Thanks for your remarks. I have agreements and disagreements with you, as usually happens in these matters. You said,

However, Europe has abandoned the biggest reason to fight: faith.

I think it’s better to say that some religions give reasons to fight and some give reasons not to fight. Most give a mixture of the two. It’s worth considering also that believers don’t seem to fight for faith; they fight for such things as their god, righteousness, and truth, which they may call The Faith. If you tell them they “fight for faith,” you should pray they don’t understand you, because if they do, they’ll suspect you don’t believe The Faith.

The islamofascists are running on auto-pilot of a dogma demanding they spread and dominate.

Although we do regard their opinions as ridiculous, those opinions have a tendency to promote a sort of crude success at the others’ expense. In an awful way, the muslims have good religion; it’s important to see that. Our religion must be better, in order to be at all.

The old Christian faith demanded a fight to the death, since the fight was the reason to exist according to Christian dogma.

The “old” Christian faith teaches that one should “turn the other cheek,” “not return evil for evil,” and “not resist evil.” It says the meek “shall inherit the earth,” although it doesn’t explain how this will come about. If these teachings, properly understood, are compatible with war, then it’s important they be properly taught, and not just to a few mild-mannered seminary students. As things stand, it’s altogether too easy to think that God wants His followers to turn the world over to tyrants.

Replacing Christianity with a passive culture of consumption just doesn’t cut it against islamo-dogma.

Replacing Islam with a passive culture of consumption would have been a much better idea. One is tempted to wonder whether there’s some flaw in Christianity that makes it vulnerable to such a replacement and whether there’s some virtue in Islam that’s made it more resistant to that particular strategem.

Especially when death is to be avoided at all costs by the rationalists as the end of consumption and all joy. Appeasement yields some consumption pleasures while a fight could end it all. Rationalist consumption also demands a population death spiral to maintain the system. Bad.

I agree with many details of your account. However, in the way you use the word “rationalist,” you seem to disparage reason. Yet I don’t think you mean to say that attentive observation, good thinking, sharp reasoning, profound theory, prudent calculation, broadmindedness, and foresight are what have gotten us into this mess. Instead, it seems to be some of those very qualities and habits that allowed Mark Steyn and others to foresee our problems in advance of their full maturation. It seems good for you and me to acknowledge to ourselves the benefits we’re receiving from some whose rationality appears to have surpassed our own. My response has not been to say, “Gosh, if only I had been less rational.”

I’ve only just read your kind remarks. Plato, Machiavelli, and Locke are some of the authors I read in graduate studies. Much of my reading in Aristotle and all of my reading in Nietzsche came later. As for the Dune series by Frank Herbert, I first read it, without anything remotely like full understanding and appreciation, in high school or college. However, I must have picked up from it more than I realized, because it seems to have helped me get through my earliest studies in Plato and Machiavelli, from whose writings I might have recoiled without my, um, Bene Gesserit training. It was much later, after I’d read Nietzsche, Aristotle’s On the Soul (in Joe Sachs’s translation), and Plato’s Sophist, that I began to suspect Herbert and the philosophers (through Nietzsche) are all talking about much the same thing.

Kralizec
http://kralizec.wordpress.com/

(h/t Drudge) This is by no means breaking news and has been on the Drudge Report all day, but felt it was worth mentioning in case you missed it, especially after I posted on a potential second North Korean nuke……

If China dumps the Kim it could be because his antics might cause Japan, Taiwan, Australia, etc to go nuclear themselves. This would make future anschluss’s on the part of Bejing very difficult indeed.

dhimwit on October 17, 2006

You give me hope! I had not thought of this! China acts only in China’s interest. To move China it must be convinced it gains something bigger than weakening Anerica.

It’s embarrassing now to think of my old agreement with the treatment the U.S. gave to Serbia and Slobodan Milosevic. Now I don’t know what course of action other than imitating “Slobo” in one way or another could keep Europe from becoming muslim – Kralizec on October 17, 2006

Kralizec, I fell for it. In retrospect, I see the manipulation:

1. The MSM promoting the “men of conscience” at the State Department who threatened to quit unless we took out Milosevic. – Now I say, was there anyone worth a dime at State? I recall watching Brian Lamb interview State dept. types weaving their web of public opinion traps

2. The MSM pounding of one sided atrocities, many of which we now know were enhanced. Someone I know was stationed in that region after the US took over and talked of a mass burial site found where the non muslim victims had been dressed as muslims before execution to fake it out. He said they were finding mostly non-muslim victims

3. The Soros connection with rent-a-mob. In general where Soros is, manipulation reigns

We should have put Soros in a ring with Milosevic and let them bite each other to death. A lot cheaper and it would have stopped the building of the islamic launch site

Europe is not doomed if it does not want to die. However, Europe has abandoned the biggest reason to fight: faith. The islamofascists are running on auto-pilot of a dogma demanding they spread and dominate. The old Christian faith demanded a fight to the death, since the fight was the reason to exist according to Christian dogma.

Replacing Christianity with a passive culture of consumption just doesn’t cut it against islamo-dogma. Especially when death is to be avoided at all costs by the rationalists as the end of consumption and all joy. Appeasement yields some consumption pleasures while a fight could end it all. Rationalist consumption also demands a population death spiral to maintain the system. Bad.

Chinese fascism would be another antidote but it also restricts the pleasure points.

It’s been bugging me that I didn’t know.

Mark Steyn is the author of a new book, America Alone. He was recently interviewed on Fox News by Hannity and Colmes. He provides chilling insight into China and “their crazy pal” (North Korea) and suggests that Europe is no longer a feasible ally fo…

Mhhh – diagnosis yes, but what is the best prescription? That is always the tough question.

From your site:

The worst of that elite are the culture-critics who resent and hate the society, the times, or the very world they inhabit.

…and who don’t contribute much to it.

Btw, I agree with you on not mixing the dying of a civilization with language influences. The death of a language, howeve, often goes along with the death of that civilization…we’d need several thread on these topics :)

I’ll keep checking in to your site. Regards,

Did you miss “America Alone” author Mark Steyn on Hannity & Colmes last night? No problem. Watch it here. I’d like to see Steyn on Fox every night…….

Colmes is a nerd. Must he interrupt so much? You could tell Steyn thinks this Matthews style of incessant interruption is completely f-in rude, that’s why he rarely does TV, cept for his once a year appeareance with Brian Lamb.

chsw

I finally read the New Yorker piece on Christopher Hitchens, and enjoyed it quite a bit. I’ve read his Slate column regularly for several years, and I own collections of his work and several other books that have him included (usually writing the……

didn’t I see some talking head on tv the other day arguing that “no plutonium bomb was made,” and heralding this as a Clinton accomplishment? I wish I could remember where I heard that. Wouldn’t this news undercut that claim?

“Forget Europe, they’re doomed.”

It’s embarrassing now to think of my old agreement with the treatment the U.S. gave to Serbia and Slobodan Milosevic. Now I don’t know what course of action other than imitating “Slobo” in one way or another could keep Europe from becoming muslim. The right course seems especially clear when one thinks of France becoming a muslim nuclear power. For my part, I’ve reached that happy state of foresighted decency in which I could do to the muslims of Europe what I wish had not been done to the Cherokee, but how many others could I expect to find to share the work? So it seems probable that whole European nations will be lost, instead of merely reaching a nadir and then being renewed. It appears that imams and ayatollahs will acquire European technology, and right now it seems that the best for which we can reasonably hope is to have made that technology obsolete by the time they get hold of it.

“Developing….”

I loved the answer to Hannity’s inquiry about our allies in the world:

“Forget Europe, they’re doomed.”

Excellent.