ShrinkWrapped

The New Millennial Mania

Recent conceptions of Mania have likened it to a Seizure Disorder.  In this construct, an unstable groups of cells in the Cerebral Cortex become highly excitable and begin to fire with an increased frequency and intensity.  As they stimulate all of the neurons with which they have synaptic connections, these neurons are recruited into an ever widening network of neurons firing at elevated rates and intensities.  In a Seizure disorder, the network rather quickly becomes disorganized and the neural functioning becomes grossly impaired.  The result is a disorganized firing of neurons leading to loss of consciousness and uncontrolled stimulation of the end organs (muscles) which results in the typical spasmodic twitching of the Seizure victim.  In Mania, such elevated firing rates and intensities overwhelms the baseline neural activity which causes disturbances in sleep, appetite, and energy level/expenditure, as well as impairing the higher cognitive functioning of the brain.  As a result the manic patient loses his ability to accurate perceive and test reality.  In other words, he misunderstands reality in ways which are characteristically pathological.  The Manic patient, whose antic behavior brings him into conflict with his loved ones and often with authorities, perceives the efforts of others to control his behavior as persecutory.  He is typically quite irritable and irrational, in the worst case ready to fight at a moment's notice, and often becomes overtly paranoid and delusional.  At that point the person has usually become a danger to himself and/or others and must be hospitalized for the protection of himself and the greater society.  No amount of reasoned and rational debate can convince the patient that his psychotic weltanschauung is disordered.

On occasion, large groups of people exhibit behaviors that, if found in an individual, would be understood as Manic and Paranoid.  Throughout human history there have been periods marked by seemingly psychotic and bizarre actions sweeping through entire populations.  These Millennial movements usually take place during times of severe societal stress but are only predictable in retrospect. [HT: Richard Landes]

A World Gone Mad

I  hesitate to go as far as Melanie Phillips, who labels the growing, frenzied international vilification of Israel "a global pogrom in the making." No, it seems to me more like widespread loss of sanity. The general hysteria, not just in the Islamic world but in Europe and the Americas too, brings to mind the words of the late British historian Norman Cohn, written more than a decade ago:

There exists a subterranean world where pathological fantasies disguised as ideas are churned out by crooks and half-educated fanatics for the benefit of the ignorant and superstitious. There are times when this underworld emerges from the depths and suddenly fascinates, captures, and dominates multitudes of usually sane and responsible people, who thereupon take leave of sanity and responsibility. And it occasionally happens that this underworld becomes a political power and changes the course of history."

We now seem to be witnessing such a period of insanity, and it may well change the course of history. While the trend has been gaining momentum for some time, it took a grotesque distortion of Israel's operation against the Gaza flotilla to reveal the level to which much of the international community has sunk. One of the pinnacles of lunacy came from Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu, who, without blinking an eye, told reporters over breakfast in Washington that Israel's action was Turkey's 9/11.

...

None of this [exculpatory evidence- SW] makes any difference to the raving hordes that are storming the Israeli embassies, drowning out Israel's voice in the universities and flooding the airwaves and thousands of opinion columns in the press with their delirious portrayal of Israel. To them, facts seem to be a nothing but a distraction, and no evidence from Israel will change their mind. At the moment, even friends appear to have been bitten by this bug.

In a world gone mad, to be right is not good enough - we need to be smart. Israel needs to immediately establish its own independent commission of inquiry. In fact that should have been Prime Minister Netanyahu's first public announcement after the flotilla operation. By delaying the announcement, Israel has lost valuable points once again.

There are going to be very difficult times ahead for Israel. We need to reduce our conflicts with the international community to the ones that are most critical for our survival, and stick to them.

What is happening in the Muslim World is nothing less than a Millennialist movement in Islam.   Shia Islam has always been a Millennialist sect; the extremist group in charge of Iran, followers of the Twelfth Imam, believe that by precipitating the final clash between Good and Evil they will set in motion events leading to the emergence of the Twelfth Imam from the well in which he has been hiding for 1000 years and the Caliphate will be restored.  One plausible explanation for Turkey's recent moves presenting themselves as an authentic protector of the besieged Palestinian victims, is that by so doing Turkey will be able to wrest the leadership of the Muslim world from the Shia Persians, with whom the Turks have been at odds for several hundred years.  At the same time, by enabling the Iranian nuclear program while demonizing the Israelis, the Turks support Muslim solidarity while creating conditions that rationalize their need for their own nuclear program, in public to protect against the hated Jews, in private to offset the hated Persians.  However, there is a problem with riding the tiger of Millennialism:  [My comments are in parentheses.]

Millenarianism

Fourth, millenarian ideas have qualities which makes them tend to form the nuclei of narrative communities. The believers in the millenarian story have a role to play in the story, and so to accept the story is to feel that one is, or should be, part of the community of believers. Non-believers are not part of the community. But, in such situations, there is a natural tendency to think that everyone who is not part of the community is an enemy of the community, and since the real enemy is the Adversary, they are (at least) the Adversary's tools. [Community=The Ummah] ...

Fifth, there is an element of positive feedback at work. [Millennial movements must grow, ie recruit new members, or begin to die out, extinguish.  Since the movement si sustained by a manic passionate intensity, it cannot last indefinitely.] ...

Sixth, millenarian movements are not sustainable, for the simple reason that the millennium is not now at hand, and never has been. [Emphasis added- SW] When this becomes apparent --- and the human capacity for wishful thinking is not so great that it won't, eventually, become apparent --- something has to give. Either the movement ceases to be millenarian, or it collapses qua movement, leaving behind, perhaps, a few die-hard followers who keep finding reasons why the glorious day should be just a little more remote than they thought.... (Logically speaking, the failure of all previous millenarian expectations doesn't mean that they will necessarily be disappointed in the future. By definition, however, at most one of them could succeed.) The first five considerations apply, mutatis mutandis, to many other kinds of movement, like novel political ideologies; this one does not.

Taking these things together, we reach the conclusion that, in order to become large, a millenarian movement must grow very rapidly, if it is not to be killed off by disillusionment, but that this is hard, because many mechanisms work against rapid growth, particularly the rapid growth of a small movement. But under what circumstances will those inhibitory mechanisms not apply?

Read the rest of Cosma Rohilla Shalizi's post for some further discussion of Millenarianism, including its roots and the conditions that foster its spread.  Consider that the current conditions are ripe for such a movement.  Modernism has brought the failure of the Muslim world into unmistakable focus.  The presence of a Jewish state, run by dhimmis, in land once formerly part of the Dar al Islam, is a constant reminder, a constant irritant, to the Muslims whose pride and honor are damaged more everyday by the insult of Israel's continued existence.  The passions being aroused in the Middle East are not amenable to reason or reality.

Further, and more chilling, the wild fire of anti-Semitic Millenial rage flowing through the Umma, cannot be quenched as long as Israel continues to exist.  This means that the existence of Israel represents an existential threat, on many different levels, to the versions of Islam being promulgated by the Shia and Sunni Millennialists in the Middle East.  The pressure must intensify against Israel.  Iran is certainly playing their part, as their genocidal, eliminationist rhetoric escalates.  If Israel cannot be destroyed by the Iranians, and soon, the spasms of passion and rage will either dissipate or need to be re-directed against a more available opponent. 

Israel's best hope is to hunker down and play defense.  They may well be forced into making the terrible decision to protect themselves from an existential, nuclear attack (though so far, it appears that Iran does not yet have the capacity to attack Israel with nuclear weapons.)  Israel must not be drawn into another War it cannot win.  The more time that passes without an Iranian nuclear attack, the more likely it is that Israel will weather the storm.  The more time that passes, the more likely it becomes that the Millennial passions now at play will burn out; the manic episode will pass, and all will be able to breathe a sigh of relief.  Israel must work on its defensive missile screen, Iron Dome and derivatives, protect itself as best it can, and wait.

For the Umma, the lessons of Psychiatry and Neurology should be understood and recognized: The aftermath of a Seizure is a period of confusion and enervation; the aftermath of a Manic episode is a Depression.

A Time of Testing

The news out of the Middle East is dispiriting.  Israel has suffered a major defeat in the information war being waged against it.  Among Israel's friends the reactions ranges from anger at the Israeli government for botching the response to the aid convoy to appropriate concern that Israel Does Not Understand 4GW.  The soldiers who boarded the Turkish ship were inexcusably unprepared by their military/political superiors for the violent reception they met.

Yaacov Lozowick points out the ecology of Israel's existential crisis:

We need to step back and remind ourselves of the broad picture of the concentric circles at whose center we live.

The outer circle is the utter hatred large swathes of the Muslim World bear towards the idea and reality of a Jewish state. As a demonstrator in Istanbul shouted, there can be no Jewish state in the Arab world: what bothers him about the siege of Gaza is that Jews are in the position to impose it, not it's particular details. (The irony of Turks hating Jews for infractions of human rights or international law is striking).

The next circle are the Westerners of various stripes who also wish Israel gone, and reject the right of the Jews to be a nation. Many of the hate-motivated Muslims are willing or eager to engage in violence. Most of the Westerns haters aren't. They prefer to spew their malice at places like the Guardian, as documented daily by CiFWatch, or at many similar cesspools. Some, however, go further: Gerta Berlin, for example, a spokesperson of the Free Gaza Movement which collaborated in launching the flotilla, tells proudly that she's been active in Palestinian causes since the early 1960s, when Gaza was occupied by Egypt, not that she cared. She and her ilk are enemies of Israel, and will hi-jack whatever narrative holds out promise of damaging Israel. Today it's Gaza, before that it was Jenin, and next it will be... whatever.

Then there's the very large circle of cynics idealists and the lazy. The cynics are epitomized by, say, China. The Chinese don't care about international law or morality. They care about power and China. When working with Israel fits their purposes they'll do so gladly; when not, not. In neither case will they be motivated by the conditions in Gaza, to which they are utterly indifferent unless there's an angle for Chinese profit.

The idealistic and lazy typically rely on an international media that has been repeatedly "played" by those forces inimical to Western Civilization and as a result tend to buy into the narrative of brutal (White) Western oppressors and innocent and desperate (brown) victims; this allows the aggressors to start each engagement with a decisive advantage.  Further, the early pictures and video come prepared with a ready narrative (built in the weeks prior to the incident)  which leaves the conventionally more powerful defender at a significant disadvantage.

All of this is unified by the international Jihad being waged by Islam and their allies on the Left against Western Civilization.  Andrew McCarthy discusses how Jihad is being waged in America, The 'peaceful' Jihad in America; the "peaceful" Jihadis leverage the violent Jihadis to advance their ideology.  As usual, Israel serves as the "canary in the coal mine" but where Israel goes, the United States soon follows.  Once Israel has been rendered incapable of self-defense, American efforts to safeguard our country will be further eroded in ways which make a successful defense of civilization itself problematic.

Barry Rubin tries to use reason and reality to fight this war: Sympathy for the Devil and the Gaza Sea Confrontation: How Can Helping a Repressive Fascist, Genocide-Intending Hamas Regime be Noble?  It is certainly important for supporters of Israel and Western Civilization to know the facts as clearly as possible but it seems to me we are well past the point where facts are going to sway public opinion in any significant way or advance the cause of Peace or Victory over those forces of barbarism that threaten us.

Richard Fernandez, perhaps remembering his Three Conjectures, believes that eventually the reality of this global war will become unmistakably real:

The Consolations of Philosophy

Both cases [the Gaza flotilla and the Cheonan sinking] demonstrate that nothing is more paramount either to the establishment nor to the politically correct sections of the media than the maintenance of a lie. For the lie is in the service of the greater good. High reasons of policy will be invoked to explain why the truth should not be so. But the extreme reliance on fantasy by parts of the Western establishment goes well beyond surrounding a kernel of the truth with a “bodyguard of lies.” Instead it is the lie itself which is guarded by even more falsehoods.  Gradually and inexorably, an entire political class has staked its existence on continuation of falsehood. The greater good is the fiction. Deception has become a necessity in itself.

As a result, any moderately well informed individual knows that there is no Islamic extremism, nor even terrorism. There are only man made disasters. Everybody knows that we can borrow our way out of debt, that the welfare state is the sustainable wave of the future; that Egypt has no border with Gaza through which it can provide supplies if it wanted; that the UN has kept Hezbollah from importing hundreds of missiles into Lebanon; that the thought of a handful of Jews has kept hundreds of millions of oil-rich Muslims from attaining prosperity; and that Global Warming is the main danger facing the planet Earth. That these assertions are untrue hardly matters; that they are indisputable is what seems to count. For who shall dispute them?

Reality might. And therein lies the problem.

Here’s what is going to happen with one hundred percent certainty. All of these lies will explode with considerable force in the faces of political establishment. Nothing can prevent it. Just as reality eventually exposed the hollowness of the financial bubble and showed that nothing was “too big to fail,” eventually it will demonstrate to our extreme cost, that no lie can be maintained forever. That is the real reason anyone should really care about what happened on the “peace flotilla.” We are as corrupt as a preacher in a whorehouse. It ain’t what we don’t know that will hurt us, it’s what we know that ain’t so that will drive the dagger into our hearts.

In 2010 we have been knowingly at war with radical Islam, now referred to using euphemisms designed to deny that very fact but recognized as such by anyone paying attention, for almost 10 years.  Radical Islam (with very little demurral from "moderate" Islam) has been at war with the West since the 1940s, more openly since the 1967 Middle East War, and most directly against America since 1993 (the first WTC bombing.)   Europe is, as has been their wont, determined to be the last crocodile by tossing Israel over-board.  Our current administration, convinced by the European style facile rationalization popular at elite Universities, is either confused, has ambivalent leanings, or is simply disinterested in understanding our current peril and as a result facilitates the growth of Islamist ideology. 

[In any local situation, the choice of submission to the Islamists versus alliance with the West must now be filtered through a lens of American neo-isolationism.  The local thugs will win every time in this calculation.]

Israel can not win this war by using conventional means.  It is a civilized community living in the middle of a population of sociopaths and lunatics.   As Max Boot points out, Israel Can Win Every Battle but Still Lose the War. 

I can see no way out for Israel in the near term.  It is rapidly being delegitimized and made a pariah.  The best, perhaps only, way to protect oneself from sociopaths (the Islamist leadership) is to threaten them with an overwhelming response.  Sociopaths desire to live and the Islamist leadership give every indication of desiring to live and continue to wield power, whether as a Prince in Saudi Arabia, a Mullah in Iran, or a heroic Hezbollah or Hamas Resistance fighter in Damascus.  Only if the leadership are convinced that their well being is at risk will they be at all willing to rein in the lunatics who they send to murder and die.  The problem for Israel is now several fold:

Can Israel credibly threaten, sotto voce, a Samson Option?*

Will its enemies believe its threats?

Can a democracy make such a threat and convince itself of its necessity?

The logic of the Information War against Israel and the Iranian race to obtain nuclear weapons, combined with European animus and American insouciance, suggests that at some point, a willingness to use nuclear weapons in the defense of Israel will become a necessity if the state is to survive long term.  The more credible the threat of use is, the less likely it will become necessary.  Unfortunately, in the Middle East, there will always be those willing to test Israel's resolve to use all means at its disposal to confirm Never Again.

I fear we are moving perilously close to that test.

* The Samson Option will be a necessary deterrent for the next 10 years.  At that point the asymmetry at the heart of Israel's problems will be addressable and the Islamists will no longer have the advantage in unconventional war.  That makes the next ten years the most perilous in recent memory. I will expand on these ideas in a future post.

What Are You Willing to Die For?

[Update at end]

In post-religious, secularized Western countries, the answer to the title question tends to devolve to "nothing" beyond the self and its interests.  Western elites are fond of instructing their inferiors to sacrifice for their Utopian ideal of the moment but sacrificing one's life for the "life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness" for others is typically seen as the province of less well educated, less sophisticated, non-members of the elite.  America still has enough young people who value what this country has to offer that they are willing to put their lives on the line for us, but Europe has long since surrendered to the progressive forces of history and eschews self-defence of their ideals.   For Western elites, people who are motivated by religious beliefs, usually overlapping with those too ignorant to avoid the military, are essentially the equivalent of cannon fodder, ie, they do not count.  Our elites pride themselves on their functional atheism.  Politicians may from time to time profess their deep religious convictions but most often on the left this is a rather transparent attempt to appeal tot he rubes and when a politician appears to have genuine religious convictions, as for example Sarah Palin, they are savaged by the elites in media and academia.

Because religious belief has been so discredited by our elites, they tend to see anyone who believes as either a charlatan (using their beliefs to scam people) or as at best ignorant if not overtly intellectually limited.  The idea that there exist people whose religious beliefs motivate them to kill and die for their deity does not reach the threshold of consciousness for our elites.  They may occasionally give lip service to the idea (though less often since we are no longer at war with Islamic terrorists) and may admit that the Islamic foot soldiers of Iran, al Qaeda, Hamas, or Hezbollah are religious radicals, but they insist that the leaders of such groups can be approached as rational actors.  Greg Sheridan, in the Australian, points out how we fool ourselves by imagining our enemies to be rationally motivated:

Tehran on path to our destruction

Iran has been determined to acquire nuclear weapons for a long time. It is, as US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton describes it, something of a military dictatorship, with the Revolutionary Guard assuming more and more power. It is still also, however, a theocratic dictatorship. The purpose of the state is to serve theological ends.

Most Western analysts refuse to take Islamic religion seriously as a factor in geopolitics, assuming there must always be a rational national-interest explanation for any state's behaviour.

The truth is that history is littered with states behaving irrationally and pursuing irrational ends, and doing so in often self-destructive ways. In Mao's China tens of millions of people died in famines directly caused by state policy. North Korea has driven its people into starvation. Pol Pot not only committed genocide on his own people, he then attacked Vietnam so that it would destroy him. Saddam Hussein was such a canny, realist calculator of the odds that his regime ended up gone and he ended up dead.

It is intensely ahistorical to believe political regimes will always act according to Western conceptions of enlightened self-interest.

Melanie Philips' comment on Greg Sheridan's article is apt:

It is striking, to this British observer at least, how very unlikely it would be to encounter anywhere in the British media such a well-informed, realistic and intelligent analysis of the Iranian crisis and the paralysis of the west.

Even among seasoned and reasonable observers who have been involved in thinking about the Middle East for a very long time, there is an implicit assumption that the belief structure of the enemy can be approached using rationality.  In the course of an article about Andrew Sullivan's antipathy to Israel* and himself, Jeffery Goldberg notes that he has for a long time worried about Israel becoming complicit in its own destruction:

Andrew Sullivan is Going to Tear Me To Shreds

I've been writing since 2004 that Israel will one day be considered an apartheid state if it continues to rule over a population of Arabs that doesn't want to be ruled by Israelis. That is why it is vital for Israel to establish permanent, internationally-recognized borders that more-or-less adhere to the 1967 border. Unlike Andrew, I believe that Israel has tried to free itself from ruling these Palestinians (the pull-out from Gaza is an example, as is Ehud Olmert's recent, unanswered offer to the Palestinians to pull out from virtually 100 percent of the West Bank). But the reality remains: It will be very dangerous for Israel to engineer this pull-back, but it will be, over time, fatal for it to stay in the West Bank.  Anyway, more to come, eventually.

According to this fairly common point of view, Israel has the choice of continuing to "oppress and occupy" West bank Palestinians, which will inevitably lead to the delegitimization of the Jewish state or they must engineer a (unilateral) Peace agreement which would be tantamount to Israeli suicide.  There has never been any indication that any Palestinian leader, no matter how "moderate" would be willing to accept a Jewish state.  The current favored Moderates of the PA insist upon an unlimited right of return and indefensible borders for Israel. 

It is sophistry to pronounce that a Peace can be accomplished in which the Palestinians accept some financial inducements and a token right of return in exchange for permanent Peace.  There is no evidence, zero, that any Palestinian could cede the right of return and survive, let alone continue to rule.  To believe otherwise is delusional, an invention of the Western, rational mind.

Unfortunately, this is the current choice; there can be no compromise with people who believe that compromise, and the continued existence of the state of Israel is an anathema to their deity.  They are certainly willing to kill for their beliefs, more significantly, they are willing to die for their beliefs.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict can not end until the Palestinians, and their Arab backers, accept the legitimacy of Israel, yet they cannot do so and remain loyal to their religion.  Islam believes that it is the superior faith, that the Koran is the final, perfect word of Allah.  An independent Jewish state, especially one that has repeatedly humiliated the Arab world (in War and in Peace) threatens to destroy Islam merely by its continued existence.  After all, how can Allah be supreme when the hated Jews, who proclaim their G-d the one true G-d, remain victorious over Islam?  Islam, in its current form, cannot survive and adapt to he modern world; the very religious foundations of the faith are at risk every day that Israel persists.  The struggle to eradicate Israel and the Jews can only accommodate Peace if it temporary and in the service of the final solution.  This is not something I am simply making up out of whole cloth, it is what our enemies say on a daily basis, if we only choose to listen. 

Of course, for the West to accept this truth would be a deeply unsettling recognition.  Yet once we come to understand the reality, the solution becomes clearer, albeit one that makes our elites most uncomfortable.  A long term minimization of violence with occasional reminders by the West/Israel to the violent ones that we know where they live (ie, the current status quo) is the only way to keep the forces of destruction under control.  Allowing the Muslim world's most extreme variants to gain power and strength is a path to disaster.

* The question of whether or not Andrew Sullivan is an anti-Semite is a non-starter.  Andrew Sullivan has been increasingly using language which is indistinguishable from classical anti-Semitic tropes as filtered through the post-modern lens; after a while whether or not he entertains any particular antipathy to Jews is immaterial.  Others may disagree but ultimately it hardly matters.  The mainstreaming of anti-Semitic tropes is ongoing.

Update: In an excellent article today Barry Rubin points out that the complementary (mirror image?) of the ubiquitous blindness to the reality of radical Islamic religious ideology occurs in the views that  "Moderates" have of Israel:

Why Isn't There Peace? One Reason: Few People Know How Much is Being Offered

Among Palestinians, as more broadly with almost all of the public in the Muslim-majority world and a lot of the elite classes in Europe, there exists a mythical Israel, reminiscent of the fabricated antisemitic stereotypes of the past, that has little to do with reality. They believe Israel isn't interested in peace, doesn't offer the Palestinians anything, opposes any real Palestinian state, intends to keep the West Bank (until Israel's withdrawal from all of the Gaza Strip they would have added that territory as well), and is led by intransigent hardliners. Such a conception was comprehensible--if not fully accurate--describing the situation in parts of the 1980s but has nothing to do with the last 20 years.

In 2010 they have no idea what Israel actually offered in the 1990s' peace process, or at the Camp David summit in 2000, or what President Bill Clinton offered with Israel's agreement in December 2000, or what Prime Minister Ehud Olmert proffered in 2008, or what is in the current Israeli government's peace offer in 2010. All proposed the creation of an independent Palestinian state, the first three in close to 100 percent and the last three as equivalent to 100 percent (with some small, equal land swaps) in size to the pre-1967 West Bank and Gaza Strip.

Lacking any knowledge of these offers, or at least knowing only very distorted ones, they can maintain that Israel has offered "nothing" and that therefore the continuation of the conflict is not due to Palestinian intransigence but Israel's alleged opposition to the creation of a real independent Palestinian state. This reminds me of how Mahmoud Abbas, today leader of the Palestinian Authority, responded to some reasonably accurate descriptions in the Palestinian media of what Israel offered in 2000 at Camp David. It is better, he said at the time, not to talk about these things at all, presumably lest some Palestinians might think that it was a reasonable deal.

Anyone who actually lives in Israel knows that--whether they like it or not--Israel is ready to make big conessions and take reasonable risks to achieve peace. They know, whether or not they agree, that the overwhelming majority is ready to accept an independent Palestinian state as long as it is willing to end the conflict and live side by side in peace.

Outside Israel, far fewer people than should do so understand this reality. And that includes journalists,academics, and politicians. If they address the issue at all, they presume that Israel is asking the Palestinians to make some huge or unreasonable concession. Often, as noted above, their understanding of Israeli views is more than 20 years out of date.

Read the whole thing.  The complementary blind spots of our elites toward Israel and the Palestinians (and in a larger sense, toward ourselves and the Islamic radicals)  has important Psychological dimensions; elaboration to follow.

The Singularity & the 12th Imam: Part IV

In The Singularity is Near, Ray Kurzweil looked at the natural history of information processing and discovered that the rate of increase in the ability to manipulate information has a logarithmic slope; in other words, the rate of information processing ability increases at an exponential rate.  Furthermore, he suggested that within the next 30-40 years we will reach a time at which the pace of technological advance (the current embodiment of information processing) will become so rapid as to make further predictions impossible, a point which he called "The Singularity". 

Kevin Kelly, as part of an article critiquing certain aspects of Kurzweil's idea, described the Singularity in fairly accessible terms.  (Vinge refers to Verner Vinge, who originated the idea of an Artificial Intelligence Singularity):

In Vinge’s analysis, at some point not too far away, innovations in computer power would enable us to design computers more intelligent than we are, and these smarter computers could design computers yet smarter than themselves, and so on, the loop of computers-making-newer-computers accelerating very quickly towards unimaginable levels of intelligence. This progress in IQ and power, when graphed, generates a rising curve which appears to approach the straight up limit of infinity. In mathematical terms it resembles the singularity of a black hole, because, as Vinge announced, it will be impossible to know anything beyond this threshold. If we make an AI which in turn makes a greater AI, ad infinitum, then their future is unknowable to us, just as our lives have been unfathomable to a slug. So the singularity became a black hole, an impenetrable veil hiding our future from us.

In his response to Kelly's article, Kurzweil wrote a clarifying post and used the Internet to illustrate the concept of a "transformative technology":

Consider the Internet. When the Arpanet went from 10,000 nodes to 20,000 in one year, and then to 40,000 and then 80,000, it was of interest only to a few thousand scientists. When ten years later it went from 10 million nodes to 20 million, and then 40 million and 80 million, the appearance of this curve looks identical (especially when viewed on a log plot), but the consequences were profoundly more transformative. There is a point in the smooth exponential growth of these different aspects of information technology when they transform the world as we know it. [Emphasis mine-SW]

One of Kurzweil's great insights was that almost any information technology, when looked at over time, shows the same pattern of exponential growth, with minimal change until a threshold is hit, followed by explosive transformations. 

What does this have to do with Apocalyptic cults and irrational reactions to disruption fueled angst?

Iran and Nuclear Weapons

The Islamic Republic of Iran has been at war with the United States since 1979.  For much of that time, America fought a passive war of defense only.  The amount of damage that Iran could inflict upon us was considered tolerable in comparison to the damage that would incur from open hostilities.  Our capabilities had been so eroded since the post-Vietnam emasculation of our covert operations apparatus that any attempts to strike back at Iran were of necessity quite limited.  This was the status quo from the time of the American embassy take over in Tehran in 1979 until 9/11. 

Post-9/11, many people recognized Iran as a greater long term threat than Iraq, but numerous constraints, internationally and at home, made a direct response to Iran an impossibility.  I firmly believe that the strategic decision was made to encircle Iran with the aim of eventually toppling the regime, which since the advent of Ayatollah Khomeini has been the single greatest supporter of Islamic terror in the world. 

Not surprisingly, in all such wars, the final battles tend to be the most dangerous.  We are approaching the end game and the timing and outcome depend on too many factors that are either unknown or unknowable. 

The problem for the West is that modernization is incompatible with the Islam practiced by the Iranian Mullahs, which is closely related to the Islam practiced by the Saudi Wahhabists and al Qaeda.  Furthermore, every day that passes, the defeat of their version of Islam inevitably comes nearer.  Obtaining a nuclear weapon is the only hope the Mullahs have for stopping the slide of "true" Islam into apostasy; furthermore, using a nuclear weapon is the only hope they have of vanquishing the infidels.  Their version of Allah demands it and no merely human intervention by the UN will have any chance of derailing their desires.