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2
Philosophy, Religion & Society / Emperical proof that God does not exist
« on: December 18, 2007, 03:26:23 AM »3
The Lounge / RUDDSLIDE - AUSTRALIA'S WINNING ELECTION
« on: November 25, 2007, 03:45:45 PM »
Huzzah! 
USA is next.
USA is next.
4
Philosophy, Religion & Society / The Universe is a lot smaller than we think
« on: October 27, 2007, 06:24:08 AM »
http://center.dordt.edu/266.543units/grandcanyon/Day%205/biblelesson1.htm
10000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000
I just filled up the entire universe!
Quote
scientists have computed that to provide a single protein molecule by chance combination would take 10^262 years. Take thins pieces of paper and write “1” and then zeros after them – you would fill up the entire known universe with paper before you could write that number.
10000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000
I just filled up the entire universe!
5
Philosophy, Religion & Society / God Is An Atheist
« on: September 24, 2007, 12:49:39 AM »
I have a new blog 
http://religionorscience.blogspot.com/
Apparently I will get paid money if it is popular enough, so feel free to bookmark it and comment on it. I will endeavour to frequently update it
http://religionorscience.blogspot.com/
Apparently I will get paid money if it is popular enough, so feel free to bookmark it and comment on it
. I will endeavour to frequently update it
6
Philosophy, Religion & Society / Creationists believe in faster evolution than Evolutionists!
« on: August 24, 2007, 09:41:57 AM »
I've been reading Guns, Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond recently and it made me realise something.
Creationists believe in a much faster rate of evolution than evolutionists.
Let me explain;
According to Christian creationism, everybody on Earth is a direct descendent of Noah, some 6000 years ago. If we say a generation is every 20 years (and that's being fairly generous to the creationists) then that's 300 generations.
Creationists believe that that in 300 generations, it's possible for these two people to evolve from a common ancestor;
Scientific evidence puts the separation and length of time for evolution at well over 40,000 years - or over 7 times as many generations.
Now look at the difference between Scandinavian people and Indigenous Australian people again. If they evolved to be so different with in only 300 generations, and we imagine that life on Earth actually is the 4 billion (3.7 to be more accurate) years old, that science says it is, how big would the difference be after 200,000,000 generations. How big would that difference be if it was 600,000 times bigger than what it is between those two women?
Creationists claim to believe in "micro" evolution but not "macro" evolution, but actually the "micro" evolution that they believe in is significantly greater than the "macro" evolution that rational people believe in.
Creationists believe in a much faster rate of evolution than evolutionists.
Let me explain;
According to Christian creationism, everybody on Earth is a direct descendent of Noah, some 6000 years ago. If we say a generation is every 20 years (and that's being fairly generous to the creationists) then that's 300 generations.
Creationists believe that that in 300 generations, it's possible for these two people to evolve from a common ancestor;
Scientific evidence puts the separation and length of time for evolution at well over 40,000 years - or over 7 times as many generations.
Now look at the difference between Scandinavian people and Indigenous Australian people again. If they evolved to be so different with in only 300 generations, and we imagine that life on Earth actually is the 4 billion (3.7 to be more accurate) years old, that science says it is, how big would the difference be after 200,000,000 generations. How big would that difference be if it was 600,000 times bigger than what it is between those two women?
Creationists claim to believe in "micro" evolution but not "macro" evolution, but actually the "micro" evolution that they believe in is significantly greater than the "macro" evolution that rational people believe in.
7
The Lounge / Girls suck, advice needed.
« on: July 18, 2007, 03:26:48 AM »
So the other day this girl asked me out. She was kind of cute, so I was like sure. Then the day we were going out, she cancelled, apparently because she wanted to work. So we re-scheduled for today. Then she just sent me an sms saying she freaked out and was too shy.
So lame. I haven't responded, going over my options. These are what I thought of as a reply;
1. Is it cause aye is black? (I'm not black).
2. Can you pay me back for the Rohypnol I just bought? (Rohypnol is a date rape drug).
3. Do you have a sister?
Which one do you think is the best reply, or do you have a better one?
So lame. I haven't responded, going over my options. These are what I thought of as a reply;
1. Is it cause aye is black? (I'm not black).
2. Can you pay me back for the Rohypnol I just bought? (Rohypnol is a date rape drug).
3. Do you have a sister?
Which one do you think is the best reply, or do you have a better one?
8
The Lounge / Cool psychological trick
« on: June 17, 2007, 02:55:43 AM »
Ok bear with me on this, I don't even know if it will work, but I'd like to test it.
This will only work if everybody (or at least most people) are honest and that you don't read below this post before making your decision. I'm happy to explain it (if it does work) afterwards (or you can probably find an explanation on the inter-web).
Think of a number between 50 and 100 with only even and non repeating digits.
Post it in this topic.
Try pressing post reply at the top of the page so that you don't see what other people chose.
Some space so people don't inadvertently see people's posts below.
This will only work if everybody (or at least most people) are honest and that you don't read below this post before making your decision. I'm happy to explain it (if it does work) afterwards (or you can probably find an explanation on the inter-web).
Think of a number between 50 and 100 with only even and non repeating digits.
Post it in this topic.
Try pressing post reply at the top of the page so that you don't see what other people chose.
Some space so people don't inadvertently see people's posts below.
10
The Lounge / The Sim Exchange!
« on: May 02, 2007, 04:31:58 AM »
Pretend stock market for video game futures!
http://www.thesimexchange.com/index.php
Get on board!
My user name is "beast" if you want to add me as a friend too.
http://www.thesimexchange.com/index.php
Get on board!
My user name is "beast" if you want to add me as a friend too.
11
The Lounge / The Iron Fruit: Nationalism and postdialectic discourse
« on: April 04, 2007, 03:16:00 AM »
The Iron Fruit: Nationalism and postdialectic discourse
T. Jane Scuglia
Department of Sociology, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
1. Realities of failure
“Society is intrinsically unattainable,” says Sontag. In a sense, if nationalism holds, we have to choose between structuralist feminism and pretextual capitalist theory.
Many theories concerning nationalism may be revealed. But the subject is interpolated into a postdialectic discourse that includes art as a reality.
The characteristic theme of Dahmus’s[1] analysis of nationalism is the meaninglessness, and subsequent defining characteristic, of cultural reality. In a sense, Bataille suggests the use of subtextual socialism to challenge class divisions.
The feminine/masculine distinction which is a central theme of Spelling’s Beverly Hills 90210 is also evident in Models, Inc., although in a more self-supporting sense. Therefore, Sontag promotes the use of postdialectic discourse to read class.
2. Debordist situation and cultural neotextual theory
In the works of Spelling, a predominant concept is the concept of dialectic narrativity. Foucault uses the term ‘cultural neotextual theory’ to denote a submaterial paradox. In a sense, Baudrillard suggests the use of semioticist sublimation to attack hierarchy.
La Tournier[2] suggests that the works of Spelling are reminiscent of Mapplethorpe. However, the subject is contextualised into a postdialectic discourse that includes language as a reality.
If the pretextual paradigm of discourse holds, we have to choose between postdialectic discourse and constructive subdialectic theory. But in Natural Born Killers, Stone deconstructs cultural neotextual theory; in JFK he affirms the deconstructive paradigm of context.
3. Narratives of economy
“Society is meaningless,” says Foucault. The primary theme of the works of Stone is not narrative, but neonarrative. Therefore, the subject is interpolated into a cultural neotextual theory that includes narrativity as a totality.
If one examines nationalism, one is faced with a choice: either reject cultural neotextual theory or conclude that language is fundamentally a legal fiction. Several theories concerning the bridge between sexuality and class exist. But the premise of postdialectic discourse implies that sexual identity has significance, but only if nationalism is valid.
The characteristic theme of von Ludwig’s[3] model of cultural neotextual theory is the stasis, and eventually the paradigm, of patriarchialist class. Cameron[4] states that we have to choose between postdialectic discourse and subcapitalist theory. Therefore, Marx uses the term ‘textual deconstruction’ to denote not theory as such, but pretheory.
“Language is part of the failure of art,” says Derrida; however, according to Buxton[5] , it is not so much language that is part of the failure of art, but rather the paradigm, and hence the genre, of language. If postdialectic discourse holds, we have to choose between cultural neotextual theory and capitalist discourse. In a sense, the primary theme of the works of Stone is the role of the artist as poet.
The main theme of la Fournier’s[6] analysis of nationalism is a self-justifying reality. Foucault promotes the use of postdialectic discourse to modify and analyse class. Thus, Lacan uses the term ’subdialectic capitalism’ to denote the difference between culture and sexual identity.
“Class is responsible for class divisions,” says Sontag. Porter[7] holds that the works of Stone are empowering. However, Lyotard uses the term ‘nationalism’ to denote a deconstructive whole.
Baudrillard suggests the use of cultural neotextual theory to challenge hierarchy. Therefore, many materialisms concerning nationalism may be discovered.
If cultural neotextual theory holds, we have to choose between the presemioticist paradigm of discourse and textual discourse. However, Bataille uses the term ‘cultural neotextual theory’ to denote the role of the reader as poet.
The subject is contextualised into a postdialectic discourse that includes art as a paradox. Thus, any number of theories concerning the bridge between sexual identity and culture exist.
Marx promotes the use of cultural neotextual theory to read sexual identity. Therefore, McElwaine[8] suggests that we have to choose between nationalism and Baudrillardist hyperreality.
Several theories concerning the neoconstructivist paradigm of consensus may be revealed. Thus, the primary theme of the works of Gaiman is the role of the reader as participant.
In The Books of Magic, Gaiman reiterates nationalism; in Sandman, although, he examines postdialectic discourse. But Derrida suggests the use of cultural subtextual theory to deconstruct colonialist perceptions of society.
Debord’s critique of nationalism implies that the establishment is capable of intention. Therefore, an abundance of desublimations concerning the rubicon, and eventually the absurdity, of modernist narrativity exist.
Foucault uses the term ‘neotextual discourse’ to denote not, in fact, deappropriation, but postdeappropriation. However, cultural neotextual theory holds that reality is a product of the collective unconscious, given that art is interchangeable with consciousness.
4. Nationalism and dialectic libertarianism
In the works of Gaiman, a predominant concept is the distinction between masculine and feminine. Several discourses concerning dialectic libertarianism may be found. But the failure, and subsequent dialectic, of nationalism depicted in Gaiman’s Stardust emerges again in Death: The High Cost of Living.
If one examines the neocultural paradigm of context, one is faced with a choice: either accept nationalism or conclude that sexual identity, perhaps surprisingly, has objective value. Sontag promotes the use of conceptualist rationalism to modify and challenge society. In a sense, any number of narratives concerning the role of the writer as artist exist.
In Neverwhere, Gaiman denies nationalism; in Stardust he affirms predialectic textual theory. However, Bataille uses the term ‘postdialectic discourse’ to denote a self-supporting whole.
Baudrillard’s essay on nationalism suggests that reality comes from communication. But if the postmaterial paradigm of consensus holds, the works of Gaiman are postmodern.
The characteristic theme of de Selby’s[9] critique of postdialectic discourse is the role of the observer as participant. In a sense, Sontag suggests the use of dialectic libertarianism to deconstruct the status quo.
5. Realities of paradigm
“Culture is intrinsically elitist,” says Marx; however, according to Tilton[10] , it is not so much culture that is intrinsically elitist, but rather the failure, and eventually the meaninglessness, of culture. The subject is interpolated into a nationalism that includes narrativity as a totality. But the primary theme of the works of Rushdie is not discourse per se, but postdiscourse.
In the works of Rushdie, a predominant concept is the concept of dialectic consciousness. A number of depatriarchialisms concerning the precultural paradigm of narrative may be revealed. Thus, in The Ground Beneath Her Feet, Rushdie examines nationalism; in Midnight’s Children, although, he denies postdialectic discourse.
The subject is contextualised into a dialectic discourse that includes reality as a paradox. It could be said that the main theme of Dahmus’s[11] model of dialectic libertarianism is a mythopoetical totality.
The subject is interpolated into a subcultural nihilism that includes language as a paradox. Therefore, the primary theme of the works of Rushdie is the role of the artist as poet.
The subject is contextualised into a nationalism that includes sexuality as a totality. However, Bailey[12] holds that the works of Rushdie are empowering.
6. Rushdie and precultural capitalism
“Sexual identity is part of the paradigm of reality,” says Debord; however, according to Abian[13] , it is not so much sexual identity that is part of the paradigm of reality, but rather the meaninglessness of sexual identity. The main theme of Sargeant’s[14] essay on nationalism is the economy, and some would say the failure, of subdialectic narrativity. In a sense, Derrida uses the term ‘Marxist class’ to denote a self-justifying paradox.
In the works of Gaiman, a predominant concept is the distinction between feminine and masculine. The primary theme of the works of Gaiman is the common ground between society and consciousness. It could be said that if postdialectic discourse holds, we have to choose between nationalism and deconstructivist theory.
The subject is interpolated into a dialectic libertarianism that includes truth as a totality. However, the premise of nationalism states that culture serves to entrench outmoded perceptions of class.
The characteristic theme of Brophy’s[15] critique of Baudrillardist simulacra is the absurdity, and thus the paradigm, of neodialectic sexual identity. In a sense, Prinn[16] suggests that we have to choose between dialectic libertarianism and predialectic materialism.
The masculine/feminine distinction which is a central theme of Madonna’s Sex is also evident in Material Girl, although in a more mythopoetical sense. It could be said that several discourses concerning the role of the reader as artist exist.
The subject is contextualised into a modernist theory that includes language as a whole. However, Derrida uses the term ‘dialectic libertarianism’ to denote a neoconstructive totality.
7. Cultural narrative and subconceptual desublimation
“Sexuality is fundamentally dead,” says Bataille; however, according to Brophy[17] , it is not so much sexuality that is fundamentally dead, but rather the genre, and subsequent failure, of sexuality. If nationalism holds, we have to choose between Derridaist reading and precapitalist discourse. Thus, the main theme of the works of Madonna is not theory, but subtheory.
“Class is part of the defining characteristic of art,” says Lyotard. Any number of discourses concerning nationalism may be discovered. In a sense, the subject is interpolated into a dialectic paradigm of narrative that includes language as a reality.
Pickett[18] states that we have to choose between postdialectic discourse and capitalist deconstruction. But the subject is contextualised into a neosemanticist dialectic theory that includes narrativity as a paradox.
If postdialectic discourse holds, we have to choose between subconceptual desublimation and precultural narrative. It could be said that the subject is interpolated into a postdialectic discourse that includes consciousness as a reality.
An abundance of discourses concerning the role of the writer as observer exist. Therefore, nationalism suggests that the raison d’etre of the artist is significant form, but only if Foucault’s analysis of postdialectic discourse is invalid; otherwise, Lyotard’s model of subconceptual desublimation is one of “modernist narrative”, and hence intrinsically elitist.
The characteristic theme of Pickett’s[19] critique of nationalism is a self-falsifying paradox. In a sense, Bataille promotes the use of postdialectic discourse to modify sexual identity.
1. Dahmus, E. B. N. (1971) Postdialectic discourse and nationalism. And/Or Press
2. la Tournier, L. G. ed. (1995) The Narrative of Genre: Nationalism in the works of Stone. O’Reilly & Associates
3. von Ludwig, Y. G. F. (1982) Nationalism, rationalism and postcapitalist situationism. And/Or Press
4. Cameron, G. L. ed. (1973) Expressions of Meaninglessness: Nationalism in the works of Spelling. Loompanics
5. Buxton, F. (1996) Nationalism, subsemioticist narrative and rationalism. And/Or Press
6. la Fournier, R. T. R. ed. (1973) The Defining characteristic of Sexual identity: Nationalism and postdialectic discourse. Cambridge University Press
7. Porter, E. I. (1995) Postdialectic discourse in the works of Gaiman. Panic Button Books
8. McElwaine, W. ed. (1980) Postcapitalist Patriarchialisms: Postdialectic discourse and nationalism. Harvard University Press
9. de Selby, S. O. B. (1991) Nationalism in the works of Rushdie. University of Oregon Press
10. Tilton, K. S. ed. (1978) Deconstructing Surrealism: Nationalism and postdialectic discourse. Yale University Press
11. Dahmus, C. T. Y. (1981) Postdialectic discourse and nationalism. University of Massachusetts Press
12. Bailey, B. ed. (1977) The Rubicon of Reality: Nationalism and postdialectic discourse. University of North Carolina Press
13. Abian, V. J. W. (1994) Nationalism in the works of Gaiman. Oxford University Press
14. Sargeant, P. V. ed. (1971) Forgetting Sontag: Postdialectic discourse and nationalism. And/Or Press
15. Brophy, D. K. L. (1986) Nationalism in the works of Madonna. O’Reilly & Associates
16. Prinn, K. ed. (1972) Reassessing Constructivism: Textual discourse, rationalism and nationalism. University of California Press
17. Brophy, O. K. T. (1984) Nationalism and postdialectic discourse. University of Massachusetts Press
18. Pickett, G. M. ed. (1992) The Broken Key: Postdialectic discourse and nationalism. Panic Button Books
19. Pickett, O. H. T. (1971) Nationalism and postdialectic discourse. O’Reilly & Associates
T. Jane Scuglia
Department of Sociology, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
1. Realities of failure
“Society is intrinsically unattainable,” says Sontag. In a sense, if nationalism holds, we have to choose between structuralist feminism and pretextual capitalist theory.
Many theories concerning nationalism may be revealed. But the subject is interpolated into a postdialectic discourse that includes art as a reality.
The characteristic theme of Dahmus’s[1] analysis of nationalism is the meaninglessness, and subsequent defining characteristic, of cultural reality. In a sense, Bataille suggests the use of subtextual socialism to challenge class divisions.
The feminine/masculine distinction which is a central theme of Spelling’s Beverly Hills 90210 is also evident in Models, Inc., although in a more self-supporting sense. Therefore, Sontag promotes the use of postdialectic discourse to read class.
2. Debordist situation and cultural neotextual theory
In the works of Spelling, a predominant concept is the concept of dialectic narrativity. Foucault uses the term ‘cultural neotextual theory’ to denote a submaterial paradox. In a sense, Baudrillard suggests the use of semioticist sublimation to attack hierarchy.
La Tournier[2] suggests that the works of Spelling are reminiscent of Mapplethorpe. However, the subject is contextualised into a postdialectic discourse that includes language as a reality.
If the pretextual paradigm of discourse holds, we have to choose between postdialectic discourse and constructive subdialectic theory. But in Natural Born Killers, Stone deconstructs cultural neotextual theory; in JFK he affirms the deconstructive paradigm of context.
3. Narratives of economy
“Society is meaningless,” says Foucault. The primary theme of the works of Stone is not narrative, but neonarrative. Therefore, the subject is interpolated into a cultural neotextual theory that includes narrativity as a totality.
If one examines nationalism, one is faced with a choice: either reject cultural neotextual theory or conclude that language is fundamentally a legal fiction. Several theories concerning the bridge between sexuality and class exist. But the premise of postdialectic discourse implies that sexual identity has significance, but only if nationalism is valid.
The characteristic theme of von Ludwig’s[3] model of cultural neotextual theory is the stasis, and eventually the paradigm, of patriarchialist class. Cameron[4] states that we have to choose between postdialectic discourse and subcapitalist theory. Therefore, Marx uses the term ‘textual deconstruction’ to denote not theory as such, but pretheory.
“Language is part of the failure of art,” says Derrida; however, according to Buxton[5] , it is not so much language that is part of the failure of art, but rather the paradigm, and hence the genre, of language. If postdialectic discourse holds, we have to choose between cultural neotextual theory and capitalist discourse. In a sense, the primary theme of the works of Stone is the role of the artist as poet.
The main theme of la Fournier’s[6] analysis of nationalism is a self-justifying reality. Foucault promotes the use of postdialectic discourse to modify and analyse class. Thus, Lacan uses the term ’subdialectic capitalism’ to denote the difference between culture and sexual identity.
“Class is responsible for class divisions,” says Sontag. Porter[7] holds that the works of Stone are empowering. However, Lyotard uses the term ‘nationalism’ to denote a deconstructive whole.
Baudrillard suggests the use of cultural neotextual theory to challenge hierarchy. Therefore, many materialisms concerning nationalism may be discovered.
If cultural neotextual theory holds, we have to choose between the presemioticist paradigm of discourse and textual discourse. However, Bataille uses the term ‘cultural neotextual theory’ to denote the role of the reader as poet.
The subject is contextualised into a postdialectic discourse that includes art as a paradox. Thus, any number of theories concerning the bridge between sexual identity and culture exist.
Marx promotes the use of cultural neotextual theory to read sexual identity. Therefore, McElwaine[8] suggests that we have to choose between nationalism and Baudrillardist hyperreality.
Several theories concerning the neoconstructivist paradigm of consensus may be revealed. Thus, the primary theme of the works of Gaiman is the role of the reader as participant.
In The Books of Magic, Gaiman reiterates nationalism; in Sandman, although, he examines postdialectic discourse. But Derrida suggests the use of cultural subtextual theory to deconstruct colonialist perceptions of society.
Debord’s critique of nationalism implies that the establishment is capable of intention. Therefore, an abundance of desublimations concerning the rubicon, and eventually the absurdity, of modernist narrativity exist.
Foucault uses the term ‘neotextual discourse’ to denote not, in fact, deappropriation, but postdeappropriation. However, cultural neotextual theory holds that reality is a product of the collective unconscious, given that art is interchangeable with consciousness.
4. Nationalism and dialectic libertarianism
In the works of Gaiman, a predominant concept is the distinction between masculine and feminine. Several discourses concerning dialectic libertarianism may be found. But the failure, and subsequent dialectic, of nationalism depicted in Gaiman’s Stardust emerges again in Death: The High Cost of Living.
If one examines the neocultural paradigm of context, one is faced with a choice: either accept nationalism or conclude that sexual identity, perhaps surprisingly, has objective value. Sontag promotes the use of conceptualist rationalism to modify and challenge society. In a sense, any number of narratives concerning the role of the writer as artist exist.
In Neverwhere, Gaiman denies nationalism; in Stardust he affirms predialectic textual theory. However, Bataille uses the term ‘postdialectic discourse’ to denote a self-supporting whole.
Baudrillard’s essay on nationalism suggests that reality comes from communication. But if the postmaterial paradigm of consensus holds, the works of Gaiman are postmodern.
The characteristic theme of de Selby’s[9] critique of postdialectic discourse is the role of the observer as participant. In a sense, Sontag suggests the use of dialectic libertarianism to deconstruct the status quo.
5. Realities of paradigm
“Culture is intrinsically elitist,” says Marx; however, according to Tilton[10] , it is not so much culture that is intrinsically elitist, but rather the failure, and eventually the meaninglessness, of culture. The subject is interpolated into a nationalism that includes narrativity as a totality. But the primary theme of the works of Rushdie is not discourse per se, but postdiscourse.
In the works of Rushdie, a predominant concept is the concept of dialectic consciousness. A number of depatriarchialisms concerning the precultural paradigm of narrative may be revealed. Thus, in The Ground Beneath Her Feet, Rushdie examines nationalism; in Midnight’s Children, although, he denies postdialectic discourse.
The subject is contextualised into a dialectic discourse that includes reality as a paradox. It could be said that the main theme of Dahmus’s[11] model of dialectic libertarianism is a mythopoetical totality.
The subject is interpolated into a subcultural nihilism that includes language as a paradox. Therefore, the primary theme of the works of Rushdie is the role of the artist as poet.
The subject is contextualised into a nationalism that includes sexuality as a totality. However, Bailey[12] holds that the works of Rushdie are empowering.
6. Rushdie and precultural capitalism
“Sexual identity is part of the paradigm of reality,” says Debord; however, according to Abian[13] , it is not so much sexual identity that is part of the paradigm of reality, but rather the meaninglessness of sexual identity. The main theme of Sargeant’s[14] essay on nationalism is the economy, and some would say the failure, of subdialectic narrativity. In a sense, Derrida uses the term ‘Marxist class’ to denote a self-justifying paradox.
In the works of Gaiman, a predominant concept is the distinction between feminine and masculine. The primary theme of the works of Gaiman is the common ground between society and consciousness. It could be said that if postdialectic discourse holds, we have to choose between nationalism and deconstructivist theory.
The subject is interpolated into a dialectic libertarianism that includes truth as a totality. However, the premise of nationalism states that culture serves to entrench outmoded perceptions of class.
The characteristic theme of Brophy’s[15] critique of Baudrillardist simulacra is the absurdity, and thus the paradigm, of neodialectic sexual identity. In a sense, Prinn[16] suggests that we have to choose between dialectic libertarianism and predialectic materialism.
The masculine/feminine distinction which is a central theme of Madonna’s Sex is also evident in Material Girl, although in a more mythopoetical sense. It could be said that several discourses concerning the role of the reader as artist exist.
The subject is contextualised into a modernist theory that includes language as a whole. However, Derrida uses the term ‘dialectic libertarianism’ to denote a neoconstructive totality.
7. Cultural narrative and subconceptual desublimation
“Sexuality is fundamentally dead,” says Bataille; however, according to Brophy[17] , it is not so much sexuality that is fundamentally dead, but rather the genre, and subsequent failure, of sexuality. If nationalism holds, we have to choose between Derridaist reading and precapitalist discourse. Thus, the main theme of the works of Madonna is not theory, but subtheory.
“Class is part of the defining characteristic of art,” says Lyotard. Any number of discourses concerning nationalism may be discovered. In a sense, the subject is interpolated into a dialectic paradigm of narrative that includes language as a reality.
Pickett[18] states that we have to choose between postdialectic discourse and capitalist deconstruction. But the subject is contextualised into a neosemanticist dialectic theory that includes narrativity as a paradox.
If postdialectic discourse holds, we have to choose between subconceptual desublimation and precultural narrative. It could be said that the subject is interpolated into a postdialectic discourse that includes consciousness as a reality.
An abundance of discourses concerning the role of the writer as observer exist. Therefore, nationalism suggests that the raison d’etre of the artist is significant form, but only if Foucault’s analysis of postdialectic discourse is invalid; otherwise, Lyotard’s model of subconceptual desublimation is one of “modernist narrative”, and hence intrinsically elitist.
The characteristic theme of Pickett’s[19] critique of nationalism is a self-falsifying paradox. In a sense, Bataille promotes the use of postdialectic discourse to modify sexual identity.
1. Dahmus, E. B. N. (1971) Postdialectic discourse and nationalism. And/Or Press
2. la Tournier, L. G. ed. (1995) The Narrative of Genre: Nationalism in the works of Stone. O’Reilly & Associates
3. von Ludwig, Y. G. F. (1982) Nationalism, rationalism and postcapitalist situationism. And/Or Press
4. Cameron, G. L. ed. (1973) Expressions of Meaninglessness: Nationalism in the works of Spelling. Loompanics
5. Buxton, F. (1996) Nationalism, subsemioticist narrative and rationalism. And/Or Press
6. la Fournier, R. T. R. ed. (1973) The Defining characteristic of Sexual identity: Nationalism and postdialectic discourse. Cambridge University Press
7. Porter, E. I. (1995) Postdialectic discourse in the works of Gaiman. Panic Button Books
8. McElwaine, W. ed. (1980) Postcapitalist Patriarchialisms: Postdialectic discourse and nationalism. Harvard University Press
9. de Selby, S. O. B. (1991) Nationalism in the works of Rushdie. University of Oregon Press
10. Tilton, K. S. ed. (1978) Deconstructing Surrealism: Nationalism and postdialectic discourse. Yale University Press
11. Dahmus, C. T. Y. (1981) Postdialectic discourse and nationalism. University of Massachusetts Press
12. Bailey, B. ed. (1977) The Rubicon of Reality: Nationalism and postdialectic discourse. University of North Carolina Press
13. Abian, V. J. W. (1994) Nationalism in the works of Gaiman. Oxford University Press
14. Sargeant, P. V. ed. (1971) Forgetting Sontag: Postdialectic discourse and nationalism. And/Or Press
15. Brophy, D. K. L. (1986) Nationalism in the works of Madonna. O’Reilly & Associates
16. Prinn, K. ed. (1972) Reassessing Constructivism: Textual discourse, rationalism and nationalism. University of California Press
17. Brophy, O. K. T. (1984) Nationalism and postdialectic discourse. University of Massachusetts Press
18. Pickett, G. M. ed. (1992) The Broken Key: Postdialectic discourse and nationalism. Panic Button Books
19. Pickett, O. H. T. (1971) Nationalism and postdialectic discourse. O’Reilly & Associates
12
The Lounge / PLEASE READ AND VOTE TO SAVE TREES
« on: March 28, 2007, 04:39:07 AM »
Please everybody vote No to the poll on the front page at the link below. The question should be; "Do you support the State Government introducing legislation to assess the Tamar Valley pulp mill proposal?"
The upper house of the Tasmanian government is voting on this issue right now. To give you a little back ground. The Australian Medical Association, The Wilderness Society and The Commonwealth Bank have raised medical, environmental and economical concerns about this mill. It's a project that, if those people are right, will kill people, destroy the environment and lose money. The government has admitted that the mill does not pass the environmental emission requirements, as set by state law, and want to pass this new legislation in order to ensure that the mill still passes despite that fact. You can help make sure it doesn't happen!
http://www.examiner.com.au/index.asp
The upper house of the Tasmanian government is voting on this issue right now. To give you a little back ground. The Australian Medical Association, The Wilderness Society and The Commonwealth Bank have raised medical, environmental and economical concerns about this mill. It's a project that, if those people are right, will kill people, destroy the environment and lose money. The government has admitted that the mill does not pass the environmental emission requirements, as set by state law, and want to pass this new legislation in order to ensure that the mill still passes despite that fact. You can help make sure it doesn't happen!
http://www.examiner.com.au/index.asp
13
The Lounge / Feminism and our religious tolerance
« on: March 07, 2007, 07:14:18 AM »
As somebody is very firmly on the left, I have grown increasingly ashamed of the tolerance of morally despicable religious views by other members of the left. Pamela Bone, probably my favourite journalist at the moment, summed it up beautifully in her last article.
-----------
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,20867,21342722-7583,00.html
Pamela Bone: Western sisters failing the fight
* On International Women's Day, where are the protests in our cities against stonings, honour killings or any other persecutions to which women are still subjected
* March 08, 2007
LET it be recorded that in the last decade of the 20th century the brave and great movement of Western feminism ended, not with a bang but with a whimper.
I am trying to work out just when it began to fade away. It was certainly still there in strength in Vienna in 1993, when the World Conference on Human Rights was held. I was there, not as a participant but as a very partisan reporter, cheering on the women from across the world who had been working for years to have the UN recognise women's rights as human rights.
It may surprise some who think feminism is frightfully old-fashioned, that it took until the 1990s for this to happen. "The human rights of women and the girl-child are an inalienable, integral and indivisible part of human rights," the Vienna Declaration proclaimed. It was a time of great triumph. I watched as representatives of some of the most misogynistic governments of the world took their place at the podium to commit to this declaration. They were lying through their teeth, of course, but I didn't know it then.
And it was still strong at the World Conference on Women in Beijing in 1995, where a global sisterhood united to defeat attempts by a curious alliance of Muslim and Christian (mainly Catholic) conservatives to prevent women having control over their own bodies. I was there too.
Beijing was a hard battle. American family associations strongly objected to the term women's and girls' sexual rights. Leaders of Islamic governments objected to the use of the word equal in relation to women's rights, preferring instead equitable. It was equitable that women should inherit half as much as a man, since men were obliged to spend their wealth to support women, they argued.
But we won again.
The Beijing Platform for Action made many important statements about the equality of women, such as: "The human rights of women include their right to have control over and decide freely and responsibly on matters related to their sexuality, including sexual and reproductive health, free of coercion, discrimination and violence."
These were exhilarating times. But between Beijing in 1995 and New York in September 2001 the unity was lost. Somewhere along the line it happened that only one part of that curious Beijing alliance could be seen as the enemy. While a US administration that refused to fund programs against AIDS unless they taught about chastity instead of condoms could rightly be criticised, the mullahs whose abuses of women's rights were very many degrees worse could not.
Was it before or after September 11 that thinkers of the Left - for feminism was a movement of the Left - decided that racism was a far more serious crime than sexism? When did cultural sensitivity trump women's rights? Was it about the time that Australian feminist Germaine Greer defended the practice of female genital mutilation because, as she pointed out, Western women put studs through their nipples and labia?
Consider this: a struggling, screaming little girl is held down by several people (usually women) while another woman cuts through her clitoris and inner labia, with the intention of ensuring this girl will never experience sexual pleasure; and the world's most famous feminist, to whom much is owed, I don't deny, can compare this practice to adult women choosing, for whatever silly reason, to decorate their sexual parts with metal. The UN estimates that three million girls are mutilated every year. It has lately been warning against the medicalisation of the practice: as societies develop, it is being carried out by health professionals, which doesn't make it less of an abuse.
I don't hold much hope on this International Women's Day of seeing big protests in Australian cities against female genital mutilation; or against honour killings, stonings, child marriages, forced seclusion or any of the other persecutions to which women are still subjected. The fire of Western feminism has quietly died away, first as a victim of its success, lately as a victim of cultural relativism, of anti-Americanism and reluctance to be seen to be condemning the enemies of the enemy.
Yet as Western women take their rights for granted, other women are just beginning to demand theirs. There will be marches in Europe this International Women's Day, organised by Muslim (or ex-Muslim) women reformers. They will march through Germany and France to present a grievance to the European Parliament in Brussels, saying that the veil is "a manifestation of political Islam and a symbol of the oppression of women".
In Pakistan, the Prevention of Anti-Women Practices Bill, which would ban forced marriages and give women rights over property, is before the national assembly. In Syria, the murder of a 16-year-old girl by her brother, at her family's request, has prompted a national debate about the leniency shown to perpetrators of honour killings.
In Saudi Arabia, Bill Gates, addressing a recent business seminar, told the segregated audience - women, their faces and bodies shrouded in black, behind a large partition - that the country would not achieve its ambition to become an economic power while it failed to use the talents of half the population. "One side of the audience loved it," he quipped later.
Change is happening. It would be nice to think the women pushing for change had support. Maybe they do and I just don't hear about it. There are organisations, such as the International Women's Development Agency, that work tirelessly for women in poor countries. They'll be getting a donation from me this International Women's Day.
Maybe my report on the death of Western feminism is greatly exaggerated. I hope so. "Don't be so polite, girls!" the old feminists used to sing. "Show a little fight, girls, show a little fight!" And amid the confusion, hold on to what was won in Vienna. Human rights are universal. And women's rights are human rights.
Pamela Bone is author of Bad Hair Days, a book about cancer and war (Melbourne University Press).
-----------
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,20867,21342722-7583,00.html
Pamela Bone: Western sisters failing the fight
* On International Women's Day, where are the protests in our cities against stonings, honour killings or any other persecutions to which women are still subjected
* March 08, 2007
LET it be recorded that in the last decade of the 20th century the brave and great movement of Western feminism ended, not with a bang but with a whimper.
I am trying to work out just when it began to fade away. It was certainly still there in strength in Vienna in 1993, when the World Conference on Human Rights was held. I was there, not as a participant but as a very partisan reporter, cheering on the women from across the world who had been working for years to have the UN recognise women's rights as human rights.
It may surprise some who think feminism is frightfully old-fashioned, that it took until the 1990s for this to happen. "The human rights of women and the girl-child are an inalienable, integral and indivisible part of human rights," the Vienna Declaration proclaimed. It was a time of great triumph. I watched as representatives of some of the most misogynistic governments of the world took their place at the podium to commit to this declaration. They were lying through their teeth, of course, but I didn't know it then.
And it was still strong at the World Conference on Women in Beijing in 1995, where a global sisterhood united to defeat attempts by a curious alliance of Muslim and Christian (mainly Catholic) conservatives to prevent women having control over their own bodies. I was there too.
Beijing was a hard battle. American family associations strongly objected to the term women's and girls' sexual rights. Leaders of Islamic governments objected to the use of the word equal in relation to women's rights, preferring instead equitable. It was equitable that women should inherit half as much as a man, since men were obliged to spend their wealth to support women, they argued.
But we won again.
The Beijing Platform for Action made many important statements about the equality of women, such as: "The human rights of women include their right to have control over and decide freely and responsibly on matters related to their sexuality, including sexual and reproductive health, free of coercion, discrimination and violence."
These were exhilarating times. But between Beijing in 1995 and New York in September 2001 the unity was lost. Somewhere along the line it happened that only one part of that curious Beijing alliance could be seen as the enemy. While a US administration that refused to fund programs against AIDS unless they taught about chastity instead of condoms could rightly be criticised, the mullahs whose abuses of women's rights were very many degrees worse could not.
Was it before or after September 11 that thinkers of the Left - for feminism was a movement of the Left - decided that racism was a far more serious crime than sexism? When did cultural sensitivity trump women's rights? Was it about the time that Australian feminist Germaine Greer defended the practice of female genital mutilation because, as she pointed out, Western women put studs through their nipples and labia?
Consider this: a struggling, screaming little girl is held down by several people (usually women) while another woman cuts through her clitoris and inner labia, with the intention of ensuring this girl will never experience sexual pleasure; and the world's most famous feminist, to whom much is owed, I don't deny, can compare this practice to adult women choosing, for whatever silly reason, to decorate their sexual parts with metal. The UN estimates that three million girls are mutilated every year. It has lately been warning against the medicalisation of the practice: as societies develop, it is being carried out by health professionals, which doesn't make it less of an abuse.
I don't hold much hope on this International Women's Day of seeing big protests in Australian cities against female genital mutilation; or against honour killings, stonings, child marriages, forced seclusion or any of the other persecutions to which women are still subjected. The fire of Western feminism has quietly died away, first as a victim of its success, lately as a victim of cultural relativism, of anti-Americanism and reluctance to be seen to be condemning the enemies of the enemy.
Yet as Western women take their rights for granted, other women are just beginning to demand theirs. There will be marches in Europe this International Women's Day, organised by Muslim (or ex-Muslim) women reformers. They will march through Germany and France to present a grievance to the European Parliament in Brussels, saying that the veil is "a manifestation of political Islam and a symbol of the oppression of women".
In Pakistan, the Prevention of Anti-Women Practices Bill, which would ban forced marriages and give women rights over property, is before the national assembly. In Syria, the murder of a 16-year-old girl by her brother, at her family's request, has prompted a national debate about the leniency shown to perpetrators of honour killings.
In Saudi Arabia, Bill Gates, addressing a recent business seminar, told the segregated audience - women, their faces and bodies shrouded in black, behind a large partition - that the country would not achieve its ambition to become an economic power while it failed to use the talents of half the population. "One side of the audience loved it," he quipped later.
Change is happening. It would be nice to think the women pushing for change had support. Maybe they do and I just don't hear about it. There are organisations, such as the International Women's Development Agency, that work tirelessly for women in poor countries. They'll be getting a donation from me this International Women's Day.
Maybe my report on the death of Western feminism is greatly exaggerated. I hope so. "Don't be so polite, girls!" the old feminists used to sing. "Show a little fight, girls, show a little fight!" And amid the confusion, hold on to what was won in Vienna. Human rights are universal. And women's rights are human rights.
Pamela Bone is author of Bad Hair Days, a book about cancer and war (Melbourne University Press).
14
Philosophy, Religion & Society / Morality
« on: March 07, 2007, 06:44:56 AM »
I really enjoyed this article by Sam Harris and thought I'd share/see what other people think;
----------
SAM HARRIS
Neuroscience Researcher; Author, The End of Faith
We Are Making Moral Progress
No one has ever mistaken me for an optimist. And yet, when I consider what is perhaps the most pristine source of pessimism—the moral development of our species—I find reasons for hope. Despite our perennial mischief, I believe that we have made unmistakable progress in our morality. Our powers of empathy appear to be growing. We seem to be more likely now than at any point in our history to act for the benefit of humanity as a whole.
Of course, the 20th century delivered some unprecedented horrors. But those of us living in the developed world are becoming increasingly alarmed by our capacity to do one another harm. We are less tolerant of "collateral damage" in war—undoubtedly because we now see images of it—and we are less comfortable with ideologies that demonize whole groups of human beings, justifying their abuse or outright destruction.
Taking a somewhat provincial example: racism in the United States has unquestionably diminished. If you doubt this, consider the following Los Angeles Times editorial, written in 1910, in response Jack Johnson's successful heavyweight title defense against Jim Jeffries, the so-called "Great White Hope":
A Word to the Black Man:
Do not point your nose too high
Do not swell your chest too much
Do not boast too loudly
Do not be puffed up
Let not your ambition be inordinate
Or take a wrong direction
Remember you have done nothing at all
You are just the same member of society you were last week
You are on no higher plane
Deserve no new consideration
And will get none
No man will think a bit higher of you
Because your complexion is the same
Of that of the victor at Reno
A modern reader could be forgiven for thinking that this dollop of racist hatred was printed by the Ku Klux Klan. Rather, it represented the measured opinion of one of the most prominent newspapers in the United States. Is it conceivable that our mainstream media will once again give voice to such racism? I think it far more likely that we will proceed along our current path: racism will continue to lose its subscribers; the history of slavery in the United States will become even more flabbergasting to contemplate; and future generations will marvel at the ways we, too, failed in our commitment to the common good. We will embarrass our descendants, just as our ancestors embarrass us. This is moral progress.
I am bolstered in my optimism by the belief that morality is a genuine sphere of human inquiry, not a mere product of culture. Morality, rightly construed, relates to questions of human and animal suffering. This is why we don't have moral obligations toward inanimate objects (and why we will have such obligations toward conscious computers, if we ever invent them). To ask whether a given action is right or wrong is really to ask whether it will tend to create greater well-being, or greater suffering, for oneself and others. And there seems little doubt that there are right and wrong answers here. This is not to say that there will always be a single right answer to every moral question, but there will be a range of appropriate answers, as well as answers that are clearly wrong. Asking whether or not an action is good or bad may be like asking whether a given substance is "healthy" or "unhealthy" to eat: there are, of course, many foods that are appropriate to eat, but there is also a biologically important (and objective) distinction between food and poison.
I believe that there are right and wrong answers to moral questions in the same way that there are right and wrong answers to questions about biology. This commits me to what philosophers often call "moral realism"—as opposed to anti-realism, pragmatism, relativism, post-modernism, or any other view that places morality entirely in the eye of the beholder. It is often thought that moral realism fails because it requires that moral truths exist independent of minds (it doesn't). Indeed, this worry partly explains humanity's enduring attachment to religion: for many people believe that unless we keep our moral intuitions pegged to the gold-standard of God's law, we cannot say that anyone is ever right or wrong in objective terms.
Consider the phenomenon of "honor-killing": throughout much of the Muslim world at this moment, women are thought to "dishonor" their families by refusing to enter into an arranged marriage, seeking a divorce, committing adultery—or even by getting raped. Women in these situations are often murdered by their fathers, husbands, or brothers, sometimes with the collaboration of other women. Is honor-killing wrong? I have no doubt that it is. But is it really wrong?
There seems to be no question that we are wired in such a way that love is more conducive to happiness than hate, fear, and shame are. If this is true, honor-killing would be wrong even if a majority of human beings agreed that it was right. It would be wrong because this practice (along with the intentions that give rise to it) reliably diminishes human happiness: it creates immense suffering for women and girls; it conditions men to feel that their personal dignity is predicated upon something that it need not be predicated upon; it deranges the relationships between men and women, making them far less loving and compassionate (and therefore a lesser source of happiness) than they might otherwise be. While these are claims about human subjectivity, they are also, at bottom, objective claims about the real foundations of human happiness.
All of this implies, of course, that morality is a potential branch of scientific inquiry—not merely that science will one day describe our moral judgments at the level of the brain, but that science may one day be able to tell us what is good (that is, it will tell us which psychological intentions and social practices are truly conducive to the deepest happiness).
Because I believe that moral truths transcend the contingencies of culture, I think that human beings will eventually converge in their moral judgments. I am painfully aware, however, that we are living in a world where Muslims riot by the hundreds of thousands over cartoons, where Catholics oppose condom use in villages decimated by AIDS, and where the only "moral" judgment that seems guaranteed to unite the better part of humanity at this moment is that homosexuality is wrong. Which is to say that I am here celebrating our moral progress while being convinced that billions of my neighbors are profoundly confused about good and evil.
I may be a bigger optimist than I thought.
----------
SAM HARRIS
Neuroscience Researcher; Author, The End of Faith
We Are Making Moral Progress
No one has ever mistaken me for an optimist. And yet, when I consider what is perhaps the most pristine source of pessimism—the moral development of our species—I find reasons for hope. Despite our perennial mischief, I believe that we have made unmistakable progress in our morality. Our powers of empathy appear to be growing. We seem to be more likely now than at any point in our history to act for the benefit of humanity as a whole.
Of course, the 20th century delivered some unprecedented horrors. But those of us living in the developed world are becoming increasingly alarmed by our capacity to do one another harm. We are less tolerant of "collateral damage" in war—undoubtedly because we now see images of it—and we are less comfortable with ideologies that demonize whole groups of human beings, justifying their abuse or outright destruction.
Taking a somewhat provincial example: racism in the United States has unquestionably diminished. If you doubt this, consider the following Los Angeles Times editorial, written in 1910, in response Jack Johnson's successful heavyweight title defense against Jim Jeffries, the so-called "Great White Hope":
A Word to the Black Man:
Do not point your nose too high
Do not swell your chest too much
Do not boast too loudly
Do not be puffed up
Let not your ambition be inordinate
Or take a wrong direction
Remember you have done nothing at all
You are just the same member of society you were last week
You are on no higher plane
Deserve no new consideration
And will get none
No man will think a bit higher of you
Because your complexion is the same
Of that of the victor at Reno
A modern reader could be forgiven for thinking that this dollop of racist hatred was printed by the Ku Klux Klan. Rather, it represented the measured opinion of one of the most prominent newspapers in the United States. Is it conceivable that our mainstream media will once again give voice to such racism? I think it far more likely that we will proceed along our current path: racism will continue to lose its subscribers; the history of slavery in the United States will become even more flabbergasting to contemplate; and future generations will marvel at the ways we, too, failed in our commitment to the common good. We will embarrass our descendants, just as our ancestors embarrass us. This is moral progress.
I am bolstered in my optimism by the belief that morality is a genuine sphere of human inquiry, not a mere product of culture. Morality, rightly construed, relates to questions of human and animal suffering. This is why we don't have moral obligations toward inanimate objects (and why we will have such obligations toward conscious computers, if we ever invent them). To ask whether a given action is right or wrong is really to ask whether it will tend to create greater well-being, or greater suffering, for oneself and others. And there seems little doubt that there are right and wrong answers here. This is not to say that there will always be a single right answer to every moral question, but there will be a range of appropriate answers, as well as answers that are clearly wrong. Asking whether or not an action is good or bad may be like asking whether a given substance is "healthy" or "unhealthy" to eat: there are, of course, many foods that are appropriate to eat, but there is also a biologically important (and objective) distinction between food and poison.
I believe that there are right and wrong answers to moral questions in the same way that there are right and wrong answers to questions about biology. This commits me to what philosophers often call "moral realism"—as opposed to anti-realism, pragmatism, relativism, post-modernism, or any other view that places morality entirely in the eye of the beholder. It is often thought that moral realism fails because it requires that moral truths exist independent of minds (it doesn't). Indeed, this worry partly explains humanity's enduring attachment to religion: for many people believe that unless we keep our moral intuitions pegged to the gold-standard of God's law, we cannot say that anyone is ever right or wrong in objective terms.
Consider the phenomenon of "honor-killing": throughout much of the Muslim world at this moment, women are thought to "dishonor" their families by refusing to enter into an arranged marriage, seeking a divorce, committing adultery—or even by getting raped. Women in these situations are often murdered by their fathers, husbands, or brothers, sometimes with the collaboration of other women. Is honor-killing wrong? I have no doubt that it is. But is it really wrong?
There seems to be no question that we are wired in such a way that love is more conducive to happiness than hate, fear, and shame are. If this is true, honor-killing would be wrong even if a majority of human beings agreed that it was right. It would be wrong because this practice (along with the intentions that give rise to it) reliably diminishes human happiness: it creates immense suffering for women and girls; it conditions men to feel that their personal dignity is predicated upon something that it need not be predicated upon; it deranges the relationships between men and women, making them far less loving and compassionate (and therefore a lesser source of happiness) than they might otherwise be. While these are claims about human subjectivity, they are also, at bottom, objective claims about the real foundations of human happiness.
All of this implies, of course, that morality is a potential branch of scientific inquiry—not merely that science will one day describe our moral judgments at the level of the brain, but that science may one day be able to tell us what is good (that is, it will tell us which psychological intentions and social practices are truly conducive to the deepest happiness).
Because I believe that moral truths transcend the contingencies of culture, I think that human beings will eventually converge in their moral judgments. I am painfully aware, however, that we are living in a world where Muslims riot by the hundreds of thousands over cartoons, where Catholics oppose condom use in villages decimated by AIDS, and where the only "moral" judgment that seems guaranteed to unite the better part of humanity at this moment is that homosexuality is wrong. Which is to say that I am here celebrating our moral progress while being convinced that billions of my neighbors are profoundly confused about good and evil.
I may be a bigger optimist than I thought.
15
The Lounge / Most influential scientists today
« on: March 07, 2007, 04:58:26 AM »
Who do you think are the most influential scientists today? Here is my list, in order of influence, although I'm sure I'd change my order every time I went through the list 
.
1. Richard Dawkins
2. Stephen Hawking
3. David Suzuki
4. Marc Hauser
5. Jared Diamond
6. Francis Collins
7. Stephen Pinker
8. Ian Frazer
9. Brian Greene
10. Paul Davies
.1. Richard Dawkins
2. Stephen Hawking
3. David Suzuki
4. Marc Hauser
5. Jared Diamond
6. Francis Collins
7. Stephen Pinker
8. Ian Frazer
9. Brian Greene
10. Paul Davies
16
The Lounge / Britney Spears - the implosion
« on: February 22, 2007, 08:08:05 PM »
Anybody else been at least mildly interested in this? I only know what's going on because when I check into msn, that fucking "msn today" thing comes up with typically trashy news. My favourite newspaper (the Australian) tends not to mention her much.
Anyway what are people's thoughts? Seems like she's one of the many people who get fucked over by the general populations stupid obsession with celebrity. Think about that fanboys - you worshipping people probably does them harm. I have no ill will towards Britney, I don't know what kind of a person she is, and I can easily see how easy it is to lose the plot when you're treated the way celebrities are. Can't say I'm a fan of her music, or would even recognise it.
Anyway what are people's thoughts? Seems like she's one of the many people who get fucked over by the general populations stupid obsession with celebrity. Think about that fanboys - you worshipping people probably does them harm. I have no ill will towards Britney, I don't know what kind of a person she is, and I can easily see how easy it is to lose the plot when you're treated the way celebrities are. Can't say I'm a fan of her music, or would even recognise it.
17
The Lounge / Australian Journalism - so much integrity.
« on: February 22, 2007, 06:34:42 AM »
I found this amusing. Some people seem to be completely removed from reality. Please read both articles and then decide which person you would prefer representing the views of your country. I think there is a clear reason why The Guardian is one of the top newspapers in the world, and nobody outside of Australia would have ever heard of The Daily Telegraph. One papers website top story is about Iraq, the other's is about what's going to happen tonight in a trashy American TV drama. Gee, nice work team.
Quote from: Germaine Greer
Few Guardian readers could imagine the furore that greeted news in Australia of the article I wrote for this paper six months ago when Australian eco-warrior and millionaire zoo owner Steve Irwin was foully done to death by a stingray. I had been asked whether I was "surprised" by his death. I answered, "No." "Grief-stricken?" "No." "Was it a great loss to the conservation movement?" Again, "No." "Please explain." I did. It is my judgment that Irwin made a habit of, and a fortune by, intruding upon the steadily diminishing space available to wild creatures, and that his intention was to demonstrate his power over them, in much the same way as lion-tamers used to do before what they did was recognised as cruelty. Crocodiles, apparently, take longer. Daring to suggest that animals will be better off without Irwin is what some newspapers call "savaging" him.
The Guardian published my opinion as a sole dissenting voice amid a chorus of general lamentation and fervid celebration of Irwin's contribution to the understanding of Australian fauna as vicious, aggressive, and dangerous, which they are not, rather than timid, elusive and endangered, which they are.
Though Irwin made many Australians cringe, millions of others were outraged by my lack of respect and bayed for my blood. Matters were not helped by my agreeing to defend my view in a TV interview by satellite, which I thought would be live. It was in fact recorded, went on for ever, and included questions such as, "Do you still consider yourself Australian?" The version that eventually went to air was cut for maximum uproar value. When I flew to Australia a week later, the orchestrated clamour was still deafening. The premier of Queensland weighed in, announcing that he would treble my taxes, if he could, which gave new heart to those who thought I should be fed to the crocodiles. Lately someone has been throwing food at the windows of my house in England, mostly eggs, sometimes jam doughnuts, once corned beef hash and shaved ham, and, this weekend, two dead rabbits.
News that the Australian national portrait gallery has had a rehang, in which a picture of Steve Irwin has appeared and a picture of me has been returned to storage, pumped new life into the carcass of this forlorn controversy. The art world was punishing me; Irwin was revenging himself from the grave. Matters were not helped by the usual failure of the Murdoch press properly to research its story. The gallery owns two photographs of me; one was taken in 1999 by Polly Borland, who chose to photograph me sitting on my bed in my usual night attire, that is, naked. The other was taken in 1988 by Jacqueline Mitelman and acquired by the gallery in 1999. The Times sneered at the wrong one, by Polly Borland, and then mis-described the right one as showing me in academic robes, when I am actually wearing a T-shirt. For once, they trumpeted, I was speechless. Actually, I was filming all day, knew nothing of the matter and couldn't have cared less.
It is of course disgraceful that it has taken the Australian national portrait gallery six months to get round to exhibiting any portrait of Steve Irwin. Indeed, if the photographer Robin Sellick had not given them one free of charge in December, there would still be no likeness of this most famous Australian at the gallery. Sellick's picture was taken at Australia Zoo with a female elephant called Siam; with his right hand Irwin is doing something invisible to the captive animal, who, according to the gallery's statement, was waiting to make her daily appearance before the crowds as part of the entertainment at Australia Zoo. With a bare 15 minutes for the shoot, Sellick, who usually takes a whole day, could only keep snapping, hoping to get the kind of perversely suggestive image for which he is famous. As Siam became more restless, Sellick besought Irwin to show his vulnerable, caring side, which Irwin did by tilting his head and simpering. His left thumb is hooked rather coyly in a pocket; his lime-green shirt is undone to the fourth button, and pulled open to display his bosom in a manner not altogether manly.
Irwin's mantle has now descended on the capable shoulders of his nine-year-old daughter, Bindi, whose speech at her father's memorial service was seen by more than 300 million viewers, and voted the TV moment of the year. So it's not surprising that people who think that the Irwin approach is counterproductive whisper and look nervously behind them when they tell me so, such as the young woman in the duty-free shop who felt she had to follow me out into the concourse before she could safely whisper, "I thought you were right about Steve Irwin, but I didn't dare say so."
What I said has now also been said by naturalists and conservationists writing in the dedicated press but still I'm the one who gets the death threats. As Australia gradually morphs into California, it is losing its respect for honesty and directness. Ballyhoo rules, and it's not OK.
Quote from: Paul Kent
SERIAL Australian-hater Germaine Greer has described it as disgraceful that it has taken the Australian National Portrait Gallery six months to hang a portrait of the late Crocodile Hunter Steve Irwin, before having another crack at Australia.
Greer has also had another subtle attack on Irwin, describing his portrait as "unmanly".
While she commended the gallery for finally getting around to hanging Irwin's portrait – in the place her portrait once occupied – most of her article in London's Guardian was predictably spent defending her criticism of Irwin and complaining about the unfair treatment she believed she got following her comments in the days following Irwin's death in September last year.
"Lately someone has been throwing food at the windows of my house in England, mostly eggs," she sniffled, "sometimes jam doughnuts, once corned beef hash and shaved ham, and, this weekend, two dead rabbits."
Greer, who became famous for writing The Female Eunuch, has since made a career out of being an Australian that hates Australia.
She sensationally caused a stir in the days following Irwin's death by claiming the "animal world had finally got its revenge" on Irwin – a line she conviently failed to mention in her Guardian column.
Instead, she claims: "It is my judgment Irwin made a habit of, and a fortune by, intruding upon the steadily diminishing space available to wild creatures and that his intention was to demonstrate his power over them, in much the same way as lion-tamers used to do before what they did was recognised as cruelty".
She claims Irwin's death was no great loss to the conservation movement and that his approach was "counterproductive".
She also claims Irwin "made many Australians cringe".
Naturally enough, Greer has justified her claims by blaiming it on changes she believes she has seen in Australia – even though she has not lived in Australia for many years.
"As Australia gradually morphs into California," she writes, "it is losing its respect for honesty and directness."
While Greer did not complain about Irwin's portrait replacing her own, she did mock the portrait of Irwin that now hangs, in which he is captured with a female elephant called Siam from his Australian Zoo.
She claimed Irwin's right hand was "doing something invisible to the captive animal" before launching into Irwin, again.
Photographer Robin Sellick "besought Irwin to show his vulnerable, caring side, which Irwin did by tilting his head and simpering.
"His left thumb is hooked rather coyly in a pocket; his lime-green shirt is undone to the fourth button and pulled open to display his bosom in a manner not altogether manly."
18
The Lounge / Non-resitance vs power
« on: February 22, 2007, 12:03:31 AM »
So Bog things that non-resistance is greater than power. If that is the case he should be able to defeat a car in a fight to the death. Do you think this is the case?
19
The Lounge / An Argument for Creationism
« on: February 07, 2007, 04:47:59 AM »
So I'm reading this book "In Six Days" - which is a collection of essays by "scientists" about why the believe in creationism. It is certainly intriguing, and hilarious. I put scientists in inverted commas, because, although they may have scientific qualifications, their arguments are ridiculously unscientific.
For example the first essay, by Dr Jeremy L Walter - who is a mechanical engineer is essentially about the fact that life on Earth cannot evolve to become more complex because of the laws of thermodynamics. While his statement could be true in some sense, he overlooks the fact that both the laws of thermodynamics he talks about only apply to closed systems. Fortunately for life, we have an almost never ending supply of energy coming from the sun.
Anyway, this argument was so good, I wanted to post it up.
It is written by Dr Jerry R Bergman - who is a biologist and actually has a BS, an MS, an MA and two Ph.Ds. First he puts forward the argument about irreducible complexity. Many real bioligists have totally destroyed this argument. He also continually talks about how there are more than one opinion on the creation of the Earth, and acts like they should be viewed as equals - ignoring the fact that over 90% of the worlds top scientists are atheists, and I'm sure a large percentage of the remaining 10% also do not believe in creationism. He then puts forward this argument:
-------
Creation Of Humans
The problem of an instantaneous creation are best illustrated by the first man, Adam. If created a mature adult, Adam would appear to be about, say, thirty years of age when he was only one day old. If Adam were examined medically, much scientific evidence in support of a thirty-year age estimate would be found. Most medical tests completed on such a man would conclude he was and would have to be treated medically as if he, in fact, were at the prime of his life, even though only a day old.
This does not imply that God is deceptive, but only that to exist as a living organism, the human body had to be created fully formed. If his blood was not already circulating when Adam was created, the few minutes that it would take to prime the system and for blood to circulate to the brain could cause major cell death or damage. All of Adam's organs, including his heart, lungs, kidneys and brain, must have been functioning simultaneously as a unit the second he was created. In other words, God created Adam as a mature man.
Although the physician who completed a physical on Adam a day after he was created would have had to conclude from development measures, such as bone-to-cartilage ratios, that Adam was thirty years old, some evidence for youth might be found - in a one-day-old Adam, we might not have found certain effects of aging, such as brain cell changes, which exist in the average thirty-year-old today. This, though, might have been because he was perfect, but this does not rule out the fact that some evidence, such as tissue culture examination of his cells, might have existed to prove he was in fact one week old.
Likewise, because the universe is enormously interrelated, the Creator could not have created the earth along, but must have created the entire heavens an dearth as a functioning unit. And as God likewise created the universe for a reason (such as a support system for the earth), and must have created Adam with blood moving in his veins, it is likewise a logical inference that the stars were created moving in their orbits and with light in transit.
Although this belief may not currently be provable, it may nonetheless be the most reasonable of the few possibilities that now exist.
-----
I also found this paragraph hilarious:
----
The comparing of the creation of a human body with the creation of the universe has been supported by recent findings. Research has revealed that the universe is extraordinarily organised: our earth is organised into a solar system, which is part of a highly organise group of stars called a galaxy, that is part of a highly organised family of galaxies called clusters which, in turn, are organised into an enormous group of clusters called superclusters.
-------
The real question is; Why are those terms in bold? I don't know. I guess God did it.
For example the first essay, by Dr Jeremy L Walter - who is a mechanical engineer is essentially about the fact that life on Earth cannot evolve to become more complex because of the laws of thermodynamics. While his statement could be true in some sense, he overlooks the fact that both the laws of thermodynamics he talks about only apply to closed systems. Fortunately for life, we have an almost never ending supply of energy coming from the sun.
Anyway, this argument was so good, I wanted to post it up.
It is written by Dr Jerry R Bergman - who is a biologist and actually has a BS, an MS, an MA and two Ph.Ds. First he puts forward the argument about irreducible complexity. Many real bioligists have totally destroyed this argument. He also continually talks about how there are more than one opinion on the creation of the Earth, and acts like they should be viewed as equals - ignoring the fact that over 90% of the worlds top scientists are atheists, and I'm sure a large percentage of the remaining 10% also do not believe in creationism. He then puts forward this argument:
-------
Creation Of Humans
The problem of an instantaneous creation are best illustrated by the first man, Adam. If created a mature adult, Adam would appear to be about, say, thirty years of age when he was only one day old. If Adam were examined medically, much scientific evidence in support of a thirty-year age estimate would be found. Most medical tests completed on such a man would conclude he was and would have to be treated medically as if he, in fact, were at the prime of his life, even though only a day old.
This does not imply that God is deceptive, but only that to exist as a living organism, the human body had to be created fully formed. If his blood was not already circulating when Adam was created, the few minutes that it would take to prime the system and for blood to circulate to the brain could cause major cell death or damage. All of Adam's organs, including his heart, lungs, kidneys and brain, must have been functioning simultaneously as a unit the second he was created. In other words, God created Adam as a mature man.
Although the physician who completed a physical on Adam a day after he was created would have had to conclude from development measures, such as bone-to-cartilage ratios, that Adam was thirty years old, some evidence for youth might be found - in a one-day-old Adam, we might not have found certain effects of aging, such as brain cell changes, which exist in the average thirty-year-old today. This, though, might have been because he was perfect, but this does not rule out the fact that some evidence, such as tissue culture examination of his cells, might have existed to prove he was in fact one week old.
Likewise, because the universe is enormously interrelated, the Creator could not have created the earth along, but must have created the entire heavens an dearth as a functioning unit. And as God likewise created the universe for a reason (such as a support system for the earth), and must have created Adam with blood moving in his veins, it is likewise a logical inference that the stars were created moving in their orbits and with light in transit.
Although this belief may not currently be provable, it may nonetheless be the most reasonable of the few possibilities that now exist.
-----
I also found this paragraph hilarious:
----
The comparing of the creation of a human body with the creation of the universe has been supported by recent findings. Research has revealed that the universe is extraordinarily organised: our earth is organised into a solar system, which is part of a highly organise group of stars called a galaxy, that is part of a highly organised family of galaxies called clusters which, in turn, are organised into an enormous group of clusters called superclusters.
-------
The real question is; Why are those terms in bold? I don't know. I guess God did it.
21
The Lounge / Apostates of Islam - We Left Islam
« on: February 02, 2007, 04:25:00 AM »
We left Islam
Who we are:
We are ex-Muslims. Some of us were born and raised in Islam and some of us had converted to Islam at some moment in our lives. We were taught never to question the truth of Islam and to believe in Allah and his messenger with blind faith. We were told that Allah would forgive all sins but the sin of disbelief (Quran 4:48 and 4:116). But we committed the ultimate sin of thinking and questioned the belief that was imposed on us and we came to realize that far from being a religion of truth, Islam is a hoax, it is hallucination of a sick mind and nothing but lies and deceits.
What we believe:
Some of us have embraced other religions but most of us have simply left Islam without believing in any other religion. We believe in humanity. We believe that humans do not need to follow a religion to be good. All we need to follow is the Golden Rule. All we have to do is to treat others they way we expect to be treated. This is the essence of all the goodness. All good religious teachings stem from this eternal principle. This is the ultimate guidance humanity need. This is the Golden Rule.
Why Mohammed was not a prophet:
One who claims to be a messenger of God is expected to live a saintly life. He must not be given to lust, he must not be a sexual pervert, and he must not be a rapist, a highway robber, a war criminal, a mass murderer or an assassin. One who claims to be a messenger of God must have a superior character. He must stand above the vices of the people of his time. Yet Muhammad’s life is that of a gangster godfather. He raided merchant caravans, looted innocent people, massacred entire male populations and enslaved the women and children. He raped the women captured in war after killing their husbands and told his followers that it is okay to have sex with their captives and their “right hand possessions” (Quran 33:50) He assassinated those who criticized him and executed them when he came to power and became de facto despot of Arabia. Muhammad was bereft of human compassion. He was an obsessed man with his dreams of grandiosity and could not forgive those who stood in his way. Muhammad was a narcissist like Hitler, Saddam or Stalin. He was astute and knew how to manipulate people, but his emotional intelligence was less evolved than that of a 6-year-old child. He simply could not feel the pain of others. He brutally massacred thousands of innocent people and pillaged their wealth. His ambitions were big and as a narcissist he honestly believed he is entitled to do as he pleased and commit all sorts of crimes and his evil deeds are justified.
Why Quran is not from God:
Muhammad produced no miracles and when pressed he claimed that his miracle is the Quran. Yet a cursory look at the Quran reveals that this book is full of errors. Quran is replete with scientific heresies, historic blunders, mathematical mistakes, logical absurdities, grammatical errors and ethical fallacies. It is badly compiled and it contradicts itself. There is nothing intelligent in this book let alone miraculous. Muhammad challenged people to produce a “Surah like it” or find an error therein, yet Muslims would kill anyone who dares to criticize it. In such a climate of hypocrisy and violence truth is the first casualty.
What is our goal?
We are apostates of Islam. We denounce Islam as a false doctrine of hate and terror. However we are not against Muslims who are our own kin and relatives. We do not advocate hate and violence. Muslims are the main victims of Islam. Our goal is to educate them and let them see the truth. We are against Islam and not the Muslims. We strive to bring the Muslims into the fold of humanity. Eradicate Islam so our people can be liberated, so they can prosper and break away from the pillory of Islam. We would like to see Islamic countries dedicate more time to science and less time to Quran and Sharia. We would like to see them prosper and contribute to human civilization. We would like to see the draconian laws of Islam eliminated and people are treated humanely. We strive for freedom of beliefs, for equality of gender and for oneness of mankind.
Mankind’s biggest challenge:
Today the humanity is facing a great danger. Islamic fundamentalism is on the rise and the hatred is brewing in the minds of millions of Muslims. This hatred must be contained or there would be disastrous consequences. We believe that the education is the only answer. Muslim intellectuals must realize that Islam is a false doctrine and they must let the rest of Islamic world know the truth. Islam is a religion that thrives on the arrogant assumption that it is the most logical, the most scientific and the most perfect religion. While the fact is that it is the stupidest doctrine — the most backward and absurd belief. Once the truth about Islam becomes common knowledge, it will be weakened and the Islamic fanaticism will lose its fangs. Hundreds of billions of dollars are being expended to combat Islamic terrorism, yet no effort is made to contain the ideology behind this terrorism. It is our belief that Islamic terrorism will not be eliminated unless and until the ideology behind it is exposed and eradicated. This is what we intend to do.
Who we are:
We are ex-Muslims. Some of us were born and raised in Islam and some of us had converted to Islam at some moment in our lives. We were taught never to question the truth of Islam and to believe in Allah and his messenger with blind faith. We were told that Allah would forgive all sins but the sin of disbelief (Quran 4:48 and 4:116). But we committed the ultimate sin of thinking and questioned the belief that was imposed on us and we came to realize that far from being a religion of truth, Islam is a hoax, it is hallucination of a sick mind and nothing but lies and deceits.
What we believe:
Some of us have embraced other religions but most of us have simply left Islam without believing in any other religion. We believe in humanity. We believe that humans do not need to follow a religion to be good. All we need to follow is the Golden Rule. All we have to do is to treat others they way we expect to be treated. This is the essence of all the goodness. All good religious teachings stem from this eternal principle. This is the ultimate guidance humanity need. This is the Golden Rule.
Why Mohammed was not a prophet:
One who claims to be a messenger of God is expected to live a saintly life. He must not be given to lust, he must not be a sexual pervert, and he must not be a rapist, a highway robber, a war criminal, a mass murderer or an assassin. One who claims to be a messenger of God must have a superior character. He must stand above the vices of the people of his time. Yet Muhammad’s life is that of a gangster godfather. He raided merchant caravans, looted innocent people, massacred entire male populations and enslaved the women and children. He raped the women captured in war after killing their husbands and told his followers that it is okay to have sex with their captives and their “right hand possessions” (Quran 33:50) He assassinated those who criticized him and executed them when he came to power and became de facto despot of Arabia. Muhammad was bereft of human compassion. He was an obsessed man with his dreams of grandiosity and could not forgive those who stood in his way. Muhammad was a narcissist like Hitler, Saddam or Stalin. He was astute and knew how to manipulate people, but his emotional intelligence was less evolved than that of a 6-year-old child. He simply could not feel the pain of others. He brutally massacred thousands of innocent people and pillaged their wealth. His ambitions were big and as a narcissist he honestly believed he is entitled to do as he pleased and commit all sorts of crimes and his evil deeds are justified.
Why Quran is not from God:
Muhammad produced no miracles and when pressed he claimed that his miracle is the Quran. Yet a cursory look at the Quran reveals that this book is full of errors. Quran is replete with scientific heresies, historic blunders, mathematical mistakes, logical absurdities, grammatical errors and ethical fallacies. It is badly compiled and it contradicts itself. There is nothing intelligent in this book let alone miraculous. Muhammad challenged people to produce a “Surah like it” or find an error therein, yet Muslims would kill anyone who dares to criticize it. In such a climate of hypocrisy and violence truth is the first casualty.
What is our goal?
We are apostates of Islam. We denounce Islam as a false doctrine of hate and terror. However we are not against Muslims who are our own kin and relatives. We do not advocate hate and violence. Muslims are the main victims of Islam. Our goal is to educate them and let them see the truth. We are against Islam and not the Muslims. We strive to bring the Muslims into the fold of humanity. Eradicate Islam so our people can be liberated, so they can prosper and break away from the pillory of Islam. We would like to see Islamic countries dedicate more time to science and less time to Quran and Sharia. We would like to see them prosper and contribute to human civilization. We would like to see the draconian laws of Islam eliminated and people are treated humanely. We strive for freedom of beliefs, for equality of gender and for oneness of mankind.
Mankind’s biggest challenge:
Today the humanity is facing a great danger. Islamic fundamentalism is on the rise and the hatred is brewing in the minds of millions of Muslims. This hatred must be contained or there would be disastrous consequences. We believe that the education is the only answer. Muslim intellectuals must realize that Islam is a false doctrine and they must let the rest of Islamic world know the truth. Islam is a religion that thrives on the arrogant assumption that it is the most logical, the most scientific and the most perfect religion. While the fact is that it is the stupidest doctrine — the most backward and absurd belief. Once the truth about Islam becomes common knowledge, it will be weakened and the Islamic fanaticism will lose its fangs. Hundreds of billions of dollars are being expended to combat Islamic terrorism, yet no effort is made to contain the ideology behind this terrorism. It is our belief that Islamic terrorism will not be eliminated unless and until the ideology behind it is exposed and eradicated. This is what we intend to do.
22
The Lounge / Is it ok for churches to say "Jesus Loves Osama"
« on: February 01, 2007, 03:23:42 AM »
Tough question, because I feel like they should have the right to say that, but at the same time, is obviously not true, as Jesus is dead. I'm sure there are other opinions out there though.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2007/02/01/wosama101.xml
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2007/02/01/wosama101.xml
23
The Lounge / In The News
« on: January 31, 2007, 09:42:23 PM »
Lazy Sloth Sacked
Sloth won't move for scientists.
Iguana to get the chop
Iguana has erection for a week. Will have penis amputed. Does not mind, as doesn't know what the word "amputation" means.
Cat in a jam
Cat tries to catch mouse in a jar. Gets head stuck. Mouse escapes.
Python swallows 11 guard dogs
lol
Sex Shock: Sea Horses Exposed
Turns out that sea horses not only love to fuck, but they're bisexual too.
Sloth won't move for scientists.
Iguana to get the chop
Iguana has erection for a week. Will have penis amputed. Does not mind, as doesn't know what the word "amputation" means.
Cat in a jam
Cat tries to catch mouse in a jar. Gets head stuck. Mouse escapes.
Python swallows 11 guard dogs
lol
Sex Shock: Sea Horses Exposed
Turns out that sea horses not only love to fuck, but they're bisexual too.
24
The Lounge / Global Warming
« on: January 30, 2007, 03:23:52 AM »
For those who don't know, the IPCC report on Climate Change is about to be released this week (on Friday).
The Intergovernmental Panel On Climate Change is a panel made up of over 1000 climate based scientists. Its reports have to be unanimously approved by 154 governments and the research used has to be peer-reviewed.
The IPCC is notorious for being conservative and painting the most positive picture possible. As with other reports, a number of scientists believe that the current IPCC report has understated the significance of the problem.
Despite that, this is what the upcoming report will say:
There is more than 99% certainty that carbon levels in the atmosphere are higher than they have ever been for at least the last 650,000 years.
There is above 95% certainty that global warming is happening and is caused by human actions.
If we maintain the current levels of actions than approximately 20% of all species of life on Earth will be extinct by the end of the century.
60% of coral reefs, including the Great Barrier Reef, will be completely wiped out within the next 20 years. (Which alone will cost Australia around $5,800,000,000 per year).
We will face the worst economic depression the world has ever seen.
Within 75 years, between 1.1 billion and 3.2 billion people will face serious water shortages.
We have 10 years to make a difference.
The Intergovernmental Panel On Climate Change is a panel made up of over 1000 climate based scientists. Its reports have to be unanimously approved by 154 governments and the research used has to be peer-reviewed.
The IPCC is notorious for being conservative and painting the most positive picture possible. As with other reports, a number of scientists believe that the current IPCC report has understated the significance of the problem.
Despite that, this is what the upcoming report will say:
There is more than 99% certainty that carbon levels in the atmosphere are higher than they have ever been for at least the last 650,000 years.
There is above 95% certainty that global warming is happening and is caused by human actions.
If we maintain the current levels of actions than approximately 20% of all species of life on Earth will be extinct by the end of the century.
60% of coral reefs, including the Great Barrier Reef, will be completely wiped out within the next 20 years. (Which alone will cost Australia around $5,800,000,000 per year).
We will face the worst economic depression the world has ever seen.
Within 75 years, between 1.1 billion and 3.2 billion people will face serious water shortages.
We have 10 years to make a difference.
25
The Lounge / Rain
« on: January 20, 2007, 08:07:01 PM »
How good is rain? Seriously. If people aren't aware, Australia is currently experiencing our worst drought on record. It's not so bad down where I live, but much worse else where. Anyway right now we're getting some serious torrential rain. The first real sustained rain I've seen in about a year. It's so fantastic, relaxing and soothing. I just wanted to express my great joy at seeing the gutters fill and overflow, at seeing the trees glow and constant static of it. Rain is awe inspiring
There is a little thunder and lightening as well.
There is a little thunder and lightening as well.
26
The Lounge / The Age Of Horrorism - by Martin Amis
« on: January 17, 2007, 05:20:28 PM »
A long, but great essay by Martin Amis about Islam, religion and the world. So large I had to post in 2 parts - but worth a read.
---
It was mid-October 2001, and night was closing in on the border city of Peshawar, in Pakistan, as my friend – a reporter and political man of letters – approached a market stall and began to haggle over a batch of T-shirts bearing the likeness of Osama bin Laden. It is forbidden, in Sunni Islam, to depict the human form, lest it lead to idolatry; but here was Osama's lordly visage, on display and on sale right outside the mosque. The mosque now emptied, after evening prayers, and my friend was very suddenly and very thoroughly surrounded by a shoving, jabbing, jeering brotherhood: the young men of Peshawar.At this time of day, their equivalents, in the great conurbations of Europe and America, could expect to ease their not very sharp frustrations by downing a lot of alcohol, by eating large meals with no dietary restrictions, by racing around to one another's apartments in powerful and expensive machines, by downing a lot more alcohol as well as additional stimulants and relaxants, by jumping up and down for several hours on strobe-lashed dancefloors, and (in a fair number of cases) by having galvanic sex with near-perfect strangers. These diversions were not available to the young men of Peshawar.
More proximately, just over the frontier, the West was in the early stages of invading Afghanistan and slaughtering Pakistan's pious clients and brainchildren, the Taliban, and flattening the Hindu Kush with its power and its rage. More proximately still, the ears of these young men were still fizzing with the battlecries of molten mullahs, and their eyes were smarting anew to the chalk-thick smoke from the hundreds of thousands of wood fires – fires kindled by the multitudes of exiles and refugees from Afghanistan, camped out all around the city. There was perhaps a consciousness, too, that the Islamic Republic of Pakistan, over the past month, had reversed years of policy and decided to sacrifice the lives of its Muslim clients and brainchildren, over the border, in exchange for American cash. So when the crowd scowled out its question, the answer needed to be a good one.
'Why you want these? You like Osama?'
I can almost hear the tone of the reply I would have given – reedy, wavering, wholly defeatist. As for the substance, it would have been the reply of the cornered trimmer, and intended, really, just to give myself time to seek the foetal position and fold my hands over my face. Something like: 'Well I quite like him, but I think he overdid it a bit in New York.' No, that would not have served. What was needed was boldness and brilliance. The exchange continued:
'You like Osama?'
'Of course. He is my brother.'
'He is your brother?'
'All men are my brothers.'
All men are my brothers. I would have liked to have said it then, and I would like to say it now: all men are my brothers. But all men are not my brothers. Why? Because all women are my sisters. And the brother who denies the rights of his sister: that brother is not my brother. At the very best, he is my half-brother – by definition. Osama is not my brother.
Religion is sensitive ground, as well it might be. Here we walk on eggshells. Because religion is itself an eggshell. Today, in the West, there are no good excuses for religious belief – unless we think that ignorance, reaction and sentimentality are good excuses. This is of course not so in the East, where, we acknowledge, almost every living citizen in many huge and populous countries is intimately defined by religious belief. The excuses, here, are very persuasive; and we duly accept that 'faith' – recently and almost endearingly defined as 'the desire for the approval of supernatural beings' – is a world-historical force and a world-historical actor. All religions, unsurprisingly, have their terrorists, Christian, Jewish, Hindu, even Buddhist. But we are not hearing from those religions. We are hearing from Islam.
Let us make the position clear. We can begin by saying, not only that we respect Muhammad, but that no serious person could fail to respect Muhammad – a unique and luminous historical being. Judged by the continuities he was able to set in motion, he remains a titanic figure, and, for Muslims, all-answering: a revolutionary, a warrior, and a sovereign, a Christ and a Caesar, 'with a Koran in one hand', as Bagehot imagined him, 'and a sword in the other'. Muhammad has strong claims to being the most extraordinary man who ever lived. And always a man, as he always maintained, and not a god. Naturally we respect Muhammad. But we do not respect Muhammad Atta.
Until recently it was being said that what we are confronted with, here, is 'a civil war' within Islam. That's what all this was supposed to be: not a clash of civilisations or anything like that, but a civil war within Islam. Well, the civil war appears to be over. And Islamism won it. The loser, moderate Islam, is always deceptively well-represented on the level of the op-ed page and the public debate; elsewhere, it is supine and inaudible. We are not hearing from moderate Islam. Whereas Islamism, as a mover and shaper of world events, is pretty well all there is.
So, to repeat, we respect Islam – the donor of countless benefits to mankind, and the possessor of a thrilling history. But Islamism? No, we can hardly be asked to respect a creedal wave that calls for our own elimination. More, we regard the Great Leap Backwards as a tragic development in Islam's story, and now in ours. Naturally we respect Islam. But we do not respect Islamism, just as we respect Muhammad and do not respect Muhammad Atta.
I will soon come to Donald Rumsfeld, the architect and guarantor of the hideous cataclysm in Iraq. But first I must turn from great things to small, for a paragraph, and talk about writing, and the strange thing that happened to me at my desk in this, the Age of Vanished Normalcy.
All writers of fiction will at some point find themselves abandoning a piece of work – or find themselves putting it aside, as we gently say. The original idea, the initiating 'throb' (Nabokov), encounters certain 'points of resistance' (Updike); and these points of resistance, on occasion, are simply too obdurate, numerous, and pervasive. You come to write the next page, and it's dead – as if your subconscious, the part of you quietly responsible for so much daily labour, has been neutralised, or switched off. Norman Mailer has said that one of the few real sorrows of 'the spooky art' is that it requires you to spend too many days among dead things. Recently, and for the first time in my life, I abandoned, not a dead thing, but a thriving novella; and I did so for reasons that were wholly extraneous. I am aware that this is hardly a tectonic event; but for me the episode was existential. In the West, writers are acclimatised to freedom – to limitless and gluttonous freedom. And I discovered something. Writing is freedom; and as soon as that freedom is in shadow, the writer can no longer proceed. The shadow, in this case, was not a fear of repercussion. It was as if, most reluctantly, I was receiving a new vibration or frequency from the planetary shimmer. The novella was a satire called The Unknown Known
Secretary Rumsfeld was unfairly ridiculed, some thought, for his haiku-like taxonomy of the terrorist threat:
'The message is: there are known "knowns". There are things that we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we know we don't know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we don't know we don't know.'
Like his habit of talking in 'the third person passive once removed', this is 'very Rumsfeldian'. And Rumsfeld can be even more Rumsfeldian than that. According to Bob Woodward's Plan of Attack, at a closed-door senatorial briefing in September 2002 (the idea was to sell regime-change in Iraq), Rumsfeld exasperated everyone present with a torrent of Rumsfeldisms, including the following strophe: 'We know what we know, we know there are things we do not know, and we know there are things we know we don't know we don't know.' Anyway, the three categories remain quite helpful as analytical tools. And they certainly appealed very powerfully to the narrator of The Unknown Known – Ayed, a diminutive Islamist terrorist who plies his trade in Waziristan, the rugged northern borderland where Osama bin Laden is still rumoured to lurk.
Ayed's outfit, which is called 'the "Prism"', used to consist of three sectors named, not very imaginatively, Sector One, Sector Two and Sector Three. But Ayed and his colleagues are attentive readers of the Western press, and the sectors now have new titles. Known Knowns (sector one) concerns itself with daily logistics: bombs, mines, shells, and various improvised explosive devices. The work of Known Unknowns (sector two) is more peripatetic and long-term; it involves, for example, trolling around North Korea in the hope of procuring the fabled 25 kilograms of enriched uranium, or going from factory to factory in Uzbekistan on a quest for better toxins and asphyxiants. In Known Knowns, the brothers are plagued by fires and gas-leaks and almost daily explosions; the brothers in Known Unknowns are racked by headaches and sore throats, and their breath, tellingly, is rich with the aroma of potent coughdrops, moving about as they do among vats of acids and bathtubs of raw pesticides. Everyone wants to work where Ayed works, which is in sector three, or Unknown Unknowns. Sector three is devoted to conceptual breakthroughs – to shifts in the paradigm.
Shifts in the paradigm like the attack of 11 September 2001. Paradigm shifts open a window; and, once opened, the window will close. Ayed observes that 11 September was instantly unrepeatable; indeed, the tactic was obsolete by 10am the same morning. Its efficacy lasted for 71 minutes, from 8.46, when American 11 hit the North Tower, to 9.57, and the start of the rebellion on United 93. On United 93, the passengers were told about the new reality by their mobile phones, and they didn't linger long in the old paradigm – the four-day siege on the equatorial tarmac, the diminishing supplies of food and water, the festering toilets, the conditions and demands, the phased release of the children and the women; then the surrender, or the clambering commandos. No, they knew that they weren't on a commercial aircraft, not any longer; they were on a missile. So they rose up. And at 10.03 United 93 came down on its back at 580mph, in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, 20 minutes from the Capitol.
I found it reassuringly difficult, dreaming up paradigm shifts. And Ayed and his friends in sector three find it difficult too. Synergy, maximalisation – these are the kinds of concept that are tossed from cushion to floormat in Unknown Unknowns. Here, a comrade argues for the dynamiting of the San Andreas Fault; there, another envisages the large-scale introduction of rabies (admixed with smallpox, methamphetamine and steroids) to the fauna of Central Park. A pensive silence follows. And very often these silences last for days on end. All you can hear, in Unknown Unknowns, is the occasional swatting palm-clap, or the crackle of a beetle being ground underfoot. Ayed feels, or used to feel, superior to his colleagues, because he has already had his eureka moment. He had it in the spring of 2001, and his project – his 'baby', if you will – was launched in the summer of that year, and is still in progress. It has a codename: UU: CRs/G,C.
Ayed's conceptual breakthrough did not go down at all well in Sector Three, as it was then called; in fact, it was widely mocked. But Ayed used a family connection, and gained an audience with Mullah Omar, the one-eyed Islamist cleric who briefly ruled Afghanistan – an imposing figure, in his dishdash and flipflops. Ayed submitted his presentation, and, to his astonishment, Mullah Omar smiled on his plan. This was a necessary condition, because Ayed's paradigm shift could only be realised with the full resources of a nation state. UU: CRs/G,C went ahead. The idea was, as Ayed would say, deceptively simple. The idea was to scour all the prisons and madhouses for every compulsive rapist in the country, and then unleash them on Greeley, Colorado.
As the story opens, the CRs have been en route to G,C for almost five years, crossing central Africa, in minibuses and on foot, and suffering many a sanguinary reverse (a host of some 30,000 Janjaweed in Sudan, a 'child militia', armed with pangas, in Congo). On top of all this, as if he didn't have enough to worry about, Ayed is not getting on very well with his wives.
Those who know the field will be undismayed by the singling out of Greeley, Colorado. For it was in Greeley, Colorado, in 1949, that Islamism, as we now know it, was decisively shaped. The story is grotesque and incredible – but then so are its consequences. And let us keep on telling ourselves how grotesque and incredible it is, our current reality, so unforeseeable, so altogether unknowable, even from the vantage of the late Nineties. At that time, if you recall, America had so much leisure on its hands, politically and culturally, that it could dedicate an entire year to Monica Lewinsky. Even Monica, it now seems, even Bill, were living in innocent times.
Since then the world has undergone a moral crash – the spiritual equivalent, in its global depth and reach, of the Great Depression of the Thirties. On our side, extraordinary rendition, coercive psychological procedures, enhanced interrogation techniques, Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, Haditha, Mahmudiya, two wars, and tens of thousands of dead bodies. All this should of course be soberly compared to the feats of the opposed ideology, an ideology which, in its most millennial form, conjures up the image of an abattoir within a madhouse. I will spell this out, because it has not been broadly assimilated. The most extreme Islamists want to kill everyone on earth except the most extreme Islamists; but every jihadi sees the need for eliminating all non-Muslims, either by conversion or by execution. And we now know what happens when Islamism gets its hands on an army (Algeria) or on something resembling a nation state (Sudan). In the first case, the result was fratricide, with 100,000 dead; in the second, following the Islamist coup in 1989, the result has been a kind of rolling genocide, and the figure is perhaps two million. And it all goes back to Greeley, Colorado, and to Sayyid Qutb.
Things started to go wrong for poor Sayyid during the Atlantic crossing from Alexandria, when, allegedly, 'a drunken, semi-naked woman' tried to storm his cabin. But before we come to that, some background. Sayyid Qutb, in 1949, had just turned 43. His childhood was provincial and devout. When, as a young man, he went to study in Cairo, his leanings became literary and Europhone and even mildly cosmopolitan. Despite an early – and routinely baffling – admiration for naturism, he was already finding Cairene women 'dishonourable', and confessed to unhappiness about 'their current level of freedom'. A short story recorded his first disappointment in matters of the heart; its title, plangently, was Thorns. Well, we've all had that; and most of us then adhere to the arc described in Peter Porter's poem, 'Once Bitten, Twice Bitten'.But Sayyid didn't need much discouragement. Promptly giving up all hope of coming across a woman of 'sufficient' moral cleanliness, he resolved to stick to virginity.
Established in a modest way as a writer, Sayyid took a job at the Ministry of Education. This radicalised him. He felt oppressed by the vestiges of the British protectorate in Egypt, and was alarmist about the growing weight of the Jewish presence in Palestine – another British crime, in Sayyid's view. He became an activist, and ran some risk of imprisonment (at the hands of the saturnalian King Farouk), before the ministry packed him off to America to do a couple of years of educational research. Prison, by the way, would claim him soon after his return. He was one of the dozens of Muslim Brothers jailed (and tortured) after the failed attempt on the life of the moderniser and secularist, Nasser, in October 1954. There was a short reprieve in 1964, but Sayyid was soon rearrested – and retortured. Steelily dismissing a clemency deal brokered by none other than the young Anwar Sadat, he was hanged in August 1966; and this was a strategic martyrdom that now lies deep in the Islamist soul. His most influential book, like the book with which it is often compared, was written behind bars. Milestones is known as the Mein Kampf of Islamism.
Sayyid was presumably still sorely shaken by the birth of Israel (after the defeat of Egypt and five other Arab armies), but at first, on the Atlantic crossing, he felt a spiritual expansion. His encyclopedic commentary, In the Shade of the Koran, would fondly and ramblingly recall the renewal of his sense of purpose and destiny. Early on, he got into a minor sectarian battle with a proselytising Christian; Sayyid retaliated by doing a bit of proselytising himself, and made some progress with a contingent of Nubian sailors. Then came the traumatic incident with the drunken, semi-naked woman. Sayyid thought she was an American agent hired to seduce him, or so he later told his biographer, who wrote that 'the encounter successfully tested his resolve to resist experiences damaging to his identity as an Egyptian and a Muslim'. God knows what the episode actually amounted to. It seems probable that the liquored-up Mata Hari, the dipsomaniacal nudist, was simply a woman in a cocktail dress who, perhaps, had recently drunk a cocktail. Still, we can continue to imagine Sayyid barricading himself into his cabin while, beyond the door, the siren sings her song.
He didn't like New York: materialistic, mechanistic, trivial, idolatrous, wanton, depraved, and so on and so forth. Washington was a little better. But here, sickly Sayyid (lungs) was hospitalised, introducing him to another dire hazard that he wouldn't have faced at home: female nurses. One of them, tricked out with 'thirsty lips, bulging breasts, smooth legs' and a coquettish manner ('the calling eye, the provocative laugh'), regaled him with her wish-list of endowments for the ideal lover. But 'the father of Islamism', as he is often called, remained calm, later developing the incident into a diatribe against Arab men who succumb to the allure of American women. In an extraordinary burst of mendacity or delusion, Sayyid claimed that the medical staff heartlessly exulted at the news of the assassination, back in Egypt, of Hasan al-Banna. We may wonder how likely it is that any American would have heard of al-Banna, or indeed of the Muslim Brotherhood, which he founded. When Sayyid was discharged from George Washington University Hospital, he probably thought the worst was behind him. But now he proceeded to the cauldron – to the pullulating hellhouse – of Greeley, Colorado.
During his six months at the Colorado State College of Education (and thereafter in California), Sayyid's hungry disapproval found a variety of targets. American lawns (a distressing example of selfishness and atomism), American conversation ('money, movie stars and models of cars'), American jazz ('a type of music invented by Blacks to please their primitive tendencies – their desire for noise and their appetite for sexual arousal'), and, of course, American women: here another one pops up, telling Sayyid that sex is merely a physical function, untrammelled by morality. American places of worship he also detests (they are like cinemas or amusement arcades), but by now he is pining for Cairo, and for company, and he does something rash. Qutb joins a club – where an epiphany awaits him. 'The dance is inflamed by the notes of the gramophone,' he wrote; 'the dance-hall becomes a whirl of heels and thighs, arms enfold hips, lips and breasts meet, and the air is full of lust.' You'd think that the father of Islamism had exposed himself to an early version of Studio 54 or even Plato's Retreat. But no: the club he joined was run by the church, and what he is describing, here, is a chapel hop in Greeley, Colorado. And Greeley, Colorado, in 1949, was dry
'And the air is full of lust.' 'Lust' is Bernard Lewis's translation, but several other writers prefer the word 'love'. And while lust has greater immediate impact, love may in the end be more resonant. Why should Qutb mind if the air is full of love? We are forced to wonder whether love can be said to exist, as we understand it, in the ferocious patriarchy of Islamism. If death and hate are the twin opposites of love, then it may not be merely whimsical and mawkish to suggest that the terrorist, the bringer of death and hate, the death-hate cultist, is in essence the enemy of love. Qutb:
'A girl looks at you, appearing as if she were an enchanting nymph or an escaped mermaid, but as she approaches, you sense only the screaming instinct inside her, and you can smell her burning body, not the scent of perfume but flesh, only flesh.'
In his excellent book, Terror and Liberalism, Paul Berman has many sharp things to say about the corpus of Sayyid Qutb; but he manages to goad himself into receptivity, and ends up, in my view, sounding almost absurdly respectful – 'rich, nuanced, deep, soulful, and heartfelt'. Qutb, who would go on to write a 30-volume gloss on it, spent his childhood memorising the Koran. He was 10 by the time he was done. Now, given that, it seems idle to expect much sense from him; and so it proves. On the last of the 46 pages he devotes to Qutb, Berman wraps things up with a long quotation. This is its repetitive first paragraph:
'The Surah [the sayings of the Prophet] tells the Muslims that, in the fight to uphold God's universal Truth, lives will have to be sacrificed. Those who risk their lives and go out to fight, and who are prepared to lay down their lives for the cause of God, are honourable people, pure of heart and blessed of soul. But the great surprise is that those among them who are killed in the struggle must not be considered or described as dead. They continue to live, as God Himself clearly states.'
Savouring that last phrase, we realise that any voyage taken with Sayyid Qutb is doomed to a leaden-witted circularity. The emptiness, the mere iteration, at the heart of his philosophy is steadily colonised by a vast entanglement of bitternesses; and here, too, we detect the presence of that peculiarly Islamist triumvirate (codified early on by Christopher Hitchens) of self-righteousness, self-pity, and self-hatred – the self-righteousness dating from the seventh century, the self-pity from the 13th (when the 'last' Caliph was kicked to death in Baghdad by the Mongol warlord Hulagu), and the self-hatred from the 20th. And most astounding of all, in Qutb, is the level of self-awareness, which is less than zero. It is as if the very act of self-examination were something unmanly or profane: something unrighteous, in a word.
Still, one way or the other, Qutb is the father of Islamism. Here are the chief tenets he inspired: that America, and its clients, are jahiliyya (the word classically applied to pre-Muhammadan Arabia – barbarous and benighted); that America is controlled by Jews; that Americans are infidels, that they are animals, and, worse, arrogant animals, and are unworthy of life; that America promotes pride and promiscuity in the service of human degradation; that America seeks to 'exterminate' Islam – and that it will accomplish this not by conquest, not by colonial annexation, but by example. As Bernard Lewis puts it in The Crisis of Islam
'This is what is meant by the term the Great Satan, applied to the United States by the late Ayatollah Khomeini. Satan as depicted in the Qur'an is neither an imperialist nor an exploiter. He is a seducer, 'the insidious tempter who whispers in the hearts of men' (Qur'an, CXIV, 4, 5).
Lewis might have added that these are the closing words of the Koran. So they echo.
The West isn't being seductive, of course; all the West is being is attractive. But the Islamist's paranoia extends to a kind of thwarted narcissism. We think again of Qutb's buxom, smooth-legged nurse, supposedly smacking her thirsty lips at the news of the death of Hasan al-Banna. Far from wanting or trying to exterminate it, the West had no views whatever about Islam per se before 11 September 2001. Of course, views were then formulated, and very soon the bestseller list was a column of primers on Islam. Some things take longer to sink in than others, true; but now we know. In the West we had brought into being a society whose main purpose, whose raison d'etre, was the tantalisation of good Muslims.
The theme of the 'tempter' can be taken a little further, in the case of Qutb. When the tempter is a temptress, and really wants you to sin, she needs to be both available and willing. And it is almost inconceivable that poor Sayyid, the frail, humourless civil servant, and turgid anti-semite (salting his talk with quotes from that long-exploded fabrication, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion), ever encountered anything that resembled an offer. It is more pitiful than that. Seduction did not come his way, but it was coming the way of others, he sensed, and a part of him wanted it too. That desire made him very afraid, and also shamed him and dishonoured him, and turned his thoughts to murder. Then the thinkers of Islam took his books and did what they did to them; and Sayyid Qutb is now a part of our daily reality. We should understand that the Islamists' hatred of America is as much abstract as historical, and irrationally abstract, too; none of the usual things can be expected to appease it. The hatred contains much historical emotion, but it is their history, and not ours, that haunts them.
Qutb has perhaps a single parallel in world history. Another shambling invert, another sexual truant (not a virgin but a career cuckold), another marginal quack and dabbler (talentless but not philistine), he too wrote a book, in prison, that fell into the worst possible hands. His name was Nikolai Chernyshevsky; and his novel (What Is To Be Done?) was read five times by Vladimir Lenin in the course of a single summer. It was Chernyshevsky who determined, not the content, but the emotional dynamic of the Soviet experiment. The centennial of his birth was celebrated with much pomp in the USSR. That was in 1928. But Russia was too sad, and too busy, to do much about the centennial of his death, which passed quietly in 1989.
In The Unknown Known my diminutive terrorist, Ayed, is not a virgin (or a Joseph, as Christians say), unlike Sayyid, on whom he is tangentially based. He is, rather, a polygamist, confining himself to the sanctioned maximum of four. On top of this, he indulges himself, whenever he has enough spare cash, with a succession of 'temporary wives'. The practice is called mutah. In her justly celebrated book, Reading Lolita in Tehran, Azar Nafisi tells us that a temporary marriage can endure for 99 years; it can also be over in half an hour. The Islamic Republic is very attentive to what it calls 'men's needs'. Before the Revolution, a girl could get married at the age of 18. After 1979 the age requirement was halved.
In Beyond Belief: Islamic Excursions Among the Converted Peoples, VS Naipaul looks at some of the social results of polygamy, in Pakistan, and notes that the marriages tend to be serial. The man moves on, 'religiously tomcatting away'; and the consequence is a society of 'half-orphans'. Divorce is in any case unarduous: 'a man who wanted to get rid of his wife could accuse her of adultery and have her imprisoned'. It is difficult to exaggerate the sexualisation of Islamist governance, even among the figures we think of as moderate. Type in 'sex' and 'al-Sistani', and prepare yourself for a cataract of pedantry and smut.
As the narrative opens, Ayed is very concerned about the state of his marriages. But there's a reason for that. When Ayed was a little boy, in the early Eighties, his dad, a talented poppy-farmer, left Waziristan with his family and settled in Greeley, Colorado. This results in a domestic blow to Ayed's self-esteem. Back home in Waziristan, a boy of his age would be feeling a lovely warm glow of pride, around now, as he realises that his sisters, in one important respect, are just like his mother: they can't read or write either. In America, though, the girls are obliged to go to school. Before Ayed knows it, the women have shed their veils, and his sisters are being called on by gum-chewing kaffirs. Now puberty looms.
There is almost an entire literary genre given over to sensibilities such as Sayyid Qutb's. It is the genre of the unreliable narrator – or, more exactly, the transparent narrator, with his helpless giveaways. Typically, a patina of haughty fastidiousness strives confidently but in vain to conceal an underworld of incurable murk. In The Unknown Known I added to this genre, and with enthusiasm. I had Ayed stand for hours in a thicket of nettles and poison ivy, beneath an elevated walkway, so that he could rail against the airiness of the summer frocks worn by American women and the shameless brevity of their underpants. I had him go out in all weathers for evening strolls, strolls gruellingly prolonged until, with the help of a buttress or a drainpipe, he comes across a woman 'quite openly' undressing for bed. Meanwhile, his sisters are all dating. The father and the brothers discuss various courses of action, such as killing them all; but America, bereft of any sense of honour, would punish them for that. The family bifurcates; Ayed returns to the rugged borderland, joins 'the "Prism"', and courts his quartet of nine-year-old sweethearts.
As Ayed keeps telling all his temporary wives, 'My wives don't understand me.' And they don't; indeed, they all want divorces, and for the same embarrassing reason. With his paradigm-shift attack on America now in ruins, and facing professional and social disgrace, Ayed suddenly sees how, in one swoop, he can redeem himself – and secure his place in history with an unknown unknown which is sure to succeed. For this he will be needing a belt
Two years ago I came across a striking photograph in a news magazine: it looked like a crudely cross-sectioned watermelon, but you could make out one or two humanoid features half-submerged in the crimson pulp. It was in fact the bravely circularised photograph of the face of a Saudi newscaster who had been beaten by her husband. In an attempted murder, it seems: at the time of his arrest he had her in the trunk of his car, and was evidently taking her into the desert for interment. What had she done to bring this on herself? In the marital home, that night, the telephone rang and the newscaster, a prosperous celebrity in her own right, answered it. She had answered the telephone. Male Westerners will be struck, here, by a dramatic cultural contrast. I know that I, for one, would be far more likely to beat my wife to death if she hadn't answered the telephone. But customs and mores vary from country to country, and you cannot reasonably claim that one ethos is 'better' than any other.
In 1949 Greeley was dry… It has been seriously suggested, by serious commentators, that suicide-mass murderers are searching for the simplest means of getting a girlfriend. It may be, too, that some of them are searching for the simplest means of getting a drink. Although alcohol, like extramarital sex, may be strictly forbidden in life, there is, in death, no shortage of either. As well as the Koranic virgins, 'as chaste', for the time being, 'as the sheltered eggs of ostriches', there is also a 'gushing fountain' of white wine (wine 'that will neither pain their heads nor take away their reason'). The suicide-mass murderer can now raise his brimming 'goblet' to an additional reward: he has the power, post mortem, to secure paradisal immortality for a host of relations (the number is a round 70, two fewer, curiously, than the traditional allotment of houris). Nor is this his only service to the clan, which, until recently, could expect an honorarium of $20,000 from Iraq, plus $5,000 from Saudi Arabia – as well as the vast prestige automatically accorded to the family of a martyr. And then there is the enticement, or incitement, of peer-group prestige.
Suicide-mass murder is astonishingly alien, so alien, in fact, that Western opinion has been unable to formulate a rational response to it. A rational response would be something like an unvarying factory siren of unanimous disgust. But we haven't managed that. What we have managed, on the whole, is a murmur of dissonant evasion. Paul Berman's best chapter, in Terror and Liberalism, is mildly entitled 'Wishful Thinking' – and Berman is in general a mild-mannered man. But this is a very tough and persistent analysis of our extraordinary uncertainty. It is impossible to read it without cold fascination and a consciousness of disgrace. I felt disgrace, during its early pages, because I had done it too, and in print, early on. Contemplating intense violence, you very rationally ask yourself, what are the reasons for this? And compassionately frowning newscasters are still asking that same question. It is time to move on. We are not dealing in reasons because we are not dealing in reason.
After the failure of Oslo, and the attendant consolidation of Hamas, the second intifada ('earthquake') got under way in 2001, not with stonings and stabbings, like the first, but with a steady campaign of suicide-mass murder. 'All over the world,' writes Berman, 'the popularity of the Palestinian cause did not collapse. It increased.' The parallel process was the intensive demonisation of Israel (academic ostracism, and so on); every act of suicide-mass murder 'testified' to the extremity of the oppression, so that 'Palestinian terror, in this view, was the measure of Israeli guilt'. And when Sharon replaced Barak, and the expected crackdown began, and the Israeli army, with 23 casualties of its own, killed 52 Palestinians in the West Bank city of Jenin, the attack 'was seen as a veritable Holocaust, an Auschwitz, or, in an alternative image, as the Middle Eastern equivalent of the Wehrmacht's assault on the Warsaw Ghetto. These tropes were massively accepted, around the world. Typing in the combined names of "Jenin" and "Auschwitz"... I came up with 2,890 references; and, typing in "Jenin" and "Nazi", I came up with 8,100 references. There were 63,100 references to the combined names of "Sharon" and "Hitler".' Once the redoubled suppression had taken hold, the human bombings decreased; and world opinion quietened down. The Palestinians were now worse off than ever, their societal gains of the Nineties 'flattened by Israeli tanks'. But the protests 'rose and fell in tandem with the suicide bomb attacks, and not in tandem with the suffering of the Palestinian people'.
This was because suicide-mass murder presented the West with a philosophical crisis. The quickest way out of it was to pretend that the tactic was reasonable, indeed logical and even admirable: an extreme case of 'rationalist naivete', in Berman's phrase. Rationalist naivete was easier than the assimilation of the alternative: that is to say, the existence of a pathological cult. Berman assembles many voices. And if we are going to hear the rhetoric of delusion and self-hypnosis, then we might as well hear it from a Stockholm Laureate – the Portuguese novelist Jose Saramago. Again erring on the side of indulgence, Berman is unnecessarily daunted by the pedigree of Saramago's prose, which is in fact the purest and snootiest bombast (you might call it Nobelese). Here he focuses his lofty gaze on the phenomenon of suicide-mass murder:
'Ah, yes, the horrendous massacres of civilians caused by the so-called suicide terrorists… Horrendous, yes, doubtless; condemnable, yes, doubtless, but Israel still has a lot to learn if it is not capable of understanding the reasons that can bring a human being to turn himself into a bomb.'
Palestinian society has channelled a good deal of thought and energy into the solemnisation of suicide-mass murder, a process which begins in kindergarten. Naturally, one would be reluctant to question the cloudless piety of the Palestinian mother who, having raised one suicide-mass murderer, expressed the wish that his younger brother would become a suicide-mass murderer too. But the time has come to cease to respect the quality of her 'rage' – to cease to marvel at the unhingeing rigour of Israeli oppression, and to start to marvel at the power of an entrenched and emulous ideology, and a cult of death. And if oppression is what we're interested in, then we should think of the oppression, not to mention the life-expectancy (and, God, what a life), of the younger brother. There will be much stopping and starting to do. It is painful to stop believing in the purity, and the sanity, of the underdog. It is painful to start believing in a cult of death, and in an enemy that wants its war to last for ever.
Suicide-mass murder is more than terrorism: it is horrorism. It is a maximum malevolence. The suicide-mass murderer asks his prospective victims to contemplate their fellow human being with a completely new order of execration. It is not like looking down the barrel of a gun. We can tell this is so, because we see what happens, sometimes, when the suicide-mass murderer isn't even there – as in the amazingly summary injustice meted out to the Brazilian Jean Charles de Menezes in London. An even more startling example was the rumour-ignited bridge stampede in Baghdad (31 August 2005). This is the superterror inspired by suicide-mass murder: just whisper the words, and you fatally trample a thousand people. And it remains an accurate measure of the Islamists' contortion: they hold that an act of lethal self-bespatterment, in the interests of an unachievable 'cause', brings with it the keys to paradise. Sam Harris, in The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason, stresses just how thoroughly and expeditiously the suicide-mass murderer is 'saved'. Which would you prefer, given belief?
'... martyrdom is the only way that a Muslim can bypass the painful litigation that awaits us all on the Day of Judgment and proceed directly to heaven. Rather than spend centuries mouldering in the earth in anticipation of being resurrected and subsequently interrogated by wrathful angels, the martyr is immediately transported to Allah's garden…'
Osama bin Laden's table talk, at Tarnak Farms in Afghanistan, where he trained his operatives before September 2001, must have included many rolling paragraphs on Western vitiation, corruption, perversion, prostitution, and all the rest. And in 1998, as season after season unfolded around the president's weakness for fellatio, he seemed to have good grounds for his most serious miscalculation: the belief that America was a softer antagonist than the USSR (in whose defeat, incidentally, the 'Arab Afghans' played a negligible part). Still, a sympathiser like the famously obtuse 'American Taliban' John Walker Lindh, if he'd been there, and if he'd been a little brighter, might have framed the following argument.
Now would be a good time to strike, John would tell Osama, because the West is enfeebled, not just by sex and alcohol, but also by 30 years of multicultural relativism. They'll think suicide bombing is just an exotic foible, like shame-and-honour killings or female circumcision. Besides, it's religious, and they're always slow to question anything that calls itself that. Within days of our opening outrage, the British royals will go on the road for Islam, and stay on it. And you'll be amazed by how long the word Islamophobia, as an unanswerable indictment, will cover Islamism too. It'll take them years to come up with the word they want – and Islamismophobia clearly isn't any good. Even if the Planes Operation succeeds, and thousands die, the Left will yawn and wonder why we waited so long. Strike now. Their ideology will make them reluctant to see what it is they confront. And it will make them slow learners.
By the summer of 2005, suicide-mass murder had evolved. In Iraq, foreign jihadis, pilgrims of war, were filing across the borders to be strapped up with explosives and nails and nuts and bolts, often by godless Baathists with entirely secular aims – to be primed like pieces of ordnance and then sent out the same day to slaughter their fellow Muslims. Suicide-mass murder, in other words, had passed through a phase of decadence and was now on the point of debauchery. In a single month (May), there were more human bombings in Iraq than during the entire intifada. And this, on 25 July, was the considered response of the Mayor of London to the events of 7 July:
'Given that they don't have jet planes, don't have tanks, they only have their bodies to use as weapons. In an unfair balance, that's what people use.'
I remember a miserable little drip of a poem, c2002, that made exactly the same case. No, they don't have F-16s. Question: would the Mayor like them to have F-16s? And, no, their bodies are not what 'people' use. They are what Islamists use. And we should weigh, too, the spiritual paltriness of such martyrdoms. 'Martyr' means witness. The suicide-mass murderer witnesses nothing – and sacrifices nothing. He dies for vulgar and delusive gain. And on another level, too, the rationale for 'martyrdom operations' is a theological sophistry of the blackest cynicism. Its aim is simply the procurement of delivery systems.
Our ideology, which is sometimes called Westernism, weakens us in two ways. It weakens our powers of perception, and it weakens our moral unity and will. As Harris puts it:
'Sayyid Qutb, Osama bin Laden's favourite philosopher, felt that pragmatism would spell the death of American civilisation… Pragmatism, when civilisations come clashing, does not appear likely to be very pragmatic. To lose the conviction that you can actually be right – about anything – seems a recipe for the End of Days chaos envisioned by Yeats: when "the best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity".'
The opening argument we reach for now, in explaining any conflict, is the argument of moral equivalence. No value can be allowed to stand in stone; so we begin to question our ability to identify even what is malum per se. Prison beatings, too, are evil in themselves, and so is the delegation of torture, and murder, to less high-minded and (it has to be said) less hypocritical regimes. In the kind of war that we are now engaged in, an episode like Abu Ghraib is more than a shameful deviation – it is the equivalent of a lost battle. Our moral advantage, still vast and obvious, is not a liability, and we should strengthen and expand it. Like our dependence on reason, it is a strategic strength, and it shores up our legitimacy.
There is another symbiotic overlap between Islamist praxis and our own, and it is a strange and pitiable one. I mean the drastic elevation of the nonentity. In our popularity-contest culture, with its VIP ciphers and meteoric mediocrities, we understand the attractions of baseless fame – indeed, of instant and unearned immortality. To feel that you are a geohistorical player is a tremendous lure to those condemned, as they see it, to exclusion and anonymity. In its quieter way, this was perhaps the key component of the attraction of Western intellectuals to Soviet Communism: 'join', and you are suddenly a contributor to planetary events. As Muhammad Atta steered the 767 towards its destination, he was confident, at least, that his fellow town-planners, in Aleppo, would remember his name, along with everybody else on earth. Similarly, the ghost of Shehzad Tanweer, as it watched the salvage teams scraping up human remains in the rat-infested crucible beneath the streets of London, could be sure that he had decisively outsoared the fish-and-shop back in Leeds. And that other great nothingness, Osama bin Laden – he is ever-living.
In July 2005 I flew from Montevideo to New York – and from winter to summer – with my six-year-old daughter and her eight-year-old sister. I drank a beer as I stood in the check-in queue, a practice not frowned on at Carrasco (though it would certainly raise eyebrows at, say, the dedicated Hajj terminal in Tehran's Mehrabad); then we proceeded to Security. Now I know some six-year-old girls can look pretty suspicious; but my youngest daughter isn't like that. She is a slight little blonde with big brown eyes and a quavery voice. Nevertheless, I stood for half an hour at the counter while the official methodically and solemnly searched her carry-on rucksack – staring shrewdly at each story-tape and crayon, palpating the length of all four limbs of her fluffy duck.
There ought to be a better word than boredom for the trance of inanition that weaved its way through me. I wanted to say something like, 'Even Islamists have not yet started to blow up their own families on aeroplanes. So please desist until they do. Oh yeah: and stick to people who look like they're from the Middle East.' The revelations of 10 August 2006 were 13 months away. And despite the exposure and prevention of their remarkably ambitious bloodbath of the innocent (the majority of them women and children), the (alleged) Walthamstow jihadis did not quite strive in vain. The failed to promote terror, but they won a great symbolic victory for boredom: the banning of books on the seven-hour flight from England to America.
My daughters and I arrived safely in New York. In New York, at certain subway stations, the police were searching all the passengers, to thwart terrorism – thus obliging any terrorist to walk the couple of blocks to a subway station where the police weren't searching all the passengers. And I couldn't defend myself from a vision of the future; in this future, riding a city bus will be like flying El Al. In the guilty safety of Long Island I watched the TV coverage from my home town, where my other three children live, where I will soon again be living with all five. There were the Londoners, on 8 July, going to work on foot, looking stiff and watchful, and taking no pleasure in anything they saw. Eric Hobsbawm got it right in the mid-Nineties, when he said that terrorism was part of the atmospheric 'pollution' of Western cities. It is a cost-efficient programme. Bomb New York and you pollute Madrid; bomb Madrid and you pollute London; bomb London and you pollute Paris and Rome, and repollute New York. But there was the solace given us by the Mayor. No, we should not be surprised by the use of this sempiternal ruse de guerre. Using their bodies is what people do.
The age of terror, I suspect, will also be remembered as the age of boredom. Not the kind of boredom that afflicts the blasé and the effete, but a superboredom, rounding out and complementing the superterror of suicide-mass murder. And although we will eventually prevail in the war against terror, or will reduce it, as Mailer says, to 'a tolerable level' (this phrase will stick, and will be used by politicians, with quiet pride), we haven't got a chance in the war against boredom. Because boredom is something that the enemy doesn't feel. To be clear: the opposite of religious belief is not atheism or secularism or humanism. It is not an 'ism'. It is independence of mind – that's all. When I refer to the age of boredom, I am not thinking of airport queues and subway searches. I mean the global confrontation with the dependent mind.
One way of ending the war on terror would be to capitulate and convert. The transitional period would be an unsmiling one, no doubt, with much stern work to be completed in the city squares, the town centres, and the village greens. Nevertheless, as the Caliphate is restored in Baghdad, to much joy, the surviving neophytes would soon get used to the voluminous penal code enforced by the Ministry for the Promotion of Virtue and the Suppression of Vice. It would be a world of perfect terror and perfect boredom, and of nothing else – a world with no games, no arts, and no women, a world where the only entertainment is the public execution. My middle daughter, now aged nine, still believes in imaginary beings (Father Christmas, the Tooth Fairy); so she would have that in common, at least, with her new husband.
Like fundamentalist Judaism and medieval Christianity, Islam is totalist. That is to say, it makes a total claim on the individual. Indeed, there is no individual; there is only the umma – the community of believers. Ayatollah Khomeini, in his copious writings, often returns to this theme. He unindulgently notes that believers in most religions appear to think that, so long as they observe all the formal pieties, then for the rest of the time they can do more or less as they please. 'Islam', as he frequently reminds us, 'isn't like that.' Islam follows you everywhere, into the kitchen, into the bedroom, into the bathroom, and beyond death into eternity. Islam means 'submission' – the surrender of independence of mind. That surrender now bears the weight of well over 60 generations, and 14 centuries.
The stout self-sufficiency or, if you prefer, the extreme incuriosity of Islamic culture has been much remarked. Present-day Spain translates as many books into Spanish, annually, as the Arab world has translated into Arabic in the past 1,100 years. And the late-medieval Islamic powers barely noticed the existence of the West until it started losing battles to it. The tradition of intellectual autarky was so robust that Islam remained indifferent even to readily available and obviously useful innovations, including, incredibly, the wheel. The wheel, as we know, makes things easier to roll; Bernard Lewis, in What Went Wrong?, sagely notes that it also makes things easier to steal.
By the beginning of the 20th century the entire Muslim world, with partial exceptions, had been subjugated by the European empires. And at that point the doors of perception were opened to foreign influence: that of Germany. This allegiance cost Islam its last imperium, the Ottoman, for decades a 'helpless hulk' (Hobsbawm), which was duly dismantled and shared out after the First World War – a war that was made in Berlin. Undeterred, Islam continued to look to Germany for sponsorship and inspiration. When the Nazi experiment ended, in 1945, sympathy for its ideals lingered on for years, but Islam was now forced to look elsewhere. It had no choice; geopolitically, there was nowhere else to turn. And the flame passed from Germany to the USSR.
So Islam, in the end, proved responsive to European influence: the influence of Hitler and Stalin. And one hardly needs to labour the similarities between Islamism and the totalitarian cults of the last century. Anti-semitic, anti-
liberal, anti-individualist, anti-democratic, and, most crucially, anti-rational, they too were cults of death, death-driven and death-fuelled. The main distinction is that the paradise which the Nazis (pagan) and the Bolsheviks (atheist) sought to bring about was an earthly one, raised from the mulch of millions of corpses. For them, death was creative, right enough, but death was still death. For the Islamists, death is a consummation and a sacrament; death is a beginning. Sam Harris is right:
'Islamism is not merely the latest flavour of totalitarian nihilism. There is a difference between nihilism and a desire for supernatural reward. Islamists could smash the world to atoms and still not be guilty of nihilism, because everything in their world has been transfigured by the light of paradise…' Pathological mass movements are sustained by 'dreams of omnipotence and sadism', in Robert Jay Lifton's phrase. That is usually enough. Islamism adds a third inducement to its warriors: a heavenly immortality that begins even before the moment of death.
For close to a millennium, Islam could afford to be autarkic. Its rise is one of the wonders of world history – a chain reaction of conquest and conversion, an amassment not just of territory but of millions of hearts and minds. The vigour of its ideal of justice allowed for levels of tolerance significantly higher than those of the West. Culturally, too, Islam was the more evolved. Its assimilations and its learning potentiated the Renaissance – of which, alas, it did not partake. Throughout its ascendancy, Islam was buoyed by what Malise Ruthven, in A Fury for God, calls 'the argument from manifest success'. The fact of expansion underwrote the mandate of heaven. And now, for the past 300 or 400 years, observable reality has propounded a rebuttal: the argument from manifest failure. As one understands it, in the Islamic cosmos there is nothing more painful than the suspicion that something has denatured the covenant with God. This unbearable conclusion must naturally be denied, but it is subliminally present, and accounts, perhaps, for the apocalyptic hurt of the Islamist.
Over the past five years, what we have been witnessing, apart from a moral slump or bust, is a death agony: the death agony of imperial Islam. Islamism is the last wave – the last convulsion. Until 2003, one could take some comfort from the very virulence of the Islamist deformation. Nothing so insanely dionysian, so impossibly poisonous, could expect to hold itself together over time. In the 20th century, outside Africa, the only comparable eruptions of death-hunger, of death-oestrus, were confined to Nazi Germany and Stalinite Kampuchea, the one lasting 12 years, the other three and a half. Hitler, Pol Pot, Osama: such men only ask to be the last to die. But there are some sound reasons for thinking that the confrontation with Islamism will be testingly prolonged.
It is by now not too difficult to trace what went wrong, psychologically, with the Iraq War. The fatal turn, the fatal forfeiture of legitimacy, came not with the mistaken but also cynical emphasis on Saddam's weapons of mass destruction: the intelligence agencies of every country on earth, Iraq included, believed that he had them. The fatal turn was the American President's all too palpable submission to the intoxicant of power. His walk, his voice, his idiom, right up to his mortifying appearance in the flight suit on the aircraft-carrier, USS Abraham Lincoln ('Mission Accomplished') – every dash and comma in his body language betrayed the unscrupulous confidence of the power surge.
We should parenthetically add that Tony Blair succumbed to it too – with a difference. In 'old' Europe, as Rumsfeld insolently called it, the idea of a political class was predicated on the inculcation of checks and balances, of psychic surge-breakers, to limit the corruption that personal paramountcy always entrains. It was not a matter of mental hygiene; everyone understood that a rotting mind will make rotten decisions. Blair knew this. He also knew that his trump was not a high one: the need of the American people to hear approval for the war in an English accent. Yet there he was, helplessly caught up in the slipstream turbulence of George Bush. Rumsfeld, too, visibly succumbed to it. On television, at this time, he looked as though he had just worked his way through a snowball of cocaine. 'Stuff happens,' he said, when asked about the looting of the Mesopotamian heritage in Baghdad – the remark of a man not just corrupted but floridly vulgarised by power. As well as the body language, at this time, there was also the language, the power language, all the way from Bush's 'I want to kick ass' to his 'Bring it on' – a rather blithe incitement, some may now feel, to the armed insurgency.
Contemplating this, one's aversion was very far from being confined to the aesthetic. Much followed from it. And we now know that an atmosphere of boosterist unanimity, of prewar triumphalism, had gathered around the President, an atmosphere in which any counter-argument, any hint of circumspection, was seen as a whimper of weakness or disloyalty. If she were alive, Barbara Tuchman would be chafing to write a long addendum to The March of Folly; but not even she could have foreseen a president who, 'going into this period', 'was praying for strength to do the Lord's will'. A power rush blessed by God – no, not a good ambience for precautions and doubts. At that time, the invasion of Iraq was presented as a 'self-financing' preventive war to enforce disarmament and regime change. Three and a half years later, it is an adventurist and proselytising war, and its remaining goal is the promotion of democracy.
The Iraq project was foredoomed by three intrinsic historical realities. First, the Middle East is clearly unable, for now, to sustain democratic rule – for the simple reason that its peoples will vote against it. Did no one whisper the words, in the Situation Room – did no one say what the scholars have been saying for years? The 'electoral policy' of the fundamentalists, writes Lewis, 'has been classically summarised as "One man (men only), one vote, once."' Or, in Harris's trope, democracy will be 'little more than a gangplank to theocracy'; and that theocracy will be Islamist. Now the polls have closed, and the results are coming in, region-wide. In Lebanon, gains for Hizbollah; in Egypt, gains for Sayyid Qutb's fraternity, the Muslim Brothers; in Palestine, victory for Hamas; in Iran, victory for the soapbox rabble-rouser and primitive anti-semite, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. In the Iraqi election, Bush and Blair, pathetically, both 'hoped' for Allawi, whose return was 14 per cent.
Second, Iraq is not a real country. It was cobbled together, by Winston Churchill, in the early Twenties; it consists of three separate (Ottoman) provinces, Sunni, Shia, Kurd – a disposition which looks set to resume. Among the words not listened to by the US Administration, we can include those of Saddam Hussein. Even with an apparatus of terror as savage as any in history, even with chemical weapons, helicopter gunships, and mass killings, even with a proven readiness to cleanse, to displace, and to destroy whole ecosystems, Hussein modestly conceded that he found Iraq a difficult country to keep in one piece. As a Sunni military man put it, Iraqis hate Iraq – or 'Iraq', a concept that has brought them nothing but suffering. There is no nationalist instinct; the instinct is for atomisation.
Third, only the sack of Mecca or Medina would have caused more pain to the Islamic heart than the taking, and befouling, of the Iraqi capital, the seat of the Caliphate. We have not heard any discussion, at home, about the creedal significance of Baghdad. But we have had some intimations from the jihadis' front line. In pronouncements that vibrate with historic afflatus, they speak of their joyful embrace of the chance to meet the infidel in the Land Between the Rivers. And, of course, beyond – in Madrid, in Bali (again), in London. It may be that the Coalition adventure has given the enemy a casus belli that will burn for a generation.
There are vast pluralities all over the West that are thirsting for American failure in Iraq – because they hate George Bush. Perhaps they do not realise that they are co-synchronously thirsting for an Islamist victory that will dramatically worsen the lives of their children. And this may come to pass. Let us look at the war, not through bin Laden's eyes, but through the eyes of the cunning of history. From that perspective, 11 September was a provocation. The 'slam dunk', the 'cakewalk' into Iraq amounted to a feint, and a trap. We now know, from various 500-page bestsellers like Cobra II and Fiasco, that the invasion of Iraq was truly incredibly blithe (there was no plan, no plan at all, for the occupation); still, we should not delude ourselves that the motives behind it were dishonourable. This is a familiar kind of tragedy. The Iraq War represents a gigantic contract, not just for Halliburton, but also for the paving company called Good Intentions. We must hope that something can be salvaged from it, and that our ethical standing can be reconsolidated. Iraq was a divagation in what is being ominously called the Long War. To our futile losses in blood, treasure and moral prestige, we can add the loss in time; and time, too, is blood.
An idea presents itself about a better direction to take. And funnily enough its current champion is the daughter of the dark genius behind the disaster in Iraq: she is called Liz Cheney. Before we come to that, though, we must briefly return to Ayed, and his belt, and to some quiet thoughts about the art of fiction.
The 'belt' ending of The Unknown Known came to me fairly late. But the belt was already there, and prominently. All writers will know exactly what this means. It means that the subconscious had made a polite suggestion, a suggestion that the conscious mind had taken a while to see. Ayed's belt, purchased by mail-order in Greeley, Colorado, is called a 'RodeoMaMa', and consists of a 'weight strap' and the pommel of a saddle. Ayed is of that breed of men which holds that a husband should have sex with his wives every night. And his invariable use of the 'RodeoMaMa' is one of the reasons for the rumble of mutiny in his marriages.
Looking in at the longhouse called Known Knowns, Ayed retools his 'RodeoMaMa'. He goes back to the house and summons his wives – for the last time. Thus Ayed gets his conceptual breakthrough, his unknown unknown: he is the first to bring martyrdom operations into the setting of his own home.
I could write a piece almost as long as this one about why I abandoned The Unknown Known. The confirmatory moment came a few weeks ago: the freshly fortified suspicion that there exists on our planet a kind of human being who will become a Muslim in order to pursue suicide-mass murder. For quite a time I have felt that Islamism was trying to poison the world. Here was a sign that the poison might take – might mutate, like bird flu. Islam, as I said, is a total system, and like all such it is eerily amenable to satire. But with Islamism, with total malignancy, with total terror and total boredom, irony, even militant irony (which is what satire is), merely shrivels and dies.
In Twentieth Century the late historian JM Roberts took an unsentimental line on the Chinese Revolution:
'More than 2,000 years of remarkable historical continuities lie behind [it], which, for all its cost and cruelty, was a heroic endeavour, matched in scale only by such gigantic upheavals as the spread of Islam, or Europe's assault on the world in early modern times.'
The cost and cruelty, according to Jung Chang and Jon Halliday's recent biography, amounted, perhaps, to 70 million lives in the Mao period alone. Yet this has to be balanced against 'the weight of the past' – nowhere heavier than in China:
'Deliberate attacks on family authority… were not merely attempts by a suspicious regime to encourage informers and delation, but attacks on the most conservative of all Chinese institutions. Similarly, the advancement of women and propaganda to discourage early marriage had dimensions going beyond 'progressive' feminist ideas or population control; they were an assault on the past such as no other revolution had ever made, for in China the past meant a role for women far inferior to those of pre-revolutionary America, France or even Russia.'
There is no momentum, in Islam, for a reformation. And there is no time, now, for a leisurely, slow-lob enlightenment. The necessary upheaval is a revolution – the liberation of women. This will not be the work of a decade or even a generation. Islam is a millennium younger than China. But we should remind ourselves that the Chinese Revolution took half a century to roll through its villages.
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It was mid-October 2001, and night was closing in on the border city of Peshawar, in Pakistan, as my friend – a reporter and political man of letters – approached a market stall and began to haggle over a batch of T-shirts bearing the likeness of Osama bin Laden. It is forbidden, in Sunni Islam, to depict the human form, lest it lead to idolatry; but here was Osama's lordly visage, on display and on sale right outside the mosque. The mosque now emptied, after evening prayers, and my friend was very suddenly and very thoroughly surrounded by a shoving, jabbing, jeering brotherhood: the young men of Peshawar.At this time of day, their equivalents, in the great conurbations of Europe and America, could expect to ease their not very sharp frustrations by downing a lot of alcohol, by eating large meals with no dietary restrictions, by racing around to one another's apartments in powerful and expensive machines, by downing a lot more alcohol as well as additional stimulants and relaxants, by jumping up and down for several hours on strobe-lashed dancefloors, and (in a fair number of cases) by having galvanic sex with near-perfect strangers. These diversions were not available to the young men of Peshawar.
More proximately, just over the frontier, the West was in the early stages of invading Afghanistan and slaughtering Pakistan's pious clients and brainchildren, the Taliban, and flattening the Hindu Kush with its power and its rage. More proximately still, the ears of these young men were still fizzing with the battlecries of molten mullahs, and their eyes were smarting anew to the chalk-thick smoke from the hundreds of thousands of wood fires – fires kindled by the multitudes of exiles and refugees from Afghanistan, camped out all around the city. There was perhaps a consciousness, too, that the Islamic Republic of Pakistan, over the past month, had reversed years of policy and decided to sacrifice the lives of its Muslim clients and brainchildren, over the border, in exchange for American cash. So when the crowd scowled out its question, the answer needed to be a good one.
'Why you want these? You like Osama?'
I can almost hear the tone of the reply I would have given – reedy, wavering, wholly defeatist. As for the substance, it would have been the reply of the cornered trimmer, and intended, really, just to give myself time to seek the foetal position and fold my hands over my face. Something like: 'Well I quite like him, but I think he overdid it a bit in New York.' No, that would not have served. What was needed was boldness and brilliance. The exchange continued:
'You like Osama?'
'Of course. He is my brother.'
'He is your brother?'
'All men are my brothers.'
All men are my brothers. I would have liked to have said it then, and I would like to say it now: all men are my brothers. But all men are not my brothers. Why? Because all women are my sisters. And the brother who denies the rights of his sister: that brother is not my brother. At the very best, he is my half-brother – by definition. Osama is not my brother.
Religion is sensitive ground, as well it might be. Here we walk on eggshells. Because religion is itself an eggshell. Today, in the West, there are no good excuses for religious belief – unless we think that ignorance, reaction and sentimentality are good excuses. This is of course not so in the East, where, we acknowledge, almost every living citizen in many huge and populous countries is intimately defined by religious belief. The excuses, here, are very persuasive; and we duly accept that 'faith' – recently and almost endearingly defined as 'the desire for the approval of supernatural beings' – is a world-historical force and a world-historical actor. All religions, unsurprisingly, have their terrorists, Christian, Jewish, Hindu, even Buddhist. But we are not hearing from those religions. We are hearing from Islam.
Let us make the position clear. We can begin by saying, not only that we respect Muhammad, but that no serious person could fail to respect Muhammad – a unique and luminous historical being. Judged by the continuities he was able to set in motion, he remains a titanic figure, and, for Muslims, all-answering: a revolutionary, a warrior, and a sovereign, a Christ and a Caesar, 'with a Koran in one hand', as Bagehot imagined him, 'and a sword in the other'. Muhammad has strong claims to being the most extraordinary man who ever lived. And always a man, as he always maintained, and not a god. Naturally we respect Muhammad. But we do not respect Muhammad Atta.
Until recently it was being said that what we are confronted with, here, is 'a civil war' within Islam. That's what all this was supposed to be: not a clash of civilisations or anything like that, but a civil war within Islam. Well, the civil war appears to be over. And Islamism won it. The loser, moderate Islam, is always deceptively well-represented on the level of the op-ed page and the public debate; elsewhere, it is supine and inaudible. We are not hearing from moderate Islam. Whereas Islamism, as a mover and shaper of world events, is pretty well all there is.
So, to repeat, we respect Islam – the donor of countless benefits to mankind, and the possessor of a thrilling history. But Islamism? No, we can hardly be asked to respect a creedal wave that calls for our own elimination. More, we regard the Great Leap Backwards as a tragic development in Islam's story, and now in ours. Naturally we respect Islam. But we do not respect Islamism, just as we respect Muhammad and do not respect Muhammad Atta.
I will soon come to Donald Rumsfeld, the architect and guarantor of the hideous cataclysm in Iraq. But first I must turn from great things to small, for a paragraph, and talk about writing, and the strange thing that happened to me at my desk in this, the Age of Vanished Normalcy.
All writers of fiction will at some point find themselves abandoning a piece of work – or find themselves putting it aside, as we gently say. The original idea, the initiating 'throb' (Nabokov), encounters certain 'points of resistance' (Updike); and these points of resistance, on occasion, are simply too obdurate, numerous, and pervasive. You come to write the next page, and it's dead – as if your subconscious, the part of you quietly responsible for so much daily labour, has been neutralised, or switched off. Norman Mailer has said that one of the few real sorrows of 'the spooky art' is that it requires you to spend too many days among dead things. Recently, and for the first time in my life, I abandoned, not a dead thing, but a thriving novella; and I did so for reasons that were wholly extraneous. I am aware that this is hardly a tectonic event; but for me the episode was existential. In the West, writers are acclimatised to freedom – to limitless and gluttonous freedom. And I discovered something. Writing is freedom; and as soon as that freedom is in shadow, the writer can no longer proceed. The shadow, in this case, was not a fear of repercussion. It was as if, most reluctantly, I was receiving a new vibration or frequency from the planetary shimmer. The novella was a satire called The Unknown Known
Secretary Rumsfeld was unfairly ridiculed, some thought, for his haiku-like taxonomy of the terrorist threat:
'The message is: there are known "knowns". There are things that we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we know we don't know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we don't know we don't know.'
Like his habit of talking in 'the third person passive once removed', this is 'very Rumsfeldian'. And Rumsfeld can be even more Rumsfeldian than that. According to Bob Woodward's Plan of Attack, at a closed-door senatorial briefing in September 2002 (the idea was to sell regime-change in Iraq), Rumsfeld exasperated everyone present with a torrent of Rumsfeldisms, including the following strophe: 'We know what we know, we know there are things we do not know, and we know there are things we know we don't know we don't know.' Anyway, the three categories remain quite helpful as analytical tools. And they certainly appealed very powerfully to the narrator of The Unknown Known – Ayed, a diminutive Islamist terrorist who plies his trade in Waziristan, the rugged northern borderland where Osama bin Laden is still rumoured to lurk.
Ayed's outfit, which is called 'the "Prism"', used to consist of three sectors named, not very imaginatively, Sector One, Sector Two and Sector Three. But Ayed and his colleagues are attentive readers of the Western press, and the sectors now have new titles. Known Knowns (sector one) concerns itself with daily logistics: bombs, mines, shells, and various improvised explosive devices. The work of Known Unknowns (sector two) is more peripatetic and long-term; it involves, for example, trolling around North Korea in the hope of procuring the fabled 25 kilograms of enriched uranium, or going from factory to factory in Uzbekistan on a quest for better toxins and asphyxiants. In Known Knowns, the brothers are plagued by fires and gas-leaks and almost daily explosions; the brothers in Known Unknowns are racked by headaches and sore throats, and their breath, tellingly, is rich with the aroma of potent coughdrops, moving about as they do among vats of acids and bathtubs of raw pesticides. Everyone wants to work where Ayed works, which is in sector three, or Unknown Unknowns. Sector three is devoted to conceptual breakthroughs – to shifts in the paradigm.
Shifts in the paradigm like the attack of 11 September 2001. Paradigm shifts open a window; and, once opened, the window will close. Ayed observes that 11 September was instantly unrepeatable; indeed, the tactic was obsolete by 10am the same morning. Its efficacy lasted for 71 minutes, from 8.46, when American 11 hit the North Tower, to 9.57, and the start of the rebellion on United 93. On United 93, the passengers were told about the new reality by their mobile phones, and they didn't linger long in the old paradigm – the four-day siege on the equatorial tarmac, the diminishing supplies of food and water, the festering toilets, the conditions and demands, the phased release of the children and the women; then the surrender, or the clambering commandos. No, they knew that they weren't on a commercial aircraft, not any longer; they were on a missile. So they rose up. And at 10.03 United 93 came down on its back at 580mph, in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, 20 minutes from the Capitol.
I found it reassuringly difficult, dreaming up paradigm shifts. And Ayed and his friends in sector three find it difficult too. Synergy, maximalisation – these are the kinds of concept that are tossed from cushion to floormat in Unknown Unknowns. Here, a comrade argues for the dynamiting of the San Andreas Fault; there, another envisages the large-scale introduction of rabies (admixed with smallpox, methamphetamine and steroids) to the fauna of Central Park. A pensive silence follows. And very often these silences last for days on end. All you can hear, in Unknown Unknowns, is the occasional swatting palm-clap, or the crackle of a beetle being ground underfoot. Ayed feels, or used to feel, superior to his colleagues, because he has already had his eureka moment. He had it in the spring of 2001, and his project – his 'baby', if you will – was launched in the summer of that year, and is still in progress. It has a codename: UU: CRs/G,C.
Ayed's conceptual breakthrough did not go down at all well in Sector Three, as it was then called; in fact, it was widely mocked. But Ayed used a family connection, and gained an audience with Mullah Omar, the one-eyed Islamist cleric who briefly ruled Afghanistan – an imposing figure, in his dishdash and flipflops. Ayed submitted his presentation, and, to his astonishment, Mullah Omar smiled on his plan. This was a necessary condition, because Ayed's paradigm shift could only be realised with the full resources of a nation state. UU: CRs/G,C went ahead. The idea was, as Ayed would say, deceptively simple. The idea was to scour all the prisons and madhouses for every compulsive rapist in the country, and then unleash them on Greeley, Colorado.
As the story opens, the CRs have been en route to G,C for almost five years, crossing central Africa, in minibuses and on foot, and suffering many a sanguinary reverse (a host of some 30,000 Janjaweed in Sudan, a 'child militia', armed with pangas, in Congo). On top of all this, as if he didn't have enough to worry about, Ayed is not getting on very well with his wives.
Those who know the field will be undismayed by the singling out of Greeley, Colorado. For it was in Greeley, Colorado, in 1949, that Islamism, as we now know it, was decisively shaped. The story is grotesque and incredible – but then so are its consequences. And let us keep on telling ourselves how grotesque and incredible it is, our current reality, so unforeseeable, so altogether unknowable, even from the vantage of the late Nineties. At that time, if you recall, America had so much leisure on its hands, politically and culturally, that it could dedicate an entire year to Monica Lewinsky. Even Monica, it now seems, even Bill, were living in innocent times.
Since then the world has undergone a moral crash – the spiritual equivalent, in its global depth and reach, of the Great Depression of the Thirties. On our side, extraordinary rendition, coercive psychological procedures, enhanced interrogation techniques, Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, Haditha, Mahmudiya, two wars, and tens of thousands of dead bodies. All this should of course be soberly compared to the feats of the opposed ideology, an ideology which, in its most millennial form, conjures up the image of an abattoir within a madhouse. I will spell this out, because it has not been broadly assimilated. The most extreme Islamists want to kill everyone on earth except the most extreme Islamists; but every jihadi sees the need for eliminating all non-Muslims, either by conversion or by execution. And we now know what happens when Islamism gets its hands on an army (Algeria) or on something resembling a nation state (Sudan). In the first case, the result was fratricide, with 100,000 dead; in the second, following the Islamist coup in 1989, the result has been a kind of rolling genocide, and the figure is perhaps two million. And it all goes back to Greeley, Colorado, and to Sayyid Qutb.
Things started to go wrong for poor Sayyid during the Atlantic crossing from Alexandria, when, allegedly, 'a drunken, semi-naked woman' tried to storm his cabin. But before we come to that, some background. Sayyid Qutb, in 1949, had just turned 43. His childhood was provincial and devout. When, as a young man, he went to study in Cairo, his leanings became literary and Europhone and even mildly cosmopolitan. Despite an early – and routinely baffling – admiration for naturism, he was already finding Cairene women 'dishonourable', and confessed to unhappiness about 'their current level of freedom'. A short story recorded his first disappointment in matters of the heart; its title, plangently, was Thorns. Well, we've all had that; and most of us then adhere to the arc described in Peter Porter's poem, 'Once Bitten, Twice Bitten'.But Sayyid didn't need much discouragement. Promptly giving up all hope of coming across a woman of 'sufficient' moral cleanliness, he resolved to stick to virginity.
Established in a modest way as a writer, Sayyid took a job at the Ministry of Education. This radicalised him. He felt oppressed by the vestiges of the British protectorate in Egypt, and was alarmist about the growing weight of the Jewish presence in Palestine – another British crime, in Sayyid's view. He became an activist, and ran some risk of imprisonment (at the hands of the saturnalian King Farouk), before the ministry packed him off to America to do a couple of years of educational research. Prison, by the way, would claim him soon after his return. He was one of the dozens of Muslim Brothers jailed (and tortured) after the failed attempt on the life of the moderniser and secularist, Nasser, in October 1954. There was a short reprieve in 1964, but Sayyid was soon rearrested – and retortured. Steelily dismissing a clemency deal brokered by none other than the young Anwar Sadat, he was hanged in August 1966; and this was a strategic martyrdom that now lies deep in the Islamist soul. His most influential book, like the book with which it is often compared, was written behind bars. Milestones is known as the Mein Kampf of Islamism.
Sayyid was presumably still sorely shaken by the birth of Israel (after the defeat of Egypt and five other Arab armies), but at first, on the Atlantic crossing, he felt a spiritual expansion. His encyclopedic commentary, In the Shade of the Koran, would fondly and ramblingly recall the renewal of his sense of purpose and destiny. Early on, he got into a minor sectarian battle with a proselytising Christian; Sayyid retaliated by doing a bit of proselytising himself, and made some progress with a contingent of Nubian sailors. Then came the traumatic incident with the drunken, semi-naked woman. Sayyid thought she was an American agent hired to seduce him, or so he later told his biographer, who wrote that 'the encounter successfully tested his resolve to resist experiences damaging to his identity as an Egyptian and a Muslim'. God knows what the episode actually amounted to. It seems probable that the liquored-up Mata Hari, the dipsomaniacal nudist, was simply a woman in a cocktail dress who, perhaps, had recently drunk a cocktail. Still, we can continue to imagine Sayyid barricading himself into his cabin while, beyond the door, the siren sings her song.
He didn't like New York: materialistic, mechanistic, trivial, idolatrous, wanton, depraved, and so on and so forth. Washington was a little better. But here, sickly Sayyid (lungs) was hospitalised, introducing him to another dire hazard that he wouldn't have faced at home: female nurses. One of them, tricked out with 'thirsty lips, bulging breasts, smooth legs' and a coquettish manner ('the calling eye, the provocative laugh'), regaled him with her wish-list of endowments for the ideal lover. But 'the father of Islamism', as he is often called, remained calm, later developing the incident into a diatribe against Arab men who succumb to the allure of American women. In an extraordinary burst of mendacity or delusion, Sayyid claimed that the medical staff heartlessly exulted at the news of the assassination, back in Egypt, of Hasan al-Banna. We may wonder how likely it is that any American would have heard of al-Banna, or indeed of the Muslim Brotherhood, which he founded. When Sayyid was discharged from George Washington University Hospital, he probably thought the worst was behind him. But now he proceeded to the cauldron – to the pullulating hellhouse – of Greeley, Colorado.
During his six months at the Colorado State College of Education (and thereafter in California), Sayyid's hungry disapproval found a variety of targets. American lawns (a distressing example of selfishness and atomism), American conversation ('money, movie stars and models of cars'), American jazz ('a type of music invented by Blacks to please their primitive tendencies – their desire for noise and their appetite for sexual arousal'), and, of course, American women: here another one pops up, telling Sayyid that sex is merely a physical function, untrammelled by morality. American places of worship he also detests (they are like cinemas or amusement arcades), but by now he is pining for Cairo, and for company, and he does something rash. Qutb joins a club – where an epiphany awaits him. 'The dance is inflamed by the notes of the gramophone,' he wrote; 'the dance-hall becomes a whirl of heels and thighs, arms enfold hips, lips and breasts meet, and the air is full of lust.' You'd think that the father of Islamism had exposed himself to an early version of Studio 54 or even Plato's Retreat. But no: the club he joined was run by the church, and what he is describing, here, is a chapel hop in Greeley, Colorado. And Greeley, Colorado, in 1949, was dry
'And the air is full of lust.' 'Lust' is Bernard Lewis's translation, but several other writers prefer the word 'love'. And while lust has greater immediate impact, love may in the end be more resonant. Why should Qutb mind if the air is full of love? We are forced to wonder whether love can be said to exist, as we understand it, in the ferocious patriarchy of Islamism. If death and hate are the twin opposites of love, then it may not be merely whimsical and mawkish to suggest that the terrorist, the bringer of death and hate, the death-hate cultist, is in essence the enemy of love. Qutb:
'A girl looks at you, appearing as if she were an enchanting nymph or an escaped mermaid, but as she approaches, you sense only the screaming instinct inside her, and you can smell her burning body, not the scent of perfume but flesh, only flesh.'
In his excellent book, Terror and Liberalism, Paul Berman has many sharp things to say about the corpus of Sayyid Qutb; but he manages to goad himself into receptivity, and ends up, in my view, sounding almost absurdly respectful – 'rich, nuanced, deep, soulful, and heartfelt'. Qutb, who would go on to write a 30-volume gloss on it, spent his childhood memorising the Koran. He was 10 by the time he was done. Now, given that, it seems idle to expect much sense from him; and so it proves. On the last of the 46 pages he devotes to Qutb, Berman wraps things up with a long quotation. This is its repetitive first paragraph:
'The Surah [the sayings of the Prophet] tells the Muslims that, in the fight to uphold God's universal Truth, lives will have to be sacrificed. Those who risk their lives and go out to fight, and who are prepared to lay down their lives for the cause of God, are honourable people, pure of heart and blessed of soul. But the great surprise is that those among them who are killed in the struggle must not be considered or described as dead. They continue to live, as God Himself clearly states.'
Savouring that last phrase, we realise that any voyage taken with Sayyid Qutb is doomed to a leaden-witted circularity. The emptiness, the mere iteration, at the heart of his philosophy is steadily colonised by a vast entanglement of bitternesses; and here, too, we detect the presence of that peculiarly Islamist triumvirate (codified early on by Christopher Hitchens) of self-righteousness, self-pity, and self-hatred – the self-righteousness dating from the seventh century, the self-pity from the 13th (when the 'last' Caliph was kicked to death in Baghdad by the Mongol warlord Hulagu), and the self-hatred from the 20th. And most astounding of all, in Qutb, is the level of self-awareness, which is less than zero. It is as if the very act of self-examination were something unmanly or profane: something unrighteous, in a word.
Still, one way or the other, Qutb is the father of Islamism. Here are the chief tenets he inspired: that America, and its clients, are jahiliyya (the word classically applied to pre-Muhammadan Arabia – barbarous and benighted); that America is controlled by Jews; that Americans are infidels, that they are animals, and, worse, arrogant animals, and are unworthy of life; that America promotes pride and promiscuity in the service of human degradation; that America seeks to 'exterminate' Islam – and that it will accomplish this not by conquest, not by colonial annexation, but by example. As Bernard Lewis puts it in The Crisis of Islam
'This is what is meant by the term the Great Satan, applied to the United States by the late Ayatollah Khomeini. Satan as depicted in the Qur'an is neither an imperialist nor an exploiter. He is a seducer, 'the insidious tempter who whispers in the hearts of men' (Qur'an, CXIV, 4, 5).
Lewis might have added that these are the closing words of the Koran. So they echo.
The West isn't being seductive, of course; all the West is being is attractive. But the Islamist's paranoia extends to a kind of thwarted narcissism. We think again of Qutb's buxom, smooth-legged nurse, supposedly smacking her thirsty lips at the news of the death of Hasan al-Banna. Far from wanting or trying to exterminate it, the West had no views whatever about Islam per se before 11 September 2001. Of course, views were then formulated, and very soon the bestseller list was a column of primers on Islam. Some things take longer to sink in than others, true; but now we know. In the West we had brought into being a society whose main purpose, whose raison d'etre, was the tantalisation of good Muslims.
The theme of the 'tempter' can be taken a little further, in the case of Qutb. When the tempter is a temptress, and really wants you to sin, she needs to be both available and willing. And it is almost inconceivable that poor Sayyid, the frail, humourless civil servant, and turgid anti-semite (salting his talk with quotes from that long-exploded fabrication, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion), ever encountered anything that resembled an offer. It is more pitiful than that. Seduction did not come his way, but it was coming the way of others, he sensed, and a part of him wanted it too. That desire made him very afraid, and also shamed him and dishonoured him, and turned his thoughts to murder. Then the thinkers of Islam took his books and did what they did to them; and Sayyid Qutb is now a part of our daily reality. We should understand that the Islamists' hatred of America is as much abstract as historical, and irrationally abstract, too; none of the usual things can be expected to appease it. The hatred contains much historical emotion, but it is their history, and not ours, that haunts them.
Qutb has perhaps a single parallel in world history. Another shambling invert, another sexual truant (not a virgin but a career cuckold), another marginal quack and dabbler (talentless but not philistine), he too wrote a book, in prison, that fell into the worst possible hands. His name was Nikolai Chernyshevsky; and his novel (What Is To Be Done?) was read five times by Vladimir Lenin in the course of a single summer. It was Chernyshevsky who determined, not the content, but the emotional dynamic of the Soviet experiment. The centennial of his birth was celebrated with much pomp in the USSR. That was in 1928. But Russia was too sad, and too busy, to do much about the centennial of his death, which passed quietly in 1989.
In The Unknown Known my diminutive terrorist, Ayed, is not a virgin (or a Joseph, as Christians say), unlike Sayyid, on whom he is tangentially based. He is, rather, a polygamist, confining himself to the sanctioned maximum of four. On top of this, he indulges himself, whenever he has enough spare cash, with a succession of 'temporary wives'. The practice is called mutah. In her justly celebrated book, Reading Lolita in Tehran, Azar Nafisi tells us that a temporary marriage can endure for 99 years; it can also be over in half an hour. The Islamic Republic is very attentive to what it calls 'men's needs'. Before the Revolution, a girl could get married at the age of 18. After 1979 the age requirement was halved.
In Beyond Belief: Islamic Excursions Among the Converted Peoples, VS Naipaul looks at some of the social results of polygamy, in Pakistan, and notes that the marriages tend to be serial. The man moves on, 'religiously tomcatting away'; and the consequence is a society of 'half-orphans'. Divorce is in any case unarduous: 'a man who wanted to get rid of his wife could accuse her of adultery and have her imprisoned'. It is difficult to exaggerate the sexualisation of Islamist governance, even among the figures we think of as moderate. Type in 'sex' and 'al-Sistani', and prepare yourself for a cataract of pedantry and smut.
As the narrative opens, Ayed is very concerned about the state of his marriages. But there's a reason for that. When Ayed was a little boy, in the early Eighties, his dad, a talented poppy-farmer, left Waziristan with his family and settled in Greeley, Colorado. This results in a domestic blow to Ayed's self-esteem. Back home in Waziristan, a boy of his age would be feeling a lovely warm glow of pride, around now, as he realises that his sisters, in one important respect, are just like his mother: they can't read or write either. In America, though, the girls are obliged to go to school. Before Ayed knows it, the women have shed their veils, and his sisters are being called on by gum-chewing kaffirs. Now puberty looms.
There is almost an entire literary genre given over to sensibilities such as Sayyid Qutb's. It is the genre of the unreliable narrator – or, more exactly, the transparent narrator, with his helpless giveaways. Typically, a patina of haughty fastidiousness strives confidently but in vain to conceal an underworld of incurable murk. In The Unknown Known I added to this genre, and with enthusiasm. I had Ayed stand for hours in a thicket of nettles and poison ivy, beneath an elevated walkway, so that he could rail against the airiness of the summer frocks worn by American women and the shameless brevity of their underpants. I had him go out in all weathers for evening strolls, strolls gruellingly prolonged until, with the help of a buttress or a drainpipe, he comes across a woman 'quite openly' undressing for bed. Meanwhile, his sisters are all dating. The father and the brothers discuss various courses of action, such as killing them all; but America, bereft of any sense of honour, would punish them for that. The family bifurcates; Ayed returns to the rugged borderland, joins 'the "Prism"', and courts his quartet of nine-year-old sweethearts.
As Ayed keeps telling all his temporary wives, 'My wives don't understand me.' And they don't; indeed, they all want divorces, and for the same embarrassing reason. With his paradigm-shift attack on America now in ruins, and facing professional and social disgrace, Ayed suddenly sees how, in one swoop, he can redeem himself – and secure his place in history with an unknown unknown which is sure to succeed. For this he will be needing a belt
Two years ago I came across a striking photograph in a news magazine: it looked like a crudely cross-sectioned watermelon, but you could make out one or two humanoid features half-submerged in the crimson pulp. It was in fact the bravely circularised photograph of the face of a Saudi newscaster who had been beaten by her husband. In an attempted murder, it seems: at the time of his arrest he had her in the trunk of his car, and was evidently taking her into the desert for interment. What had she done to bring this on herself? In the marital home, that night, the telephone rang and the newscaster, a prosperous celebrity in her own right, answered it. She had answered the telephone. Male Westerners will be struck, here, by a dramatic cultural contrast. I know that I, for one, would be far more likely to beat my wife to death if she hadn't answered the telephone. But customs and mores vary from country to country, and you cannot reasonably claim that one ethos is 'better' than any other.
In 1949 Greeley was dry… It has been seriously suggested, by serious commentators, that suicide-mass murderers are searching for the simplest means of getting a girlfriend. It may be, too, that some of them are searching for the simplest means of getting a drink. Although alcohol, like extramarital sex, may be strictly forbidden in life, there is, in death, no shortage of either. As well as the Koranic virgins, 'as chaste', for the time being, 'as the sheltered eggs of ostriches', there is also a 'gushing fountain' of white wine (wine 'that will neither pain their heads nor take away their reason'). The suicide-mass murderer can now raise his brimming 'goblet' to an additional reward: he has the power, post mortem, to secure paradisal immortality for a host of relations (the number is a round 70, two fewer, curiously, than the traditional allotment of houris). Nor is this his only service to the clan, which, until recently, could expect an honorarium of $20,000 from Iraq, plus $5,000 from Saudi Arabia – as well as the vast prestige automatically accorded to the family of a martyr. And then there is the enticement, or incitement, of peer-group prestige.
Suicide-mass murder is astonishingly alien, so alien, in fact, that Western opinion has been unable to formulate a rational response to it. A rational response would be something like an unvarying factory siren of unanimous disgust. But we haven't managed that. What we have managed, on the whole, is a murmur of dissonant evasion. Paul Berman's best chapter, in Terror and Liberalism, is mildly entitled 'Wishful Thinking' – and Berman is in general a mild-mannered man. But this is a very tough and persistent analysis of our extraordinary uncertainty. It is impossible to read it without cold fascination and a consciousness of disgrace. I felt disgrace, during its early pages, because I had done it too, and in print, early on. Contemplating intense violence, you very rationally ask yourself, what are the reasons for this? And compassionately frowning newscasters are still asking that same question. It is time to move on. We are not dealing in reasons because we are not dealing in reason.
After the failure of Oslo, and the attendant consolidation of Hamas, the second intifada ('earthquake') got under way in 2001, not with stonings and stabbings, like the first, but with a steady campaign of suicide-mass murder. 'All over the world,' writes Berman, 'the popularity of the Palestinian cause did not collapse. It increased.' The parallel process was the intensive demonisation of Israel (academic ostracism, and so on); every act of suicide-mass murder 'testified' to the extremity of the oppression, so that 'Palestinian terror, in this view, was the measure of Israeli guilt'. And when Sharon replaced Barak, and the expected crackdown began, and the Israeli army, with 23 casualties of its own, killed 52 Palestinians in the West Bank city of Jenin, the attack 'was seen as a veritable Holocaust, an Auschwitz, or, in an alternative image, as the Middle Eastern equivalent of the Wehrmacht's assault on the Warsaw Ghetto. These tropes were massively accepted, around the world. Typing in the combined names of "Jenin" and "Auschwitz"... I came up with 2,890 references; and, typing in "Jenin" and "Nazi", I came up with 8,100 references. There were 63,100 references to the combined names of "Sharon" and "Hitler".' Once the redoubled suppression had taken hold, the human bombings decreased; and world opinion quietened down. The Palestinians were now worse off than ever, their societal gains of the Nineties 'flattened by Israeli tanks'. But the protests 'rose and fell in tandem with the suicide bomb attacks, and not in tandem with the suffering of the Palestinian people'.
This was because suicide-mass murder presented the West with a philosophical crisis. The quickest way out of it was to pretend that the tactic was reasonable, indeed logical and even admirable: an extreme case of 'rationalist naivete', in Berman's phrase. Rationalist naivete was easier than the assimilation of the alternative: that is to say, the existence of a pathological cult. Berman assembles many voices. And if we are going to hear the rhetoric of delusion and self-hypnosis, then we might as well hear it from a Stockholm Laureate – the Portuguese novelist Jose Saramago. Again erring on the side of indulgence, Berman is unnecessarily daunted by the pedigree of Saramago's prose, which is in fact the purest and snootiest bombast (you might call it Nobelese). Here he focuses his lofty gaze on the phenomenon of suicide-mass murder:
'Ah, yes, the horrendous massacres of civilians caused by the so-called suicide terrorists… Horrendous, yes, doubtless; condemnable, yes, doubtless, but Israel still has a lot to learn if it is not capable of understanding the reasons that can bring a human being to turn himself into a bomb.'
Palestinian society has channelled a good deal of thought and energy into the solemnisation of suicide-mass murder, a process which begins in kindergarten. Naturally, one would be reluctant to question the cloudless piety of the Palestinian mother who, having raised one suicide-mass murderer, expressed the wish that his younger brother would become a suicide-mass murderer too. But the time has come to cease to respect the quality of her 'rage' – to cease to marvel at the unhingeing rigour of Israeli oppression, and to start to marvel at the power of an entrenched and emulous ideology, and a cult of death. And if oppression is what we're interested in, then we should think of the oppression, not to mention the life-expectancy (and, God, what a life), of the younger brother. There will be much stopping and starting to do. It is painful to stop believing in the purity, and the sanity, of the underdog. It is painful to start believing in a cult of death, and in an enemy that wants its war to last for ever.
Suicide-mass murder is more than terrorism: it is horrorism. It is a maximum malevolence. The suicide-mass murderer asks his prospective victims to contemplate their fellow human being with a completely new order of execration. It is not like looking down the barrel of a gun. We can tell this is so, because we see what happens, sometimes, when the suicide-mass murderer isn't even there – as in the amazingly summary injustice meted out to the Brazilian Jean Charles de Menezes in London. An even more startling example was the rumour-ignited bridge stampede in Baghdad (31 August 2005). This is the superterror inspired by suicide-mass murder: just whisper the words, and you fatally trample a thousand people. And it remains an accurate measure of the Islamists' contortion: they hold that an act of lethal self-bespatterment, in the interests of an unachievable 'cause', brings with it the keys to paradise. Sam Harris, in The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason, stresses just how thoroughly and expeditiously the suicide-mass murderer is 'saved'. Which would you prefer, given belief?
'... martyrdom is the only way that a Muslim can bypass the painful litigation that awaits us all on the Day of Judgment and proceed directly to heaven. Rather than spend centuries mouldering in the earth in anticipation of being resurrected and subsequently interrogated by wrathful angels, the martyr is immediately transported to Allah's garden…'
Osama bin Laden's table talk, at Tarnak Farms in Afghanistan, where he trained his operatives before September 2001, must have included many rolling paragraphs on Western vitiation, corruption, perversion, prostitution, and all the rest. And in 1998, as season after season unfolded around the president's weakness for fellatio, he seemed to have good grounds for his most serious miscalculation: the belief that America was a softer antagonist than the USSR (in whose defeat, incidentally, the 'Arab Afghans' played a negligible part). Still, a sympathiser like the famously obtuse 'American Taliban' John Walker Lindh, if he'd been there, and if he'd been a little brighter, might have framed the following argument.
Now would be a good time to strike, John would tell Osama, because the West is enfeebled, not just by sex and alcohol, but also by 30 years of multicultural relativism. They'll think suicide bombing is just an exotic foible, like shame-and-honour killings or female circumcision. Besides, it's religious, and they're always slow to question anything that calls itself that. Within days of our opening outrage, the British royals will go on the road for Islam, and stay on it. And you'll be amazed by how long the word Islamophobia, as an unanswerable indictment, will cover Islamism too. It'll take them years to come up with the word they want – and Islamismophobia clearly isn't any good. Even if the Planes Operation succeeds, and thousands die, the Left will yawn and wonder why we waited so long. Strike now. Their ideology will make them reluctant to see what it is they confront. And it will make them slow learners.
By the summer of 2005, suicide-mass murder had evolved. In Iraq, foreign jihadis, pilgrims of war, were filing across the borders to be strapped up with explosives and nails and nuts and bolts, often by godless Baathists with entirely secular aims – to be primed like pieces of ordnance and then sent out the same day to slaughter their fellow Muslims. Suicide-mass murder, in other words, had passed through a phase of decadence and was now on the point of debauchery. In a single month (May), there were more human bombings in Iraq than during the entire intifada. And this, on 25 July, was the considered response of the Mayor of London to the events of 7 July:
'Given that they don't have jet planes, don't have tanks, they only have their bodies to use as weapons. In an unfair balance, that's what people use.'
I remember a miserable little drip of a poem, c2002, that made exactly the same case. No, they don't have F-16s. Question: would the Mayor like them to have F-16s? And, no, their bodies are not what 'people' use. They are what Islamists use. And we should weigh, too, the spiritual paltriness of such martyrdoms. 'Martyr' means witness. The suicide-mass murderer witnesses nothing – and sacrifices nothing. He dies for vulgar and delusive gain. And on another level, too, the rationale for 'martyrdom operations' is a theological sophistry of the blackest cynicism. Its aim is simply the procurement of delivery systems.
Our ideology, which is sometimes called Westernism, weakens us in two ways. It weakens our powers of perception, and it weakens our moral unity and will. As Harris puts it:
'Sayyid Qutb, Osama bin Laden's favourite philosopher, felt that pragmatism would spell the death of American civilisation… Pragmatism, when civilisations come clashing, does not appear likely to be very pragmatic. To lose the conviction that you can actually be right – about anything – seems a recipe for the End of Days chaos envisioned by Yeats: when "the best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity".'
The opening argument we reach for now, in explaining any conflict, is the argument of moral equivalence. No value can be allowed to stand in stone; so we begin to question our ability to identify even what is malum per se. Prison beatings, too, are evil in themselves, and so is the delegation of torture, and murder, to less high-minded and (it has to be said) less hypocritical regimes. In the kind of war that we are now engaged in, an episode like Abu Ghraib is more than a shameful deviation – it is the equivalent of a lost battle. Our moral advantage, still vast and obvious, is not a liability, and we should strengthen and expand it. Like our dependence on reason, it is a strategic strength, and it shores up our legitimacy.
There is another symbiotic overlap between Islamist praxis and our own, and it is a strange and pitiable one. I mean the drastic elevation of the nonentity. In our popularity-contest culture, with its VIP ciphers and meteoric mediocrities, we understand the attractions of baseless fame – indeed, of instant and unearned immortality. To feel that you are a geohistorical player is a tremendous lure to those condemned, as they see it, to exclusion and anonymity. In its quieter way, this was perhaps the key component of the attraction of Western intellectuals to Soviet Communism: 'join', and you are suddenly a contributor to planetary events. As Muhammad Atta steered the 767 towards its destination, he was confident, at least, that his fellow town-planners, in Aleppo, would remember his name, along with everybody else on earth. Similarly, the ghost of Shehzad Tanweer, as it watched the salvage teams scraping up human remains in the rat-infested crucible beneath the streets of London, could be sure that he had decisively outsoared the fish-and-shop back in Leeds. And that other great nothingness, Osama bin Laden – he is ever-living.
In July 2005 I flew from Montevideo to New York – and from winter to summer – with my six-year-old daughter and her eight-year-old sister. I drank a beer as I stood in the check-in queue, a practice not frowned on at Carrasco (though it would certainly raise eyebrows at, say, the dedicated Hajj terminal in Tehran's Mehrabad); then we proceeded to Security. Now I know some six-year-old girls can look pretty suspicious; but my youngest daughter isn't like that. She is a slight little blonde with big brown eyes and a quavery voice. Nevertheless, I stood for half an hour at the counter while the official methodically and solemnly searched her carry-on rucksack – staring shrewdly at each story-tape and crayon, palpating the length of all four limbs of her fluffy duck.
There ought to be a better word than boredom for the trance of inanition that weaved its way through me. I wanted to say something like, 'Even Islamists have not yet started to blow up their own families on aeroplanes. So please desist until they do. Oh yeah: and stick to people who look like they're from the Middle East.' The revelations of 10 August 2006 were 13 months away. And despite the exposure and prevention of their remarkably ambitious bloodbath of the innocent (the majority of them women and children), the (alleged) Walthamstow jihadis did not quite strive in vain. The failed to promote terror, but they won a great symbolic victory for boredom: the banning of books on the seven-hour flight from England to America.
My daughters and I arrived safely in New York. In New York, at certain subway stations, the police were searching all the passengers, to thwart terrorism – thus obliging any terrorist to walk the couple of blocks to a subway station where the police weren't searching all the passengers. And I couldn't defend myself from a vision of the future; in this future, riding a city bus will be like flying El Al. In the guilty safety of Long Island I watched the TV coverage from my home town, where my other three children live, where I will soon again be living with all five. There were the Londoners, on 8 July, going to work on foot, looking stiff and watchful, and taking no pleasure in anything they saw. Eric Hobsbawm got it right in the mid-Nineties, when he said that terrorism was part of the atmospheric 'pollution' of Western cities. It is a cost-efficient programme. Bomb New York and you pollute Madrid; bomb Madrid and you pollute London; bomb London and you pollute Paris and Rome, and repollute New York. But there was the solace given us by the Mayor. No, we should not be surprised by the use of this sempiternal ruse de guerre. Using their bodies is what people do.
The age of terror, I suspect, will also be remembered as the age of boredom. Not the kind of boredom that afflicts the blasé and the effete, but a superboredom, rounding out and complementing the superterror of suicide-mass murder. And although we will eventually prevail in the war against terror, or will reduce it, as Mailer says, to 'a tolerable level' (this phrase will stick, and will be used by politicians, with quiet pride), we haven't got a chance in the war against boredom. Because boredom is something that the enemy doesn't feel. To be clear: the opposite of religious belief is not atheism or secularism or humanism. It is not an 'ism'. It is independence of mind – that's all. When I refer to the age of boredom, I am not thinking of airport queues and subway searches. I mean the global confrontation with the dependent mind.
One way of ending the war on terror would be to capitulate and convert. The transitional period would be an unsmiling one, no doubt, with much stern work to be completed in the city squares, the town centres, and the village greens. Nevertheless, as the Caliphate is restored in Baghdad, to much joy, the surviving neophytes would soon get used to the voluminous penal code enforced by the Ministry for the Promotion of Virtue and the Suppression of Vice. It would be a world of perfect terror and perfect boredom, and of nothing else – a world with no games, no arts, and no women, a world where the only entertainment is the public execution. My middle daughter, now aged nine, still believes in imaginary beings (Father Christmas, the Tooth Fairy); so she would have that in common, at least, with her new husband.
Like fundamentalist Judaism and medieval Christianity, Islam is totalist. That is to say, it makes a total claim on the individual. Indeed, there is no individual; there is only the umma – the community of believers. Ayatollah Khomeini, in his copious writings, often returns to this theme. He unindulgently notes that believers in most religions appear to think that, so long as they observe all the formal pieties, then for the rest of the time they can do more or less as they please. 'Islam', as he frequently reminds us, 'isn't like that.' Islam follows you everywhere, into the kitchen, into the bedroom, into the bathroom, and beyond death into eternity. Islam means 'submission' – the surrender of independence of mind. That surrender now bears the weight of well over 60 generations, and 14 centuries.
The stout self-sufficiency or, if you prefer, the extreme incuriosity of Islamic culture has been much remarked. Present-day Spain translates as many books into Spanish, annually, as the Arab world has translated into Arabic in the past 1,100 years. And the late-medieval Islamic powers barely noticed the existence of the West until it started losing battles to it. The tradition of intellectual autarky was so robust that Islam remained indifferent even to readily available and obviously useful innovations, including, incredibly, the wheel. The wheel, as we know, makes things easier to roll; Bernard Lewis, in What Went Wrong?, sagely notes that it also makes things easier to steal.
By the beginning of the 20th century the entire Muslim world, with partial exceptions, had been subjugated by the European empires. And at that point the doors of perception were opened to foreign influence: that of Germany. This allegiance cost Islam its last imperium, the Ottoman, for decades a 'helpless hulk' (Hobsbawm), which was duly dismantled and shared out after the First World War – a war that was made in Berlin. Undeterred, Islam continued to look to Germany for sponsorship and inspiration. When the Nazi experiment ended, in 1945, sympathy for its ideals lingered on for years, but Islam was now forced to look elsewhere. It had no choice; geopolitically, there was nowhere else to turn. And the flame passed from Germany to the USSR.
So Islam, in the end, proved responsive to European influence: the influence of Hitler and Stalin. And one hardly needs to labour the similarities between Islamism and the totalitarian cults of the last century. Anti-semitic, anti-
liberal, anti-individualist, anti-democratic, and, most crucially, anti-rational, they too were cults of death, death-driven and death-fuelled. The main distinction is that the paradise which the Nazis (pagan) and the Bolsheviks (atheist) sought to bring about was an earthly one, raised from the mulch of millions of corpses. For them, death was creative, right enough, but death was still death. For the Islamists, death is a consummation and a sacrament; death is a beginning. Sam Harris is right:
'Islamism is not merely the latest flavour of totalitarian nihilism. There is a difference between nihilism and a desire for supernatural reward. Islamists could smash the world to atoms and still not be guilty of nihilism, because everything in their world has been transfigured by the light of paradise…' Pathological mass movements are sustained by 'dreams of omnipotence and sadism', in Robert Jay Lifton's phrase. That is usually enough. Islamism adds a third inducement to its warriors: a heavenly immortality that begins even before the moment of death.
For close to a millennium, Islam could afford to be autarkic. Its rise is one of the wonders of world history – a chain reaction of conquest and conversion, an amassment not just of territory but of millions of hearts and minds. The vigour of its ideal of justice allowed for levels of tolerance significantly higher than those of the West. Culturally, too, Islam was the more evolved. Its assimilations and its learning potentiated the Renaissance – of which, alas, it did not partake. Throughout its ascendancy, Islam was buoyed by what Malise Ruthven, in A Fury for God, calls 'the argument from manifest success'. The fact of expansion underwrote the mandate of heaven. And now, for the past 300 or 400 years, observable reality has propounded a rebuttal: the argument from manifest failure. As one understands it, in the Islamic cosmos there is nothing more painful than the suspicion that something has denatured the covenant with God. This unbearable conclusion must naturally be denied, but it is subliminally present, and accounts, perhaps, for the apocalyptic hurt of the Islamist.
Over the past five years, what we have been witnessing, apart from a moral slump or bust, is a death agony: the death agony of imperial Islam. Islamism is the last wave – the last convulsion. Until 2003, one could take some comfort from the very virulence of the Islamist deformation. Nothing so insanely dionysian, so impossibly poisonous, could expect to hold itself together over time. In the 20th century, outside Africa, the only comparable eruptions of death-hunger, of death-oestrus, were confined to Nazi Germany and Stalinite Kampuchea, the one lasting 12 years, the other three and a half. Hitler, Pol Pot, Osama: such men only ask to be the last to die. But there are some sound reasons for thinking that the confrontation with Islamism will be testingly prolonged.
It is by now not too difficult to trace what went wrong, psychologically, with the Iraq War. The fatal turn, the fatal forfeiture of legitimacy, came not with the mistaken but also cynical emphasis on Saddam's weapons of mass destruction: the intelligence agencies of every country on earth, Iraq included, believed that he had them. The fatal turn was the American President's all too palpable submission to the intoxicant of power. His walk, his voice, his idiom, right up to his mortifying appearance in the flight suit on the aircraft-carrier, USS Abraham Lincoln ('Mission Accomplished') – every dash and comma in his body language betrayed the unscrupulous confidence of the power surge.
We should parenthetically add that Tony Blair succumbed to it too – with a difference. In 'old' Europe, as Rumsfeld insolently called it, the idea of a political class was predicated on the inculcation of checks and balances, of psychic surge-breakers, to limit the corruption that personal paramountcy always entrains. It was not a matter of mental hygiene; everyone understood that a rotting mind will make rotten decisions. Blair knew this. He also knew that his trump was not a high one: the need of the American people to hear approval for the war in an English accent. Yet there he was, helplessly caught up in the slipstream turbulence of George Bush. Rumsfeld, too, visibly succumbed to it. On television, at this time, he looked as though he had just worked his way through a snowball of cocaine. 'Stuff happens,' he said, when asked about the looting of the Mesopotamian heritage in Baghdad – the remark of a man not just corrupted but floridly vulgarised by power. As well as the body language, at this time, there was also the language, the power language, all the way from Bush's 'I want to kick ass' to his 'Bring it on' – a rather blithe incitement, some may now feel, to the armed insurgency.
Contemplating this, one's aversion was very far from being confined to the aesthetic. Much followed from it. And we now know that an atmosphere of boosterist unanimity, of prewar triumphalism, had gathered around the President, an atmosphere in which any counter-argument, any hint of circumspection, was seen as a whimper of weakness or disloyalty. If she were alive, Barbara Tuchman would be chafing to write a long addendum to The March of Folly; but not even she could have foreseen a president who, 'going into this period', 'was praying for strength to do the Lord's will'. A power rush blessed by God – no, not a good ambience for precautions and doubts. At that time, the invasion of Iraq was presented as a 'self-financing' preventive war to enforce disarmament and regime change. Three and a half years later, it is an adventurist and proselytising war, and its remaining goal is the promotion of democracy.
The Iraq project was foredoomed by three intrinsic historical realities. First, the Middle East is clearly unable, for now, to sustain democratic rule – for the simple reason that its peoples will vote against it. Did no one whisper the words, in the Situation Room – did no one say what the scholars have been saying for years? The 'electoral policy' of the fundamentalists, writes Lewis, 'has been classically summarised as "One man (men only), one vote, once."' Or, in Harris's trope, democracy will be 'little more than a gangplank to theocracy'; and that theocracy will be Islamist. Now the polls have closed, and the results are coming in, region-wide. In Lebanon, gains for Hizbollah; in Egypt, gains for Sayyid Qutb's fraternity, the Muslim Brothers; in Palestine, victory for Hamas; in Iran, victory for the soapbox rabble-rouser and primitive anti-semite, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. In the Iraqi election, Bush and Blair, pathetically, both 'hoped' for Allawi, whose return was 14 per cent.
Second, Iraq is not a real country. It was cobbled together, by Winston Churchill, in the early Twenties; it consists of three separate (Ottoman) provinces, Sunni, Shia, Kurd – a disposition which looks set to resume. Among the words not listened to by the US Administration, we can include those of Saddam Hussein. Even with an apparatus of terror as savage as any in history, even with chemical weapons, helicopter gunships, and mass killings, even with a proven readiness to cleanse, to displace, and to destroy whole ecosystems, Hussein modestly conceded that he found Iraq a difficult country to keep in one piece. As a Sunni military man put it, Iraqis hate Iraq – or 'Iraq', a concept that has brought them nothing but suffering. There is no nationalist instinct; the instinct is for atomisation.
Third, only the sack of Mecca or Medina would have caused more pain to the Islamic heart than the taking, and befouling, of the Iraqi capital, the seat of the Caliphate. We have not heard any discussion, at home, about the creedal significance of Baghdad. But we have had some intimations from the jihadis' front line. In pronouncements that vibrate with historic afflatus, they speak of their joyful embrace of the chance to meet the infidel in the Land Between the Rivers. And, of course, beyond – in Madrid, in Bali (again), in London. It may be that the Coalition adventure has given the enemy a casus belli that will burn for a generation.
There are vast pluralities all over the West that are thirsting for American failure in Iraq – because they hate George Bush. Perhaps they do not realise that they are co-synchronously thirsting for an Islamist victory that will dramatically worsen the lives of their children. And this may come to pass. Let us look at the war, not through bin Laden's eyes, but through the eyes of the cunning of history. From that perspective, 11 September was a provocation. The 'slam dunk', the 'cakewalk' into Iraq amounted to a feint, and a trap. We now know, from various 500-page bestsellers like Cobra II and Fiasco, that the invasion of Iraq was truly incredibly blithe (there was no plan, no plan at all, for the occupation); still, we should not delude ourselves that the motives behind it were dishonourable. This is a familiar kind of tragedy. The Iraq War represents a gigantic contract, not just for Halliburton, but also for the paving company called Good Intentions. We must hope that something can be salvaged from it, and that our ethical standing can be reconsolidated. Iraq was a divagation in what is being ominously called the Long War. To our futile losses in blood, treasure and moral prestige, we can add the loss in time; and time, too, is blood.
An idea presents itself about a better direction to take. And funnily enough its current champion is the daughter of the dark genius behind the disaster in Iraq: she is called Liz Cheney. Before we come to that, though, we must briefly return to Ayed, and his belt, and to some quiet thoughts about the art of fiction.
The 'belt' ending of The Unknown Known came to me fairly late. But the belt was already there, and prominently. All writers will know exactly what this means. It means that the subconscious had made a polite suggestion, a suggestion that the conscious mind had taken a while to see. Ayed's belt, purchased by mail-order in Greeley, Colorado, is called a 'RodeoMaMa', and consists of a 'weight strap' and the pommel of a saddle. Ayed is of that breed of men which holds that a husband should have sex with his wives every night. And his invariable use of the 'RodeoMaMa' is one of the reasons for the rumble of mutiny in his marriages.
Looking in at the longhouse called Known Knowns, Ayed retools his 'RodeoMaMa'. He goes back to the house and summons his wives – for the last time. Thus Ayed gets his conceptual breakthrough, his unknown unknown: he is the first to bring martyrdom operations into the setting of his own home.
I could write a piece almost as long as this one about why I abandoned The Unknown Known. The confirmatory moment came a few weeks ago: the freshly fortified suspicion that there exists on our planet a kind of human being who will become a Muslim in order to pursue suicide-mass murder. For quite a time I have felt that Islamism was trying to poison the world. Here was a sign that the poison might take – might mutate, like bird flu. Islam, as I said, is a total system, and like all such it is eerily amenable to satire. But with Islamism, with total malignancy, with total terror and total boredom, irony, even militant irony (which is what satire is), merely shrivels and dies.
In Twentieth Century the late historian JM Roberts took an unsentimental line on the Chinese Revolution:
'More than 2,000 years of remarkable historical continuities lie behind [it], which, for all its cost and cruelty, was a heroic endeavour, matched in scale only by such gigantic upheavals as the spread of Islam, or Europe's assault on the world in early modern times.'
The cost and cruelty, according to Jung Chang and Jon Halliday's recent biography, amounted, perhaps, to 70 million lives in the Mao period alone. Yet this has to be balanced against 'the weight of the past' – nowhere heavier than in China:
'Deliberate attacks on family authority… were not merely attempts by a suspicious regime to encourage informers and delation, but attacks on the most conservative of all Chinese institutions. Similarly, the advancement of women and propaganda to discourage early marriage had dimensions going beyond 'progressive' feminist ideas or population control; they were an assault on the past such as no other revolution had ever made, for in China the past meant a role for women far inferior to those of pre-revolutionary America, France or even Russia.'
There is no momentum, in Islam, for a reformation. And there is no time, now, for a leisurely, slow-lob enlightenment. The necessary upheaval is a revolution – the liberation of women. This will not be the work of a decade or even a generation. Islam is a millennium younger than China. But we should remind ourselves that the Chinese Revolution took half a century to roll through its villages.
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The Lounge / A Members Only Forum
« on: January 17, 2007, 05:01:02 PM »
I don't know about everybody else, but I'm sick of all these n00bs coming up with the same false arguments and destroying many interesting topics. I also would very much like to discuss the greater meanings of this forum and why some people get it and others don't etc. but don't feel it would be appropriate to discuss those issues in public. Would it possible to have a secret and hidden forum where all the people who have been on this forum for a long time (and do get it) from either side of debate are able to discuss these issues without interruption? I would be happy to be the group moderator for the usergroup and to do any work that is required if necessary.
Cheers
Cheers
28
The Lounge / Money vs commitment
« on: January 11, 2007, 06:06:15 PM »
Ok so here is the situation.
I've agreed to do a footbag demo at this event on Saturday - $200 for 30 minutes. It could lead to more events in the future. It's about 2 hours away, I have a free lift and very good friends who I see once a year to stay with while I'm there. Fairly choice.
On the other hand, there's been a crisis at work and I could go in, work 20 hours, earn $400 and give up my weekend. I'm in management and it would be very good for my relationship with work, and I do believe in the people I work for strongly (an environmental charity). I'm also sure working over the weekend will save me a lot of trouble later on, and I feel some responsibility to be there.
I would appreciate people's thoughts and opinions.
Cheers,
I've agreed to do a footbag demo at this event on Saturday - $200 for 30 minutes. It could lead to more events in the future. It's about 2 hours away, I have a free lift and very good friends who I see once a year to stay with while I'm there. Fairly choice.
On the other hand, there's been a crisis at work and I could go in, work 20 hours, earn $400 and give up my weekend. I'm in management and it would be very good for my relationship with work, and I do believe in the people I work for strongly (an environmental charity). I'm also sure working over the weekend will save me a lot of trouble later on, and I feel some responsibility to be there.
I would appreciate people's thoughts and opinions.
Cheers,
29
The Lounge / Spiders
« on: January 10, 2007, 06:44:40 PM »
I've decided spiders are the coolest animals in the world. In fact I'm going to try and get some pet ones. They're just so amazing, so diverse and so cool looking. There is a tribal West African saying; "The wisdom of the spider is greater than that of all of the world together."
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The Lounge / Awake - A footbag video
« on: December 23, 2006, 04:33:30 PM »
I made this video for another forum. Can't say I put much effort into it, well I did, because my computer is shit, but not into editing, just into getting it to work. It's aimed at footbaggers so you'll probably struggle to see the actual bag a lot of the time but it is actually there. I could upload a 3 gig version of the vid to prove it, but frankly I would rather have you not believe then go to that much trouble.
http://www.footbag.org/media/639/Awake.wmv
It's about 16mb big.
http://www.footbag.org/media/639/Awake.wmv
It's about 16mb big.