Buried up to his chest, 48-year-old Mohamed Ibrahim made an appeal for his life yesterday before Hizbul Islam militants stoned him to death for adultery. |NYT|
Ok wait bros, here me out here…Have you heard this one yet? So a priest and a rabbi walk into a bar…
I love how people like this are still respected by the vast majority of the liberal intelligentsia. That is, any vague suggestion that we might have the moral authority to tell these people how to live their lives is seen as outright racism.
Rants like this are always best started with an Orwell quote. Here’s the old sage on Rudyard Kipling:
“All left-wing parties in the highly industrialised countries are at bottom a sham, because they make it their business to fight against something which they do not really wish to destroy. They have internationalist aims, and at the same time they struggle to keep up a standard of life with which those aims are incompatible. We all live by robbing Asiatic coolies, and those of us who are “enlightened” all maintain that those coolies ought to be set free; but our standard of living, and hence our “enlightenment”, demands that the robbery shall continue. A humanitarian is always a hypocrite, and Kipling’s understanding of this is perhaps the central secret of his power to create telling phrases.”
How does this have to do with these ignorant moslems who are about to stone their compatriot in the photograph above? It’s simple enough, really: As Orwell points out, there is a great paradox in the liberal idea that our way of life is no better or commendable (comparatively) than the next man’s. Such a line of thought accommodates militant (ignorant) Islam because it is seen as a reaction to the perceived antagonisms of the West.
But I think it’s quite the other way around: These people are backward. The “liberal internationalist”, as Orwell would call him, cannot reconcile his generalizations —“everyone deserves a decent living wage”—with the reality upon which such a proposition depends (“cheap gasoline for all!”).
Destroy All Monsters (Kaijû sôshingeki / Monster Invasion) (1968, Japan) | pjmix
My Top 5 Artists (Week Ending 2009-12-13) -
Imported from Last.fm Tumblr by JoeLaz
(via retreattothefuture)
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Free Confederacy of Dunces Audiobook -
A Confederacy of Dunces, one of my favorite books of all time, is free on audible until 10 am. tomorrow. If you haven’t read this book, I recommend picking it up. If you’re pressed for time or can’t be bothered to buy it, please download this and listen to it. It will lighten your life.
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“This culture of excess brought its own counter-culture. Arguably its most extreme adherent was Mohamed Atta, the Egyptian-born al-Qaida operative who flew one of the jets into the World Trade Centre. Atta had trained as an architect in Cairo and an urban planner in Hamburg. He wrote his thesis on what he saw as the destruction of Syria’s Aleppo, his ideal city, by crude modern commercial development and, in particular, by tower blocks. When he attacked New York, his vicious crusade was as much against skyscrapers as it was against western values and the US.” — This is a great little article.
The Morgan Freeman Chain of Command
In case anyone was actually left wondering when I posted this, I have decided to take a job with the Jaipur Virasat Foundation. Unpaid, which is probably where all the money I’ve saved will come in handy.
I plan to subsist on Quinine and drape myself underneath a mosquito net at all hours, but I should have some time to take photographs, write, and learn a spot or two of Hindi.
Mandarin, at least for the next few months, is out of the cards. Hong Kong, though? I heard it’s right down the street.
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