> That's only 100 million people,
> so rest easy...

100 of the least effective, least-connected people on the surface of the globe... The most childish, easily-spooked, regressive personalities the human race can devise.

Blair had a follow up to the door kicker. I just can't help but think these people are children. They think like children, the move like children, they dream like children, they resist discipline like children... And they have a child's sense of loyalty.

Cultures which inculcate adult conduct will always be able to kick fanatical Muslim cultures, and kick them hard. Adults know how to communicate readily. We know how to quickly build alliances for limited purposes. We know how to adjudicate minor disagreements while pursuing shared goals, and how to reward the best performers, and how to do a thousand other things that buffoons like this "professor" can't imagine. (What do you suppose his best students are like?)

It's not that there isn't a fight coming, but it's just not possible that we'll lose.

It is always easier to destroy than to create. Consider: how many man-years (people-years?) of labor were destroyed in 9/11? Tens of thousands? Hundres of thousands? By a group of less than a dozen?

If these idiots would prefer to sit cackling on the rubble of civilization instead of participating in it, 100 million may be quite enough.

No, I promise, it won't be enough. It they weren't cowards, we wouldn't be having these problems.

Crid - "Cultures which inculcate adult conduct will always be able to kick fanatical Muslim cultures, and kick them hard." I'd be interested to hear your comments on "The Suicide of Reason: Radical Islam's Threat to the West" by Lee Harris.

http://www.amazon.com/Suicide-Reason-Radical-Islams-Threat/dp/046500203X

He takes a different position to you - he reckons that fanaticism will always overcome reason. I don't find his arguments fully persuasive.

this kuwaiti seems to behave more like a radical islamist fanatic terrorist than a professor. he (like all moslems from around the world)certainly spewed extremely sick stuff. the next time kuwaitis had a problems/war with their fellow islamic fanatic neighbour, US should tell these middle easterners to sort out their own problem. that will certainly decrease their islamist fanatic terorist tendencies towards us freedom loving people in the world.

"It's not that there isn't a fight coming, but it's just not possible that we'll lose."

Perhaps you are correct, at least if the fight comes soon enough. The question is, at the rate we're self-destructing, how long will that be true?

Cultures which inculcate adult conduct will always be able to kick fanatical Muslim cultures, and kick them hard

The guy is talking about having some fanatic who believes he'll get fucked by 72 virgins sneak through the Mexican border with a bio weapon. Will my blogging from the rational point of view be a good defense?

I said this once before, and people like Crid called me an idiot. I'll say it again.

Simple math.

9/11: 3,000 Americans killed by 19 hijackers. That's a casualty rate of 158:1.

Beirut 1983: 300 Americans killed by one truck bomber. 300:1. Same day, another truck bomb at the French Barracks killed 58. 58:1 casualty rate there.

Let's give ourselves the most optimistic case of a 1:1 kill ratio. If we assume that 10% of the world's muslims are sufficiently motivated to engage in Jihad, and that half of them will do so, that still means fifty million dead non-muslims.

Do we really need to lose 50,000,000 people to these monsters before we respond? Because every time one of them kills without repercussions, more of them will be motivated to do so.

And if every one of them were to drive a truck bomb or hijack a plane or some other thing to get that kill ratio up to 100:1 or 300:1, then 100 million crazed muslims hell-bent on paradise could kill every one of us.

Hyperbole? Perhaps. But how many more 9/11's will it take before we do something serious? We already saw the left's reaction to our attempt to put a drain in the swamp in Iraq. We see their reaction to every attempt by Israel to prevent further attacks.

At what point do we either see the left change its mind on defense or see the rest of us finally ignore them?

If we cannot get rid of terrorism by convincing the bulk of the world's muslims that it is in their existential interest to take out the fundamentalists, then one of two things happens: we die, or we evaporate all of them.

And nuclear fallout's a bitch.

Who will do the fighting, Crid? It won't be late fifty-ish me. I'm too old, my active duty days are over.

We've got a volunteer military despised and maligned by half the country. We've got an administration that actually proposed trying to force private insurance to pay for their wounds. What will they fight with? The DOD will face budget cuts, and the same military that was too small for Iraq will be smaller still.

The idiots in DC will still be arguing about health insurance while their heads are being chopped off.

The West will win; the question is will it do so by spreading its culture or by genocide. _Caliphate_ by Tom Kratman is a terrible (in more ways than one) vision of the second option.

Many of the problems attributed to Islam are exacerbated by corruption and persecution in developing countries. To the extent that we can reduce that, we can make radical Islam unappealing. Historically, turning enemies into friends has been more successful than trying to kill all the enemies.

Yes, but history is not on our side here.

We're offering "democracy, whisky, sexy"
They're offering "eternal virgins".

When you're uneducated, you don't know what to do with democracy or whisky.

And let's face it, eternal sex with women who can't say no beats attempted sex with women who can.

"But how many more 9/11's will it take before we do something serious?" So hammering the shit out of Iraq and Afghanistan wasn't serious? I don't disagree but what are you proposing?

"Let's give ourselves the most optimistic case of a 1:1 kill ratio." Have you read the casualties from Israel? One of the last spat had 13 dead Israelis and a few hundred Palestinians. That's not 1:1 and it sure as shit is not in their favor. We killed far more than 3000 in either Iraq or Afghanistan. Neither war did much to halt their spread.

"When you're uneducated, you don't know what to do with democracy or whisky." Have you visited rural America. Cletus know plenty about democracy and even more about whisky.

Cletus isn't uneducated. He's unschooled.

And I'm not disagreeing with your point on kill ratios. But when people say that "it's only a fringe, they aren't a threat to us", it's either wishful thinking or an outright lie.

The reason the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq did little to stop their spread is that we weren't violent enough, fast enough, or ruthless enough.

We hoped to set up an island of democracy in Iraq with the intention of having it influence their neighbors.

Afghanistan is beyond help.

And we won't take out nations that really need it, like Pakistan and Saudi Arabia.

Until Pakistan, Saudi, and Iran fall, Islamist terror will be with us. We can either try to wait it out, or we can push them over.

If it weren't for oil and luck, we wouldn't be having this conversation because their backward religion would never have found the power to spread.

let them(these islamic bullies dig their own oil), then there would be least likelihood of them terorising us. if other western and other gullible people stop helping their nasty islamic commmunity, perhaps their backward nasty community would start to behave better towards other nonbelievers?

as for luck, I just hope their luck and their terrorist tendencies will disappear for good soon. then, we, the nonbelievers don't have to live in fear (of their abusive, weird, backward discriminative community or their islamic terrorist tendencies or their dirty islamic religious tactics) anymore.

When I become President, I will make it crystal clear to these sand monkeys that if any terrorist attack is made against the United States, a swift, decisive nuclear strike will be made on the offending country/countries of origin that will make Nagasaki and Hiroshima look like a fireworks display. That is the only way to deal with these sick, mentally unbalanced, inbred, evil bastards.

> at the rate we're self-destructing,
> how long will that be true?

Who says we're self-destructing? What do you mean we, paleface? My life is going better than ever. I'm more alert to important things than ever before. I'm more aware of the goodness and strength in other people, including people I don't like, than ever before. My hair is thicker, my gait is more authoritative, my sexual technique grows ever more compelling....

You sound like someone who listens to who listens to NPR too much. The all-time champion tears-of-a-clown type was Robin Williams... I remember an early interview in Rolling Stone, when he was still a bright new kid, and he said

Aha! It's on the web: "[Life on Earth is] a one-in-a-billion crapshoot. And we're fucking it up."

That seemed like a stupid thing for him to say, and I never forgot it. Well, here we are twenty years later: he's been through two marriages, drug nightmares, alcohol nightmares, and (as of this week) cardiac surgery. Despite having all the success in the world (through unspeakably shitty work, at that), he's the one who seems to have fucked things up. In that same time period, millions, perhaps billions of others have lived lives of safety and fulfillment and gratitude, with plenty more to anticipate.

Complain all you want. But even if you correctly interpret the meaning of some sad story in the newspaper (or on Amy's blog), that doesn't mean you should adopt the posture of the wizened cynic.

> I said this once before,
> and people like Crid called
> me an idiot.

Not just once!

> Let's give ourselves the
> most optimistic case
> of a 1:1 kill ratio.

Walter Sobchak! Brian, you are Walter Fucking Sobchak. You must put Lebowski on your netflix queue. I promise a revelatory, life-changing experience... You will not believe that a Hollywood characterization could so clearly capture the identity of an actual person.

> Who will do the fighting,
> Crid? It won't be late
> fifty-ish me.

We'll have soldiers enough on the military side. Conflict like this has many venues. Brian's violent daydreams and blustery pouting to the contrary, there's plenty of work for people inclined to think clearly and argue persuasively. Meanwhile, if the guy next to you on the airliner tries to set his shoe on fire....

> the question is will it do so
> by spreading its culture
> or by genocide.

If anyone's making a case for "genocide", please post the link.... A lone blog from six-grade graduates at some fortified encampment in Montana will not be enough. Who in the public sphere's really making the case for genocide? Which "genes" would they want to extinguish, anyway? (Geneticists have reported that Jews and Arabs are indistinguishable at the level of DNA.)

I'm reminded of the comments of A.G. Android in the days after the attacks. (If I remember correctly, that was the nom de plume of Glenn Reynolds, whose own blog was just beginning to catch fire.)

> Yes, but history is not
> on our side here.

It's worked out for me. With a minute of reflection, you'd probably acknowledge that it's worked out for you, too, unless you lost an arm in Grenada that you haven't told us about.

> then, we, the nonbelievers don't
> have to live in fear (of their
> abusive, weird, backward discriminative
> community or their islamic terrorist
> tendencies or their dirty islamic
> religious tactics) anymore.

They think like children. Their most destructive players are like the virgin Tim McVeigh. Troublesome enough, but not admired by any thoughtful citizen.

Whoops, one more point on that last quoted passage: The childish spirits will always be with us. Dealing with Islamic primitives is one of civilizations clean-up operations. Just like the dinner dishes, it can't be rushed and it won't be fun, but it needs to be done and it will be done.

One more about the "genocide" thing:

> The West will win; the question
> is will it do so by spreading
> its culture or by genocide

Even if, even if the most violent response we could dream up were necessary to meet this challenge (and it won't be), you're fighting on the wrong side of the issue when you call it genocide.

See this clip starting at about 3:15. The series of four clips begins here.

the moslems men and moslems women are known to be the vilest hypocrites. they should clean themselves up. it just sickens me that this type of morally inferior islamic religious bastards try to find fault with us, when they could not even clean their workplace properly or throw the rubbish out properly or fix their clogged drains properly or behave in a civilise manner.

Crid - I assure you I am not Walter Sobchak.

Nor am I The Dude, or Mr. Lebowski.

Hell, I can't even bowl.

But that rug really tied the room together.

No, that's you. The reflexive, faux-militant posturing, the shallow moods, the percussive obscenities, the whiplash regression to wounded emotional postures; perfect!

> "The Suicide of Reason: Radical
> Islam's Threat to the West" by
> Lee Harris.

Well, when looking at the blurb on Amazon...

| The foe is resistant to any of
| the normal methods of conflict
| resolution such as negotiation,
| economic sanctions, or
| conventional armed confrontation.

... I'm reminded of the metaphor proposed above. We've all heard parents say these things about their own offspring.

Of course it's only a metaphor, and describing militant Islam as humanity's children doesn't acknowledge the fact the people who needed to be defeated are adults, and they're not just going through a stage.

But on the other hand, they've got nowhere else to go. They've got to grow up. Children can't bring the crops in, let alone run a modern industrial economy.

Furthermore— I think that as most of us are growing up, we want to be a little older than we are. The big brother or neighbor kid who's a little farther down the path seems to be enjoying treats presently unattainable, whether it's a full serving of soda pop or a real catcher's mitt or a ticket to a concert or a girlfriend or drugs or a car or a Master's in Business Administration.

In any neighborhood there are a couple of sour-grapes kids who say they're not going to grow up, and they mean it. And their lives turn to shit. Any friend you've ever had in earlier years who's still a good friend is a person who's grown.

I think most Islamic cultures want the advantages of Western culture: abundant wealth, freespirited women, and so forth. But they need to be shown (and reassured) that responsibility makes things work. When an American woman has a credit card, everyone's cool with it. When she gets into trouble with it, we understand that it didn't happen because she's a woman.

One more point, and it's a big one: Fatalism of the kind described by Lee and reflected in many of the comments here neatly mirrors the infantile narcissism of militant Islam and the virgins awaiting them in the afterlife.

• It's stupidly reductive, condensing a huge number of contingencies (in fact, the entirety of civilization) to a single probability of failure. This seems lazy and cowardly, whether conjured from Riyadh or from Cleveland.

• It's cartoonishly apocalyptic and violent. It imagines the struggles and conversations and experiences of adult lives across the planet as meaningless in comparison to a fabulist's cataclysmic battle. It's like a teenager who loses a fistfight by the railroad tracks after school and can't imagine anything but humiliation of going forward.

• It simplistically, romantically sentimental. It dreams of a perfect outcome where someone is proved right or someone is proved wrong and can live happily ever after.

I think nothing makes a person, or a nation, or a religion or even a craftsman more admirable than the recognition that things are imperfect, including human nature, including one's own nature. (American capitalism may be the sweetest expression of this. When a businessman hits it big, we don't worry that his teenage paper route wasn't a tremendous success.) It's Islam that has no patience with flaws; it's obsessed with the day when perfection is achieved.

Yes, it's a fight to the death. But a lot of fights like this are going on all the time. It's not all about sticking a knife into a guy's chest like in a war movie. The fight's also about what we ask of our fellow citizens, our children and ourselves. There's more to it than Angry Achmed and his silly prayers.

But I'll look for the book.

I think most Islamic cultures want the advantages of Western culture ... freespirited women

Well, they've got a funny way of showing it. Free-spirited women don't do very well in their societies.

Little boys taunt prom queens for cooties.

kishke - another reason those islamic societies is such a failure is because their eastern/islamic culture is extremely selfish, extremely unhelpfullly stagnating and extremely discriminative against/towards the outside world. it just take one western company to ignore them and the islamic societies will go downhill very quickly. indeed, I agree with you(with some added input from me) - free-spirited poor nonbelievers/freethinking highly ethical person with high standard of morals who refused to compromise their own nonbelievers individual freedom don't do very well in those alien suffocating evil manipulative extremely greedy islamic societies or restrictive asian societies.

WLIL: Free-thinking and -spirited women in particular. Think "honor" killings. These are incredibly mysogynistic societies.

Kishke, I see what you're getting at. I don't think there are any free spirited women in militant Islamic societies, that's the point.

Sex is a tremendously powerful force in our lives. Paglia says "Sex is nature in Man", and that puts it pretty well. But like anything else, you can put more importance on it than it can bear.

Today's best photo of women in burqas is here, #11. Any kid who walks out of a classroom to find his mother waiting for him like that is having his education unraveled.

We're supposed to understand that the women are dressed that way to protect the men from their own overpowering feelings of lust, right? But let's consider for a moment where many modern Islamic men turn instead for sexual titillation.

Humanity is a naturally misogynistic species. The modern west has learned to deal with this. The rest of the world needs to be shown the way.

"Humanity is a naturally misogynistic species."

No, not really. In fact scientific studies have shown that there is a profound natural prejudice directed against males, and that we "big up" women, while we do down me. The source of this prejudice is mostly unconscious, so we are blinded to it; and it can only be (and has been) uncovered by the tools of scientific psychology.

Try reading up on ev. psych., especially the dominance hierarchy. An excellent source of information is Steve Moxon's "The Woman Racket".

Take ever'body, shake up their heads, wipe away their cities, and drop them drugged with no memory back on the African savannah, and come back in 5,000 years. I bet you'll find more villages with women in Burqas than you'll find men in need of Iron John or Top Gear.

If you're narrowing down the issue to one of what Islamic women wear, that is also breifly addressed in Moxon's book (along with foot-binding, female circumscision, and all the other "oppressive practices"). Basically, they represent female intra-sex competition.

Also, I'm talking about science..not some pretend scenario as the one you mention.

> I'm talking about science..not
> some pretend scenario

Everybody knows that real scientists allways put the correct three dots in an ellipsis! This blog has always been frequented, and only occasionally hosted, by bullshiters who think their every word is the quintessence of rationality.

I think "The issue" is whether women would have done as well (or as poorly) in any new poker hand as they did in this one. If you want to argue that

> we "big up" women, while we
> do down me. [sic]

then go ahead, but you wont get many takers.

I think the nature of masculinity and femininity is such that nascent cultures probably default to systems like that of militant Islam, and that modernity does a better job of things.

Any disagreement?

Kthx

Crid, I agree with your opinion with regard that there are no freespirited women in islamic societies. they(together with their various backward islamic tribes) are only interested in fiercely controlling(and enslaving) nonbelievers in a negative way(whenever they have the opportunity to do so) and imposing their totalitarian ideology on unsuspecting nonbelievers.

Crid, one reason there aren't any free-spirited women in Islam is that they are persecuted or driven away. Take, for example, the admirable Aayan Hirsi Ali, who is literally hunted by her former co-religionists. There's no place for someone like her in an Islamic society. A while ago you posted pics of Afghanistan in the 60s, featuring women in miniskirts. Those women no longer exist there. They've been driven out or frightened into compliance.

kishke, I am minority nonbeliever, living uncomfortably, unhappily in a predominantly ruled islamic country and I only come across opportunistic abusive discriminative bullies in all of them. they, the islamic people are their own worst enemies. nothing admirable about them. they are only interested in enriching their own kind. their islamic societies treated poor nonbeliever like myself extremely shabbily, while expecting special priveleges all the time and that is most obscenely unacceptable. I find them all untrustworthy and their weird disciminative islamic culture extremely selfish, filthyly discriminative and divisive. you certainly don't hear people like aayan hirsi ali whining during the height of their islamist supremacy. i can never trust any of their own kind.

WLIL: Read Hirsi Ali's autobiography; listen to her speak; I think you'll change your opinion of her. I sympathize with your situation.

kishke, I am not interested in her plight or her long boring islamic story. I have nothing in common with her or her islamic background.

kishke. anyway, i rather steer clear of islamic people, whether they are genuinely apostate or not.

"Any disagreement?"

Lots. The Venus of Willendorf isn't wearing a burka. I don't think Ice Age men who faced down mammoths & saber-tooth tigers with spears had many existential doubts about their masculinity.

Yes, modern Western women are better off than any other females in the entire existence of our species. But the claim that Talibanization of women is humanity's default mode is the biggest steaming load of bullshit you've ever dumped on this blog.

Here's Bernard Lewis, from "The Muslim Discovery of Europe":

"The Muslim visitors who have left records of their travels to Europe were...without exception, males. Most of them, however, have something to say on the subject of women and their place in society...The Christian institution of monogamous marriage, the relative freedom of women from social restrictions, and the respect accorded to them by even exalted personages never failed to strike visitors from the lands of Islam with wonderment, though rarely with admiration.

One of the earliest impressions of European sexual mores is given by the Arab ambassador al-Ghazal, who visited a Viking court in about 845 A.D. According to his own testimony, during his stay with the Vikings he enjoyed a light flirtation with the Viking queen...She laughed, and said to him: "We do not have such things in our religion...Our women are with our men only of their own choice. A woman stays with her husband as long as it pleases her to do so, and leaves him if it no longer pleases her".

...A point which could not fail to strike the Muslim observer in medieval as in more modern times was what seemed to him the licentious freedom of the women and the extraordinary lack of manly jealousy in the men. Usama, a Syrian neighbor of the Crusaders, has several stories illustrating this point:

"The Franks have no trace of jealousy or feeling for the point of honor. One of them may be walking along with his wife, and he meets another man, and this man takes his wife aside and chats with her privately, while the husband stands apart for her to finish her conversation; and if she takes too long he leaves her alone with her companion and goes away."

The Frankish knights' code of chivalry a thousand years ago was light years apart from the tribal barbarism that still rules male-female relations in the Muslim world today. Even back then, the difference in freedom between Western & Muslim women was astonishing. No, you would not find universal burkas & clitorectomies if you went back far enough in your time machine, and the blame for the evil the Taliban perpetrates in the name of Islam cannot just be dumped on the nature of man.

"Little boys taunt prom queens for cooties."

Lavender Burgundy Turquoise Purple Quince Fuchsia Celadon

The mnemonic for a gay wiring color code?

"Any disagreement?"

Yes - see below...

"Everybody knows that real scientists allways put the correct three dots in an ellipsis"

I never claimed to be a scientist myself; and everyone knows there are blogs where there are bullshitters who patrol the comments for how many dots are in each ellipsis.

".."The issue" is whether women would have done as well (or as poorly).."

You made a statement ("Humanity is a naturally misogynistic species"), and I responded to it - what's the problem?

"go ahead, but you wont get many takers"

So?

those islamic people are just so extremely mean-spirited. I come across (too) many of them who are extremely mean-spirited (extremely nasty as well). It is time we the freedomloving nonbelievers stop being so generous with those many types of islamic people(from various tribes around the world) who were and are extremely intolerant of us, nonbelievers. pehaps, those islamic women and men will start to behave in a more civilise manner, when their socalled middleeast oil resources is completely depleted.

Sorry for not responding, I thought this one was dead.

> one reason there aren't any
> free-spirited women in Islam
> is that they are persecuted
> or driven away

Right. I'm saying this persecution is a bad thing that needs to be stopped... "It needs to be done and it will be done."

> The Venus of Willendorf
> isn't wearing a burka

Do you think her life was good? Do you suppose she was president of the Willendorf Valley Council?

I didn't say that horrible oppression of women present in every stage of cultural development... (For example, here in Los Angeles, women are doing OK. Just ask my last three of my last five bosses.) ...Only that nascent cultures usually default to it. I don't know the exact hour that "nascent" refers to... Nor of a surviving culture where women came to dominate as men have most of the world. And I don't know any culture that couldn't use a little more feminism, at least in the best refinement.

> Yes, modern Western women
> are better off than
> any other females

Great, we're done here... Right?

> But the claim that Talibanization
> of women is humanity's
> default mode

You mischaracterize.

> One of the earliest impressions
> of European sexual mores is
> given by the Arab ambassador

One of the earliest impressions by an Arab, not by someone with the eye or taste for free women. Who cares? The primitiveness continues in the Arab world. I think Japan needs to take some giants steps, and China's a mess, too. Who are you arguing with?

> The mnemonic for a gay
> wiring color code?

I don't understand your point.

> I responded to it -
> what's the problem?

You dodged the context.

> So?

Every now and then Amy gets a visitor who wants only to growl low and mean about how womanhood done him wrong. It's not entertaining for anyone else, so they move on pretty soon.

No one's life was good in the Ice Age. But if Cro-Magnons could have seen the spectacle of women in burkas, there is no reason to believe that they would have regarded it as natural. Male dominance is one thing. The pathology of militant Islam is another, and it can't be explained just by men being men.

The freedom of women in Western society is not just an artifact of modernity. It has very deep roots, going back thousands of years. Medieval Europe & Etruscan Italy were very sexist societies by modern standards, but the women in them had so much freedom by contemporary standards that they horrified observers from more repressive cultures. That's the point of the stories from Lewis: that Muslims a thousand years ago were as shocked by the freedom of women in the medieval West as today's Muslims are by the modern West.

"The modern West has learned to deal with this. The rest of the world needs to be shown the way."

The West has been dealing with it better than any other culture for thousands of years. Women in most of the rest of the world are not as miserable as those under the Taliban, but transplanting the hard-won lessons of the West to other cultures won't be easy. Modernity alone won't do it.

it is the fault of those nasty backward islamic women(as well as those nasty backward islamic men) who got too haughty(with their socalled oil wealth) and who became too preoccupied with defending their socalled religious supremacy (and bullying other disadvantage nonbelievers) without blinking an eye for other poor nonbelievers. their islamic societies is just so rotten on the inside, so much so that having anything to do with them is just a waste of time.

> The pathology of militant Islam
> is another, and it can't be
> explained just by men being men.

You're optimistic about human nature. You think the problem's coming from something else.

Everything that I hate about clumsy Islam carries an echo of something stupid from my childhood: Either from my own preliterate, infantile daydreams about how others could be manipulated (or bluntly forced) to meet my needs, or from the humiliations of the older men in midcentury America who were having to get with the program ("the girls in the steno pool," etc.). These guys are just men. There's nothing special about them. They're not being controlled by Star Trek demons from an orbiting space ship.

Just typing that, I'm reminded how ironic it is that modern feminists (Mavis Leno excepted) don't take the threat of radical Islam more seriously.

The sort of feminists that people on this blog hate and want to ridicule –like the ones in Norman L's caricatures in this post and others nearby– make a distinctive error. And it's a distinctive feminine error, ironically enough.

They think everyone feels what they feel. When girlish zombie feminists consider the root source of boorish masculine behavior, they try to imagine what could motivate that behavior in themselves. And all they can imagine –in their own case– is social pressure, since they can't concede there are genuine human impulses they're not aware of.

The weird part is that when you compare an Islamic bachelor to Dylan, the guy who sat next to her in high school, it's true! The only difference between Achmed and Dylan is socialization!

But for some reason, when dealing with the really ugly forces, lesser feminists prefer to assume the problem is something bigger. The fact that men and women are different can't be even a part of the problem.

And I know what you mean about pathology. This guy was on the radio today:

| A young female Navy medic who was
| asked to approach a detainee she
| had treated in the past. The man
| grabbed her head, smashed her
| face against the bars, and
| inflicted such damage that she
| has had 16 reconstructive
| plastic surgeries on her face.

These guys are truly primitive. But only that.

> Modernity alone won't
> do it.

Well, yes it will. Either by the seductions of modernity's fulfilling work, safety, nutrition, sexuality, expression, amusement, medicine and intellect, or by modernity's neatly-aimed bullet. We're not fuckin' around over here.

Besides... What else you got, Martin?

| For most of history, Anonymous was
| a woman. —virginia woolf

The other error that feminists make is that they assume that since male dominance is universal, all pre-feminist cultures are equivalent, all women in them are (or were) in the same boat,and all men in them think & behave essentially alike.

You must have noticed that Islam is a loser magnet. Consider the caliber of American recruits to the cause of militant Islam: Johnny "American Taliban" Walker, Adam Gadahn, the thousands of gangstas who've converted in prison. Islamists are really scraping the bottom of the barrel here, and that's not surprising. Radical Islam has zero appeal for healthy, successful, & free men. It has enormous appeal for psychopaths & losers. The culture of Islam is what you get when such men rule.

"The only difference between Achmed & Dylan is socialization!"

Most of the vital elements of that socialization have nothing to do with modernity or feminism, and were already in place in the Middle Ages. If you look at a photo of a crowded street in Cairo or Karachi today, you most likely won't find a single female face looking back at you. By contrast, a thousand years ago in Medieval Europe, the sight of women, married & unmarried, freely going about their business in the public square was so ordinary that no one took any notice. The Wife of Bath may have been a creature of Chaucer's imagination, but his readers would have found her completely believable. There is no character like her in Muslim literature, because any woman like her in Muslim society would have been murdered a hundred times over.

The Magna Carta was signed in 1215. There is still no equivalent to it anywhere in the Muslim world. The Iraqi & Afghan constitutions come closest, and they were cooked up under American occupation. How many times have you read or heard commentators gushing over the Golden Age of Islam, while sneering at the Dark Ages of the West? Yes, 13th century Islam had more wealth & power, more advanced technology, and better standards of hygiene. But the West had 2 things that were more important: limited government and free women. We've since perfected those to a greater degree than any other civilization, and they're a huge part of the reason why we're # 1.

For an example of how modernization alone does not do that much to improve the status of women, look at India, which likes to think of itself as a future superpower. The Indian middle class has expanded enormously, and every day more & more Indians get cell phones, satellite TV, and cars. But India has always had a lopsided sex ratio, thanks to the widespread practice of female infanticide, and this has actually gotten worse over the past several years. Previous generations had to resort to primitive means of getting rid of baby girls. Now, an ultrasound followed by an abortion in a sterile modern hospital does the job.

"And I don't know any culture that couldn't use a bit more feminism, at least in the best refinement." I'll agree there.

> Most of the vital elements of
> that socialization have nothing
> to do with modernity or feminism

What makes you say such wacky things?

> By contrast, a thousand years
> ago in Medieval Europe

Exactly! The good stuff took root in this culture and not in that one.

Look, if you're this eager to argue, you ought to at least disagree on some fundamental point, otherwise there's no sport in it.

"You dodged the context"

Sorry, please own up to the fact that the statement can for all practical purposes be taken as stand-alone. Let me ask: do you really believe that man(human-)kind is inherently misogynist?

As far as being fly by night, I have posted on the board before then took a long break. But suppose I did come here only with an "agenda"; then I'd wonder, if I were posting on the board as a black person standing up for blacks, instead of a man standing up for men, would you have made the same comment? (No. In fact the comment was likely another example of our natural propensity to do down men, and to discount their legitimate grievances.)

Martin, the wealth, power, advanced technology and good standards of hygiene comes from the advanced influence of the west/europeans and certainly not from backward islam.
Those islamic, asian, african countries all went downhill after most of the europeans left.
Even now, you can see the evidence of very poor standard of hygiene in many islamic countries as well as in many asian countries.

> the statement can for all
> practical purposes be taken
> as stand-alone

Well, things can be taken out of context, for practical purposes or for others.

> Let me ask: do you really
> believe that man(human-)kind
> is inherently misogynist?

No; I think the nature of masculinity and femininity is such that nascent cultures probably default to systems like that of militant Islam, and that modernity does a better job of things.

> But suppose I did come here
> only with an "agenda"

Who are you quoting? It was just a warning that bores don't (always) do well here....

> another example of our natural
> propensity to do down men, and

Boooooorinnngg!