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  Blog \Blôg\, n. [Jrg, fr. Jrg. "Web-log".
     See {Blogger, BlogSpot, LiveJournal}.]
     A stream-of-consciousness Web journal, containing
     links, commentary, and pointless drivel.


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Wednesday, February 27, 2002
02:30 - Just... go read the Bleat today.
http://www.lileks.com/bleats/022802.html

(top) link
Skip past the Bleat Primer stuff (if you're impatient) and start about 2/3 down the page, at:
But there's more! I found this website via Fark today, and it just depressed me unutterably. The following excerpt is pathetic and sad, on so many levels. See if you can figure out what this is. The language is rather fractured because it's translated from the Arabic, and I won't make fun of that since I speak but one tongue, and hence have no business joshing at those who are less than expert in a second language. But the ideas come across intact:

What he then quotes and annotates is the Readme file from a video game called Underash-- a militant Muslim video game.

Lileks doesn't say much about the game itself, other than that it stinks; but his point-by-point pick-through of the Readme file is that inimitable mix of irresistibly funny and helplessly saddening that is the hallmark of so much Lileks commentary. The Readme, as he demonstrates, is apparently the developers' manifesto for proving beyond all doubt that despite a worldwide Jewish conspiracy to keep game technology out of Muslim reach, the valiant Developers of Allah have persevered and brought out this game, thus proving their elect status in the technological world, the Chosen Geeks of God who have broken the impenetrable anti-Muslim code that has held them back so unjustly from realizing their eternal dream... of creating a third-person shooter game in which you slay Jews and destroy Israel.

I'm sure this looks to Muslims about the same as Wolfenstein 3-D did to us, but... I don't know. It's not like Wolfenstein was released in 1943.

It's been a number of weeks now since the Spectator article that cast a stark light on the ideological differences between Israel and the Arab world, and (in an eerie parallel) between America and Europe. Israel channels its energy into social end economic fulfillment, the article concluded, and Islam channels its energy into "pathetic victim fantasies". It would have been a very harsh judgment if it didn't continue to be borne out as true by revelation after revelation, coming from the oddest and least looked-for quarters.

An enterprising Israeli company, as I heard recently on NPR, is making a fortune making and selling camel's-milk ice cream (camels apparently are easier to herd than cows for dairy, they give about ten times as much milk, and the milk doesn't bother people with lactose intolerance, among numerous other reported advantages).

And during the seven years that this company has spent refining its product and marketing it to an eager public, Dar Al-Fikr has managed to produce... a video game that lets people live out their fantasies of dying in holy jihad. And to read their Readme, you'd think this was the ultimate living proof of the rightness of their cause.

I'll never grumble about Asheron's Call again.


(Maybe.)


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© Brian Tiemann