Ironicwarcriminal posted:‘There are going to be serious cultural antagonisms between the western and Islamic world’
It is my hypothesis that the fundamental source of conflict in this new world will not be primarily ideological or primarily economic. The great divisions among humankind and the dominating source of conflict will be cultural.
Nation states will remain the most powerful actors in world affairs, but the principal conflicts of global politics will occur between nations and groups of different civilizations. The clash of civilizations will dominate global politics. The fault lines between civilizations will be the battle lines of the future.
Edited by prikryl ()
There are three types of people today:
1. People who want to put our civilizational strife behind us by accepting a watered-down version of our traditional beliefs that incorporates all peoples and cultures into one glorious human family, who may or may not worship a God.
2. People who stick strongly by their traditional beliefs and refuse to accept the fusion of all ideologies and religions into one homogenized Whole.
3. People who think traditional beliefs should be discarded and erased from history forever and a new vision of mankind should be created that pretends the prior version was essentially a different species that we evolved past (aka the übermensch)
Of the three: I am a Catholic.
Chthonic_Goat_666 posted:
lol what a fucking clown
I had spent much of the 1990s at war with the gay left, and I think it had embittered me. That those battles were over my campaign for marriage equality and military service as the two biggest priorities of the gay rights movement makes for a strange irony today. Nonetheless, when you have been smeared, physically threatened, picketed and despised by the gay left, you dig in and begin to see nothing but bad in that political faction. And earlier that same year, I had been publicly humiliated by parts of the gay left for being HIV-positive, and trying to find other HIV-positive men online for sex and love. That made my embitterment deeper. When I really examine my emotional state that year, I can see better now why my anger at the left in general came out so forcefully in the wake of such a massacre. It was a foolish extrapolation from a handful of haters to an entire political tradition. Again, this is not an excuse. But if I am to understand my own personal anger at the anti-war left, it is part of the story.
Second, I was marinated in the knowledge of Saddam Hussein’s unique evil. At TNR in the 1990s, the consensus was that this dictator truly was another Hitler type (and in many ways, he was). My moral umbrage was exacerbated, I think, by this previous history. You can see it in the blog – as early as September 11, the day the mass murder occurred. Here’s the post:
Check out this 1995/1996 Public Interest essay on the first World Trade Center bombing. Some of it sends chills down your spine with its prescience. But its most important suggestion is that Iraq might have been behind the bombing. Ditto today. Saddam is not only capable but willing – especially against a nemesis like the son of the first George Bush. More evidence that Colin Powell’s tragic abandonment of the war against Saddam might well be one of the biggest blunders in recent history. If this coordinated massacre needed real state-sponsored support, which nation would you pick as the prime suspect?
This was an instinctual response, not a rational one. Notice I am not stating that Saddam had WMDs or had any connection to al Qaeda. I’m just raising the question. But by merely doing that on the day of the attacks, I’m revealing something important about the neoconservative mind. I had been prepped for something like this – prepped to see Iraq behind it. And so the pivot to Iraq for me was not a surprise. It felt like the obvious response. And it took me three more years to even thoroughly doubt the necessity for taking him out. That epistemic closure, that surrender of the mind to the gut, that replacement of analysis with anger: this was part of it.
boom headshot
aerdil posted:In more uplifting news, a good start: http://www.latimes.com/news/nation/nationnow/la-na-nn-iraq-veteran-suicide-20130321,0,500135.story
this guy was against the wa.r
aerdil posted:In more uplifting news, a good start: http://www.latimes.com/news/nation/nationnow/la-na-nn-iraq-veteran-suicide-20130321,0,500135.story
I thi nk you meant this http://www.hiphopdx.com/m/index.php?s=news&id=23316
