Quick Roundup 145
Monday, January 29, 2007
Unwanted Integration
Now that I've moved my blogging account to the new version of Blogger, which is owned by Google, I am seeing some unwanted "talking" between my Blogger account and my Gmail account when people leave comments.
Previously, I'd get an email in my inbox when someone wanted to leave a comment. After I decided whether to post it, I had a filter set up so that the posted comments would land in a separate folder. I would then delete the comment notices after I knew the comments themselves were posted. I kept the comments in the folder for future reference.
Now that I'm on New Blogger, Gmail apparently "recognizes" the stuff from Blogger now and is stringing all this together into "conversations", which is great for email correspondence, but pretty well knackers the system I'd set up for comment tracking. But for this minor inconvenience, I am very happy with New Blogger.
Chinese Year of the "Prophet" Approaches
This may be old news to some of you, but China has apparently decided to subordinate its ancient tradition of naming successive years after signs of its zodiac to the "sensibilities" of its Moslem citizens.
According to the Chinese edition of the Asia Wall Street Journal, [state-owned] CCTV issued a notice to all advertising agencies on Jan 23 that "China is a multi-ethnic country... in order to show respect to the Muslims, as instructed by the respective government unit, that CCTV will not air any ads containing images of the pig throughout 2007. This measures also applies to ads related to the Chinese New Year."In celebration of the upcoming Year of the Pig (or should that be, "The Year of the Prophet"?), I present the image of my blog's mascot at right.
Images of the pig to be banned includes photographs, cartoons, paper cutting silhouettes, and even "Happy Year of the Pig" slogans.
This cartoon is amazing! It not only summarizes perfectly the "position", as it were, taken by the Chinese government, it also accords to Islamofascism exactly the degree of "respect" it deserves!
It is bad enough that the Chinese government does not respect the right of its citizens to freedom of speech, but for it to force its citizens into dhimmitude strikes me as a new low! (HT: Resident Egoist (story), Zombietime (image))
Counting Corpses in the LA Times
Via Arts and Letters Daily, I have learned of an atrocious article in the Los Angeles Times by one Professor David A. Bell, of Johns Hopkins University, in which he asks -- seriously -- whether we have "overreacted" to the atrocities committed in the name of Islam -- a religion held in great esteem by our "strategic partners", the Red Chinese -- on September 11, 2001.
Imagine that on 9/11, six hours after the assault on the twin towers and the Pentagon, terrorists had carried out a second wave of attacks on the United States, taking an additional 3,000 lives. Imagine that six hours after that, there had been yet another wave. Now imagine that the attacks had continued, every six hours, for another four years, until nearly 20 million Americans were dead. This is roughly what the Soviet Union suffered during World War II, and contemplating these numbers may help put in perspective what the United States has so far experienced during the war against terrorism. [minor format changes, my bold]One wonders what this educated moron would say if he were victimized in some crime and the police refused to do anything about it on the grounds that it didn't hold a candle to some similar crime. "Sorry, Professor, but you only got a bloody nose and lost twenty dollars in cash. Last week, some eighty-year-old landed in the hospital and lost a bag with ten grand and a bunch of old coins. We arrested his mugger, but since nothing really happened to you by comparison, we're going to hand it over to Statistics and call it a day. To make an arrest in your situation would be to overreact."
Would Professor Bell not become indignant, not to mention worried that he might be in greater danger of similar crimes in the future thanks to this inaction? The purpose of our government is to protect individual rights, not to wait for us to get seriously-enough injured or for some minimal number of us get slaughtered before doing something about an injury or a threat. This applies equally well to foreign threats as it does to domestic ones.
We have, in fact, reacted inappropriately to the atrocities that Professor Bell dares to trivialize, but not in the way he claims. Less digging of toilets in the desert and more bombs would be appropriate, for starters. For more on what the proper response would look like, go here.
-- CAV
Updates
Today: Corrected typo and made clarification to last section.
6 comments:
Regarding "Prof." Bell's argument, since only 2,471 people died when Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, I guess it was really silly for our disproportionate reaction then.
Fewer people died at Pearl Harbor than at the 9/11 attacks, yet we responded by mobilizing 16,112,566 soldiers to unconditionally defeat two superpowers, Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan.
Compare that with our "War on Terror." I would suggest that our "prudence" in this war really is the height of silliness.
Regarding your mascot, I heartily approve, but this is one case where I might empathize with a PETA activist who could see this as a heinous portrayal of pig abuse. Oink!
Foolishness such as Just War Theory aside, Bell's argument would be something along the lines of "They aren't capable of doing as much damage to us as the Germans or the Japanese were, so the Islamofascists aren't such a huge threat."
This has a grain of truth to it, except that all it does is describe how fortunate the irresolute West is to have such incompetents as foes. What Bell wants us to forget are (1) what our government is for, which is to make sure we face such threats as close to never as possible, and (2) how to achieve that end. Ignoring the role of state sponsorship of terrorism and the need to completely demoralize a sponsor state or two will not cause this low-grade (but still unacceptable) threat to disappear.
RE: Derogatory pig portrayal.
But whichpig?
Ba-da-boom!
I guess I should have specified which pig I was referring to, but I thought that was obvious! :-)
On a different note, I agree completely with your follow-on comment to my comment regarding Prof. Bell. The Muslim threat really is small. It is akin to the Muslim threat of 200 years ago of the Barbary Pirates. At that time, a much weaker United States under the guidance of Pres. Jefferson sent warships and the Marines to demoralize some of the sponsor states then of the piracy that had plagued our ships.
I am infuriated that such a weak foe today occupies so much of the attention of our country's leaders. But, in addition to the infuriation, I do fear what could happen if a Muslim state sponsored a nuclear attack on a U.S. city. The Muslims are very inept (after all, they use the Koran as their textbook in their madrassas), but eventually they could lurch toward having practical nuclear weapons. Already, Pakistan is a Muslim state that has successfully developed nuclear weapons, North Korea may have a primitive nuclear weapon, and Iran is working hard to get one.
The threat of a nuclear attack is why the Muslims must be forcefully dealt with. However, even if such a possibility did not exist, we should still deal with them. Why? Because we can. No country or terrorist group has the right to take a single American life, let alone the several thousand who died on 9/11.
"No country or terrorist group has the right to take a single American life...."
This is exactly what so many of our leaders have already forgotten, and which the Moslems, along with the useful idiot known as Professor Bell hope we do not recall any time soon. And this is precisely my point in blogging this.
And I more than share your frustration at the absurd amount of effort and attention this war -- against an unworthy foe as it is -- has been taking us. Recall Burgess Laughlin's identification about the origin of our welfare-state government's response in this war (being in the nature of a welfare state). In a sense, it is this very paralysis that is being used as a weapon against us. The Moslems would be nothing without forbearance or an ineffective response by the West.
This fact is yet another reason the work John Lewis has been doing in outlining the proper response in this war has been so important, and why pretending that anything less is adequate is treasonous.
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