This one’s for Beat Kuntz

Bill Whipple with the first two installments of what looks to be another typically trenchant series about the divide between idealists and realists:

Intellectualism, as it is practiced today, is a trap.

It is not a palatial hall of great minds looking for answers and then testing them in the real world; it is a basement in your parents house filled with lazy and filthy hippies eating your leftovers and drinking the last of your milk. Intellectualism is certainly not the same as intelligence, and more and more, it is becoming antithetical to intelligence. When well-off people who call themselves intellectuals drive their SUV’s to march in support of Marxism, you can see the chasm between intellectualism and intelligence in full flower. When elitists who fancy themselves brighter and more compassionate than the rest of us choose to support the Taliban, with its stoning of women and execution of homosexuals in football stadiums before mandatory audiences, over a representative democracy with unparalleled structural protections of minorities and freedoms of expression, then self-styled intellectuals have abandoned intelligence altogether, as well as morality, reason, compassion and indeed sanity.

Likewise, when coffee-house intellectuals dictate their worldview according to non-existent pipelines or supposed theft of oil revenues where no evidence of such theft can be produced but deposits into Iraqi national accounts can, then one has to ask one’s self if this intellectual badge is worth the mud it’s printed on.

Beat Kuntz is a (European, it goes without saying) aquaintance I had a discussion with recently who raised some objections to the official explanation of 9/11 and advanced the no doubt original theory that the evil Amerkkkan president, no doubt spurred on by the Jooooos, was behind the whole thing– on the basis of some ambiguities relating, if I remember correctly, to the car rental records of the alleged terrorists. I was so croggled at this utter disconnect from reality I could only repeat the anti-idiotarian refrain: you need to deal with the world as it is, not as you would like it to be.

Of course you always think of better things to say after the fact. In this case, let’s look at the preponderance of the evidence: one one side two enormous gaping lacunae in the New York skyline, passenger manifests, personal documents, official declarations of Jihad, video tapes, etc., etc.; on the other, a firm desire to believe the worst of the United States.

As Bill Whipple says: get up on deck, take a look around, and smell the ammonium nitrate.

Europe and America

More insightful commentary from Steven Den Beste on the gulf between European and American culture, and the persistent misunderstanding by Europeans of Americans:

Too many of Europe’s opinion makers are living in a delusional world anyway. They believe that raising taxes and increasing social spending doesn’t stifle economic growth, and that labor laws which prevent layoffs increase employment. They think they can catch up to the US economically by 2010. They think all disagreements can be settled through negotiations and that no one needs or should have a military any longer. They think all citizens should rely on the state to protect them from criminals, and any who try to protect themselves should be punished.

They think they’re still important, and they think that the world views them that way. Amidst that great sea of delusion, it’s hardly surprising that they also think America is becoming more and more European as it finally grows up, and that deep down we admire them and want to be more like them.

Nor will it be surprising that they will continue to find our behavior bewildering and infuriating as they continue to botch their dealings with us.

I continue to maintain that a large part of anti-Americanism is aesthetic in nature. The fact that American popular culture is largely trivial and vulgar make people think that Americans will be that way in all areas, and need European sophistication in politics as well as art.

Unfortunately, not only is American popular culture virulently contagious, the trivial, vulgar, happy-go-lucky Americans have the bad habit of actually buckling down when things get serious, and dealing with problems (usually the cultured, sophisticated European habit of massacring each other or trying to conquer the world) without anyone else’s help.

You’d think they’d have learned to be all noble and arty after having saved the world three times in the past century, but no, it’s back to monster trucks and Sex in the City.

Once you have paid him the Dane-Geld…

Further consolidating Canada — my, er, default* homeland — in my mind as a third-world country is this article about Canada’s lack of control over the majority of its territory.

Now that the Northwest Passage seems to be opening up for year-round traffic, due perhaps to global warming, this is going to become far more serious an issue than the standard image of stalwart Mounties standing guard over barren wastelands of snow and ice has heretofore suggested.

* I was born in Liberia, but Liberia’s constitution bars me from being a citizen on the basis of my skin colour. Canada was kind enough to let me in, no doubt on the basis of my spelling.