July 6, 2012

"We are against tourism. They foster debauchery."

And soon the ancient buildings will be gone, razed by fanatics who imagine themselves saving the local people from the sin of worshipping idols.

In Timbuktu.

They destroyed the wooden door of the old mosque:
“I asked them why they were doing it... They said, ‘People believe that if that door is opened, the world will end’ ”— an un-Islamic superstition, the men explained, that had to be disproved....

127 comments:

tim maguire said...

Hardly an original observation, but worth saying, nonetheless: given the opportunity, they would destroy the world.

traditionalguy said...

Another catch 22: You must either believe in supernatural Mohammed prophecies or we kill you. And by the way, if you believe in superstitions, we kill you.

It's the miserable religion of the sword that has never made anyone happy in 1500 years of chanting and bowing to its pride filled legalistic rules.

coketown said...

The United Nations condemned the destruction and the International Criminal Court suggested it could be a war crime...

Uh, um...ehh. *sigh*

Considering the ICC makes an Entmoot look brief and succinct, those buildings are doomed. They'll all be rubble before the ICC can even establish its committee to elect a board of supervisors to establish an exploratory committee to consider the question, "Is this a war crime?" But first they'll need to settle the question of whether Timbuktu residents are or are not orcs.

Ann Althouse said...

The victims are also Muslims.

Known Unknown said...

The victims are also Muslims.

They usually are.

Rusty said...

How dismally eighth century of them.

If crack want's to get outraged over a religion this is the one.Why we give credence to these particular islamists beliefs is beyond me.

Lauderdale Vet said...

Reminds me of when the Taliban destroyed the Buddhas of Bamiyan.

Shameful.

Anonymous said...

Ann, I'm out. Peace. Or should I say, Salaam.

bagoh20 said...

""We are against tourism. They foster debauchery."

The fun ones anyway.

I guess what they mean by "debauchery" is that these tourists don't respect the local customs. Ironic isn't it?

ricpic said...

The old mosque
The old mosque
They say such things and they do such things in
The old mosque
The old mosque
I'll never go there anymore.

YoungHegelian said...

This is the fault of the Saudis and the severe & iconoclastic (even by Islamic standards) Wahhabi Islam that they gleefully export.

The Saudis are so weird they wanted to get rid of the Kaaba in Mecca. They were stopped only because the rest of the ummah went positively apeshit when they heard about it. If anything new gets dug up by archaeologists in Arabia, the government immediately bulldozes it so that the new find doesn't become an object of idolatry.

Timbuktu has been in Muslim hands for hundreds of years now, and only now do Muslims come through who decide it has to be purged of "idolatry".

jacksonjay said...

Were the Pharaohs Muslim?

How long will the Pyramids last?

Luke Lea said...

They did the same thing in China during the cultural revolution. Bonfire of the Buddhas. The entire ancient city of Beijing disappeared, starting with the walls. The Protestant Reformation did stuff like this too.

KCFleming said...

The religion of pieces strikes again.

Smilin' Jack said...

‘People believe that if that door is opened, the world will end’ ”— an un-Islamic superstition, the men explained, that had to be disproved....

Ah, the diversity of humanity...so many different flavors of stupid.

ricpic said...

Muslims,
Muslims killing muslims,
Are the happiest muslims in the world.
No more hunger and thirst but first
Be a muslim who kills muslims,
Muslims who kill muslims,
Are the happiest muslims
In. The. VOYALD!

edutcher said...

These are the people we need to understand.

We need to be sensitive to their culture.

These are the people Choom has told NASA he wants bridges built to them.

Suuure.

EMD said...

The victims are also Muslims.

They usually are.


One of the reasons we won in Iraq. People got a little tired of being told they should be proud their families were collateral damage in the attacks on the Americans.

And, of course, Barry was on the other side.

SteveR said...

Thanks ricpic, its really that silly

Michael said...

Barbarians.

glenn said...

Like I often have the opportunity to say "people get the government they deserve"

MadisonMan said...

All they are for, it seems, is destruction and a dreary existence.

Welcome to the Desert.

ndspinelli said...

I was accepted in the Peace Corps to work a project in Mali. I would have been in and near Timbuktu. I turned it down and chose a Vista project.

I studied this country quite a bit back in the 70's prior to my briefing. Timbuktu is a very historic city for Muslims and others. Just last week I had a nice conversation w/ a cab driver from Togo. He was Christian but lamented what's going on in nearby Mali.

Tom Spaulding said...

Some people superstitiously walk in circles around a meteorite in Mecca, therefore it must be destroyed.

Seems simple enough.

Proceed.

The Drill SGT said...

We look on that as French Sphere of Influence.

Let some Foreign Legion Commandos give a few Jihadi's a 9mm caste mark and it may make the rest play quietly for a while.

Paddy O said...

Now there's a people unwilling to put up with New Age! Or Old Age!

Middle Age religion is just right.

Also, this event is a big reason why I support Israel as much as possible.

While the UN would express regret, thousands and thousands of years of history would be destroyed.

KCFleming said...

When will the West finally (and once again) see these barbarians for what they are?

Oso Negro said...

And we helped!

YoungHegelian said...

@Luke Lea,

Actually as much fun as it would be to blame the Protestants for iconoclastic violence, they were mere pikers at it historically.

Ah, but the French & Russian Revolutions! Those boys were the masters of artistic destruction!

It's not something the left likes to talk about because it's all those troglyditic Christianists who are anti-art, donchaknow, and it's embarrassing for them to admit it's in their DNA from their inception.

You want to have a blood boiling experience? Visit what's left of the monolithic church of St. Emilion in St. Emilion, France.

Wally Kalbacken said...

To that old mosque, I don't go.

MadisonMan said...

You want to have a blood boiling experience? Visit what's left of the monolithic church of St. Emilion in St. Emilion, France.

Or visit the Parthenon.

A. Shmendrik said...

In no time, these ruins will be ruined!

Pettifogger said...

The Christian missionaries who spread out over much of the Third World in the 19th and early 20th Centuries may have been callous to the richness of local cultures, but I suspect few of them were as destructive as Muslim fanatics routinely are.

Mark said...

There has been a push in recent years to return antiquities to their countries of origin. The counter-argument is that we stole 'em / bought 'em fair and square, so they ain't coming back. Another argument is that is that if they're returned, the locals will destroy them and no one will see them again, such as the Babayam Buddha, recent events in Egypt, Iraq, and not Timbuktu. I say let diversity rein - and we'll keep those antiquities to preserve them from your destructive impulses.

YoungHegelian said...

@Pettifogger,

Actually, it is to the work of those 19th & 20th century missionaries that we owe a great deal of our linguistic knowledge of tribal languages, since they felt they had to quickly learn the language to preach & more importantly to translate the Bible into the local language.

Also, while the Spanish may have trashed a lot of the Aztec empire, but it's thanks to a Spanish priest that we have masterpieces like the Mayan Popol Vuh.

lemondog said...

O/T

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Paul said...

Sounds like Mao's 'Cultural Revolution' is now in Timbuktu. Only they are destroying Muslim heritage.

Now I don't care for FANATIC Muslims but destroying ones heritage is just about always a mistake.

NotWhoIUsedtoBe said...

"But the first European to cross to Timbuktu was the Scottish explorer Alexander Gordon Laing, who set out from Tripoli in July 1825 at the behest of the UK colonial secretary. He arrived over a year later, in August 1826, broke, sick, and without a right hand, which he'd lost in one of many skirmishes with marauding Tuareg. He settling into this house, where he planed to remain only three days before continuing on, but ended up staying 38, on the final of which he was murdered."

NotWhoIUsedtoBe said...

On the Cultural Revolution, yes, that's right.

Islamic radicals are not conservatives. They are a revolutionary, modernizing, nationalist movement. In this they are much like the Communists and appeal to the same kinds of people. They destroy the old in the name of replacing it with something that never existed before. Claiming that they are inspired by the past doesn't mean it's true.

KCFleming said...

So why is it that Progressives see the same world I do, but somehow they deduce that the world moves inexorably forward, that Progress is inevitable, when in fact history, as here repeatedly demonstrates otherwise?

The 20th Century was replete with this sort of shit, degraded and destroyed cultures and humans. But Progressives saw Progress.

Conservatives see the Same Old Shit, where maintaining progress needs constant effort.

Paddy O said...

The 20th Century was replete with this sort of shit, degraded and destroyed cultures and humans. But Progressives saw Progress.

Well, the Germans are much easier to live with now... as are the Japanese.

And most of the world is now better than the Romans as far as understanding the value of a human.

The trouble is that Progressives often pick the wrong paths towards the eventual progress, and open up the door for a lot of ontological backsliding.

YoungHegelian said...

@PaddyO,

When I was growin' up in northern Alabama, my Maw and Paw would smack me right upside the head if they ever caught me ontologically backsliding.

And let me tell you what, I'm a better man because of it!

Rusty said...

Luke Lea said...
They did the same thing in China during the cultural revolution. Bonfire of the Buddhas. The entire ancient city of Beijing disappeared, starting with the walls. The Protestant Reformation did stuff like this too.

Oh. It's OK then.


Christ in a sidecar.

MadisonMan said...

Imagine how they'd feel about tourism if they lived next to a state full of FIBs!

edutcher said...

Pogo said...

When will the West finally (and once again) see these barbarians for what they are?

When it finally has its fill of Leftism and goes back to the values that made it great.

garage mahal said...

Crisp Conservatism.

Paddy O said...

YH, if there's one thing I know about Alabama child raisin', it's that folks there know the value of teaching youngins to manifest a good ontology quick and thoroughlike.

Out here on the West Coast, parents tend to be much more casual about putting up with a dialectic of ontological exploration. Damn hippies.

Rich Hill said...

Did you see the pics? Honestly, it's a bunch of mud walls with logs sticking out of them. Let them destroy the entire thing for all I care.

bagoh20 said...

They have it backwards anyway:

Debauchery fosters tourism.

Chip Ahoy said...

Oddly, I don't care.

They look like the kind of buildings that have to be kept up every year.

They showed the outside of a mud building that looked like something in Taos except not the right color mud. A Taos kiln with structural sticks poking out of it. Said it housed 13,000 or summat but it looked like 12,995 would be standing outside waiting to get in. The ornate doors didn't look all that ornate. No interior shots at all. I'm not impressed with the loss. I am completely ignorant about the first aspect this culture and I don't care about that either.

If it were a Smithsonian article it would be the last thing read after all the advertisements which are actually interesting sometimes, sometimes something different in there, and then I'd go, "good, another Smithsonian all the way through." And the pictures of the mud building would slip into memory of all the other mud buildings that melted.

virgil xenophon said...

"They have it backwards anyway"

Don't they though, just look at the explosion of sex tourism in SE Asia over the past 40 yrs...saaayy, speaking of vacations..

Lem the artificially intelligent said...

I'll get the door.

Big Mike said...

Timbuktu is a UN Heritage site, and home to hundreds of thousands of irreplaceable manuscripts from back when Islam led the world in knowledge and enlightenment.

Too bad the UN is caught up in fashionable anti-Americanism and can't be bothered to send in some Peacekeepers to protect the historic sites and manuscripts. Of course the UN Peacekeeping force didn't exactly shine in Serbrenica, did it now.

Michael K said...

"The victims are also Muslims.

They usually are."

The islam of "hundreds of thousands of irreplaceable manuscripts from back when Islam led the world in knowledge and enlightenment" was populated by Christians who had been forcibly converted by the barbarian Muslims and who were bilingual or trilingual. The Arabs and Turks were interested only in practical subjects so most of the Greek literature was lost.

When the secular Turkish government decided to make Hagia Sophia a tourist museum, they began removing 500 year old panels with Arabic calligraphy and found that the mosaics beneath them had been carefully preserved by the converted Christian workmen who expected Constantinople to be recovered by the Byzantines.

I wonder if the increasingly Islamist AKP party in Turkey will stay the course or destroy the mosaics.

Penny said...

Sooooo much easier to be in Rome.

Eating pasta.

And hiding from the carb nazis!

Robert Cook said...

"Hardly an original observation, but worth saying, nonetheless: given the opportunity, they would destroy the world."

Who? Human beings? We're working on it!

Robert Cook said...

"One of the reasons we won in Iraq."

Ha! Well, we killed their leader, and a bunch of civilians, and laid waste to the fairly advanced society there.

Aside from that, where's the "win?"

Robert Cook said...

"Like I often have the opportunity to say 'people get the government they deserve.'"

Yep...and we've been getting ours for quite a few years now!

virgil xenophon said...

@MichaelK

How about the various "graven image" monuments/mausoleums of Attaturk himself? The're all over the place. Of course there is a 1951 law that prohibits any "disrespect" of the Man or memorials to him, but when has something like that ever stopped religious zelots of any kind? Prime target might be the mountainside carving of his bust still under construction after all these years at Buca, a suburb of Izmir on the Agean sea. When I was in the USAF and we staged out of Incirlik Ab (Adana) we noted the place on our charts (for to take the tourista pics while doing an airborne fly-by) "Atta-boy Attaturk!" LOL.

Joe said...

Where is the gratitude for Obama? It was largely due to his generosity with our money and military that he is helping these poor Muslims see the proper way.

Penny said...

Oh, come on, Cook.

You don't really believe that humans set out to "destroy the world".

I think you're just upset that humans sometimes band together and decide to use their collective power in ways that make zero sense to you.

Scarey?

Sure!

Just remember...

We're still here TALKING about what scares us.

Penny said...

Those idiot collective power mongers that you totally disagree with, have not caused the world's end... YET!

Penny said...

I see that as a very good sign.

And, at best, you see this as our lucky day.

Anonymous said...

Ah ha! Penny you know that stuff'll kill ya eventually.

Richard Dolan said...

This is an example of an old religious idea, akin to the biblical admonition to pluck out your eye if it leads you into sin. Westerners don't put much store in those old religious ideas any more, to the point where an Abraham who took his only son up a moutain and prepared to sacrifice him because the Voice of God told him to do so, would be locked up as criminally insane. (Every year or so, you can read exactly that story in the NYPost, writing about some Santeria-besotted family in the Bronx taking the biblical Abraham-Isaac story a bit too literally.) Religious devotion has a hard time accommodating compromise; the Voice of God does not take 'no' for an answer. It's a reflection of how little sway religion has on Westerners today that this story strikes us as shocking.

Penny said...

Better me than the world, Allie.

And I say that as the "proportional" thinker that I am. ;)

Penny said...

Some day you need to come to my house for Thanksgiving dinner, Allie.

I assure you, we will get an equal amount of turkey and stuffing.

TOO!

viator said...

I believe Timbuktu is also the home of some very ancient libraries.

Desert Libraries of Timbuktu

Penny said...

I'll invite Cook.

For obvious reasons.

Plus, he seems most capable of doing the dishes when the parties nearly over...for good!

Besides.

I think it would matter to Cook if he got to say he "told us so".

Penny said...

And that's some pumpkin pie with whipped cream on top.

ed said...

Which is why when muslims bitch about fundamentalist Hindus smashing mosques all I do is laugh.

el polacko said...

@jacksonjay: the islamists in egypt have already called for the destruction of the sphinx and the pyramids. guess they don't like tourism (or much of anything else) there either.

ed said...

@ Robert Cook

"Ha! Well, we killed their leader, and a bunch of civilians, and laid waste to the fairly advanced society there."

"advanced"? Most of the towns in Iraq didn't even have sewer systems.

I hope that was meant sarcastically because otherwise that has to rank as one of the stupidest things I've read today.

Methadras said...

Lauderdale Vet said...

Reminds me of when the Taliban destroyed the Buddhas of Bamiyan.

Shameful.


Oh, they've destroyed much more. But if shameful is the only word you can think of to describe what islam does and will do to you or anyone else that gets in it's way then you are already lost. See the evil for what it is. Find a way to destroy that evil and be rid of it. Islam is a cancer on the world and it must be removed as a religion and as a political movement. But you will have to go through its meat-wall of leftists who will defend it first as human shields.

Lem the artificially intelligent said...

In lieu of Mali visit..

Email, just now, from the Obama campaign ;)

Michael K said...

"Of course there is a 1951 law that prohibits any "disrespect" of the Man or memorials to him, but when has something like that ever stopped religious zelots of any kind?"

There is great reverence for Ataturk in Istanbul but I doubt it is as strong when you get to Anatolia and the east.

The Crack Emcee said...

Rusty,

If crack want's to get outraged over a religion this is the one.

I just checked in to see how many posts it would take before I'm mentioned.

Six (I've still "got" it,...)

For the record, I've laid into Islamists as I have Mormons, and it got me just as much traction.

Sorry, but most of you want to point and call those other beliefs weird, while hanging onto or supporting whatever nonsense you hold dear. I, on the other hand, see you ALL as nutjobs - a whole PLANET of Rielle Hunter's, Tom Cruise's, Oral Roberts', Mitt Romney's, Steve Jobs', and other assorted fruitcakes, thinking you're making *perfect sense* as you point out someone ELSE is talking out of their ass.

Since I view religion as outdated, this is tragic - I'm not for destroying history - though I have to give those Islamist boneheads credit:

When it comes to eliminating superstition, they're doing the best they can with what little they (mentally) have - and even that's more than the average American has attempted.

To re-cap:

The Allah Kings attacked a shrine of some end-of-the-world types, and the people about to elect a follower of Joseph Fucking Smith as their leader find them strange.

Come on.

You're all a bunch of moronic dingbats who reveal too much of the whites of your eyes in conversation.

Fanatics, one and all,...

BTW - heard an interesting discussion on NPR today - pay attention to the section on attempts at being "happy," and the role of Self-Help books on society, and my criticisms might start making more sense to you morons,...

Penny said...

Cripes, if ONLY we could monetize "Passing Judgement".

Crack would be a friggin' millionaire!

Penny said...

Now here's the rub...

Half of us would be very happy for him.

And the other half would cry FOUL!

Penny said...

My advice?

Penny said...

Ha ha

And you thought you'd get that for FREE?

Penny said...

I'm a fan of Jared Lanier.

"I Am Not a Gadget".

Penny said...

But...just for tonight?

You can call me "Gidget".

And I will call you "Moondoggy"

Methadras said...

Penny said...

Cripes, if ONLY we could monetize "Passing Judgement".

Crack would be a friggin' millionaire!


What's wrong with passing judgment? Do you believe all thoughts and ideas are should illicit the same levels of respect?

Michael K said...

Crack has the religion of rejecting religion. Every bit as fanatic. Why not ignore them ?

Can't do that. The Gaia would punish you.

bagoh20 said...

"Fanatics, one and all,"

Now that's funny. Especially in the middle of that rant, in the middle of this election season, which has been one been fanatical rant, and not from the rest of us.

Either Obama or Romney will be President soon and neither will prove you right about Romney. It's gonna be a bad time for you dude, because you've lost perspective... like a fanatic.

Emil Blatz said...

OK, so the wooden door is gone. Check. But, what about the ornate and exquisite etched glass door in the back? Did that make it?

Palladian said...

It's gonna be a bad time for you dude, because you've lost perspective... like a fanatic.

How does one lose perspective when one never had any?

Palladian said...

Do you believe all thoughts and ideas are should illicit the same levels of respect?

I believe that illicit thoughts and ideas should elicit less respect than licit ones...

Penny said...

Gotta love it when Palladian shows up as peanut farmer, Jimmy Carter.

Course I never did figure out if Jimmah lusted in his heart BECAUSE he had two little peanuts, or in spite of them?

Penny said...

I don't have two little peanuts, but I really, really LIKE peanuts.

rcommal said...

Extremists destroy. That's what extremism fundamentally does, and that's what extremists seek to do.

bagoh20 said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
bagoh20 said...

Knowing the truth can make you a monster. Only the crazy know the truth. The rest have doubts. What we say about it is irrelevant.

And that's the truth...maybe.

Anonymous said...

Is it true about Jimmy Carter's peanuts? The sad truth.

Anonymous said...

Penny did you ever eat those flaming hot peanuts from Planters?

chickelit said...

People could never figure if Carter was pro or ana phylaxis. He was against contraception, but very pro-peanut. He fought against the axis of boll weevil as a young man, but ended up a promulgator of the anaphyaxis of peanut evil, though he opposed the lustful evils brought on by the peanuts.

Carter was a complex man.

Penny said...

Rcommal, political extremists
mark the brutally cold north and south poles.

Centrists hang out at the hellish hot equator.

If we're "smart"?

We're heading north! Or south!

Anonymous said...

Some like it hot.

chickelit said...

We're heading north! Or south!

Off to the Tropic of Horny Goats or the Tropic of Crabs--you decide--nice choice!

Penny said...

They got the fever.

Anonymous said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Anonymous said...

I prefer the Tropic of Capricorn.

Fen said...

"People believe that if that door is opened, the world will end’ ”— an un-Islamic superstition, the men explained, that had to be disproved...."

Ah, the diversity of humanity...so many different flavors of stupid.

Just as long as no one opens the vault door at Fort Knox. If that door is opened, the world will end.

Gary Rosen said...

[AllieOop]

"Some like it hot."

Nobody's perfect!

Craig said...

My mother-in-law's live-in caregiver is a former nun from Burkina Faso. The first time she left Ougadouga to visit France she had to make the trek to Timbuktu because that's the nearest international airport.

Craig said...

She married a Desert Storm vet a few months ago and asked me to suggest a video he might like for his birthday. I asked her if she'd ever seen The Gods Must Be Crazy. She wasn't sure. She wanted to know what it was about. I told her it's about a Coke bottle that falls out of an airplane. She started laughing. It was the first video she saw after joining the Carmelites. The movie is nearly as old as she is. Last weekend he took her to see Alice Cooper perform in Milwaukee.

Rusty said...

@ Robert Cook

"Ha! Well, we killed their leader, and a bunch of civilians, and laid waste to the fairly advanced society there."



Um. The Al Queda and Taliban are civilians.

lemondog said...

razed by fanatics who imagine themselves saving the local people...

In the US fanatics are known as congresscritters.

TMink said...

Come see the violenece inherent in Islam.

Really.

Trey

bandmeeting said...

The victims are also Muslims

They don't seem much interested in stopping their victimization.

Robert Cook said...

"You don't really believe that humans set out to 'destroy the world.'"

No, Penny, I don't believe humans set out to destroy the world, (or, more accurately, human society). However, in our vanity, our greed and gluttony, our blindness, our short-sighted pathological focus on selfish aims, our obliviousness to the consequences of our actions, that could be the end result.

By the way, of course I'd be happy to help with the dishes if I were invited for Thanksgiving.

Anonymous said...

Say, didn't the Taliban do something like this in Afghanistan, back in the day? Good thing that nothing of consequence ever matured out of that.

JonRobert said...

"Who now speaks of the Armenians?"

Or the Copts?

Or the Patriarchate in Constantinople?

David said...

Islamists are insincere, since the pyramids still stand.

tree hugging sister said...

Were the Pharaohs Muslim?

How long will the Pyramids last?


Shoot, I don't know. Ask the giant Buddhas of Afghani...oh, wait. You can't.

All blowed up.

Can't repeat that often enough.

Fiends got a good start when they stormed the Cairo Museum and it would have been worse had it not been for the enlightened who ringed the building to save it.

They'll be hunted down like dogs soon enough.

Californio_6th_ gen said...

and the next statement - "We are also against your devil based 'internal medicine' and also the tool of the devil the 'ak-47' as it was created by foreign devils. From now on we will be killing each other with rocks! ALLLLLLLLLah Akbar!"

The Crack Emcee said...

Ha! Penny passes judgement, on passing judgement, while thinking she's against passing judgement. Solipsism at it's best.

Michael K claims I have "the religion of rejecting religion," when I clearly stated above I only see it as outdated. Which means A) he can't read, or B) he's such a fanatic, against any criticism of religion, he just makes shit up. Awaiting Gaia's punishment, indeed.

bagoh,

No election season with a cultist on the ballot can "be a bad time" for me. I was right about Obama, I will be right about Romney - I know cults and cultists. It is the rest of you who are engaged in the silliest of groupthink, and have lost perspective, otherwise you wouldn't be supporting either of them.

As The Stones said, time is on MY side,…

Palladian,

How does one lose perspective when one never had any?

No, atheism isn't a perspective, but being gay is the all-important one I should hear about constantly? Look, tell me all about it after you get off your knees and wipe your mouth,…

jr565 said...

Crack wrote:
The Allah Kings attacked a shrine of some end-of-the-world types, and the people about to elect a follower of Joseph Fucking Smith as their leader find them strange.


Nope. I don't find them strange, I find them murderous and barbarous. Ultimately, I could give two craps where you (collective you, not you Crack Emcee) think we come from as a race. Nothing, not even evolution has a sufficient answer for all of those questions about how we got here. So strange is not the word.
Romney might have some weird views on the man in the sky, but you know what, so has almost every other president we've ever had (don't remember too many atheist presidents) and yet they've functioned as leaders.
Is Romney advocating destruction of ancient temples as part of his religion and moral basis? no? Then because they share a similarity in believeing in false idols and poppycock(in your view) isn't really an apt comparison at all.

jr565 said...

crack wrote:
I know cults and cultists. It is the rest of you who are engaged in the silliest of groupthink, and have lost perspective, otherwise you wouldn't be supporting either of them.

It's not like there's a third choice on who's to be president. BUt is Romney's cultism anything but an incidental to his campaign? How would it impact on your life. Is Obama' leftism incidental to his campaign? How will it impact on your life?
I can deal with a Mormon having strange views on god, I can deal less well with 4 more years of non economic recovery and an expansion of the lefty agenda.
So if you must, choose the lesser of two evils. If you, because of your hatred of cults, can distingusih between an evil that is an abstraction at best, and which will not impact on your life in any way, versus one where it will directly impact your bottom line, then god help you

Foobarista said...

John Lynch is right. Basically, these people are Pol Pot Zero Year-ists with Korans instead of Das Kapital in their pocket.

rcommal said...

Let's cut to the chase:

I am not just stupid, but also wrong. And squishy! Also, I guess, scarey dangerous. And a stalker! Also--alternatively--entirely ill-educated or overly educated. And not in any way like any sort of average American in any way, shape or form, as viewed from any (or at least the other) side!

But hey. Whatever. So it goes.

(Steadily.)

John Cunningham said...

It's going to take a few more terrorist massacres, probably include a nuke strike on the USA, for us to realize that the Islamic death cult must be eradicated. I figure we destroy all their holy cities, execute all the leaders, and put the rank and file into reservations.

Trashhauler said...

@Robert Cook:

"Ha! Well, we killed their leader, and a bunch of civilians, and laid waste to the fairly advanced society there.

Aside from that, where's the 'win?'"

Well, let's see. We no longer have to station troops in Saudi Arabia to safeguard the world's oil. Saddam isn't going to threaten his neighbors again, nor will he again attempt to obtain weapons of mass destruction. Baathism, as a political movement was largely crushed. No need for no fly zones and we no longer have to protect the Kurds. Iraqi society, unleashed from autocratic restraints, is modernizing by leaps and bounds. They have a chance at an improved form of representative government. The corrupt UN oil for food program has been rendered moot.

All at an historically modest cost, as such things go. Yep, a win.

Sure, it might all go for nought. And the Germans might once again dominate Europe, despite the drubbing we gave them a while back.

Mel said...

For this, my daughter will be studying Anthropology in the fall. To learn of and save the memory of the things that extremists would want us to lose forever.
And also because if you don't really know what they think, you will never be able to convince them to change their minds.

And, yes, the Bible says, "If your eye offends you, pluck it out." But a) I believe it leaves the option turning your head and looking some other way and b) you are supposed to get rid of YOUR OWN EYE, not the object that it's looking yet. I can only allow G-d to change ME. Some other idol will come along for folks who want one.

rcommal said...

The Gods Must Be Crazy

I am sorry that I earlier missed the comment that referenced this movie, which has been one of my very favorites for--well, since I first saw it. ; )

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