Club for Sloth (Cont.)
OK, it's nearly 11 o'clock and I've spend THE WHOLE MORNING sitting in an armchair reading Mark Steyn's
book. There are many, many other things I should have been doing—writing NR editorials, for e.g. Mark is so readable, though—even though much of the book is warmed-over journalism that I recalled reading before. Irresistible.
I'm sorry to report, though, that all the doubts my paleocon friends voice about Mark ended up at the front of my mind. There are too many contradictions in his outlook. Minimal govt. at home, but a huge imperialist effort at spreading our values abroad? Well, it worked for the Victorian Brits, but that was then—when, as Mark himself points out many times, the demographic balance was all different. Heck, everything was all different. Like many another, Mark is dazzled to blindness by the example of the British Empire. Note to Mark: It was a one-off.
At the end of the book Mark says we have three options: submission to Islam, the destruction of Islam, or the reform of Islam. Just so, just so.
Now I have to get on with doing the things I should have been doing all morning, at triple speed.
Posted on 11:13 AM by John Derbyshire
Comments
31 Oct 2006
Bob
Another point about imperialism not working anymore like it once did: All the easy targets have long since been taken. The big open temperate places and pleasent uninhabited tropical islands have already been colonized. So to the partially Westernize-able peoples of South and East Asia.
Perhaps Burma might be recolonized and Westernized, but that is about it. The British were wise to have avoided making their major efforts in Arab middle east. The French were not so wise and were humiliated in Algeria, just as we are now in Iraq.
31 Oct 2006
bob
Just had a look at your religion article. If you want a "religious experience" you ought to eat pyslocybin mushrooms. I would not advise you to brake the law by purchasing them in New York, so instead I suggest purchasing them legally in the Netherlands, or alternately consulting a guide for finding them wild. There are species native to both England and the American Southeast.
