(no subject)

[johnny9fingers]

 www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-11463544

You know, it sometimes seems that Al-Qaeda and other Islamic militants really want to precipitate a complete war of cultures.

Ramp it up a bit more....and watch retaliatory pogroms in Western countries, why don't you? A total war with Islam doesn't bear thinking about, but just in case it seems some folk think that the Western powers are complete namby-pambies, this piece of scary lunacy was posted on my friends page by jk_fabiani 

"1339. I Don't Want to Be a Soldier (Traditional English)" (Watch on YouTube)

Bah. Stupid is as stupid does. We can barely keep our lunatics from running the asylum and the Islamic lunatics keep pushing with outrage after outrage. Just think what will happen when Sarah Palin is President? I mean, give the US a reason to elect her, then give her an excuse to go over the top: go on, why don't you?

I despair of humans of all kinds sometimes. So little thought, so many grievances.

Comments

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

Palin will be defeated in the primaries. She keeps repeating the memes of the 2008 election when the 2012 election will be an entirely different animal, so to speak. Barack Obama's solidly ended the Presidency as a white man only thing. That means we may well see Bobby Jindal come out of nowhere and beat Palin, though my expectation is that it'd be either Huckabee or Romney.

What people also ignore is that the Islamists have not a snowball's chance in hell of triggering something like this. Saddam al-Majid was hardly popular, but the Dawa, a Khomeinist-style terrorist group (that now actually govern the place thanks to my country's idiotic invasion) could not depose that regime on their own. That took the US invasion after eight years of ruinous war with Iran, the first war with the USA and several years of bombing prior to the war.

By contrast the Soviet Union and the older communist regimes were/are (North Korea) threats on a much bigger scale than the Central Asian version of the Hutaree is.

[johnny9fingers.livejournal.com]

I will admit what you say makes a lot of sense, but when it comes to the public of any country I side with H L Mencken: "No one ever went broke....etc"

I mean, it's not as if it hasn't happened before.

Nevertheless I will admit hyperbole is hyperbole, to use a tautology of Wittgenstein-like obviousness.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

See the thing is that for people to buy into it there must be a grain of plausibility. People do not automatically tend to fall for rank hoaxes and humbugs. People feared communism in republican Germany because they had lived through two failed putsches and Thaelmann was a rising force in the early 1930s, faster actually than the Nazis themselves were, so fear of a Thaelmann Putsch would have been very realistic.

Islamists? They're mainly a threat to themselves and no-one else.

[johnny9fingers.livejournal.com]

In the history of excuses for doing bad things there have been any number of proschemata with lesser justification than 'lunatic Islamists': even some recent ones spring to mind.

There was little plausibility in the whole WMD/Iraq 2002 debate. Still, no-one's been prosecuted, so that's all right then.

Germany did indeed fear communism: and also the major industrialists and rump of the Prussian old guard thought they could control the party they had built around their Charlie Chaplin manque, and even control him.

I may actually agree with you, but some dark recess of the mind keeps nagging at me, telling me: the odds against 'it' (worst case scenario) happening are small, but still, given the nature of the populace, to a great extent random.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

True, and you've mentioned the major one.

See the problem is that as noted there were two failed German putsches, including one in Bavaria the first place to really go Nazi. And of course the longest-lasting totalitarian regime in German history was East Germany, not Nazi Germany.