It's awfully strange how difficult it must be for a genuine Islamicist to defend acts of terror on American citizens. They're either straight crazy or are playing a longer game than anyone considers possible. But let us presume that both are true. That means that the violence has both short term and long term meanings and they are both the same, that only Islamisicsts have the courage of their convictions, against all odds, to prevail against the infidels.
The structure that supports the short term goal is the death cult of indoctrinated militants. The structure that supports the long term goal is one particularly strategic version (or perversion if you must) of jihad. The reward for both is the establishment of Islamic Court standard of justice in the world. I think we have seen enough to know that these cults can be maintained here in the US as we add Orlando to San Bernardino in the lexicon or our recent tragic experiences. But what has to come apart in the US for Islamic justice to become preferable to the system we have in place? Perhaps not as much as we think, precisely because we don't often think about America's justice system. Isn't it interesting how certain American politics takes the shape of jihad in defending nominal Islam against the American system of justice?
I think there is very little understanding in our country about any process of judicial review. As far as the populous is concerned, we vote for President in order for them to appoint ideological justices to the Supreme Court. Other than that, nada. I would suggest to my fellow defenders of the first few amendments to the Constitution, that we spend a bit more time tracking this process down and writing about it. We can't wait for every gross miscarriage of sexual assault cases to get us ready to remove and disbar, but that's what it seems to take considering Duke and now Stanford Universities.
I cannot help but chuckle with sadness at the level of frustration people who are completely invested in the post-industrial sections of our economy. For them, the inevitably hypocrisy inherent in the inflation of narratives must be horribly taxing on their sense of fairness. When you actually believe that free speech is everything, and in fact the only thing, diversity presents a mind-blowing challenge. At some point one must admit that hate speech must be allowed because no arbitration of speech can really allowed. Everybody's history must be revealed, and you cannot weasel out of cultural appropriation and you cannot deny history. These contradictions of political correctness are now more clearly manifest than ever, so what to do? Well, their simplistic evasion of logic abuses logic by using half logic. If the modern world is capable of making manifest the actions inherent in the conflict of narratives, and yet every narrative must have free reign, how do we keep from violent conflict? Their answer is to destroy that capability in the modern world. Let the Muslims hate the West, and although we stand against it, let the West hate the Muslims. Now all we need is to destroy both of their capacities to act on those hatreds. I think these post-modernists will attempt that until it comes to war, only during war finally recognizing their (some other word than fascist) requirement for monopolization of the use of force.
I am reminded of the three tools of coercion. Seduction, negotiation and force. The matrix works something like this. Seduction means you can convince someone to work in your interests against their own interests. I like the word fraud equally well, but fraud is a false negotiation revealed after the fact which might be overturned. With seduction it is always too late. Negotiation has both parties aware of what they stand to gain and what they stand to lose in an honest brokerage of interests. They come to a mutually agreeable settlement. Force is what it is. In both force and seduction, the dominant party wins and the losing party is humiliated. So they are zero-sum and we pay the most attention to them. But a negotiated contract, that's a hard bargain and it requires mutual coercion whether it entails the best of two bad worlds, or the worst of two good worlds.
Coercion is necessary for the co-existence of all narratives. PC represents something between the two extremes of bad and good negotiated worlds. The problem is that the settlement is not holding and the stakes are too high. So we are moving into the realms of seduction and force. This is what happens when speech defines. If we lived in an industrial economy where nobody cares about the words spoken in the factory where the car was made, the stakes would not be so high. If the value were most found in the structural integrity of a bridge, instead of the famous photographs and words spoken in protest on one particular day in the life of that bridge, the stakes would not be so high. If the post-industrialists actually believed that actions spoke louder than words, we could be a lot more free with our words, but we can't. We are cowards and not men of actions. We are men of emotions and emotional outbursts. We must be this way in a post-industrial world.
I think I can best exemplify this requirement for coercion in the idea that for whatever human problem exists, "there is an app for that". The process of developing software is to put our best abstractions of a human activity, and/or all knowledge associated with that activity, into a computer simulation. This requires extraordinary brains, cooperation, discipline and a whole other boatload of virtuous qualities. It is a making of an interactive map, through which we might navigate the world of problems while looking at our cellphones, sitting at our armchair computers. If you didn't take a moment to think about it before, let me assure you that it's a programmer's world and you just live in it. All of the roads, alleys, walls and doors of software mazes are planned before you rats move through it. That includes the drama of the narrative. You are totally constrained. Or as Golding says, language fits experience like a strait jacket. What chance do the larger markets of miseducated have to second guess the virtual world frameworks of post-modern debate and politics? I think only blood and pain crash the apps like cellphones dashed to the pavement. In the meantime, the ceiling of disbelief remains suspended. In the PC world the false pillars of racism, capitalism and patriarchy are said to hold that ceiling up, and so the peasantry content themselves to live among the grass roots, never to climb.
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What the post-industrialists understand is that their leadership depends upon masses paying attention. So in order to maintain their power, they must sustain those systems of belief that are the talking points of their narrative. Most importantly, they must keep talking and they must be consistent in their talk such that they can project backwards and forwards, constantly revising their seductions about the past and about the future as well. Whereas the man who makes a horseshoe or a pair of pliers can prove the physics of the universe serve his purposeful work without uttering a word or sharing a selfie.
This Islamists bring the pain. As sure as there are avenues for every conceivable narrative and contradictory fantasy in the post-modern West, there are but a few allowed for the devout Islamist. The alternative is death. And when death and dismemberment cannot be brought directly to the American infidel, then it is brought streaming into his interwebz. Even this content defies the PC narratives and thus challenges the self-righteous ingenues of our Hollywood frameworks. So this is the new soft terrorism. The narrative Producers must amp up their portrayals of blood and death in order to bring 'realism' to the screens. They abuse the myths of superheroes, ennobling them only as proxies of central committees. All superheroes will become Hulk over time. Mark my words. The thoughtful individual heroes will be crushed by disillusion as they approach the Enemy. Because it is an axiom of PC faith that the Western man suffers a complex of irredeemable original sins. He is white. He is male. His fortunes come from free markets. He applies individual logic and justice against the poor Muslim from a Western point of view. The pain brought by the jihadi is our just dessert, for an uncountable number of reasons which can be recalled on demand from any liberal American university study.
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In America there are men who wrench their own automobiles, who know the fields from which came the cotton in their shirts. There are those who understand that their shoes are leather and are not swayed by narratives against the use of animals or the consumption of wheat. There are men who wear single function devices on their off hands, recognizing that time is precious and not to be divided amongst the multiple distractions of multitasking apps. Such men keep precious thoughts born by hard won experience in their heads. They will never compete with the cacophony of the Cathedral. The knowledge and force of such men cannot be integrated into the power structures of democracy. It requires, as does all decentralized authority, its own rites of initiation and channels of communication. The farmer must mind his own hedgerows. So let him be a hedgehog. Let him know what he knows best and let his heart and his family and his virtues stand on their own with his select interdependencies. He will turn off the broadcasts of his own accord. He has better things to do with his time. And when the Islamicist comes to these islands in America, he will be met with unblinking eyes, but only if our Judiciary has not abdicated its responsibility to Constitutional justice.
All depends upon us understanding and experiencing the relevance of our jurisprudence in our lives and culture. No post-modern creations can bring us there, neither of economic or humanitarian design. We must align ourselves to our extraordinarily slow pace of evolution and trust our human instincts armed with the insights of our own founding history, even as we use the tools of modernity. We must settle ourselves within a world where water is precious, where physical labor reminds us of our duty to our born bodies, where courage requires that experience against the firebombing of propaganda razing our cities into markets of fantasy and cant. If AI can replace you, you are already surplus. Your mind is not to be led by the Marauder's Map. Your experience is something to be initiated by your courageous virtue, not purchased from the app store. I understand what C.S. Lewis said about magic; ignore that too, because post-modern wizards struggle every day to advance their technology to be indistinguishable from it, and they will never reveal where the minds are that make it. Focus instead on justice. We have had it in our lives, and we should never forget its blindness, especially as the screaming media and interwebz attempt to coerce what we see.
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