Eh? Not murdering people is a religious idea? And here I was thinking it was a common sense prerequisite for any culture that doesn’t want to keep itself in the bloody mud. Are you implying lawmakers found it important to pass laws against murder ‘at least partly’ because it was against their religion?

Excellent post though. I’m nowhere near neo-neocon levels but I am a liberal getting quite pissed about the idiocy of the ‘hug a suicide bomber’ type liberals.

I wish there were more conservatives like you; ones that (from what little I’ve read so far) make sense, and less like those at LGF, whose comment threads are flamewars instead of discussions. I’m still looking for more moderate liberals, too. It did take me a couple months to figure out Chomsky was ridiculously over the top… I really wish the rest of ‘my side’ would catch on to things like that, and say so when they do.

This describes our current situation quiet well. We the people have (barely) elected George W. Bush, all-too-obvious warts and all, twice, with great resistance from the true powers that be of our culture: our movie-makers, the mass media, the entrenched state and federal bureaucracy, and the education establishment that raises the next generation while we’re out pursuing our two-career lives.

Now, if an orthodox believer attempts to use force or coercion to bring others onto the path he believes to be correct, then he becomes an extremist.

The disturbing thing about the cartoon jihad isn’t the actions of the rioters- it’s the lack of visible resistance by the silent Islamic majority, which is tantamount to approval, even if it’s neutral.

You could argue that the polygamists can be given the Mormon title for their obvious connection to the historical roots of Mormonism, but this confuses them with actual members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, who consider them apostates of the first order.

I agree that the polygamists need to be prosecuted and rooted out as aggressively as possible. I don’t think anyone detests them as much as actual Mormons; I should know, I am one.

I suppose this could be seen as a “Moderate Versus Radical Islam” type issue, but it doesn’t really fit. The polygamists aren’t even considered Mormons by anyone in the Church itself, and they’re an incredibly tiny minority of the more than twelve million Mormons in the world, most of whom live outside the United States.

That said, there is something wrong with how the extremists are reacting. There’s something very, very wrong and misguided about it. Their reaction is not even close to being a dialogue with the rest of society, in spite of their own conviction that it is. Their reaction is an attempt at imposition, an attempt at subjection. There *is* no attempt at dialogue, which overturns the whole reason for objecting to begin with. There is no attempt to convince; the current reaction is only a threat to punish. In contrast, my reaction to something like Piss Christ is my own, yet if I choose to speak up about it, my opinion had better be a rational attempt to use logic to convince others of the validity of my point of view. It would ideally be a dialogue, a conversation, a debate even. But not a threat; that would be taking things too far. That is how society gets along: It discusses.

But this current reaction… there’s no attempt at dialogue. There’s only a demand. There’s only threat. The demonstrators could have restrained their reaction to registering complaint and actually have gotten sympathetic answers because merely objecting would have been a natural part of the dialogue between various groups in society. That would’ve been an attempt to convince, not impose. It’s astonishing that they don’t see that. It seems as though they feel so separated, maybe even so far above society that they feel no obligation to enter such dialogue. Thus, the protests, and violent threats to the cartoonists, the paper publishing them, and the society that refuses to censor them. The protesters seem to revel in the schism. Add to that a sense of moral superiority, and it’s as if their view is that the rest of society must give in to them, not merely enter a dialogue of accomodation where both parties give and take.

But that reveling in the schism… there’s something fundamentally nihilistic about that. There’s no way an intelligent being can fail to recognize how destructive that is. And that’s the ultimate condemnation of the overreaction. Demanding punishment, threatening death, burning down embassies in other countries… there’s no care for others in the societies they exist in. There’s no attempt to see the cartoons as anything other than an excuse to excercise hatred and contempt. And there certainly is no attempt to make things “better” i.e. there’s no attempt to create positive environments for their beliefs, there’s no attempt to reconcile themselves with their immediate neighbors, there’s no attempt to better themselves in the environment they’ve ended up with. There’s only demonstrations of malicious intents. That, ultimately is the epitome of nihilism: The idea that destruction is desireable for its own sake independent of any constructive possibilities. And that’s why I’m troubled by these demonstrators. The act of speaking up itself is a natural, tolerable one, but these extremists seem more to be affirming the schism between them and the rest of society than actually protesting what they see as an insult. They seem to be indulging in the separation, and doing so in the most negative, fanatical way possible. They don’t seem to be interested in civil construction, only societal demolition. And ultimately, they only tarnish themselves. The only problem is, they destroy a heck of a lot of the society they belong to in the process.

Are you anonymously claiming that Jyllands-Posten is currently, officially, fascist? That “fact” was not published in any of the articles about this issue.

Do you have any proof?