Random Nuclear Strikes

It is just this simple

So when people – archbishops, G20 demonstrators, the preposterous psychologist Oliver James – attack consumerism, and as the credit crunch brings them bigger audiences and more credibility, I think they are really attacking something far more banal. I think they are dressing up their assault in fancy language – like undergraduates who get involved in college politics and start calling themselves student unionists – to make a prosaic idea sound impressive.

I think that they have looked back at 5,000 years of human history – at pestilence and famine and disease and degradation, at genocide and civil war, at fear and loathing, at bigotry and ignorance, chauvinism and dictatorship – and concluded that our biggest problem is… shopping.

Daniel Finkelstein

RTWT

Found @ Samizdata

I’ll try to work on this

5. “Jihadi.” The jihad is an internal struggle first, a process of improving one’s spiritual self-discipline and getting closer to God. The lesser jihad is external, validating “just war” when necessary. By calling the groups we are fighting “jihadis,” we confirm their own – and the worldwide Muslim public’s – perception that they are religious. They are not. They are terrorists, hirabists, who consistently violate the most fundamental teachings of the Holy Koran and mainstream Islamic scholars and imams.

Chris Seiple – 10 Terms NOT to use with Muslims

Really, I will.

Just as soon as those “mainstream Islamic scholars” start working on fashioning their weekly sermons into denounciations of the assholes.

A two-fer! One short. One long. Same topic.
#1

It’s wrong for you to steal from me; and getting 52 million of your friends together to to vote on it and say it’s OK, doesn’t make it so.

Chris Byrne – The Anarchangel

#2

Some of the demonstrators in this week’s G20 protest jamboree are demanding the “overthrow” of capitalism. Well, there are lots of things than can be done to “capitalism” – it can be undermined, suppressed, sabotaged, even outlawed – but it cannot be “overthrown” because in itself, it has no power.

It is the very opposite, in fact, of a tyranny. It is simply the conglomeration of all the transactions made between individual and corporate players in an open market. Some people may gain power through those transactions but that power is transient and contingent on their own financial success: they are not installed in immutable positions from which they can be forcibly removed in a coup d’etat.

The question we are wrestling with now – and which the G20 will certainly fail to resolve – is how much the bodies which actually do have power should undermine, suppress, sabotage or even outlaw the practice of capitalist exchange.

Those who talk of “overthrowing” capitalism are determined to depict it as a system of government in a precise parallel with socialism, when in reality, capitalism is not a system in the ideological sense.

It is, if anything, an anti-system: the aggregation of human behaviour as it goes about fulfilling particular wants and needs. It can be described in anthropomorphic terms, such as “ruthless” or “benign” but of itself has no motives and no objectives. (Gordon Brown is more than usually fatuous when he insists that markets need to have “values”: only people have values, methods of exchange do not.)

Janey Daley – Telegraph UK

There’s more goodness where those links go to.