Epigrams and Aphorisms from the Right

I must, alas, confess that I failed to note the various authors of these strikes (many were Twitter posts)--but I will publish them anyway:

The more one learns about Charlie Hebdo, the more you realize it's a vile magazine totally supportive of a non-white future for France.

Muslim immigration into non-Muslim nations: the worst idea of the 20th century, after communism.

It isn't whether the French will have the freedom to practice satire. It's whether France has the right to stay French.

When zoo animals get loose and harm people, the question should be to find out WHO opened the cage not to get mad at animals...

So much for the magically transformative power of geography. Two of the three Muslim killers in Paris were born in France.

"There are good Muslims." Yeah, great. Now guess what happens when the bad Muslims win battles? The good Muslims fall the fuck in line.

Lie of the Day: "They aren't Muslims, they're terrorists." You may not believe in tribalism, but tribalism believes in you.

Allow me to encapsulate the mentality of white decadents right now: "There are still plots of non-vibrant land I can retreat to!"

Charlie Hebdo won't wake up the white man. Only the white masses stringing up the white elite will wake up the white man.

I'm coming to think that white European civilization (and outposts) can't survive without a return to a vigorous religious belief.

I think it was a smart attack from the jihadist perspective. Sure, people will pound their chests and declare I AM THIS SHITTY FRENCH MAGAZINE, but back in reality the point has been made. Because it is an attack on the media. It exposes the weakness and insecurity of Western elites. I'm sure there will be a crackdown of some kind, some cells will be rolled up, security will be tightened in some respects. But the impression has been made. Your freedom is meaningless against someone who hates you totally. And now you are surrounded by them.
So for now there will be a crackdown, solidarity, speeches. This will last maybe two months. Then, gradually, a growing concern about those who are always going around upsetting these volatile people. Now these can be talked to, cajoled, threatened. Unlike the men with AK-47s. The recent EU Joint Statement enacts exactly this response: restrict citizens' speech, spy on citizens, disarm citizens, propagandize citizens--and, of course, continue current immigration policies. Overall, it looks like a big, big win for the Islamists.  

Minions of the Tyrant

http://majorityrights.com/weblog/comments/hunting_innocent_patriots_on_a_pretext
Apparently Breivik, the right-winger who killed several dozen civilians in Norway, "liked" a letter this fellow Hamilton wrote. Consequently, British Counter Terror units came down on Hamilton and commenced smearing him and lying about his activities. His real crime was opposing the replacement of Englishmen in England with Muslims and blacks. I don't often hear about Muslim preachers being prosecuted when some terrorist "likes" their babblings toward a new Caliphate.

This is the Way the World Ends

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/30/magazine/how-ready-are-we-for-bioterrorism.html?pagewanted=1&ref=magazine&adxnnlx=1320145648-K5idnXUdyKqBqlIIQsGvhw

The Bio-Defense establishment’s official position seems to be that a smallpox outbreak would be the worst case scenario bioattack. The article mentions a simulation of such an attack done a few years ago, which concluded that a million Americans would die. Calling this the “worst case” might be right if the simulation were modified to “a genetically engineered smallpox outbreak”—the toll would be higher. No one knows by how much!

Diseases can be “improved” for virulence or communicability or survivability or vaccine resistance or treatment resistance—or, theoretically, any other imaginable traits—by means of genetic manipulations. This has been possible since the 70s. And, today, it’s not even difficult to modify diseases. It is difficult, however, to achieve genetic modifications that will produce desired results. That is, transposing genes within an organism’s DNA, as a mechanical operation, is cheap and easy. Finding out which modifications will “improve” the beast remains difficult and expensive because so many non-linear variables come into play, and precise calculation of their interactions is impossible—the Soviets had to do extensive animal testing to determine what effects various modifications would have when exposed to animal immune systems and the natural environment. So, the worst case might involve a more virulent, more communicable disease not susceptible to conventional treatment, a disease that might kill far more than a million Americans. Even back in the 60s, per the article, before genetic engineering was possible, America had achieved weaponized tularemia (presumably by means of rapid, selective, experimentally-guided evolution) to the point that 50 pounds of it, properly disseminated, would wipe out 60% of a megacity.  

Protection against crude attacks with unmodified agents may well provide a high probability of effective defense for a couple more decades (though something more than a black swan risk is present already). The Muslim world is unlikely to muster anything but amateur-hour efforts within this time frame. Attacks from other quarters are improbable. But, back to the lingering black swans. The thing is, there are multiple black swan risks out there. A sample of contingencies: an accidental release of a bio-agent from a government lab (dozens of governments work on dangerous pathogens, offensively or defensively, and America alone has dozens of such labs), a pathogen developed in an “entrepreneur’s” garage and released, a deliberate release into the environment that escapes intended limits (eg, a controlled test of pathogen characteristics), a government employee deliberately steals, then sells or releases a bio-agent.   

The article discusses the dilemma of whether to focus resources on vaccine defenses or therapeutic defenses. Yet it fails to mention one of the prime determinants of the relative efficacy of these two approaches: the impact of the threat of genetically modified disease agents. Do vaccines against the variola major strain of small pox, for example, have a high probability of success against a genetically modified variant of the disease? And how difficult, in the context of a bio-arms race, would it be to develop small pox variants that would resist a known, stockpiled vaccine? I suspect the answers to these questions, if they’ve been considered and if they’re knowable, are classified.

The article concludes with a hint at the clash between political decision-making processes and cost-benefit processes. What translates into political capital tends to starve ugly, obscure issues until the piper comes round at last. “How to balance the unlikely but catastrophic potential of bioterror with the steady advance of natural disease is one of the most puzzling challenges for biodefense policy going forward.” This is an unavoidable question, except I would say the “steady retreat of natural disease.” The only significant inroads natural disease has made in the last 100 years are those related to poor nutrition—consequent upon mere stupidity (including the stupidity or conspiracy of doctors) and torpor. Natheless, sichlike common health issues, never out of sight and never out of mind, exert great gravitational pull on the common politician.  

Another part of the problem seems to be a matter of bureaucratic influence on policy decisions—like this Fauci genius spending 70% of biodefense funding on common diseases afflicting public health. Fauci is a public health bureaucrat, not a defense bureaucrat—so he spends what he can on public health. Bureaucrats generally fit the mold of defective wind-up toys—little action, no thought. Also, moving up a notch to the political sphere, it’s lovely to discover that Obama has ended centralized direction of biodefense. What we have is a few part-timers in the White House overseeing the program and trying to coordinate multiple mutually antagonistic bureaucracies. Well, I suppose it’s over-optimistic to expect Obama to take an interest in something other than handouts and labor unions.   

After such knowledge, what forgiveness? Think now
History has many cunning passages, contrived corridors
And issues, deceives with whispering ambitions,
Guides us by vanities. Think now
She gives when our attention is distracted
And what she gives, gives with such supple confusions
That the giving famishes the craving. Gives too late
What’s not believed in, or if still believed,
In memory only, reconsidered passion. Gives too soon
Into weak hands, what’s thought can be dispensed with
Till the refusal propagates a fear. Think
Neither fear nor courage saves us. Unnatural vices
Are fathered by our heroism. Virtues
Are forced upon us by our impudent crimes.
These tears are shaken from the wrath-bearing tree.

--Gerontion

Islam and the West

http://www.tnr.com/book/review/citizen-islam-zeyno-baran

The link is to a review of a book, Citizen Islam: The Future of Muslim Integration in the West, by Zeyno Baran, on Muslim citizens in Western countries. It's a sharp, concise, excellent review, worth reading. The reviewer wrote a highly regarded book on this subject a couple of years past, Reflections on the Revolution in Europe: Immigration, Islam and the West. Both authors agree that the most essential question the rise of the Muslim population puts before us is what form of Islam these people will ascribe to. I agree with this assessment, though in those countries with relatively modest Muslim populations the issue of the magnitude of future Muslim immigration is almost as important. The politically correct view, of course, in America and Europe, is that mainstream Islam is distinct from "Islamism" (the interpretation that Islamic values and rules ought to prevail in the political sphere).

That the priests or imams should want mastery accords with the natural order of things. Why shouldn't the arbiters of the ultimate things requite their pious followers with the gift of effectual earthly guidance?

“Islamism shares the most fundamental aim of Islam and all religions,” Baran writes, “to bring the world closer to God.” In so saying, she removes us from the cocoon of cant that swaddles most public—and all governmental—discussion of Islam’s role in terrorism.

The motive force behind Islamic terrorism is thus conceived by its practitioners as transcending the civil laws of merely secular governments. And, since its inception, the Quran has seemed to certain numbers of its adherents interpretable in this direction. If confined to a few extremists or to marginal lands, this might be of minor consequence, and it has been little more than a nuisance through most of Islamic history. However, massive Muslim immigration into the West has changed things, and rendered this disease much more contagious, if not also more virulent.

Islamists are, by definition, politicized Muslims. They are better at politics than their apolitical coreligionists. European officials made a mistake in the 1980s and ’90s, when they “granted asylum to many immigrants who presented far more of a threat to democratic rule than the regimes they had fled.” The core of Baran’s book is her description of the tactics by which Islamists co-opted, infiltrated, bamboozled, and overwhelmed Muslim institutions of long standing. Islamists generally preferred subverting existing bodies to setting up their own, Baran writes, because it “required less effort and offered greater recruitment possibilities.” Her account of such subversion will remind readers of the history of Communists in the trade-union movement. As Baran shows, boards of directors staffed with doddering old-country patriarchs do not stand a chance against young, modern, Internet- and media-savvy “professional Muslims.”

One might also analogize Islamists to a special interest group in politics. Though constituting a small number, they care about their monomania more than the great mass of the polity, and often use their focus to achieve goals against the interest of the nation. This looks to be something of a vicious circle. Revolutions, though, tend to burn themselves out as the youthful vanguard becomes less youthful and settles heavily into power. But, by a similar process of energetic youth overcoming apathetic age, the nonpolitical version of Islam is losing power also in many Muslim nations. Turkey is cited as a clear case of this. It has proceeded in Pakistan, Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran--and the Arab Spring may yet prove another step in furtherance of this trend.

The threat of Islamism in the near and medium term arises from its manifest terrorist tendencies. Any irrational belief system, including any religion, may become dangerous. "The problem is that religion itself is a conveyor belt to radicalism in this way." The remedy for this, the action Western governments ought to undertake, according to Baran, is this:

  They should “shift their current focus from countering extremist violence to preventing extremism from taking hold in the first place.” The strategy she suggests might indeed be a better one. But there are two reasons it cannot be carried out. One is that Americans are too frightened of being disciplined and punished for breaches of political correctness to discuss honestly any aspect of any policy touching on Islam. Even this term—“political correctness”—does not do justice to the Zhdanovite lockdown that the government enforces when it comes to discussing Islam.

Apparently, even the Ft. Hood massacre of American soldiers by a radicalized Islamist soldier was dismissed by DOD as unrelated to Islamism.

Secondly, Americans don’t know Islam well enough. The distinction between “Islamists who renounce violence” (the people we are empowering now) and the “moderate Muslims who reject Islamism” (the people Baran would like us to empower)—these distinctions might be meaningful for a literary Turk with a good Koranic education. They will be lost on a galoot congressman from the mountain West who has never met a Muslim. And to draw such distinctions in the first place would reveal what a big, intransigent problem traditionalist Islam poses for Western societies. It is a problem that already has a long record of forcing those societies to weigh their commitment to diversity against their commitment to freedom.

We observe all this with a complacency born of the amateurism and incompetence of our domestic Islamic foes. In many Western nations, including America, their numbers are too small still to present a great danger. And the problem may well, by a variety of possible mechanisms, be self-correcting. The two most likely forms of this are the senescence of the revolutionaries or a change in attitude in Western nations should the threat become grave. That said, I see no benefit for the West from continued large scale Muslim immigration. Also, the radicals ought to be deported. We do not need the distraction and the drain on our powers political Islam involves--certes we do not benefit this way. Proliferation of WMDs, China's rise, and socialism-induced internal decay are quite a sufficient platefull of problems.

A Delivery for Allah

Obama did the right thing in this case, which also happened to be the common sensical thing to do. Pakistan was exposed, for once, to the contemptuous treatment it highly merits, and bin Laden was granted a quick, sordid conclusion (capture would have been ideal). Should the President be accorded genuflections as a great Hero, as much of the Left insists? I think not. The SEALS who did the raid and provided backup, and their chopper pilots, were the heroes. Obama merely did his job--a new sensation for him.

 

I cannot say this changes my opinion on Afghanistan--the sacrifices being made without any sense of how to win are indefensible--Bush/Obama repeating just the same fundamental, disgustingly irresponsible and cowardly mistake of Johnson/Nixon. The presence of bin Laden in Pakistan, the ongoing base for our foe in the Afghan war, merely provides redundant emphasis on the futility of this fight. The endless government lies about Af/Pak: political correctness in action getting our soldiers killed overseas.

The Rewards of Extremism

The lesson is: if you're crazy enough, people will take you seriously and SUBMIT. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/26/opinion/26douthat.html?ref=opinion

Indulgences

http://www.policeoracle.com/news/40-Fanatics-Go-Free-From-Jail_20179.html

The problem is not just lax sentencing, but the fact that the legal system evolved with British citizens in mind. These terrorists are citizens of the Caliphate of their fantasies.  I believe the British will adopt harsher measures in proportion to their experience of terrorist incidents--they have only seen a single, relatively modest, incident thus far.

The Rock and the Hard Place

I count this a clear and ugly summary of our prospects in Afghanistan, and some implications for the region. I especially like the anecdote about the illiterate retards we're trying to train up to fight the insurgents. How long do you think we can continue to fight against an enemy which renders itself unbeatable by taking shelter behind the border of one of our supposed allies and for a narco-state that has neither the resources nor the moral conviction to defend itself? http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1865730,00.html?iid=sphere-inline-sidebar   The Muslims of the world have the most to lose from a failure in the struggle to contain terrorism. After all, the most cost effective way to do this, from the perspective of rest of the world is to contain all the Muslims of the world within a certain prescribed geographical range--and then ensure that they are deprived of the technological capacity to develop weapons of mass destruction. At that point all their terroristic impulses would merely be implosive, and the rest of us could shed the nihilistic drag we currently bear.

Full of Passionate Intensity

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB120450617910806563.html
The margins of the Islamic world have been radicalized by their obvious lack of power. Also, their religious leaders fear that the creep of secularization evident in most of the world will progress into Islamic lands and minds. I view this, on the whole, as a defensive response--though, of course, some of Europe's naturalized Islamic radicals overtly seek to expand the "caliphate" throughout Europe as well. Unfortunately, given the demographic explosion underway in most Islamic nations, plus their retrograde political institutions and economic policies, the number of potential recruits for such jihadism is likely to continue to increase. This article is mainly an anecdotal diagnosis (and thus leaves open the question of how broad its applicability may be), and it fails to offer any solutions. The solution is to address the demographic, political, and economic problems that seed the deathly garden. Or simply contain Islamic problems within Islamic lands--and stay out.

Is It Possible to have an Entrepreneurial Government?

Certain Israelis affirm it:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/21/world/middleeast/21israel.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1

As to the strategic argument that reducing oil demand will lower oil prices and choke off the material resources of Islamic extremists--I think arguments could well be made that impoverishing the Arabs would also encourage extremism, especially since such impoverishment would be all the more painful and humiliating following a period of relative wealth.

The Moroccan Way

There is an article today in the NY Times on the Moroccan strategy for handling incarcerated terrorists and radicals.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/31/world/africa/31prison.html?_r=1&hp&oref=slogin

 

After reading it, though disgusted by the brutality of both sides, I considered that these terrorists are really a non-threat to the government of Morocco (and most other Islamic nations). In virtually every respect they are marginal types, lacking centralized, coordinated organization and competent leadership. Their relatively high profile is disproportionate to their limited power and absence of a coherent strategy to actually overthrow the King. Yet, they do exert some influence. The question is to what effect. From the government's perspective they're a chronic, but manageable, disease of the body politic. Further, it may be a disease that justifies more severe control over that body, the rest of which may then be pacified by the justification of "disease-control." Most of the Muslim world is a prison, one whose strictures are all the more defensible as a result of certain elements of resistance. In other words, these incompetent extremists (who appear by their actions, as opposed to their words, to be more like anarchists than theocrats) form a (witless) pillar of support for these dictatorial regimes. Anarchism is indeed a game at which the police can beat you. And if the dictators are happy enough to retain their power in despite of the forms of democracy available, the terrorists do not generally seem to view this as a less attractive state of affairs than a democratic option might offer--democratic government poses the threat that it might muster up such a degree of popular legitimacy as a dictator could not sustain in our time and thereby the more effectually block their theocratic ascendance. Thus, the two mortal enemies and the two most powerful forces in many Muslim nations conspire by disparate actions to thwart political and social liberalization.

---

Confidence is High, I Repeat, Confidence is High

Problem: terror in the air

Solution: GED-equipped government employees 

Result:  Report: Airport Screeners Fail To Catch Bomb Components

Liquid Explosives, Detonators Smuggled Past Security

POSTED: 11:36 pm EST November 14, 2007

WASHINGTON -- Government investigators smuggled liquid explosives and detonators past airport security, exposing a dangerous hole in the nation's ability to keep these forbidden items off of airplanes, according to a report made public Wednesday.

A Lengthier Torture Session

Here are a few common pro-torture arguments I've heard and my responses:

 

1 "Government inflicts torture for good reasons."

Unfortunately, this concession does not distinguish your position from that of Hitler or Stalin: neither tortured for amusement, but only for defined purposes.

 

2 "Torture is justifiable if there is an imminent threat or a high profile detainee."

There are several problems with this position. First, it cedes the moral high ground in an absolute sense (though not relative to our current enemies): it is in clear violation of the Geneva Convention. Second, lines tend to blur in practice--who is to define what these this imminent threat is and when it is at stake in a given case. This is ultimately a subjective judgment which will be made by men who have a much stronger incentive to err on the side of inflicting a little more torture instead of permitting a little higher risk of terrorism or some other calamity. I do not trust unchecked power; it would be positioned to inflict torture at its discretion upon whomever it considers a suitable information source. Unchecked government power is anathema to Anglo-American political culture--indeed it is anathema to any decent political culture: unchecked executive power is the simplest definition of tyranny. Third, it would be wise to consider whether, given the costs of torture outlined above, the benefits we may reasonably expect to derive from it are commensurate. I am not persuaded that they are. Not only would we in theory use torture rarely, according to your standards, but on those occasions when it might be used there is no guarantee that it would be effective. To my sense, the costs of employing torture against suspected terrorists are so high that it would only be justified if we were threatened with much more dangerous organizations--ones that could mount more sophisticated attacks than training 4 suicide pilots on flight simulators and finding 14 more suicide volunteers to hijack some planes and do a suicide run.

 

3 "We have the right to torture when necessary because our history demonstrates that we have the moral high ground."

Relative to the values of our enemies in the last century, we clearly have the high ground. But, we judge ourselves by our own values, and, to a large extent, are so judged by the rest of the world. It is relative to our own values, not our enemies' values, that we have ceded ground since 9/11. This process, the widening of the gap between our values and our policies, has damaged our image abroad; also, it has eroded the rights of our citizens and the power of the media and of all governmental institutions except the Executive branch of the federal government. Moreover, policies that fall short of our moral standards, if sustained, will noxiously erode our moral nature and slowly undermine our "higher ground."

 

4 "We committed torture in the war against Japan and this was done to save lives--a simple value equation."

In diametric contrast to our current struggle, PR considerations were not immediately relevant to the war in the Pacific Theater. The only two audiences that mattered in the short term were the Japs and us. Neither was likely to falter in its convictions (in the context of such a hot and brief war) due to an occasional war crime. But, whether such torture as occurred benefitted us in the war is another question. Few Japs were captured and most of the torture occurred at the tactical level, which was likely to accrue benefits only at the tactical level, if at all. Given the probable insignificance of any benefits derived from torture, I doubt whether your "value equation" worked to our advantage in the long run. 

 

The most effective foreign policy is one which maximizes the leverage of both our hard power (military, economic) and our soft power (image, culture, PR, values) to achieve strategic objectives. It follows that in determining which of these forms of power to implement in face of a given challenge we must learn to make intelligent trade-offs informed by cost-benefit analysis (and torture may be the most dramatic instance, and one of the most important, of this conflict).

The Torture Obsession

On the torture question we have not, as we ought to have, held to the moral high ground in the struggle to prevent terrorism. We can afford still to hold this ground and ought to hold it, even at the inescapable risk of paying a tangible price. Instead, we have begun the descent toward the moral level of the enemy. And the further we proceed on this path the closer we come to aiding and abetting the enemy in our defeat. I define defeat as the destruction of our culture and value system, and, thus, by definition whatever is necessary to sustain their existence. Survival of our government and national borders and military, at the cost of the destruction of this essential core is not an end for which I would fight or sacrifice. The Bush people apparently believe that the Anti-Terror struggle can be won without resort to the public relations campaign that was a major element in our victory in the Cold War. In this they are dunces. P.R. is even more important in this struggle than it was in the Cold War, because information is much more easily disseminated now than it was then. And virtually all the terrorists seem to be ideologically-motivated volunteers--as few Soviet soldiers were. Torture, rendition, detention without trial, heavy-handed encroachments upon the rights of American citizens--all of these tactics function as the most effective P.R. for the terrorists and Islamo-fascists.

A Time-Honored Trade-Off

The heart of the argument in this Economist piece is the analogy between the cold war and the war on terrorism. Of course, though on the whole this is an excellent re-perspectivizing, the enemy in each instance was significantly different in nature--from a common sense view, homeland security was less important in the struggle against the Soviets than it is likely to be in the new war. But, until the terrorists come armed with WMDs I am inclined to The Economist's strategy. The erosion of our liberties ought not to be disproportionate to the actual danger, especially as the example of our liberty may once again help us prevail in the struggle. This article is intelligent and courageous and wise.

http://www.economist.com/node/9833041