed. Also, if you have a Hostmatters blog, you won’t be able to host it on your site. It’s a server-killer, probably due to the perverts. Maybe the perverts will rupture their organs of reproduction this time and die of gangrene so we won’t be bothered by them anymore. Hey, a girl can dream.
Via the idefatigable Tex we are introduced to one Joseph Wakim. This poor child needs his diaper changed or something. I won’t bother quoting his dribble – it basically translates to: “I hate you! I hate you! It’s all your fault! I wont eat! I’ll hold my breath! Give me candy! I hate you! Waaah! Waa waa waaahh!”
Dear Muslims Like This Wakim Person: Grow. The. Fuck. Up. Now.
I was going to paste this in the comments to this post but they have some script-prevention thing that prevents the same person from commenting more than once every two days, or something (I had commented elsewhere on the site) so here is what I was going to say:
You know, I think it is possible to both apologize for atrocities committed by members of our armed forces, while not grovelling to the “we bad, we the worst” school of thought people – but I think that point has been left far behind in the frantic fight to get Dubya Out of Office. A part of me almost wishes Bush would lose to Kerry – the misanthropic part, who wants to sit back and laugh at the fools’ inevitable bungling when they find themselves with this hot potato in their hands.
You are advised not to make La Shawn Barber angry. You might not like it when she’s angry.
But I like it.
This is what I meant about Arab (other than Iraqi) reaction to the Abu Ghraib affair being worthless, if I wasn’t entirely clear. Sample:
Bush was right to apologize to the Iraqis for what was done, and, politically it may have been shrewd to couch that apology in wider terms to all Arab peoples, but we should be clear about one thing. The denunciations of America by the Arab press outside Iraq has no more moral (politically speaking, it is something else) significance than the sight of a weeping Goebbels. It’s nothing more than the howling of a coterie of hand-picked hypocrites, flaks for the fascists, theocratic or otherwise, who run their countries, journalistic attack dogs who, it seems, have learned to love their leashes.
Western journalists need to look closely at these “fellow journalists” that they have accepted into their club.
(Via Rand Simberg.)
Had enough of the sale going on in the basement of human nature? Here’s some activity on an upper floor. I read about this a couple of weeks ago on dead tree before That Issue took over the front page of all the papers. I was quite frankly surprised that something so obviously Christian was given page one treatment, even in the Orlando Sentinel, which is one of the slightly less-stridently liberal newsorgans around. But I guess even the press needs a vacation from hopelessness every now and then.
(Via Small Dead Animals.)
I’ve updated this post too many times, so here’s a fresh one on the same subject. Fred Reed has a typically acid take to the torture issue. I still say – if they didn’t play Air Supply while doing their dirty deeds, it doesn’t quite rise to the level of real torture.
I kid! Air Supply isn’t that bad. Well, at least I don’t get the urge to toss radios across the room when Air Supply songs come on them, but then that’s usually because the radios are in cars, and that would throw my back out.
I had another thought: I wonder if some of the problems in the military (how did all what Fred calls “special people” get in here) could be solved by ditching that dumbass “Army of One” advertizement. I keep imagining some yob taking this slogan to its logical conclusion because he’s been raised on a steady diet of MTV and beer: “Yeah, I’m a motherfuckin’ Army of One, and I rule!” I could be wrong, though. But I keep in mind that many of today’s commanding officers, who should have known better, are younger than me and therefore are more susceptible to degeneracy in the time-honored fashion of the older generation running down the younger.
No, as Fred says, it’s a problem indemic to life in wartime, and human history in general. Of course, we could go back to concentrating on being moral, pure, and above-it-all instead of getting our hands dirty in the grubby mess of the Rest of the World. That served us so well before. Sure, we will lose a few thousand people to sudden death by terroristattackitus, the cure of which is almost as bad as the disease, every few months or years or so. And millions of people not insulated by our wealth will suffer and no doubt die painful deaths. But our souls will be pure. They’ll look pretty in Hell.
(Via a commenter on Michael Totten’s blog.)
Oh my. As usual, Robert Fisk’s shrieks-to-text don’t say much about his subject (which is this time, of course, the Abu Ghraib “tortures” – a subject tailor made for La Fisk, he must have nearly passed out with ecstacy when he heard about it). But they do say a great deal about Mr. Fisk himself, all of it rather disgusting. By the way, look for news of the former Robert Fisk donning white robes and changing his name to Rab al-Osama Batt-Kissar, or something like that in the near future – I’d be willing to bet money on his eventual conversion to Islam. Come on – what would you rather be associated with: a nasty, sexuality-obsessed ("the sexuality of the Old Testament” – what did go on in the staid chapels of La Fisk’s youth?) Christianity or a pure, clean religion (that the “sexuality-obsessed” Christianity can only collide with “revoltingly” and “obscenely") like Islam? Besides, that way he can be closer, in spirit anyway, to his hero Osama Bin Laden. (Hey, I don’t even have to infer all this by reading between the lines – Fisk does all but shoot us in the head with his Bin Laden hero worship. Personally, I find that to be “obscene” and “revolting,” but I’m a partisan American so don’t pay any attention to me!)
(Via Tim Blair.)
Phillip Kennicott is only happy when it rains:
But these photos are us. Yes, they are the acts of individuals (though the scandal widens, as scandals almost inevitably do, and the military’s own internal report calls the abuse “systemic"). But armies are made of individuals. Nations are made up of individuals. Great national crimes begin with the acts of misguided individuals; and no matter how many people are held directly accountable for these crimes, we are, collectively, responsible for what these individuals have done…
Here is my noble, civilized response: blow smoke up someone else’s ass, you smarmy, pompous dickhead. Collectively responsible – I’ll bet Mr. Kennicott has recused himself from this “us” – obviously he sees himself as being one of Our Betters. The heck with all the good that we have done in Iraq; instead, against every principle of liberal thought, the actions of a handful of butthead MPs just invalidated over two hundred years of history – nay, the entire two-thousand years of history since the death of Christ – which was, of course, exclusively the fault of Americans.
At this point all I can do is laugh. These people don’t want to live, they don’t want to carry this civilization into the future – they don’t want to give it even as long as the Romans gave theirs. They had 800 years – we don’t even get to make 250? Sometimes I think that the Baby Boomers not only want to spend all the money before they go, they want to take the civilized world down with them. And I am nagged by the feeling that even our government is sliding closer and closer to embracing this viewpoint – witness the grovelling before the entire Muslim world today for something that, should it have been done by military personnel in, say, Syria, would have been considered four-star fine treatment.
And another thing: this should have been between us and Iraq only. What the fuck does Egypt or Al-Jazeera or any other fucking Arab organization have to do with this? Who asked them to jump in? Were the humiliated POWs your imported thugs, fuckos? If I were Bush I’d have told all the other so-called Arab spokesbeings who were not from Iraq to stay the fuck out of this, no one asked you your opinion. I wouldn’t be nice about it either. But you know, once some moron started the “hearts and minds” bullshit, we had to play comfort woman for every single joker in the Middle East except the Israeli Jews.
Let’s get something straight: we will not win the “hearts and minds” of the Muslim world. From what I can see a significant number of them have black hearts and minds rotten with inherited centuries of Jew-hatred and resentment of the way the rest of the world has passed them by in their self-imposed cultural and spiritual prison. Most of the rest of them are either too timid or ignorant for their organs of feeling and thought to be accessible. I am disgusted with the constant backing and filling every time a “Muslim spokesperson” lets out a squeal because he came upon something somewhere that reminded him that there are other ways of thought and living than his own. And I am sick and tired of being accused of “narrowmindedness,” “racism,” “ignorance,” and all the rest of the bullshit because I happen to express my dislike of real examples of the above coming from someone whose ancestry was not primarily European.
No wonder (chorus) They Hate Us. So many of us so obviously hate ourselves and our fellow citizens. Our enemies must be frustrated as all heck right now: if only they had known it would be that easy.
I will probably add to this later; right now I have to go to bed.
(Via Random Jottings.)
Update: this post of Dipnut’s is highly instructive. Since he says pretty much what I was going to say, I don’t have to add anything more to this entry.
Update 2: one final link – I meant to mention this too – what the hell was it with the picture-taking? The closest thing I can come to is something a co-worker said her husband, who was in the military, told her: “those GIs, they sure do like to take pictures.” Then again, there are sickos right here at home doing sick things – no links, just google around – and not only do they whip out the Polaroid and the camcorder, they get out the digital devices and upload the results for all to see and enjoy. Why? Like Natalie Solent said, it’s not as if these images showed the perpetrators in any good light according to the laws and customs of modern Western society. But when you ask people why they take pictures of themselves doing things that are, supposedly, still considered shameful and disgraceful by normal people, they either equivocate or just look at you. The current impetus is, maybe, the “self-esteem” movement which we can see now has done more harm, or at least as much harm, as it has done good. Sure, people think better of themselves, and are not so crippled by guilt and shame as the psychiatrists – our priests – told us we used to be back in the bad old days – but I haven’t see that this has led to an increase in esteem for others as we were told would be the result of this loosening of inner bonds and focusing on the self instead of others. Quite the contrary.
OK, yet another update: Nelson Ascher has some interesting observations from outside the fray (ie, he’s not an American and doesn’t live here). By the way, it is clear to me that what he means by this being a “conspiracy” is the sudden huge “get rid of Rumsfeld” component to the scandal, not that there were Bush-haters who went to Iraq and planned the whole thing. I did wonder, though, whose idea it was to pass the photos around like candy. (Via Charles Austin.)
And one more: how the photos got to CBS is explained here.* (Though not how they got to Al-Jazeera. Then again, the press is just one big club, whose only membership requirement seems to be “we are beholden to none but our deadlines.") Before they had apparently only been known to “among soldiers and military investigators.” Well we can’t have that – even if disclosure of evidence of wrongdoing to the general public before the investigation is finished might compromise that investigation just as badly as a coverup would, it is important because the Public Has a Right to Know™! Right? (Via Tim Blair.)
*Registration required, though it’s free. Use “laexaminer” for both the password and the id.
I’ve slapped Jeff Jarvis around a lot lately for his wacky Howard Stern mania, but pry his attention away from the Great White Radio Ass and he’s often spot on – as he is here in the critique of a column written by Tom Friedman while deep in the grips of hysteria. I have to copy this sample from Friedman, because it’s just so pathetic on so many levels:
I have never known a time in my life when America and its president were more hated around the world than today. I was just in Japan, and even young Japanese dislike us. It’s no wonder that so many Americans are obsessed with the finale of the sitcom “Friends” right now. They’re the only friends we have, and even they’re leaving.
Good god, is Friedman a grown man or a teenager who yearns to be accepted into the popular group at his high school? So some Japanese people (I doubt he talked to the entire population) expressed some sort of America-hatred. Well damn me, having the Japanese love us is what keeps me going through this vale of tears called life; now that they hate us, I’ve got nothing to live for! Except the final episode of Friends, which I will watch while wearing deepest black because I base my entire life on what Phoebe, Ross, and the rest of the gang whose names I can’t remember because I always find things better to do (cleaning my cat’s litter box, laundry, spackling tiny cracks in my walls, scraping the grease out from the grease trap under the stove and rolling it into symmetrical balls and packing them in neat rows in cardboard boxes which I tie with twine) than watch the show, and now that it’s ending I realize that all that is left between me and the void is the caring and concern that ooze out of nervous nellies like Mr. Friedman, who was once thrilled to bits when a Saudi prince told him he (the prince) had a peace plan that didn’t involve destroying Israel – well, not destroying it all at once, anyway, just sort of whittling away at it slowly until there was nothing left of the Jewish State but something that could be jammed into the bottom of a matzoh box, but in a peaceful way.
Anyway, Jarvis takes Friedman’s trash out to the curb. RTWT.
Fox rocks. And after tomorrow Saturday, May 15th, I’ll have them 24/7 again for at least a month.
(Via Random Jottings.)
I just wanted to rescue this bit of news from Jeff Jarvis’ blog, where it has been abandoned to the ravages of a troll called “Faramin.” Needless to say, due to comment moderation, that won’t happen here. This leaves us free to discuss this latest atrocity. I don’t know how permanent SFgate’s links are, so here is the whole thing:
(more…)
Best post ever on the subject of the ultimately strange hatred that the Leftovers (that is my name for the washed-out leftists, dictator-admirers, America-haters, and other freaks that have come out of the woodwork since September 11th) for the very culture that enables them to spew their bile from comfort and safety. Blogspot’s links on this site seem to be broken, so scroll ye down to April 17th’s post entitled “Cupio Dissolvi” and read:
These people have had this precious gift, this civilization, and they have got bored with it. They take all the advantages it offers them for granted, and despise the ideals that have powered it. They wish for annihilation, the next new thing, as if it was a wonderful party. Won’t it be great, dancing on the ruins?
That’s just a sample. Read it all.
(I found this soliloquy from Hamlet appropriate to the subject.)
…would be the one these guys are making. (Via Kathy Shaidle, whose Blogspot blog keeps going on and off like a lightbulb in Falujah.)
Note to Rene Gonzales: “I’m sorry you were offended” is not an apology. I’d have a modicum – very small, but it would have been there – of respect for him if he’d stuck to his position, instead of hiding it behind the skirts of PC catchphrases. “Insensitive” hell – what Gonzales wrote was openly adversarial, not to mention obscene. And towards someone he didn’t even know – what was he to Pat Tillman or Pat Tillman to he? And don’t even get me started on the quality of his writing. I mean, if you are going to go ad hominem on a national hero at least be original about it. Comparisons of soldiers to Rambo was a moldy technique when both Tillman and Gonzales were in diapers.
(Via C.G. Hill.)
Late update: here’s a nice fisking of the creep’s blattings. Enjoy. (Via MCJ.)
On another note re this foofaraw over the Ted Koppel I Can’t Believe It’s Not Vietnam!™-style “tribute” to our war dead on Nightline – don’t want to boost the show’s May Sweeps ratings? Well – don’t watch it then. This isn’t rocket science, people.
Did you know that Americans need Concerned Media Spokespersons to shove their noses into the fact that help them remember that soldiers are dying in this current war? You didn’t? Well, Ted Koppel is here to lead you by the hand! Just ignore this soldier going home over here in the corner. After all, he’s being returned to someplace in the middle of nowhere like Wyoming or Idaho – why, I’ll bet they don’t even have a Starbucks there.
Australia’s prime minister, John Howard, has been getting the same sort of flack from the anti-war Leftovers that Bush has been getting. This will make them jump up and down like enraged monkeys in a cage: he went to Baghdad to visit his country’s troops for ANZAC Day. John Howard rocks.
I was hanging out with some people at work at a pub near my job and saw the announcement on one of the tvs. Of course, it is not surprising that some people (read the comments to that and the other post) can’t handle the knowledge that there are young people to whom the “ultimate sacrifice” does not mean giving up watching American Idol to take their kid sister to a Brittany Spears concert. It’s not surprising – but it is pathetic. Can’t they give it up, just for one day?
Speaking of reading, everyone who has an opinion on the matter of what caused the events of September 11th, 2001 to happen should read this article. Here’s a sample quote to get you started:
As Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has observed, weakness is provocative. The fecklessness of meeting terrorist attacks with court proceedings – trials that take years to prepare and months to present, and that, even when successful, neutralize only an infinitesimal percentage of the actual terrorist population – emboldened bin Laden. But just as hurtful was the government’s promotion of terrorism trials in the first place. They were a useful vehicle if the strategic object was to orchestrate an appearance of justice being done. As a national-security strategy, they were suicidal, providing terrorists with a banquet of information they could never have dreamed of acquiring on their own.
I can’t help coming away from reading it thinking that while we’re not exactly doomed – yet, anyway – I am not at all sure (even less so than the author) we have the collective willpower to do what needs to be done to reverse the effects of “a quarter century of sloth"; or at least, that we will be able to do that in time for it to matter. As they say, it’s never too late to drag defeat from the jaws of victory.
(Though I have Commentary linked in my sidebar, I found this particular article via Scott Chaffin.)
It’s just the itsiest, bitsiest, teensiest, weensiest minority of well-to-do, middle-class, Westernized Muslims who support the efforts of West-hating, infidel-slaughtering Islamist terrorist scum. True, Mr. Aminul Hoque apparently can’t swing a cat without hitting a friend or relative who thinks Osama Bin Laden and crew are the bees’ knees, but that’s no reason to worry, or change the tune “Islam (It’s a Religion of Peace – and Reforming Young Criminals!)” one little bit. Don’t you feel better? I know I do.
The oil that we still produce in our own backyard, that is. (Via Instapundit.)
Tex, you told about the Killbots. Now you will have to be liquidated. So sorry.
(Then link to the main page so you can read all the fun things he found on newsgroups. Better him than me…
“War is not the answer. An eye for an eye makes the whole world– Hey look, Republicans! Let’s kick some ass!“
And you know, considering the huge mass of denial that leftists (or whatever they are) seem to be operating under these days, I have thought of another reason it is a good thing a stuffy conservative administration happened to be in power when September 11 2001 rolled around: with people as unstable as the current crop of Democrat supporters seem to be, I wonder how many Middle-Eastern countries would resemble Corelle dinner plates right now if it had been a Democrat sitting in the White House when the planes went into the Towers?
(Via a small victory.)
No, really. Behold the next Godwin.
(Via Lilac Rose.)
Update: I quite passed over this remark: “If the methods of victims do not differ from that of their attackers, who is to say who the victims now are?” I don’t get it. You want they should have stroked him to death with silk whips instead? What the hell kind of reasoning is that – “He used guns so you can’t use guns to fight him back you have to use lead-weighted nets instead!” One of the dangers of indulging in sanctimony is the way it clouds one’s thought processes. Remember that next time you lecture, mes amis pieux. (Brought to my attention by Mac Swift.)
Ding dong, the sheik is dead. Notice how politically-correct the Israelis are: even handicapped terrorists get a chance to get killed. (I am waiting for the first person to whine about how cruel and mean the Israelis were for offing a guy in a wheelchair, despite the fact that this particular cripple was the “spiritual” leader of Hamas.)
Spain isn’t quite finished yet. Here’s the whole thing since I don’t trust the stability of news item links:
(more…)
Craven cowards. Yellowbellies. Oathbreakers.
You know, I am sorry that the people in Spain suffered such a loss as they did recently. We lost nearly 3,000 people, not all of them citizens but “our people” none the less because they lived and worked here. Did we as a nation bend over and drop our drawers for the terrorists and their many fans like so many of our so-called “allies” told us we should?
Whatever. Please note what Steven Den Beste points out about the threats the French have been getting from the Islamokillers, for all their fine posturing. It’s too bad about all the people in Spain who didn’t want this to happen and I feel for the Spanish soldiers as well, many of whom were no doubt valiant in their efforts on behalf of the coalition and now must feel shame at the way their government is treating them. As for how the US should react should the rest of our “good buddies” cut and run: Hige sceal þe heardra, heorte þe cenre, mod sceal þe mare, þe ure mægen lytlað. ("Our hearts must grow resolute, our courage more valiant, our spirits must be greater, though our strength grows less.” Source.)
Re: Spain, the words of a Bunyip:
[…]to indulge stupidity and pretend that craven expedience will do just as well as courage in a moment of crisis, well, it verges on the criminally negligent – and like most criminal acts, it will hurt the perpetrators as much as the victim, which in this case, ironically, is nothing less than democracy itself.
Do the voters who swung their support behind the appeasers really believe that the bombers will now leave them alone? Do they imagine that the timely renunciation of resolve can placate an implacable foe? As sure as eggs, the Wahabi scum will be back to demand more concessions. The highest moral station to which Spain can now aspire – and it is a miserable ambition – will be to make Greece its model. Greece, where authorities made a point not to apprehend Palestinian terrorists, and if they did, if the offence was so egregious that there was no alternative but to slap on the cuffs, where the accused were gently treated, mildly sentenced, and then set free as quietly and quickly as possible. Now the Greeks are preparing to host the Olympics and living in dread of a terrorist assault. Fat lot of good being so pliable did them.
This particular manifestation of the democratic will of the people reminded me that I own both The Portable Curmudgeon and The Portable Curmudgeon Redux. Here are a few pithy quotes on democracy:
“The crude leading the crud.” – Florence King.
“Giving every man a vote has no more made men wise and free than Christianity has made them good.” – H.L. Mencken.
“Every government is a parliament of whores. The trouble is, in a democracy, the whores are us.” – P.J. O’Rourke.
“Democracy gives every man the right to be his own oppressor.” – James Russell Lowell.
“Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.” – H.L. Mencken again.
And again: “Democracy is the art of running the circus from the monkey cage.”
Yay democratic progress. It’s at times like these that I don’t wonder that there are still people in the world who yearn for absolute monarchy. Of course, many of these people, if asked, are the most strident in their defense of “democracy,” though I doubt they have thought things through to the realization that their version of the process is the surest way to the destruction of that very same institution.
People are falling apart and having conniption fits and lecturing at each other all across blogland because Spain has dumped its government, apparently as a petulant response to the recent terrorist bombing there. Oh no! cry the cyberpundits, we’re doomed! The terrorists have won! Now they will bomb everybody since Spain has lain down and died (after a real good show of enraged crowd-gathering; I guess they used up all their ire on the streets)! And worst of all – the US has lost another ally!
Well. I say: good riddance.
And who needs ‘em? If this is indeed the case, that the Spanish people think that by electing a less States-friendly government they’re going to get the hands-off treatment by slavering fanatics who blow babies to bits, then who needs these millstones around our necks and burdens on our backs? He travels fastest who travels alone, and after observing the shenanigans of our so-called “allies” (with the exception of the “Anglosphere” countries) over the past two-and-a-half years, I have decided that that goes triple for a country. If the world doesn’t like us… it can stop buying our stuff. No one is forcing you, world, to watch our movies, patronize our transplanted fast food restaurants, to wear blue jeans. You are always bragging that your own food and clothing and toilet tissue and whatnot are far superior to ours, so it’s time to put your money where your mouth and other parts are. Go ahead and drop us. A few Americans will shed a tear or two, but I won’t be among them.
Go ahead, appease the Islamofascistibabykillermotherfuckers. Bow your heads to god their way, cover your women in black sacking, kill your gays. Forbid Jews to hold good jobs, make them wear yellow stars – you know the drill. As the Great Cthulhu says, “You will be devoured last! Yum!” But at least you’ll have shown up those Yankee imperialists! And that’s what counts, isn’t it?
Update: what Steve H. said. “Spain is now ruled from a tiny cave somewhere in Pakistan or Afghanistan, and her rulers will be encouraged to see how many other countries they can take over.” Yup. Even if the “real” reason for the change of governments was some weaselly non-important matter like health care or whatever it is the socialists over there think is worth a few bombs going off every now and then, the terrorists will think they’ve caused this, and they will respond accordingly.
Funny. No one complains about those people who kept pieces of the Berlin Wall.
(Via the Jarv.)
Sorry for the no posting in days. Tired, busy, preoccupied, etc. Send flowers to Spain. Link to the main site for more posts on this. I heard about it on the radio at work today, but there’s been no time to react.
“We may rise and fall, but in the end we meet our fate together.” (Source.)
By all means, let’s use conventional criminal investigation and prosecution methods to deal with terrorism. It works so well. 
(Via commenter Dwayne.)
All castles made of sand, slide into the sea, eventually. Good-bye, France.
(Via Silent Running.)
If you would like to watch a sublime event of a troll getting his posterior handed to him, go here.
Enjoy the irony; because of the war in Iraq:
American artists hate America.*
*Ursula Le Guin used to be one of my favorite writers, until I read an essay of hers referring to the “sick, white skin” of current American culture. (It’s one of the ones in Dancing at the Edge of the World, I forget which one, and I no longer have the book so I can’t check it.) I didn’t immediately think “go to hell, lady,” but I remember not being quite as interested in when her next book was going to come out after that. A good thing too – I made the mistake of reading Tehanu.
Update: links added to book titles so you can see what I am talking about if you so choose.
Second update: yes it’s true dammit. Via Croooow Blog.
I have a question on this WMD thing. So, apparently we are now concluding that Hussein did not, in fact, have a huge stash of nuclear weapons aimed at New York and Washington DC. That’s a good thing, isn’t it? It means that the thing the administration wanted to prevent was, in fact, prevented, and not only that, a dangerous troublemaker has been removed from power in a very unstable region.
So why is everyone so mad? I’m not seeing the problem here. It wasn’t as if Hussein was a mild-mannered old dear who collected stamps – he made no secret of his ambition to amass large amounts of dangerous weaponry and take over the entire Middle East and inflict yet another tyrannical empire on the world. He was a terrorist sponsor – for those to whom this term seems unclear, that means he gave money, resources, encouragement, and training, to terrorists. While he may not have shared the eventual goals of all the terrorist groups (such as the Islamic fundamentalist ones – his version of Islam seemed to have been more centered around Saddam Hussein than Allah) he was quite willing to enable them to attack his most hated enemies: Israel and the United States, and their allies. And last but certainly not least, he was a vicious terrorizer of his own people.
By the way, don’t bother leaving comments about how we, the US, had no “right” to invade this other country “just because” we were worried that its ruler might attack us some day. I won’t even bother approving any comments that spout silliness like that; I’ll just delete them.
Update: oh yeah, I forgot: I won’t be publishing comments rehashing old canards about Bush’s “record in the National Guard” that include links to hatchet job articles by the Boston Globe, and using the feeble comeback that we should have “invaded North Korea first.” If you aren’t smart enough to figure out just why the chance to do much about North Korea (besides waiting for it to implode) has come and gone, you aren’t smart enough to post comments to my blog. So I guess I won’t be posting any more comments by “Mohammed Bakti.” Get your own blog, Mr. Bakti.
This is a very good article by Dr. Helen Smith (Who I believe is Mrs. Instapundit), on the correct way to confront and treat violent people such as criminals and terrorists. Don’t appease them, she says, that only makes them meaner:
Those patients who threatened me backed down only when I got up in their face and told them forcefully to stop – the slightest hint of fear or intimidation (or sympathy!) on my part was met with increased threats. In the real world of private practice, confronting real murderers, I learned to act in ways that were different from what I had been taught in graduate school.
Since she deals with violent criminals in her line of work, she knows what she is talking about. I am sure, however, that she will have many detractors: a lot of money and influence, as well as personal pride, is at stake when it comes to the prizes-not-punishment method of treating terrorists and other violent criminals. Of course violence can be said to be “striking out” due to emotional and mental confusion when it comes from children up to a certain age, but there is a point where we say human beings should be considered knowledgeable of right and wrong, and at the very least we could stop pretending that adults who choose criminal violence are doing so due to pressures beyond their control instead of consciously choosing the path of evil.
The thing the appeasers don’t want to accept (because it threatens their own sense of power and their view of how the world works) is the fact that violent people are not so because we treat them inhumanly, but because they have already decided that we are not human – at best we are obstacles to their desires. Confronting them and calling them on their behavior – calling it what it is – shocks them into at least realizing that they are dealing with another human being like themselves; and paradoxically gives them the respect they supposedly crave. For example, for decades we in the West – or at least, the intellectual elite – treated Muslim fanatics like little children stamping their feet whenever they spouted threats. Far from allaying the hatred that they felt for us, this attitude merely fed the flames, and the results we saw on September 11th, 2001 (among other dates).
(Via Relapsed Catholic.)
Just a brief post before I hit the sack: what do people really mean when they say “I am against the war but I support the troops,” in the context of a war – yes I mean this one against Muslim fanatics who want to take over the world* – that said troops support and are generally proud to be a part of? Personally, I’m with Citizen Smash, who thinks it’s bullshit, a way for the cowards uttering this little homily to deflect the ire they so deserve. Otherwise, the statement just falls apart logically – it’s as if I said I supported someone’s entry into law school, but refused to countenance his actual practicing of law once he graduates. And so on. This is also illustrated by a little ditty my father used to sing, culled from my grandmother’s store of late-Victorian pop hits: “Mother dear may I go for a swim?/Yes my darling daughter/Hang your clothes on a hickory limb/but don’t go near the water.”
*Because that’s what they are and that’s what they want, ducks. No more tiptoeing around the truth, qualifying it with little white thank-you-sir-may-I-have-another-just-please-don’t-kill-me lies like “Oh, we are only fighting against dastardly terrorists who just didn’t sufficiently learn that Islam is peace. Nice Muslims are our friends” on this blog. Deal with it.
Ladies and Gentlemen, John Rhys Davies:
I am really proud to be living in a society that accepts women as our equals, that accepts civilised discourse that allows people to hold different opinions without coming to any act of violence.
Here in America when that earthquake happened in Iran the reaction of everyone I knew was horror and dismay, the reaction of everyone when they heard that the old woman had been brought out alive long after they thought there was anyone there was absolute awe at the extraordinary capacity of the human spirit to survive. Contrast that with people jumping up and down and clapping at the 9/11 disaster in certain countries.
I don’t think that Western society is opposed to Islamic society at all. I think a very important part of Islamic society is opposed to Western society.
It is time that ordinary Muslims stood up to be counted.
Of course, for making the mistake of criticising Our Muslim Betters, he has incurred the wrath of the morons who think that one’s religion is as immutable as one’s ancestry.
(Link via Instapundit.)
The Israeli ambassador to Sweden, Zvi Mazel, struck a blow against anti-Semitism and bad art when he destroyed a suicide bomber exhibit at the Stockholm Museum of National Antiquities recently. You go, ambassador. Here’s a description of this “valuable and important” piece of crap work of art:
Located in the museum’s courtyard, “Snow White and the Madness of Truth” depicted a smiling Hanadi Jaradat, the Maxim restaurant suicide bomber who killed 21 patrons and staff as well as herself on October 4. Her photograph was placed on a little boat floating in a basin filled with water dyed red.
You know, it is only congenital laziness, an aversion to filling out reams of government forms, and perhaps an unwillingness to shrink my creative powers to the apparent microscopic capacity needed to come up with “art” like this that has kept me from applying for grants from guilt-ridden Western institutions like museums. By the way, what the heck was an exhibit like this doing at a “Museum of National Antiquities“?
Update: Here’s the link to the article in the Jerusalem Post.
Scott Talkington on the left’s refusal to face calamity:
Ultimately the problem lies in the habit of wishful thinking that afflicts most of America’s historical allies, and some of its own deluded clan. Without any capacity to confront calamity the natural tendency is to deny it. Pretend it doesn’t exist, or is an exaggeration, and you need not change your worldview, or your mind. (But you may be obligated to hate the bearer of bad tidings.) Thus we find Chomsky’s obsessive unwillingness to be impressed by 9/11, an attitude also affected by Michael Moore and even Derrida and Habermas, recently. It’s a sort of false bravado that takes refuge in subtly deceptive hermeneutic constructions, or outright lies, and insists that the analysis of text is indistinguishable from the analysis of reality.
Yes, it’s another link to someone else. I haven’t felt like writing much today, but I keep coming upon these good things to read.
(Admin note: I am not sure that this trackback stuff Wordpress has works with anything, or at least with Movable Type blogs, but I try to trackback anyway.)
I was so busy futzing around with my websites last night that I didn’t watch the New Year’s Eve stuff at Times Square, so I missed all the Orange Alert hats. As Jeff Jarvis says, what a cool “f.u. to terrorists.”
Michele also has a neat picture of the festivities, here.
The best smackdown of Communism and its perplexingly many fans has been produced by Tacitus. Just in case you’ve forgotten.
You need to read this post by Mohammed on Omar’s blog welcoming the new year and saying good-bye to the old. Sample:
2003; the year of freedom.
Before you I was mute, and here goes my tongue praying for the best,
Before you I was hand-cuffed, and here are my hands free to write,
Before you my mind was tied to one thought and here I find wide horizons and greater thoughts,
Before you I was isolated, and here I join the wide universe.
I will never forget you; you broke the chains for my people, and rid us from the big jail.
As they say, read the whole thing.
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