Anthology of Ideas

It started with a post on Aardvarchaeology which was then linked by Pharyngula and responded to with a post on Uncertain Principles. Martin Rundkvist, of Aardvarchaeology, declares that US Politics Have No Left Wing which was quickly responded to by Chad Orzel, of Uncertain Prinicples, who retorted that it could just as easily said that European Politics Have No Right Wing. I agree with their base statements: Europe is left of America which is right of Europe, Europeans and Americans both got where they are through trial and error, and that many American politicians are very right-wing, but…To argue that higher taxes are fundamentally better than lower ones, and that certain political positions are better than others, and that religious politicians — regardless of how they publicly use their religion — are inherently inferior to their counterparts is a little too broad for my tastes.

You have no doubt heard about the pro-democracy protests in Myanmar over the past week or so and the resulting government crackdown on the protests. The flood of information out of the country was staggering in the beginning, and the government was faced with enormous amounts of information flowing out of the country. They tried to stop it by releasing their own propaganda and attempting to slow the spread of information from the country, but protesters weren’t so easily dissuaded and information continued to leak out.

Friday, Osama bin Laden released his first video in three years, and it has been posted, in full, online. Unlike his fire and brimstone videos in the past, this one is more relaxed and he talks in a calm, definite manner as if he was trying to teach people his beliefs rather than indoctrinate them by force. Bin Laden doesn’t directly attack America as a whole—as he is prone to do—but instead attacks certain aspects of American culture and history that he disagrees with and which demonstrate the faults he believes America has.

Simplifying mightily, its bumpy path to democratization goes roughly as follows: set up an empire; inherit a caliphate; fight on the losing side in a world war; in desperation dissolve the caliphate and submit to the autocratic rule of a modernizer who pushes Islam ruthlessly to the margins; the wait the better half of a century for the emergence of an Islamist party that looks mild and moderate enough to be trusted with the reins of government.

Yet again I break my own rules and get into current American politics. America is often considered the pinnacle of democracy, or at least that is how Americans see themselves, but as with almost all other representative governments power just flows from one party to another. The 2006 elections were seen by many as the return of the Democratic party to power after the supposed failure of the Republicans to lead and protect the country.

It seems obvious to me that the USA is losing the war on terrorism because, as much as governments may like to think so, you can’t wage a winning war on ideas that spread like a disease. Conducting a shooting war on terrorism is about absurd as randomly chopping off limbs to cure a tooth ache or carpet bombing the north pole to kill Santa Claus. As an aside even more amusing is when people talk about a “War on Terror”.

It started with a post on Aardvarchaeology which was then linked by Pharyngula and responded to with a post on Uncertain Principles. Martin Rundkvist, of Aardvarchaeology, declares that US Politics Have No Left Wing which was quickly responded to by Chad Orzel, of Uncertain Prinicples, who retorted that it could just as easily said that European Politics Have No Right Wing. I agree with their base statements: Europe is left of America which is right of Europe, Europeans and Americans both got where they are through trial and error, and that many American politicians are very right-wing, but…To argue that higher taxes are fundamentally better than lower ones, and that certain political positions are better than others, and that religious politicians — regardless of how they publicly use their religion — are inherently inferior to their counterparts is a little too broad for my tastes.

You have no doubt heard about the pro-democracy protests in Myanmar over the past week or so and the resulting government crackdown on the protests. The flood of information out of the country was staggering in the beginning, and the government was faced with enormous amounts of information flowing out of the country. They tried to stop it by releasing their own propaganda and attempting to slow the spread of information from the country, but protesters weren’t so easily dissuaded and information continued to leak out.

Friday, Osama bin Laden released his first video in three years, and it has been posted, in full, online. Unlike his fire and brimstone videos in the past, this one is more relaxed and he talks in a calm, definite manner as if he was trying to teach people his beliefs rather than indoctrinate them by force. Bin Laden doesn’t directly attack America as a whole—as he is prone to do—but instead attacks certain aspects of American culture and history that he disagrees with and which demonstrate the faults he believes America has.

Simplifying mightily, its bumpy path to democratization goes roughly as follows: set up an empire; inherit a caliphate; fight on the losing side in a world war; in desperation dissolve the caliphate and submit to the autocratic rule of a modernizer who pushes Islam ruthlessly to the margins; the wait the better half of a century for the emergence of an Islamist party that looks mild and moderate enough to be trusted with the reins of government.

Yet again I break my own rules and get into current American politics. America is often considered the pinnacle of democracy, or at least that is how Americans see themselves, but as with almost all other representative governments power just flows from one party to another. The 2006 elections were seen by many as the return of the Democratic party to power after the supposed failure of the Republicans to lead and protect the country.

It seems obvious to me that the USA is losing the war on terrorism because, as much as governments may like to think so, you can’t wage a winning war on ideas that spread like a disease. Conducting a shooting war on terrorism is about absurd as randomly chopping off limbs to cure a tooth ache or carpet bombing the north pole to kill Santa Claus. As an aside even more amusing is when people talk about a “War on Terror”.