ShrinkWrapped

Vampires and Zombies: Monsters from the Zeitgeist

This morning I followed a link from Glenn Reynolds to Amazon's top 20 bestsellers in Science Fiction and Fantasy.  I have been a devotee of science fiction for most of my life and have always favored the "hard" sci-fi, starting with Robert Heinlein's books aimed at young adolescent males (which inculcated libertarianism without the reader even being aware, something for which I will always be indebted to the late author.)  In the golden years of Sci-Fi, most of the bestsellers were hard Sci-Fi, with an emphasis on science, and fantasy was the minority genre interest.  This has changed. 

In Amazon's Top 20, there 6 books about vampires (including 3 in the top 5), 6 books that are some variation of sword and sorcery fantasy (2 in the top 10), 2 books about witches, 2 related  books about Roswell aliens (a variant of hard sci-fi apparently), 2 books about Magic, and 1 hard Sci-Fi epic. The remaining book is a collection of Sherlock Holmes stories which more properly would be considered detective stories but make it onto the Amazon Science Fiction and Fantasy list.

This very unscientific mini-survey reflects a change in the zeitgeist. 

In the heyday of monster movies, the late 1950s and early 1960s, the Japanese monster, Godzilla, was recognized to be a manifestation of our fears of nuclear annihilation.  Godzilla was unstoppably destructive and razed most of Tokyo to the ground (repeatedly, in sequels.)  Godzilla was our nightmares become real. 

At the same time Science Fiction was the most optimistic of genres, introducing us to worlds in which anything and everything was possible.

In the 21st century, our nightmares have changed.  Why vampires?  Vampires serve many different functions as a repository of anxiety.  On the most personal level, the relationship between parent and child, in the setting of economic anxiety and modern notions of "helicopter parenting", reflect a deep seated anxiety over supplying and receiving sufficient emotional nurturance.  Parents often experience their needy children as insatiable while children often experience helicopter parents, who cannot tolerate their separation-differentiation, as sucking the life out of their youthful bodies for the support of the older, waning parent.  The fantasy of relationships as Vampire-Prey experiences is a common feature of modern relationship anomie. 

Consider a recent article in Slate magazine.  The imbalance on college campuses between successful young women and the relative paucity of successful young men (a result of long term trends de-emphasizing typically masculine work versus typically feminine pursuits) means that the sexual marketplace has shifted.  Men find women easier to find for casual sex, leaving young men and women in trouble: [HT: Glenn Reynolds]

Sex Is Cheap
Why young men have the upper hand in bed, even when they're failing in life.

Jill, a 20-year-old college student from Texas, is one of the many young women my colleagues and I interviewed who finds herself confronting the sexual market's realities. Startlingly attractive and an all-star in all ways, she patiently endures her boyfriend's hemming and hawing about their future. If she were operating within a collegiate sexual economy that wasn't oversupplied with women, men would compete for her and she would easily secure the long-term commitment she says she wants. Meanwhile, Julia, a 21-year-old from Arizona who's been in a sexual relationship for two years, is frustrated by her boyfriend's wish to "enjoy the moment and not worry about the future." Michelle, a 20-year-old from Colorado, said she is in the same boat: "I had an ex-boyfriend of mine who said that, um, he didn't know if he was ever going to get married because, he said, there's always going to be someone better." If this is "the end of men," someone really ought to let them know.

And yet while young men's failures in life are not penalizing them in the bedroom, their sexual success may, ironically, be hindering their drive to achieve in life. Don't forget your Freud: Civilization is built on blocked, redirected, and channeled sexual impulse, because men will work for sex. Today's young men, however, seldom have to. As the authors of last year's book Sex at Dawn: The Prehistoric Origins of Modern Sexuality put it, "Societies in which women have lots of autonomy and authority tend to be decidedly male-friendly, relaxed, tolerant, and plenty sexy." They're right. But then try getting men to do anything.

A woman who is anxious and desirous of emotional sustenance which is withheld can easily see herself and be seen as a Vampire, while the man who takes what is most precious from her with nothing in return can easily see himself and  be seen as a Vampire.  Further, the lack of depth to sexual relationships, casual sex without commitment or emotional connection, leaves both being little more than Zombies.  After all, what is a zombie but a hollowed out person who can no longer do anything productive?

In addition the dearth of traditional hard Science Fiction on Amazon's list reflects the current pessimism arising from an accelerating pace of change that has us all feeling at times as if we are living in a Science Fiction novel.  In reaction, the ability to transport oneself to realms where Men are MEN and wield swords in manu a manu conflict, and where damsels are distressed (or alternately, powerful independent spirits, desirable and beautiful)  offers a ready wish fulfillment for those who are burdened by too much reality in their lives even as it harkens back to a halcyon (imagined) past where one knew one's place in a stable world.

[On other levels, Vampire fantasies can relate to the sense that the current arrangements that most of us have established between work and play and love have become destabilized.  The changes taking place in the economy as globalization grows means that the traditional, post-war arrangements are changing in unpredictable ways.  (See Walter Russell Meade's discussion of Blue State Dems Turn on State, Local Workers for a sense of the dislocations involved.)  We have workers feeling drained by the demands of their work and the diminution of sustenance (wages) that almost everyone is undergoing.  The ubiquity of Zombies relates as easily to the dread of our foreign competitors (faceless hordes who threaten to overwhelm us) as to the spiritually deadened young men and women who couple and share physical intimacy without ever sharing emotional intimacy.  These are topics for another post.]

Fully Immersive Virtual Reality May Be Closer Than We Think

In practice there should be no difference between fooling your mind that you are in a different body via a mannequin in a lab and the same experience in a computer constructed world, simulation, or game:

Out of Body Experiences

Exploring out-of-body experiences: interview with Henrik Ehrsson

Out-of-body experiences (OBEs) have fascinated people for millennia – their existence has raised fundamental questions about the relationship between human consciousness and the body, and has been much discussed in theology, philosophy and psychology. An OBE occurs when a person who is awake sees his or her own body from a location outside the physical body. OBEs have been reported in clinical conditions where brain function is compromised, such as stroke, epilepsy and drug abuse, or in association with traumatic experiences such as car accidents. Around one in ten people claim to have had an OBE at some point in their lives.

However, the neuroscience behind this phenomenon remains obscure. Henrik Ehrsson, a 38-year-old cognitive neuroscientist at the Karolinska Institutew1 in Stockholm, Sweden, investigates how the brain represents the self, and has induced the phenomenon of OBE in healthy volunteers for the first time. He recreated an illusion in which individuals look at themselves from outside their physical bodies.

The volunteers wear goggles with a video screen for each eye. Each screen is fed with images from a separate camera behind the volunteer and, because the two images are combined by the brain into a single image, the individual sees a stereoscopic (3D) image of his or her own back. We then move a plastic rod towards a location just below the cameras while the volunteer’s chest is simultaneously touched in the corresponding position. The participants reported feeling that they are located back where the cameras are placed, watching a body that belongs to someone else.

I anticipate that with the arrival of true fully immersive virtual reality (FIVR), there will be a mini-epidemic of psychiatric decompensations and psychoses where people who have insecure ego boundaries panic at feeling uncertain about the return to their own bodies.  Perhaps I am wrong and our connection to our bodies is more consistent, adhesive, and specific than these experiments and OBEs suggest, but I have seen enough derealization and depersonalization in my career to anticipate problems.  Whether this will then limit the availability of FIVR is a political question; I doubt even the most hysterical politicians will be able to hold it off for long since the value of FIVR for business, gaming, and, of course, sexual and other entertainment, will be immense.

Character Matters

Yesterday's post generated a fair amount of commentary about the question of American action versus inaction in the Middle East, specifically about the wisdom of intervention in the Libyan turmoil. 

Judge Crater, whose frequent comments are always appreciated (though would be more useful if they could be more specific and constructive) suggested that the entire edifice of neoconservative policy has failed.  In considering the impact of the Iraq War, I am tempted to use Chou en Lai's (perhaps apocryphal) response to the question of the impact of the French Revolution: Its too soon to say.  I do not know if the Arab world is irredeemably autocratic and authoritarian.  It may well be that in one or two generations something resembling a liberal democratic polity will emerge in the Middle East and the entire world will benefit from such a development.  However, the failures of the neoconservative Freedom agenda is not the current question.  As M_O_M so eloquently pointed out in her response to CF, if we refrain from using any of the means at our disposal to support those who are risking their lives for Freedom, we are surrendering what makes us Americans.

This does not require armed intervention. It could be as simple as working out some arrangement sponsored by the UN that allows military people to leave and dump their military assets in areas that are understood as belonging to Libya. Draw up a few naval assets and establish a Libyan naval refuge. Declare a few airports sanctuary. There is something acutely sick about the fact that at least some of the military there are trying to avoid participating in bloodshed and no one on the outside is helping them.

We owe it to ourselves. We owe it to our history. We owe it to our future. Whatever the strange compendium of history, culture, experiment, etc, that went to forming the basic Commonwealth culture that is still alive in parts of the UK, Canada, the US and Australia, and perhaps will still dominate in India, it does require us to make that attempt. If not, we are abandoning that culture willfully.

It is possible to appreciate that what follows a monster like Qaddafi may be a disaster; an Islamist government in Libya would be terrible for Libya, the region, and the world and there may be little we can do to stop it, yet our diffidence in supporting Libyan Freedom fighters with the same passion with which we attack Israeli apartment building is a travesty.

Natan Sharansky (née Anatoly Borisovich Shcharansky) in his memoirs wrote about living in despair in the Gulag.  The belief, fostered by their jailers, that the world did not care about their plight was a constant burden to the prisoners of conscience.  When news of Ronald Reagan's "Evil empire" speech reached the prisoners, it had a galvanizing effect.  They were not forgotten!  The most powerful man in the Free World was with them, even if reality dictated that our support could never be overtly military.

In contrast, our current President, who proudly proclaimed his goal to change America's character to one nearly identical with every other tribal society on the planet (for, after all what is multiculturalism but an amalgamation of competing tribes with individuals subsumed by their tribal identification?)  has offered minimal support, verbal or otherwise, to those in the Middle East who desire the Freedoms we take for granted.  The Obama administration, in their arrogant cynicism, even cut the minimal funds supporting Egyptian (liberal) democrats in the last two years. 

America was founded on the idea that the individual matters.  A nation of individuals rather than tribes has accomplished amazing things and brought Freedom to millions at the sacrifice of much blood and treasure.  America may have a limited capacity to influence change in the Middle East (though there are many things we could be doing short of armed intervention that we are eschewing in favor of working with the international community, ie the UN, the most corrupt and banal institution on the planet) but you would think that the least we could do would be to make it more difficult for madmen to murder their own people.

If our President succeeds in changing our character so that we are no longer a people who support democracy and freedom, even if all we can do is offer verbal support, we may well no longer be exceptional.

History Repeats

Broadly speaking there have been two isolationist trends in American politics.  The isolationist on the Right disdain foreign involvements because they do not think it is wise or appropriate to squander American blood and treasure on non-Americans.  Pat Buchanan and Ron Paul are the two most prominent proponents of such isolationism today.  They are relatively marginal figures on the Right and have little influence in American politics.  The isolationism on the Left has a different provenance and much greater influence on American policy since the Vietnam war.  For the Left, American influence (and the West, in general) has historically been seen as insidious and invidious; America has been, to this way of thinking, more often a force for evil in the world rather than a force for good. 

President Obama came of age politically in a milieu steeped in Academic Leftism, fully endowed with the philosophical belief that America has been an evil empire.  The Left has traditionally ignored or mitigated the evil of non-Americans (going back to the New York Times hagiography of Joseph Stalin, for which William Duranty "earned" a Pulitzer Prize.) 

There is another important trend line in Academic Leftism that also informs current events, that is a distaste and mistrust of action versus contemplation.  For the American and European Leftist, action by and for our interests is inherently unworthy.  Occasional action, when forced to ti in extremis, can be justified when it is quick and painless.  This kind of approach was prominent among the Democrats in the run-up to the Iraq War when they voted overwhelmingly to authorize an invasion for fear of appearing weak and feckless but turned on the endeavor when the struggle bogged down and disaster threatened. 

History is repeating itself in the Middle East.  We have a President who is lagging behind events, nearly paralyzed by his inability to lead and his antipathy for taking steps that might force him into taking action.  At the same time, the usual suspects are preparing the grounds for the triumph of tyrants who are overtly anti-democratic and anti-American.

First, Elliot Abrams on Obama's Pathetic Response to Libya:

This [the President's comment on Libya]  is not so much a feeble response as a non-response. It is an announcement to Qaddafi that we won’t even get the secretary of State moving for five more days—five more days of likely slaughter. The verbs the president employed in his remarks are toothless: we will “monitor” and “coordinate” and “consult.” We will “speak with one voice.” While he “strongly” condemned “the use of violence in Libya” the president could not bring himself to condemn the regime or its leader, the man who is imposing this reign of terror. He did say “the Libyan government has a responsibility to refrain from violence, to allow humanitarian assistance to reach those in need, and to respect the rights of its people. It must be held accountable for its failure to meet those responsibilities, and face the cost of continued violations of human rights.” But at what cost? He did not say. The closest the president came to speaking of action was this: “I’ve also asked my administration to prepare the full range of options that we have to respond to this crisis. This includes those actions we may take and those we will coordinate with our allies and partners, or those that we’ll carry out through multilateral institutions.” No one knows what this means, but it presumably may mean sanctions. Maybe. Next week. Because "prepare" is not an action verb either.   

...

The administration has followed its near silence over Iran in June 2009 and its wavering on Egypt last month with days of silence on Libya. Finally the president has spoken and said next to nothing. For a superpower this is an embarrassment. Belgium and Luxembourg can consult and coordinate and monitor; can we do no more? How about sending Stuart Levey (leaving Treasury soon but still there) off to get freezes on all Qaddafi family assets? Instead of sending Hillary Clinton to the Human Rights Council, how about sending the Marine commandant or the chief of staff of the Air Force to NATO headquarters? Perhaps that message would be a bit more likely to capture Qaddafi's attention. How about demanding indictments of Qaddafi for war crimes right now?

Second, the New York Times, with its finger nowhere near the pulse of events int he Middle East, prepare to treat a modern evil with the same diffidence with which it has treated past evils, from Hitler to Stalin to Mao:

Egypt: The Muslim Brotherhood and Democracy: Listen to Those Who Know Best

The Western media continues to portray the Muslim Brotherhood--without citing any actual evidence and ignoring everything said or written by its leaders in Arabic--as moderate and full of diverse factions.

But what does it mean when Yusuf al-Qaradawi, the most important Islamist cleric in the world and of the Muslim Brotherhood, says, "The revolution is not over yet." He means that, like the Russian revolution of 1917, Egypt should have a two-stage revolution: first, the overthrow of the dictatorship and the development of democracy; second, the revolution to implant an Islamist state. Between one and two million Egyptians listened to that speech and cheered.

Yusuf al-Qaradawi is not a moderate; he is not a democrat; he is an Islamist Nazi who is the most influential cleric in Egypt (and among the most important in Sunni Islam) and is the leader of a group which is indistinguishable from the Nazis in its genocidal desires.  The New York Times and much of the MSM have not noticed.

When so many of the policy prescriptions proposed by the Left cause misery and pain, it is tempting to look for a Psychological explanation.  Moral Masochism was proposed by Freud as an explanation for negative therapeutic responses: [My additions in brackets and italics.]

Moral masochism is seeking unpleasure without being aware of the masochistic sexual satisfaction thus obtained because of unconscious feelings of guilt.

[The connection to masochistic sexual satisfaction deserves explication.  All of our impulses, fantasies, wishes, etc ultimately stem from very primitive sexual and aggressive drives derivatives.  The connection posited by Freud for Moral Masochism back to sexual masochism can be attenuated and of minimal importance in many people.]

Freud used the term moral in The Ego and the Id (1923b), where he linked negative therapeutic reactions to a "what may be called a moral factor" (p. 49), an unconscious sense of guilt and its satisfaction by means of punishment and suffering.

In "The Economic Problem of Masochism" (1924c), Freud described moral masochism as the third form of masochism, alongside feminine masochism and erotogenic masochism. In moral masochism the connection to an external object comes undone: "The suffering itself is what matters; whether it is decreed by someone who is loved or by someone who is indifferent is of no importance. It may even be caused by impersonal powers or circumstances; the true masochist always turns his cheek whenever he has a chance of receiving a blow" (p. 165).

[Freud's limitation in understanding Narcissism and its vicissitudes, especially in its societal reflection in Honor-Shame dynamics, left his theories one-sided; his concentration on libidinal explanations, sometimes rather tortured explanations, have been superseded in many areas.  Masochism, self harm gratifying unconscious desires, is often related to deeply buried unconscious sado-masochistic sexual fantasies, but for may not be the only or most important dynamic in particular people or societies.]

Unconscious guilt feelings are thus assuaged. This is at once one of the greatest benefits of neurotic suffering and the source of negative reactions to therapy. Freud made the valuable observation that the notion of a need for punishment applies only to patients whose sense of guilt remains unconscious. The ego's masochism in fact stems from the cruel superego, which, at its formation, assumed the mantle of the introjected parents. "The dark power of Destiny" (p. 168) is the final figure in this series of authorities that begins with the parents, and it remains their unconscious representative. Whereas self-punishment by the cruel superego is consciously perceived, this is not the case with masochism of the ego.

... Arising from instinctual fusion and libidinal satisfaction, moral masochism comes from a death drive that has not been diverted outward, and for this reason is dangerous.

For the Left, there are a number of additional steps that must be understood before their anti-Americanism can be fully grasped.  The guilt must be generalized; in other words, the Leftist does not see his guilt as emerging in part from his personal relationships, especially to his early objects (parents, siblings); rather his guilt is an intellectual construct arrived at by studying Western Civilization's perfidy over the centuries.  Next, the guilt must be externalized.  He is not the guilty party; only those who support America's past, traditional American values, believers in American exceptionalism, have become imbued with American guilt.  Finally the Masochism is inverted and turned into a sadistic attack on those upon whom the guilt has been projected.  For the Left, they are in no way responsible for the evils of America (genocide of Indians, racism, various other isms that are imagined to only exist in America and Europe); it is the Capitalists/Republicans/Whites (pick your scapegoat) who are responsible for all the evils of our history and our present.  The results would be amusing if the world were a more forgiving place.  For example, President Obama has been so committed to being "not George W. Bush" that he has made himself into a caricature of an Academic Leftist in over his head in the White House.

Thus we see the Left, once proudly proclaiming their support for freedom against tyranny, remaining nearly silent while mercenaries hired with Libyan oil money shoot unarmed protesters and truly evil, anti-democratic forces of Islamic Nazism, plot to gain power in the Middle East.  If the Muslim Brotherhood gains power in Egypt, all those who the Left so loudly support, Gays, women, minorities, will be forced under the yoke of totalitarian Islam, with America's silent complicity:

If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face - forever

George Orwell

Work ...

has been more intense than usual, which has interfered with blogging today.  Luckily, the world will still be a mess tomorrow so I should have something to add.

And just to clarify, my comments yesterday

Any comments that suggest that the current administration is staffed by people who do not appear to support traditional American notions of Freedom will reluctantly be disqualified because they simply cannot be true (as the supporters of the Obama administration continually insist) and such comments are, therefore, un-civil.

were meant as sarcasm, which does not translate very well on the internet.  The sad fact is that the current administration does an excellent impression of what one might expect to see if a group of left wing, anti-American undergraduates were able to enact their  fantasies of an ideal West Wing administration. 

Compare and Contrast

There is a lot of turmoil in the world right now, much of it centered in the Middle East where Arabs and Muslims are attempting to throw off the yoke of their tyrants.  Consider how the Obama administration has reacted:

Libya:  One of the most brutal, sociopathic dictators in the world, running his nation as his private fiefdom, uses his security forces to kill peaceful demonstrators in the hundreds.  The Obama response is measured and careful; from the Wall Street Journal: [All emphases added-SW]

"We are working to ascertain the facts, but we have received multiple credible reports that hundreds of people have been killed and injured in several days of unrest," State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley said in a statement. He added that "the full extent of the death toll is unknown due to the lack of access of international media and human rights organizations.''

...

"We have raised to a number of Libyan officials, including Libyan Foreign Minister Musa Kusa, our strong objections to the use of lethal force against peaceful demonstrators," Mr. Crowley said.

Libyan officials said they were committed "to protecting and safeguarding the right of peaceful protest. We call upon the Libyan government uphold that commitment,'' Mr. Crowley said. The U.S. wants Libya to "hold accountable any security officer who does not act in accordance with that commitment," he added.

The comments came as protesters continued to challenge authoritarian governments from North Africa to the Persian Gulf. U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said the Obama administration would support—but not seek to direct—pro-democracy forces.

"We cannot dictate the outcomes. We cannot tell countries what they're going to do," Mrs. Clinton said.

Iran: People are again risking their lives to protest against the Mullacracy in Iran; it is interesting that a search of the New York Times and on Google brings up a story from a week ago, and nothing today:

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said Monday that Tehran's crackdown on demonstrators, after it had praised the popular uprising in Egypt, shows the "hypocrisy" of the Iranian government.  Clinton said steps by the Egyptian military thus far to manage a democratic transition are reassuring. 

U.S. officials have made no secret of their irritation over the Iranian government’s suppression of dissent, while claiming credit for popular foment in Egypt and elsewhere in the region.

Again, the response is quite measured; we are "irritated" by their suppression of dissent; I suppose that in Diplospeak, "suppression" is synonymous with murder and torture.

Now, contrast with the Obama administration response after their politically motivated veto of a UN Resolution condemning Israel for building new apartments in territory that is universally understood, including by the Palestinians, to be part of Israel in any conceivable comprehensive agreement:

Our opposition to the resolution before this Council today should therefore not be misunderstood to mean we support settlement activity. On the contrary, we reject in the strongest terms the legitimacy of continued Israeli settlement activity. For more than four decades, Israeli settlement activity in territories occupied in 1967 has undermined Israel’s security and corroded hopes for peace and stability in the region. Continued settlement activity violates Israel’s international commitments, devastates trust between the parties, and threatens the prospects for peace…

It is the Israelis’ and Palestinians’ conflict, and even the best-intentioned outsiders cannot resolve it for them. Therefore every potential action must be measured against one overriding standard: will it move the parties closer to negotiations and an agreement? Unfortunately, this draft resolution risks hardening the positions of both sides. It could encourage the parties to stay out of negotiations and, if and when they did resume, to return to the Security Council whenever they reach an impasse…

While we agree with our fellow Council members—and indeed, with the wider world—about the folly and illegitimacy of continued Israeli settlement activity, we think it unwise for this Council to attempt to resolve the core issues that divide Israelis and Palestinians. We therefore regrettably have opposed this draft resolution.

So anti-American tyrants murder their own people and we express irritation; Israel, our single closest and most reliable ally in the Middle East, builds apartments and we are outraged and rush to join in with the UN lynch mob in attacking Israel's legitimacy.

Feel free to discuss among yourselves.  Any comments that suggest that the current administration is staffed by people who do not appear to support traditional American notions of Freedom will reluctantly be disqualified because they simply cannot be true (as the supporters of the Obama administration continually insist) and such comments are, therefore, un-civil.

[For the record, before 1948, Arab pogroms against the Jewish population of Palestine were a regular occurrence.  After Israel achieved statehood in 1948 it was attacked by 5 Arab armies.  After the 1967 War, the Arabs announced the Three No's of Khartoum: No Peace; No recognition; No negotiation.  More wars followed and while Egypt and Jordan agreed to a cold Peace with Israel, the Palestinians to this day refuse to accept Israel as a Jewish state and continue to explicitly support genocide of the Jews.  That is why there is no Palestinian state.]

MSM Failures Continued: NPR Edition

NPR is the radio station of, by, and for liberal elites. I typically listen to their news reports at the top of the hour and occasionally will spend more time there when they have interesting guests or discussions. Their slant is clearly and distinctly to the left and this is not a problem when they report the news. However, when their slant causes them to misreport or simply to ignore the most important news, their ignorance is decidedly not blissful.

This morning, rather than my usual 5 minutes of attention I listened carefully to their morning news show, The Takeaway, as they discussed events in the Middle East, with an emphasis on Bahrain, Libya, and Egypt.

The discussion of Libya was fair. They did report on the danger facing the protesters (ie, the Libyan security forces have never shown much restraint when it comes to protecting Qaddafi's private kingdom) and that the security forces fired into the crowds yesterday, killing at least 15 (and probably much more.) There was little mention of that fact that the worst fascists are the least likely to be deposed and there was some reason for hope the that Libyans will be able to remove their regime. However, their discussion of Egypt and Bahrain were, to be generous, lacking.

In fact, their discussion of Bahrain was nothing less than astonishing. For almost ten minutes they discussed the violence there and its impact on the neighborhood. They interviewed a sports reporter who was in Bahrain for the Bahrain Grand Prix race (which at the time had not yet been canceled but has now apparently been canceled because of the violence.) They then interviewed a BBC reporter for his insights on the impact of events on the Bahrain banking industry (in competition with Dubai, et al, to be the primary banking hub between the Muslim world and the Global Economy) and they made some mention of the problems facing America in our confrontation with Iran should our Fifth Fleet lose its base in Bahrain. What was astonishing is that in the entire story there was no mention made of the religious dimension to the violence; there was no mention that it is the Shia majority protesting against the Sunni rulers that is the key issue in Bahrain; most egregiously there was no discussion at all of the likelihood (certainty) that Iranian agents were involved in every aspect of the uprising. Nor was there mention of Iranian claims to Bahrain, an oil rich island that would enhance Iran's portfolio. This is not news reporting; this is non-news reporting. NPR managed to obfuscate more than they illuminated.

In their discussions of Egypt, they continually referred to today's gathering in Tahrir Square featuring Yusuf al-Qaradawi's first sermon there in 30 years, as a demonstration celebrating the protesters victory over the government of Mubarak.

 Here is a picture and some tweets from Tahrir Square:

 

 Excerpts from his sermon  and a photo of Tahrir

1. about 3 hours ago via web

2. Egyptians on Meydan Tahrir will pray the Salat El Ghaib (prayers for the absent) for "All those who died during Mubarak's 30 year rule" about 3 hours ago via web

3. Al Qaradawi delivered the last speech in Egypt in 1981 after the assasination of Sadat & has been banned ever since. Via @AlArabiya_Eng about 3 hours ago via web

4. Qaradawi says that there are three million people. They will pray both noon & afternoon prayers. Amazing scenes. Will take a page grab. about 3 hours ago via web

5. Awesome aerial view of Meydan Tahrir now. Easily over a million people. Time in Egypt 12:50pm http://yfrog.com/h225249537j about 3 hours ago via Twitter for iPhone

6. Qaradawi: To the brave Egyptian army, I ask you to open Rafah border crossing so that Gazans can get the supplies they need. about 3 hours ago via web

7. Emotions surge: Qaradawi: I pray that God as he has let me see a free Egypt to see a free Quds (Jerusalem), so I can deliver a speech there. about 3 hours ago via web

8. Qaradawi: to Arab leaders, don't lie to your people & trick them, respect their minds. This is my message to Arab leaders. about 3 hours ago via web

9. Qaradawi: One final word to Arab leaders, don't fight history, you can't delay the day when it starts. The Arab world has changed. about 3 hours ago via web

10. There are more people praying together in Cairo's Meydan Tahrir than in Mecca today. about 3 hours ago via web

11. Al Qaradawi has probably never & will probably never again deliver a sermon to two million people. This is the highlight of his 85-year life about 3 hours ago via web

12. Qaradawi: It is the right of all Egyptians to have all their rights, but we must also have patience so our brothers in the Army can work about 3 hours ago via web

13. Qaradawi: The army must transfer power to a civil rule as soon as possible. Away from this gov who sent camels & ran over protesters in cars about 3 hours ago via web

14. Qaradawi: I ask the army to free immediately all political prisoners who lived for years in jail due to emergency laws & military courts about 3 hours ago via web

15. Qaradawi: I ask the army to free us from the cabinet that Mubarak has appointed who is responsible for so many crimes. about 3 hours ago via web

16. Qaradawi: Tareq El Bishri (who is responsible for the constitutional amendments) is great intellect, fair and wise (+ tons of praise) about 3 hours ago via web

17. Qaradawi: In my first sermon after his (Mubarak's) terrible speech, I said the Egyptian army won't be less patriotic than the Tunisian army. about 3 hours ago via web

18. Qaradawi: I salute the Egyptian army, who are the protectors of the Egyptian people & stood by them, I always believed so. about 3 hours ago via web

19. Qaradawi: I call on Copts today who have protected Muslims & stood by them to prostrate with them as a thanks to God. about 3 hours ago via web

20. Qaradawi: I was in Cairo & a Christian Egyptian came to me to thank me for pulling the people together. about 3 hours ago via web

21. Qaradawi: To all Egyptians, the Quran mentions Egypt five times, it is the only country, it says "Enter Egypt by God's will in security" about 3 hours ago via web

22. Qaradawi: Don't let anyone steal the revolution from you. Those hypocrites who will wear a new face that suits them. Guard your revolution about 3 hours ago via web

23. Qaradawi: I wish to kiss the hands of everyone of you for what you have done. The revolution hasn't ended, it is continuing to build Egypt about 3 hours ago via web

24. Qaradawi: You had patience & that is why you succeeded. Over state security, snipers, torture & camel riders. I congratulate you all. about 3 hours ago via web

25. Qaradawi: There were the poor & the rich, Muslims & Christians, men & women all were one working to free Egypt from tyranny & evil

There is news from the world, much of it unsettling, and there is “news” from the world, a more comforting mix of Freedom and Peaceful Revolution, without the danger of passionate, America hating, viciously misogynistic, homophobic, anti-Christian, anti-Semitic, and paranoid religious sentiment discomfiting the anchors at NPR.

The Takeaway from the Takeaway? If NPR represents state of the art reporting on the Middle East, no one should be surprised that our government is completely unprepared for events and we are all flying blind.

NPR's new logo:

 

The Most Important News Today in Egypt...The MSM? MIA.

You will search the New York Times today in vain for the most important news story yet on the unfolding events in Egypt.  As of this morning there has been no mention of the triumphant return of  Yusuf al-Qaradawi, the best-known Muslim Brotherhood cleric in the world and one of the most famous Islamist thinkers.  His weekly Television show from exile from Egypt was watched  by ~60,000,000 people every week.  His ideas are anathema to the West and his idea of Freedom is freedom to submit to Sharia Law.  He is now in Tahrir Square preparing to give the Friday Sermon.  As of this morning, the Square is filled, with one report claiming the crowds are larger than at any time during the Revolution.  Ahrom on line is live blogging the event; here are some early highlights:

Live Update: Egypt's Friday of victory and continuity

13:35PM Journalists march from their syndicate to Tahrir demanding that their profession be cleansed of all symbols of Mubarak's regime.

13:27PM Activist Mona Seif reports on Twitter that Cairo University staff are marching to Tahrir from Manyal.

13:18PM The number of people in Tahrir today could be the highest so far, certainly this early in the day. The square is packed.

It is deplorable that the learned commentators at the Times and our prominent media outlets do not even know that they are missing the most important story in Egypt.  Worse, our government and media seem to have adopted the belief that the Muslim brotherhood is "moderate." 

[Claire Berlinski does an excellent job describing how "expert opinion" can be shaped by those who have a particular slant; like Wormtongue, the experts are insidious.  The best advice remains: Follow the Money.] 

Here is some information about Yusuf al-Qaradawi that might be relevant to our policy considerations in Egypt:

Egypt Gets Its Khomeini: Qaradawi Returns in Triumph

Qaradawi, though some in the West view him as a moderate, supports the straight Islamist line: anti-American, anti-Western, wipe Israel off the map, foment Jihad, stone homosexuals, in short the works.

One of Qaradawi's initiatives has been urging Muslims to settle in the West, of which he said, “that powerful West, which has come to rule the world, should not be left to the influence of the Jews alone.” He contends that the three major threats Muslims face are Zionism, internal integration, and globalization. To survive, he argues, Muslims must fight the Zionists, Crusaders, idolators, and Communists.

Make no mistake, Qaradawi is not some fossilized Islamic ideologue. He is brilliant and innovative, tactically flexible and strategically sophisticated. He is subtle enough to sell himself as a moderate to those who don't understand the implications of his words or look beneath the surface of his presentation. 

What is his view of both the Mubarak regime and the young, Facebook-flourishing liberals who made the revolution? As he said in 2004: “Some Arab and Muslim secularists are following the U.S. government by advocating the kind of reform that will disarm the nation from the elements of strength that are holding our people together.”

Have no doubt. It is Qaradawi, not bin Ladin, who is the most dangerous revolutionary Islamist in the world and he is about to unleash the full force of his power and persuasion on Egypt. [Emphasis mine-SW]

Who are you going to bet on being more influential, a Google executive and an unorganized band of well-intentioned liberal Egyptians or the world champion radical Islamist cleric?

Perhaps Barry Rubin is too pessimistic about his neighbors in Egypt.  Maybe all will turn out well and a relatively moderate government will emerge in Egypt.  Unfortunately we are still paying, 30 + years later, for our failure to anticipate and counter the radical Shia Revolution in Iran.  A radical Sunni revolution in Egypt has the potential to be an exponentially greater disaster.

"Society is Always Three Meals Away From Savagery"

From time to time it is useful to zoom out and take a longer perspective on events.  Ray Kurzweil, author of The Singularity is Near, considers the long stretch from the Big Bang to the near future as a story of the punctuated equilibrium evolution of information processing.  According to Kurzweil, some time in the 2040's the information processing power of our computational devices will reach, and then rapidly surpass, the human brain.  At that point, there is no way to predict the course of human, or post-human, history.  There is good reason to believe that on the pathway to the Singularity (which may, if malevolent AI develops, be the end of human history) there will be fundamental clashes between those elements of human irrationality which aim to destroy civilization and those forces within us which tend to build civilization.

The wave of unrest that is sweeping through the Middle East, the birthplace of Civilization, illustrates the risks and rewards that may emerge from the current destabilization of the status quo.  The possible emergence of consensual democracy in Egypt could, in time, facilitate Egyptian Arab Muslims joining the modern world.  Such an outcome, as devoutly as we may wish, is not the most likely outcome.  It would require finesse and a level of commitment and organization that has not been seen in the Middle East outside of the Muslim Brotherhood and would also require the full (though subtle) force of American support, an unlikely possibility considering the ideological stance of our President who seems to have difficulty making difficult decisions.  Even if democracy or some semblance emerges, it is by no means certain that the short term outcome will be salutary.  Democracies can easily be swayed by their passions and there is no passion stronger in Egypt right now than hatred of Israel.  A war in the Middle East would threaten the lifeblood of the modern world, oil.  The more likely outcomes in Egypt, a new totalitarianism by the Army or MB, present their own quanta of risk. 

The problematic fact is that the Egyptian revolution is a mere digression from the underlying realities of the Middle East: There are too many people inhabiting failing economies who have too little money to support themselves and feed themselves in a world which is becoming more and more competitive and more and more complex.

In Egypt, Tunisia, and Neo-Mathusianism, I suggested three possible outcomes to this conundrum:

1) The marginal peoples discover ways to increase their productivity to catch up to their populations (as so many nations in Asia have done since WWII.)

2) The productive nations find an exponential increase in their productivity so that they have enough excess largess to support (ie, bribe) the failed economies of the world.

3) The marginal states descend into greater chaos and the ancient scourges of famine and pestilence, with a soupçon of terror and war, emerge to devour ever greater numbers.

It may be possible to wall off the Middle East if the 3rd option comes to fruition but this neglects an important point for those of us who inhabit the Modern World, ie Tom Barnett's Core.  As the world has gotten smaller and more interconnected, the level of complexity has increased markedly.  If Joseph Tainter is correct that complex societies start to fail when the marginal returns on increased complexity in solving societal problems peak and start to diminish, then our increased interconnectedness, which provides significant resiliency for those who are connected, is also a potential source of catastrophic collapse.

The Global order is still working through the results of the economic meltdown of the last few years.  Climate change, man caused or from natural causes, is a given (though at the moment cooling seems as likely as warming) and events such as China's drought, mean that in an interconnected world the least efficient economies will suffer terribly from any disruptions. 

The Arab nations have a tendency to externalize their problems and seem to prefer violence as their primary form of conflict resolution.  The inescapable fact is that they also do not grow enough food to feed themselves and the title of this post reflects reality.

It is possible to concoct scenarios in which the entire global order disintegrates, taking with it the near future and any hope of reaching the Singularity.  It will take a fair amount of luck and resilience in the world's most efficient economies to bridge the gap between our current economies of scarcity and a potential future of abundance. 

[Without going into detail, the abundance is certain if we can make it for another 20-30 years.  Mature nanotechnology means that the cost of goods will decrease exponentially; if you can literally print a computer on your desktop, or a Stradivarius, for the cost of a few pennies worth of raw materials and a small fee to the designer, the cost of "things" will be vanishingly small.  Once we grow our meat in vats, the cost of food will also start to descend rapidly.  Eventually our grandchildren and their children will make what they want and need in their homes and grow their own food in the basement.  This does not presuppose a Singularity but may be necessary for us to reach the Singularity.]

Lately, there has been a great deal of attention being paid to Civil Defense; administration comments have not inspired confidence that we are protected from a dirty bomb or a nuclear attack by non-state actors.  Our relative decline in power, a necessary transition in a globalizing world but a transition unnecessarily sped up by our President's disinterest in foreign affairs and inability to rein in his desires to spend for his constituencies, means that the likelihood of an attack has increased.  How our enemies factor in the appearance of a disinclination to respond to confrontation is impossible to gauge; but our current course is clearly not making Iran more amenable to peaceful coexistence with its own people or its neighbors.  In a world "red in tooth and claw" a defenseless animal, even if defenseless by choice, is attacked rather than allowed to slink away in peace.

One of the great errors in liberal foreign policy is the belief that if we refrain from using our power, people will like us more and therefore be more willing to live in peace.  The sad fact is that the world has been most at peace when the United States was most powerful.  The turmoil in the Middle East, with its potential to metastasize and mutate, is worsening in response to the American retreat from confrontation with the Islamists, both Shia and Sunni.  Our foreign policy is being run by people who seem eager to disengage from the Middle East, abandon the battlefield to Iran, the Taliban (and their supporters in Pakistan), and willing to elevate the Muslim Brotherhood, the font from which much of today's radical Islam has emerged, to a position of power in Egypt.

Through much of the Cold War the consensus mantra was that any future world war was likely to start in the Middle East.  With the importance of the Middle East as great as ever (in fact our refusal to drill for our own energy makes their resources even more important than in the 1970's)  turmoil in the Middle East has the potential to facilitate collapse for all of us.

Our Next President

An adult addressing adult problems: