Picking sides

I'll do these in reverse chronological order and (at least partially) let you draw your own conclusions.

Religious violence kills more than 200 in Nigeria

Plateau State governor Jonah Jang said the violence was not provoked by a lack of opportunity in this rural farming community. He claimed many of the attackers were from Muslim-dominant northern Nigeria and from the nearby, predominantly Muslim nations of Niger and Chad.

"There are people masterminding this for their own selfish reasons," said Jang, who is Christian.

The Minister of Police Affairs, Ibrahim Yakubu Lame, issued a statement Tuesday blaming the violence on "some highly placed individuals in the society who were exploiting the ignorance and poverty of the people to cause mayhem in the name of religion."

Jos is not alone in being shaken by religious violence. In July, an extremist group known as Boko Haram -- translated as "Western education is sacrilege" -- attacked police stations and other government buildings, starting days of violence that left more than 700 people dead in northern Nigeria. Another wave of violence started by infighting in another Islamic extremist group left at least 38 people dead in December.

Still, nearly all violence caused by extremist sects comes from intensely local politics or grievances -- not any call for holy war against the West.

I particularly like the "...not any call for holy war against the West." The word you're looking for is JIHAD, but nice try soft-soaping it. Also, they don't seem to read their own article; the previous paragraph, for bleep's sake, talked about Boko Haram (not the first I've heard of them, either) a.k.a. "Western education is sacrilege". What is that if it's not "holy war against the West"?

That was a few days ago. The headline now is:

At least 150 Muslims reported killed in Nigerian town

JOS, Nigeria — An international human rights group is calling on Nigerian officials to investigate reports that at least 150 Muslims were killed in a central Nigerian town.

Human Rights Watch on Saturday cited reports of a massacre in a town located south of Jos, where fighting broke out between Christians and Muslims about a week ago.

Witnesses said that armed men attacked on Tuesday and that some of the victims were burned alive. One official said that the bodies of 22 young children had been recovered.

Muslim leaders told Human Rights Watch at least 364 people have been killed in the last week, while the Christian death toll was still being compiled.

Look at the sources: human rights (ha!) group using numbers from "Muslim leaders" while Christian deaths numbers were conveniently unavailable. "One official said that the bodies of 22 young children had been recovered." WHAT official?! The opening sentence "calls" for officials to look into this, so who the hell are they talking about? Note also the standard use of atrocity images; burned alive, children, etc. It's a rough neighbourhood and these things are possible, but this is sloppy and sensationalistic hack journalism with an agenda. The agenda is apparent from tracking the changing versions of the story.

Islam has spread by the sword from the beginning, and it's inherent in its' teachings that it's a primo way to do it. Submitting and paying the "second-class-citizen tax" (jizya; check the Koran) is an option, but then economic and social coercion finishes the job that the sword begins.

In Nigeria at least the Christians haven't forgotten how to fight back. They don't want to be putting their arses up in the air for Mohamed five times a day, and I don't blame them. Our media shows which side they're on with their treatment of stories.

As might not be obvious, I dislike any kind of religious idiot, and I don't like the Christian fundamentalists any more than the Muslim ones. That said (and I've said it before) if I have to pick a side I'll put the old cross of St George on the front plate of my body armour and go down shooting before I'll let Sharia take over my country. I have that much in common with the Nigerian Christians on their "bloody border" with Islam.

Whatever happens, we have got, the UAV, and they have not. For now at least...

For a while now (several years at least) I've been concerned about how the reams of paranoid stuff I'm reading is affecting my worldview. To dispel that I occasionally force myself to read the leftist equivalent, and that soon reassures me that I'm on the right track.

There are a lot of branches off the "right track", which is subjective to begin with. The key that I find to evaluating my opinions is to look at articles about contentious things which are written by those ideologically opposed to me. I frequently notice that I read something that intends to enrage with injustice, etc. and I draw the opposite from it. Polemics against violating the "rights" of terrorists (newsflash, bleeding hearts; they have none under international law) by waterboarding, keeping them up late, etc. fail to move me, and indeed usually make me feel that much more could and should be done to wring useful info out of them. Why else are we keeping them alive anyway?

So, general worldview intact, I look for the best ways to identify and defend our interests. Identifying them shouldn't be necessary, but I find it shocking the lack of direction in the West these days. What happened to "with us or against us"? THAT was the key, and we've thrown it away.

Many see that as "be like us" which is not remotely what it means to me. These jihadis of any stripe are the enemy of all reasonable people the world over. They are the most pernicious religious idiots out there, and need to be obliterated, hunted to the death and their financiers and apologists with them. With that as the objective (although the latter two groups might be a bit harder to liquidate) I see some hope that Gen McChrystal's strategy might have a chance to work, at least partially.

Putting our troops on the front line and not letting them call the shots is still a mistake, but the drone attacks are starting to bear fruit on the other side of the Durand Line:

January 1, 2010: In South Waziristan, Pakistan, a Taliban suicide truck bomb went off at a sporting event, outside a village that was organizing an anti-Taliban militia. The blast killed over a hundred and wounded 3-4 times that. The villagers were enraged, and called for vengeance, and continued use of the militia.

January 2, 2010: In the wake of the January 1st South Waziristan bombing, popular opinion became more insistent that the Islamic terrorists, particularly the Taliban, be hunted down and killed or captured. The government thus decided to go into North Waziristan to seek out Taliban who had fled there after the army moved into South Waziristan. There, police and troops continue to raid rural compounds where the Taliban have taken refuge, and hoped they would not be noticed. But too many people, even in the tribal territories, are appalled at the Taliban bombing attacks against civilians and the murder of tribal elders. For the Taliban, that means too many people willing to pass information on to the police or army. It's getting harder to hide, the more suicide bombing headlines there are.

Al Queda poisoned their own well in Iraq a few short years ago, and the same is happening in Pakistan now with both them and the Taliban. Things are starting to swing to the point where the stick (Hellfire strikes from Predators/Reapers) is being led by our carrots (rewards) and peoples' revulsion with the Taliban's methods.

Rewards were previously ineffective, but now that the shine is off the home team, people would like to watch movies and listen to music. There is nothing appealing about strict interpretations of any religion, and Islam is no exception. Pakistan is far ahead of Afghanistan, and the rules of the game are a bit different, even in the tribal areas. Even in Afghanistan, nobody wants the Taliban back in charge, as bad as things are, and in Pakistan they were never intended to take over, just keep the Indians busy in Kashmir and off-balance in Afghanistan.

I come back to my "raiding" doctrine, and it's working as I write this where it is being employed. The counterstrike on the CIA in Afghanistan is a sign that things are starting to bite, as these were the men who find targets for the UAV strikes. A setback for our side, but the locals will keep bringing us targets as long as our interests coincide, as they do at present.

Things still look shaky for us, but we can beat the jihadis if we want to. This will remain anecdotal as I can't find a source for it, but I read the other day that WW2 vintage Brits were polled, and many said they wouldn't have fought if they had seen what their country would turn into. That is our biggest fight, with ourselves, and that is the only one that can bring us down.

Ask not for whom the pendulum swings...

A discussion with a friend the other night brought up the blog, and I mentioned that I was not entirely happy with the narrowing of my focus; specifically too many “collapse of Western Civilization” items.

After a bit of reflection this is unlikely to change, because I don’t care a whole lot about pop culture, and I require motivation to write this stuff. Motivation comes from strong emotions (indignation/disgust being most productive) or interest. A number of things that I’m merely interested in don’t inspire any (I hope) clever insight, but most of all it’s the NAME of the thing. I called it “Arithmetic on the Frontier” not merely because I like Kipling and it sounds cool, but because of what I hope to put across here. It’s about the Sharp End.

The sharp end is generally taken to be the “tip of the spear”, e.g. the folks on the front line, and I certainly work that angle. Note that the front line isn’t merely military; it can be anyone dealing with difficulty or fighting stupidity and ignorance in all forms. The other thing I try to address is the “thin edge of the wedge”. This can have the same meaning as the above, but here I mean it as some fresh (or ancient) indignity being hoisted upon right-thinking people. “When I use a word, it means what I want it to mean” indeed, but I’m sure you’re used to that here by now.

What does this have to do with anything you may ask? Well, a bit of clarification in the mission statement is useful at intervals, but it leads into this:

Executive Summary: The Western World has quietly become a civilization that undervalues men and overvalues women, where the state forcibly transfers resources from men to women creating various perverse incentives for otherwise good women to conduct great evil against men and children, and where male nature is vilified but female nature is celebrated. This is unfair to both genders, and is a recipe for a rapid civilizational decline and displacement, the costs of which will ultimately be borne by a subsequent generation of innocent women, rather than men, as soon as 2020.

It’s a loooong article, be warned, but worth reading, especially the parts that link to this guy. This does NOT mean that I agree with all of it, particularly not the bits about developing “Game” so as to play the women who aren’t worth the risk to marry. Entertaining reading in its’ own way that, but not addressing the problem.

None of this is news to me, but I read a lot of this stuff yesterday (I read a hell of a lot faster than I can write) and it made me think about it. My life bears absolutely zero relation to anything described by “Roissy in D.C.” , but he links some interesting stuff, and gives a glimpse of a part of the blogosphere that I had never thought to explore. That namely is one of unmarried men (never, or divorced) who are unimpressed with the women they know.

This is deeper than mere chauvinism; many of these guys are talking about women who are not looking for “the classic provider beta” male, so to me if these “cads” pick them up for a “pump and dump” (using the lingo here) I feel scant sympathy.

Of course this is the tactical picture, and seems an adaptive response within a certain slice of the American population (urban, educated, at least the women) to the strategic problem of many men feeling marginalized by the current Western legal position of men and marriage. I have thought about the basics of this as laid out by “The Futurist” and others, and the current state of feminist-dominated family and divorce law cannot survive.

This doesn’t mean that it’ll all come apart tomorrow, but ask yourself this; do you know a man who has been taken to the cleaners by a woman who simply felt that she no longer wanted to be married to him? I’m sure you do (unless there are 20-year-olds reading this that I’m unaware of), and the follow-up question is: where is the motivation to work hard or innovate when you’ll only have it taken away from you?

Yes, there are many legitimate reasons to end a marriage, and I most certainly don’t advocate (and would in fact fight) the repeal of the rights of women to be full and productive members of society. The problem was laid out as a combination of BOTH no-fault divorce AND guaranteed alimony.

Just because they were married, women can take a great part of a man’s income for a long time (all the way sometimes) after they split. Local details differ as to the exact regulations, but this is the general rule in our soft western countries. Yes, cases exist of men doing the same to women, but the numbers of those are not statistically significant, meaning it hardly ever happens.

These laws were passed with the best of intentions, as in many cases women would traditionally be kicked to the curb with nothing, so there is no simple solution. This is anecdotal, but I believe that the situation in this regard is much worse in the US than in Canada, so the above bloggers are somewhat biased. Alimony itself is not the problem (although child support is prone to abuse) so let’s look at divorce.

No-fault divorce is comparable to using abortion as a routine method of birth control. That’s pretty inflammatory, but in both cases you thought this was a good idea at the time and then changed your mind when the consequences became inconvenient. Phrased like that it is aimed more at women, but the numbers seem to indicate that they are most likely to initiate a divorce.

So, someone can decide that they want to do something else and then penalize the other party because of it? This seems unreasonable to me. Also, if you require extensive financial support from the other party for the children, it seems to me that custody should stay with he/she possessing the necessary resources, provided they want it.

Every once in a while some guy will kill his wife and kids and then typically himself. The numbers of these occurrences are absolutely small, but not as low as they should be relative to the rates of psychopathic/suicidal proclivities that would spontaneously generate these events. While in no way excusing this sort of behaviour, I will merely point out that it is universally known to be a bad idea to corner any animal. Men are no exception to this, and depriving a man of viable options never leads anywhere you’d want to go.

Incentives and disincentives are the real issue here. These are what make people productive or otherwise and the argument is made that de-incentivising men will cause the eventual collapse or sweeping aside of our civilization.

Much is made (rightfully) about excluding 50% of the population from achievement, e.g. the economy. While women moving into the workforce have not displaced men on a one-for-one basis, men are increasingly marginalized by official policy in addition to straight competition. As more and more of our economy moves to the Public realm this will bite harder, at least if you’re a white male.

Fred Reed has said that a civilization without men “would last until the oil needed changing” and I defy anyone to convince me otherwise. As expendable as we are individually, the current male-averse social structure is upheld by the acquiescence of men. There are certain irreducible truths in life, and that men are bigger and stronger than women is a physical fact; as a group if we are pushed too far the result will be a dark age for women that Gloria Steinem can only imagine. When men no longer feel that they are valuable to society they often do bad things as they feel they have nothing to lose anyway.

It’s not as bad as that yet, but I can distantly see it from where we are. Read the stuff I linked to this for a far more thorough take on it, but the treating of men like simpletons must end and the radical feminist agenda masquerading as many of our laws must be reined in. I am but one island of political-incorrectness, but if we are to survive as a society we must remain dynamic enough for ALL of our citizens, requiring true equality of opportunity, NOT of outcome.

I have also heard a good deal about the high maintenance required of the latest generation of young women, and it all ties in. Life isn’t a fairy tale, and a lot of women (not just girls) don’t get that until far too late. There is a lot more to say on THAT, but unless someone wants to discuss it I’ll leave it out there for now.

Mixed news at the end of the 'Naughties

As per the link, the long awaited attempt on the life of Kurt Westergaard by a Muslim fanatic has been foiled. This one at least; I can only hope that they send any others to their just reward.

Al Queda hasn't exactly been knocking them out of the park of late, so I hope the losing streak continues although I have to say our side isn't doing as much as it should to help them along. AQ claimed responsibility for the "johnson bomber" (credit apparently to Mrs Roberta Pournelle for the term) who only managed to castrate himself with his explosive underwear. I'd keep my mouth shut about that were I them, but it takes all kinds.

The panicky response of the TSA and other security brain trusts is a victory for all of our enemies. The adage "he who defends everything, defends nothing" comes to mind, but the security theatre keeps a lot of people with nothing better to do off the street and employed. Not much of a silver lining as we get full-body scans and have to sit immobile for the last hour of flights. I can always hope that things will settle out to a reasonable balance of risk policy, but given human nature that is not something I'll put money on.

For Canada, the year closed on the loss of four more of our soldiers and a reporter in Afghanistan. This was while looking at a project to improve the quality of life in a village that we have taken on, and is not the first time these recipients of our "hearts and minds" largesse have failed to warn us about IEDs planted around their village. It's a bloody good thing for them that I'm not in charge of a response to those "lapses".

Things are unlikely to improve there, however many troops the Americans fly in. The point to take from this particular loss is that all of these men were part of the Provincial Reconstruction Team (PRT) which is the part that will be remaining (in one form or another) after the Battlegroup is stood down in 2011. Work is already being done to pull our gear back to Canada, so the sooner the better. There has to be somewhere else that we can actually make a long-term difference.

The Copenhagen conference on "climate change" ended in fiasco, the best of probable outcomes from my perspective. Those clowns are an unholy alliance of greens, big/world-government proponents, white-guilt flagellants and Luddite anarchists (to name a few) and nothing that even a plurality of them would agree on could be good for our tottering First-World economies and societies. This link from WUWT gives you some idea which direction I think things are going in, and the evidence for it is becoming overwhelming, even to the wilfully blind "Mainstream Media". I'd say there's more work to be done to debunk their pernicious twaddle about CO2 and warming, but Nature does not, never did, and never will wait on us.

We do keep muddling through, and I will continue to do what I can. Happy New Year to my few faithful readers and anyone else who chances by.