Postmodern Fallacy #14: relativism leads to historical barbarism!

In "Why the Left hates 300" Townhall.com columnist Ben Shapiro today gives us a review on Hollywood's latest adaptation of somebody's national history being abused, misinterpreted and re-arranged according to whatever is the day's dominant idea of the politically correct. Shapiro's commentary, and how the flick is savaged by the Left, are also not beyond reproach.

For those who haven't yet had the pleasure, Shapiro quotes some of the narrative: "Only the hard and strong may call themselves Spartans ...We do what we've been trained to do. We do what we've been bred to do. We do what we were born to do." There are no descriptors for this kind of purposeful anti-subtlety, opines Shapiro.

This narrative may come across as theatrical, as purposeful anti-subtlety, but it is exactly in accordance with the spirit of the myths surrounding the Spartans. They were a highly disciplined, military nation about whose toughness several stories circulate. I don't recall this prime example verbatim, but the gist of it is that a soldier stood prolonged to attention even though a fox cub was nibbling away at his ribs - a measure of the Spartan toughness and discipline.

Shapiro's not exactly civilized valley of the skulls and the father and baby overlooking it, is the stuff of the same legends: it is said that babies were exposed so that only the toughest would survive to make up the legendary Spartan army. The producer so far, is on topic.

The Persian tyrant (Greek: as opposed to democratically elected) Xerxes I - by the way, do we have a moral duty to inform ourselves? - was under orders of his father to take revenge on the Greeks for the defeat at Marathon. Seeking world-wide domination may be a Hollywood way of describing it, but Xerxes subdued Egypt and Babylon and sought to enslave the Greeks, which in 480 B.C. was together just about what made up the entire known world (Europe and Asia). The Persian army may well have consisted of degenerates: there must have been some reason this vast army lost the battle from a handful of Spartans (300?).

On the same note, Herodotos wrote in 485 B.C.: "The Persians consider Asia part of their property". An American army officer declared not so long ago rather proudly that "they (Iran) haven't invaded another country in two hundred years!"

Shocking as it may be, promiscuous bi-sexual conduct and the exposure of babies was considered quite the done thing before Jesus Christ taught humanity that it is actually unethical. If anything is the point of Christianity in favor of paganism, this is it. That today we're purposefully doing the exact opposite, is here off topic.

I regret this article is full of shocks for the uninformed Utopian, but before we recently (almost) all agreed to some form of military code of conduct, "mass murder of its male citizens, rape of female citizens, and use of women and children as slaves" contituted normal warfare. In fact, in some parts of the world it still is.

The Left's panning of the film and the comment that "Spartans in the film are a bunch of jackbooted thugs (probably their projection of a sort of ancient soup Nazis) and that "the tyranny they fight is less tyrannical than Sparta" is entirely knee-jerk predictable and wholly conform politically correct multiculturalism that possesses the Left today: caucasion, freedom-loving Greeks are identified as the 'Bad Us', while the antagonists, the Persians are the swarthy misunderstood noble savages and - of course - unsurprisingly, inherently better than we are.

The Greeks took their freedom very seriously indeed (as is the case today), and were willing to fight to the last man, woman or child to preserve it: they preferred death over a life in bondage (this also was the national motto in the fight against the Turks: freedom or death) ... a matter of principle ...

Comparing the Persians with "Al Qa'ida in adult diapers" may be considered a hilarious depiction, it is actually a sin in more ways than one:

1. it's projecting the current political situation on the one of 480 B.C., and
2. it is passing moral judgement on values and ethics of 2.500 years ago.

Doing so is common bad practice in the current relativised West and a measure of our barbarity and profound lack of wisdom and historical insight. Considering all cultures and views equally valid and beyond moral judgment may be a relativist principle, it doesn't stretch to the West, the Right, the Past and Christianity, upon which constant moral judgment is pored with relish. But we already knew that reason and logic isn't a forte of the Marxist dialectic.

The flick, as well as the commentary left, right and centre illustrates how political correctness and relativism sadly has perverted our way of thinking. Please take careful note of the following:

It is no surprise that we in the West value freedom above anything else! It is because we have inherited this Greek ideal! This is one of the points Pope Benedict XVI was trying to make in his (in)famous Regensburg speech! Through its fusion with Rome it has come to us, in Christianity! And this is the reason why we should cherish both: the ideal of freedom as well as the heritage that gave us this ideal.

And this is why - and let me phrase this carefully - it is so reprehensible that the Left is selling out a 2500 year old cultural heritage - of which they are a part - to a 2500 year old sworn enemy - the tyrants who hate liberty.

Post postmodernism: what are the options? (III)

Regretfully Europe is buying the postmodern drivel, wholesale.
- Belgium's almost certainly a lost cause.
- France is sinking fast, as both the left and the right have adopted postmodernism as the new height in intellectualism of which it considers itself the very source; moreover they perceive it as a fresh opportunity to counter-balance American cultural domination of American culture.
- The Netherlands is going under and is blissfully unaware that the world has moved on to yet a new post-Enlightenment menace.
- The U.K. has become unrecognisable in a stretch of just a few years, as is the case with Spain that is being run by a cultural equivalent of Attila the Hun. Both have suffered Islamo-Nazi attacks and because of it, suffer from psychological displacement disorder [5], an illusionary remedy, while the actual danger is still in their very midst.
- Germany seems to have capitulated, but there are a few orthodox [6] still seem to be standing.
- The only ones really fully awake to the danger and offering resistance - as far as I can see - are a number of realistic Aussies and Americans.

I'm a bit ambivalent about this postmodern usurpation of Western civilization. On the one hand it's thoroughly pernicious and all pervasive; it's undermining and destroying from within the type of society we hold dear. It acts as the 'new communism' in more ways than one. Droves of naive people only wish to see its benign, idealistic guise, unwilling to accept proof to the contrary [7]: that multiculturalism is totalitarian in character, is against the individual, is anti-realism and collectivist.

They are making common cause with the overt enemies, the Islamo-Nazis, and as such are a Trojan horse.
Its ugly little sister, relativism, is practiced and actively promoted by the mainstream media and the intelligentsia.
It is hardly part of any existing political program - let alone being voted on, and still finds its way into people's minds and covertly becomes policy anyway, apparently on no one's particular authority.

On the other hand I refuse to see it as a mature ideology: philosophically it's a mess and is easily refutable; to remain standing, albeit wobbly, the very foundations of science and reason have to be suspended. Proponents aren't even sure of the basis of what they preach. At present they are in trouble because relativism, the very core of their belief, excludes 'eternal truths' as 'dogmatic'. Besides itself, that also happens to include human rights. Denouncing that, would unmask multiculturalism as

A. not as benign as it seems, and
B. reveal its anti-human dictatorial tendencies.

Since they cannot let that stand, a case is made to adopt instead Liberalism as its basis! As if a free thinking, free market society, based on individual liberty for all, would ever tell dissidents to get double quick back to their collectivist, socialist ghettos [2]! Postmodernism is once again going for the impossible, creating yet another paradoxymoron [2], the sort of monstrosities that are its trade mark. It all becomes possible, once you have literally taken leave of your senses.

The West has fought totalitarian, collectivist, irrational dictatorships before. Wars have been fought, sons and daughters have given their lives for our liberty. The state of the present intellectual and cultural turmoil is indicative of the still early stages of incubation and, as we have seen in the case of the Russian Revolution, can be decades in the making.

But we have to be aware there isn't really ever such a thing as the end of history. The free world - especially because it is free and strong - will always have challengers. People who want to start history all over, because their pathological egocentricity has convinced them that they are the New Ubermensch, and the creation of a new paradise is attainable in their hands, if we'll only let them. They will do so with, or without the help of those who feel, that they also are deserving of another shot at dominion over others. Whether unlearned or denied, the past has a depressing tendency of repeating itself.

Then, as now, there will be appeasers who maintain we mustn't over-estimate the dangers, Trojan horses proliferating psi-ops and having pot-shots at our morales. But they needn't have illusions: we will fight for our right to perpetually tolerate traitors in our midst - and we will prevail!


In the next post we will have a closer look at proper philosophy, and surprising proposals to defeat the defeatism of postmodern anti-reason.

Help! Can anybody just stop these heathens!

Help!

While in my absence - fifteen years ago - somebody in Holland proclaimed the Multicultural Society and pretended it to mean 'being nice to immigrants', some heathen or other - probably lurking within the government appointed Board of Governors of the BBC - has now proclaimed perfectly good Englishmen, Welsh and Scotsmen to be Indigenous Britons.

Its only a matter of time before we all become Native Europeans, Allochthon Americans or some other politically correct designation!

And this is all being done without any body's consent, any democratic process whatsoever, or so much as a by your leave through a simple public discourse.

Is this still a free continent (sort of) or are we all simply being sold out by the so-called leftist, relativised, multiculti, politically correct intelligentsia?!

Help! Can anybody just stop these heathens!!!

Post postmodernism: what are the options? (II)

Not ever in my life have I come across such a treacherous and foul piece of thinking as relativism (that includes all its other postmodern relatives [1]). The reason why I would even prefer full-blown communism, is that at least, it states in fairly straight forward terms what it portends to be. You can reason about it, debate it, you can fight it.

Relativism goes far beyond that. There is no underlying reason [3] and there's no debating it: it is an epistemology that tells you your senses and by extension your rationality is unreliable, that any conviction you have about it - or in respect of anything else, for that matter - is just your opinion, and that its fallacies are invalid because they are based on vacuous Western ethnocentricity. It seems to be tailor-made to cause the greatest possible confusion in people's minds. To put it bluntly: it f%#*s with the brain, plays dirty mind-games.

We may not realise it, but every day - whenever we press a button for a connection to the nearest news outlet - we are bombarded with its messages. What then are the consequences of these psi-ops?

1. The politically correct genesis.
Simply said: Darwinism. Life is chance and has by accident developed out of primordial soup. When our time has come, we disintegrate. What we, naked apes, do in the time we walk the earth is inconsequential. The meaning of life is reproduction, the survival of the species, passing on the genes. Once we've reproduced, we become useless. We are a bad, destructive species: better not to reproduce at all if you want to act environmentally responsible. The biggest polluters are babies: not just their nappies, but think of all the pollution they will cause during their lifetime. Planet Earth without us is infinitely better. How all the above figures to adherents of the Gaia hypothesis, I don't wanna know.
Consequence: cynicism - nihilism - uselessness - boredom - survival of the fittest - irrationality - violence - chaos - 'the law of the jungle' - humanity commits suicide in favour of a pristine planet Earth.

2. Your senses are untrustworthy.
End of natural philosophy. Has consequences for science, but is practically status quo.
Consequence: Self-doubt and uncertainty about the world around us. Scientific confusion: ignoring presuppositions of the empirometric method gets official policy status. Related expression: he's taken leave of his senses.

3. Relativism wants you to believe ten impossible things before breakfast.
All is possible, all is relative [4]. Laws of nature are relative and perhaps imaginary. Is it perhaps all a dream, or a parallel universe you can step out of?
Consequences: lots and lots of disappointments.

4. Since there's no truth, there's no such thing as wrong.
Think whatever you will. It is of no consequence. So can everybody else.
Consequence: intellectual chaos. No problem.

5. There's no truth, only personal opinion.
Personal opinion is never really 'wrong', but it can cause offence. Say whatever you will, but never criticize. So-called 'eternal truths' (laws for instance, or religious tenets) are just somebody's opinion. If an opinion is offensive to anyone, it should be exchanged for another that is more agreeable.
Consequences: debate is reduced to small talk about personal tastes. Related expression: there no arguing about tastes (Dutch proverb). No critique, no personal improvement (all good things come at a price, after all). End of tolerance about ideas. Ad hominem attacks: intolerance and disrespect towards the person. The end of freedom of expression, as there will always be an opinion that's offensive to somebody. Legal chaos. Religion is also personal opinion. Practicing exact science has become impossible: technological and scientific progress come to a halt. The Alphas, the Humanities, the Liberal Arts thrive: funding is re-channeled in its direction. Combating disease is no longer tenable.

6. Morally there's no good, there's no evil.
Do whatever your instinct or 'some stuff in your brain' tells you to. Everybody has the right to his own morals. We don't pass judgement on each other's moralities. Forget the past: there's no sin, there's no guilt. Consequences: no sin, no forgiveness. Moral chaos. Legal chaos. The cannibal is happily celebrating his culture and has invited the voodoo queen too lunch; others are ritually slaughtering sheep, while animal rights activists jump up and down for joy at so much unoppressed pluralism.

7. All faiths are equally valid.
But they are all fundamentalisms that must be jettisoned asap. Until such time they are a private matter and have no business in the public space. Muslims have been awfully victimised. They have therefore a right to special consideration (this has nothing to do with decibel production or with nail bombs). Islam, Buddhism, animism, voodoo, paganism, wicka are equal=identical: wicka is Islam.
Consequence: there's no distinction between Kali worship and zen. If human sacrifice is your creed's highest expression of worship, nothing should be standing in its way. But consider yourselves on notice that your faiths are emotionally backward and are ultimately subject to abolition. A prime example if so much ignorance and callousness can be found here (who says there's not a war on?).

8. All ideologies are equally valid.
But they are all fundamentalisms that need to be dumped asap. Communism, socialism, fascism, liberalism, etc. are all Western inspired expressions of ethnocentristic hegemonism. They're all equally bad=identically bad: communism is liberalism.
Consequences: related policies will be abolished forthwith.

9. All cultures are equally valid.
All cultures are equal=identical: cannibalism is pacifism. Not subject to termination.
Consequences: see 7.

10. Western culture is intrinsically bad.
It should consider itself on notice that it will be reduced to a small corner of the whole of human culture, if it behaves. Preferably it will not survive at all.
Consequence: Western morale undermined. Defeatism.

11. Christianity is intrinsically bad.
It will not survive.
Consequence: Christian morale undercut. Its legacy vacuous.

12. Science is Western culture and is intrinsically bad.
Reason, rationality is Western, bad and objective.
Consequences: unspeakable.

It's the seductive voice of a latter day version of World War II siren Tokyo Rose: "Give over, you are bad, you are losing ...losers!" Can you think of any better psi-ops, the untold message that daily spreads from the media, from universities and the pundits? The message to non-Westerners is of course the mirror image.

To be continued: what's next?

Post postmodernism: what are the options? (I)

Multiculturalism has been exposed, in these pages and others, as a crypto-totalitarian ideology that makes common cause with the other enemy of freedom and democracy, Islamo-Nazism.

On a policy level there have been efforts in the recent past to implement multicultural experiments on the ground, but all have miserably failed. These endeavors however have not remained without consequences and place city councils and the communities involved, for enormous challenges. They have to start over, but with great disadvantages.

Considering multiculturalism is currently not seriously seen as a viable solution by any government on the face of the earth (perhaps the Canadian one exempted), I think we can safely ritually stake, garlic and bury the entire concept for the piece of irresponsible nonsense that it is. The Left, progressive as they consider themselves to be, have once again fallen for yet another pernicious ideology. A learning curve is non-existent there.

I'm glad to note that the Australian Muslim intelligentsia at Austrolabe is also not particularly enamoured by the postmoderns, however much the latter would like to think differently in view of the apologetics and the considerable amount of appeasement that has been thrown at it in recent years.

I'm quoting from Amir's answer to my query regarding multiculturalism: "Postmodern epistemology is something that annoys us greatly, it is essentially nothing, nihilistic and fashionable. The only country which does not have a multicultural policy, has the strongest and most energetic Muslim community, the United States. As for Islamism’s links with Marxist methodologies, we have previously discussed it here. Regards" ... so ... please take note.

One of the problems with the proponents of the postmodern ideologies is, that you cannot get them to accept refutations. You can prove their ranting a fallacy for all you want, it doesn't mean anything to them. So they just go on and on in cycles: see Dr Pat's latest on the matter: The Left's Theory of Relativity [1]. Unchecked and convinced of their own bizarre wisdom, they try to sell absurdity as the height of wisdom. But taken to task over the irrationality, you find yourself up against a wall of disinterest that I now understand to stem from the profound idea that they "balk at such colonial-hegemonic-rationalistic-Western traditions. The notion that one can criticize another’s cultural practices, beliefs, ways of thinking, and ultimately actions, is just emblematic of an Enlightenment hegemony that has infected Western society and by extension the rest of the world for hundreds of years", writes somebody in the know. Well, get thee behind me ...

Which leaves us with the fact that postmodern ideas are still dominating large and key depositories in society: youth culture, (not so high and) higher education, the mainstream media and the intelligentsia, including most Left-leaning political parties.

- On the level of youth culture and students postmodernism is predominantly practiced on a subconscious level; and it attracts those that consider certain aspects of it fashionable, or a cool life-style of choice. Its expressions remain largely and relatively naive. Popular are environmentalism, animal rights [2] and relativism.

- On the levels of 'high culture' postmodernism is much more actively theorized and practiced. By some adherents the message is spread with almost messianic zeal, out to convert the masses. Considering its access to the media, universities and the political echelons, it is here that chances of dissemination are most profuse.

To be continued, with postmodernism's daily message.

Neo-communism exposed! (II)

To complete our case that:

- the postmodern [1] mind-set is not tuned towards individualism, democracy and freedom, but on the contrary is in fact collectivist, irrational and totalitarian in character;

- it could be termed neo-communist, or neo-Marxist (already taken up by some other re-invention of trouble), but its epithet is immaterial to the case;

- that postmodernism has made common cause with radical Islam, in these pages dubbed The Unholy Alliance of Convenience.

- The case is first of all borne out by the postmoderns themselves. By: the nomenclature; the allergic reactions towards religion and rash caused by concepts as ... !Authority!; compilation of a dossier against the common scape-goat and enemy (Jews and Christians); the propagation of ideals that are only practically attainable under dictatorial-cum-totalitarian circumstances; the hatred towards dissidents; and indifference towards the interests of individuals who must conform to the masses and submit to the ideology; the tendency to allow the end to justify the means; the attitude towards science: if it doesn't underpin the ideology, it is manipulated so that it does, or it is considered irrelevant (a snap shot of tomorrow's post: it is "... colonial-hegemonic-rationalistic-Western tradition and just emblematic of an Enlightenment hegemony that has infected Western society and by extension the rest of the world for hundreds of years ...").

- The case is underpinned by Dr Pat's psychological analysis.

- It is confirmed by Nick Cohen article in Opinion Journal (Wall Street Journal), "An Upside-Down World, The British far left makes common cause with Muslim reactionaries".

- And affirmed by German social scientist Ulrike Ackermann in her article "In Praise of Dissidence" on Signandsite in defence of expostulate Ayaan Hirsi Ali, and by the latter herself;

- Today it has been re-affirmed by 'Britain's foremost political philosopher', a man whose credentials must be beyond postmodern suspicion: Professor John Grey in his article "The best we can hope for is tolerance". In fact, he's spilling the beans!

Here's a quote from John Grey's [4] article on Austrolabe: "In Britain at the present time, the threat of terror ... comes from a radicalised minority which has embraced a type of thinking that has more in common with radical Western ideologies such as Leninism and anarchism than with traditional Islamic theology ... The most urgent task is to halt the process of radicalisation, and it is here that the current exaggerated revulsion against multiculturalism can be dangerous".

John Grey, though not described as a multiculturalist or a postmodern - but his knee-jerk reaction betrayes him - obviously still labours under the illusion that something ultimately beautiful has gone lost in multiculturalism. Instead of it standing for 'Westerners being nice to Muslims, and allowing them to celebrate their own culture and faith as a part of the society they respect for the freedom and wealth it provides them', a conviction, by the way, held by the average Westerner - we now know multiculturalism quite the contrary - to be, a species of crypto-totalitarianism:

... each 'tribe' isolated in their own urban ghetto or rural reservation - or 'archipelago' as the commentators on Austrolabe term it - indifferently avoiding criticism of 'the others' at all cost and hoping the thought police will the able to stop any dissent within before it breaks through the tribal Berlin Wall, out into the public Hobbesian space of perpetual almost war of all against all, a failed state, on a world-wide scale.

A little later Grey openly admits that "rather than raking over the ashes of multiculturalism, political leaders should focus on genuine obstacles to peaceful co-existence between Britain’s communities". Grey admits that the multicultural ideal is now lost, but finds that those that are still in pursuit of a liberal monoculture as the ideal - presumably pointing at Ayaan Hirsi Ali c.s. - will founder on the diversity on the ground. Exactly how and why, is food for thought.

The Muslim commentators on Austrolabe applaud Grey for 'exploding' the idea of teleological liberalism - the wide-spread concept of ongoing progress of Western liberal democracy as per Fukuyama's book "End of History ..." - a thought abhorred by postmoderns, anti-globalists in particular. It remains unclear in the post if the teleological outlook has always been a part of Classical Liberalism. I'm also not sure, but I think it is a Christian concept that at some point has become part and parcel of Liberalism. Perhaps somebody can confirm this.

If Grey is right in this, then free democratic society has reached culmination point somewhere between say World War II and the change of the millennium; from there onwards decadence and degeneration has set in and things can only go down hence onward. But we aren't to worry, as Muslim youths and culture will save the West from itself and re-launch it as the pearl in the crown of the world-wide Ummah - or something like that (I'm only letting my imagination run riot).

Grey suggests harking back to Classical Liberalism - Hobbes [5] and John Stuart Mill [6] (as long as nobody else gets hurt) are paraded onto the stage in an effort to bring the ideal of a happy melting pot closer towards our idea of a free democracy. Dr Pat's first chart has shown that the Classical Liberal tenets have been perverted by the Left. In that respect is Grey's suggestion to go back to basics, perhaps not a bad one.

If one thing becomes clear from this article and its appending comments by the intellectual Muslim readership of Austrolabe, it is that multiculturalism's initial offer on behalf of the West, of Down With Us, renders the peaceful assimilation of Muslims into free societies and adjusting themselves to the status quo ante, too much to expect.

After Grey betraying his postmodern mind-set once again by a spot of religion bashing - never mind that we thank the very concept of scientific thinking, the belief in human dignity and secularism itself, on Christianity - he ultimately goes on to advocate a return to unspecified human rights and true tolerance.

It is therefore such a pity that postmodern relativism has exactly eroded human rights as figments of Western ethnocentrism, and has perverted the very concept of tolerance beyond all recognition!

To be continued with the question, what to do post postmodernism?

Neo-communism exposed! (I)

Seek and ye shall find ... answers are forthcoming, in ever greater number! Not only have we been conned by the Left, with hindsight it must be said that I should have seen this coming light-years hence ... say from 1989 onwards. The good old method of infiltration and destruction from within has been doing its damnedest. Considering today's confusion I'd say they've been pretty successful this time, and on the whole better covered than usual (except for the environmentalists, the anti-globalists and the animal rights activists, which were a little overt, come to think of it).

I'll give you the wrap up in this two part post, after which we can start doing some damage control and exposing these miserables and their time-honoured subversive [1] methods for what they are, and hence begin the mobilisation of the masses to claim back what they've tried to uproot. I'll come to the details, but first here are the latest developments. (By all means, follow the link to note [1], it's worthwhile in itself!)

Autrolabe is a Muslim group blog in Australia. Contributor Amir recently posted an article by John Grey (Britain's foremost political philosopher) "The best we can hope for is tolerance". While I wasn't particularly enamoured by Grey's defense of the indefensible - a multicultural knee-jerk or whatever reason led him to pose that martyrdom operations aren't particularly Islamic - the overall quality of the piece is outstanding, and stands in thrill contrast to the state-sponsored ravings you had the misfortune to stumble upon last Friday in this blog, meanwhile suitably ditched by 'Defend America'.

I left a comment on Austrolabe, explaining Greg Koukl's insight into the perversion of tolerance, so often discussed in these pages, primarily on: Koukl's Tolerance Trick and Postmodern Fallacies I-II-III (subsequent). The same is of course true of multiculturalism, that is not the definition of a tolerant society with more than one culture, but on the contrary harbours a particularly pernicious piece of social manipulation, nothing less than an attempt at destruction from within, as we shall currently show. In the meantime I got a reply from Amir, which can be accessed via the Austrolabe site, but I'd like to come back to it in some detail in part II, tomorrow.

The striking thing is that the recent connection I stumbled on, and that has been borne out by Dr Pat's psychological investigations - the sympathetic link between radical Islam and the remnants of the radical Left and all its derivatives - is today re-affirmed by Amir's observations in his article on Austrolabe. And if that isn't enough, it is confirmed on the meanwhile well known German site of Europe's high culture, Signandsite - a source beyond any suspicion in that regard - in an article "In praise of Dissidence" making similar assertions. Things have come together just lovely: I declare my case closed. It's uncanny that once you know it, you see the evidence all around you.

Ulrike Ackermann is a German social scientist, freelance author and columnist for Merkur magazine. Her book "Sündenfall der Intellektuellen" (Klett-Cotta, Stuttgart) on anti-totalitarian traditions in France and Germany, was published in 2000. In above article - a contribution to the by now infamous postmodern polemics of Messrs Stuart Sim, Ian Buruma and Timothy Garten Ash on the one hand, and Paul Cliteur, Necla Kelek and Pascal Bruckner on the other, she exposes the Left's common attitude towards communist dissidents during the Cold War, and the present to our contemporary dissenter of Islam, Ayaan Hirsi Ali positioned herself explicitly in the tradition of Eastern European dissidents.

She quotes from Ayaan's speech, delivered in Berlin while the Danish cartoon hysterics were raging: "A divided city in which the communist state held people captive behind a wall ... in the West ... the works of Karl Marx were being taught at university. Dissidents who had escaped from the East could ... persuade others that communism was a long way from creating paradise on earth ... Today the open society is being challenged by Islamism ...Our opponents want to use violence to silence us. They claim that we are spiritually and mentally unreliable and shouldn't be taken seriously. Communism's defenders used the same methods." Although the article can be accessed in full on Signandsight, the content is worth quoting extensively:

"The sympathetic reading of Islam recalls that of communism before 1989. At the time, the West's self-hatred and invalidation of the accomplishments of free democracy were expressed in a generous interpretation of communism. A similar phenomenon is to be seen in attitudes towards Islam today, in large part thanks to its anti-capitalism and anti-Americanism. Many Western intellectuals had reservations about Eastern European dissidents because they were only fighting for the so-called 'bourgeois liberties'. Many dreamed at the time of a 'third way' [2] between capitalism and communism. The analogy is evident in the terminology: Stalinism could be criticised but communism was handled with kid gloves. Today, criticism of Islamism is common sense, but criticism of Islam has to be conducted with care".

"Her criticism arouses ... anger and critique ... of European leftist intellectuals such as Ian Buruma and Timothy Garton Ash who accuse her of being an 'Enlightenment fundamentalist', who is pouring oil onto the fire and engendering 'politics of fury'. For Hirsi Ali, the legacy of the Enlightenment - the separation of religion and state, political and individual rights, self-determination of the individual, reason and the equality of the sexes [3] - are of fundamental importance, and so they should be. To have to defend these against an accusation of fundamentalism is, given the situation in which we find ourselves, pretty ludicrous".

A few other qualifications also come to mind, but we know by now that all that isn't relativism, is per definition fundamentalist in the eyes of these subversives. I won't mention anymore the lunacy that inspires them to seriously equate 'Hitler had a mustache, comrade Stalin had a mustache, Hitler is comrade Stalin: I said elsewhere that this logic is forgivable only if perpetrated by very young children.

"Hatred for the 'decadence' of the West, its capitalism, consumerism and individualism, was as much part of the communist ideology as it is of radical Islam today. In the fusion of belief and social order, of truth, hierarchy and social reality, arose a secular Umma in which the individual is to be collectivised. The individual is suspicious to all ideocratic totalitarianisms. Unpredictable, instinctive, egoistic, headstrong and anarchistic, it must be controlled and dominated for the good of the respective Umma: the national, class or religious community. The communist social experiment cost millions of lives, as did National Socialism and fascism. Learning from this history can only mean remaining vigilant in face of new totalitarian dangers which threaten our painstakingly acquired freedom.

This must be defended "in a continuously repeated act of liberation, an eternal battle in which there can be no final victory, because that could only mean the death of all combatants, that means all those living."
Benedetto Croce

Conned by The Left, again! (II)

In recent days there have finally been some queries about the weird Unholy Alliance of Convenience of radical Muslims, radical Enlighteners and radical environmentalists. Sometimes they aren't even that visibly radical, but go by epithets as Greens, Socialists, Social Democrats, Liberals, Christian Democrats, etc. Even compared with the situation quite recently, one or two years ago, presently re-visiting some European countries, is almost a surreal experience. I can attest to this happening in the Netherlands. The situation in the United Kingdom is pictured in this article in Opinion Journal (Wall Street Journal), "An Upside-Down World, The British far left makes common cause with Muslim reactionaries" by Nick Cohen.

"Not weird at all", says Dr Pat. "In fact, if you look at the underlying two ideologies, it makes perfect metaphysical, epistemological and ethical sense." I can heartily recommend reading Dr Pat's post entirely, but in the meantime let me borrow her chart for a moment:


It makes perfect sense. Since a far-left green party in The Netherlands declared some months ago, that it now too had embraced Liberalism, an ideology that till then to them had been Anathema and The Principal Free Market Enemy, I should have been forewarned. Indeed I was, but I didn't get the big picture, as per chart, which shows how Classical Liberalism has been perverted into a kind of Postmodern thinking, much akin to the collective, social étatism, accompanied by messianic zeal, that is characteristic of political Islam.

A quote from Dr Pat's post: Radical Islam's has "been successful precisely because they are in philosophical and ethical step with the political left ..."; "The identity politics of today's left is based on two quasi-religious and pseudo-intellectual tenets that conveniently enable and promote the Islamist agenda ... multiculturalism and political correctness ... exists to undermine Western culture at the expense of other cultures";

and

"Both intellectual strategies have been widely used by leftist intellectuals unable to abandon the socialist ideology ... In fact these two doctrines have been slowly and relentlessly absorbed at all levels of Western culture in the last several decades, clearing the way for a constant and steady undermining of Western values ... The process has accelerated since the end of the Cold War, and it is so insidious that most people don't even realize that objective reality and truth, as well as reason and logic have been replaced with the subjectivism and relativism of postmodern rhetoric".

We have seen in the first post about Tom Reiss' great historical work, "The Orientalist" that the engine of the Russian Revolution's philosophy of choice was Nihilism. It is no wonder Stuart Sim reacted to Paul Cliteur's accusation, as if stung by a giant Marxist bee: it reveals the mentality underlying all that nice left-leaning squasi-intellectual postmodern drivel. Sim may not see himself as a nihilist, but he probably has some problem looking objectively into the mirror. A nihilistic mind-set doesn't need to follow from a conscious decision. It is relativism, taken one step further, like an atheist world view leads to cynicism.

In the following flow chart Dr Pat shows us how the strategy to rescue Socialism has worked out over the years. It makes powerful reading:


The canon fodder of the Unholy Alliance of Convenience are the traditional Leftist masses, the dupes. They can be found amongst other places, on the Feminist Bloggers Network and write touching stuff like: "Sometimes people say "relativism" means there "is no center" but they are gravely mistaken, "relativism" means there are infinitely many centers. Each of us is our own center, and to say there is none is beyond misleading." What did I tell you about relativism producing all these pompous, egocentric, little Masters of their own empty and hollow Universes?

Dr Pat also helps answer a few of the other minor queries that still remained to be solved: the obsession with the trivial and the rise of the irrational.

The fashionable admiration for the irrational, i.e. superstitions and quack-isms, tree-hugging, paganism, earth motherism and mantics of all sorts and expressions - from tea leaves to bird entrails - is visible in Pat's first chart as Anti-Realism in the grid Postmodern Metaphysics.

Voilà, all mysteries solved, but one: the answer to the obsession with the trivial, the insignificant and the irrelevant. If a total irritant in my personal opinion, it is at the same time also the most intriguing of all the forces and cross currents presently at work: it may be a sort of subconscious, if inadequate Romanticism, or a form of escapism, an antidote to the bizarre reality of today's world: jihadism, the threat of terrorist attacks and the brewing Global War. I'd really like to know what you think!

If the last puts you down a bit, I'll promiss to come back with better news in the next couple of days.

To be continued with more surpising connections between radical Islam and the Postmoderns.

Conned by The Left, again! (I)

The last few days on the postmodern front have been eventful in terms of affirmations, confirmations and fresh developments. Let's work ourselves a way through my notes and memos: nightly scribbles on scraps of paper, or neatly jotted onto pieces of old newspaper or on napkins, currently in evidence all over the place.

Regular readers may remember I have been commenting on a multiculti discussion on the site of the German salon of intellectual high culture and dropped the ball in midair in sheer disgust over so much intellectual sloppiness. While some people - like naive little me - have been labouring their socks off to logically disprove the tenets of postmodernism [1], all along they aren't remotely interested if their narrative contains ten, twenty, or no fallacies at all. We've been had, conned! This isn't an intellectual debate at all! This is good old Leftist Collectivist Ideology at work, that will realise its goals whatever the cost. The destination is the only thing that counts; it's irrelevant if the road to get there is one of error: the end justifies the means, remember? If the subject were more pleasant you could almost call it a feast of recognition.

When the Berlin Wall fell and Francis Fukuyama wrote his book "The end of history ..." not only did he forget to look east-wards, but also left-wards at what was left of the Left in the West. Meanwhile they have been plotting how to re-invent themselves and have now re-emerged in the guise that is currently taking shape: little by little the veil's being dropped.

They've entered into this Unholy Alliance of Convenience with radical Muslims, radical Enlighteners and radical environmentalists (terminology ring a bell?) and all the while have been in the process of reframing the old totalitarian ideology. The necessary scape-goat and common enemy has already been identified: Jews, Christians and the neo-cons. I got a first hint of their crypto-totalitarian tendencies, realising that their hatred of Ayaan Hirsi Ali is rooted in her individualism: she doesn't conform, and she goes against the collective. While Stuart Sim asserts us he envisions cognitive contamination [3] to take place and that he wishes, yes - desires - multiculturalism to include dissent within 'the systems of belief', he must realize as well as the next person, that this cannot be done while the Prime Directive [2] of non-interference is in force. And you cannot abandon that, otherwise it'll soon be over with the peaceful tribal coexistence.

But consistency is totally lost on Professor Sim: while happily ranting on with his meta-dogma, he mentions Lyotard as a prime example. He wanted to be a nice Left-leaning person but without the unexamined ideology; Sim himself wants to be a relativist but at the same time hold on to universal values! And I'd like to be Britney but without the paparazzi! If this is the best the intellectual high salons can do, I haven't got time for it: all pretence and the inflated egos of the peacock pen!

To be continued tomorrow with an analysis of the relationship of radical Islam with The Left, and their common objectives.

History Class: of agit-prop, revolution and terror!

I think we need a bit of a breather from all the pseudo-intellectual ranting. Only this morning I saw some fallen Christian write that "relativism is indisputable" - whereas we have seen - it hasn't got a leg to stand on. Which brings me to another one of post fin-de-siècle's mysteries: is it me or is irrationality on the rise, especially among classes that are supposed to be the strongholds of reason? These are interesting times, in so far that at this moment there is hardly anyone alive (I think), who has seen the last time in human history, that there was so much confusion about.

Which provides me with a convenient bridge to one of the most interesting books written in recent years. Published in 2005 I'm surprised it didn't get more attention before now; but then, it is reality based! I read it a year ago when I was preparing the ground in Athens for my impending emigration. Bought, in a draughty airport bookshop - a place mostly associated with the lighter digestible material - "The Orientalist" by Tom Reiss provides some valuable understandings and profound insights into a world that is now gone, but that is impacting us until this day.

The book has a few lessons too, if we are willing to internalize them. I am at present re-reading it and propose - whenever I hit a passage worth sharing - to jot down some notes in this blog. For those interested in another perspective on history, or a holiday from ethnocentricity, this is it. Multicultis: off your lazy bums and to the bookshop with you! (Or hit the Library button on your left hand side.)

It tells the story of the author of what can be termed, Azerbaijan's national novel: Ali and Nino, the tale of a Muslim boy and a Christian girl, set in the oil capital Baku. The author of this national treasure, Lev Nussimbaum, was born there in a railway carriage, in the midst of the failed revolution of 1905 as the son of Jewish parents: father an oil magnet, mother a revolutionary, would be suicide and an associate of the Georgian Koba Djukashvili, in later years known by his nom-de-guerre, Joseph Stalin.

The latter, having been thrown out of seminary (one can only guess why, or the reason for entering in the first place), operated in those years in Baku where - due to the vast oil wealth - there was a lot of expropriation to do. Reading his exploits, one is reminded of the early years of Saddam Hussein in Iraq: setting out as a thuggish enforcer of the imperial secret police, the Okhrana, he soon developed into a revolutionary in his own right: terrorist attacks, intimidation, extortion and kidnappings were the order of the day.

Russia was of course fertile breeding ground for the revolution, that had been in the making since 1881, when the liberal and progressive Czar Alexander II was killed in a terrorist attack by a group called The People's Will. But it took until 1917 to come to full fruition.

Feudalism like we knew it in Europe, with a hierarchy of aristocratic nobility from the king or emperor downwards, was non-existent in Russia. There was the Czar and there was serfdom, only abolished in 1861 (!) by said Alexander II, and nothing in between. To put this in perspective, when Parisians were shouting à la Lanterne!, in Russia Czarina Catharine the Great was granting basic rights to the nobility.

My grandfather used to say, that one's social class is betrayed by whom you look down at. He meant, that the queen doesn't look down on the cleaning lady (they are probably on first name terms), but the doorman does. Accordingly, while Russia's new middle-class was acting this out by turning serfs into slaves, another social mechanism kicked in: the well-educated children and grand-children of the new middle-class turned against it. They became the self-appointed advocates for the exploited and downtrodden, turning themselves into the engine of the revolution, as the downtrodden themselves were rather loath to up the barricades.

We have seen the same happening in our own time with Mohamed Atta c.s. on 9/11, and before them the Bader Meinhoff Group and the Rote Armee Faction. All combined to a fatal potion: a mentality by which the end justifies the means, the glorification of violence as the exclusive means towards the realization of The People's Will (no pain, no glory), the prescribed philosophy for the Russian engine of the revolution: nihilism, Paul Cliteur's accusation of Stuart Sim, that sent the latter into the chandeliers.

The Russian agitatist-terrorist groups bore names that makes Al Qa'ida look a rather unimaginative crowd: Death for Death, The League of the Red Fuse, The Terrorist Individuals, The Anarchist Blackmailers, etc. Starting out as self-styled people's advocates, their actions soon became violence for its own sake. The assassinated Czar Alexander II was succeeded by his son Alexander III, whose first act was the re-call the modern oukazes of his father, and afterwards did little else but clamping down on the revolutionaries.

It may be argued - as some now do - that clamping down probably made matters worse: the revolutionaries even preferred a tightly closed lid so that when a hole was breached, steam would be let off proper, thus fuelling the revolutionary zeal. But without the proper controls and repressive measures The Black Hand would have agitated twice as hard for the lack of it, and so as to compensate for more steam. There doesn't seem to be a 'right' way, to react to terrorism. Clamping down quick, still seems to be cautious advice.

But the environment for terrorists and agitators to foster in the first place, is a police-state that is characterised by oppression, injustice and exploitation; not one subjected to the rule of law, democratic principles and the occasional well-deserved critique. The conclusion that a democratic process in the Middle East is long overdue, seems to be not that far fetched.

Of Demons, Daftness and 1968 and All That!

Sometimes, on these winter Athenian nights when the cold winds blow in over the Carpathian mountain range, a terrible noise can be heard, sharply penetrating the broody dark of the night's sky, riding the waves of a million demons and piercingly echoing through the silence of The Lighthouse, sending the cat, fur on end, into the curtains: the witch-finder's shriek with the familiar re-occurrence of a word I thought staked, suitably buried and garlicked nearly half a century ago. And considering its hailing I suddenly realised hence the relativist and multiculti winds blow. The retrospective state of apoplexy caused by that awe inspiring word ...Authority... gives away the 1968 iconoclast identity.

What is it with the baby-boom generation and authority - the justification of power - that awakes the damnedest in them? It is work for the good doctor, I think - perhaps she has some slot on the couch available shortly?

"If there is no right and there is no wrong, you cannot blame anyone anymore than you can blame them for the colour of their hair", reads a memo in my notebook. "This is a convenient situation for some people", you might be inclined to think. Yes, it is called relativism and it is thought up and developed by a category of people that from experience has learnt a few useful ideological survival tricks: see that you get a gullible popular movement behind you that believes in make-ability, and if what you propagate turns ugly, see you have an exit strategy to pass up the blame.

What The Unholy Alliance of convenience, of assertive Muslims, habitual Western iconoclasts and their Leftist dupes, in fact is doing, is furthering their misguided ideals of salvation for all, and when things go wrong or they are disproved by adverse facts on the ground, with a pointer to relativism say 'well, don't look at us'.

Nice Left-leaning people like the Euston Manifesto signatories and Stuart Sim aren't really relativists, and neither are the other self-confessed adherents to universal values, freedom of speech and expression and other such eternal truths. Because you cannot be both: relativism states that there is no truth, eternal, universal or otherwise. If that's leading cold incisive logic too far, just ignore, rename or spin it - as Professor Sim prefers to do. You end up with something like, the sun but without all that heat. It sounds nice but it doesn't exist.

At present they subscribe to relativism and multiculturalism simply because it offers the latest opportunity to wreck the enterprise called Western civilization. At a given point - some, a lot later than others - they got disenchanted with communism and its derivatives. That particular fruit of the Enlightenment at first looked like the most promisingly road to destruction. After its glory-less demise - leaving behind millions of victims, wrecked economies and pointlessly destroyed lives just to prove the people's authority - for a while they sat brooding, oozing cynical nihilism, unlike Nazi adherents, ducking responsibility for the misery they caused or advocated.

But never caring all that much for logic and consistency anyway, they adopted relativism and multiculturalism in a last ditch effort not to go into history as the generation of total losers. One last shot at leaving a permanent mark before being pensioned off, to wait out the pointless existence on planet Earth until - in full and final settlement - the physical atoms start disintegrating and the soul with Asmodean shriek commits itself to the realm of all pretenders to total power.

They didn't succeed in the past and I pray Our Good God that they won't succeed with the present project either, but at what price this time?

Intellectual flatulence!

In last week's two part post A Failed State on a World-Wide Scale we saw how Paul Cliteur in Falling Prey to Relativism refuted Stuart Sim's radical multiculturalist posit, that all that isn't relativist, is in fact fundamentalism. Cliteur said: "Multiculturalists also reject the universality of Enlightenment ideas of democracy, human rights, and the rule of law, viewing them instead as isolated preoccupations of no universal appeal and ... just one more kind of fundamentalism that has to be rejected." One wonders why all the Leftist and Liberal adherents to the notion seem to be unaware of that!

Cliteur also accused Sim of nihilism, which seems to have touched a raw nerve, an allegation that Sim is at present endeavouring to refute in the article Don't Blame the Post-Moderns - something that I personally do incessantly as I blame them for almost every current ill in the world. We will see how far he gets.

First a short reminder of Cliteur's accusation addressed to Sim c.s., Timothy Garton Ash and Ian Buruma.

- "What Sim wants to encourage is a kind of radical skepticism toward all ideas of authority ('the more scepticism the better')".

- "The reasonings of postmodern relativists have preposterous consequences, but these consequences logically flow from the postmodern outlook".

- Cliteur expressed his "worry about this relativistic - or rather, nihilistic - position, in that it makes Western societies easy prey for the ideology of radical Islamism".

- "Demonizing every criticism on religious mentalities as "polarizing" and "provocation" denies even the right to defend democratic institutions. That would be a suicidal position", says Cliteur. I call it immoral and authorophobic.

The French writer Pascal Bruckner in a refute Enlightenment: fundamentalism or racism of the anti-racists? takes it yet one step further, calling the multicultural efforts, propagation of "legal Apartheid" and a display of "a neo-colonial attitude towards 'the natives'", leaving them to celebrate their 'otherness' in their own ethnic and religious enclaves and reservations.

The author exposes the symptoms of the relativist error, the inherent paradoxymora [2] that it "accords the same treatment to all communities, but not to the people who form them, denying them the freedom to liberate themselves from their own traditions."

At that point it dawned on me that multiculturalism isn't concerned with individual rights. Quite on the contrary! Its implicit premise is the submission of the individual to the group; the latter is declared sacrosanct and untouchable. It has no place for dissidents like Ayaan Hirsi Ali, an icon of individualism. "Multi-culturalism's crypto-totalitarian and dictatorial character is shining through here", I stated in that post. It's a profound accusation that I propose to work out further in a dedicated article.

I do not propose to repeat each polemist's posits verbatim as anyone can read the articles for themselves. Rather I add my own comments and draw conclusions as per above. No doubt Paul Cliteur will in turn refute Sim's allegations. Let's at present move on to Sim's refute.

At which point ... about three hours later ... in a fit of sheer hysterical madness I tore up the whole thing! In all honesty, I find it deeply depressing and not a little disturbing that intellectuals - as Professor Sim - inhabit places of higher learning and is set loose on our children and politicians. What he's lacking in academic attitude and logic, he makes up for in unresolved youthful issues towards religion and God. He seems to be stuck in a 1968 time warp of anti-authoritarianism out of which there seems no escape; hence perhaps his almost skatalogically immature obsession with the transcendental - it borders on paranoia.

Every other sentence is refutable and wide open to attack. Frankly, I simply do not have so much time and I doubt my readers have either. I hope Paul Cliteur will make mince-meat of this shoddy piece of sophistry that uncovers once more relativism and multiculturalism for the nonsense and time-waster that it is.

Professor Sim launches completely off the rails and into thin space rather early in the piece, stating: "Multiculturalism has its drawbacks and paradoxes, but it is still worth defending if the alternative is enforced cultural homogeneity". God forbid! The last half of that statement is self-explanatory in its lack of an example on the real ground (please, not again Al Andaluz!). As to the former half I can only lament that if a philosopher finds himself in the presence of a paradox and isn't alerted to the fact that something might be seriously flawed in his logic, then frankly - I don't wanna know ... it is deeply depressing.

I'm giving up on the polemics of the Kindergarten variety on the relativist treasure trove, the German government sponsored "international debating site" that seeks to counter the "American dominance" of their own language. Intellectual flatulence indeed!

Of Hypocrisy, burqas, Blair and bummers.

While yesterday I had a bit of a breather thanks to Danny Carlton's new CrossPosted initiative, things are now piling up quite heavily and the back-log is becoming apparent all over the house. The relativist treasure trove Signandsight has posted a reply from Professor Stuart Sim (if it isn't relativst, it's fundamentalist!) to Paul Cliteur's Falling Prey to Relativism. (See posts A Failed State on a World-wide Scale and Leviathan.) If that's not enough multiculturalism, our Muslim brothers are also at it, again. Let's take one at a time:

The new Dutch government has officially been installed, and truth be told, it doesn't look good. While I have no intention of getting into matters of taxation and just who is going to pay up - any post 1945 government of whatever colour or description has been equally expert at this form of daylight robbery - it is at once apparent that the Labour Party has returned to power, judging by appointments that basically come down to, on the one hand employing the fox to run the hen-house and on the other, letting the flea circus run itself. While the previous message to immigrants was, assimilate or do - whatever it is you are doing - elsewhere, the new tenure has unearthed the old multiculturalist adagium, by all means celebrate your own culture in your own ghetto. Back to square one. Long live the burqa! Go ahead, draw a bag over your head and call it personal choice and respect for women! Multiculture wins, society looses.

Meanwhile in Iraq it's Hypocrisy Revealed: "Sunni insurgent groups including al-Qaida in Iraq have called for revenge attacks after a second rape allegation against the Shiite-dominated security forces." While it is too sad of words that a chance of civilised government is being squandered in this way, it must be stated that under the old regime nobody ever talked about it, but this was regretfully the norm. And that was just rape in the name of law enforcement. Saddam's boys had made it a habit to commit - how did Ann Coulter describe it? - recreational serial rape! Now the shoe is on the other foot, but at least at present Sunnis are in a position to cry foul!

In the U.S. justice has its course - at least, that is what we must assume (if it doesn't mirror the case of Eric O. in the Netherlands). A soldier of the U.S. army, who has been accused of being part of a group, which raped and murdered an Iraqi girl and killed members of her family, has been given a sentence of 100 years in a military prison.

The Daily Telegraph has Tony Blair on the couch: in an article "The Unspoken Truth Behind Blair Interview" it alleges the U.K. Prime Minister is in denial in his Today interview, insisting that the withdrawal of British troops from Iraq was not an admission of failure but a sign that its fledgling democracy was growing stronger. While this may be the obvious conclusion of the neutral observer, to the anti-war activist it is the umpteenth sign of lies, more lies, giving raise to rage, and more rage! Although my time is scarce and bathroom chores await, I don't mind throwing caution to the wind and fisk this article to shreds for a while. Let's see:

Q: What he did not say: It's not the British but the US forces who are patrolling Baghdad who are much more unpopular.
A. Yes, perhaps ... but what has that got to do with 80-90 percent of the violence being caused by terrorism? Even if it were penguins it wouldn't make a difference. The terrorists don't throw bombs at the troops because of their unpopularity, but because they cannot let go of total power and because their interests are best served under chaotic and hopeless conditions. (Unpopular indeed, as if it were Top of the Pops which is no longer attainable!)

Q: What he did not say: The militias carrying out the killings could not have existed under Saddam.
A. Indeed. In the time of Saddam it was Saddam doing the killing. It has been calculated that the rate of deaths per 24 hours stood at 240, a figure - in spite of all the terrorism and revenge killings going on - not matched till this day.

Q: What he did not say: Estimates of Iraqi casualties range from 150,000 to 650,000 with more than two million people fleeing the country.
A. Yes, my aunt may have 1 million in the bank, but it may actually be six! It so happens that it is not the allied troops that torture people to death each God-given night, dumping their bodies in the streets. Neither do they plant IEDs, nor as a rule do they commit kidnappings and hostage takings. Moreover, as per above.

Q: What he did not say: It took far too long to replace them (the Ba'athist Iraqi police force and army).
Yes, it takes a bit of time to replace the entire police and army of a country going 27 million inhabitants. The quicker you do it, the less you're able to do the proper screening so as to avoid infiltration by general bad hats and re-hire former rapists (see above rape allegation), etcetera.

Q: What he did not say: An opinion poll cited by senior Democrat and Republicans in Washington showed 61 per cent of Iraqis favoured armed attacks on coalition forces.
A: While it is quite an achievement to conduct an opinion poll under the circumstances, armed attacks are not carried out by the respondents, but by different lots. These, we must assume, weren't voluntarily participating in the poll.

Q: What he could not say: It would be political disaster to even countenance it (after withdrawing troops, having to redeploy because of adverse circumstances).
A: No, sunny side up.

Q: What he did not say: His own focus groups show that most voters think suicide bombers have come to Britain because of Iraq.
A: This is a peculiar way of reframing "extremists previously used Kosovo, Palestine and Kashmir as justification for terrorism". And, as we know, opinion shouldn't be confused with fact. Roger Bacon, English philosopher (1214-1292) identified several obstacles to truth, among them uninstructed popular opinion and long-standing but erroneous custom.

Q: What he did not say: How does this (interventions in removing dictatorships from Kosovo, Sierra Leone, Afghanistan and Iraq) square with my prediction after one month as Prime Minister: "Mine is the first generation able to contemplate the possibility that we may live without going to war or sending our children to war."
A: It doesn't. Ah, live can be a bummer, can't it?

The rest is too much innuendo and drawing on sentiment, to be worthy of my time. Time for the weekly cat litter.

Introducing CrossPosted.net!

I noticed I hadn't been getting any updates from Stop the ACLU, then realized that I had accidentally blocked the email address I'd given them. I always had a problem having to reformat the entry they provided. What they emailed didn't have paragraph tags, and what was on their site had other tags I didn't want.

Lately I've been working with article directories, setting some up http://resourceshop.net/, http://hyux.com/, http://dogs-cats-pets.net/, http://blogepublishing.com/, http://homeschoolarticles.net/ and also submitting some of my posts to various directories. In the process I've looked through several different article directory scripts.

Then the two came together! Bloggers cross post entries all the time. Why not have a place where bloggers can go to look at posts other bloggers think are worth cross posting? The current scripts available all had problems, but they were fixable. I quickly got the domains name http://beta.blogger.com/, set up an account on my server, and within 5 minutes of coming up with the idea, the site was live. Last night I tweaked the script I'd chosen and have the site fully functional. I'll be working on the overall design over the next couple of weeks, but for now it's ready to be used.

This is also a great tool for those who run BlogBursts. It will allow you to more easily provide the posts to be used in the BlogBurst, as well as provide a more useable and uniform HTML code. As the site grows, it will also be a way for other bloggers to find out about your BlogBurst and join.

Author: Danny Carlton. Cross posted from JackLewis.net.
Danny Carlton has blogged at JackLewis.net for several years now.