Mark Steyn: When all the world’s a “distraction,” maybe you’re not the main event after all

Ref: National Review Online, Apr 11th, 2009

“Don’t be surprised if “the civilized world” shrivels and retreats in the face of state-of-the-art reprimitivization. From piracy to nukes to the limp response of the hyperpower, this is not a “distraction” but a portent of the future. “

Kenneth Anderson: The New York Times and the information theory of the leisure class

Ref: Kenneth Anderson’s Law of War and Just War Theory Blog, January 07, 2009

“Yet the Times threw in the “fact” towel before the battle was even joined, saw the future and decided it was in opinion writing asserted as fact in order both to charge a higher price than a mere opinion magazine could charge and seek to satisfy, at least superficially, the fact-based raison d’etre of the daily newspaper. It looked at its ‘elite’ readership and concluded that, at bottom, those readers were not very interested in facts, much less in paying for them. Instead they wanted high falutin’, high-gravitas chat based around politics. And so the Times has proceeded to offer it.”

Bruce Bawer: Submission in the Netherlands?

Ref: City Journal, Winter 2009, vol 19, no 1. Jan 22nd, 2009

“a court in the Netherlands—a nation once famous for being an oasis of free speech—has now decided to prosecute a member of the national legislature for speaking his mind. By doing so, it proves exactly what Wilders has argued all along: that fear and “sensitivity” to a religion of submission are destroying Dutch freedom.”

Bruce Bawer: Who’s Sleeping More Deeply — Europe or America?

Ref: Pajamas Media, September 30, 2008

“I don’t know exactly how to characterize or understand this mass self-deception, this determination to cling to an illusion of the West in which the ongoing Islamization of Europe simply is not a factor; it would appear to be rooted partly in confusion, partly in cowardice, partly in careerism — and partly, I think, in a perhaps not entirely conscious conviction that some truths are just too sensational to speak without sounding hysterical, too repulsive to be honest about without sounding (to some ears) vulgar and bigoted, and too challenging to face without being utterly overwhelmed by the scale and the horror of it all.”

Bruce Bawer: An Anatomy of Surrender

Ref: City Journal, Spring 2008, vol. 18, no 2

“The key question for Westerners is: Do we love our freedoms as much as they hate them? Many free people, alas, have become so accustomed to freedom, and to the comfortable position of not having to stand up for it, that they’re incapable of defending it when it’s imperiled—or even, in many cases, of recognizing that it is imperiled.”

Jared Diamond: Vengeance Is Ours

Ref: The New Yorker, Apr 25, 2008

“Nearly all human societies today have given up the personal pursuit of justice in favor of impersonal systems operated by state governments—at least, on paper. Without state government, war between local groups is chronic; coöperation between local groups on projects bringing benefits to everyone—such as large-scale irrigation systems, free rights of travel, and long-distance trade—becomes much more difficult; and even the frequency of murder within a local group is higher.”

James Kirchick: How Tyranny Came to Zimbabwe

Ref: The Weekly Standard, 06/18/2007, Volume 012, Issue 38

“Mugabe became prime minister and was toasted by the international community and media as a new sort of African leader. “I find that I am fascinated by his intelligence, by his dedication. The only thing that frustrates me about Robert Mugabe is that he is so damned incorruptible,” Andrew Young, Jimmy Carter’s ambassador to the United Nations, had gushed to the Times of London in 1978. The rest, as they say, is history.”

Michael Meyers: Obama blew it

Ref: Los Angeles Times, March 20, 2008

“We can’t be united as a nation if we continue to think racially and give credence to racial experiences and differences based on ethnicity, past victim status and stereotypical categories.”

SALIM MANSUR: Multiculturalism cannot survive

Ref: Toronto Sun, March 8, 2008

“This was the minimum Muslims in the West owed to the civilization where they sought refuge, and where they found security, prosperity, freedom and self-fulfillment of the like denied them in their native lands.

Instead Muslim-based organizations, at first having offered denial, followed with an unending volume of polemics condemning the West for past sins. By exploiting the West’s post-colonial guilt they held it responsible for the conditions in the Arab-Muslim world that breeds the politics of terrorism.”