ShrinkWrapped

Failure to Differentiate

Last night those who are on Michael Yon's e-mail list received a poignant note, which linked to a horrifying story:

Greetings,

It saddens me greatly to read on my own pages mindless slanders against the entire Muslim world. There are some bad ones, just as there are bad Jews, Hindus, and Christians. Yet tonight, like many nights, I sleep under protection of Afghan Muslims. They will protect me with their lives. They are good men.

And this courageous Iraqi was lost to the same savages that we fight together. May God cherish his courageous soul.

The story at Michael Yon's blog is almost too horrifying to discuss, but it must be noted since it illuminates the evil at the core of radical Islam: (NB: The names in the e-mail posted on his blog have been changed to protect survivors.)

Our Muslim Friends Suffer, Too

CSM M-----Original Message-----
From: Far North Mellingers
Sent: Friday, June 26, 2009 7:56 AM
To: Mellinger, Jeffrey J CSM MIL USA AMC
Subject: RIP SGM Mohemmed al-Ahbab, ICTF

SGM Mohemmed al-Ahbab was a member of the ICTF and Iraqi Special Forces (ISF).  He rode many miles with me and my crew, and was right in the middle of any fray we had, moving quickly to the sounds of the guns.  The Iraqi Counter-Terrorism Force (ICTF) was on everyone's hit list, as they were fighting for Iraq, and against all who were not for Iraq first.  The ICFT killed plenty of Anti-Iraqi Forces (AIF) and Al Qaeda - Iraq (AQI), and I was privileged to go on many raids and operations with them.  I was never afraid of them - they were patriots and fierce fighters.

To soften the blow to the Lion 7 team, the above email reflects what I told them.

The truth is, he was captured leaving his Sadr City (Tharwa) home.  His brothers had been captured, tortured and killed while refusing to disclose his location.  His father suffered the same fate. Finally, Mohammed himself was captured coming back from leave.

For the next four days, sadistic Shi’a bastards (and he was himself Shi’a) beat him to the point of opening tissue and breaking major bones, used electric drills to drill every major joint (elbows, knees, ankles, shoulders), several locations in his skull, and every rib.  Not to leave a single nerve unexposed, they used a Sawz-all to cut a notch from his bottom jaw, four teeth wide, and to the jut of his chin.  Still, he lived. [Emphasis mine-SW]

Still alive after four days of this, he was shot twice in the head.  He was bruised and swollen almost beyond recognition, but a tattoo revealed his identity.

A couple of weeks later, I was called by the CSM of the USSF element at the Radwaniyah Palace Complex (RPC) in Baghdad, and asked if I wanted to come along on the raid to kill/capture the rat bastards that had tortured and killed Mohemmed.  Well, of course!

The highlighted section should be re-read because its impact is so great to any civilized human being that several readings may be necessary to comprehend the evil involved.

Michael Yon makes the point that there are many civilized Muslims in the world, many of them allied with us in our struggle with these sub-human monsters.  Those who suggest that Islam itself is evil or dangerous are indeed undermining our allies and adding fuel to the fires that are threatening to consume the world of Islam and the West.

There is no doubt that Sharia Islam, as it is being promulgated by its adherents, has evil at its core.  While the fatuous claim is made that "in Islam there is no compulsion", in reality, all that Sharia has to offer is compulsion.  But that misses a couple of important points.

First, even among those who support Sharia, there are differences between monsters willing to gouge out eyes and those who simply want to have the right to torment and control their own tribesmen and women.  It is not in our interest to mobilize the great majority of passive proponents of Sharia in a true clash of civilizations.  When statements are made that "all Muslims" are enemies of the West, it supports the contention of the eye gougers that Islam is under attack.

Second, it is not in our interest to allow those who support Sharia from imposing their rules on us, as far too many in the Liberal international elites would enable.  Every time an obnoxious, or merely naive, American draws a cartoon or threatens to burn a Koran, and they are not supported by our government and elites, the mass of Americans who have always believed that they have the right to be obnoxious are pushed toward the regressive position; in such a position, if given a forced choice between supporting our own values and surrendering them, the majority will support our own values; with the government and large parts of the elites demonizing our values in the name of multiculturalism or PC, more and more of those who are being told to "shut up" will come to see Islam as the problem. 

One of the great failures of the Bush administration was its inability to establish linguistic constructions that adequately differentiated our enemies from our allies from those who were essentially passive spectators in the Muslim World.  The Obama administration has, if anything, done an even poorer job of creating such differentiations.  When fine differentiations are effaced all that are left are the more coarse grained differentiations, which lend themselves to easy Splitting into "all good" and "all bad".

At a time when terror threats have once again become more real, we should be attempting to win the information war which fuels the terror war by insisting upon adherence to our own values and making it clear to friends, enemies, and the uninvolved or neutral alike, that we can differentiate among them and target appropriately.

Thought Experiment

Imagine what the Grateful Dead could have done with this technology: [HT: George Dvorsky]

 

Sonar from Renaud Hallée on Vimeo.

PC is a Thought Disorder

I have no time for blogging today so a couple of cartoons will have to suffice. 

First, a quiz courtesy of Dry Bones:

Second, what is wrong with this picture? [HT: Are We Lumberjacks?]

There is more from Glenn McCoy here.

Any questions?

On "Normal" Splitting

During the first few years of life an infant develops multiple integrated images of the world around him.  For example, to the youngest infant, the Object (mother) who soothes him with the breast or by holding him is not the same Object who denies him succor when he is in distress.  When the breast doesn't soothe (because the baby is not hungry or is in distress for some other reason) the breast is not an object of pleasure but of frustration.  Eventually the baby learns that the breast and the skin and the arms and the breathing and the heartbeat and the voice that soothe him, and occasionally frustrate him, all belong to the same object, his mother.  This ability to fuse the multiple images of mother into a single coherent and consistent object is one of the early developmental milestones of early infancy; it is referred to as Object Constancy.

In situations where the frustrations by the mother are more than the infant can tolerate, the still unstable Constant Object can be shattered into its constituents as the infant's ego regresses.  This occurs when there is an abusive caretaker, for example, and is at the core of much of the pathology of the adult survivor of childhood abuse.  This Splitting of the Object is used as a primitive defense.  Since the infant needs to feel cared for (and needs to be cared for) and its psychological survival depends on its relationship with the caretaker, the splitting allows the negative aspects of the object to be repressed so that the positive aspects can be held onto.  It preserves the object even as the infant partially destroys the object.  This is a brief introduction to a complicated area.  One element of this description that is important to note is that everyone, no matter how healthy, has passed through a time in development in which their Object Constancy was not yet firmly established and splitting was an ever present risk.  As adults, under stress, it is well within the range of normal behavior to engage in periodic and limited Splitting.  The danger for us arises when such a process is unrecognized and contaminates our relationships.  For our society, the danger occurs when splitting takes place on a large group basis.

Consider an example of reasonably normal Splitting:

Being forgiven for our past sins — or, maybe, O’Donnell has grown up *UPDATED*

I know this will come as a surprise to all of you, but I was not born wise or well informed.  I blush to think of some of the behaviors in which I indulged, and the ideas that I held, when I was younger.

When I was a very little girl, I picked up from the secular people surrounding me the idea that there is no God.  Not only did I refuse to say the Pledge of Allegiance, although I was scared enough of the teacher that I still moved my lips, I also thought all believers were fools.  I held to this belief for many, many years.

After reading Gone With The Wind for the first time, when I was 11, I came away with the impression that slavery wasn’t really such a bad thing, as long as you treated your slaves nicely. It took me a while to shake this belief too, especially because it seemed to me that the way many American blacks lived, whether in San Francisco’s Bayview/Hunters’ Point, LA’s Watts and South Central, or Michigan’s Detroit, wasn’t a great improvement over the life of a slave.  The concept of freedom, versus mere material welfare, eluded me.

At around the same time, as a child who grew up watching the Vietnam War on the news, as well as all the antiwar protests, I thought the American military was evil, and that Communists weren’t so bad.

When I was 17, and California voters pass Prop. 13, I thought it was outrageous that people should want to keep their own money when it could go to the government, which would spend it for the people’s own good, only it would do it better.

When I was 18, I voted for Jimmy Carter and was deeply saddened when he lost.

When I was a 20-year old student attending Berkeley, and I heard that Ronald Reagan had been shot, I agreed with my fellow students that he deserved it, a sentiment that earned me a harsh and well-deserved scolding from my parents.

When I was 21 and living in England, I wore a keffiyeh, because it was a cool fashion statement.  That same year, I listened in silence as a British Arab man told a terrible and cruel holocaust joke, because I was too socially intimidated to speak up.

When I returned to America in the early 1980s, I was fascinated by MTV, and watched it obsessively, believing that somehow those videos, with their rocking beats and alternatively meaningless or crude images, could enrich my life.

Throughout my teens and 20s, I hated Christian proselytizers, because I thought they wanted to hurt me, a Jew.  It took me decades to understand that they were acting out of great spiritual generosity, and that they would respond immediately and respectfully to a politely given “no.”

Throughout this commentary, Bookworm implicitly describes how those with whom she disagreed were understood by her and perceived by her to be nearly all bad.  This, of course, is common in adolescence, when we tend to be highly moralistic, know far more than we will ever know again, and have certainty that transcends even the exalted knowledge that we are sure we contain.

But Bookworm, a mere two paragraphs down, illustrates why I can refer to this as "normal" Splitting:

The good news is that I grew up.  During those same years, I managed to learn a lot.  At Berkeley, because I could’t understand the Marxist cant that permeated every non-science class, and therefore ignored it, I managed to learn about history and art and literature.  At law school (despite a miserable semester with Elizabeth Warren), I learned how to revere the constitution, respect the law and, significantly, analyze data. [Emphasis mine-SW]

There is a great deal more at her site, including some excellent links.  She was moved to write her post because of the attacks on Christine O’Donnell, who is being assaulted in the media and by her political opponents for stupid statements and inane comments she has made.  I do not know Christine O’Donnell and would probably have voted for Mike Castle if I were in Delaware, as a strategic vote, but the caricatures of her being bandied about in the media and the left blogosphere are noxious and damaging to political discourse.  As Bookworm pointed out, all of us have said stupid things and believed stupid things, at various times in our lives.  Such limitations do not render us completely evil or even completely wrong.  Splitting is easily done in politics and in the media; it lends itself to simplicity and ease of narrative.  Unfortunately it also treats its viewers and readers as if they are still stuck in adolescence and unable to master complexity.

It has always struck me as amusing that the liberal side of our political discourse has traditionally insisted they were the fonts of complexity and knowledge and yet they spent so much time on demonizing their opponents, demonization being merely one iteration of Splitting.

It is quite clear that the Democrats do not have any monopoly on regressive tactics but one of the great disasters of our age has been the descent of our media into PC partisanship (perhaps a regressive response to the pressures of their business model failing?); the lack of alternative opinions in mainstream newsrooms is a disaster for them and has been, until the advent of the Internet, a disaster for political discourse.

We are facing very difficult times and need more than ever the ability to have a debate that encompasses nuance and complexity.  Were Barack Obama the intellectual and self aware character he was imagined to be during the last election, we might have some hope that he could elevate and deepen our discourse; sadly, he has conspicuously not done so as yet and I doubt he will show the ability to change under the stress of popular repudiation at the polls.  Most people tend to regress under pressure, only very rarely do we find great men and women who can lead when under pressure.

A Good Stuxnet Summary

Over at Classical Values, M. Simon (who has some expertise in the area) summarizes what is known publicly and offers some interesting speculations:

Plant Breakdown

Over the last few days I have been piecing together a number of reports on the Iranian nuclear efforts. The reports lead me to some interesting conclusions/speculations. More on the conclusions/speculations later. First let me start with the breakdown of Iran's enrichment centrifuges from July of this year.

Read the whole thing.

It would be worth celebrating if the Stuxnet virus/worm could delay the Iranian nuclear program for a few years.  We will all be safer for it, including the Iranian people.

Societal Regression and the Loss of Legitimacy

From the time I began this blog I have been concerned, and have written a great deal about, the danger of Societal Regression under stress.  Historically, the greatest threat of Societal Regression has been under the impact of severe economic distress and/or during and after a lost war, when the basic tenets that hold a society together are most frayed.  Germany in the 1930's is often used as the poster child of Regression to totalitarianism in the face of severe economic stress and a lost war.  However, there are also countervailing processes in relatively healthy societies that can mitigate or protect against the kinds of regression that lead to fascism and genocide.  A healthy society has self-correcting processes and procedures; as long as the government retains legitimacy society can tolerate a fair amount of stress without dissolution into violence and authoritarianism.

The major sources of stress on Western societies are economic stagnation and our current War with Sharia Islam.  Our leaderships' responses in both areas are failing.

From Europe to the Untied States the elites have been racing to surrender their legitimacy.  They do this in blind obeisance to unproven theories of governance and dated ideology, and by doing so, risk fracturing their societies in dangerous ways.

Consider a few data points from Europe and America:

You Can't Say That

September was a turning point in European attitudes towards immigration. On September 14, the French Senate followed the National Assembly in banning the public wearing of the burka. Before the dust had settled, France’s president, Nicolas Sarkozy, was already embroiled in controversy on a wholly different matter: France’s expulsion of homeless Romanian gypsies, or les Roms, which European commissioner Viviane Reding attacked as a “disgrace” that reminded her of the Second World War. There was broad public support for Sarkozy when he suggested at a dinner at the Elysée Palace that Reding welcome the gypsies to her native Luxembourg, if she felt that strongly about it. 

Last week, the Sweden Democrats, a xenophobic party with far-right antecedents, took 20 seats in Sweden’s Riksdag, after airing an extraordinary ad. It explained that all politics is about setting budgetary priorities and then showed an old lady pushing a walker getting trampled by burqa-wearing women with baby carriages running to the front of a welfare line.

But the most important development, over the long run, will have been the publication in Germany of a taboo-breaking book which touched on immigrant themes. It is by Thilo Sarrazin, a member (but not for long, as it turned out) of the Bundesbank’s board of governors. Sarrazin’s book is Deutschland schafft sich ab (roughly, “The Abolition of Germany”). The controversy it has unleashed resembles the one that America had in 1994 over Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein’s book The Bell Curve. That was a book about the role of intelligence in society that wound up being read as a book on race. Sarrazin’s is a book about Germany’s economic future that detractors have cast as a book about how immigration is ruining Germany’s “stock.” The widespread criticism the book has received from establishment politicians has not blocked—and may even have spurred—its success. It has been a number-one bestseller for a month. Stores have been sold out for days at a time.

In Europe, the growing consensus is that recent immigrants, overwhelmingly Muslim, have failed to assimilate and become Europeans, and that such failure to assimilate is threatening the character of the European states in which they now reside.  The European elites, on the other hand, continue to insist that there is "nothing to see here", even as more and more evidence accumulates.  A parent can force a child to not see what the parent cannot tolerate recognizing, but the cost is a damaged child.  A government can only force its population to close their eyes by using force.  In Europe hate speech laws and libel laws are used everyday to silence uncomfortable depictions of reality.  Such efforts leach legitimacy and worsen the tendency toward regression that is already occurring in the face of significant economic stress.

In America, there is a similar insistence by the government, at all levels of bureaucracy, that what we see with our own eyes is illusion and only approved words have meaning.  As Michael Goodwin notes, our government has accepted a victim narrative for Islam from our enemies; as a result we do not need to actually do anything for them to leverage this narrative as a weapon to be used to recruit and attack us:

Menace of 9/11 myths

Let's be kind. Let's say it was a coincidence that, at about the same time the Iranian madman was at the UN spewing his nonsense that 9/11 was an "inside job," the Pakistani terror mom was in a downtown courtroom claiming Israelis destroyed the Twin Towers.

Now let's be honest. The only coincidence was the timing. The similar content of the two claims illustrates a growing menace in the Muslim world.

The myth-making about 9/11 is spreading, and so is the danger. Nine years after the mass murder by Islamic terrorists, conspiracy theories are deflecting Muslim guilt and inflaming a new generation of jihadists, many of them living in the West.

...

To many Muslims, the belief that Islamists are being blamed for an atrocity carried out by Americans or Israelis fits into a larger theory that the West is oppressing Islam.

As I have written, firm opposition by New Yorkers to the Ground Zero mosque is another piece of "evidence" to believers. In short, anything and everything we say and do is proof Islam is under attack.

Tony Blair, the former British prime minister, identifies the wide acceptance of the victimization narrative as a major factor fueling terrorism. As he writes in his memoir, "A Journey," actual terrorists "are small in number, but their narrative . . . has a far bigger hold."

He says Muslim political leadership often "feels impelled to go along with this narrative for fear of losing support."

Or their heads.

Blair sees President Obama's outreach to the Muslim world as ambiguous at best. Writing of Obama's Cairo speech last year, he says, "It was in part an apology, and taken as such. The implicit message was: We have been disrespectful and arrogant."

However, he adds: "The trouble is, respectful of what, exactly?" Respect for Islam "should not mean respectful of the underlying narrative."

What the Obama administration is doing is bleeding their own legitimacy (whatever is left of it at any rate) by denying reality; who are we to believe:  The Obama administration insisting, as the Bush administration did before them, that Islam is the Religion of Peace, the Saudis are our friends, and anyone who questions the violence constantly done in their name is an Islamophobe or those who believe that the Islamists should be confronted and that we should insist upon adherence to our own most cherished values?

While the Republicans spent the first 6 years under Bush squandering their legitimacy, the Democrats in only two years have gone much further. Unfortunately the Obama administration seemingly has insisted on accelerating their loss of legitimacy; a story ignored by the MSM for the last 2 years can be ignored no longer:

Obama Justice Department Rocked

The former head of the Justice Department’s New Black Panther trial team, Chris Coates, testified Friday before the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights. See here and here and here (subscription required). Before Coates broke his silence, the commission’s critics, a minority of the commissioners, and the mainstream media insisted that the dismissal of a slam-dunk voter-intimidation case had no significance beyond the single incident on Election Day 2008. However, Coates’s account of the administration’s hostility to race-neutral enforcement of voting laws and refusal to enforce Section 8 of the Voting Rights Act (requiring that states clean up their voting rolls to prevent voter fraud) blew that assertion to smithereens.

...

As the [Washington] Post conceded, Coates’s testimony will “carry greater weight because he worked decades ago as an attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union, has won awards from civil rights groups and lacks the partisan GOP resume of the department’s harshest opponents.”

Read the whole thing.  One word for the psychological process that fuels selective enforcement based on ethnicity is splitting, a prominent feature of regressed societies.  Splitting actively fostered by the government threatens the concept of equal before the law, a bedrock assumption (even if often breached in practice) of our society.

The next two years are likely to be extremely dangerous.  Beyond the obvious dangers of an Iranian nuclear weapon, a high casualty terror attack on American or Europe, and the risk of not only a double dip recession but worse [HT: Instapundit], the greatest danger is that our political class and our information class (the Media, Academia) have become so cut off from the majority of the population that their legitimacy is collapsing.  Two years of gridlock should the Republican make the projected gains will be tolerable if the Republicans and Democrats act in a minimally responsible manner and make a genuine effort to put the country's fortunes ahead of their personal gain; if the passions in Washington lead the leadership of both parties to intensify their partisan invective, what little is left of their legitimacy may vanish.  A governing ethos which attempts to split the opposition is tenable when there is moderate stress; at times of intensified stress on the system, attempts by the government to enhance regressive splitting is dangerous and irresponsible.

The gulf between Washington and the country is as large as it has been in my life time.  During the Vietnam war, despite the fact that we were protesting against an insular government and thought we were fighting the good fight against war and violence, the stakes were actually quite a bit more modest than now.  The economy was basically sound, though the attempts to have both guns and butter proved damaging.  Today, we are faced with a potential disaster if we do not find a way to rein in borrowing and spending.  This will require genuine entitlement reform, problematic in the best of times, perhaps impossible unless we actually hit the wall. 

Our leadership has lost a great deal of its legitimacy.  A good start on regaining legitimacy would be to start dealing with reality instead of denying it.  It is almost certainly true that the majority of Muslims in America and Europe are not actively trying to install Sharia, but almost everything the Western governments do enhances the power and prestige of the Islamists at the expense of true moderates.  The effect of such fecklessness is to paradoxically empower those forces in Islam and within the reaction against radical Islam that are most likely to devolve into Manichean splitting.

Beyond Corruption

If you get your "news" from the MSM, you will not know that Christopher Coates testified this morning to the Civil Rights Commission on the perversion of justice committed by the Voting Section of the DoJ devoted to the Voting Rights Act.  Ed Morrissey points out one bombshell:

Coates: Obama appointee told me to stop pursuing race-neutral enforcement of Voting Rights Act

PJTVis broadcasting the testimony of Christopher Coates to the Civil Rights Commission live this morning, but they already have his opening statement available in PDF format at Pajamas Media.  It contains at least one bombshell, which is that Obama appointee Loretta King ordered Coates to stop asking applicants whether they supported race-neutral enforcement of the Voting Rights Act.  The question became necessary because of resistance in the Civil Rights division from career attorneys to enforce the law when it resulted in African-American defendants rather than victims, an attitude that Coates first encountered in the Bush era:

Opposition within the Voting Section was widespread to taking actions under the VRA on behalf of white voters in Noxubee County, MS, the jurisdiction in which Ike Brown was and is the Chairman of the local Democratic Executive Committee.  In 2003, white voters and candidates complained to the Voting Section that elections had been administered in a racially discriminatory manner and asked that federal observers be sent to the primary run-off elections.  Career attorneys in the Voting Section recommended that we not even go to Noxubee County for the primary run-off to do election coverage, but that opposition to going to Noxubee was overridden by the Bush Administration’s CRD Front Office.  I went on the coverage and while traveling to Mississippi, the Deputy Chief who was leading that election coverage asked me, “can you believe that we are going to Mississippi to protect white voters?”  What I observed on that election coverage was some of the most outrageous and blatant racially discriminatory behavior at the polls committed by Ike Brown and his allies that I have seen or had reported to me in my thirty-three plus years as a voting rights litigator.

In my perusal of his testimony at the PJM site, I was alarmed (though not surprised) by a second bombshell.  I have been unable to cut and paste so will paraphrase.  (pps 15-16)

In June 2009, the Election Assistcne Commission issued its bi-annual report concerning which states were not complying with Section 8's list maintenncae provisions.  These provisions are in place to insure that voting rolls are periodically updated and ineligible voters removed formt he rolls.  Eight states were identified as particularly egregious offenders.  These states has reported no voters were removed from the rolls in he previous two years!  In some cases there were more voters on the rolls than adults over 18 in the area. (The total number cited in his testimony was 130% of the persons over 18 in Noxubee county.)   Not surprisingly these were predominantly Democrat run states.  As Chief of the Voting Section, Chirspotpher Coates was in achagre of ensuring compliance.  He requested permission to begin an investigation and such permission was never granted.

It is bad enough that the racialists and race hustlers in our community insist there is no such thing as minority racism but for the government to explicitly refuse to grant equal protection to a group of people based on their color is anathema to American values.  This is far more than a peculiar decision by the Obama DoJ not to pursue a case against the New Black Panther Party for voter intimidation, this is an effort to facilitate the subversion of our electoral system and undermine faith in the integrity of our elections.  This is beyond corruption.

[Update] There is much more here:

American Hero: Coates Negates a Year of Justice Department Spin on New Black Panther Case

It has been a very bad week for the dwindling number of people defending the dismissal of the voter intimidation case against the New Black Panther Party by Eric Holder’s Justice Department. Today might have been the worst day of all. Former Voting Section Chief Christopher Coates testified to the United States Civil Rights Commission that Obama political appointees dismissed the case because they are opposed to enforcing civil rights laws in a racially neutral fashion.

And that was just the beginning.

In a dramatic hearing in Washington, D.C., Coates simply destroyed the year-long spin from the Justice Department regarding the dismissal. Coates is the former Voting Section chief, and served as lead attorney on the Black Panther case. He has practiced voting rights law longer than any other lawyer at the Justice Department. His testimony today was the worst possible nightmare for the Obama political officials responsible for the dismissal.

I testified before the Commission in July that Obama political appointee Julie Fernandes made it clear that the Voting Section at the Justice Department would not be bringing any more cases against traditional national racial minorities, like the members of the New Black Panthers. Under oath, Coates corroborated my testimony.

Read the whole thing and here's a prediction: if the Republicans take either House of Congress in November, Eric Holder will shortly thereafter find a need to spend more time with his family.  As the Chinese saying has it: The fish rots from the head.

There'll Always Be An England?

There'll always be an England,
And England shall be free
If England means as much to you
As England means to me.

-- words & music: Parker & Charles

The first time I wondered in a post if There Will Always Be an England? was in May of 2006.  Things have not measurably improved since then, and in some ways the erosion of British freedom has accelerated.

Most Americans, present occupant of the White House excepted, treasure the special relationship with England that has evolved over the last 100 years.  We have fought together, bled together, and died together maintaining what is now quaintly referred to as "the Free World."  The portents are troubling and suggestive that England, the birthplace of our Democracy, has traveled so far down the path to soft despotism that their future is in question.  A terribly troubling article by Melanie Philips offers the first example:

PC Plod loses the plot

A quite devastating report by HM Inspectorate of Constabulary has admitted that the British police have staged a 30 year ‘retreat from the streets’ and abandoned the public to endemic thuggery which has blighted the lives of millions of people.

This report, by the Chief Inspector of Constabulary Sir Denis O’Connor, is a stunning admission of what can only be described as systemic professional collapse. The picture he paints is of a society whose most vulnerable inhabitants have been simply abandoned because the police have, as he bluntly observes, ‘defined disorder down’ -- and effectively out of existence -- as they have looked the other way.

The kind of yobbery he is talking about is, as he says,  

a cumulative, corrosive issue that undermines the ability of victims to live in peace.

Yet the police by and large don’t take it seriously. The principal reason is that anti-social behaviour does not fall into the category of ‘crime’ – and therefore does not register in the crime statistics. And since for years now the police have tailored what they do in order to be seen to be meeting crime statistics targets set by the government, the victimisation of whole communities by yobbery has gone unaddressed.

Not surprisingly, those most victimized by "yobbery", which essentially means thuggery (muggings, petty crime, burglary) are the poor, elderly, infirm, and disabled.  The causes are manifold:

The fact is that, over the past three decades or so, PC Plod has simply lost the plot. There have been many reasons for this: a denigration of policing street experience in favour of increasingly ideological academic qualifications as the criteria for promotion; the undermining of justice and morality by ‘victim culture’ and human rights law; the savaging of police attitudes by the politically correct inquisition; the politicisation of the upper ranks and their kow-towing to Whitehall interference and managerial gobbledegook.

Read the whole thing.  The second data point for the day comes courtesy of the Viking:

Three-year-olds being labelled bigots by teachers as 250,000 children accused of racism

Teachers are being forced to report children as young as three to the authorities for using alleged ‘racist’ language, it was claimed last night.

Munira Mirza, a senior advisor to London Mayor Boris Johnson, said schools were being made to spy on nursery age youngsters by the Race Relations Act 2000.

More than a quarter of a million children have been accused of racism since it became law, she said.

This is PC running out of control.  It is inimical to freedom and mere steps away from re-education camps. 

(It might pay to consider if there are efforts underway to institute another aspect of PC Thought Control on our children: U.S. Education Secretary Vows to Make American Children 'Good Environmental Citizens'.)

A third data point concerns the further erosion of speech rights in England:

Six arrested in Gateshead over 'Koran burning'

Officers detained two men on September 15 and four more yesterday and all six were bailed pending further inquiries, Northumbria Police said.

''The arrests followed the burning of what are believed to have been two Korans in Gateshead on September 11,'' the spokesman said.

''The incident was recorded and a video placed on the internet.''

In a video still accessible on YouTube, six young men in hooded tops or wearing scarves over their faces can be seen pouring petrol on a book and setting it alight, before burning another.

...

Northumbria Police said the men were not arrested for watching or distributing the video, but on suspicion of burning the Koran.

Lest we become too complacent, in America we have our own version of threats to Free Speech, even aside from the pressure brought to bear by government officials on Terry Jones:

Pastor behind Quran plan may face  $200,000 bill

TAMPA — The preacher from Gainesville who ignited a firestorm of criticism over his plan to torch 200 copies of the Quran says he wants to move his church to the Tampa Bay area by the end of the year, NBC affiliate WFLA reported.

He's also facing a $200,000 bill for policing costs during the firestorm his plan created, The Gainesville Sun newspaper said. However, officials say they're not sure they can force him to pay.

England has become a nation which has completely surrendered to Political Correctness.  There is no right to self defense, speech is severely circumscribed so as not to provoke protected victim groups, and the citizenry are no longer protected from society's predators.  The Wolves have been empowered, the Sheep terrified, and the Sheep Dogs emasculated.  The only remaining question is whether the process has gone so far that it is now irreversible.

England is a cautionary tale for America.  There are those who would like nothing less than to follow down the same path.  Here, too, there is a sense that we are fast approaching a point of flection, at which time we will either begin the arduous struggle to reverse course, or surrender to the Progressive erosion of our Freedoms. 

Islam and The Blackmailers’ Paradox

There are some facts that are so intuitively obvious that Nobel Prizes are given for their recognition and codification.  Most people understand by First Grade that if you give a bully your lunch money on the first day of school you will be going without lunch all year.  Robert Aumann won the 2005 Nobel Prize for economics for his work in game theory, or interactive decision theory, a formal analysis of repeated games.  Lee Smith interviewed him to help understand why the Palestinian-Israel Peace Process never seems to end up with Peace:

Wrong Move

Aumann’s analysis of repeated games explains how cultures build systems that allow them to function reasonably smoothly. The problem is when one player does not understand the sort of game being played. For instance, when it comes to the Arab-Israeli peace process, Aumann believes that the problem isn’t that the Israelis and Arabs don’t want peace, but rather that the Israelis and their U.S. patron believe they are playing a one-time game whereas the Arabs see themselves as playing a repeated game. Jerusalem and Washington are in a hurry to conclude negotiations immediately, whereas the Arabs are willing to wait it out and keep playing the same game. The result is that Israel’s concessions, or the desire to have peace now, have brought no peace.

What Aumann is getting at is what he called in his Nobel lecture “one of those paradoxical upside-down insights of game theory.” Of course, poker players are familiar with the principle: Don’t show your hand with chips still on the table. “For repetition to engender co-operation, the players must not be too eager for immediate results,” Aumann said in his lecture. “The present, the now, must not be important. If you want peace now, you may well never get peace. But if you have time—if you can wait—that changes the whole picture; then you may get peace now.”

In Aumann’s view, the post-Oslo period shows that Israel’s behavior leaves it at a serious disadvantage in a repeated game. “In games that repeat over time,” Aumann wrote in an article called “The Blackmailers’ Paradox,” “a strategic balance that is neutral paradoxically causes a cooperation between the opposing sides.” Aumann offered the example of two men forced to split $100,000. Person A assumes that they will split it evenly and is astonished when Person B explains that he will not accept anything less than $90,000. Afraid that he will leave empty-handed, A relents and takes one-tenth of the money. In this situation, A acted as if this were a one-time game, but had he understood it as a repeated game and refused the split so that both he and B walked away empty-handed, he would have shown for future reference that he was every bit as determined as B. This in turn would make B more willing to compromise. “Likewise,” Aumann wrote, “Israel must act with patience and with long-term vision, even at the cost of not coming to any present agreement and continuing the state of belligerence, in order to improve its position in future negotiations.”

Once again, Israel is the canary in the coal mine for the West, for today the game is being played by proponents of Sharia, which includes radical Islam but also includes many who are regularly touted as moderate Muslims, against Western Civilization. 

While the schoolyard bully is easily identified and the dangers of surrendering to his demands are well known, the paradigm is identical for Sharia Islam; yet because the stakes are higher and the dangers greater there are far too many in the West who convince themselves that there is no long game at play.  To fail to see the nature of the threat that Sharia poses to the West requires one to be a charlatan or particularly craven and in denial of one's own fears.  There are many in the West who would like nothing more than to suppress free speech.  Hate speech laws are nothing less than efforts to silence the speech of those who are out of favor with the PC thought police.  Our MSM has marginalized themselves in the struggle to maintain our freedoms, as the Viking trenchantly points out:

If you only have time to click one link on this blog today, make it this one. It's about EDM Day, which I've written about a lot, and it goes into the utter failure of our media and law enforcement institutions. Could you imagine if the FBI said it couldn't protect black people from the KKK? The media would be all over their asses, and rightly so. What has happened to the "creator" of EDM Day is a complete and utter travesty. If you needed any more evidence that NYT writer Nicholas Kristof has his head firmly lodged up his ass, read this article. If you didn't, read the article. Bottom line, read this article.

Molly Norris had the temerity to insult the incredibly easily insulted proponents of Sharia's proscription about any ridicule of their religion or their founder.  Death threats, and the complete failure of our institutions which are supposed to be dedicated to preserving and protecting our freedoms, led her to go into her own Infidel Protection Program.  Where are those members of the MSM who tout their bravery in speaking truth to power?  Where are our officials who have done Shariah limbo in order to support the building of a Mosque of triumph at Ground Zero? 

Our intelligentsia, in an effort to preserve an image of themselves as fearless fighters for all that is good and right in the world, have determined that insulting Islam is a far worse crime than Muslim death threats.  A rural rube threatening to burn a Koran mobilized officials from the President on down and their minions in the media to castigate the intolerance of the Koran burners (who never actually went through with their threats.) Meanwhile an American citizen is in hiding because the RoP has threatened her with death, threats that have proven to  be all too real in the past, for the crime of mocking how Islam has allowed Mohamed to be hijacked by radicals.  (Are they radicals if their program is supported by the majority of Muslims?  Are they only radicals if they use violence as opposed to merely enabling and excusing violence?)

Every time a Western politician or "Statesman" surrenders our freedom to mock and annoy in the service of keeping the worst elements in Islam appeased, we lose another battle in this very long war.  By seeing every instance as a "one-off" we are losing because we are playing a series of isolated single games while our enemies are playing the same game, repeated time and again.  Until we catch on, which means having the adults punish the bullies and letting them know in no uncertain terms that stealing the little kids' lunch money is no longer going to be tolerated, this war will go on.  By appeasing we will keep the casualty rate low ... right up until the day they find a way to make our casualty rates explode.

Check Outside Your Window

It is quite possible that you will see Pigs flying: Judge Crater is correct in his criticism of my post yesterday.  That is not to say that his analogy was appropriate but that his main point is on target:

Using "it has been reported" as a pretext to slander people and to engage in self-serving speculation is a not uncommonly used smear tactic.

First, in order to mitigate the difficulty in admitting error, let me offer all my rationalizations (aka excuses):

I was very pressed for time.

The story was Believable.*

As to the first point, that is a vocational hazard for any Blogger and few of us would accept it as exculpatory.  As for the second point, the fact that a story fit into my pre-existing impression of the President (*confirmation bias) should have been a warning signal to be more, rather than less, careful.

During the Bush administration when all sorts of unsubstantiated charges, often using anonymous sourcing, was presented as fact by those who opposed his policies or his politics, the Right leaning blogosphere correctly lambasted them for resorting to such tactics.  George W. Bush was variously depicted as an out of control "dry drunk", a slave to his Oedipal revenge fantasies (hence the War in Iraq), a draft dodger, and a Narcissist.

In just the same way Barack Obama has been depicted as a secret Muslim, an anti-Colonialist, a Socialist, and a Narcissist. 

As with the attacks on Bush, those who are predisposed to think the worst of a person are much more likely to accept such unsourced stories as, perhaps not literally true, then, to borrow from the Bush Air National Guard scandal, a reflection of a greater Truth.  This is a mistake when done by those with whom I disagree and just as much a mistake when done by me.

Since I do not employ multiple layers of editors and fact checkers I must rely on the wisdom  and vigilance of my readers to keep me alert to my own excesses.  For that reason, it is always a good idea for any blogger to have readers who disagree with him; they are far more likely to point out errors of judgement or fact than those who agree with one's point of view.

Tomorrow, back to my usual blogging when I will, with any luck, irritate and perhaps horrify the Judge once again, by pointing out the follies of the Statists in the Political Industrial Complex.