Superb!

Liberalim is a human development that took many years to be developed and I think it is contrary to the human nature.

The idea that a Creator has endowed any human being unalienable rights, such as Freedom of Speech, first evolved in Greece, after that was combined with other beliefs in Christianism and later was added by the English after a bloody civil war to Constitunionalism. Finally got fully developed in America, where it is considered a tradition. (Check the diference between European and American Traditionalists aka Conservatives).

Freedom is incompatible with, and cannot persist in, a culture that seeks to prevent anyone -- and most particularly, politically favoured groups -- from being offended, insulted, annoyed, angered, or made "uncomfortable" by what someone else says or does.

Threats and active intimidation are another story.

So, are you saying that liberals should not fight for their values or their rights because that could start a war and wars are bad? We should just try to set an example by being really, really nice...

Pretending that we are our own worst enemy, pretending that we can control the actions of others by being good people is a classic liberal concept. It's a nice theory, it's gives us a feeling of almost godlike control and power, but already been proven wrong. Soft diplomacy, trade, kindness and buying the world a coke doesn't make everyone love us. If we didn't learn that after the peacetime attack on 9/11, sponsored and carried out by our allies, then when will we learn it?

Sometimes you have to fight for your rights, and sometimes you have to defend yourselves. We're constantly being attacked and intimidated by Islamists and the states that support them. Pretending that we can stop them by being very good people hasn't been working. Pretending that they're our allies hasn't been working. Why should we continue to apply a theory that doesn't work?

Yes, every culture has more than its fair share of barbarians, but in the Islamist culture the barbarians make the laws, run the government and take all the money. Sharia, the laws that these barbarians create are brutal when compared to American liberal democracy. They're brutal when compared to the French, to the Thais, to most South and Central American governments, the Chinese government, Hong Kong and most of south and central Asia.

These Islamist state-sponsored protests are part of these Islamists' attempts to force us to live according to their apartheid Sharia laws. Terrorism is their other method. The goal behind all Islamist terrorism and intimidation is Sharia. If we're not willing to criticize and fight back against this onslaught, then we will be brought down to their level - then we'll be brought below it.

I'm almost with you, Matt. Almost.

Of COURSE the potential for violence is in us all. But unless you can somehow concoct and successfully promulgate a version of Islam that suppresses the doctrine demanding the conquest of unbelievers and their subjugation by force - and which abjures the claim that Allah demands imposition of sharia on all - then your statement that it is not Islam vs. modernity is unconvincing to me.

Indeed, tribalism is an underlying factor. In many of the countries which are predominantly Muslim the culture, economic and political structures have never risen above tribalism.

It is also noteworthy, however, that few if any Muslim leaders have decried this fact, or pressured and encouraged a move away from that identity or the horrid actions it often promulgates.

For me as a woman, this is not a theoretical debate about human nature. I read of "honor" rapes of young women, the violation of their inner selves and the resulting outcast status for life, and I have a pretty direct understanding of just how vile that practice is. I watch videos proudly streamed over the internet of the long lasting agony of a man whose head is slowly cut off by those who revel in such evil and then I wait ... and wait ... and hear no outcry against it by those who speak for Islam.

Every society, every religious or political group, is bound sooner or later to have its crazies. What matters is how they are dealt with - and how much damage they are allowed or are able to inflict. If Islam, or John Birchers, or (insert your favorite group to rail at here) rant and rave without great effect, that's one thing.

But to ignore the fact that increasingly aggressive, unapologetic and far-reaching threats AND ACTS of violence are occuring in the name of Islam is irresponsible, IMO. Perhaps a century from now the threat will be different. Here and now, that is where a major threat lies.

But - and this will be critical as we face greater threats on our borders - not from Islamacists alone. From any and all willing to intimidate and to kill to impose their ideologies on others.

I'm all for free-speech but there should be limits, something like Godwins Rule when Dune is invoked.

"We have met the enemy, and he is us."

Err.. I'd be LOL right now if that wasn't just completely sad.

"In the course of the current controversy over the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten's publication of cartoon depictions of the Prophet Mohammed, some observers have either insinuated or explicitly claimed that the Muslim reaction to the cartoons constitutes evidence that Islam is not ready to join the modern world."

Well, I'm not sure about Islam as a whole, but it is frankly dumb to claim that the visible vocal face of Islam that provokes these conversations is any in sense compatible with the modern world.

"Ironically enough, there is a non-trivial intersection between the set of people who hold the aforementioned view of Islam and the set of people who have loudly called for Ted Rall's cartoons to be dropped from all newspapers."

Maybe, but there is a fallacy of composition being created here. There is nothing incompatible about the two views mostly because the two reactions are not comparable to any significant degree. You can both think that Ted Rall's cartoons should be dropped from all papers, and believe without any cognitive dissonance that the current Islamic reaction to the Danish cartoons is incompatible with the modern world. Likewise, believing that the world would be a better place if Ted Rall wasn't getting cartoons published in newspapers, is not in any way the same as believing that Ted Rall should be dead - and belief in the former in no fashion implies belief in the latter. If in fact all that had happened in responce to the Danish cartoons was some protesting, calls for boycott of the paper, and a few death threats of the cartoonist/editor, we wouldn't even be having this conversation. The modern world would be compatible with such a responce, which is as you note not that different from what happens when anyone says anything some large group finds offensive.

But that isn't what happened, and that's why we are having this discussion. Maybe even more importantly, what happened in responce to the Danish cartoons was and is sadly predictable behavior.

It's also worth noting that there is probably a large intersection between people in the West (or at least in America) who denounce the Danish cartoons as 'hate speach', but who defended even the public funding of things like 'Piss Christ' as essential to free speach. And frankly, I think there are more of those in our society - and these control more commanding memetic heights - than there are people that who really want to kill Ted Rall.

"...there is no better way to disabuse oneself of the notion that Muslims are somehow special in their capacity for savagery than to simply study history..."

STOP RIGHT THERE. In no fashion does one need to believe that Muslims are "somehow special in their capacity for savagery" in order to believe that the current behavior of the Islamic world is incompatible with the modern world, or even that a disproportionate number of acts of savagery in the modern global culture are coming out of Islamic nations. Your argument in the essay from here pretty much directly proceeds into a defamation of the character of people who don't hold your position. You basically imply that anyone that doesn't agree with you is a racist, and as far as I can tell you offer this as the sole proof of the validness of your position - full stop.

If that is your viewpoint, if accepting such a charge is a precondition of a debate with you, then its fundamentally impossible to have a discussion with you.

"Having taken a rather roundabout path, the point is this: while the behavior exhibited by many Muslims today is unacceptable by our civilized standards, the psychological substrate that governs these behaviors is fairly uniform across cultures."

Agreed, but so what? The behaviors are currently even by your own admission quantitatively (and in my opinion qualitatively) different. Sure, of course every ethnic group is capable of barbarism, and every cultural group has been at some time in the past or present barbaric. But so what? We aren't talking abstractly about what is possible or what happened then as opposed to now. We are talking about the here and now and we have to find a solution for the here and now, and such a solution won't involve once again wallowing in Western cultural self-flaggelation for whatever emotional satisfaction that gives us.

The fundamental wishy-washiness of this whole essay is revealed when you get down to bottom of it and say:

"But casting this as Islam versus modernity works fundamentally against that goal by polarizing the field, in addition to missing the point –- it's modernity versus the tribe, the open society versus the closed, and it's a struggle of the human psyche more than anything else."

You complain about polarizing the field, but that's not really what bothers you because you in the very same sentence polarize the field into two groups. What bothers you is the labelling. What bothers you is that we can label a cultural group as being more 'tribal' than 'modern' (to use your axis) or more 'open' than 'closed'. What fundamentally bothers you is that by doing so, we identify a situation in which we (in the sense of our cultural) are not the enemy and that fundamentally it is some other group which must change and not ourselves. IT's that really bothers you, and its that you are still giving lingering resistance too even when its increasingly clear that in order to addess this situation honestly we must do so with a less abstract label. This is not a struggle of our 'human psyche', as if you or I could by going and being introspective and meditating alter myself to the point that the problem would be fixed - which you recognize in the very next sentense.

"We're in a race to bring the rest of the world up to our level before the bin Ladens of the world can bring us back down to theirs."

This is fundamentally incompatible with the conclusion, "We have met the enemy at it is us." Of course we are capable of barbarism. Of course it is only our current culture which makes them different than us. But while all that is true, that is a battle for a different day. Today the battle is against the Bin Ladens of the world.

We have met the enemy, and he is not us. And to the extent that the enemy is us, it is precisely those people which refuse to recognize that there is some enemy out there other than us. Your whole essay relies on facile comparisons. Sure, there are still 'barbarians' in our culture, but they are fringe groups quantitatively and even qualitatively there is a huge difference in how the 'barbarians' in our culture behave. Sure, at one level Professional Wrestling and Roman Gladiatorial Combat are manifestations of the same psychological need, but leaving the comparison at that ignores the very real differences in the two cultural institutions. Recognizing that the two are similar may be a wonderful excercise for people who are (or think that they are) "rightmost intellectual tail of the bell curve", but it really has very little to do with addressing the problem at hand. In fact, such a discussion in my opinion only feeds the worst instincts of the enemy and distracts us with endless facile moral equivications.

I'm all for free-speech but there should be limits, something like Godwins Rule when Dune is invoked.

Matt:

Ironically enough, there is a non-trivial intersection between the set of people who hold the aforementioned view of Islam and the set of people who have loudly called for Ted Rall's cartoons to be dropped from all newspapers.

I hope you realize that's just barely relevant to anything. I'm fairly sure I can oppose sedition during a time of war without getting to serious about Ted Rall's cartoons, and I don't think there are many who have called for the beheading of WaPo editors because they've run the cartoons. The only justification I can see for not immediately taking sides in this controvesy is not some mistaken notion that we're no better than they, but that there are some Muslims who don't support the meme that Muhammed that the Salafists honor isn't the same Muhammed of the Koran. Therefor they'd support the cartoons by virtue of the fact that they call to Muslim attention the fact that some who claim the label are not really Muslim, and therefore not worthy of much deference.

I'm just not inclined to see the fact that we have an imperfect society as an insurmountable problem, or that such a fact turns us into our own worst enemy. Islam has seen us tolerate Ted Rall, so just WTF is their problem?

Sorry, but their attitude is just completely unacceptable on any level.

The most dangerous game in the world is being played by those who misunderstand us just as much as we misunderstand them: those who take the tolerance of the civilized world for granted rarely stop to consider the wanton brutality that we are all undoubtedly capable of when pushed far enough.

Wisdom and prudence therefore suggest that we clue them in before they go too far. Failure to do so is hardly compassion. Rather, it's a form of corruption.

There's a legitimate justification for a middle ground, but that doesn't prove that neutrality is the only appropriate position to take. We aren't the enemy. Let's keep that straight, OK?

You can both think that Ted Rall's cartoons should be dropped from all papers, and believe without any cognitive dissonance that the current Islamic reaction to the Danish cartoons is incompatible with the modern world.

You cannot. Either you are free or you are not. It is like being pregnant. Other issue is about tastes, but it is futile to legislate about tastes.

In no fashion does one need to believe that Muslims are "somehow special in their capacity for savagery"

They are. Their religion allows them to commit horrendous acts against infidels.

We're in a race to bring the rest of the world up to our level before the bin Ladens of the world can bring us back down to theirs.

This is fundamentally incompatible with the conclusion, "We have met the enemy at it is us.

You miss the point, celebrim.

This world's Bin Ladens are trying to push us back towards a pre-Liberal (meaning classic Liberal) world, and the fact that classic Liberalism is against the human natural order (tribes, groups united by force vs government chosen among free equal people) is helping them. The enemy is among us because many of our citizens do not understand classic Liberalism.

In America consists many times, just in Tradition, the Founding Fathers: the Constitution, etc, but its importance is not debated. In European countries, (except the UK) is almost forgotten and in Latinamerica classic Liberalism has never taken roots, which explains what happens in the region.

There is no middle ground, Demosophist. Either you are free or you are not. There is no middle ground between classic Liberalism and the rule of Mohammed. If you give up just a tiny piece of your freedom, aren't you saying that the civil laws Mohammed enacted prevail over Freedom, the Western civilization most precious treasure?

Islam has seen us tolerate Ted Rall, so just WTF is their problem?

???? I don't tolerate Ted Rall. He is endowed with the right of free speech, as are the WaPo cartoonist. I might complain about bad taste, but not about freedom of Speech. That is the point, the majority do not tolerate him, but he has the right by himself to express what he wants.

Wisdom and prudence therefore suggest that we clue them in before they go too far.

No. We have to send the right message, a message understandable for that kind of people.

We aren't the enemy. Let's keep that straight, OK?

We are. Most of our citizens do not understand the importance of Freedom and think that giving up tiny pieces, in order to not bothering other peoples or facilitating some national defence tasks, problems will be solved. It is in human nature, but that's a mistake!

"You cannot."

Oh, really? Why?

"Either you are free or you are not. It is like being pregnant. Other issue is about tastes, but it is futile to legislate about tastes."

That's BS on multiple grounds.

One, no one is completely free. There is no such thing as complete freedom, least of all complete freedom if you want to live in a community. Complete freedom implies no constriction of action, and we are constricted in our activities by our own weakness (physical and moral) and by the need to respect the desires of others we are living with.

Two, no one said anything about legislating Ted Rall out of his ability to write. Legislation is not needed to get Ted Rall out of the newspaper, just people excercising thier right of association and right to dispose of thier private property how they see fit. If enough people to choose NOT to buy Ted Rall's product, then newspapers will change to something people will listen too and buy. This isn't about my attack on free speach, but about the fact that free speach doesn't mean you have a right to make other people listen to you.

Three, my ability to dissent against Ted Rall is part of my freedom. If I can't criticize Ted Rall for what he says, I have no free speach. If Ted Rall can insist I hear him, I likewise have no freedom. Supporting the right of someone to say whatever they feel - which I do even in Ted Rall's case - is not at all the same of supporting everything people say. I don't have to insist that Ted Rall be given a forum in order to believe in free speech. Nor is criticizing how someone uses thier speech crushing to free speech.

Four, 'taste' doesn't have a strictly definable definition. There are many things that what legislate that may in fact just be matters of taste, but which we generally don't recognize as matters of taste because we decided to legislate them. But even if it did, my pointing out that Ted Rall was in poor taste, or even that I thought there were some tasteless false and dangerous that people should not say, would not constitute a crushing blow to free speach. Note that saying that someone shouldn't say something is entirely different than saying that they shouldn't be allowed to say something.

"They are."

No they are not.

"Their religion allows them to commit horrendous acts against infidels."

More precisely, there religion encourages to commit violence and excuses them for committing horrendous acts. But while this is true, it doesn't mean that they are special in their capacity for savagery. Arguably though it makes them at the current time in their cultural development special in their propensity for savagery. But strictly speaking nothing prevents us from engaging in the same degree of savagery, however our cultural insitutions were developed to make it relatively unlikely that we would do so.

"This world's Bin Ladens are trying to push us back towards a pre-Liberal world, and the fact that classic Liberalism is against the human natural order is helping them. The enemy is among us because many of our citizens do not understand classic Liberalism."

I didn't miss that point at all. In fact, I said the very same thing in a different way. That is in fact one of the very same criticisms I made of Mr. McIntosh's work.

"There is no middle ground, Demosophist. Either you are free or you are not."

If you are going to take that is axiomatic, there isn't much point in continuing a conversation. I think that the fact that there is no such thing as complete freedom, and that there is no such thing as degrees of freedom is self-evident. If you do not thing that it is, I suspect you are frustrated alot when you try to have a conservation with people.

"There is no middle ground between classic Liberalism and the rule of Mohammed."

While I'm tempted to agree with that, the fact is that Moslems have found all sorts of middle ground over the years. I'm not so much worried about Islam's strict incompatibility with Islam, as I am that Islam has never demonstrated the ability to form a stablely liberal society - or in other words relative incompatibility with liberalism. Here again, we run into the problem of you claiming that freedom doesn't have a spectrum.

"If you give up just a tiny piece of your freedom, aren't you saying that the civil laws Mohammed enacted prevail over Freedom..."

No I'm not. The one doesn't follow from the other. The first does not imply the second, though I believe the second may in fact imply the first that is an entirely different thing. You are aware aren't you that the implication function is not communative, right? There is also a slippery slope falacy here - giving up a tiny bit of your freedom doesn't necessarily imply giving up all of it. There is also a false dilemma falacy here - if you give up just a tiny bit of your freedom, it implies nothing about your opinion on the civil laws of Mohammed.

Muslims in the West have the right for peaceful protest aimed at changing the minds of people running newspapers and the general public. This is how things get done in the West. We don't blow each other up but have political rallies. See: Dr. King's I Have A Dream Speech, or other political events throughout the West.

These are the rules: peaceful protest without violence or the threat of violence to make your argument before the court of public opinion. It's a reasonably effective way of managing social conflict and WORKS.

Muslims in the West (and in Muslim lands) have violated these rules. Burning down the Danish Embassy in Damascus, ransacking the Embassy in Jakarta, threatening death in London and Denmark and threatening to "exterminate" all Danes is a violation of the "rules" by which Western Society governs itself.

This is inevitable since Islam itself embraces tribal violence at all levels to insure "big man" tribal leadership that is incompatible with modern rational secular humanist society.

Of course we are at war, and have been since 1945. Modern telecommunications, satellite TV and radio and television and Videotapes and DVDs and the internet all show Muslims a wealth, prosperous, and totally alien society violating all of THEIR rules (essentially being the slaves of the local big man and following a slavish ideology/religion/way-of-life in all areas) that tells them their entire way of life is a failure by what they see with their own eyes.

Yes we are at war. Best to get it over sooner, with a minimum of bloodshed. For all concerned, them as well as us.

Defeat in War is the one thing that cannot be explained away. Defeat is obvious, and the more crushing the defeat the more a society looks for what went wrong and embarks on reform. Ataturk himself saw the debacle of the Sultan's armies getting wiped out by the forces under Allenby at Meggido, and saw the need to reform to produce a society like Britain's capable of mustering airplanes (which bombed and strafed the sultan's troops), artillery, machine guns, troops acting on their own individual actions within broad orders, and masses of trucks to transport soldiers and their supplies to the battlefield. Ataturk saw this with his own eyes, and understood the need. The Sultan's soldiers were very brave, and had Western rifles but that alone was not enough.

If anything the US has been too timid in confronting the Muslim world. Defeat and destruction of the military forces of Iraq, Iran, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, most of the Gulf states, and Syria would have provided an unassailable message: backward and tribal societies even with lots of oil and people end up losers in the world and the Muslim world to survive MUST embrace modern secular rationalism (as Japan and China and Korea and even to a degree India has).

The world of Islam will always be in conflict and war with the West until and unless it is forced to reform. The great spiritual bonds that Malcolm X and Sir Richard Francis Burton both wrote about unfortunately keep the societies in Amber, frozen in the world of 1200 or so.

"I think that the fact that there is no such thing as complete freedom, and that there is such a thing as degrees of freedom is self-evident."

Pardon me, got to carried away with my negations. I meant the above, as should be clear by context

Matt, that was very, very good. May i admire you?

The Bene Gesserit have only one thing to say on this.

Everything evolves.

If you need something to worship, then worship life-all life, every last crawling bit of it! We're all in this beauty together!

--Paul Muad'Dib Atreides

and, this is good.

In reply to the erring interpretation of his own facts :
" "People should not be allowed to express opinions that are harmful or offensive to members of other religious or racial groups." A total of 42% either agreed or strongly agreed. Liberalism does not come naturally to humans, and its true friends are few.
And yet, here we are. We live in the most wealthy, tolerant, pluralist, liberal society ever to exist on Earth.
"

Yet here we are, the author announces, dumbfounded by the existence of that which he just told us is not available in the human race by misinterpreting the data he cites.

This is an amazing phenomenon I've seen all over the print media and the TV news and the blogs. A person sights a polled statistic, then immediately obviously totally micharacterizes it with some hogwash jibberish.
It's not the stats or the way the quesiotns are asked, as so many claim, it is in fact the lame brained morons
who fail to interpret the obvious answers from them correctly.

If 42% do not support RACISM or RELIGION BASHING in the word, well then - GOLLY -

58 % DO !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

But immediately after the dreaded 42% against number is lofted, leaving out the 58% FOR, from any thought whatsoever, the conclusion is :

"Liberalism does not come naturally to humans, and its true friends are few."

Apparently however, it comes quite easily to 58%, while only 42% don't want to allow racist talk, or religion bashing.

Dumbing down is apparently emotionally completed for some.

If these geniuses of the written news and opinion cannot correctly interpret the single division of 100% into two pieces, and see which one is the larger and therefore in the majority, what chance have we of believing in their seriousness ?

I do wonder if their whole point is often to deny the very obvious thing they discover in their personal research.
That way, via arrogance that supplements the reason why they should be heard by anyone at all, is the placement of complete fabrications within their very own text denying the facts set forth in the same.

I get very sick of it very quickly.

What does their mind busy itself with ?

I just sit here shaking my head, convinced they cannot subtract 42 from 100 and get an answer, that they indeed need a calculator, and they would never think of it anyway.

A smart aleck is now dying to say : " Well, you didn't consider the amount that could be abstaining, it doesn't neccessarily follow that 58% said it was ok, perhaps 16% answered "I don't know", leaving only 42% that are for it, and it's a tie. "

Yes, yes, indeed. We don't need that information though, we clearly see the authors slant, and can easily surmise he left out the other side of the equation for a good reason. It makes for CYA.

This is an all too common phenomenon. Are the people doing it to dumb to realize what they are doing, or are they crafting their wares ?

I believe it is some of both. They figure they wouldn't notice, so if they wisp along, they figure almost noone else will.

The sick thing is, if they were honest to begin with on the stats, their entire stance would take on the flavor of truth, which is ironically forbidden it seems...

#6 from celebrim on February 4, 2006 06:43 PM

Thank you so much for pointing out several of the massive flip flops the author spews while going on endlessly against himself, at least one in the same sentence ! I didn't even force myself to read his whole incantation.

I believe his conslusion that "we" are the enemy, is really true about just himself and others like him, whom can contradict themselves completely dozens of times and never even notice it.

Call it a diseased mind. Call it wordiness. Call it pretending to be intelligent. Call it whatever it really is if anyone actually knows.

In any case, it is extremely frustrating to know that this type of person is out there, and in here. I still don't know if they are possessed, and if so, by what, or merely mistaken, or "feeling artistic".

I'd sure like to find out so I could help give them the cure.

Do they sit there giggling as they type up the twists and turns from standard logic, or are they totally oblivious ? Is their claim to complexities and insistence that others failure to comprehend those their personal cover, when more likely the opposite, or something else is at work ? Will they suddenly say that's not what they meant, even though it is what they said ?

I suppose there should be some gratitude for lefts like Bill Press, who came out with a book called Spin This, then proceeded to hit the TV circuit saying he spins all the time, and so does everyone else.
At least with that character you know he admittedly does it, and never intends to stop, and excuses himself and everyone else in the process. So he can be aware of it or not as he does it, it really doesn't matter.

I appreciate truth above all else, no matter where it winds up. I'd like to know what is really going on. There is nothing wrong with that. Rumors are it used to be a standard requirement.

There is an enemy out there we have met. We have even met the the effect of them being here. I do believe there is another enemy here, but it is not "us", although they are here.

In order to make sure I'm not overdoing it, I went to the auhors link contained in his text "it's true friends are few."

Well, it just absolutely confirmed my premise. Here is that authors "analysis", as flawed as usual.

" After having the First Amendment read to them, 35 percent of high schoolers agreed with the statement that it goes too far in the rights it guarantees, while only 44 percent disagreed and the remaining 21 percent couldn't even summon enough gumption or brain power to answer the question. A year earlier in a survey of American adults, 30 percent agreed the First Amendment goes too far while 65 percent disagreed.

Does not bode well for the future of those values that sustain liberty, does it? "

Note in the first sentence, 35% agreed, while only 44% did not.
I would remind this author fool as well that 44% is more than 35%, and the word only belongs with the 35, not the 44.

In his next cited false calamity, we graduate from teeny boppers to adults a few years earlier, and find that only 30% are against in some fashion the 1st amendment, and in fact a full 60% of the adults, a good indication of growing up yielding the desired results.

But what does this charlatan fool say instead ?

"Does not bode well for the future of those values that sustain liberty, does it?"

Well, it is no wonder that he forms his statement as a question, since of course the answer is:

IN FACT IT DOES BODE WELL FOR THE FUTURE OF THOSE VALUES THAT SUSTAIN LIBERTY !

I have all I can do not to level a gigantic cussfest in text now.

Where these people come from and who pays them to be foolish liars should be investigated. One needs to be very wary of those that read them and are convinced of their lies as well.

My anger got the best of me.

In the year earlier adult survey, 65% supported the first amendment.
That is a 21% increase from the high school survey of 44% for it, turning 5% of the 35% that were somewhat against it, and 15% of the 21% unable to form an answer that early in life for it.

Review Journal should fire that moron Thomas Mitchell if it cared for accuracy at all.

The rule seems to be instead, twist even the polling you cite toward your desired partisan hack false conclusion.

The danger is not the danger these morons cite somewhere else, it is they whom are the real danger.

I've just seen an interesting thread on the Peak Oil website: The Oil Drum where the physicist Stuart Staniford displays the evidence that world oil production peaked in early 2005. If that is the case then we are now at the peak economic and social influence of OPEC and therefore a large part of the muslim world.

As we pass the peak, production starts to fall and price must rise to the point that demand destruction keeps pace with falling production. I estimate that we will reach that dynamic equilibrium point with oil close to $100 a barrel by the end of this year.

From then on, OPEC's power will diminish as the oil price remains more-or-less constant, barring recessions, but falling oil production means falling oil income.

A decade from now, the resurgence of Islam that has flowed from the historic Oil Peak will have ended. And we will have to find something new to worry about. Probably the rising power of China.

Bullshit!

The whole post can be summed up as:

1. Muslims are actually committing violence.

2. "We" are capable of committing violence.

Therefore,

3. "We" are the enemy.

You gotta be $%*^ me.

BTW any price and time estimates in my previous post are purely my private uneducated opinion, and should not be thought of as investment advice. If you need investment advice I strongly recommend that you see a qualified investment advisor.

One final qualifier: Stuart Staniford is not actually claiming that oil production peaked last year, no-one is yet. But those of us who are interested in the Peak Oil debate are watching the lengthening plateau in oil production with great interest.

If oil actually was peaking now, this is what it might look like in real time. So, maybe this is it.

"It has not occurred to you that your ancestors were survivors and that survival itself sometimes involved savage decisions, a kind of wanton brutality which civilized humankind works very hard to suppress. What price will you pay for that suppression? Will you accept you own extinction?"

The demographic collapse of Old Europe and the rise of a culture of death - pro-abortion and anti-fertility among other things - strongly suggests that for us, the answer is "Yes."

What we are doing as a civilisation is without precedent. Civilisations have committed themselves to effete fatal follies before, and paid the ultimate price for it, but by far, we are worse. We are treating our babies and foetuses as problems, and tacitly accepting Stalin's solution. Person: problem. No person: no problem. We think it's acceptable because it doesn't happen to us politically active individuals, personally and in public. But it's still death.

This is not a moral argument, because I know I'm talking to hearts of stone on this. It's a practical one, about how a society has to work.

The people that we kill will not protect us in our dotage, because they are gone!

Young European men today will not, in sufficient numbers, accept any challenge and fight any foe for the sake of the children too many of them do not have, and for the sake of a future they do not yet have the ultimate, sobering, stake in. They will not, in sufficient numbers, with sufficient force, stand up for their authority, their power. Their fathers didn't teach them how to do that.

If you want to find the men like those who stood off Hannibal and preserved the seeds of the civilisation that we typing away with Latin letters still belong to today, first find me the strong, fertile Roman families that made them.

But since today we are talking about a culture so sodden with death, with the successful suppression and frustration of the most basic impulse of healthy life, that we can't replace ourselves, don't expect too much.

Don't expect too much of an Italy or a Spain that's down to a fertility of 1.1 or 1.2, halving in every generation. Don't even expect too much of Australia at around 1.75. And certainly don't expect too much from Russia: the culture was so deeply poisoned there that Russia is still dying, not recovering. There the poison of the Stalin mentality did the most awful cultural damage.

So, no, the enemy is not us, not our vitality, not our capacity to act primitively and effectively for the sake of the future. (Including and not limited to our ability to be practically ruthless and violent against our enemies.) That is what we have lost, and we need to get it back.

We are too like the late post-pagan Romans who couldn't take sufficiently seriously the idea that their ancient civilisation with all its decorous comforts and its enervated, low-fertility, low-vitality demography could really go under a barbarian tide. They were wrong.

When people today talk smugly about our successful societies (ignoring the petty matter of a next generation), and the failure of Islam (ignoring the petty fact that fertile militant Islam is conquering the heartland of our civilisation, and openly gloating over the power of jihad and our moral weakness in standing up to it), we are even more wrong.

Families make the future. Broken families: broken future. Babies are the future. Kill your babies: no future for you, baby.

A culture that refuses to internalise that might as well be run by the Eternals of Zardoz (1974), the satirical, impotent and infertile end-points to hippie political correctness, who met the irruption of the Exterminators into their childless world with the glad cry "Kill us!" Yes, it can end like that for us too. (Minus the satirical science fiction lunacy. But dead is dead, with or without paper-mache masks.)

I am against our would-be Exterminators.

I haven't forgotten what Trent Telenko reminds us of from time to time: that the proliferation of nuclear weapons imposes time constraints that cut in before demographic projection become actual, if they ever do. That does not invalidate my point about the cultural sickness that is affecting our actions right now.

We can choose to forget all this, and most will. (After perhaps chastising whoever so impolitely noticed Death in the ballroom.)

But the gods of the copybook headings will not forget it, or forgive us.

The Gods Of The Copybook Headings
- Rudyard Kipling

As I pass through my incarnations in every age and race,
I make my proper protestations to the Gods of the Market-Place.
Peering through reverent fingers I watch them flourish and fall.
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings, I notice, outlast them all.
We were living in trees when they met us. They showed us each in turn.
That water would certainly wet us, as Fire would certainly burn:
But we found them lacking in Uplift, Vision, and Breadth of Mind,
So we left them to teach the Gorilas while we followed the March of Mankind.
We moved as the Spirit listed. They never altered their pace,
Being neither cloud nor wind-borne like the Gods of the Market-Place;
But they always caught up with our progress, and presently word would come
That a tribe had been wiped off its icefield, or the lights had gone out in Rome.
With the Hopes that our World is built on they were utterly out of touch.
They denied that the Moon was Stilton; they denied she was even Dutch.
They denied that Wishes were Horses; they denied that a Pig had Wings.
So we worshiped the Gods of the Market Who promiced these beautiful things.
When the Cambrian measures were forming, They promiced perpetual peace.
They swore, if we gave them our weapons, that the wars of the tribes would cease.
But when we disarmed They sold us and delivered us bound to our foe,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: 'Stick to the Devil you know.'
On the first Feminian Sandstones we were promiced the Fuller Life
(Which started by loving our neighbor and ended by loving his wife)
Till our women had no more children and the men lost reason and faith,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: 'The Wages of Sin is Death/' ...

There's more, and it's all good, but for those with eyes, that's enough to cover our present case.

If we disarm, morally and/or practically, Islam will not be our friend. That trick never works.

If you are tempted to believe that if we let ourselves be delivered bound to our foes, Muslims will realise at last that we don't want to oppress them and they will stop being angry at us, watch their hostage-decapitation videos over and over till you get it clear in your mind: that trick never works.

A culture of death, a culture that successfuly stifles the most basic and necessary animal insinct and the cry of new life, a culture of literally killing our future, will not give us the strength we need today and the people we will need tomorrow. It doesn't add up.

Neither our empty, complacent boasting nor our politically correct rhetoric will protect us from the gods of the copybook headings.

Thomas Andrews: The pumps will buy you time, but minutes only. From this moment on, no matter what we do, Titanic will founder.
Ismay: But this ship can't sink!
Thomas Andrews: She is made of iron, sir. I assure you, she can. And she will. It is a mathematical certainty.
- Titanic (1997)

You guys are too smart for me. I’m a simple guy. I would not fight for oil, I would not fight for economic gain and I would not fight for george bush but I will fight to my last bloody breath for the personal liberties of myself, my children and my children’s children! When the average moslem can disagree with me but still respect my right to a different opinion, then I will respect them. Until then, all bets are off. Any belief system that doesn’t separate governance from religion is by definition in the intellectual kindergarten. Look to the American founding fathers or the European middle ages for proof. I am a godless person. My personal opinion is that all religion is based on fairy tales. But that’s just my opinion. I respect anybody’s right to have a god and the religion of their choice, but don’t tread on me, don’t impose it on me, and don’t expect me to live to mediaeval rules based on fairy tales and gothic parables. And when Mr. Joe Average Moslem figures that out, he’ll be ready to be an upstanding member of planet earth. Until that point, everything else said is rhetorical pablum. …..to my last bloody breath

Celebrim, the only limit to your freedom should be the freedom of others. That is not a different degree of freedom, on the contrary. It is absolute freedom for ALL individuals.

If enough people to choose NOT to buy Ted Rall's product...

This is not the point here. The point is that Muslims don't want to see cartoons about Mohammed published.

There are many things that what legislate that may in fact just be matters of taste

It should not.

More precisely, there religion encourages to commit violence and excuses them for committing horrendous acts. But while this is true, it doesn't mean that they are special in their capacity for savagery. Arguably though it makes them at the current time in their cultural development special in their propensity for savagery. But strictly speaking nothing prevents us from engaging in the same degree of savagery, however our cultural insitutions were developed to make it relatively unlikely that we would do so.

celebrim, if they want, they have an excuse to commit horrendous acts. We don't, even in war.

There is also a slippery slope falacy here - giving up a tiny bit of your freedom doesn't necessarily imply giving up all of it. There is also a false dilemma falacy here - if you give up just a tiny bit of your freedom, it implies nothing about your opinion on the civil laws of Mohammed.

In this case, yes. Are we free to draw cartoons about Mohammed or not? Which law prevails, Western classical Liberalism or Islam? If you begin to limit the freedom to draw whatever cartoon you want about the Muslim world, you are saying that Muslim should prevail.

Freedom is absolute, with the only limit of someone else's, though the Western world has evolved into societies where it is managed by the government in some extent. That is the problem, this is why the enemy is among us, most of our citizens think that freedom is something flexible that should be controlled and adapted according to the situation. It is a mistake, freedom is absolute. No one should be in a legal position to tell you what kind of cartoon draw. Other issue is that they are considered as bad taste and no one buys the publication that includes them, but that is the freedom of the consumer. Only someone else's freedom, freely expressed, should limit yours.

This is the main difference between America, Europe and Latin America. In America, due to tradition (the Constitution, the Founding Fathers) freedom is still central in living. In Europe the governments manage a great part of them, though they had to keep its hands out of the economy (foundation of the EU) due to the problems arised when Nationalism and Socialism are mixed together. In Latin America, except Chile, many governments still manage the freedom of their citizens even in economic matters, with catastrophic consequences.

The enemy is among us. Freedom is not a matter of negotiation, but of fighting.

This is a protest that is not resonating in the Arab/Muslim street.

If the Arab street was really inflamed you would see hundreds of thousands in the streets. Indonesia had a few hundred trash the embassy. Syria had hundreds set fire to the embassies. Thousands protesting in the UK.

Robin Burk,

"Of COURSE the potential for violence is in us all. But unless you can somehow concoct and successfully promulgate a version of Islam that suppresses the doctrine demanding the conquest of unbelievers and their subjugation by force - ...unconvincing to me."

Think crusades and imperialism, bringing "God and Civilization to the heathen Savages" was the battle cry. Islam or sharia is not historically unique. "Kill The Infidels and Cross Worshippers" is a campaign slogan.

The relationship between Kings and Religion was one of mutual benefit. The Religion provides a belief system which enable battles with horrendous casualty rates to occur, and the King provides the gold to support the religion.

J Aguilar: Basically, we have a purely symmantic argument. We don't really disagree with each other on anything of significance (at least as far as this issue goes), we just disagree with each other in the language we use to describe the problem.

"Celebrim, the only limit to your freedom should be the freedom of others. That is not a different degree of freedom, on the contrary. It is absolute freedom for ALL individuals."

We have a different understanding of the word 'absolute'. By my understanding of the word, 'absolute', there can be no limit - not even the freedom of others. The word I would prefer here is 'maximum'. A system which limits freedom at the point at which it would interfere with the freedom of others (and I should point out that I think that if pressed you'd have to go through some pretty tortorous logic to justify all good laws as doing only that, but nevertheless), gaurantees the maximum freedom for all individuals collectively. This is different than gauranteeing the absolute freedom for individuals.

"This is not the point here. The point is that Muslims don't want to see cartoons about Mohammed published."

Here you are agreeing with me, you just don't notice. First, I think you are using your langauge too loosely. I don't want to see Ted Rall cartoons published, but that doesn't mean that my antipathy (or even revulsion) for Ted Rall cartoons is the same as the antipathy being displayed by the Moslem culture here. What differs is the degree to which I tolerate Ted Rall publishing his cartoons, even if I would prefer that he not do so. What differs here is the actions I would be willing to take to see that Ted Rall not publish his cartoons. The difference is that I would never resort to the use of force - whether legal force or extralegal force - to see that they not be published. That is a very big difference IMO, and it is wholly in that difference that the comparison between the (I think) proper revulsion you should have for Ted Rall, and the proper revulsion they think you should have on seeing (as they consider them) idolotrous depictions.

As far as taste goes, I'm well aware that you don't think that taste has a role in law. To a certain extent I agree with you, but only to a certain extent. For example, I think it is only a matter of taste that we as a society tolerate tobacco and alchohol, and not certain other equally destructive substances. I would not necessarily judge a culture inferior for embrassing on or another addictive substance over another, but I would judge a culture inferior if it hedonisticly embrassed all those worst impulses - especially without any cultural controls to limit the damage they do. You I suspect judge a culture inferior if it bans any of them, since you would I think argue that freedom is maximized when individuals can choose to use them (so long as that choice doesn't interfere with the security or freedom of others). I on the other hand think that ambivalence to addictive substances is the exact opposite of maximizing the freedom of your society. Anyway, this is entirely a tangent to the point of the discussion - the subject at hand we largely agree in even if you and I will never see quite eye to eye over Libertarianism.

"celebrim, if they want, they have an excuse to commit horrendous acts. We don't, even in war."

BS. If we want an excuse, we will find one - especially in war.

"In this case, yes. Are we free to draw cartoons about Mohammed or not? Which law prevails, Western classical Liberalism or Islam? If you begin to limit the freedom to draw whatever cartoon you want about the Muslim world, you are saying that Muslim should prevail."

You continue to get the implication function backwards. Yes, if you embrase Islamic moral norms, you must give up at least a little bit (and probably alot) of your freedoms. But if you give up at least a little bit of your freedoms, it doesn't imply that you've embrassed Islamic moral norms.

"Freedom is absolute, with the only limit of someone else's, though the Western world has evolved into societies where it is managed by the government in some extent."

Not only managed, but protected. And ideally managed only to the extent that it gaurantees us a measure of security without which it would impinge on our freedoms greater than the degree to which the management itself does. And not absolute, maximized. Freedom is never absolute, not only do we lack the physical and moral strength to be truly free in our actions (in that we can always imagine things that we want to do but cannot), but because we are morally flawed we and our neighbors always want things which harm the security and freedoms of our neighbors and so societies must collectively restrict their members actions to the extent that freedoms are protected as best as the society as able, constrained always by the fact and always considering that a legal cure for some moral ills is often worse than the thing it proposes to cure.

"That is the problem, this is why the enemy is among us, most of our citizens think that freedom is something flexible that should be controlled and adapted according to the situation. It is a mistake, freedom is absolute."

You keep saying that. You continue to be wrong. The problem here is more complex than you think it is. We could still be in the very same fix if we were pure libertarians, and in fact it is a wrong-headed sort of libertarianism that is at the root of the problem with multi-culturalism. There is more things on earth than exist in your (single axis) philosophy.

"No one should be in a legal position to tell you what kind of cartoon draw."

I don't however disagree with that statement. I just arrive at that point by a different route.

"The enemy is among us."

The problem with this statement is it seems to argue that the greatest enemy is among us, and that if we would only fix that problem then we would need to do nothing else. I agree that there is a 'enemy' among us, but it would be wrong-headed to think of the 'enemy' among us in the same fashion we think of Islamic terrorists or to hold to that enemy greater responcibility than we hold the Islamists too. Not only is that a dangerous and wrong course, but it is rooted in a racist assumption that everything that happens is centrally about 'us'. We are just not central to this issue. It only touches upon us, and we aren't even central to its fix.

"Freedom is not a matter of negotiation, but of fighting."

Freedom is not only a matter of negotiation, and not ever a matter of negotiation only. Somethings are non-negotiable.

This train of thought has been pondered from time to time by Wretchard over at Belmont Club, by Spengler at Asia Times, and by Victor Davis Hanson, as well.

Wretchard's notable '3 Conjectures' posits that the West will tolerate losses up to a certain point, beyond which 'tolerance' goes out the window, and the nukes begin to fly to the East.

Spengler has written about the ability of an aroused democracy to spill blood in startling quantities, with the American Civil War being the most telling case.

Hanson has also been thoughtful in reminding just how is was that Europe was a grubby backwater in 1250, and within 500 years had come to own the planet: Europeans have been extraordinarily skilled at killing, rather than merely subduing their opponents.

This could get really ugly.

This train of thought has been pondered from time to time by Wretchard over at Belmont Club, by Spengler at Asia Times, and by Victor Davis Hanson, as well.

Wretchard's notable '3 Conjectures' posits that the West will tolerate losses up to a certain point, beyond which 'tolerance' goes out the window, and the MIRVs begin to fly.

Spengler has written about the ability of an aroused democracy to spill blood in startling quantities, with the American Civil War being the most telling case.

Hanson has also been thoughtful in reminding just how it was that Europe was a grubby backwater in 1250, and within 500 years had come to own the planet: Europeans have been extraordinarily skilled at killing, rather than merely subduing their opponents.

This could get really ugly.

Oops. Sorry for the double post. Slow thoughts, fast fingers.

"Think crusades and imperialism, bringing "God and Civilization to the heathen Savages" was the battle cry. Islam or sharia is not historically unique. "Kill The Infidels and Cross Worshippers" is a campaign slogan.

The relationship between Kings and Religion was one of mutual benefit. The Religion provides a belief system which enable battles with horrendous casualty rates to occur, and the King provides the gold to support the religion."

I find all the above to confused and to tenous in its relationship to the subject at hand to really understand what you are trying to say.

Certainly the Crusades were not launched to bring civilization to the savages. The idea that Kings and Religion had a relationship of mutual benefit through much of history is a view that can only be held if you have a only a theory of history and ignore actual history itself (especially Western history). Typically Kings and Religion had an antagonistic relationship - not only are they are competing for the same resources (money and influence), but the laws of one tended to constrain the actions of the other - and its only after Kings like Henry VIII manage to make themselves heads of the religion do you see anything like what you describe. Moreover, if history shows anything its that nationalist fanatics endure far greater casualty rates than religious fanatics. It's not till the modern era that you find battles with truly horendous casualty rates on both sides. Most ancient battles I'm familiar with involved routs which either turned into complete massacres of one side with almost no casualties on the other, or else relatively few casualties as the losing side gets away. Fighting discipline is not in any fashion related directly to religion or its absense. You can instill it into an army entirely without recourse to religion, and historically this occured more often than not.

What this has to do with the subject at hand, I'm not entirely sure. It seems to me like a vague and hip anti-religous rant. The sort of thing I expect to be accompanied by fashionable declarations like Buddhists have never been bloodthirsty or warlike.

I think this is an interesting post; unlike mariner, I don't think it's an issue of equivalence.

Look, to make the mataphor simple, there;s a crazy man in the town square, holding a sword. I'm a cop.

I've got the full resources of modern cop technology at my disposal. I can shoot him any time I choose to - but my job isn't to shoot him, except as a last resort. How do I defuse the situation, if it's defusable?

The point that Matt makes is that our culture was once as wacky as Islam is now; they aren't aliens. We can reach them, or, if you prefer - infect them with a memetic virus - if we can figutre out how.

That seems better than shooting them to me.

A.L.

"That seems better than shooting them to me."

Agreed. But the implication of, 'We have met the enemy, and he is us', is that the crazy guy with a sword is a fairly harmless eccentric, whereas the cops are dangerous pschopaths who - if they ever shoot the harmless guy with the sword who just wants to be loved - would be far far worse than the crazy old chap, if indeed they aren't already for simply entertaining the idea.

I think that this take on the situation is all too common, and that as much as the writer of the original essay understands whats wrong with that, he still finds himself emotionally tied to tired old cliches like 'We are the enemy'.

I don't think Christianism and Islam are equivalents. Tell me intolerant, but I drive to Granada and I can still see the Alhambra, the Arab palace, untouched by the Christians due to its beauty. I go to Seville and I can see the Alcazar, the Arab fortress, because of the same reason, and I can go to Cordoba and see the Abd-El-Rahman mosque, one of the world's biggest and most beautiful, just lightly modified to become a cathedral.

Then I drove out of Cordoba and I can visit the remains of Medina Azahara, the Abd-El-Rahman III palace, one that had ponds filled with quicksilber in order to act as mirrors. The palace was sacked and destroyed during the civil wars among Muslim factions.

For me, the difference is clear.

Having taken a rather roundabout path, the point is this: while the behavior exhibited by many Muslims today is unacceptable by our civilized standards, the psychological substrate that governs these behaviors is fairly uniform across cultures.

I agree with that. Don't you think, celebrim, that some Muslims may appeal to those psychological substrates common to any person to try to impose themselves?

The closer analogy would be 16th century protestants who stormed churches and destroyed and defiled statues to seek God's favor. They were primarily young men and while there was much theological support in the community, the older and wealthier members were concerned about how mob action might escalate.

Solution: The nobles passed laws barring graven images and the statues were passed in an orderly fashion to the storage rooms and bonfires. And for the sake of order, the state became the arbiter of religion. Both defining it and prosecuting its enemies. That didn't work out too well for the next hundred or two hundred years. And I suspect that if the European states step in to protect Muslim sensibilities, it will only be the first of many concessions sought.

I've got the full resources of modern cop technology at my disposal. I can shoot him any time I choose to - but my job isn't to shoot him, except as a last resort. How do I defuse the situation, if it's defusable?

Sometimes the crazy guy is smarter than you think he is. The extremist/political branch of Islam is more like a cult than a religion, and they've had hundreds of years to perfect their brainwashing/taquiya skills.

We have the military skills and we're centuries ahead of them as far as technology, belief in civil rights and honor goes, but when it comes to brainwashing, meme-spreading, deception and lies, we're bumbling incompetents compared to them.

We're not omnipotent and they're not crazy. We should play to our strengths, not our weaknesses.

Why would shooting the crazy guy with the sword be a bad thing? He very well might be dangerous, he might be hallucinating with his sword, and even if he's not dangerous today, do we want to go to sleep tonight in peace and quiet with him roaming around with his sword? Finally, what is he bringing to the party that would make us want to spare him, even if he's not actively or currently trying to hack someone's head off?

Do you think if we shoot the one crazy guy who's swinging his sword around that all his crazy brothers and sisters might then leave their swords home? And if the whole crazy family does come at us all swinging their swords at the same time, isn't that preferrable to them sneaking up on us one at a time into the dim mists of the future?

It is "Islam vs modernity" because one attribute of modernism is precisely the ability to transcend the impulse to turn our outrage into actual violence. Sure we have the same raw feelings as the typical Muslim, but most of us are able to moderate our actual behavior by applying the abstract concept of "freedom of speech."

Muslims moderate other behaviors in the service of an ideal. For example, all normal human beings get hungry and thirsty, but devout Muslims fast for an entire month during Ramadan. Most of us could do that too, but it's not one of our values.

Mary, Stephen Green says we can win a culture war, if we want to.

I think the problem is we are so nice that it's taking us a while to catch on to what they are doing, because we don't want to believe it of them.

But when we do, I agree with Stephen that we can run rings around their memes.

In a statement released on Friday, the ADL said the fact that despicable anti-Jewish caricatures appear daily in newspapers across the Arab and Muslim world has been overlooked in the whole controversy.

"While invoking the supposed 'freedom of the press' in their countries, Arab and Muslim leaders have refused to take any action to stem the drumbeat of anti-Semitism in widely circulated newspapers, many state-sponsored," the statement read. The statement said that the leaders of Egypt and Saudi Arabia have "virtually ignored" appeals from the United States and Jewish organizations to put an end to incitement in their media.

"One would hope that leaders of the Arab and Muslims would turn all of the anger being aimed at the European press into a larger lesson for their own people about the power of images," the statement read.

Well, that's exactly the problem, isn't it? We do that and they don't.

"I think the problem is we are so nice that it's taking us a while to catch on to what they are doing, because we don't want to believe it of them."

I believe that is exactly the issue. We are encultured to believe in and expect the best of people. We are encultured to be sympathetic, to be empathetic, and we project onto them our own motives. But this is not the only possibility. Several works come to mind.

Iain M. Banks, The Player of Games
Vernor Vinge, A Deepness in the Sky

Both books are about the psychology of the conflict between Liberalism and Fascism, and are well worth reading for the mirror that they may hold up to us and the challenge that they represent to our own preconceptions.

But when we do, I agree with Stephen that we can run rings around their memes.

That's just what they want you to think.

Stephen's piece is great and I'd like to agree with you, him and AL, but I don't. The powers-that-be in the Muslim world have managed to mobilize and army of thousands of foaming-at-the-mouth zealots, all of whom, worldwide are simultaneously registering similar amounts of outrage while not actually killing anyone. Can we do that?

These simultaneously outraged protesters have somehow found truckloads of Danish flags out there in the desert to burn. They simultaneously burn down Danish embassies, their governments simultaneously issue apologies; Muslims, moderate and otherwise around the world simultaneously insist that images of Mohammed have always been forbidden despite the fact that we know they haven't.

We're not fighting a meme or a clever marketing scheme, we're fighting a cult. This is Jim Jones kool aid stuff on a massive scale, a suddenly wealthy cult that has been brainwashing and terrorizing people for hundreds of years. We have never figured out what to do about cults like this. Our traditional intelligence gathering techniques have been useless, and when they say they want to 'reform' we actually believe them. Do you know how to deprogram thousands of brainwashed zealots? Do you know how many 'moderate' muslims are also similarly brainwashed? Neither do I.

It all sounds like a lame James Bond plot but then again so did 9/11. If we believe that some Palestinians will accept peace with Israel, if we believe that Sistani is our friend, if we believe that our clever marketing tactics, soft diplomacy, democracy and financial influence will diminish the influence of terrorism and win us friends in the Muslim world, then these crazy cultists have already proven that, in many ways, they're smarter than we are.

I'm sorry if I've skipped over a previous comment...

I've read lots of posts and had lots of conversations about muslims being 'generations behind us' in terms of attacking speech against their views with violence.

I'd just thought I'd point out the Civil rights movement; where people did nothing but walk down the street and were sprayed with firehoses. Churches were burned, individuals who nonviolently acted were tortured, mutilated and killed.

All in public view. All with support by their rural populations.

Every population has their demons. The question is how do we help the muslim populations remove theirs?

The question we've asked is "Why don't muslims decry violence?"

Maybe the question should be "Why aren't these papers encouraging debate by including muslim voices?"

Here are some moderate Muslims decrying violence. They make this interesting point:

The problem with media representation of such issues tends to be that the media only picks up the loudest voices, ignoring the rational ones that do not generate as much noise.

We are Sorry

Yes, In his next cited false calamity, we graduate from teeny boppers to adults a few years earlier, and find that only 30% are against in some fashion the 1st amendment, and in fact a full 60% of the adults, a good indication of growing up yielding the desired results.

..."We're in a race to bring the rest of the world up to our level before the bin Ladens of the world can bring us back down to theirs. That was the purpose of Iraq, and no matter how one felt about the wisdom of the Bush administration's choices (or lack thereof, depending on your point of view), we can all hope that the Iraqis will succeed, insh'allah"....

So thats what the war was all about "civilizing"...
you can not in all seriousness believe that
does the word eurocentric mean anything

i think there are miss understanding betweem the muslim and the christain. the muslims dont play with there religion. especially when it comes to the prophets the get really mad. such publication should be abolished.

Well Bash,

That's why we tend to think of you folks as savages. As a culture, we've outgrown that kind of violent fanaticism. Those of us who are religious take our religion very seriously, but we feel no need to kill people who do not. If some poor fool wants to burn in hell forever, that's between him and God. It's called tolerance. You barbarians should try it.