This Memorable Day

[R.A. Hettinga]

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At 12:50 PM +0100 11/3/04, Nomen Nescio wrote:

>Nonsense! Are you in junior high?

Are you high, junior? Or is it just your politics that sound so...
sophomoric?

:-)

>This post gave me a big laugh. So naive. There are a few basic
>forces feeding extremism and terrorism around the world and those
>are inequalities and injustice anywhere.

Ah. That's right. Inequality, instead of causing progress, causes
damnation. Where's Robespierre when we really need him? Another
useful idiot for "equality".

>As long as the most powerful
>nations of the world continues to exploit the earth's resources
>without taking appropriate considerations to other nations the wrath
>and dismay of people elsewhere will always persist.

Communism, Fuck Yeah!!! States are People Too!!!!

Please. Take the towel out from under the dorm-room door and quit
regurgitating what you learned passing the bong around.

"Groups" are not people. They don't have rights, for instance. Only
people have rights. Nation-states are not people either. More the
point, they aren't people in a dialectical struggle to free
themselves from the Oppressive Industrial West, any more than "the
workers" are in a dialectical struggle to free themselves from some
guy in a top-hat and spats.

If you'd learned any history, you'd know that the first argument is
the result of the complete failure of the *premises* of the first to
happen at all, and that both arguments have been demonstrated wrong
in the face of *evidence*: the explosion of the "bourgeoisie" in the
West (that's "middle-class" to those of us with a state-school
education; the group including *you*, bunky, unless your name is Bush
or "Kerry" [really Forbes or Cohn, take your pick] and you went to
say, Andover and Yale), and the explosion of gross domestic product
in the very countries you now claim the west exploits. If you don't
believe that, ask that Sidekick-wearing software engineer in
Bangalore the next time you're talking to a help-desk sometime about
how Nehru, the great Indian Leveller, was such a wonderful guy that
millions of his own countrymen starved during his tenure as the
Indian more equal than all the others. It wasn't until Indians
actually started to free their markets that people stopped starving
in the streets.


Our culture -- yours, too, bunky, since I bet you don't shit into a
hole in the floor and pray 5 times a day for, as Hanson appropriately
calls it, a nuclear caliphate --- has figured out a way to make more
new stuff cheaper, and to continually do it for the last 2500 years
or so. And, guess what? As a result, we can kill more people cheaper,
too.

That means we win wars. That means we'll win this one, too. Because,
if you hadn't noticed, they have to use *our* stuff to fight *us*.
Some around here see that as a bug, of course, but I see that much
more as a feature: I'll see that "bug", raise you a couple of MOABs,
and call the bet.

>Not understanding
>this or simply neglecting it will further add to the negative
>feelings and opinions and fuel extremism.

Ah. That's right. I'm not "nuanced" enough. It's too *complicated*
for anyone who didn't take your sophomore (cryptomarxist) "History
Studies" class, or whatever. Please.

>The only way to move towards a more friendly world is to make people
>feel they are able to share the wealth and prosperity of the world.
>As long as there is one single person anywhere in the world
>hungering to death there is still a basis for fundamentalism and all
>the problem that leads to.

"If we would all just get along", the lion would still eat the lamb
for a mid-afternoon snack, bunky, and then lie down for a nap.
Singing "Kumbaya" in Arabic won't make it happen any different.

More to the point, some mook in chi-pants marching in a black-block
in Seattle advocating the confiscation of what someone *earns* by
*working* is not going to make some *other* islamist mook, who also
got his way paid through college by *his* daddy, to stop building
bombs and crashing airplanes into skyscrapers. What *will* stop mooks
of the latter persuasion is to kill as many of them as possible, and
as quickly as possible. Maybe their parents, too, for raising an
entire generation of ignorant superstitious children. It was ever
thus, however. The Meijii Japanese could *copy*, even perfect,
aircraft and aircraft carriers, but they couldn't *invent* new stuff,
like, say, atom bombs. Only markets can do that, bunky. More to the
point, only markets full of free people arguing their heads off about
what's right and wrong can do that.

>Continuing being arrogant and policing the world without listening
>to the oppressed people in the middle east and elsewhere will never
>ever eradicate terrorism. You may may or may not be able to
>reasonable confidently hinder most terror deeds (but only after
>having turned also the western civilization into police states) but
>you cannot stop the oppressed man from growing the hatred i his
>mind.

Hint: "policing" the world is what happens when, after 30 years of
attacks we actually *ignore* because we're too busy to care, someone
kills enough people to get our attention. Then we kill them back. A
lot.

>If you do not understand this you are not only unintelligent IMNSHO
>but also part of the problem itself.

Ah. Stupid me. I should have been in the dorm room that day. Do you
have notes?

Dude, I was *in* that dorm room, once. Then something marvellous
happened maybe 10 years later. I grew up.

>You're not to be so blind with patriotism that you can't face
>reality. Wrong is wrong, no matter who does it or says it. (Malcolm
>X)

There we go. Wisdom from a thug. How about this thug, instead, kid,
quoted just about as much out of context as you have yours:

"When the hares made speeches in the assembly and demanded that all
should have equality, the lions replied, "Where are your claws and
teeth?" -- attributed to Antisthenes in Aristotle, 'Politics', 3.7.2

Oh. That's right. One shouldn't read Aristotle. He was a White Male
Oppressor...

>Johnny Doelittle

Little Johnny Doe?

Stand in the headlights, dude. It's waaay brighter over there...


Sheesh. When will September ever end?

Cheers,
RAH

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-- 
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R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah at ibuc.com>
The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/>
44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA
"When the hares made speeches in the assembly and demanded that all should
have equality, the lions replied, "Where are your claws and teeth?"  --
attributed to Antisthenes in Aristotle, 'Politics', 3.7.2