[ExI] To Arms!

[Lee Corbin]

Rafal writes

> On Thu, Apr 2, 2009 at 9:41 PM, Lee Corbin <lcorbin at rawbw.com> wrote:
> 
> I [Rafal] wrote:
>>> PS. To make myself more clear, I am actually fucking pissed off that
>>> the idea of kicking people out of their homes for being Muslim is
>>> being bandied about here. WTF?
 >>
>> WTF? Very simple. Were you living in France, how would
>> the prospect of you and your children living under Sharia
>> strike you?
> 
> ### To repeat "WTF?" - what are you talking about?

That hardly merits a response. So I'll skip it and get
to the substance:

 > What is the chain of reasoning that leads you from
 > "I live in France" to "Muslims need to be destroyed"?

Exaggerating what someone has said is really beneath
you. Even Painlord was at pains, I saw, to point out
that no people need be destroyed, that, indeed, in high
likelihood (in his view) taking this action now would
ultimately save people from being destroyed. But that's
his  argument, and so let's not defocus on that back
to this:

> Do you think that all Muslims are immoral?

Certainly not! What a crazy idea. This is a very
bad indication that you feel compelled to go so far.

They're no different from anyone else. It's very
difficult to find examples of large groups of people
that are systematically better or more moral than
other groups, especially when disparities in
wealth and tech progress are controlled for.

> You are not making any sense, Lee. Spell out in detail how being an
> innocent, law-abiding Muslim in France justifies being persecuted.

I myself took pains to *explain* that this did *not*
justified persecuting anyone. "What justified Americans
persecuting Englishmen by going to war against them in
1812" is just as misguided a question as yours. Since
when do all actions need to be justified? Why don't your
word choices clash with your knowledge of PCR?

Rounding up and deporting some enormous class of people
because they look at the world entirely differently
than you do---and ultimately destroy institutions that
took hundreds of years to develop---is not unreasonable
at all.

Need I repeat the obvious? At thankfully rare times
either individually or collectively it becomes necessary
to act in violation of a lesser principle in order to
save a greater. Now I do realize that anyone could say
that about anything---yet I shouldn't need to go into
detail about how different France will be under Sharia.

Unfortunately, we evidently *do* need to go into detail
(and so I apologize a bit for the previous paragraph).
Under the Caliphate of Paris a lot *worse* things will
happen than mere deportation of a recently immigrated
foreign group that for over a thousand years France
has been at odds with. (Think of perpetual enslavement
of women, just for starters.)

Charles Martel, though turning in his grave, might
on reflection be not too disappointed: he could say,
"Hey, well, what I did and my descendants did lasted
almost twelve-hundred years! Not bad. Could have been
a lot worse. Still, it's sad to see that finally France
succumbs to the Muslim threat." (Yes, for you pedants
out there, I know that France is really only eight
hundred or so years old.)

> And for the sake of completeness, tell me why being
 > Muslim in the US does not justify persecution. Or does it?

America? You want to compare America to a real country
like the France, or, to be more precise, like the France
that used to be?

Ha! The U.S. is a very recent "country" which indeed was
a real nation for a while, but it was always a land of
immigrants, and always rather diverse to boot. (Not that
this last did not cause an inordinate amount of bloodshed
and to this day imposes enormous costs in lack of trust
and so on.)

Which group would someone start with if you tried to
reduce the U.S. to a "loyal only" portion? The whole
onion (which is a union only in the loosest sense)
would just disappear, layer by layer.

Of course, if tomorrow 200 of Osama Bin Laden's henchmen
showed up in shopping malls with Uzis and killed ten
thousand people, the Americans would very likely intern
everyone from the middle east. That's what they do, e.g.
fly off the handle, go ballistic. It's an American
specialty.

Naturally oh! the hand-wringing! oh! the remorse! oh
the wailing and gnashing of teeth. And I would just say
what Frederick the Great said when he heard about how
upset Maria Teresa of Austria was about the partitioning
of Poland: "She wept, but she took".

>> Meanwhile, no Frenchman who values the past or future of
>> his country ought to accede to what is going on. It's
>> simply a question of survival of western institutions
>> *at all* in France, though I agree that the cost (of
>> sacrificing temporarily some principles) is very high.
> 
> ### Ah, yeah, lets kill or otherwise destroy a million innocent
> people, since they believe in some mumbo-jumbo. Reminds me of Robert
> Bradbury's idea of nuking random cities in Afghanistan. You feel some
> vague sense of discomfort with a group, so let's just kill them all.
> Brilliant.

Me? I *never* said kill 'em all. You must have me confused
with the great Robert B. (I must post something about that,
I'm really sad I was off the list when that happened.) No,
the worst I've done along those lines is to claim that
France could have a 4-million man army ("levée en masse"---
they're actually quite used to the idea), and threaten
to use it, and hint that atomic weaponry lay even behind
*that* threat.

Lee