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Home Front: Culture Wars

Jonah Goldberg: "The White Man is the Jew of Liberal Fascism"

2016-09-27

h/t Instapundit
Few lines from my book have generated more rage and ridicule than this one. It’s all over the lefty blogosphere.

...But since I have room here to explain, I will.
One of the more under-appreciated motives of the Nazi extermination campaign against the Jews was how it was driven by paranoia. Nazi anti-Semitism wasn’t merely bigoted, it was conspiratorial. The Nazis and affiliated intellectuals firmly believed that the Jew was behind the scenes, pulling strings, manipulating events, rigging the system -- even the language -- in profound and pernicious ways. Carl Schmitt -- quite popular on the left today -- was tasked with the job of purging the Jewish spirit from the law. Other similar projects were launched across the political, economic and intellectual landscape.

...Politically, the Nazis insisted that "the Jews" had attacked Germany first. Every bad circumstance or inconvenient fact could be laid at the feet of the Jews. Hitler even proclaimed that the conscience itself was a Jewish invention designed to keep the oppressed Aryans and others down.While still a Nazi collaborator, Paul de Man-- the revered postmodern theorist who eventually taught at Yale and Cornell--wrote of the Jews, "Their cerebralness, their capacity to assimilate doctrines while maintaining a cold detachment from them," is one of "the specific characteristics of the Jewish mind." I could go on, but you probably get it.

...Now look at today’s culture. In academia you have the proliferation of "Whiteness Studies," simply the most absurd discipline dedicated to purging the "white mind" from society.
Most run by white professors
...These attitudes ultimately stem from the view that the white man, like the Jew, represents every facet of what is wrong and oppressive to humanity. As Susan Sontag proclaimed in 1967, "The white race is the cancer of human history."
Could explain why these baboons like Muzzies so much?

Link

Home Front: Culture Wars

Scenes From the Exhibitionists

2007-01-12

BY KAY S. HYMOWITZ

Some of my best friends are women--heck, I am a woman--
I don't know Kay, but I suspect we'd get along well. I happen to think women in general - despite the obvious exceptions - are delightful creatures.
but I've come to the conclusion that we've seen too much of the fairer sex. For me, the final straw came last month when Britney Spears jauntily revealed her waxed nether-regions to waiting photographers as she exited her limo.
Britney has a pretty smile, and a typically ugly fairly fresh caesarian scar. I'll admit I looked, even though I shouldn't have...
Britney's stunt made her the Internet smash of the season. But in providing America's workers with this cubicle distraction, Britney was doing a lot more than making her own privates public.
I'm not certain what it did for her career. She was wildly successful before she took up with no-talent dancing boys and moved into a Beverly Hills trailer house to pop out a couple babies. All she needed to do to reclaim her wild success was to ditch the no-talent dancing boy and move out of the trailer house. She's a pretty enough young woman, especially when she keeps her mouth shut.
In fact, Britney was following to its logical end what has become the first rule of contemporary American girlhood: to show that you are liberated, take it off.
Kind of a blow to "equal rights," isn't it? If I flashed my gennies getting out of a car I'd be arrested for indecent exposure. I'll admit that hers are prettier than mine, however, even with the scar.
Liberty means responsibility . . . to disrobe. Paris Hilton, Britney's BFF (Best Friend Forever), taped her sexual escapades with an ex-boyfriend, though even she was tactful enough to pretend that she hadn't meant for the video to go public.
Likely she didn't. If we'da had the technology way back when that we do today, I'd have probably taped several of what are today mere fond memories. She was probably going to save a collection of them to watch when she's old enough for Social Security.
Courtney Love, Lindsay Lohan and Tara Reid have also staged their own wardrobe malfunctions. But flashing is hardly limited to celebrities. The girls-next-door who migrate to Florida during spring break happily lift their blouses and snap their thongs for the producers of "Girls Gone Wild," who sell their DVDs to an eager public.
I think I may have remarked on an occasion or two that 50 percent of everyone is below average and 80 percent of everyone is middlin'. The lusty peasant wenches of a couple hundred years ago are the lusty spring break babes of today. The difference is that today we don't enforce rectitude. It's the difference between our society and Islamic society, where the girlies in question could be flogged for flashing their honkers, stoned to death for having sex on the beach. Probably we've gone as much too far in one direction as Islam goes in the other.
Nor is it just young female flashers who are driven to expose themselves to the masses. Older women, whether because of lingering traces of reticence or doubts about the camera-readiness of their intimate anatomy, use the written word to bare all. There are legions of women bloggers who write about last night's bed tricks, their underwear preferences and their menstrual cycles (yes, Virginia, there is a tamponblog.com).
The difference is that we used to hide porn away, either hypocritically or politely - pick one, they're both free - pretending it didn't exist.
More sophisticated exhibitionists turn to tasteful erotic memoirs. In "A Round Heeled Woman," Jane Juksa gives us a detailed description of her varied sexual adventures after, at age 66, she advertised for sex in the personals of the New York Review of Books.
Jane being 66, I probably don't have quite as much interest as I'd have had if she'd been 30, or even 40.
In "Surrender," the ex-Balanchine dancer Toni Bentley tells of the spiritual transcendence she experienced during the 298 times she had anal sex with a former lover--making this the first transcendent sex ever to involve a calculator.
Butts - they're not just for pooping anymore. Nor, surprisingly enough to some, have they ever been. On the other hand, it's only in our "liberated" age that we discuss such things in excruciating detail. And while indulging in the sins of my youth, it never occurred to me to actually keep count of the number of times I did this or that.
Now, this is the point at which the enlightened always begin grumbling: What's wrong with women showing that they are "sexual beings"?
Women are sexual beings whether they go out of their way to show it or not. Islamists obsess on that fact. But if women were only sexual beings, if there was nothing else there, then the Islamists would be right, wouldn't they? We men would never be able to concentrate on anything because the temptresses would be swarming all over us, distracting us from manly things like science and technology and intellectual pursuits by making us continually concentrate on bosoms and thighs and buttocks and the exchange of bodily fluids.
In this vein, the show-or-tell-all is an act of bravery, demonstrating a woman's determination to throw off society's taboos against full expression of her sexuality. "Female exhibitionism is . . . an act of female power," Richard Goldstein of the Village Voice has written. "We should redeem the slut in ourselves and rejoice in being bad girls," Naomi Wolf once urged (but has since modified now that she has an adolescent daughter).
Amazing, how what feels good to you might not be good for your offspring.
It follows that reservations about self-exposure are a sign of anti-sex, anti-woman prudery. They may just be the first step in a long-planned, mandated return to the missionary position, female frigidity and meatloaf dinners, cooked and served by apron-clad wives.
This being a family publication, I'm not going to point out that the missionary position does in fact have its virtues and that meatloaf dinners and female frigidity don't have to be mutually inclusive, assuming neither party overdoes it on the meatloaf. (Having one or both parties come down with the vapors when nekkid can induce frigidity in either sex, especially when bumping bloated bellies in the missionary position.)
But this Puritans-are-coming! stance, validating, as it does, someone as cracked as Paris Hilton, finally implodes.
I'm not sure it does, since society's always had room for both the lady and the doxy. I often fear we're seeing the triumph of the doxy, but that's because the doxies go out of their way to draw more attention to themselves. And the doxies have always outnumbered the genuine ladies.
The problem with a Britney or a Bentley is not that they are floozies.
The tradition of floozies is a long one, if not particularly honorable...
It is rather that they are, paradoxical as it might seem, naive. They underestimate the magnetic force field created by intimate sexual information and violate the logic of privacy that should be all the more compelling in a media-driven age. People in the public eye always risk becoming objectified; they are watched by hordes of strangers who have only fragmentary information about them. When that information includes details that only their Brazilian waxers should know for sure, it's inevitable that, humans being the perverse creatures that they are, all other facts of identity will fall away. Instead of becoming freer, the exhibitionist becomes an object defined primarily by a narrow sexual datum.
Kay kinda loses me here, though maybe I'm just missing her point. Britney, Paris, and all the Trixies and Molls and even the Phrynes of this world have always defined themselves primarily by a narrow sexual datum. Because 50 percent of everybody is below average, that would imply that maybe a majority of that 50 percent of women are in fact limited to what we could impolitely call "breeding stock." From the bacterium level on up, the urge to reproduce is the way the species keeps on speciating. Cows eat grass and they produce milk and veal. That's all they do. The advantage of humanity over the bovine is that we can fit a few other activities into our busy schedule - but we're actually not required to do so.
The writer Daphne Merkin offers the perfect cautionary tale about the dangers of giving the public Too Much Information. In 1996 Merkin published an essay in The New Yorker describing the erotic pleasure she found in spanking. Her sensational article hardly stalled her career; if anything it increased her name recognition.
Daphne Merkin? She's named after a pubic wig? I thought I recognized the name...
Understandably Ms. Merkin doesn't regret her essay, which she continues to believe to be "both intellectually and emotionally daring." But she kids herself when she says "I'm known more for the rigor of my thinking . . . than I am for revelations about my erotic preferences." Her article is still the major fact of her public identity; she will forever and always be Daphne Likes-to-Be-Spanked Merkin. This is not because the shocked public wants Ms. Merkin to cover herself up. It is because Ms. Merkin has invited us to know her by information that has far more power than her insights into Virginia Woolf.
We got news for youse, Daphne: People who've heard of you think of you with red heinie cheeks first and foremost. Then they think of pubic wigs. Then they might give a passing thought to your intellectual rigor.
It was doubtless for this reason that Susan Sontag hesitated to write about her romantic relationship with the photographer Annie Leibovitz.
Actually, the thought of the late Susie Creamcheese nekkid is kinda counter-sexual to me...
Some people believe that it is lingering misogyny rather than naive exhibitionism that leads the public to define women by their sexual anatomy and proclivities. Perhaps there is something to that. But the exhibitionism surely doesn't help. It seems that men, despite their reputation as braggarts, actually don't find self-exposure all that appealing. Where are the male counterparts to Britney Spears and "Girls Gone Wild"?
Kay goes on for a little while longer, but she brushes by the what should be the central point, despite having led into it with the story of Pink-cheeked Daphne.

There are 24 hours in the day, each and every day. The sex act takes anywhere from five to twenty minutes when performed routinely. If you really buckle down, you can stretch it to an hour or so, not counting the time you spend sleeping like a rock when you're done. That leaves the question: What do you do with the remaining 23 hours in the day? If you're a cow, you spend the time eating grass. If you're human breeding stock, I suppose you can spend the time shopping for erotic outfits, having your nipples pierced, and getting your pubes waxed.

If you've somehow crawled out of the lower 50th percentile of the population, or even into the higher end of it, you actually find yourself with non-sexual things to do. Maslow smiles upon you and reproduction ceases to be the be-all and end-all of your life. You don't have to invent agriculture, since it's already been done and we now have grocery stores. Probably you've got someplace to live, if only a trailer house in Beverly Hills, so you don't have to worry about that. The elusive concept of self-actualization begins to beckon. You may decide to invent things, to write poetry, to gaze longingly upon the stars, or even to go bowling.

Link

Fifth Column

Only Racists Hate Peace Loving Muslims

2006-06-20

If there is such a thing as definitive Moon-battery, the following Oxford spew gets the big Moon-Howler Award

Monthly Review
15/06/06

The Muslim Presence in the Racist Mind
by Arshin Adib-Moghaddam
"Arse" for short
In one of her last essays published in the United Kingdom, the late Susan Sontag compared the pictures of tortured Iraqi inmates at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq with the photographs "of black victims of lynching taken between the 1880s and 1930s, which show smalltown Americans, no doubt most of them church-going, respectable citizens, grinning, beneath the naked mutilated body of a black man or woman hanging behind them from a tree." Sontag was amongst the few voices who opposed the collective transmutation of the transitory mood of anger after 11 September into hatred channeled primarily towards the Islamic worlds. She sensed the dangers of mobilising collective passions for political ends and the dichotomisation of the world into good and evil. It was that period, one remembers, that produced Anne Coulter's demand that "[w]e should invade [Muslim] countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity" and suggestion that, since "[t]here's nothing like horrendous physical pain to quell angry fanatics," "a couple of well-aimed nuclear weapons" can transform "Islamic fanatics" into "gentle little lambs." Coulter was not the only one infusing public discourse with tightly packaged hate messages: Fred Ikle, for instance, alluded to a nuclear war that "might end up displacing Mecca and Medina with two large radioactive craters"; John Cooksey suggested that any airline passenger wearing a "diaper on his head" should be "pulled over"; and Jerry Falwell asserted on 60 Minutes that "Muhammad was a terrorist" and that he was "a violent man, a man of war," a statement for which he later apologised. It was that period, in short, which made the Muslim Vogelfrei culturally and, to a certain extent, legally as well.
Re. "collective transmutation of the transitory mood of anger": gotta watch the "transmuter" denial.
One would have expected many analysts and critics to have understood that hostility to the Islamic worlds stems from the same source that had nourished anti-Semitic ideas; that racism is a grammar with interchangeable referents (Jews, African-Americans, Latinos, the Japanese after Pearl Harbor, the Vietnamese, Arabs, etc.) and interchangeable signifiers (kike, nigger, caffer, greaser, Jap, gook, hadji, etc.). Instead, alas, indiscriminate violence is normalised: in Kabul and Kunduz, Baghdad and Falluja, by organised armies; in Haditha and Abu Ghraib by sadistic individuals; and in New York, Bali, Madrid, and London by nihilistic terrorists. "War you wanted, war you want?" Fallaci writes. "Good. As far as I am concerned, war it is and war it will be. Until the last breath."
Yeah, buy a gun
As a result of this massive upsurge of anti-Islamic sentiments, Muslims are simply not judged as individuals anymore. Their very presence calls for management strategies -- Islam in itself has been turned into a police matter. In other words, the state and its apologists put Islam under permanent surveillance, and we are placed in a state of perpetual alert, because of its alleged potencies to disrupt our everyday life. This obsession with everything Islamic, in turn, has also created a perverse desire for it -- the desire to control it, to liberate it, and, finally, to conquer it as the ultimate imperial prize. Why is this simplistic notion of the Muslim presence amongst us, abstracting as it does from the intrinsic plurality of Islam, so pervasive? In a networked society such as ours, where the "other" can be downloaded with a mouse-click, what explains the re-emergence of latent racism? How can we not differentiate between such disparate objects of analysis as the very real threat of a transnational terrorist sect, the war in Iraq, the war in Afghanistan, and the Muslim next door? Why this tendency to subsume everything under one mnemonic?
Muslims are unicultist - I caught the jargon contagion - in Dar-Islam, and pluralist in Dar-Harb. Like I wrote: buy a gun.

Link

Terror Networks & Islam

Terrorism: A Creation of Culture

2005-07-19

Sayyed Wild Abah
In the aftermath of the terrorist bombings in London, the usual analysis on the roots of extremism and terrorism, focusing on the socio-economic causes of violence, was repeated across the city.

It's a mantra: "O-o-o-o-om mane padme root causes cycle of despotism globalization violence maginalization injustice poverty oppression hu-u-u-u-um..."

Terror, according to this framework, is best understood as a reflection of a deep crisis in society, caused by poverty, a lack of opportunity and institutional support, in addition to social restrictions.

That's what I just said... errr... chanted.

A number of commentators ascribed to this line of thoughts so as not to provoke Muslims and associate terrorism with Islam.

Cert'nly not! The Lutherans do the same thing. You just don't hear about it very often...

Others agreed in the spirit of the moment.

"Yup. Yup. We agree."

Undoubtedly, this framework is popular with socio-political analysts and is based on a number of strong arguments. No one can deny that poverty, marginalization, despotism, and injustice are factors that contribute to the spread of extremism.

Just chanting it makes it so. Do it enough times and you can levitate or put nails through your butt cheeks and not feel a thing...

Yet, a closer examination of the backgrounds and actions of this new breed of terrorists, especially al Qaeda and similar groups, reveals a new reality that can not be accounted for by the above analysis.

What? A new ingredient in the sociological soup? How can that be?

It is well known that the suicide bombers who attacked US cities on September 11, 2001 were the sons of well to do families.

Yeah, but they knew people who were marginalized and oppressed by globalized despots. Well, they knew of them anyway...

They were Western-educated and specialized in the latest technologies which enabled them to use their knowledge of communications to commit heinous violence.

And they call us a consumer society! Islam can't invent all those latest technologies, but, boy! Can they figure ways to make them explode!

The fact is those who solely follow the socio-economic framework of analysis are mistaken; they believe that honesty and objectivity are exclusive to the intellectual class, while extremism and violence are popular amongst those who are unable to think for themselves and therefore easily succumb to fundamentalism.

There's so much wrong with that single sentence that it may be causing the lobes of my brain to separate. First, it assumes the existence of an "intellectual class," and assigns to it the ability to think for itself. Now, I don't doubt the existence of the turtleneck and Gaulloise set in Europe, and certainly we've seen them turn out for Susan Sontag's funeral here. I'm sure the Islamic world has its equivalent â the embroidered burnoose and antique narghileh set? â as well. But I'd also venture to say that here in the civilized world there's a rather largish class (not in the Marxist sense, though) of people who might be considered part-timers at the intellect game. Most of us whose undergraduate days are behind us managed to wade through enough Camus and Sartre and Hegel and those kinds of guys to at least pick up the general idea, and many of us can even recall Kirkegaard's first name, given enough time and maybe a hint or two. We read, then promptly forgot, what Bishop Berkeley had to say and we know that Descartes thought, and that if he hadn't we'd never have heard of him. So we have an intellectual grounding, too. Those of us who didn't go on to get Ph.D.s in Ph. then moved on to things of slightly more utility, which includes getting a degree in Phys Ed. or a ticket as an electrician. But we still know all about all this thinking stuff.

The other end of the postulated spectrum â and notice the missing 80 percent where the middle of the bell curve should be â consists of the Islamic equivalent of the cliche Alabama trailer park denizen, given to his beer (or in the Islamic case, religion), guns, beating his wife, and in general ready to fly off the deep end for no good reason, just because his holy man tells him to. Now, as anyone who's ever been to a trailer park can tell you, there are people just like that to be found there, but they're the ones who occupy the lower ten percent of the trailer park bell curve, while the middle to other 90 percent are perfectly normal folks, who're perfectly capable of thinking for themselves, some of whom could whip out Kirkegaard's first name from memory without even hesitating. We can tell that the group that's ready to erupt exists â we see them at every MMA rally in Lahore or Multan, just as we see them in the occasional riot when the Lakers or the Red Sox lose, and sometimes when they win. But we also regard them as socially retarded shitkickers.

Having pointed out the hole in the author's worldview, we can now move on to the meat of the argument...

Two aspects of this line of thought immediately stand out:

1- A critical arrogance or the view that the masses, by their nature, are gullible, irrational and receptive to extremist ideas.

Good for him. He saw the hole. I still have problems with his terminology, since here in the good old U.S.A. we're fresh out of masses. We have plumbers, electricians, carpenters, salespeople of thousands of varieties, farmers, doctors, lawyers, teachers, factory workers, politicians, cowboys, laborers, cooks, dish washers, firemen, policemen, and what have you, none of whom consider themselves to be "the masses." None of us are faceless, even while those who presume to be our intellectual betters attempts to ascribe facelessness to us. Having lived among the faceless masses in a number of non-Western countries, I can attest to the fact that each and every member of the masses does indeed have a face. They don't even all look alike. Not only do they have faces, but they have Moms and Dads, aspirations, goals, things they'd like to accomplish in their short, brutish lives, which tend to be short and brutish because they're ruled (not governed) by their "intellectual" betters. These people tell stories, crack jokes, get into fist fights, make love, holler at their kids, and sometimes even go bowling. I think it's both a shame and a mistake to underestimate them.
According to this perspective, the masses are unable to act reasonably and objectively as they are motivated by myth and imagination. They are accustomed to depravity and exploitation. As such, it is for the intellectual class, as the sole guardian of reason and logic, to create the social and economic conditions that will assist the masses.

Which is where we come up with the approach of ruling them, rather than governing.
2- A nihilist tendency or the loss of hope regarding attempts at social reform and the tacit acceptance of repression, exploitation, and despotism in Western societies.
I'm having difficulty with the idea of "repression, exploitation, and despotism" being ascribed to Western societies. "Kow-tow" is a Chinese word, and the practice itself was a lot more common in Eastern societies than in the West. Alexander's men were royally cheesed when he tried to introduce the practice to his court; honest Greek hoplites found such bowing and scraping to be beneath their dignity. Arabs, a thousand years later, took to it pretty readily.

Both aspects are found in philosophical treatises, from Plato and al Farabi to Foucault and Derida.

I'm not familiar with al Farabi, but Plato's vision of the perfect society was a.) unworkable, and b.) hideous. Foucault can only be comprehended while wearing a turtleneck and smoking a Gaulloise, so his postmodern opinion can be discounted. Give me time and I'll come up with something memorable that Derida said, and maybe even his first name...

What happens when bigoted and extremist sentiments grow amongst the privileged few?

They find an audience easier than the bigoted and extremist guy with the same idea down at the bowling ally...

This is a provocative question. The evidence before our eyes suggests that the indoctrination and destructive ideologies that have terrorized the world in recent years are held by members of the elite.

Bingo! When the guys down at the bowling ally get out of line the cops jug them. When they've got tenure they hold press conferences.

It is easy to forget that rationality, in itself, doesnât protect against extremism and fundamentalism.

It's also easy to forget that rationality isn't the exclusive province of intellectuals. In fact, I'd go so far as to say that because of their isolation from the common herd with their teevees and bowling allies and company picnics and firemen's parades, the intellects are probably less likely to be rational than the guy rounding up the carts at the grocery store. Not that I want to go to the other illogical extreme and Aaron Copeland the Common Manâ¢, who's capable of just as much stoopidity and venom as anyone else. I'm just pointing out that he's also capable of just as much TRVTHâ¢ and Beautyâ¢ as anyone else. It depends on the person, which is a view that allows for individuality for everyone, and the circumstances, which says merely that the guy who loans you his hedge clippers on Saturday may attempt to attack you with a chainsaw on Tuesday, assuming in the meantime you ran over his dog and off with his wife.

In fact, it is sometimes the most effective tool to legitimize tyranny and inequality.

What is? I got so wrapped in in what I was saying I forgot what he was saying...

Nietzsche believed as much and Foucault analyzed the relationship between power and knowledge.

"Golly, gosh!" he said, rocking on the front porch of his trailer house. "Nobody'd never done that before!"

In fact, the brightest minds in the history of human thought have, for the most part, supported authoritarianism and justified repression.

Whoa! Hold it! Stop! Halt! Cease and desist!... Just because they tell you they're the brightest minds in the history of human thought doesn't mean they actually are. Don't believe everything you read... No. Wait. I didn't mean that. Really. Now, read this carefully: "Put $500,000 into the Rantburg Pay-Pal account by Thursday evening or Descartes will cease to have existed." It's up to you, pal...

The founder of philosophy, Plato, was known for his attacks on Athenian democracy which he sought to replace with the dictatorship of the philosophers. The rational Mutazilites who supported the interpretation of the Quran persecuted their opponents and, while Sufis were being persecuted for their opinions, the philosophers of Islam, such as al Frabi, Avicenna, and Averroes enjoyed the privileges of their association with Islamic rulers. This model applies to the Western world as well as the life of the founder of modern philosophy Descartes reveals.

I hope you're getting the money together if you want to keep that paragraph...

Recent information has shed light on the intimate relations between some of the most prominent German thinkers and the racist extremist Nazi ideology, Heidegger being a prime example.

So what you're saying is that the very brightest minds the world has ever seen have all come up with totalitarianism in one form or another as the end result of their ponderings. It's the non-intellectual dullards, men like Augustine and Thomas Aquinas, Lincoln, Jefferson, and John C. Calhoun, who come up with other approachs to ordering the world that didn't involve jackboots and massive rallies, approaches that are inferior in some respect to totalitarianism. Then you can throw in the guys like Jonson, who were more concerned with getting laid, Wang Wei, more concerned with getting drunk, and the guys like Lin Yu Tang who weren't even singing from the same sheet of music, and discard them all. I can follow that. I can't agree, but I can follow it.

Things are no different in the Arab World.

"Worse" and "different" aren't the same thing.

I was astounded, during the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, to hear one of the most widely read Arab intellectuals justify Baghdadâs actions as âthe sacred violence that will usher in a new Arab renaissance.â

Sounds like something Normal al-Mailer wrote while wearing a turtleneck and smoking something other than a Gaulloise. There was a lot of that going around at the time. Ad-Dusour called it a "glorious Arab stand," if I recall correctly. Sometimes you do things today and don't think about how they're going to look tomorrow or ten or fifteen years from now.

It is wrong to assume that the roots of extremism lie in the masses and their erroneous beliefs, as Mohammed Arkoun says, basing his arguments on shaky anthropological premises.

Nope. You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make him drink. But if you lead a herd to water, statistically a certain number are going to drink, and a smaller number within that number are going to gorge. Selah. It is written. Someplace, anyway. You could look it up...

Even if terrorist groups are supported by the masses, from time to time, they remain separated from the lower classes because of their elitist approach and their intellectual notions. These groups are also distinguished from religious elements who are mostly peace loving members of society.

Depends on the religious elements. If you're talking about Capuchin monks, that's a true statement. If you're talking about Islamic holy men, that's a different creature entirely. Some few are holy men in something approaching the western mold. A significant number are much more like cogs in a machine, the ruthless and scheming minions of some other holy man, or a group of holy men, or someone â like Binny or Zark â who presents himself as being not only ever so holy, but also in possession of all the answers.

Had it not been for isolated efforts to explain extremist positions as a reaction to Western foreign policy, extremist groups would have lacked any support from the masses.

There would always have been a certain amount of support. See horses analogy, above.

Intellectuals usually play two roles in society: they criticize society and contribute to building its foundation. The first responsibility is crucial to undermine dogma and combat idleness. The second is very dangerous and can, unfortunately, lead to a rise in fundamentalist ideologies and extremist thought that inevitably lead to exclusion, repression, and violence.

The danger for intellectuals as a class extend far beyond that. Their most common failing is to take themselves much too seriously. The second most common is to assume that because they're thinking, they're comprehending, considering all the angles, understanding human nature, assessing accurately the way the world works. That's the failing in Marx, and it's been the failing in each and every other "profound" thinker, with the possible exception of Hayek, who built his world view on the basis of not being able to comprehend all the factors and being less able to manipulate them even if he could. I'd go on to the next most common failing, but I don't want to sit here all day and discuss common failings until I run out of numbers. Practice trumps theory each and every time, regardless of how profound the theoretician.

Link

-Short Attention Span Theater-

A look back: Those who left us in 2004

2004-12-31

Edited for brevity. Many more at link.

John Toland, 91. Won 1971 Pulitzer for nonfiction for "The Rising Sun," on the Japanese empire during World War II. Jan. 4.
Tug McGraw, 59. Relief pitcher with Mets, Phillies; known for slogan "You Gotta Believe." Father of country music star Tim McGraw. Jan. 5. Brain cancer.
Alfred Pugh, 108. Last known combat-wounded U.S. veteran of World War I. Jan. 7.
Bob Keeshan, 76. Gently entertained generations of youngsters as TV's walrus-mustachioed Captain Kangaroo and became an outspoken opponent of violence in children's television. Jan. 23.
Daniel J. Boorstin, 89. Former Librarian of Congress; million-selling historian, social critic. Feb. 28.
Abul Abbas, 56. Palestinian who planned hijacking of the Achille Lauro passenger ship. March 8. Natural causes in U.S. custody.
He could have left us much, much earlier, as far as I'm concerned.
Pat Tillman, 27. NFL player who traded in multimillion-dollar contract to serve as Army Ranger in Afghanistan. April 22. Killed in action.
Retired Gen. Robert F. Seedlock, 91. Led arduous construction of the Burma Road during World War II. May 5.
Col. Robert Morgan, 85. Commander of famed Memphis Belle B-17 bomber during World War II. May 15.
Tony Randall, 84. Comic actor; the fastidious Felix Unger in "The Odd Couple" and fussbudget pal in several Rock Hudson-Doris Day movies. May 17.
Ronald Reagan, 93. The cheerful crusader who devoted his presidency to winning the Cold War, trying to scale back government and making people believe it was "morning again in America." June 5.
God bless ya, Ronnie!
Ray Charles, 73. Transcendent talent who erased musical boundaries with hits such as "What'd I Say," "Georgia on My Mind" and "I Can't Stop Loving You." June 10.
Marlon Brando, 80. Revolutionized American acting with "A Streetcar Named Desire"; created the iconic character of Vito Corleone in "The Godfather." July 1.
Charles W. Sweeney, 84. Piloted the plane that dropped an atomic bomb on Nagasaki. July 15.
Fay Wray, 96. The damsel held atop the Empire State Building by the ape in "King Kong." Aug. 8.
Julia Child, 91. Brought the intricacies of French cuisine to Americans through her television series and books. Aug. 13.
Johnny Ramone, 55. Co-founded supremely influential punk band "The Ramones." Sept. 15. Prostate cancer.
Russ Meyer, 82. Producer-director who helped spawn the "skin flick" — and later gained a measure of critical respect — for such films as "Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!" Sept. 18.
Rodney Dangerfield, 82. The bug-eyed comic whose self-deprecating "I don't get no respect" brought him stardom in clubs, television and movies. Oct. 5.
Christopher Reeve, 52. "Superman" actor who became the nation's most recognizable spokesman for spinal cord research after a paralyzing accident. Oct. 10.
Theo van Gogh, 47. Outspoken Dutch filmmaker; great-grandnephew of Vincent. Nov. 2. Murdered, apparently by Islamic radicals.
Yasser Arafat, 75. Palestinian guerrilla leader turned Nobel Peace Prize winner, but also reviled as a sponsor of terrorism. Nov. 11.
Hot enough for ya?
Reggie White, 43. NFL defensive great for the Philadelphia Eagles and Green Bay Packers. Dec. 26. Respiratory ailment suspected in death.
Susan Sontag, 71. National Book Award-winning author, essayist and activist. Dec. 28.
Jerry Orbach, 69. Star of stage, screen and television, most notably for role as world-weary cop on "Law & Order." Dec. 28. Died of prostate cancer.
Rest in peace, Lennie!

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Home Front: Culture Wars

The Right Way to Write a Susan Sontag Obit

2004-12-29

EFL. From Michelle Malkin's blog via Country Store.

Susan Sontag, a critic, novelist and essayist who blamed America for the September 11 terror attacks and once declared that "the white race is the cancer of human history," died in New York yesterday at age 71.
Yikes! Honesty in reporting? Must be the Washington Times.
*snip*
"The white race is the cancer of human history," she wrote in a 1967 essay in Partisan Review. "It is the white race and it alone — its ideologies and inventions — which eradicates autonomous civilizations wherever it spreads, which has upset the ecological balance of the planet, which now threatens the very existence of life itself."

Such comments led novelist Tom Wolfe to dismiss Mrs. Sontag as "just another scribbler who spent her life signing up for protest meetings and lumbering to the podium encumbered by her prose style, which had a handicapped parking sticker valid at Partisan Review."
Ol' Tom sure knows how to turn a phrase. :-D
*snip*
Born Susan Rosenblatt in New York in 1933, she later described her childhood as "one long prison sentence." Her father died when she was 5, and her mother later married an Army officer, Capt. Nathan Sontag.
That may well explain a lot. Or maybe she was just born a bitch.

At age 17, she married social psychologist Philip Rieff, then 28, just 10 days after meeting him at the University of Chicago.
Showed complete lack of judgement early in life, I see. Why wait? Get stupid early so you can perfect it while you're still relatively young.
The couple had a son, David, born in 1952, but divorced in the 1960s. In later years, she described her lesbian relationship with photographer Annie Leibowitz as "an open secret."
If it's open, it ain't a secret. How old was this aged teenager?

Ex-radical author David Horowitz noted yesterday that in 1969, he published the Sontag essay, "On the Right Way (For Us) to Love the Cuban Revolution" in Ramparts magazine.

"There is no right way to love the Cuban Revolution. That was my second thought. It's a pity [Mrs. Sontag] never had second thoughts, too," Mr. Horowitz said.
Ouch! Of course, I don't think she had any first thoughts, either.

Rest in pieces, moonbat. Say hello to your terrorist and commie buddies in Hell for me.

(Though I do offer my condolences to her son. It's hard to lose your mother, even if she is a moonbat.)

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Home Front: Culture Wars

Susan Sontag: An Obituary

2004-12-29

When a friend called me yesterday morning with the news that Susan Sontag had died at the age 71, just about the first thing I thought was, "well, we'll have a huge, hagiographical, front-page obituary tomorrow in The New York Times." Check to see if I am correct. In the meantime, as you prepare yourself for the Times' litany about 1) what a penetrating critical intelligence Sontag wielded and 2) what a "courageous" and challenging "dissident" voice she provided (those quotation marks are proleptic: let's see if the Times uses those words), here is another "courageous," "penetratingly intelligent" dissident voice, that of Salman Rushdie, who provided this bouquet in his capacity as President of the PEN American Center:

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Fifth Column

Susan Sontag assails US ambassador

2003-10-14

Left-wing U.S. author Susan Sontag criticised the US ambassador to Germany, Daniel Coats, on Sunday for failing to attend a Frankfurt ceremony where she received a prestigious peace prize. "He should be here while a citizen of his country receives this prize," she told 700 German dignitaries in Frankfurt and a national television audience, ~~"so that I could harrangue him and embarass him to his face."~~

He probably didn't come because he doesn't like you, Suzy...

Sontag, 70, who has criticized US wars from Vietnam to Iraq, said the ambassador had declined an invitation to the ceremony in June, directly after the award was announced. Coatsâ absence was a deliberate expression of the "ideological position" of the U.S. administration.
Ambassador Dan Coats apparently is aware of which country he represents... the United Staes of America and its President, George W. Bush.
Sontag, who has written both novels and essays, referred in her acceptance speech to US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeldâs attack on "Old Europe" earlier this year, when France and Germany led opposition to US intervention in Iraq. "We cannot do without the old," said Sontag,

"I mean, look at me! I'm old."

a sceptic who enraged Americans after the September 11 attacks by writing, "Whatever may be said of the perpetrators, they were not cowards." Sontag however had been infuriated at the "inertia" of the European Union nations, when they refused to intervene militarily in the Balkans in the 1990s to prevent ethnic conflict.
You like Old Europe? Fine. Go hang out and sulk with all your amis Francopessimismes.

Bitch, bitch, bitch. With some people it's a verb. With others it's a noun...

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Fifth Column

Susan Sontag criticizes Bush policies. Really.

2003-10-12

EFL
New York-born author and human rights activist ~~Suzy Creamcheese~~ Susan Sontag on Saturday criticized President Bushâs policies as imperialistic and a break with 50 years of U.S. foreign policy tradition.

Suzy's spent the past 50 years saying that U.S. policies were just like she claims they are today... Wolf! Wolf!

Sontag, 70, spoke to reporters a day before receiving the German book tradeâs prestigious $17,700 Peace Prize. ââI think as long as the USA has only one political party â the Republican Party, a branch of which calls itself the Democratic Party â we arenât going to see a change of the current policy,ââ she said.
Take that, Wesley Clark, glorious victor of Kosovo!
Sontag said Bushâs policy breaks with Americaâs tradition of consulting with allies on global matters instead of acting alone. She was referring to the Bush administration decision to go to war against Iraq without U.N. backing.
You canât say they werenât consulted, some just refused flatly what had to be done.
ââItâs really the end of the republic and the beginning of the empire,ââ she said, referring to ancient Rome.
No historical clues at all huh? The three wars against Karthago were the deeds of republican Rome. And the last one wiped Karthago from the face of this earth, salt included. That was indeed a most imperialistic action. You might argue that the Iraq war went a bit differently?
Sontag also had harsh words for California governor-elect Arnold Schwarzenegger, saying his election showed that traditional politics are disappearing.
I know quite a few people in Germany who would recall Schroeder in a flash if they were given that option.
ââWe are in a new civilization, a post-political civilization,ââ she said.
Post-modern, post-colonial, post-political. Ah and Neil Postman is dead, too.

One day soon we're going to enter a post-post civilization...

Sontag, whose works have been translated into more than 30 languages, is a lover of European literature, especially German classics and philosophy.
Me too, but that doesnât mean that you lose your ability to think clearly.
ââIâm not only a writer. Iâm first of all a person with a moral conscience,ââ Sontag said. ââI will never support a decision which seems to me absurd.ââ
Tell the people freed from Iraqi hellhole jails.
Shortly after the Sept. 11 attacks, Sontag criticized U.S. officials and media commentators for their simplistic depiction of those events.
America was attacked, 3000 people were murdered cowardly, and America doesnât seem to let the terrorists get away with it. Very simplistic indeed. Sometimes the simple things are true.
She also sympathized with German Chancellor Gerhard Schroederâs refusal to participate in the U.S.-led war in Iraq, but denied the jury selected her for this reason.
Ah no, of course not!
ââI am immodest enough to think that even if I hadnât spoken up about Bush I would have earned this prize anyway,ââ she said. Last yearâs prize went to Nigerian-born writer Chinua Achebe. Past winners also include Nobel Peace Prize laureates Octavio Paz and Hermann Hesse, and former Czech president and anti-communist dissident Vaclav Havel.
Well Ms Sontag, if you think that you are in the same league with these world class writers, you are more than immodest.
In her acceptance speech this morning she criticized U.S. ambassador Coats for not attending the ~~spittlefest~~ ceremony. I fully sympathize with him. I was invited as well but didnât feel the urge either...

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Fifth Column

Sontag receives Sontag Award...

2002-09-11

Andrew Sullivan flings some fragrant fruit in Salon, at ~~Suzie Creamcheese~~ Susan Sontag for her latest emission.

That is one sign that it is not a war but, rather, a mandate for expanding the use of American power.

What can that last sentence mean? Could it not have been written during every single war that this country or any country has ever waged? Of course, wars mean an expansion of government power. That is why, for example, small-government types like me support war only as a last resort. But unlike Sontag, I consider the massacre of 3,000 people in New York City, after decades of low-level terrorism against American citizens, and the promise of even more bloodshed, to be a reason to defend ourselves.

Suzie is so-o-o-o-o September 10th. September 10th, 1968, in fact...

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Fifth Column

Sullivan: The blindness of the left

2001-09-19

Andrew Sullivan.com, by Andrew Sullivan
One of the amazing things about the far left's embrace of the anti-American ideology of some in the Middle East is their willful blindness about what these fanatics actually believe in. Susan Sontag, for example, is a Jew. Does she honestly believe that America is responsible for more evil than a bunch of Muslim fanatics who would gas her in a second if they could? Could any gay person seriously argue for appeasement of people who would execute them on the spot if they lived under their rule? Could any serious feminist not believe in opposing fanatics who would eviscerate the slightest shred of freedom for women? I just don't get it. Liberals of all people should be the most serious about fighting this scourge. Is their hatred of America that deep?

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Fifth Column

Sontag: It wasn't cowardly. Nope.

2001-09-21

Washington Times
Witness Susan Sontag, writing in the current issue of The New Yorker: 'The voices licensed to follow the event seem to have joined together in a campaign to infantilize the public. Where is the acknowledgment that this was not a 'cowardly' attack on 'civilization' or 'liberty' or 'humanity' or 'the free world' but an attack on the world's self-proclaimed superpower, undertaken as a consequence of specific American alliances and actions?'

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