February 27, 2006
Time for Democratization 2.0
"While the Islamists have recently chosen bold new offenses, aside from Iraq we are still in a defensive mode and have not adjusted. Saying how bad they are is not enough, when the Enemy is brazenly advancing in full openly declared evil. It is only if we honestly face the consequences of inaction and appeasement that we might summon the will to adjust our strategy. The time has come for the next phase in the war. To the uninitiated (i.e., most blue staters), to advocate a shift to the offense seems like bloodthirsty madness. Indeed, I think these “positive actions” are, all else being equal, terrible. But all else is not equal, and such considerations merely constitute a new political realism about the ongoing war to replace the illusion that our enemies are not openly advancing in their work on our destruction.
Iran’s bold statements on Israel, the holocaust, their nuke ambitions, and their Islamist ambitions. The Pally election of Hamas, openly striving for Israel’s demise and supporting the Islamist agenda overall. The global show of force that was so successful, even the major US papers and State Department deferred to their claims of “offense”. (This is not to say that the Mobombhead cartoon was not in poor taste, but rather that the prior and current offenses (and raucous silences) of the putative “offended” parties, which insult their prophet rather more than the cartoon does, remove the legitimacy of their censorship authority claims.) And now the Sunni attack on the major Shiite shrine which was so successful in fomenting civil war that even some sensible non-dove conservatives, such as WF Buckley, are talking about failure. (I’m skipping over dozens of smaller Islamist terrorist attacks on Jews, Israel, Europe, etc., and hundreds of open neo-Nazi global Islamofascist pronouncements that have become unremarkable lately.)
Is Democratization 1.0 working? Not while there are Bin Ladens and Irans out there cheering on and funding the global jihad. No, in this climate, the Arab street still, to the extent they can, “votes” for Bin Laden and against America.
What to do? Aside from Democratization, Bush’s SOTU mentions only one other idea: Undermine their economic support by getting off of oil. That helps, but they’ve already substantially diversified, and getting off oil is apparently somewhat of a long term process (it’s not that nobody thought of that idea in the 1970s). Divest from terror? Also a nice idea, but wouldn’t that just invite certain less scrupulous trading nations with whom we will continue to trade (if only because we are overwhelmingly interlocked with them already) to monopolize on both the economic and political benefits of trade with the bad guys? Obviously the generally harmful UN, as it stands, would not help. In a world where France could be so weaselly on Iraq and where Google can’t help but assist in political censorship in China, can we really expect other (mostly unfree) countries to care for US interests?
Seems kind of hopeless.
Some on the left and even paleocons, dovish “withdraw from the world” libertarians, and Islamo-sympathetic white Neo-nazis (we seem to ignore that Jerusalem Nazi Grand Mufti al-Husseini thoroughly infused modern Islam with Hitler’s ideas, not to mention giving Hitler a few Islamic ideas), like Churchills opponents, like to think that we can obtain a satisfactory outcome by appeasing our enemies. We might withdraw from Iraq, and the mid east in general. Israel? “She can take care of herself.” And maybe “Fuck ‘em.” Erm, but what about Europe? Shariah for them too? Including France with its nukes? “So? They go Islamist, and make our vacations there less fun.” Or “Screw those guys; we're going home.”
Well, there’s some vaguely reasonable hope that by this point Russia and China’s Jihadists are so encouraged that they push these behemoths to our side, conditional on tremendous concessions from us. Maybe. On the other hand given the destruction to the global economy that the above losses would cause, China and Russia will probably be too busy with their own civil wars by now.
And they will still need to prove unambiguously that America is not hegemon, and Islam is. That means tearing down all the symbols that might suggest to anyone that America might be hegemon and replacing them with symbols that show that there’s a new hegemon. Military forces, McDonalds and other US corps, English as the standard global language, etc. Basically America will have to Submit to Shariah too. Not so likely, so they will have to settle with nuking America to the point that nobody could possibly still consider this country a Superpower, and regardless of their own domestic “fallout”.
Then, they will have the level playing field in which Islam can thrive.
OK, is this too negative? I think it’s a pretty realistic projection of the consequences of the direction we have been going in. Should we despair? Maybe a bit.
But then maybe we just might be foresighted enough to change directions.
Can we wake up and realize we’re in a hot-and-cold war with crazier-than-Nazi motherfuckers, armed with a suicidal all-encompassing ideology, hate, knives, planes, guns, rockets, $, media, and maybe already, nukes? Victory is only possible through a de-nazification that we have not had the nerve to implement. Must we wait to be nuked first? Probably. Our democracy is too bureaucratic (slow) and divided to elect someone to do this in 2008 or in any case before we are nuked. But by then, and hopefully before then, we will launch the next phase of the war:
Decapitate Syria and Iran as a farewell to Iraq? (Invite Israel to) really wipe out Hamas? (But would Israel do it?) Fund popular resistance movements in Europe? Take the Saudi oil fields? Offer moderate Muslims the chance to pass a democratic competence / loyalty test and find asylum in the new Muslim mid-east state of New Islamabad? Supervise our madrassas? New Sedition laws? Strike some (counterbalancing) fear in the hearts of our own Fifth Columns?
As far as I see it, this counter-Islamism program is not a matter of whether, but of when. OK, the whether is whether we will still have the capability after the next 9/11.
By the way, Mark Humphry's Islamic Fascism page , which I found as the top entry from Googling "the answer to Islamism" has good and thorough background analysis on Islamism and the war to help bring the uninitiated up to speed."
Note from Matt: Warren Churchberg asked me to post this essay, and let me know he would kick my ass if I did not.
Posted by Matt at 09:19 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
Fashion Jihad?
Notice anything about this photo of a meeting between Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad an Hamas leader Khaled Meshal in Teheran last week (via Powerline)?
Why are they both wearing western style semi-formal clothing? Where is the kaffiyeh or turban? Have they internalized western style norms or are they performing? For whom might they be performing?
(Dan: Does this count as breaking out of structure?)
Posted by Alex at 11:33 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)
February 24, 2006
US Madrases
The US should be setting up schools all around the world that train people to be Americans. Graduates of such schools would have a better shot at immigration. Perhaps we create an expat-Citizen category that gives them some of the international benefits of US citizenship. The primary goal here would be to spread US ideas of capitalism and democracy in local populations and to beat the Saudi madrass operation at their own game.
Inspired by this Max Boot OpEd.
Posted by Alex at 11:21 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)
More basement biotech
I've been following this issue on and off for a while. Here Paul Boutin talks about Carlson curves (the biotech equivalent to Moore's law) and how it is getting incredibly easy to synthesize any organism.
This stuff is probably my top macro-scale worry.
Posted by Alex at 11:17 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (1)
February 20, 2006
School Choice vs Religion
Libertarians like the idea of leaving schooling to the private sector. They forget that the interests of parents and children diverge and that certain state interests may override those of the parents.
The Telegraph writes about British Muslim desire to form a state within a state:
"He calls the education in the state schools of the West 'aggression against the Islamic personality of the child'. He has said that 'the Muslim respects the laws of the country only if they do not contradict any Islamic principle'. He has added that 'compromising on principles is a sign of fear and weakness'."
One of the functions of the schools is to make children into citizens. It is not clear that school choice accomplishes that goal.
And by school choice, I don't just mean vouchers, I mean that perhaps the rich should not be allowed to buy themselves out either. Perhaps we need compulsory public schooling just like other countries have compulsory military service.
Posted by Alex at 07:57 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (1)
Government responsibile for actions of the governed?
Eugene Volokh notes:
I'm glad that even against the backdrop of murderous thuggery by Muslim extremists, some people are willing to repeat that, no, free nations and governments are not responsible for what their newspapers publish.
I'm not sure he is entirely right about this. For example, our justification for invading Afghanistan and ridding it of the Taliban was that they could not disavow the actions of Al Queada (then residing in Afghanistan) simply because they did nothing illegal in Afghanistan.
Now, if a team of hackers in another country was releasing computer viruses that did substantial damage to US systems (e.g. hospital and DoD), we might also hold the government of that country responsible.
Is publishing a computer virus different from publishing a cartoon? Isn't the point of free speech that it should be content neutral?
Finally, the underlying assumption of viral marketing programs is not very different from the assumptions underlying computer viruses. Humans, like computers, have vulnerabilities that can be exploited to cause them to redistribute some payload and infect others.
So, if the US is right to object to computer viruses, are Muslim leaders right to object to the spreading of memes that cause their populations to freak out?
Posted by Alex at 05:00 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack (12)
February 12, 2006
Socialism is Mutually Exclusive with Multiculturalism
Hypothesis: Socialism can only survive in a state where almost everyone shares the same ethnic heritage (such as Israel or formerly Sweden). People might be willing to pay high taxes to help support others who are just like them but less fortunate; but people are not willing to pay high taxes when they think that someone very different is receiving them (because these "very different" are always undeserving because they don't live up to your cultural standards, such as not working hard enough). This also explains why socialism could never take hold in the USA, the most multiethnic society out there.
A relevant quote in today's NY Times, from the cultural editor of the obscure Danish newspaper who commissioned the cartoons and began the crisis:
He continued, "People are no longer willing to pay taxes to help support someone called Ali who comes from a country with a different language and culture that is 5,000 miles away."
Therefore--if this hypothesis is true--then socialism and nationalism are even more intertwined than I had previously thought.
Posted by Morgan at 05:50 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack (0)
UIs I like
I always want everything sorted by frequency of use. But very few UIs do this. Are my usage patterns idiosyncratic, or do other people find this sort of organization useful, too?
Here are some examples of things I would like to see organized by frequency of use but aren't:
* Contacts in my cell phone
* Bookmarks in my web browser
* E-mail archive folders
Posted by Morgan at 03:55 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack (6)
February 11, 2006
Islamism Timeline
It just occured to me that a hypertext timeline with 9/11, the Madrid and London attacks, many Israel attacks, assassinations like Pearl, Van Gogh, regular Iraq beheadings, and propaganda actions like Rushdie, the beauty pageant, Mahathir's OIC speech, and the Danish Cartoon fartoon, with internal links to the pretext of each, and then external links to show responses to each, might be informatively alarming. Google search failed to find what I seek (though apparently an attempt to create one on wikipedia resulted in a revert war and commentary on such). Anybody up for this project? Alex, wanna partybus it?
Posted by Matt at 12:50 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
February 10, 2006
Starbucks US unlike Starbucks China
As I ponder how starbucks is so successful in China when, on a PPP basis, it’s a multiple of the price, it occurs to me that Starbucks China is still a luxury brand, as McDonalds China was at first. Star China is spacious, calm, quiet, with nice chairs and ... no smoke! It’s one of the only places without smoking in China, unlike cities like NY where all bars and restaurants are smoke-free. Starbucks China is still something like a shared living room. Starbucks NY, I type as I sit in a NY Starbucks next to some phlem-gurgling fiend who I do not believe ever even bought anything, is more like a nicer transport junction.
Posted by Matt at 06:43 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
Al Jazeera: Voice of Moderation?
Last night I had dinner with an old good friend, who speaks Arabic fluently, lives in Israel, used to work for the Israeli government translating Arabic newspapers into Hebrew. She now teaches Arabic to native Arabic speakers in Israel, and she's a liberal Jew and a zionist--and she pays through the root in Israel to get a satellite television with Al-Jazeera.
Her analysis of Al-Jazeera was profoundly shocking.
First (before we get to the politics) on the language: it actually turns out that the language used on Al Jazeera doesn't exist. Arabic in different countries is not like Spanish in Latin America of American/Australian/British English; they are different languages that are not mutually intelligble, if you can speak on you can't speak the others. But, they all share the same written language universally (Modern Standard Arabic)--Arabic written everywhere is identical but, to the average speaker, has little connection to the spoken language anywhere. As a consequence, there is a deep divide in each country between the spoken language and the written language. What Al Jazeera does is, turn this standard, universal written language into a spoken language--so everyone educated in the Arabic world can, without too much difficulty, figure out what they're saying--they all know that way of writing, they've just never heard it spoken before: they've given a voice to a known but unspoken written language. This has nothing to do with politics, but I found it quite interesting. (This may be connected to politics like this: this might be a contributing factor towards illiteracy; if our spoken language was that different from our written one, the bar for learning how to write would be much higher so illiteracy would be, too.)
Second, politics. My friend was surprised to learn that Al Jazeera is presented in the US as a radical and extremist station. She said that Al Jazeera is the most moderate mainstream media or publication in the whole arabic middle east. Yes, of course they still hate Israel and yes, of course they still want to kill the Jews--but they are fundamentally the liberal voice of enlightenment for that part of the world.
She gave me a few examples that shocked me. Here they are.
Every other Arabic publication in the entire middle east only ever refers to Jerusalem as "occupied Jerusalem." But Al Jazeera--and only Al Jazeera--refers to "East Jerusalem" and "West Jerusalem." She said that when she was listening to Al Jazeera for the first time and heard this, she was shocked, since she had never heard before an Arabic speaker refer to Jerusalem by anything other than "occupied Jerusalem." (She told me the actual phrases in the original Arabic but I don't remember them--sorry.)
She also made the point that Al Jazeera--also, alone among the Arabic publications in the middle east--gives a voice to the other side (even if they do have a bias). They will do things such as, actually interview people on both sides of different debates and questions. This is a contrast to the standard in the middle east media, where their side is presented as the only side.
It is for reasons like these that, within the arabic world, Al Jazeera is known as a liberal publication. It's just sad what our standards for liberalism are over there.
Posted by Morgan at 11:52 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (2)
February 08, 2006
Getting serious about the Cartoons, with all due respect
1) The Seattle Danish Cartoon poster is wrong.
Yes, nations, individuals and religions have the right to *demand respect*. The problem is that the demanding party should *earn respect*. They should earn it by *manifesting respect* toward others in general, and in the manner of making the demand. (I think this framework really clarifies the situation.)
2) Andrew Sullivan is misguided.
Alex, you and Andrew Sullivan may note with benefit:
China WAS in that position a few months ago (protesting Japanese textbooks’ understatement of Japanese colonial oppression, etc.), and most Islamic gov'ts are in the same position -- they are not sponsoring the demonstrations, and indeed have little use for them, but the purveyors of discontent have cleverly forced them to earn their street cred by expressing offense (to the Japanese and Danes, respectively) and permitting SOME demonstration and at least a smidgen of violence which can then be used as the excuse to shut the demonstration down and perhaps even denounce the excesses of the
demonstrators. China-Japan relations, like Western-Arab gov't relations, are strained, but not destroyed.
Talk of “toppling dictatorships” is totally inappropriate here.
3) Sorry Morgan, I’m with Dershowitz.
See #1 above.
Posted by Matt at 06:05 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)
via Dan Savage
Link here
Posted by Alex at 11:13 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
Are anti-china cartoons next?
I had been thinking about this issue this morning and just found this comment from AndrewSullivan:
If Chinese radicals were ransacking Western embassies because of a cartoon, and were backed by the Chinese government, we would be outraged, demanding apologies, severing relations, and so on. But when Muslims do it, backed by Islamist governments, we are supposed to take it on the chin, to "respect" their religious traditions, issue mealy-mouthed statements, etc.
Which leads to the interesting question, what if some western news organs were to engage in massively provocative cartoons directed at the Chinese? What if, for example, some Japanese paper started making cartoons talking about how they enjoyed the Chinese women during their occupation of Manchuria?
The Chinese government would have to put troops in front of the Japanese embassy to prevent it from being burned. Would Japanese owns factories be sacked? etc.
The Chinese government would have the choice of a massive crackdown, explaining to their people the value of free speech, or going to war. Since the government is not stupid enough to start a war over this sort of thing and since a crackdown would be massively expensive....
Not entirely sure how this would work, but it may be an interesting general way to topple dictatorships...
Posted by Alex at 10:53 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
February 07, 2006
Alan Dershowitz on the Danish Cartoons
Alex has long been arguing to me (offline) that Alan Dershowitz is not like us--that he does not share our worldview, the dedication to an open society and open markets that we do--and I've been long disagreeing with him.
But a video I saw last night--of him being interviewed on a Finnish TV station about the Denmark cartoon crisis--made me agree with Alex more than I ever had.
His key point in the interview is that the fundamental problem with how the Muslims are responding is that "there is no symmetry" -- that they publish deeply anti-semitic cartoons in the Middle East, so that they are being hypocritical in their demands. His argument is that a world where everyone mocks everyone else's religions is fine; or a world in which no one mocks anyone else's is fine--but you can't have it both ways.
Alex, you're right: he's not like us. I want to live in a world where we can publish these sorts of innocuous cartoons about any religion. I don't want to live in the world where no one can mock anyone else's religion--as symmetrical as it might be.
(I'll update this post with a link if I'm able to find it again later.)
UPDATE: added some verbiage in the first paragraph for clarity!
Posted by Morgan at 03:18 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
Moderate Muslims
At first, I was happy to see a web site Sorry Norway Denmark, by a group of moderate Muslims, unequivocally siding with the free press of Norway and Denmark, clearly criticizing the destruction and murder caused by their fellow Muslims as a result of the cartoon crisis.
Yet... I couldn't help but feel a bit less sympathetic for Norway and Denmark when I got to this paragraph, at the very end of their letter:
There is a strong tradition of friendship and cooperation between the Norwegian and Danish people and Arab people. Of most note is the continued support that these governments give to the Palestinian people in their struggle for freedom and liberation, and the brave stance that these governments have often taken to defend Palestinian rights. We sincerely hope these special bonds will not be broken.
It's hard to think of a Muslim-related problem in the world today that has less to do with the Jews than this cartoon crisis. (Israel is not involved and there are almost no Jews in Denmark.) How come they always bring it back to the Jews?
Having a tough time sympathizing for Denmark, Volokh recently made a related point (with a great factoid about the Danish General Worker's Union).
Posted by Morgan at 03:08 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
February 06, 2006
Common Law is Open Source Law!
The homepage of http://OpenSource.org reads:
The basic idea behind open source is very simple: When programmers can read, redistribute, and modify the source code for a piece of software, the software evolves. People improve it, people adapt it, people fix bugs. And this can happen at a speed that, if one is used to the slow pace of conventional software development, seems astonishing.
I believe this is largely the same argument used by supporters of the English common law legal tradition. From the article Morgan to which Morgan linked about Dubai adopting common law:
Why has DIFC chosen English common law in preference to the codified system of "civil" law, derived from Roman law and used throughout Europe, the Middle East and beyond? [...]"The judge has discretion to fashion remedies where precedents do not exist or existing remedies are not adequate to right the wrongs," he says.
The general principle is that having judges constructing local ad hoc remedies based on precedent is superior to civil law proclaimed by the state. It is very much parallel to having programmers construcing local ad hoc software solutions based on existing available code.
Perhaps this was obvious to others, but I just made the connection now.
Posted by Alex at 12:30 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
February 05, 2006
The mystery of "what are Malcolm Gladwell's political views?" has been solved
...by the New York Times
Gladwell, a self-described "right-winger" as a kid — he had a poster of Ronald Reagan on his wall during college — notes that his politics have changed over the years. When he was growing up, Canada was "essentially a socialist country" so "being a conservative was the kind of fun, radical thing to do," he said. "You couldn't outflank the orthodoxy on the left the way that people traditionally did when they wanted to be rebels. There was only room on the right." Now, he plays the flip side: "I hate to be this reductive, but an awful lot of my ideology, it's just Canadian. Canadians like small, modest things, right? We don't believe in boasting. We think the world is basically a good place. We're pretty optimistic. We think we ought to take care of each other," he said. "And it so happens that to be a Canadian in America is to seem quite radical." [MP3 audio clip.]On his Web site, Gladwell offers an apologia pro vita sua: "If I could vote (and I can't because I'm Canadian) I would vote Democrat. I am pro-choice and in favor of gay marriage. I believe in God. I think the war in Iraq is a terrible mistake. I am a big believer in free trade. I think, on balance, taxes in America — particularly for rich people — ought to be higher, not lower. I think smoking is a terrible problem and that cigarette manufacturers ought to be subjected to every possible social and political sanction. But I think that filing product liability lawsuits against cigarette manufacturers is absurd. I am opposed to the death penalty. I hate S.U.V.'s. I think many C.E.O.'s are overpaid. I think there is too much sex and violence on television."
Posted by Morgan at 12:17 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
Dubai: part of the country will no longer be subject to Dubai law, but English Common Law
Article here in the Telegraph.
Interesting, interesting development. The Common Law meme is spreading--third world dictators are now realizing how important it is.
This is also an interesting test of various propositions: Can a jurisdiction just declare itself to have the common law? (I don't know of a case where that has happened before--can you?). What will happen when people there start doing things that the Sheik disapproves of? How will multiple, deeply contradictory, legal systems coexist? That has been done before (think of Louisiana vs. the rest of the US; or Quebec vs. the rest of Canadia) but the Napoleonic and Common Law systems, although philosophically different, are in practice very close compared to the arbitrary dictatorial methods of Sheikdom.
Posted by Morgan at 11:23 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
February 04, 2006
"Best Of" Albums
Ann Althouse makes the great point:
But when did "best of" collections become respectable? I remember when it was considered embarrassing to purchase your music in that form. If you haven't been following an artist, you were supposed to pick an album. You were supposed to try to figure out which is the best one, and start there, with a set of tracks in the form the artist wanted.
I remember that "Best Of" albums used to be what girls listened to; guys would get every single Zep album and figure out for themselves which songs were good and which ones weren't--and sharing these preferences was a great discovery technique. But girls would just go and get the Queen's Greatest Hits album and tell everyone how great Bohemian Rhapsody and Another One Bites the Dust are. Real Men never had a Best Of album. (This is consistent with the general male obsession with trivia, a great point that Mencken makes in In Defense of Women.)
So, the fact that "Best Of" albums have become respectable is, to me, representative of the increased feminization of our culture.
Posted by Morgan at 01:37 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
February 03, 2006
The best description of Brussels I've ever seen
Here, from the Brussels Journal.
Posted by Morgan at 01:41 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (1)
February 02, 2006
Muslim Reaction to the Danish Cartoons
If we agree that we need to punish bad behavior far out of proportion, then--from the Muslim point of view--doesn't it make sense to be going all out because of these cartoons, as they are doing?
(Counter-point: the boy who cried wolf.)
Posted by Morgan at 01:56 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
February 01, 2006
Failing Flynn Effect in Britain?
It is a commonplace among people who study IQ that every generation has been geting smarter than the last. The effect whose causes are a matter of controversy is called the "Flynn Effect". Now a new study indicates that things have started to move in the other direction in Britain:
For a decade we’ve been told that our kids, just as they seem to be getting taller with each generation, are also getting brighter. Every year new waves of children get better GCSE, A-level and degree results than their predecessors. Meanwhile, in primary schools, the standards in national maths and English tests at 11 head in one direction — relentlessly upwards.Last week came the bombshell that blew a gaping hole in this one-way escalator of achievement.
Far from getting cleverer, our 11-year-olds are, in fact, less “intelligent” than their counterparts of 30 years ago. Or so say a team who are among Britain’s most respected education researchers.
After studying 25,000 children across both state and private schools Philip Adey, a professor of education at King’s College London confidently declares: “The intelligence of 11-year-olds has fallen by three years’ worth in the past two decades.”
Now, one of the things to do when you see surprising data is to check your experimental assumptions. One BIG question that is not answered by the article is whether the children studied are really from the same population that was studied in the 1990s and the 1970s. Given the vast amount of immigration to Britain and the fact that there are now more active Muslims than active Christians there, it is highly likely that the studied population has simply changed.
It would be helpful to compare the IQs of the children of recent immigrants with the IQs of multigenerational Brits. It is entirely possible that British cultural insitutions are intact and functioning, but that either they are not operating on the immigrant population or the immigrant population is simply less intelligent than the Brits.
Note, given that Arab Muslim culture is both polygamous and historically nomadic, it would be unsurprising if they did not compete well in practical intelligence with the monogamous and industrious Brits. (See my prior post on Polygamy. I will discuss the problems of nomads in a future post).
Note, it is also quite possible that the Brits themselves have really gotten stupider. The welfare state has created all the wrong incentives and European culture has been failing in all sorts of ways in the recent past. Given that immigrants are typically more energized than native populations, it is entirely possible that the immigrants are actually bringing up the score.
My point here is that more data would be really helpful.
Posted by Alex at 12:24 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
Eat me I'm a Danish
After 9/11, a common refrain in the United States was "We are all Israelis now." Meaning that we would not have to deal directly, domestically, and regularly with Muslim terrorists.
Since a Danish newspaper published some caricatures of Mohammed, the Muslim world has been aflame. Protesters in gaza are burning Danish flags, Saudi Arabia has recalled its ambassador, and Libya is closing its embassy.
The Danish are standing up to the pressure and now the French are joining them.
France Soir said it had published the cartoons to show that "religious dogma" had no place in a secular society.
[...]
Responding to France Soir's move, the French government said it supported press freedom - but added that beliefs and religions must be respected.
[...]
Under the headline "Yes, we have the right to caricature God", France Soir ran a front page cartoon of Buddhist, Jewish, Muslim and Christian gods floating on a cloud.It shows the Christian deity saying: "Don't complain, Muhammad, we've all been caricatured here."
The full set of Danish drawings, some of which depict the Prophet Muhammad as a terrorist, were printed on the inside pages.
I periodically get into debates with some of my fellow bloggers here as to whether the Europeans will develop some spine before they are overrun by the combination of their welfare state and unassimilated radical Islam. Here we have some evidence that they will.
Posted by Alex at 12:11 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)
