Politics Stuff

[skywaterblue]

Still continuing: Maureen Dowd still thinks Barack Obama could be 'Sorkinier'.

Charlie Stross thinks the USA's future is too unstable to predict.

Over in the Guardian:
A new world is coming into being almost unnoticed, where America is only one of several great powers, facing an uncertain future it can no longer shape.

More or less.

The Barack Obama plan for science.

Comments

[jordan179.livejournal.com]

The future of Europe is even less stable, due to the Muslim cultural/demographic threat. What makes things even more chaotic is that the crisis may resolve itself differently in different countries, especially if it fractures the EU.

[skywaterblue.livejournal.com]

Erm, I don't have that impression. (Mainly because I don't share your fear of all things Islam.) In fact, I'd say of the four big players: the EU, China, America and Russia, the EU has the stablest growth pattern.

China's (probably) going to retreat in on itself again in fifteen to twenty years, the United States is going to spend AT LEAST the next decade digging itself out of the hole of George W. Bush, and Russia has set itself up for another volatile revolution in the next ten to twenty years.

[jordan179.livejournal.com]

I don't have a "fear of all things Islam." I do, quite rationally, fear Islamofascism, and that's what's growing among the Muslim immigrant community in Europe right now. Fairly "mainstream" mosques are preaching radical messages, to the effect that the Muslims will "take over" European countries and that Muslims do not owe loyalty to their countries of citizenship. And the Muslims turn this sort of ideology into action, as witness the increasing pattern of violent attacks in Europe against non-Muslims -- especially homosexuals and younger women.

Europe has a stable but slow economic growth pattern, true. But her overall growth is not as good over prolonged periods as is America's, and the non-economic factors are also important. European countries look fairly likely to be torn by serious rioting over the next decade, and the situation is made worse by the utterly craven and indecisive attitude of the European governments toward putting down such disturbances. Ordinary crime, often to some extent ideologically motivated (in shari'a it is moral for Muslims to take the property or assault the persons of non-dhimmi non-Muslims) is also growing in consequence.

I don't know what this "hole of George W. Bush" is that you imagine we must "dig ourselves out of." The roots of the current fiancial crisis date back to the Clinton Administration and the mandated loans to unqualified minority borrowers, and it's not as bad as the crisis which caused the Great Depression (which only lasted a decade, not "more than a decade.")

Any US President is going to have to fight the War on Terror. Any President who tries not to fight it is simply going to suffer defeats on the world stage until he chooses to start fighting again, and be in a worse position for having taken a breather. This applies to Republicans -- Democrats -- whoever.

I agree with you on Chinese and Russian instability, the more so because neither regime has any meaningful ideological underpinnings.

[skywaterblue.livejournal.com]

Ugh, Jordan. "Unqualified minority borrowers?" Please stop repeating that racist Republican talking point (as if you cared about the financial crisis, like, two weeks ago). Most of the people who have gone under due to foreclosure are white. In fact, according to a study by a group called Compliance Technologies they were surprised to learn that a vast chunk of subprime mortgages were taken out by affluent white people.

Enjoy doing your homework. (http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/03/realestate/03mort.html?_r=3&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss&oref=slogin&oref=slogin&oref=login) Here's an archived WST article about how rich people were taking out subprime mortgages to leverage the money to buy more houses, a major cause of the housing bubble. (http://forum.xcpus.com/financial-chat/7550-subprime-debacle-traps-even-very-credit-worthy-housing-boomed-industry-pushed-loa.html)

I'm sure next you'll be telling me all about how Obama used to work for ACORN and ACORN helped fuel the subprime crisis by encouraging brown people to take those loans. Except that one of ACORN's central tenants is that they encourage people to take out standard 30-year loans and have been trying to warn people about this issue for most of this decade.

(And this ignores actual real criticism about ACORN, like how they pay dumb kids to register voters, and those kids inevitably end up committing voter fraud, or how like the PIRGS, they advocate for unions but won't let their own employees unionize etc.)

[jordan179.livejournal.com]

The problem isn't the "minority" part but the "unqualified" part. The excuse for relaxing the requirements for the loans was to "help minority borrowers."

I actually don't know much about ACORN, so I wasn't going to mention it. I have my own experiences of the hell that working for supposedly "enlightened" organizations can become. And I don't mean FoFo (which was actually a fairly nice place).

[skywaterblue.livejournal.com]

FoFo is one of the best places I've worked; they seem to care a lot about the canvassers there, actually. One of the few places that walks the walk.

The problem isn't the "minority" part but the "unqualified" part. The excuse for relaxing the requirements for the loans was to "help minority borrowers."

Yeah, and while minorities constitute an important section of why we did it, it doesn't change the fact that the people who ended up abusing and ultimately breaking the system were housing speculators.

[fashionbeast.livejournal.com]

I don't have a "fear of all things Islam." I do, quite rationally, fear Islamofascism, and that's what's growing among the Muslim immigrant community in Europe right now.

So what, now instead of the International Jew, we've got the International Muslim?

[jordan179.livejournal.com]

I don't have a "fear of all things Islam." I do, quite rationally, fear Islamofascism, and that's what's growing among the Muslim immigrant community in Europe right now.

So what, now instead of the International Jew, we've got the International Muslim?

If Jewish religious leaders in the 1920's and 1930's had been organizing and urging their communities to attack Christian houses of worship, carry out rampages of robbery, rape and murder againt the Gentiles with Biblical sanctions, and telling them that they need have no loyalty to Christian states because soon Jewish religious laws would become the laws of the land, then the fears of the Nazis (and other anti-Semites) would have been justified. What I described is exactly what the Muslims are doing in Europe.

[fashionbeast.livejournal.com]

No no, you're getting confused. I'm not addressing the content of your argument, I'm attacking your methodology. Henry Ford wrote of the "International Jew", as seperate from "Good" Jews (quoty marks mine) who either kept to their little ghettos or assimilated and were as un-jew-riffic as possible. However his idea of the International Jew is so abstract and paranoiac, that there's really no way to distinguish in his argument how to tell a "Good" Jew from an "International Jew" pretending to be a "Good" Jew.

In your argument you've said you're not speaking of all Muslims, but your ill-named concept of the Islamofacist* means that any person of the Islamic fatih COULD be a secret jihadi.

Here's the problem with Islamofacism as a conceptual term: Islamofacism is a term WE created as a blanket. You can't talk about them the same way you talk about the Nazis for instance. There is o Islamofacist party. Abdul Al-Hazred did not pen the Islamofacist Manifesto after being imprisoned following the Pita Pit Putsch. You can call anybody you like an Islamofacist and there's nothing anyone can do to refute your assertation.

*Which I'm not blaming you for, you didn't invent the term.

[jordan179.livejournal.com]

Here's the problem with Islamofacism as a conceptual term: Islamofacism is a term WE created as a blanket. You can't talk about them the same way you talk about the Nazis for instance. There is o Islamofacist party. Abdul Al-Hazred did not pen the Islamofacist Manifesto after being imprisoned following the Pita Pit Putsch. You can call anybody you like an Islamofacist and there's nothing anyone can do to refute your assertation.

You've got a very good point there. Some people prefer "jihadist" for that reason -- the Terrorists actually call themselves a variant of that -- though that also runs into possibilities of over-generalization, because "jihad" can have more than one meaning in Islam.

One likely outcome of this Clash of Civilizations (*), assuming that the West wins, will be the tainting of Islam and its symbols in the popular mind for generations to come, much the same way that German nationalist symbols have been tainted by their association with the Nazis. This would be unfortunate -- but not as unfortunate as if we lose.

If we lose, then ideals that I care very much about -- equal rights under the law for all religions, both sexes and all sexual orientations; freedom of speech; freedom of scientific inquirty -- these will perish for an unknown period of time, perhaps centuries.

===
(*) Not the Iraq War, nor even what we term the "War on Terror," but the much larger conflict of which these are but parts.

[jordan179.livejournal.com]

Here's Bruce Bawr's "First They Came For the Gays" essay discussing the growth of violent physical attacks on homosexuals by Muslims in Europe, to illustrate part of the reason why I feel that fear of Islamism is perfectly rational, and why Europe has a major problem.

http://pajamasmedia.com/blog/first_they_came_for_the_gays/

Note in partcular that it is the second and later generation Muslims, not the first-generation immigrants, who are the main perpetrators of this violence. The Europeans are clearly failing to integrate the Muslim immigrants into their culture.

I could find you similar articles regarding Muslim attacks on womens, Jews etc.

[skywaterblue.livejournal.com]

I'd like to see more than anecdotal evidence, preferably cross referencing the rate of significant gay hate crime and rapes in European countries with the rape and gay-bashing rates in America. My gut instinct is that Europe probably still has a FAR LOWER rate of such things by population than the United States, having seen a moderate increase up from slightly less than nil.

You know why? Because brown people attacking white women (and that's why we gotta regulate who they are and what they do) is quite literally ONE OF THE OLDEST IN THE BOOK.*

*Interesting that in the 21st C. all minority groups are held to be roughly equal.

[jordan179.livejournal.com]

You know why? Because brown people attacking white women (and that's why we gotta regulate who they are and what they do) is quite literally ONE OF THE OLDEST IN THE BOOK.*

The color of the perps isn't the problem. It's the aggressive ideology, supported by religion. For that matter, not all Muslims are "brown people." Those from the Balkans are exceedingly "white," as are the Turks.

[skywaterblue.livejournal.com]

I don't really spend a lot of time worrying about Islamofacism. (Sorta the same way I don't REALLY worry too much about Christofacism, although I do hope everyone votes Dem this year to try and stem off some our own crazy religious people.)

Mostly, because of stories like this. (http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/27/world/middleeast/27beirut.html?scp=3&sq=turkey%20television&st=cse)

Not that globalization is a perfect solution. It hasn't so much worked for China as made China more interested in buying us instead of bombing us.

[jordan179.livejournal.com]

Not that globalization is a perfect solution. It hasn't so much worked for China as made China more interested in buying us instead of bombing us.

Since China "buying" us is to our benefit, while China "bombing" us would be to our harm, it sounds like it's working just fine from our POV.

[fashionbeast.livejournal.com]

Uh, no, I'm sorry. The more our economic infrastructure gets ripped out of our country the less anyone will need to bomb us.

[jordan179.livejournal.com]

China "buying" us does not equal "economic infrastructure" getting "ripped out of our country." China "buying" us simply means that the Chinese are investing in our economy.