Posted on 08/02/2009 7:15:16 PM PDT by FreedomPoster
Christopher Caldwell’s “Reflections on the Revolution in Europe: Immigration, Islam, and the West” is a hot book presented under a cool, scholarly title. To observe that Mr. Caldwell’s rhetoric is “hot” is not to say that it is aggrieved or unruly. On the contrary, Mr. Caldwell, a senior editor at The Weekly Standard and a columnist for The Financial Times, compiles his arguments patiently, twig by twig, and mostly with lucidity and intellectual grace and even wit.
But they are arguments one is not used to hearing put so baldly, at least from the West’s leading political journalists. Primary among them are these: Through decades of mass immigration to Europe’s hospitable cities and because of a strong disinclination to assimilate, Muslims are changing the face of Europe, perhaps decisively. These Muslim immigrants are not so much enhancing European culture as they are supplanting it. The products of an adversarial culture, these immigrants and their religion, Islam, are “patiently conquering Europe’s cities, street by street.”
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(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
The dilemma on the Left is that they can’t resist the Islamic invasion without contradicting everything they’ve been preaching for decades. Of course, this assumes they really want to resist Islam—its quite possible it may all be part of the plan.
When you peel back the onion, the Left has always been after one thing: absolute power. It was true (and obvious) in Stalin’s time and it is true now. The best way to successfully wield absolute power is to totally subvert the individual to the State. To do that, one must tear down the attitudes, values, and traditions that the majority holds dear and replace them with a new, different set. This is a variant on the technique used in military basic training. That is part of the reason why the Left supports things like rampant immigration, Gay marriage, and radical feminism while eschewing traditional Western religions. Radical Islam fits the bill in two respects. First, like the Left, it seeks the overthrow of Judeo/Christian culture. Second, and more importantly, Islamic clerics have close to absolute power over their adherents. If the Mullahs can motivate someone to be a suicide bomber, convincing them to pay higher taxes should be a piece of cake. Many in the Left must salivate at the thought of having that much control over the individual. At some point, the Left will have to choose between radical Islam and the continued embrace of its traditional interest groups (gays, feminists, etc). I predict they will chose the former, because ultimately the Islamists will be more numerous (in 30-50 years or so).
I didn’t register with them. I think if people do, they will start charging sooner or later.
parsy.
The “rivers of blood” have not formed yet!
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/west_midlands/7343256.stm
They may start charging anyway whether anyone registers or not. I think a lot of them may have to start charging or go out of business. Some already are charging but no major ones I'm aware of yet. Maybe now I wouldn't register with them, very rarely do anywhere any more unless for good reason.
But I don't understand why you can't read the article without registering and wonder if any other posters who have never registered are having the same problem.
And why can I read the article without signing/logging in? I'd be hard put to remember exactly what I registered under. I swear I cannot keep up with all my stupid user names and passwords I use around the web lol. And I haven't joined a new site for a long time now. And there are only two sites where I'll go see my "greeting card" because I believe a lot of them are to collect valid email addresses for spam or possibly worse.
BTW, after I cleaned my cache, I picked up one more piece of garbage from the NYT because I left the browser open. So I cleaned it out and closed it.
Same. But this is third time today I could not view article. And last 2 weeks I actually posted NYT articles and linked to them here.
Who knows.
parsy.
If one looks at the world, it doesn’t take a majority of Muslims to cause chaos. In France, they are a majority, yet EVERY year on New Year’s, they riot and burn hundreds of cars. They are parts of France police and “infidels” can’t go. Other nations in Europe face similar problems NOW, when Muslims are still a relatively small minority, The age of Muslims is also a problem as young men tend to be more criminal than women or older men. Muslims are young in Europe and elsewhere. Europe will be lost I imagine relatively soon - a few decades.
You have provided a very astute observation, and I agree with most of what you say. Yes, the left lusts after absolute power, and to achieve that end they must destroy the foundations of the West. Multiculturalism is the hammer they wield to smash the West.
But where I disagree with you is the characterization of the West as Judeo-Christian. It is not. The West is Hellenistic-Christan. And when we forget that magnificent amalgam, we will be lost and crumble. Giving us amnesia of that amalgam is precisely the aim of the political Left.
Maybe it's a simpler answer or clear out your cache and cookies and try again? Maybe you do that habitually already.
Maybe they'll block me for posting here if there's a way to track; undoubtedly there is.
EvidenceEliminator will nuke all the cookies that you do not tell it you want to keep. You wouldn't believe how much scumware, malware, cookies, and web droppings EE cleans out of there.
A good disc cleaner is worth its weight. Check around for one. Too, try this guy's cleanup links:
http://www.hal-pc.org/~toner27/cleanup.html
The most fundamental ideas -- such as privacy, modesty, personal space (your bathroom e.g.) -- are Judaic. They go back to the cleanliness and godliness of the temple priests, the Levites and Zadokites (Sadducees), whose ablutions and customs of cleanliness were taken up by the Essenes and transmitted by them to the proto-Christians. Greco-Roman ideas like, say, mass public latrines and baths with full nudity and sexual activity in the alcoves (exedrae) have been repudiated in our culture, and the recrudescence of "Greek" sexual mores is almost exclusively homosexual and decayed.
Yeah, stuff gets stuck all over my pc probably don't know the half of it. Some of it I don't know what it's for or I'd delete it knowing that it could be recovered with sophisticated software and techniques anyway. Use Win Media Player with FF and it still turns up in my IE8 cache. Some third grader would probably figure that out faster than I did.
I'm going to have to do some more research on this one. Sometimes I do ~think~ I have nuked all my cookies and start over because I do that occasionally, but I doubt that's sufficient.
I resent the sneakiness and deceptiveness of it all. I mean even supposedly reputable sites, what do they need with all that garbage and what do they do with it?
That characterization of ancient Greek and Roman culture is extremely distorted and frankly wrong. Those culture were highly moral, developing moral philosophy and intellectual disciplines that make ancient Jewish culture look quite primitive. Christianity never took root among Semitic cultures, whether Jewish or Arabic.
Without the Hellenistic inheritance, there is no West.
That very thing happened last week. Do a search for "New York Times" and "sunspots" and you'll find an article that suspects the globe will be in for some significant cooling for the next couple of decades.
It's not that new. Domestic politics is another animal, but the NY Times is worth reading for foreign affairs and science reporting and reviews except when the topic is already politicized, e.g. global warming. Even with global warming, they're cracking.
Atlas Shrugs belongs on that list
What’s the difference if they charge you? You won’t even use them when they are free.
It is "extremely distorted" only in this, that I pointed to a feature of classical life that is conspicuously missing from Western culture today; and howbeit that that arrangement was not the rule among the people who practiced classical civilization, nevertheless it is diagnostic, an Occam's Razor if you will, for separating and distinguishing the classical attitudes toward the body and bodily functions from their Judaic counterparts. We inherited the Judaic attitudes and customs.
This statement is abundantly supported by the archaeological record and is not "wrong".
That defi will come as a severe shock to Christian Galilaeans and to any number of Maronite and Nestorian Christians. Believing it would make it nearly impossible to understand how Christians in India came to practice their liturgy in Syriac. My sister got married in this language 25 years ago, in a church Christianized 17 centuries previously by St. Thomas of India, who followed the Roman trade routes to take up a mission in the Greek trading entrepots of the Malabar Coast.
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