Taking down the thought police is just the warm up.
Obama Girl – at the front of the line. Right?
Glavin on on Afghanistan.
Add yours in the comments.
Taking down the thought police is just the warm up.
Obama Girl – at the front of the line. Right?
Glavin on on Afghanistan.
Add yours in the comments.
Americans get their first dose of Suzuki:
http://hotair.com/archives/2008/02/07/canadian-scientist-politicians-skeptical-of-global-warming-belong-in-prison/
So what will Craig say when PMSH gets a majority.
Isn’t his comment very biased for a reporter.
It will be fun to see Craig unemployed, or retiring for family reasons.
It will be fun to see Dion break Kim’s record for number of mps elected.
It will be fun to see May defeated.
It will be fun to quit paying Paul Martin an mps salary for nothing.
It will be great fun listening to dion and PMSH debate, in english. No spinners allowed to tell us what he meant to say.
Craig is simply pining for his Liberal Senate appointment, having performed all his media manipulations.
CTV should fire the old useless goat. In the age of the internet, his opinions don’t matter.
He won’t even fade away. He’ll immediately evaporate.
Surely even old Liberal Lover Craig Oliver didn’t say it would be fun to put the Conservatives specifically out of misery. I think he meant this Parliament in general. The Conservatives are not in misery, it’s the Liberals and Dippers who fall into that category, the Bloc are as pathetic as ever.
The Liberals are scared s**tless of an election. Their leader and his deputy, the Puffin Man, are on different wavelengths for starters.
We have only one clear choice to run this Country
and that is Harper. There’s no other person even close to capable.
MND
No consideration or discussion of mass movements – religions – politics – or those that topple left – is complete without Hoffer’s insight.
Warning: “The True Believer” is a small book – but it is a BIG read. Or perhaps one could say it warrants many re-reads.
Dave – I think that Islam in the ME will actually change faster than Islam in the West. That’s because Islam in the ME, as an ideology, is confronted with reality. The reality of economics and a population within that national economy. You can’t stay in a tribal mode within an industrial economy. You must move into a civic mode.
The tribal mode operates via family and kin networks. The civic mode operates via collaborative non-kin work networks. An industrial economy requires the civic mode, also known as a ‘middle class’. I think the hard economic realities of the ME will move it into that civic mode.
Bush’s structural change of Iraq was exactly right; and the ME will change. What you see now in the ME, is Muslim vs Muslim, or, fundamentalists trying to prevent a middle class from emerging. They’ll work it out.
The danger is in the sophistry of the leftist West with their insistence on multiculturalism.
That enables Islam as an ideology, a detached, isolate ideology to exist…decontextualized from the realities of the economy, from interaction with other peoples…An ideology that is isolated from daily reality moves into a Purist form. That’s dangerous. That’s what Hirsi Ali and others are experiencing and correctly rejecting. But, this isolationism enables and promotes fanaticism.
me no dhimmi – I think that understanding an ideology’s historic emergence gives one some understanding of its ‘fault lines’. Though you are quite right. Knowing how Islam emerged won’t necessarily help one to deal with it now.
But, realizing that it emerged as a result of an economic tension in the ME, enables one to realize that Islam has very little to say about ‘religion’, ie, the metaphysical, and most of what it says is copied from the Judaic and Christian ideology.
Islam is primarily an economic, social and political system – and the system is tribal. Once you realize that the Islamic system is about a tribal mode of life, you can understand, I think, how to deal with it and realize that the ME areas must be assisted to move into a civic mode.
I think you’ll enjoy Popper; his argument is in favour of a civic mode (the open society) versus a tribal mode (the closed society).
I think that defeating Islamic fascism, which is not the same as the original Islam, and not the same as the ‘everyday follower of Islam’, is vital. There are two major tactics. The first, the US has, in large part, accomplished. That was to move it back into the ME.
It was being forced out into the West by the ME tribal dictators who were trying to get rid of people angry against their dictatorship by diverting them to be ‘anti-American’. The real problem is those tribal dictators!
Islamic fascism developed as an attempt to deconstruct tribalism – which is setting up corrupt oil-rich tribal elites — and move the ME into a centralist theological politico-religious structure (aka the Taliban). The current oil-rich tribal dictators in the ME wanted to retain THEIR tribe-in-power.
But -Neither a hierarchical tribal system nor a centralized theological structure will work. It has to be a civic mode. So, the US pushed the fight between these two systems back into the ME. That’s where it should be, and that’s what the current fighting is about in the ME. It’s internal. But it can’t be either tribalism or a theological autocracy. It has to be a civic mode, because the economy is industrial. No choice.
The other tactic is to reject the dangerous ‘haven’ of the West’s multiculturalism. This haven, which moves Islam in the West from being a contextualized ideology to a Purist Ideology, is extremely dangerous. The West has to confront multiculturalism and reject any introduction of Sharia law, reject any attempts to stop criticism of Islam, and so on.
The multicultural isolation of Islam, removing it from the daily life realities of the local economy, the local politics, and other-people is where ‘Textual Jihad’ can exist; it’s textual only because it, as an ideology, is completely decontextualized from everyday reality.
It’s a pure, fundamentalist ideology – you can’t argue with it, you can’t show that it can/cannot work, because it’s pure thought. Pure ideology. Therefore, you can’t argue with a Text. There’s no debate. In that sense, it’s very dangerous – as Aristotle said again and again. And you’ll read the same in Popper.
We are nowhere near dealing constructively with this danger. We are starting; the West is, in Europe, rejecting Sharia, rejecting special rights and insisting on the common rule of law. It’s not enough, but it has to continue and more strongly. But, we have to work with Muslims on this – moderate ones – to reject Sharia, reject shutting down free speech, etc.
(I don’t think Irwin Daisy would ever be receptive to my analysis; he doesn’t understand economic and political structures).
Heh.
couldn’t happen to a nicer guy!
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20080207.wexxon0207/BNStory/energy/home
me no dhimmi – you say you received vol. 2 of the Popper book? I know which edition you received! I once ordered that title for my students in one of my classes and the bookstore only ordered the second volume. I was stunned; it’s one book, regardless of some versions being put into two volumes.
At any rate, the first volume, on Plato, is really quite important. See his brief outline in the introduction and his first chapter on ‘historicism’. Vol 2- ch 23, 24, 25 are good summaries.
No, I haven’t read Hoffer. Have you read Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs and Steel? He has an ecological focus.
ET
Methinks thou are optimistic too far. But perhaps being a kaffir in Muslim lands on too many occasions and experiencing subtle and overt discrimination based on the ‘beliefs’ of True Believers has left me jaded. Moderation is unlikely for to be ‘moderate’ is to reject the ‘beliefs’.
Again, I recommend Hoffer’s observations – perhaps MND will loan you his copy – but that too is unlikely for it is a precious little book.
ET
I second your recommendation of Jared Diamond’s “Guns, Germs and Steel”. No one should be allowed to graduate high school without reading – and understanding it.
However, Diamond’s “Collapse” misses Reality by such a wide margin it brings his earlier work into question.
Jet – Agree with you about Collapse. Unreal that the two books could be from the same author.
JET: Hoffer, The True Believer. You got that right. I was so excited reading it this morning that I sorta promised to loan it to a friend unfinished while I continued with my other reads. But I have since demurred.
Absolutely clear this will be a multiple read.
ET/JET (heh): Thanks for the Jared Diamond recommendation. I’ll put it on my list.
“(I don’t think Irwin Daisy would ever be receptive to my analysis; he doesn’t understand economic and political structures).”
ET,
Again you make assertions on no evidence whatsoever. How do you know what I understand? How do you know what I do for a living?
I don’t agree with you on a fundamental issue – your irrational rejection of the texts, including the actions and sayings of Mohammad as the basis of the ideololgy and the application of such to history right up to the present time.
In doing so you also reject what Muslims say and believe.
You can assert whatever theory you like and you can project whatever mystical outcome based on your theory. The fact of the matter is you are not dealing with reality, if you reject the ideology. Just as disturbing is that your theory is largely based on historical revisionism. On top of it all, you arrogantly refuse to supply evidence to support your theory and your view of history,
irwin daisy:
Frankly, I too was shocked by that assertion based on my readings of your excellent posts.
I believe ET’s argument, while perhaps containing some merit vis a vis ecology/economy and the emergence of Islam, is really very confused.
Clearly, the fact that Caliphate Islamists use and are highly motivated by the texts is beyond debate.
One other thing: I believe ET is a bit confused on the “great man” thing. While it’s true that the “great man” doesn’t change history all by himself, i.e., the populace is ripe and primed for the change, his role is still key as he represents a highly concentrated distillation of the zeitgiest and leads the people to where they are already prepared to go. So he is instrumental!
Another afterthought: Evidently, Western appeasers just did not read Mein Kampf. They took his jew-hatred as just so much bluster, and didn’t bother reading “holy text”. But it was there, all spelled out in black and black. You only needed to have read it — and taken him seriously.
This is essentially Coughlin’s point. We ignore the texts and what the jihadists themselves say at our own peril. Walid Phares opines that it was the role of the academy to keep us out of the know about Caliphate Islam, and hence the question after 9/11: “Why do they hate us”. I suspect that ET is a unwitting party to this dangerous obfuscation.
Rational reason is the poison which Islam is not want to take.
Such is the cutting of the lines.
ET is right for all the wrong reasons.