Taboo

So I watched a show called Taboo last night on the National Geographic channel.  They had 3 segments.  In Thailand, parents make their kids fight Mui Thai for money, a woman is still breast-feeding her 6 year old son, and shiite muslims butcher themselves and encourage their sons to butcher themselves during the “festival” of ashoura.

Oh, and they showed how 100 years ago, children in western countries worked at an early age.  Nice moral equivalence, this episode.  First of all, let’s take the breast-feeding story right out of it.  Whatever the merits of doing it that long, or of weaning a child at an earlier age, this just isn’t in the same league as the other segments!

Let’s quickly address child labor so we can get on to the real point.  Today, people take it as a god-given right of children not to work until 16 or 18.  This is the same error as Marxism.  Where will the stuff come from, that we all have a “right” to consume?  A childhood of leisure and education is a luxury only affordable to the wealthy (such as the majority of Americans today).  Societies such as America 100 years ago, or most of the world today, cannot afford this.

Now, on to sending children to risk their lives and their brains in the blood sport of Mui Thai.  They are poor.  They are doing it for money.  They need money.  But it’s wrong.  You earn money in order to pay for the values necessary to human life.  You can’t destroy human life in order to earn money (well you can, but I condemn it).  It’s bad enough when consenting adults risk their lives, health, and brains to fight for money.  It is obscene to force a child into this self-destructive lifestyle.

The one thing that I will say about it is that it appears (based on the “depth” of watching 20 minutes about it on TV, mind you!) to be based on a desire to earn money, based on human values.  That is not the case with the acts of bloody self-mutiliation of the shiites during ashoura.

Unlike the parents of the fighting toddlers of Mui Thai, who said they were confident that their children would not be seriously hurt, the parents of the children who were deeply cutting themselves in a frenzy of violent self-loathing in an out-of-control festival of thousands doing likewise knew their children could be killed.  They were not merely fatalistic about it, but defiant.

One father said he would not be sad if his son died.  One mother said that she would be proud if her son was martyred.

Folks, this is a death cult.  They don’t love or value their children.  They are trained from infancy that their lives are worthless, and the goal is death.

The multicultural announcer tried to obscure the distinction between a culture that loves its children and this culture that wants to destroy theirs.  But this is what we’re up against.

We basically, despite many decades of socialized education, love life and love our kids.  Our implacable enemy does not want to live.  They want us to die.  Not only do we not really grasp this, but we have TV shows and “news” that lie about this distinction.

The good news is that it is easy for our military to defeat these knife-wielding savages.  The bad news is that we have not yet admitted that we know who the enemy is.  We are only fighting a war “on terror”, that not-quite-clear tactic used by unknown or unmentionable people.  What is clear is that Lutheran grandmothers have to be searched before being allowed to get on airplanes, and it is not permissable to focus one’s search on muslims from saudia arabia or pakistan.

And right now, every voice on TV agrees that cultures are just different, and no judgement can be made.

Our lives depend on making this judgement.  If that statement seems far fetched, look at the example of the hare who raced the tortoise.  The hare didn’t think it was possible to lose.

In the Name of God, I Kill Thee

Today, Christians do not kill in the name of their god.  This may be due, in part, to what their bible does or does not say.  Or, as I believe, it has more to do with the culture today–still guided by the Enlightenment.

I was interested to see a little spat between Robert Spencer and Glenn Reynolds:

Well, I believe in evolution, memetic as well as physical, and I think that if violence works, more people will use it, and the religious doctrine to justify that will follow. Am I right, or is Robert Spencer right? The world had better hope that Spencer is, since our spineless powers-that-be seem determined to conduct the experiment. . . .

I think Reynolds is right.  Let’s not forget that for a period of 1000 years, plus or minus, Christians were constantly killing in the name of their god.  They could begin again (though I don’t think that this is imminent).

I think there is another, more important, point here.  Instead of focusing on defending Christianity (or Hinduism or Judaism, etc.) I think we need to focus on the fact that islamism is the enemy.  We can work together without having to argue theology on the problem of defeating the jihad.  I am not interested in Christianity per se.  I am very interested in defeating the jihadists permanently.

I don’t want to be fighting a war “on terrorism” for the rest of my life, replete with airport psuedo-security checks and other humiliations, not to mention the actual acts of mass murder on American soil!

Obama: Poverty->Anger->Terrorism

There was much ado in the blogosphere yesterday regarding Obama’s post-9/11 statements that poverty led to anger which is the cause of terrorism.  I think the conservative bloggers (properly) ripped him a new one for this tired, old leftist platitude.

I want to point something else out.  This is consistent with Barack’s and his wife Michelle’s view domestically.  The term they use for this is “social justice”.

In this view, being poor causes anger (which is the response to injustice).  I guess this is what they mean by social justice: someone else’s success is unjust.  This means that if the person can’t be forced to make you successful, then he must be forced down to your level.  I guess this is what Obama meant that the rest of the world isn’t “cool with” the fact that Americans eat well, drive well, and live with central air conditioning.

The correct word for this is actually “envy”.  The poor person today is taught to envy the non-poor people.  He is taught that their non-poorness comes at his expense.  This is why he gets angry: his whims are being frustrated.  He wishes for wealth (but it doesn’t come), so he is angry when he sees others for which this seems to have worked.  He does not bother to grasp that wealthy people didn’t get wealthy by wishing.

This is the epidemic that has swept the black community.  This is why they have reverends like Wright, Jackson, Sharpton, etc.  This is why Obama said originally about the views of Wright “I don’t think they’re particularly controversial.”

They aren’t.  The envy of wealthy people is nearly unanimous among the black community, and this is why they vote almost as a perfect block for the most marxist hard Left candidates on the ballot.

Not only is this a bad way to think about islamism and terrorism, it’s also a perfectly lousy way to think about domestic policy.

Journalist “Embedded” with Taliban

What does it mean for someone to be “embedded” with an enemy terrorist group?  Charles Johnson at Little Green Footballs writes today that this is sickening.  Yes, it is.

But more, the Taliban are at war with the United States of America.  To “embed” with them is to join with them.  So this “journalist” becomes a partisan for the enemy.  And if this is done on behalf of AP, then that makes the AP traitors and the enemy.  Justice demands freezing the assets of AP, declaring them to be an enemy combatant group, arresting every director and officer, and employee, disbanding the AP, and criminalizing membership in the AP.

If this sounds radical, then my answer is that the very notion of a free and sovereign country is radical.  Let’s start acting like we take it seriously before we lose it.

 

Update

Heh.  Ace of Spades has the money quote:

“No word yet if the AP will be charging the Taliban if they use the photos or excerpts of the story on their jihadi recruitment sites.”

Torturing Terrorists

One of the most important points of Objectivism is that morality is not in conflict with living.  Morality is a set of principles to guide living.

So let’s look at the contrary view for a moment.  For years, there has been controversy about the US policy of waterboarding terrorists.  To summarize, we have captured people who are:

• murdering US military forces
• torturing captured US military forces
• murdering innocent civilians
• torturing captured innocent civilians
• waging war to destroy the USA
• breaking every treaty governing warfare including:
  • hiding as civilians
  • hiding behind civilians
  • misdirecting return fire at civilians

The debate is a classic blind donkey vs elephant one, for the most part.  Donkeys hate President Bush, so they oppose everything he does.  So they oppose torture and waterboarding.  The fact that it weakens our war efforts is added incentive for these people.  Elephants can’t bring themselves to support “torture”, and so have to tortuously work the word waterboarding around until it is not “torture”.

Now Christopher Hitchens submits himself to waterboarding and writes about it.  He declares:

I apply the Abraham Lincoln test for moral casuistry: “If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong.” Well, then, if waterboarding does not constitute torture, then there is no such thing as torture.

Slavery uses the threat of violence and death against innocent people.  There is no argument to defend it, other than self-serving junk by would-be slave holders.

Torture–applied to terrorists–is a way to end the war more quickly.  Just a brief recap here, this means fewer Americans killed, fewer innocent civilians killed, reduced risk of a mass-murder atrocity on American soil (e.g. crashing airplanes into skyscrapers).

But many Americans have this notion of “morality” based on self-sacrafice.  To them, respecting the “civil rights” of terrorists is a moral imperative, but protecting the lives of the American military personnel that they ordered to fight on our behalf is not.

With sickness like this, it’s no wonder why the jihadists are holding their own against our massive military superiority.  We’re defeated before we begin.

Abstract Principle –> Real Consequences

How many innocent people did this terrorist kill?  Let’s call this the “moonbat toll”, the people killed due to the real consequences of their sick ideas.

Libertarian Support for Jihad

There is little difference between libertarianism’s anarchist bias and murderous jihad idealogy–and none that matters where the bodies hit the road.  I sometimes link to Coyote because he is thoughtful.  Well, today, he is blind, cavalier, and just plain old horribly wrong:

I am a bit late to this, having just gotten back in town, but this is extraordinarily good news: [that the Supreme Court is compromising our war effort]

To be clear, I agree with the title of his essay.  Rights are an attribute of humans not Americans.  But one does not wage a war with the sort of prissy, blind dogmatic, politically-correct notion that today governs our police and courts.

In a war, you shoot to kill.  You don’t throw away the lives of American soldiers trying to “arrest” enemy soldiers to bring back for trial.  You don’t throw away the lives of American soldiers (or Americans) by holding back during interrogation.

And you don’t give procedural protections (“rights” is the wrong word in any case) to skulking enemies who pretend to be civilians, hide behind civilians, and/or deliberately seek to harm civilians.  You extract every bit of information that they have and dump their remains in a ditch somewhere.

And you back this up with a policy that seeks to avoid warfare whenever possible, and which seeks to win as quickly as possible when necessary.  You don’t pretend that the enemy can’t be named, you don’t pretend that the “war” is against a tactic, and you don’t pretend that our “dispute” is with a particular leader.  You fight to win as quickly as possible so that you can end the hell that is war and go back to the goodness of peacetime!

Showing mercy to the enemy–much less releasing enemy combatants in wartime–is a good way to ensure more suffering to Americans.  Don’t innocent Americans have rights too?  What ever happened to those rights?

It is the rights of Americans that our government exists to protect.

Obama’s Religion

A while ago, I wrote that Obama has lied about his religion.  He was a muslim, and for all I can tell, still is.  Someone from Reuters actually posted some taqiyya on my blog.

Today, Melanie Phillips writes in the Spectator a devastating analaysis of “Princess Obama Syndrom”.  The money quote is:

To repeat once again for sufferers from PODS: the issue is NOT Obama’s religion, now or in the past. It is the many questions which need to be answered about a) why he has sought to conceal his early background; b) why he has so many indirect associations with radical Islamism; and c) whether these two questions are in some way related.

My only disagreement is that I think his religion does matter.  Islam is waging a war to destroy our civilization.  Every cleric, every sheik, every imam, and every ayatollah from San Francisco to North Carolina to Saudi Arabia to Pakistan agrees.  The Great Satan must die.

While this does not mean that every muslim wants to destroy the United States, it would be suicide to elect a muslim as President.  And, by the way, this particular musim has numerous close friends and associates who are radical islamists or friendly to their cause.

Are Leftists Trying to Destroy America?

Yesterday, I asked if Dems are trying to hurt the economy.  Today, I ask if leftists are trying to destroy the country altogether.

Charles at Little Green Footballs writes that the Supreme Court has ruled that terrorists–who were caught in battle trying to pretend to be civilians and/or hiding behind civilians and/or trying to murder civilians–have constitutional rights and can fight in US civilian courts.

Oh my god.  How wrong is this?  How evil??

I think I will write a lot more on this topic, but the bottom line is that you can’t fight a war with the rules that bind police and the courts dealing with a criminal in a civil society.  (Obviously, you can’t deal with a criminal in a civil society the way you would deal with an enemy soldier on a battlefield, either).

There is no way that these f—ers on the Supreme Court, or their sympathizers in the media or the Obama campaign can possibly be thinking about the principles of the matter.  This is so obviously about trying to appease our enemies.

To what end?

Why do leftists always “err” on the side of death and destruction?

Airport Security

Shortly after the act of war that destroyed part of NY City and the Pentagon, and which could have been much worse if our enemies were a bit luckier, there was a rational voice on the topic of security.  This voice (I don’t remember who it was) said:

You don’t defend against enemies at the airline counters.  You bring the fight to their home countries.

We decided not to pursue the countries that are the biggest supporters of terrorism: Iran and Saudi Arabia.  Instead, we have been chasing the illusion of security by making air travel ever more aggravting.

Today, Brian writes on SixMeatBuffet about a new intrusion:

Body-scanning machines that show images of people underneath their clothing are being installed in 10 of the nation’s busiest airports in one of the biggest public uses of security devices that reveal intimate body parts. [emphasis in original]

This is just the next degree of the same principle they’ve been using since the hijackings of the 1970’s.  We can trade little liberty for security because, in this instance, it will work somehow.  What we’re doing is imposing martial law on law-abiding citizens.  This has nothing whatsoever to do with actual security against state-funded terrorists waging war against us (and it won’t stop them just as every previous measure hasn’t stopped them).

I agree with Brian.  I don’t fly unless I must for work.  I drive up to 800 miles, and fly only if I don’t have time or if the distance is greater than that.