Posted on 10/17/2006 12:02:31 AM PDT by goldstategop
"Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached." -Manuel II Paleologus
"Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached." -Manuel II Paleologus
Ironically, I see liberalism hung by it's own petard. Do we have the freedom to associate with who we wish? Well, an "all male" or "non-Jewish" country club is automatically evil, and must be considered bigoted, and therefore destroyed. Can a business only allow "certain" people inside? I must admit I am torn on this issue. Part of me thinks this is blatant discrimination that wouldn't be tolerated for a second by liberals in any other situation. On the other hand, is this guy allowed to be a bigot, or retard, or intolerant jackass? Should it be all economic? If he refuses to pick up "evil" people with alcohol, then shouldn't he therefore suffer the consequences of losing out on paying customers?
What if I were to get in the cab and eat a hot dog or sausage sandwich? Will that be next?
You bet and should those who are not bringing alcohol in the cab decide they don't want a Muslim driver?
Any driver who participates in this nonsense should deal with more than the loss of one fare.
Taxis are a regulated public utility, requried to take all legal business, in exchange for market protection from unlicensed competitors.
The proper response is to yank the guy's taxi license.
(Or get government out of the taxi regulating bidness...but that's a topic for a different thread...)
I think everyone should bring bottles of alcohol to taxi stands.
Then again, I see no difference between this and pharmacists who refuse to give out RU-486, or such things.
So the parable of the taxi driver teaches us that Islam has yet to taste of the Scottish Enlightenment. No Enlightenment means no tolerance, no notion that tolerance is essential to civilization.
What are we to do with this insight? If you are a rabid Muslim hater (there are such people after all) you are inclined to say, "see, I told you so, there is no dealing with these people, negotiation means appeasement and appeasement means only defeat, Islam must be defeated which means that Islam must be annihilated." If you are a liberal, you react in horror to such a stance, you call it the equivalent of racism, and proclaim that the root causes of Muslim intolerance must be dealt with. If you are a conservative, you reject the first as morally wrong and physically impossible (there are after all 1.4 billion Muslims in the world), and the second as impractical (we are in a war in which crazed Islamo- fundamentalists would cheerfully blow up or cities and murder us by the millions and there is not that much time or money or even patience in the enlightened world to get the job done).
So what is the conservative solution? The problem is that the world of Islam is so intolerant that it is dangerous and mortally dangerous at that to our civilization, our democracy, and our children's very lives. But the Muslim does not see himself as unenlightened. He is sure he is possessed of all of the Enlightenment there is to have and it is divine enlightenment. He denies that he is intolerant and insists that he is righteous. There is no scientific method, no idea of the marketplace of ideas, no receptivity. Just as the medicine of oncology cannot kill the cancerous cell if it cannot gain entry, so the intolerant Muslim cannot hear if he will not listen.
The honest truth is that there is no conservative solution to this dilemma. If the problem were an incorrigible criminal, conservatives would know what to do: lock him up, quarantine him. But we are dealing with a fifth of the planet here. There is an entity which showed itself quite capable of dealing with huge portions of the world's population who were ignorant, violent, and in many cases, Muslim and that entity was the British Empire operating in all the glory of its enlightened imperialist age. How did the thin red line manage the uncivilized world so successfully for so long until the royal Navy passed the baton to the American Navy?
Well, they did not do it the French way, the Brits did not go native. For the most part, they maintained their standards, they provided an efficient bureaucracy, a rule of law, and an essentially honest administration. In short, they operated within the lights of their own enlightenment. The caricature of the British colonialist of the Victorian age is of an Englishman so insular and so arrogant that he was incapable of understanding or adapting to local conditions and cultures even to the extent that he would go out into the midday sun. This is wholly unfair and a misreading of history. In fact the Brits were quite observant and really good listeners. Clive did not conquer India with only 800 men by overwhelming millions, he achieved this stupendous victory by setting his enemies against each other. He read each faction carefully and manipulated them.
I have posted time and again on these threads my belief that ultimately this intergenerational, world war against 1.4 billion Muslims for the very survival of our civilization and our democracy and our children's lives must be lost if it is not won by Muslims themselves. We must become as wily as the British and mobilize what is sane in the Muslim world to save us because they must save themselves.
But in the long haul it is only Muslims who have the keys to their brothers. If the medicine is to kill the cancerous cells in the body Islam, the medicine must somehow find the portal into the cell. We cannot enlighten our taxi driver by exhorting him to be enlightened. He is deaf and blind to these Western ideas. He does not feel himself any bit enlightened but rather threatened. He is, however, likely to be receptive to ideas which are couched in the language and the idiom of Islam. Like Clive, we had better learn the idiom.
The question is more fundamental than that. In most places taxis operate under a license, and the number of licenses is limited. The pious fiction is that this insures safety, the reality is that is lessens competition and increases prices, presumably benefitting the drivers.
I really liked the proposal to color-code the "taxi" signs on the cars. While this might not help the blind man with a dog, it would theoretically allow people with alcohol to avoid muslim-driven cabs.
It would have the marvelous benefit of allowing any American at all to completely boycot muslim-driven cabs. Something I feel would be completely justified.
The current situation is unsustainable, but I wonder what happened to the enforcement mechanism we already have. The simple way to deal with the issue is to re-notify the cab drivers that they are common carriers and must take all passengers. The send out a few inspectors with dogs and bottles of wine. A hefty fine for the first infraction, say $5000, and complete loss of cab driving license for the second one would bring these guys into compliance in short order. I would even propose changing the taxi laws to provide jail time for refusing to take a guide dog.
If we do not take every opportunity to demonstrate to muslims that they must comply with the laws of the US, rather than forcing the US to comply with their laws we will lose the war with islam.
Next thing you know they won't let in women that do not wear a burkha. They must not be allowed to get away with this!
No such 'animal' exists.
You have 1.4 billion Muslims to wage war against. When does the bombing start? I assume you will want to go nuke right away to kill all of them if you can because even a few in our midst can cause us terrible damage.
Today's taxi drivers may well be tomorrow's suicide murderers. The taxi drivers may talk and smile during the day, while plotting to kill us all at night.
Let me guess, your english?
But Anglophile.
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