Monk

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Mark Steyn takes a caustic hit on some of the reactions to global warming. For the problem is us! And what a beautiful world it would be if we weren't in it.

( Steyn )

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It looks like Islam is striking back at Mark Steyn:

And I make this point in light of the case that has been brought against Mark Steyn and Maclean's magazine, before Human Rights Commissions for Canada, British Columbia, and Ontario, by the Canadian Islamic Congress, led by Mohamed Elmasry. The first two commissions have already agreed to hear the case, and thus rule on whether Mark Steyn had the right to express the opinions and beliefs in his bestselling book, America Alone, and specifically in the excerpt entitled, “The Future Belongs to Islam,” which ran in Maclean's last year. According to the complaint, by expressing his opinions and beliefs, Mark Steyn “subjects Canadian Muslims to hatred and Islamophobia.”

I didn't even know that Human Rights Commissions had this power, as it sounds like a kind of super court, along the lines of the WTO.

Steyn does throw out the red meat pretty liberally, but this does sound like madness. Ironically, this even bolsters his point, that the forces of Islam are starting to take more control of our lives, and that's just backwards. They really should be more influenced by the West and our ideals of individual liberty, like not whipping people who name a teddy bear Muhammad or for being gang-raped, or executing gays, which are true violations of human rights.


(Source: David Warren at RealClearPolitics.com)

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But Thanksgiving (excepting the premature and somewhat undernourished Canadian version) is unique to America. "What's it about?" an Irish visitor asked me a couple of years back. "Everyone sits around giving thanks all day? Thanks for what? George bloody Bush?"

Well, Americans have a lot to be thankful for.

-- Mark Steyn for The Orange County Register

It's pretty rah! rah! and I tend to feel sort of stateless myself, but American exceptionalism does continue to be a living if fading force, and Steyn gives us a well-expressed sentiment worth keeping.

( Steyn )

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"You've betrayed Vietnam. Someday you're going to sell out Taiwan. And we're going to be around when you get tired of Israel."

-- Syrian Dictator

Mark Steyn is doing the quoting, in a piece supporting President Bush's use of the Vietnam War as an analogy for his case to stay the course, in the face of the controversy that the Vietnam analogy is more fitting for the left and why we need to withdraw from Iraq.

Losing in Iraq certainly isn't going to help America's cause, but not even having a real strategy to win isn't better. We don't seem to be able to do what it takes to win, so it is hardly insensible to cut our losses.

It is a nightmare.

It is so bad a nightmare that, if Iraq does fall into chaos and becomes effectively a platform and staging ground for anti-Western hostilities, we may have to go back sometime, maybe within ten years, and it is likely to be costlier and harder, but we might not have any choice.


(Source: Mark Steyn for The O.C. Register)

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I try to answer this question by way of some celebrated remarks by the acclaimed British novelist Margaret Drabble, speaking just after the liberation of Iraq. Ms Drabble said:

"I detest Coca-Cola, I detest burgers, I detest sentimental and violent Hollywood movies that tell lies about history. I detest American imperialism, American infantilism, and American triumphalism about victories it didn't even win."

That's an interesting list of grievances. If you lived in Poland in the 1930s, you weren't worried about the Soviets' taste in soft drinks or sentimental Third Reich pop culture. If Washington were a conventional great power, the intellectual class would be arguing that the United States is a threat to France or India or Chad or some such. But because it's the world's first nonimperial superpower the world has had to concoct a thesis that America is a threat not merely to this or that nation state but to the entire planet, and not because of conventional great-power designs but because – even scarier – of its "consumption," its very way of life. Those Cokes and cheeseburgers detested by discriminating London novelists are devastating the planet in ways that straightforward genocidal conquerors like Hitler and Stalin could only have dreamed of.

-- Mark Steyn for Orange Country Register

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In America, public opinion is in no mood for war with Iran. In Washington, Congress is focused on finding the most politically advantageous way to lose in Iraq. In Europe, they've already psychologically accepted the Iranian nuclear umbrella. In the Western world, where talks are not the means to the end but an end in themselves, we find it hard despite the evidence of 30 years to accept that Iran talks the talk and walks the walk. Once it goes nuclear, do you think there will be fewer fatwas on writers, stonings of homosexuals, kidnappings in international waters, forced confessions of American hostages and bankrolling of terror groups worldwide? These latest hostages are part of a decades-old pattern of behavior. The longer it goes without being stopped, the worse it will be.

-- Mark Steyn for The O.C. Register

Ahhh, nothing like the optimistic air of Mark Steyn to refreshen one's hopes for the Middle East!

He has a knack for hitting on the absurdity in the way we tend to treat the likes of an Iran with kid gloves and expect the West to appease the fanatic humor of the Islamists. One does have to wonder where such a game can lead.

( Steyn Bomb )

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If a tree falls in the forest and nobody hears it, is it because Al Gore and a bunch of elderly rockers organized an all-star stadium gala on its behalf? The colossal flopperoo of Live Earth is a heartening reminder that there are some things too ridiculous even for global pop culture, and one of them is the Reverend Almer Gortry speaking truth to power ballads.

-- Mark Steyn for New York Sun

I wouldn't be as gleefully mischievous about it, but I did think the show to save the world was silly, though I am dull like that. Yet, the silliness is there:

Still, for the brave few who stuck with all 174 hours of Live Al, there was something oddly touching about seeing rock gazillionaires who'd flown in by private jet tell Joe Schmoe all the stuff he doesn't need. Your own car? A washer and dryer? Ha! Why can't you take the bus and beat your underwear on the rocks down by the river with the native women all morning long?

As long as we're making environmentally-friendly lifestyle suggestions, here's one thing we don't "need": Stadium rock. Amplifiers. Electrified instruments. Entourages. Recorded music. They all add up to one helluva carbon footprint.

Global warming is presumably a serious problem, but there is a certain frivolousness in these efforts, seemingly as much about vanity as anything real.

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This is where we came in two decades ago. We should have learned something by now. In the Muslim world, artistic criticism can be fatal. In 1992, the poet Sadiq Abd al-Karim Milalla also found that his work was "not particularly well-received": he was beheaded by the Saudis for suggesting Muhammad cooked up the Quran by himself. In 1998, the Algerian singer Lounès Matoub described himself as "ni Arabe ni musulman" (neither Arab nor Muslim) and shortly thereafter found himself neither alive nor well.

-- Mark Steyn for The Orange County Register

I had to get Steyn's fiery commentary on the issue...

( Steyn )

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This is a temporary post pointing the way to a Mark Steyn column on the school shooting, arguing against the idea that society needs to be more protective of college students. In it he mocks the manhood of the victims in a general argument about how our culture is too passive, breeding that passivity in too many. He also related a similar shooting in Canada that brings out his point more clearly. People need to be better able to defend themselves.

Mark Steyn's "A Culture of Passivity."

Personally, I think it's an interesting point, but it can be overdone. In the Cho case, it looks like we could have had a better reaction from our mental health institutions, as there were evidently a lot of bad warning signs.

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The question is whether what's happening now is just the natural give and take of the planet, as Erik the Red and my town's early settlers understood it. Or whether it's something so unprecedented that we need to divert vast resources to a transnational elite bureaucracy so that they can do their best to cripple the global economy and deny much of the developing world access to the healthier and longer lives that capitalism brings. To the eco-chondriacs that's a no-brainer.

-- Mark Steyn for The Chicago Sun-Times

I have been keeping track of the global-warming scare, and it seems only fair to hear a contrarian voice. Steyn also has this good idea:

You could take every dime spent by every government and NGO and eco-group to investigate "climate change" and spend it on Internet porn instead, and it wouldn't make the slightest difference to what the climate will be in 2050.

Just make sure it's the good, misogynistic, violent kind. The one thing we don't need is more really bland porn.

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