Sigh

A "typical reunion" of former students of the Instituto Politécnico Superior "General San Martín" in Rosario, Argentina, from the school's Wikipedia article. Photo by Fernando Lopez Anido. I was just looking for a campus picture and found this.

Sitting at a desk a couple of miles from the killing yesterday afternoon watching it unfold on the Twitter, heart-sickening. Those paths, a ribbon of parkland, only a few yards wide in places, almost completely ring Manhattan nowadays, and I spend a lot of time in them, on the Hudson River side, mostly not that far downtown. They are really peaceful and happy places. Every once in a while a little Parks vehicle tootles by, and everybody scurries easily out of its way. I can't get the thought out of my mind of the five men from Argentina, Hernán Mendoza, Diego Angelini, Alejandro Pagnucco, Ariel Erlij and Hernán Ferruchi, who were in New York, in a party of eight, to celebrate the 30th anniversary of their graduation from the Escuela Politécnica in Rosario, when the truck hurtling up the path cut them down and killed them. How incomprehensibly random is that?

There are Jews in the world who run moneylending operations charging exorbitant interest rates, in addition to millions of non-Jewish usurers. There are African American men who are shiftless and lazy alongside shiftless and lazy people of other races. There are Muslims who commit appalling acts of terror. It's so disheartening every time you have to acknowledge the existence of such people reinforcing the worst stereotypes. In mid-afternoon it seemed possible that this was some kind of road rage incident; there were reports of a violent quarrel between two truck drivers. Then the news that the killer driver had shouted the "Allahu akbar", at first from unreliable sources, at last corroborated by authorities. The haters on the Twitter grew palpably more and more excited, taking a savage joy in seeing their hatred justified and their beliefs confirmed.

Trump is already blaming the whole thing on Chuck Schumer. He heard it on Fox & Friends.

The terrorist came into our country through what is called the "Diversity Visa Lottery Program," a Chuck Schumer beauty. I want merit based.

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 1, 2017

"Senator Chuck Schumer helping to import Europes problems" said Col.Tony Shaffer. We will stop this craziness! @foxandfriends

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 1, 2017

Not a word about why Uzbekistan isn't on his #MuslimBan. Or Europe, for that matter, since Col. Shaffer brought it up.

Comically enough, Schumer is not only not responsible for the Diversity Lottery (he did help create it, in 1990, as a Brooklyn congressman; it allows in some 50,000 immigrants a year from unusual countries, mostly in Africa), he voted to abolish it in 2013, as part of the "Gang of 8" immigration reform proposals that died from the opposition of the Trumpiest anti-immigrant Republicans.

The most consoling thing is New York City, which doesn't get terrorized, as Roy notes.

Say the magic words

Whenever you say, "radical Islam," a duck resembling you comes down and terrorism stops. pic.twitter.com/r4WaGBTSXi

— pourmecoffee (@pourmecoffee) June 14, 2016

Shorter David Brooks, "Religion's Wicked Neighbor", New York Times, June 17 2016:

Obama is wrong not to say "Islamic terrorism". What he shouldn't say is "religious terrorism", because it isn't religious at all. It's just Islamic.

Brooks on a brief visit home from the psychophilosophical wilderness to his National Review roots, perhaps as a kind of Father's Day tribute to old Mr. Buckley, playing the traditional game of making the elaborate Jesuitical argument to justify some stupid conservative slogan, in this case the denunciation of the president for refusing to say the magic words that will—well, it's not clear what they'll do. Probably we'll never find out. Thanks, Obama!

Barack Obama is clearly wrong when he refuses to use the word “Islam” in reference to Islamist terrorism.

That's pretty cute, given that Brooks himself is using the word "Islamist" in contradistinction to "Islamic", meaning not of Islam ("submission" to God and to nothing else) but of Islamism, the idolatrous worship of the religious edifice instead of the deity. In fact he doesn't know he's doing that, of course. He just thinks it sounds elegant and chic. He may have gotten it from Hillary Clinton, who consciously used it the other day (I think)—

Update: Ramadan

The leaders of the American Muslim Community Centers, from Longwood, Florida, have also released a statement.

“The American Muslim Community Centers is saddened and shocked by the senseless killings in downtown Orlando, and we pray for the victims and their family members,” says chairman Atif Fareed.

Mr Fareed adds, “Ramadan is a month of deep reflection and prayer. Senseless violence has no place in our religion or in our society. We strongly condemn this heinous act of violence against humanity.”

The center then cited the Quran, chapter five verse 32.

“…if any one killed a person, it would be as if he killed the whole of mankind; and if any one saved a life, it would be as if he saved the life of the whole of mankind…”

LGBT groups around the US are also rallying, many with Muslim Americans.

We stand with our fellow Muslim students who are unjustly being scapegoated & vilified. We will not be used to fuel more hate.

— UTK Pride Center (@UTKPrideCenter) June 12, 2016

(The Guardian)

Monday Trump Dump

Image from Reddit via Giphy.

Trump responds to allegations from British prime minister:

“Number one I’m not stupid, I can tell you that right now. Just the opposite. I don’t think I’m a divisive person. I’m a unifier.” (Via Independent)

Well, then, that settles that. Who would know better than the man himself? He's not so sure whether he's divisive or not, but he's positive on the stupid issue. No pussyfooting or equivocation, no "I have no recollection of being stupid" or "it depends on what the meaning of 'stupid' is". Just boldly acknowledging the fact.

Vowels of compassion

Some Americans, New York, December 2015. Photo by Esther Merono, Huffington Post.

This is about something that came up over at Alicublog over the course of the week involving linguistics, where I thought it might sort of be my duty to say something more boring than would be appropriate for the comment section there, as always the Best Party Ever, where you really want to look your nattiest at all times.

Also, while I may not actually have all that much to say, at least I'm going to spell it right, which is more than can be said for M.G. Oprea at the Federalist, whose post

How You Pronounce ‘Muslim’ Says A Lot About Your Politics

Ever notice how those on the Left pronounce ‘Muslim’ like ‘Mooss-lim’? Here’s what it means.

was the topic of discussion:

This pronunciation is code for “I’m not Islamaphobic.”

(That's how rightists spell "islamophobic", to show their contempt for traditional rules of word-formation, where a compound with an Ancient Greek stem like φόβια always uses the thematic vowel -o-,  still true in modern Greek incidentally.)

How Brooks Makes Paragraphs

Conrad Veidt in Robert Wiene's Das Cabinet des Doktor Caligari (1920). Image via WolfInAGorillaSuit.

Shorter David Brooks, "How ISIS Makes Radicals", New York Times, December 8 2015:

The crucial issue in the terror attack in San Bernardino is really, how is it possible for an Islamic State headquartered in some stranded desert post in Syria to radicalize a couple in the Inland Empire of southern California, what "technology of persuasion" flings its influence all the way from there to here?

(1) The best place to look for an answer is still Eric Hoffer's 1951 book, The True Believer, because although it doesn't perhaps have anything to say about winning hearts and minds by remote control, it certainly provides us with stuff I can spin out for ten paragraphs worth of paraphrase and direct quote;

(2) Probably they use the Internet.

I have a strong feeling I know how he got to the celebrated longshoreman philosopher of the 1950s, Eric Hoffer, to find out that he was the "best source of wisdom" on the radicalization issue, which is namely the autogooglotic technique, or self-googling. Because the last time he published an explanation of how people get radicalized, in February, John Huckans at Book Source Magazine picked up on it in his own piece on, precisely, The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements, in reference to a quote from Hoffer:

Expelling the Moriscos

The Expulsion of the Moriscos at the Port of Denía. Vincente Mostre, 1612. Via Wikipedia.

A little clarity from the New York Times:

1. It can't be done.

Putting the policy into practice would require an unlikely act of Congress, said Stephen Yale-Loehr, a professor of law at Cornell and a prominent authority on immigration.

Should Congress enact such a law, he predicted, the Supreme Court would invalidate it as an overly restrictive immigration policy under the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment.

“It would certainly be challenged as unconstitutional,” he said. “And I predict the Supreme Court would strike it down.”

2. It's not about Muslims, it's about Cruz.

Mr. Trump has a track record of making surprising and even extreme comments whenever he is overtaken in opinion polls by other Republican candidates – as happened on Monday just hours before he issued his statement about Muslims. A new Monmouth University survey of likely Iowa Republican caucus-goers found that Mr. Trump had slipped from his recent top spot in the state, which holds the first presidential nomination contest on Feb. 1. According to the poll, Senator Ted Cruz of Texas earned 24 percent of support, while Mr. Trump had 19 percent and Senator Marco Rubio of Florida had 17 percent...

3. Cruz knows that.

...some were more careful in their denouncements. Senator Ted Cruz, who has overtaken Mr. Trump in Iowa and has been gaining on him nationally, said: “Well, that, that is not my policy.” The Republican from Texas went on to explain that he has called for a moratorium on refugees from countries where the Islamic State or Al Qaeda control significant territory.

The whole point of the exercise could just as easily be to make everybody forget that Jeb! and Cruz were both calling for the exclusion of non-Christian refugees on equally unconstitutional grounds, oh, about three weeks ago. Now, says Bush, such ideas are "unhinged" and "not serious". To be fair, he has got it right this time.

The only way to stop a bad guy with a religion

Al Jolson and May McAvoy in Alan Crosland's and Gordon Hollingshead's The Jazz Singer (1927),. Image via Alchetron.

1. Theodemography

So the good news is, according to David Brooks, "Finding Peace Within the Holy Texts", that secularization is over, and a process of desecularization is under way, because this always happens. In part, it's just simple arithmetic, because the unsecular have more babies.

Research by the German theodemographer Michael Blume shows that every nonreligious population in human history, going back to ancient India and Greece, has fallen into decline, while the world population on the whole continues to expand, indicating that the Old Order Amish and the followers of the Lubavitcher Rebbe are swiftly taking over the planet, which will not surprise you if you've ever been in the Williamsburg Greenmarket, or maybe it will (I go to Manhattan greenmarkets myself, actually, where you sometimes see a lot of Amish pretzel salespersons, which is what made me think of it, so I don't really know, but the online pictures suggest that there's nobody there from either group.)

The sociobiological theory behind this, by the way, apparently taken up from the thinking of the economist Friedrich von Hayek, is possibly not known to David Brooks, and it's that religiosity is an adaptive evolutionary trait; females of the species tend to gravitate toward males who go to church, or whatever, as a sign that they are more likely to be solid family guys who will take an affectionate interest in their offspring's survival, thus boosting the replication chances of their girls' genes as well as their own. Thus when Faust is seducing Gretchen she asks him "Sag, wie hast du's mit der Religion?" (Tell me, how do you feel about religion?), showing what kind of mate she's particularly seeking (pay no attention to the facts that Faust evades the question and she sleeps with him anyway, and that she ends up going mad and drowning her baby and thus fails entirely to transmit his and her genes to the next generation).

Carson clarifies

A visit to the dentist in medieval Persia. Via medievalists.net.

What's wrong with Muslims?

"Under Islamic Law, homosexuals – men and women alike – must be killed. Women must be subservient. And people following other religions must be killed," he continued. "I know that there are many peaceful Muslims who do not adhere to these beliefs. But until these tenants (sic) are fully renounced…I cannot advocate any Muslim candidate for President."

Obviously that's a lot worse than Biblical literalist Christianity in which only male homosexuals need to be put to death and the girls get away scot-free. I know that there are many peaceful Christians who do not agree with the death penalty for sodomy, including the members of Dr. Carson's Seventh-Day Adventist Church, who hold that

Why do they hate religious freedom?

Umayyad troops retreating from Narbonne in 753. Via Wikipedia.

New rightwing meme on the European refugee crisis: It's a replay of the 8th century! Paynim hordes conquering a continent!

If you think the map looks like part of an ISIS battle plan, you would be correct. This is exactly what ISIS promised earlier this year: to flood Europe with 500,000 African Muslims, sent by boat across the Mediterranean Sea. What is now unfolding is at a level far and beyond ISIS’s wildest dreams. Hijrah in action.

(Sorry? If it's beyond ISIS's dreams, how come it's exactly the same?) Sure, dead kids on the beach are cute, but it's just a distraction:

I'll cherish that old rugged Ross, rugged Ross...

Crusaders meeting Muslims, Jerusalem 1099. I believe an Arab artist, but I can't identify.

According to Monsignor Ross Douthat, Apostolic Nuncio to 42nd Street, the history of the Crusades, to which President Obama adverted in his speech at the National Prayer Breakfast on Thursday, is "incredibly complicated".

Obama said,

North Carolina Terrorists Win

The strange, evil foreign muezzin sending waves of sharia out across defenseless Durham. No wait, it's only a Duke student, Ibrahim Saber, rehearsing the three-minutes-a-week performance inviting his friends to perform their religious obligations, which is now not going to take place because some heavily armed Christians seem to object. Photo via WRAL radio.

That is, the plan for the Muslim Students Association at Duke University to use the chapel bell tower as a minaret to broadcast one Friday call to prayer each week—prayers have been held in the chapel basement for years, and nobody's complained about that—has been scrapped.

Not apparently because of the efforts of Reverend Franklin Graham and his brothers in bigotry to get university donors to make financial threats to the university:

No, Tom

From Brainless Tales.

Uh-oh, Friedman's off his meds again. Not just because the president didn't go to Paris, although he disapproves of that, but

it is typical of American politics today that we focus on this and not what would have really made the world feel the jihadist threat was finally being seriously confronted. And that would not be a march that our president helps to lead, but one in which he’s not involved at all. 

Wait, he was involved in the one he didn't go to but he should have not gone to the one he wasn't involved in?

Suis-je Charlie?

For a moment I was afraid this meant he was dead, but of course he was born a long time before 1994.

"Nous sommes tous des juifs allemands," said Daniel Cohn-Bendit in May 1968, or not exactly. He was Jewish himself by birth and German by choice. His parents were German Jews who had fled to France in 1933, and he was born stateless in 1945; after his family moved back to Germany in 1958, already a radical, he opted for German citizenship, specifically to avoid the military service demanded of young French men, but he wound up in France anyway, in 1966, as a sociology student at the working-class university of Nanterre in the northern Paris banlieues.

Don't just do something, stand there

Image via Heather from the Grove.

So Eric Schmitt in the Times informs us that Jeh Johnson, the Secretary of Homeland Security, is barnstorming the ummah, working to get America's Muslim youth off the path of terrorism.

His aim is to build partnerships between the federal government and the local law enforcement, educational and community groups that are better positioned to detect potential militants in their midst and to derail those young men and women from the path of radicalization before they turn violent.

These efforts have been underway since the Sept. 11 attacks, but have often failed to gain traction, government officials acknowledge.

Hm, I wonder why. Maybe we could get an idea from community leaders at the Noor Islamic Cultural Center in Dublin, Ohio, where Johnson was visiting last week, who

Ramadan karim!

And selamat puasa!

In Singapore and Malaysia, the older Muslim kids are being ostentatiously heroic, rolling their eyes and suggesting they might faint, while their mothers beg them to eat something: "You're too young!" In offices and and factories and at outdoor worksites, all the Muslims, from cabinet ministers to daily-rated workers, are crabby—not nasty—or dopey and slow, in the awful humidity. At nightfall, everything is magically transformed as the feasting begins.

If David Brooks had any intellectual honesty, Islam would be his favorite religion, for the simple but rigorous demands made on the faithful and the social cohesion it provides. I admire it too, though I'm only a tourist in religion, congenitally faithless, and aesthetically I prefer a chewier theology. Ramadan, though, is just beautiful, comical and sweet. Human at its humanest.

Strasbourg mosque. Image from Euronews (but I can't pin down a proper credit).

Airborne Elephant Watch: London

The Olympics have not yet begun, but there's already a hot contender for this year's Thomas P. Friedman Award for best "Islam is scary" story composed exclusively of materials that can be found in an ordinary taxi.

From Roqoo Depot.

It's NPR's faith-based correspondent, Barbara Bradley Hagerty, for

Olympians' Dilemma: 'Starve My Soul' For Ramadan?

with the Olympics falling during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, the 22-year-old athlete had to make a choice: be in top physical condition or maintain a primary tenet of his faith.

She didn't find any religious authorities to say that you had to fast (you can postpone it, as with pregnancy or sickness), or any Muslim athletes who would in fact be fasting, though she thought there must be some of those from the more conservative countries or in some of the less aerobic sports, so the amount of controversy she found on the issue would be exactly 0.0, but she filed the story anyhow.

Best of luck to Egyptian 10.000-meter open-water swimmer Mazen Aziz, who loses 11 pounds in a typical race!

I Led One and a Half Lives

Our NYPD at work, insinuating itself into the company of some suspiciously pious college students with suspiciously healthy ideas of what to do for fun. From documents of the undercover surveillance of area Muslims put on line by AP, via ThinkProgress, the adventures of one intrepid agent.

Fiendish, those Muslims, aren't they, orchestrating and stuff?

I love how the agent's training seems to have made him aware that the number of times per day you pray is significant in Islam, but not what the actual number is.

Cheap shots and chasers 3/16

Santorum lets out his inner Islamofascist:

Santorum had the opportunity to make an uninterrupted case, calling out Newt Gingrich for two-timing the Republican party in a 2008 anti-global warming video (“I didn’t sit on a couch with any other woman. I sit on a couch with my wife, not Nancy Pelosi.”)

He's accusing the Newtster of khalwat!

Two Lovers, by Reza Abbasi, 1630 (A.H. 1039). Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Republican physics:

Avant-garde opinionist James Poulos, doing some classically styled concern trolling for the President's poll numbers during the 15 minutes or so that it looked as if he was losing this week:

Inertia — the tendency of an object to resist any change in its motion — is the momentum of incumbency, and inertia favors the president right now, on the economy, on foreign policy, even on the deficit.

Also, centrifugal force is the Republican gravity--I picked that up from David Brooks.
Recycled from comments at Rumproast.

Inertia demonstration. From Educational Technology Clearinghouse, Florida.

Panty-sniffing is the fifth freedom:

Arizona House Bill 2625, authored by Majority Whip Debbie Lesko, R-Glendale, would permit employers to ask their employees for proof of medical prescription if they seek contraceptives for non-reproductive purposes, such as hormone control or acne treatment.
“I believe we live in America. We don’t live in the Soviet Union,” Lesko said. 

Oh, right—in the Soviet Union only the government was supposed to pry into your personal life. Here, your boss is free to do it too. That's why he loves this country!

 

The week in the Persian Wars

Persian War, the hurdler, by Persian Gulf out of the Chanteur II mare, Warning, born 1964. The story of his brave and arduous life and more pictures are at TVG Community.

So, where were we? On the 21st, Netanyahu and Barak said General Dempsey was "serving Iranian interests" by having the chutzpah to disagree with them. On the 22nd, the IAEA announced that the current round of talks with Iran over weapons inspection had failed after their team was barred from inspecting the military plant at Parchin, where Iranians are suspected of working on trigger explosives for the nuclear weapon. On the 24th, US intelligence repeated what it has been saying since 2007, that there is as yet no evidence that Iran has decided to build one.

There's lots more, but I am more and more of the opinion that what is mainly happening is elections—Iran's first of all (this week!), Israel's likely next, (they don't have to come till 2013, but Netanyahu knows his chances of winning are more likely to get worse than [jump]