Posted on 10/25/2002 12:14:19 AM PDT by jennyp
The Recent Nightclub Bombings in Bali Illustrate Just What the "War on Terror" Is Really About
On the night of Saturday, October 12--the second anniversary of the suicide bombing of the USS Cole, a year, month, and day after the destruction of the World Trade Center, and mere days after terrorist attacks in Yemen, Kuwait, and the Philippines--two car bombs detonated outside neighboring nightclubs on the island of Bali, triggering a third explosive planted inside, and killing nearly 200 people (the majority of whom were Australian tourists), injuring several others, and redirecting the focus of the war against terror to Indonesia.
Also on the night of Saturday, October 12, the following bands and DJs were playing and spinning at several of Seattle's rock and dance clubs from Re-bar to Rock Bottom: FCS North, Sing-Sing, DJ Greasy, Michiko, Super Furry Animals, Bill Frisell Quintet, the Vells, the Capillaries, the Swains, DJ Che, Redneck Girlfriend, Grunge, Violent Femmes, the Bangs, Better Than Ezra, the Briefs, Tami Hart, the Spitfires, Tullycraft, B-Mello, Cobra High, Randy Schlager, Bobby O, Venus Hum, MC Queen Lucky, Evan Blackstone, and the RC5, among many, many others.
This short list, taken semi-randomly from the pages of The Stranger's music calendar, is designed to illustrate a point that is both facile and essential to reckoning the effects of the Bali bombings. Many of you were at these shows, dancing, smoking, drinking, talking, flirting, kissing, groping, and presumably enjoying yourselves, much like the 180-plus tourists and revelers killed at the Sari Club and Paddy's Irish Pub in Bali. Though no group has come forward to claim responsibility for the bombings, they were almost certainly the work of Muslim radicals launching the latest volley in the war against apostasy.
Whether the attacks turn out to have been the work of al Qaeda or one of the like-purposed, loosely connected, multicellular organizations that function in the region--groups like the Jemaah Islamiyah (an umbrella network that seeks a single Islamic state comprising Malaysia, Indonesia, and Singapore), the Indonesian Mujahedeen Council (led by the nefarious Abu Bakar Bashir), Laskar Jihad (which waged holy war on Christians in the Spice Islands before mysteriously disbanding two weeks ago), or the Islam Defenders Front (which makes frequent "sweeps" of bars and nightclubs, attacking non-Muslims, and violently guarding against "prostitution and other bad things")--will ultimately prove to be of little consequence. What matters is that the forces of Islamic fascism have struck again, in a characteristically cowardly, murderous, and yes, blasphemous fashion that must register as an affront to every living human with even a passing interest in freedom.
The facile part: It could have happened here, at any club in Seattle. It's a ludicrous thought, of course--at least as ludicrous as the thought of shutting the Space Needle down on New Year's Eve because some crazy terrorist was arrested at the Canadian border--but that doesn't make it any less true. That doesn't mean we should be looking over our shoulders and under our chairs every time we go to a show. It simply means that it could happen anywhere, because anywhere is exactly where rabid Islamists can find evidence of blasphemy against their precious, imaginary god.
Which brings us to the essential part: The Bali bombings were not an attack against Bali; they were an attack against humankind. In all the jawflap about the whys and wherefores of the multiple conflicts currently dotting our collective radar screen--the war against terror, the war on Iraq, the coming holy war, et al.--it seems worth restating (at the risk of sounding pious) that the war against basic human liberty, waged not by us but on us, is at the heart of the matter. Discourse has justifiably, necessarily turned to complexities of strategy, diplomacy, and consequences. The moral truth, however, remains agonizingly basic. We are still dealing with a small but indefatigable contingent of radicalized, militant absolutists who believe that every living being is accountable to the stricture of Shari'a, under penalty of death. As Salman Rushdie wrote, in an oft-cited Washington Post editorial, the fundamentalist faction is against, "to offer a brief list, freedom of speech, a multi-party political system, universal adult suffrage, accountable government, Jews, homosexuals, women's rights, pluralism, secularism, short skirts, dancing, beardlessness, evolution theory, sex." If these were fictional villains, you'd call them hyperbolic, not believable. But they aren't fictional. Their code would be laughable if it weren't so aggressively despicable.
As headlines about Bali cross-fade into news of North Korean nukes, and there are further debates about the finer points of Iraqi de- and restabilization, it's crucial to remember that there is, in fact, a very real enemy, with a very real will, and the very real power of delusional self-righteousness. How to remember? Consider the scene of the attacks (as reported by various Australian and European news sources):
It's a typical hot, sweaty, drunken, lascivious Saturday night. People, primarily young Aussie tourists from Melbourne, Geelong, Perth, and Adelaide, are crammed into the clubs, mixing it up, spilling out into the street. Rock band noises mix with techno music and innumerable voices as latecomers clamor to squeeze inside. Just after 11:00 p.m., a car bomb explodes outside of Paddy's, followed a few seconds later by a second blast that smashes the façade of the Sari Club and leaves a hole in the street a meter deep and 10 meters across. The second bomb is strong enough to damage buildings miles away. All at once, everything's on fire. People are incinerated. Cars go up in flames. Televisions explode. Ceilings collapse, trapping those still inside. Screams. Blistered, charred flesh. Disembodied limbs. Mangled bodies. Victims covered in blood. Inferno.
Now transpose this horrible, fiery mass murder from the seedy, alien lushness of Bali to, say, Pioneer Square, where clubs and bars are lined up in the same teeming proximity as the Sari and Paddy's in the "raunchy" Jalan Legian district, the busiest strip of nightlife in Kuta Beach. Imagine a car blowing up outside the Central Saloon and another, across the street at the New Orleans. Again, it seems too simple an equation, but the fact remains that the victims were not targeted at random, or for merely political purposes. They were doing exactly what any of us might be doing on any night of the week: exercising a liberty so deeply offensive to religious believers as to constitute blasphemy. And the punishment for blasphemy is death.
There is an ongoing lie in the official governmental position on the war against terror, which bends over backwards to assure us that, in the words of our president, "we don't view this as a war of religion in any way, shape, or form." Clearly, in every sense, this is a war of religion, whether it's declared as such or not. And if it isn't, then it certainly should be. Not a war of one religion against another, but of reason against religion--against any belief system that takes its mandate from an invisible spiritual entity and endows its followers with the right to murder or subjugate anyone who fails to come to the same conclusion. This is the war our enemies are fighting. To pretend we're fighting any other--or worse, that this war is somehow not worth fighting, on all fronts--is to dishonor the innocent dead.
Replace "God" with "the purple gnome that lives under my bed" and it should be obvious. If it isn't obvious, I would question your grasp on rationality. It is generally not healthy to blindly believe irrational assertions, which you have stated above (in not so many words) that you do. Actually, this has little to do with belief in God specifically, and has everything to do with believing ANY assertion with null priors.
Before you criticize anyone for lack of substance, you had better do something about your typical post, Mr. Placemarker, sideline cat-caller.
BTW, your linked definition of reason --the faculty that identifies and integrates the material provided by man’s senses, sure looks like a benchwarmer definition of the human mind.
Stop trying to use a hammer to fix a watch -- you are ignoring all the details of substance. A rational belief is one with non-null priors (e.g. children falling down stairs) and therefore it is reasonable to use this as an assertion. An irrational belief is one with one or more null priors (e.g. purple aliens stole my dog) and therefore cannot be reasonably used in an argument UNLESS you can prove that the priors are non-null (e.g. provide solid evidence that purple aliens even exist). These are the rules for "reason" in any rigorous sense. They do not change when one of the priors is "God", "Marxism", or any other arbitrary concept.
In your above statement, you've confused making a rational assertion with an irrational assertion. If the assertion is rational in the sense that it has all non-null priors, then it is reasonable for anyone to believe it. And even if they don't believe it, it is reasonable for you to use it in an argument as long as they accept that there are no null priors. This is "reason". If there is even one non-null prior, it is not reasonable for someone to believe it, and expecting that they should is unreasonable. Whether or not something happened is immaterial to whether or not it is rational for any one else to believe you. I could tell everyone that I saw my truck levitationg in my garage, and maybe I really did, but that does not constitute a reasonable assertion to most people and the onus is on me to prove that such things are possible.
I was explaining why "orthogonal" and "compatible" are not mutually exclusive terms. They aren't, but you seemed to think they were.
That is not null, millions of people have "seen" that very thing happen on television.
The door opened in any event, and on February 2 they drove in Iraq. The tapes Alpert and DeLeo brought back show an eerily empty highway to Baghdad, with the occasional bombed-out truck floating past the car window.
And I hope that you would agree it is not reason which determines what will be your no null prior. Reason can play with what it puts on the table, but it is not reason which decides what is permissible for consideration. The operations of the mind including reason do not work independently. They depend on the senses, but also memory and will.
Let's say you did see your truck levitating in the garage. Is it necessary to prove it to someone else in order for it to be true?
It may very well have happened, but you can't prove it. Brilliant or not, lets have the argument we're having, not some other argument, ok?
I would argue that a good analogy holds between the use of the word in math, and in ordinary discourse. If two phenomena related to a given field of discourse have effects that can reasonably taken to be independent of each other, than it's reasonable to call them othogonal, even if they haven't an exact metric you can use measuring instruments on. As in, for instance, the claim of a mother that her love for her child does not diminish her love for her husband. Orthogonal love--I've got pictures from the Kama Sutra.
When I talk about animals collectively hunting, or using tools, I refer to Jane Goodall's landmark study of wild Chimpanzees at Gombe,Tanzania This work is an on-going project which began over 30 years ago and continues today. Dr. Goodall was the first to observe chimpanzees using twigs to "fish" for termites which are a delicacy for them. She stated that not all animals used this method, but that she observed adult females instructing their young how to do this. This was the first time an example of tool-use by a non-human primate was documented. Her students at Gombe and other primatologists working in other sites have also reported tool use among chimpanzees.
Dr. Goodall also reported that she observed small groups of animals banding together for the purpose of cornering and killing small monkeys which they enjoy consuming. They generally chose Colobus monkeys, but she observed them also killing other species. She described that the flesh would be eaten by the highest raking male and then distributed to other males and then females and juveniles.
When I discussed language, I thought primarily of the ongoing experiment with the gorilla Koko begun over 15 years ago ( could be older than that) by Dr. Francine (Penny) Patterson. Koko, a female was obtained as an infant and hand-raised by Dr.Patterson. She undertook a project which was designed to teach language through the use of symbols and AMESLAN (American sign language). Koko was systematically exposed to pictorial representations and signs and acquired an extensive vocabulary of over 251 (could be more) symbols to communicate with. Koko could combine words creatively to form new objects.Over the years, she voiced her desire to have a kitten and was given one which she named All Ball. Subsequently, All Ball was killed by a car and Dr. Patterson catalogued on film a period of inconsoleable mourning that Koko endured. She later chose another kitten. With Koko's maturity,Dr. Patterson realized that soon, she would be wanting a mate. Koko told Dr. Patterson that she wanted to have her own infant. Since choosing a potential mate for Koko would be a daunting process, Dr. Patterson allowed her to see photos of prospective mates to choose from. Subsequently, her male companion was sent from a zoo. Unfortunately, they have not mated as yet.
Another example of primates acquiring language was the experment with Kanzi the pygmy chimp. In the 1970's, Sue Savage Rumbaugh trained two chimps, Sherman and Austin, to use a keyboard to produce lexigrams (symbols representing objects like Koko used).When they became fairly fluent, she conmstructed an experment in which they had to cooperate to perform various tasks. She observed that they spontaneously used the lexigrams to learn from and communicate with one another.
In the experiment with a male chimp, Kanzi, Dr. Rumbaugh was surprised to observe that he had learned to use the keyboard to produce lexigrams entirely on his own by watching his adoptive mother.
There is also the oldest of the studies involving the chimp Washoe who was taught AMESLAN. This was the forerunner of all the other studies.
These experiments all display the extent to which non-human primates have exhibited cognitive abilities. If these animals can create words, explain their feelings, and communicate with their human and non-human companions, I believe this is evidence of a latent intellectual capacity. If you need references for any of the examples I cited, I will happy to provide them, but that will take some time to accomplish.
When I talk about animals collectively hunting, or using tools, I refer to Jane Goodall's landmark study of wild Chimpanzees at Gombe,Tanzania This work is an on-going project which began over 30 years ago and continues today. Dr. Goodall was the first to observe chimpanzees using twigs to "fish" for termites which are a delicacy for them. She stated that not all animals used this method, but that she observed adult females instructing their young how to do this. This was the first time an example of tool-use by a non-human primate was documented. Her students at Gombe and other primatologists working in other sites have also reported tool use among chimpanzees.
Dr. Goodall also reported that she observed small groups of animals banding together for the purpose of cornering and killing small monkeys which they enjoy consuming. They generally chose Colobus monkeys, but she observed them also killing other species. She described that the flesh would be eaten by the highest raking male and then distributed to other males and then females and juveniles.
When I discussed language, I thought primarily of the ongoing experiment with the gorilla Koko begun over 15 years ago ( could be older than that) by Dr. Francine (Penny) Patterson. Koko, a female was obtained as an infant and hand-raised by Dr.Patterson. She undertook a project which was designed to teach language through the use of symbols and AMESLAN (American sign language). Koko was systematically exposed to pictorial representations and signs and acquired an extensive vocabulary of over 251 (could be more) symbols to communicate with. Koko could combine words creatively to form new objects.Over the years, she voiced her desire to have a kitten and was given one which she named All Ball. Subsequently, All Ball was killed by a car and Dr. Patterson catalogued on film a period of inconsoleable mourning that Koko endured. She later chose another kitten. With Koko's maturity,Dr. Patterson realized that soon, she would be wanting a mate. Koko told Dr. Patterson that she wanted to have her own infant. Since choosing a potential mate for Koko would be a daunting process, Dr. Patterson allowed her to see photos of prospective mates to choose from. Subsequently, her male companion was sent from a zoo. Unfortunately, they have not mated as yet.
Another example of primates acquiring language was the experment with Kanzi the pygmy chimp. In the 1970's, Sue Savage Rumbaugh trained two chimps, Sherman and Austin, to use a keyboard to produce lexigrams (symbols representing objects like Koko used).When they became fairly fluent, she conmstructed an experment in which they had to cooperate to perform various tasks. She observed that they spontaneously used the lexigrams to learn from and communicate with one another.
In the experiment with a male chimp, Kanzi, Dr. Rumbaugh was surprised to observe that he had learned to use the keyboard to produce lexigrams entirely on his own by watching his adoptive mother.
There is also the oldest of the studies involving the chimp Washoe who was taught AMESLAN. This was the forerunner of all the other studies.
These experiments all display the extent to which non-human primates have exhibited cognitive abilities. If these animals can create words, explain their feelings, and communicate with their human and non-human companions, I believe this is evidence of a latent intellectual capacity. If you need references for any of the examples I cited, I will happy to provide them, but that will take some time to accomplish.
I am, in fact, overly fond of lecturing into hyperspace, just ask my family. However, insofar as I can tell, my responses to you have been cogent and to the point.
Someone said reason and faith are orthogonally compatible, I questioned what that was, and you two start into rocket science. If you guys want to read stuff you say, just do it in notepad, read it over and over, but don't send it to me. Neither one of you said anything understandable about the relationship between reason and faith. At least you're not rude like the other guy.
If you do not see the analogy between a mother's love for her children and her husband, and human respect for reason and faith, I cannot force it on you, but I also don't feel too inclined to shoulder the responsibility for your incomprehension. I think I have been reasonably brief and clear.
Did you not read the rest of what I wrote? In this case, it would be unreasonable for anyone else to believe me, even if it really happened. In other words, it is only a rational belief from my perspective, but utterly irrational from the perspective of others and correctly so. I can't really know that I saw or experienced what I thought I saw. Hence "extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof". The problem is that most people don't even prove their beliefs to themselves and take what they think they've experienced at face value. Not very wise.
This is where science comes in. Science, in a nutshell, is about generating priors for a given assertion. From the perspective of someone who didn't see the car levitate it is rational to dismiss the claim until such time as someone can provide evidence to support the claim. It is never rational to believe the arbitrary assertion of a person when it is not backed up by any significant priors. Do you listen to and believe everything some knucklehead (like me :-) tells you automatically? Science is typically the systematic method by which priors can be obtained so that something is rationally believable.
Whether or not YOU THINK something happened is completely immaterial to whether it actually happened and whether or not any one else should believe you. People are notoriously unreliable observers and this is how we filter out psychotic episodes, delusions, misinformation, poor memory, and a boatload of other things that make people believe things that never actually happened. Only a fool trusts that their personal experiences are an infallible record of truth or reality. That's why it is necessary to checkpoint everything you believe against a rational framework.
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