Liberal Symmetry

Someone at the United Nations stood up for the United Nations without clearing it through John Bolton’s office. Deputy Secretary-General Malloch had the nerve to point out growing popular sentiment in the U.S. that we don’t need the United Nations.

And today, on a very wide number of areas, from Lebanon and Afghanistan to Syria, Iran and the Palestinian issue, the U.S. is constructively engaged with the UN. But that is not well known or understood, in part because much of the public discourse that reaches the U.S. heartland has been largely abandoned to its loudest detractors such as Rush Limbaugh and Fox News. That is what I mean by “stealth” diplomacy: the UN’s role is in effect a secret in Middle America even as it is highlighted in the Middle East and other parts of the world.

[T]he prevailing practice of seeking to use the UN almost by stealth as a diplomatic tool while failing to stand up for it against its domestic critics is simply not sustainable. You will lose the UN one way or another … Too much unchecked UN-bashing and stereotyping over too many years—manifest in a fear by politicians to be seen to be supporting better premises for what they unjustly regard as overpaid, corrupt UN bureaucrats—makes even refurbishing a building a political hot potato.

Mild-mannered John Bolton went on the offensive:

Well, on that speech, this is a very, very grave mistake by the Deputy Secretary General… Even though the target of the speech was the United States, the victim, I fear, will be the United Nations. And even worse was the condescending and patronizing tone about the American people.

If anyone knows condescending and patronizing, it’s John Bolton.

He should get used to it. Rumsfeld was recently checked by a “Third World nobody” in front of reporters.

MMORPGs are catching on. Landover Baptist Church, a parody site, wrote a spoof on the online game I play, World of Warcraft:

Christian game enthusiasts around the US are turning the world of Azeroth inside the new video game, “World of Warcraft” into a mission field, where virtual battles are fought and real souls are won to the Lord Jesus Christ.

Billy Houston, a Landover Baptist Senior High youth, has been sharing Jesus in the virtual gaming world for over three years. “I evangelized in Lineage 2, Everquest, Diablo, and a bunch of other games,” he says, “but I haven’t seen nearly as many people who are as open to hearing the Gospel message as I have inside the World of Warcraft.” Billy has what gamers call, a Level 57 Undead Priest with Holy Focus. “I’m also in one of the largest Christian guilds on our server,” he says. “I think the reason so many people are open to hearing about Jesus in the World of Warcraft is because the majority of people who play the game are lonely kids who don’t have any friends. I doubt any of them play sports so you can pretty much guess that there are lots of gay boys and fat little pale-faced Wiccan girls on the servers who hate themselves and escape into virtual characters so they don’t have to deal with their pathetic lives. When they hear that someone loves them, even if it is just the Lord Jesus Christ, they always want to hear more!”

One prospective missionary at the Landover Baptist Christian Academy says, “Most people who are mean, liberal, nasty, lonely, unsaved losers in real life choose to play the Horde (an evil race of characters in the World of Warcraft) and people and guilds who are conservative, Republican and pretty much easier to win to Jesus Christ with are found in the Alliance. That’s why the real True Christians™ pick the Horde to play as characters and start their guilds in Horde territory because they like the challenge of sharing Christ’s message in a perilous, lava-soaked, environment. Sometimes you have to pester people for weeks before they listen to you. I followed some stupid gnome around for 8-hours until he finally told me that he would accept Jesus as his Personal Savior if I would just promise not to contact him anymore. Now that rocks!”

Yes, I play on the Horde side.

Christian gamers are also excited that they are able to live out their faith in the same way the early True Christians™ did, before their religion was sissified by liberalism, science, and political correctness. “It is such a rush to kill other players who refuse to accept Jesus Christ as Lord,” says one gamer. “I feel like I can really practice my faith the way God intended it. It is like I’m fighting alongside Christians of old, instead of the pansies and sissies from my Sunday school class.”

Here are two screenshots of Stonetalon Mountains:

What better handle for conservatism today? I mean, Rush Limbaugh flummoxes the very democratic responsibility of discovering what happened at Haditha with being gang raped and Ann Coulter thinks 9/11 widows are given a pass in the media. The liberal media, just so we’re clear on that. From her Godless: The Church of Liberalism book:

These broads are millionaires, lionized on TV and in articles about them, reveling in their status as celebrities and stalked by grief-arazzies. I have never seen people enjoying their husbands’ death so much.

In an interview with Matt Lauer she defended that quote as the left’s Doctrine of Infallibility: “If they have a point to make about the 9-11 commission … how about sending in somebody we are allowed to respond to. We have to respond to someone who had a family member die. Because then if we respond, oh you are questioning their authenticity.”

It’s true that some widows publicly endorsed Kerry’s campaign but I take it Coulter considers the infallible president blocking the widows’ attempts to get to the bottom of what happened as insufficient reason for these women to turn traitor.

Speaking of pulp, here’s an article uncovering Michelle Malkin’s use of the Doctrine of Infallibility:

Tying every issue to a leering swipe at the physical appearance, personal style or intimate life of a prominent figure — especially those with a high sex-appeal quotient — was becoming Malkin’s trademark. It didn’t matter that the subject had done nothing to invite focus on her personal life. Even Elizabeth Dole didn’t escape Malkin’s radar. In Is Bush a Liddy Dole Republican? (Mar. 17, 2000) Malkin snipes, “She’s baaaack. Elizabeth Dole has been buffed, polished, and pulled off the Republican trophy shelf by Texas Gov. George W. Bush in a lame attempt to attract liberal women voters.” Malkin even seemed to hint at a bit of sexual chemistry between Dole and Bush. “She cooed that Bush was ‘my kind of conservative.’” She sexualizes Dole with the gratuitous observation: “The woman nicknamed ‘Sugar Lips’ has been wading inside the Beltway for decades, like a giddy queen bee in a bottomless pot of taxpayer-subsidized honey.”

Malkin was becoming skilled at supplying back-door titillation to those who liked to heap righteous indignation on supposed immorality while leering at its sexiest exponents. Some observers thought Malkin was out to make herself an object of right-wing titillation. For her column’s headshot she cultivated a put-together look that included parted lips coated with red lipstick, big wind-blown hair and a red blouse unbuttoned to expose a prominent V of flesh.

The rest of her new visitors will find in Malkin’s columns a gleeful sort of pleasure in seeing their distate for liberal weenies and pushy minorities articulated by a hot little Asian woman full of bitchy putdowns worth repeating over beers. They may well find strength in seeing the principles of their eroding way of life being shored up by a woman who looks like the enemy. Some may accuse Malkin of dispensing phony outrage, but her core audience will find it all the more gratifying that an Asian woman has found them worth catering to at a time when they’ve been pushed to the margins of society by members of their own race.

How do you stop the contagion of a backwards ideology without killing half or more of the population desiring freedom of expression and freedom from religion? Who would have thought austerity was so alluring, so powerful … so good for short-circuiting cognitive reasoning. From Zeyad’s Healing Iraq blog:

Baghdadis are reporting that radical Islamists have taken control over the Dora, Amiriya and Ghazaliya districts of Baghdad, where they operate in broad daylight. They have near full control of Saidiya, Jihad, Jami’a, Khadhraa’ and Adil. And their area of influence has spread over the last few weeks to Mansour, Yarmouk, Harthiya, and very recently, to Adhamiya.

All of these districts, with the exception of Adhamiya, are more or less mixed or Sunni majority areas. They make up the western part of the capital, or what is known as the Karkh sector (the eastern half of Baghdad is called Rusafa). These areas also witnessed an influx of families displaced by the violence in the Anbar governorate, since many residents of the western part of Baghdad have roots in western areas of the country, such as Fallujah and Ramadi.

People who live in the mentioned districts claim that unknown groups have distributed leaflets (often handwritten), warning residents of several practices, ranging from instructions on dress codes to the prohibition of selling or dealing with certain goods.

The instructions vary between neighbourhoods. Amiriya and Ghazaliya have the full menu, while others stress only 2 or more of them. So far, enforcing the hijab for women and a ban on shorts for men are consistent in most districts of western Baghdad. In other areas, women are not allowed to drive, to go out without a chaperone, and to use cell phones in public; men are not allowed to dress in jeans, shave their beards, wear goatees, put styling hair gel, or to wear necklaces; it is forbidden to sell ice, to sell cigarettes at street stands, to sell Iranian merchandise, to sell newspapers, and to sell ring tones, CDs, and DVDs. Butchers are not allowed to slaughter during certain religious anniversaries. Municipality workers will be killed if they try to collect garbage from certain areas. Private neighbourhood generators are banned in a few areas. And the last I heard is that they are threatening Internet cafés and wireless providers.

As a result, the remaining Iraqi women who haven’t yet covered their heads are now buying veils and more moderate dress. My sister now covers her head when she goes out to college, as do most of my female relatives. Trousers and short skirts have long been abandoned. Guys are now either wearing Bermuda shorts that cover their knees or just plain trousers. Me? I have insisted so far to keep my hairy legs exposed.

Why don’t they just blow up the city and erect tents instead? It would make life much easier. We could go to school or work riding on camels. We could sit at the mosque all day, stroking and scratching our filthy beards and waiving flies away, while our women recline in their harems.

In short, they are trying to take us back to the 7th century, so we can experience the simple life of the prophet and his pious companions. We should abandon everything and anything that was not available at the time of the prophet in order to be true Muslims.

Yet the followers of this simplistic, backwards ideology have no problem with using hi-tech explosives, IEDs, machine guns and RPGs. According to their sick creed, it is not against Islam to detonate a car bomb at a bustling market or to shoot a kid twice in the head because he had gel on his hair. No, that is okay in Islam.

I think the misguided desire to return to a simpler life is part of the explanation. Maybe my history is off, but post-invasion institutions, authorities, warlords, etc. cut off rights under the false pretense of security measures. Regaining those rights is difficult and next to impossible in some parts of the world. Women in Afghanistan, for example, enjoyed greater freedom before the Russian invasion than they do today.

The state of Afghan women was not always as it has been in the past couple of decades and still is today. Afghan women have seen better times when they were free to go out, to work, to attend schools, there weren’t all these restrictions on their dress. How did Afghan women lose all these basic human rights?

Revolutionary Association of Women of Afghanistan spokesperson Sahar Saba: It started with the Russian invasion. When we say this it is because first of all [when] Afghanistan was invaded everyone including women lost their freedom, everything. Secondly, the Russian invasion [provided] a big chance for the fundamentalists to become stronger [and gain] power because they got financial and military support. They were created, in fact, by the support they got from the United States [to fight the Russians]. That was a big opportunity for the fundamentalists because in the name of jihad [they took control] to fight the Russians which the United States wanted.

So we usually say that the tragedy with the Afghan women began with the Russian invasion. Before that, the fundamentalists really had no place in Afghanistan; they were hated by the Afghan people. They didn’t have any popularity. But suddenly they were imposed on us and they made themselves accepted [by the people] by force. They were there and people couldn’t do anything. That certainly made life more terrible for Afghan women.

A perfect breeding environment for social repression and intellectual regression. And if your denomination hasn’t undergone the rigors of modernity in your part of the world thanks to isolation, so much the easier to implement tyranny.

Well, the cause of RU-486/mifepristone-related deaths has been known for a year. Mifepristone induces abortion by blocking progesterone and stopping pregnancy. A second dose is needed to induce contractions.

The cause of death in mifepristone cases is Clostridium sordellii, a deadly bacteria. C. sordellii has been detected in some, but not all, of the bodies of women who have died as a result of taking mifepristone. What I didn’t know was:

• Some women who died from C. sordellii never took mifespristone. These women died after a live birth (Cesearean and vaginal), medical abortion, and C. sordellii was present in one woman’s menstrual blood. These bacteria-related deaths may suggest they have their origin in hospitals. Although, C. sordellii can “be present in women’s intestinal and rectal areas and cause no symptoms whatsoever.”
• My chances of surviving mifepristone are better than surviving a live birth. (Link)
• Mifepristone is being researched to treat endometriosis and several cancers.

Now for the part of my post that made me laugh. Abort73 is one of the better pro-life websites I’ve come across. Be aware that when you click on the link a graphic movie automatically runs. This is Abort73’s message board. Teri, a pro-life woman writes:

I was raped when I was in my teens and I had a 3rd trimester abortion that was performed by George Tiller in Wichita, KS. I have since realized what a horrible mistake I made. I have detailed my experience on my website: Tiller Patient Speaks.

Having that abortion did not un-rape me & it made my innocent son pay for his father’s crime.

One pro-choice “Guest” noticed a discrepency in Teri’s line of thinking (edited for puncutation and spelling):

Interesting, your hatred against Muslims, how you call for executing them without trial.

Do you know Muslim women do get unintentionally pregnant too, and eventually do have abortions too? I guess you are perfectly okay with abortion if the mother is Muslim. Do you know in the USA lives approx. 5 million Muslims? So you would restrict abortions only for American non-Muslims?

And I forgot liberals; you hate them too, right? And perhaps you hate niggers, chinks and kikes too, right?

So basically only close-minded, brainwashed, Republican Christians should be restricted from having abortions, and all other people can keep their freedom?

Teri apparently had an attack of the conscience because I cannot match Guest’s allegations to Teri’s website. But in a follow-up post, Teri doesn’t deny Guest’s charges and rejoins Guest with a show-stopping:

Whatever. You are obviously an idiot & until you live in America & experience a day like 9/11, then have your father shipped off to fight some [bullshit] war, I really could care less what you have to say. End of story.

Uh, apparently Teri, you did care enough about Guest’s accusations to polish up your website by removing politically incorrect content. And God bless you for it, dear. Good Christian soldiers won’t get very far in the abortion debate if they wear their bigotry on their sleeves.