Mark Steyn: The Facebook Caliphate

National Review Online ^ | May 26, 2012 | Mark Steyn

[neverdem]

So how’s that old Arab Spring going? You remember — the “Facebook Revolution.” As I write, they’re counting the votes in Egypt’s presidential election, so by the time you read this the pecking order may have changed somewhat. But currently in first place is the Muslim Brotherhood candidate Mohamed Morsi, who in an inspiring stump speech before the students of Cairo University the other night told them, “Death in the name of Allah is our goal.”

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In second place is the military’s man Ahmed Shafiq, Hosni Mubarak’s last prime minister and a man who in...

--snip--

No one should begrudge Mark Zuckerberg his billions, and decent people should revile in the strongest terms thug-senator Chuck Schumer’s attempts to punish Zuckerberg’s partner Eduardo Saverin for wishing to enjoy his profits under the less confiscatory tax arrangements of Singapore: It is a sign of terminal desperation when regimes that can’t compete for talent focus their energies on ever more elaborate procedures to prevent freeborn individuals voting with their feet.

But it is also a sign of desperation to talk up amiable diversions for pampered solipsistic Westerners as an irresistible force of modernity. One of the basic defects of the Bush administration’s designation of a “war on terror” was that it emphasized symptoms (bombs and bombers) over causes (the underlying ideology). In the war of ideas, the West has chosen not to compete, under the erroneous assumption that the ever more refined delivery systems for its sensual distractions are a Big Idea in and of themselves. They’re not. If you know your Tocqueville, they sound awfully like his prediction of a world in which “an innumerable crowd of like and equal men . . . revolve on themselves without repose,” a phrase which nicely distills the unending busy-ness of our gaudy novelties...

[lentulusgracchus]

We will prattle on inanely like Maureen Dowd about cultural phenomenon like Facebook rather than recognize blood in the streets and rape in broad daylight, ....

What rape? One of CBS's newsettes was raped with cameras watching in the middle of a Cairene street only a year ago .... and CBS still won't talk about it.

We owe Obozo a treason trial, frankly. He has back-channeled Hillary and the entire State and Defense Departments, and directly engaged the Muslim Brotherhood through unseemly (and murderous, Communist) surrogates to foster this destruction of America's key relationship with a vanguard ally, to the manifest injury of the People of the United States.

[Doctor 2Brains]

Now I gotta go look up “eidetic”!

[Joe 6-pack]

Steyn, for all his brilliance and his recognition of the general superiority of western cuture, baffles me at times. He unabashedly recognizes that the west has developed and grown in ways unparalleld by other cultures and civilizations, but he seldom pays more than lip service to Christianity which is at the very core of the west's success.

I know he is not a theologian or a Christian apologist, but if he would more freely tie in the spiritual with the intellectual he would easily be the equal of a CS Lewis or GK Chesterton.

[BwanaNdege]

Whooo boy!

Steyn doesn’t pull any punches in “After America: Get Ready for Armageddon”.

I highly recommend reading it.

Kindle e-book $9.58 (readable on your PC, Android phone, Tablet or Kindle device)

[The_Reader_David]

No, things measured in different units are not comparable in size. The “comparison” is like marveling that the distance between two cities (in miles) has approximately 2/3 the value of the speed-limit on some road in miles per hour. If the road connected the cities it would tell you that it would take about 40 min to get from one to the other, but otherwise it’s silly.

(2/3)*(NZ GDP in US$/year)having approximately the same numerical value as Facebook’s market capitalization in US$ is a pointless “comparison”.

[lentulusgracchus]

W looks like he’s going to knock him out.

Chucky's the kind of little smartassy guy who missed out on all his social-adjustment ass-beatings out behind the loading dock.

[lentulusgracchus]

I know he is not a theologian or a Christian apologist, but if he would more freely tie in the spiritual with the intellectual he would easily be the equal of a CS Lewis or GK Chesterton.

I don't know where he hails from, but I'd put a nickel in the dark on South Africa, which if I'm right will have had to alter his perception of humanity quite a bit, and dampened his enthusiasm -- like Kurz's in Heart of Darkness -- for Christian uplifting of the pullulating masses of happily unchristlike barbarians.

Besides, Europe is pretty much a religious dead zone; their Christianity pretty much died of materialism during the two World Wars. By the time my old man got to France and Germany in 1944 and 1945, he said the congregations for weekly Mass were down to children, very old men, and women, and were already well shy of anything like a full house.

[passionfruit]

May as well look up Solipsism while you’re at it. I had to.

[passionfruit]

May as well look up Solipsism while you’re at it. I had to.

[Joe 6-pack]

Steyn was born in Canada, and educated in the UK.

[9YearLurker]

You’re being small-minded.

He’s making the comparison in the sense that you might say you could have listened to Wagner’s ring cycle in the time it took you to see a doctor in the emergency room.

No need for equations trying to compare music and medicine, the key point is made simply.

[EEGator]

I agree. I’d love to see him get his ass beat.

“The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers” - Henry VI, Shakespeare

[Owl558]

“”Western Christian civilization is superior to Islamic barbarism and we will defend our higher way of life against the forces of medievalism, female mutilation, and authoritarianism; it is Islam which must reform and not America and the West which must apologize or submit”?

Your summation reminded me of a bygone era. Different ideology, but really no different.

“We shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, in order to assure the survival and the success of liberty.”

[buffaloguy]

“Indeed, for a “social-media revolution,” the principal beneficiaries seem to be remarkably antisocial: Liberated from the grip of Mubarak the new Egypt is a land where the Israeli embassy gets attacked and ransacked, Christians get killed and their churches burned to the ground, female reporters for the Western media are sexually assaulted in broad daylight, and for the rest of the gals a woman’s place is in the clitoridectomy clinic.”

Even more anti-social than you can believe. The “clitoridectomy clinic(s)” in Egypt are now mobile. No waiting...

[nathanbedford]

“We shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, in order to assure the survival and the success of liberty.”

It has become a commonplace to observe how far the Democrat party has evolved from the firmness of purpose expressed in Kennedy's inaugural address. The Obama administration is mired up to its genitals in the swamp of relativism seemingly capable only of vomiting up apology after apology out of its dismay over what we have done in the last half-century "to assure the survival and success of liberty."

Whether Kennedy read these words of his speech writer, Ted Sorensen, because he really believed them or because he was insecure and felt it was necessary to dress his new administration with an aura of square jawed purpose is not entirely clear to history. One can review Kennedy's performance at the Vienna summit with Khrushchev, his decision to go ahead with the Bay of Pigs but also his failure to support it, his performance under pressure during the Cuban missile crisis, and come to either conclusion. Kennedy was at the end of the day a politician but he was also an Irish-American patriot. The same could hardly be said of his brothers. Teddy even treacherously consorted with the KGB to gain the White House.

If one looks at the foreign policy of Jimmy Carter and Barack Obama it is difficult to see any coherent driving purpose except acceptance of the notion that the nation state is an evil institution and the American nation state is the most evil of those institutions because it stands athwart the march of socialism toward utopia obstructing progress.

In the shack-up of modern progressive neo-communism with Islamic jihad under Obama we see the inversion of Kennedy's words to the effect that we will support any enemy and subvert any ally to assist in the survival and success of statism and one world socialist government.

Ultimately, one is driven to believe that the ultimate rationalization moving the Obama administration is nothing more elevated than, "the enemy of my enemy is my friend." The leftists which now inhabit not only the Oval Office but the State Department and the CIA are so purblind in their hatred of American exceptionalism that they will court Islamic terrorism in the homeland, believing in their arrogance that they will be able to triumph over Islam just as they will have defeated American capitalism. They will stand over the ruins of both.

[going hot]

Well written.

Except the very last sentence, you give them more credit than due.

They will stand over the ruins of both.

[Lancey Howard]

This guy Steyn is the best.
He’s like a wittier, more intellectual version of the Ann Coulter of five years ago.

[Lancey Howard]

Ironically, KGB documents that were declassified and released in 2006 revealed that another Kennedy, Teddy Kennedy (D-Hell), went behind Reagan's back in a brazen attempt to collude with the Soviet Union to undermine American foreign policy.

Naturally, the Democrat "mainstream" newsrooms spiked the story on behalf of their fat, drunken, murderous piece of sh** Teddy Kennedy.

[PhilDragoo]

In the shack-up of modern progressive neo-communism with Islamic jihad under Obama we see the inversion of Kennedy's words to the effect that we will support any enemy and subvert any ally to assist in the survival and success of statism and one world socialist government.