Although I realize that there was more to the Muslim protests of a trashy American Film than mere humiliation over religious blasphemy, I think that commentators may have missed one important element in the violent demonstrations which have engulfed the Middle East. That element is ignorance. I believe that the vast majority of the people demonstrating out on the streets were too ignorant to understand that this film was the work of a small group of anti-Muslims living in the U.S. and that the United States Government and the American People had nothing to do with it. Moreover, they are too ignorant to understand the American dedication to free speech and the inability of our government, under the First Amendment, to punish the makers of this garbage.
I have no doubt that the people who are stoking this conflagration are not so stupid. They recognize that the majority of the people on the streets do not have the intelligence to make the fine distinctions necessary to see the film as the work of a tiny group of outsiders. They see it as an opportunity to heighten the level of anti-Americanism and anti-western hatred. The head of Hezbollah called on all Muslims to protest the film and demonstrate against America. While he may be feeding into a lot of other issues that motivate Islamic mobs to hate America, he is also feeding into profound mob ignorance.
Let’s face it. Although there is plenty of ignorance among the ordinary citizens of America and most western countries, and although any mob is almost by definition ignorant, the ignorance of western mobs is nothing to compare with the ignorance of the Muslim mobs. Centuries ago the West began to outpace the Middle East in industry, education, arts, sciences and civilization. It is one of the things that rankles the Muslims. They envy and resent that fact that in almost every field of endeavor the western countries have vastly outdone them. They see the prosperity of the western world and its adherence to Christianity and secular thinking as a rebuke to and humiliation of the Muslim religion. They feel that this superiority of western civilization is a new type of Crusade, and they call the western nations “Crusaders.”
This backwardness and lower civilization is not shared by the Middle East country of Israel. Israel is populated by people, or their descendents, who came from northern civilized countries. With the exception of a minority of ultra orthodox Jews, their religion, Judaism, does not have the same kind of anger and paranoia found with the Muslims.
Because Muslims resent the great advantages western countries have over the Middle East, they turn to their religion as a consolation. They believe not only that theirs is the true religion, but also that adherence to this religion makes them superior to western believers in other religions. Thus, their religion makes-up for their feelings of inferiority when confronting the West. Their religion gives them a special place that more than compensates for their backwardness in most other areas. Any western attack on their religion, particularly by means of comedy or satire, is an attack against their whole system of self-respect.
This is not an uncommon phenomenon. People all over the world use religion to overcome the many disadvantages that would otherwise give them feelings of inferiority. Even in the United States you will find that people of the lowest income groups and social class cling to religion as the one thing that compensates for their low status.
I do not know the whole reason why the West outpaced the Middle East in all aspects of civilization, but I have no doubt that the Muslim religion bears a large part of the blame. In its more orthodox aspects it is a highly restricting religion. As practiced by Muslims all over the world, particularly the Taliban when they controlled Afghanistan and by the people in Saudi Arabia today, it is a deadening religion that does nothing to encourage innovation and freedom of thought. It is a religion that teaches men to treat women as lesser beings, that makes women wear unattractive clothing, that forbids women to do many things allowed in the West, and that punishes them severely for infractions of these many restraints.
What is it that makes Muslim mobs so ignorant? Why are they incapable of the kind of peaceful demonstrations found in western countries? I believe that it is accounted for by the lower level of civilization found in the Middle East. I have come to believe that the critical moral element in the world is civilization. I believe that the ethical and moral content of most human actions is largely governed by the amount of civilization achieved by the actor, his group, his society, and his nation. Although most people in the world share certain moral values, the extent to which those values are practiced depends largely on the level of civilization present in the actor and his fellow actors.
To give one example: During the protests in Egypt that unseated President Mubarak, Lara Logan, an attractive newswoman for CBS, was covering the protests in Tharir Square, Cairo. Somehow she got surrounded by men. These men proceeded to attack and sexually assault her. She was saved only when a group of Moslem women came to her aid. Thus, Moslem men, whose religion is very strict about sex, had no problem with gang-rape of a female reporter in a public place.
Now try to imagine this happening during a demonstration in New York, or Washington, or London, or Paris. It couldn’t. The reason that it could happen in Egypt, and not in a western country is simply that the people of Egypt are less civilized than the people of those western nations. It is not difficult to imagine such an attack taking place in other cities of the Middle East or Africa, but it is impossible to imagine it happening in America, or Canada, or any western European country.
Why do Muslims in the Middle East resort to violence when confronted by blasphemy of their religion? Why were there no such demonstrations in the United States when an artist exhibited a piece called “Piss Christ” in which he had a crucifix standing in what he claimed to be his own urine? Why have there not been violent demonstrations against many other blasphemous works of art, literature, and film in the West? The answer is that the West is simply far more civilized than the Middle East.
To a large extent, civilization is and has always been geographical. The most religious, backward, uncivilized countries are in the southern parts of the world. Africa, the Middle East, India, Southeastern Asia, and South America are all far less civilized than Northern Europe, Japan, Canada, and the United States. Even within countries, the geographical distribution of the population helps explain different levels of civilization.
The southern states in America, where slavery prevailed until eliminated by the Civil War, are less civilized than the northern states. This kind of dichotomy is found in large countries throughout the world. One of the factors indicating lower civilization is religion. The people of the Middle East are more attached to their religion than are the people of the more secular West. When you look at the countries of Scandinavia, you notice a far higher percentage of the people are atheists. Those countries have the highest levels of civilization. People demonstrating on their streets are far less likely to be violent than the people in the Middle East. I do not know the full explanation for this difference, but I am certain that the lower civilization, the religion, and the ignorance of the people of the Middle East helps explain the stupidity of their demonstrations against a low budget, anti-Islamic movie.
Tuesday, September 25, 2012
Tuesday, September 18, 2012
Romney and Jobs
Jobs, jobs, jobs--the Republicans have made jobs the central issue in this campaign. Their claim is that President Obama has not done the things needed to improve the economy and create more jobs. In their effort to make Mitt Romney appear to be the businessman capable of bringing real expertise to the economy and creating job growth, they deliberately obscure the facts
The first obscured fact is that when President Obama took office the country was in a terrible recession and millions of jobs had been lost. That recession continued after he was inaugurated, but the recession eventually ended and the economy began to turn around. Through stimulus and bailouts the President has helped add over 4.5 million jobs to the economy. His actions have saved the American automobile industry and the millions of jobs connected to that industry. It is an industry that Romney would have allowed to expire in bankruptcy. The President’s actions have also saved many US banks from going under. Many people criticize the bank bailout, but without it we would probably have gone into a deep depression.
Most people fail to realize what effect the President’s stimulus and bailouts had upon the economy. The Republicans point to the fact that the stimulus did not create the millions of jobs necessary to make-up for the huge loss of jobs during the recession. That is because those programs represented a finger in the dyke that prevented a nightmare collapse of our entire economy. Matt Bai of The New York Times put it this way: “Obama’s first remedy of choice, the stimulus package worth more than $800 billion, remains unpopular. This is partly because three years later the stimulus doesn’t really seem to have stimulated much real growth. But it’s also because a lot of the short-term assistance that came to states during that time wasn’t really visible to the public; it was used to maintain existing commitments to social programs and capital projects, the kinds of things that would have been noticed only had they suddenly disappeared — which could well have happened without federal intervention. According to figures kept by the administration, Ohio received some $3.5 billion in additional Medicaid payments, and more than 860,000 residents received expanded unemployment benefits. In addition, Ohio claimed about $8.8 billion for other projects, including public school systems, roadwork and police departments. It stands to reason that Ohioans, who make up about 4 percent of the country, received about that proportion of nearly $540 billion in tax breaks and income subsidies. If the Recovery Act didn’t turn things around in Ohio, it surely kept things from getting markedly worse.”
Bai went on to describe the effect of the auto bailout: “We can’t know how many new jobs would never have existed if not for the auto bailout, but it’s beside the point. What’s more relevant, and all but impossible to calculate, is how many previously existing jobs would have disappeared in Ohio had at least two of the three major American automakers gone under. The Council of Economic Advisers under George W. Bush, who undertook the first federal intervention in the industry back in 2008, estimated (probably conservatively) that a million American jobs would be vulnerable, most of them in the Midwest. Obama’s advisers during the auto crisis privately discussed the possibility of a ‘Lehman risk’ if they stood by while the auto companies tanked — in other words, a sudden collapse of the automakers might cause a catastrophic failure of the entire industrial sector, just as the dissolution of Lehman Brothers sunk the financial markets.”
The economy has continued to grow. The fact that growth has been slower than desired can be attributed to many factors, not least of which is the opposition by congressional Republicans to any bill or program that would stimulate the economy and add jobs. In September 2011, President Obama submitted to Congress his jobs bill, the "American Jobs Act of 2011." It is a bill that economists say would create millions of jobs and stimulate the economy. You would think that the second it was introduced the Republicans in Congress would, out of love of country and concern for the lives of working Americans, have supported and enacted it even if they had doubts as to its effectiveness. But no, they blocked the bill and prevented its enactment.
Perhaps in this political world I am being too dramatic when I describe this opposition to any program for job enhancement as cold-hearted and un-American. But think of the robust hypocrisy of Republicans speaking out of one side of their mouths about the need to create jobs while preventing any progress on the jobs bill. How do the millions of unemployed people out there benefit from the obduracy of the Republicans in Congress? It seems that in their zeal to prevent President Obama from being reelected, they have decided that it is in their interest to prevent the economy from rebounding and to prevent the jobs picture from improving. This is a callous abandonment of those millions of people suffering from lack of jobs.
Mitt Romney has put-out a jobs plan which we must assume he would enact if elected president. The question is whether this plan would bring-about the huge increase in jobs necessary to overcome the current stagnation. Keep in mind that in the American Jobs Act of 2011, the President aims to create jobs now, not somewhere down the road. The Act would invest billions in infrastructure, hire more state and local workers, double the size of the payroll tax cut, and add a new set of tax cuts for small businesses and companies that hire new employees. If the Act had been passed back in September 2011, there would, by now, be many thousands of those jobs in evidence. Instead, because of Republican opposition, there is nothing.
Economists have stated that President Obama’s jobs plan is far better than Romney’s. This is because Obama aims to create jobs now. Romney aims to improve the economy so that jobs will be available somewhere in the future. Romney’s plan calls for negotiating trade agreements with Latin America, confronting China’s trade policies, rewriting a new corporate tax code, expanding domestic energy production, building the Keystone pipeline, and cutting taxes on billionaires. While some of these programs might help create jobs in the future, each would take a long time to have a serious effect on the national jobs situation.
In a recent statement by Romney, you get a taste of his plan to delay immproving the jobs situation and try to upgrade the economy instead : "My campaign is about helping people take more responsibility and becoming employed again, particularly those who don't have work," he said. "His (Obama's) whole campaign is based on getting people jobs again, putting people back to work. This is ultimately a question about direction for the country. Do you believe in a government-centered society that provides more and more benefits or do you believe instead in a free enterprise society where people are able to pursue their dreams?"
So the real jobs candidate is not Mitt Romney. It is President Obama. All Mitt Romney and his party have to do is pass the American Jobs Act of 2011 and get people back to work. Then, once we have a jobs bill in action, the Republicans can sit down with the Democrats and work to enact some of the ideas put forward by Romney.
The first obscured fact is that when President Obama took office the country was in a terrible recession and millions of jobs had been lost. That recession continued after he was inaugurated, but the recession eventually ended and the economy began to turn around. Through stimulus and bailouts the President has helped add over 4.5 million jobs to the economy. His actions have saved the American automobile industry and the millions of jobs connected to that industry. It is an industry that Romney would have allowed to expire in bankruptcy. The President’s actions have also saved many US banks from going under. Many people criticize the bank bailout, but without it we would probably have gone into a deep depression.
Most people fail to realize what effect the President’s stimulus and bailouts had upon the economy. The Republicans point to the fact that the stimulus did not create the millions of jobs necessary to make-up for the huge loss of jobs during the recession. That is because those programs represented a finger in the dyke that prevented a nightmare collapse of our entire economy. Matt Bai of The New York Times put it this way: “Obama’s first remedy of choice, the stimulus package worth more than $800 billion, remains unpopular. This is partly because three years later the stimulus doesn’t really seem to have stimulated much real growth. But it’s also because a lot of the short-term assistance that came to states during that time wasn’t really visible to the public; it was used to maintain existing commitments to social programs and capital projects, the kinds of things that would have been noticed only had they suddenly disappeared — which could well have happened without federal intervention. According to figures kept by the administration, Ohio received some $3.5 billion in additional Medicaid payments, and more than 860,000 residents received expanded unemployment benefits. In addition, Ohio claimed about $8.8 billion for other projects, including public school systems, roadwork and police departments. It stands to reason that Ohioans, who make up about 4 percent of the country, received about that proportion of nearly $540 billion in tax breaks and income subsidies. If the Recovery Act didn’t turn things around in Ohio, it surely kept things from getting markedly worse.”
Bai went on to describe the effect of the auto bailout: “We can’t know how many new jobs would never have existed if not for the auto bailout, but it’s beside the point. What’s more relevant, and all but impossible to calculate, is how many previously existing jobs would have disappeared in Ohio had at least two of the three major American automakers gone under. The Council of Economic Advisers under George W. Bush, who undertook the first federal intervention in the industry back in 2008, estimated (probably conservatively) that a million American jobs would be vulnerable, most of them in the Midwest. Obama’s advisers during the auto crisis privately discussed the possibility of a ‘Lehman risk’ if they stood by while the auto companies tanked — in other words, a sudden collapse of the automakers might cause a catastrophic failure of the entire industrial sector, just as the dissolution of Lehman Brothers sunk the financial markets.”
The economy has continued to grow. The fact that growth has been slower than desired can be attributed to many factors, not least of which is the opposition by congressional Republicans to any bill or program that would stimulate the economy and add jobs. In September 2011, President Obama submitted to Congress his jobs bill, the "American Jobs Act of 2011." It is a bill that economists say would create millions of jobs and stimulate the economy. You would think that the second it was introduced the Republicans in Congress would, out of love of country and concern for the lives of working Americans, have supported and enacted it even if they had doubts as to its effectiveness. But no, they blocked the bill and prevented its enactment.
Perhaps in this political world I am being too dramatic when I describe this opposition to any program for job enhancement as cold-hearted and un-American. But think of the robust hypocrisy of Republicans speaking out of one side of their mouths about the need to create jobs while preventing any progress on the jobs bill. How do the millions of unemployed people out there benefit from the obduracy of the Republicans in Congress? It seems that in their zeal to prevent President Obama from being reelected, they have decided that it is in their interest to prevent the economy from rebounding and to prevent the jobs picture from improving. This is a callous abandonment of those millions of people suffering from lack of jobs.
Mitt Romney has put-out a jobs plan which we must assume he would enact if elected president. The question is whether this plan would bring-about the huge increase in jobs necessary to overcome the current stagnation. Keep in mind that in the American Jobs Act of 2011, the President aims to create jobs now, not somewhere down the road. The Act would invest billions in infrastructure, hire more state and local workers, double the size of the payroll tax cut, and add a new set of tax cuts for small businesses and companies that hire new employees. If the Act had been passed back in September 2011, there would, by now, be many thousands of those jobs in evidence. Instead, because of Republican opposition, there is nothing.
Economists have stated that President Obama’s jobs plan is far better than Romney’s. This is because Obama aims to create jobs now. Romney aims to improve the economy so that jobs will be available somewhere in the future. Romney’s plan calls for negotiating trade agreements with Latin America, confronting China’s trade policies, rewriting a new corporate tax code, expanding domestic energy production, building the Keystone pipeline, and cutting taxes on billionaires. While some of these programs might help create jobs in the future, each would take a long time to have a serious effect on the national jobs situation.
In a recent statement by Romney, you get a taste of his plan to delay immproving the jobs situation and try to upgrade the economy instead : "My campaign is about helping people take more responsibility and becoming employed again, particularly those who don't have work," he said. "His (Obama's) whole campaign is based on getting people jobs again, putting people back to work. This is ultimately a question about direction for the country. Do you believe in a government-centered society that provides more and more benefits or do you believe instead in a free enterprise society where people are able to pursue their dreams?"
So the real jobs candidate is not Mitt Romney. It is President Obama. All Mitt Romney and his party have to do is pass the American Jobs Act of 2011 and get people back to work. Then, once we have a jobs bill in action, the Republicans can sit down with the Democrats and work to enact some of the ideas put forward by Romney.
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