Political incorrectness

If you’ve been within ten yards of any news source over the past few weeks, you’ve probably caught wind of the latest stunt from our favourite clog-wearing, windmill-surfing, tulip-chewing Billy Idol wannabe. I still don’t get his hair, but he made a film. Or well. Not a film, really, more like a video. A clip. Of the kind angsty jewtube generation teenagers make on a subject they feel it is necessary to inform the public of through the use of poorly edited Windows Movie Maker products, featuring horrific imagery and even more horrific mangling of the English language.

In spite of this, Fitna (فتنة – arab.: strife/conflict/AIDS/murder/donkey rape) does raise some fair – and however un-nice they may be – valid points. Ok, so the muslims aren’t all going to bring out the AKs and semtex and start their revolt at your local mall tomorrow. That’s not really what anyone’s trying to claim either, although certain elements would have you think otherwise. The muslims do, however, come in droves and try to impose their not-so-democratic laws and customs on everyone else. Now, a lof of people like bitching about the flaws of democracy, but seriously – we’ve yet to come up with something better that actually works (working on paper doesn’t count).
And fuck knows we’ve tried already.

The democracy package also happens to come bundled with a couple of fringe benefits that a lot of people I know would be reluctant to give up – the right to say whatever you want, for instance; even if it’s absolute drivel. The right to print bile on cheap paper and sell it as news being another.

Fast-tracking to the point: Only a very small minority of the denizens of the western world would want to do away with democracy. Thanks to the inherent irony of the universe, the self-declared propagators of democracy, equality and fairness are the ones who are most prone to assuming a submissive and completely apologetic stance towards Islam – the only religion that is actively attempting to undermine democracy and civil rights. As per today, the political spectrum is marred by the fact that anything is subject to Muslim Approval ™ before it can be inflicted on the clearly unsuspecting and frail-minded public, in which there is a small percentage of Muslims (who may be offended and threaten to blow something up). This political correctness run rampant effectively ensures that any potential debate about religion in general – and Islam in particular – is stillborn.

The PC police also appears to have reverted to their customary tactics when faced with an issue that tears down the imaginary world they seem to live in: They scream “FAR RIGHT” and “EXTREMIST” at the top of their voices in an attempt to invalidate any and all opinions whoever it is they target may postulate. In the mind of the public, “far right” is still tantamount to “nazi”, and as such it’s a brutally effective verbal assault. No one wants to agree with a nazi, after all. I’m not about to plunge into the whole “but national socialism was a leftist ideology!” debacle, I’m just going to say that being opposed to Muslims as the ruling caste, Islam being the compulsory religion, and the shari’a set of islamic laws replacing whatever Constitution or Magna Carta that makes up your current legislation does not make you an extremist, nor does it make you a nazi.

In spite of this, those who attempt to label anyone disagreeing with them as racists/fascists/nazis/anti-semitists have a point. It’s hard to find anyone sharing your opinion on Islam as an expansive force – who are not at the same time total numpties. You have the traditional Europan far right (and these guys actually are far right), who in recent years have figured out that hating muslims gets you more votes than hating jews and black people. Curiously, back when they advocated the bombing of Israel and persecution of Jews, many of their voters happened to be Muslim. Not only are these political groupings nauseatingly populistic in nature, they’re also comprised almost exclusively of simpletons with a quasi-religious conviction to various ethnic cleansing-ideologies mixed with a bit of nationalism and half-assed liberatarianism. Overseas from Europe, you have neocons and conservatives making up the Christian Right – and while they don’t like muslims, they also happen to be Christian fundamentalists who think the earth is 6000 years old, and fervently maintain that there is no evidence suggesting that baby Jesus did not in fact have a pet Velociraptor that proves the coexistence of mankind and very large reptiles. The following anecdote from where the fundies blissfully ignore the real world ought to illustrate the problem:

It is sometimes asserted that if human bones aren’t found with dinosaur bones, then dinosaurs and man didn’t live together. Creation scientists point out that this is a false assumption; if human bones aren’t found buried with dinosaur bones, it simply means they weren’t buried together.
Evolutionists point out that radiometric dating of rocks containing dinosaur bones shows them to have formed between 65 million years ago and 250 million years ago, whereas rocks with human bones in them are dated as being much newer (less than 5 million years old). Young Earth Creationists believe that these methods of dating rocks provide false results, and therefore reject this argument.

Their approach to scientific method and the convergence of evidence can be summarized as follows: If the evidence does not fit the conclusion you had decided in advance to reach, based on your belief in an elaborate fairytale – ignore it!
Their use of the term “creation scientist” implies that they think creationism is somehow related to science. The only relation so far is that a band of creationists have attempted to pass their ramblings off as actual science, by casting a very thin veil of factuality over their beliefs. It doesn’t work. Basically, whatever stuff you happen to believe in “because it said so in the Bible” does not constitute as science. Creationism (and its baseborn derivation, Intelligent Design) is not science. No one takes you seriously. The creationist lobby are also famous for trying to make you believe that “Big Science” is in fact …

… a shadowy group of men, exercising their absolute authority over any and all science across the world from a secluded penthouse office space, where they gather in secret around a table in the shape of an aborted fætus to plan who they will next excommunicate from their scholarly brotherhood, whose principal values are communism, atheism, and darwinism…

This is not the case. Science is not some exclusive brotherhood where you have to perform heinous rituals and pay tribute to pagan gods to be initiated and allowed to publish. It’s a public matter. Scientific journals are entirely public. The reason why so-called creation scientists’ works are not published, is because they can’t get through the mandatory peer review – their failings to comply with basic scientific method causes it to not qualify as science; it’s not falsifiable, it’s based largely on the assumption that a divine creator exists (which in turn is hardly testable), and the lack of solid, empirical evidence is simply astounding. If they had been actual scientists, they would have gone back to the lab and tried again, this time employing proper scientific method – but as this is a poorly disguised attempt at validating religious beliefs by turning them into science, that’s simply not possible. The solution?
In the tradition of whiny cunts who think they’re right in spite of being totally wrong, they then run to the media and claim that the scientific community is biased and hates them and that the theory of evolution is to blame for the holocaust, all scientists are atheists, and atheists give less to charity, therefore it follows logically that creationism is superior and should replace actual science as a subject in schools.

Add to this Conservatives’ habit of filling their so-called encyclopedia with distinctly non-encyclopedic material, such as unfounded and unsourced “warning to parents about Dungeons and Dragons” (I’m not lying, check the revisions history for the page if they’ve changed it by the time you read this), that they’re opposed to civil rights unless you’re a heterosexual male, tend to mutilate their children on a regular basis (it’s only out of love!), and so on.

The only thing that makes them better than Muslims is that there’s not quite as many of them that seem to be quite as interested in dismantling democracy and western civilzation. At least not at this point. I’m fairly certain that in the ideal world of a fundie, everyone’s a pious christian (in fact, other religions, not to mention atheism, would be outlawed and severely punished), being gay is punishable by death, any doctor found to have performed an abortion must be stoned to death along with the woman he performed the abortion on (and whoever impregnated the bitch would be castrated to prevent further mishaps), and only the most pious can become leaders. And I’ll bet you anything they would think this is the right and just way of doing things, oblivious to the obvious fact that avoiding a situation like this is exactly why opposition to Islamistic expansion exists in the first place. Fundamentalist Christian rule doesn’t appeal to me any more than Muslim sovereignty.

Democracy is ideally secular – in the sense that everyone can choose whichever version of the fairytale they want, and then live by it – all as long as you don’t get in peoples’ faces, and tell them they’re condemned to eternal torment in a fiery pit because they happen to not harken to your particular version of the fairytale… Or attempt to persuade others into converting to your religion of peace by threatening to kill them if they don’t. You would even be free to not believe in fairytales in the first place.

Finally, as is to be expected in this age of user-created content, muslims have taken it upon themselves to be clever back. This anti-Fitna flick is likely done in a fit of righteous indignation, but it turns out to fail spectacularly for a number of reasons. It seems, for instance, to assume that The War on Terror (woe to thee, dictionaries) is a war on the behalf of christianity, like some Pope-sanctioned Crusade of the kind that went out of fashion in the 13th century. Unless the US of A are the embodiment of Christendom – and I’m sure there are people who think they are, anyway – the wars in both Afghanistan and Iraq are entirely on the behalf of those nations who launched them. While it is mandatory that the Commander in Chief invokes his god every now and then, I’m pretty sure the executive orders came from a mere mortal, and that it is indeed only mere mortals who pilot the bombers (that the pilots might feel a bit like god at times is a different matter), and – judging by the body count – only mere mortals who trudge around in the desert and get shot at.
I’m also a little disappointed that he missed some of the more hilarious quotes from the bible. I appreciate the need for doomy and gloomy statements that match those of Fitna, but these are still more fun – and some of these others do involve death and massacring. Admittedly, most are from the Old Testament, but still: There’s a law dictating how to cut your hair, and how to grow your beard. There’s a law specifying that you can’t have people from neighbouring areas as slaves (maybe it’s time to stop abusing your Mexican maid?), and a whole host of laws that should provide you with ample opportunity to throw stones at your daughters and wives. In the end, the whole mess comes down the chronology – Europe rallied to kill muslims 900 years ago, and our collective conscience has been suffering dearly ever since. But that was 900 years ago; Muslims were crashing civilian planes into large buildings 7 only years ago. Therein lies the difference.

At the end of the day, someone who’s opposed to Islamic expansion yet not of a rabid disposition in either direction when it comes down to political convictions (and not too hot on the religion thing in general), is in for a real challenge when trying to settle down somewhere in the political landscape. Michelle Malkin obviously has a somewhat functional brain, but her tendency to erupt in a flood (pardon the lewd imagery) of ad homimem bullshit turns me away – as does her amazing ability to throw hissy fits over Absolut-ly nothing – even if she’s good at highlighting what she calls the “shari’a creep” (a very apt term). The way she runs a closed system where her neocon disciples circlejerk endlessly over her writings isn’t particularly impressive either – fuck’s the point of writing something online if only people who already shamelessly fawn over you are allowed to voice their opinions without having their names, addresses and home phone numbers made available on her blog, after which follows the customary death threats from her acolytes? I don’t get it.

With “docility” being the favoured political stance on anything unpleasant in Europe these days, I guess we’re going to see history repeat itself soon enough. Almost a hundred years ago now, tensions in Europe got the better of someone, and we killed millions of our own and turned half of France into a ditch. Thirty years later, the short guy with the silly moustache wanted to try his hand at war, and so we ended up having our asses saved, again, by the same dirty colonials we sent off on some rickety boat 400 years ago, who, while we bickered amongst ourselves as always, grew into a superpower who didn’t really like us, but helped out us out anyway. Not only did they make sure we didn’t starve during the war, they also made sure we didn’t all end up speaking Russian as part of the aftermath of the war. If we keep ignoring any and all threats that are not just at our door – but nicely settled in our living room – we’re going to have to depend on some foreign superpower to pull us out of the mire we’ve gotten ourselves stuck in, again. This time, however, the question of which superpower it is, is a lot more open. Comrade Putin, perhaps? Our friends of small stature and large-yet-still-steadily-growing economy from the east?
The playing field is a little too open for comfort

Post-publish edit: As of 14th of April, comment registration on Michelle Malkin’s blog was re-opened, meaning anyone wishing to comment on her blog ought to peg down a username before it closes again closed. I’m still opposed to the idea of demanding registrations for posting comments in the first place, but as we’re guests on her premises, common sense and etiquette demand we play by her rules.

References, resources and further reading
http://eupolitics.einnews.com/news/geert-wilders
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/faith/article3636049.ece – Geert Wilders is “far-right”
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/943764.html – Geert Wilders is still “far-right”
http://www.startribune.com/local/17406054.html
http://youtube.com/
http://en.wikipedia.org/
http://conservapedia.org/
http://pajamasmedia.com/
http://michellemalkin.com/
http://www.stephenjaygould.org