Well, we’re back from our little trip to Banderas Bay.
It’s bracing to be back home again in the frigid North. Balmy breezes in February are nice enough in small doses, I suppose, but frankly the whole tropical-paradise thing has a limited and transitory appeal to Ice People like me. If history hasn’t already made the case that such climates have an enervating and soporific effect, I can now add my personal testimony.
I will say this, though: although I have given only the scantest of coverage to pelicans in these pages over the years, I left Mexico with deepened respect for these remarkable animals. Though they may be a little ungainly on land, they are truly magnificent fliers and hunters, and I never tired of watching them skim the water’s surface with the lethal precision of a Tomahawk missile.
I did snap a photo or two, of course. Here’s a cocktail-hour view of the bay from a little waterfront bistro, taken during a lull in a day-long rainstorm:
I seem not to have missed much: some silly flap about the news-reader Brian Williams; a horrible train-wreck (literal, rather than figurative, for once); some sports thing or other; and some typically West-loathing, morally debauched, and historically unlettered remarks by Barack Obama, this time about the Crusades. (That last might be worth a post, I suppose, if I can’t think of something less like shooting fish in a barrel.)
Back to regular posting soon.
28 Comments
Welcome back! And I agree that warm-weather countries cultivate an indolence that isn’t as visible in colder-weather countries. Witness the varying fortunes of northern versus southern European nations–how they’re faring as part of the Eurozone and all that. It’s grasshoppers versus ants.
Pelicans low-hanging in formation off the Outer Banks is a sight that never gets old.
Welcome home, Malcolm.
[img]http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-Bq8wR9xMmIE/VNbCHjLmR0I/AAAAAAAABSg/Tb_IUGvnAiU/s1600/I%2Bdon’t%2Balways%2Blie.jpg[/img]
Welcome home. The times I made a trip like yours from cold to warm and back…I almost always took the flu. Beware.
Henry…nicely done! NBC and ABC are envious. Stay phony my friends.
It is always amazing to me how banal and entirely correct remarks from President Obama send right wingers into paroxysms of anger and hysteria.
There is nothing “historically unlettered” with the statement that “during the Crusades and the Inquisition, people committed terrible deeds in the name of Christ.” At the direction of the Pope, Christian armies invaded lands held by Muslims for 462 years, and slaughtered Muslims and Jews by the thousands in a savage conquest. The Inquisition led to the deaths of countless innocents. It is equally true that “slavery and Jim Crow all too often was justified in the name of Christ.” Do you deny that these things happened?
Christianity has also been used to justify colonization, as well as the brutal way in which England, France, and other countries treated the residents of countries they invaded and occupied. If Obama wanted to cite more recent examples of barbarity effected in the name of Christ, he could have mentioned the Bosnian massacre of Muslims. If he wanted to cite a recent example of barbarity effected in the name of Judaism, he could have mentioned the hero’s welcome which Baruch Goldstein got from the Israeli far right after massacring a few dozen Muslims praying in a mosque.
There is nothing “West-loathing” about referring to these historical truths, any more than referring to Nazi concentration camps is German-loathing.
If a speech which describes ISIS as a “brutal, vicious death cult,” while condemning other examples of brutality and viciousness perpetrated by Christians, is “morally debauched,” then we have very different conceptions of morality and debauchery.
The existence of “terrible deeds in the name of Christ” is inarguable historical truth, much as Obama’s critics would prefer just to ignore them entirely. His larger point — that extremist violence in the name of religion is by no means unique to Islam — is equally true. The overwrought reaction to a factual and inoffensive remark says far more about the unreality of conservative bloviating than it does about Islam or Christianity.
Durned tootin’ Peter. Right with ya.
I certainly remember the last millennium as if it was yesterday.
Oh please. I am so weary of the Crusades being presented in this tendentious, and yes, historically unlettered, way, as an example of un-Christian viciousness committed in Christ’s name. The Crusades were in every sense a “just war’; they were a defensive, belated, and ultimately ineffective response to the brutal conquest of much of Christendom by Muslim jihad. Likewise, the so-called “Inquisition” (also a historically ignorant misnomer, as there was not one Inquisition, but many) was primarily an effort by the Church to put an end to the summary injustices faced by “heretics” at the hands of mobs and feudal lords.
Did medieval Crusaders and Inquisitors sometimes behave cruelly? Of course. So what? Was there any medieval institution, East or West, religious or temporal, that didn’t? And as for slavery and Jim Crow, it was in large part the Christian religion that led the struggle against them, as it has so often led the struggle for all the things Progressives hold dear.
Moreover, why is Obama so eager to pin Christianity’s sins on Christianity, and so reluctant to associate Islamic horror with Islam? Jonah Goldberg asked:
How indeed?
What is so offensive (and so very telling) about Mr. Obama’s remarks — and I cannot believe that I actually have to explain this, even to you — is that he cannot even bring himself to condemn a group that is furiously raping, slaughtering, pillaging, beheading, enslaving, and torturing innocent civilians today, without feeling it necessary first to establish moral equivalency by blaming the West for alleged “sins” it committed almost a thousand years ago.
Here is the man whom we have entrusted with the stewardship of the greatest polity in what remains of Western civilization, and he can’t even criticize ISIS — ISIS, for God’s sake — without first apologizing for what we are. If Barack Obama actually thinks we can’t even get on a moral “high horse” in relation to these monstrous barbarians, then what does that tell us about his real opinion of the West? If anything, I’d say “loathing” understates the case.
Is it “hysterical” to expect that our own President actually take pride in, and speak favorably of, the history and traditions of the nation he was elected to lead, and the civilization he purportedly represents, rather than apologizing for them at every opportunity? That he might wonder, just once, whether he is worthy to lead this nation, rather than whether it is worthy of him?
Belated? By 462 years?
By your logic, native Americans are justified in massacring everyone who came here since the Mayflower to reclaim land which was once theirs. Palestinians are justified in massacring Israelis to reclaim the land which was once called Palestine. Launching an aggressive war against a civilian population to reclaim land which was yours over four and a half centuries ago is neither “just” nor “defensive.”
Obama did not “associate Islamic horror with Islam” for the same reason that he did not associate Christian horror with Christianity. He was making the simple and obvious point that history is replete with examples of religious extremists acting savagely in the name of their religion, which reflects on the extremists and not the religions. Nor did he “pin Chistianity’s (sic) sins on Christianity.” The fact that history has recorded many “terrible deeds in the name of Christ” does not imply that those deeds are emblematic of Christianity any more than stating that Anders Breivik is a psychopathic mass murder pins all Islamophobes with his sins.
Your suggestion that Obama is somehow reluctant to condemn or confront ISIS ignores not only that he refers to them in the same speech as a “brutal, vicious death cult,” but that he is bombing the crap out of them, along with other Muslim and non-Muslim nations which are also bombing the crap out of them.
It is true that the Crusades were about 900 years ago. Colonization, Jim Crow, and slavery were considerably more recent, as was Bosnia. Your point eludes me.
Nowhere does Obama “apologize.” He states historical facts. Your assertion is equivalent to contending that someone who condemns pedophilia by priests is anti-Catholic or apologizing for Catholicism.
The estimable Jonathan Chait explains it this way:
“At one historical time, Christian extremism posed a far larger problem than Muslim violent extremism. At the present time, the reverse is true. (Dissent writer Michael) Walzer posed this argument against the left, much of which dismisses any acknowledgement of the current disproportionate danger of radical Islam as racist. In this sense, Obama is sharply rebuking a strain of left-wing thought and endorsing what could be thought of as a pro-American and even pro-Christian analysis.”
http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2015/02/bobby-jindal-crusades-are-just-beginning.html
Needless to say — or maybe not — Obama will “take pride in, and speak favorably of, the history and traditions of the nation he was elected to lead, and the civilization he purportedly represents” in pretty much every speech he makes. You can find it in the SOTU speeches, campaign speeches, UN speeches, and nearly every other time he speaks.
However, he is not a mindless cheerleader, and acknowledging past injustices drives right wingers nuts. Perhaps this is reflective of the ultracrepidarianism and epistemic closure which are signal traits of contemporary conservatism. White washing events of the past, and analyzing current events devoid of historical context, yields the kind of uninformed hysterics which President Obama’s reasonable and historically accurate remarks generated.
I figured it out! The apology bit, that is.
It’s from that speech in Cairo: “We should all look to a future when every government respects the will of its citizens — because the ideal of democracy is universal. For 60 years, my country, the United States, pursued stability at the expense of democracy in this region here in the Middle East — and we achieved neither.”
Except the speaker was Condoleeza Rice, speaking in Cairo on June 20, 2005. Funny how right wing media failed to characterize her trip as an apology tour.
Or perhaps it is from the numerous times after 9/11, when George Bush – much to his credit – assured Americans that our enemy was not Islam, but a small group of Islamic extremists.
Of course, George Bush and Condoleeza Rice are rock stars in the conservative world (or at least Bush used to be a rock star, until the point when conservatives dropped him like a flaming porcupine lest the manifest failures of his administration taint their prior support of him, or the results which occurred when the levers of power were used to put conservative ideology into action).
But when Obama says the same things …
Different peoples regard different historical events in different ways, generally in ways that look most favorable to their own group.
Though Obama lives in the West, he most identifies with non-Westerners (read non-Whites) and against the history of the West.
It’s entirely natural (you could even say biological) for Obama to view the West through such a lens.
What’s strange indeed is for true Westerners to embrace the non-Western view of history. It’s a 60 or so year sickness.
Westerners create different societies than do non-Westerners. Even non-Westerners prefer the societies of the West. They prefer Western society to the societies that their own people create, and want to come here and take advantage of Western society, while at the same time they endlessly complain about the Western society that they choose to live in, forever blaming Whites for their group level relative lack of success (excluding higher IQ NE Asians, of course). It’s understandable that non-Westerners view the world through that racial prism. It would have to be painful to acknowledge that their relative lack of success owes to low group level IQ. It’s so much easier (although patently false) to blame Whites for their lack of success. It’s absurd and craven for white Westerners to buy into such a self-abasing view of themselves.
Obama merely views the world from an appropriate perspective for someone of his background. It’s astonishing that someone of his alien views could have been voted into the presidency.
“[W]hy is Obama so eager to pin Chistianity’s sins on Christianity?”
Maybe because the spelling is so similar?
Jeffery Hodges
* * *
Peter, what a farrago of fallacies and fatuities. And your axioms are showing; you should keep in mind that a reductio ad absurdum is only as effective as the assumptions it makes.
Why, yes! I’m sure both American Indians and Palestinians would feel justified in waging a bloody war to reclaim the land they used to occupy, and they’d do it tomorrow if they could. And you need travel no further than your nearest college campus to see the case made, in the most emphatic terms, for the justice of both causes. Indeed, to argue against this view will put you in a highly disfavored minority pretty much anywhere in academia. If I were a member of either of those groups, I’m sure I’d feel the same way.
No? So the Christians of the West, having had their ancient homelands and citadels overrun by alien invaders, their holiest shrines and altars despoiled by bloodthirsty heathens, and their kinsfolk slain, raped, and enslaved, should simply have resigned themselves to eternal subjugation and dhimmitude, because in your opinion the statute of limitations had run out? Tell us, then: what’s the use-by date for a “just war”? A week? A month? Two years? Ten?
And that is where “historically unlettered” comes in: the Crusades were, above all, a Christian campaign. Just like Islamic jihad then and now, the Crusades were a holy war — and not to identify the Crusades as a manifestation of Christianity, or the current global jihad as a manifestation of Islam (as the President resolutely, and increasingly absurdly, refuses to do), is either profoundly disingenuous or profoundly ignorant.
The rest of your response is just a descent into logical fallacies, where it doesn’t simply miss the point altogether.
As for the former: one of your favorite, “go-to” tactics is the tu quoque argument; hardly a thread goes by in which you fail to lean on that one. In this case, it takes the form of digging up something Condoleezza Rice said long ago — the implication being, apparently, that if “conservatives” didn’t chide her for it back then, then I have no basis for criticizing Barack Obama for saying similar things now. But I am not “conservatives”, nor am I “the Right” — and I couldn’t care less what they did or didn’t say at the time (though I could, if I wanted, find you plenty of contemporaneous right-wing criticism of Ms. Rice’s views; here, for example, is one of many posts about Condoleeza Rice from the late Larry Auster).
Anyway, I don’t know why you’d think I would approve of, or agree with, her remarks. Just as Mr. Obama does every chance he gets, Ms. Rice was apologizing for prior American policy, as if the nation was nothing more than a morally shabby fixer-upper until she and her cronies came along. Let’s look at what she said:
Rubbish. It is nothing of the sort, and very often democracy is an express-train to perdition. This sort of naive and utopian universalism is the bane of our epoch, and it is rapidly bringing Western civilization to ruin. (It hasn’t done the Middle East any favors, either.)
Another fantastically naive assumption is on display here. For most people, always and everywhere, stability matters a very great deal more than the structural details of whatever form of government provides it. Was it a mistake to “pursue stability at the expense of democracy in this region”? Well, for more than ten years now we’ve been doing exactly the opposite. How’s that going? How much do you think the ordinary people, or the Jews and Christians, of Iraq and Syria and Lebanon and Yemen and Libya are enjoying their new lives? I rather expect a little stability would seem awfully good right now, and the “pursuit of democracy” be damned.
But above all, and completely as usual, you entirely miss the point, which is this: why on earth should it be necessary, when speaking of ISIS, for the President of the United States to mention the ancient sins of the West? It is of course true that Christians did some horrid things long ago, and that there were Jim Crow laws in America; as you say, “these are historical facts”. But the question is: why bring them up? The only possible reason for Obama’s doing this — and he does it all the time — is to establish moral equivalency; to ram home his deeply held belief that America, and by extension the great Western and Christian heritage from which it sprang, is really no better than anyone else. Moreover: even to hint at moral equivalency in this horrifying context is shocking, Peter. It should be astonishing to you that the President of the United States, the standard-bearer of what remains of the West, would address this nation, at this time, in this way. He clearly cannot confront even the vilest foe, the purest evil, without snatching a chance to disparage America’s history, or its religion, or its “racism”, or its traditions — or its ordinary people, clinging so stupidly and so bitterly to their God and their guns.
But as John remarked above: it shouldn’t surprise us that Barack Obama sees America and the West in this way, given what he is, who his parents were, how he was raised, who he has associated with all his life, and the resentful ideology he’s been marinated in since his earliest youth. What should astonish us, rather, is the fact that such a man could ever have become President. And for that, we have nobody to blame but ourselves.
I agree with all that you say, Malcolm, except for your overly generous last statement. I accept none of the blame for Obama’s presidency. I smelled a rat from the getgo. I did everything I could think of to dissuade the people I came in contact with from voting for that scoundrel.
I attribute all of the blame on [vulgarity deleted for the sake of decorum – The Editors] like your friend the OBM.
Let’s keep it civil, please, Henry.
Sure Malcolm. I’m sure he knows what he is.
Malcolm, I obviously have too much time on my hands because I have just written an essay which I’m going to email to Henry. I don’t know what has possessed me to do such a thing because I am not a writer, neither am I a deep thinker. Because much of the inspiration for my questioning has come about through reading your blog, I hope you don’t mind me including you on the email. This achieves two things:it may temper Henry’s criticism or at least off-set it, and it lets you know who I am, or at least tells you my name, I really do prefer the moniker “Musey”, and now you know why.
I have written this “essay” the old-fashioned way, that is with pen and paper because my typing is never going to be any good and because I am a slow-two-fingered keyboard warrior my thoughts are easier to express on paper. It will be interesting to see how long it takes me to type out what I can scrawl in a couple of hours.
Thanks, Musey. I look forward to reading it — and if I’ve played any part in inspiring you to learn to sing, well, you’ve made my day.
Musey,
You are wise to take out an insurance policy with Malcolm against my temper. Malcolm, as we all know, is generous to a fault; whereas my own motto is, “Strike while the irony’s hot!”
I recall Peter, who lives near the San Andreas, saying that he tosses a quarter in whenever he drives by. He likes to be generous to a fault as well.
A quarter? What is a subway token these days?
Well Henry …
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WS-OIgpQJp4
Picking on Christianity nowadays is like picking on a retarded kid. It just isn’t fair. On so many fronts has Christianity been neutered for so many reasons. A pope today preaching crusade would be met with yawns and bewilderement at the church’s suggestion of going on a march before the next iteration of the I-phone is out.
When I lived in the Bible belt I noticed that you have all this real estate under the name of God, yet they are only used a Sunday morning and maybe a Wednesday night for a couple of hours. Evidence that Americans don’ take their religion that seriously.
And so to compare the current politically, monetarily, legally neutered, and feminized version of the Christianity against a religion that is currently, furiously raping, slaughtering, pillaging, beheading, enslaving, and torturing innocent civilians today…one the burns dudes alive and brags about it on the internet……..is amazingly disingenuous at best. But I would argue that Obama is a self-hating coward.
I’m an atheist, and I don’t want to see Christianity die. Sure, there the crusades and inquisitions and those were evil with a capital “E.” But the Church did not have a monopoly on violence and torture. Secondly there are things that Christianity inspired like the Pieta, Gothic Cathedrals, Vivaldi, Listz, The Sistene Chapel, and standing up for black folks in the South.
The life affirming tenants of Christianity are a foundational wall of Western Civilization. A civiization that has sent robots to the stars, obliterated smallpox, increased the standard of living, increased the amount of FREEDOM!, and gave us Pink Floyd.
JK,
The “secret message” of my question above was that a quarter is too puny to qualify as “generous”.
When I first came to NYC in 1949, the subway fare was a nickel (that’s right; it was 5 cents). Today, the fare is 40 times as much, namely 8 quarters, or, if my math is correct, it is $2.
Henry, it’s now $2.50, and about to go up.
Malcolm,
I am guessing that the subway system has improved by 25% to account for the fare increase since I last checked?
http://www.duffelblog.com/2015/02/brian-williams-drops-claim-beheaded-by-al-qaeda/