Time to put Harry Browne, Libertarian Party chief guy or whoever he is, in a home, if this latest screed is anything to go by:
This just in: Bin Laden wins Afghan war. It's full of the usual:
— American forces have left Afghanistan in ruins (apparently the Soviets, the warlords, and the Taliban had created a fruitful Eden).
— We've killed thousands "of Afghans" (none of who participated in the fighting on the Taliban's and Al Qaeda's side).
— Millions of Third World people hate us (which is probably at least 80 percent due to the efforts of people like Harry Browne to sympathize with their plight and speak for them, instead of showing their despotic 'governments' a little muscle).
— The Israelis are Bad People for killing those poor, helpless Palestinians (all those suicide bombers are really just victims of Spontaneous Human Combustion — the truth is out there, Scully!).
— And so on, yadda yadda.
Favorite quote:
"Do you think Usama bin Laden cares how many innocent Afghans are killed?"
Actually, Mr. Browne, I don't think he cares about anything at all. It's kind of hard to care about things when you've been mashed to the thickness of one millimeter under tons of rock.
We should just give up, apparently:
"The root fallacy in the war on terrorism is the idea that we have no choice but to fight people who won't rest until they destroy us.
"But there have always been thugs in the world who wanted to destroy others. There have always been people who hated America - for good or bad reasons. There have always been evil people, malicious people, brutal people."
See? Nothing you can do. Just give in to the bombs. You'll learn to love death and destruction, man.
He goes on to drag out the Hitler apologetics: If Germany hadn't been treated so badly after WWI, Hitler would never have risen to power, etc. It must be nice to see everything in neat little packages of moral equivalence. It's a great way of giving oneself a free pass for one's own moral failings: If it wasn't the German peoples' fault for being swept away by Nazism, then I don't have to feel so bad for being a coward who secretly admires thugs like Usama bin Laden. After all, doesn't he have a legitimate grievance?
Some of us whose consciences are more annoyingly resistant to such temptations find it difficult to succumb to such weasel behavior.
Dead Souls
Concerning the girls who died in a fire in Mecca because some members of the so-called "religious police" refused to let them out of their burning building without their headscarves and abayas, Dreaded Purple Master asks:
"How can such a society survive?"
Answer: it can't. Saudi Arabian society, as well as other Muslim countries where they follow the wahhabi ways, is on the way out. It is impossible for these societies to continue as they are in the real world, which will continue to impinge upon them from all sides, no matter how high the barriers to the outside they try to erect.
These societies have tried to have their cake and eat it too; have tried to be modern, powerful states while simultaneously imposing a backwards, medieval life on themselves, and they have failed miserably at both.
The oil wealth of countries like Saudi Arabia has only staved off this reckoning. All the money they have made selling their oil has not resulted in any flowering of their culture. Innovation and discovery are not encouraged there, and without such no nation can grow. There is a reason so many Saudis come to the U.S. and attend our universities when they need to learn anything besides religious matters.
The slightest glimmer of hope comes from the fact that there was condemnation of the actions of the mutaween (the religious police), though this was buried at the bottom of the first article I read about this in the Arab News. I can only hope it leads not to something useless like "soul-searching" but actual changes in Saudi society that would make it, yes, more free, open and modern.
As I see it, they have two choices before them. One, they can continue on their delusional path of pretending to shut the corrupt, infidel world out of their pure land — a path that will end in madness and self-destruction (and probably a lot of destruction in the rest of the world too as Islamokazis try to take as many infidels down with them as they can). Or, two, they can discard their medieval, totalitarian ways and join the rest of the world like a grown-up nation.
Your Tax Dollars Working for You:
Dig the new Homeland Security Advisory System. Hey, we've got a couple more colors than Star Trek had. But I'll bet we don't get any of the cool sounds, so as far as I'm concerned it's a bust.
Your Tax Dollars Working for You, Part 2:
Hey, it's cool with the INS for Mohammed Atta to go to flight school— as of March 11, 2002. Nice six months anniversary present, INS! Way to go! Perhaps a contingent of INS bureaucrats would like to present the visa to Mr. Atta in his current place of residence.
Andrea Harris is a native Floridian and avowed spinster who is currently in a mid-life pursuit of her Bachelors in Humanities at the University of Central Florida. You can catch more of her babblings, scribblings and tappings at Ye Old Blogge.
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