#Arkhaven INFOGALACTIC #Castalia House
Since Instapundit is asking the question, I thought it would be interesting to see the difference in candidate preferences between our readerships.
| Who would you support for GOP 2012 Presidential nominee? | |
| Michele Bachman | |
| Herman Cain | |
| Thaddeus McCotter | |
| Sarah Palin | |
| Rick Perry | |
| Ron Paul | |
| Tim Pawlenty | |
| Newt Gingrich | |
| John Huntsman | |
| Mitt Romney | |
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Mr. Harris weighs in with what some will likely consider to be a surprising, (and disappointing), conclusion. But it speaks well for his integrity and actually approaches an intelligent response. It also explains why the “Christian fundamentalist” theme is rapidly disappearing from the media:
It has been widely reported that Breivik is a “Christian fundamentalist.” Having read parts of his 1500-page manifesto (2083: A European Declaration of Independence), I must say that I have my doubts…. As I have only read parts of this document, I cannot say whether signs of a deeper religious motive appear elsewhere in it. Nevertheless, the above passages would seem to undermine any claim that Breivik is a Christian fundamentalist in the usual sense. What cannot be doubted, however, is that Breivik’s explicit goal was to punish European liberals for their timidity in the face of Islam.
I have written a fair amount about the threat that Islam poses to open societies, but I am happy to say that Breivik appears never to have heard of me. He has, however, digested the opinions of many writers who share my general concerns—Theodore Dalrymple, Robert D. Kaplan, Lee Harris, Ibn Warraq, Bernard Lewis, Andrew Bostom, Robert Spencer, Walid Shoebat, Daniel Pipes, Bat Ye’or, Mark Steyn, Samuel Huntington, et al. He even singles out my friend and colleague Ayaan Hirsi Ali for special praise, repeatedly quoting a blogger who thinks she deserves a Nobel Peace Prize. With a friend like Breivik, one will never want for enemies.
One can only hope that the horror and outrage provoked by Breivik’s behavior will temper the growing enthusiasm for right-wing, racist nationalism in Europe. However, one now fears the swing of another pendulum: We are bound to hear a lot of deluded talk about the dangers of “Islamophobia” and about the need to address the threat of “terrorism” in purely generic terms.
First, it’s quite clear that Breivik was a Christian in the sense of Christendom, not Jesus Christ. As The Perfect Aryan Male, who is a lawyer occasionally required to do work with Saudi visas, explained it, when you go to Saudi Arabia you have to choose between checking “Christian” or “Muslim” on your application. The Saudis couldn’t care less about personal beliefs, your self-identification, or if you pretend to worship the Flying Spaghetti Monster, they simply want to know if you are a member of the Umma or the Dar al-Harb.
Second, Harris has recognized what so many people seem to find inexplicable. Breivik targeted the future politicians of the Labour Youth because the quislings of the Labour Party are responsible for Norway’s open borders and the subsequent Islamic immigration. While Breivik may or may not have been a bigot, it is clear that his murderous attack was not a bigoted act, but rather, an explicitly political one. This is something he addresses directly in the manifesto when he writes about how it is not the wild animals who are to blame for entering the zoo, but the zookeepers who hold the gates open and permit them to enter.
(That being said, given the pictures of the Labour Youth that have been released, it wouldn’t be surprising if a significant percentage of the victims were not, in fact, ethnic Norwegians.)
Third, I believe Harris is incorrect with regards to his analysis of the probable consequences. Contra the blithe assumptions of the media, I suspect that Breivik’s mass murder will tend to increase the enthusiasm for nationalism on both the European Right and Left because it has increased and underlined what were already the extraordinarily heavy costs being imposed upon European societies by the multiculturalists and immigration enthusiasts within it. As Harris notes, many people, of various creeds, already harbor serious concerns about the incompatibility of Islam and secular society.
There are national elections approaching in Switzerland and France. We should be able to determine if Breivik will have any discernable effect upon the political situation by seeing if the anti-immigrant, anti-Islam People’s Party (CH) and National Front (FR) perform better or worse than they did in the previous elections.
Of course, as Kevin Williamson noted, it is self-evident that Breivik is a lunatic of the sort defined by Umberto Eco in Foucault’s Pendulum.
A lunatic is easily recognized. He is a moron who doesn’t know the ropes. The moron proves his thesis; he has a logic, however twisted it may be. The lunatic, on the other hand, doesn’t concern himself at all with logic; he works by short circuits. For him, everything proves everything else. The lunatic is all idée fixe, and whatever he comes across confirms his lunacy. You can tell him by the liberties he takes with common sense, by his flashes of inspiration, and by the fact that sooner or later he brings up the Templars.
There goes another atheist claim. It turns out that the areligious in Britain are the least likely to go to to college:
A study of more than 13,000 young people found that 77 per cent of those who described themself as Hindu at the age of 15 went on to higher education, compared with 45 per cent of Christians. Some 63 per cent of Sikh teenagers and 53 per cent of Muslims went on to study at university, but just 32 per cent of those who had no religion at 15 undertook higher education.
This is, of course, further evidence in my point about the two churches of atheism. I expect that the college attendance rate of High Church self-identified atheists will be higher than the Christian rate, and perhaps even as high as the Hindu rate. It’s all about the restrictions on the group selected. No doubt the rate of Hindu college attendance is rather lower in India, where most Hindus actually live, than in Britain, where the Hindus are a small and self-selected group.
This is why it’s always necessary to pay attention to the Atheist Dance. When they want to talk up their numbers, they refer to Low Church “no religion”. When they want to talk up their objective qualities, they refer to High Church self-identified atheism. It’s rather like making a distinction between Christians and Catholics. The latter is a subset of the former.
Throughout history, nations have taken violent exception to being invaded by large masses of foreigners. The Canaanites did not take kindly to Israelite immigration into the Promised Land, nor did the Israelites later welcome the arrival of Philistine immigrants from the Aegean Sea. The Arabs, who immigrated to Palestine in the centuries that followed Hadrian’s destruction of Judea after the Third Jewish War, are still actively resisting the return of the Jews to their ancient ancestral lands 63 years after the Israeli war of independence.
In Spain, the Reconquista took 770 years, from King Pelagius’ defeat of the Umayyad Caliphate at the Battle of Covadinga in 722 to the last European sultan’s capitulation to King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella in 1492.
People value their cultures, their traditions, their religion, their land and their blood. They always have and they always will.
It was interesting to read George R.R. Martin’s latest so soon after seeing HBO’s A Game of Thrones and reading two fantasy series that some have attempted to compare to Martin’s epic, The First Law by Joe Abercrombie and The Prince of Nothing by R. Scott Bakker. My first thought upon simply viewing the size of the tome was that Martin is clearly suffering from the same disease that inflicted Stephen King and JK Rowling before him. It would appear that some time in between A Storm of Swords and A Feast For Crows, Martin came down with a bad case of morbus nemendatorus. This is the illness which strikes an author after he has become so prodigiously successful that he no longer sees any need to pay heed to an editor. It can be diagnosed on sight by the simple measurement of the thickness of the first book in the series and comparing it with that of the last book in the series. After reading A Dance with Dragons, it is abundantly clear that Mr. Martin has not yet recovered from it.
Read the rest at the Black Gate.
UPDATE – Matthew David Surridge, who is one of the best critics in the SF/F genre, offers a substantially different take on the novel.
The interesting thing about the Republican white flag is that it wasn’t even a real flag. Karl Denninger went through the details and broke it down:
NO domestic spending cuts whatsoever.
NO material changes to entitlement spending ($25 billion/year on Medicare is pointless.)
NO other mandatory spending cuts. Anywhere.
Remember, the deal was supposed to be about $2 trillion in total – $1.2 as outlined above, and then $800 billion in “revenue increases” (tax hikes.) The deal “blew up” when Obama wanted another $400 billion in taxes. We’re talking about chicken**** here folks – these “cuts” are not real, they are all “reductions in planned spending increases.
In other words, the Republicans were offering real tax increases and nonexistent spending cuts in exchange for raising the debt ceiling. Boehner and Cantor are shameless liars whose only goal is to raise the debt ceiling without letting the Tea Party and fiscal conservatives know that they have done so without any significant spending cuts.
Moreover, there is no chance of forced default. In August, there will be a projected $150 billion in tax revenue. Interest payments will only be $29 billion. That leaves more than $120 billion to spend on everything else. So, anyone who claims that default is unavoidable as of August third or anytime in August is blatantly lying.
Here we go again. Jeb Bush contemplates 2012:
“You never say never. This is a standard answer that I’ve kind of learned how to give which is — you never say never, but I never rule out being on Dancing with the Stars either … there are a lot of ways you can make a difference.”
No. Oh, please no. Not another bloody Bush. Somewhere in New York City, Kathryn Jean Lopez is burning out the batteries on her personal massager. And I can already hear Karl Rove and Dick Morris babbling complete nonsense about the Hispanic vote in my nightmares.
John Podhoretz, who has advocated war against Iran and Iraq, is outraged by the evil in Norway:
The monstrous events today in Norway—as of this writing, word is that a gunman slaughtered at least 30 kids at a youth camp who had gathered to hear about the earlier bombing of government offices in Oslo—have stirred in me a kind of rage I haven’t felt this viscerally since the days after 9/11, when my apartment in Brooklyn Heights looked out directly on the violent purple gash in the sky that hovered over the wreckage like a demonic counterimage of the holy cloud that followed the Jews through the desert in the aftermath of the Exodus. Perhaps it is that my own daughter is, as I write, at her own day camp outside New York City, and so there is something visceral, primal, in my sense of connection to the dead and dying and their parents. This rage, which is accompanied by all manner of violent thoughts about what should be done and could be done to the living body of the depthlessly evil monster who committed this Satanic act, is disturbing in its intensity. I would like it to go away. But it won’t, and it shouldn’t, because without it–without a stark response to something so purposefully awful–we are unilaterally disarming ourselves. The monster and his comrades have the passion to commit their foul deeds. If we respond with dispassion, we are ceding to them part of the animating force that makes us human. If we decide to intellectualize our emotions rather than allow them to influence us, we are turning our back on our responsibility to those whose lives were stripped from them.
So, it’s evil for Saudis to kill Americans, it’s evil for Norwegians to kill Norwegians and nominal Norwegians, but it is a moral imperative for Americans to kill Iraqis and Iranians. Got it? Let’s compare the bodycount to date:
9/11: 2,996 deaths. VISCERAL RAGE!
Oslo: 92 deaths. DEPTHLESS AND SATANIC EVIL!
Iraq: 135,369 deaths. NOT ENOUGH DEAD SUNNIS! (1)
Iran: ???? deaths. KILL AMALEKITES FOR ISRAEL! (2)
(1) “What if the tactical mistake we made in Iraq was that we didn’t kill enough Sunnis in the early going to intimidate them and make them so afraid of us they would go along with anything? Wasn’t the survival of Sunni men between the ages of 15 and 35 the reason there was an insurgency and the basic cause of the sectarian violence now?”
(2) “If Barack Obama wants Israel to pull back to the 1967 borders, a position that could not be politically achieved today. If he thought that would solve everything, the best way for him to do that is to hit Iran’s nuclear facilities. If the US takes out Iran’s nuclear capacity and Obama goes to Jerusalem and says, ‘I have saved you from Amalek, I have saved you from the revival of the greatest threat to the Jewish people, you do something for me.”
Needless to say, Podhoretz the Younger is not only selective about what sort of deaths fill him with BOUNDLESS RAAAAGE and what sort he would like to see more of, but he also supports the very sort of immigration policy that appears to have led to yesterday’s lethal attacks in Norway.
“[A]s a Jew, I have great difficulty supporting a blanket policy of immigration restriction because of what happened to the Jewish people after 1924 and the unwillingness of the United States to take Jews in.”
So, Norway should permit Sri Lankans and Tunisians to settle in Norway because the USA didn’t permit Jews to settle in the USA in 1924. Got it? Podhoretz’s emotional histrionics are particularly ironic in light of the way the logic of his various positions suggests that the U.S. military should have attacked the Utoya Worker’s League camp and slaughtered everyone “between the ages of 15 and 35” in order to save Norway from Cush. The amusing thing is that there is a very good chance that at least one of the deaths that so outrage him now was that of a male Sunni between 15 and 35.
It also strikes one that perhaps the Iranians should consider rethinking their strategy vis-a-vis Israel. Instead of pursuing nuclear weapons, which is, per Podhoretz, bad, Tehran should simply order a few hundred thousand of its citizens to peacefully immigrate to Israel, which is, per Podhoretz, good. No doubt this will cause Podhoretz the Younger to abandon his call for war with Iran and joyfully embrace the new Persian-Israelis.
UPDATE – One wonders if Podhoretz will soon express similar rage over the death of a 35-year old youth who was gunned down in Tehran today.
The House Republicans walk out when Obama refuses to accept their surrender:
President Barack Obama and congressional leaders are scrambling to find a way ahead on a debt deal after House Speaker John Boehner threw negotiations into crisis by walking out less than two weeks before the deadline to avoid a potentially catastrophic default.
A visibly frustrated Obama summoned Boehner, R-Ohio, to the White House for a Saturday morning meeting with the three other leaders – Sens. Harry Reid, D-Nev., and Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., and Rep. Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif.
“We have run out of time and they are going to have to explain to me how it is that we are going to avoid default” on Aug. 2, the president told reporters at a hastily scheduled news after Boehner’s announcement.
The media coverage of the debt ceiling issue has really been abysmal. There is absolutely no more threat of U.S. default in August than there was yesterday or than there is today. If Obama elects to default by deciding to pay for the occupation of Afghanistan or sending out Social Security checks instead of paying interest on the debt, it is no more unavoidable or necessary than a default by a private individual who decides to buy a new car instead of paying his mortgage and credit card bills.
There is a perfectly good case to be made for strategic default, especially considering how much U.S. debt is owed to its self-appointed enemy of the future, China. But it is a blatant and shameless lie to claim that a failure to reach an agreement on raising the debt ceiling, or even a budget, means that a default cannot be avoided.
It shouldn’t be hard to explain to Obama how to avoid a default. First, you collect tax revenues. Second, you pay the interest on the outstanding debts. Third, you pay for your various spending programs with whatever money you have left. Since interest was only $197 billion in 2010 and tax revenues were $2,162 billion, it is mathematically obvious that any default can only be an intentional and strategic one, the protestations of politicians notwithstanding.
It appears I was eight months early in predicting mainstream recognition of economic depression “towards the end of 2010” in RGD:
We can only hope that the politicians huddled in Washington and Brussels succeed in averting these threats. But here’s the thing: Even if we manage to avoid immediate catastrophe, the deals being struck on both sides of the Atlantic are almost guaranteed to make the broader economic slump worse.
In fact, policy makers seem determined to perpetuate what I’ve taken to calling the Lesser Depression, the prolonged era of high unemployment that began with the Great Recession of 2007-2009 and continues to this day, more than two years after the recession supposedly ended.
Of course, Paul Krugman has no idea what he’s talking about. This is not a lesser depression, it is a larger depression. The full scale and scope simply isn’t apparent yet.
That’s why I referred to it as “the Great Depression 2.0” in RGD. In the 1930s, only the USA exacerbated the situation with Keynesian stimulus policies. In the 2000s, China, Japan, and the European countries all engaged in such policies, with China and Japan spending an even greater portion of their GDP on them than the USA. Therefore, we can expect the Great Depression 2.0 to be a genuinely worldwide one, as opposed to a mostly American one in the 1930s. It’s not that Europe didn’t experience a depression, but it wasn’t known as a “Great” depression because it was largely over by 1933.
“Europe’s subsequent decline was gentler, shorter, and smaller as European governments did not engage in the same heroic attempts to fight the effects of the contraction that the U.S. government did. There was no European Reconstruction Finance Corporation or New Deal to prolong the downturn, so the European economies hit their collective nadir in 1932 and had already grown past their pre-depression levels in 1936. With the exception of Germany, which suffered from the economic complications of a socialist government, crushing war reparations, and the famous Weimar Republic hyperinflation, unemployment in Europe was lower than in the United States. While U.S. unemployment reached an estimated peak of 24.9 percent in 1933, British unemployment peaked at 17 percent in 1932 and French unemployment never even reached double digits. Japan saw neither a big pre-1929 boom nor a massive post-1929 bust….”
– RGD, p. 178
UPDATE: Okay, this comment made me laugh.
I’m honestly sorry to say this, but when you start your article with “Amanda Marcotte is right,” you’ve pretty much just taken your credibility, shot it in the back of the head, and are now frantically digging a hole to bury the corpse in before somebody comes to investigate the loud noise.