Category Archives: Media Criticism

Media Criticism, Philosophy, Political Commentary, Technology and Society, War Commentary

From Norway To Hell

27 Comments

Walter Russell Mead is channeling Bill Joy:

The inescapable reality is that the very forces creating our affluent, modern and democratic world also generate violent antagonism. Breivik, like Al-Qaeda and like Timothy McVeigh and the Unabomber, is the shadow of progress. When conditions are right, the lone psychopath becomes a cult leader; in a perfect storm when everything breaks his way, the psychopath becomes Fuehrer.

That would be bad enough, but there’s one more turn of the screw. The same technological progress that helps create violent alienation and rage also empowers individuals and groups. 200 years ago a Breivik could not have done so much damage. 100 years ago Al-Qaeda could not have hijacked a plane. Modern society is more vulnerable than ever before to acts of terror, and developments in weaponry place ever greater power in the hands of ever smaller numbers of people.

This is still in early stages. Fortunately Breivik was a traditionalist and relatively low tech mass murderer; he did not hack vital computer systems to wreak murderous havoc with a rail or air traffic control system. He did not poison the reservoirs with weaponized biologicals. He did not even pump poison gas into a subway system.

We can be reasonably confident that an increasingly chaotic and stressful 21st century will generate more bitter nutjobs and place more destructive power in their hands. Democracy and affluence won’t cure it; the same forces that raise those golden arches build bombs to knock them down.

I have to say that Breivik and McVeigh are in an entirely different category than bin Laden. The latter is part of a totalitarian religious movement, with the support of millions, while no one is cheering the former in the streets, and in fact they are being roundly condemned by their own group members (that is, those with whom they share a genetic heritage). I am particularly disgusted by the media’s attempts to paint both as “Christians” when I’ve seen no evidence that either is, and McVeigh actively disavowed a belief in God. But they have to do so to feed the moral relativistic narrative in defense of Islam.

But here’s where I just don’t get his argument at all:

The only conclusion that makes sense to me is that human beings are stuck in a condition of radical uncertainty. Something big and earth shaking is going on around us, but the information we have does not allow us to predict where it all goes.

In my view, this is one of the reasons that belief in a transcendent power beyond the human mind is intellectually necessary to grapple successfully with the realities of our time. When the determinist progressives threw God under the bus, they threw away the possibility of an integrated world view that has room both for scientific and rational analysis on the one hand and a honest, unsparing appraisal of the radical uncertainty around us on the other.

We still live in the Age of Apocalypse that opened in World War Two when Hiroshima and the Holocaust delineated the essential problems of the new and possibly last era of human civilization. Mankind has long had the potential for radical, desolating evil; today we still have that potential among us, and we have united it to the power to end all life on earth. We live with one foot in the shadows and another on the high and sunny uplands of democratic and affluent society. We have one foot in Norway and the other in Hell and nobody knows where we step next.

One of the reasons to bother God in our century is the hope that in turn he will bother about us. Whatever is coming, we will face it more honestly and live it more richly with him.

This presupposes that he exists, but that we are just ignoring him. Well, that may be, but I have no sense of it, which is why I’m a non-believer, and furthermore, I feel no need for him for me to intellectually grasp what’s happening. While I admire Professor Mead, I think that he is projecting his own apparent intellectual inadequacies on the rest of us.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, War Commentary

The Hypocrisy Of James Fallows

66 Comments

Thoughts, over at The American Spectator:

So let me get this straight. Even a week after Tucson, after it was absolutely clear that Palin and the right had nothing whatsoever to do with the Giffords shooting, Fallows was still saying that the very “purpose” of journalists is to connect dots and “see if there’s a pattern there,” and that “it is legitimate in our current climate to ask” if the rhetoric on the right had something to do with the shooting. But now that Rubin, VERY shortly after the Norway tragedy, doesn’t just connect nearly invisible dots but actually cites stories quoting jidahists themselves as claiming jihadist “credit” for the terrorism, Fallows says it suddenly is not only a horrible sin for Rubin to take the jihadists’ words themselves for real — these aren’t mere dots, they are what’s known as solid circumstantial evidence — but that is is a mistake bad enough that her employer should apologize to the world.

Maybe it’s not hypocrisy so much as the usual grotesque double standard among the media in the service of a leftist ideology.

[Update a few minutes later]

Related thoughts from Jim Treacher:

When something gets blown up, we’re not supposed to even suspect the terrorist is Muslim? It’s a bit late for that, isn’t it? Are you complaining to Reuters and the NYT and all those other right-wing outlets that suspected Muslim involvement? Or are you somehow confused about what the word “suspect” means? Shouldn’t you save some of your spiteful glee for anybody out there who’s still asserting that this crime was motivated by Islam, despite the evidence to the contrary?

If it’s some sort of victory to you that this freak is a Christian and a right-winger, go ahead and revel in it. As Neal Boortz pointed out: “Muslim zealots kill, Muslims celebrate and conservative Christians are angry. Christian zealots kill, liberals gloat. Odd.” Not as odd as it used to be, unfortunately.

Meanwhile, close to 100 people were murdered. I’m not going to whine that the murderer doesn’t represent all Christians, that he doesn’t speak for all right-wingers. Of course he doesn’t, just as Muslim terrorists don’t speak for all Muslims. Only the dumbest, most jaded lefty creeps are saying otherwise, and bickering about it isn’t going to bring any of those dead people back.

I hate that murdering bastard, and if it were up to me, right now he’d be rotting in Hell after death by waterboarding.

He just can’t stop being politically incorrect.

[Mid-morning update]

Apologize for what?

Anders Behring Breivik, the deranged savage who committed mass-murder in Oslo last Friday, is a severe critic of Islam. His targets, though, were not Muslims. They were his fellow Norwegians and Norway’s government. As Mark Steyn keenly observed this morning, it is patently absurd that Breivik’s attitudes about Muslims have come to dominate coverage of a horrific episode that appears to have little or nothing to do with Muslims — such that those actually killed become, as Mark puts it, “mere bit players in their own murder” while the legacy media shrieks about “Islamophobia.” As Bruce Bawer pointed out in his trenchant post this weekend (at Pajamas), we are now looking at “a double tragedy for Norway. Not only has it lost almost one hundred people, including dozens of young people, in a senseless rampage of violence. But I fear that legitimate criticism of Islam, which remains a very real threat to freedom in Norway and the West, has become profoundly discredited, in the eyes of many Norwegians, by association with this murderous lunatic.”

If we are to remain free and secure, that cannot be allowed to happen. And that starts with not apologizing for the entirely rational fear that future terrorist attacks will be fueled by Islamist ideology, just as thousands of past attacks have been. Prominent Muslims are forever making the most unfounded, most offensive pronouncements, and yet they never have to apologize. Right after 9/11, MPAC’s Salam Marayati told a Los Angeles radio interviewer, “If we are going to look at suspects, we should look at groups that benefit the most from these kinds of incidents, and I think we should put the State of Israel on the suspect list.” Before becoming a top Obama aide and envoy, Rashad Hussain excoriated the Bush Justice Department’s prosecution of Palestinian Islamic Jihad leader Sami al-Arian as a “politically motivated” “travesty of justice” that fit a “common pattern … of politically motivated prosecutions,” by which the U.S. government exaggerates the “threat to American security” — al-Arian later pleaded guilty to a terrorism charge. CAIR has made a career of rushing to the nearest microphone to discredit the investigation of Muslims who are later found guilty of terrorism. The list goes on and on; only the words “I’m sorry, I was wrong” are never uttered — and never demanded.

No,they aren’t. At least not from the likes of James Fallows.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary

Trouble To The President’s Left

17 Comments

Bernie Sanders says that he needs some primary competition, but I found this an insightful comment:

Obama is a bland take-no-chances-unless-other-people-are-doing-the-hard-work type of guy. He’s not a leader, but just a vessel through which the left thought they could get all their pet projects passed, by endowing Obama with Absolute Moral Authority by virtue of his historic position.

But to get elected, Obama had to have a bland, beta-male personality, and that’s what’s driving the left crazy. People like Bernie knew Obama was lying to swing voters in 2008 about being a moderate; they just thought he was also lying to them about being a beta male. Now that he’s got push back from House Republicans on his and the left’s pet issues, he doesn’t have the stomach to either take on the GOP ideologically by presenting a plan of his own, or to tell his own side to pound sand and move towards a compromise deal the way Clinton did on welfare reform.

They didn’t mind Obama’s lies during the campaign — they expect people to lie, given their projection — they’re just mad at him because he lied to them.

Business, Economics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary

Is The Left Right?

19 Comments

Claire Berlinski is suffering a little cognitive dissonance.

My brief response, without a lot of deep thought. I can’t speak for Europe, which never had anything resembling our Constitution and Bill of Rights, but I think that the biggest flaw of the Founders was in failing to recognize the apparently ductility of the Commerce Clause, which has basically rendered the 9th and 10th amendments moot. They also perhaps didn’t anticipate the degree to which the courts might come to aid and abet to that end. But at bottom, it is not a failure of freedom, but a failure to adhere to the original intent of the Constitution to limit government.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, War Commentary

Open-Source Warfare

22 Comments

Zenpundit has been slogging through the Oslo terrorist’s writings, and found some interesting things (check some of the other posts as well):

…the British, too, come in for a measure of contempt, via a quotation from none other than Osama bin Laden:

“When people see a strong horse and a weak horse, by nature they will like the strong horse”. Perhaps its unsurprising that the author is something of an admirer of bin Laden’s means, if not his ends.

This came to me via an email from James (Anglosphere) Bennett, who comments:

For the past decade people concerned about the consequences of multiculturalism have warned that one of its hazards will be an inevitable response, which a short perusal of European history will quickly suggest will not be very nice. Looking at this, my thought is “well, here it is”.

And there may be more of it to come.

[Update a few minutes later]

Was he influenced by the Unabomber?

Of course, given the similarities, maybe it was Al Gore.

Media Criticism, Philosophy, Popular Culture, Science And Society, Social Commentary, Technology and Society

The Father Of Transhumanism

2 Comments

…has deanimated:

In 1947 Ettinger wrote a short story elucidating the concept of human cryopreservation as a pathway to more sophisticated future medical technology: in effect, a form of “one-way medical time travel.” The story, “The Penultimate Trump”, was published in the March, 1948 issue of Startling Stories and definitively establishes Ettinger’s priority as the first person to have promulgated the cryonics paradigm: principally, that contemporary medico-legal definitions of death are relative, not absolute, and are critically dependent upon the sophistication of available medical technology. Thus, a person apparently dead of a heart attack in a tribal village in the Amazon Rainforest will soon become unequivocally so, whereas the same person, with the same condition, in the emergency department of large, industrialized city’s hospital, might well be resuscitated and continue a long and healthy life. Ettinger’s genius lay in realizing that criteria for death will vary not just from place-to-place, but from time-to-time. Today’s corpse may well be tomorrow’s patient.

Ettinger waited for prominent scientists or physicians to come to the same conclusion he had, and to take a position of public advocacy. By 1960, Ettinger realized that no one else seemed to have grasped an idea which, to him, had seemed obvious. Ettinger was 42 years old and undoubtedly increasingly aware of his own mortality. In what may be characterized as one of the most important midlife crisis in history, Ettinger reflected on his life and achievements, and decided it was time to take action. He summarized the idea of cryonics in a few pages, with the emphasis on life insurance as a mechanism of affordable funding for the procedure, and sent this to approximately 200 people whom he selected from Who’s Who In America. The response was meager, and it was clear that a much longer exposition was needed. Ettinger observed that people, even the intellectually, financially and socially distinguished, would have to be educated that dying is (usually) a gradual and reversible process, and that freezing damage is so limited (even though lethal by present criteria) that its reversibility demands relatively little in future progress. Ettinger soon made an even more problematic discovery, principally that, “…a great many people have to be coaxed into admitting that life is better than death, healthy is better than sick, smart is better than stupid, and immortality might be worth the trouble!”

I’ve never understood the resistance, either.

Rest in peace, but not in perpetuity.

[Update early afternoon]

Adam Keiper has a link roundup over at The New Atlantis, with a promise of more to come.

[Another update a few minutes later]

This is the first time I became aware that Mike Darwin (long-time cryonics pioneer) has a blog. I’ll have to add it to the blogroll.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary

The Stupidity Of The “Assault-Weapons” Ban

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Part 2. Bob Owens calls it “silly,” but I’m going to go with “stupid.” And in some cases, even evil (see project “Fast and Furious,” in which it becomes clear that the federal government in this administration wants to make sure that criminals can get weapons, but that law-abiding citizens can’t, and then stonewall and cover up when they get caught in the act).

I particularly enjoyed this unintended consequence.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary

That Actually Took Longer Than I Thought

60 Comments

It took almost a day for some on the left to start blaming Sarah Palin for what happened in Norway. It probably took a while for them to get over their cynical shock that it actually was a white guy this time.

I will note, though, as an aside, that like school shootings in “gun-free zones,” this was another catastrophic failure of gun control. Just a few rifles in the hands of the older kids on that island, with training, would have ended this pretty quickly. Instead, they were fish in a barrel for him.

[Saturday evening update]

Bruce Bawer:

It is chilling to read my own name in postings by this mass murderer. And it is deeply depressing to see this evil, twisted creature become the face of Islam criticism in Norway. Norwegian television journalists who in the first hours of the crisis were palpably uncomfortable about the prospect of having to talk about Islamic terrorism are now eagerly discussing the dangers of “Islamophobia” and “conservative ideology” and are drawing connections between the madness and fanaticism of Breivik and the platform of the Progress Party.

This is, as he says, doubly tragic, and a setback in the war.