ShrinkWrapped

The Council Has Spoken!

This weeks wining post was A Dialogue, by Dymphna at Gates of Vienna, which presents a fascinating glimpse into how people can begin to frame the current quest for clarity about the Muslim world after 9/11.  The second place winner was SHAME, GUILT, THE MUSLIM PSYCHE, AND THE DANISH CARTOONS by Dr. Sanity, in which she offers some further elucidation (complete with handy charts) of the differences between a "shame culture" and a "guilt culture."

Among some wonderful non-Council posts, The Big Pharaoh offers a novel set of The 10 Commandments; if only....

Second place among the non-Council posts was a wonderful post by Alexandra at All Things Beautiful concerning America's Useful Idiots; on a related note, Alexandra had a second post receive votes, an elegiac look back at her father and The Virtue Of Courage; read them both.

As always, all the nominees are at the Watcher of Weasels and all are worth your time and attention.

How Ideological Bias Destroys Reality Testing: Yet Another NY Times Example

It is the weekend and while I rarely get a chance to go to the movies these days, I do enjoy reading movie reviews and planning which movies I will put on my "must see" list for future home DVD viewing.  I still occasionally check on the reviews in The New York Times, with the usually vain hope that they will occasionally be able to report on a movie without their particular political, moral, and ethical blindness obscuring my view of the movie and to that end I took a look at the review by Stephen Holden of 'SOPHIE SCHOLL: THE FINAL DAYS'.  The movie sounds like a painful but important one, and the review starts promisingly:

"Sophie Scholl: The Final Days" conveys what it must have been like to be a young, smart, idealistic dissenter in Nazi Germany, where no dissent was tolerated. This gripping true story, directed in a cool, semi-documentary style by the German filmmaker Marc Rothemund from a screenplay by Fred Breinersdorfer, challenges you to gauge your own courage and strength of character should you find yourself in similar circumstances. Would you risk your life the way Sophie Scholl (Julia Jentsch) and a tiny group of fellow students at Munich University did to spread antigovernment leaflets? How would you behave during the kind of relentless interrogations that Sophie endures? If sentenced to death for your activities, would you still consider your resistance to have been worth it?

After this good start, Holden speeds up and heads straight off the cliff into "Bizarro World" where everything is its opposite.  Note that the following lines are in the same, opening, paragraph as the lines above:

Tribes and Societies

All societies contain a percentage of their members, primarily men, who are sociopathic.  A true sociopath is amoral, lacking in empathy, aggressive without feelings of guilt, and uses other people to satisfy his own instinctual desires.  Malignant Narcissism overlaps and merges with sociopathy:

In more severe cases, the existence of the other person’s mind and life is simply of no consequence.  For the Malignant Narcissist, other people are mere props in the pageantry of their lives.  A tyrant can throw someone into a shredding machine without a second thought because the victim only matters in relation to how he can support the grandiosity of the tyrant; beyond that, he is faceless, nameless, worthless.

There are, luckily, very few true sociopaths.  For normal people, it is not easy to contemplate harming another living human being.  Perhaps because of the existence of mirror cells in our brains, empathy is innate in almost all of us.  There is a much larger group for whom sociopathic behavior is possible depending on the circumstances.  For example, in prison settings, the ability to hurt another without qualms can have survival benefits.  Another example would be the drug addict whose empathy is overwhelmed by his need for his fix. 

In Bill Whittle's famous essay on Tribes, he included excerpts from The Bulletproof Mind in which Lt.  Colonel Grossman divided people into wolves, sheep, and sheep dogs.  Most people are sheep, with some unknown percentage also being potential sheep dogs under the proper circumstances while another unknown percentage are potential wolves under the same circumstances.  As Lt. Colonel Grossman puts it:

The sheep pretend the wolf will never come, but the sheepdog lives for that day.

While Bill and the Lt. Colonel were talking about our society, with Bill emphasizing our response to 9/11, their description lends itself to some thoughts on how societies organize themselves to deal with those who have sociopathic tendencies.

Pity the Poor Anti-Semite

Anti-Semitism is an ancient scourge that has destroyed all who have become infected with it throughout history.  It is a deadly illness of the mind which contains the nidus of self-destruction within its genetic code. 

Most of us in the West have long recognized the danger of anti-Semitism.  Victor Davis Hanson recently pointed out that it is symptomatic of totalitarian societies which need to deflect the blame for their failures onto others:

Anti-Semitism, of course, is the mother's milk of fascism. It is always, they say, a small group of Jews — whether shadowy cabinet advisers and international bankers of the 1930s or the manipulative neoconservatives and Israeli leadership of the present — who alone stir up the trouble.

The beauty of anti-Semitism is that the Jews have a long tradition of being small in number yet relatively visible in the societies in which they lived.  Thus, they serve as the perfect objects on which to project ambivalently held traits.  For example, the leading anti-Semites of the world are now found in the Arab world.  Their projection of all evil traits onto the Jews is a thing of beauty in its incoherent hatred.  Pamela comments on the prevalence in the Arab world of the most noxious cartoons slandering Jews with the old time-worn and time tested blood libel first made popular int eh middle ages:

Cartoons, the MSM, and Unintended Consequences

The paradox of the MSM and the EU supporting free speech by appeasing the most radical of the Islamists over the cartoons is likely to have very serious and tragic repercussions.  Anyone who has graduated from grade school should recognize that when you give the bully your lunch money on the first day of school you have sealed your misery for the rest of the year.   

The EU has no particular investment in free speech and has had no problem promulgating laws to limit free speech, so the flaccid response of the bEUreaucrats is not remarkable.  On the other hand, the failure of the American MSM, which not only has a long legacy of freedom and, more importantly,  a Constitutional protection of free speech, to show the Cartoons is profoundly troubling and will almost certainly increase the risk of exacerbating the coming confrontation with Iran.  And just in case anyone has been wondering if perhaps the MSM doesn't deserve the benefit of the doubt on this issue, consider the contrast between their diffidence in publishing some mildly inflammatory cartoons versus new pictures from an old story, abu Graib, which inflame the Muslim world.  As Tim Blair puts it: [HT: Stop the ACLU]

They won’t publish cartoons, but they will run anything they can get out of Abu Ghraib. Both sets of images provoke Islamic anger; note how the media behaves when that anger is directed at them.

The MSM knows no one in the West will threaten them with decapitation for printing pictures which inflame Muslims against the United Sates; however, aside from MSM hypocrisy and craven appeasement, which is infuriating but not deadly, there is the bigger problem of unintended consequences.

As many have now pointed out, the cartoons, some of which were manufactured for the occasion by the Muslim Imams themselves, have been, and continue to be, used as a pretext for the rioting of Islamic fascists in various places around the world.   The Western response has to be extremely instructive for the Iranian Mullahs and seems almost designed to lead them to make a fatal miscalculation.

Allow me to explain.

Another Look at the Cartoon Wars

In my youth, during the 1960's, I attended many anti-war rallies to protest the Vietnam War.  By the late 1960's, the protests had become impressive affairs, with upwards of half a million people attending.  In the spring of 1970, the protests in Washington, DC, drew over a million people.  When "The People" are moved to action, their political will is hard to resist. 

Recently we have learned this lesson anew, as hundreds of thousands protesting a stolen election in the Ukraine forced democratic change in that former Soviet Socialist Republic. 

As well, large demonstrations were instrumental in forcing Syria out of Lebanon (though their influence persists in less direct ways.)  Just yesterday, the Lebanese took to the streets on the one year anniversary of the assassination of Rafik Hariri; Michelle Malkin has a picture of the protest and describes the scene in AN ANNIVERSARY IN LEBANON:

Today marks the first anniversary of the assassination of Rafik Hariri and the birth of Lebanon’s Cedar Revolution.

Half a million Lebanese citizens rallied in honor of Hariri's memory today.

Take a look at the picture Michelle has in the post; the crowd is extensive, filling the entire frame with innumerable tiny images of people crowded together.  Contrast that with this story, CARTOON JIHAD: THE NEXT GENERATION, from yesterday, of a Hamas rally protesting the Danish cartoons.  Notice how each picture features a tight close-up of no more than three or four children.  It is a common MSM technique to shoot tight close-ups of protesters to make small crowds look more dramatic; with the proper placement, a crowd of 50 can look like it is merely a small portion of a crowd of many thousands.

You might wonder why I include such information in a post on the Cartoon Wars; the explanation is simple.  What has become most striking about the Muslim protests about the cartoons is the limited size of the protesting crowds. 

The NSA Spying Program: What is the Danger?

As the Democrats back away from their noisy critique of the NSA wiretapping "scandal" it is instructive to look at what might have motivated them to raise the alarms.  Dr. Sanity has an excellent summary of the Democrats climb-down, and places it in a larger context in Democrats Courting A Long Political Drought.  She believes that partisan politics is driving the Democrats over a cliff and they certainly offer evidence to support this position on a regular basis.  However, from time to time I think it is useful to take a fresh look at their concerns and see if there is anything new to be learned from them.  We absolutely need a responsible opposition and the arguments of those who press the Democrats from their base are essential to understand for this very reason.

OpEdNews.com is a news/blog aggregator which offers a wealth of articles and posts for perusal.  On February 10, 2006, Bob Burnett offered an interesting article, Bush Eavesdropping - Why do We Care?, as the last of a series:

In December, The New York Times revealed that the Bush Administration, has been eavesdropping on our phone calls, by means of National Security Agency computer systems, without a court order. Although the exact nature of the surveillance is highly classified, it appears that the White House has gone on a massive “fishing trip;” one that invades the privacy of thousands of ordinary Americans. This is the third of three articles about Administration eavesdropping – why this matters.

In the first two articles, which I have not read, Burnett wrote about the use of NSA computers to monitor phone calls and other electronic communications and gave his take on the FISA law.  My interest lies in examining his three major reasons for concern over the Bush administration's wiretapping. Burnett starts off quite well in stating the problem:

Liberal Dis-Armament

Most people do not like to think of themselves as cowards.  Unfortunately, when a person is unable to defend himself, it is a natural tendency to back away from confrontation and to simultaneously invent reasons why backing down is not only the wisest choice, but the bravest choice.  This is, of course, a rationalization, that is, the invention of logical and seemingly coherent explanations for behavior that hides the true, often partially or completely,unconscious reasons for the behavior.

An example of a rationalization would be our MSM refusal to print pictures of the Cartoons of Mohammed which have roiled the Islamic world, out of respect for the religious sensibilities of their Muslim readers.  If the policy of the New York Times, et al, had been consistently to show sensitivity to the religious feelings of all their readers, this explanation would at least hold some plausibility, but the Times has shown no such compunction about showing anti-Christian pictures which tends to undercut their rationale.

The Times has been a predictable purveyor and determiner of the liberal point of view for a very long time.  Now it is the triumph of liberalism which threatens to destroy the liberal society that it helped create.

The Council Has Spoken!

AJ Strata at the Strata-Sphere composed the winning Council post this week with a satirical 2006 Democrat Contract With Al Qaeda ... at least I think it was meant to be satirical, though with the behavior of some of the leaders of the Democratic party recently, you might wonder...

In second place was my post on The Academy Awards, Pan-Sexuality, Narcissism, & Loneliness, in which I dissected cultural trends which aim to increase the objectification of sex at the expense of relationships.

Among the non-Council posts, The Anchoress applies her unique blend of insight and forbearance to devastating effect in Wellstoning the King Funeral - UPDATED; outrage is most effective when it is done with subtlety.

In second place was a tie between Gagdad Bob's The Pathetic Last Children of Nietzsche's Pitiable Last Men and a post from Dean's World, Islam and Freedom and Democracy (Updated, Revised Data).  As always, Gagdad Bob's post defies easy summation, so go read the whole thing.  Dean's piece is an interesting effort to show that the world of Islam has been democratizing and there is no incompatibility between Islam and democracy.  He inadvertently makes an excellent case that the neo-cons have been correct that the clash of civilizations is not between Islam and the West but between a small number of wealthy Islamic totalitarian states (and their client states) and the West.  Take a look and draw your own conclusions.

As always, all the nominees are worth reading and are available at the Watcher of Weasels; read them all.

Western Cultural Suicide

In The Suicidal Pursuit of Perfection I described a young woman whose political absolutism and demands that the world function the way she wanted it to rather than the way it actually did placed her in significant, real, danger.  Once she was able to recognize what she was doing to herself, she began the difficult work of Psychoanalysis and was eventually able to discover the self-destructive nature of her own rage at the unfairness of the world she was born into.  In effect her anger at the world's unfairness became a boomerang that threatened to harm her more than it would ever hurt anyone else.

There is now a mountain of evidence that we are in fact, as a culture, doing the very same thing to ourselves.  This extends from the most overt, liberal attacks on the NSA surveillance program despite no evidence of any harm to any Americans from the program, to more subtle attacks on the legitimacy of our culture. 

I am going to range far and wide in this post with a particular aim in mind, to show that there is a cultural point of view that remains exceedingly powerful in Western culture, a derivative of liberalism that is no longer liberal, which unwittingly and unconsciously, demands that we disarm ourselves and surrender to our enemies.

As you read this post, keep in mind the question of risk and risk/benefit assessment, a perspective which is noticeably lacking in most MSM news reports.  As a Physician, I am always forced to make risk/benefit analyses; for example, is a particular medication worth the risk of side effects?  As a Psychoanalyst, I recognize that all of our behavior involves the negotiation of internal and external conflict; a patient wonders if he should give in to his libidinal desires and have a proffered affair despite his guilt or rather deny himself such immediate gratification in the interest of a longer term goal of marital intimacy and thereby have to tolerate frustration?  In effect, we are all always making risk/benefit assessments.  However, those who define many of our current conflicts and issues of the day are derelict in their duty in this regard; they almost never present the conflicting desires, needs, fears, of our conflicts.  Start with cartoons: