Shannon Love

Publicizing Terrorism

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The whole ActionFigureGate episode really makes me think about the standards applied by international major media (IMM) to the stories they disseminate. Why were major media so quick to disseminate pictures of an action figure as a genuine hostage photo?

More to the point, why are major media so quick to disseminate anything that a terrorist group, or purported terrorist group, releases?

The quickest way to get the prime spot in IMM today is to release a picture of somebody with a gun to his head. The IMM will immediately disseminate the picture and all of your demands and statements!

For the terrorist, it is like being given millions of dollars in free advertising.

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Forgetting Iraq

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Back in September I wrote about winning in Iraq:

“If we succeed, we will not realize it at the time. It will be as in the Cold War, we will look around one day and suddenly realize that Iraq is largely peaceful and stable. We will realize that our goals were accomplished and everybody except leftist academicians will say, “we won, I don’t know exactly how or exactly when, but we won.”

It has begun.

(update: Does anyone know how to statically link to a specific day-by-day cartoon? I realized that the code I used above will cause a different cartoon to get loaded everyday.)

Aztecs and Arabs

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A very interesting observation via Instapundit.

On his site, Wheeler includes a subscription article comparing the Aztecs with Arabs: “Both the Arabs and the Aztecs invented a religion of jihad as a rationale to justify their imperialist empires. …”

“War – Holy War – became the purpose of the Aztec state. All soldiers in the Aztec army were holy warriors, warriors of the gods. Peace was dangerous. No war meant no prisoners to sacrifice, no food for the gods, which risked the destruction of mankind and the universe itself. The only way to avoid cosmic disaster was for the Aztecs to accept the burden fate had given them and wage perpetual war for the salvation of humanity.

“All in all, a pretty clever rationalization for a monstrous imperialist tyranny, wouldn’t you say? Sounds like they were taking religion-inventing lessons from the Arabs.”

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Those Idiot Iraqis

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I feel sorry for those poor, deluded people of Iraq.

Yesterday, in my ignorance, I thought their election represented another step forward for their country, and perhaps the entire region. I admired the people’s bravery in going to the polls under a threat of death.

That was before I learned THE REAL TRUTH!

Surfing around the web today I learned that (1) the election was all sham, (2) even if it wasn’t a sham it meant absolutely nothing, (3) even if it does mean something, it just means the absolute best that the Iraqi people can hope for is an awful state of tyranny and oppression like suburban America. (Apparently, having the option of shopping at Walmart is a horrible fate beyond all telling. I never imagined!)

Yes, according to everyone from the kid behind the counter at Starbucks to the political-science professor who has never had a real job, the elections in Iraq are a complete waste of time, a non-event. But what about all those Iraqis who were thrilled and ecstatic to be voting for the first time?

Idiots and dupes, the lot of them.

I mean, they’re actually right there in Iraq! Can’t they see how awful everything is? If even the kid at Starbucks understands THE REAL TRUTH about the election, why can’t the great mass of Iraqis? Are they like brain damaged or something?

You know, we should take up a collection and arrange to fly all these earnest lefties who understand THE REAL TRUTH over to Iraq so that they can explain to randomly selected Iraqis just how awful their lives are, how stupid they are for hoping for a better and more democratic future, that the price they paid to get to this point was too high and, oh yeah, how they were really soooooo much better off under Saddam.

One can just images the faces of the Iraqis lighting up when THE REAL TRUTH strikes them. Even though they have personally lived through all of the events of the last 15 years, the striking intellect of the kid from Starbucks — who watches a lot of CNN — will overawe them and convince them that any hope they have for the future is just illusionary.

I really want to see that.
I want to film it and sell tickets.
From a safe distance.

Delusions of De Soto’s Delusion

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John Gravois over at Slate pronounces Hernado de Soto’s ideas a failure in alleviating poverty in the 3rd world. In doing so, Gravois makes what I believe to be a common error among those of the Left: mistaking the formal system for the actual system.

As we learned with “Privatization” and “Deregulation”, even in the 1st world, just because a politician slaps a label on some law doesn’t mean it will actually accomplish what the name implies. Just because a 3rd-world nation passes a law saying that people now have private property, and that specific individuals have title to specific lands, it doesn’t mean that the actual system works that way. If the actual system doesn’t function like something very close to a 1st-world property system then the new laws have failed to establish a working property system.

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