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Peeve Farm
Breeding peeves for show, not just to keep as pets
Brian Tiemann
Silicon Valley-based purveyor of a confusing mixture of Apple punditry and political bile.

btman at grotto11 dot com

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Wednesday, May 12, 2004
10:05 - Total Perspective Vortex
http://littlegreenfootballs.com/weblog/?entry=11009#c0255

(top) link
Last night, in the beheading-video thread at LGF, a new reader (with the apt name of "possum") popped up to offer everybody his considered opinion that Islamic terrorism is "a tiny threat". To have some sense of perspective.

Americans can't figure this one out, how to respond. In reality, the whole Moslem world is a tiny threat. Late 20th century media takes what goes on between them and the western world and blows it up a million fold. The video is an example. That's the best they can do. Stop and think about that for a minute. The germans quielty and calmly got the jews and others to queue up in an orderly manner before they gassed them and used their body parts to stuff pillows and make lampshades. Several million people. And the germans would have dominated the world eventually if they hadn't had the audacity to declare war on everyone except the japanese at the same time. The islamist snatch someone here, somewone there and make a video of their murder and put it out and its impact is way beyond the reality of what these people are capable of. 9/11 was their crowning glory.. probably. And even if they set of a nuke or dirty bomb, they won't come within a mile of doing the damage that was done to europe during the second world war or america during the civil war.

In other words, all the Islamists are ever going to be able to do are these little one-on-one, emotionally charged, but otherwise harmless pinpricks. If we just deal with these things proportionally, and don't get all worked up into a holy lather about how threatened we and our way of life are, then we can just go on living more-or-less happily. Right?

You mean like in the "warren of the snares" in Watership Down, right? Where one's food and security are provided for, but you do not speak of the snares or the ones who are lost? Where everybody knows that rabbits occasionally just... disappear? And that's just the price they know they have to pay for their comfortable life?

Or to take a more temporaneous example: in Van Helsing, the villagers mistrust the eponymous vampire-hunter when he arrives, but once he starts killing vampires, they despise him. Why? The vampires only take what they need to survive, they tell him. Only one or two per month. As long as we don't actually try to eradicate them, they leave us for the most part alone!

Because enduring one or two grisly murders a month, and hushing up the talk of it, is preferable to risking it all on an attempt to actually put a halt to it.

Well, that may be how Europe thinks people should deal with their problems: cope with them. Accept them. But for God's sake, don't try to solve them, like the "cowboy" Van Helsing suggests doing. (And succeeds.)

You'd think, with all these memes floating around and so central to our consciousness, we'd understand as a people the importance of moral absolutes in cases like this? You'd think we'd understand Douglas Adams' admonition that the one thing one cannot afford to have is a sense of perspective?

But no, Viggo Mortensen was apparently unmoved by the lessons of Lord of the Rings. So maybe we've become capable of completely dissasociating the stories we tell from the morality we follow.

What an awful future that leaves us.


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