Nyah – I think the Left loves Glenn Beck. Or should. If I were running the Vast Left Wing Conspiracy, and playing to win, I’d wish him an even bigger audience.
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Some seem to believe that concerns about conservatives making fools of themselves by publishing ludicrously alarmist statements about “creeping sharia,” or by letting themselves be duped by Islamophobic activists, are exaggerated. This post demonstrates, I think, the contrary.
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If y’all would stop characterizing those things we find revolting (honor killings, “female circumcision,” terrorism?) as “Muslim practices,” maybe people would stop rightly accusing you of “defamation of religion.”
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Did you ever hear anyone declare that the fate of Kyrgyzstan, say, touched on “something perduring and eternal”?
No, the support for Israel that is offered by me and like-minded people is based not on headline-devouring apocalypticism but on something perduring and eternal: a sense that the fate of the Jews implicates humanity, that a world that refuses to find a place for the Jews is engaged in a rejection of even more fundamental truths. This State of Israel is, yes, a state like all other states; that should go without saying. But how strange that, of all the 200 or so states-just-like-other-states in the world today, this one alone is treated increasingly as a pariah that’s on a deserved path to being wiped out.
Well, which is it? Can a state be “just like other states” and at the same time a heartstring-plucking symbol of “more fundamental truths” that “implicate humanity”?
Forget the plucked strings: Even the famous bell-tower striking the hours of high noon right next door may never penetrate the ears of Israel’s would-be best friends: You shouldn’t declare Israel of “perduring and eternal” importance on the one hand, then be surprised when others, your enemies especially, fail to treat it “just like all other states.” There is a perduring and near-eternal resonance here with a whole holy unholy heckuva lot of historical baggage, something about the downside of being “chosen.”
With unique and supreme importance comes unique and supreme scrutiny. Sometimes unique and supreme myopia, too.
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The far-right third party that Nevada GOP Senate candidate Sharron Angle called home in the 1990s supported abolishing “the debt money system” and ran a vitriolic anti-gay insert in state newspapers that portrays LGBT people — or, as Angle’s party called them, “sodomites” — as child-molesting, HIV-carrying, Hell-bound freaks, according to documents obtained by TPM.
Hey, lefty, child-molesting, HIV-carrying, Hell-bound freaks are people, too! Stop with the judgmental negativity, haters.
narciso wrote:
No the reverse is more often true, consider 9/11, the Cole bombing,
Ft. Hood, Christmas Flight, Times Square, et al, they often ignore what’s right in front of their face
Including Colombine and Virginia Tech,opps My apologies,different story.
The Cole bombing – a few unfortunate casualties and a damaged ship. 9/11, two buildings and 3,000 civilians. Ft. Hood, more unfortunate casualties. Two additional failed and completely amateurish attacks. If either had somehow succeeded (which is a stretch), another infinitesimal material impact – to be answered, in all likelihood, by orders of magnitude larger casualties on the “other side,” though more among the uninvolved than among the responsible. From a materalistic perspective, setting emotionalism and symbolism aside, it’s a measure of how well things are in hand overall that such threats and events loom large in our calculations, which have more to do with public relations and the desirability of avoiding escalated confrontation than any threat to a vital area. We have the luxury of indulging imaginary tribalistic reaction to affronts, our extension of moral significance only to members of our pseudo-tribe, allowing numerous otherwise reasonable people to talk up genocidal retaliation and world-historical social and moral self-disfigurement.
If we really had the war that some seem to want, all of that stuff would amount to negligible friction. No one would be “terrorized” by it who wasn’t directly on hand.
The point. dear Czar is that much of this was known in some fashion, yet it happened because of bureaucratic incompetence
Terrorist attacks are not and will never be the main danger. Those conducting them are, in fact, doing us a favor by making it impossible for us to ignore the main and real danger which is militant Islam subverting from within.
@ False Witness: Or the main danger might be allowing demagogic politicians to curtail our freedom and consolidate power into their own Cheneyesque hands by calling for extreme measures to combat an external danger that is relatively small.
You know considering that there is one political figure, who considers
‘information to be a distraction’ has a cadre of supporters who long for him to assume dictatorial powers, believes freedom of speech, is a ‘negative liberty’ along with others who believe that freedom of speech
stands in the way of ‘redistribution of wealth’ and community organizing, I think Cheney, either fils or daughter is the least of your
problems
@ Parson Logic T ReFog:
I’ve noticed that Hopey Hussein Changey and his party’s fully controlled congress have repealed the Patriot Act, closed Guantanamo and ended all the other civil liberties threats implemented by that bad guy Cheyney.
And I’m still eagerly awaiting the scrupulously fair trial of the bearded freak that Cheyney and his minions were holding illegally.
Whatever happened to the highly ethical and totally outraged politically disinterested terrorist lawyers who used to make a big stink about trampling on the rights of all those Gitmo guys? Did Cheyney and his minions round them up in the middle of the night and silence them?
@ False Witness:
Stop torturing yourself, Sully. We’re old enough to know that unringing the bell ain’t easy.
http://www.house.gov/house/Contract/CONTRACT.html
You might as well be asking about heroic unperson Ogilvy’s efforts on the Malabar Front, Sully, we have always been at War with EastAsia
@ Parson Logic T ReFog:
Unringing the Patriot Act ain’t hard at all, it’s just a bit politically unpopular. I’m beginning to harbor just a hint of a smidgeon of a vague suspicion that the motives of the outraged anti-Bush and Cheyney “civil libertarians” were not pure.
And as for that bearded KSM dude; I’m very confident there are tens of thousands who would be very glad to ring, or unring, his bell quite smartly if given the opportunity.
CK MacLeod wrote:
@ Rex Caruthers:
Oh, c’mon, there’ve been far stupider posts at NZ Contentions this week.
I told you, so,our team was cursed by CONTENTIONS
@ Rex Caruthers:
NZ Contentions = Non-Zombie Contentions (you call it Real Contentions, but I think ZC is “Real Contentions,” kind of like the Real IRA vs the IRA).