Quick Roundup 119

War Memorials for Animals

In a very interesting piece over at Spiked, Josie Appleton notes that, "There has been no memorial to British soldiers who died in Iraq [or any] major museum exhibition dealing with the wars of the Blair era. Yet memorials to animals in war are proliferating like wildfire."

She then considers why this would be the case and arrives at the following:

It is because of animals' unthinkingness that they can be celebrated. "They had no choice" is the message posted both on the war memorial and in the exhibition. Animals had no reasons or responsibility for wars. A culture that is uncomfortable with the idea of soldiers choosing to fight and risk their lives, can nonetheless cheer at the leap of a dog.

Animals can also be portrayed as pure victims, too. Neither the horse peppered with enemy fire nor the sniffer dog that got half its face blown off in any way chose their fate. Soldiers, on the other hand, pick up a gun and move to the frontline, knowingly risking their lives. They are not dumbly and innocently following orders, like animals.

In a sense, animals have become a model for interpreting human actions in war. "They had no choice" has become the standard theme for war reports. [bold added]

It sometimes astounds me how thorough the opponents of Western civilization are in their attacks. The environmentalist movement pretty much singles out man as the Great Villain for exercising his rational faculty -- as if his means of survival is, alone among the animals, un-natural. Here, the attack remains in essence against against man as rational, but it is a little different. We rational animals are being attacked for making choices.

Most people have no inkling that morality is properly a rational science. Indeed, most would laugh at the very idea as absurd. And yet the nihilistic left seem to have sniffed this out like a pack of wild dogs. And, hating man, they have begun attacking us for being actors in our own lives.

How can that be? The facts of reality are interconnected. While men may explicitly reject the idea that reason can (and should) guide morality, to the extent that they remain alive, they must -- at least on some implicit level -- act rationally. The wild dogs can see this much and so do not even need to know explicitly what they are doing to home in on the right target.

In that respect, the good are at a disadvantage. To protect ourselves effectively -- by teaching our children properly, by presenting rational counterarguments to receptive adults, or by knowing what we should do -- we must understand philosophical issues explicitly.

By analogy: It took years of coordinated, well-planned effort and many more of education and training to build the World Trade Center. It took little special knowledge and only a few minutes for the those heroes of the left -- the Islamic barbarians -- to destroy them. And so it is that in the arena of ideas, mere furry animals must be countered with solid arguments and heroic efforts to make them known.

Building is hard. Destruction is easy.

This Merits an Article?

A man I take to be a moderate Moslem has written a column about allegations that Apple computer has insulted the Religion of Self-Parody simply by building a cube-shaped structure in New York City.

While Western civilization is inventing scientific and artistic marvels, the other wings of Islamism are preoccupied with inventing provocations in the hope of mobilizing otherwise ordinary Muslims. We have seen this before: the Muhammad cartoon controversy exhibited the same faulty reasoning but unfortunately it succeeded in turning thousands of Muslims to violent protests. This latest incident is one more in a growing list of examples of Muslims over-reacting, over- and mis-interpreting, jumping to conclusions and causing controversy over something innocent or innocuous.

Shall we also outlaw the use of the term Mecca in the English language? The Apple company itself does not officially refer to its Fifth Avenue store as a "Mecca" for Apple customers, but should anyone who uses the term be rounded up? Should any and every object in the form of a cube be outlawed, recalled, trashed? [bold added]

I appreciate Doctor Silay's speaking out, but who is he going to reach here? Moderate Moslems like himself will have no trouble seeing a cube for what it is: a freaking cube. And the Islamists? Every breath we take is a pretext for them to murder. They just see some pretexts as more -- erm -- sexy than others. This is just their latest attempt to create a symbol to rally around, a focal point for their murderous impulses.

As for the sentence in bold face, I know of at least one political party for whom that is not a rhetorical question. They are in charge and if you thought Islamic outrage over a cube was ridiculous, just wait until we hear their answer to that question, in the form of HR-288.

New Zealand Prepares for Future ...

... as Butt of Jokes in Anglosphere.

New Zealand's high school students will be able to use "text-speak" -- the mobile phone text message language beloved of teenagers -- in national exams this year, officials said.

This native son of Mississippi looks forward to a place that actually deserves it replacing his home state as a symbol of backwardness and illiteracy in the English-speaking world.

On a more serious note, how is this supposed to prepare students to become efficacious adults? If I were looking at job applications, for example, and saw text-speak, I would have serious doubts about the intelligence and social acumen of the applicant, to say the very least. Do they know how to write intelligently? And if so, why did they choose not to do so for such an important task?

British Soil Selves over Single Bullet

A single effin' bullet found in a doorway has caused a stir in London and a news article -- complete with a photograph of the very Engine of Destruction itself -- that has the look and feel of something you'd see in The Onion.

LIVE ammunition has been found lying in the doorway of a busy high street shop. [Oh! The humanity! --ed]

...

A police spokesman said: "Recovering firearms and ammunition is a priority for the police. We take the same view of ammunition as we do of a gun.

"If it goes bang, it is still lethal."

Police are treating the unattended ammunition as a crime. Mr Khan alerted them at 10.16am, and they arrived at his shop to pick up the bullet at 11.32am. [bold added]

The redoubtable Haroon Khan, who single-handedly took the bullet into custody and protected an unwitting public from it for over an hour, was quoted as saying, "But rather me pick it up than a little kid."

Yunno. Not too long ago, kids not only handled bullets, we could trust them with guns. Loaded ones.

Not only is this story laughably silly, it provides a profound example of both cultural decline and -- when you consider how much attention this inanimate object got compared to how little radical Islamic clerics get over there -- anarcho-tyranny.

(HT: Hannes Hacker)

-- CAV