Feingold

The important ideas in this post can gleaned by reading the bolded paragraphs.

According to an AP news article, on Tuesday Senator Russ Feingold (D-WI) told a meeting of the Arab American Institute, "We must avoid using misleading and offensive terms that link Islam with those who subvert this great religion or who distort its teachings to justify terrorist activities." Feingold continued, "Fascist ideology doesn't have anything to do with the way global terrorist networks think or operate, and it doesn't have anything to do with the overwhelming majority of Muslims around the world who practice the peaceful teachings of Islam." My interpretation of what motivates Feingold's speech is that Feingold believes that if we lump all Muslims together under some label of evil, they will fight back as a group, which means more support for terrorism.

Now, I think we are at war with the whole of Islam and that Feingold is in denial. Feingold does admit the terrorism is real and he is proposing a strategy to deal with it. Choosing between Feingold's strategy and my more aggressive strategy for dealing with Islamic terrorism seems to me to come down to some fairly simple empirical questions:

1.Is Islam a religion of peace?
2.Is terrorism a distortion of its teachings?
3.Can saying nice things about Islam make it play nice with the rest of us?

I believe that the answer to first two question is a resounding no, but I have no interest in rehashing what you can read on Jihadwatch. I also believe that the answer to the third question is no. Once again, you can read in many places is that an aggressor's response to appeasement is more demands, but I want to go two additional issues here.
One additional issue with Feingold's appeasement strategy is if we don't attack Islam for its viciousness, how can any moderate faction even get enough influence to become part of the conversation. Currently, there are no moderate factions with any influence. They are only likely to get even mild influence if we force them down the throat of an unwilling Islamic world. Admittedly, I don't think moderate Islam has any chance at all, but if non-muslims want it to have some influence, we will have to demand and fund its influence.
A second additional issue with Feingold's appeasement approch is that it would need to be part of a coordinated strategy to win the hearts and minds of the Islamic world. Such a strategy would also require efforts to improve the image of America in the world and promote capitalism and tolerance. Feingold would vehemently oppose any effort to do any of that. The man spends virtually every waking second doing what he can do to hurt America's image and promote socialist fantasies and political correctness—which is the opposite of tolerance. So, yes, while there is a chance that Feingold's strategy could work in tune with other strategies, there is no chance they work would given Feingold's other objectives.
A third additional issue is we have to consider the time that it takes social change to occur. Social change is rather slow. Iran will have nuclear weapons soon. I don't think any nice guy strategy to Islam stands a prayer under that tight deadline.

Good Logic

I just read the most amazing op-ed in the today's Boston Herald by Jules Crittenden. One paragraph in particular asks just the right questions:

But enough about me.Some questions for you: Do you actually think our own president is a greater menace to world peace and stability than our opponents would be with nuclear weapons?Are we to accept the word of tyrants that they were well-intentioned and not engaged in weapons programs when all the evidence has convinced our leaders and intelligence agencies that they are? Has history given us any indication that sanctions without a credible threat will have an effect? Even among our own allies, we’ve found nations that tout humanitarian action and seek to avert war, while cynically pursuing corrupt financial arrangements with the same tyrants. Do you believe it is acceptable to have nations of demonstrated murderous intent in a position to control large portions of the world’s strategic resources? Tinpot dictators busy killing their own people can become brass-hat dictators and start killing other people. If we were to walk away from all of this, do you believe they would leave us alone?

It's question like these that have helped me win over half way to moonbathood people to a more realistic view of the war with Islam.

Thoughts on 9/11

Warning: The start of this post contains material that some people on the political right will find objectionable. I suggest people on the political right read the whole post, because they will find my change of heart most gratifying.

In the Islam War blog industry, one is required to make some comments about September 11 five years ago. In honesty, I didn’t really realize the problem five years ago. The stock market was doing so well that I thought everyone would be rich. Paradoxically given my love of capitalism, I was hanging out with leftist kids who cheered the fall of the WTC. I loved these kids rejection of normalcy, but still the leftist kids shocked even me by saying they didn’t care if businessmen died at the WTC. When they went into the woods to burn flags that night, I warned them not to let anyone see them. In one of their few outbreaks of good sense, they said they would be discrete. When they started stealing flags in the patriotic aftermath, I urged them to sell them. It was the time of the flag shortage, but they didn’t want to violate their socialist purity. I even offered to sell them and give them a 50-50 cut, but they realized that I am Capitalism's demon, even when fencing stolen goods.

A couple of weeks after 9/11, I invited the leftist kids for dinner. My dishes rivaled the art in many museums of modern art: World Trade Center Flambé and Ground Zero Tabouli. In retrospect, it was probably a mistake to use chicken, instead of pork for the flambé. I used red tomato, red pepper, and red onion in the tabouli. My leftist retard friends still laugh at those dishes, and I suppose I do too, but I no longer seek to trivialize September 11. I have learned about Islam since then and it scares me what we are up against.

We confront a murder cult that has been trying to kill off our Western Judeo-Christian/Secular society for the last 1400 years. We cannot sit around pretending everything is alright or indulge in fantasies that Bush is the cause of all evil. On the other hand, I do wonder if any person in a position of power who says Islam is a Religion of Peace should be tried for treason and executed. Do I, too, have Bush Derangement Syndrome?

Thinking back on human history, it was ok for us to ignore the threat of Islam before September 11 in the United States. It really wasn’t affecting us enough, though we should we should been picking up hints since the events in Iran in 1979. After 9/11, there is no excuse for how we have ignored Islam. We have had ample time to honestly evaluate Islam’s goals and aims and react accordingly. Since Islam has declared war on us, we should begin to fight back. President Bush has wished to escape this logic with his hopes to secularize the Islamic countries, while ironically pushing theocracy here in America. While many bad things can be said about Bush’s approach, let us concentrate on the good. Bush’s intentions are honorable. I don’t think that last sentence can be repeated too often given the amount of outrageous lies flung against Bush. Bush is a decent guy who hopes to avoid the War the Muslims have declared, but Bush is naïve to believe that people brainwashed into a murder cult are going behave civilized because he gives them the opportunity to have a democracy. I suppose we had to try Bush’s nice guy approach first. Perhaps, we were even morally obligated to do so, before we go in and do what we need to do: slaughter them all. It's just that we need to explain much better how the War in Iraq represents an effort to be a loving, gentle people. I haven't even seen many conservatives many conservatives make this point, which is the best defence of what Bush has done. Ironically, I'm probably better positioned to see the necessity of making this defence of what is happening in Iraq than the conservatives, because I'm a political moderate who hates Bush. (There is no contradiction between hating a political figure and saying the political figure as a person is a decent man. We forget this all too often.)

In this anniversary of 9/11, we should honestly consider the probability that Muslims will act like anything besides murderous savages. Let’s consider at the behavior of fundamentalist Christians. For instance, would Pat Robertson ever admit that Creationism is nonsense? Though evolution is a proven fact by any reasonable criteria and Creationism is not essential to Christianity, we can be pretty certain that Christian fundamentalists aren’t going to renounce their Intelligent Design nonsense. How can we then possibly expect the Muslims to give up one of the key teachings of their religion, the obligation to kill or enslave everyone else in the name of Allah? It’s not like you prove them wrong by any objective criteria like Creationism/Intelligent Design can be shown wrong.

(I suppose I should come clean with a weak spot in my argument above. I believe that fundamentalist Christians will over the long run accept gay marriage, since there is so little discussion of homosexuality in the Bible and fundamentalist mothers of gay sons will demand gay marriage in their churches. On the other hand, jihad is a central tenet o the Koran and no powerful group internal to Islam with an organic interest to oppose it.)

If we harbor hatred towards any politicians, hatred towards Bush should be kept at rational level. If we feel a need for demonification, our demons should be the European political elite who gave away Europe to the Arabs. While I oppose torture for virtually every other human being, I would support torturing in barbaric ways Valéry Giscard d'Estaing, Jacques Chirac, the entire leadership of the all European socialist parties, and similar traitors in other parties for how they enabled Arab immigration into Europe. Of course, Bush’s response to immigration is not in the any better than d'Estaing’s. Luckily, we have a civilized country to our south. I may strongly oppose the flood of Mexican immigrants, but permitting them in isn’t the suicide of our civilization.

Unrelated thoughts about Ahmad Shah Massoud illustrating why this is not a hate blog
I read up recently on Ahmad Shah Massoud who Al-Qaeda deliberately killed before the 9/11 attack. He seemed rather reasonable for a muslim, despite the whining by human rights groups. I would like to see a human rights activist ninny be appointed head of a political faction in a muslim country (and many other countries). He would get to decide whether he wants to die maintaining his human rights purity or live. As I continue to argue, we have to judge people in context and not simply according to abstract rules. This does not deny the importance of the abstract rules when making moral judgments. It is just to judge in a way suitable for living on Earth, instead of the ethereal, geometric kingdom.

Massoud has such perfect teeth, like he had braces. Where in his Afghan childhood, could one get braces? Anyway, in some of his younger photos, he’s really quite sexy. Sadly, there are no shirtless photos of him on the web. For that matter, why not mujahidin porn? It may not be Islamic, but it sure would be Afghan culture. Oh well, here I’m calling for the genocide of all who believe like the attractive Massoud, but I fear it is necessity in the era of cheap WMD. And there will always be other attractive men.

The Scurrilous Argument Challenge

One popular illogical argument in political forums like LitteGreenFootballs and DailyKos goes like this:

An allegedly evil figure, X, supports political candidate, Y
Therefore, Y is evil.

I challenge anyone to come up with an argument of this form to discredit the moderate Senator Olympia Snowe(R-ME), because I donated a small sum to her campaign. To make it easier, you should know that Olympia Snowe is Greek and has been hostile to the Turkish government as I think we should be.

Let Me Be Your Paragon of the Evil

Ralph Peters is concerned about Islam haters who advocate the genocide of all 1 billion muslims on the planet. The nice, Christian people at jihadwatch are pointing out that what Peters says doesn’t apply to them, and they are right. As far as I know, I'm the only person with a large vocabulary and a sense of humor to call for the genocide of all 1 billion muslims in a socially progressive and ecologically sensitive way. My Doctrine of Benign Genocide will enable us to kill a large population of religious crazies & have our society remain a decent, pleasant place to live. Indeed, our post-genocidal society can be a better place than now! The soldier will return from slaughtering thousands of muslims to lifting an earthworm from the sidewalk and throwing it in the grass so it won't be stepped on. There is no contradiction. One may be careful about butterflies but be bloodthirsty about guinea worms and bed bugs

It's true that I have Coulter syndrome and articulate my statements as extreme as possible. I know that most "muslims" aren't dangerous crazies, simply because in all religions, most people follow the religion in only the most superficial manner. Muslims are only evil when they take the step of taking their religion seriously. We shouldn't let Peters know that the whole point of Coulter syndrome is to aggravate people like him.

So here I am, the paragon of the “rotten core of American [right-wing] extremism.” Let's be clear that Peters is right in claiming I am “bent on discrediting honorable conservatism.” After all, I’m a political moderate who roots for politicians like Senators Lincoln Chafee(R-RI) and Joe Lieberman(D-CT). It’s also true that I am bent on discrediting honorable liberalism. I advocate people thinking for themselves and not following simplistic political packages. Let me be clear that I'm not trying to get people to give up on big ideas in politics like liberalism and conservatism. There is much to admire in conservatism and liberalism as political philosophies. It’s just that the contemporary baskets of unrelated ideas known now as conservative and liberal are both nonsense. Further, it's not clear what the bulk of right-wing positions in the United States have to do with conservatism and what the bulk of the left-wing positions have to do with liberalism. Because of our refusal to think, we deserve the approaches the left and right give us.

I do have to object to Peters' entirely predictable claim that “when you read between the lines, that all Muslims are evil and subhuman.” I hope that I don’t come across that way. If someway I haven’t been clear, muslims are typical humans corrupted by an evil ideology—just like Nazis and Communists are. And people acting on the influence of evil ideals do evil things like terrorize their fellow citizens as Mohammed Reza Taheri-azar did on March 6, 2006 in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, as Naveed Afzal Haq did on July 28, 2006 in Seattle, Washington, as Omeed Aziz Popal did on August 29, 2006 in San Fransisco, and so forth. Despite Peters's implication otherwise, it is only a matter of time until some muslims “have strapped on bombs and walked into Wal-Mart.” To repeat myself, individual muslims not strongly influenced by their religion can be nice people. The trouble is that people may turn to their religious faith at any time in their life. For instance, I saw reference in the press to two of the three above named terrorist not being devout at some point in their life, though I’m not willing to put full faith in such news without more research. Still, you should know that the nice muslim guy you knew two years may have become a bloodthirsty terrorist since then. I wonder about the Palestinian boy I dated five years ago. The atmosphere was always tense when Islam was brought up, and this is long before I realized how Islam threatens human survival. Back then, I believed we could fuck our way to peace with the Palestinians. My orgasm was my present to mother Israel.

I’m over my silly leftism of fucking=peace now, but Peters is not over my silly leftism: “Once free of the maladies of the Middle East, Muslims thrive in America. Like the rest of us.” In fact, the Islamic terrorists have come from Westernized, middle class back ground like my ex-boyfriend with his MD/PhD. I’d be more concerned about a random muslim from the middle class of the United Kingdom being a terrorist than a muslim from any other country or economic class. Other middle class Western Europeans would be next on my list. We do not corrupt muslims as fast as Peters thinks. Hell, I’m not even sure if Palestinian boyfriend was gay. He is more likely to have been a straight man dealing with Islamic segregation of sexes like a prisoner. I always played the woman’s role not just in our sex, but even in our flirting. He would be annoyed otherwise, and I would put up with it because he had an amazing body. If we can’t even get muslim straight men who have been here over seven years to fuck girls not guys, getting muslims to act like the “rest of us” will not be a quick process.

Robert Spencer has much more to say about about why Peters is wrong at JihadWatch.Org.


I had another thought related to making arguments that the ideas above can illustrate. The right-wing often prides itself on its embrace of an "objective morality" and condemns its opponents for not having an objective morality. I think that this is wrong on many levels. Most obviously, the far left, like the far right, often has a small number of rules that they apply to every situation, and so the left's morality is every bit as objective as the right. But there is a sense in which objective morality disarms us in arguments. We lose the ability to say better or worse. Some examples:

1. Civil libertarians who can't tell the difference between keeping enemy combatants in Gitmo and police arbitrarily imprisoning American citizens
2. So-called pro-lifers who claim to be unable to tell the difference between killing an adult and killing a fetus.
3. Leftist who can't tell the difference Israel defending itself against Islamic terrorism and Islamic terrorism.

At the risk of my being boring, let's make me make some obvious moral judgments to illustrate how I think we should think about things. If I am correct that my Palestinian ex-boyfriend was straight, he would hardly be the only heterosexual muslim man to practice sodomy. Islamic societies are societies where straight boys leave the natural use of the woman, burn in their lust one toward another; men with straight men working that which is unseemly, and receiving in themselves that recompense of their error which was meet (Romans 1:27). I'd like to make the moral claim that it is wrong to pervert desire from it natural course for any ideological reason, though to avoid an unnecessary argument with the left here let me grant that some experimentation may be exempt from this criticism.
Thus, we should condemn Christian Right Reparative Therapy leading gay men to unnatural sex for them, Muslim misogyny leading straight men to sodomy, and the postmodern nonsense of bisexuality which leads to both bad outcomes. In regard to the last, studies of the human brain activity in young men provide the empirical evidence that there is no bisexuality, but don't expect gay rights groups to drop demands for bisexual rights anytime soon. The least bad of these three causes of perverted sex is bisexuality, because it is freely chosen and people have a easy time getting over it. The overwhelming common pattern is a person has a few encounters in their early twenties and they get over claiming to be bisexual. I have observed this in every bisexual I've known for a long time. The second least bad is Christian Right Reparative Therapy, because like bisexuality it is freely chosen and people get over it at probably the same frequency as bisexuality. The trouble with Christian Reparative Therapy is that encourages people to feel bad about themselves for being guilty while bisexuality makes people feel good about themselves for being open-minded, different, and original--just as punk rock kids feel so different and original for cutting their hair like kids did in the late seventies. Muslim misogyny leading straight men to sodomy is by far the worse of these three causes of perversion. It is a system you can't escape--more like a prison than a fashion statement. There are many people who would attempt to morally equivalence the Christian Right Reparative Therapy with Islamic misogyny which leads to sodomy or even more likely with Islamic homophobic, but we should attack back. Christian Right Reparative Therapy is one's own choice, while leading a lifestyle with prison like segregation of the sexes is not. Nor is being stoned to death for sodomy optional under sharia.

ambigious feelings about far right political activity

As a gay Jew who loves the West, I'm delighted that white racist extremists in UK are waking up to a real threat, instead of traipsing along in their usual paranoia. They are releasing video threats against Islam immigrants. It's about time some group takes at least a feeble step to make the muslims feel unsafe. The muslims have made me have reasonably fears about my safety as a gay Jew. Jews in the Western Europe now must fear for their personal safety at levels unknown since Hitler. Why is it that the Muslims get a free pass to terrorize everyone else and no one gets to fight back?

It's also great they are actually doing something that may discourage a few immigrants. A majority of Western people have views on immigration more similar to the white extremists than with the West's political elite. I wish there were some way to beat the political elite at the ballot box, but its hard to defeat an idea shared by George W Bush and John McCain as well as by Jacques Chirac and Ted Kennedy. There is no political avenue open on this issue. In the absence of political avenues, I worry about these right wing extremists getting too popular by finding ways to air a popular opinion that will be even more popular when the muslims succeed in their next mass murder. It is not in my interest as a gay Jew for these extremist groups to get too powerful. I was partly motivated to start this blog out of fear that if the far right is the only group to defend the West, then the support for the far right will become uncomfortably strong. More moderates should join me in defending the West. Look, I'm not asking here for them to agree with me that genocide of Muslims is necessary. I'm just asking my fellow political moderates to state that our culture and its people are worth preserving. I realize that even saying that will earn you the label of racists from the PC police, but can't you stand yourself a little?

I also worry that the main stream media will use the white extremist groups' activities to discredit doing anything about the tidal wave of immigration. There is a strong need for people who these white extremists group respect to tell them to do everything they do with propaganda impact in mind. They should supplement other political efforts rather detract from them. Now is a good time for reasonable people on the far right to converse with the white extremists. Of course, I realize that there is as much hope for sane political activity from extremists as there is for sane poltical discussion in the mainstream media.

At least, we know we are completely safe from the mainstream media using jihadi videos to discredit muslim groups.

math nerd post script: I wonder how much the political inability to combat massive immigration is due to a lack of understanding of exponential growth. Could we be doomed by our fear of math?