Rusted Sky

The cartoon flap is getting pretty interesting. First you have mobs burning the Danish and Norwegian embassies, over the cartoons. Now, this seems a bit like an overreaction to me, but if you look at it from a political standpoint it makes perfect sense. The radical Islamists are staking out their territory, marking the lines so to speak. "Publish a cartoon we don't like, and we'll burn your embassy." A fine bit of intimidation, that, which sets the stage nicely for further blackmail down the line.

You think not? Well, you've got more faith in the goodwill of the radicals than I have at this point. I think they're feeling out just how far they can push things playing the outraged victims of a heinous crime perpetrated on them by the evil West.

You might be interested in the following two links - the writer points out how the acceptance in the west by a good number of academia and policy makers of the concept that identity politics trump all and cultural relativism was the only way to go has gone far in precipitating the current crisis. (I think it's fair to call what's going on a crisis - it's difficult to tell just what's going to happen next and the alternatives all look rather bloody...) He mentions the following...

Unsurprisingly, this whole philosophical movement—insofar as it was based first on essentialism and then, once the group could be defined down through blood, to the excommunication of apostates to that essentialist narrative after the battle over defining the official ethnic and political narrative was internally decided—was destined to end in a will to power. Which is what happens when universalism—even in its softest and most agreed upon form (for instance, it could simply be a contractual, contingent universalism, to satisfy the sensibilities of post modernists)—is discarded in favor of the notion that individualism (the base point at which human universalism as an ideal is at its strongest, the point that Bush has cleverly made over and over again in his speeches) is to be surrendered to collectivism (the point at which the will of the most powerful within the group is always ascendant, and where apostacy, which we might call disagreement, is a legitimate offense), comes to mimic a kind of individualism by united front: “The Arab Street.” “The Jihadist.” Etc. These are types taken as individuals.

The way to fight back against such an historical drift toward a postmodern conception of a world defined by warring narratives vying for itinerate temporary ascendency (what is commonly called relativism, though the concept is not by nature evil) is to discredit the underlying mechanisms that allow them to form, take root, and aquire justification through intellectual means (be those means the academic acceptance and defense of the underlying premises, or the political and public policy adoption of the lessons offered by such defenses).

Identity Politics, Free Speech, and the Future of worldwide Liberalism, 2: a follow-up

Short form - liberalism as constructed presently is doomed. The 'melting pot' ideal of assimilation works much better than a 'patchwork quilt' version, and the insistance on identity politics isn't viable long-term...

Indeed, it may well be fatal for the body which implements it.

J.