[MD] Hippies (and Humour) in the Middle East

[Platt Holden]

> [Platt previously]
> Bohemians and hippies in the Middle East. Do you mean Hamas?.
> 
> [Arlo replied]
> No one but you buys this idiotic pairing. Bohemians and hippies advocated a
> rejection of social and intellectual patterns, in pursuit of DQ. Hamas advocates
> allegience to social patterns. That you would attempt to equate the two only
> further evidences your deceptive tactics.
> 
> [Platt]
> Geez. I ask a simple question and get a lecture in return. You get more like
> Rigel with every post.
> 
> [Arlo]
> More distortion. You didn't "ask a simple question". You can easily tell my
> Pirsig's own description of bohemians and hippies as "contrarians" (which I've
> emphasized in every post) has nothing whatsoever to do with a militant group
> like Hamas. What you tried to do, as always, is make a rhetorical pairing
> between all that oppose you and militant tyranny.

What I tried to do was get a simple answer to a simple question. As usual, you 
didn't answer and still haven't answered. Who are the bohemians and hippies in 
the Middle East?

> Imagine your outrage if YOU
> had said "America needs more conservatives", and I had replied with "You mean
> like the SS?" And then said, "Gee, Platt, I didn't mean anything by it, it was a
> simple question.".... The only one "getting more like Rigel", Platt, is you, so
> consumed with blind obedience to static social patterns. 

My outrage? You mean my laughter. To liberals like you all conservatives are 
like Hitler and Nazis. Bush is compared to Hitler almost daily. 

> [Platt]
> The man on the street in Iran should be working to overthrow the government so
> intellectual values could flourish. Instead we see riots against free speech.
> 
> [Arlo]
> We see riots against a perceived threat, something very easy for the leaders of
> the country to build up with fear, propaganda and reliance on historical
> knowledge.

As if the people are too stupid to know better, a typical liberal attitude 
toward the common man and grandmothers. . 

> But if the Middle East had more hippies, if we would have supported secular
> liberal groups throughout the Middle East, instead of the oil autocracies and
> mujahideens, maybe we'd be seeing "riots for free speech". But again, you reap
> what you sow...

Yes, of course, America is to blame for radical Islam. Good old Noam.

> Speaking of which, Ant mentioned the republicans' role in getting Iran nuclear.
> >From wikipedia...
> 
> "The foundations for Iran's nuclear program were laid in the 1960s under
> auspices of the U.S. within the framework of bilateral agreements between the US
> and Iran. In 1967 the Tehran Nuclear Research Center (TNRC) was built and run by
> the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran (AEOI). The TNRC was equipped with a US
> supplied 5-megawatt nuclear research reactor. Iran signed the Nuclear
> Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) in 1968 and ratified it in 1970. With the
> establishment of Iran's atomic agency and the NPT in place plans were drawn by
> Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi (Iran's monarch) to construct up to 23 nuclear power
> stations across the country together with USA by the year 2000.
> 
> By 1975, The U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, had signed National
> Security Decision Memorandum 292, titled "U.S.-Iran Nuclear Cooperation," which
> laid out the details of the sale of nuclear energy equipment to Iran projected
> to bring U.S. corporations more than $6 billion in revenue. At the time, Iran
> was pumping as much as 6 million barrels (950,000 m³) of oil a day, compared
> with about 4 million barrels (640,000 m³) daily today.
> 
> President Gerald R. Ford even signed a directive in 1976 offering Tehran the
> chance to buy and operate a U.S.-built reprocessing facility for extracting
> plutonium from nuclear reactor fuel. The deal was for a complete "nuclear fuel
> cycle". The Ford strategy paper said the "introduction of nuclear power will
> both provide for the growing needs of Iran's economy and free remaining oil
> reserves for export or conversion to petrochemicals."
> 
> Notice two key sentances... "the sale of nuclear energy equipment to Iran
> projected to bring U.S. corporations more than $6 billion in revenue" and "both
> provide for the growing needs of Iran's economy and free remaining oil reserves
> for export or conversion to petrochemicals".
> 
> You reap what you sow...

Yes, of course, America is to blame for Iran's nuclear weapon ambitions. Good 
old Noam.

> [Arlo previously]
> Blind faith in that belief will always lead to conflict.
> 
> [Platt]
> Right. And Germans believed Jews should be exterminated as a matter of justice.
> I suppose you sympathize with them, too? 
> 
> [Arlo]
> Just more deceptive rhetoric... really, Platt, c'mon. The point I'd make is it
> was exactly "blind faith and obedience to the Nation State" that led to the
> success Third Reich. They felt, as you feel, that their Nation could do no
> wrong, that to criticize the Reich made one an "enemy of freedom", that the Jews
> represented a "biological threat" to their Glorious Social Patterns. Of course,
> to perpetrate such an attitude, the Nazi leaders first had to discredit the
> Academy as full of evil liberals and other dispicably biased creatures. Then it
> had to "redefine" patriotism as "obedience to the Reich". It had to create an
> real enemy that would keep the Germans living in fear, and finally it had to
> stage a national tragedy, the burning of the Reichstag, that it could blame on
> its enemy so as to build popular support for a "patriot act" and the creation of
> the German Homeland Security Act, giving Hitler power to act above
> constitutional law and jurisprudence. Nonetheless, it was "blind obedience in
> the absolute morality of the nation state", the same thing you advocate, that
> led to WWII. If only Germany had more hippies... 

You've done everything but say, "Bush is like Hitler." Why don't you just come 
right out and say it if that's what you believe?
 
> [Platt]
> And what "viable solution" do you suggest?
> 
> [Arlo]
> I don't know. Like I said, I think there may be too much hatred on both sides to
> prevent some sort of armed conflict. And we will believe "they hate us for our
> freedom" and kill 'em like germs, and they will believe that we are the evil
> empire and kill us like germs. And so many lives will be lost because neither
> side is able to admit any culpability in the situation.

If it comes to armed conflict, whose side will you be on?

> I do like Ant's suggestion, provide economic rewards for Iran to allow liberal
> secularism to go unpunished and begin building a valid, organized and popular
> base within Iran.

What sort of "economic rewards" (bribes) do you have in mind? How would you 
define a "valid, organized and popular base?"  Would a conservative "base" 
qualify?

> But, we should have been doing this decades ago, instead of
> providing our unquestioning support of the Shah and his autocratic regime that
> decimated free press, free speech, and other liberal policiies. Just like we
> should be doing now in Saudi Arabia, rather than supporting a repressive
> autocracy. Funny, we love our dictators so long as they do business with us. But
> as soon as they stop...

Would you favor overthrowing the rulers of Saudi Arabia? What about Cuba?
 
> [Platt]
> Faith in a nation that guarantees individual liberty and freedom of expression
> is not likely to bring about the end of liberty. Nations that oppose such ideas
> can indeed snuff out the light of the world.
> 
> [Arlo]
> The price of freedom is eternal vigilance. - Thomas Jefferson. One cannot be
> blind and unquestioningly obedient and be vigilant. Threats to freedom are not
> always in the form of enemy armies marching over the hill, sometimes they come
> in insideous ways, like when a nation hands over its privacy to the President in
> the name of "security". And being able to know, and say, when your country has
> acted immorally is the foundation of liberty, not its antithesis.

I'm all for free speech, including mocking Mohammed, Bush, and college 
professors. 

> [Platt]
> At last, a definitive statement -- "I don't want Iran to build atomic weapons."
> Now the question is, "What are you prepared to do about it?"
> 
> [Arlo]
> Initially, I thought, "Hey, why should my children have to pay the price for
> republicans who began the nuclear program in Iran to 'make a buck' and secure
> more oil for American oil companies? Since it was republicans who are to blame
> for Iran's level of nuclear development, let them pay the price of stopping it."
> Just think, had the republican party NOT provided so much nuclear development
> support, Iran might still "want" nuclear power, but it would be decades behind
> where it is now.
> 
> Then I thought, "It was because my government tossed its full support behind
> autocracies and mujahideens, right-wing dictators whom we loved when they did
> business with us, and either watched passively or encouraged the suppression and
> extinguishing of all "secular liberal groups" in the region, not caring at all
> about the oppression of these regimes until they turned on us, that is part of
> the reason there is no viable resistence to hard right-wing fundamentalism in
> the region. If my government hates hippies so bad that it bed dictators to
> suppress them, then as a hippie-kindred spirt, I am justified in saying 'you
> reap what you sow'."

Yes, of course America -- especially the Republican party -- is to blame for 
the current crisis in Iran. Noam, we love you. :-) 

> But, realistically, I don't think there is "anything I can do about it". The
> wars and the hatred will not end until Islam now undergoes a Reformation, which
> will only be possible if secular-liberalism is able to gain a foothold again in
> the region.

How about letting Christianity gain a foothold in the region? Would you object 
to that?

> Until then, the hatred on both sides of the Atlantic is so deep, the
> will to war is so great, and the historical understandings of the complexity of
> the situation so vapid, that there is only one conceivable outcome. War and
> death. And there will be nothing but war and death until somehow the Middle East
> can grow some hippies. The question is, is our own loveable right-wing able to
> support that? I doubt it. I am only deeply saddened by the people, so consumed
> with blind patriotic fervor, that will die in a pissing contest rather than for
> one moment admit that My Noble Country has ANY responsibility for the current
> state of affairs.

Assuming we are totally responsible for Iran's wish to obtain weapons of mass 
destruction, would you be in favor of preventing them from doing so up to and 
including military action or not?

Platt