Posts in September, 2006
Improving the world through scorn
September 5, 2006 16 comments
One of the tools available to a web-dictator such as myself shows which search terms people have been entering into google in order to arrive at the site. This can be very illuminating. I am happy that people searching for “failed asylum seekers” or “unspeak christian“, or even the evocative phrase “kamm terrorism“, end up here: that is as it should be. However, I feel I ought to apologise to those people who were also driven into my virtual arms by looking for information on “supernatural odour” (what does a ghost smell like? Happily, I have no idea) and – fascinatingly – “orwell on cereals“. (I regret to say that the Introduction offers no theory about whether George Orwell preferred cornflakes to muesli.) My favourite so far, however, is “insolence revolution blog”, which, once I had stared at it for a couple of seconds, I decided was miraculously appropriate.
Yes, this is an insolence revolution blog. Here at unspeak.net, I and my regular commenters are conspiring to foment an insolence revolution. Soon, insolence will be on the march, imposing the precious freedom of scorn for authority on all corners of this benighted globe. I say now: if you’re not with us in this war on deference, you’re against us.
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Deserts of the real: on ‘race’ and foreign policy
September 4, 2006 16 comments
At Harry’s Place, a commenter introduces himself by calling himself a race realist. Interesting. That he subsequently complains of the “looming threat” posed to the US by “uncontrolled low-IQ immigration”, resulting in “a USA almost half brown and black by 2031”, shows exactly what his true perspective on “race” is.
But let’s try to take race realist at face value, and reconstruct the logic behind it. Of course racism is bad and stupid, the “race realist” might say, but unfortunately the great unwashed masses are racist. So if we don’t take account of their views, bad things will happen. (A river foaming with much blood, etc.) This is the “realist” part: a pretended pragmatism about what people actually believe. The problem is that it subsequently implies we should order the world such that these racists, although foolish, will be kept happy, presumably for overriding reasons of public order. And the analytical problem is that recommending policies to keep racists happy is in the end indistinguishable from recommending policies that are actually racist. They will be, surely, the same policies. So “race realist” inevitably collapses, it seems to me, into simply “racist”.
Let’s compare the school of “realism” in international affairs, often attributed to Henry Kissinger . . .
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Martin Amis: analyze this
September 2, 2006 56 comments
Martin Amis analyzes the perpetrators of 9/11:
The spectacular attack, “the big one”, was a non-starter until the fortuitous arrival in Kandahar of the “Hamburg contingent” (Atta et al): these men were superficially Westernised, and superficially rational: possessed by just the right kind of functioning insanity.
A fascinating mini-psychodrama is packed into the phrase “functioning insanity”. With the first word, Amis glibly lays claim to clinical expertise, appealing to the sense of “functioning” used in psychiatric assessments. Yet in the very next word, manfully impatient with such bullshit, he invokes the brute, non-clinical idea of “insanity”. In lightning succession, he postures in pretension to medical authority, and then peacocks his courageous rejection of that same authority. Superficially rational, indeed.
56 comments
Why we really have to stay in Iraq
September 1, 2006 8 comments
The rest of George W. Bush’s speech yesterday consisted of the usual warnings about appeasing Nazis, new totalitarianisms, and so on. He banged on quite insistently about one familiar idea, giving it a new twist:
We will fight the terrorists overseas so we do not have to face them here at home. […]
If we give up the fight in the streets of Baghdad, we will face the terrorists in the streets of our own cities. […]
General John Abizaid, our top commander in the Middle East region, recently put it this way: “If we leave, they will follow us.”
That’s right: the terrorists will follow us home and attack us in the streets of our cities if we leave Iraq. The obvious question is: why aren’t they doing this already? There is only one possible answer:
They don’t know where America is.
Do the math: in a stunning psyops operation, all the world’s maps must have been covertly altered. The continental USA is now labelled “Greenland”. The terrorists can only find America again by actually following the US military when it leaves Iraq. So the US must never leave. Any questions?
8 comments
Nice names for nukes
September 1, 2006 2 comments
In case we had forgotten why bringing democracy to Iraq was important, George W. Bush reminded us in his speech to the American Legion yesterday:
Governments accountable to the voters focus on building roads and schools – not weapons of mass destruction.
This is slightly odd, since democracies such as the US, the UK and India spend quite a lot of money on “weapons of mass destruction”. But what if you gave these activities soothing names? Instead of a “weapons of mass destruction-related program activity”, for example, you could say that you were engaged in a “Science Campaign” . . .
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