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.
This is the BIG QUESTION that you can expect to face endlessly. That this doesn't refute the law of identity, only that we haven't found the proper identity, is never entertained.
If the law of identity works all the time, than, pardon my french--it works all the time. If it doesn't work all the time, than it is not ubiquitous, yes or no? Oh, but wait, you say, SOMEDAY, we will discover just the correct way to turn our heads so that we see that it works for the 2-slit.
Now that's a devastating argument, isn't it? The fact is that one buckyball goes through two visibly separated slits at the same time. This nakedly violates Identity using very simple structures that you can easily draw venn diagrams around. So unless you want to claim that buckyballs can't be elements of sets when you figure out how to "see" this as NOT a violation of the law of identity, you will have also thrown out the rest of classical physics.
QM is a house of cards built upon Planke's Constant and that Planke's Constant is bad math, not derived from any actual observation but by working backwards and plugging in a certain figure because that is the only figure that works but no one knows the how or why of that figure.
I suspect that both statements are true. There has been an accurate measurement of the Planck Constant by NIST. OTOH, the Planck Constant is the constant of proportionality.
(It seems like I'm forever defending the Platonist position that math and geometry pre-exist and await discovery - LOL!)
THE MOST ACCURATE MEASUREMENT YET OF THE PLANCK CONSTANT, the number which describes the bundle-like nature of matter and energy at the atomic and subatomic levels, has been carried out by NIST physicists, instantly improving the accuracy of related fundamental constants (such as electron mass, proton mass, and Avogadro's number) and paving the way for a quantum-based definition of mass. Carrying out an experiment first proposed by Brian Kibble of the National Physical Laboratory in England (011-44-171-594-7845), a NIST group (Edwin Williams, 301-975-4206) determined Planck's constant, otherwise known as h, by using a "moving-coil watt balance," an apparatus with a kilogram mass connected to a metal coil in a magnetic field. Injecting a current through the coil created an upward magnetic force which exactly balanced the downward force of gravity on the mass. In a second step, the group allowed the coil to move downward, measuring its velocity and the voltage it generated.
In both steps, the electrical power associated with the mechanical motions of the system contained quantities proportional to Planck's constant, allowing the researchers to extract the value of h while cancelling out factors such as the geometry of the setup. The team calculated a value for h of 6.62606891 x 10-34 Joule-seconds, with an uncertainty of 89 parts per billion, two times better than previously published measurements. Their watt-balance setup ultimately promises to lead to a definition of the kilogram based on quantum units, rather than one based on the stalwart physical artifact currently stored in France. (Physical Review Letters, 21 September 1998; figure at www.aip.org/physnews/graphics)
Introduction to Fundamental Physical Constants (NIST)
The velocity of light (c) and Planck's constant (h) are examples of quantities that occur naturally in the mathematical formulation of certain fundamental physical theories, the former in James Clerk Maxwell's theory of electric and magnetic fields and Albert Einstein's theories of relativity, and the latter in the theory of atomic particles, or quantum theory. For example, in Einstein's theories of relativity, mass and energy are equivalent, the energy (E) being directly proportional to the mass (m), with the constant of proportionality being the velocity of light squared (c2) -- i.e., the famous equation E = mc2.
The big quest in Physics is for the Higgs boson, which is necessary for the Standard Model. If it is not found, then the accepted theory of where mass comes from is in deep trouble.
HEP Fugitive - Higgs Boson (hilarious summary from Fermilab)
The Higgs Search at Fermilab (background)
Thank you so much for the encouragement and for the great discussion!
There is only one.
The self, the individual is the universal standard. Every person is ultimately concerned with him or her self. Reason is the means to understand and function in reality, to further that self. Only those that are concerned with reality need embrace reason.
There’s no way that I know of to reason a “happy middle” between the two views. I simply must accept that you don’t believe in God, and you to accept that I don’t believe in man (so to speak – that is, that man is the standard). And that’s just the way it is, the reality of the matter “at this point in time.”
Yet I seem to get you upset when I try to explain what I think and believe – probably because you think it totally far-fetched and “unreasonable.” You wrote: “Feelings don’t matter in this case, thoughts do. But only for those who think. Maybe one day you can join us.” [emphasis added]
From which I gather you do not consider me a thoughtful, reasoning individual, rather a thoughtless person “unconcerned with reality,” and given to fits of “feeling.” Or – good grief! – maybe even a mystic!!! (whatever that term signifies to you). Sigh…if that is the case, then why do you – a hard-headed rationalist -- want to waste your time speaking with me?
FWIW, having actually thought about and struggled with the problems of transcendence and immanence over several decades, I have concluded there is nothing unreasonable about faith. I look at it this way:
We live in an ordered, intelligible universe. It must be intelligible, otherwise man could not understand it; or alternatively, one could say that man has the “gift” of reason precisely so he can understand the way the world is. For man, a spiritual being, was “put in the world” -- i.e., man is an incarnated spirit – and must labor in it if he is to survive. Reason is man’s best “survival skill,” we might say.
Now if the universe is intelligible, it must be the product of Intelligence. Its orderliness speaks of conscious, rational, willed design. I do not see how the universe can be the product of purely random processes, of an “accidental piling up of accidents.” No, where there is design, there is Designer; where there is thought, there is a Mind to think it (pace Hegel); that there is “something” rather than “nothing at all” bespeaks a Desire, a Creative Will at work. The universe is “lawful” – in both the physical and spiritual (i.e., moral) realms. And it was consciously designed to be that way.
Its laws are the “measure” for man. For man cannot be his own “measure,” for to argue otherwise is to make every individual a “law unto himself.” If this were true, then what can the meaning of law really be – let alone the meaning of justice?
Earlier I wrote:
The world that “IS” can only be a world that is possible.
To which you replied:
You have just defined reality. See, I knew you knew. But you left something out, ‘at this point in time.’ And if any of us truly accepted that, then none of us would do anything to make a better world. The world changed when Aristotle codified logic. The world changed when Newton used those rules to try to develop universal principles. This is no different. We live in a world that was impossible 500 years ago.
A quibble here: Yes, the “world changed” when Aristotle codified logic, or when Newton developed the science of mechanics. But the laws of the universe don’t change: They were presumably such for Aristotle and Newton as they always have been and ever will be. If the laws change willy-nilly, then they cannot be said to be “laws.” If there are no laws, then I don’t know what either Aristotle or Newton could have “discovered” – for precisely their discoveries were of the operations of certain universal laws, as best as they understood them in their own time. Neither possessed “final truth” – each made a “best effort” that contributed enormously to human progress.
It may be more accurate to say, not that the “world changed,” but that the “world of man changed.” To put it another way, the conditions of human existence have changed; but that does not mean that human nature – as finite, contingent being – has changed, or that the human condition (which is ineluctably “conditioned” by man’s finitude and contingency) has changed….
But it seems to me the more the conditions of human existence change, the more man needs to understand God’s law. It further seems to me that the only way a man can really “make the world a better place” is to live in God’s Law. To try to live outside that Law is to disorder one’s own existence, and that of the community of which one is a part. It is to “go against the grain” of the universe, so to speak.
So I have a quibble with this: “Reason is the final arbiter of justice, that is correct (beyond a reasonable doubt). As human beings we have no other means at our disposal.”
Reason is a tool, not a “final arbiter of justice”; or so it seems to me. The Law is the “final arbiter of justice,” or the standard by which justice finds its measure. Reason is that which allows us to think constructively about the Law and its applicability to human problems.
You continue: Justice concerns reality and reason is how we understand and take actions in reality. And the reason why human history has failed so far to bear this out is, it has never been truly tried, never completely tried. It has never been fully implemented. The closer we come to it, the more effective justice is, but we still, to this day, have yet to really put it in practice. But if no one ever says that this is what we must do, then it will never happen.
Man cannot “save himself.” There is no perfect state that man can construct, no perfect justice that man can mete out, such that man can “save himself” out of the action and passion of the human condition. Men may long passionately for justice – that they even have a notion of such a thing speaks of the human ability to perceive ineffable, spiritual things – for justice is part of God’s Law which is indelibly imprinted “on earth, as it is in heaven.” Man may strive to achieve justice here on earth; but in all likelihood, for all his reason and pains and even sacrifice in its pursuit, he will fail.
The astonishing thing is that man has a seemingly ingrained sense of justice – he “knows” what it is. This would seem to argue in favor of the idea that man “instinctively” (for lack of a better word) recognizes the Law. There is something in man that resonates to it, even if its Source – God Himself -- is denied; and even if a man does not choose to act in accordance with what is highest and best in him.
I must close for now – but first, one last comment. You wrote:
As I said before, this definition of ‘Rights’ is what is at the basis of the Bill of Rights. They were trying to create as secular and universal a definition as possible, which is why there is no mention of God in the Constitution. England had proven that couldn’t work, and Locke had given them a way to define it, natural rights, that didn’t rely upon religion as a basis….
I do not say that “Rights” rest on religion. I say they rest in God, Who is their Source – as Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence clearly maintains. (I like to think that the DoI is the “preamble” to the Preamble of the U.S. Constitution….) Ours is a secular society because we do not wish to repeat the “European” mistake of picking and choosing a sectarian-religious basis for government. (Pick one and you “disenfranchise” all believers of the “excluded sects,” and this sort of thing hardly makes for civil peace.)
But to say that we do not have a religious basis for our government isn’t to say that we do not have a government of Law. And the Law that we have is “biblically-based” in the Old and New Testaments. That doesn’t make it “religious” Law. It just makes it True Law, and eternally valid.
Don’t know if any of this helps, LogicWings. But I did honestly try to explain what I think – and thus what I believe.
p.s.: I know what you mean about FR being so engrossing -- "Even if I'm not writing I'm thinking about what I'm going to write." Sometimes you've just got to take a break from it. So do that if you need to, LW. We can chat again anytime you feel like it. 'Bye for now....
Why, because you say so?
I thought you might know. Then what I read was correct. That proportionality would have to be measured in every case, for every frequency, in order to be considered entirely valid, a Herculean task. You've shed a great deal of light on something I've wondered about for years. I thank you.
(It seems like I'm forever defending the Platonist position that math and geometry pre-exist and await discovery - LOL!)
This is one of the great dilemma's, isn't it? All these go back to those unanswerable questions.
Thank you so much for the encouragement and for the great discussion!
Your welcome. You have interesting posts.
With regard to the accuracy, the NIST scientists were reporting an uncertainty of 89 parts per billion. On the NIST website, it describes the significance as follows:
From which I gather you do not consider me a thoughtful, reasoning individual, rather a thoughtless person “unconcerned with reality,” and given to fits of “feeling.”
I consider you a thoughtful, reasoning individual or I wouldn’t be bothering to converse with you. I recently quickly ended an interchange with someone who didn’t reason, reacted in exactly the manner you’re describing here, because it isn’t possible to have a conversation with such people. I have a high regard for your ability to reason. So an apology is in order, sorry. I was reacting to your post because I felt you were blowing me off and referred to not ‘feeling merry’ or not ‘feel pressed’ like answering, so that shaped my response. It was as much your tone as anything.
As for the rest of it, it is just more of the same. A restatement of your position, and a mischaracterization of mine. I work very hard to keep what I believe hidden from view, and then you go and make assumptions about what I believe. Even after I gave you evidence that what you assume is my ‘belief’ is something that I consider logically absurd. But you just go ahead and toss me in that box anyway. Tells me you aren’t paying as close attention to my posts as I am to yours.
At this point, you’re right, I am beginning to wonder. Is it possible for a person to see his or her assumptions are, in fact, assumptions? FWIW, having actually thought about and struggled with the problems of transcendence and immanence over several decades, I have concluded there is nothing unreasonable about faith.
I count a minimum of five assumptions here and one contradiction in terms. If I point out the assumptions you will root those back in other assumptions. that there is “something” rather than “nothing at all” bespeaks a Desire, a Creative Will at work. The universe is “lawful” – in both the physical and spiritual (i.e., moral) realms. And it was consciously designed to be that way.
At least half a dozen assumptions rest in these statements. Or: Now if the universe is intelligible, it must be the product of Intelligence.
And even if I grant you all these assumptions it doesn’t justify the conclusion: I do not say that “Rights” rest on religion. I say they rest in God,
You have gone from one set of assumptions to yet another assumption. And I assert that the definition of human rights cannot rest upon an assumption. If it cannot rest upon all these assumptions the only other thing it can rest upon is Reason because, as you said: Reason is man’s best “survival skill,” we might say.
So the only thing left for me is to challenge your religious beliefs. I have never been interested in doing that. I am questioning the thought process that arrives at these assumptions and conclusions and you will not examine them. So, to conclude: I have concluded there is nothing unreasonable about faith.
If you cannot see what is wrong with this statement, then you cannot see where your ‘reasoning‘ is failing you.
I think you misunderstood me. I wasn't questioning the accuracy of the measurement. They measured it a whatever frequency that the test concerned, whatever frequency of the coils involved. That doesn't prove it is that accurate for everything across the spectrum, from micro waves to visible light to xrays to cosmic rays. We can assume that it is, we already are, but if somebody finds a way to test PC for say xrays and we find PC is inaccurate at that frequency, we have big problems. This will probably never happen, but I can see why it is a possible problem.
Wasn't that Popeye?
See your post 1146 for the source of my choice of words.
I don't know there is a word for that, or that we need one.
I need one. How about the "sensorious mind"?
And, while I'm asking, what is the commonly accepted term for the mind with both sensations and concepts?
'Commonly accepted?' Don't know there is one. Don't know that anybody has ever thought about it before now.
How about the "conceiving mind"?
That is the problem with being out on the edge, there aren't any maps to follow. You have to make your own.
Ooo. Hope I don't cut myself.
From your post 1278 to betty boop: Take your time, I'm trying to cut down anyway. I love FreeRepublic, this is one of the best sites on the web. But it takes too much of my time. Even if I'm not writing I'm thinking about what I'm going to write. I need to spend more time on other things.
Ditto. I'm trying to pace my posts, and go one tiny step at a time so that I don't get obsessed. I hope this suits you and we can continue the dialog.
If you could, would you provide a link to these discussions? I had my own on this very thread, starting here. Of historical note (for this thread), post #614, which was part of that discussion, launched the blame Scripture for the Holocaust discussion.
Yes, gets rather addictive, doesn't it? And yes again, the smaller the posts the easier it is to follow the argument, not get lost running all over.
Ok, for the sake of argument, we will accept your definitions. I'm not sure we can define a knife 'edge' demarcation between the separate definitions of what is taking place in a single mind, since we are describing a process not an object, but that isn't really a worry until it comes up.
You may not cut yourself, but you may fall over.
Uhh, how do I link to a single post like that, never done that before. The interesting part starts between donh & beavus at 1201, at 1257 I open my big yap commenting to beavus on 1253. You can follow it from there.
You are correct, I misunderstood you. Indeed, it would be a problem if PC is found inaccurate in those instances!
Read this.
I'll take a shot at that.
Faith, to me anyway, is that voice that tells me that this too will pass. That my God IS God, that his message is the exact opposite of the message being promoted by radical Islam. That His will will be done, and not the will of a false prophet. That I need to trust in Him to "win" this struggle, and that He would never advocate the sword.
If we are to truly "win" this struggle, it must be done in His terms, and not theirs.
Well duh! What was I thinking? I just had to look at the html. Doh!
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