Open thread 9/9/2026
This is a piece of double dance history. The choreography is from 1845, and the original version featured the four greatest ballet dancers of the day. This revival was filmed in 1964, over 60 years ago:
The New Neo
A blog about political change, among other things
Ayaan Hirsi Ali writing in TabletMag, “What Mohamed Atta Was Trying to Tell Us“: https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/mohamed-atta-25-years-911
Sdferr: I was about to post the same link.
Looks like the theory of evolution is making a comeback…
https://instapundit.com/821883/
Great essay by Ayaan Hirsi Ali. Thanks for posting.
With all due respect to the artistry, grace, style, and technique of the four ballerinas, I like watching Russ Tamblyn better.
Maybe it’s just the music.
The degree of athleticism by dancers like Tamblyn is of Olympic gymnast caliber. I suspect some of the ladies could do proportionately similar hi-falutin’ stunts, but they aren’t given as many opportunities to show off solo.
sdferr on September 9, 2026 at 12:10 pm:
Thank you for this link. I find the writing and thinking of Ayaan Hirsi Ali to be just amazing. Her brilliance just springs off of the page!
What it is going to take for us (collectively and civilization wide) to address her concerns, I have ideas but little confidence they will be implemented.
I suppose we should also attempt to balance her views against some of the sources that claim Islam is going to collapse or otherwise decline to a non-entity. I hope there is some truth in that, but I don’t find that the best way to bet.
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On evolution: during my last few airplane rides, I did happen to find some of my seat mates to be large Hispanic gentlemen with necks only slightly smaller than the Russian pictured above. They were men of wide shoulders, too, but not to the extreme in that posting.
sdferr, thanks much for that extraordinary link.
Hirsi Al’s methodically constructed, unflinchingly honest tour de force may well become, for this generation, the signature analysis and strategic guide regarding what the West must do to first comprehend and then protect itself from the global, hybrid threat posed by Islam and the Left.
In fact, while there are other formidable analysts out there, Hirsi Ali may, with this wise and comprehensive guide, be considered to be this era’s George F. Kennan; though one might take issue with her assumption that the West, in fact, truly wishes to survive, even if such an assumption OUGHT TO BE correct….
In short, a remarkable document that should be read and read again.
On 9-11 I was a leftist.
But a leftist who had read the Quran and books on Islam. I knew my comrades were asking entirely the wrong question: “Why do they hate us?”
That’s how I started to change. So Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s article is indeed important. Here’s her paragraph conclusion:
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To deny the radical and positive importance of Western culture to the human inheritance is more than a form of historical and individual blindness; it is a death wish that we can no longer afford to indulge. Tocqueville wrote that the greatness of America lay in her ability to repair her faults, not in being more enlightened than other nations, and that is still the right standard by which to judge the republic at 250. The question now is no longer whether America can kill terrorists faster than they regenerate. A resilient civilization would redesign its protections so that free information, migration rules, and associational liberty function as intended, to shelter citizens rather than adversaries. It would rebuild formative institutions, repair its leadership class, and recover enough constitutional confidence to resist civilizational subversion without abandoning liberty itself. It would also build a wall against people who do not share our culture and indeed actively wish to destroy it.
–Ayaan Hirsi Ali