Thoughts from
San Diego on Law, Politics, and Culture

 
Oh is that all
By Tom Smith

Every so often what the British call a sad git indulges in this sort of behaviour. Over a public utility charge or more likely, a child custody dispute, he gets his shotgun, takes over an office, and demands to be heard. Often he ends up shooting himself when the police arrive. One tends to think, well, the sad git was insane. But, one realizes, billing or custody disputes can drive even a good, if weak, man crazy.

But this is the exception to the rule. The rule is, if you are the sort of people who blow up as many innocents as you can, in order to get what you want, chances are what you want is very unreasonable. It is not just that your methods are flawed. You probably want something you cannot get by persuasion or purchase.

So now we have al Qeada and associated nutcases telling us, either you and the rest of the worlds billions convert to our extremely funny version of Islam or else we'll blow up dozens of you here and thousands of you there. It raises a question just what sort of fundamental life style change one would be willing to roll over for. If pre-liberation Afghanistan or "modern" day Saudi Arabia were some sort of science fiction wonderland, where everyone just ran around in their bathrobes all day having fun and the robots did all the work, you might think, well, maybe they have a point. But instead, what one sees is darkest ignorance and poverty, combined with slavery, and the masters having to go to church God knows how often and spend the rest of their time listening to debates about why God created the mosquito. And ladies have to wear those parachute thingies. I don't think so. Before that, I would become a Unitarian or something.

These fruitcakes may know their Koran, but they need to get a clue about Americans, and they don't know the British too well either. After we clear out of the Middle East, so they can settle down to selling oil and building nuclear weapons, these nutters want to get to work on the rest of the world. Not only freedom of religion and speech, but beer and cable TV would be among the first things they'd get rid of. It makes you wonder who they think they're dealing with. Most Americans would gladly see most of their towns and cities reduced to smoking rubble before they would accept going back to only five channels. All that good stuff in the Constitution, we'd never even get to. And the British? They are not as loud as Americans, but there is a hard core to them, and of them, that would charge into machine guns before they would let anyone tell them they couldn't have a pint.

The sooner the American and British left realize this, the sooner they could stop wasting everyone's time. Oddly enough, however, the gruesome Gollaway has a point. Terrorist attacks are the price we pay for not giving in to this particular insane ideological outbreak. Just like WWII was the price we paid for electing not to live in the unbelievably creepy fantasy world of a metastisizing German death cult. Or the Cold War was the price of going elsewhere than according to the bizarre maunderings of a deeply confused late Victorian economist, as interpreted by various Russian sociopaths. People just want to watch the telly, have a pint, do their bit at work, but, oh no, it's we'll blow your limbs off unless you roll over for the rantings of some guy who lives in a cave in his bathrobe. Like that's going to happen. At least the Communists promised a utopia. These Islamic horrors turn whole countries into gulags and say, no, really, this gulag is how God wants you to live. One supposes God must feel rather insulted at the implication. I know I do.

But to get to my point. London shows what we already knew. These are evil, crazy people seeking evil, crazy goals. They do that, and it happens a lot more than one would wish in history. We don't have a lot of options except to crush them, and even if we had, we're doing the world a favor when we do.

AND this seems exactly right to me. (via instapundit)
posted by thomas at 7/08/2005 08:27:00 AM