Virtual Church of the Blind Chihuahua

So how does a nice, Jewish boy become a radical Islamist? You think I'm making this up, right? Wrong. It actually happened. It's okay - he outgrew it and went to law school – but his book about it is a good read, and an important testimony to how radicalization works, and is working. To this very day, maybe even in your home town.

Here's a review.

Forewarned is forearmed. Enjoy.

Judging by their commentaries on J. K. Rowling's seven-volume Harry Potter series, Lakshmi Chaudhry (writing for The Nation) hates what Lisa Schiffren (writing for The Weekly Standard) likes. Chaudhry thinks Rowling's moral lessons in what is, after all, a work of children's literature, are "politically evasive." Schiffren is put off by Harry's not ever killing anyone, not even his worst enemy.

Come now. Do we really want to politicize our children? And do we really want Harry to become one of those "underage fighters" like those who are the scourge of developing societies in places like Africa and Central Asia?

Finally, Chaudhry decries the triteness of the personal - it seems that the great conflict wasn't really about some noble abstraction (like liberating the masses, one supposes), rather it was about the freedom to live an ordinary life. Schiffren celebrates this, rightly claiming that all the great causes are ultimately about the freedom to live our ordinary lives - that, ultimately, all political philosophy, political economy, all politics is about the personal life, and who should determine how we might best live it. Schiffren thinks that determination is best made by each of us. One wonders who Chaudhry thinks should make it.

The tug-of-war between the two reviews reinforces my opinion that Liberals and Conservatives each live in half of reality, more or less.

Your results:You are Geordi LaForge.
You work well with others and often fix problems quickly. Your romantic relationships are often bungled.

Click here to take the Star Trek Personality Quiz

Sometimes I think that (in the United States anyway) political parties can be characterized by the delusions shared by their respective leaderships. For instance, the Republican delusion seems to be that everything can and should be run like a business. That this doesn't work with war - that you can't fight and win with bean counters (think Rumsfeld) forcing you to do it on the cheap - is only beginning to dawn on them. They even think you can run the National Laboratories like businesses, and have replaced the old University-run management with business consortia. Yes, the University of California is still involved, but the business is changed for the worse, including the compensation plan that used to help retain seasoned scientists. (And the Republicans are mouthing the same platitudes I heard at the now defunct Bell Labs when it began to be run like a business 20 years ago.) Indeed the Republicans think the business delusion applies to everything and everyone but themselves - no business could stay in business, or its managers out of prison, if its finances were run like our government.

The Democrats, on the other hand, labor under the delusion of Amerocentrism. They think everything in the world revolves around us, and therefore it is our foreign policy that determines everything that happens in the world. For example, they think we would have no war against the Bin-Ladenists if we had treated the 9/11 attacks as an international police matter. [Never mind that we treated the attacks leading up to 9/11 as police matters, which gave the Bin Ladenists the time and shelter to organize, recruit and grow strong. It was not our response to 9/11 that led to a surge in recruitment - it was the images of the towers collapsing all over the internet, which the Bin Ladenists downloaded and incorporated into their recruiting videos. More...]

Amero/Euro-centrism is also the reason why many people (not just Democrats) think that if we were only nicer to everyone, they would like us and adopt our values. Sorry, huge portions of humanity see things differently. While we might think that earning a reasonable living at a tolerable job and coming home to watch TV without fighting with our neighbors or being repressed by my government is the pinnacle of human achievement, others find it unbearable. To them, a life without struggle (other than to earn the next dollar) is a life without honor, without glory, and therefore without meaning. Therefore the culture that promotes such a life is inhuman and must be stamped out. While our enemies might complain about our foreign policy, we need to understand that what they really hate is us. And that we can only change that by ceasing to be ourselves.

On the question of possible reparations paid (presumably) by the US Government to descendents of Africans enslaved in America, the answer is NO. The institution of legal slavery in the United States ended 144 years ago in 1863. The Confederate States of America continued the practice until its military defeat by US forces in 1865. In other words, the US fought and won a very costly war to end slavery, so the cost of reparations must be deducted from the cost of the war, with interest. But more to the legal point, there is nobody alive today who can show that they themselves have been personally damaged by the above referenced slavery.

On the other hand, there are plenty of people who can show that they have been damaged by the Jim Crow laws that used to be common throught the United States until the middle 1960s. Or the discriminatory hiring practices that were not stopped until the then farcical "Equal Opportunity" was replaced by "Affirmative Action," in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Or even the red-lining and steering practices of the banking and real estate industries that continued into the 1980s. Folks who have been on the receiving end of such practices are still very much alive, but somehow the idea of reparations for slavery always seems to push their causes out of public view. Could it be because someone might actually have to pay up if we could keep public attention on our more recent practices?

Dear Barack Obama,

I like you, and I may support you for President someday, but not this go-round. You have more book-learning than many of your opponents. But today, you proved to me that you lack the necessary real-world experience, by raising the specter of US troops on Pakistani soil.

President Musharraf's regime is poised on the edge of a knife. On one side he is undermined by the Pakistan People's Party composed of ethnic Sindh's led by Benazir Bhutto (widely believed to have been corrupt both times she was Prime Minister of Pakistan), and on the other by a collection of Islamofacist parties openly sympathetic with al-Qaeda. In the middle is the Pakistani military led by Musharraf, trying to keep Pakistan together.

At the same time, we have a nuclear arms standoff between Pakistan and India. Yes, Barack, both countries have already built and tested nuclear weapons. They even got close to having a war which might have gone nuclear, when Islamofacists based in Pakistan bombed the Indian Parliament a few years ago.

Now it may be that one of the things that keeps the Islamofacists from gaining enough sympathizers to topple Musharraf's government (and take possession of Pakistan's nuclear arsenal) is that, so far, Musharraf has managed to keep massed US troops from crossing into Pakistan. You have just signaled that in an Obama administration, this might no longer be the case.

Even the mere talk of US military incursions into Pakistan by a candidate for US President might have potential to destabilize Pakistan. Such destabilization could lead India (in an attempt to pre-empt a nuclear attack by a new Islamofacist regime) to try to sieze Pakistan's nuclear weapons. The Islamofacists, knowing that they cannot prevail against India in a conventional conflict, might opt to use their new nuclear weapons, rather than let India take them away. In other words, your remarks may court the possibility of igniting a regional nuclear war.

Your are correct to note that the Pakistani army has been unable to control Pakistan's mountainous Northwest Frontier Provinces and Federally Administered Tribal Areas where Bin Laden and company are widely suspected to be hiding out. But no army in history ever has.

So maybe we could get Bin Laden if we sent troops into Pakistan, and maybe we couldn't. But one thing is clear: all hell might break loose if we tried it. The irony of it is that, in a manner of speaking, Bin Laden (if he is there, if he is even still alive), may be hiding under Pakistan's nuclear umbrella.

If you want to get the al-Qaeda senior leadership thought to be in Pakistan, Barack, then you had better have a really good, well thought out plan, not based on book learning, but on ground truth knowledge. You would also do well to make sure they are really there. And it would be best to keep quiet about it.

It isn't about policy, it's about pride. Or as it's known in the Christian world, the sin of pride, and the self-deceptions, the paranoid fantasies that whole peoples will adopt in order to save face in the face of cultural change.

Cultural change is the inevitable result of globalization bringing cultures into such close contact that they interpenetrate: people from different cultures are trying to live on each other's turf. And the cultures that are dying are the old honor/shame cultures of northern Africa, the Middle East, and Central Asia that date from the Time of Ignorance before the coming of Islam.

To be respected in a traditional honor/shame culture, you must know more than your children. You must force all your family members to retain the details of your cultural dress and lifestyle, because the source of your honor is adherence to the code of honor that prescribes that dress and lifestyle, and any other choices they might make reflect badly on you. Yet you are surrounded by media which your kids are more savvy at using than you are, and it carries appealing images of alternative dress and lifestyles. You almost begin to feel like a left-behind loser with a rag on your head.

But, wait! There's a quick fix! A paranoid fantasy that makes the surrounding culture evil and you good. The other culture consists of devils who are attacking your religion! You are good and wise, they are depraved. But they are winning, and must be stopped! KILL THEM!!!!!

See? You're feeling better (meaning superior in an honor/shame culture) already. Never mind that Islam is universal and transcends culture, never mind that Islam as a religion is almost nowhere under attack, and that with over a billion adherents, shows no sign of going away.

Now once you've adopted the paranoid fantasy, all you need do is twist any facts you can into supporting your fantasy, and disregard those you can't. This is the dynamic behind the film, "Valley of the Wolves," in Turkey, for example. The film purports to be a documentary and depicts the current Iraq conflict as what yesterday's Wall Street Journal calls, "an organ-harvesting operation run by greedy Jews and fundamentalist Christians."

Unfortunately for us, the paranoid fantasists will think what they want to think and do whatever they can to inflict mega-violence on all their designated enemies, regardless of any of our words or actions. But fortunately for us, their cause is already lost, partly because their culture is simply not competitive, and partly because their ideology is rooted in idolatry and blasphemy. Idolatry because they imagine that God is as wedded to their culture as they are, and blasphemy because they impute their own rage (and evil intent) to God.

So have a good look at the picture above. These are the faces of the defeated, but they are not going down without a fight (even a nuclear one, if they can get the wherewithal). The pity is that the fight is unnecessary: nobody is insulting Islam (because in modern culture it is meaningless to try to insult a revealed religion), nobody is even insulting them, because we're all too politically correct to do that. It's just that they feel insulted (dishonored, shamed), because the surrounding culture does not afford them honor in their traditional ways of getting it. Rather than open their minds and hearts to new ways of being Muslim, they trap themselves into thinking that they must subjugate the rest of us, or live with dishonor.

Finally, contrast their behavior with that of the surrounding culture. People like those in the photo rioted over the "Muhammad" cartoons, because they feel genuinely (culturally) threatened. If the British were as touchy, they would have responded to the above provocation with riots and mass deportations. But they can afford to be less touchy, because their cultural identity and sense of self-worth is not threatened. They know that ultimately, it just doesn't matter what these people think.