Thursday, September 19, 2002

It's sad, really. I know that I'm probably known as SDB's biggest and most strident critic, and I'm sure that those who have read this and see me that way are expecting a point-by point takedown or something of the like.

I mean, it's not like there's not a lot there to look at. The naive notion that what happened in Japan can be easily replicated, for example, even if the jury didn't remain out on whether the "Salaryman" culture that resulted after the war isn't in the process of meltdown. Perhaps he insane belief that deliberately erasing an ethnicity and culture is somehow not genocide (which has absolutely nothing to do with PoMo and everything to do with the difference between genocide and mass murder.) There's the absolute paranoia, borderline racism, absurd stereotyping, pathetic invocation of "political incorrectness", parroting of Raymond's anti-Islamism, incredible overreaction, and the downright evil South-American dictator style use of medical terminology to try to describe chaos, violence, and death.

Heck, even the silly "they're just jealous of our freedom" argument rears its ugly head, when time and time again arabs in the region say that they don't particular dislike the U.S. itself... just its foreign policy. (Whether that dislike is justified is quite suitable for debate, but doesn't remotely fit this "jealous" paradigm.) It's even coupled with the traditional breast-beating statements that the United States is the best country in the history of the world, "economically and technologically and militarily and even culturally", a statement of dubious validity at the very least, and abject hilarity to anybody who isn't trying to rally the faithful.

I could. Easily.

But....

I just don't see the point. All I really get from this is a vague sense of nausea that someone could think this way, and relief that by and large most others don't. I have visions of SDB revving that motorcycle, shouting "aaayyy" right before he jumps the sharktank. I look around and see that he's reduced himself to an article of fun on Eschaton. Hesiod easily skewers it as well, making a damned good point when he calls it the "Protocols of the Elders of Mohammed". While the charges and rhetoric are different, it is still an assault on a ethnocultural group, just as anti-semitism is, and would anti-semitism be any less so if the anti-semite wasn't advocating that the jews all be killed, but forced at gunpoint to give up their religion, culture, and identity, just as Mr. Den Beste has said should be the policy of the United States? And all because 19 Al Qaeda Members flew some planes into some buildings hoping to start exactly the cultural war that SDB is calling for? Is he even aware that he's become Bin Laden's posthumous marionette?

For that matter, why is he so bloody eager to basically replicate what happened to the Native Americans?

Honestly, while I have no doubt that this particular article will play well with those who are hungry for enemies to hate, cultures to attack, and grand purposes to no doubt utterly screw up, it completely finishes him as any sort of worthwhile and objective commentator. He might as well get a contract with Newsmax, start hanging out with Ben Shapiro, and suck back the Scaife dollars. TransProg was silly and funny, but this is the end. It's beneath contempt.

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