Sixteen Volts

Some famous conservative, I forgot who but maybe somebody will remind me, wrote a few decades ago an essay about what would happen to the liberal society and individual freedoms if anybody was able to build a bomb that would level a whole city block. In light of the recent days, let us hope that homemade liquid or plastic explosives and wireless detonators will never be perfected. As much of a technological optimist that I am, there are certainly some technologies that I hope are not physically possible or will never be invented, since they would be so utterly disruptive that the social order would not be able to stand them. For example, the invention of Star Trek transporter technology would not be fun or cool at all, since this invention would cause the whole society to collapse. There is simply far too much relying on the physical assumption that it is possible to build walls, doors and locks that can keep other people out. Remove this assumption, plus the assumption that a person can't essentially be in two places at once, and everything that we like in the present society will instantly go bye-bye.

About the more realistic and pressing concerns, I recently slowed down to the old ways and watched some television news about you-know-what, and just had to laugh about the stupidity of these new countermeasures against liquid bombs. No liquids allowed in the carry-on luggage, except water, juice and mother's milk if you have a baby with you. Now, unless I am mistaken, there are two possibilities: either it is not possible to masquerade a bomb as water, juice or milk, in which case this restriction is moot, or it is possible, in which case the whole restriction lies on the assumption that the terrorist won't take his or her baby with him/her as a cover. I would say that this assumption is somewhat dubious.

And I'm certain that the rest of the world will soon again be rolling on the floor laughing at Americans, when their airport screeners strip search old grannies from Idaho because "profiling doesn't work" (you know, just like Bruce Schneier constantly keeps telling us) and then let a bunch of Middle-Eastern or Pakistani men board unhindered because it would be "racist" to give them any special attention. I wonder if there is any other country in the world that would behave this stupidly under the same circumstances. It's not like profiling is especially hard, since as Mahalanobis points out in his post "Many?", it's not like any of these terrorism suspects were named something like Robert Postlewaite or Lars Svorensgaard. (Or Paddy O' Shaughnessy, as Dennis Mangan points out in "Paddy O'Shaughnessy and the Terror Plot".) If you really need to check with special care anybody else than the swarthy males, then the young white women, especially the obese ones, should be the next group to give special attention to. There must be a whole bunch of ungrateful leftist women out there who hate the West and would therefore eagerly help their exciting Muslim boyfriends to bring it down, smiling like Ulrike Meinhof when they flick the detonator switch, knowing that they really made a difference and kicked the Western patriarchy in the nuts.

There are other news coming from the old country, these related to the question I raised yesterday about the strange lovey-dovey relationship between the Western leftists and Muslims, who should be two ideological antipodes but apparently are not, even though this love might in reality be somewhat one-sided when the Muslims consider the leftists simply "useful idiots". Just trade one master to another who is equally brutal, and the leftist is happy how he is once again making a difference, afflicting the comfortable and challenging the dominant assumptions about what is the best way to live. Jussi Halla-Aho reports in his brand-new essay "Rauhanmarssi Helsingissä" ("Peace march in Helsinki") how the peace-loving united front of Socialist Union and Arabs living in Finland had pelted a pro-Israel counterdemonstration with eggs and tomatoes (the basic gear in every peace marcher's toolkit, I guess) and then attacked them and shouted "Death to Israel!" I have no photos to link about this event, but I'm sure we can all imagine what it looked like, the peace demonstrators representing diverse concerned strata of the Finnish society just like in the previous march. According to Halla-Aho, the peace demonstrators had openly waved Hezbollah flags, which was somewhat strange. (Well, not really.)

I followed the links to the websites of these marchers and socialists, and over there I learned that socialists don't think that Islamic fundamentalism is a real threat, it's just something that the Americans have cooked up to get a convenient enemy so that they can control the oil-producing nations in the Middle East. And by the way, the violence that erupted in Helsinki was just because of the provocation by Christians. It should also be noted, the way Halla-Aho does, that these people didn't organize a single march and demand ceasefire and peach before the Israeli offensive against the rocket launchers started.

The always-excellent Gene Expression has a new post "Why Turkey should not be let into the EU" that is also related to the hypocrisy of the Western leftists in their adoration of Islam that is more antithetical to their goals than a gun-toting redneck in Christmas. As Razib puts it

If secular liberals think that "Jesusland" is bad, wait 'till they experience "Prophet Land" (Peace be upon him).

Considering the issues that the Western left at least nominally holds dear, the mainstream Muslims are much worse than all but the most extreme Western conservatives. But as vocal as the leftists are in their opposition of conservatism, you really have to dig deep to find them making even the slightest peep against Muslims that you might interpret to be critical. This even though they scream like banshees whenever some Western man makes some much more insignificant violation against the leftist goals, such as saying that he is uncomfortable with the notion of gay marriage. Leftists consider this opinion to make the man who says it a subhuman monster and bigot, while they seem to have no problem whatsoever with the countless Islamic nations in which homosexuals would have to literally fear for their lives if they were outed.

For example, we can constantly read the leftists mocking and berating Christians who are Biblical creationists. This mockery is well deserved, I'm not denying that, but as the table in the post "Creationist Turkey shold not be let into the EU!" shows, even the most secular Muslim nation, Turkey, has proportionally more creationists than even the most religious Western nation, the United States. This extremely interesting table unfortunately cuts off well before its gets to the more traditional and hardline Muslim countries, but I'm pretty sure I could guess with a reasonable accuracy how the curve would continue. As Razib puts it

But the reality is that Turkey is secular and Western by the standards of the Islamic world, not the Western world. An acquaintance of mine recently mocked "Red America" as "dumb fuckistan," well, if Turkey is the secular and progressive promontory of the Islamic world, then the Dar-al-Islam must be "really dumb fuckistan."

In this light, please tell me, leftists: especially when we also remember how extremely common cousin marriage is in the Arab countries, when will we see you mocking the Third World Muslims as the "uneducated inbred yokels" that they are by any relevant objective standard, the same way that you constantly mock and berate people in the West who hold these same opinions? (Unless these people are First Nations or blacks who oppose Darwinism, of course, since then you don't seem to have any problem with their denial of evolution.)

This table of how many creationists there are in each nation is very interesting and revealing. I would certainly like to see similar tables compiled about how many people in various nations accept and support certain other leftist goals and ideas. Some example questions that I would like to see polled include

1. Should homosexuals be allowed to marry so that this marriage would be considered legally as valid as the traditional marriage between a man and a woman?
2. Should it be considered a serious crime when a husband forces himself on his unwilling wife to have sex with her?
3. Are men and women equal, so that men are not set above women by God and the natural order to rule and guide them?
4. Should every teenage single mother be given a free apartment and money for groceries and other living, courtesy of the taxpayer, so that she could be free and independent?
5. Shoud it be considered a serious crime when a husband slaps his disobedient wife around?
6. Should transsexuals have any more rights than dogs?
7. Should homosexuals be allowed to live and openly parade their lifestyle?
8. Should the adult male homosexuals be legally allowed to have anal sex with 14-year-old boys, the way the Canadian leftists and gay rights groups are currently demanding?

and then publish the results in similar handy tables for the whole world to see. Of course, this won't happen, because anybody with a common sense knows already what the results would like like in countries such as, say, Iran, Mexico or Nigeria, so there is no point spending money to go ask people there their opinions about these questions. In fact, I'm pretty sure that I could predict what these numbers would look like in all of the Third World countries that are so very beloved and admired by the progressive leftists. Which, in turn, makes the question of why the Western leftists are so fiercely protective towards the brown people who viciously hate absolutely everything that the enlightened Western leftists claim to stand for even more puzzling.

It's so very strange... this double standard of who the leftists are willing to condemn and for what seems to indicate that, just like the Unabomber wrote in his famous manifesto, the real problem that the leftists have with the West is not its general belligence and unenlightened attitudes towards minorities. It's more like the real goal of leftism was not creating a new social utopia of equality, freedom and happiness, but utterly destroying democracy, capitalism and individual freedoms of the Western society that the leftists hate for being so good and successful? Nah, perish the thought.

Posted by Ilkka Kokkarinen on Friday, August 11, 2006 at 5:04 PM