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Blair might ‘need the Tories’

· UK affairs

… and why not? After all, as we now live in a de facto one ideology state (and that ideology is populist utilitarianism), what difference do the antics of what goes on in Parliament really make? The sooner we have the government doing away with this fiction of political process and just start ruling mostly by administrative edict, the better really. Far too many people are just hiding behind comfortable fictions.

March 2nd, 2006 | 40 comments - (Comments are closed)

Another guy who doesn’t like crunchy cons

· North American affairs

The other day I made a less-than-complimentary reference to the thoughts of so-called “crunchy con” Rod Dreher, who has taken against the ugliness of modern capitalism and its assorted vulgarity. Blogger Clive Davis thought that I was being a touch unfair.

Well, if you thought I was harsh, then check this out by Radley Balko:

“Only after raw, unabashed capitalism has taken care of more primitive problems can we begin to have places like Whole Foods, or targeted products like no-chemical, no-additive, no-hormone, free-range chicken. Only after industry has knocked down a lot of trees and sullied a lot of streams on its way to feeding us, medicating us, and giving us good reason to think we’ll live past the age of forty do we get the luxury of beginning to worry about the health of the environment, and the survival of beings outside our own families, much less outside our own species.

I don’t begrudge Dreher his Birks and his granola, but talk about the excesses of capitalism and so-called conspicuous consumption are innevitably followed by calls to slow things down — maybe idle the engines of progress for a bit. There’s generally little acknowledgement that it is excess and consumption that have put them in the position of being able to write books about the problems associated with…you guessed it…excess and consumption.”

Absolutely. My only query: what on earth is a Birk?

March 2nd, 2006 | 29 comments - (Comments are closed)

And the fact Cameron is a Blairite is news?

· UK affairs

I find the notion that it is news that Tory leader David Cameron is a Blairite so unremarkable that I am puzzled the Telegraph even runs with the story.

The closest thing to an actual conservative party is the UKIP because it sure as hell is not the Conservative Party.

March 1st, 2006 | 94 comments - (Comments are closed)

Do we now have a better understanding of Islam? Yes indeed we do

· Middle East & Islamic

The Khaleej Times is reporting that the Danish consul to Dubai has said:

The massive protests in the Muslim world against the Danish cartoons have helped Denmark, as also Europe, have a better understanding of, and respect for, Islam

Well that is both quite correct and completely false, but of course a diplomat is someone whose job it is to lie for his country. It has indeed given millions of Europeans a better understanding of Islam… and thereby led them to an utter lack of respect for it. Now every time I hear someone saying “Islam is one of the world’s great religions”, I tend to get very rude rather quickly.

The diplomat was quite sound on the core issue however.

The Danish diplomat made it clear that, however, ‘We will not change our constitution (to exert controls over the media)’.

And that is why this site has a ‘support Denmark: no burqa on free speech’ graphic in the sidebar. Hold the line.

Update: It would appear that Imran Khan is now officially a moron:

I don’t think the message has got through that for us it’s far more painful than perhaps even the Holocaust for the Jews. Any caricature or any ridicule or any humiliation of the holy prophet is far more painful for the Muslims

These cartoons are more ‘painful’ that the mass extermination of six million Jews? And this from a much acclaimed ‘moderate’? Yes indeed, I think a great many people’s understanding of Islam is improving pretty much by the day.

March 1st, 2006 | 142 comments - (Comments are closed)

Yet more opinions on the ‘Satanic Cartoons’

· Middle East & Islamic

There was an excellent article the other day in the Prague Post about the whole Jyllands-Posten ‘Mohammed cartoons’ issue. What a pity such sentiments seem few and far between in the craven media in Britain.

To many, the notion that a cartoon could provoke global riots, dozens of deaths, a $1 million assassination contract and vacillation among Western leaders seems like an abstract fantasy, a trip down the rabbit hole into a theater of the absurd.

But that perspective remains precisely what these protesters have attacked: the rejection of the idea that it’s justified – or even rational – to kill people over their speech, particularly a statement as trifling as a cartoon.

The purple elephant in the middle of this crossfire is the contemporary notion – or, more accurately, the Western one – that the values of most Islamic societies have modernized along with the rest of the world.

[…]

The West has naively greeted this scorpion with its Cold War handshake, believing that the virtues of peace and democracy appear self-evident; as if good intentions, by definition, will be good enough. But even the mainstream Islamic mindset has proven inscrutable to the West in a way that communism was mythologized to be but never truly was.

Good stuff. Read the whole thing.

Also, some of the people very much at ‘fatwa ground zero’, such as Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Salman Rushdie, are taking a stand against the new Islamic totalitarianism.

(hat tip to JP)

March 1st, 2006 | 65 comments - (Comments are closed)
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