John C. Wright points out some contemporary pathologies, and suggests bad philosophy is the underlying disease. This quote isn’t really representative of his thesis, but I like it.
“[T]he West is at war with Islamic nations who use the rhetoric of Civil Rights to mask their grisly and inhuman deeds of cowardly mass murder. The enemy goal is hegemony over the Near East, and the imposition of Sharia law, a draconian system of theocratic misogyny. Rather than heaping scorn and abhorrence on these fanatics, the modern intellectual helps, aids, abets, forgives and excuses them, even to the point of refusing to admit what he sees and knows. Instead of expressing solidarity for women trapped behind the veil, or for homosexuals stoned to death by this inhuman law, the modern intellectual blames the Christians for seeking theocracy, heaps scorn and mockery on Christ, and upbraids as racism jokes, criticism, or any other opposition to the Jihad program.
“A more obvious spectacle of a culture committing cultural suicide cannot be imagined: it is too gross to be exaggerated.” — Sophomoronology, A New Science, by John C. Wright
Here’s another, linked above:
“The dreary vomit of modern art exists because the modern artists are obsessed with images of death and unreason. Picasso’s jarring angles of meaningless visual gibberish are a violent rebellion against beauty: and in this rebellion the modern Intellectual finds crooked comfort.”
Wright thinks pretty clearly, and says what he thinks very directly. The result is unappealing, like (I imagine) the autopsy of a diseased corpse. Which autopsy, if made into an independent film, might win a prestigious award from the “sophomorons” he condemns.
UPDATE 10 June 2010: Hatless in Hattiesburg takes note, and links to How We Became the Proxies of Islam, by Daniel Greenfield. Citing several examples Greenfield says western governments are captive to the Saudis:
“Oh we still have armies. And when the Saudi Royal Family needs us to fight a war for them, or entangles us in one, we’ll be sure to use them. We still elect our own governments, we just don’t have the power to tell them to stop the Muslim immigration flood or to ban a mosque at Ground Zero. We can even buy newspapers, so long as they don’t publish any Mohammed cartoons in them. Why we’re as free as India under the British Raj.
“When did all this happen? It happened when we gave up control of our own destiny and our own economy. And then the Muslim countries stopped being our proxies, and we became theirs instead. The tail began to wag the dog, until it eventually it was the dog. Now the tail barks, and our elected officials ask, “How High?” We don’t have a terrorism problem, an immigration problem or an energy independence problem. We have a problem because we’ve become the dog’s tail. We stopped giving orders, and we began taking orders. We act as proxies of our Muslim overlords. We fight their wars. We enforce their policy for them. Our money goes into their hands. Our people go off to do their work for them. Their people come here at our expense.” — How We Became the Proxies of Islam
I think that’s exaggerated, but Greenfield raises some interesting points, inviting us to consider how our actions might look through the filter of fundamentalist Islam. At least it’s a welcome counter to the manifestly goofy claims that Jews control the world.
Monday Evening 