All the cool kids are doing it, so I figure I’d better knock one of these out. Readers, if any remain, of my overwrought treatment of The Substance of Style (Part I; Part II; Part III) would understandably flee this blog right now, so I’ll try to be less, well, overwrought in my treatment of An Army of Davids …
Jay Manifold
Bioweapons, Unk-Unks, and Delayed Gratification
Thanks, I suspect, to Glenn’s concern, Technorati shows 13 links to The Knowledge, Technology Review‘s article about the dangers of biological weapons — but only one to Assessing the Threat, the companion piece that casts doubts regarding the same subject. None of the links I found via Technorati lead to any lengthy commentary, and Glenn — whom I regard as a national treasure, so this is not meant to convey disrespect — doesn’t seem to get beyond saying “this is scary, and we ought to do something about it.” The blogosphere, it would seem, has its limitations, even in the face of mortal threats.
By way of starting somewhere, then, I have a framework to offer that might at least help us determine how much trouble we’re in …
KHANNNNN!
Imagine Montana, population 900,000, conquering the Western Hemisphere, population 800 million. In little more than one generation: slaughtering its armies, assimilating its air forces and navies, killing almost every government and corporate official; conscripting a tenth of the entire population in every country to provide logistical support; deliberately sparing, but nonetheless abducting, every high-profile scientist, engineer, entrepreneur, doctor, and clergyman, and rotating them amongst Helena, Albany, Austin, Mexico City, and Brasilia. Building infrastructure from Point Barrow and Labrador to Recife and Tierra del Fuego, then mounting a two-pronged invasion of Africa, overrunning Nigeria and South Africa in six weeks, poised to sweep north and east to the Mediterranean and Red Seas within months — and then abruptly withdrawing.
In the thirteenth century, events on that scale occurred in Eurasia, and Jack Weatherford explains how in Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World …
It Can’t Happen Here
A point I have not seen mentioned in the discussion of the cartoon riots: the virulent ideology of Islamist extremism is a necessary, but not sufficient, condition for violence.
As this discussion of meme propagation illustrates, the hearers must be inclined to act in certain ways. The message is the same in all cases, but its dissemination is not guaranteed.
There are at least 5 million Muslims in the US. Out of that number, there must be thousands who privately applaud the destruction and intimidation we have seen in the news. But none have attacked consulates or embassies. As far as I know, none have even staged public protests, certainly not with placards threatening our extermination.
Nor can this be attributed to isolation; communications technologies easily permit minorities of one in a thousand to link up and undertake coordinated efforts. Of the one million Muslims in California, a thousand could have taken to the streets of Sacramento with bloodcurdling slogans. But they didn’t.
And they won’t. Because they’ve got real jobs and real lives; because they can reasonably hope for attainment and enjoyment of the things that human beings find fulfilling: family, challenging and meaningful work, religion, prosperity … in coming to America, the evil seeds of extremism “fell among thorns, and the thorns grew up and choked them.” Thank God.
UPDATE: There was a small, peaceful protest in Philadelphia yesterday morning.
The Importance of Being Miserable
Right, that’s enough thankfulness for this year. UofC College and B-school alum Bill Roule sends this story and comments:
This younger generation certainly lacks the guts we had. When we went to Chicago, we knew we were going to be miserable. We wanted to be miserable. We were proud we were miserable. Where is the sense of accomplishment if the task is easy? Seeing how the family can raise $1M in bond, I have my doubts that anyone there can explain this to her.
They’re wimps, all right. Notice this paragraph in the story:
None of the fires did serious damage. But after a fire was set in Swift Hall on Monday morning, and in three adjacent buildings on the following day, a number of the 12,000 students on campus had felt unsettled, said university spokesman Larry Arbeiter.
“Unsettled”? Unsettled?! They should have felt: 1) mildly interested in her technique; 2) amused by the prospect of retelling the story back home to horrified family and friends; 3) numb from finishing two papers and a physics problem set the previous night; or perhaps 4) nothing at all due to having seen no direct sunlight in several weeks. Not “unsettled.”
Pussies. ;^)