It's Not About Islam, Again

Foreign Policy:

According to the Washington Post, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev "told interrogators that the American wars in Iraq and Afghanistan motivated him and his brother to carry out the attack." Policymakers and pundits will dismiss this rationalization with little acknowledgment, analysis, or certainly sympathy. Moreover, even if we could agree that we had perfect information for why the attacks happened -- based upon the perpetrators' words, and corroborated with official investigations -- we won't engage in honest self-reflection or change public policy in response. First, no state wants to acknowledge that their policies, institutions, or culture might contain any flaws that could serve as primary motivations for terrorism. Politicians cannot accept any correlation between domestic or foreign policies and terror attacks.

So, let's get this straight. The author, Micah Zenko, believes we should reflect on how our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan may have instigated a terrorist attack. Those wars were a result of attacks and provocations by Muslim countries, but we probably brought that on ourselves as well, I suppose. However, even if the perpetrator admits, and the evidence shows that Islam was the motivator, we should reflect on how our 'policies, institutions and culture' contributed to the crime. The values of Islam and those of Islamic societies are never questioned. When we're attacked, it's cause for self-criticism.

The 'we' in the article is the United States, of course, and even though Muslims carry out several terror attacks worldwide every day, that overwhelmingly common denominator doesn't really matter. There just has to be some commonality between the policies, institutions and cultures of The United States, UK, Spain, Indonesia, Russia, India, Tunisia and everywhere else Muslims have slaughtered unsuspecting victims. Oddly enough, the policies, institutions, and cultures of Iran and Saudi Arabia don't inspire much in the way of terrorism on their soil. Weird, huh? 

Actually no, this hackneyed meme'  only applies to the west in general, and America in particular.  As intellectually and morally bankrupt as that sounds, it's what passes for sophisticated thought by self-loathing westerners. The fact that it's espoused by a PhD from The Council on Foreign Relations and Harvard is just more proof that higher education in the U.S. is no longer about the pursuit of truth and knowledge.It's about the pursuit of rationales in support of Left Wing conclusions, no matter how glaringly stupid and morally obtuse those rationales may be.

These terrorists were also products of an American, Blue State education. Perhaps they were just very good students and fully digested the anti-American indoctrination they were fed. 

Update: OK, it's now self-parody:

  "Could the amateur boxing career of Tamerlan Tsarnaev, the deceased suspect in last week’s Boston Marathon bombings, have had a role in the massacre? That’s a question leading brain researchers at Boston University’s School of Medicine hope medical examiners look into when they perform an autopsy of the 26-year-old who was killed during a firefight with law enforcement officials early Friday morning."

 Update: And the hits keep coming!

 "[H]e was angry that the world pictures Islam as a violent religion.”

From an e-mail to a New York Times reporter by the former brother-in-law of Tamerlan Tsarnaev, explaining the Boston bomber's motives.

Your Children are Our Children

This one has created quite an uproar over the last few days. But Melissa Harris-Perry's views are fairly common in leftists circles, especially in academia, where Ms. Perry can be found when she's not broadcasting to MSNBC's miniscule audience. Her Communitarian and collectivist notions of child rearing can be heard almost daily on college campuses throughout the country.

Normally, the left isn't this publicly candid, since even they - mostly - know how toxic an unvarnished expression of their true intentions can be to most Americans. That's why MSNBC can be so useful and instructive. At minimum, dozens of people were involved in the production and airing of this promo, so the network clearly felt it reflected the views of its audience, and themselves:

   “We have never invested as much in public education as we should have because we’ve always had kind of a private notion of children – ‘Your kid is yours, and totally your responsibility.’ We haven’t had a very collective notion that these are our children. So part of it is we have to break through our kind of private idea that kids belong to their parents, or kids belong to their families, and recognize that kids belong to whole communities.”

 The United States spends more per student on education than any industrialized country in the world, and receives mediocre results at best.  But that's not quite what Ms Perry is talking about. She wants the community (State) and its values do be the dominant influence in children's lives. Skyrocketing out of wedlock births, especially prevalent among younger and less educated women, have provided the left with a growing number of children for whom the government becomes the second parent, and the school as the place that provides the very food they eat.  Many of these kids will never learn much of anything useful and will be far more likely to have negative outcomes as adults, but they will be sufficiently indoctrinated with a statist value system. If you belong to the community as a child, then you will belong to it as an adult.

The problem for Ms. Perry is that too many families are the biggest influence their kids lives, and they teach them subversive values and beliefs like liberty, individualism and self reliance. They may even tell their kids - as I did with my two college graduate sons - to not believe everything their teachers told them, and to be critically thinking individuals above all else. This is why the left continuously attacks home-schooling, with some making a constitutional argument for outright bans. The left's opposition to vouchers and charter schools is not just about the greed of the NEA. It's about future generations universally believing their self worth is calculated based on their value or cost to the collective.

Like many parents, I view the raising of children as a long process of gradually letting go. That we teach, and then give them increasing levels of  independence and responsibility, until they are ready to make their own way in the world.  

The authoritarians view your children not as an end in themselves, with the right to live life for its own sake, but as a means to their ends. 

  

Obama: I Didn't Mean MY Kids!

From the "some are more equal than others" department, we've been told that it's bad form to criticize The One for sending his children to a private school while denying those less fortunate the opportunity to do so themselves:

(CNSNews.com) - President-elect Barack Obama and his wife Michelle “have every right” to send their children to public or private school, and no one should “criticize” their decision, Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), said in an interview with CNSNews.com on Monday at the National Press Club.

Democratic Iowa Gov. Tom Vilsack echoed Weingarten’s comments at the conference, telling CNSNews.com that “it’s a very personal decision” that the president-elect and his wife need to make and the issue “should not be subject to criticism or comment.” ...

...Weingarden said “none of us” can relate to being in the position of president of the United States. “Look, none of us knows what it’s like to be a president of the United States of America or a president-elect,” she said. “I think Senator Obama and his wife have every right to make a decision that works for their family and their kids, and none of us should criticize it.”

Vilsak and Weingarden can relate to and make personal decisions for the millions of ordinary parents they wont allow to escape from the corrupt and incompetent government school system. The education fascists would also prohibit parents from teaching their own children if they could as we saw in the recent attempt to ban homeschooling in California:

The California Teachers Association, the state teachers’ union, has been critical of parents’ rights in the case. “Parents do not have an unfettered right to dictate the terms of their children’s education,” stated a lawyer for the union. “Unregulated,unsupervised homeschooling, the lawyer said, is an invitation to ‘educational anarchy.’”

That's because the Obamas are part of the anointed ruling elite and their kids need and deserve the best education possible. The children of the unwashed masses on the other hand, merely need to be indoctrinated as loyal servants of The Church of Secular Government with just enough education to make them useful drones. Well educated, critically thinking people are just trouble making bourgeoisie.

So everyone should just know their place and stay there. Disruptive questioning of the ruling class will not be tolerated.

Indoctrination by The Indoctrinated

This video of a useful idiot school teacher reveals both the cruelty and incoherence of the bullies on the double-speak Left.

That this was filmed by Europeans makes it embarrassing as well.

Diantha Harris: It’s a senseless war! [Stares at Kathy.] And by the way, Kathy, the person that you’re picking for president said [Harris shakes her head] that our troops could stay in Iraq for another hundred years if they need to! [Kathy bites her lip, looks ashamed. Other kids stare at Kathy, laugh, smirk.] So that means that your daddy could stay in the military for another hundred years!

[Kathy is on verge of tears.]

[In an interview later:]

Diantha Harris: Now I can support whomever I want to support, as long as I don’t browbeat another person for the candidate that they supported. Like I have some students that support John McCain, and when they told me that, I said ah … “that’s good’ and I just moved on. So, I think that everybody is entitled to their own personal opinion.

The frightening thing is that this fascist drone actually believes what she's saying. What's more frightening is that a Democrat controlled government will give the government schools additonal power while cutting off all avenues of escape.

H/T Hot Air

They Wanted More School.

David Freddoso uses Obama' education positions to highlight the duplicitous and venal nature of the candidate in all things:

"Obama writes:

[T]heir number one issue was this: Because the school district couldn’t
afford to keep teachers for a full school day, Thornton let out every day at
1:30 in the afternoon. With the abbreviatebd schedule, there was no time for
students to take science lab or foreign language classes.How come we’re getting
shortchanged? they asked me. Seems like nobody even expects us to go to college,
they said.They wanted more school."


The elementary-school day and year in Chicago proper are the shortest of
any major U.S. city. It lasts five hours and 45 minutes, and the schools are
open just 174 days per year. This is entirely a result of the intransigence of
the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU), a staunch ally of Barack Obama and an early
endorser of his presidential candidacy.

The United States already spends the highest percentage of its world's largest GDP on education, while achieving mediocre results at best. The unholy alliance between democrats and teacher's unions exists only to mutually benefit themselves with power and money, while producing socialist indoctrinated drones just ignorant enough not to cause the elites trouble.

Black Education: Hard Times at Douglass High

From Walter Williams:


"Whether we want to own up to it or not, the welfare state has done what Jim Crow, gross discrimination and poverty could not have done. It has contributed to the breakdown of the black family structure and has helped establish a set of values alien to traditional values of high moral standards, hard work and achievement."

Obama: Teachers More Important Than Parents

Barack Obama addressed his indoctrination corps at a union meeting of the American Federation of (government) Teachers:

" ...the single most important factor in determining a child’s achievement
is not the color of their skin or where they come from; it’s not who their
parents are or how much money they have. It’s who their teacher is."

Peppered throughout Obama's speeches are dozens of tidbits like this that show his clear belief that individuals exist to further the goals of the state. Obama's definition of a child's acheivement is meant only in so far as they are trained to serve those goals. Parents are merely a necessary evil.

Computers And The Government Free Market

A Tech Retrospective from PC world shows us the remarkable advances in computer technology relative to price. Beyond the wow factor it also shows us how free markets not only give us better products, but at a lower price as well. Profit driven competition in the technology industry, unfettered by government intervention has created jobs, wealth and higher standards of living for billions throughout the world. It has also saved countless lives through further innovation these products have inspired.

Compare this to the inefficient and broken Health Care and Education industries. Government meddling and the demonization of private sector participants has resulted in skyrocketing costs with little or no corresponding increase in value. And what do Hillary and Obama propose as solutions? More government fixes to government created problems.

All markets, free or not are subject to the Laws of Supply and Demand. Not the Theory or Suggestion, but the law. Like the Laws of Gravity, ignore them and disaster will be the result.