Category: Internet

Speaking of the evil Mao and his clueless minions, Marc Cooper reminds us of the stakes:

The savage bombings in the London underground are a stark and bloody reminder that, alas, we live in a complicated world in which civilization is threatened on many fronts. How nice it would be to inhabit a more simplistic bi-polar fantasy, say, of the Maoist bent. It was the Great Helmsman himself who harrumphed that “The primary contradiction is between U.S. imperialism and and all the worlds’ peoples.”

Chairman Mao conveniently forgot all those other “secondary” contradictions. You know, like the one between his totalitarian state and the 17 million people it killed. Or the one between the Russians and the Chinese. The Vietnamese and the Chinese. The Vietnamese and the Cambodians. Rich versus poor. White versus black. Hutus against Tutsis. The sacred against the profane. The religious fanatics versus secular democracy.

Which brings us back full circle to the savagery in London. It was bad enough listening to the reports of the bombings themselves. That pain was aggravated by the politicization of the events. From the Idiot Right were the numbskulls arguing over Shock Radio that the bombings somehow justified the war in Iraq. From the Idiot Left came Janeane Garfolo’s shriekings over Air America that somehow these bombings could be traced back to the Bush administration’s supposed countenance of terrorism.

Pathetic, really. Whatever one thinks of Bush (and I hold him in very low esteem) the London bombers are monsters who are fully responsible for their butchery. Period.

And Marc suggests a look at the Norm Geras inventory of terrorist attacks as well.

And speaking of Maoism, its essence is the creation of a “new man” by means of coercion from the level of politics down to genetics:

When Mao Zedong set forth his designs for China’s Great Leap Forward into communist modernity, he described the Chinese people as “poor and blank.” “On blank sheets of paper,” he declared, “free from any mark, the freshest and most beautiful characters can be written, the freshest and most beautiful pictures can be painted.” Possessed by the totalitarian dream of human nature as his open canvas, Mao thought a new sort of man could be written into being, that Marxist progress was an inevitable fact of China’s destiny, and that brutal means of creating the new society would be justified.

In the quest for the New Man, the end justifies any means, including mass murder. What a sick bastard Mao was.

The one thing that needs to be said about the 7/7 attackers is that they’re simply savage barbarians, operating completely outside any reasonable concept of human civilization. Those of us who live under the umbrella of civilization and the rational approach to life have to stand together in opposition to them, regardless of our politics.

Northeast Intelligence Network reports:

7 July 2005; 12:54 ET: Preliminary reports from a source inside the Pentagon indicate that one of the operatives involved in this morning’s bombings in London was recently released from the prison at Guantanamo. DEVELOPING…

I hope he wasn’t mistreated.

This is worth reading and taking to heart:

It’s through terrorism that the people that have committed this terrible act express their values and it’s right at this moment that we demonstrate ours.

I think we all know what they are trying to do, they are trying to use the slaughter of innocent people to cow us, to frighten us out of doing the things we want to do, of trying to stop us going about our business as normal as we are entitled to do and they should not and must not succeed.

When they try to intimidate us, we will not be intimidated, when they seek to change our country, our way of life by these methods, we will not be changed. When they try to divide our people or weaken our resolve, we will not be divided and our resolve will hold firm.

We will show by our spirit and dignity and by a quiet and true strength that there is in the British people, that our values will long outlast theirs. The purpose of terrorism is just that, it is to terrorise people and we will not be terrorised.

I would like once again to express my sympathy and sorrow for those families that will be grieving so unexpectedly and tragically tonight. This is a very sad day for the British people but we will hold true to the British way of life.

We’re all Britons today.

Every time a terrorist group explodes a bomb, we see the same range of reactions: rational, sane people commiserate with the victims of the attack and their families, cutting through the confusion and getting to the essentials. When the smoke clears, they connect the dots with similar attacks and resolve to fight even harder against the terrorists.

And then you have your moonbats who go “see – this proves the hobby horse I’m riding is going in the right direction!” somewhere toward Appeasementville, Chimpy McBushitlerburton-bashing-ville, or off on some bizarre tangent that intersects with Internet triumphalism or Sinn Fein triumphalism or politically correct triumphalism or whatever.

Moonbats, the next time you have a chance to embarrass yourself, why not wait 24 hours or so for your head to clear before showing the world what a nutter you are? You’ll be glad you did.

UPDATE: For a good case study in what happens to those who violate the 24 hour moonbat rule, see the total destruction of “DarkSyde” by rational people. (Q: Why do these lunatics always go by pseudonyms?)

I wonder if Judith Miller and Li’l Kim are gonna be cellmates. Miller goes to the pokey for not talking:

WASHINGTON, July 6 – A federal judge today ordered Judith Miller of The New York Times to be jailed immediately after she again refused to cooperate with a grand jury investigating the disclosure of the identity of a covert C.I.A. operative.

… and Li’l Kim for the wrong kind of talking:

The hip-hop star, born Kimberly Jones, was sentenced today to one year and one day in prison for perjury and must turn herself in to authorities on September 19th. Kim was convicted in March of lying to a federal grand jury to protect two associates in relation to a 2001 shooting against rival rap outfit Capone-N-Noreaga outside New York City hip-hop radio station Hot 97 in which one man was injured.

But also for sticking to the rappers’ code of silence:

In sentencing Lil’ Kim for perjury, the judge cited the unsolved slaying of Notorious B.I.G as evidence of a troubling code of silence in the hip-hop community.

”It’s because people did what you did, that we still don’t know who killed him,” he said.

What’s the difference between the rappers’ code of silence and the journalists’ code? And if journalists are to be shielded by the law from penalty for sticking to their code, don’t rappers (and Mafiosi) deserve the same kind of protection? It seems that they do.

H/T Notorious Orin Kerr.

George Soros’ stooge Duncan (Atrios) Black is whining about the so-called Chickenhawks who opposed Saddam even though they hadn’t actually been tortured or murdered themselves, so the Indepundit puts him in his place:

DUNCAN BLACK says Nathan Taylor should “sign up or shut up.”

I’ve never met Nathan Taylor. I’m guessing that Duncan hasn’t, either. Yet Duncan seems to be arguing that Nathan can’t support the war unless he is prepared to fight in it himself.

I’m not going to speculate as to why Nathan hasn’t enlisted. It’s his life, and he has to make his own choices. Not having met Duncan, I also won’t speculate as to why he wants Nathan to “shut up.” I thought liberals were supposed to believe in freedom of speech.

It’s not surprising that some of these free speech-deniers support the communist Chinese police state recently embarassed by hackers:

Police states, like China, have a serious problem with the Internet. They need it, for economic reasons. The Internet has become part of the worldwide economic infrastructure. But the Internet also allows unfettered exchange of information. For a police state, this is bad. A police state remains in power, in part, by controlling the media. China has a booming economy, and cannot afford to lock down, or keep out, the Internet, as has happened in police states with poor economies (North Korea, Cuba, Burma). So China is adding more software, and personnel, to police Chinese Internet users. So far, their approach has made many casual Internet users wary of saying, or looking for, anything the government does not approve of. But millions of more savvy Chinese Internet users know of ways to get around the “Great Firewall of China,” to do as they wish on the Internet. This attack on the Beijing General Security Service was just a reminder that the Chinese war on the Internet is far from over.

The Internet is the kind of disruptive technology feared by fascist powers.

You would think that dams would be a no-brainer in a country that gets all its rainfall in three months of the year and has no significant snowcap to slow its release into the rivers and the ocean, where most people still work in agriculture and where drought and starvation are constant problems. Certainly, every government in India has built them, and every political party has supported them, and they’ve done more than any other modern invention to raise living standards for the poor.

But along comes an expert who knows better than all these people, a person of such excellent insight in civil engineering and agriculture she puts all the experts to shame, exposing hidden facts that dams actually cause flooding, disease, and even earthquakes. This genius is Arundhati the novelist, champion of the poor:

Big Dams started well, but have ended badly. There was a time when everybody loved them, everybody had them – the Communists, Capitalists, Christians, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists. There was a time when Big Dams moved men to poetry. Not any longer. All over the world there is a movement growing against Big Dams. In the First World they’re being de-commissioned, blown up. The fact that they do more harm than good is no longer just conjecture. Big Dams are obsolete. They’re uncool. They’re undemocratic. They’re a Government’s way of accumulating authority (deciding who will get how much water and who will grow what where). They’re a guaranteed way of taking a farmer’s wisdom away from him. They’re a brazen means of taking water, land and irrigation away from the poor and gifting it to the rich. Their reservoirs displace huge populations of people, leaving them homeless and destitute. Ecologically, they’re in the doghouse. They lay the earth to waste. They cause floods, water-logging, salinity, they spread disease. There is mounting evidence that links Big Dams to earthquakes.

That’s some heavy stuff.

Molly Ivins complains that the right twists liberals’ positions around:

Setting up a straw man, calling it liberal and then knocking it down has become a favorite form of “argument” for those on the right. Make some ridiculous claim about what “liberals” think, and then demonstrate how silly it is. Limbaugh, Bill O’Reilly and many other right-wing ravers never seem to get tired of this old game. If I had a nickel for every idiotic thing I’ve ever heard those on the right claim “liberals” believe, I’d be richer than Bill Gates.

So she clarifies things with this boner:

I think we have alienated our allies and have killed more Iraqis than Saddam Hussein ever did.

I think we should take Molly’s wishes to heart and carefully and correctly state her positions and those of people who think as she does.

It’s much more damning to use direct quotes like this one. Jeff Bishop has more.

Happy Independence Day.

Nixon called Indira Gandhi an “old witch” but she wasn’t as hostile to the US as Arundhati Roy, the narcissistic Indian novelist-turned-revolutionary who wants our enemies to hit us and hit us hard while she stands back and watches (login nobugs, pw bugmenot):

Personally I’m not prepared to pick up arms now. But maybe I can afford not to, at whatever place I am in now. I think violence really marginalizes and brutalizes women. It depoliticizes things. It’s undemocratic in so many ways. But at the same time, when you look at the massive amount of violence that America is perpetrating in Iraq, I don’t know that I’m in a position to tell Iraqis that you must fight a pristine, feminist, democratic, secular, non-violent war. I can’t say. I just feel that that resistance in Iraq is our battle too and we have to support it. And we can’t be looking for pristine struggles in which to invest our purity.

She’s basically aligned with Al Qaeda; it’s good to know that, in a “keep your enemies closer” sense.

H/t Michael Totten.