The War on Terror Words

Man-made disaster is the new phrase approved by the Obamanauts for what the aftermath of terrorism looks like.

Enemy combatant is so last-administration. I can’t remember what they’re calling them this year. Oh, yeah, isolated extremists.

Not that I was a fan of Bush’s almost equally feckless nomenclature. War on Terror is wussy-speak too. As is the term “radical Islam.” Or “Muslim extremist.”

In the Christian/Western world, extreme/radical implies being in the minority.  That’s why our fearlessly feckless leaders use such adjectives to describe our Muslim enemies.

What we’re at war with is Jihadi Islam. We are at war with every Muslim who believes in Jihad in any sense of the word. That’s most Muslims.

They’re hoping against hope that we don’t notice that mainstream Muslims fit the extremist/radical criteria.

There are a lot of people making a lot of money pretending that mainstream Muslims aren’t the implacable enemies of the West. True, most Saudis don’t have the guts or intent to fly planes into buildings, but most Saudis giggle about videos of 9-11 like we giggle about YouTube kitty videos. Were Americans to know what the majority of Iraqi Shiites and Sunnis really think about us, how much less might we be willing to spend to protect them?

The majority of Muslims deeply hate me. Not in particular, but only because they don’t know me in particular. They hate you too, gentle reader.

Mainstream Islam is a hot mess.

We are at war with mainstream Muslims, not just a tiny extremist minority. We are at war with Islam like we were at war with Japan and Germany in World War II. Most Germans and Japanese did not lust for Allied blood, but they passively agreed with and supported their bloodthirsty leadership. And make no mistake, jihadi mullahs and imams lead the Islamic world like Hitler led Nazi Germany

Riding that train, high on cocaine, General Casey…

After the recent Muslim mass murder at Fort Hood, General George Casey put things in perspective:

“Our diversity, not only in our Army, but in our country, is a strength. And as horrific as this tragedy was, if our diversity becomes a casualty, I think that’s worse.”

Casey is in charge of the US Army. A lot of people ridiculed Casey for making such a deeply stupid statement. I think that was wrong. The statement deserves to be taken seriously. The latest Muslim attack on America, the Christmas Day Crotch Bomber, makes this obvious.

The Christmas attack happened because American officials in charge of security really do prefer more terrorist attacks to less “respect for diversity.”

Janet Napolitano, Obama’s head of Homeland Security created her own “Heckuva job, Brownie!” moment yesterday when she claimed on CNN, repeatedly, that her “system worked.” Today, she’s backing off after being subjected to universal jeering.

The TSA has already issued new asinine regulations for international flights: In the final hour of a flight, no more going pee-pee, no pillows or blankets, no getting out of your seat, no getting anything out of your purse. Laptop use will be banned for the whole flight; no more GPS display of where the flight is, no more live TV and airlines are now supposed to actually somehow enforce that cell phones are off for the whole flight.

The UK had denied the Crotch Bomber a visa to return to England. His dad reported him to the US Embassy in Nigeria as possibly radicalized a couple of months ago. He was in a watch database. He paid for his ticket with cash.

As with the Fort Hood murderer, there was obvious, ample evidence that was ignored by multiple officials and investigators that led directly to the tragedy. General Casey waved Major Hasan through and Janet Napolitano said, “Have a nice flight!”

In the wake of the Hasan murders, what do you think the army has done to identify other Muslim radicals in the ranks?

In the wake of the Crotch Rocket Radical, Napolitano has already taken decisive action — against you and me when we travel. We are to accept more stupid restrictions to make up for their incompetence.

I’m starting to think that the real purpose of TSA rules is to see how much crap we’re willing to put up with. Each silly new rule in response to yesterday’s threat is just another rectal thermometer stuck up the public’s butt to take its docility temperature.

The Heart of the Matter

The time has come for me to stop ranting about liberals. This has been an interesting, meditational exercise for me (if by meditating you mean indulging in vitriolic rants).

I’ve suspended commenting on Tiger Woods, Al Gore and the new Dollhouse season just to keep picking at this subject. Clearly, I need to get over it.

So what have I learned?

• Liberals believe they are on average smarter than conservatives, and thus morally better. How this differs from garden variety snobbery I have not yet figured out.
• Liberals are bigoted against conservatives in the same way that white supremacists are bigoted against blacks. Liberal contempt for NASCAR and grits is psychodynamically identical to racist contempt for jungle music and fried chicken. The fact that jungle music and fried chicken are really good and NASCAR and grits really suck is beside the point.
• Demographically, conservatives are dumber than liberals. Let’s face it: If you choose to watch PBS instead of going to NASCAR this weekend, your IQ is probably higher. Even if you’re doing less with those extra points.  You could look at this as showing that conservative ideas are so obviously better that even shallow stupid small town people understand them because they’re not deeply stupid.
• Deep stupidity is an intelligence-resistant neurosis, similar to an antibiotic-resistant virus. A guy with a 98 IQ going to NASCAR every time he can and raising a family and holding down a job is not stupid. He’s punching well above his IQ weight class. An effete beta liberal working in the public or non-profit sector with a 120 IQ indulging in infantile progressive fantasies is deeply stupid. He wants Big Brother to play My Bodygaurd because he’s afraid to duke it out with life in ANY weight class. He senses, deep down, that his livelihood depends on that NASCAR guy.
• Liberal ideology, at its most fundamental level, is predicated on turning the human race into poster children for liberal intervention. The fact that the liberal plan to help is stupid and obviously won’t work doesn’t matter because liberals are being promiscuously compassionate and you’re not.
• Promiscuous compassion is the first refuge of the liberal scoundrel. Compassion excuses every stupid liberal proposal to control other people from intelligent criticism. Promiscuous compassion is the liberal’s outward-facing raison d’etre. Inwardly, it’s I should run everyone and everything. Lugubriously pretending that I care about everyone and everything is the way that I, Liberal, distinguish myself from Pol Pot.
• Even liberal compassion has its limits. Anyone who succeeds in normal human terms is exempted. If you’re no good at coming up with grievances and boo-boo’s, you’re no good to liberals. You’re invisible if you suck it up and don’t whine.
• Succeeding as a normal human is proof that you’ve victimized someone somewhere and you must be punished and hampered. But not outright stopped. Even the most deeply stupid liberal, like the worst spoiled 7 year old, doesn’t want Dad to lose his job. But has no idea on on what Dad’s job is really like or on what it depends.

The term deep stupidity deserves more definition. Here’s what liberals don’t get that makes them deeply stupid:

• The rule of law. Without this, nothing else matters. Being able to reasonably predict the long-term outcome of your actions is essential to human thriving. If the rules change minute to minute, you’re always a whim away from being wished into the cornfield. Stable relationships are the lifeblood of civilization. Even bad rules are better than whimsical rules. When you think it’s ok to change the rules without overwhelming consensus and careful experimentation, you’re a huge danger and a force for chaos.
• Self-ownership. Your life, talents and resources belong to you and should not be subject to even partial appropriation by others, no matter how unfortunate their circumstances or how powerful their advocates. In terms of what you should be forced to do, you owe other human beings nothing more than justice. The rest is up to you.
• Along with being deeply stupid, Liberals are deeply ignorant about the objects of their promiscuous compassion. They break the rule that to be wisely compassionate you should be deeply involved with the person you intend to help.
• The fundamental property of government that distinguishes it from all other social institutions is violence. Any time you think that you need government to solve a problem, you’re really saying that the right thing to do is to hold a gun to other people’s heads to get this problem solved. This includes banning smoking in restaurants and enforcing garbage sorting on your neighbors. What kind of a moron do you have to be to think that resorting to threats of violence is the way to deal with those things?
• Consistency and seriousness. Celebrity Liberals fly private jets to Copenhagen to talk about how to reduce their gigantic carbon footprints. Because they’re so important it’s OK that they not do this over Cisco virtual meetings so they can sweat on each other and nosh with each other and pontificate as a herd and have a chance to get the hot Swedish liberal to come up to  your room. They go to $500 a plate fundraisers for poverty and suck down pate and Chardonnay while Sally Struthers’ 5 year old kids still look pregnant. Why do they act like this?
• Because liberal principles are impossible to live up to, you don’t really have to try that hard. When you believe in things you can’t live up to, it’s so easy to just say, I’ll do what I can and I’ll say when it’s enough. Intent trumps output. Here’s how problems actually get solved, you poseurs: Some guy with deep knowledge spends his weekends and nights thinking hard and makes a little tweak or invention that moves things slightly in a better direction. He’s not a banquet-whore and he doesn’t fly to Copenhagen on someone else’s dime–he doesn’t have time. His carbon footprint is tiny because he’s up in his head and working instead of flitting and emoting. Liberals, like all children, think that if problems aren’t being solved, it’s because others aren’t trying hard enough. Lacking the skills to create new vaccines or more efficient car engines, they prefer to mandate that others figure it out or else. (Sadly, this attitude works  pretty well. I’d like to tell Ralph Nader that he has 2 years to design a perfectly safe car or I’m going to put a rabid wolverine down his pants–I bet I’d get to unleash the rabid wolverine. Liberals don’t know how to solve problems–they think they can coerce those who do know.)
• Other people aren’t dolls. All liberal plans and pretensions depend on other people being pliable victims who wait for and accept rescue. Liberals are always shocked that other people make chess moves against them and subvert their noble intentions for selfish ends. Here’s what liberals think:  Teenage single mothers will take those food stamps to shop carefully and cook nutritious meals for their under-birthweight children, and will use the rest of their AFDC to go to DeVry and learn to program computers. People who get SBA loans after the banks laughed out loud will succeed anyway if we just give them a chance. Giving poor people with 300 credit scores and 30 minute time horizons 30 year mortgages will make them responsible. When liberals say that the personal is political, they have no idea how truly they speak. Liberalism is codependency writ large. They have no idea that the poor are far more malicious, lazy and cunning than they are unfortunate. Liberals are always surprised when they are punked by the people they propose to help.
• The law of unintended consequences. The point above is an important example of liberals not understanding unintended consequences, but it’s not the whole of it. Liberals don’t understand that wage and price controls substitute scarcity and queues for wages and prices. They don’t count the number of dead children they accept as the price for banning DDT. They don’t notice who they demoralize and disincent and divert and kill. They’re focused only on the benefits of what they do. Like a chemical company that thinks only about what they ship and get paid for, not what they pump into the water supply.  Liberals have no notion of economic ecology.
•  What things cost. Because productive people are a taken for granted resource, like parental bank accounts are taken for granted by spoiled children. Liberals don’t budget when they’re prescribing. After all, it’s not their own money and daddy will figure it out somehow.

Which brings me to my final Duh! epiphany.

The entire Liberal plan is to use government as a magic wand.

That’s it. They have no other strategy or hope. Liberals view every social institution except government as ineffective.  On the playground of life, liberals always run to teacher.

Liberals, Finis, part v (The rule of law)

A good government must be a predictable government. As with parenting, it’s more important to be predictable than to be fair. It doesn’t matter so much what the rules are as that the rules are enforced predictably. Human beings are good at games. They’ll adapt and thrive under most any set of predictable rules.

Going beyond predictability, impartiality is a fundamental attribute of justice. It’s also a fundamental goal of PC (Promiscuous Compassion). According to PC, we should care equally about Starvin’ Marvin and our own childen. It’s an outright injustice for us to feed our own brats while Marvin gets no mac ‘n’ cheese.

Does Marvin feel hunger any less than our own adorable little carpet-monsters? On what decent moral basis can we justify nurturing our own little Birth Control Failures while Marvin’s starvin’?

Yes, because I do no injustice to Marvin by not feeding him. I am literally not responsible for Marvin’s problems. I didn’t create them and I am not obligated to fix them.

Let’s reduce the notion that I am responsible to help Marvin out by phrasing it differently: Seriously, you’re going to tell me that I should let my own kid go hungry unless I feed everyone else’s at the same time?

Any liberal still reading this: if you own a TV or a Cuisinart or a nice dining room set or an Internet-connected computer, shut up now. By your PC principles, you should sell all you have and give to the poor.  The fact that you won’t means you are a walking performative contradiction.

(Ah, but we are responsible for Marvin’s plight because Western colonialism/imperialism/slavery/exploitation, rejoins the liberal. Shut up. I’m not going to deal with that Marxist nonsense here.)

Justice doesn’t work by the same rules as compassion, and it shouldn’t. The rules for justice are often the opposite of those for compassion (or why do you think people talk so much about mercy vs justice?)

Justice is all about impartiality and treating people as interchangeable units (all are equal before the law). Justice needs to ignore individual character, circumstances and history, and decide things based on adherence to a set of rules that all are expected to live up to.

Compassion needs facts on the ground, personal judgment, intuition and deep interpersonal wisdom.  Compassion needs to be smart and discriminating and know a basket case when it sees one. Compassion should not be promiscuous or indiscriminate, or it will become evil’s co-dependent little helper. At best, promiscuous compassion corrupts the human spirit by starving it for justice, exactly like a spoiling parent.

Compassion, rightly understood, respects justice and then goes beyond to find the spiritual fire still burning at the center of the worst pile of human garbage. This is dangerous business, in proportion to the crimes that compassion wants to forgive.

So I’m all in favor of compassion, but not when it trumps justice. This is how those 4 cops in Tacoma, Washington just got killed. Lazy bureaucrats, given cover by appealing to compassion, let out a guy out who obviously didn’t deserve to ever walk the streets. Everyone felt compassion because he started committing violent crimes so young. People in the justice system were stupidly compassionate instead of appropriately ruthless. Thank God one of those dying cops spent his last seconds ruthlessly putting a bullet in that guy instead of focusing on what might have driven him to act like that.

Most people who need our compassion don’t deserve it. They’ve dumped on everyone who’s tried to help them. They have ruthlessly gone their own way and then extorted or manipulated help. They need a rodeo cowboy instead of a social worker. Someone who can last for more than 7 seconds  of their bullshit.

Competing for our compassionate resources are fertile girls with axes to grind and itches to scratch. People who give in to the urge to stay stoned rather than to pursue goals. Jerks with chips on their shoulders who’ve never learned to swallow and say, “Yes, boss!” Amoral punks who see the rest of us as marks or prey. So we should leave people to starve in the streets if they have an attitude problem? Yeah, that’s what I’m saying.

Sure, there are innocent victims who deserve our unguarded compassion–the children of those fertile girls, for the first few years, until they grow up to be psychopaths like their moms. People with serious birth defects and brain injuries, victims of horrible car crashes, some widows (not previously married to gangsta’s) and all orphans.

Kick everyone off welfare who doesn’t meet real “I didn’t have much of anything to do with my plight” victim tests, and there’s hardly anyone left on welfare.

95% of the declared candidates for compassion in America are people who could have done better but didn’t. Actually, that’s a mistake: I should have said, people who should have done better but wouldn’t.

Doing compassionate good in mass, large-scale cases without doing more harm than good is even harder than in individual cases. Go ahead, send money to Starvin’ Marvin. Warlords will intercept it and use it to slaughter his village. Or, if it reaches him, you strangle his country’s own nascent agricultural industry.  Live Aid made a lot of lasting difference, didn’t it?

I went to a party last night. I talked to a good guy who helps with subsidized housing for all these CCFC’s. (CCFC’s = Class Candidates For Compassion). They have to put in extra strong drywall in CCFC housing because the CCFC’s tend to kick holes in their walls whenever they get mad. Stoves and ovens have timers that shut off after 30 minutes because the CCFC’s would otherwise burn the building down every week. Getting CCFC’s to pay their part of the rent, well… This good guy had lots of patience about this stuff. I have a different philosophy.

The first rule of help is: Change the batteries in your bullshit detector.

Most people whose lives are a hot mess are skilled liars. Not so much to themselves, but to everyone who has tried to help them.  They are lazy, malicious and manipulative. They brandish contempt and resentment as fashion statements. Karen Horney coined the term “hostile dependency.” Great term.

The second rule of help is: Absent an unusual disaster or obvious malicious act of God in their lives, everyone able-bodied who asks for your help is a screwup and a huge pain in the ass. If someone doesn’t have obvious brain injury or no legs, and they are seeking your help, they are trouble. Are you up for trouble?

My third rule would be anyone who kicks a hole in the wall of their subsidized apartment wall is out of there, forever, die in the street. We catch you with an unpatched hole in your wall, you’re done. Better learn some drywalling skills, son, if you aren’t going to learn anger management.

It’s like being a parent. If you’re not up for a high level of long-term uncomfortable and confrontational involvement, then get your tubes tied.  Better to be barren and selfish than to help screw up other people’s lives to indulge your romantic delusions about them. Compassion isn’t just about doing touch and go’s, but requires you to put and keep some skin in the game.

Justice really isn’t all that harsh in the vast majority of cases and it is a much better teacher for most people than compassion. Justice enforces rules and what most people demanding help really need is to learn to accept the rules.

Long ago, I read Scott Peck’s People of the Lie, his attempt to grapple with human evil. Peck proposed several DSM-ish criteria for identifying evil (ultimately a wrong-headed approach, I think).

He talked about militant ignorance. Most people in need of unusual help from other people are militantly ignorant. Compassion is mostly wasted on these people. They are fecal alchemists, turning help and everything else in their lives into shit. Are they evil? I don’t think answering that question matters, at least in this context.

Let’s just say they aren’t ready yet for help. Most people who demand our help are in need of moral toilet training before we start buying them big boy pants.

Liberals, Finis, part vi (everyone does what I tell them to do)

Lierals expect that if they fund AFDC and food stamps, then teenage single mothers will shop carefully, cook healthfully and go to DeVry to learn to program computers.

Liberals expect that people who get SBA loans will mostly succeed.

Liberals don’t believe that most messed-up lives are because the people living those lives messup hard, relentlessly and tenaciously.

Liberals think that giving people more resources will solve the problems of people who have problems because they squander their resources.

Liberals think that the poor are clay. Malleable, teachable, pettable.

Liberals treat unlucky human beings like 7 year old girls treat their dolls. They pose them and play with them and forget about them when it’s time to go out to play with their friends.

Liberals make the best bargain they can with the misery that they feel responsible to solve. But no way in hell are they serious about resolving it.

Liberals, Finis, part iv (Checks and Balances)

In part iii, I made a case that your obligation to help the less fortunate is owed to yourself, if to anybody, not to them. Neither the less fortunate nor the liberal carpetbaggers who exploit them have any inherent right to your labor or property.

It’s a big mistake to conflate a sense of moral obligation based on your own values with a legal duty that supersedes your values. Liberals win by rushing you from the first to the second without you realizing it. The moment you lose is when you grant that it’s OK to use government to help anyone with your money. That’s not what governments are for.

Government is for suppressing violence and resolving disputes that would otherwise escalate to violence. Governments arrogate to themselves the exclusive right to do violence. (There are limited exceptions where government will allow its subjects to do violence, each exception subject to government review and ex post facto approval.)

Government is magic. As close to magic as you’ll see in this world. Kim Jong Il, the tiny fucker who terrorizes North Korea for a living, lives a magical life. He lives the liberal dream: to seize the reins of power and remake the world like he wants it to be. In KJI’s world, people wish they could get wished into the cornfield because at least there’d be something to eat. The typical American liberal wants the same power to use more wisely.

But all lust for absolute power is evil. You need an opposition to reality check you. If you get absolute power, even if you start out harmless, you become at least Michael Jackson. Most people have no idea how important the people who oppose them are to keeping them sane. This is the whole point of checks and balances.

Every American knows that checks and balances are important because they were told so in 5th grade. Judicial, Legislative, Executive, yeah can I go out and play now? Few Americans understand that Paris Hilton and Michael Jackson are what every boy and girl would grow up to be if they didn’t have checks and balances in their own lives.

Regardless of whether you think human nature is inherently good or evil, you must admit that humans need a daily dose of checks and balances to keep from turning into complete Michael Jacksons.

Think about  institutional checks and balances in a wider context than branches of government: Church, State, Family, Business, Community, Individual.

The power of the Church is moral. The power of the family is to determine the character and values of the next generation. Business takes care of the material side of life. Like-minded people find each other and form communities. The individual exercises sovereignty to create things that feed back into all other institutions. Government keeps the violence down to a dull roar so all the other institutions can function safely.

Government should no more take over all power in society than should Judicial, Legislative or Executive freeze out the other 2 branches of government. Liberals and progressives, God bless ’em, whether they know it or not, are choking out church, family, business, community and individuals, transferring power to government like they claim George Bush transferred power to the Executive branch. They think of government not as a background service that allows the other institutions to flourish, but as a hammer to make all the other institutions accept the bit. One ring to rule them all…

If you are a person who believes that government should rightly be used to do most or all of these jobs,

• Stock libraries
• Feed the hungry
• Job training
• Mass transit
• Encourage green living
• Educate children
• Subsidize failing businesses
• Subsidize prospering businesses so they’ll move to your town
• Provide medical care
• Run the electric company. And the gas company. And pick up trash.
• Subsidize sports teams
• Subsidize artists
• Subsidize abortions, adoptions or orphanages
• build roads
• etc

… then you are part of the problem.

You are ceding to the societal institution that embodies violence what should be left to institutions that can flourish only in the absence of violence. You are napalming the social ecosystem, destroying the village to save it.