Lather, Rinse, Repeat...

There is not much that can be said anymore in the wake of the Moslem terrorist attack in Manchester, England.  This website has discussed at some length both the roots of Islamic terrorism and the reactions to it.  Aside from the physical location of the atrocity, every single syllable of the Westminster Bridge Is Falling Down post applies fully to this one, too.  A couple of further points can be made though.

The first concerns the, um, leader of what passes for the main opposition party in Britain.  The avowed Communist Jeremy Corbyn has proposed that Moslem terrorism owes at least in part to the West's "foreign policy," in particular the various wars and alliances such as the quagmires of Afghanistan and Iraq, the support for Israel, the tolerance of the likes of Egypt's Al-Sisi, and so forth.  Now, Corbyn himself can be easily dismissed as, to put it charitably, a total fruitcake: He said not that long ago that labeling the Islamic State troglodytes as terrorists was a subjective value judgment, hence undesirable.  Yet, his contention about the West's putative share in the responsibility for terrorism is not an altogether novel argument.  That canard and variations on the theme have been doing the rounds for years.  "Poverty" causes terrorism.  "Discrimination" causes terrorism.  Even "climate change" causes terrorism.  Yes.  Seriously.  Deadly seriously.  Naturally, such assertions are readily recognized as risible tripe by the sensible majority but what is interesting is how mired in racism (for want of a better word) they are.  They are rooted in the premise that Moslems are beasts who act on animalistic reflexive instinct.  They see something on the news they dislike and their reaction is "I'll blow up a pop concert full of teenage girls."  They are thus, redolent of the view of the Mandatory mindset of the League of Nations, essentially children, devoid of free agency and mental capacity to be either able to act rationally or be held responsible for those actions.  They need the Leftist "white saviors" as surrogates for their personhood, in the way a group of schoolkids on a field trip are chaperoned and protected from strangers by their teachers.

That view is also supremely offensive to the billions of people, past and present, who endured untold privations, pestilence, oppression, injustice, and other types of suffering, but who forbore from channeling their misery in savagely destructive ways.  The fine people of Congo were horrifically brutalized by the Belgians.  The peoples of Latin America were decimated by the conquistadors.  The folks in West Africa and India suffered unspeakably, for centuries, at the hands of the British colonists.  The less said about Viet Nam (first the excesses of the French, then America and Agent Orange), the better.  Yet, not a single one of those people ever shot up a theater in Brussels, suicide bombed a restaurant in London, took an elementary school hostage and executed hundreds of the kids in Madrid, or blew up an airliner over New York.  What a collective indictment of Moslems, then, that they are considered to be incapable of expressing anything but the basest, caveman behavior...  What an even more severe indictment of the Left, which forever virtue-signals about how anti-"racist" it is and hectors those it deems not to be...

The second point relates to the eye-rollingly predictable cheap platitudes expressed by the West's "leaders": the "unity," "standing together," "no Islamophobia," "nothing to do with Islam," and the other well-rehearsed banal cliches.  It is becoming plain as day that such claims made by the elites (the governments, media, academia, professional activists, &c.) and the observable reality are wider apart than ever before.  Indeed, the chasm between the two is so prodigious that there are few if any points of reference common anymore to the elites versus the general public.  The proverbial ivory towers in which dwell the elites are easily as removed from the quotidian realities experienced by us peasants as they were in Louis XVI's France before the Revolution broke out.  This constatation does not merely make for a neat rhetorical tableau; it entails practical repercussions also.  In a democracy, the people are governed by consent, which is in turn engendered by a respect for and belief in the system.  When there occurs an irreconcilable disconnect between the government and the governed, two scenarios can come to pass.  Either the system collapses in part or in whole (as has happened in the West's history quite a few times in the wake of various scandals, such as Watergate) or the government transitions into a ruling class that maintains its position through force, intimidation, and repression.  The emergence of "managerial politics" and phenomena such as asiktskorridor (on both of which more in a future installment) have been a part of that transition for a while now, as has what can only be termed as persecution of law-abiding people by an ideologically-driven police, but their tactics are reaching an unprecedented crescendo.  The British prime minister put military troops on the streets--unthinkable in a democracy as well as utterly pointless--, and has openly and most unapologetically presented plans for a "new" Internet, monitored and censored by the--benevolent, of course!--government.  Indeed, she has termed the Internet the "new battlefield" in the fight against "online extremism."  One would have to be supremely naive to believe that such schemes are designed with solely Moslem terrorists in mind.  After all, this is the same woman who less than four months ago designated the readers of Breitbart News as "extremists" to be targeted in a $75million campaign against online "hate speech."

It (almost) makes one hope that Corbyn dufus wins in the forthcoming British elections...

© 2017 Michael L.S.

A Three-Ring Circus at Airport "Security"

That did not take long, did it!  Nary but six weeks ago the U.S. government banned laptops being taken on board aircraft, in carry-on, on flights to America originating in a few airports in the Near East.  It was obvious then that it was only a matter of time before the prohibition was extended to other airports, and moves are indeed afoot to do precisely that.  It makes sense: Abdullah Al-Jihadi could easily circumvent the original rule by flying from, say, Istanbul to Germany (Germany famously lets anybody in), have a short layover, and proceed on to the States, an explosive-laden laptop always in his carry-on backpack.  The only way to forestall that possibility is to ban laptops, etc. in carry-ons on all flights to the U.S., which is almost inevitable to happen sooner than later.

It will not stop there though.  Surely, if America believes it necessary to take this step, then the threat must be real, and, betimes, all other countries will do the same.  The ban on liquids is instructive in this regard, and regulations only ever get tightened, never relaxed.  For it is not enough that people get routinely harassed, humiliated, sexually abused, and generally treated like criminals by the jumped-up semi-literate clowns at airports' "security" checkpoints.  "You, peasant, take off your belt and shoes!"  "What is this fluid in the baby-bottle, ma'am?  Your breast milk, you say?  Drink it!"  "Sir, yes you, the 90-year-old egg-timer with the walker!  Step on over here so we can swab your crotch for traces of explosives!"  "You, little toddler too young to talk: Crawl through this body scanner!  Unaided!!"  Evidently, even more ways to inconvenience travelers are needed.  The long put-upon passengers will have two choices.  The first is to pack their laptops, tablets, cameras, etc. (soon enough it will be cellphones, too) in their hold luggage, cross their fingers and toes, and hope for the very best.  Mishandling of people's luggage, with it being tossed around like throw-pillows, as well as thievery among luggage personnel are legendary, so putting in anything worth more than fifty bucks is a crapshoot.  The second option is to travel without.  Being that most people need Internet access and cameras to record their escapades even on brief vacations, it is unclear if that is a viable option at all.

Two things come to mind though.  Is this really about security?  The more conspiratorially-minded might suspect this is rather aimed to bolster the insurance industry.  Few people will put their $1,500+ laptops in their suitcases, knowing what fate might befall them.  What about those who travel only with carry-on to save on the costs of checked bags?  They will now have to spring for one, which will certainly gratify the airlines.  The elite tin-foil-hat brigade might even suspect there may be a desire to dissuade people from traveling at all in the name of combating "climate change."

This though is the nub of the issue: It is clear why this is happening, even assuming it is motivated by genuine security concerns.  When the Western society and the wider world consistently refuse to even name the threat (that would be Islam and Moslems), let alone address it, the only alternative left is to victimize everyone.  Everybody's convenience, time, dignity, and honor are routinely sacrificed on the altar of political correctness, which mandates that Moslems must not be profiled, even though they are the only ones carrying out terrorist attacks against airliners.

Here comes the worst part.  People take it.  They stand on line like pathetic sheep at T.S.A. checkpoints and let themselves be denigrated and dehumanized.  They then vote for the same managerial politicians, indistinguishable from one another, who enable it.  They partake in the vilification of those very few who dare to point to a better way.  Quite a few shrug and aver matter-of-factly: What's the big deal, just buy insurance.  Many denounce the naysayers with that trite old canard "better be safe than sorry."  But since terrorists have already found ways to conceal explosives inside their bodies, what will all these right-on Dudley Do-Rights say when, in a not-too-distant future, passengers begin to get a probe introduced into their backsides?  "I quite enjoyed that; thank you for keeping us safe," most likely.  After all, people who are happily shafted by their "leaders'" policies metaphorically will surely not mind it being done physically.

© 2017 Michael L.S.