Our Choice- Live in Incorrectness or Die Correct

I generally dislike sports analogies. They are often overblown and the context of sports is much simpler that real life. But with The Super Bowl coming up and The Perfect Season Patriots looking like they will soon rewrite football history, there is a subtle lesson to be learned from some of the “sports talk” we are hearing.

New England Patriots coach Bill Belichik has always been a controversial head coach but this year the controversy has come in waves all season long. He has long been an object of media and fan fascination often called a genius and sometimes called obsessed, cold, ruthless and even evil, but this year the debate has been fueled by forces larger than usual.

From the ‘tape-gate” scandal in the first game of the season to the whining about “running up the score”, the yapping dogs of envy and the devious media jackals that feed on the scraps left by big meat-eaters like Bill and this year’s undefeated Patriots have been trying to diminish his achievements and draw attention to themselves. They alternately, cluck their tongues disapprovingly and rail disingenuously about rules and moral issues that in the end have played no discernable role in this triumphal season. There has even a very earnest debate over whether Belichik deserves to be the “Coach of the Year”.

There is more to this debate than meets the eye. A large part of the animus against him, of course, is the anti-competitive angst of the fans of other teams who would like to find a way of rationalizing their teams as the “better” teams. But, beyond that, I think Mr Belichik is disliked in so public a way because he is very Incorrect Politically.

Here are some of the things about him that are incorrect:

He believes in keeping score.
He does not pander to the press.
He does not mince words.
He wants to win every time he competes.
He shows disregard for the feelings of opposing players and fans.
He thinks winning is more important than the emotions of his players.
He does not allow his own emotion to cloud his judgment.
He is resourceful, self-reliant and self-confident.
He is notorious for never being satisfied just to win- he wants to use it as an opportunity to assure continued winning.
He is famous for being so diligent and dedicated that he simply out-works all opposing coaches.
He knows the difference between inventive strategy and cheating and is not afraid to walk the thin line between them to secure victory.
When he is judged wrong he takes his penalty without complaint.
He is focused on winning because he knows it’s better than losing.
He knows the difference between a reason and an excuse.
He does not want to give in to “you can’t win them all”.

The thing that most offends the general sensibilities of people who don’t understand Belichik is the way he responds to winning. The Tuesday after a win he always has an even longer list of negative notes and film clips of mistakes and miscues to go over with the players than after a loss. This is looked on with a mixture of horror and amusement by much of the press and the general public. There are those who seem to believe that with a great group of individual athletes to lead and a winning system, Belichik might be better advised to celebrate a little longer and give his players a bit more of a reward. But Belichik knows that that is not how perfect seasons happen.

I heard John Madden (the former coach turned broadcaster) on the radio last Sunday morning. He was talking about how the most successful coaches have always been the kind of person who never rests on success. They are driven toward perfection. They are winners.

Madden was talking about the amused, even condescending, attitude with which many people, even inside football respectfully deride such behavior. But he defended it. He explained it this way, he said;

“Whatever you let go when you’re winning, you will have to live with when you are losing.”

I knew just what he meant.

A top flight coach realizes that if he can see it on the film then the opposing coach can see it too. When, for example, a linebacker habitually does not take responsibility for defending against the run in a particular formation, he is leaving his team defenseless against that threat. Sooner or later an opposing coach will design a running play to take advantage of him. The victorious team may think they will be winning forever but the coach knows better. If the coach does not correct that lapse now, he will, in the future, have to live with the result on a day when the team is not winning.

It has become a habit for us in the West to assume that we will be winning forever. We have, after all, dominated the civilized world for several centuries. By comparison the ‘07-‘08 Patriots are a flash in the pan. So it is understandable if not forgivable if we have begun to lose sight of what makes western civilization great.

Having our way so habitually has even made us a little shame-faced about it. We try very hard not to rub it in- not to appear to be “running up the score” on the opposition. In fact, we invented multiculturalism so that we could pretend that there really is no competition- that we are all just the same as everyone else and that there is no reason why any other culture should feel anymore threatened by us than we do of them.

The problem is that our perspective has become warped. We are not afraid of them because we have been on such a long winning streak. They hate us for our success and power- and they despise our smarmy, condescending, back-handedly racist multiculturalism.

At the same time, non western challengers are rising up in the Islamic world and Asia who do not share our values and our scruples. We don’t believe it, but they have no interest in becoming like us. We are so busy trying to console them for being so backward that we cannot comprehend that they don’t see it that way.


Nobody in the west can see this as clearly as someone from the outside. Alexander Solzhenitsyn saw it. In his 1978 commencement speech at Harvard (Hat tip to Jeremayakovka) he delivered a very clear and ominous notice to the western world about this blindness. He said:

“But the blindness of superiority continues in spite of all and upholds the belief that the vast regions everywhere on our planet should develop and mature to the level of present day Western systems, which in theory are the best and in practice the most attractive. There is this belief that all those other worlds are only being temporarily prevented (by wicked governments or by heavy crises or by their own barbarity and incomprehension) from taking the way of Western pluralistic democracy and from adopting the Western way of life. Countries are judged on the merit of their progress in this direction.”

Solzhenitsyn was viewed as a crank back then. I remember the polite but troubled way in which most reviewers of that speech backed away from his ideas. They did not engage his observations because they could not find the words to do so in their politically correct vocabulary. And back then the vocabulary was so much broader and unconstrained than it is today. The Correctness mafia has been picking off words and ideas progressively and spreading the blankness of omerta wider and wider.

We actually have become so polite about it that we feel that discussing those things that make Western Civilization better than (or preferable to) other cultures (let alone the measures that might be necessary to defend the west) in public constitute some kind of “bad form”. We even have whole sets of words and ideas that we refuse to use because they sound too harsh, too male dominated, too power oriented, too insensitive or judgmental. This is what is called Political Correctness and if we could put a good coach in charge, a geopolitical Belichik or an American Solzhenitsyn, he would put a stop to it before another game went by.

Just as the small and overly legally-minded have continued caviling about Bill Belichik’s tape-gate peccadillo and crying that it should invalidate his body of work, so the tiny minds and shriveled souls of the progressive wing and their surrogates in the media have been harping on Abu-Ghraib, Guantanamo, inflated collateral casualty figures and fabricated public-relations incidents like al Durah, Jenin, Gaza Beach and Qana and implying that they make us, “no better than” those who want to destroy us.

Political Correctness is Unilateral Cultural Disarmament. As bad as it is here in the U.S. it is even worse in Israel. In December Caroline Glick wrote about the aftermath of the Lebanon War:

“This week the IDF distributed ribbons to its soldiers and officers for their service in the war with Hizbullah in 2006. The ribbons were a source of embarrassment. Soldiers and officers, who like the general public view the war as Israel's greatest military defeat, are loath to pin them on their uniforms.

While the soldiers and general public view the war as a failure, one sector of Israeli society sees the war as a great triumph. For Israel's legal establishment, the war was a great victory. It was a war in which its members asserted their dominance over Israel's political and military leadership.

The legal establishment's ardor for the Second Lebanon War was exposed on Tuesday with the publication of the testimonies of Attorney-General Menahem Mazuz and Military Advocate-General Avichai Mandelblit before the Winograd Committee which the Olmert government established to research the war's failures. In their testimonies both men shared their perception of the war as a great victory of lawyers in their campaign to "lawyerize" - or assert their control - over Israeli society.

In his opening statement, Mazuz extolled the war as "the most 'lawyerly' in the history of the State of Israel, and perhaps ever." He explained, "The process didn't begin in Lebanon 2006. It… is a gradual process of 'lawyerizing' life in Israel."

Mazuz responded negatively to the question of whether legal considerations superseded operational and strategic goals during the war. He claimed that the government and the IDF restricted their plans from the beginning to conform with perceived legal restrictions.

As he put it, that preemptive limitation of goals was "the result of a sort of education and internalization that have taken place over the years. I remember periods where there was a great deal of friction with the senior military level regarding what is allowed and what is prohibited. But today I think that there is more or less an understanding of the rules of the game and I can't identify any confrontation… or … demands to 'Let the IDF win.'"

Solzhenitsyn predicted we would come to this in the west:

“I have spent all my life under a Communist regime and I will tell you that a society without any objective legal scale is a terrible one indeed. But a society with no other scale than the legal one is not quite worthy of man either. A society which is based on the letter of the law and never reaches any higher is taking very scarce advantage of the high level of human possibilities. The letter of the law is too cold and formal to have a beneficial influence on society. Whenever the tissue of life is woven of legalistic relations, there is an atmosphere of moral mediocrity, paralyzing man's noblest impulses. And it will be simply impossible to stand through the trials of this threatening century with only the support of a legalistic structure.”

The very idea that a nation fighting for its life could be saddling its combat units with the legal equivalent of the Communist “political officers” who used to be assigned to every unit of the Soviet armed forces is hard to believe. Israel is clearly on the threshold of discovering the point at which she can no longer live with all of goofy politically correct baggage that the west has loaded onto the back of her spectacularly successful society. She is, as is the rest of western civilization, is being challenged now by a new kind of enemy. Funded by torrents of petrodollars, allowed to breed uninhibited by any effective counter-measures and armed with the power of darkness and light through it’s control of our energy supply, this enemy has been studying our films. They know our weaknesses better than we do.

Israel and all of western civilization must face the fact that millions of us, including most of the most intelligent, powerful and affluent of us have already lain down our arms in this struggle. We refuse to talk about a proven threat despite the proof (9/11, Madrid, London, Beslan, Bali, etc…). Or we shrug and concede that we may, in fact, deserve the death with which we are threatened (viz. Vanessa Redgrave, Cindy Sheehan, Rabbi Michael Lerner, Sean Penn, Harry Reid, etc…). Some of us even accede that we should be ashamed to resist. We need to find ways to take back our city walls, to hold back the horde at the gate and to find weapons and rearm ourselves before we are conquered in a war whose existence we still refuse to even acknowledge.

There is yet some faint hope.
Back on December 27 I saw, on Little Green Footballs, a snip of an article by Andrew C. McCarthy who is director of the Center for Law & Counterterrorism at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. The National Review Online article is clear and comprehensive and you should read it in full but I’ll shorten up the LGF quote to the most important paragraph:

“But we should at least stop fooling ourselves. Jihadists are not going to be wished away, rule-of-lawed into submission, or democratized out of existence. If you really want democracy and the rule of law in places like Pakistan, you need to kill the jihadists first. Or they’ll kill you, just like, today, they killed Benazir Bhutto.”

You read it right. He said “kill”. A very incorrect word, that. In spite of the prejudice in our public life that “you can’t say that” he said it.

It is true. A lot of people have already been killed and many more are going to get killed and we are going to have to learn to talk and think about the prospect of the killing sooner or later. The sooner we do, the better off we will be. We need to be able to talk about it so that we can figure out how to do it with the minimum number of deaths and to make sure that the deaths that do happen, happen to them and not us.

“Surely, there must be another way”, the Political Correctness mafia tell us- “War is not the answer” they say. If you say that war is not the answer to any question, that means you have refused to understand the question.

Solzhenitsyn, our friendly outsider, says that we do not comprehend the danger we face because we think that there will be a point of convergence where all other cultures (he calls them worlds) will overcome their backwardness and corruption and begin to think and act like us…

“…It is a soothing theory which overlooks the fact that these worlds are not at all developing into similarity. Neither one can be transformed into the other without the use of violence.”

Last April I used a lot more words to say what amounts to the same thing: In my series debunking the American Indian Analogy I wrote,

One of the two cultures, Islam or The West, must conquer the other and, if the end of the conquest is to be humane, there must be a clear winner. Someone has to admit they have been conquered. At the end of the Indian wars there were many moments of despair, bitterness and regret which still haunt America. Chief Joseph of the Nez Perce tribe gave voice to the Indian defeat in a speech that is both dignified and noble:
"Tell General Howard I know his heart. What he told me before, I have it in my heart. I am tired of fighting. Our chiefs are killed; Looking Glass is dead, Too-hul-hul-sote is dead. The old men are all dead. It is the young men who say yes or no. He who led on the young men is dead. It is cold, and we have no blankets; the little children are freezing to death. My people, some of them, have run away to the hills, and have no blankets, no food. No one knows where they are—perhaps freezing to death. I want to have time to look for my children, and see how many of them I can find. Maybe I shall find them among the dead. Hear me, my chiefs! I am tired; my heart is sick and sad. From where the sun now stands, I will fight no more forever."

It took several generations a profound transformation of the environment (including the slaughter of the buffalo herds) and much bloodshed to force that speech out of an Indian.
If, as seems to be the case, we cannot get the Calphatists to make that same transition peacefully, we will have to reduce them by some combination of that same kind of starvation and attrition. We will have to make them capitulate the way we did with Chief Joseph.

The good news is that we still have enough power and resources to protect ourselves, if we can find the will, there are a number of comparatively humane and easy ways to render them harmless. One that appeals to me because it addresses the source of their power most directly and would not damage the environment or kill large numbers of them to implement this solution, is to deprive them of the oil money. Without that vast river of cash to float on, they would be on a very short and precipitous downhill slide back to the pit of atavistic oblivion that their honor/shame based culture.

“No blood for oil”, you say? I have already written about that little Correctoid. What do you think 9/11 is? What do you think every honor killing of a young woman in western countries is? How about the slaughter of innocents in Israel? Its all blood for oil.

We must learn how to discriminate among the peoples of the earth. Who shares our cultural aspirations? Who are our cultural equals and who must we help by leading them through the gateways to equality? And who (if they, by their dedication to our destruction, insist) must we conduct, humanely (that is with the least number of collateral casualties)and swiftly as possible, to The Pearly Gates.

Just so there is no room for misunderstanding here, let me say this explicitly, I leave it open that it is possible that America did not have to kill all of the Indians who were killed in the development of the continent. It is probable that a better understanding of the cultural issues at stake and a better grasp of the possible strategies might have brought about a solution to the problem without as much carnage as did happen. No one (at least no one with any power to change the course of events) was able to see and verbalize that the Indians and their way of life were being replaced by the leading edge of western civilization. If they had been able to frame the situation that way, the whole thing might have been handled with out the wasteful and disillusioning hypocrisy of treaties that promised autonomy and coexistence.

Likewise, I am not saying we have to kill a large number of Muslims. It might only be necessary to kill a few- the few that are actively trying to kill us. The fact is, though, that our current approach is without doubt the worst way to handle the problem and will end up costing more in suffering and blood than a more frank and aggressive tack. We must acknowledge that they do not consider us fully human, and that many of them take it as their sacred responsibility to either make us full humans in their eyes by converting us to their primitive and imbecilicly intolerant cult or KILL us.

They will continue killing us and forcing us to kill them until we solve the problem in some way and that solution will be impossible if our rules of discourse continue to outlaw the vocabulary to describe the problem and the concepts that define it.

One thing is for sure, we have to neutralize the oil problem one way or another. After all, before the oil money started to pour into the shabby remnant of the Caliphate after World War II it had been shriveling on the vine for five centuries- dying of its own incompetence ( see here and here).

Or maybe we can either invent a replacement for oil or, perhaps just take it away from them. How we do it is debatable but unless we are able to speak frankly about it and consider the alternatives, we will continue to pretend it’s not really a problem until the Christians and Jews among us are all reduced to dhimmi status and the rest are forced to become Muslims and head the call to prayers five times a day
I’m not necessarily advocating that we take and hold the oil fields, nor am I saying we must invade Iran next. I am merely saying that we have no idea what we can do to stop being picked off a few (or a few dozen or a few thousand) at a time. We have not yet made the commitment to define and solve the problem as it exists. As a result we are forced to make concessions to a parasitic cultural disease. Caliphate Islam is attempting to burrow into and control the heart and mind of Western Civilization. Unless we can reclaim the vocabulary with which to identify and talk about it, we are at its mercy. The only thing standing in our way is our misunderstanding of our own principals.

I remember my step-daughter, at fifteen years old, cornering me after having been denied a bid to attend a "rave" in another state with her seventeen year old boyfriend. She had argued all of the familiar teenage arguments about trust (how can you ever trust me if you don't give me a chance to prove that I can be trusted? etc...) she had made her bid for respect (I'm not a baby anymore, you treat me like a child, etc..,) and she let us know how entirely unreasonable our position was (every other kid I know is going, etc...,) and her mother and I had been united in telling her that it was inappropriate and wasn’t going to happen.

After a while, her mother left the house and she approached me from behind as I typed. "Yaacov", she said, "do you consider me an equal?" With only a moment’s hesitation I recognized the attack. She was employing the fiendishly manipulative adolescent tactic of using an over-simplified version of one's deeply cherished principals to coerce you to give them what they want. Just like a besieged parent dealing with a sociopath (that's what teenagers are) we in the civilized world have to look the rest of the world and tell them "No, you are not yet fully equal. You have the rights but you are not up to the responsibilities that the rights require. Until you are experienced and mature enough that you will not kill yourself and others, I'll have to help you decide these things."

It is a fatal mistake to take "All Men are Created Equal" too literally. This allows the radical left, and the Caliphateists, to torment them by advocating premature equality. There must be a lower limit of civic ability below which a population cannot be trusted to act in their own best interest. The right to self-determination may be inalienable but THE ABILITY to participate in a culture that allows such freedom has to be affected by education, experience and culture. Multiculturalists will ask, “Who are we to pass judgment on another culture?” If the criteria are not obvious enough, I’ll mention a few:

Freedom of speech
Freedom of religion
Freedom of association
Free Enterprise
Legal, social and economic equality for Women

There are more but those will do for a start. If we could just stop pretending that we are all the same and put a real effort into understanding which countries have those attributes and which do not, we could begin to understand who our enemies are and why. The multicultural, politically correct elite want to prevent that discussion. This is how multiculturalism strikes at the heart of western democracy- it insists that the unqualified, the unwilling and the unready nations should never be identified by those characteristics. As a result, they are afforded the same access, independence and respect as the most culturally advanced.

Thus, the women, children and non-Muslims of those countries suffer murder, beatings, and all manner of abuse and humiliation while the US who first put those ideals into words for the rest of the world is mocked and Israel who scrupulously reigns in her own power and embodies the finest instincts of the west is branded a pariah.

In the event that the United States continues to dither away our waning oppotunity to reverse the direction of this threat, Israel has to begin to throw off its lawyers and resurrect her self-defence. Seraphic Secret had a very good post last week about the requirements for that effort. Here is part of it:

“Time is running out for Israel. If she doesn't get serious about the jihadist threat, I fear for her existence. Here then our recommendations for defeating the Arab/Muslim threat.

Towards Victory:

1. Jews have the right to live anywhere in the world. Especially in Israel, the Jewish State.
2. Appeasement leads to further aggression on the part of Israel's enemies.
3. There is no peace process; there is a process of war.
4. Israel should cut off all supplies of power and fuel to Gaza.
5. Israel should cease all negotiations with the Arabs. There's nothing to talk about. We have legitimized these genocidal killers far too long.
6. Israel should declare Israel's boundaries; the Arabs can sink or swim.
7. Israel should announce that the next rocket that comes from Gaza will be met with an overwhelming barrage against the infrastructure of Hamas.
8. If the rockets from Gaza continue, Israel should announce that the next attacks will be directed at the civilian population of Gaza.
9. Israel must carry through on these threats. Further: all terrorist attacks must be met with disproportionate responses.
10. Israel must never trade land for promises of peace.”

Here is the text of a comment I left on that Seraphic Secret post:

Jews must stop acting as though we live at the sufferance of others. May I presume to add another point? Since the Arabs seem to value their holy sites much more than their children, and in the light of their desecration of all Jewish holy sites within their reach, I have long thought that Israel should simply tell them that every Qassam that falls on Israeli soil will cause a brick to be removed from the Al Aqsa Mosque. Every Israeli murdered by Qassams, Katushas, drive-bys or suicide killers would be worth a wall. A mass killing should equal a plastique charge. When the Al Aqsa excrescence has been eradicated from our Temple Mount there will be other targets. In fact, if I were free to make policy, I might just tell them that if Israel is attacked militarily, the next time you want to make a pilgrimage to visit the Ka’ba you’d better plan to take a Geiger Counter and a very long rappelling rope. Of course we can afford to do the honorable thing and give them a day’s notice before launch…

Its not just Jews- Western Civilization must stop behaving as if we don't feel entitled to live unless every other culture wants to be like us. We have to understand that life is always and always has been a competition for survival. If we want our children and our values to survive, it is time to act while we are still able to win easily.

Cultural Insanity - Part I - The Diagnosis

I’ve been quiet for a week and as you might know by now that means I’ve been working on something big Here is the First of a two part essay-

In a recent post on his own blog Richard Landes printed a letter he had received from someone who had heard him interviewed on the radio. The letter cited numerous “facts” that were obviously false and claimed to point to evidence that was clearly “cooked” and kneaded into a pungent soufflé of anti-Israel canards.

Landes, never one to miss a challenging “teaching moment”, wrote a lengthy reply. In the course of his reply, he addressed the superficial reasonableness of the letter writer’s arguments. He wrote:

“The important point here is not that your position isn’t “reasonable” — and as supported by evidence as mine. It’s a legitimate one. And under normal circumstances, we could agree to differ, just as Ptolomean and Copernican astronomers could differ without grave consequences in the 16th century. But don’t try to send a space ship beyond the solar system using Ptolomean calculations.”



It might seem that Landes goes a little too far in his charitable concession that his interlocutor’s point of view was “reasonable” and “just as supported by evidence” as his own, but Landes is following an honored and sadly neglected academic method, one that is designed not to merely support a point of view in a contest but rather to test it against alternatives and see which one is more successful at describing reality. So without looking any further than the narrow frame of reference in which the letter writer framed his point of view, they seemed just to present competing and equally valid ways of looking at the situation.

Landes’ then proceeded to widen the frame around the argument to show that, like the Ptolomean system, the narrow view taken by the radio listener does not work once you expand the frame to a wider and more comprehensive view of reality. The Copernican system is, of course, much more useful in space travel because it more closely approximates the real positions, relationships and movement of the heavenly bodies; and Landes’ view is much more robust and able to account for the reality of the conflict between Western Civilization and those who wish to rule the world with collectivist systems.

That point, elegantly stated, traces the stark fault line between the strangest sets of bedfellows the world has ever seen and the most successful civilization in history. The fatally conjoined, murderously quarrelsome twins of the Sunni and Shia Caliphate Cults and the liberal/socialist/communist/collectivist bastard children of The West (fascists all !) all have this in common, that they simply lack the ability to see the cultural frame of world events in any but the narrowest perspective. This is more than a willful blindness and it is not a product of stupidity of ignorance either. As I observe the smug, suicidal behavior of the progressive/socialist/liberal left and compare it with the belligerent, intolerance of the Caliphate Muslims seem to me to be in the grip of a similar kind of mental illness. They are all “collectivists” and there is something about people who believe in giving up one’s rights and prerogatives to a group of any kind that renders them unable to behave in a broader self-interest- even while they believe that they are doing the righteous thing. One way to explain this apparently inexplicable behavior is that it represents a cultural analog of a mental illness known as Borderline Personality Disorder.

I am not in favor of criminalizing or dehumanizing people because of their ideas and I believe that calling anyone that disagrees with you “insane” is an intolerant and unproductive tactic. I also Acknowledge that, just as it is dangerous and inexact to apply models of animal behavior to human beings, and that it is perhaps even more tricky to project individual psychology onto social and cultural groups Nevertheless, the parallels here are striking and, I believe, very instructive.

Wikipedia defines Borderline Personality Disorder this way:

Borderline personality disorder (BPD) is defined as a mental illness primarily characterized by emotional dysregulation, extreme "black and white" thinking, or "splitting", and chaotic relationships. The general profile of the disorder also typically includes a pervasive instability in (1) mood, (2) interpersonal relationships, (3) self-image, (4) identity, and (5) behavior, as well as a disturbance in the individual's sense of self. In extreme cases, this disturbance in the sense of self can lead to periods of dissociation.[1]

Dissociation is the key. The leftist and the Islamist (infact collectivists of any stripe) are dissociated from their own very natures. They deny basic human truths in a defensive but doomed effort not to have to deal with issues that cause them tremendous anxiety.

Wikepedia continues:


“The disturbances suffered by those with borderline personality disorder have a wide-ranging and pervasive negative impact on many or all of the psychosocial facets of life, including employability and relationships in work, home, and social settings. Comorbidity is common; borderline personality disorder frequently occurring with substance use disorders and affective disorders. Suicidality and completed suicide are possible outcomes without proper care and effective therapy.”

Whether it is the abrupt and violent suicide culture of such diverse groups as al Qeada, Hamas and Hezbollah or the slow cultural/intellectual suicide of multiculturalism, it is compellingly apparent that the definition applies in both cases. Caliphate Islamism and Leftist liberalism both predispose their adherents to lose the ability to see the wider moral and ethical frame of the world around them.

This explains why, even though their idiosyncratic and xenophobic ideological systems are mutually contradictory, they don’t find it important to argue with each other. That’s because at the moment the contradictions amongst them are orthogonal - that is to say, in the presence of the dominant Western and American cultural and political influence, they really don’t interfere with each other. Their common disease makes them natural allies against that larger, more psychologically stable power structure that seems to them to humiliate and mock them by its very existence.

Of course, that alliance would evaporate the instant one of them ever got into a position of power. As soon as Islamists take over in an area, whether in Iraq, Waziristan or (most recently) in Gaza, they immediately behead, shoot, disembowel and torture anyone that represents moderation or reasonableness. The left, given the opportunity, in the USSR, China, Korea and Cambodia has always done the same. But while Western civilization is the common enemy, an Islamic Caliphateist who believes that women are inferior to men can accept (or at least ignore) the ranting of an anti-Israel socialist woman who believes that no human being is any more deserving than any other because she, as he does, finds it so much more important to deny the reality and moral superiority of Israel- a country whose founding principals are not orthogonal to but directly opposed to his. Indeed, the very existence of Israel is a challenge to his most basic beliefs and desires. She, on the other hand, remains blind to the plight of Muslim women and the lack of even the most rudimentary freedom of expression in the Muslim Caliphate because she has dissociated those things- split them off from her reality because they are intolerable for her and her illness has so weakened her that she cannot contemplate them.

Wikipedia provides this a list of diagnostic criteria from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-IV-TR). The presence of five out of nine of these is considered diagnostic of borderline personality.

Frantic efforts to avoid real or imagined abandonment…
A pattern of unstable and intense interpersonal relationships characterized by alternating between extremes of idealization and devaluation.
Identity disturbance: markedly and persistently unstable self-image or sense of self.
Impulsivity in at least two areas that are potentially self-damaging (e.g., spending, promiscuous sex, eating disorders, substance abuse, reckless driving, binge eating). [Again, not including suicidal or self-mutilating behavior covered in Criterion 5]
Recurrent suicidal behavior, gestures, threats, or self-mutilating behavior.
Affective instability due to a marked reactivity of mood (e.g., intense episodic dysphoria, irritability, or anxiety usually lasting a few hours and only rarely more than a few days)
Chronic feelings of emptiness.
Inappropriate, intense anger or difficulty controlling anger (e.g., frequent displays of temper, constant anger, recurrent physical fights).
Transient, stress-related paranoid ideation or severe dissociative symptoms.

I’ll admit at the outset that my definition of the progressive/socialist/liberal left is pretty broad and fuzzy around the edges. To try to define it down would be to miss the point. My point is that beyond a fairly narrow band close to the center of the political spectrum, the left has so swallowed the failed progressive agenda that they all suffer from the same cultural malaise. Here are the symptoms I see for the left:

1. Frantic efforts to avoid real or imagined abandonment…
a. Objections to the Israeli Security fence and the Mexican border fence.
2. A pattern of unstable and intense interpersonal relationships characterized by alternating between extremes of idealization and devaluation.
a. The idealized view of Caliphate Islam as “freedom fighters” and “non-materialistic religious devotees while at the same time devaluing them with the “racism of lowered expectations” by not holding them to the same high standard in human rights, public discourse, child welfare and civil governance as expected of other people.
3. Identity disturbance: markedly and persistently unstable self-image or sense of self.
a. Self-hatred:
i. Concentration on the “human rights record of Israel” while the Arab/Islamic, Chinese, Korean, Zimbabwean and Rssian records are orders of magnitude worse
ii. Public displays of disgust with America even though it is the greatest country and most finest democratic experiment in the history of mankind
4. Impulsivity in at least two areas that are potentially self-damaging (e.g., spending, promiscuous sex, eating disorders, substance abuse, reckless driving, binge eating). [Again, not including suicidal or self-mutilating behavior covered in Criterion 5]
a. Advocacy of sex-education that emphasizes techniques and birth control and derides abstinence and relationship counseling.
b. The introduction of legislation to control the content of food beyond basic safety standards. The move to outlaw trans-fats in some locals is symptomatic of food-faddism and group eating disorders.
5. Recurrent suicidal behavior, gestures, threats, or self-mutilating behavior.
a. Multiculturalism leads to the inability to discriminate between right and wrong and to protect the culture from death-cult attacks
b. Persistent belief that “War is Not the Answer” even when an enemy has sworn to destroy and rule over you.
6. Affective instability due to a marked reactivity of mood (e.g., intense episodic dysphoria, irritability, or anxiety usually lasting a few hours and only rarely more than a few days)
7. Chronic feelings of emptiness.
8. Inappropriate, intense anger or difficulty controlling anger (e.g., frequent displays of temper, constant anger, recurrent physical fights).
9. Transient, stress-related paranoid ideation or severe dissociative symptoms.
a. Conspiracy Theories (9/11 truth movement, Bushitler stole the election)
Well, there’s six, a diagnosis plus one. I’m sure there are a lot more- suggestions and additions are welcome …

Here’s my take on the symptoms of The Caliphate:

1. Frantic efforts to avoid real or imagined abandonment…
a. Objections to the Israeli Security fence
2. A pattern of unstable and intense interpersonal relationships characterized by alternating between extremes of idealization and devaluation.
3. Identity disturbance: markedly and persistently unstable self-image or sense of self.
a. Humiliation and rage over everything The West is and does stems from the dissociation of the knowledge that their culture is actually inferior.
b. Honor killings
c. Rampant child and sexual abuse
4. Impulsivity in at least two areas that are potentially self-damaging (e.g., spending, promiscuous sex, eating disorders, substance abuse, reckless driving, binge eating). [Again, not including suicidal or self-mutilating behavior covered in Criterion 5]
5. Recurrent suicidal behavior, gestures, threats, or self-mutilating behavior.
a. Suicide martyrdom raised to a cultural ideal
6. Affective instability due to a marked reactivity of mood (e.g., intense episodic dysphoria, irritability, or anxiety usually lasting a few hours and only rarely more than a few days)
a. The “Arab Street” in general
7. Chronic feelings of emptiness.
8. Inappropriate, intense anger or difficulty controlling anger (e.g., frequent displays of temper, constant anger, recurrent physical fights).
a. The two Intifadas
b. The Cartoon-ifada
c. The Pope-ifada
d. The Paris street riots
9. Transient, stress-related paranoid ideation or severe dissociative symptoms.
a. Jew Hatred
b. Dhimmi laws
c. Conspiracy theories (9/11 was an Israeli plot, etc)
There’s six there too. It’s only six because of time restraints- suggestions and additions welcome here too.

Let me make it clear, I’m not a psychiatrist or psychotherapist so I don’t know what the prognosis is for individuals with this disorder or what price their family members and neighbors pay for their proximity to them. I do have a degree in anthropology, however, and I am able to see into the cultural scale of the problem. It is not hopeless but is is frightening.

Loren Eiseley who was a great anthropologist and paleontologist of the old school, knew the pathology of culture well. In his great essay The Star Thrower he wrote, “Man would kill for shadowy ideas more ferociously than other creatures kill for food, then, in a generation or less, forget what bloody dream had so oppressed him.” That is culture on a rampage. My next post will focus on the hope for recovery and reconciliation.

The Blind and Merciless Sky Above

The post immediately below this one still has me unsettled. I spent the remainder of the week last week wondering about the whole thing. For those of you who made the decision not to expose yourselves to the horror of that film clip, let me just say that neither what happened to the girl, nor the insane act of covering her nakedness that I talked about in my post were the most lasting image I carry with me. It is the crowd of frenzied attackers, many of them with cell phones in their hands, crowding around her, beating her, all the while holding those hideous glowing cell phones up to record the unfolding horror.

I always wondered who it was that took pictures like this

during the holocaust. I suppose that in some deep recess of my heart I had dared to harbor the hope that at least some of those photographers might have been trying to record the horror so that future generations might know and work to prevent such things from ever happening again. It was my naïve hope that the man in this picture might have been glancing up to see a sympathetic figure, a figure who wanted to make his final moment one that would live in human hearts and help to improve them. That despicable film has taken that silly, fragile hope from me.

The girl in that film clip died, as this man did, under a blind and merciless sky, in the savage hands of atavistic murderers, without a hope of any redemption. It is only by freakish accident that you and I, dear reader, have had the opportunity to feel as though we were with them in their last instants of life. The blind enthusiasm and fatuous immorality of their tormentors have preserved those moments for us. We owe it to them to carry their images in our hearts and to make sure that we do our best to prevent such things in the future.

If we allow Western Civilization to lose heart and give in to the bloody advance of the Caliphate, every sky will be blind and merciless for millennia to come.

No, Its Not All Their Fault...

It's up to all of us to insist on a free world.

Islamism, Islamofascism or just plain Islam- however you feel the definition should be framed, is a problem but it can only be as big a problem as we allow it to be. Western civilization, like any other natural phenomenon, contains the seeds of its own destruction that exist as part and parcel of the properties that make it grow and thrive. People grow and learn only to become old, brittle and moribund. The object of the game in civilizations, as it is for living creatures, is to accentuate the healthy properties and minimize the effect of those defects as much as possible for as long as possible. The challenge is to survive, fight entropy and create a greater and more satisfying life in the process.

The west has been driven by an engine of dynamic change tempered by ethical benevolence greater than any other the world has ever known. It is not necessarily the case that the world-wide Jihad has been so damaging, it is just that it has found was of taking advantage of our vulnerabilities. It is these vulnerabilities that we have to address before we can stop the process by which the Jihad threat has accelerated the sapping of the moral courage of our entire civilization.

Dr Jacob Bronowski identified the key aspect of the problem back in the early 1970’s. It is crucial for us to understand that, as evil and immediate as Islamofascism is today, it has only been able to make the inroads in the west that it has because of the crucial flaws that Bronowski eloquently exposed in his brilliant BBC series, “The Ascent of Man”.

Islamofascism, of course, was not even on anyone’s radar screen at the time, and Bronowski’s concerns centered on the “popular”, non-rational intellectual fads of the day, but Bronowski’s words are prophetic. Long before Islam re-emerged as a threat he had a clear vision of the vulnerability to it that was, then, in its embryonic stage. His words echo across the decades with a warning and an exhortation.

“And I am infinitely saddened to find myself suddenly surrounded in the west by a sense of terrible loss of nerve, a retreat from knowledge into--into what? Into Zen Buddhism; into falsely profound questions about, are we not really just animals at bottom; into extra-sensory perception and mystery. They do not lie along the line of what we are now able to know if we devote ourselves to it: an understanding of man himself. We are nature's unique experiment to make the rational intelligence prove itself sounder than the reflex. Knowledge is our destiny. Self-knowledge, at last bringing together the experience of the arts and the explanations of science, waits ahead of us.

It sounds very pessimistic to talk about western civilization with a sense of retreat. I have been so optimistic about the ascent of man; am I going to give up at this moment? Of course not, the ascent of man will go on. But do not assume that it will go on carried by western civilization as we know it. We are being weighed in the balance at this moment. If we give up, the next step will be taken- but not by us.”

It is a striking passage. Leading up to this point, through twelve preceding episodes, Bronowski has dramatized the critical intellectual and scientific personalities and their discoveries that have brought western civilization to the pinnacle of human progress. He is neither apologetic nor tentative. Even in speaking of his reservations about the use of the atomic weapons on Hiroshima and Nagasaki he never wavered from his full confidence that the intellectual honesty, tolerant respect for new ideas, adventurous thirst for discovery and rigorous insistence on testing in reality that are the strengths of western science will lead to continual advancement and higher evolution. Now he confesses a deep concern for the continuity of that evolution.

Although it is true that Bronowski was a Jew, his real faith was in science and rationality. Born in Poland and raised in England he mounted a passionate defense of science even as he cathected personal loss and anguish in another memorable scene. This one filmed in Poland, standing by the swampy shore of a pond.

“Look for yourself. This is the concentration camp and crematorium at Auschwitz. This is where people were turned into numbers. Into this pond were flushed the ashes of four million people. And that was not done by gas. It was done by arrogance. It was done by dogma. It was done by ignorance. When people believe that they have absolute knowledge, with no test in reality--this is how they behave. This is what men do when they aspire to the knowledge of gods.

Science is a very human form of knowledge. We are always at the brink of the known; we always feel forward for what is to be hoped. Every judgment in science stands on the edge of error, and is personal. Science is a tribute to what we *can* know although we are fallible. In the end, the words were said by Oliver Cromwell: "I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ: Think it possible you may be mistaken."
(Now, as he begins this next sentence, he seems to forget that he is wearing a suit and dress shoes and walks, as he is speaking into the water at the edge of the pond) We have to cure ourselves of the itch for absolute knowledge and power. We have to close the distance between the push-button order and the human act. (Here he squats down over the shallow water and reaches down to pull up a hand full of muck) We have to touch people.”

How sickened he would be to see what is happening in the Country he loved, where political correctness and multiculturalism have allowed the world’s most irrational and repressive ideology to use the tolerance he so prized to allow intolerance to gain a foothold. Bronowski understood better than anyone that tolerance is a two-way street. I has to lead to real debate and genuine give and take. If you agree to tolerate, you must insist on being tolerated in return. If the west continues to grant unidirectional tolerance to Muslims who refuse to accept western values, persist in anti-western behavior (in which classification I put such activities as wife beating, plotting terror attacks, honor killing, advocating the institution of Shari a Law and advocating the overthrow of the government)

“I, whom England made, whom it taught its language and its tolerance and excitement in intellectual pursuits, I should feel it a grave sense of loss (as you would) if a hundred years from now Shakespeare and Newton are historical fossils in the ascent of man, in the way Homer and Euclid are.”

Unless we in the west find a way to restore our own faith in the values that have made our civilization the shining light of humanity, that day is coming- and soon.