Mike Resnick once got in horrible trouble for saying “Poor f*cked up Africa” in public. I wonder what “poor f*cked up Western Civilization” will get me? Probably nothing, because as a culture we love to beat up on ourselves. Which is rather the problem.
Humans are tribal. We in the United States tend to forget that, mostly because any family can have about ten different shades of skin and because we all (okay, not me) have at least a grandparent who spoke another language. So we think of ourselves as tribe-free.
We’re not, of course. Our tribe is not defined by blood but by the words of the Constitution and the birth certificate that is the Declaration of Independence. (You should see the VERY puzzled emails I get from friends abroad who read A Few Good Men. “I like the story, and I love the characters, but it’s so… so… political… and American… and Political.” And for the record, no, I wasn’t even trying to be political. It’s Nat and Luce’s book, and they MADE me write it.)
The tribalism in the US is loose, and it has always been. We’re a nation of scraps. We can – and do – condemn the actions of our own country rather vigorously. They weren’t necessarily (or probably) our ancestors. But it is still there. G-d help us if it stops being there.
But we tend to forget tribalism abroad. And h*ll EUROPEANS who should know better tend to forget tribalism.
Part of the reason I’ve been foretelling doom for the UE since before its inception was three fold: Economic – part of the issue is that the meetings I was present at, they assumed what made the US successful was size. (No, seriously. Of course, we’re now on our way to proving that what made the US – once – successful was no central micro management.) Demographic – population had already started falling with my generation, and it’s gotten worse since. Tribal- this was the most important. I’m shocked it is not the first one to hit. Europe can be tribal at a level Americans can’t even understand. While you guys who grew up here had grandparents who zipped in cars the length of the country (okay, zipped might be an exaggeration, but while at the Naval Academy, Heinlein bought a car and drove cross country with his friends) I had parents for whom a trip to the next village over was an all-day endeavor. Oh, they had buses, but the schedule as iffy, the stops frequent and… My mom will still say, in complete lack of irony “Those people from that village, they’ve always been—” even though these days that village is mostly a dormitory for the big city, as is ours. (Sometimes the reasons for this are literally tribal and can be inferred from the name of the village. For instance we had a very poor opinion of Alfena. Americans are now all too familiar with that first syllable, so I don’t need to explain.)
The reason – as I understand it, but correct me if I’m wrong and if one of you is a specialist (not even rare on this blog) – that Indo Europeans, which we now think were not a race but a conglomeration of peoples, a loose federation of culture if you will, did so well was that they could somehow set aside tribalism. It was a mental hardware reboot. Instead of taking over the fallen enemy, killing all the males, raping all the women, making all the pre-pubescent boys slaves, they co-opted them. In fact, they co-opted people who weren’t even enemies, but just at the periphery of their expanding area.
Now, the theory – my favorite, for obvious reasons – of how this happened, was stories. There were the old men of the tribe, who stood up and told the sagas of heroes. It’s hard to tell exactly, because that we know (this might change. We’re discovering far older writing than we knew existed in various regions all the time) these people had no written language. HOWEVER so far as we can tell from remaining fragments of sagas and poems (which stayed in the culture long enough to be written down) the culture was based on and expanded through great big banquets at which long sagas that made the Iliad look tame were told.
I like this idea, because it means western civ, at its oldest implementation was ultimately based on a story. On the story of who we were.
Unlike all those little tribal societies, based ONLY on shared blood and the amount of shared blood, at that, Western Civ existed solely based on the idea of western civ. Christianity added to this. It created a supernational identity. But it was still a Western Civilization identity.
And it evolved, as Christianity gave way to enlightenment, as the divine right of kings gave way to republics, because the story remained. The story went something like this: “We are the biggest, baddest fighters around and the most civilized too.”
The two were intertwined. Partly I think because of that Christianity overlay, though probably going back because of a tribal G-d overlay. “We conquer because we our gods kick their gods’ asses.” Became “We conquer because we have the G-d of Christianity on our side.”
Military victory was proof of righteousness and vice versa. This not only gave you the ability to deal roughly with the other side (though Western civ was NEVER as rough as the more basic, tribal civilizations) but to impose our laws on them mercilessly.
The fact that by and large Western civ is the most successful (in terms of bringing about prosperity and unlocking individual potential) of the human mental hardware we call culture isn’t invalided by the fact that in certain times and in certain places we were more brutal than the savages. (To believe so is something College Professors do, but they themselves are a weird primitive tribe full of strange and atavistic beliefs and we need not regard them.) Atrocities are part of being a human beast. Christianity both teaches that, and makes people want to deny it. As it filtered through the culture it changed “We’re good because we beat the other guys” to “we’re god because we’re kind and merciful.” This is not a bad thing, as it makes international commerce easier. Or at least less explosive. It meant, though, that Western Civ started self criticism. What allowed us to beat our swords into plowshares, also set up a deep cultural conflict over war. (We can debate whether or not communism hooked into this as a virus hooks into a healthy cell, as a way to destroy us.)
It was perhaps inevitable that eventually the new ethos would go to war with the old ethos. What was not inevitable was that it would rip the culture apart. Though it was inevitable once the power of stories had taken to the news press and started being in the hands of a small elite who had their own principles and purposes (and here we come up against the aims of international Marxism abroad.)
I’ve said before that we were still suffering from WWI. In fact we’re suffering from both wars, the long war of the Twentieth Century. As RES has mentioned in comments before, the war paused just long enough to grow another generation for the butcher mills.
Part of it was that the early twentieth century was the end diffusion of Christianity. Which by itself tells you how long an idea REALLY takes to diffuse through a culture. Look, we see it in the US with Political Correctness. Does anyone really believe all their shibboleths? (MAYBE the organizers of Wiscon. Sorry, ran into a post yesterday in which they screamed outrage (again) at the April 1 post and justified EVERY stereotype about feminists.) No sane person could. “Women must always be free” can’t mesh with “Muslims have the right to put women in burkas and treat them like chattel.” (And sorry, Wiscon feminists. While not every Muslim does that, the culture DOES devalue women. And every country that falls under the sway of a Muslim government does that. They also kill homosexuals, which meshes badly with “everyone must be allowed to be who they are.” Personally I have a pact with a gay friend. They’ll push a wall over him the minute after they put me in a burka (which will take killing me) and vice versa.)
People can pretend to believe the strangest things and go along to get along, but that’s not how they act when they can get away with it, and… Things don’t always match words. So, Christianity was accepted because the king had accepted it (most places) and it made life easier. But the old “we can kick their asses because we’re us” ethos of Indo European culture remained, beneath. It is as I said what created “We win, because G-d is on our side.”
This was a reasonable compromise while the enemy wasn’t – largely – Christian and part of Western Civ. When it was – WWI – it set up a bizarre splitting reaction. Part of Nazism – besides bad economic ideas and crisp uniforms, which are also a penchant of the human race everywhere – was a return to the ethos of paganism and tribalism. “We can beat their asses, because our race is superior.” It can’t have been taken seriously by most people. It just can’t. Even Germans knew they had many races within their country. (As “races” were defined then, in which definition, I’m a different race from my husband. I’ll note my family refers to our kids as “mixed race.” Tribalism.) BUT it was a reaction to “we’re the same people and we just killed masses of each other.”
And because Germany was point-man for Western civ the revelations of what was really happening after WWII didn’t help the self-image of Western civ.
(And it’s no use at all saying “every German knew.” You know that’s bs, and I know that’s bs. How many people in the US do you think know about no-knock raids or drone killings? Some, sure. But we live in a world with internet. Never underestimate the power of a compliant press. We did that in November. We’re still doing it. How much worse was it without the net and divergent voices? Yes, the people down from the death camps knew – PROBABLY. But what were they going to do about it? Storm the camp on their own, yes? How? Remember they had the most efficient army in Europe, and the internal image was more so. Yes, some people were utterly despicable. Maybe as many as half of them (though I doubt that.) but most were just human. Humans go along with the group, in general. Humans try to survive, in general. The same, btw, goes for every country occupied by this malicious idea. I have my own dark opinion of the French character, having read literature of the time. But it is perhaps worth noting I have had a bad opinion of the French since the French revolution. My opinion is biased, and I know it’s biased. Remember too if genealogy is true both my husband and I have a decent peppering of French blood.)
Now… now we’re in a position where the majority of Western Civ – Europe, by and large, certainly the educated classes (the plebes are saner. They have to be, or they wouldn’t survive) – hates itself and bares its chest and pounds on it every chance they have.
Part of this is because they’ve been taught Western Civ is UNIQUELY despicable. A lot of human traits are being taught to them as uniquely a problem of the west: expansionism; imperialism; triumphalism.
Brother! The reason that other civilizations haven’t conquered and gone forth is NOT that they’re “cute little brown people, who live in a kind of primitive Eden” (when this is applied to me, it always makes me scream, because I feel like “you’re saying Portuguese are too stupid to be oppressors” which, beyond betraying a stunning ignorance of history, is bizarrely dysfunctional.) Look at the way they treat their own people – you can find out, though our press won’t report it – and imagine what they’d do to the defeated. (Vae Victis) and all that.
But because our children have been taught that way, and because since WWII we’ve lost confidence in the story of who we are, and lost the idea that we triumph because we’re the best, we’ve acquired the idea that “we triumph because we’re the worst.” Therefore triumphing or doing well in general is considered proof of how bad we are.
Yes, Marxism – which btw, in practical fact, under the name of “liberation” acts like the empires of old, putting all to fire and sword – has made things worse, with its pious mumblings about how all property is theft (unless a party apparatchik has it! Because then it belongs to “the people”) and how all war is evil (unless we’re liberating the oppressed) makes things worse.
But Marxism and the insanity that was the USSR wouldn’t have survived long if the trauma wasn’t already there and the pain already there.
Maybe there is a limit to how large a civilization can get. Maybe for humans to eschew tribalism is already a form of madness, violating the creature we are, and the end is foretold. Or maybe we’ll yet find a way around all this.
The one thing certain is we can’t go on as we are. We’re still bleeding from the wounds of the long war – not because it was unique, people here mentioned the 100 year war before that – but because it was brutal AND well propagandized.
Our efficiency at telling stories increased just in time to publicize self doubt and self hatred. At some level all of us still know our civilization is the best thing ever. (No? Would you voluntarily move to Algiers? Or let’s go to parts of Western civ but more unsteady, like Portugal? Mexico? Yes, some people do, but not many.)
The stories that made us have turned poisonous. Note they’re now going after not just western civ but humanity itself and, in some cases, life itself. Can we fix them in time to save ourselves?
I hope so. But first we need to know that the problem IS in the stories, in the image of ourselves.
Yes, the long war of the twentieth century was terrible. So was the 100 years war, the French revolution, the Napoleonic war (I was listening to bios of the time the other day, and let’s say that there were reasons Napoleon is called The Monster), the American Civil War. I suspect that the Roman invasions were no picnic, and BOY could I tell you stories of the Moorish invasion and the Spanish occupation and…
War is what our species does. No, we can’t study war no more. Unless a miracle occurs and the entire world can love each other as brothers and sisters (ah) war shall always be with us. And often its justified. Atrocities happen in every human culture.
And the abattoirs of WWI and WWII were – like the Roman invasions, if you think on it – more the result of what the technology was at the time, than a problem of western culture.
Yes, wars will happen. We are human. Yes, as civilization gets better at other things, it gets better at war, too. Yes, this is bad. But removing civilization doesn’t remove death, pestilence and famine. It just makes them more constant, more local, and the peace times worse.
Regardless of what my colleagues think, it is unlikely, short of a religious redemption, that there will ever be a utopian civilization where there is no war. (And OMG, a civilization of all women is the worst way to achieve this.) We’re not designed that way. And war is not always the worst thing. Look at North Korea. A civil war might be preferable to that.
Yes, going to space might reduce the instances of (at least) intercultural war. It will also reduce at least the destructiveness of civil war, at least while the population is sparse.
Western culture, as mental hardware has the best chance of getting us there and of getting us to the point the human race doesn’t become extinct. (Yeah, we have problems. But I’m human. What species would be better? Angels are not in the running.)
Can poor f*cked up western culture figure out a way to get there? Who knows? Things look rather bleak right now, don’t they?
As I’ve said before, though, it’s always darkest before dawn. Tech is now going towards less centralization. And we’re changing too. The centralism and Marxism many people mouth are less than skin deep. Beneath it is a roll-up-the-sleeves-and-get-to-it ethos that goes well with the new distributed tech.
We are a people of stories. Stories have turned against us, but they can be changed.
Let the best saga-writer win. Our ancestors told the stories that made people want to join them. Can we not do the same?
According To Hoyt 
> Mike Resnick once got in horrible trouble for saying “Poor f*cked up Africa” in public.
If THAT is enough to get one in trouble in this day and age, I shudder to think how polite society would receive me. ;-)
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Consider that the society in which he got in trouble was only polite for the given value of, “equality for me, but not for thee.” A healthy society may not, in fact, be terribly polite.
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“Polite Society” is mostly notable for who gets to define what “politeness” is. At the BBC “politeness” apparently consisted of turning a blind eye to what Jimmy Saville and John Nathan-Turner were doing with (to) children.
I prefer abiding in a civil society. “Polite Society” can go bugger itself.
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N.B. – for those not clear on the difference, a “polite society” says “We don’t talk about that.”
A civil society says “Hey! Whattya think you’re doin’? We don’t treat people like that!”
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Is that a quote? If so who is it from?
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I prefer abiding in a civil society. “Polite Society” can go bugger itself.
That would be a vast improvement on what they currently do.
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We could sell video tapes and– Sorry, sorry, sorry. Too far.
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No, to be legal we must have a disclaimer that all participants are consenting and of legal age.
To violate that disclaimers perpetrates stiff punishment.
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And the thing is, Resnick should know, he’s actually BEEN there, multiple times.
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That’s what’s found particularly heinous: being informed and being right. You don’t think the emperor was charitable to that kid, do you?
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This is actually more appropriate for The Past is a Story, but I came in late on that one. I read a book many years ago by a guy who grew up during Hitler’s rise to power; he didn’t really know anything else. It’s fascinating because he appears to be able to dredge that kid back up as he writes, instead of (or sometimes in addition to) what he would prefer to remember. The book was Hitler’s Last Courier, by Armin D. Lehmann. I’ve linked an old review of mine in my name.
He was mostly too young to take part in the war, but he has no illusions about what he would have done if he hadn’t.
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The story was all powerful and in tune with the prejudices of times.
I meant to say in the comment thread for the last point, but it seemed beside the point, some people never got over the story — not the commenter! — my older son’s best friend in High School looked like a member of Hitler’s youth. He came by it naturally on one side. Great grandfather fought in WWII, Grandfather was according to grandson (and my son) “a nazi” even though he came to America. He still believed the story. Father was “progressive.”
On the other side… grandparents were camp survivors. Grandparents AND family lived in same suburb.
I love America. And I wonder if they hid all the cutlery at Thanksgiving meals.
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That’s an amazing story too—perhaps one of the great American stories, similar to the brothers who become one a gangster, the other a cop.
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That’s great. I never heard them before.
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> Unless a miracle occurs and the entire world can love each other as brothers and sisters
you have two boys, It would be utterly miserable if everyone treated each other the way people do their own siblings sometimes.
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Bad example. They argue a lot, but they are actually very good to/with each other. They argue a lot because the whole family does that. We sound Italian. LOUD, three arguments at once, and only four of us. AND THAT is when we’re having fun. Sometimes we scare waiters.
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One time my husband was witness to my mother, brother and I having what I call a ‘braided’ conversation. He and she were talking about one thing, she and I were talking about a second thing, and he and I were talking about a third thing, all at the same time. It got too confusing for my poor husband when I commented on my bro and mom’s conversation thread and my mom commented on my and bro’s conversation. :D We stopped when he complained.
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Hey. I admire (some of) the effectiveness at murder of the Romans. That wasn’t all technology, at least in the artifact sense.
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A lot of it was social “technology”. Their entire society seemed to have been geared towards winning wars. IIRC, they were the first with a line of battle and behind it a sergeant type encouraging the troops (as opposed to the tight Greek phalanx).
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Exactly. Why I said it wasn’t artifacts. They pioneered a bunch of stuff still in use today. Even if they lost the ability to use some of what they had because of social changes. Even if we cannot use some of what they could, because our own native insanities just aren’t the same. I do like to think that the American insanity stacks up fairly well, in comparison, where war is concerned.
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Look up Genghis Khan. Dude made the Romans look like pansies.
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a) There are things I admire also about the Mongols.
b) Part of what the Romans, at their best, did was systematize it, to spread it across their entire society, or at least those parts of it that are recorded. Temujin had a challenging childhood, and it prepared him for success as an adult. Somewhere behind the myth and legend, Roman society had a background that prepared it for what it became.
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And the Romans had better mental software to make civilizations that lasted a millennium or two, depending on what you consider as the fall of Rome. The Mongols began their disintegration right on schedule for most empires: two generations (or so) after the founder.
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The Romans made the conquered Roman citizens.
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The Romans left us lessons on law, statecraft, soldiering, engineering, and various other things. Including some very graphic lessons on the failure modes of Republics, as well some of their vile customs which we continue to us as examples to Christian children of what is wrong.
The Mongols
a) Demonstrated slaughter and terror on a massive scale. (The Romans did also do some of this.)
b) Trade and religious tolerance, blah blah blah. (Romans also to some degree. They had more of a fine eye for religions that they couldn’t co-opt, and would therefore suppress.)
c) Diplomacy and the essential underlying institutions of same. The Romans were relatively unclear and poor examples for this, on certain points. This is an area where it is absolutely vital that we continue to learn from the example the Mongols set.
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The Mongols also taught us the value of competent subordinates with their own initiative. Read up on Temujin’s sons, a large part of the Mongols empire was added because they took the initiative and just went ahead and conquered it while Genghis Khan was busy elsewhere. Also while reading up on them you should note the lesson we seem to have failed to learn from them: the failings of a centralized government.
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Genghis gets a bad rap from history, partly of his own doing. His death toll is vastly over-stated because the Mongols effectively employed propaganda to sap their targets’ will to resist.
While spreading tales of the terror wrought upon cities that resisted the Horde, Genghis and his generals also promoted the stories of city-states who, by accepting Mongol suzerainty were allowed to remain in peace, maintaining their present enlightened political leadership and merely pay a small tribute to the Empire. Faced with a choice of redirecting their taxes and being razed and salted, most city-states were quite happy to accede to Mongol rule.
A basic rule of war is convincing your enemies you are a bunch of crazy mother-sodomizing just barely restrained berserkers. As Sun Tzu admonished, “Supreme excellence consists of breaking the enemy’s resistance without fighting.”
The preceding message was brought to you by the Committee For Mongol Revisionism. Any resemblance between this message and actual historical fact is entirely speculative (as are the alleged sins attributed to Temujin’s troops.)
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You forgot to provide the link where we can join and/or donate to the CFMR.
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I have been authorized to advise all parties interested in contributing to the CFMR that contributions to the According to Hoyt tip jar and any purchases from Amazon consequent to following a link from this site will foster maintenance of this august group’s efforts to further its mission.
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CFMR?
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The Committee For Mongol Revisionism, of course.
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Oh. I knew about the CFKMR of course (Committee for Kit Marlowe Revisionism. I’m the head. There might be a butt before that head) and the Committee for Richard III Revisionism is famous. I killed and dismembered all members of the Committee for William Shakespeare Revisionism… so I was confused. :)
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It is a fully accredited sub-group of the CFRR — Committee For Revisionism Revisionism, although recent organizational changes have led to consideration of revising that.
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This ^^ I must tell Robert about this for Ninja nun!
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Membership is open, requiring no registration … nor even much typing skills. Simply spread the Truth (pat pending) of Mongol enlightenment. And buy the books of Harold Lamb and buy copies of Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World* and distribute them in bus stations, train depots and public parks.
*To quote the Wikipedia summary:
Sorry– I am already involved in the Norse Enlightenment Movement for pillaging and burning– ;-)
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You should join the Committee for the Reinstitution of the Varangian Guard, then.
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lol– sounds fun ;-)
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Right now I’m all tied up with my dealings with Picts for Plunder. I’m negotiating for a larger share…
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I recommend you do your negotiations with the point of a spear, it is much easier to get concessions that way.
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I guess my own addition here might be a hyperbolic version of something I’ve said before, that goes well beyond what I can actually support.
First, the Mongols are the foundation of modern diplomacy. (They took their ambassadors seriously.)
Therefore, any failure to follow their example on such matters deeply undermines the institution of diplomacy, and thus makes peace less likely and war more likely.
Their example on such matters stemmed from their culture. This makes opposing such racism and cultural intolerance. No, failure to fully embrace such methods is racism.
Thus, anyone and everyone who does not fully support exterminating Banghazi, and other appropriate places, in just retaliation for the killing of an Ambassador, is a racist who hates peace.
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SECONDED.
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thirded!
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Right after we clean our own house, tyvm.
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You know, at the time of Benghazi, I thought I was reacting fairly calmly, considering all the issues I had going on in real life. Then I found myself mellowing.
I eventually came to the conclusion that screw ups on the American end may have at least come close to invalidating the premise that the host country can be held responsible for the safety of diplomats issued to it. It certainly does not feel as clear cut as it seemed at first.
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At this date in time, what #@!&*$ difference does it make!?
;-)
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To me, all the difference in the world. The ex-madame secretary might yet be president, but I will fight with all my heart before that happens.
It was the most horrible of betrayals. They let them die alone for political motives. Such things should invite Biblical level retribution.
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In spite of MSM efforts to silk purse it, her record as SecState is a true sow’s ear, and her “defense” of her incompetence deserves to live in infamy. If she is awarded the Democrats’ nomination in 2016 I look forward to ads repeating that question with savage anticipation.
I hope the GOP doesn’t nominate another of their limp-wristed RINOS who would be afraid to use that line in the debates. I rate the likelihood of that hope being granted only slightly behind my hope of waking up one morning thirty-five pounds lighter with all limbs and major organs intact.
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I can see the ad now — softly lit gauzy portrait of the candidate in background, morphing into harsh photo at end, while captions and narrator list the foreign policy “achievements” as SecState, coccluding with announcer stating: When finally called upon to defend and explain her actions and policies, Mrs. Clinton replied: [sound bite].
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Had some second thoughts about what I said myself.
We still have a right and responsibility to take an appropriate level of revenge, and do it where the world can see. We must have reprisal.
However, we cannot wash out the stain by shedding enough blood overseas. We need to see that the Americans responsible are punished, as best we can, for that.
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Yes.
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Sarah,
I too, find that course of action necessary.
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I wrote this on my own weblog at the time. I still mean every word of it. Shrillery Clinton is only slightly less competent to hold public office at any level than Barrack Obama. Both would be on the bottom end of the political competency bell curve. Unfortunately, more than half of our government is in the same position.
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I love Jack Weatherford’s books on the Mongols. I have a lot of admiration for much about the culture, it just fell apart in the same old way.
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But what have the Romans done for us lately?
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The language one speaks has been shown to have an effect on the personality, apparently. I studied Latin partly with the mindset of cultivating the things the Romans had, that they brought to civic duty, statecraft, and war. That said, I dunno that it has had any effect at all.
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UM….
I wonder what it says about me that I fell into English like a poor duckling who has been raised in a desert finding water at last. “oh, wow. When I think in this I feel SANE.” Which is why I was THINKING in English at the end of my first year of classes. (First book I read in English was Dandelion wine. I still have the copy. I read it with an English-Portuguese dictionary to hand, and a paper. When I hit a word I didn’t know, I wrote the translation above it. By the end of the book, there are almost no notes. The beginning is thick with them.)
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Typical American madman, perhaps.
I’m pretty sure I didn’t actually start out using any of the dialects of English that I was exposed to as a child. Or rather, I think I wasn’t fluent in them, and thought in a warped dialect that didn’t entirely mesh with what I tried to speak. Or anything those around my spoke or listened with. At least, at one time, that was my operating theory.
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Korean Airlines managed to shift from being one of the most accident prone airlines in the world to one of the safest by ordering its pilots to use English, not Korean,in the cockpit.
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There may be some reason why the language of international aviation is English, rather than French, which had a head start in the beginning.
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Besides the fact that more countries have English as the first language than have French as the first language? [Evil Grin]
Or besides the fact that there are more English as the first language people than there are French as the first language people? [Big Evil Grin]
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And there are reasons for that, non?
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Darn, hit the button too early…
There are odd little holdovers in aviation, though, like “aileron” and “longeron” and mayday (m’aidez) for a distress call.
And abbreviations in weather briefings sometimes don’t make sense until you find out they derive from French terms. Like “br” for misty conditions, from “brumeaux”. Which doesn’t help so much, so we think of it as “baby rain”.
But they mostly lost the bid.
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So are snow flurries bs, for baby snow?
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Regarding KAL, it was a bit more than just changing cockpit language usage. They completely overhauled their training process and operational procedures, which made a huge difference. (I used to work for JAL’s flight training operation at Napa, CA, and heard about some of the process. You can bet the Koreans wouldn’t be enthusiastic about noting that they modeled some of their operations on Japan’s national airline, though.)
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Sure but even lingua franca was only mostly latin …
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If communism is a disease of Western Civ. did it begin before it? I have always thought it came from the early church, where they pooled their belongings and lived together. Which works, short term, for a very small group of people. I’m sure the concept goes back further, but how far back? Did the rise of humanism bring about the widespread misconception that a commune would a viable societal option?
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I think communism, in its earliest inception is just the way monkey brains work. BUT Catalina was a communist in all but name. Look it up.
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Voluntarily. There have been communistic communes throughout history. They require strict discipline and being small enough that everyone can see who’s shirking.
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Small enough being the rather important point.
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Small enough is one important point – the other important point is that almost always, after about six months, you will start to get “bosses.” And after two years, they will be the heads of the commune. Oddly enough, since everyone involved is human, it’s not always pretty. And when you get larger than the large-monkey-band the human being can easily count as “this group,” (150-200 or so) you get even stranger results. And yes, I have looked at the studies of some modern Christian groups that have done this, as well as some other groups.
In college, I lived for two years in an off-campus house of fourteen people (officially -once you added in sig others, it was closer to seventeen). That was enough to convince me that it would take a *lot* of prayer to make most people (especially me!) into someone who would do a good job of living in an intentional religious community. And without the “intentional religious” part of it, communal life would be a big old glimpse of hell.
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There’s always been a strain of communism in Christianity, but it has always been voluntary participation in a community, sometimes outside and even against the state (see the Diggers and Levellers in the English Civil War, among others). Marxist Communism makes the State the enforcer of community. Some other Romantics also toyed with it (Fourier, the Oneida Movement) but Marx and his followers made it “scientific,” large-scale, and mandatory rather than religious and voluntary.
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There’s always been a strain of communism in Christianity, but it has always been voluntary participation in a community, sometimes outside and even against the state (see the Diggers and Levellers in the English Civil War, among others).
I’ve recently noticed being hit over the head with the way that a lot of sins are just imbalances of good things, or good things with a vital aspect removed. Example: giving a loaf of bread is a good thing- it’s charity/sacrificial love– taking a loaf of bread to give to someone else is a bad thing.
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A family is “communist.” Strong leaders, defined jobs, everything goes into the pot survival-wise….
I think that’s part of why it appeals so much– but it simply doesn’t work without the love involved in a healthy, survival-level family.
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And if the family isn’t healthy– it won’t work either (personal experience) and will cause a lot of ill-feelings.
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because parents don’t bother making sure they have minimal buy in from the kids. (Like, we were not going to avoid moving for no one, but for Robert to be happy, we had to paint his new room yellow. That sort of thing. Did we have to? No. Did it eat my time? Yes. BUT it made him happy about the move.)
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YES– geez I wish you had been my mother *sigh ;-)
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*nod*
An unhealthy family is actually a pretty good model for how communism functions, no?
Or just go to Terry Pratchett’s… gad, can’t remember, it’s the one about soccer/”foot the ball,” where the supermodel girls family pools funds, held by the father, who pools them at the local bar, and they soon pool at the base of the wall behind the bar…..
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I haven’t read that one– Do you remember the title– need to put it in my TBR list.
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Unseen Academicals.
It is different from his other Discworlds, but then again he had had his brain incident by then and admits that what he produced by dictation is different than what he produced when he wrote.
It is more like his YA in flavor.
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Thanks–
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That’s why I write historical fiction about the US – to try and counter some of that dreadful poison dispensed by mainstream media and progressive academia. And it is poison – being taught to hate yourself and your culture. If a single child’s confidence in himself was being slowly and methodically demolished the way that our cultural confidence is being destroyed – well, we wouldn’t stand for the first, why are we putting up with the second?
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What we are seeing is adolescent angst at the national level. “Our sins are the greatest EVER!” is merely the national equivalent of insisting “My zits are worse (bigger/more numerous/worse placement/etc) than ANYBODY’s.”
Adolescents obsess over their flaws, however trivial. It makes them far easier to exploit, whether you are selling communism or zit cream.
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Oooh, very good, RES – Our zits are the most horrible evah!
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The local historical society just got done producing a series of articles for the local paper about county history. Nothing earth shattering, these are stories about the first brick house in the Oregon Territory, controversies about the state highway, who various cities and roads were named after and what the families did. It is partially advertising for the museum, but again, there is a lot of history people don’t know and they should. It is more than “hicks showed up in wagons and took the land away from the indians, and then put in shopping malls”
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David Goldman has an intriguing book out – How Civilizations Die (And Why Islam Is Dying Too). He makes the point that most western societies reacted to Christianity by internalizing the Chosen People principle. God will bless France/Germany/Italy/etc. be cause WE are His chosen people now.
The interesting point he makes is that the Americas, being comprised mostly of mixed cultures, never exhibited this idea during the colonial period.
Even Japan – hardly a Christian nation – held to the same ethos. japan was blessed because they are a more chosen people.
So Christianity largely was externalized, even as the Elect idea was internalized. Just the opposite of what Christianity taught. But everyone accepted it as so, therefore it must be true.
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Reading Chesterton’s End of the Armistice was interesting there: he pointed out that Nazism obviously ripped off the idea of the Chosen People from the Jews.
Then, reading The End of the Armistice is always interesting. It’s a book about the outbreak of World War II. Chesterton died in 1936.
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Lots of colonials believed that they were the Chosen People (notably the Puritans, aka the Children of Israel), and manifest destiny is sure as heck about Americans being a chosen people. It’s just that after a while we started doing the invasion less and the secular/trade/religious/political missionary thing more.
Also, because Americans really aren’t that interested in taking over other countries when we already have pretty much everything we could possibly want in land. Taking over other planets, now, that’s a bit more exciting.
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Yes! Invade Alpha Centauri!
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Some of the more documented “collectives” were in Germany and Poland during the late Dark Age up to about the late 1500’s. There many variations but essentially the farmland surrounding the town was owned by the town. Often the place where you lived was owned by the town. Farm work was done both individually and collectively. You might also have your own vegetable plot. But the system was inherently weak. In Germany the dilution of the nobility (you know hundreds of princedoms) allowed it to work. In Poland it allowed the nobility, under a weak monarchy, to re-enserf the population.
In fact, during the late Renaissance, when the trend was for more privately held property Poland went in the other direction. The only area of Poland where the peasantry prospered was in the Germanic lands known as Royal Prussia. When Casimir fought the Teutonic Knights he promised the locals they could retain their form of self government.
Meandering back to the point. To the Polish peasant what did it matter if the land they worked was owned by the town council or some Grand Duke who had just smashed a few princelings and took their land? By the late 1400’s it mattered a great deal as the nobility put a stranglehold on what really made things work. The trade in grain. The peasants were paid a fraction of the value of their crops ad teh nobility got wealthy…even if it meant the rest of Polish economy was not functioning. So the lure of a return to true collectivism was always attractive to the Russian and Polish peasantry, and to a degree the German peasantry. And all the peasant uprising, particularly in the 1800’s stem from the propaganda of Bakunin and Marx. Forget about the part where it’s a weak system that leads to tyranny.
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Does this mean you are out of the hospital?
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he is. He sure likes scaring us, don’t he?
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There were medieval Italian city-states that were communes.
1) Religiously based.
2) Everybody was making lots of money, so definitely not anti-capitalist.
3) Family groups and individuals remained strongly independent.
So basically, not anything at all like Marx’s idea of Communism.
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So much yes to all this! (My tribe is those people who believe in the US Constitution!)
“every German knew” – agreed, pretty much no one knew, in Germany, in the US, until our soldiers showed up at the gates, and great care was taken to keep it that way.
A pilot friend of mine (who says there’s an informal international fraternity of all pilots) met a former top German ace WWII pilot, who said that during WWII, someone got him proof of the death camps – pictures, testimony – and asked him to get it to his friend, Hannah Reitsch, the famous female German test pilot. She was horrified by the information, as any sane person would be, and said she would get this immediately to Hitler’s attention, because he clearly could not know and would stop it. She came back and said Hitler assured her this was all a fraud.
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Well, actually, soldiers knew quite a bit. We, and the British, had a program where we would put bugs in rooms with POWs and listen in. A scholar recently discovered them and started to study. There were not that many allusions to the Holocaust, but whenever they are made, no one expressed surprise about the systemic killing; mostly it was about the technical details, such as the difficulties of killing children who wouldn’t stand still.
To be sure, even they might have had no idea of the scope. In the waning days of the war, a German wrote to an English friend that they would have to crush Nazi Germany because many Germans were unaware that hundreds of thousands of Jews had been murdered in the East.
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At bottom is always the question: What can one man do?
That is why it is an important part of the American Mythos that one man can do something, even if only throwing sand in the gears. It would be easy to start a list of movies evoking that myth, from Mr. Smith Goes To Washington through Shane, High Noon and Bad Day at Black Rock to Die Hard, all answering the question of what one person can do.
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http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/biography/wallenberg.html
Does that answer your question?
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Yes – and there was a Japanese diplomat who was a hero as well – even though he knew it would destroy his career.
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Actually Sarah, I think you’re missing something here. Well, either that or I am. But let me explain..
In the US it’s true that we definitely don’t have the long standing tribes that Europeans do. I don’t think that means that Americans don’t have tribes though. Honestly, to me it seems like we’ve got a bunch of competing tribes. Think about it.
Portugal (France, UK, etc.) has not only had centuries to get itself together, they have a relatively homogeneous population. The US not only doesn’t, it has reached the point where it’s cool to not be part of the tribe. Now-a-days the best thing to do (in the eyes of many) is to break away from the tribe and claim victimhood. Then you can form a new tribe. This works on both sides of the aisle. (IE Anti Handgun Inc. “Those d*mned gun-owners are killing us!” vs. NRA “You’re taking my rights away.” BTW I’m an NRA member, just using this as an example.) Enough victims makes an army. Don’t believe me?
Hitler: We’ve been screwed over by the Jews! The Volksduetsche are victims!
Tojo: We’ve been disrespected by the world! The Japanese are victims!
Lenin: We’ve been screwed over by the capitalists! The proletariat are victims!
Roosevelt: (OH MY GAWD AM I GONNA TAKE SOME HERE): We were backstabbed by the Japanese! Americans are victims!
This is the way it’s always been done. Unfortunately, in the US we’re currently all victims right now, so there is no clear national tribe but in fact it’s possible to be a member of several tribes at once. It can be be very confusing, but there it is.
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What I meant is that we don’t have tribes by blood. It’s almost impossible (though NOT impossible in certain small towns) to get into the sort of extended “What her Sheryl said about our Elaine” century old feud that results in actual dead and small scale war.
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Well, except for that whole War of Northern Aggression thing …
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You mean the War of Democrat Treason, right? :) Grins, Ducks, and Runs Away.
Technically, that may have been more of a political faction fight. Or, fallout of the English Civil War.
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Or yes.
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That may be true, but there was a broad stroke of fighting over the excise tax that favored Norther manufacturing, and agricultural slaves which were considered to be needed in the Southern agricultural economy in there too. This was wrapped up in the twin mantles of states’ rights and emancipation, and made worse by the national parties’ way of dealing with it, which was to promote Northern or Western politicians who would would appeal to the Northern states with the larger voting share, and who would have Southern sympathies to drag votes from the Southern states. (In short lying, two faced pols who would not deal with terminal issues because they might lose votes.)
In the end, of course, the Whigs decided to be identical to the Democrats, and dissapeared as a political party.
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As a Southern Chick by adoption (I was naturalized in NC and home SF con is in TN) I completely get this. OTOH I’m married to a man from CT so least said, the best, no?
Without joking — it’s not deep enough that you find yourself saying “oh, they’re not American” and I caught myself saying “Oh, they’re not Portuguese” about someone from Southern Portugal Because… population type quite different, etc. What I should have said was “not the SAME KIND of Portuguese.”
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I dunno. What I was getting at last thread, some of the point I was trying to make is that it looks like the differences of opinion between Americans on gun control might correlate some with cultural/background differences. Europe would lack, it seems, a lot of the important parts of that background.
Equally unfairly, one might speculate that the American gun control lobby
a) Whatever the legal status, by background, fails to qualify as American by culture.
or
b) is actually white supremacist
Really, far too soon to say. I grew up on ‘the sky is falling’. It is big in my family. I can find doom and gloom anywhere. I strongly disapprove of gun control, but as with every other social issue of the day, it is far too soon to say how it will all fall out.
I still think being able to claim that the British Labour Party is White Supremacist and willing to murder minorities, because the UK has gun control, makes for an excellent joke.
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You mean Slaveholders’ Revolt. (I lost a great to the nth uncle in that one. We found the first records of him in a book about the Slaveholders’ Revolt.)
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The second Daniel Hoyt fought in the Civil War. (the first fought in the revolutionary war.) Dan is the third. We’re getting kind of old for him to live up to the name…
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Aha, the solution to ending wars (on American soil at least): make sure no future generations of Hoyts name any of their sons Daniel. Even if you seem to have gotten lucky with the third does not mean the curse has disappeared, maybe it just got distracted a bit this time. It may notice if there is a fourth.
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Hear hear.
(He shouts from deep in foreign territory)
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I think he should still have a decade or two for the curse to hit, if it is a curse. Small sample size and all. Frankly, the ‘curse of tecumseh’ has a larger, but still too small to count, sample size, and IIRC Bush missed it. Unless you count Obama as Bush’s version of the curse.
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Ouch. Could be a major hit, actually, just in a different form.
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Huh? he is already out of office, and served two terms, unless the laws were changed and he was reelected he can’t die in office. Somehow I don’t see either of those, much less both happening.
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Reagan had some health issues while in office that lead to some mental impairment, IIRC.
Bush’s last couple of years in office were fairly weak. This may have contributed to the Obama disaster. That said, I’m pretty sure it doesn’t count.
a) Bush probably counts as mediocre in the grand scheme of things. Yes, significantly better than Clinton and Gore. Yes, more or less up to what was needed from him. But not so great that he could have been expected to politically suppress the Democrats, and ensure that they would not come to office while they were being insane. Frankly, it is a bad idea for a Republic to have to depend on Great Men.
b) People becoming fatigued executing the office of the President seems to be normal, for a honest effort.
c) Political reverses are probably normal.
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Reagan was also shot, but survived. Whether he was suffering significant mental impairment while in office has been debated but never proven either way.
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Sorry, reread that and realized you were referring to DAN having another decade or two for the curse to hit; it’s time for me to go to bed ;)
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Cultural war.
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Well! Then he should fricking well do more of it, instead of delegating to me!
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He does cover fire. *grin*
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Okay. Occasionally. Though I’ll point he only stopped thinking I was a political nut two years ago.
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Ah, but did he try to stop you?
Those who are not against us…. ;^p
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No. He also thinks I’m a house-cleaning nut, a writing nut and a cat nut. The only one he tried to actively stop is cats “Four and no more.”
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*sniffle* Lucky, I got vetoed about getting a kitten for the Duchess. After all, I argued, they’re adorable and Princess got one when we were awaiting the arrival of the Duchess…..
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When my maternal grandmother was still alive, she showed me photographs of ancestors – she was proud of all the CSA vets in their uniforms and I did not point out to her the several that were in fact in Union uniforms in their portraits …
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Certainly not impossible, although I guess in my family’s case (Hatfield v McCoy) it didn’t go on for centuries.
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Having more than a small smattering of Creek blood, I know from history that there were such feuds in North America before the arrival of the “evil” white man. The Creeks and the Seminoles fought back and forth for several hundred years. The Sioux hated the Blackfoot, the Apaches absolutely exploded against the Aztecs and their allies in the south, and the Navajo in the north, etc. Read some about the Inca conquests for some REALLY bloodthirsty behavior. Western Civilization since the Romans/Christians has been rather benign, relatively speaking. Only technology has allowed us to be the equals of some of those before us.
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Whenever I’m appalled at Rome utterly destroying Carthage, I remember how Hannibal came very close to doing the same thing to Rome first.
We are so lucky now, we live in an era of law and we are protected – I do not have to rely on a strong family to be safe and what I earn stays largely mine (for now). Too many people think this is somehow the natural state of man.
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“I remember how Hannibal came very close to doing the same thing to Rome first.”
He never had a chance to sack Rome. He had no siege engines or siege-trained troops. Even after Cannae the Romans could have put enough troops around Rome to hold him off. Plus, his favorite thing was to choose the terrain he was going to fight on — besieging Rome would have pinned him in one place.
Still, the Romans still had a deeply-ingrained fear of the Gauls (who previously sacked Rome), and Hannibal’s first act after crossing the Alps was to ally with some of the Cisalpine Gallic tribes. Then he wiped out three or four consular armies…
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I’d hardly call the Romans benign, either. Of course, my last round of research on the Romans was on Caesar, which colors things.
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Mostly it colors them dark brownish red.
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The Southern Indians were perfectly willing to bring in whites as allies, and get into a great slave trade with them. (To be sure, “whites” meant English. The Spaniards were Christians, and the French — traders, IIRC.)
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One major reason the United States succeeded in supplanting the Amerindians was their eagerness to use these new Europeans in their wars against rival tribes.
To paraphrase a later Ambassador to England, These white-eyes, we can do business with them. The “French and Indian War” was as much about the competition between the Algonquian and Iroquois as it was the French and British.
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Heck, everybody hated the Blackfoot…
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Sports. Red Sox Nation vs the Yankees, Michigan vs Ohio State, Chapel Hill vs Duke — pick the sport, pick the region and you will quickly identify the tribes.
This is a relatively benign outlet for our natural bent toward forming tribes, permitting the form but vitiating the content.
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Except Europe has sports “tribes”, too, and more vehemently than America. Longer tradition of it, too.
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Remember the Nika riots, after all.
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Remember them? Was tempted to reenact them when I was in Istanbul.
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Part of this is because they’ve been taught Western Civ is UNIQUELY despicable. A lot of human traits are being taught to them as uniquely a problem of the west: expansionism; imperialism; triumphalism.
This is why it’s so important to know a bit about WORLD history. The Chinese have been an expansionist society for 5000 years. The Mongols were an expansionist society that exploded upon central Asia and ended up conquering from China to the Balkans. Islam is an expansionist, imperialist, trimphalist religion/government/culture. If you read a history of Africa, you’ll find expansionist empires forming, growing, and collapsing. The Japanese participation in WWII was to create an empire (Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere — prosperity for the Japanese). ONLY Western Civilization has ever given up an empire without war. NOT teaching World History is part of the “dumbing down” that keeps the “masses” from questioning the “ruling elite” – may they all rot in hell, sent there by people like me.
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I do not understand why the college professor elite is so anti American and anti western Civ. when there is much to admire. (Kind of echoing Mike here). But there has always been a strain of admiration for whatever the most recent European fantasy political theory. Socialism and its siblings means central control and the surrender of individual rights.
Now we do have a very limited blood tribalism (e.g. the aforementioned Hatfields and McCoys) but we still have ethic and racial tribalism (Insert group here).
Another note, only once in history has a nation arisen to #1 status without a war with the former #1. That was when the U.S. passed England.
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It is easier to criticize than defend, easier to tear down than build up. Plus, it gives them a frisson of rebelliousness to pose as speaking “Truth to Power.”
Note the degree to which they speak their “Truths” to safe powers, ones that insist on a right of people to disagree rather than speaking their “Truths” to dangerous powers, the kind that cut off their heads for disagreeing.
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Note also how they mainly speak their ‘Truths’ to those with the ‘Power’ to get a failing grade if they disagree.
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While you guys who grew up here had grandparents who zipped in cars the length of the country (okay, zipped might be an exaggeration, but while at the Naval Academy, Heinlein bought a car and drove cross country with his friends) I had parents for whom a trip to the next village over was an all-day endeavor. Oh, they had buses, but the schedule as iffy, the stops frequent and… My mom will still say, in complete lack of irony “Those people from that village, they’ve always been—” even though these days that village is mostly a dormitory for the big city, as is ours.
My grandma had a delightful story about going down to Texas while her husband trained, and when she headed home another Army wife agreed to drive with her, at least one other baby, and my infant, eldest uncle… on the first day, Grandma found out that the other woman couldn’t actually drive. Nobody had mentioned it because, well, Granpa was Sarge, and of course his wife would Take Care Of It.
She did, although half a century later she was still complaining about the “bridges” that were four boards. You put down the boards, walked across, hauled the boards that were on the far side to your side, drove over, and pulled the bridge-boards after you. At one of them, some SOB hadn’t bothered to move the other boards…..
Texas to the Nevada/Oregon/California border, and she was angry at how badly the roads had been designed. *grin* I can just imagine what her dad– from Scotland– thought of his girl driving several times the length of his old home country!
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Greetings from a member of the Carl Sagan tribe. I agree, stories are of the utmost importance, and there must be a much greater story to tell than is currently being told. I disagree with a lot of the rest however.
First, the complaint about self-loathing–or how I label it in my head–“Blame America”. I’m sure there are people that experience a shallow American self-loathing, but I think the overall critique of the pheonomena is a straw man. It’s quite possible to have a roll-up-your-sleeves mentality, a desire to de-centralize power from where it is currently concentrated, a yearning to explore the stars (hello Sagan!), a realistic view of human imperfection, and an awareness that on the scale of smoking-train-wreck to actualizing the potentials of humankind, America is a lot closer to smoking trainwreck than to the latter one. We can say that, but also know that yeah we’re doing a better job than the Kim family. It is not “Blaming America” to acknowledge that we are leaders of the free world, we still prop-up wretched governments, buy products manufactured by slaves, fish the oceans to collapse, give retroactive immunity to telecom companies that help the government spy on its own people, invade other countries with the most laughable retroactive justification, and can’t even make sure our own people all have food. That’s not self-loathing, that’s acknowledging reality.
We are responsible for what America does so who better than Americans to take stock of our shortcomings? We must be self-critical but not for its own sake. We need to understand the problems. We share this world with seven billion human beings, and each is entitled to the same inalienable rights we possess. Let’s not give ourselves a huge pat on the back for being the least bad superpower until we have a real conversation about how what each of us do in our own lifetimes (the only resource we may fully command) will advance the cause of human rights for all.
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Alex, I take it you have not had the dubious honor of sitting through lectures about how one cannot criticize other cultures because the West caused 99% of the problems found in the other culture. Note that in some cases these problems predate the period called the Rise of the West in old textbooks. According to this strain of thought, Western Civilization and Christianity are uniquely bad. This is very different from critiquing what the US and Europe could do better.
One memorable example I endured had a woman declaring that the pay differential between women and men in the same positions in the US and Europe was evidence of the lingering evils of Christian patriarchy, but that child marriage, bride-burning, and honor killings were valid parts of South Asian culture and that Westerners could not comment on them. The human rights of the women and girls? Well, according to this speaker and her school of thought, the women understood their culture differently and so they accepted being burned to death because their families could not cough up more dowry goods. This lady was/ is an extreme case, but that’s the sort of self-loathing we need to fight against.
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I haven’t had that honor. It’s extreme, but I think there is a more reasonable form of that objection. Too often the barbarity (perceived impeity or objective material failure) of other people is used as justification for their de-humanization. It’s not controversial to say that a part of the justification for our involvement (there’s a tidy word) in Afghanistan is the treatment of women at the hands of the Taliban. This treatment is an in-dignity to women everywhere. But what is the actual result of the last century of Western involvement in the Middle East? We have humiliated the Muslim people through sponsoring coups, propping up monarchs (Thomas Paine is spinning in his grave), installing military bases in lands they consider sacred, and many other indignities. It should be pretty clear which party is being more aggressive here. Should we seek to raise the dignity of women throughout the Muslim world? Yes. Do we achieve that by humiliating the Muslim world? No. So we really have to be careful about how our critiques of other cultures can be used to justify violence.
If peace is our hope it seems more achievable to me if we give room for some mutual respect. I’m aware of the early history of Islamic conquest. They are just as susceptible to the abuse of power as we. But as the powerful we are in a position to express greater humility.
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Maybe it’s just the collapse of the Ottoman Empire? And, frankly, that “humiliation” many Muslims felt from the West began in the 1600s, when the Turks started to wonder just why they couldn’t keep up with the West on the battlefield. Hell, I still run into Muslims who blame their current state on the Mongol invasion, much less anything the West did. Seems to me that there might be longer term systemic issues besides Western conduct.
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When I was an exchange student, I got along pretty well with the young man from Jordan until he told me with a straight face that Portugal was Islamic land and MUST be reconquered. Because Allah and stuff. We had converted (at the point of a sword and partly) once, and therefore we were theirs forever. Let’s say since then I was aware of the trouble in the wind.
Sometimes it’s not our fault. It’s THEIRS.
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You’re right. Islam is responsible for the current invasion of Portugal…
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No. But it would be, if it got a chance. Do you by any chance understand deterrent force. Look up Pax Romana
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No, they don’t.
They can’t even see that the good Christian stuff we have is Christian, rather than “human nature.”
The idea that all humans are people, and people are morally equal? They REALLY DON’T FLIPPING GET IT that it’s not a basic human belief.
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(And they’re infectious. I had to resist the urge to add in something like “not that Christianity is perfect” etc., because THAT’s not a totally fallacious attempt to change the subject when a valid point is made.)
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NONE of us is perfect. That goes without saying. But saying “We make life livable for most people” is not exactly high bragging. And clearly we CHANGE and try to improve. It’s baked in.
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I don’t know, compared to the natural human condition, I think it IS high bragging. And well-deserved.
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I considered saying the same, but didn’t want to quibble when I think I know what she’s basing it on– the solid scale, not the relative one. That is, the same scale it’s being attacked on, rather than the sane scale.
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An iman wrote a critique on a declaration of human rights pointing out that since Muslims are intrinsically superior to non-Muslims, one must execute a non-Muslim who kills a Muslim, but must not execute a Muslim who kills a non-Muslim.
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*sigh* I’m sure that human dignity requires the killing of impure Muslim women, too….
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Especially when the ‘impurity’ is due to rape.
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They aren’t because they can’t, but the look in that young, educated man’s face, and his absolute certainty that parts of the world were his by right was enough to tell me the desire was there.
And that it was not our fault. (You tell me what Portugal has done to Islam since the battle of Alcacer Kibir? Imposed kings on them? Took their oil? WHAT exactly, besides existing and not being Muslim.)
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existing and not being Muslim
THAT is exactly what we’ve “done” to them they cannot stand. The problem is, Islam is supposed to be perfect, and is supposed to encompass every land and every people. Anyone NOT a muslim is an affront. Christianity, especially, is an affront, since it not only refuses to kowtow to Islam, it has the “audacity” to refute most of what Islam professes as being absolute. The fact that Christianity can acknowledge God as being bigger than His creation, can do anything He pleases (including being born of flesh, living and dying), and that His purpose is not to subjugate His believers, but to FREE them, all not only confuses muslims, it angers and incites them. The fact that Christians are more prosperous, more free, more in control of themselves and their world, also drives them bonkers. Islam is a religion of the insane, and any non-Islamic thought is enough to start a war.
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Ground gone over with in Bernard Lewis’ ‘The Roots of Muslim Rage’ – when this article was first published, I went around to all my friends (I was in the military then, and it was the build-up to the first Gulf War) saying “This is why they are so mad at us!”
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1990/09/the-roots-of-muslim-rage/304643/
It’s that they have done everything right, by their vision – and still failed catastrophically – and we have done everything wrong and still prospered. Either their belief system is flawed (to say the least) or the Judeo-Christian West has been aided and abetted by the Evil One.
So, which would be the conclusion most readily come to by devout Muslims, not of a self-critical and intellectually rigerous nature?
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Thank you. I read this. It makes sense and is really well reasoned.
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I forget which country sentenced a Christian minister to death because he had Muslim ancestors and therefore was a Muslim.
I remember the first comment was an atheist stating that the man deserved to die for believing in fairy tales.
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Muslim cultures tend to be very competent at self-delusion. They cannot deny that Al Andalus (the Iberian Peninsula) should eventually revert to Muslim rule. But they’re very good at waiting until they are able to achieve that.
Given the fertility rates of Portugal (1.51) and Spain (1.48) vs. Morocco (2.17) and Western Sahara (4.15), I’d say waiting is a good strategy at this point.
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Portugal seems to be importing MOSTLY Russian immigrants, actually.
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Israel is doing the same (in Israel’s case, to counterbalance the Ultra Orthodox). Good strategy as long as a country can be better than Russia – which should be for a long time.
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Just to clarify, the speaker in my example was referring to Hindu traditions, not Islamic. And if you ever have the chance to skip that kind of presentation, I recommend doing so. I had a splitting headache from trying to understand the speaker’s logic.
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” It should be pretty clear which party is being more aggressive here.”
Yes, 9/11 made it as plain as the nose on your face.
” It’s not controversial to say that a part of the justification for our involvement (there’s a tidy word) in Afghanistan is the treatment of women at the hands of the Taliban.”
I would agree it isn’t controversial, because I have never heard that justification used before. (I have heard it as a justification for things we have done while there, but never even a whisper if it being used as justification for INVOLVING ourselves in the first place).
“If peace is our hope it seems more achievable to me if we give room for some mutual respect.”
To achieve mutual respect you must have two sides capable of giving the other respect, if only one side is capable of giving respect it doesn’t work. (kind of like sheep trying to make peace with a pack of wolves). The Koran plainly teaches disrespect (a very mild term for what it actually teaches) for all nonmuslims, since practically all muslim countries are theocracies how you expect them to respect us is beyond me. If you can’t garner respect from someone the next most effect way to create peace (other than the Mongol method) is to engender fear in them, and we have been doing a very poor job of that lately.
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And we will pay for it. In blood.
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Canadian media was using it as justification for helping the US. (We weren’t the ones attacked by terrorists, so they had to come up with some reason other than just standing beside the one that got attacked.sigh.)
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Sorry, was in a hurry. Should have clarified that it was used as justification for moving into Afghan after Iraq, and for staying past the original deadline, and the new deadline, and the one after that, and….
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Twaddle. You cannot humiliate a people; that is a opinion based on a peculiar expression of race and ethnicity. It is not as if the Muslim people were not perfectly capable of sponsoring coups and installing monarchs on their own — they did it for a millennium before “The West” started playing in the “Islamic World.”
Or do you think that Byzantium was a democratic republic?
Thomas Paine was a nut, a supporter of the French Revolution and the Terror who ended up attacking President Washington as
As his obituary notice from the New York Citizen read in part: “He had lived long, did some good and much harm.” He isn’t spinning in his grave because he doesn’t have one — and the bones have been long ago lost.
As for “installing military bases in lands they consider sacred” — those would be the bases we established at the invitation of the Saudi and Kuwaiti governments to defend their “holy lands” against Saddam? A strange form of imperialism.
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“Or do you think that Byzantium was a democratic republic?”
Byzantium wasn’t Muslim. It was Christian, and generated enough coups and counter-coups and betrayals for two or three other civilizations.
Fer crissake, they were so shocked when one of their emperors inherited the throne by legitimate succession they made that fact part of his name.
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Oops! Thanks for correcting the brain fart. I was thinking of the Ottomans, who were admittedly around less than a millennium.
As someone born on the 500th anniversary of the fall of Constantinople a body would think I wouldn’t make such an error. In penance, this year I shall mark the 560th anniversary of the fall of the Byzantine Empire by draining a bottle of retsina. And reading again the Drake & Flint Bellisarius novels.
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Retsina! Well, Portuguese Verde is better, and cheaper, and besides, we DID kick Muslims out of the peninsula. (Well “we” broadly interpreted. It was mostly French crusaders. But since a lot of them were secular noblemen and behaved as noblemen would, I’m fairly sure some er… in a genetic sense are still with us. With me. Whatever.)
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As long as the Muslims think of the Crusades as unprovoked, there is no hope of communication.
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If we can’t maintain our way of life without degrading others we really need to work on a re-write of our story.
This is the story I believe in: http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=o9tDO3HK20Q
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What the heck do you mean by not maintaining our way of life by degrading others? WHAT? That doesn’t even make any sense. Sir, are you infected with Marxist economics?
Capitalism CREATES wealth. It is not a finite pie.
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What the heck do you mean by not maintaining our way of life by degrading others?
Sarah, sounds like Alex has been sampling on the Marxist progressive liberal philosophy. Ugh.
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It sounds like he’s blinded by it, too.
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Marxist progressive liberal philosophy is like wood alcohol – your first sip, you think it must be great. Then it leaves you blind, deaf and mindless, and finally dead with no one to mourn your self-induced destruction.
Give me the aged single malt of Western Culture, to be savored while listening to Bach and enjoying the old master artists’ works.
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great analogy. I was snickering for awhile–MADE my day
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I believe in private property, wealth creation, stewardship of the planet, entrepreneurship, and all of those good things. There is a difference between doing these things responsibly and what is going on in the world today.
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Well yes I agree with you there, but somehow I think we are standing back to back, pointing in opposite directions when pointing out the differences.
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Ah. So you have not actually closely examined your beliefs in the light of the actual data, despite your claims to have done so. If you had done so you would not be able to state that you believe in private property etc. without recognizing that private property and entrepreneurship is utterly incompatible with believing that we are maintaining our way of life by degrading others.
In the simplest of terms: entrepreneurship will increase wealth. Increased wealth leaves others looking poor by comparison. That does not degrade them. They degrade themselves when they claim that the entrepreneur’s wealth came from somehow stealing from them.
What is going on in the world today is largely Marxism hard or soft. Any flavor of absolute control corrupts. Absolute control by the only entity around with a mandated monopoly of force corrupts absolutely.
It is not Western Civ, which once upon a time told the story “you too can have these good things, and this is how you do it”. Now the story is “You are a victim.”
That story is a lie. The only way anyone can be a victim is by choosing to be one – and thereby giving the victimizer control over them forever.
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But what is being done today is centralization, micromanagemment by fiat and bureaucrat, seizure of wealth, destruction of capital through inflation, and preventing individuals from doing what they want to do with their own property all in the name of “correcting the tradgedy of the commons”. Unfortunately they identified that the problem is that an area that no one has a stake in maintianing is not cared for by anyone, which is sort of correct as far as it goes, but decide that the best solution is to make everything the commons, and put it under the control of people who have not grounding in the economy, no interest in how it turns out for the little folk that live there and a lot of interest in making sure that the profits and benefits go to their friends and supporters.
I am glad you believe in private property, wealth creation, and stewardship, but you may want to do a review of whether what is going on is going to promote all that for everyone or just the special few, the elect, the good-old-boys in power.
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–the neo-Aristocrats
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Which is what always happens when you give bureaucrats the right to oversee free men. They have no reason NOT to impinge. Their power is their wealth and vice versa.
I SWEAR if I ever become dictator of the world, BEFORE I ruthlessly leave everyone alone, I’m going to tattoo on everyone’s forehead — backward so they read it every morning in the mirror — “GOVERNMENT EMPLOYEES ARE NOT ANGELS”
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“–the neo-Aristocrats”
The filthiest joke ever told.
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ROFL
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No, he’s not a Marxist, he’s a Ronulan, who wants to leave everyone alone until they kill us all.
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And for this, I point to Heinlein: Read The Sixth Column.
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I was semi-there until 9/11. My LORD that was a wake up call. But no, Wayne, remember, capitalism can’t survive without “degrading” others. No, no, this is the real (red) deal.
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Carl Sagan was militantly atheistic. He must be spinning in his grave to know that he is the prophet of ‘Saganism’ that you worship.
The death knells of the Islamic world were tolled when they chose to destroy anything non-Islam in their path. We are now supposed to kiss their feet for the few pieces of information they pulled from the burning libraries and churches that *they* had set fire to — instead of cursing them for all the knowledge lost when *they* burned the libraries and churches of Byzantium. They may have had a few people smart enough to figure out what they had in their hands, and translate the words. But they were, and are, incapable of building on anything. Once in a while, someone in Islam builds something wonderful. It is allowed to fall apart into decay because nobody has the gumption to fix it – it is Allah’s will if it falls down, and only Allah is perfect, so everything humans make or do must have built-in errors so that Allah will not feel mocked.
And this, you say, is the fault of the **Christians**? Do do realize that Sagan, were he here, would laugh in your face, adjust his turtleneck, and leave the room you were in?
Poor, pathetic creature. Your entire premise of life is bassackwards and tumbling down a precipice.
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Again, not sure how you think I’m saying the state of the world is the fault of Christians. I’m saying we (and that we is broader than Christianity) seem to have a hard time acknowledging when we screw up.
Did I say I worship Sagan? Or was I trying to throw in my two cents about which is a “better story”? I’d love someday for the story to be told that humans set aside some of their differences, recognized each other’s common humanity, and found a way to survive through our adolescence and explore the stars.
But pointing out that we invaded Iraq on some pretty stupid pretense results in a faceful of hate!
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See here is where I really disagree with you– Alex– Christianity has a part of it where we admit our wrongs and make them better. Or try to– It is a very strong part of the religion for individuals. As a nation– if we go around bowing to other nations, beating our breasts and asking for forgiveness, we shouldn’t be surprised if we get invaded.
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Yes. Exactly.
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Conduct which is laudable in individuals cannot often be scaled up to nations. Turn the other cheek, endless forgiveness and understanding – all very good for a person (within limits short of the saintly). For a nation, a death-sentance in slow motion.
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Turning the other cheek works great when there is a police force, so even if you appear weak there is somebody to defend you. In an anarchic situation, like the one that exists between sovereign nations or between hunter/gatherer clans, it is an invitation for aggressors.
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So, you’re saying that in certain circumstances “turning the other cheek” gets your butt kicked?
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Yes. Remember, I’m Jewish. I feel no need to agree with Jesus.
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Sigh. Now I have to go read — AGAIN — On Venus Do We Have A Rabbi. (The go to answer when discussing the remote possibility Robert will ever want to get married “Yes, yes, but which tentacle DO you circumcise?” I’m happy and proud to report it results in rolled eyes and a long-suffering sigh.)
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It was about the proper response to a deadly insult, anyways…. not to an actual attack.
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In Jesus’s defense, it is a magical response to the Middle Eastern culture. Think about it. In a culture of honor killings and of death in return to an insult, that is the way to stop the crazy violence. Might not be survivable for the first few people doing it, but just the novelty of it would eventually stop the madness, and hey, treasure in heaven and all that. Between nations, OTOH, as Ori pointed out there is NO law. (International Law is largely a fiction.)
BTW, Ori, thank you for the metaphor. I always thought “because it’s like kindergarten with armed toddlers” was closest to what international relations are like but “like a hunter-gatherer band” also works.
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One hell of a kung-fu insult, too– “Oh, you slapped me with your off hand? Well, not only was it not much of an insult coming from you, it was kinda wimpy– try your strong hand.”
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I’m not sure that they were that Middle Eastern at the time. The Romans didn’t like their subjects feuding, and they could be rather….persuasive.
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The right one, of course.
Sidenote: What kind of mother would let her son even entertain the thought of marrying an uncircumcised barbarian?
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Venusian.
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One that approves of gay marriage, of course.
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There was no mention of the Venusian barbarian in question being male. (in alien lifeforms circumcision is not necessarily a determination of sex)
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Jewish circumcision wouldn’t apply otherwise.
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the circumcision was for the male child of the marriage with the Venusian. TRULY if you haven’t read the story do. It’s one of those “so hilarious I cried” stories.
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What book is it in?
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The google foo is not with me today, and all I’m bringing up is biographies: http://www.tor.com/blogs/2010/02/william-tenn-1920-2010
I’d rank the story up there with Cold Equations and Midnight Mass as one of my favorite ever.
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“On Venus, Have We Got a Rabbi” can be found in the collections listed here: http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?58920
Oh, isfdb.org (http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/index.cgi) is a good place for trying to find older stories.
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Thank you Drak!
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Thank you. I’ll keep an eye out for those books.
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Are you thinking Venus and the Seven Sexes?
ALL William Tenn is good reading, although Null-P induces laughter and tears in equal quantity.
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in the story it is very definitely female. The reason we use this, btw, is that my son Robert likes exotic women, the more exotic the better. So….
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Not that he shows much interest in anything but medicine, but the only women he thinks are “beautiful” are… well… his first crush was black-Irish-Cherokee, back in Kindergarten.
There are exceptions, but his head swivels at the more exotic ones, even if it also swivels at the “average” ones. So, we tease him, which is what families do. (At least this family.)
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I like exotic-looking women, too. I usually like a little Asian or Polynesian in the mix, too.
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And the reason I’m entitled to teasing him — today’s chapter was late because as I was in full swing, writing away, he comes in to rant about a book he had to read for class. JUST rant. For half an hour. Popped me RIGHT out of the regency. Children. Can’t live with them. Can’t find a pot big enough to cook them in!
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Your son is showing his intelligence and good taste.
His intelligence by steering clear of women in general, thus not only reducing his headaches, but NOT reducing his pocketbook.
His good taste by liking the exotic ones,
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“But pointing out that we invaded Iraq on some pretty stupid pretense ”
See here is my problem, what one of us sees as a self-evident truth, the other sees as a base lie. We probably aren’t going to agree on much of anything, and since we are working from totally different ‘truths’ that the other believes are ridiculous falsehoods argueing is almost pointless.
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As for Iraq, ask a Kurd about chemical weapons.
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Faceful of disdain, you mean. Hate would require we thought you were other than a deluded twit.
Pointing out you have made some pretty stupid arguments is not an expression of hatred, it is encouraging you to attempt honest self-examination and to consider how you might improve.
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“Did I say I worship Sagan?”
You don’t have to say it; you merely show it.
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Also, we invaded Iraq because a) they broke the cease-fire (NOT peace treaty) they agreed to after Gulf War I and b) the consensus of every intel agency and many governments was that they were in fact doing what they were accused of in fomenting acts of terrorism against us and our allies. In fact, this belief was codified into US law by the Democratic Party in 1998.
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Alex, Alex, Alex, where to begin. Or is it Alexi tovarisch?
“It is not “Blaming America” to acknowledge that we are leaders of the free world, we still prop-up wretched governments, buy products manufactured by slaves, fish the oceans to collapse, give retroactive immunity to telecom companies that help the government spy on its own people, invade other countries with the most laughable retroactive justification, and can’t even make sure our own people all have food. That’s not self-loathing, that’s acknowledging reality.”
Let’s start with the “Propping up wretched governments.”
First yes, we have “propped up” some rather nasty bastards in the past and continue to do so today. You have the left’s rather idiotic idea that morality somehow has a place in interactions between nations. I say idiotic because it is, on several levels.
First because the left’s insistence on “morality” only seems to apply to other people and then only overseas. Second because right and wrong simply do not apply. National interest does. We propped up Franco because it was in our national interest to do so. Portugal was red or leaning red and Franco was a check. We didn’t need a major Western European Nation to go communist so we held our nose and dealt with the man. Which applies to any number of strong men in Africa and should have applied to Castro. “He may be a sonofabitch, but he’s our sonofabitch” is a legitimate justification in international relations. But I digress.
“Buy products manufactured by slaves.”
First you can’t eliminate slavery. It has existed since man first figured out how to rub a couple of sticks together and it will exist long after we leave this mudball.
But I suspect what you really mean is “buy products made by little brown people (or little yellow people) who only make a few dollars a day.”
That’s true as far as it goes. However, what lackwits like you don’t get, is that when you pay someone in Vietnam $25 a week, when he’s used to living on $2 a week, to make Nike shoes, you have materially improved his life. This is what capitalism does. In fact, Nike moved their factories FROM Vietnam because they had so improved the standard around there they couldn’t afford to hire labor anymore. So Nike went elsewhere. But other companies, for whom $25 a week was still cheap as hell, moved in. Capitalism thus improving the standard of living and enriching people as it always does when allowed.
I won’t spend much time on the “fish the oceans to collapse” because it’s bullshit and not worth wasting words on.
“Give retroactive immunity to telecom companies that help the government spy on its own people.”
Yeah not real happy about that one. But it’s also not _quite_ what it sounds like either. The wiretaps in question were on jihadiscum or suspected jihadiscum who were talking to US citizens. The “retroactive immunity” was granted because the telecoms in question cooperated with government officials in what they thought was legal. The situation, as usual, is more complex by far than the dumbass soudbites you got off MSNLSD.
“invade other countries with the most laughable retroactive justification.”
Hmm BLAME BOOOSH. Here you reveal yourself for the contemptible, koolaid drinking lackwit you truly are. You would have fit right in in Jonestown.
The intelligence that Hussein possessed NBC weapons was not just ours, it was shared by EVERY MAJOR WESTERN INTELLIGENCE AGENCY AND THE RUSSIANS. You hemorrhoid on an abscess. Moreover, a raping, murdering, genocidal maniac and his psychopathic sons are dead, and 20 million people at least have a shot at freedom. Did we do every thing right? No. Was it a net positive? Resoundingly yes.
“Cant’ even make sure all our own people have food.”
*Rolls on the ground laughing for about an hour and then stands up, his sides hurting and wipes away a tear.*
You dimbulb you do realize the biggest problem poor people in this country have is OBESITY right? Hunger is not missing a meal or two. Hunger is not having to have free lunch at school.
Hunger is a small child, his belly distended from malnutrition and starvation, without the energy to bat away the flies walking across his OPEN EYEBALLS because he’s too tired to BLINK.
In short, I am astounded you remember to breathe.
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Fishing the oceans to collapse? I must have missed that when I was skimming.
I saw what happened in the Marshall Islands. Despite our presence in the area for seventy years, viable and large populations of multiple types of food fish existed. Recently, the Marshallese gave fishing rights to the Chinese, who have overfished the seas there. (What’s the animal equivalent of “clear-cutting the forest?”)
Are elements in our society that narcissistic to believe the world is that centered around us that we believe we’re at fault for everything anybody anywhere does?
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Yep. This is what this post is about. They don’t realize it’s a form of narcissism. Or arrant racism.
I once sat through an American lefty explaining to me how the reason Portugal didn’t have a computer industry was SOMEHOW the fault of IBM (this was the eighties.) My reaction was “So, the fact the colleges are mostly aimed at making you learned in a medieval way; that we have all sorts of obstacles to entrepreneurship; that we take two hour lunches and three months vacations is ALL America’s fault? Wow, powerful America created Portuguese culture and politics before it existed.” I didn’t like being patronized. He was shocked. He expected me to thank him, I guess, and say, yes, it was all America’s fault that I “had to” immigrate. (Rolls eyes.)
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What he said.
On propping up wretched governments – I would like to add: 1) a lot of that was in response to the Soviet Union in the Cold War, which was, sadly, fought through satellite countries, and 2) Egypt is a good example of what happens when you get rid of the bastard – you get something much much worse.
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Yes and exactly.
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Where do you get this peculiar idea that we have any obligation to “advance the cause of human rights for all”? How do you define those “human rights” of which you speak? Is not the very idea of “human rights” an implement of Western Imperialism?
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Now now, RES, Whiteman’s Burden and all, eh what? Noblesse Oblige you know.
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The list of “human rights” adopted by the UN was at the behest of the USSR to use as a stick to beat western Countries with — The Rights of Man are largely nonsense
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we have a real conversation about how what each of us do in our own lifetimes will advance the cause of human rights for all.
So you’d support my idea of hiring mercenaries to take out slavers in Africa?
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Only if they are Union mercenaries.
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I dunno; unionized fighting forces seem like a bad idea. Especially if they go on strike.
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IIRC, union fighting forces performed pretty well in the American War of Southern Secession.
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It just occurred to me that this is one of a likely very few places where such terms can be tossed around without the comment section blowing up into a new civil war of its own.
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yeah, but we go unwarrantably nutty on other stuff. I get crazy on any suggestion of price/wage fix including minimal wage and go around calling people Marxist. (Yes, I DO have my Thomas Sowell cuddle-up stuffed toy. SHUDDUP. He goes well with my Hayek pillow.) And you lot have deep unresolved Long War of The Twentieth Century issues. (Okay, I do too, that’s kind of part of being alive and not being a tribal aboriginal, but all the same.) AND add to that that I’m not smart enough to keep my mouth shut on that stuff. (Or come in out of the rain. Good THING I live in Colorado.) And I suspect RES is right and the What Is Human Post should wait to Monday, as it will give us “legitimate chewtoys.” (Like half of my female colleagues. Eh. I’ll be unfit for polite society, I tell you.) If we’re going to be in a firefight, we might as well enjoy it.
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Right. Clear the calender for Monday, step up BP medications. Sharpen pointed sticks. Pick up some bananas and a bunch of loganberries.
N.B. – Sarah, DO NOT GOT TO NRO’s Human Exceptionalism (http://www.nationalreview.com/human-exceptionalism) blog this weekend. You do not need more ammo, nor more cause for massive ordnance strike.
DO NOT read about the Animal Rights/Bioethics/Transhumanism conference at Yale, nor about Death [being] “Morally Insignificant” in Organ Donation.
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I’m looking for my BP medicine just reading that referral And I DON’T HAVE ANY. (My BP is actually abnormally and chronically low which is why until I have my minimum daily caffeine I give a good impression of a lazy slug.)
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I could probably skip some of mine on the weekends and send you some. FedEx could probably get it there in time for Monday… :-)
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Niacin (flushing kind) might work
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You could always try bleeding, letting blood has been used successfully to lower blood pressure for centuries.
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Let’s not give ourselves a huge pat on the back for being the least bad superpower until we have a real conversation about how what each of us do in our own lifetimes (the only resource we may fully command) will advance the cause of human rights for all.
Let us notice that we ARE entitled in this description to a huge pat on the back, not when we do any good, but when we have this “conversation.” Have it, and we’re golden without having done the least benefit to our fellow man.
It’s like the liberals who insist that they are more generous than conservatives — when they earn 6% more and yet conservatives give one third more to charity. (Bring it up, and they start weaseling about what really counts. You will notice that giving to a museum or orchestra you visit, or to a private school that your children attend, really counts, because that’s the sort that liberals do more of than conservatives.)
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The questions facing Westerners is Western conduct. That’s what we must improve, because that’s us!
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Define improve. Are you aware that if you don’t fight back, the rest of the world assumes you’re ripe for the taking? Or do you think they are all enlightened beings. MUST all Westerners be angels, so that them poor blighted brown people will see the way. Do you realize how inherently racist that is?
We have an oversized child. We taught him never to hit anyone. In Kindergarten, he got beat up on by EVERYONE, until we told him to take the gloves off. Was it his fault he didn’t go to a school for angels only? Do you realize the world is not full of angels?
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Thanks for calling me a racist? I don’t believe I showed you that courtesy.
Anyways, we don’t have to be angels. We can start by not invading other countries that haven’t actually attacked us.
Are brown people all enlightened beings? Nope, humans like the rest of us. If they launch a military invasion of Portugal should we fight back? Yes.
I realize the world is not full of angels. We need not be either. We should work on doing some of the basics better.
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You are delusional. Nobody called you a racist. Sarah said a belief was racist – not you, personally. You may have *wanted* somebody to, and so you let loose with your pre-canned “racist response”. I’m sorry you’re so slow. More fool you. You realize that you are parading your ignorance and making yourself look more and more foolish by the moment? This is something you intended to do? Strip down naked and let us laugh at the zits that should be your manhood?
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She did not call you racist– and I am still trying to figure out where we launched a military invasion. If you say Iraq or Vietnam I will be very very very insulted. You need to go back and read your history and not that slobber they call history in school. Also talk to the soldiers who were there– which will change your view extremely well…
If you say Japan– I will just laugh in your face. I am still trying to figure out why you think we invade– unless we are attacked first. (or there is a reason). If you talk about the Cuba missile crisis, then I’ll know you are talking out the side of your face. We were in a war– the Cold war. And it was terrible and scary. We did a lot of things to prepare for missiles hitting the US. If we had let the missiles get so close to our land mass, we were asking to get into a much hotter war.
If you are talking about Afghanistan, well– we couldn’t let that one go– No country can let an attack go on their soil and still have respect from other countries.
So how do we improve our relations… DO WE give them mo’money? I haven’t seen where that has done us any good in diplomatic relations even with our allies. It just makes the countries we give “tribute” to feel superior to us. In the past it was the losers that gave tribute. We have turned it around and we give money, food, and weapons to our enemies.
If I am wrong in this– I know RES will correct me. But this is my view— and I have lived in several countries besides the US.
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Just a little side note: Vietnam was a French war at first… we went in to help our allies, and then the North Vietnamese which is how we got mired into it. It was also a part of the Cold War– we couldn’t let more countries go communist. As someone who was a child during those times, it could get terrifying–
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Oh and another note– the Vietnamese had been at war for several hundred years before we stepped into that anthill.
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Like the muslims. War is a pasttime. Again, the only reason for relative peace has been Pax Americana
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Exactly– the entire country was filled with tunnels and weapons– etc. etc. Pax Americana has changed the world. One of our mottos in the Navy was “peace through superior firepower.” It kept the shipping lanes open for decades (century or more).
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Exactly – think for a moment of how perilous international shipping would be, if the US Navy didn’t patrol – and even when they do, the danger to small and commercial shipping is still pretty bad. Anyone remember how dangerous the Med was until the early 19th century? The piracy in that area was epic – merchant ships taken over and robbed, crew and passengers sold as slaves across North Africa. That line in the Marine Corps song about “the shores of Tripoli” isn’t there for rhyme and metre. For more information about this, see Giles Milton’s “White Gold”- http://www.amazon.com/White-Gold-Extraordinary-Thomas-Million/dp/0374289352/ref=cm_cr_pr_product_top
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Let’s take Iraq. In what sense is landing a large army and occupying a country for a decade and counting, building a billion dollar consulate not an invasion?
And let’s say for the sake of argument that it was a humanitarian mission (though that’s an invention that came later). How successful were we?
And what about Vietnam? How many Vietnamese died in that conflict so we could interfere with the governance of another country?
How do we improve relations? By just leaving them alone and getting our own house in order before we try to play world police next time.
Some example projects that we can do at home: figure out what we have to do so people have a sense of financial security again, maybe study the effects of toxic chemicals in our food supply and set up better funded abatement programs…I mean, we could really use a good polishing on the basics of Maslow’s Pyramid. It’s my hope that such a project is compatible with entrepreneurial activity. I’d love to see more grass roots democracy, more resilient communities building up their structures to protect themselves from the crumbling global order. I’d love to see greater scientific literacy, and yes, challenging even ‘scientific’ authorities. I’d love to see less overfishing.
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OH geez– so you don’t believe in the WMD of Iraq and the bellicose attitude of Sadaam Hussein since Desert Storm. How many times did he throw out the inspectors after he lost the war? (first time).
As for Vietnam– before we were even involved in that war, they had very few men over the age of mid-20s because of the wars– We may have killed some, but we killed less — than they killed of each other (did I say centuries?) Read The 13th Valley to see what was happening in Vietnam if you really want to know (del Vecchio).
So you are an isolationist– We found out in WWI &WWII what happens when we are isolationists. At least we have keep many of the wars to a low simmer. (We found out that we aren’t left alone and we are attacked– may I remind you of Pearl Harbor?)
Maaslow Pyramid only works with individuals– and is ridiculous to apply it to nations. It would be great to have grass-roots capitalism (democracy doesn’t work unless it is hybrid like ours). But you forget grass-roots needs to come from the people OF THAT COUNTRY. Americans in the Peace Corps are NOT grass-roots. So I see what you have to say. And I think you believe it– and want this utopia, I am against the NEw world order (what they started calling it in I think the 1930s — now it is the global world order) because it needs to start in the communities. However you and I cannot enforce our brand unless– we force it.. (another form of invasion). Oh this made me laugh actually–
You are in a catch 22– situation there. ;-)
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Cyn
You say the meds made you lose your brilliance. I want to tell you it’s still there.
Bows.
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Thank you Sarah– you made me cry ;-)
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According to the terms, Hussein agreed that it was not our place to prove he had WMD — it was his place to prove that he didn’t. And he didn’t.
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YEP– Alex doesn’t understand it– and thanks for the clarification– it wasn’t for us to prove he didn’t (although it is become clear as time goes on that he did have some nasty nasty weapons.)
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Iraq brought that on themselves (well, Saddam did). The biggest mistake Bush did was to try to add the Chemical Weapons to the list of reasons (incidentally, we’ve now found that he really DID send them to Syria).
There was a cease fire agreement in the first Gulf War. There was no treaty. Saddam violated this agreement multiple times, and Clinton ignored this, likely leading Bin Laden to become more bold, instead of crushing him like the bug that he was when he should have.
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Not to mention the second intifada. Saddam paid 10k (I think) per suicide bomber in Palestine to their families. In my mind, as I type this, is the image of the blood covered stroller in that restaurant blown up at Passover.
And even then we left them alone, though they were attacking our ally. This could not continue after 9/11 and the eviction of inspectors. It couldn’t.
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Well, had *I* been elected instead of Bush, I would have invaded Iraq in March of 2000. I had been saying if Clinton had any b*lls, he would have done it while he was President.
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Oh, G-d yes. No going to the UN cap in hand. Bunch of useless leeches. The UN is based on the assumption an assembly of wolves and three lambs are an effective way of keeping the lambs from getting eaten.
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Seems to me one of the biggest faults of America may be that you have problems going through with things – you start something, and after an election or two end up with people who decide to withdrew because, and then have to leave things half done. And the same, you are not ruthless enough, you want to play nice, which can lead to the same result, cause playing nice can mean things take longer. So the people on the receiving end get pissed, but not scared and when they are pissed they dare to do things which they just might avoid if they were actually scared. For several cultures you have fought with fear also seems to be an integral part of respect, if they do not properly fear you they won’t respect you either and so they will try to mug the dragon, again and again, because they keep thinking it looks more like a common lizard and so should be easy prey.
Playing nice and being merciful can be very good things, but not when they prolong conflicts.
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Actually the idea that we’re not ruthless enough is not quite accurate. Americans are the most ruthless, remorseless killers the world has ever seen — if you get us mad enough.
And that’s the thing. We came within a hairsbreadth of wiping the Japanese people out in WWII — and it scared us.
Nothing since has gotten us angry enough to take the gloves off. Perhaps 9/11 should have, probably 9/11 should have. But those who would poke the sleeping giant should remember that if we get angry enough we will wipe them out utterly and sow the ground with salt.
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And that is pretty much the point. You could, but you haven’t. Sooner or later you’ll probably have to, but the longer it takes the more casualties there will be – on both sides. One or few at a time instead of many at once, but if the one at a time goes for long that will mean more altogether.
I can well imagine the outrage you taking your gloves off would/will cause, though, but people seem to be pretty determined to hate you anyway, no matter how nice you play.
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YES
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Most countries respond in a linear fashion. The more they are provoked, the more they respond. Our response curve is S-shaped. Until a certain point we ignore the problem or call it a law enforcement issue. This makes us look weak, so we are provoked more. Then, when you get to be bend in the S curve, we start acting crazy. “A country per office building” crazy.
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Are we there yet, Ori? ;)
Yes, you’re right.
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We might have been there 9/12/2001. We aren’t now. But I think we are primed. A chemical or nuclear attack on a US city would provoke an aggressive response, on January 2017 at the latest.
I still don’t know if 9/11 was a black swan event, or if the followers of Political Islam decided it really isn’t worth it to mess with the US.
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Massive response is far more likely under a Democrat administration, for reasons which I leave as an exercise for the intelligent student.
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WHich is why Tom wrote Caliphate: as a warning of what would come of ignoring the root causes.
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It was $25K, Sarah, not $10K. He also sent tons of weapons, munitions and trainers to Gaza and Lebanon. He’s also the one that initially armed the Bedouin in the Sinai, and supplied arms to Somalia and Eritrea. As for WMDs, does anyone remember Osirak? The Israelis set Hussein back 20 years with that attack.
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“The biggest mistake Bush did was to try to add the Chemical Weapons to the list of reasons”
No, the mistake was letting that get turned into the “only” rationale, then letting the press and the left (BIRM) play “no true Scotsman” with every piece of evidence found.
The declaration of war passed by Congress (even if it didn’t have that name, that’s what it was) listed over a dozen reasons for removing Saddam.
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Viet Nam? Interfere with the governance of another country? Are you insane? Viet Nam, and Korea, were invasions by the Soviet Union and China. Oh, they didn’t send their own troops there to take over, they sent advisors, money, and weapons to sympathetic parties in their governments so they could get governments that would ally with them. We made half-assed attempts to KEEP them from being interfered with.
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“Oh, they didn’t send their own troops there to take over,”
I know someone who served at the Chosin we would argue with that.
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Lots of pilots who would disagree, too.
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I knew that there were Soviet troops there, but I thought they were sent in later. However, I will readily admit that many are far more knowledgeable on the subject than I.
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I was referring to the fifteen divisions of Chinese.
Wikipedia may be an unreliable source, but should be fairly accurate for an order of battle.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Chosin_Reservoir_order_of_battle
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Oh, I see. My writing got confused, and it wasn’t clear that, when referring to troops, I was only talking about Russian troops.
Yeah, there were LOTS of Chinese.
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One group I worked with and supported kept track of the “Ho Chi Minh ‘Trail'” — a network of some 800 miles of roads and trails through Laos, built by the North Vietnamese Army, “assisted” by engineers from more than a dozen Communist worlds, including East Germany, Hungary, Bulgaria, and of course, Russia. The Chicoms built a road across northern Laos so they could tap the “Golden Triangle” for more drugs to feed to American servicemen and women. Most people don’t have a clue all the nasty things that went on in that war.
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My hubby was there with a portable radio (it took a jeep to cart it around). So yes–
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My dad, in college in the 1950s, had Korean War vets as classmates, one of whom told of manning a machine gun turret, and hundreds of Chinese soldiers armed with broomsticks, no real weapons, running at him, and he had to mow those poor guys down.
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My dad went to Macao on business during the Cultural Revolution. He said bodies washed up there, in great number. G-d forgive us not just for what we’ve allowed to happen (as human beings not as Americans. I don’t think America as a country could have prevented it. I mean all of us humans.) And G-d forgive the chowder heads in college half in love with China and trying to justify it. Might they never experience what they admire.
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Might they never experience what they admire.
Amen. Also, “may we not receive what we so justly deserve,” and “for what we are about to receive, may we be truly grateful.”
Also of note: “those about to rock salute you.”
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I daily give praise for His mercy.
(Yes, I’m a suck-up when even I cannot deny being out of my weight class.)
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Might they never experience what they admire
You are much nicer than I am.
I had a wonderful history prof in college who instilled a love of the Constitution in all of us, not by teaching US history, but by teaching Western History from the Renaissance forward, which really is about all the forces that led to the US Constitution. He’s where I first heard the idea of the necessity of preventing the tyranny of the majority.
I’m sure he started out left-wing, given his age, vocation and the times, but he told us he actually spent time in Yugoslavia and saw life behind the Iron Curtain for real. (He said he and his buddie, who was a total Communist, were sitting in their bleak apartment on a Saturday night, and there was absolutely nothing to do. They stared at each other, and then his buddy stood and sang “God Bless America” at the top of his lungs, all the way through. He sat down and said, “You better never tell anyone I did that.”)
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That is a reason why, even though its director is a total lefty, Moscow On The Hudson is a favorite movie. Warts and all, America is one of the better places to be, and it is regrettable that some people can’t see past the warts.
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One of my uncles (by marriage; American born Chinese, graduated from medical school here in 1949) went to China as soon as he finished medical school to help China recover from the previous couple of decades of hell. He got far more than he expected…
Mao, Five Year Plan(s), Red Guards, Cultural Revolution (including instances of cannibalism), being “repurposed” as an herbalist doctor (because “Western Medicine”), etc etc. The side effects of various bright ideas backed by people who had no idea what they were doing: sparrows, etc., were pests, so kill ’em all. After the insect population exploded, with expected results on crops and foliage in general, dealing with the dust storms that followed.
He finally got out in the late 80s, wrote two small and obscure books, retired and generally lived quietly with his new family ’til he passed away in his early 90s.
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I’m now wondering if I read the two small and obscure books…
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In what sense is landing a large army and occupying a country for a decade and counting, building a billion dollar consulate not an invasion?
When they shoot at you first.
Double-plus if they try to kill your leader.
Before 9/11, we turned the other cheek; after 9/11, someone figured out that non-Christians– anti-Christians– mistake restraint for weakness.
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Exactly– one of the airplanes was supposed to hit the White House– if you remember– it was the one that was stopped by the passengers. May they rest in peace.
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Amen.
Saddam wasn’t quiet about his attempt to assassinate George H W Bush, nor about his support for terrorists, nor about his failure to account for the WMDs he was allowed to hold on to on the condition of inspection.
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There was also the little matter of the massacre of thousands upon thousands of his own people. I’ve always thought there was a bit of finishing what should have been done in the Gulf War behind the Iraq War. If the US had taken Baghdad in the 90s, how many people would be alive today? (Of course, no one would have known, and the same people would be crying “warmongers.”)
As for today, we should not only NOT have left Iraq, we should have built a base there. It would have had a very stabilizing presence on the region, especially right there by Iran. We won the Iraq war, and every Iraqi I’ve seen interviewed says the place is better for the US presence. The US is still very popular in Kuwait (it’s still popular in Japan, for that matter, and we nuked them).
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There was also the little matter of the massacre of thousands upon thousands of his own people.
Yeah.
I was in bootcamp for 9/11, and when I got to my school one of my room mates was an artist lady from New York. Her husband was (probably still is, actually) a doctor, and she had a beautiful studio… that looked right out at the twin towers. She was in there working on 9/11. Signed up to become a bomb tech. (AO, for those who do Navy stuff, not EOD)
She’d graduated by the time Iraqi Freedom started, but I really wonder what she thought of it… shortly after she got to school, she cornered me with an old copy of the New Yorker with information on the treatment of the Kurds and Marsh Arabs, demanding why we weren’t doing anything yet.
I can’t remember her name, but she was a strikingly beautiful woman, in a sharp way– I really hope she poured the passion into supporting OIF, instead of turning on it like most of the other hardcore libs.
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“How do we improve relations? By just leaving them alone and getting our own house in order before we try to play world police next time.”
I philosophically lean towards isolationism myself; but the only way it works is if the lone wolf is a bigger, meaner, nastier, wolf than all the hyenas circling around him, and proves it. We haven’t had any problems with Japan since Nagasaki, but we were to restrained for the rest of the world to take us seriously (also we were out of bombs). So they continue to poke and tease us, to see how we react, the more we cower in the corner of the locker room while slapping at their hands and crying, “quit it, leave me alone,” the more confident and aggressive they get. If we really want to be left alone we are going to have to seriously overreact. If the next person who picks on us we slam their head through the lockers, put the cleats to them when they go down, and then use a baseball bat on them, maybe the others will leave us alone for a while. That is the way to be successfully isolationist.
If you don’t want to that there are only a couple other ways to avoid being picked on, either find the coach or some other bad*ss and suck up to them, so they will protect you, and make sure you never get caught out of their sight (who exactly do you think is big enough, and bad enough to protect America?) or, be willing to fight back and do so, while at the same time making friends with others that are willing to do the same (allies) if you make enough semicompetent friends you will be able to protect each other, usually without having to resort to as drastic of measures as the lone wolf, but you have to be willing to if needed, because there are crazies out there who see any restraint as a sign of weakness.
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I agree with everything here. Nuke the Moon! (imao.us)
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One of our biggest failings since WWII was in failing to require Europe to build a necessarily large enough, bad enough, and capable enough armed force to handle Russia on their own. There were reasons for it at the time, but in hindsight, it was a really appallingly ignorant thing to do. It’s going to take them collapsing in on themselves before they’ll be able to put their socialist dreams in the trash can and join the society of independent nations once more. Right now, they’re STILL dependent upon us far more than they should be.
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The European Union explained in 20 secnonds: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qVrN-gkzVYI
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And the proper way to fix it.
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Man, you need to learn to stop your whining. It’s unsightly.
Listen, little progressive fool, I FOUGHT in Vietnam. The people there knew exactly why we were there. The vast majority of them supported our presence there. I know this because I talked to them, da%$&*% daily. Their office was just across the hall from mine. ALL the officers there spoke English and French, as well as their native Vietnamese. So did a fair number of the NCOs. The problem with the Vietnamese war was that idiot LBJ got us into a situation where nothing we did would have allowed us to win without becoming a pariah nation. The majority of the Vietnamese I spoke to wanted nothing more than to be left alone to farm the plots their family had been tending for generations. The South was a minor nuisance, about the level of the French before. The North was another story, and they knew it.
As for Iraq, you have no idea how much Saddam Hussein was doing to cause us problems in the Muddled East. I spent twenty years working to keep up with what was going on. If you think he didn’t have “weapons of mass destruction”, where the he$$ do you think the chemical weapons Syria IS USING came from? What do you think all that “yellowcake” the US found was for? What do you think all those chemical exercises the Iraqi Army consistently engaged in (at MINIMUM, twice a year) were about?
You know absolutely NOTHING about history between 1945 and 2010. You’ve adequately displayed that fact here today on this blog. I WAS IN THE MIDDLE OF MAKING THAT HISTORY from 1967 until 1991, and I’ve kept up with friends on the inside. You’ve bought the progressive message lock, stock, and (gun)barrel, and the barrel is in your mouth.
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As it always is. And this is why I I say the Germans in WWII largely didn’t know — because right now, the majority of brainwashed fools have NO CLUE.
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(applause). Thank you, sir.
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Before anyone gets too deeply into their criticism of US involvement in the Vietnamese War they need to come up with a better explanation for the Boat People than “it was a reaction caused by the US’s needlessly prolonging the conflict.”
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One of the formative experiences of my life was working as a volunteer with a local church group to settle Vietnamese refugees in 1975. The Vietnamese that I met through this effort – they were good people. (Well, most of them were.) They came, assimilated, became good citizens – and there your are.
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And then they need to get my parish’s Father– and the other, older members who were also boat people– to agree with them.
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Okay, let’s take Iraq. Saddam’s regime had engaged in territorial aggression against its neighbors and, immediately preceding our invasion had engaged in multiple acts of war against our forces in violation of the truce which he had signed. The only way to extract our troops and close the military bases in the “holy lands” was to eliminate the threat posed by Saddam’s regime.
BTW, have you not noticed that the WMD held by Saddam have indeed turned up in Syria?
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And what about Vietnam?
yes, what about Vietnam? The country where we successfully kept out the evil-doers for years — the country where more people died in the first two years of “peace” than in the whole war — the country where people were not taking to the high seas in anything that floated to escape until we stopped the war — what about it?
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We all know what the rest of the world does when we decide to not to play policeman. The first time it was World War II. Those who do not like our playing police should not make us anticipate World War III if we back down.
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YES
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When it is a response to repeated cease-fire violations that continued over a decade, it isn’t an invasion that is not justified fully.
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“We can start by not invading other countries that haven’t actually attacked us.”
And the bozo bit is set…
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We must improve our conduct? Yes. Because we’ve gotten soft, and allowed people to kill our diplomats without reprisal. We’ve shown a weak and effeminate “President” bowing and apologizing to people who should have been strung up from the nearest lamp post, while making the Dali Lama exit through the garbage stacked around the back door of the White House. We’ve let people convince us that there is something wrong with Christianity, but that Islam is wonderful. YOU, Alex Dempsey, are what’s wrong with Westerners. You are a mealy mouthed, apologetic, whiney nothingness. Most of us have a moral compass. You have moral Brownian motion. You don’t have enough knowledge of Western Civilization to even discuss it properly.
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You’re projecting Kitteh. When did I indict Christianity? When did I say Islam is wonderful?
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When you complain about “the West” (which has been Christian in some form or other for nearly 2000 years) abusing the Taliban and Islamic countries, you honestly think we can’t figure out what’s going on? You honestly think you can hide behind euphemisms? You think everybody here is as ignorant as you? Kiddo, you’re playing in the far end of the bell curve, and waaay out of your depth. Quit now, while we allow you some small shreds of dignity to hide your shortcomings.
And, for your information, I’m Kitteh-DRAGON. There is a reason for this. NOBODY calls me Kitteh without paying for it from one end of the ‘net to the other. This is your only warning.
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Yes, I see that I’m on a further end of the bell curve than I anticipated Kitteh-Dragon. And I genuinely come in peace and come to challenge my own thinking by engaging with the values of those that think differently. I probably should have probed with more questions first before diving into a fusillade. I like to argue about ideas, and I get heated, but I’m still friends with people that I disagree with.
Here is a statement of fact that I just have trouble living with: we back foreign governments who’s values are 100% opposed to our own Constitution, and we often suppress people’s movements when they don’t align with our interests.
Is the world so realpolitik that I’m a fool to stop and ask “Hey, is there a better way gang?” Maybe it is. But if so we have you for that contingency. I’m on Earth for the “we’ve got a shot at peace” possibility. And it’s by no means exclusive. I’m skeptical of all massive concentrations in power. A one party system is worse than the two party system.
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Alex, you’re clearly further on the bell curve than you thought. Unfortunately, it’s the wrong side of the curve. That or you turned your brain off. Or you’re lying through your keyboard.
Your “statement of fact” is 100% bullshit. You’re like the pacifist who thinks he can stop the invading tanks by being nice to the drivers and wonders why they shot him. Quite simply, if the US government afforded other governments the rights and values of our constitution, we would be destroyed. Not immediately because we’re still militarily strong enough to smack down anyone else’s army. But ultimately we would because the other governments by and large do not abide by those principles.
When it comes to international matters, the US survives by being the biggest, nastiest fish in the ocean. The cold war staying mostly cold? We bought that by being the world’s policeman, and much thanks it got us. Most of the countries we’ve protected don’t bother to pay us for the service and then expect us to pay them to bail out their own bankrupt policies.
Regardless of individual levels of civilization, between nations the interactions are much like those in places where the word for “pacifist” is “slave”. You might like to research the Dahomey and how they maintained their supply – as well as who they mostly sold to (The answer is not “Westerners” – it’s “Arabs” – and they raided pacifist tribes in their area until those tribes became extinct.)
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You know Kate, listening to the people talking with this Alex reminds me of David Weber’s line about “a battle of wits with an unarmed man”. [Very Big Evil Grin]
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*snort– and I take daily chemo ;-)
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The cold war staying mostly cold?
Unfortunately, Kate, that’s what far too many people “believe”. The documents I read say we lost more than 9000 people — more than have been killed in both Iraq and Afghanistan — to HOSTILE FIRE during the “Cold War”. I knew a couple of them. It was always a “minor incident” that was quietly papered over in order for us NOT to go to DEFCON1 and send the missiles flying, but the people died, still.
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I would consider 9000 in fifty years mostly cold, for a war. Obviously a war, but very low casualties, we lost more than that a lot of DAYS in WWII.
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9000 in 50 years is just under 200/year
how many people are killed each year from car accidents?
from food allergies?
from bicycle accidents (even if you leave out the ones where cars are involved)
that’s a tiny number of people.
someone should report what the normal casualty rate from training accidents is per year (especially for the size forces that the Soviets and Chinese have). While our military now tries to get close to zero training casualties, that is a very unusual condition historically.
I remember reading that our casualties during the first gulf war were actually lower than would be expected from the same number of man-hours of training excercises.
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“While our military now tries to get close to zero training casualties, that is a very unusual condition historically.”
That is also a very shortsighted and dangerous condition. This should be self-evident, but obviously since we implement such policies, it isn’t.
Also I wouldn’t trust any numbers the Soviets or Chinese produce, the US as been proven to use ‘training accidents’ for deniability of clandestine operations, and we have a culture of accountability, and a ‘free’ press. What all do you figure the Marxists cover up with the fig leaf of ‘training accidents’?
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From memory, that’s more than accidental gun deaths, but less than US birth related maternal deaths.
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The papering over in order not to go DEFCON1 was also part of keeping it at cold, I think. “Mostly” cold, with flare-ups that could be papered over vs outright war that would cause immense damage to all parties concerned.
Of course, I’ve also looked at the estimates (their dead and ours) for a conventional invasion of Japan as opposed to the nuclear weapons that were dropped. The US saved millions of Japanese lives with that decision as well as the US lives they saved.
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Probably also made it honorably possible for Japan to enter the world as a country I am rather fond of, rather than some maimed, hostile monster.
Nothing wrong with changing when you’ve been utterly, flatly, massively defeated. But if you just barely lost, at great cost to the enemy?
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And this is particularly a part of Japanese psychology (one part of The Chrysanthemum and the Sword that still applies bigtime). The Japanese have two culturally enshrined responses: keep doing the same thing until it works (which is good if the approach is right and you just need persistence and improved skills), or change everything (failure that creates sudden inspiration or causes a search for something new).
We forced the Japanese to change everything (both by the bombs and destruction, and by forcing a peace treaty and imperial change), and it allowed most of them to forgive themselves and the surviving Japanese soldiers. It also allowed a lot of the factions of Japanese society that had been oppressed to become important, or at least made them need to be reckoned with.
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Oh, gad, I’ve been watching too much anime… I had a sudden mental vision of how samurai swords came about, because the iron was so messed up they HAD to beat it and beat it and fold and maul for an insane number of times…and you end up with a work of art.
In a century or two, someone needs to do a philosophy type anime series with that as a theme. (too raw right now)
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I recall there being considerable uproar during the Reagan presidency over an American colonel (to my shame I cannot remember his name) shot in cold blood by a Russian soldier while acting as a NATO observer of East Bloc war games.
I sus[ect there were many such, just few so public or as callous.
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There was also the ax-murder of two American officers at Panmunjon by North Korean soldiers in 1976- they were supervising (IIRC) trimming a poplar tree which blocked a view from one of the guardposts.
(detail’s and pictures here – http://www.environmentalgraffiti.com/history/news-axe-murder-incident
Camp Boniface – a US military post in the ROK is named for one of the officers murdered there.
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Unfortunately the “papering over” allowed them to take over universities sand our “kultur”. And G-d knows where the cold civil war will lead.
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Alas, true. At the time, it presumably seemed the best decision available.
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I feel stuff like the rampant fraud in the last election is being hushed up by both sides, for the same reason.
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Any person who has been in a long term relationship understands that if you first admit a problem exists the next step is to address it. If you deny the problem you do not have to admit your lack of ability (or will) to address it.
Politicians, as a group, do not find addressing insoluble problems an effective electoral strategy. It is right behind “turning down money for the district” in fact.
Besides, the local media will not praise you for it, will they?
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Don’t forget, Kate, none of your conclusions is exclusive.
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Alex, I’ve been considering just how to respond to your various comments. My first impression as I read them was that this line of thinking is very similar to those who supported the U.S. isolate itself from what was happening overseas prior to World War I. After all, according to them, we didn’t need to get involved in what was happening across the ocean as it didn’t involve us. That argument didn’t work then and it sure doesn’t work now, in an age of instant communication and near instant travel. We have to be concerned with what happens overseas because, like it or not, our economy is tied to it and if we hide our heads in the proverbial sand, we’ll find ourselves the target of those who wish to see our way of life dead.
My second thought as I read your comments was to wonder if, in your mind, men should be ashamed of their sex because of what they have historically done to women. Or if whites should feel a race shame because of what they have done to people of color? Should those with money feel shame because of the fact their ancestors may have run sweat shops or mines that weren’t particularly safe?
But to get to the gist of your comment, that we brought on the hatred of the Islamic countries – sorry, but no. You are choosing to look at only a relatively few years of historical significance and forget what happened over the last ten or more centuries. For every time you claim the West has done something bad to Islam, you can probably find at least one instance of the same from the other side.
Most of all, I find myself thinking about all those who claimed after 9/11 that we brought the attack on ourselves. No, we didn’t. Those attacks, like every other terrorist attack were planned to harm innocents and that, sir, is an act of war and something we have every right to protect ourselves from.
Ask yourself this: if we are to uphold our own values, can we sit back and watch a nation commit genocide against a portion of its population simply because those particular people aren’t the right color or blood background? Can we sit back and watch as Islamic governments kill their own citizens because those men and woman might be Christian or Baha’i or some other religion?
Can we do better? Of course. But we can’t sit back and watch as the world goes to hell around us. Go ahead and stick your head in the sand if you want. Me, I’ll pay attention to history and learn from it. But I will not spend my life apologizing for something that happened years before I was born and over which I had no control.
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Most Muslims think that the Crusades were unprovoked. Which is to say, centuries of unprovoked jihad were not, in their eyes, provocation.
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Somehow this makes me think of the battered spouse syndrome. For some in the western world that is – those others are kind of exciting, and exotic, and we want to like them especially since liking them makes our daddies kind of pissed (or at least we imagine that it will) and being the rebel is cool, so excuses will be made for bad behavior – they had such a bad childhood, and are really trying, and if we just give them a little more time and help and understanding surely they will get over that and become the absolutely wonderful people we think they actually are even if it can be a bit hard to notice sometimes… (And admitting that you might be wrong can seem like the more intolerable alternative, after all the noise you made about your new absolutely wonderful best friend forever, even after that new friend has given you a few bruises. And more so if you personally actually haven’t been hit yet, your BBF has so far just beaten a couple of other people, well, maybe they seemed as if they were mostly just minding their own business when BBF attacked them, but he said they had done something and of course you believe him, and he’d never hurt _you_, you just know it, not without reason anyway.)
Yep, there must be something or they wouldn’t have done it, surely they would not do something like that without provocation.
Except if somebody is determined to be provoked they _will_ find something to provoke them.
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It is characteristic of human nature that, when confronted by a threat, we often redirect our reaction to a safe target. Thus an abused spouse, rather than confront the actual threat, will kick the dog.
The American Left quickly concluded it was safer for them to attack conservatives than confront the real threat posed by external foes hostile to the principles of humanistic democracy.
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*considers some of the really incredibly vicious attacks she’s been on the receiving end of, out of the blue*
The left must be really, incredibly, insanely terrified a lot.
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I cannot provide links because, frankly, the topic is not one I particularly care about, but there have been ample psychological studies that purport to demonstrate that the Left is more prone to hysteria than is the Right.
Not that I place much confidence in such studies as they seem especially subject to design bias. Jonathan Haidt has (as noted by Colonel Kratman) had some interesting observations on this.
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“we often suppress people’s movements…”
Damned straight. “People’s movements” are 99% fronts for totalitarian horror shows. The slogan “power to the people” means “power to the people who shout ‘power to the people'”.
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No nation backs foreign governments because of their values, it backs them because of our interests.
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Islam is a cancer, and you cut cancers out. Btw, if you had any real sense of history, oh Spewer of Mouth Flatulence, you would know that the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq are just the latest round of a war between the so-called “House of Peace” (As an aside, they like to tell people Dar al-Islam means House of Peace, it really means House of Submission) since that child raping pimp Muhammed and his assboys boiled out of Arabia in the 7th century.
This is a war of between civilization and barbarians, and a civilized man owes nothing to barbarians.
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You want a dialogue, let’s start with you explaining exactly what you mean here. Because it sounds like bumper sticker claptrap. Your other comments, however, show that you have a deeper system of thought than mere sloganeering. What exactly about Western conduct is problematic to you and why?
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Where’s the evidence of deeper thought?
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Nathan is feeling charitable.
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I’m not. Fools should NEVER be suffered, gladly or otherwise. Chew toys are chew toys, and should be treated as such.
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So…ya wanna play tug-a-war? ;)
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I think Mike Weatherford threw him behind the fridge…
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Isn’t it getting crowded back there?
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Sorry. I’ll come clean up the mess. (whimper)
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I’m hoping it’s something besides, “Wouldn’t it be nice if everyone was nice?” If it is, Alex, it might be time to introduce you to Terry Pratchett if you haven’t already read him…
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“For instance we had a very poor opinion of Alfena. Americans are now all too familiar with that first syllable, so I don’t need to explain.”
Big cat eaters, were they?
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er? LOL.
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ALF was the name assigned a character (a muppet) in a sitcom many years ago. He was an alien. ALF simply stands for Alien Life Form. He ate cats.
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He was quite the gourmand of cats.
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I know that. I never watched the show because ick, cats? but I know that. I was just surprised at his seeing first syllable as ALF not AL.
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Oh. I didn’t realize the confusion, because that’s what I took for the first syllable, too, and I was trying to figure out what you were referring to.
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Because of the context I assumed Al, and just thought because it was a foreign language the syllable breakdown was different. Besides it had been so long since I heard of ALF, that that reference didn’t occur to me. (last I checked cats don’t have cloven hooves, so eating them would be right out, for the residents, anyways)
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I had to back up and reread the name, the “recently” was the key. I’ve long since given up on trying to herd the cats in my head.
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He always wanted to eat a cat but never quite succeeded.
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Back before I retired a group of us were eating lunch, maybe 6 or 8 of us around a nominally four person round table, and being all guys were doing what guys tend to do give each other grief for something or the other. This day it happened to be “national origin”. Everyone there was at least 40 years old except for a young black research assistant, and very sharp guy, in his early 20’s. He was looking at each of us with a sort of shocked amazement, and finally, when he could get a word in edgewise, said, “I thought you were all just white guys”. We all looked at him and chuckled, and commented on how our ancestors in Europe had spent at least hundreds of years fighting each other so just being “white” meant pretty much nothing.
Being Scots Irish, I can remember on Sunday drives as a child the car radio being tuned to a program by an Irish Catholic priest who mostly played Irish music with a lot of IRA and Sinn Fein rebel songs in the mix. No apologies either. He had no use for the English, and my Irish great great grandmother apparently passed her great love for them on to my father.
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Irish were refused American naturalization on the grounds that they didn’t fit the criterion: “free white person.”
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Everyone got to chew on Alex but me, because I was on the road driving to foreign territory.
I think I’m going to pout.
However, I noticed that when Alex came up with that “No WMD” horse manure, it was rightly pointed out that WMD was not the sole reason for our invasion, however, no one pointed out that the Duelfer Report listed a lot of WMD’s found in Iraq.
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I know…someone… pointed out that “we didn’t find WMD” was a crazy thing, and someone else pointed out that all the stuff found got “No True Scotsman”ed, and someone mentioned the yellowcake….
Nobody mentioned the specific report, though, no– thank you for the name!
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Probably because by that time he had already shown his ability to ignore inconvenient facts. (the one ability he seemed truly good at)
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several computers and hard drives ago I had a whole folder chock full of links to WMD, Plans, and production items we found, as well as links to various folks who were working on the programs, or had knowledge of where stuff went before we could find it (some to Syria, some equipment back to its supplier Russia for face-saving) that as stated were “Scotsmaned” by the leftoids and isolationist fools.
I’ve grown weary of dealing with the fools and as stated no matter how many facts and stories, some stories at very leftoid supporting media outlets with some of those facts, those like Al seems to still claim they do not exist or worse, feel Saddam had every right to have those items and his proclivity for using them was none of our concern.
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My thought was that the comments about steward of the earth and such essentially canceled out any other way that he might be trying to be ethical and responsible. Such essentially amount to efforts to indirectly murder very many people.
All green policies probably cause enough needless suffering to offset, say, supporting a hundred anti-communist anti-Salafi dictatorships overseas, at the least.
Green stuff in America causes enough suffering to offset any and all entitlement and social spending. You could cut all that, make ‘Screw the Poor Day’ a federal holiday, and still see a net improvement in suffering if Green were gotten rid of.
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Oh yes. They don’t seem to realize that the policies they’re advocating require starving 9/10 of the Earth population. Except that when you talk to them you realize they KNOW it and approve. It is an EVIL religion, perhaps more evil than communism, because its AIM is death.
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There’s nothing wrong with _being_ a steward of the earth. The problem is that most folks go about it in a darnfool sort of way, as opposed to being actually interested in making money, improving the land, allowing for varied habitats and yet keeping harmful animals out of human niches, etc. Farmers tend to be very good stewards of the earth, because there’s something in it for them and they have clear goals (ie, stewarding it for their family in the future).
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*nod*
It’s really funny to read some of the new wave environmentalist claptrap where they’re trying to come to terms with Really Big, Challenging Ideas like… not all imported plants or animals need to be treated to zero tolerance, and environmental health might be more important than stasis. Being environmentalists, of course, they dive off the far end and start talking like species are people and it’s related to bigotry…..
(Mary C. shared a review of one of the books on her LJ, something like “rambunctious garden” — I couldn’t read it. I was too busy banging my head against the wall because it’s like watching the city-kids turned “farmers” who are slowly discovering all the stuff my folks grew up doing… and, hopefully, will EVENTUALLY come around to sort of where my folks are, if they live long enough; otherwise, their kids might.)
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Stewardship without an ownership interest usually turns out badly.
I will now suppress a rant about MSNBC hosts who want to be “stewards” of other people’s children, primarily as an excuse to loot other people’s wallets.
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Seems like a logical merging of communism/socialism coupled with the view of children as consumer goods and the “you didn’t build that” world view.
Why bother with the trouble of having kids on your own when you can just force others to raise theirs as you wish?
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Sigh … when you contemplate the debt burden being placed on those kids … I very much doubt that ancestor worship has much future in America.
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You are the first non orthodox-Jewish writer I have ever seen write G-d with the dash replacing the o. I know why my tribe is doing that, what’s behind your use of this unusual form?
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I can’t speak for our hostess, but I sometime use the G-d spelling when it feels like I’m standing there, poking Him in the ribs over and over by saying His name/title.
I suspect it would also be very useful to differentiate between the Judeo-Christian One, vs the…rather different one of Islam, let alone other faiths.
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Being raised in a Catholic family with a Jewish background (where that dividing line lies can move back and forth a lot and sometimes I suspect doctrinally speaking they might almost be reversed,) having a lot of Jewish friends, and feeling a strange awe of writing The Name in full.
Call me superstitious. Though perhaps mystical would work better. It’s certainly more flattering.
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Funny I don’t get that. G-o-d isn’t a name. it’s an identifier. Shouldn’t even be a proper noun. And nobody knows the name of The One (a.k.a. Al Lah), so how is it possible to blaspheme by taking his/her/its name in vain? Enquiring minds and all that.
M
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I beg the pardon of anyone that this might be sacrilegious to.
The Jewish proper name of God, YHWH, is translated as God, mainly because Adonai YHWH is awkward if translated as “Lord LORD.” So, in this case God is a name as it’s a direct substitute for YHWH, the name that pious Jews won’t speak out loud lest they possibly take the name in vain.
Capital G God should be as much of a proper noun as capital Z Zeus. Because in the language, God is referring to the being who identified himself as “I AM He who causes things to be.” YHWH.
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Prayer is a highly dangerous business, because He is listening, and more than willing to use a willing pair of hands to His own ends, not mine. (I also harbor some dire suspicions about his sense of humor.) Unless I’m willing to to stand before His scrutiny, I’d prefer not to get His attention by writing out His name.
It’s not superstition when it’s based on reason and knowledge; it’s definitely mysticism.
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His attention! And then next thing I know He’s enlisted me into HIS work by sending yet another set of blundering and unstoppable characters into my head. Yes, I like writing. Being hijacked for months at a time for things I don’t understand why I should write… is something else. So, I tread lightly.
The Author might be listening. I might give Him plot ideas.
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I prefer the Tom Jones version (??!! It startles me, too) but this is the one available: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TaeLeUdV8y0
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This too– ;-)
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I also harbor some dire suspicions about his sense of humor.
Just suspicions? You are much, much more polite than myself! (or more sensible)
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If none of you have stood in the middle of the room going “You think THIS is a clever plot twist?” and not been charred, and had a feeling He was laughing, you don’t know about that sense of humor…
Me? I’m the plucky comic relief!
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He seems to prefer puns in my case– or simple absurdities, with a large dose of… what is that thing where you do folks a favor, but you do it in such a way that they can not feel like you did them a big favor?
I have a reputation for things going wrong in the best possible way. (I think that’s more of His humor, too, since I also hate, hate HATE asking for help/accepting help.)
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Sigh– I think I am the tragic hero. When I get help, I get an equal and opposite crash. Everything balances, but not in the way I hope either. I think I am paying for having such a good husband. I know HE has a sense of humor– since I seem to be the butt of it so much.
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I have no doubt about His sense of humor. Platypus, anyone? Camel? The source for the words to “I Know That My Redeemer Liveth”? Yes, He has quite a sense of humor.
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Totally off topic, but I since education and climate change are popular topics here, I figured I would link this article, that shows at least for some it is malice, not incompetence.
http://www.foxnews.com/science/2013/04/12/new-science-standards-have-americas-educational-publishers-turning-page/
”
The influence of political and religious views on evaluators and adopters in state education departments should be minimized by these new standards. Students who are educated in accordance with them will have a far better chance for success in college courses and in competition on the employment market than those steeped in creationism design, new earth theory, and other alternative accounts.”
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I don’t see proof of malice.
Perhaps he just just so ignorant of the material that he doesn’t see how readily man caused global temperature change can be compatible with young earth stuff. (Again, for global temperature stuff, look at the Earth’s geometry.)
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Most people in the USA belong to the “ignorance is bliss” tribe. Others belong to the “someone needs to pay” mob. The rest of us belong to “frustrated with the tribe, fearful of the mob” separated clusters.
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Most people in the USA belong to the “ignorance is bliss” tribe. Others belong to the “someone needs to pay” mob. The rest of us belong to “frustrated with the tribe, fearful of the mob” separated clusters.
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Mildly OT, but speaking of civilizing influences, has anyone else gotten to see “amen corner” from the Masters’ Tournament this year? The flowers are incredible! I don’t think they’ve been this lovely in years. I’m not a big golf buff, but the flowers at Augusta are worth watching some golf for. :)
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VERY OT — I was wondering why today’s chapter had NO comments and was about to make a vaguely sobby sound over it — and realized I hadn’t published it. It’s been written and on the site waiting the publish button press since this morning. Sometimes I think I need help.
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I kept checking– but it didn’t show up ;-) You need a reminder? Possibly?
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It’s up now. I need a sanity check. I dragged out of bed at seven thirty so it would be up on time. (Hits head on keyboard. Repeatedly.)
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There’s a small dent in the sheetrock in my office that fits the curve and depth of my forehead. I blame computers and the ‘Net.
As we were reviewing the next to last version of “Justice and Juniors,” I realized that both the editor and I had missed the need to capitalize a title in one story. That title shows up, oh, 15 times. *thump, thump, thump*
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Don’t feel too bad. I sometimes figured that a (technical) book was close to being ready to ship when I got to the point that I wouldn’t have noticed my own name, misspelled, in the text. Just seeing what I knew ought to be there.
A good editor is worth countless rubies and emeralds. That, and none of us are perfect, so put down the sword and get back to work, all y’all.
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A sanity check? From this lot??? You would have to be crazy. Asking this lot for a sanity check is like asking the cat whether “this dress makes my butt look too big.”
Nor do I recommend inviting the lot of us to prod you about putting up writing. You might as well invite the family to ask “are we there yet?”
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She’s no crazier than I am.
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I’m pretty sure I failed my SAN check years ago. But then, how would I know?
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I would argue that the tendency to question one’s sanity is in fact proof of it. The truly mentally ill are positively convinced they’re normal.
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With unrequested seriousness… this is where I come for some sanity.
Folks are zany, and I don’t always agree, but I can count on rational arguments– and everybody jumps on those rare examples when an argument is not rational.
I know that one of the meanings of “sane” is “in keeping with the overall culture,” but another is a synonym for “rational,”– the inverse of “crazy troll logic.”
Without mind-reading abilities, it’s possible to get folks’ starting assumptions, and work out what they think. That’s refreshing, especially since I’ve spent the last two days arguing elsewhere with folks who open up with the claim that the difference between the racial black and white is the same as that between a man and a woman. (About an hour ago, one admitted that his basis is “because I think paying attention to either is wrong.” Which doesn’t actually justify his initial position that a distinction between the former was the same as a distinction between the latter…. )
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I thought that the difference between a man and a woman was just a social construct and an illusion caused by hierarchical social structure. Have they changed the rules again?
Don’t know much about history
Don’t know much biology
Don’t know much about a science book
Don’t know much about the french I took
But I do know that I love you
And I know that if you love me too
What a wonderful world this would be
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I thought that the difference between a man and a woman was just a social construct and an illusion caused by hierarchical social structure
Depends on what they want it to be at the moment.
Seriously had to leave an argument after a guy would not admit that it takes two sexes for humans to reproduce…..
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I am guessing that was not a discussion of human cloning nor parthenogenesis. I wonder how he thinks it is done?
Any chance this guy was willing to carry a baby to term? I suspect he would find the delivery enlightening.
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Just a kid trying to “find” himself, I think, and too willing to treat social falsehoods/simplifications as facts, I think– road to hell, not thinking about why he believes this or that, etc.
For carrying a child… the guy thinks that surrogates are volunteers.
(And that the child is in no way hers, even if she was simply impregnated with the sperm of one of the legal-parents. They’re just… volunteer ovens, basically, same way the kids are something you order and get. And he can’t figure out that’s dehumanizing, at best.)
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I have known of a woman being a surrogate mother for her sister and her sisters husband, because the sister was unable to have kids (but had viable eggs), in this case I believe the woman was truly a volunteer. Most surrogates however are hired, voluntarily renting out your body and volunteering are two very different things.
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My dad volunteered to donate for his twin brother, too, back in the early 80s; that doesn’t excuse being so ignorant of the current, more common reality, when commenting on it, though….
Especially since that case with the woman who refused to, um, “terminate” imperfect consumer goods still being in the news. If you’re willing to hear of such things in our Brave New World, let alone consider them an issue.
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Looks down. Nope. No penis. There IS a difference, G-d be praised. (As I’m sure the existence of men and particularly my husband is proof that G-d loves women — and particularly me — and wants us — and me! — to be happy.)
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I’ll second that.
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the difference between the racial black and white is the same as that between a man and a woman
And here I get to propound on my thought experiment on isms. It involves a magic wand, whose first property is that it prevents panic, and even distress, when the second property is invoked, and whose second property is that when waved with the right magic word, it divides the universe into alternate universes, one for each group of people it divides up humanity into.
Now, if you do this by race, you will probably get an ugly scene in many worlds, as the balance of power is destablized, as minorities in countries try to hold on while people stampede from countries to lay claim to all the now free resources, but in a hundred years or so, the planet would be meandering onward into the future on each world.
Sex? The initial confusion would be less, but in a hundred years or so
Except unlike the young man to whom Shakespeare addressed the procreation sonnets, what we mind is of very little importance. Humanity would be extinct, or surviving with some very fancy technological innovations, and after a population crash.
Then you go on with the more obscure ones. Classism, for instance, would have some scrambling but probably manage. Some universes would be worse off than others, based on education. (Much would depend on whether it divided people based on their class in each country, or looked global to determine who was poor.)
Or ageism. The elderly universe would face extinction, children would face the danger of becoming feral, but adults, even if divided into subgroups, would go serenely on. (Remember what I said about distress?)
When someone tells you that isms are all alike, apply the wand. See how it would differ.
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That is a wonderful way of demonstrating the difference between discrimination (unjust) and discrimination (identifying differences).
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Anybody is welcome to send me a sanity check, also. How much is one worth anyways? I wonder if my local bank will cash it?
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Now… now we’re in a position where the majority of Western Civ – Europe, by and large, certainly the educated classes (the plebes are saner. They have to be, or they wouldn’t survive) – hates itself and bares its chest and pounds on it every chance they have.
I don’t think it is self-hatred, or self criticism on the part of the coastal elite wrt Western civilization. They don’t see themselves in what they criticize. The coastal/academic elite think rather highly of themselves. They are the heirs to the enlightenment. (The good parts, from Continental Europe, without all that messy selfish individual rights crap). They are the “brights”, the owners of the achievements of science and the future. What they criticize is y’all from flyover country.
(I wonder if some of the plethora of “hillbilly shows” on TV now aren’t some sort of projection from the Hollywood crowd of what they think of all the yokels from the provinces?)
Anyway, it just seems like straight-up tribalism to me. You have the Marxist coastal elite/new aristocracy trying to stir up a Marxist underclass (the ‘Blue’ civilization) against the remnants of capitalist old Western civilization (the ‘Red’ civilization) (Color schemes may vary from continent to continent)
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