Who will call these thugs out for what they are?
Hard to think of a better way to engender sympathy for your cause than preventing people from Christmas shopping, or getting home for Christmas.
[Update mid afternoon]
Enough is enough: Hold “Black Lives Matter” accountable.
David Solway has thoughts on living with it:
Our electrician is a fundamentally decent man, as are probably the majority of his fellow citizens whose views are shaped by skewed reporting and yellow journalism, and who share the same erroneous beliefs. Moreover, many do not enjoy sufficient disposable leisure to research the topics and issues on which they vote. I suspect that even if they did, however, they lack the interest, desire and will to educate themselves, to acquire a historical perspective and a grasp of the less obvious details that ultimately impinge on their well-being. Vigilance is a desideratum of informed citizenship.
Even more dispiriting, many do not want to hear the Muslim hum for what it is, instead attributing it to other sources or re-interpreting it as something it is not. Perhaps the hum is only an auditory hallucination or, for those with ears differently attuned, the hum is “really” a sweet and appealing melody. Robert Spencer recounts a recent instance of such a convenient transposition, involving a young woman affiliated with Georgetown University’s Saudi-funded Alwaleed bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding. She was photographed at a Washington demonstration carrying a sign reading: “I’m a Christian and I LOVE the Quran.” The woman presumably believes, Spencer comments, “that Jesus is the Son of God, the Second Person of the Trinity, who was crucified and rose from the dead for the salvation of the human race. Yet she is professing love for a book that not only denies all of that, but also insists that Christians are accursed, vile beings who should be waged war against until they submit to the hegemony of a group that believes differently.”
This may be an unaccommodating thing to say, but what one tends to find among the temporizers is a particularly daunting combination of ignorance, stupidity and self-infatuation. Such people do not want to recognize the peril before them since that would require the impulse to think, which is always hard, and the courage to act, which is never easy. Meanwhile, it’s obvious that ear mufflers won’t work against the Muslim detonations. Living beside a construction site is bad enough; living in a destruction site is infinitely worse.
Europe is learning this the hard way.
[Update a couple minutes later]
From early in the year, but related: Islamaphobia is a myth:
“Islamophobia is a code word for mainstream European elites’ fear of their own populations, of their native hordes, whom they imagine to be unenlightened, prejudiced, easily led by the tabloid media, and given to outbursts of spite and violence.”
Yes.
[Update late morning]
The perils of Islamic apologetics: “…it’s not my job to make Islam look good, or to argue that Islam “is a religion of peace,” when the reality is more complicated.”
You don’t say.
Trump isn’t a video recruiting tool, but Barack Obama is.
As Safire said, Hillary is a congenital liar. And she’s always gotten away with it, because the media and her supporters don’t care.
Jerry Grey says that we will have to rely on it for a while longer. This is a very good history. Interestingly, he stays out of the AR1/BE-4 fight, and makes no specific recommendation of what should replace it, only that something should.
Yesterday’s space success makes Bob Zimmerman optimistic about the future.
…caught in a new climate-data scandal?
Scientists don’t operate in secret, or hide their work.
RIP:
Avi Davis, president and founder of the American Freedom Alliance, passed away peacefully early Monday morning at UCLA Medical Center in Los Angeles, where he was surrounded by friends and loved ones.
Davis suffered a heart attack 11 days ago while cycling. He was placed in an induced coma as doctors ran a series of tests to determine his brain function, but ultimately he was unable to recover. He leaves behind two sons, Mati and Amiad, both his parents, Betty and Jack, a sister Yvette, and brothers Yoni and Shimmi. He was just 57 years old.
Breitbart News Executive Chairman Stephen K. Bannon said: “Avi Davis was a good man. A fighter, a patriot, a man who understood the conservative movement first needs to win in the marketplace of ideas. The country lost a leader, Breitbart News lost a friend.”
Sad news. I met him last summer at the Magna Carta event he put together in Westwood. Sobering, because he’s younger than me.
Neo-neocon wonders what Hillary really meant:
…in Hillary’s “ISIS uses Trump to recruit” claim, isn’t Clinton really saying that all it takes to turn a significant number of Muslims into murderous barbaric ISIS recruits is the idea that a US presidential candidate might want to bar them from visiting or immigrating to this country? Isn’t that a powerful condemnation of the religion and its adherents—by Hillary? Are they so ready to kill that just a few words indicating they’re not allowed to come here would be enough to ignite them and inspire a lot of people to join the ranks of the murderous terrorists of ISIS?
Seems awfully Islamophobic to me, not to mention bigoted. And furthermore, does that mean she’s saying that we have to make nice to them and welcome them into this country, or more of them will want to kill us?
As I’ve often said, the Left’s unwillingness to grant moral agency to Muslims, saying that they have no self control and everything they do is a reaction to us, is profoundly racist.
[Update a few minutes later]
Related: Muslim women say to stop wearing the hijab in solidarity with us. The Left has a profound cognitive dissonance in talking about an imaginary Republican “war on women” while ignoring a very real Muslim one.
Star Wars proves they’re clueless about it.
Of course, #Gamergate has been demonstrating that for many months.
“Admit it, you just want your own dictator“:
this is certainly not the first time we’ve seen voters adopt a cultish reverence for a strong-willed presidential candidate without any perceptible deference to the foundational ideals of the country whose personal charisma was supposed to shatter obstacles standing in the way of making America great again. Many of the same people anxious about the authoritarian overtones of Trump’s appeal were unconcerned about the intense adulation that adoring crowds showered on Obama in 2008, though the spectacle featured similarly troubling signs—the iconography, the messianic messaging, and the implausible promises of government-produced comfort and safety. Just as President Trump fans will judge every person on how nice or mean they are to Trump, so too, those rooting against Obama were immediately branded unpatriotic or racist.
It’s frightening how many people support Trump or Hillary. Of course, they’re also the candidates with the biggest negatives, so that’s sort of encouraging.
[Update a few minutes later]
2016: The Democrats theme is totalitarianism. Not that totalitarianism is anything new to the Left, which is what the Democrats have essentially become.
[Update a few minutes later]
Related: Sad that it takes a Canadian to point out: “Don’t blame Trump; blame America“:
I agree Trump is ridiculous — but he is an illustration of a problem and not its cause. Trump is not the swamp: he is the creature emerging from it. For however ridiculous and appalling his candidacy may be, it is no worse and no more ridiculous and appalling than the whole pattern of American politics at this time.
Is his candidacy more lunatic than the idea of a third President Bush or a second President Clinton? More despairing than the idea of an America so bereft of political talent that two families supply the major pool?
Is he more manipulative than President “you can keep you doctor, you can keep you plan” Obama? Is he less venal or arrogant than Hillary “it’s my server and it’s my State Department” Clinton?
Is his candidacy less perplexing than parts of the Democratic party’s fixations? Is it less lunatic that the spectacle of a former governor, Martin O’Malley — one of the few Democrats wandering the no-man’s land of opposition to the Hillary machine — apologizing, more than once, for asserting out loud that “all lives matter”? The Democrats have drilled so deep into the factionalism and demagoguery of identity politics — sexual and ethnic — that any appeal to universalism, any echo of the greatest phrase in the Declaration of Independence — “all men are created equal” — is now toxic? Donald Trump may be annoying, but he has said or done nothing that equals the fatuousness of a system in which the claim that all lives matter is seen as a troubling deviancy?
[Via Ed Driscoll]